Apple didn't bring unix to the common man. All the real work was done in creating the BSD system that they put some nice GUI stuff on top of. So if anything BSD brought unix to (Apple's version of) the common man before linux, with Apple as a mojor contributor.
This is really bound to happen because Apple's definition of bringing to the common man is basically 'incarnated as a home-user targeted commercial OS'. Of course BSD will make this goal first since it's liscence is more commercial friendly. The BSD and GPL liscences have different goals and Apple's definition of the common man simply fits BSD goals better.
This really annoys me since it's basically Apple claiming credit for all the work that has been done on BSD unix over the past N years.
I believe that keys should only change after a break-in which was known to be successful or at a regularly scheduled time determined by policy. Like any key it is a good idea to change it periodically just in case it leaked and you didn't know it (you're worried about the private key on the server being nabbed in the case of ssh). You could establish that at all major OS upgrades, the keys should change, or maybe yearly or some such. But this should be taken seriously as far as ssh USERS go. They should be notified of this policy and notified when a changover is going to occur. The basic point is that no user should ever have to answer the "The server key has changed connect anyway?" question without knowing why the key has changed.
As in most areas, a little commen sense and communication goes a long way.
I don't know about the guy that submitted the question, but cost isn't really the issue for me. I have other issues. I want a digital vcr but I want features that are not being sold. I'll give some examples with explanation.
Fully programmable. Mr. Malda's chief complaint about his tivo was the lack of programmability. I have figured out how to look at the TV guides and know what is and is not a rerun and what is new and what is syndication. I want to be able to tell my box this too, not wait for somebody to decide to provide some variant of this for who knows what price. I want control!
No monitoring. I don't want to pay to have somebody record my viewing habits for who knows what purpose, no matter how good their intentions or what I get in return. I want to be able to anonomously download TV schedules and use them as I see fit. Without targeted advertising.
An uncrippled box. In order to archive tivo you have to use a VCR! This is asinine. I want the raw digital. I don't care if they have 'issues' with it. This is like them selling me a car, but putting in a limiter or something that prevents me from exceeding 45mph so that they won't be sued if I exeed the speed limit. Sounds pretty ridiculous huh?
My display. Face it. TV's suck. 60 hz interlaced. 3:2 pulldown on movies. Also, compared to computer monitors, TV's (except for the really expensive ones) are really behind the times. I'd like to be able to play with refresh rates and have digital level color quality and undo the 3:2 pulldown if possible.
Control over compression quality. I'm not stuck in the dichotomy of SP vs EP. I'd like a scale in between. I'd like to be able to adapt based on content. Also I'd like be able to update to better compression. MPEG-4 inhancements? better encoding algoritms? even the basics, like are they using an IEEE compliant DCT? Stuff like the last are probably irrelevant on a TV, but when you start displaying on computer monitors the fine points count.
Automated commercial removal. Not fastforward, I mean no commercials. I think it could be done. But I don't expect some large company to do it. Basically for the same reason they don't provide a digital out.
So there's what I want. I don't think these are going to appear in a box any time soon. There are just too many legal 'issues'. That and the fact that the more freedom you have the less the box makers are going to make off of you. They don't want a customer to sell a box to, the want a leash with a 'consumer' attached to the other end.
Sorry this post has been pretty bitter. It's nothing personal to you, I just turned into a rant:)
Later.
Re:Details on what's already do-able and available
on
Software-Based TIVO?
·
· Score: 1
Several notes. Last time I checked, I think they had gotten MJPEG to work for the matrox cards, though it was still a little flaky (not all resolutions and such) but it should be improving quickly. And there are other video capture boards that do work for MJPEG (the MPEG ones are the hard ones to get specs for I think.)
Now on to your second point. You assume real time compression. Why? I typically watch things 1day+ after they are broadcast (videotape). That combined with the fact that I typically record less that 10 hours a week mean that as long as I had a big enough buffer, I could spend several hours compressing a show (overnight). Also MPEG compression is very parallelizable, why don't I just distribute it over all the (4 or so) computers I have. Makes a lot more sense than attempting to do it real time, and you can do a LOT better quality MPEG compression too. As soon as you go asynchronous the options really open up.
The script thing -- I've already written a script to parse search output for clicktv.com. Works great. Certainly makes it easier to check for missed reruns. The utility of something like this is a lot smaller for a vcr though, since the real big deal is that you have to program it and feed it tapes.
The real issue for me at this point is where do I put all the stuff I record. DAT tapes are the cheapest, but the reason is the drives are really expensive. Right now I just can't compete with videotapes. (I typically record half a season of all the shows I watch and then watch them all at once.) That and I haven't had time to set it up, which is the real kicker, but maybe sometime in the future.
Maybe sometime... I'm trying to help out with LiViD right now.
This is good info. Do you know of a good book that reviews the basic history of copyright and talks about the current laws? These may be divergent topics, but it would be nice to have the contrast in one text.
This is offtopic, but hey. If this post is any indication of your reaction to stuff, I can see why you may get marked as flamebait on borderline posts. Moderators can remember past flames I'm sure, especially with a sig and an attitude like that.
The basic problem is that the timeline is as follows
Bandwidth is allocated to Broadcasters for HDTV
Broadcasters delay putting the HDTV signal in the bandwidth
Consumers don't buy HDTVs because there is hardly any content for them
Broadcasters claim there is no demand for HDTV so they should be able to use the bandwidth they got for free as they please.
Wait a second!! This seems like a cheat to me! It looks to me like they were given the bandwidth (rather than having to pay for it) specifically so they would put the HDTV into it before there were many HDTVs out there.
The best analogy I can come up with is this:
A country needs more grain, they have some extra land so they give it to a farmer with the understanding that he will plant grain, otherwise he would have had to buy the land.
The farmer never puts out any seed and basically ignores the land.
No grain grows (duh!)
Later the farmer decides he now wants to use the land for tobacco (a lucrative crop, but not what the country gave him the land for). The argument he uses is that there is no grain growing on it so he should be able to use it for something.
I would say this is crazy, but it seems like a really close analogy to me. I say to the broadcasters: put the HDTV signal up, then we'll talk about what you can do with the extra space.
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Apple didn't bring unix to the common man. All the real work was done in creating the BSD system that they put some nice GUI stuff on top of. So if anything BSD brought unix to (Apple's version of) the common man before linux, with Apple as a mojor contributor.
This is really bound to happen because Apple's definition of bringing to the common man is basically 'incarnated as a home-user targeted commercial OS'. Of course BSD will make this goal first since it's liscence is more commercial friendly. The BSD and GPL liscences have different goals and Apple's definition of the common man simply fits BSD goals better.
This really annoys me since it's basically Apple claiming credit for all the work that has been done on BSD unix over the past N years.
I believe that keys should only change after a break-in which was known to be successful or at a regularly scheduled time determined by policy. Like any key it is a good idea to change it periodically just in case it leaked and you didn't know it (you're worried about the private key on the server being nabbed in the case of ssh). You could establish that at all major OS upgrades, the keys should change, or maybe yearly or some such. But this should be taken seriously as far as ssh USERS go. They should be notified of this policy and notified when a changover is going to occur. The basic point is that no user should ever have to answer the "The server key has changed connect anyway?" question without knowing why the key has changed.
As in most areas, a little commen sense and communication goes a long way.
I don't know about the guy that submitted the question, but cost isn't really the issue for me. I have other issues. I want a digital vcr but I want features that are not being sold. I'll give some examples with explanation.
:)
Fully programmable. Mr. Malda's chief complaint about his tivo was the lack of programmability. I have figured out how to look at the TV guides and know what is and is not a rerun and what is new and what is syndication. I want to be able to tell my box this too, not wait for somebody to decide to provide some variant of this for who knows what price. I want control!
No monitoring. I don't want to pay to have somebody record my viewing habits for who knows what purpose, no matter how good their intentions or what I get in return. I want to be able to anonomously download TV schedules and use them as I see fit. Without targeted advertising.
An uncrippled box. In order to archive tivo you have to use a VCR! This is asinine. I want the raw digital. I don't care if they have 'issues' with it. This is like them selling me a car, but putting in a limiter or something that prevents me from exceeding 45mph so that they won't be sued if I exeed the speed limit. Sounds pretty ridiculous huh?
My display. Face it. TV's suck. 60 hz interlaced. 3:2 pulldown on movies. Also, compared to computer monitors, TV's (except for the really expensive ones) are really behind the times. I'd like to be able to play with refresh rates and have digital level color quality and undo the 3:2 pulldown if possible.
Control over compression quality. I'm not stuck in the dichotomy of SP vs EP. I'd like a scale in between. I'd like to be able to adapt based on content. Also I'd like be able to update to better compression. MPEG-4 inhancements? better encoding algoritms? even the basics, like are they using an IEEE compliant DCT? Stuff like the last are probably irrelevant on a TV, but when you start displaying on computer monitors the fine points count.
Automated commercial removal. Not fastforward, I mean no commercials. I think it could be done. But I don't expect some large company to do it. Basically for the same reason they don't provide a digital out.
So there's what I want. I don't think these are going to appear in a box any time soon. There are just too many legal 'issues'. That and the fact that the more freedom you have the less the box makers are going to make off of you. They don't want a customer to sell a box to, the want a leash with a 'consumer' attached to the other end.
Sorry this post has been pretty bitter. It's nothing personal to you, I just turned into a rant
Later.
Several notes. Last time I checked, I think they had gotten MJPEG to work for the matrox cards, though it was still a little flaky (not all resolutions and such) but it should be improving quickly. And there are other video capture boards that do work for MJPEG (the MPEG ones are the hard ones to get specs for I think.)
Now on to your second point. You assume real time compression. Why? I typically watch things 1day+ after they are broadcast (videotape). That combined with the fact that I typically record less that 10 hours a week mean that as long as I had a big enough buffer, I could spend several hours compressing a show (overnight). Also MPEG compression is very parallelizable, why don't I just distribute it over all the (4 or so) computers I have. Makes a lot more sense than attempting to do it real time, and you can do a LOT better quality MPEG compression too. As soon as you go asynchronous the options really open up.
The script thing -- I've already written a script to parse search output for clicktv.com. Works great. Certainly makes it easier to check for missed reruns. The utility of something like this is a lot smaller for a vcr though, since the real big deal is that you have to program it and feed it tapes.
The real issue for me at this point is where do I put all the stuff I record. DAT tapes are the cheapest, but the reason is the drives are really expensive. Right now I just can't compete with videotapes. (I typically record half a season of all the shows I watch and then watch them all at once.) That and I haven't had time to set it up, which is the real kicker, but maybe sometime in the future.
Maybe sometime... I'm trying to help out with LiViD right now.
This is good info. Do you know of a good book that reviews the basic history of copyright and talks about the current laws? These may be divergent topics, but it would be nice to have the contrast in one text.
This is offtopic, but hey. If this post is any indication of your reaction to stuff, I can see why you may get marked as flamebait on borderline posts. Moderators can remember past flames I'm sure, especially with a sig and an attitude like that.
Bandwidth is allocated to Broadcasters for HDTV
Broadcasters delay putting the HDTV signal in the bandwidth
Consumers don't buy HDTVs because there is hardly any content for them
Broadcasters claim there is no demand for HDTV so they should be able to use the bandwidth they got for free as they please.
Wait a second!! This seems like a cheat to me! It looks to me like they were given the bandwidth (rather than having to pay for it) specifically so they would put the HDTV into it before there were many HDTVs out there.
The best analogy I can come up with is this:
A country needs more grain, they have some extra land so they give it to a farmer with the understanding that he will plant grain, otherwise he would have had to buy the land.
The farmer never puts out any seed and basically ignores the land.
No grain grows (duh!)
Later the farmer decides he now wants to use the land for tobacco (a lucrative crop, but not what the country gave him the land for). The argument he uses is that there is no grain growing on it so he should be able to use it for something.
I would say this is crazy, but it seems like a really close analogy to me. I say to the broadcasters: put the HDTV signal up, then we'll talk about what you can do with the extra space.