Well, then it really sounds as if they ought to be selling the software separately in that case.
Bundling the software with the card is fine and all that, but if there's literally no real hardware difference, why have to "hack" the thing at all? Simply sell the pro-drivers separately, then if somebody needs them, they can buy them.
The images are probably included entirely automatically. You don't think they have people going over each and every single image, do you? The thing has GPS and every image is tagged and then put into a big database. No human eyes touch the things until they're online, I'm sure.
BloodRayne was probably the crowning achievement of his career. Then he followed it up with BloodRayne 2 and Postal...
Seriously, this guy has made his name by taking decent games and making completely shit movies out of them. I'm saddened to learn he's been working on an adaptation of Far Cry.
Yes, but when you look at specific kinds of distribution, FTP is still a major player. Specifically, it's the primary business-to-business data distribution protocol (at least in every industry I've ever worked in). Sounds like some rather unimportant industries. We (an unnamed Fortune 500 company) use scp for most of our file transfers, because we need encryption. It's rather hard to claim you are taking proper security measures when your important financial data is being sent over the public network in the clear.
All of the banks we deal with and have to transfer data back and forth to (half a dozen of them) support secure protocols. None of them allow FTP.
Now, for those people who don't support anything but FTP, we use VPN's to connect to them so that we can encrypt the whole thing (because everybody has a VPN in some way, and trying to get people to use SFTP is an exercise in futility). However, this is simply procedure, a lot of this data is not particularly critical and could probably stand to go unencrypted. It's simply our company policy that any automated data transfer that travels outside the firewall must be using a secure method to do it. I would think that any major industry has the same policy.
Though as an end-user, I don't care about "hops", I care about download speed. I'd prefer my client connect to the fastest sources, not the closest. Closer sources are more likely to be faster. I mean, if you are a cable modem user, you have full bandwidth and low latency to everybody else on your segment, very low latency to everybody else in the neighborhood, slightly higher latency to everybody else in the city on that cable network, and very high latency outside the city. Local peers are faster peers.
Many P2P systems try to take advantage of this, and torrent systems are starting to try to take advantage of this, but the problem is that it's somewhat difficult to tell who's local to you and who isn't. And even then, they might not be the fastest available. And even then, unless the file is extremely well seeded, the odds of somebody local to you serving it up are small.
Still, it's nice when it does work. Two peers determine that they are local, unlock their bandwidth caps, and share like there's no tomorrow. Within a fraction of the normal time, they both have shared all they had with each other, and now whenever one gets a piece, the other gets it a few seconds later. In a big enough torrent network, this essentially makes whole segments of the network into one big torrent client, since they can share with each other quickly and the external world more slowly. Any piece coming in they all get relatively rapidly.
If your curtains are open, then you do not have an expectation of privacy.
How about closing your curtains when you want to be private and not closing them when you don't? What's so hard about that? Your privacy is completely under your control.
If the documents are true, it's confidential information that shouldn't be published. Says who, exactly?
Of course they don't want them published, they're evidence of wrongdoing, yesno? They very likely have no legal basis on which to get them removed. Trying to exercise prior restraint on publishing documents like these usually doesn't survive an appeal to the first amendment.
Personally, even though I no longer work for an ISP, I don't believe that ISPs should be left holding the bag when it comes to upgrading their networks, becuase a whole whack of other compaines want to make money by streaming add laden videos. That's totally and completely unfair. The companies doing internet streaming are not customers of these ISPs. The *customers* of the ISPs are the ones paying for a given amount of bandwidth. They're the ones with the contracts.
If the ISP cannot fulfill their end of the contracts they agreed to, then yes, they're the ones left holding the bag. It's completely and totally fair because they agreed to it in the first place.
Don't blame some internet company that streams video when it was the ISP that didn't think ahead enough to install more pipe and/or change their contracts properly.
To be perfectly honest, I'm looking forward to the day when the wireless market really starts opening up and these land line based companies can no longer compete. Wireless just makes the underlying problem worse.
Think of the network as a whole. The streaming servers are towards the center, they have lots of bandwidth and very fast connections. The viewers are out towards the edges. They have less bandwidth, and most of it in the download direction only.
Now, you want to get video from the center to those edges. At each branch point, the bandwidth lessens, but the number of clients increases. If you use multi-cast, this is fine, but since we're using point-to-point connections, this makes everything slow. The ISPs on the edge rapidly run out of space on the lines.
P2P doesn't help this because now all those edge people are just putting more back in, further choking the ISP sections.
Wireless makes the problem even worse. Right now, I'm sharing bandwidth with everybody on my segment. With wireless, I'm sharing bandwidth with everybody in the immediate area. Scale it up and now I'm sharing bandwidth with everybody in the whole town.
What about public wireless mesh networks? Mesh networks are even worse. With a wireless mesh network, everything is repeated wirelessly, hopping from node to node. This is not too bad if you assume that every node has multiple wireless signals and are highly directional, but since each node only has one wireless signal that is probably broadcast and not directed in any particular direction, now every single transmission takes up 3 or 4 times the bandwidth along the way, since forwarding a packet means repeating it and preventing the original sender of it from talking while you repeat the packet he just sent you...
You are comparing a society with high levels of empowerment (or widespread appearance of it) where only a few issues are out of control of nutcases (like abortion.) Also these societies heavily discourage extremism of almost any kind (even the good kinds) in part because the populations are made passive by tons of false solutions to their needs as well as creating new problems for people to worry about. a) There is no good form of extremism. Reality *always* lies in the middle ground. b) Just because somebody doesn't feel the need to protest what they feel is wrong doesn't make them passive. I think abortion is wrong, but I'm perfectly happy to let other people practice it. This is not an inconsistent viewpoint, and it doesn't make me passive. I just think that freedom is more important than life.
Have you considered what makes a "nutcase?" Is it just person with a position without any empowerment? (well, thats simplified but I think is gist of it.) I have considered this, and it's actually quite simple: A "nutcase" is somebody who feels that their opinions should be everybody else's facts.
Take away the factors that make the Christian nuts "lame" and they wouldn't be any better. Not arguing that, however the factors in question are societal ones. We, as a society, reject extremist viewpoints. I think that this is a good thing.
That abortion clinic shooter without a gun would use bombs and without enough conflicting emotions would self-sacrifice. My point is not why the shooter shoots, but to point out there's only one of him and hundreds of the other guys willing to suicide for their beliefs. The extremists willing to commit self-sacrifice are fewer over here than over there. The religion itself plays no small part in that, although I agree that it's not the sole factor at work.
The US military promotes strong friendships, guilt, and shame in order to exploit them to get self-sacrifice - you hear many oppose the war but go back to help their friends. In this society it is ok to kill huge numbers of people to safe your buddies/family even if your buddies are in the wrong place for the wrong reasons; that is clearly UNCHRISTIAN. Rather than go to jail for a while for refusing to fight, they go and get seriously injured or killed. Some people could reasonably view that as nutty. No, I don't see that. It's perfectly sane to protect yourself and your friends, no matter what the circumstance. Killing may be necessary for self-protection. I admit that it's un-christian, but then the christian religious have never really paid too much attention to christ's actual teachings to begin with.
The liquids ban inconveniences me, but that's all it does. From the point of view of the government, that inconvenience is offset by the reduced threat of explosives on commercial aircraft. I gotta ask...
Does not allowing you to bring a bottle of water on board the plane make that plane any safer or reduce threat in any significant way? Are you a terrorist? Can you make that bottle of water explode?
If not, then the threat to the plane is unchanged. You have simply been inconvenienced for no gain of any kind whatsoever.
This is the fundamental problem with the TSA's system. They're trying to find potential threats, but they're not actually looking for real threats. They're simply looking for a set checklist of items, the vast majority of which are not threats of any kind.
Notice the internal inconsistencies in his post as well: - First, he states that a serious plot existed (and he implies that it was a real threat, despite all evidence to the contrary). Then he goes on to say that actually making liquid explosives is more or less impossible in such a situation, showing that no such threat could have actually existed. - He states that the limitation on the number and size of bottles is to prevent somebody from bringing the needed materials on board. He states that the "baggie" rule is to make the vapors from small amounts of liquid explosives more easily detectable. Problem is that if this were the case, larger containers of liquid explosives would be more detectable, and so no limitation on size or quantity would really be needed, if they were actually scanning using liquid explosives detectors (hint: they don't).
Pretty much his entire post is nothing but placating bullshit. Well-written bullshit, but bullshit nevertheless. True security in detection of liquid explosives would come from actual detection. If you have detectors for liquid explosives, then you run every piece of liquid through those detectors. If they're not 100%, then you run them through a different detector as well, to increase the odds.
Relying on limitations and procedures like sticking things into plastic baggies is blatantly obvious security theater. It makes people who don't know any better feel safer. Which might be important, I grant you, but which absolutely should not be the job of the TSA.
YAML? Are you serious? Yet another data structure that is basically worthless in the real world?
I mean, I'm no fan of JSON in general (it's fine for certain cases), but at least it has the advantage of not necessarily needing a parser since it's just javascript syntax.
Looking through YAML, you get all the disadvantages of XML (must require a parser), along with it being both whitespace and character set dependent.
Re:I don't understand...
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
-Easily compressed (in transit or stored)
Which just means that it has lots of redundancy. Or, as one might call it, bloat. Test question: Which is quicker? 1. Spending a few hours coding your formats in some binary format making maximum use of all the bits. 2. Spending a few minutes writing code to send your internal data structure to a library that will serialize it into XML and then running the XML through a generic compression routine (if space/speed actually makes any difference to your particular application).
Consider the question in both the short and the long term. Also consider that you're paying that programmer a few hundred an hour.
I can assure you that "Muslims" who bomb people they think are repressing them and picket actors'/soldiers' deaths because of whatever sexual orientation they might be- are hardly Muslims at all. While mainstream Islam disagrees with the issues behind those things, the isolated reactions by a fanatical few are totally uncalled for and vile. While I agree and understand your position, it's certainly the case that the "few" is actually "a great many". Furthermore, it's also there to a greater degree.
I mean, sure, christianity has its share of nuts, but for the most part those nuts are rather lame. Only occasionally does somebody try to kill an abortion doctor or some such nastiness. And when they're caught at it (and they usually are), then they're arrested and put in a small room and looked at for the rest of their lives.
Whereas the nuts in Islam seem to be the ones in charge. When you have women getting arrested and charged for sitting with another man in a Starbucks, then you have some serious issues that need to be resolved. When you have women being stoned to death for... well, does it really fucking matter what it's for? It's barbaric and ridiculous. Even the nutty suicide bombers seem to have really poor aim, in that they are blowing up random people. At least the anti-abortion-nutjob can aim a rifle at the abortion doctor in specific instead of blowing up cafes in the same town.
Sure, you can claim that these nuts are not "true muslims" or what have you, but that doesn't change the fact that they claim they are and so me, being an outsider, will judge them as such and judge the religion as a whole based on their actions. I'm no christian either, but even I can see that its crazy people are far less crazy (and far less dangerous) than those of the islamic faith(s).
So what you're saying is that bullying is OK - that the larger party deserves concessions, and can do whatever the hell they want just because they're larger, and that this is perfectly acceptable. a) Yes, that's exactly correct. b) Characterizing it as "bullying" instead of as "demanding discounts due to high volume purchases" kinda shoots your whole argument down. They can demand special terms because they buy a hell of a lot of stuff. If they don't get those terms, they simply stop buying from people who don't meet their terms. Nobody is forced to sell at their terms. Unless they want to do so because of all the money they're making.
The monthly fee for the TiVo service is outrageous, and TiVo ended their lifetime service payment option a few years ago. No, they offer lifetime for the TivoHD right now, for $399. No gift cards or anything else required.
Now, this may be as part of the multi-service discount, for current Tivo owners. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not, their deals change every few weeks. I know that up until recently they had a gift deal, where any Tivo owner could purchase a TivoHD with lifetime for somebody else for ~$700.
I agree that their service is overpriced straight-up, but it's not as bad if you look for the deals. I have two units, one of which I've had since 2001. I'm paying only $7 a month for service.
Video recorders were always a niche use in the USA. Think back to the VCR days. What was the main use of recorders, other than copying movies to build a movie collection?
Most of it was Video Rental. Playback. It was the only reason most people got VCRs. The fact that the box could also record was unimportant. From a tape perspective, a playback only unit didn't make any sense anyway, the hardware would play or record without any real cost difference.
The few who did know how to program their VCR's used it to record broadcast television. And almost all of that was not archival, it was one-time-use. They'd record it because they wanted to see it later. They didn't want to see it over and over again. Oh, sure, they recorded some things for the kids to watch continously, but really, once you've seen most programs once, that's enough.
Nobody really used consumer VCR's to make archives of video material. Sure, they copied movies and kept them around a while, but eventually a lot of people recorded over even these. Who has stacks of video tapes anymore? Did they move their material to DVD's? Home movies sure, but most of it just got trashed.
DVD Recorders did not take off because of all of these reasons.
a) DVD Recorders cost more than DVD players because of different hardware requirements. And most people wanted them for rental only.
b) Tivo and other hard drive based recorders filled the rest of the niche, because a Tivo is like a big programmable VCR, only you never need to change tapes.
c) The only reason left is archival, and people here simply don't archive video material. They don't really want to create their own long term storage except for their own home made materials. If they do, then they're perfectly willing to buy a high quality copy on DVD that they can keep for a long time.
The market isn't there for DVD Video Recorders simply because it doesn't fit the use cases of people who want to record video as well as other solutions do.
Yet, you cannot buy an off the air HD DVR unless it is a Sat TV or Cable co rental box. The TivoHD will record OTA HD directly. You do have to pay the Tivo monthly fee for the guide data and such, however. Or buy the lifetime service.
Admittedly, it's aimed at Cable customers with it's CableCard support. But it will record over-the-air HD channels as well.
Let's think about all the things that would have to happen for this story to be true:
1. Microsoft must have no mechanism for tracking work order/help requests. Come on. Every manager has daily/weekly/monthly reports that show the number of requests opened/closed/carried over and it flags old requests, and it sorts by age, so the oldest issue shows up at the top of the list. A manager would have seen this. Assuming that the date was put in wrong to begin with, it's possible that the system did not count the problem as it was in "the future".
2. When the help desk guy was assigned to make the followup call, he didn't notice and find it odd that the original call came in 10 years ago? He didn't call his supervisor over and say, "hey I think somebody made a mistake here! Maybe we should just close this out." I'm assuming that the problem date was actually wrong for some reason, instead of the follow-up date.
3. Somebody has the same phone number of 10 years. If you'd read the article, the reason he thinks it's 10 years old is because they called his parent's number and left a message there.
As for somebody having the same number for 10 years, my grandparents have had the same phone number for at least my entire life (I'm 31), probably longer. Not everybody moves every 5 years.
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Well, then it really sounds as if they ought to be selling the software separately in that case.
Bundling the software with the card is fine and all that, but if there's literally no real hardware difference, why have to "hack" the thing at all? Simply sell the pro-drivers separately, then if somebody needs them, they can buy them.
The images are probably included entirely automatically. You don't think they have people going over each and every single image, do you? The thing has GPS and every image is tagged and then put into a big database. No human eyes touch the things until they're online, I'm sure.
BloodRayne was probably the crowning achievement of his career. Then he followed it up with BloodRayne 2 and Postal...
Seriously, this guy has made his name by taking decent games and making completely shit movies out of them. I'm saddened to learn he's been working on an adaptation of Far Cry.
http://imdb.com/name/nm0093051/
All of the banks we deal with and have to transfer data back and forth to (half a dozen of them) support secure protocols. None of them allow FTP.
Now, for those people who don't support anything but FTP, we use VPN's to connect to them so that we can encrypt the whole thing (because everybody has a VPN in some way, and trying to get people to use SFTP is an exercise in futility). However, this is simply procedure, a lot of this data is not particularly critical and could probably stand to go unencrypted. It's simply our company policy that any automated data transfer that travels outside the firewall must be using a secure method to do it. I would think that any major industry has the same policy.
Many P2P systems try to take advantage of this, and torrent systems are starting to try to take advantage of this, but the problem is that it's somewhat difficult to tell who's local to you and who isn't. And even then, they might not be the fastest available. And even then, unless the file is extremely well seeded, the odds of somebody local to you serving it up are small.
Still, it's nice when it does work. Two peers determine that they are local, unlock their bandwidth caps, and share like there's no tomorrow. Within a fraction of the normal time, they both have shared all they had with each other, and now whenever one gets a piece, the other gets it a few seconds later. In a big enough torrent network, this essentially makes whole segments of the network into one big torrent client, since they can share with each other quickly and the external world more slowly. Any piece coming in they all get relatively rapidly.
All the FTP usage is probably under a couple of percent. Torrents surpassed 50% of the total internet traffic some time ago.
If your curtains are open, then you do not have an expectation of privacy.
How about closing your curtains when you want to be private and not closing them when you don't? What's so hard about that? Your privacy is completely under your control.
Of course they don't want them published, they're evidence of wrongdoing, yesno? They very likely have no legal basis on which to get them removed. Trying to exercise prior restraint on publishing documents like these usually doesn't survive an appeal to the first amendment.
If the ISP cannot fulfill their end of the contracts they agreed to, then yes, they're the ones left holding the bag. It's completely and totally fair because they agreed to it in the first place.
Don't blame some internet company that streams video when it was the ISP that didn't think ahead enough to install more pipe and/or change their contracts properly.
Think of the network as a whole. The streaming servers are towards the center, they have lots of bandwidth and very fast connections. The viewers are out towards the edges. They have less bandwidth, and most of it in the download direction only.
Now, you want to get video from the center to those edges. At each branch point, the bandwidth lessens, but the number of clients increases. If you use multi-cast, this is fine, but since we're using point-to-point connections, this makes everything slow. The ISPs on the edge rapidly run out of space on the lines.
P2P doesn't help this because now all those edge people are just putting more back in, further choking the ISP sections.
Wireless makes the problem even worse. Right now, I'm sharing bandwidth with everybody on my segment. With wireless, I'm sharing bandwidth with everybody in the immediate area. Scale it up and now I'm sharing bandwidth with everybody in the whole town. What about public wireless mesh networks? Mesh networks are even worse. With a wireless mesh network, everything is repeated wirelessly, hopping from node to node. This is not too bad if you assume that every node has multiple wireless signals and are highly directional, but since each node only has one wireless signal that is probably broadcast and not directed in any particular direction, now every single transmission takes up 3 or 4 times the bandwidth along the way, since forwarding a packet means repeating it and preventing the original sender of it from talking while you repeat the packet he just sent you...
b) Just because somebody doesn't feel the need to protest what they feel is wrong doesn't make them passive. I think abortion is wrong, but I'm perfectly happy to let other people practice it. This is not an inconsistent viewpoint, and it doesn't make me passive. I just think that freedom is more important than life. Have you considered what makes a "nutcase?" Is it just person with a position without any empowerment? (well, thats simplified but I think is gist of it.) I have considered this, and it's actually quite simple: A "nutcase" is somebody who feels that their opinions should be everybody else's facts. Take away the factors that make the Christian nuts "lame" and they wouldn't be any better. Not arguing that, however the factors in question are societal ones. We, as a society, reject extremist viewpoints. I think that this is a good thing. That abortion clinic shooter without a gun would use bombs and without enough conflicting emotions would self-sacrifice. My point is not why the shooter shoots, but to point out there's only one of him and hundreds of the other guys willing to suicide for their beliefs. The extremists willing to commit self-sacrifice are fewer over here than over there. The religion itself plays no small part in that, although I agree that it's not the sole factor at work. The US military promotes strong friendships, guilt, and shame in order to exploit them to get self-sacrifice - you hear many oppose the war but go back to help their friends. In this society it is ok to kill huge numbers of people to safe your buddies/family even if your buddies are in the wrong place for the wrong reasons; that is clearly UNCHRISTIAN. Rather than go to jail for a while for refusing to fight, they go and get seriously injured or killed. Some people could reasonably view that as nutty. No, I don't see that. It's perfectly sane to protect yourself and your friends, no matter what the circumstance. Killing may be necessary for self-protection. I admit that it's un-christian, but then the christian religious have never really paid too much attention to christ's actual teachings to begin with.
I'm merely trying to promote thought.
Does not allowing you to bring a bottle of water on board the plane make that plane any safer or reduce threat in any significant way? Are you a terrorist? Can you make that bottle of water explode?
If not, then the threat to the plane is unchanged. You have simply been inconvenienced for no gain of any kind whatsoever.
This is the fundamental problem with the TSA's system. They're trying to find potential threats, but they're not actually looking for real threats. They're simply looking for a set checklist of items, the vast majority of which are not threats of any kind.
Notice the internal inconsistencies in his post as well:
- First, he states that a serious plot existed (and he implies that it was a real threat, despite all evidence to the contrary). Then he goes on to say that actually making liquid explosives is more or less impossible in such a situation, showing that no such threat could have actually existed.
- He states that the limitation on the number and size of bottles is to prevent somebody from bringing the needed materials on board. He states that the "baggie" rule is to make the vapors from small amounts of liquid explosives more easily detectable. Problem is that if this were the case, larger containers of liquid explosives would be more detectable, and so no limitation on size or quantity would really be needed, if they were actually scanning using liquid explosives detectors (hint: they don't).
Pretty much his entire post is nothing but placating bullshit. Well-written bullshit, but bullshit nevertheless. True security in detection of liquid explosives would come from actual detection. If you have detectors for liquid explosives, then you run every piece of liquid through those detectors. If they're not 100%, then you run them through a different detector as well, to increase the odds.
Relying on limitations and procedures like sticking things into plastic baggies is blatantly obvious security theater. It makes people who don't know any better feel safer. Which might be important, I grant you, but which absolutely should not be the job of the TSA.
YAML? Are you serious? Yet another data structure that is basically worthless in the real world?
I mean, I'm no fan of JSON in general (it's fine for certain cases), but at least it has the advantage of not necessarily needing a parser since it's just javascript syntax.
Looking through YAML, you get all the disadvantages of XML (must require a parser), along with it being both whitespace and character set dependent.
Which just means that it has lots of redundancy. Or, as one might call it, bloat. Test question: Which is quicker?
1. Spending a few hours coding your formats in some binary format making maximum use of all the bits.
2. Spending a few minutes writing code to send your internal data structure to a library that will serialize it into XML and then running the XML through a generic compression routine (if space/speed actually makes any difference to your particular application).
Consider the question in both the short and the long term. Also consider that you're paying that programmer a few hundred an hour.
Discuss.
I mean, sure, christianity has its share of nuts, but for the most part those nuts are rather lame. Only occasionally does somebody try to kill an abortion doctor or some such nastiness. And when they're caught at it (and they usually are), then they're arrested and put in a small room and looked at for the rest of their lives.
Whereas the nuts in Islam seem to be the ones in charge. When you have women getting arrested and charged for sitting with another man in a Starbucks, then you have some serious issues that need to be resolved. When you have women being stoned to death for... well, does it really fucking matter what it's for? It's barbaric and ridiculous. Even the nutty suicide bombers seem to have really poor aim, in that they are blowing up random people. At least the anti-abortion-nutjob can aim a rifle at the abortion doctor in specific instead of blowing up cafes in the same town.
Sure, you can claim that these nuts are not "true muslims" or what have you, but that doesn't change the fact that they claim they are and so me, being an outsider, will judge them as such and judge the religion as a whole based on their actions. I'm no christian either, but even I can see that its crazy people are far less crazy (and far less dangerous) than those of the islamic faith(s).
b) Characterizing it as "bullying" instead of as "demanding discounts due to high volume purchases" kinda shoots your whole argument down. They can demand special terms because they buy a hell of a lot of stuff. If they don't get those terms, they simply stop buying from people who don't meet their terms. Nobody is forced to sell at their terms. Unless they want to do so because of all the money they're making.
No, the difference should be obvious. You're not buying thousands of cell phones. Wal-Mart is buying thousands of items from whoever they buy from.
It's a volume thing. When you buy in bulk, you pay a different price. Wal-Mart buys enough bulk merchandise to be able to demand special terms.
Now, this may be as part of the multi-service discount, for current Tivo owners. Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not, their deals change every few weeks. I know that up until recently they had a gift deal, where any Tivo owner could purchase a TivoHD with lifetime for somebody else for ~$700.
I agree that their service is overpriced straight-up, but it's not as bad if you look for the deals. I have two units, one of which I've had since 2001. I'm paying only $7 a month for service.
Video recorders were always a niche use in the USA. Think back to the VCR days. What was the main use of recorders, other than copying movies to build a movie collection?
Most of it was Video Rental. Playback. It was the only reason most people got VCRs. The fact that the box could also record was unimportant. From a tape perspective, a playback only unit didn't make any sense anyway, the hardware would play or record without any real cost difference.
The few who did know how to program their VCR's used it to record broadcast television. And almost all of that was not archival, it was one-time-use. They'd record it because they wanted to see it later. They didn't want to see it over and over again. Oh, sure, they recorded some things for the kids to watch continously, but really, once you've seen most programs once, that's enough.
Nobody really used consumer VCR's to make archives of video material. Sure, they copied movies and kept them around a while, but eventually a lot of people recorded over even these. Who has stacks of video tapes anymore? Did they move their material to DVD's? Home movies sure, but most of it just got trashed.
DVD Recorders did not take off because of all of these reasons.
a) DVD Recorders cost more than DVD players because of different hardware requirements. And most people wanted them for rental only.
b) Tivo and other hard drive based recorders filled the rest of the niche, because a Tivo is like a big programmable VCR, only you never need to change tapes.
c) The only reason left is archival, and people here simply don't archive video material. They don't really want to create their own long term storage except for their own home made materials. If they do, then they're perfectly willing to buy a high quality copy on DVD that they can keep for a long time.
The market isn't there for DVD Video Recorders simply because it doesn't fit the use cases of people who want to record video as well as other solutions do.
Admittedly, it's aimed at Cable customers with it's CableCard support. But it will record over-the-air HD channels as well.
Microsoft is based in the USA, not in Europe. 1/8/08 = January 8th, 2008.
1. Microsoft must have no mechanism for tracking work order/help requests. Come on. Every manager has daily/weekly/monthly reports that show the number of requests opened/closed/carried over and it flags old requests, and it sorts by age, so the oldest issue shows up at the top of the list. A manager would have seen this. Assuming that the date was put in wrong to begin with, it's possible that the system did not count the problem as it was in "the future". 2. When the help desk guy was assigned to make the followup call, he didn't notice and find it odd that the original call came in 10 years ago? He didn't call his supervisor over and say, "hey I think somebody made a mistake here! Maybe we should just close this out." I'm assuming that the problem date was actually wrong for some reason, instead of the follow-up date. 3. Somebody has the same phone number of 10 years. If you'd read the article, the reason he thinks it's 10 years old is because they called his parent's number and left a message there.
As for somebody having the same number for 10 years, my grandparents have had the same phone number for at least my entire life (I'm 31), probably longer. Not everybody moves every 5 years.
Barring your pending emigration, of course.
Then your DVR sucks.
My DVR can tune two DIGITAL cable channels. Without a set-top-box too, because it uses CableCards.
Typo correction: "alternative" should be "alternating".