There is another reason to get a box distro, especially if you, like me, like Mandrake. The packages shipped with the retail Mandrake and the downloadable Mandrake are occasionally different. Because Mandrake doesn't put as much testing into something which provides no revenue, these packages are occasionally broken and Mandrake doesn't fix them.
For example, Mandrake 7.2 (downloadable version) shipped with a bad ipop3d. I eventually fixed the problem but Mandrake never did - the package that came with the retail Mandrake 7.2 worked fine.
Mandrake 8.0 (downloadable version) shipped with kernel source which wouldn't compile the modules unless you did a "make mrproper" which killed the default config. I'm not sure that everybody confident enough to rebuild the kernel would think to do a "make mrproper". To the best of my knowledge, this hasn't been fixed either. I don't think it's a problem with Mandrake 8 retail.
I still use Mandrake because I like it... But if you get the downloadable version, expect complications.
From what I gather about what has been released, software can only "do it" if it can read all the raw data off of the CD meaning both the audio data and the correction data. The computer could then identify exactly which samples are "uncorrectable errors" and create the interpolated samples between the known errors and the known good samples.
Current systems CD-ROM data paths usually return an audio sector that has been verified correct, one that has been corrected, or the raw correct-or-not sector data. They don't usually return the error correction bits so that software can analyze the sectors and fix them.
If I'm way off and most CD-ROM drives out there provide a simple way to read the data with correction bits, then you are right. The software will be able to do the same interpolation the player hardware does.
You can still rip at 1x using your CD-ROM's audio path. And, as you said in your post, mp3 is lossy so the loss of quality caused by going D to A then A to D may not bother people as much. They're just upping your CD rip time from 10 minutes to 60 minutes. Once ripped, the file can float among all the others in the great P2P file sharing netherworld.
IIRC this particular kill vehicle used a new "hit to kill" technology. It physically struck the incoming ballistic target. Even if it was following a beacon, given the speeds involved and the relative sizes of the objects it's very impressive. If the rumors are true and this information was only used to simulate a high quality tracking radar then it is impressive enough that I wouldn't mind my tax dollars being spent to develop it some more.
Most current anti-missile defense systems (such as Patriot B) don't strike their target, they do exactly as you say - they have a high fragmentation charge explode close enough that the probability that a piece of shrapnel will destroy the target is acceptable.
In the days of the cold war, when the probability of destroying an incoming bomber needed to be as close to 100% as possible, we had nuclear tipped long ranged air to air missiles. I don't think those relied on shrapnel though:) Heck back then every anti-something was nuclear tipped. We even had anti submarine missiles that would launch from one sub, fly through the air, dive into the water and explode. They worked because they only needed to detonate within 3 miles of the target sub.
You can't get that accuracy with GPS either unless the object stays still for a long time and takes lots of readings. There's a GPS FAQ around that explains all of this.
IIRC JunkBuster blocks URLs to places that serve banner ads. It doesn't alter the contents of the HTML, it's a selective http proxy. If my assumption is correct JunkBuster is never in violation of copyright since it is all-or-nothing.
An interesting test case for this that I can think of off the top of my head: What if I wrote an http proxy that "protected" children from offensive language in HTML documents by replacing them with say "####". Am I violating copyright because I'm altering somebody else's copyrighted HTML? Or am I exercising my right as a parent to censor information moving between the internet and my "impressionable" child? If I'm allowed to do this, am I allowed to install another piece of software that puts yellow underlines on some words or phrases?
Nope, BSA has no power to enter and audit without a court order. Since BSA is a group which is expert at inspecting whole companies and ensuring compliance using as little time as possible, the court is likely going to grant them the authority to conduct the audit.
Once done and BSA finds out how many copies of everything you have installed, they must then prove that you have not purchased licenses for all of them. They'll usually do this by issuing a discovery subpoena for all your software purchase receipts. If you cannot show all your receipts, all is not lost... In a protracted court case you may be able to show that based on the preponderance of the evidence BSA has not shown that you were not in compliance. The court case would probably cost a couple million in time and lawyer's fees. However, it would cost BSA just as much... What they will really be looking for is a settlement.
Now what would be more fun is to have the BSA audit you and then be able to prove compliance. You can then sue the BSA for a variety of penalties, and you can have them reveal who ratted you out and sue them. Of course, the BSA knows this which is why they say in the article that they do not seek court orders frivolously. A couple lawsuits against the BSA from companies that were compliant and audited could bring them to ruin.
I question whether or not the arrest should have been allowed. I'm having trouble reading through the media spin, but it looks to me like he was arrested because he wrote a program to circumvent copy protection. Something the DMCA criminalizes in the U.S.. However, since he is a student at a Moscow university, it does not look to me like the crime occurred in the U.S..
More to the point, he was paid by his employer to do exactly what he did which is completely legal in his country. Not only that, but in his country allowing someone who made a legitimate purchase of a copyright work to make a backup is a requirement.
I'm afraid Alan Cox had it right. And I'm an embarrassed American right now. I urge every other embarassed American to sit down with a Pen and Paper and write their congressional representatives. Don't use email folks, too many zealots spamming hate have ruined that as a way to effectively communicate with congress.
Compare Java to Python. Both are interpreted and cross-platform but Python is 10 times faster.
Guido van Rossum disagrees. Perhaps you should correct him.
nor am I saying the best architecture included that various Motorola chipsets that plagued the Macintosh over the years
I programmed 68K assembly for about 2 years and x86 for about 3 and I would say that when the 68000 was introduced it was the finest microprocessor architecture within realistic grasp (in terms of cost) available to the mass market.
http is very poor at file transfer - it can't do restarts.
Check out RFC2616 and look for "partial GET". HTTP 1.1 could do a restart by requesting the range after the last byte it received. The browsers just aren't implementing it.
"While I accept my results may not include some desktop and workstations configured as Linux servers, I simply do not believe that Linux is shipping on 25 percent or more of all new servers and I just cannot believe the IDC figures," Hewitt said. "They are simply pushing the envelope and overstating what the operating system is actually doing."
If the majority of customers got their Linux via download or some other way, "then the market is in even worse shape than my survey shows," he said. "How many support contracts are vendors going to get from those customers? I have already told Red Hat that they are stretching the numbers they put out to the marketplace, which resulted in a very lively debate."
These paragraphs seems to imply that he was looking for what OS the machines were shipping with. And accepting that if the 25% of all servers are running Linux (i.e. the IDC study is correct), then those customers aren't buying support contracts.
The wording of the article is confused. What you quoted makes it sound as if they were looking at what OS servers bought in the past three months are running. What I quoted makes it sound like they wanted to know OS the server shipped with.
Why not just blow up the sub station? I would think those strips of Mylar would have to have been fairly bulky to prevent being melted before blowing the sub stations breaker, and the timing for letting the planes slip through would have to be fairly precise.
On the other hand, Mylar reflects radar fairly well, they could have just used all that Mylar as chaff to blind the enemy radar which would allow the planes to slip through. They would also float around for longer than it would take to bring a backup power generator online.
But why go through all this when you could simply destroy the enemy radar station? Anti-Radiation missiles are fairly mature, civilian casualties are minimized, disruptions to necessary civil services are minimized, and they are probably cheaper than a tomahawk (and certainly more accurate).
(which was, until recently, $200 - hey, what a coincidence!)
No, not a coincidence. If TiVo did as you said, and subsidized $200 to buy the box and you then paid $200 for a lifetime subscription, then TiVo operated at a loss. If they are still subsidizing $200 for the purchase of a box and it costs $250 for a lifetime membership, they may still be operating at a loss.
If you would read their SEC filing, they have entered into agreements with several partners (most notably Quantum) to share a portion of their revenue from subscriptions in exchange for perks (i.e. Quantum selling the hard drives to TiVo device manufacturers dirt cheap).
TiVo has played the necessary dirty games to become the only player on the block (sorry, Replay is just not a viable competitor right now) but it cost them a lot of money. One reason to support the unsubs is that TiVo could go belly up, and then you'd be dependent on the subscription structure of another company looking to recoup the costs of buying out TiVo *and* turn a profit, or you could use the setup that the unsubs fought for.
I'm not up on all the new 2.0 stuff, but my understanding was that they removed the option to use the serial port to get a bash shell.
You are right though, they can't easily stick it to you if you never call up. Though I also understand that the TiVo needs to make one "test call" before it is first used.
When (if) I get a TiVo, I think I'm going to take the "void your warranty" risk and backup the initial drive image. That way I always have a fallback if they decide to screw the consumer again. (of course I had better get a TiVo soon before the only ones available are those shipping with 2.0.1)
Since Tivo makes money only on the subscription, why are you surprised that they'd want a subscription-only model?
I'm getting pretty tired of people promulgating this false information. Tivo makes money by selling subscriptions and selling statistics on your viewing habits. That is why TiVo has non-subscribers call in. This set your clock crap is just that... crap. Tivo is not going to continue to absorb costs just to keep the clock on your TiVo box up to date. There is no reason TiVo couldn't send down a version of the software that allowed users to easily set their own clock (without going through some back door) and stopped costing them money for connecting to their service. Your TiVo connects to the TiVo service every night because it gives TiVo information that is worth more to them than the cost of the connection.
Let's see what does a non-subscribed TiVo unit allow you to do that justifies it costing more than a regular VCR:
It pauses live tv so you can answer the phone or the door.
It allows you to skip commercials so you can catch back up to the "live" feed after answering the phone or the door.
It allows you to skip 30 seconds ahead to you don't have to watch a commercial on a show you recorded while you were away.
It allows you to rewind so you can catch the key plot point you just missed because your infant daughter spit up her dinner.
It allows you to rewind so you can watch that funny E*Trade commercial that just played during the superbowl.
It allows you to record right now without fumbling around for a tape with space on it, or seeing if you can set a new record for removing a blank tape from shrink wrap and thrusting it into the loading mechanism of your VCR. (oh wait, that function was broken with the new updgrade)
There's more to having a TiVo than data mining channel listings.
Tivos are nearly useless without the service anyway.
Mostly Wrong. The whole outcry occurred because people without the subscription service found the TiVo with the 1.3 software useful for recording live TV and programming recordings of shows. When the update came out these same people found the device to be signficantly more difficult to use than before. Then the TiVo became nearly useless without the service. Your statement should have been "Tivos are nearly useless without the service after the 2.0.1 software upgrade anyway".
They have a few bugs in the new software that make it less usable for those without the service, but they are going to fix those.
What they have done is disable non-advanced features and denied promises displayed prominently on their advertising material (notably "subscription to service required for advanced features") and stated that they will leave customers - who purchased the units in good faith - in this state of significantly diminished usability for three months.
This looks like a deliberate ruse to get non-subscribers to subscribe since a 2.0.2 update that simply bypassed the "you must be subscribed" screen for one touch recording would be easy to implement and quick to QA. Even if it was initially a mistake on their part, they are making little effort to fix it since from their perspective it could clearly lead to new subscriptions.
What TiVo needs is a class action lawsuit filed against it that drops its stock price a couple of dollars. *that* will shake up the guys holding lots of shares at the top and will quickly trickle down so that the situation is fixed in short order.
First of all, why would you WANT to use your TiVo without the TiVo service?
First of all, why do I need a reason to justify that to you? If I bought the equipment and own the equipment and the advertisement only said "subscription required for advanced features" then I should, on my prerogative, be able to choose to use the equipment without subscription and without advanced features.
Second of all... Did he ACTIVELY tell the device to call into Tivo and ACTIVELY approve of a feature reduced update to be downloaded to his box? Tivo the company only makes money on the subscriptions and selling aggregated information on your television viewing habits whether you are subscribed or not. Therefore we call this an exchange... You get your clock updated by Tivo and in exchange you give them your statistics (oh you could set the clock yourself by going into a secret menu, but there is no set the clock option for a user not comfortable with back doors).
Tivo did not come into his house, but Tivo's software did have his box appropriate the use of his telephone line to connect to their service, upload information on his viewing habits, download a feature reduced software version, and installed it without informing him that this version will significantly reduce his ability to use the device and did not provide him with the option of refusing the upgrade.
An interesting addendum to all this is this RIAA response to the legal filing. RIAA basically says that they do not plan to sue Professor Felten, so the reasoning behind the lawsuit is "inexplicable".
IIRC, the timing of the "clarification" of the original "threat" was such that once the time slot was gone and the talk would no longer fit into the Information Hiding Workshop conference schedule, then RIAA decided to mention that they aren't really going to sue the Prof and they aren't really the enemy of scientific research.
I guess that's the pitfall of not sending technicians through enough theory and math classes at a university.
This broad spectral band transmission technology you speak of is what in electrical engineering they call "broadband". As opposed to putting a purely digital voltage level on your line, called "baseband" - that's what your network card uses hence "10base*" or "100base*". The problem with baseband is that attenuation scrubs the signal in pretty short order - however the circuitry for baseband is pretty simple. Not so with broadband, open up your DSL modem, I gaurantee you'll see at least one high performance DSP and a whole lot of RF shielding. It's a lot of work to take the wacky signal on your DSL line and convert it to 1's and 0's.
Now to create the broad spectrum of signal on a copper wire is fairly easy. We take fancy electronics and jiggle electrons on the line and the resulting wave travels down the wire - slowly degrading as it encounters impurities in the copper, bridge taps, and so on.
Now the analog of all this to fiber doesn't quite work. There is no reason you couldn't transmit a broad spectral signal over fiber, it is just difficult to generate the different frequencies of light quickly. What we can do is toggle on and off a particular frequency of light really fast. So what is done with fiber is we put an led at one end and it gets turned on and off millions of times a second and we put a detector at the other end. This is sort of baseband style transmission over fiber. Of course the fiber itself can handle transmission of more than just the one frequency given off by the single LED, but there are cost effectiveness issues in there affecting how complicated to make your emitter/detector pairs.
As for the voice and compression issues you mentioned... It really isn't that complicated. The cutoff for your telephone is about 4KHz. The telephone company generally samples everything down to 56kbps of digital data - that's what their switching equipment handles. Ever notice that old ISDN was 56kbps per channel and old T1 was 24 channels of 56kbps? Well, there is a reason for all that. It's all 64kbps now, but I digress. The phone company does a straight digital sampling down to 56kbps on your voice and then passes you through a bandpass filter to remove the artifacts when it puts your voice back together. This is why if you listen to one of those call in radio shows the person on the phone always sounds bad. Audio fidelity on telephones isn't good and there really isn't much difference in talking with someone across the street or across the country anymore. They don't need a supercomputer to compress your voice.
Yes, yes... That's why common two letter combinations such as "th" "oi" "ea" and "tr" (and contrawise "rt") are located so far apar.... hey, actually, they aren't. So are we really sure this reason is it?
If we could mechanically arrange those to be physically close on the keyboard but physically distant on the letter carrier, then they could have chosen any arrangement they wanted.
To all the people responding to this with "no, the reason is" please provide some substantiation for your argument? And I don't mean a link to a web page full of other people spouting unsubstantiated prose. I mean real citations. This is still the only post which seems to hold water.
Think I'm ignoring the obvious (the letter-pair distance thing is the most commonly cited reason for the layout)? The common example people use is "th". Well, look down at your keyboard... Where is the t? Where is the h? What about another real common combination like "ea" or "io"? That theory isn't really holding up to scrutiny is it?
Fitst of all, DSL requires a copper carrier. Fibre won't do.
Of course DSL requires a copper pair... That's what DSL is... Do you complain that wireless ethernet is limited because it excludes wires? If you happen to have Fiber to the Curb, DSL isn't the service you go seeking. DSL is a broadband copper pair high speed data solution. When you say "modern developments", are you implying places where the entire housing development is behind a digital loop carrier? There are solutions for that. DLCs aren't something the architects of DSL "just forgot about".
Second, probably the msot common method of dhoking off bandwidth to DSL customers is by providing them a seperate frame-relay circut, managed by the company providing the ISP portion of the DSL service
What is this frame relay circuit thing you are talking about? Are you talking about the pvc? I'm pretty well versed with DSL, and I have no idea what you are talking about. Maybe you're talking about the connection to the DSLAM? The subscriber management box? You know worst case an ISP must have a single high speed WAN connection to each CO, not each customer (it generally isn't that bad, but no matter). Even cable has a single point where data must be transferred to and carried by some other wide area transport.
Oh, and a single ATU-C line card handles about 8 ADSL connections.
If this is true you are unlikely to get any money whether you sign the letter or not. If you sign the letter and they do not pay - they've broken the contract and you have the right to sue them again. If they don't go bankrupt (meaning there is still somebody to sue), you may get punitive damages because they used the letters as a fraudulent tactic to allow them time to reorganize (Chapter 11 is what they are supposed to use if they need protection from creditors so that they can reorganize).
I still see no disadvantage to signing the letter since I don't see how anyone is going to realize the full amount owed.
The problem here is that lawyers cost money - a minimum of 1/3 the settlement amount.
The best advice I think is to take the 1/2 and write off the rest as a bad debt / business loss. You'll likely end up with a minimum of 62.5% of the total money owed (depending on your tax situation you could get more). If you go the lawyer route, you will get no more than 66.7% of the amount owed.
Is the 4.2% extra you get worth the lawsuit? Especially considering the amount of work you will have to put in and time you will have to wait? And considering the risk that if the company goes belly-up before your case is settled you will probably get nothing...
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For example, Mandrake 7.2 (downloadable version) shipped with a bad ipop3d. I eventually fixed the problem but Mandrake never did - the package that came with the retail Mandrake 7.2 worked fine.
Mandrake 8.0 (downloadable version) shipped with kernel source which wouldn't compile the modules unless you did a "make mrproper" which killed the default config. I'm not sure that everybody confident enough to rebuild the kernel would think to do a "make mrproper". To the best of my knowledge, this hasn't been fixed either. I don't think it's a problem with Mandrake 8 retail.
I still use Mandrake because I like it... But if you get the downloadable version, expect complications.
Current systems CD-ROM data paths usually return an audio sector that has been verified correct, one that has been corrected, or the raw correct-or-not sector data. They don't usually return the error correction bits so that software can analyze the sectors and fix them.
If I'm way off and most CD-ROM drives out there provide a simple way to read the data with correction bits, then you are right. The software will be able to do the same interpolation the player hardware does.
You can still rip at 1x using your CD-ROM's audio path. And, as you said in your post, mp3 is lossy so the loss of quality caused by going D to A then A to D may not bother people as much. They're just upping your CD rip time from 10 minutes to 60 minutes. Once ripped, the file can float among all the others in the great P2P file sharing netherworld.
Most current anti-missile defense systems (such as Patriot B) don't strike their target, they do exactly as you say - they have a high fragmentation charge explode close enough that the probability that a piece of shrapnel will destroy the target is acceptable.
In the days of the cold war, when the probability of destroying an incoming bomber needed to be as close to 100% as possible, we had nuclear tipped long ranged air to air missiles. I don't think those relied on shrapnel though :) Heck back then every anti-something was nuclear tipped. We even had anti submarine missiles that would launch from one sub, fly through the air, dive into the water and explode. They worked because they only needed to detonate within 3 miles of the target sub.
You can't get that accuracy with GPS either unless the object stays still for a long time and takes lots of readings. There's a GPS FAQ around that explains all of this.
An interesting test case for this that I can think of off the top of my head: What if I wrote an http proxy that "protected" children from offensive language in HTML documents by replacing them with say "####". Am I violating copyright because I'm altering somebody else's copyrighted HTML? Or am I exercising my right as a parent to censor information moving between the internet and my "impressionable" child? If I'm allowed to do this, am I allowed to install another piece of software that puts yellow underlines on some words or phrases?
Once done and BSA finds out how many copies of everything you have installed, they must then prove that you have not purchased licenses for all of them. They'll usually do this by issuing a discovery subpoena for all your software purchase receipts. If you cannot show all your receipts, all is not lost... In a protracted court case you may be able to show that based on the preponderance of the evidence BSA has not shown that you were not in compliance. The court case would probably cost a couple million in time and lawyer's fees. However, it would cost BSA just as much... What they will really be looking for is a settlement.
Now what would be more fun is to have the BSA audit you and then be able to prove compliance. You can then sue the BSA for a variety of penalties, and you can have them reveal who ratted you out and sue them. Of course, the BSA knows this which is why they say in the article that they do not seek court orders frivolously. A couple lawsuits against the BSA from companies that were compliant and audited could bring them to ruin.
That's okay, his number of available IPv4 addresses was off by 3 orders of magnitude.
I question whether or not the arrest should have been allowed. I'm having trouble reading through the media spin, but it looks to me like he was arrested because he wrote a program to circumvent copy protection. Something the DMCA criminalizes in the U.S.. However, since he is a student at a Moscow university, it does not look to me like the crime occurred in the U.S..
More to the point, he was paid by his employer to do exactly what he did which is completely legal in his country. Not only that, but in his country allowing someone who made a legitimate purchase of a copyright work to make a backup is a requirement.
I'm afraid Alan Cox had it right. And I'm an embarrassed American right now. I urge every other embarassed American to sit down with a Pen and Paper and write their congressional representatives. Don't use email folks, too many zealots spamming hate have ruined that as a way to effectively communicate with congress.
Guido van Rossum disagrees. Perhaps you should correct him.
nor am I saying the best architecture included that various Motorola chipsets that plagued the Macintosh over the years
I programmed 68K assembly for about 2 years and x86 for about 3 and I would say that when the 68000 was introduced it was the finest microprocessor architecture within realistic grasp (in terms of cost) available to the mass market.
Check out RFC2616 and look for "partial GET". HTTP 1.1 could do a restart by requesting the range after the last byte it received. The browsers just aren't implementing it.
"While I accept my results may not include some desktop and workstations configured as Linux servers, I simply do not believe that Linux is shipping on 25 percent or more of all new servers and I just cannot believe the IDC figures," Hewitt said. "They are simply pushing the envelope and overstating what the operating system is actually doing."
If the majority of customers got their Linux via download or some other way, "then the market is in even worse shape than my survey shows," he said. "How many support contracts are vendors going to get from those customers? I have already told Red Hat that they are stretching the numbers they put out to the marketplace, which resulted in a very lively debate."
These paragraphs seems to imply that he was looking for what OS the machines were shipping with. And accepting that if the 25% of all servers are running Linux (i.e. the IDC study is correct), then those customers aren't buying support contracts.
The wording of the article is confused. What you quoted makes it sound as if they were looking at what OS servers bought in the past three months are running. What I quoted makes it sound like they wanted to know OS the server shipped with.
Can anyone make sense of this?
Why not just blow up the sub station? I would think those strips of Mylar would have to have been fairly bulky to prevent being melted before blowing the sub stations breaker, and the timing for letting the planes slip through would have to be fairly precise.
On the other hand, Mylar reflects radar fairly well, they could have just used all that Mylar as chaff to blind the enemy radar which would allow the planes to slip through. They would also float around for longer than it would take to bring a backup power generator online.
But why go through all this when you could simply destroy the enemy radar station? Anti-Radiation missiles are fairly mature, civilian casualties are minimized, disruptions to necessary civil services are minimized, and they are probably cheaper than a tomahawk (and certainly more accurate).
No, not a coincidence. If TiVo did as you said, and subsidized $200 to buy the box and you then paid $200 for a lifetime subscription, then TiVo operated at a loss. If they are still subsidizing $200 for the purchase of a box and it costs $250 for a lifetime membership, they may still be operating at a loss.
If you would read their SEC filing, they have entered into agreements with several partners (most notably Quantum) to share a portion of their revenue from subscriptions in exchange for perks (i.e. Quantum selling the hard drives to TiVo device manufacturers dirt cheap).
TiVo has played the necessary dirty games to become the only player on the block (sorry, Replay is just not a viable competitor right now) but it cost them a lot of money. One reason to support the unsubs is that TiVo could go belly up, and then you'd be dependent on the subscription structure of another company looking to recoup the costs of buying out TiVo *and* turn a profit, or you could use the setup that the unsubs fought for.
You are right though, they can't easily stick it to you if you never call up. Though I also understand that the TiVo needs to make one "test call" before it is first used.
When (if) I get a TiVo, I think I'm going to take the "void your warranty" risk and backup the initial drive image. That way I always have a fallback if they decide to screw the consumer again. (of course I had better get a TiVo soon before the only ones available are those shipping with 2.0.1)
I'm getting pretty tired of people promulgating this false information. Tivo makes money by selling subscriptions and selling statistics on your viewing habits. That is why TiVo has non-subscribers call in. This set your clock crap is just that... crap. Tivo is not going to continue to absorb costs just to keep the clock on your TiVo box up to date. There is no reason TiVo couldn't send down a version of the software that allowed users to easily set their own clock (without going through some back door) and stopped costing them money for connecting to their service. Your TiVo connects to the TiVo service every night because it gives TiVo information that is worth more to them than the cost of the connection.
Let's see what does a non-subscribed TiVo unit allow you to do that justifies it costing more than a regular VCR:
There's more to having a TiVo than data mining channel listings.
Mostly Wrong. The whole outcry occurred because people without the subscription service found the TiVo with the 1.3 software useful for recording live TV and programming recordings of shows. When the update came out these same people found the device to be signficantly more difficult to use than before. Then the TiVo became nearly useless without the service. Your statement should have been "Tivos are nearly useless without the service after the 2.0.1 software upgrade anyway".
They have a few bugs in the new software that make it less usable for those without the service, but they are going to fix those.
What they have done is disable non-advanced features and denied promises displayed prominently on their advertising material (notably "subscription to service required for advanced features") and stated that they will leave customers - who purchased the units in good faith - in this state of significantly diminished usability for three months.
This looks like a deliberate ruse to get non-subscribers to subscribe since a 2.0.2 update that simply bypassed the "you must be subscribed" screen for one touch recording would be easy to implement and quick to QA. Even if it was initially a mistake on their part, they are making little effort to fix it since from their perspective it could clearly lead to new subscriptions.
What TiVo needs is a class action lawsuit filed against it that drops its stock price a couple of dollars. *that* will shake up the guys holding lots of shares at the top and will quickly trickle down so that the situation is fixed in short order.
First of all, why do I need a reason to justify that to you? If I bought the equipment and own the equipment and the advertisement only said "subscription required for advanced features" then I should, on my prerogative, be able to choose to use the equipment without subscription and without advanced features.
Second of all... Did he ACTIVELY tell the device to call into Tivo and ACTIVELY approve of a feature reduced update to be downloaded to his box? Tivo the company only makes money on the subscriptions and selling aggregated information on your television viewing habits whether you are subscribed or not. Therefore we call this an exchange... You get your clock updated by Tivo and in exchange you give them your statistics (oh you could set the clock yourself by going into a secret menu, but there is no set the clock option for a user not comfortable with back doors).
Tivo did not come into his house, but Tivo's software did have his box appropriate the use of his telephone line to connect to their service, upload information on his viewing habits, download a feature reduced software version, and installed it without informing him that this version will significantly reduce his ability to use the device and did not provide him with the option of refusing the upgrade.
IIRC, the timing of the "clarification" of the original "threat" was such that once the time slot was gone and the talk would no longer fit into the Information Hiding Workshop conference schedule, then RIAA decided to mention that they aren't really going to sue the Prof and they aren't really the enemy of scientific research.
This broad spectral band transmission technology you speak of is what in electrical engineering they call "broadband". As opposed to putting a purely digital voltage level on your line, called "baseband" - that's what your network card uses hence "10base*" or "100base*". The problem with baseband is that attenuation scrubs the signal in pretty short order - however the circuitry for baseband is pretty simple. Not so with broadband, open up your DSL modem, I gaurantee you'll see at least one high performance DSP and a whole lot of RF shielding. It's a lot of work to take the wacky signal on your DSL line and convert it to 1's and 0's.
Now to create the broad spectrum of signal on a copper wire is fairly easy. We take fancy electronics and jiggle electrons on the line and the resulting wave travels down the wire - slowly degrading as it encounters impurities in the copper, bridge taps, and so on.
Now the analog of all this to fiber doesn't quite work. There is no reason you couldn't transmit a broad spectral signal over fiber, it is just difficult to generate the different frequencies of light quickly. What we can do is toggle on and off a particular frequency of light really fast. So what is done with fiber is we put an led at one end and it gets turned on and off millions of times a second and we put a detector at the other end. This is sort of baseband style transmission over fiber. Of course the fiber itself can handle transmission of more than just the one frequency given off by the single LED, but there are cost effectiveness issues in there affecting how complicated to make your emitter/detector pairs.
As for the voice and compression issues you mentioned... It really isn't that complicated. The cutoff for your telephone is about 4KHz. The telephone company generally samples everything down to 56kbps of digital data - that's what their switching equipment handles. Ever notice that old ISDN was 56kbps per channel and old T1 was 24 channels of 56kbps? Well, there is a reason for all that. It's all 64kbps now, but I digress. The phone company does a straight digital sampling down to 56kbps on your voice and then passes you through a bandpass filter to remove the artifacts when it puts your voice back together. This is why if you listen to one of those call in radio shows the person on the phone always sounds bad. Audio fidelity on telephones isn't good and there really isn't much difference in talking with someone across the street or across the country anymore. They don't need a supercomputer to compress your voice.
If we could mechanically arrange those to be physically close on the keyboard but physically distant on the letter carrier, then they could have chosen any arrangement they wanted.
Think I'm ignoring the obvious (the letter-pair distance thing is the most commonly cited reason for the layout)? The common example people use is "th". Well, look down at your keyboard... Where is the t? Where is the h? What about another real common combination like "ea" or "io"? That theory isn't really holding up to scrutiny is it?
Fitst of all, DSL requires a copper carrier. Fibre won't do.
Of course DSL requires a copper pair... That's what DSL is... Do you complain that wireless ethernet is limited because it excludes wires? If you happen to have Fiber to the Curb, DSL isn't the service you go seeking. DSL is a broadband copper pair high speed data solution. When you say "modern developments", are you implying places where the entire housing development is behind a digital loop carrier? There are solutions for that. DLCs aren't something the architects of DSL "just forgot about".
Second, probably the msot common method of dhoking off bandwidth to DSL customers is by providing them a seperate frame-relay circut, managed by the company providing the ISP portion of the DSL service
What is this frame relay circuit thing you are talking about? Are you talking about the pvc? I'm pretty well versed with DSL, and I have no idea what you are talking about. Maybe you're talking about the connection to the DSLAM? The subscriber management box? You know worst case an ISP must have a single high speed WAN connection to each CO, not each customer (it generally isn't that bad, but no matter). Even cable has a single point where data must be transferred to and carried by some other wide area transport.
Oh, and a single ATU-C line card handles about 8 ADSL connections.
The Grammar Nazi's prefer to go boldly.
I still see no disadvantage to signing the letter since I don't see how anyone is going to realize the full amount owed.
The best advice I think is to take the 1/2 and write off the rest as a bad debt / business loss. You'll likely end up with a minimum of 62.5% of the total money owed (depending on your tax situation you could get more). If you go the lawyer route, you will get no more than 66.7% of the amount owed.
Is the 4.2% extra you get worth the lawsuit? Especially considering the amount of work you will have to put in and time you will have to wait? And considering the risk that if the company goes belly-up before your case is settled you will probably get nothing...