Maybe so, but there are always negative externalities to events like that.
What if you were a stupid parent of a kid who would have grown up to cure cancer, and you dragged him along with you on your stupid hike up the mountain? Just so you can't claim the kid has bad genes anyway, let's say the state was careless and let you adopt...
Of course, NPD released this information to drive industry interest in its services, so there's no hard data really given. This isn't a "study" by any means. Notice how there's no mention of methodology, like whether the survey was multiple choice only or whether participants could write in other names for companies offering VOD, like Greencine. It also doesn't state whether this survey was done independently or whether it was sponsored by one of the two listed companies, as many NPD surveys seem to be.
The article mentions 500 titles, including 1/2 of the top 50 PC games ever. In other words, at least some of these are not brand-new games. My question at this point would be, why would I want to pay for a crippled PC that requires a monthly service, just to bring me retreads of old games? Do we at least get to keep the content, or does it disappear if we don't pay the bill? At least the XBox has new titles, and I don't have to pay any monthly fee unless I want XBox Live. I'll probably buy an XBox soon enough so I can chip it for use as an extra, Replay-streaming media center, but I haven't rushed to buy it, yet.
Except when I was called in to set the thing up, the librarian complained that it was so slow. How slow? Why, 56k! It was no better than a modem connection.
There is a substantial difference between a symmetrical, 56K-maximum-each-way link and an asymmetrical, 53K-practical-maximum-down and 33K-max-up link. It's noticeably better than dialup, particularly if you're not just browsing or downloading mail.
So are you saying in a perfect world everyone would have a gay uncle?
In a perfect world, you wouldn't need a gay uncle, a black uncle, an uncle who's an aunt, an uncle of some other religion, a poor uncle, a blind uncle, and so forth, in order to know how to interact appropriately with people who are different.
In other news: IBM is preparing a dual-core version of its 90nm PowerPC 970FX processor - aka the G5. Codenamed Antares, the chip will be delivered - likely in sample form - to Apple later this summer.
Would either company necessarily want it to be public knowledge when they actually deliver those samples? Apple may have been testing samples for the last month, for all we know. They could have both agreed that once again, surprise would work really well in their favor in the market for this next leap in technology.
That being said, do I think they have those samples? No.
My pragmatism tells me that my vote won't count where I live, but even so, my conscience tells me emphatically not to support the Greens. I can possibly support a couple of the general principles of their platform, such as it is, but I strongly disagree with most of the stated plans for implementation for those, and definitely do not support many of the other principles. I'd rather vote for a candidate that will do less, but conversely less against the direction I want to see the country move. Especially when looking at the political reality that Cobb, if elected president, wouldn't be able to get much, if anything, through Congress.
If you care to know who I will vote for, wait until after I get a job:)
No, it's horrible! The new iMacs would be so cute as PVRs with built-in screens - especially that 20-inch one! However, there's no card slot to drop in a tuner, and nobody even seems interested in making a good quality external box, never mind trying to make quality PVR software for it? What am I missing here?
Ah, well, I guess if I buy one of those iMacs, I can just have it stream the programs off my ReplayTV using DVArchive. Most people can't do that, though, of course.
It's been a while since I read it, and I'm glad to see it, again.
I've always considered this to be one of the most touching short stories in the genre, along with one about an automated house slowly falling apart years after a nuclear blast takes its family, and a few others. Unfortunately, I don't remember titles of short stories very well at all:\
Well, yes, but it could have been much better, that's for sure.
I thought they used to hint that if they were going to shut down, they'd push out one last update that would unlock everyone who was only monthly, so that everyone could run "blind," where we could enter recording times manually after the schedule data ran out.
Obviously, if we've got an alternate source (Zap2it, actually) we've managed to get working in the community, we can keep the scheduling functionality (though our "channels" based on content heading and not titles would stop working), but we still need them to unlock the monthly subscribers. Thankfully, I got a deal on my unit with lifetime, but I still am disappointed at the lack of definite affirmation in the email you got. In fact, the response restated your question, then studiously avoided it! It just says that policies haven't changed, without stating that yes, there's a policy to unlock everyone.
Thanks for sharing this - looks like we need to be asking them some old questions about survival as well as new ones about direction.
I fully understand that for other people, other solutions are more appropriate, but I really prefer a dedicated ReplayTV unit right now, especially for the consistency and reliability, not to mention the cool remote, though I may roll my own when I eventually move to HD (there are no Replay HD or Replay+DVD offerings announced, and Tivo's HD is too encumbered out of the box for my needs).
Not to beat a not-dead-yet horse, but ReplayTV recently dumped a lot of their 5040 units for $50 each, or $30 with a special coupon code (the latter seems to have been a mistake that they cancelled quickly). These are previous-generation models that can transfer shows to other Replay units of the same 50xx model line, something Tivo has not been able to do natively, before, and which is unfortunately dropped in the 55xx line. The 50xx line also has the controversial commercial advance feature, which was dropped on the 55xx line for legal reasons(it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, but is nice when it works). With lifetime activation at $299 (or monthly fees that now vary depending on number of units), that means RTV is still a platform worth comparing against. Especially when you consider third-party tools like DVArchive (java-based!) that exploit the XML interface of the units to copy programs off for safekeeping and later streaming, without any hacking of the box or transcoding of the native.mpgs or weird versions of mplayer, unlike Tivos, again.
Oh, one more thing: people outside the US have managed to set up their legitimately-subscribed ReplayTVs with another tool called WIRNS (which you can find in AVSForum, to scrape local show listings. I mention this because, even if ReplayTV as a company dies, owners will still have alternatives to keep their schedules from going dark. And a lot of owners are also joining Poopli, a website with the objective of making transfers between Replays easier.
(No, I don't work for anybody making or selling these, nor do I own any of these websites. I'm just an owner of a 50xx that I've bumped up to 200GB with a simple patch-and-swap, very much like a Tivo owner would do. Before I bought my box, I had almost given up on tv entirely. Now, I'm looking forward to my next hard drive upgrade. And I really regret not buying another unit on sale).
For incoming (to use SPF to check incoming mail) all they have to do is have a front-end mail relay in front of their exchange server which deals with the filtering before passing mail onto Exchange -- which they should do anyway, only a nutter exposes an old version of Exchange directly on the internet.
It's the incoming to the Exchange servers that was worrying me, and you know many if not most people don't put anything up in front of their Exchange servers, or if they do, it's just a generic firewall. It doesn't matter that it's stupid, it's what they do (or don't do). Remember how long it took for people to get serious about closing their open relays? Good comment anyway, though.
We had an old Exchange 5.5 server running on under-powered hardware. We installed XWall on another machine and relayed incoming messages through it. This took the filtering and virus scanning load off the Exchange server and made it usable again. I don't know if XWall currently supports SPF (I'm also too lazy to look), but it can certainly bring additional filtering functionality to an old Exchange installation. It's pretty cheap too.
That's great to hear that you did even that much. I have no doubts that companies could implement SPF even with MS Exchange, but it will take work. And if you think back to how long it took your company to decide to set up that XWall, it will probably seem obvious that many companies, especially small ones, won't bother.
I'm really worried that MS will just include Sender-ID as part of their next server releases, or worse yet offer service packs for prior versions, and when/if companies upgrade or patch, they'll think Sender-ID is what they want because they got it "free." Since you said you're too lazy to see if XWall supports SPF, if a service pack for your exchange version came out, and enabled Sender-ID, would you just run with it? That's what I'm talking about.
These arguments others have about most email servers not being MS-related are feeble, in my opinion, because they do seem to be the largest player in the corporate email market, and that's where the important email goes. Spoofers (at least the ones I've been seeing bounced mails from) connect directly to destination mail servers, they don't use their ISPs as MTAs. So what ISPs might run is not relevant to them.
I don't think that's sufficient to force a standard.
Well, if they own 50% of that market, they are the single largest player in that market. Many small companies won't be reading up on the debate, etc., and will just think it's cool protection for email, so penetration of that 50% market will probably be high.
I have a little vanity domain that I use, and I'm seeing bouncebacks indicating that people are spoofing it daily. This domain is the best way to reach me, though, and it's where my resume points, etc. If I want to email those companies, ideology has nothing to do with it - I will eventually have to support Sender-ID or face filtering.
I'm now seeing 30-40 bounceback emails a day originally sent from people spoofing my vanity domain - I haven't given any accounts out, of course. Makes me wonder how many of their emails got through to their victims, as these are just some of the failures. The most annoying part for me is that I see them come in batches - with very different originating IPs and to different mail servers for each message - so I don't know if it's a pack of zombies and my domain is one of the ones in rotation, picked out of someone's address book, or if someone is doing a deliberate joe-job on me.
This ought to be considered actionable as a DOS attack - if companies start filtering out my domain name, I can't apply for jobs with them, for example. And if my upstream ever gets tired of explaining to idiots to read their headers instead of thinking it's me, then I'll have to hunt for another provider. Even without those reasons, it still takes me time every day to clean out my admin box so I can get my real mail. In fact, because I'm the only person at my vanity domain, and it's part of my online identity, it also ought to be considered slander for someone to pretend to be from my domain, because they're effectively claiming I'm sending these ads, etc.
I hope SPF becomes generally accepted, and soon. I'm afraid it won't, though, because there are millions of people running old copies of MS Exchange, etc., and they probably won't want to pay to upgrade or take the performance hit to authenticate messages this way. Still, if I go ahead and stick the DNS entries in, it might at least prevent some of the damage.
Interestingly, when I was watching this live over the internet, they appeared to go to a picture of the capsule underneath a canopy, in a very grainy b/w sequence that lasted just a few seconds, then they switched to another camera, and later said they didn't yet have visual on any chutes.
Too bad I don't have cable, I'd have loved to have this on my Replay, to show you some caps of the sequence.
BTW, I did catch the LAT/LON, they said it was 40 07 40 and 113 30 29, that would actually show up in China. If you say -113 instead of +113, you get a location in the Deseret Test Center. Here's a Mapquest map. They also said it was "just north of the road." Of course, they could have accidentally or deliberately been a bit off on their coordinates, but this is what they said.
A significantly large Earth-destroying asteroid could be large enough to cause debris to escape our atmosphere and end up hitting Luna. Large enough, it could cause orbital eccentricities such that Luna would spiral in over time.
Even if we do have some kind of ark, what would be the point, if we don't know that anyone will be along to use the material, or any place to put it?
The article quotes the scientist saying that we could repopulate the earth after an event of this magnitude, but I don't think he's given thought to how long it would take before the Earth would be hospitable again, assuming it was only a "mild" Earth-cleansing climatological disaster. We're talking decades or centuries, perhaps longer, for dust to settle out of the atmosphere, etc.
In the longer term, we need self-sufficient colonies far enough away that they're not affected when Sol becomes a red giant and eats all the inner planets, anyway. I don't know about you, but I don't think survivability will be high on the remaining planets, either.
Interestingly, when I was watching this live over the internet, they appeared to go to a picture of the capsule underneath a canopy, in a very grainy b/w sequence that lasted just a few seconds, then they switched to another camera, and later said they didn't yet have visual on any chutes.
Too bad I don't have cable, I'd have loved to have this on my Replay, to show you some caps.
BTW, I did catch the LAT/LON, they said it was 40 07 40 and 113 30 29, that would actually show up in China. If you say -113 instead of +113, you get a location in the Deseret Test Center. Here's a Mapquest map. They also said it was "just north of the road." Of course, they could have accidentally or deliberately been a bit off on their coordinates, but this is what they said.
Slashdot Mirror
What happened to their promise that all new portables would do MP3, and they'd have firmware updates for existing ones?
Maybe so, but there are always negative externalities to events like that.
What if you were a stupid parent of a kid who would have grown up to cure cancer, and you dragged him along with you on your stupid hike up the mountain?
Just so you can't claim the kid has bad genes anyway, let's say the state was careless and let you adopt...
Of course, NPD released this information to drive industry interest in its services, so there's no hard data really given. This isn't a "study" by any means. Notice how there's no mention of methodology, like whether the survey was multiple choice only or whether participants could write in other names for companies offering VOD, like Greencine. It also doesn't state whether this survey was done independently or whether it was sponsored by one of the two listed companies, as many NPD surveys seem to be.
The article mentions 500 titles, including 1/2 of the top 50 PC games ever. In other words, at least some of these are not brand-new games. My question at this point would be, why would I want to pay for a crippled PC that requires a monthly service, just to bring me retreads of old games? Do we at least get to keep the content, or does it disappear if we don't pay the bill? At least the XBox has new titles, and I don't have to pay any monthly fee unless I want XBox Live. I'll probably buy an XBox soon enough so I can chip it for use as an extra, Replay-streaming media center, but I haven't rushed to buy it, yet.
There is a substantial difference between a symmetrical, 56K-maximum-each-way link and an asymmetrical, 53K-practical-maximum-down and 33K-max-up link.
It's noticeably better than dialup, particularly if you're not just browsing or downloading mail.
Yeah, I know. It just looked nice when I wrote it
In a perfect world, you wouldn't need a gay uncle, a black uncle, an uncle who's an aunt, an uncle of some other religion, a poor uncle, a blind uncle, and so forth, in order to know how to interact appropriately with people who are different.
Would either company necessarily want it to be public knowledge when they actually deliver those samples?
Apple may have been testing samples for the last month, for all we know.
They could have both agreed that once again, surprise would work really well in their favor in the market for this next leap in technology.
That being said, do I think they have those samples? No.
My pragmatism tells me that my vote won't count where I live, but even so, my conscience tells me emphatically not to support the Greens. I can possibly support a couple of the general principles of their platform, such as it is, but I strongly disagree with most of the stated plans for implementation for those, and definitely do not support many of the other principles. I'd rather vote for a candidate that will do less, but conversely less against the direction I want to see the country move. Especially when looking at the political reality that Cobb, if elected president, wouldn't be able to get much, if anything, through Congress.
If you care to know who I will vote for, wait until after I get a job
No, it's horrible! The new iMacs would be so cute as PVRs with built-in screens - especially that 20-inch one! However, there's no card slot to drop in a tuner, and nobody even seems interested in making a good quality external box, never mind trying to make quality PVR software for it? What am I missing here?
Ah, well, I guess if I buy one of those iMacs, I can just have it stream the programs off my ReplayTV using DVArchive. Most people can't do that, though, of course.
It's been a while since I read it, and I'm glad to see it, again.
:\
I've always considered this to be one of the most touching short stories in the genre, along with one about an automated house slowly falling apart years after a nuclear blast takes its family, and a few others. Unfortunately, I don't remember titles of short stories very well at all
Well, yes, but it could have been much better, that's for sure.
I thought they used to hint that if they were going to shut down, they'd push out one last update that would unlock everyone who was only monthly, so that everyone could run "blind," where we could enter recording times manually after the schedule data ran out.
Obviously, if we've got an alternate source (Zap2it, actually) we've managed to get working in the community, we can keep the scheduling functionality (though our "channels" based on content heading and not titles would stop working), but we still need them to unlock the monthly subscribers. Thankfully, I got a deal on my unit with lifetime, but I still am disappointed at the lack of definite affirmation in the email you got. In fact, the response restated your question, then studiously avoided it! It just says that policies haven't changed, without stating that yes, there's a policy to unlock everyone.
Thanks for sharing this - looks like we need to be asking them some old questions about survival as well as new ones about direction.
Yes! That's it exactly! That's the best error message since the haiku 404 error messages on BeOS' native browser. Okay, it's not a 404, but still...
I wonder how these lawsuits are going to look in their planned filing with the American Stock Exchange?
Oh, man, Homestar used to have a really cool 404 page with them walking/talking in front of an exploder-style 404 page. Looks like it's gone :(
I fully understand that for other people, other solutions are more appropriate, but I really prefer a dedicated ReplayTV unit right now, especially for the consistency and reliability, not to mention the cool remote, though I may roll my own when I eventually move to HD (there are no Replay HD or Replay+DVD offerings announced, and Tivo's HD is too encumbered out of the box for my needs).
.mpgs or weird versions of mplayer, unlike Tivos, again.
Not to beat a not-dead-yet horse, but ReplayTV recently dumped a lot of their 5040 units for $50 each, or $30 with a special coupon code (the latter seems to have been a mistake that they cancelled quickly). These are previous-generation models that can transfer shows to other Replay units of the same 50xx model line, something Tivo has not been able to do natively, before, and which is unfortunately dropped in the 55xx line. The 50xx line also has the controversial commercial advance feature, which was dropped on the 55xx line for legal reasons(it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, but is nice when it works). With lifetime activation at $299 (or monthly fees that now vary depending on number of units), that means RTV is still a platform worth comparing against. Especially when you consider third-party tools like DVArchive (java-based!) that exploit the XML interface of the units to copy programs off for safekeeping and later streaming, without any hacking of the box or transcoding of the native
Oh, one more thing: people outside the US have managed to set up their legitimately-subscribed ReplayTVs with another tool called WIRNS (which you can find in AVSForum, to scrape local show listings. I mention this because, even if ReplayTV as a company dies, owners will still have alternatives to keep their schedules from going dark. And a lot of owners are also joining Poopli, a website with the objective of making transfers between Replays easier.
(No, I don't work for anybody making or selling these, nor do I own any of these websites. I'm just an owner of a 50xx that I've bumped up to 200GB with a simple patch-and-swap, very much like a Tivo owner would do. Before I bought my box, I had almost given up on tv entirely. Now, I'm looking forward to my next hard drive upgrade. And I really regret not buying another unit on sale).
It's the incoming to the Exchange servers that was worrying me, and you know many if not most people don't put anything up in front of their Exchange servers, or if they do, it's just a generic firewall. It doesn't matter that it's stupid, it's what they do (or don't do). Remember how long it took for people to get serious about closing their open relays? Good comment anyway, though.
That's great to hear that you did even that much. I have no doubts that companies could implement SPF even with MS Exchange, but it will take work. And if you think back to how long it took your company to decide to set up that XWall, it will probably seem obvious that many companies, especially small ones, won't bother.
I'm really worried that MS will just include Sender-ID as part of their next server releases, or worse yet offer service packs for prior versions, and when/if companies upgrade or patch, they'll think Sender-ID is what they want because they got it "free." Since you said you're too lazy to see if XWall supports SPF, if a service pack for your exchange version came out, and enabled Sender-ID, would you just run with it? That's what I'm talking about.
These arguments others have about most email servers not being MS-related are feeble, in my opinion, because they do seem to be the largest player in the corporate email market, and that's where the important email goes. Spoofers (at least the ones I've been seeing bounced mails from) connect directly to destination mail servers, they don't use their ISPs as MTAs. So what ISPs might run is not relevant to them.
Well, if they own 50% of that market, they are the single largest player in that market. Many small companies won't be reading up on the debate, etc., and will just think it's cool protection for email, so penetration of that 50% market will probably be high.
I have a little vanity domain that I use, and I'm seeing bouncebacks indicating that people are spoofing it daily. This domain is the best way to reach me, though, and it's where my resume points, etc. If I want to email those companies, ideology has nothing to do with it - I will eventually have to support Sender-ID or face filtering.
I'm now seeing 30-40 bounceback emails a day originally sent from people spoofing my vanity domain - I haven't given any accounts out, of course. Makes me wonder how many of their emails got through to their victims, as these are just some of the failures. The most annoying part for me is that I see them come in batches - with very different originating IPs and to different mail servers for each message - so I don't know if it's a pack of zombies and my domain is one of the ones in rotation, picked out of someone's address book, or if someone is doing a deliberate joe-job on me.
This ought to be considered actionable as a DOS attack - if companies start filtering out my domain name, I can't apply for jobs with them, for example. And if my upstream ever gets tired of explaining to idiots to read their headers instead of thinking it's me, then I'll have to hunt for another provider. Even without those reasons, it still takes me time every day to clean out my admin box so I can get my real mail. In fact, because I'm the only person at my vanity domain, and it's part of my online identity, it also ought to be considered slander for someone to pretend to be from my domain, because they're effectively claiming I'm sending these ads, etc.
I hope SPF becomes generally accepted, and soon. I'm afraid it won't, though, because there are millions of people running old copies of MS Exchange, etc., and they probably won't want to pay to upgrade or take the performance hit to authenticate messages this way. Still, if I go ahead and stick the DNS entries in, it might at least prevent some of the damage.
Baxter is, of course, the famous IRC client for BeOS. (Hi, Seth!)
This is hi, we're another website, link to our press release, please (and maybe bring our readership stats up).
./ viewers, I'm sure.
I can't tell whether it's a BBS or just a passworded webpage because it's down right now, but gee, prior art is older than some
Interestingly, when I was watching this live over the internet, they appeared to go to a picture of the capsule underneath a canopy, in a very grainy b/w sequence that lasted just a few seconds, then they switched to another camera, and later said they didn't yet have visual on any chutes.
Too bad I don't have cable, I'd have loved to have this on my Replay, to show you some caps of the sequence.
BTW, I did catch the LAT/LON, they said it was 40 07 40 and 113 30 29, that would actually show up in China. If you say -113 instead of +113, you get a location in the Deseret Test Center. Here's a Mapquest map. They also said it was "just north of the road." Of course, they could have accidentally or deliberately been a bit off on their coordinates, but this is what they said.
A significantly large Earth-destroying asteroid could be large enough to cause debris to escape our atmosphere and end up hitting Luna. Large enough, it could cause orbital eccentricities such that Luna would spiral in over time.
Even if we do have some kind of ark, what would be the point, if we don't know that anyone will be along to use the material, or any place to put it?
The article quotes the scientist saying that we could repopulate the earth after an event of this magnitude, but I don't think he's given thought to how long it would take before the Earth would be hospitable again, assuming it was only a "mild" Earth-cleansing climatological disaster. We're talking decades or centuries, perhaps longer, for dust to settle out of the atmosphere, etc.
In the longer term, we need self-sufficient colonies far enough away that they're not affected when Sol becomes a red giant and eats all the inner planets, anyway. I don't know about you, but I don't think survivability will be high on the remaining planets, either.
Make many arks, but send them far.
Interestingly, when I was watching this live over the internet, they appeared to go to a picture of the capsule underneath a canopy, in a very grainy b/w sequence that lasted just a few seconds, then they switched to another camera, and later said they didn't yet have visual on any chutes.
Too bad I don't have cable, I'd have loved to have this on my Replay, to show you some caps.
BTW, I did catch the LAT/LON, they said it was 40 07 40 and 113 30 29, that would actually show up in China. If you say -113 instead of +113, you get a location in the Deseret Test Center. Here's a Mapquest map. They also said it was "just north of the road." Of course, they could have accidentally or deliberately been a bit off on their coordinates, but this is what they said.