The reviewer goes on and on about the speakers to the point of redundancy redundancy redundancy.
One thing the reviewer mentioned was a restricted number of colors (16.7 million) versus other displays. I would have liked to read more about that, and maybe see a comparison shot to illustrate that point.
Overall, a good review with plenty of pictures to satisfy the visual need of guys who like to see stuff they're interested in buying.
The original article is a troll. The writer vastly exaggerates the addiction, the problems, and the state of the game.
I've played the game since three months after release and I still enjoy it. I've gotten good customer service. I don't obsess over it; I take breaks.
The ones with addiction problems who hate the game yet can't stop -- they have problems that don't stem from EverQuest. EverQuest addiction is merely a symptom of an obsessive personality or other psychological issues.
Since most operating systems are 16 and 32 bit in nature, why do we continue to use binary memory? Why not have memory that can somehow represent 16 or 32 states?
Since when does working for a company equate to being a slave for the company?
I, personally, would rather make $40k a year and work 8 hours a day than make $85k a year and have NO life outside work.
You WORK so that you can fulfill your basic needs (food, shelter) and maybe transportation. Beyond that, it's all gravy. You do NOT need two $40k cars and a $350k house. If you have to work 80 hour weeks to pay for it, when are you planning to enjoy the house and cars?
I owe 8 hours a day to my employer, period, unless there are extenuating circumstances.
Stock options, IPO, percentage of profits. Those kinds of things are incentives to work overtime and "balls against the wall" 12 and 15-hour days.
Work that much, just earning a paycheck with no extras? C'mon; you're not doing humanitarian work where you can save a child's life or cure cancer -- you're putting money into the stockholders' and executives' pockets, and putting a serious stranglehold on your own personal life.
Wake the hell up, people. The trend towards longer work hours and more money up at the top is bullshit. Look at all the executives being caught with their hands in the cookie jar. They give themselves multi million dollar bonuses just for staying alive another year.
Re:Some Piers Anthony novels adults would enjoy.
on
Piers Anthony Unbound
·
· Score: 1
tdye, you are absolutely correct. I didn't sit down and think about the list for very long or I would have definitely added Robert Jordan. I was very interested in the Wheel of Time books for the first two or three filibusters, but everything after that was a rehash and a slow-motion review of what could have been condensed into a sixth as many pages. It actually became painful to read, although I forced myself to go through all of them except Winter's Heart, at which point I finally threw up my hands in exasperation and gave up.
A good point, and I hope we can save someone brain cells by warning them away from this series.
I have had my problems with the Xanth series myself. I started reading them when I was fairly young (11 or 12) but I grew out of them quickly, and I thought the notes at the end were self-serving, self-centered, and a waste of trees.
"Macroscope" is a very interesting science fiction novel by Piers that many of you would enjoy.
The Apprentice Adept series (first 3) were much more satisfying intellectually than the Xanth series even at age 13.
The short story anthology "Anthonology" contains some interesting stuff, one of which was pretty extreme (torture, mutilation).
The Tarot series: your basic science fiction short story expanded into a trilogy by painfully extending the story a la Stephen King. Avoid it.
Chthon (and Phthor) are somewhat interesting sci-fi.
Unlike fine wines, most authors don't age very well. Stephen King and Alan Dean Foster are two examples of authors who have novels I've enjoyed, relished, re-read. They are also two authors who currently publish absolute shit.
King writes short stories ballooned into 1000-plus page monsters, which I assume is so he can charge more for them. Although I am not a professional writer, I do have a bachelor's degree in English literature and have written many essays and papers in my time. It's easy to overwrite. It's not easy to write just enough.
Foster writes watered down tripe that reflects his latest anthropology interest.
Terry Goodkind started off the Sword of Truth series with some really good stuff. Pillars of Creation sucked ass. The one before it was pathetically meaningless, meandering, and left me cold and lost. The latest one is barely 100 pages, and it was released as a hardcover! WTF??? Explain that one, beyond total greed.
I could go on, but I won't. Anyone who has had a book on the bestseller list is there for a reason. That doesn't mean everything they write is good, or will be in the future. Some people should know when to stop writing.
Well, I wrote this large essay in here about a brainstorm I had about tiered servers to control a Metaverse-like virtual world.
Basically I said that you could have trusted root servers for the universe, similar to the DNS root servers, then everything underneath arbitrates and delegates control over subdomains.
In this case, the domains would be like this: World -> Continent -> Country (-> maybe region) -> City -> Block/Region -> Building (-> building subdivision).
For an example, a person installs the software for the city server on his machine, configures it, then would vie to become a city server. The country server would test the city server's capacity (speed, storage, etc), check whether its information conflicted with other cities (ie, has an identical name and location) then brings it into the city network as a peer if it passes. Other cities within that region would reflect their information to this new city server, and it would then be known as New Gondoland or whatever.
There would have to be a lot of checking and intelligence built in, to prevent cascades and problems when servers crash or get bogged down.
Servers with X amount of uptime would have good marks stored in the controller's database; if there is temporary network congestion, a controller with a good history will be chosen over one with an unknown or rocky history.
Big fleas have little fleas... but the smallest flea, the apartment/house/office owner doesn't have fleas. He controls his own space, but he also gets an avatar. Other domain controllers don't get one; they are dedicated servers.
Your avatar can go anywhere within the system; he can choose to view at any of the hierarchy levels. Information states are stored with checksums so that only diffs have to be sent to clients (not in a textual method surely; that would be very wasteful of resources). A city would merely have records of street and area and building placement. Entering a city would cause a check against your last update for that city, and the last X hours or days of changes are stored so that the city can send you a diff based on your last update.
Shrug, maybe someone can run with this idea. I can see an idea similar to this becoming the basis for a real Metaverse (so to speak).
I may have picked up a book or two of Pohl's at one time or another, but can't recall what they were offhand. I've tried to sample a variety of authors, but sometimes even the great ones don't get the attention they deserve because I pick up one of their less-impressive texts, or am not sure what novels are must-reads out of the sea of books they've had published.
What is ironic is that from the death of Pohl Anderson I've gleaned a list from all yours posts of "must have" books to guide me the next time I go to the used book store.
Thanks for the recommendations; the greatest thing an author can hope for is that he is remembered for his work, and Pohl Anderson definitely seems to have left a deep impression with his fans.
I totally agree. If I buy a DVD player (I already own one, but this is for example) and I don't have a digital television with component inputs (I don't, S-video is it), and my stereo that I hook up the audio to isn't AC-3 capable (it isn't, I have a 7 or 8 year old Sony reciever), why should I spend $200 more to make sure the DVD player has those features? I can always get a much nicer DVD (much cheaper) down the road (once I upgrade my receiver and my television), and retire this player to the bedroom for watching DVDs on the smaller tube. I have VERY few VHS movies, and about the only time I use VHS is when I happen to be out of the house during a show I'd like to see. That rarely happens anymore, though, since I don't watch much television.
If you look on the
comparison page, it lists both DTS and Component Video Out. However, I'm thinking this is a scam, although whoever is doing it is doing a fucking Class-A job. Nicely designed website, and a lot of information on their comparison and dictionary pages.
There are basically 3 products at the gamedvdplayer.com website.
One is the DVD player that is the Swiss army knife with a Sega Master System built in.
Another is a portable DVD player like Sony's that allows you to watch DVDs on the go.
The third is a combination mp3 player and digital camera (say what?!) Which I guess would be cool for a teenager who listens to music and hangs out with friends and would like to take pictures and stuff. Sounds like you might have this thing in your jacket and suck up all your memory taking pictures of a dark, denim pocket... or have some music on there and try to take a picture but be out of memory.
I did searches for 'Dulux DVD' on Dogpile, Google, Lycos, and AltaVista. I came up with *no* relevant links at all.
I did a Deja USENET search and came up with the following
results.
Looks like Scotty6004 crossposted a query to a bunch of groups (might be our AC), and ONE PERSON came back with a vague "Yeah, it's great," but of course, that sounds like a corporate shill to me.
I called their 800# just now and spoke to the help desk. They gave me an email address for questions that isn't listed on the website: info@dvd8050.com
I asked if there was any magazine or website reviews of the product that I could reference aside from the gamedvdplayer.com website, and she didn't have any of that information, she was just basically a message-taker.
I'm going to send some mail to the dvd8050 and gamedvdplayer address and request 3rd party info and I'll post my results.
Nope, not a troll, I just know that Slashdot readers would probably have good input on this topic.
I looked into Windows-based Tk stuff a while back (I played with a Tk-based Windows I-Ching), but I guess it's simpler than I remembered.
I love Perl myself; I've written a lot of short scripts, nothing overly ambitious. I'll go back and take another look at Tk and (Perl|Python|other). Thanks for the tip!
I played around with Delphi a couple years ago when I got a uh.. demo copy, yeah, that's it. I have this unreasonable fear of big IDE's... probably because my first programming experiences were command-line BASIC on Apple//s and Commodore 64's. Plus the fact that I hate to read a manual on how to use an interface; a language, yes, but I should be able to sit down at any C IDE and be able to compile a simple "Hello, world!" program, knowing the C language. Am I right? Who's with me on that?
You don't have to be in a "highbrow literary publication" to put a little depth into an article that someone paid you to write. There are thousands of writers out there who would love to rest on their laurels and not actually extend any effort in their writing and still make money hand over fist.
Not gonna happen. If you can record the show to an archive (read: removable) media then you can schlepp it to your PC and email it to your buddy. If you thought Napster pissed off the suits, just wait for this....
I understand the whole copyright problem, as I wrote in my original post. But, the analogy is
Audio cassettes are to CD burners and MP3 as
VHS tapes are to TiVo-like devices.
It's not a matter of 'if' but 'when' we get removable media. It will likely come from a non-US company, where the stricter copyright laws don't apply. Just like the first mp3 players and CD burners, there will be question as to its future, and some people will be 'outraged'. Eventually it will gain more momentum as people fall in love with the idea, and then everyone will come out with them. Just like mp3 players.
As far as your concern with privacy;
Haven't yet got a TiVo 'cuz I don't like them collecting info on my viewing habits
the "TiVo Underground" people (the guys at the TiVo forums that hack around with the TiVo - and live to tell about it) have written that:
The information that is sent is very limited
You can muck around with the scripts to limit what is sent even more
The TiVo people, concerned about security as well, have stated that:
The data is submitted anonymously
They have very tight client security standards
There's no sneaky conspiracy going on
From the data someone posted that was actually being passed from the TiVo, I would agree that you're very safe from prying eyes, and if you're really paranoid, you can muck with the scripts to send even bogus info if you want.
I wish I had the link to the avsforum section on TiVo, but I lost all my bookmarks when my machine crashed a couple weeks ago. Someone else posted the link in this thread somewhere, so check it out -- I like to read the TiVo Underground section.
Off-topic, these hackers have done some really cool stuff. They've been able to display arbitrary images and text, hook the TiVo up to the Internet/local LAN, increase the storage capacity by a huge amount, suck down custom programming information where the TiVo guide is lacking (the Season Pass stuff), and write other scripts and utilities to do various things to make the TiVophile happy.
Well, if they had 3 programmers working for 6 months on a Linux version, and they make $100k apiece, that would be at least $150k the company had invested. Of course, this doesn't show the loss that is taken by them not getting a more profitable application to market sooner by moving those programmers to other projects, or the overhead involved in employment (benefits, taxes, etc).
Of course, not being a professional programmer, I can't speak to how much time it would take to port something that already works on Solaris/AIX to Linux, or even how much programmers make at Adobe.
But, the point of a business is not just to break even, but make as much of a healthy profit as possible. Who knows how many people beta tested? Who knows what market surveys were taken that indicated a very low number of potential buyers? Business decisions like this are made every day, and the safe decision is to *not* support a new, non-mainstream platform.
Interface cards that do this (some "TV Tuner" cards) already exist. It's just a matter of making them more stable, more standardized, and powerful enough not to suck up too much system resources. And of course, there's the problem of watching TV through your computer. Blech. Not a good medium for some friends to hang out and watch TV. I want to be able to use it from my couch via a handheld remote.
Well, let's look at that a moment. You'd need:
- Book PC/other slimline case PC with IR port
- TV Tuner card that can record digitally
- Remote control that works with PC
All of which are available right now, off the shelf. All that's missing is:
- the OS (postulate Linux)
- the proper device drivers for the tuner card
- the GUI and program management utilities
Optional but very nice would be a "TV Guide" kind of thing like TiVo has. Of course this is easily solved by sucking down program listings with http retrieves from tvguide.com etc and massaging them with scripts until they are in a usable format. Of course this wouldn't be nearly as flexible as TiVo's Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down, but it could do the job very adequately.
Slashdot Mirror
The reviewer goes on and on about the speakers to the point of redundancy redundancy redundancy.
One thing the reviewer mentioned was a restricted number of colors (16.7 million) versus other displays. I would have liked to read more about that, and maybe see a comparison shot to illustrate that point.
Overall, a good review with plenty of pictures to satisfy the visual need of guys who like to see stuff they're interested in buying.
The original article is a troll. The writer vastly exaggerates the addiction, the problems, and the state of the game.
I've played the game since three months after release and I still enjoy it. I've gotten good customer service. I don't obsess over it; I take breaks.
The ones with addiction problems who hate the game yet can't stop -- they have problems that don't stem from EverQuest. EverQuest addiction is merely a symptom of an obsessive personality or other psychological issues.
Since most operating systems are 16 and 32 bit in nature, why do we continue to use binary memory? Why not have memory that can somehow represent 16 or 32 states?
Since when does working for a company equate to being a slave for the company?
I, personally, would rather make $40k a year and work 8 hours a day than make $85k a year and have NO life outside work.
You WORK so that you can fulfill your basic needs (food, shelter) and maybe transportation. Beyond that, it's all gravy. You do NOT need two $40k cars and a $350k house. If you have to work 80 hour weeks to pay for it, when are you planning to enjoy the house and cars?
I owe 8 hours a day to my employer, period, unless there are extenuating circumstances.
Stock options, IPO, percentage of profits. Those kinds of things are incentives to work overtime and "balls against the wall" 12 and 15-hour days.
Work that much, just earning a paycheck with no extras? C'mon; you're not doing humanitarian work where you can save a child's life or cure cancer -- you're putting money into the stockholders' and executives' pockets, and putting a serious stranglehold on your own personal life.
Wake the hell up, people. The trend towards longer work hours and more money up at the top is bullshit. Look at all the executives being caught with their hands in the cookie jar. They give themselves multi million dollar bonuses just for staying alive another year.
tdye, you are absolutely correct. I didn't sit down and think about the list for very long or I would have definitely added Robert Jordan. I was very interested in the Wheel of Time books for the first two or three filibusters, but everything after that was a rehash and a slow-motion review of what could have been condensed into a sixth as many pages. It actually became painful to read, although I forced myself to go through all of them except Winter's Heart, at which point I finally threw up my hands in exasperation and gave up.
A good point, and I hope we can save someone brain cells by warning them away from this series.
I have had my problems with the Xanth series myself. I started reading them when I was fairly young (11 or 12) but I grew out of them quickly, and I thought the notes at the end were self-serving, self-centered, and a waste of trees.
"Macroscope" is a very interesting science fiction novel by Piers that many of you would enjoy.
The Apprentice Adept series (first 3) were much more satisfying intellectually than the Xanth series even at age 13.
The short story anthology "Anthonology" contains some interesting stuff, one of which was pretty extreme (torture, mutilation).
The Tarot series: your basic science fiction short story expanded into a trilogy by painfully extending the story a la Stephen King. Avoid it.
Chthon (and Phthor) are somewhat interesting sci-fi.
Unlike fine wines, most authors don't age very well. Stephen King and Alan Dean Foster are two examples of authors who have novels I've enjoyed, relished, re-read. They are also two authors who currently publish absolute shit.
King writes short stories ballooned into 1000-plus page monsters, which I assume is so he can charge more for them. Although I am not a professional writer, I do have a bachelor's degree in English literature and have written many essays and papers in my time. It's easy to overwrite. It's not easy to write just enough.
Foster writes watered down tripe that reflects his latest anthropology interest.
Terry Goodkind started off the Sword of Truth series with some really good stuff. Pillars of Creation sucked ass. The one before it was pathetically meaningless, meandering, and left me cold and lost. The latest one is barely 100 pages, and it was released as a hardcover! WTF??? Explain that one, beyond total greed.
I could go on, but I won't. Anyone who has had a book on the bestseller list is there for a reason. That doesn't mean everything they write is good, or will be in the future. Some people should know when to stop writing.
Well, I wrote this large essay in here about a brainstorm I had about tiered servers to control a Metaverse-like virtual world.
Basically I said that you could have trusted root servers for the universe, similar to the DNS root servers, then everything underneath arbitrates and delegates control over subdomains.
In this case, the domains would be like this:
World -> Continent -> Country (-> maybe region) -> City -> Block/Region -> Building (-> building subdivision).
For an example, a person installs the software for the city server on his machine, configures it, then would vie to become a city server. The country server would test the city server's capacity (speed, storage, etc), check whether its information conflicted with other cities (ie, has an identical name and location) then brings it into the city network as a peer if it passes. Other cities within that region would reflect their information to this new city server, and it would then be known as New Gondoland or whatever.
There would have to be a lot of checking and intelligence built in, to prevent cascades and problems when servers crash or get bogged down.
Servers with X amount of uptime would have good marks stored in the controller's database; if there is temporary network congestion, a controller with a good history will be chosen over one with an unknown or rocky history.
Big fleas have little fleas... but the smallest flea, the apartment/house/office owner doesn't have fleas. He controls his own space, but he also gets an avatar. Other domain controllers don't get one; they are dedicated servers.
Your avatar can go anywhere within the system; he can choose to view at any of the hierarchy levels. Information states are stored with checksums so that only diffs have to be sent to clients (not in a textual method surely; that would be very wasteful of resources). A city would merely have records of street and area and building placement. Entering a city would cause a check against your last update for that city, and the last X hours or days of changes are stored so that the city can send you a diff based on your last update.
Shrug, maybe someone can run with this idea. I can see an idea similar to this becoming the basis for a real Metaverse (so to speak).
I knew several people that ran Commodore 64-based "C-Net" BBss.
Rome.
Inverness.
Camelot.
Castle Royale. (oy, the Zone charges on that one!)
And then there was the MajorBBS.
Amusers.
Somewhere Online aka SOLARIS (before Sun came out with the name Solaris for their OS!)
There are a lot of memories tied into BBSs, from when I was 12 up to the end of high school. The internet came along and quashed it all.
Of course, the internet is pretty damn fun.
If you were on any of the above-mentioned BBSs in Southeastern Michigan, drop me a line.
unix_guy at hotmail.com
I may have picked up a book or two of Pohl's at one time or another, but can't recall what they were offhand. I've tried to sample a variety of authors, but sometimes even the great ones don't get the attention they deserve because I pick up one of their less-impressive texts, or am not sure what novels are must-reads out of the sea of books they've had published.
What is ironic is that from the death of Pohl Anderson I've gleaned a list from all yours posts of "must have" books to guide me the next time I go to the used book store.
Thanks for the recommendations; the greatest thing an author can hope for is that he is remembered for his work, and Pohl Anderson definitely seems to have left a deep impression with his fans.
I totally agree. If I buy a DVD player (I already own one, but this is for example) and I don't have a digital television with component inputs (I don't, S-video is it), and my stereo that I hook up the audio to isn't AC-3 capable (it isn't, I have a 7 or 8 year old Sony reciever), why should I spend $200 more to make sure the DVD player has those features? I can always get a much nicer DVD (much cheaper) down the road (once I upgrade my receiver and my television), and retire this player to the bedroom for watching DVDs on the smaller tube. I have VERY few VHS movies, and about the only time I use VHS is when I happen to be out of the house during a show I'd like to see. That rarely happens anymore, though, since I don't watch much television.
If you look on the comparison page, it lists both DTS and Component Video Out. However, I'm thinking this is a scam, although whoever is doing it is doing a fucking Class-A job. Nicely designed website, and a lot of information on their comparison and dictionary pages.
Coincidence that the guy posting on Usenet asking about the device is named Scott as well?
There's some kind of new freak "Internet DVD Player" from Raite on their website! Check it out.
There are basically 3 products at the gamedvdplayer.com website.
One is the DVD player that is the Swiss army knife with a Sega Master System built in.
Another is a portable DVD player like Sony's that allows you to watch DVDs on the go.
The third is a combination mp3 player and digital camera (say what?!) Which I guess would be cool for a teenager who listens to music and hangs out with friends and would like to take pictures and stuff. Sounds like you might have this thing in your jacket and suck up all your memory taking pictures of a dark, denim pocket... or have some music on there and try to take a picture but be out of memory.
I did searches for 'Dulux DVD' on Dogpile, Google, Lycos, and AltaVista. I came up with *no* relevant links at all.
I did a Deja USENET search and came up with the following results.
Looks like Scotty6004 crossposted a query to a bunch of groups (might be our AC), and ONE PERSON came back with a vague "Yeah, it's great," but of course, that sounds like a corporate shill to me.
I called their 800# just now and spoke to the help desk. They gave me an email address for questions that isn't listed on the website: info@dvd8050.com
I asked if there was any magazine or website reviews of the product that I could reference aside from the gamedvdplayer.com website, and she didn't have any of that information, she was just basically a message-taker.
I'm going to send some mail to the dvd8050 and gamedvdplayer address and request 3rd party info and I'll post my results.
Hope you don't have cable TV with a cable box, or a satellite dish, then. They have even more ability to track your viewing habits.
This was a funny, well-written joke. The "wearable computer" thing was a gas!
Nope, not a troll, I just know that Slashdot readers would probably have good input on this topic.
//s and Commodore 64's. Plus the fact that I hate to read a manual on how to use an interface; a language, yes, but I should be able to sit down at any C IDE and be able to compile a simple "Hello, world!" program, knowing the C language. Am I right? Who's with me on that?
I looked into Windows-based Tk stuff a while back (I played with a Tk-based Windows I-Ching), but I guess it's simpler than I remembered.
I love Perl myself; I've written a lot of short scripts, nothing overly ambitious. I'll go back and take another look at Tk and (Perl|Python|other). Thanks for the tip!
I played around with Delphi a couple years ago when I got a uh.. demo copy, yeah, that's it. I have this unreasonable fear of big IDE's... probably because my first programming experiences were command-line BASIC on Apple
I'd like to hear more about the PSX2 development environment if anyone would care to elaborate.
You don't have to be in a "highbrow literary publication" to put a little depth into an article that someone paid you to write. There are thousands of writers out there who would love to rest on their laurels and not actually extend any effort in their writing and still make money hand over fist.
On a tangent...
What's a good Windows-based development language that DOESN'T take 2000 lines of code to pop up "Hello World", and isn't slow as a dog in the process?
Not gonna happen. If you can record the show to an archive (read: removable) media then you can schlepp it to your PC and email it to your buddy. If you thought Napster pissed off the suits, just wait for this....
I understand the whole copyright problem, as I wrote in my original post. But, the analogy is
Audio cassettes are to CD burners and MP3 as
VHS tapes are to TiVo-like devices.
It's not a matter of 'if' but 'when' we get removable media. It will likely come from a non-US company, where the stricter copyright laws don't apply. Just like the first mp3 players and CD burners, there will be question as to its future, and some people will be 'outraged'. Eventually it will gain more momentum as people fall in love with the idea, and then everyone will come out with them. Just like mp3 players.
As far as your concern with privacy;
Haven't yet got a TiVo 'cuz I don't like them collecting info on my viewing habits
the "TiVo Underground" people (the guys at the TiVo forums that hack around with the TiVo - and live to tell about it) have written that:
The information that is sent is very limited
You can muck around with the scripts to limit what is sent even more
The TiVo people, concerned about security as well, have stated that:
The data is submitted anonymously
They have very tight client security standards
There's no sneaky conspiracy going on
From the data someone posted that was actually being passed from the TiVo, I would agree that you're very safe from prying eyes, and if you're really paranoid, you can muck with the scripts to send even bogus info if you want.
I wish I had the link to the avsforum section on TiVo, but I lost all my bookmarks when my machine crashed a couple weeks ago. Someone else posted the link in this thread somewhere, so check it out -- I like to read the TiVo Underground section.
Off-topic, these hackers have done some really cool stuff. They've been able to display arbitrary images and text, hook the TiVo up to the Internet/local LAN, increase the storage capacity by a huge amount, suck down custom programming information where the TiVo guide is lacking (the Season Pass stuff), and write other scripts and utilities to do various things to make the TiVophile happy.
Well, technically, he hasn't done it yet... Wasn't he/won't he be in the 24th century?
Well, if they had 3 programmers working for 6 months on a Linux version, and they make $100k apiece, that would be at least $150k the company had invested. Of course, this doesn't show the loss that is taken by them not getting a more profitable application to market sooner by moving those programmers to other projects, or the overhead involved in employment (benefits, taxes, etc).
Of course, not being a professional programmer, I can't speak to how much time it would take to port something that already works on Solaris/AIX to Linux, or even how much programmers make at Adobe.
But, the point of a business is not just to break even, but make as much of a healthy profit as possible. Who knows how many people beta tested? Who knows what market surveys were taken that indicated a very low number of potential buyers? Business decisions like this are made every day, and the safe decision is to *not* support a new, non-mainstream platform.
Interface cards that do this (some "TV Tuner" cards) already exist. It's just a matter of making them more stable, more standardized, and powerful enough not to suck up too much system resources. And of course, there's the problem of watching TV through your computer. Blech. Not a good medium for some friends to hang out and watch TV. I want to be able to use it from my couch via a handheld remote.
Well, let's look at that a moment. You'd need:
- Book PC/other slimline case PC with IR port
- TV Tuner card that can record digitally
- Remote control that works with PC
All of which are available right now, off the shelf. All that's missing is:
- the OS (postulate Linux)
- the proper device drivers for the tuner card
- the GUI and program management utilities
Optional but very nice would be a "TV Guide" kind of thing like TiVo has. Of course this is easily solved by sucking down program listings with http retrieves from tvguide.com etc and massaging them with scripts until they are in a usable format. Of course this wouldn't be nearly as flexible as TiVo's Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down, but it could do the job very adequately.