clearly you run a small, unimportant network. at many companies it's a fact of life that you need to put security fixes through a verification process to make sure that they don't cause any problems that are worse than the vulnerability before applying them. In the meantime, you're knowingly running a network with some security flaws.
In the real world, we can't all just apply every patch immediately, some of us need to make sure that a patch won't cause a problem with vital services before we do so, and contrary to what you may have read on slashdot, those verification processes aren't always trivial.
Honestly, if he's made enough money to buy an $800k home from his spam, he should consider himself lucky that the only retribution has been some catalogue signups. Personally, I'm trying for much better retribution than a few catalogues, I'm writing a letter (not an email or a fax) to my state representative and my governor, asking that they enact anti-uce legislation in my state, and asking that it have a financial penalty clause.
Who wants to fuck around with a minor inconvenience when we can do one better and legally put him out of business?
I've got a 1U machine in a colo that provides power and what not, over a very fast net connection (multiple gigabit tier one peers) for about $100/mo, but that only gives me 400 gigs of transfer. Not much in the way of available service or monitoring though, it's only good because it's cheap.
I also share 4 1U machines and a UPS colo'd in a facility that provides an unmetered 5Mbit connection (provided over ethernet) for about $180/mo per machine.
On top of that, I split the costs on a data center which has 2 regular old T1s and a whole fuckton of servers, since it's our space, and the Ts run about $1500/mo.
Nah, getting the money's no problem. I can process credit cards online right now, and I only get smacked with a 2% fee, even on small transactions. Setting up repeating transactions is also dead simple with my setup.
Honestly, the only problem is that I'd have to commit to a fairly expensive contract and I truly believe that most people who use PVR software would rather steal their data than pay for a legal feed. I mean, look at the amount of flak that TiVo catches for having a $10 monthly fee or a $200 lifetime guide data/software update fee.
The fact that the free PVR software isn't as good as TiVos software shows me that people aren't interested in additional features, they're interested in being cheap. Any evidence to the contrary is welcomed.
TV Guide doesn't sell guide data so much as it sells guide services.
Honestly, I considered setting up a company to license the TMS big build for free pvrs and such, until I realized an important point. People who call a celeron 400 with some perl scripts and a tv-out a tivo aren't going to be willing to pay $3/mo for legal guide data, when they could just steal it instead.
If I thought there was a chance in hell that the result of my hard work would be something other than a bunch of jackasses distributing the data on kazaa while some other jackasses bitched and moaned about how expensive $3/mo is and how I must be getting rich off of that somehow.
zap2it is run by Tribune Media Services, who sells guide data for profit. odds are good that they don't look kindly upon people viewing it without viewing their other content, and not paying.
you get what you pay for, and in the world of guide data, free doesn't go very far.
for what it's worth, the data is relatively inexpensive to license in bulk, so if you weren't all a bunch of cheap-ass thieves, you could cover expenses selling guide data for $2/mo. Unfortunately, I think we all know that some cheap jackass would decide that your information wanted to be free, and you'd get fucked in the end.
please explain why you're referring to the tivo subscription as being '5 year'. as near as i can tell, you're just a libelist.
enjoy your philips dvd-r, i'll enjoy watching my directivo record only new episodes of the shows i like, and recording two channels at once when two things I like collide, and keeping the original dolby digital sound from the satellite stream. my tivo makes your dvd-r look like a fucking joke.
keep your dvd-r, i'll keep my DirecTiVo and my ProntoPro remote.
400 gigs would also be enough to hold about 1000 cds in a losslessly compressed format, which is... not enough to hold all my cds. it'd also hold about 80 or so dvds, which is.... not enough to hold all my dvds. and those aren't even interesting applications.
it'll hold about 10 hours of 48 track 24/88.2 audio, a small fraction of an engineering firm's drawings or a small fraction of the raw video used by a film editor. people with servers that can boot from firewire could use them as a portable emergency recovery drive...
The fact that you don't currently have a use for a nicely packaged, relatively inexpensive mass storage device does not mean that nobody needs one.
if you really think that 400 gig firewire drives exist solely to stroke egos, go to a therapist now, because you're a pathetically insecure fuck.
thank god people are starting to realize that cracking rc5 was interesting to do once, because it addressed some new issues in distributed computing, but now it's just beating a dead horse. the protein folding project and the ogr projects can actually advance science in some minor fashion, please people, do those instead.
Is the gist of your theory that moderation is broken, and that you can't get accurate overall OS usage profiles by reading slashdot? If so, I agree with it.
If you're trying to show evidence that Mac users only like Macs because they bought one, you've failed miserably.
I'm a *nix user, and I've recently switched almost entirely to Mac.
We don't all toe the slashdot line. Some of us just want something that works well, doesn't waste our time, and lets us work effectively. OS X fits that bill wonderfully for me, and it plays well with my *nix servers.
I don't get paid based on the liberation of my software, I get paid to get things done. Fuck the KDE/Gnome amateur hour; give me OS X and software that works.
Personally I love the whole download manager thing, makes it much easier to keep track of multiple simultaneous downloads.
Now if only they'd fix the download manager in OS X (it shows nothing right now, and hasn't for quite some time), and add an option to automatically close the download manager if all downloads have completed successfully.
The storage media is just a hard drive, about 1 gig per advertised hour. I say advertised hour, because the stated number is at lowest quality (except with DirecTiVos, where it's just an approximate number, since DirecTiVo records the satellite stream directly, no encoding quality choices).
there are a number of sites that cover how to upgrade the hard drives without adversely affecting anything. it's a relatively painless operation.
I successfully did that by giving three thumbs down to the 700 club, and all the other televangalists on the 'WORD' network and what not. That seemed to successfully convince TiVo that I really don't like religion, except for a few select programs.
They were worried about what the machine would think of them.
That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that they were trying to get the machine to record programming that was more appropriate to their actual likes and dislikes.
actually a bitmap is a data structure which directly corresponds to an image that could be displayed. a bitfield on the other hand, is a collection of boolean values.
A bitfield would be close to the worst possible way to design a preferances system, since it would allow for no varying levels of interest in anything at all. You'd be forced to either love or hate every item in the field, without the option to be neutral, or only somewhat for or against an item.
What you really want to do is to establish, over time, not only how often the user says they like a certain actor, producer or genre, but to also try to find the strongest sets of correlations for that particular user. Thus, if you give three thumbs up to Saving Private Ryan, Indiana Jones, ET, Hook and Amistad, there's a high probability that you'd be interested in items of any genre, if directed by Spielberg. However, if your only three thumbs are for Terminator, Terminator 2 and Robocop, it's equally likely that you like movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Action movies, until other preferences help sort that out.
Anyway, no matter what, nobody with a clue would be using either a bitmap or a bitfield for this application.
you protect your code with a lawyer, who writes up a contract that says that they're only allowed to use it in the agreed upon ways, and that's that. They'll probably obey it, and if they don't and you catch them, you can sue them and collect your due royalties, plus punitive damages of course.
When it comes to selling source code, that's the only method that works.
The profiling isn't simply genre based. TiVo uses the tribune media service guide data, which includes a list of producer, writer, director, all the actors, how many "stars" a movie has, what the show's audiance rating is, whether or not it's subtitled, if it's in color or b&w, and a bunch of other things that I can't remember at the moment.
The TiVo can use all of these things in some formula to come up with the recommendations, not just the genre/subgenre (though there are six levels of that too, in the data). Whether or not it does, I don't know.
$10k for one person for one month is cheap. That's a $60k/year coder once you figure out the true loaded cost of the employee.
Sure, you could outsource it to India for $1k, but the overhead with outsourcing it to India winds up costing you more money, because it's extraordinarily expensive to manage a project where the coders require finished and very specific design documents if you want to get what you're expecting, and then communication tends to involve a 24 hour delay, because of time zone differences (unless you like to hold your project meetings at ungodly hours).
You can save money on one line by going to India, but you'll pay it all back in three other lines of the budget. In general, it's not a good idea.
I'm sorry, I missed the part of Lessig's presentation where he said 'contributing to the growing body of Open Source work is valueless, and should not be counted as a contribution'. Work expended has value, and can be recorded and measured. Do so, and record it on your own personal challenge page!
So do what I've done on important issues. Write a real letter to your representative, and include a nominal donation. Your representative's office will be happy to let you know how to do this without violating any campaign finance laws.
How much success have they had? enough. For details, look at what they've done lately.
some outright wins, some ties, some losses, but there's no doubt that they're doing exactly what they've promised to try to do, and they're putting up a good fight.
Slashdot Mirror
In the real world, we can't all just apply every patch immediately, some of us need to make sure that a patch won't cause a problem with vital services before we do so, and contrary to what you may have read on slashdot, those verification processes aren't always trivial.
Who wants to fuck around with a minor inconvenience when we can do one better and legally put him out of business?
Dear god, man! warn somebody when you're posting goatse photos.
ev1, i forget, and verio, respectively.
I also share 4 1U machines and a UPS colo'd in a facility that provides an unmetered 5Mbit connection (provided over ethernet) for about $180/mo per machine.
On top of that, I split the costs on a data center which has 2 regular old T1s and a whole fuckton of servers, since it's our space, and the Ts run about $1500/mo.
Honestly, the only problem is that I'd have to commit to a fairly expensive contract and I truly believe that most people who use PVR software would rather steal their data than pay for a legal feed. I mean, look at the amount of flak that TiVo catches for having a $10 monthly fee or a $200 lifetime guide data/software update fee.
The fact that the free PVR software isn't as good as TiVos software shows me that people aren't interested in additional features, they're interested in being cheap. Any evidence to the contrary is welcomed.
Honestly, I considered setting up a company to license the TMS big build for free pvrs and such, until I realized an important point. People who call a celeron 400 with some perl scripts and a tv-out a tivo aren't going to be willing to pay $3/mo for legal guide data, when they could just steal it instead.
If I thought there was a chance in hell that the result of my hard work would be something other than a bunch of jackasses distributing the data on kazaa while some other jackasses bitched and moaned about how expensive $3/mo is and how I must be getting rich off of that somehow.
Does anybody think I'm wrong about that?
you get what you pay for, and in the world of guide data, free doesn't go very far.
for what it's worth, the data is relatively inexpensive to license in bulk, so if you weren't all a bunch of cheap-ass thieves, you could cover expenses selling guide data for $2/mo. Unfortunately, I think we all know that some cheap jackass would decide that your information wanted to be free, and you'd get fucked in the end.
enjoy your philips dvd-r, i'll enjoy watching my directivo record only new episodes of the shows i like, and recording two channels at once when two things I like collide, and keeping the original dolby digital sound from the satellite stream. my tivo makes your dvd-r look like a fucking joke.
keep your dvd-r, i'll keep my DirecTiVo and my ProntoPro remote.
it'll hold about 10 hours of 48 track 24/88.2 audio, a small fraction of an engineering firm's drawings or a small fraction of the raw video used by a film editor. people with servers that can boot from firewire could use them as a portable emergency recovery drive...
The fact that you don't currently have a use for a nicely packaged, relatively inexpensive mass storage device does not mean that nobody needs one.
if you really think that 400 gig firewire drives exist solely to stroke egos, go to a therapist now, because you're a pathetically insecure fuck.
thank god people are starting to realize that cracking rc5 was interesting to do once, because it addressed some new issues in distributed computing, but now it's just beating a dead horse. the protein folding project and the ogr projects can actually advance science in some minor fashion, please people, do those instead.
If you're trying to show evidence that Mac users only like Macs because they bought one, you've failed miserably.
We don't all toe the slashdot line. Some of us just want something that works well, doesn't waste our time, and lets us work effectively. OS X fits that bill wonderfully for me, and it plays well with my *nix servers.
I don't get paid based on the liberation of my software, I get paid to get things done. Fuck the KDE/Gnome amateur hour; give me OS X and software that works.
Now if only they'd fix the download manager in OS X (it shows nothing right now, and hasn't for quite some time), and add an option to automatically close the download manager if all downloads have completed successfully.
there are a number of sites that cover how to upgrade the hard drives without adversely affecting anything. it's a relatively painless operation.
I successfully did that by giving three thumbs down to the 700 club, and all the other televangalists on the 'WORD' network and what not. That seemed to successfully convince TiVo that I really don't like religion, except for a few select programs.
A bitfield would be close to the worst possible way to design a preferances system, since it would allow for no varying levels of interest in anything at all. You'd be forced to either love or hate every item in the field, without the option to be neutral, or only somewhat for or against an item.
What you really want to do is to establish, over time, not only how often the user says they like a certain actor, producer or genre, but to also try to find the strongest sets of correlations for that particular user. Thus, if you give three thumbs up to Saving Private Ryan, Indiana Jones, ET, Hook and Amistad, there's a high probability that you'd be interested in items of any genre, if directed by Spielberg. However, if your only three thumbs are for Terminator, Terminator 2 and Robocop, it's equally likely that you like movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Action movies, until other preferences help sort that out.
Anyway, no matter what, nobody with a clue would be using either a bitmap or a bitfield for this application.
When it comes to selling source code, that's the only method that works.
The TiVo can use all of these things in some formula to come up with the recommendations, not just the genre/subgenre (though there are six levels of that too, in the data). Whether or not it does, I don't know.
Sure, you could outsource it to India for $1k, but the overhead with outsourcing it to India winds up costing you more money, because it's extraordinarily expensive to manage a project where the coders require finished and very specific design documents if you want to get what you're expecting, and then communication tends to involve a 24 hour delay, because of time zone differences (unless you like to hold your project meetings at ungodly hours).
You can save money on one line by going to India, but you'll pay it all back in three other lines of the budget. In general, it's not a good idea.
I'm sorry, I missed the part of Lessig's presentation where he said 'contributing to the growing body of Open Source work is valueless, and should not be counted as a contribution'. Work expended has value, and can be recorded and measured. Do so, and record it on your own personal challenge page!
So do what I've done on important issues. Write a real letter to your representative, and include a nominal donation. Your representative's office will be happy to let you know how to do this without violating any campaign finance laws.
some outright wins, some ties, some losses, but there's no doubt that they're doing exactly what they've promised to try to do, and they're putting up a good fight.