Still some people were persistent and patient enough to get their hands on EV1s. But after the leases had expired, they had no choice but to return the cars to GM. What did GM do with them? They crushed them! Every single one! Crushed them and dumped them in a junk yard! Seems like the prudent business decision would be to *ahem* sell your product rather than trashing it, no?
Not quite. In the small western NY town of Honeoye Falls, there are lots of EV1s. Apparently GM (who has a low profile plant working on fuel cells there) has their employees driving them. The strange thing is they are very noisy (in my opinion at least) for electric cars. Lots of loud whirring and such. Maybe that's what early electric cars sounded like, or maybe they're not stock EV1s any more...
Shatner: I'm...Slim Shady. Yes. I'm the real Shady. All you other Slim Shady's, are just imitating. So, won't the real Slim Shady...please stand up...please stand up...please stand up.
Koenig: How can you do a spoken word version of a rap song?
Hybrids only exist to satisfy CARB's (and other agencies like them) demands for low emission cars. Any car with a battery in (for drive power purposes) it isn't a good thing, hybrid or straight electric. But it's all we can mass produce at this point to satisfy CARB. Once fuel cells or some other non battery based technology comes along, that will be good. But until then, I feel that I'm polluting the environment with my diesel engine much less than people who buy hybrids with hundreds of pounds of poisonous batteries that wear out and require expensive replacement. Not to mention all the weight of those batteries being dragged around.
Don't fall for the hybrid hype. If the car companies thought that the average American would accept a super efficient diesel car, they'd be everywhere. But thanks to GM's disasterous experiment with the infamous 350 diesel around 1980, the stinky Mercedes diesel cars in the 80's, and smoke belching poorly maintained dump trucks, the average American's perception of diesel technology is way out of whack.
Judging by the increasing number of VW TDI's I see as I drive around in my Cummins powered Ram, at least some people are taking the time to research their purchase.
Mod the above comment up.. TDI Volkswagons are great. Anyone who thinks they are noisy or slow should go drive one and drop their 1980's preconceptions. Diesel is available nearly everywhere (you just have to know where to look) and pollutes far less (not just what comes out your tailpipe, but the refining process is simpler as well). TDI VW's also only require oil changes every 10,000 miles, saving you time and money there as well.
http://www.tdiclub.com/
Hybrid electrics are a joke, a stopgap technology until something better comes along. Don't bother.
It was terrible, and I think it was mostly the director's fault. He wasn't familiar with the Trek universe, and it showed. Even the doors didn't make the right noises.
They have. If I lived on the west coast, I probably would of taken them up on it too. I don't know if anyone else has been approached and gone to work for them though.
Sequence for the typical Tivo article on slashdot:
1. Wow, a new hack!
2. Click on the avsforum link just to find it's slashdotted, pissing off the people who actually are creating the hacks.
3. "Won't this let us steal service (not that I'd do that)?"
4. "Does this mean I can not pay for a subscription now?!"
5. "I don't own a Tivo, but I have all these assumptions about how the Tivo works that I'd like to throw out and have disproved by anyone who knows anything about a Tivo."
6. "What's the point, Tivo is just digital VCR. Did I mention I don't own nor understand a Tivo?"
7. Click on avsforum a few more times.
8. "Tivo is a dumb idea, just buy a video capture card."
9. "Aren't they violating the GPL?"
10. "Tivo won't like this and will stop it, even though it doesn't harm them in any way."
I really don't think any of the services contains enough detail (at least what they present to the end user) to be useful in a device like a Tivo. Especially when 2.0 comes out..
Besides, they'd (the listing sites) sue the pants off of you.
As one of the Tivo "hackers", this guy annoys me. Where is he going to get these TV listings? Pull them out of his ass? TV listings aren't free, period. The newspaper isn't free. Detailed TV listings in downloadable format aren't free. If some enterprising young idiot decided to create a "free" Tivo service by typing the data in each week's TV guide into a format the Tivo could import, it still wouldn't work. There's not enough detail there for the Tivo, and it doesn't list them far enough in advance to make the gee-whiz aspects of the Tivo work.
If someone hacks the Tivos to download service elsewhere (and I hope they don't), the lack of a network jack won't be a factor. The serial port runs ppp, that's all that would be needed.
It bugs me that this guy freely admits he doesn't own a Tivo, obviously isn't very familiar with the hack efforts, yet feels free to rant and rave like he has a clue.
Actually, it would be _significantly_ more difficult. I wouldn't count on it happening.
cc
Re:Not files, singular (as in one big glob)
on
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· Score: 2
There is a similiarity between Oracle using a raw partition and MFS, in that MFS is a filesystem built entirely in user space. It has a daemon (MfsDaemon) that controls access to it, other programs connect to this to access things. As far as the kernel though, no. MFS is entirely user space. The only thing that might be kernel related at all is the MFS daemon knows how to talk to their modified IDE drivers (which are released under the GPL) to prioritize it's reads/writes higher than the normal OS read/writes on the ext2 partitions. That's one reason why the video doesn't skip when it's doing housekeeping on it's database. The fs/mfs/* files in their kernel release are really a red herring. The engineers at Tivo a while back tried to make MFS mountable like any file system by basically hacking the NFS client to be a MFS client. But they decided it was going to be a royal pain and gave up. That mfs kernel client isn't compiled into the kernel on the Tivo, and in fact, is incomplete and won't compile at all.
Re:Digital audio support on the TiVO
on
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·
· Score: 1
The Tivo's today don't. The upcoming DirecTivo combination Tivo and DirecTV reciever does support dolby digital..
Re:Screen Savers - TiVo info up soon
on
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· Score: 1
Actually, they are anything but first. We figured out how to add the disk at the end of June.
Actually, many of us are using the same type drives that come from the factory. Contrary to popular belief, Tivo isn't using custom drives. Pop a Quantum lct.10 30 gig in (which is what the newer 30 hour units come with stock) and it'll show up as having Quickview and Tivo extensions. The Tivo just knows how to turn them on.
Re:Not files, singular (as in one big glob)
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· Score: 1
Links? I'm cc, I was the first to get the upgrade to work.:)
Others seem to have posted the main important links for the Tivo hacking information, but they did miss the big one - http://tivohack.sourceforge.net/. That's the main site we maintain with the information on how to hack it.
cc
Re:Not files, singular (as in one big glob)
on
More Tivo Hacking
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· Score: 2
Actually, none of that is really right. The OS is on standard ext2 partitions, as is/var. The guts of the Tivo application and the mpeg data, plus the user interface graphics are stored in a filesystem called MFS (Media File System), which is something Tivo invented and is not open source. It's a strange filesystem, with 1 partition holding all the little files (graphics, apps, etc) and inodes, and 1 larger partition that holds the MPEG data. And there's plenty of other complexities that we haven't figured out yet too.. Tivo did try to start making a normal Linux filesystem driver for it, and you can see it in their released kernel code under linux-2.1/fs/mfs/, but they gave up and the code is incomplete and missing some headers (which have since been lost).
Here's the text of our announcement..
on
Hacking The Tivo
·
· Score: 4
Here's the text of our announcement in case AVS Forum gets slashdotted. BTW, I'm cc.:)
Here's how to add a B drive to your TiVo by "blessing" it. This is approximately how we did it. We've only done it a few times so far. We will be refining the process. We simply wanted to get the initial information out quickly.
This has only been verified to work on a few units so far. A HDR112 has been upgraded to 52 hours with a 30 gig Quantum, another HDR112 has been upgraded to 40 hours with a 20 gig Quantum, and a Sony 30 hour unit has been upgraded as well with a Maxtor B drive, although the newer Sony/Phillips units have a drive locking mechanism that makes it very hard to mount their A drives in a non-TiVo Linux box.
WARNING: This modification is not "easy". You take all responsibility for modifying your TiVo in this way. It does involve opening the case and breaking the warranty sticker. Do not call TiVo support if you make a mistake and break your TiVo. If you break it, you own both pieces. If you mess up, don't expect us to fix it for you either. Maybe some day someone will release a utility that will just bless a drive in 1 easy command on your PC, but at this point, it's pretty tricky. It requires that you have various technical knowledge about Linux and other software tools. You could easily render your TiVo inoperable and possibly unrecoverable.
WARNING 2: There hasn't been a lot of testing so far on this procedure of course. Mine seems to be working perfectly at 52 hours, but you must accept the risk that something bad may happen down the road. We suggest that you back up your original A drive in some fashion in case you make a mistake. How to do that we leave up to you.
PDISK DISCLAIMER: We had to modify the source code to pdisk. Use it at your own risk. There may be bugs. We're not responsible for any loss of data.
And PLEASE - be careful when you open the unit. It's power supply is unshielded. Stay away from it.
In short - if you don't _understand_ what is going on below, don't do it. Just being able to read a list of steps may not be enough at this point.
When I refer to hard drive partitions on the Linux box, I'll use hdX where X is whatever letter is appropriate for that drive.
I used a Quantum lct10 30 gig drive (part number QML30000LB-A) that I bought from www.onsale.com. My off the shelf Quantum seems to have the Quickview and TiVo extensions in it, perhaps they all do. It is the same drive used in HDR31202's and presumably the newer Sonys. Any drive may work as a B drive, but I've only tried my Quantum. Also be aware - the version of Linux on the TiVo doesn't seem to support drives larger than 33.8 gig. I don't know if TiVo patched their older kernel to support them. Set the B drive's jumper to slave.
You need to be able to access the original A drive and new B drive from another Linux box. To do this on an x86 box, you need to integrate TiVo's modifications to the Mac partition code. There are some patches on ftp://ftp.curry.org/pub/tivo, ftp://ftp.rotorway.org/incoming/tivo, and http://www.wasteland.org/tivo. Please, if anyone can mirror these few files it would be very helpful. If we get hit too hard, we'll have to take the files down. You also need to be able to turn on byte swapping for those 2 drives (hdX=bswap). I had the most luck with Linux 2.4.0-test1. You also need to enable the Mac partitioning in the kernel.
If that all works, you'll see the TiVo's partitions on the A drive hooked to your Linux box. There should be 11 of them. Mount partition 4 (hdX4) somewhere, it's an ext2 filesystem. Edit the bottom of etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit so it starts a bash shell on/dev/ttyS3. Also you need to blank out the first few sectors on the new B drive, with this command: "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX bs=512 count=32".
Get the hard drives back in the TiVo (both of em) and hook up the DSS serial cable to your computer. You'll need a null modem adapter and gender changer at the minimum. The terminal settings are 9600,8N1. You should get a bash prompt shortly after the "please wait a few more seconds" screen. Run this command: "/sbin/bootpage -D/dev/hdb". Then shut down your TiVo and hook the B drive back up to the Linux box.
Now you need a modified version of pdisk which is available on the sites I mentioned above. Compile it if necessary (it's in RCS format). With the B drive in the Linux box, run "pdisk/dev/hdX" and type in these commands:
i w y q
Then run: "pdisk -d/dev/hdX" and type these commands:
C 2p 4M "Second MFS application region" MFS C 3p 3p "Second MFS media region" MFS x m 3 x w y q
That will create the new partitions. Shut down the Linux box now and mount the B drive in the TiVo permanently. Turn the TiVo back on and get into the bash shell on it again.
You need to mount the diagnostics partition next. Type this on your TiVo: "mount -t ext2 -o ro/dev/hda7/mnt". Then run this to add the magic bit sequence to your new B drive: "/mnt/diag/genAddDiskTiVoID/dev/hdb3". Type "umount/mnt" to unmount that diagnostics partition, and reboot your TiVo. That should do it. Check the system information and see if your capacity increased. If not, you can try this one last thing that I don't believe is necessary, but it might be: mount the diagnostics partition again, and run "/mnt/diag/setkeys -globalkeys/dev/hdb".
That's it. If you want to now, you can edit the rc.sysinit to stop the bash shell from starting (or if you were smart, you made a backup copy when you started and can just copy the backup over the modified one).
Credit for figuring out this procedure goes to cc, Peter Creath, TivoTechie, and Ron Curry.
I don't blame NASA for this (yet at least), because I realize how difficult it is to land a space probe on a remote planet. Especially when it's guiding itself and not under human control. And I certainly hope they'll try again.. But comments like this really disturb me:
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of misinformation...
Still some people were persistent and patient enough to get their hands on EV1s. But after the leases had expired, they had no choice but to return the cars to GM. What did GM do with them? They crushed them! Every single one! Crushed them and dumped them in a junk yard! Seems like the prudent business decision would be to *ahem* sell your product rather than trashing it, no?
Not quite. In the small western NY town of Honeoye Falls, there are lots of EV1s. Apparently GM (who has a low profile plant working on fuel cells there) has their employees driving them. The strange thing is they are very noisy (in my opinion at least) for electric cars. Lots of loud whirring and such. Maybe that's what early electric cars sounded like, or maybe they're not stock EV1s any more...
Shatner: I'm...Slim Shady. Yes. I'm the real Shady. All you other Slim Shady's, are just imitating. So, won't the real Slim Shady ...please stand up ...please stand up ...please stand up.
Koenig: How can you do a spoken word version of a rap song?
Melllvar: He found a way.
Hybrids only exist to satisfy CARB's (and other agencies like them) demands for low emission cars. Any car with a battery in (for drive power purposes) it isn't a good thing, hybrid or straight electric. But it's all we can mass produce at this point to satisfy CARB. Once fuel cells or some other non battery based technology comes along, that will be good. But until then, I feel that I'm polluting the environment with my diesel engine much less than people who buy hybrids with hundreds of pounds of poisonous batteries that wear out and require expensive replacement. Not to mention all the weight of those batteries being dragged around.
Don't fall for the hybrid hype. If the car companies thought that the average American would accept a super efficient diesel car, they'd be everywhere. But thanks to GM's disasterous experiment with the infamous 350 diesel around 1980, the stinky Mercedes diesel cars in the 80's, and smoke belching poorly maintained dump trucks, the average American's perception of diesel technology is way out of whack.
Judging by the increasing number of VW TDI's I see as I drive around in my Cummins powered Ram, at least some people are taking the time to research their purchase.
Mod the above comment up.. TDI Volkswagons are great. Anyone who thinks they are noisy or slow should go drive one and drop their 1980's preconceptions. Diesel is available nearly everywhere (you just have to know where to look) and pollutes far less (not just what comes out your tailpipe, but the refining process is simpler as well). TDI VW's also only require oil changes every 10,000 miles, saving you time and money there as well.
http://www.tdiclub.com/
Hybrid electrics are a joke, a stopgap technology until something better comes along. Don't bother.
It was terrible, and I think it was mostly the director's fault. He wasn't familiar with the Trek universe, and it showed. Even the doors didn't make the right noises.
I was just reading the specs on these two monsters, and the bigger of the two (Blue Gene/L, 360 teraflops) runs Linux. 130,000 processors. Wow.
No way. Cathy's responses may of been all in lowercase, but Henry's would all be in caps.
They have. If I lived on the west coast, I probably would of taken them up on it too. I don't know if anyone else has been approached and gone to work for them though.
- cc
Not to burst your bubble, but Directivo's aren't hackable yet because they're dual drive from the factory.
We're working on it though..
Actually, this happens every time a new Tivo hack comes out. I bet the admin of avsforum's getting mighty sick of it too. I know I am.
-- cc on avsforum
Sequence for the typical Tivo article on slashdot:
1. Wow, a new hack!
2. Click on the avsforum link just to find it's slashdotted, pissing off the people who actually are creating the hacks.
3. "Won't this let us steal service (not that I'd do that)?"
4. "Does this mean I can not pay for a subscription now?!"
5. "I don't own a Tivo, but I have all these assumptions about how the Tivo works that I'd like to throw out and have disproved by anyone who knows anything about a Tivo."
6. "What's the point, Tivo is just digital VCR. Did I mention I don't own nor understand a Tivo?"
7. Click on avsforum a few more times.
8. "Tivo is a dumb idea, just buy a video capture card."
9. "Aren't they violating the GPL?"
10. "Tivo won't like this and will stop it, even though it doesn't harm them in any way."
-- cc on avsforum
Sony's are the same as Phillips, just different plastic and paint. This should work just fine on a Sony.
"The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the ways I likes it!"
I really don't think any of the services contains enough detail (at least what they present to the end user) to be useful in a device like a Tivo. Especially when 2.0 comes out..
Besides, they'd (the listing sites) sue the pants off of you.
As one of the Tivo "hackers", this guy annoys me. Where is he going to get these TV listings? Pull them out of his ass? TV listings aren't free, period. The newspaper isn't free. Detailed TV listings in downloadable format aren't free. If some enterprising young idiot decided to create a "free" Tivo service by typing the data in each week's TV guide into a format the Tivo could import, it still wouldn't work. There's not enough detail there for the Tivo, and it doesn't list them far enough in advance to make the gee-whiz aspects of the Tivo work.
If someone hacks the Tivos to download service elsewhere (and I hope they don't), the lack of a network jack won't be a factor. The serial port runs ppp, that's all that would be needed.
It bugs me that this guy freely admits he doesn't own a Tivo, obviously isn't very familiar with the hack efforts, yet feels free to rant and rave like he has a clue.
cc
Actually, it would be _significantly_ more difficult. I wouldn't count on it happening.
cc
There is a similiarity between Oracle using a raw partition and MFS, in that MFS is a filesystem built entirely in user space. It has a daemon (MfsDaemon) that controls access to it, other programs connect to this to access things. As far as the kernel though, no. MFS is entirely user space. The only thing that might be kernel related at all is the MFS daemon knows how to talk to their modified IDE drivers (which are released under the GPL) to prioritize it's reads/writes higher than the normal OS read/writes on the ext2 partitions. That's one reason why the video doesn't skip when it's doing housekeeping on it's database. The fs/mfs/* files in their kernel release are really a red herring. The engineers at Tivo a while back tried to make MFS mountable like any file system by basically hacking the NFS client to be a MFS client. But they decided it was going to be a royal pain and gave up. That mfs kernel client isn't compiled into the kernel on the Tivo, and in fact, is incomplete and won't compile at all.
The Tivo's today don't. The upcoming DirecTivo combination Tivo and DirecTV reciever does support dolby digital..
Actually, they are anything but first. We figured out how to add the disk at the end of June.
Actually, many of us are using the same type drives that come from the factory. Contrary to popular belief, Tivo isn't using custom drives. Pop a Quantum lct.10 30 gig in (which is what the newer 30 hour units come with stock) and it'll show up as having Quickview and Tivo extensions. The Tivo just knows how to turn them on.
Links? I'm cc, I was the first to get the upgrade to work. :)
cc
cc
http://tivohack.sourceforge.net/
Here's the text of our announcement in case AVS Forum gets slashdotted. BTW, I'm cc. :)
/dev/ttyS3. Also you need to blank out the
/dev/hdb". Then shut down your TiVo and hook the
/dev/hdX" and type in these commands:
/dev/hdX" and type these commands:
/dev/hda7 /mnt". Then run this to add the magic bit /dev/hdb3". Type /mnt" to unmount that diagnostics partition, and reboot your TiVo. /dev/hdb".
Here's how to add a B drive to your TiVo by "blessing" it. This is
approximately how we did it. We've only done it a few times so far. We will
be refining the process. We simply wanted to get the initial information out
quickly.
This has only been verified to work on a few units so far. A HDR112 has been
upgraded to 52 hours with a 30 gig Quantum, another HDR112 has been upgraded
to 40 hours with a 20 gig Quantum, and a Sony 30 hour unit has been upgraded
as well with a Maxtor B drive, although the newer Sony/Phillips units have a
drive locking mechanism that makes it very hard to mount their A drives in a
non-TiVo Linux box.
WARNING: This modification is not "easy". You take all responsibility for
modifying your TiVo in this way. It does involve opening the case and
breaking the warranty sticker. Do not call TiVo support if you make a
mistake and break your TiVo. If you break it, you own both pieces. If you
mess up, don't expect us to fix it for you either. Maybe some day someone
will release a utility that will just bless a drive in 1 easy command on
your PC, but at this point, it's pretty tricky. It requires that you have
various technical knowledge about Linux and other software tools. You could
easily render your TiVo inoperable and possibly unrecoverable.
WARNING 2: There hasn't been a lot of testing so far on this procedure of
course. Mine seems to be working perfectly at 52 hours, but you must accept
the risk that something bad may happen down the road. We suggest that you
back up your original A drive in some fashion in case you make a mistake.
How to do that we leave up to you.
PDISK DISCLAIMER: We had to modify the source code to pdisk. Use it at your
own risk. There may be bugs. We're not responsible for any loss of data.
And PLEASE - be careful when you open the unit. It's power supply is
unshielded. Stay away from it.
In short - if you don't _understand_ what is going on below, don't do it.
Just being able to read a list of steps may not be enough at this point.
When I refer to hard drive partitions on the Linux box, I'll use hdX where X
is whatever letter is appropriate for that drive.
I used a Quantum lct10 30 gig drive (part number QML30000LB-A) that I bought
from www.onsale.com. My off the shelf Quantum seems to have the Quickview
and TiVo extensions in it, perhaps they all do. It is the same drive used in
HDR31202's and presumably the newer Sonys. Any drive may work as a B drive,
but I've only tried my Quantum. Also be aware - the version of Linux on the
TiVo doesn't seem to support drives larger than 33.8 gig. I don't know if
TiVo patched their older kernel to support them. Set the B drive's jumper to
slave.
You need to be able to access the original A drive and new B drive from
another Linux box. To do this on an x86 box, you need to integrate TiVo's
modifications to the Mac partition code. There are some patches on
ftp://ftp.curry.org/pub/tivo, ftp://ftp.rotorway.org/incoming/tivo, and
http://www.wasteland.org/tivo. Please, if anyone can mirror these few files
it would be very helpful. If we get hit too hard, we'll have to take the
files down. You also need to be able to turn on byte swapping for those 2
drives (hdX=bswap). I had the most luck with Linux 2.4.0-test1. You also
need to enable the Mac partitioning in the kernel.
If that all works, you'll see the TiVo's partitions on the A drive hooked to
your Linux box. There should be 11 of them. Mount partition 4 (hdX4)
somewhere, it's an ext2 filesystem. Edit the bottom of etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
so it starts a bash shell on
first few sectors on the new B drive, with this command: "dd if=/dev/zero
of=/dev/hdX bs=512 count=32".
Get the hard drives back in the TiVo (both of em) and hook up the DSS serial
cable to your computer. You'll need a null modem adapter and gender changer
at the minimum. The terminal settings are 9600,8N1. You should get a bash
prompt shortly after the "please wait a few more seconds" screen. Run this
command: "/sbin/bootpage -D
B drive back up to the Linux box.
Now you need a modified version of pdisk which is available on the sites
I mentioned above. Compile it if necessary (it's in RCS format). With the
B drive in the Linux box, run "pdisk
i
w
y
q
Then run: "pdisk -d
C 2p 4M "Second MFS application region" MFS
C 3p 3p "Second MFS media region" MFS
x
m
3
x
w
y
q
That will create the new partitions. Shut down the Linux box now and mount
the B drive in the TiVo permanently. Turn the TiVo back on and get into the
bash shell on it again.
You need to mount the diagnostics partition next. Type this on your TiVo:
"mount -t ext2 -o ro
sequence to your new B drive: "/mnt/diag/genAddDiskTiVoID
"umount
That should do it. Check the system information and see if your capacity
increased. If not, you can try this one last thing that I don't believe is
necessary, but it might be: mount the diagnostics partition again, and run
"/mnt/diag/setkeys -globalkeys
That's it. If you want to now, you can edit the rc.sysinit to stop the bash
shell from starting (or if you were smart, you made a backup copy when you
started and can just copy the backup over the modified one).
Credit for figuring out this procedure goes to cc, Peter Creath, TivoTechie,
and Ron Curry.
6/21/00
I don't blame NASA for this (yet at least), because I realize how difficult it is to land a space probe on a remote planet. Especially when it's guiding itself and not under human control. And I certainly hope they'll try again.. But comments like this really disturb me:
``and it was like, 'Look at that hole!'''
...