More and more people are moving over to HD sets. While some lucky people might live in an area where they can get a half dozen OTA channels, people who get satellite or cable can't use those products.
Cable companies are already moving to simulcast all analog channels in digital form. At some point to reclaim bandwidth they'll drop all but the 2-13 channels from their analog service anyway, and people will have to use CableCard-compatible sets or digital cable boxes.
MythTV will never support those, as the likelihood is that there will never be a cablecard adapter for a PC, precisely because its intended to prevent interception of the digital content. Who knows if Tivo will survive long enough to come out with a CableCard unit, and who knows if the broadcast flag won't be implemented in hardware.
While knee jerk reactions are commonplace on/., and being Libertarian I'm the first to start squaking about big government, your reply is rediculous.
Of course its a tax. But the claim they won't recycle the computers is a rediculous statement that you have no ability to back up.
States have shown they do not have the inititive to do this on their own. All 50 states need to have mandatory recycling programs, and they don't. Unlike the vast majority of federal government programs, this is one thats a damn good idea, and is a decade late in coming.
What are you going to build it out of that it can resist the heat from entering the atmosphere at 134,216 miles per hour? Thats almost three times the fastest speed we've ever measured for a meteor to enter the atmosphere. And those don't last very long.
If the probe weighed 1000lbs that probe has over 23 trillian joules of kinetic energy it needs to bleed off.
Now thanks to an online calculator, we can convert that into different numbers:
Now I know Slashdot likes to have things expressed in units of Libraries of Congress, but I can't seem to figure out how much energy is contained in the Library of Congress, and in any case its hard to actually convert that entire mass to energy efficiently.
But in either case those are HUGE numbers. You'd have to hit the atmosphere damn near straight on to not skip right off, and that doesn't give you much air to stop in, especially given Mars' low atmospheric pressure.
Normally you need less fuel to stop a spacecraft than to get it moving because you have burned up half the fuel getting the craft moving. Since fuel is the majority of the weight, stopping a probe is a lot easier than starting it. In reality the fuel to stop a probe is still significant enough, NASA uses aerobraking or orbital tricks when possible to save that weight.
The problem becomes enormously worse if you use ground propulsion, because you need to store enough energy in the form of fuel to counteract the amount of energy you are pumping into it from the ground. Because you only need to carry half the fuel for a given speed (only needing fuel to stop, not start), your craft will weigh something aproximating half what it otherwise would've (since most of the weight would be fuel, the actual probe itself isn't meaningful). Given the craft weights half as much, you're probably going to get it going quite a bit faster, requiring more fuel to stop it.
The point is, you can't pump more energy into the craft from the ground than you happen to be carrying along with it to stop it, and that means there's a maximum amount to be gained using an overly complex system on the ground. And the speeds they're talking about are so far beyond what any chemically-propelled spacecraft move at, it doesn't make sense that you could reasonably use a chemical system to stop it. You may get a doubling in speed out of a spacecraft and still be able to stop it, but you won't get an order of magnitude increase in speed and still be able to stop it.
If you could carry enough rocket power to stop that speed, you could carry enough rocket power to build up that speed, and we wouldn't need exotic ground-based propulsion systems.
You can't use rockets to stop. In fact, the suggestion that you could use another array at Mars to stop seems unlikely because of the unlikely possibility that you could vaporize just the paint on the back side of the sail, and not cause the heat to vaporize the bottom layer of paint on the opposite side of the sail surface, dislodging it.
I had Tivo since a few months after it came out. Four total boxes, also gave another four or five as gifts over the years.
I called last week and cancelled my service. (Boy they make that hard to do...)
Why? They're two years behind the ball where technology is concerned. Their vastly superior interface is totally wasted because it can't actually record half the stuff I watch. Its a hack at best to get it to work with a digital cable box, and no HD support at all. They told me all about the new HD box they would have out in 18 months when I cancelled, and I just had to wonder why it wasn't out now? My TV has CableCard. Clearly Sony was able to see it was a needed step to take.
I've seen arguments made my people on/. that Tivo couldn't have been faster to the market because CableCard just became available, forgetting thats to consumers. Clearly the companies have been working on units for ages.
I may hop back into the Tivo fold if their new box lives up to reasonable expectations, but its hard to argue with a $10/month box with dual HD/digital/analog tuners, 160 gig of space and a tolerable UI now that Comcast has rolled out the new TV Guide software.
I think the SDK is a poor attempt to keep the attention of their core market -- early adopters, because early adopters have all adopted other video hardware that makes the Tivo obsolete.
I'm not sure the ability to see an RSS feed or weather on the Tivo will keep someone who just dropped $3k on a HD set interested in Tivo, when they can get a box from their cable company for less money that works with it.
Thats not a safe assumption to make. A lot of organizations have site licenses for the software, so its easy for server sales to outpace OS sales.
While there may be an increase in Linux deployments, you can't infer that from any of this information.
This morning on Bloomberg News they specifically called out Halo 2 as being a very large contributor to the suprising jump in sales, as a large number of people (myself included) bought an X-Box specifically for Halo.
The dual facts that the XBox is the first modern console I've ever bought and that I've since bought ten other games is icing on the cake for them. There are a lot of people being pulled into modern consoles who were never tempted before by them.
They're good because you don't need them for premium and other scrabled digital channels. No on-demand or PPV until CableCard 2.0, though.
Personally, I think its a waste anyway. The only viable cable HD PVR solutions are part of the cable box anyway, so all a cable-card TV gets you is the ability to view the TV and not record it.
Um, no I'm quite correct. Adequate to fulfill all the mission objectives is not the same as having all the data.
Someone screwed up. Like the doppler screw up on the way out there, they cobbled together a fix for it, but it doesn't change the fact that a mistake was made, and the mission lost a significant amount of data. The fact that they claim to have gotten out of it what they wanted is meaningless, particularly since the probe survived more than an order of magnitude longer than they expected. The experiments were designed to work with 1/30th the amount of time they actually had. That, too, doesn't change the fact that vast amounts of data were lost, and information that could've provided further insight the scientists were not expecting was lost with it.
The point is, the radio channel that was never turned on was human error that caused the loss of half of all of the data from the probe. People's hard work functioned perfectly. Pictures were taken, data sampled, lander functioned correctly, no metric numbers were mistaken for imperial units, and they still lost half the data because someone screwed up.
Thats not a grand success. Compared to crashing a lander into Mars, losing everything? Yeah, its probably a grand success. But thats a pretty low standard.
Why? My cable company doesn't make PVRs, Tivo does. Unless satellite, which is a closed access system, cable has existing standards. Tivo could've released an OTA HD PVR years ago. They could've released a CableCard unit a year ago.
They've done neither. Blaming the cable company is silly.
Tivo was picked up my bleeding edge gadget people four or five years ago, and pimped to family and friends. Thats what got them where they are today. And the hardware they sell today has marginal capabilities beyond the original stuff.
I'm on my fourth Tivo now, and won't likely buy another. Why? For the same reason MythTV isn't an option -- integration. Because neither solution supports CableCard, or integrates with the cable system, neither Tivo nor MythTV can view the vast majority of my channels without a kludgey solution of using a cable box or two, hopefully with serial control but most likely with clumsy IR blasters. And I still can't use any of the OnDemand services. And most important, no HD.
Tivo acts like they're a cutting edge technology company, but they're not selling technology that bleeding edge gadget geeks want. Hell, they barely sell technology that my parents would want. They have Tivo, and love it, but I know as soon as they find out they can get a PVR from the cable company and actually make use of the 60" HDTV they've got, they'll dump it in a heartbeat.
Because I really wanted to use it in the living room, as well. Simple as that. Its a very inexpensive change that would've made the product useful in yet another environment.
I just claimed it was shortsighted to not include it since they have the ability to do hybrid jacks.
I actually already ordered one, replacing my last Linux system which was acting as a mail and file server. It'll be very happy with the iBook, iMac and gray G4 I've already got.
Thank god for my irrational hatred of Apple, though. Without it I might have not been able to stop myself after buying the Airport Express, two iPods, those other Macs, multiple versions of OSX and the last version of iLife.
That hatred has kept me under the $500 mark in songs bought from iTMS, though. Whew.
Unfortunately airport express doesn't show up as a generic audio device, its specific to iTunes.
They do make USB dongles, but that makes the unit less compact. Given the small incremental cost, and the prevelance of DD and DTS systems, its weird they left it out.
What a dumb move. With optical out it would've made a killer silent home theater system, since its got DVI (perfect for those with HD sets). Add a bluetooth keyboard, and you've got DVI DVD playback, HD photo browsing, web surfing, etc.
Without it, its just a small desktop system.
Considering the Airport Express has optical and analog, they blew it on this one. I'm sure it'll sell well, but thats a big oversight.
You sure that was VoIP? Comcast has been advertising local phone service for a few years, and has been offering it, but it wasn't VoIP, it was something proprietary. I knew a few people who have it. I was going to get it before I went with Vonage instead ($5 cheaper, and i can take it other places).
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Legitimate P2P doesn't need to be under the radar.
By stating categorically he uses a private under the radar P2P service, its perfectly reasonable to assume he is talking about illegal activity.
No need to jump on a "P2P isn't criminal!" soap box. Everyone here knows that. This guy is clearly using it for illegal purposes, though.
More and more people are moving over to HD sets. While some lucky people might live in an area where they can get a half dozen OTA channels, people who get satellite or cable can't use those products.
Cable companies are already moving to simulcast all analog channels in digital form. At some point to reclaim bandwidth they'll drop all but the 2-13 channels from their analog service anyway, and people will have to use CableCard-compatible sets or digital cable boxes.
MythTV will never support those, as the likelihood is that there will never be a cablecard adapter for a PC, precisely because its intended to prevent interception of the digital content. Who knows if Tivo will survive long enough to come out with a CableCard unit, and who knows if the broadcast flag won't be implemented in hardware.
While knee jerk reactions are commonplace on /., and being Libertarian I'm the first to start squaking about big government, your reply is rediculous.
Of course its a tax. But the claim they won't recycle the computers is a rediculous statement that you have no ability to back up.
States have shown they do not have the inititive to do this on their own. All 50 states need to have mandatory recycling programs, and they don't. Unlike the vast majority of federal government programs, this is one thats a damn good idea, and is a decade late in coming.
That was my experience visiting there, too.
I didn't see a cube in any of the buildings I was in.
60 kilometers per second.
*60* kilometers per second.
Yes, 60 kilometers *per second*.
What are you going to build it out of that it can resist the heat from entering the atmosphere at 134,216 miles per hour? Thats almost three times the fastest speed we've ever measured for a meteor to enter the atmosphere. And those don't last very long.
If the probe weighed 1000lbs that probe has over 23 trillian joules of kinetic energy it needs to bleed off.
Now thanks to an online calculator, we can convert that into different numbers:
22,110,000,000 BTUs
6,480,000 kilowatt hours
5,572,000,000,000 calories
5,576 tons of TNT.
Now I know Slashdot likes to have things expressed in units of Libraries of Congress, but I can't seem to figure out how much energy is contained in the Library of Congress, and in any case its hard to actually convert that entire mass to energy efficiently.
But in either case those are HUGE numbers. You'd have to hit the atmosphere damn near straight on to not skip right off, and that doesn't give you much air to stop in, especially given Mars' low atmospheric pressure.
That doesn't make sense.
Normally you need less fuel to stop a spacecraft than to get it moving because you have burned up half the fuel getting the craft moving. Since fuel is the majority of the weight, stopping a probe is a lot easier than starting it. In reality the fuel to stop a probe is still significant enough, NASA uses aerobraking or orbital tricks when possible to save that weight.
The problem becomes enormously worse if you use ground propulsion, because you need to store enough energy in the form of fuel to counteract the amount of energy you are pumping into it from the ground. Because you only need to carry half the fuel for a given speed (only needing fuel to stop, not start), your craft will weigh something aproximating half what it otherwise would've (since most of the weight would be fuel, the actual probe itself isn't meaningful). Given the craft weights half as much, you're probably going to get it going quite a bit faster, requiring more fuel to stop it.
The point is, you can't pump more energy into the craft from the ground than you happen to be carrying along with it to stop it, and that means there's a maximum amount to be gained using an overly complex system on the ground. And the speeds they're talking about are so far beyond what any chemically-propelled spacecraft move at, it doesn't make sense that you could reasonably use a chemical system to stop it. You may get a doubling in speed out of a spacecraft and still be able to stop it, but you won't get an order of magnitude increase in speed and still be able to stop it.
Not sure why that was modded insightful.
If you could carry enough rocket power to stop that speed, you could carry enough rocket power to build up that speed, and we wouldn't need exotic ground-based propulsion systems.
You can't use rockets to stop. In fact, the suggestion that you could use another array at Mars to stop seems unlikely because of the unlikely possibility that you could vaporize just the paint on the back side of the sail, and not cause the heat to vaporize the bottom layer of paint on the opposite side of the sail surface, dislodging it.
I had the 7.1 software and had no problem pulling the video off with a Mac.
Go to the Tivo's IP address with a web browser. Its got a web server. Just download it from there. Piece of cake.
I had Tivo since a few months after it came out. Four total boxes, also gave another four or five as gifts over the years.
/. that Tivo couldn't have been faster to the market because CableCard just became available, forgetting thats to consumers. Clearly the companies have been working on units for ages.
I called last week and cancelled my service. (Boy they make that hard to do...)
Why? They're two years behind the ball where technology is concerned. Their vastly superior interface is totally wasted because it can't actually record half the stuff I watch. Its a hack at best to get it to work with a digital cable box, and no HD support at all. They told me all about the new HD box they would have out in 18 months when I cancelled, and I just had to wonder why it wasn't out now? My TV has CableCard. Clearly Sony was able to see it was a needed step to take.
I've seen arguments made my people on
I may hop back into the Tivo fold if their new box lives up to reasonable expectations, but its hard to argue with a $10/month box with dual HD/digital/analog tuners, 160 gig of space and a tolerable UI now that Comcast has rolled out the new TV Guide software.
I think the SDK is a poor attempt to keep the attention of their core market -- early adopters, because early adopters have all adopted other video hardware that makes the Tivo obsolete.
I'm not sure the ability to see an RSS feed or weather on the Tivo will keep someone who just dropped $3k on a HD set interested in Tivo, when they can get a box from their cable company for less money that works with it.
They don't always contain the fixed version of the DVD because the "broken" version IS the correct version.
This is a case of an uneducated court finding in favor of uneducated consumers. Neither understand the way those films were shot.
Its a fluff lawsuit, junk law at its best.
Thats not a safe assumption to make. A lot of organizations have site licenses for the software, so its easy for server sales to outpace OS sales.
While there may be an increase in Linux deployments, you can't infer that from any of this information.
This morning on Bloomberg News they specifically called out Halo 2 as being a very large contributor to the suprising jump in sales, as a large number of people (myself included) bought an X-Box specifically for Halo.
The dual facts that the XBox is the first modern console I've ever bought and that I've since bought ten other games is icing on the cake for them. There are a lot of people being pulled into modern consoles who were never tempted before by them.
There is a very strong anti-Chinese movement within the US, in particular, that tends to dramatically misportray the way things are there.
And as another post, that bizarrely got moderated funny, said... its targeted at citizens, not at foreigners.
Most new TVs have slots for them.
They're good because you don't need them for premium and other scrabled digital channels. No on-demand or PPV until CableCard 2.0, though.
Personally, I think its a waste anyway. The only viable cable HD PVR solutions are part of the cable box anyway, so all a cable-card TV gets you is the ability to view the TV and not record it.
Drunken sailors have mod points?
Does that make sense?
Um, no I'm quite correct. Adequate to fulfill all the mission objectives is not the same as having all the data.
Someone screwed up. Like the doppler screw up on the way out there, they cobbled together a fix for it, but it doesn't change the fact that a mistake was made, and the mission lost a significant amount of data. The fact that they claim to have gotten out of it what they wanted is meaningless, particularly since the probe survived more than an order of magnitude longer than they expected. The experiments were designed to work with 1/30th the amount of time they actually had. That, too, doesn't change the fact that vast amounts of data were lost, and information that could've provided further insight the scientists were not expecting was lost with it.
The point is, the radio channel that was never turned on was human error that caused the loss of half of all of the data from the probe. People's hard work functioned perfectly. Pictures were taken, data sampled, lander functioned correctly, no metric numbers were mistaken for imperial units, and they still lost half the data because someone screwed up.
Thats not a grand success. Compared to crashing a lander into Mars, losing everything? Yeah, its probably a grand success. But thats a pretty low standard.
Why? My cable company doesn't make PVRs, Tivo does. Unless satellite, which is a closed access system, cable has existing standards. Tivo could've released an OTA HD PVR years ago. They could've released a CableCard unit a year ago.
They've done neither. Blaming the cable company is silly.
Tivo was picked up my bleeding edge gadget people four or five years ago, and pimped to family and friends. Thats what got them where they are today. And the hardware they sell today has marginal capabilities beyond the original stuff.
I'm on my fourth Tivo now, and won't likely buy another. Why? For the same reason MythTV isn't an option -- integration. Because neither solution supports CableCard, or integrates with the cable system, neither Tivo nor MythTV can view the vast majority of my channels without a kludgey solution of using a cable box or two, hopefully with serial control but most likely with clumsy IR blasters. And I still can't use any of the OnDemand services. And most important, no HD.
Tivo acts like they're a cutting edge technology company, but they're not selling technology that bleeding edge gadget geeks want. Hell, they barely sell technology that my parents would want. They have Tivo, and love it, but I know as soon as they find out they can get a PVR from the cable company and actually make use of the 60" HDTV they've got, they'll dump it in a heartbeat.
Now, with a 5-digit UID, you should know by now that bitching is precisely what /. is here for, even if its not useful.
And I'm sure people from Apple read these articles and comments closely. I know Microsoft people do.
Because I really wanted to use it in the living room, as well. Simple as that. Its a very inexpensive change that would've made the product useful in yet another environment.
I just claimed it was shortsighted to not include it since they have the ability to do hybrid jacks.
Um. Take a perc, or a prozac. Seriously.
I actually already ordered one, replacing my last Linux system which was acting as a mail and file server. It'll be very happy with the iBook, iMac and gray G4 I've already got.
Thank god for my irrational hatred of Apple, though. Without it I might have not been able to stop myself after buying the Airport Express, two iPods, those other Macs, multiple versions of OSX and the last version of iLife.
That hatred has kept me under the $500 mark in songs bought from iTMS, though. Whew.
Unfortunately airport express doesn't show up as a generic audio device, its specific to iTunes.
They do make USB dongles, but that makes the unit less compact. Given the small incremental cost, and the prevelance of DD and DTS systems, its weird they left it out.
What a dumb move. With optical out it would've made a killer silent home theater system, since its got DVI (perfect for those with HD sets). Add a bluetooth keyboard, and you've got DVI DVD playback, HD photo browsing, web surfing, etc.
Without it, its just a small desktop system.
Considering the Airport Express has optical and analog, they blew it on this one. I'm sure it'll sell well, but thats a big oversight.
I named my Linksys AP "Default" just to mess with people...
You sure that was VoIP? Comcast has been advertising local phone service for a few years, and has been offering it, but it wasn't VoIP, it was something proprietary. I knew a few people who have it. I was going to get it before I went with Vonage instead ($5 cheaper, and i can take it other places).