....maybe i'm obtuse, but i keep hearing about this thing as "..and we're only seeing X% of its real potential right now!"....
1) Why can't they just shout "Let 'er rip!!" and crank the thing wide open?
The Real Potential is figured as a pure function of how many processors are in a machine and what speed they're running at.
Only a certain percentage of this processing power is aimed squarely at solving a problem, however... you also have to do things like:
Run an operating system Compute error checks on code Run a network stack
Not only that, but your application if not written and tuned specifically for your setup will probably spend a significant amount of time waiting on data from other processors in the cluster.
So they have a theoretical performance they can NEVER reach, and an expected real world performance that they figure out by comparing their setup to other setups to find out how much of their performance they can expect to be eaten by overhead. Actually getting to that performance figure is not necessarily an easy thing.
True life story. A certain big company had an application that was running on Citrix Metaframe over the web. This application ran on a farm of 4-proc boxes, averaging 35-40 users per processor at the performance levels they needed.
Rather than add new boxes, this company decided to move up to 8-proc boxes. How much could the new 8-proc boxes handle per proc? 10 users, max. Yeah that's right... double the processor, less than half the performance. Why?
The processors spent more time clogging their bus than actually running code. Just for giggles we found a high performance computing cluster with a 16-proc box for loan and ran it on there. The app was unusable.
The lesson? Scaling in a multi-processor way is not easy, and in some cases doesn't make sense at all.
Did I just read a comment to get to know how important you think you are?
No; someone questioned my use of a term. I pointed out where I got that term from, and gave a page number in a reference document from the world's biggest software vendor where one could find that term.
I don't give a fuck how important you think I am.
I give a fuck that you think I'd confuse these terms on my own. I didn't. My chosen software provider gave me a manual describing features of their new operating system (which has a much greater footprint than all of linux combined) and I chose to use the terminology in that manual to describe technology features.
and it still doesn't help if you need to replace exes or dlls for something other than services, like the shell?
Actually its quite elegant, because to the end user it just works.
And it does help if you need to replace exes, dlls, or whatever. But the process locking them has to be aware of it. Of course, to get a Windows.NET certified sticker you have to prove this level of compatibility. FYI, ASP.NET is ENTIRELY compiled as dlls, this is an excellent example of this sort of functionality.
Unless you consider that most optical designs call for lasers and other polarized / collimated light sources... in which case an optical OR gate would require some special techniques to eliminate interference... similar to how current generation silicon designers have to be extremely careful with path lengths to avoid ringing and timing problems...
snapshots in the microsoft world are for backup purposes and live upgrading... Microsoft calls what normal people call snapshots "Persistent Shadow Copies" and references them as journaling file systems.
Please see pages 6-8 of the Storage Management and Backups section of the beta 2 copy of the Windows Server 2003 Technical Readiness guide (which I unfortunately cannot advise on how to procure, as it is a confidential document)
Those who are working on a budget that makes the prize itself impressive do not have a chance.
Actually the idea behind it is to encourage innovation that DOES make the prize worthwhile; the people behind the X-Prize would love to see a SSTO launch capability that can be funded at that kind of level.
Even if they spend an order of magnitude MORE than the prize itself, they will still have advanced the state of the art well beyond what NASA is currently able to achieve; NASA's launch costs are estimated at about $1000 per pound of material.
I'd argue the point that the most common form of data loss is a crashed hard disk.
In my 14 years as a Network Administrator I think I've restored backups due to failed hard disks about twice (RAID catches the rest).
Yeah but the original poster doesn't have RAID. So every failed hard drive is a problem. In my 13 years as a home user without RAID I've suffered data loss due to failed hard disks some 7-8 times.
But I restore data accidentally deleted or changed by a user at least weekly! A distributed storage system won't help you there.
Ummm save your company some money... move to a journaling file system. Windows.NET Server aka Windows Server 2003... I don't know the equivalent in Linux land.
The commercial where the guy explains to the business guys how volume shadow copy and journaling will save them millions annually? Yeah he wasn't joking...
and as you know you can build all of the other logic gates from a NAND!
That's not entirely accurate... you also need a way to link the logic gates together. And a non-destructive way of sampling the signal. (You can only build every logic gate from an NAND if you can hook the NAND's inputs together to create a NOT, meaning one signal, two sinks)
And if you have an OR gate, the process is MUCH easier...
Famine, war, plauge, class inequality, poverty, pollution, environmental damage, you name it, it relates directly or indirectly to population.
I would like to point out that all of these symptoms have been with humanity regardless of population size for nearly the entire span of recorded history.
And with the exception of pollution and environmental damage, one can make a case that most of these items are better now, at the height of our population so far, than ever before. The industrial revolution vastly increased our capacity for both pollution and environmental damage, as humans no longer need to be personally involved in either process.
On the topic of strange pre-industrial weather, wasn't there a year where summer was skipped? Winter for an entire year? The thames froze solid, IIRC...
However, no one would be STUPID enough to do that - after all, it's a 1GHz CPU!
And here I was envying the setup you describe.:)
Except knock off the 600W power supply and floppy. Neither are required in this case. And I'd rather a matrox and 3 LCD panels. With that setup you could literally hide the computer in the back of the middle panel, and attatch all three with a hinge...
semi-portable three-head gaming. Nice. Only problem is that setup gets rid of the stained glass:(
This whole post is FUD or a troll... point by point:
Mini ITX is great... really... I mean, for $2000 I can build myself a Mini-PC that is kick ass (well, shitty video card, ac97 audio, integrated LAN)
I built my Mini-ITX for $480 with an ATI TV Wonder. Had I wanted to shell out another $100 I could've had it with an ATI Radeon 8500 AIW, which I would certainly not call shitty. And this box has remote keyboard, mouse, remote control, and DVD player included.
but if I spend $1000, I can have a kick ass PC, with the ability to expand it in the future!!!
In the theoretical world where I bought an ATI Radeon instead of a TV Wonder, I spent $400 less than you for the same thing. Of course a mini-ITX is expandable. It has PCI and USB 2.0. Sure it doesn't support AGP... but if you don't NEED AGP, that's not really a problem is it? It doesn't ALWAYS have to be JUST about framerates, people.
what is it with constantly trying to adapt an x86 architecture to solve all the real world problems out there? Whether you agree or not, the x86 is a PC solution, stop putting them in pagers, phones, cars, and whatever else...
x86 has a choice of robust and powerful operating systems that many people have lots of good experience on, as well as lots of cheap (in many cases free) easy to understand and powerful development choices.
Embedded architectures are limited to one or two scaled down flaky operating systems that most programmers have little to no experience with, and the development platforms are almost universally a barrier to entry in terms of cost, support, and functionality.
You tell me which one you'd rather work on?
Mini ITX is crazy, it prevents you from customizing the PC the way most PCs can be.
How so? Oh I see you list some points... let's look at them shall we?
You have limited space for expansion slots
2 PCI plus USB. With the number of integrated devices, you don't need more... especially if you opt for USB audio and bulk devices.
logistical problems with cooling How can one possibly call a processor putting off 13W of heat a logistical problem with cooling? When I built my Mini-ITX I literally slapped the thing together. I didn't put a single extra fan in it. And it runs not only cool but quiet as well. The warmest part is the power brick which is OUTSIDE THE CASE... not really a problem in my book...
and adding storage/optical drives I have one hard drive and one DVD drive in my Mini-ITX. Yes, I am out of room in my case. But I could've opted for the two-3.5" bay case for just a few extra dollars. But you don't need it. The Mini-ITX is supposed to be a second computer, not a first computer. Or its for the non-computer enthusiast who just wants a computer thats non-obtrusive and maybe a little stylish. In the first case, if you need extra storage, set up some server shares. In the second case I doubt the user is really thinking about one day adding a 500G drive...
and in the end the damn thing runs the same OS as your desktop, and is used the same way... WHY??? I beg to differ that it is used the same way. I use mine as a DVR. Others use them for jukeboxes, mixing computers, and even office tasks. While my main computer has to be mediocre at everything, my mini computer can afford to specialize and be very good at one or two tasks at the expense of others, because I have my main computer if there's something I need to do that it can't really handle.
There is a reason for the need of a small computer, and damnit, there is always a better more economical and practical solution than stripping an x86 to fit the criteria.
I would hardly call a mini-ITX a stripped x86. With onboard EVERYTHING, decent processor speeds (their design criteria was "good enough in a low-heat low-cost package", not "as fast as possible at whatever cost". I believe they succeeded), and industry-standard connectors it can do everything that any x86 can do. And do it cheaper and quieter.
One could deduce current from voltage... as a matter of fact, any voltage across a heavy chain is going to be huge amounts of current. A heavy chain 2 feet long has practically zero resistance; so if the power is coming straight from a low ESR source to the chain, the current is going to be limited by the power source's ESR. If it has to go through a length of wire or something first, that will be the limiting resistance...
They could have fixed this in NTFS but chose not to, presumably to keep compatibility with DOS
Windows 2003 (aka Windows.NET) fixes this. Shadow volume copy has to be turned on; it uses this feature to do it. Basically, it takes a snapshot of the working filesystem, points the service to it, updates the physical filesystem, spawns a new service that points to the new filesystem, pointing all new requests to the new copy... then dequeues and spins down the old service copy.
Only problem is the service writer has to be aware and support this process. SQL Server does; Exchange does; ASP.NET does. With other services, YMMV...
I agree with you w.r.t. the reliability, robustness, and quality concerns you have.
And this is truly a YMMV kind of situation. I replaced my landline with a cell-phone 3 years ago and have no complaints; but then again I don't really like talking to people so when my phone is out or for some reason people call me and go straight to voicemail despite the fact that the phone is connected to the network, this doesn't really bother me...
That's a question that doesn't have a concrete answer. Basically a phone has a high-pass filter at 3000Hz, cutting off the high range above that... in order to accurately represent a 3000Hz frequency, one must sample at at least 6000Hz (for more information google on nyquist frequency)... bitwise representation though is kind of hard to determine. Theoretically, it requires 16 bits... which of course is a bit higher than 16 kbps... however, to get adequate voice quality one can do some smart compression.
GSM phones ("digital clarity") for instance, require a 9.6 kbps transmit rate.
Charge me $50.00 a month for 1,000 anytime, anywhere minutes and you will have my business. I'm with Cingular wireless... I get excellent reception at home, and I pay $40/mo for 750 anytime, anywhere minutes.
I think I could go up to 900 for an extra ten bucks.
And I get nights and weekends free, plus no roaming fees in the south-eastern united states.
I have heard similarly anectodal evidence that the 250PVR and 350PVR products allow one to do MPEG2 timeshifting on a C3 800 MHz... I have that exact system with an ATI TVWonder, and I can say for certain that this application is not possible with an all-software encoder.
The bottom line is, I think, YMMV. FYI, the MythTV and freevo guys are both working on compatibility with the Hauppage PVR lines, and getting pretty impressive results out of them.
I'm actually quite surprised that nobody has managed to build a card that will do MPEG2 record and play in hardware as well as assisting conversions to/from MPEG2 *and* sold it for under $1k
Hauppage's USB-connected WinTV-GO does MPEG2 encoding and costs less than $50.
How do I know it does MPEG2 encoding when they haven't released the specs?
Because it lists the CBR MPEG2 versions supported, and notes that CBR's higher than 6 Mbps must use USB2 for transfer... 8Mbps is the highest USB1.1 transfer rate for a bulk device...
Therefore, the stream coming in from the Hauppage must match the final MPEG2 stream size, and unless the software transcodes, it must be MPEG2...
Oh and if you want a card with similar functionality, look at the PVR250 and PVR350 cards from the same company. Both come in well under $1k, and do both the encoding and decoding onboard.
Because ASP.NET server side controls specifically render for IE 5.5+
You generally have to do extra work in ASP.NET to support other browsers; even if that extra work is to decide not to use server side controls, which drastically decreases the utility of the ASP.NET programming model...
Is there any "copyright" issues with using TV shows like this? How could it be any different from using a DVR in the first place.
Most TV broadcasters consider taping their shows to be an infringing use because you can skip commercials. They also consider showshifting to be an infringing use (if you've seen TimeWarner's TV commercials for their DVR, have you noticed that they carefully avoid mentioning that you can fastforward through commercials?)
Unfortunately, copying a show from the device you recorded it on to a new device may be just enough of questionable legality to keep the courts from ruling it fair use; perfect digital copies are what's got the industries up in arms now; they didn't mind it too much when you were making analog copies, because they know that those analog copies can only spawn so many children, the quality degrading all the way...
Slashdot Mirror
....maybe i'm obtuse, but i keep hearing about this thing as "..and we're only seeing X% of its real potential right now!"....
1) Why can't they just shout "Let 'er rip!!" and crank the thing wide open?
The Real Potential is figured as a pure function of how many processors are in a machine and what speed they're running at.
Only a certain percentage of this processing power is aimed squarely at solving a problem, however... you also have to do things like:
Run an operating system
Compute error checks on code
Run a network stack
Not only that, but your application if not written and tuned specifically for your setup will probably spend a significant amount of time waiting on data from other processors in the cluster.
So they have a theoretical performance they can NEVER reach, and an expected real world performance that they figure out by comparing their setup to other setups to find out how much of their performance they can expect to be eaten by overhead. Actually getting to that performance figure is not necessarily an easy thing.
True life story. A certain big company had an application that was running on Citrix Metaframe over the web. This application ran on a farm of 4-proc boxes, averaging 35-40 users per processor at the performance levels they needed.
Rather than add new boxes, this company decided to move up to 8-proc boxes. How much could the new 8-proc boxes handle per proc? 10 users, max. Yeah that's right... double the processor, less than half the performance. Why?
The processors spent more time clogging their bus than actually running code. Just for giggles we found a high performance computing cluster with a 16-proc box for loan and ran it on there. The app was unusable.
The lesson? Scaling in a multi-processor way is not easy, and in some cases doesn't make sense at all.
Did I just read a comment to get to know how important you think you are?
No; someone questioned my use of a term. I pointed out where I got that term from, and gave a page number in a reference document from the world's biggest software vendor where one could find that term.
I don't give a fuck how important you think I am.
I give a fuck that you think I'd confuse these terms on my own. I didn't. My chosen software provider gave me a manual describing features of their new operating system (which has a much greater footprint than all of linux combined) and I chose to use the terminology in that manual to describe technology features.
ugh ... kludgy
.NET certified sticker you have to prove this level of compatibility. FYI, ASP.NET is ENTIRELY compiled as dlls, this is an excellent example of this sort of functionality.
and it still doesn't help if you need to replace exes or dlls for something other than services, like the shell?
Actually its quite elegant, because to the end user it just works.
And it does help if you need to replace exes, dlls, or whatever. But the process locking them has to be aware of it. Of course, to get a Windows
An optical OR gate is, of course, trivial.
Unless you consider that most optical designs call for lasers and other polarized / collimated light sources... in which case an optical OR gate would require some special techniques to eliminate interference... similar to how current generation silicon designers have to be extremely careful with path lengths to avoid ringing and timing problems...
snapshots in the microsoft world are for backup purposes and live upgrading... Microsoft calls what normal people call snapshots "Persistent Shadow Copies" and references them as journaling file systems.
Please see pages 6-8 of the Storage Management and Backups section of the beta 2 copy of the Windows Server 2003 Technical Readiness guide (which I unfortunately cannot advise on how to procure, as it is a confidential document)
Those who are working on a budget that makes the prize itself impressive do not have a chance.
Actually the idea behind it is to encourage innovation that DOES make the prize worthwhile; the people behind the X-Prize would love to see a SSTO launch capability that can be funded at that kind of level.
Even if they spend an order of magnitude MORE than the prize itself, they will still have advanced the state of the art well beyond what NASA is currently able to achieve; NASA's launch costs are estimated at about $1000 per pound of material.
I'd argue the point that the most common form of data loss is a crashed hard disk.
.NET Server aka Windows Server 2003... I don't know the equivalent in Linux land.
In my 14 years as a Network Administrator I think I've restored backups due to failed hard disks about twice (RAID catches the rest).
Yeah but the original poster doesn't have RAID. So every failed hard drive is a problem. In my 13 years as a home user without RAID I've suffered data loss due to failed hard disks some 7-8 times.
But I restore data accidentally deleted or changed by a user at least weekly! A distributed storage system won't help you there.
Ummm save your company some money... move to a journaling file system. Windows
The commercial where the guy explains to the business guys how volume shadow copy and journaling will save them millions annually? Yeah he wasn't joking...
and as you know you can build all of the other logic gates from a NAND!
That's not entirely accurate... you also need a way to link the logic gates together. And a non-destructive way of sampling the signal. (You can only build every logic gate from an NAND if you can hook the NAND's inputs together to create a NOT, meaning one signal, two sinks)
And if you have an OR gate, the process is MUCH easier...
Famine, war, plauge, class inequality, poverty, pollution, environmental damage, you name it, it relates directly or indirectly to population.
I would like to point out that all of these symptoms have been with humanity regardless of population size for nearly the entire span of recorded history.
And with the exception of pollution and environmental damage, one can make a case that most of these items are better now, at the height of our population so far, than ever before. The industrial revolution vastly increased our capacity for both pollution and environmental damage, as humans no longer need to be personally involved in either process.
On the topic of strange pre-industrial weather, wasn't there a year where summer was skipped? Winter for an entire year? The thames froze solid, IIRC...
However, no one would be STUPID enough to do that - after all, it's a 1GHz CPU!
:)
:(
And here I was envying the setup you describe.
Except knock off the 600W power supply and floppy. Neither are required in this case. And I'd rather a matrox and 3 LCD panels. With that setup you could literally hide the computer in the back of the middle panel, and attatch all three with a hinge...
semi-portable three-head gaming. Nice. Only problem is that setup gets rid of the stained glass
This whole post is FUD or a troll... point by point:
Mini ITX is great... really... I mean, for $2000 I can build myself a Mini-PC that is kick ass (well, shitty video card, ac97 audio, integrated LAN)
I built my Mini-ITX for $480 with an ATI TV Wonder. Had I wanted to shell out another $100 I could've had it with an ATI Radeon 8500 AIW, which I would certainly not call shitty. And this box has remote keyboard, mouse, remote control, and DVD player included.
but if I spend $1000, I can have a kick ass PC, with the ability to expand it in the future!!!
In the theoretical world where I bought an ATI Radeon instead of a TV Wonder, I spent $400 less than you for the same thing. Of course a mini-ITX is expandable. It has PCI and USB 2.0. Sure it doesn't support AGP... but if you don't NEED AGP, that's not really a problem is it? It doesn't ALWAYS have to be JUST about framerates, people.
what is it with constantly trying to adapt an x86 architecture to solve all the real world problems out there? Whether you agree or not, the x86 is a PC solution, stop putting them in pagers, phones, cars, and whatever else...
x86 has a choice of robust and powerful operating systems that many people have lots of good experience on, as well as lots of cheap (in many cases free) easy to understand and powerful development choices.
Embedded architectures are limited to one or two scaled down flaky operating systems that most programmers have little to no experience with, and the development platforms are almost universally a barrier to entry in terms of cost, support, and functionality.
You tell me which one you'd rather work on?
Mini ITX is crazy, it prevents you from customizing the PC the way most PCs can be.
How so? Oh I see you list some points... let's look at them shall we?
You have limited space for expansion slots
2 PCI plus USB. With the number of integrated devices, you don't need more... especially if you opt for USB audio and bulk devices.
logistical problems with cooling
How can one possibly call a processor putting off 13W of heat a logistical problem with cooling? When I built my Mini-ITX I literally slapped the thing together. I didn't put a single extra fan in it. And it runs not only cool but quiet as well. The warmest part is the power brick which is OUTSIDE THE CASE... not really a problem in my book...
and adding storage/optical drives
I have one hard drive and one DVD drive in my Mini-ITX. Yes, I am out of room in my case. But I could've opted for the two-3.5" bay case for just a few extra dollars. But you don't need it. The Mini-ITX is supposed to be a second computer, not a first computer. Or its for the non-computer enthusiast who just wants a computer thats non-obtrusive and maybe a little stylish. In the first case, if you need extra storage, set up some server shares. In the second case I doubt the user is really thinking about one day adding a 500G drive...
and in the end the damn thing runs the same OS as your desktop, and is used the same way... WHY???
I beg to differ that it is used the same way. I use mine as a DVR. Others use them for jukeboxes, mixing computers, and even office tasks. While my main computer has to be mediocre at everything, my mini computer can afford to specialize and be very good at one or two tasks at the expense of others, because I have my main computer if there's something I need to do that it can't really handle.
There is a reason for the need of a small computer, and damnit, there is always a better more economical and practical solution than stripping an x86 to fit the criteria.
I would hardly call a mini-ITX a stripped x86. With onboard EVERYTHING, decent processor speeds (their design criteria was "good enough in a low-heat low-cost package", not "as fast as possible at whatever cost". I believe they succeeded), and industry-standard connectors it can do everything that any x86 can do. And do it cheaper and quieter.
One could deduce current from voltage... as a matter of fact, any voltage across a heavy chain is going to be huge amounts of current. A heavy chain 2 feet long has practically zero resistance; so if the power is coming straight from a low ESR source to the chain, the current is going to be limited by the power source's ESR. If it has to go through a length of wire or something first, that will be the limiting resistance...
They could have fixed this in NTFS but chose not to, presumably to keep compatibility with DOS
.NET) fixes this. Shadow volume copy has to be turned on; it uses this feature to do it. Basically, it takes a snapshot of the working filesystem, points the service to it, updates the physical filesystem, spawns a new service that points to the new filesystem, pointing all new requests to the new copy... then dequeues and spins down the old service copy.
Windows 2003 (aka Windows
Only problem is the service writer has to be aware and support this process. SQL Server does; Exchange does; ASP.NET does. With other services, YMMV...
I'm sick and tired of actually typing out "OK" 500 times everytime MAME finds something to prompt
Just move the joystick left then right. That's what I do on my arcade cab and it works great...
This is nothing new. Check out Arcadecontrols.com . Folks have been building there own arcades for awhile now.
While we're at it, our very own CmdrTaco has one of the nicest styled MAME cabinets out there... cmdrtaco.net/jubei
I agree with you w.r.t. the reliability, robustness, and quality concerns you have.
And this is truly a YMMV kind of situation. I replaced my landline with a cell-phone 3 years ago and have no complaints; but then again I don't really like talking to people so when my phone is out or for some reason people call me and go straight to voicemail despite the fact that the phone is connected to the network, this doesn't really bother me...
Isn't a phone's bandwidth equal to 16kbps?
That's a question that doesn't have a concrete answer. Basically a phone has a high-pass filter at 3000Hz, cutting off the high range above that... in order to accurately represent a 3000Hz frequency, one must sample at at least 6000Hz (for more information google on nyquist frequency)... bitwise representation though is kind of hard to determine. Theoretically, it requires 16 bits... which of course is a bit higher than 16 kbps... however, to get adequate voice quality one can do some smart compression.
GSM phones ("digital clarity") for instance, require a 9.6 kbps transmit rate.
Charge me $50.00 a month for 1,000 anytime, anywhere minutes and you will have my business.
I'm with Cingular wireless... I get excellent reception at home, and I pay $40/mo for 750 anytime, anywhere minutes.
I think I could go up to 900 for an extra ten bucks.
And I get nights and weekends free, plus no roaming fees in the south-eastern united states.
May I assume you'll be moving to cingular now?
I have heard similarly anectodal evidence that the 250PVR and 350PVR products allow one to do MPEG2 timeshifting on a C3 800 MHz... I have that exact system with an ATI TVWonder, and I can say for certain that this application is not possible with an all-software encoder.
The bottom line is, I think, YMMV. FYI, the MythTV and freevo guys are both working on compatibility with the Hauppage PVR lines, and getting pretty impressive results out of them.
I'm actually quite surprised that nobody has managed to build a card that will do MPEG2 record and play in hardware as well as assisting conversions to/from MPEG2 *and* sold it for under $1k
Hauppage's USB-connected WinTV-GO does MPEG2 encoding and costs less than $50.
How do I know it does MPEG2 encoding when they haven't released the specs?
Because it lists the CBR MPEG2 versions supported, and notes that CBR's higher than 6 Mbps must use USB2 for transfer... 8Mbps is the highest USB1.1 transfer rate for a bulk device...
Therefore, the stream coming in from the Hauppage must match the final MPEG2 stream size, and unless the software transcodes, it must be MPEG2...
Oh and if you want a card with similar functionality, look at the PVR250 and PVR350 cards from the same company. Both come in well under $1k, and do both the encoding and decoding onboard.
The most ironic thing about that song, is that it doesn't actually contain any examples of irony.
One could almost term the song as being meta-ironic...
But that would just be silly.
how is that ironic?
Because ASP.NET server side controls specifically render for IE 5.5+
You generally have to do extra work in ASP.NET to support other browsers; even if that extra work is to decide not to use server side controls, which drastically decreases the utility of the ASP.NET programming model...
Have you tried to complain at https://www.donotcall.gov/Complain/ComplainCheck.a spx ?
NOTE: Seems like only Mozilla will work when submitting a complaint. At least, that was my experience.
Ironic, considering that this is an asp.NET site...
Is there any "copyright" issues with using TV shows like this? How could it be any different from using a DVR in the first place.
Most TV broadcasters consider taping their shows to be an infringing use because you can skip commercials. They also consider showshifting to be an infringing use (if you've seen TimeWarner's TV commercials for their DVR, have you noticed that they carefully avoid mentioning that you can fastforward through commercials?)
Unfortunately, copying a show from the device you recorded it on to a new device may be just enough of questionable legality to keep the courts from ruling it fair use; perfect digital copies are what's got the industries up in arms now; they didn't mind it too much when you were making analog copies, because they know that those analog copies can only spawn so many children, the quality degrading all the way...