I have a ReplayTV 5080 and this is my understanding of how the commercial skip works:
The networks put a code into the broadcast stream (probably in the vertical blanking interval - VBI) that lets the local networks or cable/satellite providers know when to insert their commercials. The Replay box picks up on this and saves the time to an index file. When you are playing back the recorded mpeg, it looks at the index file and skips ahead to the proper point when the show resumes.
This doesn't always work, but it does work fairly well. I think it has a lot to do with the network you are watching. If you watch things like the DIY network or certain local stations, they may not always have those commercial start/stop signals embedded.
Here is why I think it is in the VBI. On one of our newer TVs, I can see at the top of the screen a thin band of colored pixels just before a commercial starts and right before a show resumes. This TV does not have a Replay box attached to it, BTW. I'm not sure what information is being sent in that burst of pixels, but I'm pretty sure that is what these boxes are using.
As a side note, I don't always use the auto skip feature. I occasionally manually skip 30 seconds ahead at a time because there are sometimes things advertised that I want to know about -- new movies being released, upcoming shows on that network, etc. I don't need to see 95+% of the commercials out there, but I've found that I've missed out on a few things by not watching at least some commercials. They are not all evil.
Oh, and one last thought... I love the ReplayTV. I can't compare it to Tivo, but I would definitely buy another RTV based on my experience with them.
> 20mbit comes into to SCO web server a second
> 20mbit goes out of SCO web server a second
> Now, how much traffic was there in that second?
Half a DS-3. A DS-3 is a full-duplex circuit with a clock speed of 44.736 Mb/s in each direction. On a DS-3 you can use this full 45 Mb/s (minus overhead) in each direction simultaneously. This is unlike a half-duplex ethernet that most non-telecom people are more familiar with -- where it makes sense to add transmit and receive to see how much of the 10 or 100 Mb/s channel is being used.
It's called Mercaptan. When I was in high school, I used to think it would be cool to get some of this stuff and release it into the school. It would have driven someone crazy trying to find that darned gas leak... I think it's supposed to be pretty safe for the most part -- at least compared with releasing actual natural gas.
Their command line is very cisco-like and their density is unbelievable. I just had the opportunity to test a couple of them for a customer of mine and was amazed.
I'm now recommending them to more of my customers.
Here's one data point. I installed Opera a while back, maybe two years ago or so? I used it for about a year, and loved almost every single feature of that browser - especially the speed! Wow, I'm starting to miss it again...
The only reason I gave it up was because the darn thing kept crashing on me. It would crash 2 or 3 times per night. It reminded me of the old Netscape 4.x browser. I had/have a standard RedHat installation with no major modifications, stable hardware, etc. I tried upgrading Opera several times, but it was always the same thing.
Finally I went to Mozilla.. Aargh.. Slllooooow, but rock solid. I always liked how Opera remembered which web pages I was on when it crashed, but still that was not much of a consolation. I figured that feature was put there as a workaround because it was so unstable. But I wasn't able to find anyone else having those same types of problems.
Other than the speed, the thing I miss the most about Opera is draggable tabs. If I knew what I was doing with UI controls I'd probably dive in and add that to Mozilla. I'm an engineer, not a coder though, so my code simply solves problems and doesn't tend to be all that elegant. Okay, too far off topic...
Anyone want to comment on how stable Opera is these days? Maybe I should give it another shot.
That is awesome! Do you buy your wheat online or from a local source? I'm totally going to get a grinder and a bag of wheat. I could go for some real, homemade whole-wheat bread... Is winter wheat better than summer? Any website for more information? I did find wheatandgrain.com, but I'm not sure if these are good prices or not.
I know, getting way offtopic, but your email address wasn't listed. heh..
Heh heh... Yeah and the idea is just as ridiculous today as it was then. How many people actually used that thing? I remember watching executives try to cut and paste their voice in that thing as they "edited" the email... Yikes.. The end results were pretty funny, but not useful for communication.
It'll be just like those people that drone on and on in your voice mail except it'll be in email with no easy way to skim ahead. Yeah, I don't see this one taking off anytime soon.
The simple solution to keeping people from skipping commercials is to make them worth watching. I would gladly sit through a few minutes of commercials if they were entertaining or informative.
Unfortunately, most commercials are stupid and insulting.
Didn't we also have a story about a year ago that described a watch that was worn by the user (instead of this pager device) that did the exact same thing? I can't find it at all.
One of the first experiments we did at UMR was to measure the acceleration of gravity. It was a weird contraption of a clothespin wired to a switch that started a timer when you released this badminton birdie from the clothespin.
We dropped the birdie onto a box with a microphone in it that stopped the timer when it heard the "thud". We dropped it from different heights and measured the time to fall and then plotted the results.
The beautiful thing wasn't learning that gravity is 9.8 m/s^2, but in showing us that from a fairly simple setup we could quantitatively measure something important in physics. We calculated the acceleration of gravity as well as the terminal velocity of the birdie. And our results were correct!
This was a great foundation to other experiments with interferometers measuring the wavelength of a laser, pendulums, exponential decay (of you name it -- cooling, capacitor discharge, etc.).
but mp3's are just so entrenched it'll be tough to get the average user to convert.
I'm not so sure I'd agree. Remember when GIFs were all the rage? I thought no one would ever convert to JPGs because GIFs were so popular. Now, you hardly ever see them. I know, JPGs are better at compression, so maybe that's the reason.
Maybe a better comparison would be PNGs compared to GIFs or JPGs? I use PNGs all the time, but I don't have a feel for how popular they are in general.
I guess my point is that if there's a compelling reason, people will switch file formats in a heartbeat. For that matter, I know people who switch MS Word formats every few years or so. Oh, wait...
I'm pretty good with my thumbs, but I think it's because of all that training on my old HP-15c calculator in college. It was longer horizontally than vertically and you could hold it in your fingers while doing all the entries with your thumbs. Man, I could seriously fly using that thing....
Ping times (for small ping sizes) are approximately equal to the amount of time it takes for light to pass through the fiber and back. Most people in telecom use 1ms per 100 route miles of fiber as a rule of thumb. (remember the fiber does not follow a straight line between cities!) So if it is 4200 route miles between NY and LA, your ping will take 42 ms to get there and 42 ms to get back = 84 ms.
You can't change this basic fact of physics. If you were running somehow on a microwave system instead of fiber, you would actually approach the speed of light in free space, so your ping time would be a little faster.
By the way, there are other factors that go into the delay of your ping besides propagation delay. Other things such as: congested buffers in routers along the way, serialization delay to clock the packet out of your device (negligible on fast links, but a big effect on dial-up), the response time of the remote device, devices delaying packets to do an ethernet arp, etc... Propagation delay usually ends to be the biggest factor when you are talking about ping times.
Slashdot Mirror
The networks put a code into the broadcast stream (probably in the vertical blanking interval - VBI) that lets the local networks or cable/satellite providers know when to insert their commercials. The Replay box picks up on this and saves the time to an index file. When you are playing back the recorded mpeg, it looks at the index file and skips ahead to the proper point when the show resumes.
This doesn't always work, but it does work fairly well. I think it has a lot to do with the network you are watching. If you watch things like the DIY network or certain local stations, they may not always have those commercial start/stop signals embedded.
Here is why I think it is in the VBI. On one of our newer TVs, I can see at the top of the screen a thin band of colored pixels just before a commercial starts and right before a show resumes. This TV does not have a Replay box attached to it, BTW. I'm not sure what information is being sent in that burst of pixels, but I'm pretty sure that is what these boxes are using.
As a side note, I don't always use the auto skip feature. I occasionally manually skip 30 seconds ahead at a time because there are sometimes things advertised that I want to know about -- new movies being released, upcoming shows on that network, etc. I don't need to see 95+% of the commercials out there, but I've found that I've missed out on a few things by not watching at least some commercials. They are not all evil.
Oh, and one last thought... I love the ReplayTV. I can't compare it to Tivo, but I would definitely buy another RTV based on my experience with them.
> 20mbit goes out of SCO web server a second
> Now, how much traffic was there in that second?
Half a DS-3. A DS-3 is a full-duplex circuit with a clock speed of 44.736 Mb/s in each direction. On a DS-3 you can use this full 45 Mb/s (minus overhead) in each direction simultaneously. This is unlike a half-duplex ethernet that most non-telecom people are more familiar with -- where it makes sense to add transmit and receive to see how much of the 10 or 100 Mb/s channel is being used.
This article is much more thorough and does say there was an "eerie glow" from the shed.
It's called Mercaptan. When I was in high school, I used to think it would be cool to get some of this stuff and release it into the school. It would have driven someone crazy trying to find that darned gas leak... I think it's supposed to be pretty safe for the most part -- at least compared with releasing actual natural gas.
Their command line is very cisco-like and their density is unbelievable. I just had the opportunity to test a couple of them for a customer of mine and was amazed.
I'm now recommending them to more of my customers.
She was also great in Night of the Comet.
Another great underrated movie!
The only reason I gave it up was because the darn thing kept crashing on me. It would crash 2 or 3 times per night. It reminded me of the old Netscape 4.x browser. I had/have a standard RedHat installation with no major modifications, stable hardware, etc. I tried upgrading Opera several times, but it was always the same thing.
Finally I went to Mozilla.. Aargh.. Slllooooow, but rock solid. I always liked how Opera remembered which web pages I was on when it crashed, but still that was not much of a consolation. I figured that feature was put there as a workaround because it was so unstable. But I wasn't able to find anyone else having those same types of problems.
Other than the speed, the thing I miss the most about Opera is draggable tabs. If I knew what I was doing with UI controls I'd probably dive in and add that to Mozilla. I'm an engineer, not a coder though, so my code simply solves problems and doesn't tend to be all that elegant. Okay, too far off topic...
Anyone want to comment on how stable Opera is these days? Maybe I should give it another shot.
That was a great article.
You think "normal" people know what any of these things really are? Why not:
I assume you've read the book Takedown. My question is, how close to reality was the story?
Is there anything specific that stands out as complete and utter BS?
That is awesome! Do you buy your wheat online or from a local source? I'm totally going to get a grinder and a bag of wheat. I could go for some real, homemade whole-wheat bread... Is winter wheat better than summer? Any website for more information? I did find wheatandgrain.com, but I'm not sure if these are good prices or not.
I know, getting way offtopic, but your email address wasn't listed. heh..
Heh heh... Yeah and the idea is just as ridiculous today as it was then. How many people actually used that thing? I remember watching executives try to cut and paste their voice in that thing as they "edited" the email... Yikes.. The end results were pretty funny, but not useful for communication.
It'll be just like those people that drone on and on in your voice mail except it'll be in email with no easy way to skim ahead. Yeah, I don't see this one taking off anytime soon.
Hey! That looks like a 1986 St. Pat's sweatshirt (from UMR) he's wearing in some of those shots. Really cool!
The simple solution to keeping people from skipping commercials is to make them worth watching. I would gladly sit through a few minutes of commercials if they were entertaining or informative.
Unfortunately, most commercials are stupid and insulting.
Hmm, I think I'm going to switch to FreeBSD!
I like the idea of using magnets. If they can do it for rides at six flags, they can use it to launch a vehicle into space.
http://www.citypaper.com/2001-01-31/feature.html
Didn't we also have a story about a year ago that described a watch that was worn by the user (instead of this pager device) that did the exact same thing? I can't find it at all.
One of the first experiments we did at UMR was to measure the acceleration of gravity. It was a weird contraption of a clothespin wired to a switch that started a timer when you released this badminton birdie from the clothespin.
We dropped the birdie onto a box with a microphone in it that stopped the timer when it heard the "thud". We dropped it from different heights and measured the time to fall and then plotted the results.
The beautiful thing wasn't learning that gravity is 9.8 m/s^2, but in showing us that from a fairly simple setup we could quantitatively measure something important in physics. We calculated the acceleration of gravity as well as the terminal velocity of the birdie. And our results were correct!
This was a great foundation to other experiments with interferometers measuring the wavelength of a laser, pendulums, exponential decay (of you name it -- cooling, capacitor discharge, etc.).
the organization as a whole has done a good job of finding spokespeople (like the professor) who appear "respectable"
Yes, it never ceases to amaze me how many "respectable" people can be swayed by that payment for being a professional witness.
It would take an unimaginable sum of money for me to sell out and lose the respect of my peers.
Thanks for the link. I've been wanting to support/join/donate to the eff for a long time and I just did it. I can't wait for my t-shirt!
I agree about gif:jpg, but if mp3 has a watermark and is unplayable, then ogg definitely has a huge advantage.
but mp3's are just so entrenched it'll be tough to get the average user to convert.
I'm not so sure I'd agree. Remember when GIFs were all the rage? I thought no one would ever convert to JPGs because GIFs were so popular. Now, you hardly ever see them. I know, JPGs are better at compression, so maybe that's the reason.
Maybe a better comparison would be PNGs compared to GIFs or JPGs? I use PNGs all the time, but I don't have a feel for how popular they are in general.
I guess my point is that if there's a compelling reason, people will switch file formats in a heartbeat. For that matter, I know people who switch MS Word formats every few years or so. Oh, wait...
I have an idea. How about simply hiring compentent sysadmins?
I'm pretty good with my thumbs, but I think it's because of all that training on my old HP-15c calculator in college. It was longer horizontally than vertically and you could hold it in your fingers while doing all the entries with your thumbs. Man, I could seriously fly using that thing....
Ping times (for small ping sizes) are approximately equal to the amount of time it takes for light to pass through the fiber and back. Most people in telecom use 1ms per 100 route miles of fiber as a rule of thumb. (remember the fiber does not follow a straight line between cities!) So if it is 4200 route miles between NY and LA, your ping will take 42 ms to get there and 42 ms to get back = 84 ms.
You can't change this basic fact of physics. If you were running somehow on a microwave system instead of fiber, you would actually approach the speed of light in free space, so your ping time would be a little faster.
By the way, there are other factors that go into the delay of your ping besides propagation delay. Other things such as: congested buffers in routers along the way, serialization delay to clock the packet out of your device (negligible on fast links, but a big effect on dial-up), the response time of the remote device, devices delaying packets to do an ethernet arp, etc... Propagation delay usually ends to be the biggest factor when you are talking about ping times.