Re:tivo & replay
on
Is MOXI Toast?
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· Score: 4, Informative
...replay 4000 has shipped with all those goodies 4 months ago....
ReplayTV has wireless distribution via 802.11b? Moxi demoed that at CES. ReplayTV already has the ability to view still images and play MP3s and DVDs? Moxi demoed those features at CES.
Yes, Moxi was showing a technology, not a product. And yes, their overblown claims about partnerships with cable and satellite companies look like wishful thinking more than actual business deals. Yes, at this point they are vapor. And yes, we all owe a debt of gratitude to ReplayTV and TiVo for bringing the PVR to the masses (albeit more slowly than they or we the converted would like). But let's at least acknowledge that they demoed features that aren't currently available on any shipping PVR.
While I don't doubt that Steam gives Valve a mechanism for eventually offering pay-per-play games, they've so far shown that they're far more interested in mining the obscenely huge video game market in a less insidious way. After all, they saw what a huge success Counter-Strike was and decided on their own to pour money and resources into making it a high-quality mod because they knew even if CS was free, it'd drive sales of Half-Life. Sure, they created a multiplayer-only version of HL based on CS and sold it separately, but everybody who'd bought HL when it first came out could get a commercial-quality multiplayer game based on HL for free.
It seems that Steam's development explains why Valve has been utterly silent on TF2 for the last year, though. They've clearly decided not to roll out TF2 until Steam is completed.
Re:'The Economist' is guilty of wishful thinking
on
Andreesen "Grows Up"
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· Score: 2
That's pretty arguable. I mean, name one major social change that has happened as a result of the Internet.
How about the change in power in Serbia? The Internet had a lot to do with creating the social and political unrest that led to Milosevic's fall from power. Yes, other sources of information also had an impact on Milosevic's downfall, but he controlled newspapers and television reasonably well. He couldn't control the Internet.
While the point has definitely been oversold, it's still true that the democratization of information is the enemy of despots and tyrants. Unfortunately, in the US, we're seeing restrictions being placed on speech and other access to information in order to protect the profitability of mega corporations.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist. I just don't like the thought of Disney or AOL/TW telling me what I can or can't think and what I can or can't see.
As the Register points out in their discussion of the story, this change only applies to the Placer and Granite Bay chipsets being developed for single- or dual-processor Xeon workstations. The existing RDRAM-based chipsets (the 850 and 860) will be refreshed with support for the 533MHz FSB but will otherwise remain unchanged.
I don't own an HDTV, but I have a friend who does. I helped him upgrade his DirecTV setup to HD-compatibility. When I got to his house the night we did that, he already had his DirecTV HD receiver attached to his OTA antenna, and he was watching fabulous HD images from the local PBS station. After we got his dish replaced and his multiswitch installed, he was receiving fabulous HD from HBO and Showtime as well.
HDNet definitely shows the phenomenal potential of HDTV, especially for sports broadcasts. Baseball is astounding on HD, but the sport that picks up the most benefit from HD is clearly hockey. On a standard NTSC picture, you can't make out much detail during a hockey game unless the camera zooms in so much that you can't see the big picture. That fight that's developing around the blue line? Can't see it because the camera's zoomed into the scrum for the puck in the corner.
HD definitely rocks. It sucks that Fox refused to broadcast the Super Bowl in HD. The year previously, CBS did offer an HD broadcast of the Super Bowl, but the local CBS affiliate refuses to install HD equipment so we got to see that in standard definition as well.
So, I guess you've never wound up the victim of a poorly-administered blacklist, have you?
My experience with open relays is virtually identical to that of the person who inspired this thread. My server was used as an open relay for part of a weekend.
Near as I can tell, the first spam fired its way out of my server on Friday night around midnight. I closed off the relay on Sunday morning around 10:00 am. In that time, literally thousands of spams were sent, so I fully expected to be blacklisted and even warned my bosses and co-workers.
What I didn't expect, however, was to still be trying to get myself off those blacklists SIX MONTHS LATER.
I think blacklists can be a valuable tool for fighting spam, but only if they're sensible. Blacklists that permanently block without ever rechecking blocked IPs are irresponsible. They're adding to the difficulty of using the Internet, not improving it. They're also reducing their value to their subscribers because they're blocking IPs they shouldn't.
In short, I agree with the post that called for an RFC. If there were some sort of standard for relay blacklists, it would be a damn sight easier getting off the lists once you've resolved the problem.
Look, as much as I hate Microsoft, it's not easy to write secure code, and it's impossible to write bug-free code. Because they're not currently generating revenue with bugfixes, I have a hard time believing they're intentionally writing crappy code just to reap the bugfix revenues. Yes, they always claim every new version of Windows is more stable and secure than the last, but almost nobody ever believes them anymore..
Their business model requires them to get people like us to upgrade our existing products to the latest versions every couple of years. Since you're not really getting a more stable product when you upgrade, and since features aren't the upgrade-enforcers they used to be, MS is trying to find a way to force you to upgrade. Witness their newest licensing/protection racket: Upgrade to the current version, or when the next version comes out, you'll pay full price to upgrade to it.
Until they change their business model to allow them to generate revenue for producing secure, stable code, they will never succeed in generating secure, stable, well-architected products.
I also saw that Frontline. One of the most damning things in the piece was the indictment of the incestuous nature of IPO allocation. VCs feed hot IPOs to investment bankers in exchange for a chance to buy into other hot IPOs offered by those bankers at the initial offering price--a price normal investors never get to pay.
I thought Bill Hambrecht's point that a huge "first day pop" is a disservice to the company was an excellent one. If a stock goes public at $30 a share and goes up to $175 a share on the first day, then the company misses out on $145 per share. That's extra capital that the company could have raised.
Hambrecht's solution is to use the old Dutch auction, which allocates stock to those who are willing to pay the most for it. That way, if the market values a stock at $75 a share, that's what the company will raise at the IPO. Unfortunately, Hambrecht has had one helluva tough time convincing VCs and boards to go with his Dutch auctions.
Hey, the policy's not lame. It's a blast. I once replaced a VCR that was deemed "uneconomical to repair." We pitched the dead one off the roof of the building my store was in. It was a hoot.
And trust me, after you've just finished dealing with an infuriating customer who took all the anger of his entire life out on you, taking his returned, worthless answering machine out behind the store and beating the crap out of it with something big and heavy is a very satisfying release.
I worked at RadioShack for 8 years. Back when "Radio Shack" was still two words.
Yes, they pay their salespeople commission. Commission is the difference between RadioShack and Best Buy. Ever tried to get somebody at Best Buy to explain the differences between the various DirecTV receivers they sell? Good luck. How about the benefits of TiVo or UltimateTV? Not likely.
And how often have you gone into a store and bought something, only to get it home and discover you didn't have all the little accessories or other crap you needed to make it all work? At RadioShack, the good salespeople make sure you know about all the accessories before you leave the store.
And because they work on commission, the best RadioShack salespeople show everybody the latest cool toys they're selling. Cellphones? RadioShack was far and away the biggest retailer of cellphones forever. DirecTV? RadioShack again. Digital cellphones/PCS? RadioShack.
And you're damn right they try to sell as much as possible. What's wrong with that? It's good for them and it's good for RadioShack. And if they do it properly, it's good for the customer, too.
Okay, yes. I still have stock in the company. Go buy some shit there!
Olympus puts f1.4 lenses on many of its digital cameras these days. Admittedly, these are "prosumer" cameras and not low-end consumer cameras, but you can buy an Olympus C2040 for about $450 these days. Sony and a few other manufacturers use Carl Zeiss lenses, which while not as fast optically as the Olympus lenses, seem to frequently have more accurate imaging.
Duh... It's Google!
on
Heart of the Net
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· Score: 5, Insightful
If there's a heart of the Net, it's Google.
Without Google, the Internet wouldn't be nearly as useful for me.
Well, you can't upgrade to the latest OS, but you can install patches and bugfixes. My Palm V ran 3.1 when I got it, and I wound up installing a couple of patches before I upgraded to 3.3. Sure, I can upgrade 3.5 or 4.0, but I don't really have a compelling need to do so, so I haven't.
So, to reiterate. You can patch your OS with bugfixes, even if you can't replace the ROM image. If you're stuck with a buggy version of PalmOS, it's not specifically because Handspring chose not to use flash to store the OS.
Perhaps you're thinking of BattleBots, Robotica, or Robot Wars. All of those have studio audiences. Junkyard Wars and Scrapheap Challenge have never had audiences, except for one of the dragster races. That was the grand championship of the season, and numerous competitors from that season and previous ones were in the stands at the dragstrip during the races.
PICK was a database-as-OS, but it wasn't relational. PICK liked to say they were "post-relational" but really, they just used flat files with multivalued fields. Essentially, any field could become a one-dimensional array.
De-fragging a disk drive on a native PICK system was a nightmare. Essentially, you had to reformat and restore from backup to defrag a native PICK machine. It's little wonder that PICK Systems eventually ported their DBMS to various *nix platforms and gave up on the DBMS-as-OS concept.
I thought ATI fell from grace with Apple when they pissed off Steve Jobs by bragging that their latest cards would be used in the G4 cubes before the G4 cubes were officially announced. Amazing how by the time the G4 cubes were actually announced, they were using nVidia cards....
The German company Crayon doesn't make crayons. The word crayon when referring to crayons is a generic term. Crayola crayons are trademarked.
Trademark law frequently permits trademarking generic terms when they refer to unusual uses of those terms. As an example, think of Microsoft Windows. Even if trademark law didn't permit such trademarking, the German word for crayon isn't "crayon"--it's "zeichenstift" according to babelfish. I'm sure there are US companies that have trademarked words that would be generic in other languages, so it should stand to reason that German law permits trademarking of foreign words that would be generic in their native languages.
Unfortunately, the real problem seems to be with the German court system permitting potentially-disastrous injunctions to be granted on the flimsiest of evidence or without real justification. The German company Crayon should be required to show that failure to grant the injunction would result in serious and irreparable harm before being granted the injunction. It's clear that the injunction was granted on flimsy grounds and shouldn't have been granted in the first place.
...I don't know of anyone who honestly expected AI to arrive in 2001...No one is marketing HAL to the masses everyday....
Actually, didn't you provide the counterpoint to your own claim here?
Clearly, the guy who dreamt up HAL thought AI would be feasible by 2001. Of course, he wasn't selling products, but if you limited yourself to products that were announced but never shipped before the company went out of business, you'd have a hard time finding products anybody had ever heard of.
There just aren't that many spectacular flops every year. For every Androbot or Indrema, there are hundreds of companies nobody has ever heard of.
Actually, it's highly likely that both TiVo and SonicBlue are patenting everything can as a defensive tactic as much as they are doing it as a revenue source. Essentially, in cases like this, the players wind up cross-licensing each others' patents for nothing (or nearly nothing). It's only when somebody new tries to enter the market and has no patents to trade, that the patent holders actually see any income from their patents.
Didn't Progeny GPL their installer? If so, I'd like to see Debian scavenge it for stuff they can use in the Debian-installer for the next version.
I know it's a cliche, but it's true. Most Debian aficionados forget how awful Debian's installer is because you only have to do it once. That said, I've installed Debian on about a dozen systems, and once you're used to it, it's not as awful. I even got it up and running on a Dell Inspiron laptop with full sound and PCMCIA support without too much trouble.
The real bear was trying to get Potato installed to a Compaq Proliant 1500 with a Compaq SMART-Array card. I *never* got that damn thing to work. Red Hat 6.something installed no trouble.
When Apple licensed the Sorenson codec, didn't they license it under an agreement that forbade its use with other media players? IOW, when they licensed Sorenson, didn't they do so with the specific intention of preventing Windows Media Player and other apps from playing Quicktime movies encoded using the Sorenson codec?
If so, that's hardly open, by even the most generous definitions of open.
I used to manage a store for a major electronics chain (you've got questions, etc.). A store across town shipped me a computer monitor that I needed for a sale I'd made. The box started out roughly cubical. By the time it made the 15 mile journey to my store, the box was roughly spherical. Mind you, this is the original, unopened factory box. The monitor was fine, but it was clear UPS took absolutely no precautions to avoid destroying it.
Shipping in original factory boxes usually isn't good enough for UPS. If they damage something shipped in the original box (with original packing material) and that original box and packing isn't up to their "drop it from waist height" standard, you're up the creek. They generally recommend you put the original box-with-packing into a larger box that you then pad at least two inches all the way around.
I once dropped off a defective 5-disc CD changer at the regional repair center 2.5 miles from my store. Parts were on back-order till hell froze over. When the shop finally sent it back to me via UPS two months later, it was almost completely destroyed when it came off the truck.
I don't think I've ever had anything severely damaged by FedEx air. I've had a lot of stuff severely damaged by UPS. FedEx Ground (formerly RPS) is not much better than UPS when it comes to damaging stuff.
The UTV's apparent advantage of 2 simultaneous recordings will soon not be when the DirectTiVo software is updated to 2.5 I am not such a TV fanatic that I have to record to shows at the same time. I can watch one on TV while TiVo records another. Big deal.
The 2.5 update should be just about completely rolled out by now for the DirecTV with TiVo owners. I gave my parents a Philips DSR6000 DirecTV with TiVo about a month and a half ago. They've had the 2.5 update for a while.
Recording two things at once can be an advantage. If there are enough people in the house that there are frequent conflicts about what to record, dual tuners is a big advantage.
If you're a private citizen, you owe me nothing. If you're an ISP, you owe me at least a cursory attempt to have an automated program try to email me. Fer cripes sake, how hard would it be to write a perl script that parses the IPs, performs a reverse-DNS lookup, tries to email postmaster@ and then blacklists?
If I'm a real spammer or a moron with a cable modem, you won't get a valid or useful reverse-DNS. Fine. Don't notify those morons or scumbags directly. But for poor bastards who got caught with their shorts down, let's not go out of our way to make their lives hell after they've already fixed the problem.
The sites that have blacklisted me aren't private individuals. They're blacklist organizations that small ISPs and some corporations belong to. The SMTP service that acted as a relay for a day and a half has a valid RDNS name that is mx.mydomain.com. It shouldn't have been tough for somebody to figure out they could send an email to postmaster@mx.mydomain.com or abuse@mx.mydomain.com or even postmaster@mydomain.com.
I'm all for killing spammers and sterilizing their children. And I don't have a problem with blacklisting morons like myself. I do have a problem with making it impossible for me to redeem myself.
The problems with most of these blacklists (and there are lots of them) is that there are no globally-accepted standards for how open relays should get on or off the lists, how to notify owners of blacklisted IPs and how long entries should be blacklisted in the absence of other feedback.
I hate spam at least as much as the next guy, but I'm still cleaning up from an attack that happened two months ago through a server I thought had been configured to prevent relaying. Unfortunately, it had been rebuilt (and badly) since the last time I'd verified its configuration. The attack launched through the relay lasted no longer than 36 hours. I realize that's a helluvalong time in Internet time, but considering the attack began over a weekend, the fact that I caught it and stopped it on Sunday morning means I caught it 24 hours faster than I normally might have.
I fully expected to wind up on some blacklists because of the incident, but I didn't expect to be winding up on new blacklists 30 days after the fact.
Today, I got an email from a user who hasn't been able to contact somebody important for three weeks. The user on the other end was completely unaware that their ISP was blocking our email.
I'd like to see standards for notifications, for aging entries (and eventually dropping them), for active verification and automated retesting, and for subscribing ISPs to notify their users how many emails they blocked and from whom they were blocked.
Slashdot Mirror
ReplayTV has wireless distribution via 802.11b? Moxi demoed that at CES. ReplayTV already has the ability to view still images and play MP3s and DVDs? Moxi demoed those features at CES.
Yes, Moxi was showing a technology, not a product. And yes, their overblown claims about partnerships with cable and satellite companies look like wishful thinking more than actual business deals. Yes, at this point they are vapor. And yes, we all owe a debt of gratitude to ReplayTV and TiVo for bringing the PVR to the masses (albeit more slowly than they or we the converted would like). But let's at least acknowledge that they demoed features that aren't currently available on any shipping PVR.
While I don't doubt that Steam gives Valve a mechanism for eventually offering pay-per-play games, they've so far shown that they're far more interested in mining the obscenely huge video game market in a less insidious way. After all, they saw what a huge success Counter-Strike was and decided on their own to pour money and resources into making it a high-quality mod because they knew even if CS was free, it'd drive sales of Half-Life. Sure, they created a multiplayer-only version of HL based on CS and sold it separately, but everybody who'd bought HL when it first came out could get a commercial-quality multiplayer game based on HL for free.
It seems that Steam's development explains why Valve has been utterly silent on TF2 for the last year, though. They've clearly decided not to roll out TF2 until Steam is completed.
That's pretty arguable. I mean, name one major social change that has happened as a result of the Internet.
How about the change in power in Serbia? The Internet had a lot to do with creating the social and political unrest that led to Milosevic's fall from power. Yes, other sources of information also had an impact on Milosevic's downfall, but he controlled newspapers and television reasonably well. He couldn't control the Internet.
While the point has definitely been oversold, it's still true that the democratization of information is the enemy of despots and tyrants. Unfortunately, in the US, we're seeing restrictions being placed on speech and other access to information in order to protect the profitability of mega corporations.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist. I just don't like the thought of Disney or AOL/TW telling me what I can or can't think and what I can or can't see.
As the Register points out in their discussion of the story, this change only applies to the Placer and Granite Bay chipsets being developed for single- or dual-processor Xeon workstations. The existing RDRAM-based chipsets (the 850 and 860) will be refreshed with support for the 533MHz FSB but will otherwise remain unchanged.
I don't own an HDTV, but I have a friend who does. I helped him upgrade his DirecTV setup to HD-compatibility. When I got to his house the night we did that, he already had his DirecTV HD receiver attached to his OTA antenna, and he was watching fabulous HD images from the local PBS station. After we got his dish replaced and his multiswitch installed, he was receiving fabulous HD from HBO and Showtime as well.
HDNet definitely shows the phenomenal potential of HDTV, especially for sports broadcasts. Baseball is astounding on HD, but the sport that picks up the most benefit from HD is clearly hockey. On a standard NTSC picture, you can't make out much detail during a hockey game unless the camera zooms in so much that you can't see the big picture. That fight that's developing around the blue line? Can't see it because the camera's zoomed into the scrum for the puck in the corner.
HD definitely rocks. It sucks that Fox refused to broadcast the Super Bowl in HD. The year previously, CBS did offer an HD broadcast of the Super Bowl, but the local CBS affiliate refuses to install HD equipment so we got to see that in standard definition as well.
So, I guess you've never wound up the victim of a poorly-administered blacklist, have you?
My experience with open relays is virtually identical to that of the person who inspired this thread. My server was used as an open relay for part of a weekend.
Near as I can tell, the first spam fired its way out of my server on Friday night around midnight. I closed off the relay on Sunday morning around 10:00 am. In that time, literally thousands of spams were sent, so I fully expected to be blacklisted and even warned my bosses and co-workers.
What I didn't expect, however, was to still be trying to get myself off those blacklists SIX MONTHS LATER.
I think blacklists can be a valuable tool for fighting spam, but only if they're sensible. Blacklists that permanently block without ever rechecking blocked IPs are irresponsible. They're adding to the difficulty of using the Internet, not improving it. They're also reducing their value to their subscribers because they're blocking IPs they shouldn't.
In short, I agree with the post that called for an RFC. If there were some sort of standard for relay blacklists, it would be a damn sight easier getting off the lists once you've resolved the problem.
Look, as much as I hate Microsoft, it's not easy to write secure code, and it's impossible to write bug-free code. Because they're not currently generating revenue with bugfixes, I have a hard time believing they're intentionally writing crappy code just to reap the bugfix revenues. Yes, they always claim every new version of Windows is more stable and secure than the last, but almost nobody ever believes them anymore..
Their business model requires them to get people like us to upgrade our existing products to the latest versions every couple of years. Since you're not really getting a more stable product when you upgrade, and since features aren't the upgrade-enforcers they used to be, MS is trying to find a way to force you to upgrade. Witness their newest licensing/protection racket: Upgrade to the current version, or when the next version comes out, you'll pay full price to upgrade to it.
Until they change their business model to allow them to generate revenue for producing secure, stable code, they will never succeed in generating secure, stable, well-architected products.
I also saw that Frontline. One of the most damning things in the piece was the indictment of the incestuous nature of IPO allocation. VCs feed hot IPOs to investment bankers in exchange for a chance to buy into other hot IPOs offered by those bankers at the initial offering price--a price normal investors never get to pay.
I thought Bill Hambrecht's point that a huge "first day pop" is a disservice to the company was an excellent one. If a stock goes public at $30 a share and goes up to $175 a share on the first day, then the company misses out on $145 per share. That's extra capital that the company could have raised.
Hambrecht's solution is to use the old Dutch auction, which allocates stock to those who are willing to pay the most for it. That way, if the market values a stock at $75 a share, that's what the company will raise at the IPO. Unfortunately, Hambrecht has had one helluva tough time convincing VCs and boards to go with his Dutch auctions.
Hey, the policy's not lame. It's a blast. I once replaced a VCR that was deemed "uneconomical to repair." We pitched the dead one off the roof of the building my store was in. It was a hoot.
And trust me, after you've just finished dealing with an infuriating customer who took all the anger of his entire life out on you, taking his returned, worthless answering machine out behind the store and beating the crap out of it with something big and heavy is a very satisfying release.
I worked at RadioShack for 8 years. Back when "Radio Shack" was still two words.
Yes, they pay their salespeople commission. Commission is the difference between RadioShack and Best Buy. Ever tried to get somebody at Best Buy to explain the differences between the various DirecTV receivers they sell? Good luck. How about the benefits of TiVo or UltimateTV? Not likely.
And how often have you gone into a store and bought something, only to get it home and discover you didn't have all the little accessories or other crap you needed to make it all work? At RadioShack, the good salespeople make sure you know about all the accessories before you leave the store.
And because they work on commission, the best RadioShack salespeople show everybody the latest cool toys they're selling. Cellphones? RadioShack was far and away the biggest retailer of cellphones forever. DirecTV? RadioShack again. Digital cellphones/PCS? RadioShack.
And you're damn right they try to sell as much as possible. What's wrong with that? It's good for them and it's good for RadioShack. And if they do it properly, it's good for the customer, too.
Okay, yes. I still have stock in the company. Go buy some shit there!
Olympus puts f1.4 lenses on many of its digital cameras these days. Admittedly, these are "prosumer" cameras and not low-end consumer cameras, but you can buy an Olympus C2040 for about $450 these days. Sony and a few other manufacturers use Carl Zeiss lenses, which while not as fast optically as the Olympus lenses, seem to frequently have more accurate imaging.
If there's a heart of the Net, it's Google.
Without Google, the Internet wouldn't be nearly as useful for me.
Well, you can't upgrade to the latest OS, but you can install patches and bugfixes. My Palm V ran 3.1 when I got it, and I wound up installing a couple of patches before I upgraded to 3.3. Sure, I can upgrade 3.5 or 4.0, but I don't really have a compelling need to do so, so I haven't.
So, to reiterate. You can patch your OS with bugfixes, even if you can't replace the ROM image. If you're stuck with a buggy version of PalmOS, it's not specifically because Handspring chose not to use flash to store the OS.
What audience?
Perhaps you're thinking of BattleBots, Robotica, or Robot Wars. All of those have studio audiences. Junkyard Wars and Scrapheap Challenge have never had audiences, except for one of the dragster races. That was the grand championship of the season, and numerous competitors from that season and previous ones were in the stands at the dragstrip during the races.
PICK was a database-as-OS, but it wasn't relational. PICK liked to say they were "post-relational" but really, they just used flat files with multivalued fields. Essentially, any field could become a one-dimensional array.
De-fragging a disk drive on a native PICK system was a nightmare. Essentially, you had to reformat and restore from backup to defrag a native PICK machine. It's little wonder that PICK Systems eventually ported their DBMS to various *nix platforms and gave up on the DBMS-as-OS concept.
I thought ATI fell from grace with Apple when they pissed off Steve Jobs by bragging that their latest cards would be used in the G4 cubes before the G4 cubes were officially announced. Amazing how by the time the G4 cubes were actually announced, they were using nVidia cards....
IANAL
The German company Crayon doesn't make crayons. The word crayon when referring to crayons is a generic term. Crayola crayons are trademarked.
Trademark law frequently permits trademarking generic terms when they refer to unusual uses of those terms. As an example, think of Microsoft Windows. Even if trademark law didn't permit such trademarking, the German word for crayon isn't "crayon"--it's "zeichenstift" according to babelfish. I'm sure there are US companies that have trademarked words that would be generic in other languages, so it should stand to reason that German law permits trademarking of foreign words that would be generic in their native languages.
Unfortunately, the real problem seems to be with the German court system permitting potentially-disastrous injunctions to be granted on the flimsiest of evidence or without real justification. The German company Crayon should be required to show that failure to grant the injunction would result in serious and irreparable harm before being granted the injunction. It's clear that the injunction was granted on flimsy grounds and shouldn't have been granted in the first place.
Actually, didn't you provide the counterpoint to your own claim here?
Clearly, the guy who dreamt up HAL thought AI would be feasible by 2001. Of course, he wasn't selling products, but if you limited yourself to products that were announced but never shipped before the company went out of business, you'd have a hard time finding products anybody had ever heard of.
There just aren't that many spectacular flops every year. For every Androbot or Indrema, there are hundreds of companies nobody has ever heard of.
Actually, it's highly likely that both TiVo and SonicBlue are patenting everything can as a defensive tactic as much as they are doing it as a revenue source. Essentially, in cases like this, the players wind up cross-licensing each others' patents for nothing (or nearly nothing). It's only when somebody new tries to enter the market and has no patents to trade, that the patent holders actually see any income from their patents.
Didn't Progeny GPL their installer? If so, I'd like to see Debian scavenge it for stuff they can use in the Debian-installer for the next version.
I know it's a cliche, but it's true. Most Debian aficionados forget how awful Debian's installer is because you only have to do it once. That said, I've installed Debian on about a dozen systems, and once you're used to it, it's not as awful. I even got it up and running on a Dell Inspiron laptop with full sound and PCMCIA support without too much trouble.
The real bear was trying to get Potato installed to a Compaq Proliant 1500 with a Compaq SMART-Array card. I *never* got that damn thing to work. Red Hat 6.something installed no trouble.
When Apple licensed the Sorenson codec, didn't they license it under an agreement that forbade its use with other media players? IOW, when they licensed Sorenson, didn't they do so with the specific intention of preventing Windows Media Player and other apps from playing Quicktime movies encoded using the Sorenson codec?
If so, that's hardly open, by even the most generous definitions of open.
I used to manage a store for a major electronics chain (you've got questions, etc.). A store across town shipped me a computer monitor that I needed for a sale I'd made. The box started out roughly cubical. By the time it made the 15 mile journey to my store, the box was roughly spherical. Mind you, this is the original, unopened factory box. The monitor was fine, but it was clear UPS took absolutely no precautions to avoid destroying it.
Shipping in original factory boxes usually isn't good enough for UPS. If they damage something shipped in the original box (with original packing material) and that original box and packing isn't up to their "drop it from waist height" standard, you're up the creek. They generally recommend you put the original box-with-packing into a larger box that you then pad at least two inches all the way around.
I once dropped off a defective 5-disc CD changer at the regional repair center 2.5 miles from my store. Parts were on back-order till hell froze over. When the shop finally sent it back to me via UPS two months later, it was almost completely destroyed when it came off the truck.
I don't think I've ever had anything severely damaged by FedEx air. I've had a lot of stuff severely damaged by UPS. FedEx Ground (formerly RPS) is not much better than UPS when it comes to damaging stuff.
The UTV's apparent advantage of 2 simultaneous recordings will soon not be when the DirectTiVo software is updated to 2.5 I am not such a TV fanatic that I have to record to shows at the same time. I can watch one on TV while TiVo records another. Big deal.
The 2.5 update should be just about completely rolled out by now for the DirecTV with TiVo owners. I gave my parents a Philips DSR6000 DirecTV with TiVo about a month and a half ago. They've had the 2.5 update for a while.
Recording two things at once can be an advantage. If there are enough people in the house that there are frequent conflicts about what to record, dual tuners is a big advantage.
Why should I tell you I'm blacklisting you?
If you're a private citizen, you owe me nothing. If you're an ISP, you owe me at least a cursory attempt to have an automated program try to email me. Fer cripes sake, how hard would it be to write a perl script that parses the IPs, performs a reverse-DNS lookup, tries to email postmaster@ and then blacklists?
If I'm a real spammer or a moron with a cable modem, you won't get a valid or useful reverse-DNS. Fine. Don't notify those morons or scumbags directly. But for poor bastards who got caught with their shorts down, let's not go out of our way to make their lives hell after they've already fixed the problem.
The sites that have blacklisted me aren't private individuals. They're blacklist organizations that small ISPs and some corporations belong to. The SMTP service that acted as a relay for a day and a half has a valid RDNS name that is mx.mydomain.com. It shouldn't have been tough for somebody to figure out they could send an email to postmaster@mx.mydomain.com or abuse@mx.mydomain.com or even postmaster@mydomain.com.
I'm all for killing spammers and sterilizing their children. And I don't have a problem with blacklisting morons like myself. I do have a problem with making it impossible for me to redeem myself.
The problems with most of these blacklists (and there are lots of them) is that there are no globally-accepted standards for how open relays should get on or off the lists, how to notify owners of blacklisted IPs and how long entries should be blacklisted in the absence of other feedback.
I hate spam at least as much as the next guy, but I'm still cleaning up from an attack that happened two months ago through a server I thought had been configured to prevent relaying. Unfortunately, it had been rebuilt (and badly) since the last time I'd verified its configuration. The attack launched through the relay lasted no longer than 36 hours. I realize that's a helluvalong time in Internet time, but considering the attack began over a weekend, the fact that I caught it and stopped it on Sunday morning means I caught it 24 hours faster than I normally might have.
I fully expected to wind up on some blacklists because of the incident, but I didn't expect to be winding up on new blacklists 30 days after the fact.
Today, I got an email from a user who hasn't been able to contact somebody important for three weeks. The user on the other end was completely unaware that their ISP was blocking our email.
I'd like to see standards for notifications, for aging entries (and eventually dropping them), for active verification and automated retesting, and for subscribing ISPs to notify their users how many emails they blocked and from whom they were blocked.
But that's just me.