The reserved space doesn't come out of your record space.
When the box says it's a 15 or 30 hour box, it's a 15 or 30 hour box. You are guaranteed 15 or 30 hours for recording -- the reserve is always reserved, and is not figured into that number. There's no wool being pulled over your eyes, and it was never promised for your use.
Argument two, I can't respond to as I haven't ever had anything paused when something was scheduled. However, it would seem the TiVo's common sense would dictate if you've got the buffer paused, it shouldn't touch the channel.
It's almost certainly an oversight that's being addressed right now, number one.
And number two, "parental controls" aren't foolproof anyway. The only effective parental control is... drumroll please... a parent! Many programs out there still don't have a rating listed. I could think MASH is objectionable and not want my (non-existent) children to watch it, but it's not rated, and thus not blockable.
Even if you go the double-bladed method of using the V-chip in your TV, you get no further than going on the TiVo's guide data alone. If there is no rating broadcast or in the guide data, your children could be watching porn until the cows come home.
Deal with it. Lock up the power cords or the TV if it's that big of an issue.
Honestly, though, today's children hear and see far worse things in school than they do on television. Everyone needs to give up on this "oh, my innocent little children" bit and get with the times.
Why would TiVo care? The poster of the parent is operating on the false information the story establishes.
That's like me going to bitch at the car dealership because my neighbor swears they're going to come make their logo four feet wide on the side door while I'm asleep if I buy their car. It's not true, and they'll laugh me out of their building.
I'm pro-TiVo, because I own one and know how the system works. (And you would too, if you followed the links, namely the third, in the article.)
You do not give up control. If the TiVo is in its "doing nothing mode", it'll record the promo content to storage space which was allotted specifically for TiVo software and branding promotions. It does not eat into your recording time. If you have a scheduled recording or are watching live TV, it will not record.
You're not forced to watch the promo, and you can get on with life by ignoring it. Hell, if you only have OTA (antenna), you'll probably never even have the promo clip to begin with.
If you have cable, the soon-to-be-rolled-out software can gather much of its program data through a late-night recording, thus decreasing the need for calls to update program data.
Also, if you haven't checked already, it's often cheaper to make long-distance calls out of state than it is to make long-distance calls in state. You may be able to halve or better your long-distance by making it dial somewhere else.
It's also possible (though not pretty) to use calling cards, or if you're feeling hackish, to use ethernet to use your PC's internet connection.
No, it doesn't. If you're actively watching live TV, it will ask to change the channel. You tell it no and get on with life. If you have a recording scheduled for that time slot, the scheduled recording will be recorded and the content will not be.
You're not forced to watch it, and if you're recording something or watching live TV, it won't be recorded. It's also not using up any available disk space, because the space it's stored in is restricted to TiVo software and brand content.
You paid for it, it's yours, and you do have the control. You're not giving any up, because it doesn't magically usurp your recordings or TV viewing.
You're absolutely right -- it's a little clip that goes and lives in TiVo central (usually "Showcases" or someplace similar).
It won't be recorded if you're watching live TV or already recording something else. It doesn't eat into your storage space, as it's stored in the TiVo's reserved space.
What this is is another fine example of Slashdot posting articles mindlessly and submitters submitting articles mindlessly.
Eh? According to all the E3 reports, it's $49.00 for a year of Xbox Live access. This is your service fee. Period. And it includes the Xbox Communicator headset for voice chat in enabled games.
$4 a month, if it were monthly-based. Whoop-de-frickin'-doo.
Reading The Reg is like reading the National Enquirer -- take it with a grain of salt, and analyze the output of "real" news outlets, too.
If you're in a large corporation and your billing contact goes to some administrative office with no technical knowledge, Verisign's campaign is mildly filthy.
Ditto if you're a home user who doesn't know about whois or has a convenient way to check expirations via your registrar.
I got mail from VeriSign to renew my domain from them because it was "expiring soon". And repeated several times in the "invoice" is "Reply by May 15", as if the domain they're trying to get me to transfer is expiring then (too bad it expires in October, and I know who I registered through).
The only real indicator it's not just a renewal is the "Renewal and Transfer Authorization" section and step 3 on the "invoice": Sign the form to authorize payment and transfer to VeriSign.
They don't really try to represent themselves as your current registrar, they just don't emphasize the fact they aren't. At any rate, I laughed at their mailing and added them to my list of people not to ever buy anything from.
The basic GUI concepts from Xerox, as many stories scattered across the web do tell, sucked. It wasn't a modern GUI in any way, shape, or form. It's like saying XFree86 is perfect without a window manager or any applications. Refinements went into the GUI of what is now known as Mac OS that went well above and beyond anything at Xerox PARC. Apple stole the concept of being able to interface with the user graphically from Xerox. Big deal.
Dodge, Chrysler, Mercedes, BMW, VW... They all stole the concept of the automobile from Ford. But we don't go around bitching about that. They improved upon a basic "product", as did Apple upon a GUI.
Apple innovates. Look at the design of their systems. Nobody else put out a mass-produced, small-footprint computer for the masses that can master DVDs. Their mobile computers get far better battery life than anything Gateway or Dell can offer.
They're pushed to actually better their systems, where the Wintel world gets excited over an extra 2 minutes of battery life or 50MHz.
Look at the software. iTunes. iMovie. iPhoto. There's some truth to Apple's "Everything's easier on a Mac" campaign. Equivalent software for Windows largely either: (a) sucks and is free or (b) is overpriced and sucks.
I paid nearly twice as much for my top-of-the-line Dell laptop as I did for my 500MHz iBook, and what do I get for it? A GeForce2 Go. The standard software complement on Apple's consumer-level computers blows Dell's (and most other Wintel resellers) out of the water. I've got AppleWorks on the Mac that can do everything I need, and Works on the Dell that has, uh, an old copy of Microsoft Word bundled. Whoop-de-fucking-do.
4 months later, the Dell battery's dying and they don't want to touch it, the touchpad's dead, and Windows has been reinstalled several times, each creating a new and fun hardware conflict. If there's innovation somewhere in that... Oh, wait, there is! Innovation in customer service!
Remember, you have to be a bank to issue a debit card. And it's been established PayPal isn't a bank -- which is exactly why, if you turn over your PayPal credit card, it isn't issued by PayPal.
It's issued through a bank, and they deal with MasterCard. It's basically just another branded card, like a baseball Visa, or a leopard print Discover, or a Star Trek mastercard. Major League Baseball, forest animals, or Paramount don't manage your money -- the bank issuing the card does.
In fact, that card isn't even issued to you. It's like a business card. From the back: This card issued to X.com, through Bank One, Indiana, NA, pursuant to a license from MasterCard International.
And the "license from MasterCard International" has nothing to do with the recipient, but the bank offering the card. They have to be licensed to use the logo and the network -- about the only card you won't see that disclaimer on is an AmEx, because they issue their cards directly.
That's true for high-end professional cameras. However, if you go grab a point-and-shoot or even a mid-line SLR, you're not going to get umpteen bazillion photos on one roll.
Your average camera simply doesn't have the capacity on the takeup reel to hold more than an average amount of film.
Yes, they are within their legal rights, and yes, it is a good idea.
The NDA isn't really so much for the bug database as it is for the developer seeds and other pre-release software which pops up on the Apple Developer Connection from time to time. The Developer Connection is for developers in general, and doesn't lock you in to one specific area. When I sign up, I get access to whatever my membership level allows me. I'm not limited to the open Darwin stuff. I may well have a developer seed show up so I can make sure my apps will run on, say, OS X.5. It's not ready for public consumption, and they don't want all the new features leaked. Hence, NDA.
* If the parent's [sic] ever rescind the permission to use content, it must be possible to effectively "unpublish" the content. Imagine the implications within a CVS repository of, say, having to remove the changes in version 1.5 of a file that is now at revision 1.24...?
That is exactly how it is applied to COPPA, and is spelled out in a quite straightforward manner in the original comment. COPPA sucks, but what choice does Apple have? He can't sign into agreements effectively, much less agree to the Apple Public License terms under which most of Darwin is licensed, and his parents could say "take everything he's poublished away".
Allowing contribution to continue could hurt Apple far more than simply pulling him until he reaches the age of majority. Kids these days...
As has been brought up over and over from the beginning of DeCSS time, CSS does not prevent bit-by-bit copying. CSS prevents playback on unlicensed (in theory) players. The point there, of course, is to drag in more profits by charging consumer electronics manufacturers to license the CSS decryption.
It's like a password-protected PKZIP file -- I don't need to know what's in it to be able to copy it, I just copy it to another disk.
I can't comment on exactly how accurate this is since it's been a while and the original site doesn't exist anymore...
But as far as the computer was concerned, the Ricochet modem was just another modem. You could send it the proper AT sequence, and you'd be on the internet, so long as your OS could communicate with the damn thing (the older serial units, of course, would be the easiest method).
That tidbit was from their FAQ section way back when, and only stuck because I was looking at getting Ricochet for my Windows/Linux laptop.
You left out one other very large carrier of note: Pacbell.
Love them, hate them, whatever... But their Cali network is GSM. And it works surprisingly well, despite all the horror stories my Californian friends have about their telco.
That's not true of all US cell providers. A few (VoiceStream, for example) give you at least a free minute of incoming calls. And given it usually takes me 16 second of airtime to say, "Hey, you have the wrong number" and press end, getting billed for wrong numbers is a joke. (Plenty of experience in this area, given the first 3 months I had my mobile, people kept calling wanting their cable TV hooked up...)
That, and most of the CDMA and TDMA providers do offer the ability to switch your account to calling-party-pays. But that drastically tapers off the number of calling parties, so most people don't do it.
Re:It would work in the U.S.
on
New Nokia Phone
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· Score: 1
VoiceStream prepaid is rather pricey, yes, but their month-to-month plans are actually quite reasonable, and get pretty damn good coverage (ran off to Colorado this summer, went all over about half the state, and never had a no-service or low-service area).
In VoiceStream's defense, they're only following suit in their prepaid plans -- Tracfone costs an arm and a leg and expires after 60 days, and has been rather popular; other cellular providers have been known to do essentially the same thing. Why lose all that money when you can rip folks off like the rest of the prepaid crowd?
I am mildly ticked at VStream about their new voicemail system, though. They ought to add at least another 15 minutes of voicemail pickup every month for all the extraneous crap we have to listen to for every message now (though some of it can be changed in the preferences, it's still annoying). And their handset pricing sucks. And the fact you have to cancel your account to buy a new phone [through them], which defeats the purpose of having a SIM in the first place.
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The reserved space doesn't come out of your record space.
When the box says it's a 15 or 30 hour box, it's a 15 or 30 hour box. You are guaranteed 15 or 30 hours for recording -- the reserve is always reserved, and is not figured into that number. There's no wool being pulled over your eyes, and it was never promised for your use.
Argument two, I can't respond to as I haven't ever had anything paused when something was scheduled. However, it would seem the TiVo's common sense would dictate if you've got the buffer paused, it shouldn't touch the channel.
You're jumping the gun just a tad.
It's almost certainly an oversight that's being addressed right now, number one.
And number two, "parental controls" aren't foolproof anyway. The only effective parental control is... drumroll please... a parent! Many programs out there still don't have a rating listed. I could think MASH is objectionable and not want my (non-existent) children to watch it, but it's not rated, and thus not blockable.
Even if you go the double-bladed method of using the V-chip in your TV, you get no further than going on the TiVo's guide data alone. If there is no rating broadcast or in the guide data, your children could be watching porn until the cows come home.
Deal with it. Lock up the power cords or the TV if it's that big of an issue.
Honestly, though, today's children hear and see far worse things in school than they do on television. Everyone needs to give up on this "oh, my innocent little children" bit and get with the times.
Why would TiVo care? The poster of the parent is operating on the false information the story establishes.
That's like me going to bitch at the car dealership because my neighbor swears they're going to come make their logo four feet wide on the side door while I'm asleep if I buy their car. It's not true, and they'll laugh me out of their building.
I'm pro-TiVo, because I own one and know how the system works. (And you would too, if you followed the links, namely the third, in the article.)
You do not give up control. If the TiVo is in its "doing nothing mode", it'll record the promo content to storage space which was allotted specifically for TiVo software and branding promotions. It does not eat into your recording time. If you have a scheduled recording or are watching live TV, it will not record.
You're not forced to watch the promo, and you can get on with life by ignoring it. Hell, if you only have OTA (antenna), you'll probably never even have the promo clip to begin with.
If you have cable, the soon-to-be-rolled-out software can gather much of its program data through a late-night recording, thus decreasing the need for calls to update program data.
Also, if you haven't checked already, it's often cheaper to make long-distance calls out of state than it is to make long-distance calls in state. You may be able to halve or better your long-distance by making it dial somewhere else.
It's also possible (though not pretty) to use calling cards, or if you're feeling hackish, to use ethernet to use your PC's internet connection.
No, it doesn't. If you're actively watching live TV, it will ask to change the channel. You tell it no and get on with life. If you have a recording scheduled for that time slot, the scheduled recording will be recorded and the content will not be.
There's no "control" issue here.
You're not forced to watch it, and if you're recording something or watching live TV, it won't be recorded. It's also not using up any available disk space, because the space it's stored in is restricted to TiVo software and brand content.
You paid for it, it's yours, and you do have the control. You're not giving any up, because it doesn't magically usurp your recordings or TV viewing.
You're absolutely right -- it's a little clip that goes and lives in TiVo central (usually "Showcases" or someplace similar).
It won't be recorded if you're watching live TV or already recording something else. It doesn't eat into your storage space, as it's stored in the TiVo's reserved space.
What this is is another fine example of Slashdot posting articles mindlessly and submitters submitting articles mindlessly.
Eh? According to all the E3 reports, it's $49.00 for a year of Xbox Live access. This is your service fee. Period. And it includes the Xbox Communicator headset for voice chat in enabled games.
$4 a month, if it were monthly-based. Whoop-de-frickin'-doo.
Reading The Reg is like reading the National Enquirer -- take it with a grain of salt, and analyze the output of "real" news outlets, too.
If you're in a large corporation and your billing contact goes to some administrative office with no technical knowledge, Verisign's campaign is mildly filthy.
Ditto if you're a home user who doesn't know about whois or has a convenient way to check expirations via your registrar.
I got mail from VeriSign to renew my domain from them because it was "expiring soon". And repeated several times in the "invoice" is "Reply by May 15", as if the domain they're trying to get me to transfer is expiring then (too bad it expires in October, and I know who I registered through).
The only real indicator it's not just a renewal is the "Renewal and Transfer Authorization" section and step 3 on the "invoice": Sign the form to authorize payment and transfer to VeriSign.
They don't really try to represent themselves as your current registrar, they just don't emphasize the fact they aren't. At any rate, I laughed at their mailing and added them to my list of people not to ever buy anything from.
The basic GUI concepts from Xerox, as many stories scattered across the web do tell, sucked. It wasn't a modern GUI in any way, shape, or form. It's like saying XFree86 is perfect without a window manager or any applications. Refinements went into the GUI of what is now known as Mac OS that went well above and beyond anything at Xerox PARC. Apple stole the concept of being able to interface with the user graphically from Xerox. Big deal.
Dodge, Chrysler, Mercedes, BMW, VW... They all stole the concept of the automobile from Ford. But we don't go around bitching about that. They improved upon a basic "product", as did Apple upon a GUI.
Apple innovates. Look at the design of their systems. Nobody else put out a mass-produced, small-footprint computer for the masses that can master DVDs. Their mobile computers get far better battery life than anything Gateway or Dell can offer.
They're pushed to actually better their systems, where the Wintel world gets excited over an extra 2 minutes of battery life or 50MHz.
Look at the software. iTunes. iMovie. iPhoto. There's some truth to Apple's "Everything's easier on a Mac" campaign. Equivalent software for Windows largely either: (a) sucks and is free or (b) is overpriced and sucks.
I paid nearly twice as much for my top-of-the-line Dell laptop as I did for my 500MHz iBook, and what do I get for it? A GeForce2 Go. The standard software complement on Apple's consumer-level computers blows Dell's (and most other Wintel resellers) out of the water. I've got AppleWorks on the Mac that can do everything I need, and Works on the Dell that has, uh, an old copy of Microsoft Word bundled. Whoop-de-fucking-do.
4 months later, the Dell battery's dying and they don't want to touch it, the touchpad's dead, and Windows has been reinstalled several times, each creating a new and fun hardware conflict. If there's innovation somewhere in that... Oh, wait, there is! Innovation in customer service!
USB (They didn't invent it, but they made it popular). FireWire (IEEE1394). Digital connections for digital displays. GUI. The list goes on.
It's early. I switched between the two off and on in that post. But it applies to both anyway, so there.
Remember, you have to be a bank to issue a debit card. And it's been established PayPal isn't a bank -- which is exactly why, if you turn over your PayPal credit card, it isn't issued by PayPal.
It's issued through a bank, and they deal with MasterCard. It's basically just another branded card, like a baseball Visa, or a leopard print Discover, or a Star Trek mastercard. Major League Baseball, forest animals, or Paramount don't manage your money -- the bank issuing the card does.
In fact, that card isn't even issued to you. It's like a business card. From the back: This card issued to X.com, through Bank One, Indiana, NA, pursuant to a license from MasterCard International.
And the "license from MasterCard International" has nothing to do with the recipient, but the bank offering the card. They have to be licensed to use the logo and the network -- about the only card you won't see that disclaimer on is an AmEx, because they issue their cards directly.
That's true for high-end professional cameras. However, if you go grab a point-and-shoot or even a mid-line SLR, you're not going to get umpteen bazillion photos on one roll.
Your average camera simply doesn't have the capacity on the takeup reel to hold more than an average amount of film.
Yes, they are within their legal rights, and yes, it is a good idea.
The NDA isn't really so much for the bug database as it is for the developer seeds and other pre-release software which pops up on the Apple Developer Connection from time to time. The Developer Connection is for developers in general, and doesn't lock you in to one specific area. When I sign up, I get access to whatever my membership level allows me. I'm not limited to the open Darwin stuff. I may well have a developer seed show up so I can make sure my apps will run on, say, OS X.5. It's not ready for public consumption, and they don't want all the new features leaked. Hence, NDA.
Here's the part you apparently grazed over:
* If the parent's [sic] ever rescind the permission to use content, it must be possible to effectively "unpublish" the content. Imagine the implications within a CVS repository of, say, having to remove the changes in version 1.5 of a file that is now at revision 1.24...?
That is exactly how it is applied to COPPA, and is spelled out in a quite straightforward manner in the original comment. COPPA sucks, but what choice does Apple have? He can't sign into agreements effectively, much less agree to the Apple Public License terms under which most of Darwin is licensed, and his parents could say "take everything he's poublished away".
Allowing contribution to continue could hurt Apple far more than simply pulling him until he reaches the age of majority.
Kids these days...
As has been brought up over and over from the beginning of DeCSS time, CSS does not prevent bit-by-bit copying. CSS prevents playback on unlicensed (in theory) players. The point there, of course, is to drag in more profits by charging consumer electronics manufacturers to license the CSS decryption.
It's like a password-protected PKZIP file -- I don't need to know what's in it to be able to copy it, I just copy it to another disk.
As has been mentioned in the past, the real thing holding QuickTime back is...
The Sorenson Codec!
So bitch at (err, ask nicely, rather) Sorenson about it.
Or just use Crossover. (I bet you can guess which one is the answer if you want support now, or any time in the next twelve decades.)
I can't comment on exactly how accurate this is since it's been a while and the original site doesn't exist anymore...
But as far as the computer was concerned, the Ricochet modem was just another modem. You could send it the proper AT sequence, and you'd be on the internet, so long as your OS could communicate with the damn thing (the older serial units, of course, would be the easiest method).
That tidbit was from their FAQ section way back when, and only stuck because I was looking at getting Ricochet for my Windows/Linux laptop.
Ah, but Sony does manufacture TiVos. They may not sell the service, but they've got the units.
You left out one other very large carrier of note: Pacbell.
Love them, hate them, whatever... But their Cali network is GSM. And it works surprisingly well, despite all the horror stories my Californian friends have about their telco.
ATB's a moot point now -- FFX went back to turn-based.
That's not true of all US cell providers. A few (VoiceStream, for example) give you at least a free minute of incoming calls. And given it usually takes me 16 second of airtime to say, "Hey, you have the wrong number" and press end, getting billed for wrong numbers is a joke. (Plenty of experience in this area, given the first 3 months I had my mobile, people kept calling wanting their cable TV hooked up...)
That, and most of the CDMA and TDMA providers do offer the ability to switch your account to calling-party-pays. But that drastically tapers off the number of calling parties, so most people don't do it.
VoiceStream prepaid is rather pricey, yes, but their month-to-month plans are actually quite reasonable, and get pretty damn good coverage (ran off to Colorado this summer, went all over about half the state, and never had a no-service or low-service area).
In VoiceStream's defense, they're only following suit in their prepaid plans -- Tracfone costs an arm and a leg and expires after 60 days, and has been rather popular; other cellular providers have been known to do essentially the same thing. Why lose all that money when you can rip folks off like the rest of the prepaid crowd?
I am mildly ticked at VStream about their new voicemail system, though. They ought to add at least another 15 minutes of voicemail pickup every month for all the extraneous crap we have to listen to for every message now (though some of it can be changed in the preferences, it's still annoying). And their handset pricing sucks. And the fact you have to cancel your account to buy a new phone [through them], which defeats the purpose of having a SIM in the first place.