Ahh the confusing state of television system middleware. The NDS site and the OpenTV sites both seem to be taking credit for Sky+ so I got a little confused.
The original post stands however as it doesn't matter who provides the technology when broadcasters are integrating their own systems to the exclusion of other open systems.
Unfortunately this is a Cable based system which will not record high definition content from DirecTV, Sky et al. who are developing their own closed systems for high defintion PVR with copy protection.
Sky are producing a system which will output certain HD contact only over HDMI or HDCP enabled DVI connections and not over analogue component.
As more and more content providers request these restrictions TiVo will be left as a niche for Cable and FTA in the US only and will most likely never return to the UK or expand into other regions.
As TiVo becomes available only as a standalone unit as users migrate towards High Defention we will see the end of TiVo as a hardware platform and the beginning of TiVo as a patent licensing agency.
OpenTV is the NDS based system which powers the Sky+ system which our US Cousins (Brit here!) will shortly be being sold now that Mr. Murdoch has taken control of DirecTV. Sky in the UK were the marketing partner of TiVo and used the experience and knowledge gained to help develop the OpenTV platform to create Sky+ - shortly after they abandonned the TiVo exercise and left it to die.
I myself prefer TiVo over Sky+ since I have a lifetime subscription and TiVo offers much greater flexibility but I can see the time coming where TiVo are forced to offer their patents to NDS and Sky+ and its Italian, Australian and American derivatives starts to offer the same ease of use and intelligence that I have had for the last 6 years.
Because we have rules which force government agencies to keep data for a certain amount of time. To get around this much of the data that was to be covered by this was wiped before the rules came into force:)
It's quite easy to record all of freeview as the data is sent multiplexed.
Playing around with the Linux DVB information you'll see that the DVB streams are easy to save off to disk or transmit across a network. As there are only 5 or 6 multiplexes it wouldn't take that much to save them all off to disks.
Get a decent controller and the right software and you're effectively time-shifting the entire broadcast spectrum.
Of course this doesn't come close to enough if you look at Sky's 60+ transponders each pumping out 20mbps+ on DVB-S:)
First we have a guy who spends 1.5 years building something you can already purchase and now we have a guy who thinks he's clever because he re-invented the shelf!
The iCurve is not that much more, far more stylish and when you count in the time can work out cheaper!
Apple has been awarded a patent on the design - not the concept. The same seems to be the case with IBM/Lenovo.
Patents can be applied to industrial design as well as solutions to a problem. The only way IBM/Lenovo would need to talk to Apple is if they included any of the features in the Apple patent and I'm sure they won't have as IBM designs are very black, matt and angular while Apple's design is glossy, white and curved.
It's only their problem if the GPL code is linked to the proprietary stuff. If they pipe stuff through or don't directly interface the two then it's not an issue.
OR at least thats how I understood the GPL to work.
You should be able to discover from the code they're released what the case is but please don't tar them until you or someone else has done the research and had it ratified.
£11.50 per month actually. Quite a bit from £50 per quarter.
If you're paying that you're also paying for one of their inclusive calls packages and should shut it off.
Have you considered what it costs to run that line of yours that you're not putting any phone calls down? The cable, the trunking, the witching equipment in the exchange, the power, the requirement to provide service to enable 999 calls etc???
Ditto - My DSL on a new line was connected 4 days earlier than they said it would be and there were no issues with BT's service. The ISP however was shocking:)
The UK has approaching 98% ADSL penetration, far higher than the US.
The reason for this is British Telecom. Despite their faults they have created a stable package that for the bulk of connections just works.
And it works a damn sight better than the nasty connection I set up in our Miami office 5 years ago which was so poor it had to be downgraded to IDSL.
One of the reasons costs are higher is because ISPs in the UK have the burden of paying to connect to networks in the US - so our bandwidth is pricier. BT also have to provide a fixed set of costs onto ISPs which bumps the price slightly higher.
Unfortunately the "journalist" in the article had fallen into the trap of having a shitty landlord who hadn';t done things properly.
I've had this with our electricity bill - despite paying all the bills it too 9 months for the account to be transfered over to our name at which point the electricity company refunded everything we'd paid to an account in our landlord's name and demanded we pay everything again. A bit of talking and looking at the names the cheques were from sorted that out in the end.
I just wish that people would understand what they're writing about before starting off on a rante - but in this age of publish and be damned internet journalism this is getting more and more rare.
Most of the comments in this article were ill thought out and based on misunderstandings, from the understanding of how BT's ATM network works to the statement that HomeChoice doesn't play well with networks. IT does, I have it at home.
So nothing like cron what-so-ever. Another great piece of Timothy's fact checking.
In fact that Ars-Technica article makes no mention of cron until half way through the page - so if it was actually read you'd have a good idea of what launchd does.
It seems to work quite well - my system has booted fully a number of times:)
IF this sort of action was taken at KaZaa what decisions of a similar nature are being taken at Skype?
I know that I use it for personal calls with no inherrent value but there are compaanies who are starting to use it to cut inter-office and employee communications bills - they could very easily be concerned about this.
We're actually about to see the final two episodes @Kobol's Last Gleaming" starting next monday.
It's turning into quite a good Sci Fi channel now Sky One. Stargate SG1 & Atlantis played non stop so we finish it first, Battlestar Gallactica is part funded by Sky, Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars on Saturday and Enterprise S4 starting later in the year!
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh the confusing state of television system middleware. The NDS site and the OpenTV sites both seem to be taking credit for Sky+ so I got a little confused.
The original post stands however as it doesn't matter who provides the technology when broadcasters are integrating their own systems to the exclusion of other open systems.
Unfortunately this is a Cable based system which will not record high definition content from DirecTV, Sky et al. who are developing their own closed systems for high defintion PVR with copy protection.
Sky are producing a system which will output certain HD contact only over HDMI or HDCP enabled DVI connections and not over analogue component.
As more and more content providers request these restrictions TiVo will be left as a niche for Cable and FTA in the US only and will most likely never return to the UK or expand into other regions.
As TiVo becomes available only as a standalone unit as users migrate towards High Defention we will see the end of TiVo as a hardware platform and the beginning of TiVo as a patent licensing agency.
OpenTV is the NDS based system which powers the Sky+ system which our US Cousins (Brit here!) will shortly be being sold now that Mr. Murdoch has taken control of DirecTV. Sky in the UK were the marketing partner of TiVo and used the experience and knowledge gained to help develop the OpenTV platform to create Sky+ - shortly after they abandonned the TiVo exercise and left it to die.
I myself prefer TiVo over Sky+ since I have a lifetime subscription and TiVo offers much greater flexibility but I can see the time coming where TiVo are forced to offer their patents to NDS and Sky+ and its Italian, Australian and American derivatives starts to offer the same ease of use and intelligence that I have had for the last 6 years.
Because we have rules which force government agencies to keep data for a certain amount of time. To get around this much of the data that was to be covered by this was wiped before the rules came into force :)
It's quite easy to record all of freeview as the data is sent multiplexed.
:)
Playing around with the Linux DVB information you'll see that the DVB streams are easy to save off to disk or transmit across a network. As there are only 5 or 6 multiplexes it wouldn't take that much to save them all off to disks.
Get a decent controller and the right software and you're effectively time-shifting the entire broadcast spectrum.
Of course this doesn't come close to enough if you look at Sky's 60+ transponders each pumping out 20mbps+ on DVB-S
First we have a guy who spends 1.5 years building something you can already purchase and now we have a guy who thinks he's clever because he re-invented the shelf!
The iCurve is not that much more, far more stylish and when you count in the time can work out cheaper!
Seriously if this was - Man makes own Blade server using Mini-ITX motherboards that would be damn impressive.
Imagine having a home cluster in a really small space with hot-pluggable units.
But this is just Man makes 4 PCs and puts hard drives in them - and spends more than if he'd bought the units anyway.
Actually I'm looking at standardising our server setup on the Opteron Dual core chips simply because they are far better than the Xeon is currently.
The Opteron has faster NUMA style meory access than the Xeons manage directly and they're running great on our databases.
I'll probably be going for HPs blades.
That's 7 servers to start with and eventually all of them going over to Opteron.
Can you point out the IBM/Lenovo patent please? Searching through Slashdot just reveals the FCC application details which are far from a Patent.
What do you mean?
Apple has been awarded a patent on the design - not the concept. The same seems to be the case with IBM/Lenovo.
Patents can be applied to industrial design as well as solutions to a problem. The only way IBM/Lenovo would need to talk to Apple is if they included any of the features in the Apple patent and I'm sure they won't have as IBM designs are very black, matt and angular while Apple's design is glossy, white and curved.
If you cast an eye over Apple's Universal Binary Guidelines you'll see that they're not using OpenFirmware on the IA32 based Macs.
It's only their problem if the GPL code is linked to the proprietary stuff. If they pipe stuff through or don't directly interface the two then it's not an issue.
OR at least thats how I understood the GPL to work.
You should be able to discover from the code they're released what the case is but please don't tar them until you or someone else has done the research and had it ratified.
£11.50 per month actually. Quite a bit from £50 per quarter.
If you're paying that you're also paying for one of their inclusive calls packages and should shut it off.
Have you considered what it costs to run that line of yours that you're not putting any phone calls down? The cable, the trunking, the witching equipment in the exchange, the power, the requirement to provide service to enable 999 calls etc???
Ditto - My DSL on a new line was connected 4 days earlier than they said it would be and there were no issues with BT's service. The ISP however was shocking :)
The UK has approaching 98% ADSL penetration, far higher than the US.
The reason for this is British Telecom. Despite their faults they have created a stable package that for the bulk of connections just works.
And it works a damn sight better than the nasty connection I set up in our Miami office 5 years ago which was so poor it had to be downgraded to IDSL.
One of the reasons costs are higher is because ISPs in the UK have the burden of paying to connect to networks in the US - so our bandwidth is pricier. BT also have to provide a fixed set of costs onto ISPs which bumps the price slightly higher.
Unfortunately the "journalist" in the article had fallen into the trap of having a shitty landlord who hadn';t done things properly.
I've had this with our electricity bill - despite paying all the bills it too 9 months for the account to be transfered over to our name at which point the electricity company refunded everything we'd paid to an account in our landlord's name and demanded we pay everything again. A bit of talking and looking at the names the cheques were from sorted that out in the end.
I just wish that people would understand what they're writing about before starting off on a rante - but in this age of publish and be damned internet journalism this is getting more and more rare.
Most of the comments in this article were ill thought out and based on misunderstandings, from the understanding of how BT's ATM network works to the statement that HomeChoice doesn't play well with networks. IT does, I have it at home.
How does 29.99GBP sound for 8Mb DSL?
We don't have fprofitable cable companies so we get gouged on the cable side of things.
So nothing like cron what-so-ever. Another great piece of Timothy's fact checking.
:)
In fact that Ars-Technica article makes no mention of cron until half way through the page - so if it was actually read you'd have a good idea of what launchd does.
It seems to work quite well - my system has booted fully a number of times
Aren't these meant to stop at midday?
Thanks for that - the Skype site doesn't indicate this too well - maybe it should :)
IF this sort of action was taken at KaZaa what decisions of a similar nature are being taken at Skype?
I know that I use it for personal calls with no inherrent value but there are compaanies who are starting to use it to cut inter-office and employee communications bills - they could very easily be concerned about this.
Ahh yes that'll be Sir Norma Foster's latest creation. Norman Foster being English of course.
Just to clarify the DNS servers are not in the UK despite the domain names. ukdnsservers.co.uk is Register to a Wilmington, DE corporation
Domain Name:
ukdnsservers.co.uk
Registrant:
ActiveBytes Software LLC
Administrative Contact's Address:
2530 Channin Drive
Wilmington
DE
19810 US
Registrant's Agent:
Fibranet Services Ltd [Tag = FIBRANET]
Relevant Dates:
Registered on: 25-Mar-2000
Renewal Date: 25-Mar-2006
Last updated: 11-Dec-2004
Registration Status:
Registered until renewal date.
Name servers listed in order:
ns3.ukdnsservers.co.uk 142.46.200.68
ns4.ukdnsservers.co.uk 207.61.90.197
WHOIS database last updated at 10:05:01 16-Jan-2005
However powerhost.co.uk appears to be a UK company - and just down the road from me
Domain Name:
powerhost.co.uk
Registrant:
Fibranet Services Ltd
Administrative Contact's Address:
2a Sutherland Avenue
Biggin Hill
Kent
TN16 3HE
England
Registrant's Agent:
Tollon Limited t/a ukureg [Tag = UKUREG]
URL: http://www.tollon.net
Relevant Dates:
Registered on: 04-Mar-1998
Renewal Date: 04-Mar-2006
Last updated: 04-Apr-2004
Registration Status:
Registered until renewal date.
Name servers listed in order:
ns1.powerhost.co.uk 217.69.32.5
ns2.powerhost.co.uk 217.69.32.6
WHOIS database last updated at 10:05:01 16-Jan-2005
We're actually about to see the final two episodes @Kobol's Last Gleaming" starting next monday.
It's turning into quite a good Sci Fi channel now Sky One. Stargate SG1 & Atlantis played non stop so we finish it first, Battlestar Gallactica is part funded by Sky, Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars on Saturday and Enterprise S4 starting later in the year!
This information is already in the public domain because of a system known as AIS.
AIS consists of radio ID transponders which transmit the ID, status and destination of ocean going vessels.
A Google search will bring up much including sites which display the information graphically live for free.
Tea, Earl grey, Hot!