I'd buy a Tivo today, but they seem to be US only. There's pages like the TiVo Canada Setup Guide but it seems only slightly less complicated than setting up MythTV. I'd really just like to give the nice Tivo people my money and use their product.
Re:As a former nuclear navy reactor operator
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 1
Putting a 300 ton cap on it reminds me of this quote:
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
But that's not the point I'm making, really. The point is that if a developing nation buys one of these, they may decide NOT to put a cap on it at all, or to reduce the safety standards, or just to use it as a source of radioactive material for Other Naughty Stuff. Part of this product would also be a surrounding complex run to strict standards and operated by the selling government, which is a weird situation for any sovereign entity.
Re:As a former nuclear navy reactor operator
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 1
I think the problem isn't the feasibility of the technology, it's the people next to the nuclear matieral. US Navy Subs rarely have operators that want to rip their reactor open and use the fuel for a dirty bomb suicide mission, which is probably why your safety record is so good.
I guess having a protective US military base built up around the reactor could work, but that sounds a rather attractive target...
I think you're right - ultimately the days of packaging and selling bits are over, no matter how much the companies sue, threaten or wrap their bits up in DRM. It's like the War on Drugs, or the War on Terror... the only way to win is to kill all your citizens.
Totally, totally agree. If they were using ascii or Google's stripped-down HTML, they'd be able to put a year's worth of searches on there, instead of 24 hours. God, they could put the RESULTS of 24 hours worth of searches!
What worries me is applying this quote from Fight Club:
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
I want people running nuclear reactors who would rather go out of business than have an accident. Screw lawsuits and bad PR as a motivator - big tobacco companies have been riding those just fine for years.
Funny - I thought this statement was really good too, but as support for NOT building nuclear power plants!:) Financial concerns trump everything in modern business, which puts safety down the ladder, and makes his recommendation a negative one.
Perhaps, *perhaps* nuclear power could be done right if it was run by a government agency with exceedingly high safety standards, detailed reporting and public transparency, but most governments are moving towards a privatised energy model anyway, which puts the dollar back on top.
God, I trust the government more than big business. Talk about the lesser of two evils...
I suspect that Google would go a different, more powerful path, which is to support a Jabber-MSN / Jabber-ICQ / Jabber-Yahoo gateway at the server level. Then users could send a Joogle IM to user@yahoo.com and it would just work, like email.
I believe this was spottily supported in Jabber servers, but was always being broken by changes to protocols, etc. Still, it would be cool if Google bought a company like say, Trillian, and used their expertise. They might even call the client Grillian.
There is going to be a big, big war to host your content in your house. Whoever does it the best, provides the most flexibility, and expandability at the best price, will win.
The key term he uses here is FLEXIBILITY, which is something that Big Companies would prefer not to ever think about, particularly regarding stuff like DRM. Where flexibility is vital, DRM is basically treated as damage. People are going to copy, edit and transcode video for their different devices, operating systems and situations, and a format that prevents this is simply going to lose.
The only thing going for DRM-land is that they can restrict content to formats that makes transcoding difficult. In this situation, the user has to play by the company's rules, even if they suck totally. (I tend to look at this as "cheating", as it doesn't let the formats compete on merit, but format lock-ins are hardly news). Hacks and alternate players that get content out of lock-in land are vital here, as they level the playing field again.
Digital audio is interesting in that an open format (mp3) basically got out and won the day early, and DRM audio really didn't ever have a chance. Everyone can encode audio these days, and play it on every operating system, or their phone, or their CD walkman, or their car stereo head unit. It's a solved problem. The digital video war is still well and truly raging, with no clear open standard that everyone can use everywhere, from their Mac laptops to their Aibos. When it comes though, DRM formats are going to have a really hard time.
This is good advice... but most nontech people don't know how to build a custom slipstreamed XP install. A less elegant but still effective solution seems to be:
1) Burn a CD with XP SP2 on it at work, a friend's place or wherever 2) Install XP fresh without being connected to the net 3) Install SP2 from the CD next 4) Install everything else
Hmmm, personal note... I really shouldn't post on Sunday mornings, because I come off sounding like a COMPLETE DICK and one of the authors in the article might actually be reading slashdot.
Anyways... thanks for the comments Charles, it's very cool to see you putting us guttersnipes in our place.
"The University of Edinburgh, located not too far from Stross's flat, has a well-known artificial intelligence department and seemed like a good possibility. Stross had never visited, nor did he feel any desire to. All the ideas he needs are right here--in his mind, his books, cyberspace."
This highlights the odd zone that sci fi authors live in... they base their futures on existing theories and tech, but they don't want to be bound by their limitations. If Stross is writing about artificial intelligence, it seems ridiculous that he shouldn't be visiting the local AI experts at the University, but there's always the chance his ideas will get "infected" with all the limiting factors of today's AI field.
On the other hand, it's particularly annoying when an author forges a future where huge chunks of it are not only "magic" but are based on flawed undestanding of current technologies. Then any techhead laughs shortly, and throws the book away.
Good sci-fi (or at least, the stuff I think is good) has enough of a solid base in real tech that it creates the resonance of possibility, while having enough wild and crazy wildness to spark the imagination. It's a tough balance.
Amen to this, Greg Egan is pretty cool. He bends my melon regularly, but it's a fun kinda bending. I always feel like there are a very small group of theoretical quantum physicists out there who understand absolutely everything he writes about, and perhaps even email him with stuff like:
"It would've have been so much cooler if the posthumans' exoselves operating inside the artificial universe with the rewritable laws of physics executing within the quantum computer running on the imploding black hole would've had the ability to restructure their components according to quantum graph theory..."
I don't know about this... what does 'enhanced' really mean? Drugs? Genetics? Robotics? Quantum physics? Explosives? Cold steel? If the definition is applied as "human plus", there's no end to what could be considered an enhancement.
I suddenly got a horrid vision of a Trek / Star Wars crossover where Old Kirk wrestles Jabba the Hutt for the attentions of the green-skinned Twi'lek slave girl, Oola.
Excuse me while I go sandblast that image out of my brain...
"The Future Force Warrior will be a responsive and formidable member of an invincible battle space team," DeGay explained, describing the system scheduled to be fielded by 2010."
Invincible eh? That's some pretty neat gear... does it include a quick dipping in the River Styx?
I agree with you the Math isn't a sport, but not for the last reason you presented. Competition doesn't require rules that allow opponents to affect you - look at sprinting, shooting, ice skating (well, apart from Tonya Harding) etc etc. Math could just be presented as a competition based on whoever can do the problems fastest, or with the most accuracy, or with points for flair and style.
I do agree that sports have to involve some kind of competitive physical activity though, which math lacks. If it's just about "competition", then everything is a sport, since a competitive angle can be applied everywhere.
Gotta agree, it's pretty silly to not mention Sandman. Sandman was, for me, the inflection point when I realised that comics didn't just have to be Mutant Angst teen soap operas with impossibly-muscled guys and basketball-breasted, gravity defying, 7/8ths-of-their-body-is-leg girls. Of course, I can EASILY see the attraction of that kind of thing, particularly for a hormone-charged teenage boy.
It's funny though, I think Sandman ruined the genre for me, or at least it made my standards prohibatively high. I tend to ADORE what I would consider to be the very few good comics, and ignore everything else. I've enjoyed Sandman, Watchmen, The Dark Night Returns, Astro City, and... that's about it. I tried Transmet, Cerebus and Preacher, and didn't like them, as much as I really tried to.
This is different to fantasy / sci-fi novels, where I can usually find a "decent" new book or series that will keep me interested if I'm that kind of mood. With comics it seems more "all or nothing at all".
This is exactly what I plan on doing when iRiver release UMS firmware for my IFP-790T. That will make it visible as a removable drive under Windows, instead of forcing me to use the nasty "copy a single file at a time by dragging and dropping" manager they bundle with the unit.
Pretty funny though, a actual example of where Linux's driver support is superior to Windows when using a just-released multimedia gadget!
Heh... I also have an iRiver flash player. I went with it over a hard drive player for these reasons:
Price. My 256MB flash player - CAN$295. 15GB iPod (the cheapest hard drive player I can get here in Canada) is $450. These prices include huge Canadian sales taxes of course.
Weight. My iRiver IFP-790T is 36 grams. The iPod mini (which I can't buy here yet anyway) is listed on Apple's spec page as 3.6 ounces, which is 99 grams.
Non-skipping. The iPod has a 32MB memory buffer, which is about 25 minutes. I jog for longer than this (or at least I try to) so the iRiver is better in this regard.
Battery. I've been running on the included AA battery off and on for 2 weeks now. It's only dropped one bar in the charge display, so I'm guessing it's going to last most of a month without me having to worry about power.
All that said, having to "load up" with music from my PC still annoys me. Having all my music on an iPod or such and just putting it on random play would be superb... the price and portability aspects was just more important to me right now.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but the correct reference is:
Smart, hot, sane. Choose any two.
I'd buy a Tivo today, but they seem to be US only. There's pages like the TiVo Canada Setup Guide but it seems only slightly less complicated than setting up MythTV. I'd really just like to give the nice Tivo people my money and use their product.
Putting a 300 ton cap on it reminds me of this quote:
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
But that's not the point I'm making, really. The point is that if a developing nation buys one of these, they may decide NOT to put a cap on it at all, or to reduce the safety standards, or just to use it as a source of radioactive material for Other Naughty Stuff. Part of this product would also be a surrounding complex run to strict standards and operated by the selling government, which is a weird situation for any sovereign entity.
I think the problem isn't the feasibility of the technology, it's the people next to the nuclear matieral. US Navy Subs rarely have operators that want to rip their reactor open and use the fuel for a dirty bomb suicide mission, which is probably why your safety record is so good.
I guess having a protective US military base built up around the reactor could work, but that sounds a rather attractive target...
I think you're right - ultimately the days of packaging and selling bits are over, no matter how much the companies sue, threaten or wrap their bits up in DRM. It's like the War on Drugs, or the War on Terror... the only way to win is to kill all your citizens.
Totally, totally agree. If they were using ascii or Google's stripped-down HTML, they'd be able to put a year's worth of searches on there, instead of 24 hours. God, they could put the RESULTS of 24 hours worth of searches!
What worries me is applying this quote from Fight Club:
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
I want people running nuclear reactors who would rather go out of business than have an accident. Screw lawsuits and bad PR as a motivator - big tobacco companies have been riding those just fine for years.
Funny - I thought this statement was really good too, but as support for NOT building nuclear power plants! :) Financial concerns trump everything in modern business, which puts safety down the ladder, and makes his recommendation a negative one.
Perhaps, *perhaps* nuclear power could be done right if it was run by a government agency with exceedingly high safety standards, detailed reporting and public transparency, but most governments are moving towards a privatised energy model anyway, which puts the dollar back on top.
God, I trust the government more than big business. Talk about the lesser of two evils...
I suspect that Google would go a different, more powerful path, which is to support a Jabber-MSN / Jabber-ICQ / Jabber-Yahoo gateway at the server level. Then users could send a Joogle IM to user@yahoo.com and it would just work, like email.
I believe this was spottily supported in Jabber servers, but was always being broken by changes to protocols, etc. Still, it would be cool if Google bought a company like say, Trillian, and used their expertise. They might even call the client Grillian.
There is going to be a big, big war to host your content in your house. Whoever does it the best, provides the most flexibility, and expandability at the best price, will win.
The key term he uses here is FLEXIBILITY, which is something that Big Companies would prefer not to ever think about, particularly regarding stuff like DRM. Where flexibility is vital, DRM is basically treated as damage. People are going to copy, edit and transcode video for their different devices, operating systems and situations, and a format that prevents this is simply going to lose.
The only thing going for DRM-land is that they can restrict content to formats that makes transcoding difficult. In this situation, the user has to play by the company's rules, even if they suck totally. (I tend to look at this as "cheating", as it doesn't let the formats compete on merit, but format lock-ins are hardly news). Hacks and alternate players that get content out of lock-in land are vital here, as they level the playing field again.
Digital audio is interesting in that an open format (mp3) basically got out and won the day early, and DRM audio really didn't ever have a chance. Everyone can encode audio these days, and play it on every operating system, or their phone, or their CD walkman, or their car stereo head unit. It's a solved problem. The digital video war is still well and truly raging, with no clear open standard that everyone can use everywhere, from their Mac laptops to their Aibos. When it comes though, DRM formats are going to have a really hard time.
This is good advice... but most nontech people don't know how to build a custom slipstreamed XP install. A less elegant but still effective solution seems to be:
1) Burn a CD with XP SP2 on it at work, a friend's place or wherever
2) Install XP fresh without being connected to the net
3) Install SP2 from the CD next
4) Install everything else
Hmmm, personal note... I really shouldn't post on Sunday mornings, because I come off sounding like a COMPLETE DICK and one of the authors in the article might actually be reading slashdot.
Anyways... thanks for the comments Charles, it's very cool to see you putting us guttersnipes in our place.
Interesting to see this:
"The University of Edinburgh, located not too far from Stross's flat, has a well-known artificial intelligence department and seemed like a good possibility. Stross had never visited, nor did he feel any desire to. All the ideas he needs are right here--in his mind, his books, cyberspace."
This highlights the odd zone that sci fi authors live in... they base their futures on existing theories and tech, but they don't want to be bound by their limitations. If Stross is writing about artificial intelligence, it seems ridiculous that he shouldn't be visiting the local AI experts at the University, but there's always the chance his ideas will get "infected" with all the limiting factors of today's AI field.
On the other hand, it's particularly annoying when an author forges a future where huge chunks of it are not only "magic" but are based on flawed undestanding of current technologies. Then any techhead laughs shortly, and throws the book away.
Good sci-fi (or at least, the stuff I think is good) has enough of a solid base in real tech that it creates the resonance of possibility, while having enough wild and crazy wildness to spark the imagination. It's a tough balance.
Amen to this, Greg Egan is pretty cool. He bends my melon regularly, but it's a fun kinda bending. I always feel like there are a very small group of theoretical quantum physicists out there who understand absolutely everything he writes about, and perhaps even email him with stuff like:
"It would've have been so much cooler if the posthumans' exoselves operating inside the artificial universe with the rewritable laws of physics executing within the quantum computer running on the imploding black hole would've had the ability to restructure their components according to quantum graph theory..."
I don't know about this... what does 'enhanced' really mean? Drugs? Genetics? Robotics? Quantum physics? Explosives? Cold steel? If the definition is applied as "human plus", there's no end to what could be considered an enhancement.
Dude, I'm a New Zealander living in Canada. You just made my day twice.
I suddenly got a horrid vision of a Trek / Star Wars crossover where Old Kirk wrestles Jabba the Hutt for the attentions of the green-skinned Twi'lek slave girl, Oola.
Excuse me while I go sandblast that image out of my brain...
I think seven porn stars in the bodies of seven nubile virgins would be the optimal solution.
Shouldn't be too much of a stretch for an omnipotent creator, either.
I love this quote (emphasis mine):
"The Future Force Warrior will be a responsive and formidable member of an invincible battle space team," DeGay explained, describing the system scheduled to be fielded by 2010."
Invincible eh? That's some pretty neat gear... does it include a quick dipping in the River Styx?
What? Hast thou forgotten the holy creation that is Heavy Metal?
I agree with you the Math isn't a sport, but not for the last reason you presented. Competition doesn't require rules that allow opponents to affect you - look at sprinting, shooting, ice skating (well, apart from Tonya Harding) etc etc. Math could just be presented as a competition based on whoever can do the problems fastest, or with the most accuracy, or with points for flair and style.
I do agree that sports have to involve some kind of competitive physical activity though, which math lacks. If it's just about "competition", then everything is a sport, since a competitive angle can be applied everywhere.
Hey, I'm looking forward to be able to type "grep socks".
Gotta agree, it's pretty silly to not mention Sandman. Sandman was, for me, the inflection point when I realised that comics didn't just have to be Mutant Angst teen soap operas with impossibly-muscled guys and basketball-breasted, gravity defying, 7/8ths-of-their-body-is-leg girls. Of course, I can EASILY see the attraction of that kind of thing, particularly for a hormone-charged teenage boy.
It's funny though, I think Sandman ruined the genre for me, or at least it made my standards prohibatively high. I tend to ADORE what I would consider to be the very few good comics, and ignore everything else. I've enjoyed Sandman, Watchmen, The Dark Night Returns, Astro City, and... that's about it. I tried Transmet, Cerebus and Preacher, and didn't like them, as much as I really tried to.
This is different to fantasy / sci-fi novels, where I can usually find a "decent" new book or series that will keep me interested if I'm that kind of mood. With comics it seems more "all or nothing at all".
This is exactly what I plan on doing when iRiver release UMS firmware for my IFP-790T. That will make it visible as a removable drive under Windows, instead of forcing me to use the nasty "copy a single file at a time by dragging and dropping" manager they bundle with the unit.
Pretty funny though, a actual example of where Linux's driver support is superior to Windows when using a just-released multimedia gadget!
- Price. My 256MB flash player - CAN$295. 15GB iPod (the cheapest hard drive player I can get here in Canada) is $450. These prices include huge Canadian sales taxes of course.
- Weight. My iRiver IFP-790T is 36 grams. The iPod mini (which I can't buy here yet anyway) is listed on Apple's spec page as 3.6 ounces, which is 99 grams.
- Non-skipping. The iPod has a 32MB memory buffer, which is about 25 minutes. I jog for longer than this (or at least I try to) so the iRiver is better in this regard.
- Battery. I've been running on the included AA battery off and on for 2 weeks now. It's only dropped one bar in the charge display, so I'm guessing it's going to last most of a month without me having to worry about power.
All that said, having to "load up" with music from my PC still annoys me. Having all my music on an iPod or such and just putting it on random play would be superb... the price and portability aspects was just more important to me right now.