The Tivo gets its guide data off the air; the Replay needs to connect to a central server to get it. What happens when Replay goes bankrupt?
Let's see, you're advocating that people by a Tivo (which makes profit from the subscription, not the sale of the box) and then install a hack that lets them use it w/o subbing? I don't think it's Replay that's going to go bankrupt.
The Tivo has a 30 second commercial skip feature too
That's not "commercial skip", that's instant 30-second fast-forward. The 4000 skips commercials without the user having to press anything - and for me it works bang-on 19 out of 20 times.
And you forgot to mention those neat extract-and-stream hacks (getting back to the original subject). If you want to extract video from a Tivo you have to pull the hard drive and mount it on a Linux machine.
The Replay units more or less have the "lifetime subscription" built into them - that's why they're more expensive (out of the box) than Tivo. Add $250 US to the price of the Tivo (their lifetime cost) and you get a better comparison.
Both the Tivo and non-4000 Replay units connect to your phone line and they call "home" every night to download program listings and software and channel updates, etc. The Replay 4000 units demand broadband, and have a 100baseT connection in the back.
The sattelite versions get their data off the dish, I think. Not sure.
Using a PVR without the channel listings loses a great deal of the benefit of the unit - I think you'd be better off with one of the PC solutions already discussed.
The Model 100 portable was as much of an "official" TRS-80 as the original Model I or business-oriented Model II or FCC-approved Model III etc etc etc
Groovy. I'll put a Ford logo on my laptop and then I'll be able to drive it to work.
The Model 100 wasn't a "portable version" of anything - it was a platform in and of itself. That was my point. You can put a "TRS-80" sticker on a grizzly bear if you care to, just don't expect it to load and run Android Nim.
Try buying a house and convincing a bank that your $10,000 a year salary will pay for it. "What! Why are you laughing... go to where?....."
Assuming that you're going to come up with $2,500 for a down payment, and $10,000/year is *net*, property taxes at $1,000/year, $150/year for insurance, a 30 year loan at 7%, and add in the ever-suckful mortgage insurance, and you'll be making payments of about $438/month.
Which would be more than half of your income of $833 a month.
I'd laugh, too.
But look on the bright side: You're amongst the richest poor people in the world. Tell somebody in Afganastan how much your life sucks, and you'll probably get another laugh.
...I'd then take it back to the store and return it as defective (which it provably is.)
...and then the store puts it back on the shelf, and the next person who buys it has the same problem, and takes it back, and...
You might want to write on the box that the key is already registered, just to save the next poor schmuck a little trouble.
I seem to remember that EB had a policy of "lending out" software to their employees (so they could become familiar with it), then re-shrinkwrap it and sell it. Betcha that's where the "pirate" key came from.
If only we could persuade students to follow a math/science/engineering route instead.
The easiest way to do that would be to make the job less lucrative - the reason people want to be lawyers is because there are so damned many rich ones.
What we should do is change the laws to (a) put a cap on the amount lawyers can take on contingency, and (b) make the losing side pay the winning side's expenses. I work for a company that provides essentially "lawyer insurance" - we tell our customers that if someone brings a suit against them, even a stupid or trivial suit that they're sure to win, they can spend tens of thousands of dollars to get that "win".
Of course this will never happen, because so many of the lawmakers are (gulp) - lawyers!
I do like the term "lawyer entropy". Describes the situation to a T.
If the entertainment industry would just sell me copies of every X-Files or Babylon 5 episode on DVD, rather than making me wait 5 years after the end of the series...
Don't worry, the same technology advances that are letting Replay folks share shows can be used to make studio content pay-per-view. I see that as the next step. You want no commercials? Fine - ante up for your content.
Isn't this the exact same lawsuit (well, almost) that the movie and tv studios waged when the VCR came out in the 70's?
In a word, no. There are several differences:
1) VCRs are "dumb" recorders. The record the commercials along with the content. Granted, you've got that fast-forward button to skip'em, but it still takes a while and you still see at least some of the commercial.
2) PVRs record to a hard drive, meaning you have instant skip capability - a couple of button presses on the remote and bam you're back to BattleBots. And the newer recorders (in particular the Replay/SonicBlue 4000 series) are pretty smart about detecting when a commerical begins and ends (I'd guess about 19/20 times for me), and skips them automagically. I think that's what the plaintiffs are really worried about.
As far as the claim that it's illegal to search for shows by star, or director... man, that's gotta be the pipe smoking. I would think such searches would turn up stuff you wouldn't have watched otherwise, and that would be a good thing for the studio, but I'm not a studio exec.
As far as the studios beging OK with the VCRs - if they were, they wouldn't have brought that old lawsuit in the first case, would they? They lost the battle to ban'em, but that doesn't mean they're happy about it.
Sure! Don't hire them because they know their work, hire them because they did a REALLY GOOD JOB of LOOKING for work.
I detect a bit of bitterness here:-)
If someone is "vaguely" motivated about finding a job (which I should think is a pretty damned high priority, unless you're living with your parents or something), why should the potential employer think they're going to be anything but vaguely motivated to do their work?
Living in your car ain't so bad, I suppose.
Anyone reduced to living in their car ought to be motivated like a motherfucker - yes, to the point of putting up with the "torture" that is a job interview, and doing so honestly, and putting in those 8-10 hours looking for work. I mean, what the hell else would you have to do? Clean the car?
According to Gartner, the only IT-sector that is currently booming, and that will continue to do so with almost absolute certainty, is the anti-virus sector.
I'd infer from this that there will also be a boom in virus creation work. Those anti-virus companies need to justify those update subscription services!
How much does the average virus contract go for? Anybody know?:-)
Corruption is the single worst thing that can happen to a machine.
...assuming that the contents of the machine's hard drive are in any way particularly valuable. Now I'm the first to agree that anyone doing this on their main system is a flaming idiot, but it was implied in the article that this would be something you'd do for your oh-so-fashionable dedicated LAN-party machine. Which means if (well, let's be fair: when) there is corruption evident you yank out that crappy 2gig drive, toss it in the trash, mod another one and re-install the OS and handful of games from CD-ROM. The biggest loss here is the time it takes to R&R the drive and reinstall the software.
You can't lose valuable data if you didn't have any in the first place.
If you've never seen advertising for an ISP which claimed "unlimited use" (which equals unlimited consumption of bandwidth), then you've been living under a rock.
You're assuming that unlimited use equals unlimited consumption of bandwidth. Granted, it's an abiguous claim, but jesus, did you just fall off the turnip truck? Do you also believe that you can build a C*A*B*L*E D*E*S*C*R*A*M*B*L*E*R for $9.95 worth of Radio Shack parts? Rent some skepticism already.
In the words of Tom Waits: "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away."
There must be legal limits to this. Otherwise they'd change the contract to "Last month's rate increase: $100,000 or the deed to your home.".
AFAIK the cable company has always announced, usually several months in advance, any changes in charges or service. It's on that little leaflet they occasionally put in your bill, you know the one, four pages of dense 6-point type that no one ever reads.
Changing an heavily advertised as unlimited plan to a limited plan would, IMHO, be a huge change that would warrant giving the consumer a chance to opt out.
I challenge the idea that any ISP anywhere has ever promised unlimited bandwidth - but feel free to prove me wrong. Point me to an ISP end-user-agreement that says "take all the bandwidth you want, we'll buy more".
I think this false memory of "unlimited bandwidth" is a mass/. hallucination, brought on by the shock that There Is No Free Lunch, triggered by their ISP slamming bandwidth caps on their 24/7 500GB MP3/DVD Leech-o-Matic machine.
One day these will be considered the Golden Years, where vast, untouched expanses of Cheap Bandwidth stretched as far as the eye could see... for just $39.95 a month.
While I am not that much of a football fan, I never felt compelled to use any of the trick play features of my Tivo simply because every play was already replayed for me from 27 different angles...
I'm a Replay customer myself, but six in one and half-dozen in the other... one thing I love about it is during a game if I get a phone call or knock at the door I can pause the live game, handle the interrupt, and pick up right where I left off 20 minutes (or whatever) later - I don't miss a play, and by having those minutes spooled I can quickly bypass commercials.
Another thing I've found by accident - not everthing that happens during the game gets replayed. There was one instance during a Tribe game (near the playoffs, IIRC) where some ditzy chick-reported asked a few totally fluff-ball questions of a guest (a scout for the Mariners, I think). At the end of the interview she tosses it back to the booth, and while the video switches away the mics are still open and we get to hear the interviewee ask "I waited three innings for THAT!" It would have been difficult to pick up exactly what happened without your own instant-replay.
And one last little benefit - I don't record football games, but because of the instant replay I was able to archive to tape the infamous Browns/Jaguars debacle this year, in all it's bottle-throwing obscenity screaming glory.
Then maybe the supplier shouldn't be selling the product as "unlimited".
I'm missing something here - who, exactly, is crazy enough to be promising "unlimited bandwidth"?
I'm looking at the Rogers EUA right now and it promises "unlimited connect time to the Internet and to other information" (emphasis mine). I don't see any promises about any guaranteed level of bandwidth.
I think the d/l hogs are complaining that they're not getting something they were never promised in the first place. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, however.
The license agreement I signed clearly stated there's no bandwidth restrictions for home users, but you can't run servers.
And I'll lay money that somewhere in that agreement is a clause that states they can change the terms any time they feel like it. That's how they'll get you.
You should feel lucky that they called you - they were being nice. If they can get some voluntary compliance from the bandwidth hogs they won't have to take more drastic measures.
But if the rest of the hogs are as unrepentant as you it's a safe bet that they'll be implementing either bandwidth caps or pay-as-you-go as the solution.
I think fixed-rate big bandwidth will be extinct within three years. It doesn't make sense to let 10% of your customers use 50% of your resources.
Also, this thing could be great for musicians trying to make that first demo. You can rent a mixing board from your local music store for a small amount of money, and then use this thing to do the recording.
Anyone planning to do this had better buy two of the things, because if one breaks down at a critical moment it's unlikely you'll be able to track down a replacement in any hurry.
I'd be very leary of using proprietary hardware / media for content I was getting paid to produce.
Question: What's the advantage to this MP3 recorder over a minidisc recorder?
I was going to point out longer battery life on the solid-state recorder, but given it's memory limitations it'll run out of recording space long before it runs out of juice.
Reading between the lines it seems to me this thing is for professional interviewers. For voice recording it should be adequate (but not quite good enough for NPR, I wager) but for music - I'll pass.
What puzzles me is why this puppy doesn't have built-in mics? One less thing to carry around with you.
I'd be more interested in a case made out of that new-fangled transparent concrete. Granted that maintenance would be a bitch, but talk about uber-l33t!
She of the burning mouse-palm evidently didn't mind letting her students cruise the Web back in '96. One of the goals of a course was to "USE TECHNOLOGY and the INTERNET to communicate, cooperate and write with students in other places". Hmm. I wonder if she's apologized to all those poor twitchin' kids she led astray?
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The Tivo gets its guide data off the air; the Replay needs to connect to a central server to get it. What happens when Replay goes bankrupt?
Let's see, you're advocating that people by a Tivo (which makes profit from the subscription, not the sale of the box) and then install a hack that lets them use it w/o subbing? I don't think it's Replay that's going to go bankrupt.
The Tivo has a 30 second commercial skip feature too
That's not "commercial skip", that's instant 30-second fast-forward. The 4000 skips commercials without the user having to press anything - and for me it works bang-on 19 out of 20 times.
And you forgot to mention those neat extract-and-stream hacks (getting back to the original subject). If you want to extract video from a Tivo you have to pull the hard drive and mount it on a Linux machine.
The Replay units more or less have the "lifetime subscription" built into them - that's why they're more expensive (out of the box) than Tivo. Add $250 US to the price of the Tivo (their lifetime cost) and you get a better comparison.
Both the Tivo and non-4000 Replay units connect to your phone line and they call "home" every night to download program listings and software and channel updates, etc. The Replay 4000 units demand broadband, and have a 100baseT connection in the back.
The sattelite versions get their data off the dish, I think. Not sure.
Using a PVR without the channel listings loses a great deal of the benefit of the unit - I think you'd be better off with one of the PC solutions already discussed.
Model 100 : TRS-80 :. Newton : Macintosh
actually.
Err, yes, that's a much better analogy. Thank you.
The Model 100 portable was as much of an "official" TRS-80 as the original Model I or business-oriented Model II or FCC-approved Model III etc etc etc
Groovy. I'll put a Ford logo on my laptop and then I'll be able to drive it to work.
The Model 100 wasn't a "portable version" of anything - it was a platform in and of itself. That was my point. You can put a "TRS-80" sticker on a grizzly bear if you care to, just don't expect it to load and run Android Nim.
The model 100 was the portable version of the beloved TRS-80
No. It wasn't.
It was a very useful "laptop" for it's time, but it was a TRS-80 like an IBM AT was a Macintosh.
Do some research fer crissake.
Try buying a house and convincing a bank that your $10,000 a year salary will pay for it. "What! Why are you laughing... go to where?....."
Assuming that you're going to come up with $2,500 for a down payment, and $10,000/year is *net*, property taxes at $1,000/year, $150/year for insurance, a 30 year loan at 7%, and add in the ever-suckful mortgage insurance, and you'll be making payments of about $438/month.
Which would be more than half of your income of $833 a month.
I'd laugh, too.
But look on the bright side: You're amongst the richest poor people in the world. Tell somebody in Afganastan how much your life sucks, and you'll probably get another laugh.
...I'd then take it back to the store and return it as defective (which it provably is.)
...and then the store puts it back on the shelf, and the next person who buys it has the same problem, and takes it back, and...
You might want to write on the box that the key is already registered, just to save the next poor schmuck a little trouble.
I seem to remember that EB had a policy of "lending out" software to their employees (so they could become familiar with it), then re-shrinkwrap it and sell it. Betcha that's where the "pirate" key came from.
If only we could persuade students to follow a math/science/engineering route instead.
The easiest way to do that would be to make the job less lucrative - the reason people want to be lawyers is because there are so damned many rich ones.
What we should do is change the laws to (a) put a cap on the amount lawyers can take on contingency, and (b) make the losing side pay the winning side's expenses. I work for a company that provides essentially "lawyer insurance" - we tell our customers that if someone brings a suit against them, even a stupid or trivial suit that they're sure to win, they can spend tens of thousands of dollars to get that "win".
Of course this will never happen, because so many of the lawmakers are (gulp) - lawyers!
I do like the term "lawyer entropy". Describes the situation to a T.
If the entertainment industry would just sell me copies of every X-Files or Babylon 5 episode on DVD, rather than making me wait 5 years after the end of the series...
Don't worry, the same technology advances that are letting Replay folks share shows can be used to make studio content pay-per-view. I see that as the next step. You want no commercials? Fine - ante up for your content.
Isn't this the exact same lawsuit (well, almost) that the movie and tv studios waged when the VCR came out in the 70's?
In a word, no. There are several differences:
1) VCRs are "dumb" recorders. The record the commercials along with the content. Granted, you've got that fast-forward button to skip'em, but it still takes a while and you still see at least some of the commercial.
2) PVRs record to a hard drive, meaning you have instant skip capability - a couple of button presses on the remote and bam you're back to BattleBots. And the newer recorders (in particular the Replay/SonicBlue 4000 series) are pretty smart about detecting when a commerical begins and ends (I'd guess about 19/20 times for me), and skips them automagically. I think that's what the plaintiffs are really worried about.
As far as the claim that it's illegal to search for shows by star, or director... man, that's gotta be the pipe smoking. I would think such searches would turn up stuff you wouldn't have watched otherwise, and that would be a good thing for the studio, but I'm not a studio exec.
As far as the studios beging OK with the VCRs - if they were, they wouldn't have brought that old lawsuit in the first case, would they? They lost the battle to ban'em, but that doesn't mean they're happy about it.
Sure! Don't hire them because they know their work, hire them because they did a REALLY GOOD JOB of LOOKING for work.
:-)
I detect a bit of bitterness here
If someone is "vaguely" motivated about finding a job (which I should think is a pretty damned high priority, unless you're living with your parents or something), why should the potential employer think they're going to be anything but vaguely motivated to do their work?
Living in your car ain't so bad, I suppose.
Anyone reduced to living in their car ought to be motivated like a motherfucker - yes, to the point of putting up with the "torture" that is a job interview, and doing so honestly, and putting in those 8-10 hours looking for work. I mean, what the hell else would you have to do? Clean the car?
According to Gartner, the only IT-sector that is currently booming, and that will continue to do so with almost absolute certainty, is the anti-virus sector.
:-)
I'd infer from this that there will also be a boom in virus creation work. Those anti-virus companies need to justify those update subscription services!
How much does the average virus contract go for? Anybody know?
Corruption is the single worst thing that can happen to a machine.
...assuming that the contents of the machine's hard drive are in any way particularly valuable. Now I'm the first to agree that anyone doing this on their main system is a flaming idiot, but it was implied in the article that this would be something you'd do for your oh-so-fashionable dedicated LAN-party machine. Which means if (well, let's be fair: when) there is corruption evident you yank out that crappy 2gig drive, toss it in the trash, mod another one and re-install the OS and handful of games from CD-ROM. The biggest loss here is the time it takes to R&R the drive and reinstall the software.
You can't lose valuable data if you didn't have any in the first place.
If you've never seen advertising for an ISP which claimed "unlimited use" (which equals unlimited consumption of bandwidth), then you've been living under a rock.
You're assuming that unlimited use equals unlimited consumption of bandwidth. Granted, it's an abiguous claim, but jesus, did you just fall off the turnip truck? Do you also believe that you can build a C*A*B*L*E D*E*S*C*R*A*M*B*L*E*R for $9.95 worth of Radio Shack parts? Rent some skepticism already.
In the words of Tom Waits: "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away."
There must be legal limits to this. Otherwise they'd change the contract to "Last month's rate increase: $100,000 or the deed to your home.".
/. hallucination, brought on by the shock that There Is No Free Lunch, triggered by their ISP slamming bandwidth caps on their 24/7 500GB MP3/DVD Leech-o-Matic machine.
AFAIK the cable company has always announced, usually several months in advance, any changes in charges or service. It's on that little leaflet they occasionally put in your bill, you know the one, four pages of dense 6-point type that no one ever reads.
Changing an heavily advertised as unlimited plan to a limited plan would, IMHO, be a huge change that would warrant giving the consumer a chance to opt out.
I challenge the idea that any ISP anywhere has ever promised unlimited bandwidth - but feel free to prove me wrong. Point me to an ISP end-user-agreement that says "take all the bandwidth you want, we'll buy more".
I think this false memory of "unlimited bandwidth" is a mass
One day these will be considered the Golden Years, where vast, untouched expanses of Cheap Bandwidth stretched as far as the eye could see... for just $39.95 a month.
While I am not that much of a football fan, I never felt compelled to use any of the trick play features of my Tivo simply because every play was already replayed for me from 27 different angles...
I'm a Replay customer myself, but six in one and half-dozen in the other... one thing I love about it is during a game if I get a phone call or knock at the door I can pause the live game, handle the interrupt, and pick up right where I left off 20 minutes (or whatever) later - I don't miss a play, and by having those minutes spooled I can quickly bypass commercials.
Another thing I've found by accident - not everthing that happens during the game gets replayed. There was one instance during a Tribe game (near the playoffs, IIRC) where some ditzy chick-reported asked a few totally fluff-ball questions of a guest (a scout for the Mariners, I think). At the end of the interview she tosses it back to the booth, and while the video switches away the mics are still open and we get to hear the interviewee ask "I waited three innings for THAT!" It would have been difficult to pick up exactly what happened without your own instant-replay.
And one last little benefit - I don't record football games, but because of the instant replay I was able to archive to tape the infamous Browns/Jaguars debacle this year, in all it's bottle-throwing obscenity screaming glory.
So has the EUA always been like that, or has it recently changed?
The one I quoted is at least a year old, according to this page.
Then maybe the supplier shouldn't be selling the product as "unlimited".
I'm missing something here - who, exactly, is crazy enough to be promising "unlimited bandwidth"?
I'm looking at the Rogers EUA right now and it promises "unlimited connect time to the Internet and to other information" (emphasis mine). I don't see any promises about any guaranteed level of bandwidth.
I think the d/l hogs are complaining that they're not getting something they were never promised in the first place. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, however.
The license agreement I signed clearly stated there's no bandwidth restrictions for home users, but you can't run servers.
And I'll lay money that somewhere in that agreement is a clause that states they can change the terms any time they feel like it. That's how they'll get you.
You should feel lucky that they called you - they were being nice. If they can get some voluntary compliance from the bandwidth hogs they won't have to take more drastic measures.
But if the rest of the hogs are as unrepentant as you it's a safe bet that they'll be implementing either bandwidth caps or pay-as-you-go as the solution.
I think fixed-rate big bandwidth will be extinct within three years. It doesn't make sense to let 10% of your customers use 50% of your resources.
How is this different than Napster
The downloads take a lot longer.
Also, this thing could be great for musicians trying to make that first demo. You can rent a mixing board from your local music store for a small amount of money, and then use this thing to do the recording.
Anyone planning to do this had better buy two of the things, because if one breaks down at a critical moment it's unlikely you'll be able to track down a replacement in any hurry.
I'd be very leary of using proprietary hardware / media for content I was getting paid to produce.
Question: What's the advantage to this MP3 recorder over a minidisc recorder?
I was going to point out longer battery life on the solid-state recorder, but given it's memory limitations it'll run out of recording space long before it runs out of juice.
Reading between the lines it seems to me this thing is for professional interviewers. For voice recording it should be adequate (but not quite good enough for NPR, I wager) but for music - I'll pass.
What puzzles me is why this puppy doesn't have built-in mics? One less thing to carry around with you.
I'd be more interested in a case made out of that new-fangled transparent concrete. Granted that maintenance would be a bitch, but talk about uber-l33t!
She of the burning mouse-palm evidently didn't mind letting her students cruise the Web back in '96. One of the goals of a course was to "USE TECHNOLOGY and the INTERNET to communicate, cooperate and write with students in other places". Hmm. I wonder if she's apologized to all those poor twitchin' kids she led astray?