As others have pointed out, they do have RSS feeds, but that's not quite the same as a straight HTTP interface to the same queries they expose via SOAP.
a) It's not triangulation, because as you might guess, triangulation on 802.11 is extremely problematic because of occlusion, reflection and multi-path issues. That said, thinking of it in terms of triangulation isn't way off. It is definitely reliable enough to use as a layer of authentication. Depending on the deployment, the accuracy and precision can be quite high (sub-meter). Of course, even in those cases, we always recommend the use of other authentication mechanisms as well. Security is about multiple factors. Location is only one.
b) On a wireless network, because of purely passive sniffing, you also want encryption in addition to access control. WEP is a good first step, but it is obviously reasonably easily crackable. A variety of other options are coming soon (WPA, RSN, etc.)
In addition to these two sides (access control and encryption), there's a whole bunch of other security issues you need to worry about: ad-hoc networks, accidental outside associations, AP spoofing, and a number of others. We (Newbury Networks) provide location based monitoring of all of these attacks. There are a number of other good monitoring products out there including free ones like Kismet and other commercial ones like AirMagnet, AirDefense, NetworkChemistry and a handful of others. Naturally, I think our product is the best, but our product is a bit different.
My company (Newbury Networks, Inc.) makes a product that provides physical perimeter security on 802.11. It uses our location-tracking technology to identify the location of all 802.11 traffic and can then both report and classify traffic as well as deny access to devices outside your physical perimeter. While some security problems remain, this largely mitigates the "attacker in the parking lot" scenarios.
Most people assume that wireless security cannot be coupled to physical security. If you can keep people outside your building off your network, it's a whold different ball game. This essentially eliminates spoofing problems because it doesn't matter if you're spoofing if you're outside. Obivously, internal threats are still an issue and any security system should be multi-factor. Location is simply a key element that it's hard to provide for wireless.
(I hope this isn't taken as inappropriate product pushing, but I believe it is a useful and relevant solution to many wireless security problems)
I purchased my first digital camera (a Agfa ephoto307) 3 years ago, and just purchased my second. The Agfa was very nice (36 640x480 pix, long battery life, no LCD) but is a bit outdated by todays standards. When it came out, I had to write my own Linux drivers, but now gphoto supports most cameras.
I just purchased a Kodak DC280, which is an outstanding camera. 2 megapixel images, 2x optical zoom, supports CompactFlash cards, and has stunning image quality. The USB support under linux is even good, making the download times reasonable (~1 second per image) instead of the wait that serial causes (10-40 seconds per image). The "smaller" resolution (896x592) is very good as well.
One common problem with digital cameras is how quickly you can take consecutive shots. On my Agfa, it is several seconds (and it's gotten worse since it was dropped) which can be very annoying. On my Kodak, it still takes a long time to write to the compactflash card, but it has some built in RAM, which allows it to buffer this. So, your "steady state" picture taking rate is still only one every 4-8 seconds, but you can shoot of 2 or 3 in rapid succession before the temporary buffer is full. This is a key feature.
Another one I seriously considered, somewhat less expensive, is the Olympus D-340R. C|Net has some good reviews.
The major features to look for roughly in order, IMHO, are:
gphoto support (or linux driver availability) Resolution Pictures stored (and expandability) Time between photos Transfer times Optical zoom Battery life Picture quality LCD UI/other features
Decide what of these is important to you, and read some reviews. As mentioned above, C|Net is pretty good.
I've had a TiVo for almost a year now (since last May, I think). I love it.
To respond to and add to some of Rob's points:
Recommendations. When I first got TiVo, I wasn't so impressed with this idea. As with Rob, it recorded a lot of crap early on. Nowadays though, I often don't bother getting season passes for things unless I critically feel I can't miss them. I just give them a thumbs up or two or three, and TiVo gets them for me.
Crashes. In the entire time I've had mine, I've seen maybe 3 crashes.
Subscriptions. You can't use one subscription on two TiVos.
Season Pass Overlaps. I've had occasional problems with this as well. Version 2.0 (due out "sometime this year") contains a "season pass prioritizer" that should substantially alleviate this problem.
Reruns. The South Park problem shouldn't happen. My TiVo never records the same program twice, unless I've already deleted one copy of it. That is, you'll never have two copies of a program on the drive at the same time. If you watch your shows very promptly, you may get duplicates after you delete them. The basic problem with this is that Tribune (their data source) is not consistent about things like providing episode numbers or rerun flags.
Overall, I can genuinely say TiVo has changed the way I watch TV. I watch a lot more PBS now because it doesn't matter that Nova is on at 5am, I can watch it at 8pm that day. Instant replay is great when you miss something, which means you can watch TV without dedicating 100% of your attention to it. If you miss something, replay. Being able to watch a program as its being recorded is really amazing too. Start watching a program 15 minutes in, and you can finish it when it finishes, after fastforwarding through commercials. Also very cool is the fact that you can watch a program at 3x with closed captioning turned on. Very useful when you're watching a movie and decide a scene is dragging:-)
Another thing Rob didn't mention is the remote. This is one of the nicest remotes I've ever seen. Ergonomic, powerful, easy to use, and complete.
A lot of people question the video quality: I'm not a videophile at all (I've lived most of my life with just good antenna reception), but I find the lowest quality fine for all the TV I watch.
Overall, TiVo is an incredible device, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
I have a 14 hour Tivo. I record everything on the highest compression rate, and while I notice the MPEG artifacts especially in high action scenes, unless you're a real videophile, it doesn't detract from most programs. So, I get 14 hours of video on it.
Additionally, 14 hours is plenty unless you want to use it to record lots of movies and then be able to sit down whenever you want and pick one.
Despite my original skepticism, the recommendation feature is outstanding. Having the disk always full with programs I generally like is very cool.
While the Redhat Wealth Monitor seems a reasonable idea, their calculations are not at all reasonable.
They equate the fraction of megabytes of the Redhat distribution created by The Community with the fraction of their market cap created by The Community, which is outright ludicrous.
While Redhat has clearly derived a lot of value from the contributions of the community (and correspondingly, they have contributed back), using the 87% number that the RHWM uses is baseless. This number assigns no value to their marketing efforts, branding, service work, packaging, sales, etc, which have a much larger impact on their valuation.
I see why some people are worried, in that I essentially never watch commercials anymore. However, on rare occasion, I will go back to view a commercial (movie ad, usually) that looked interesting while fastforwarding.
It's really not an understatement to say that this thing "totally changes the way you watch TV". Being able to watch one recorded program while another is recorded has a greater impact than you would guess. Being able to pause anything, anytime is also amazingly useful.
Actually, I contacted ReplayTV tech support and they said that without the service you CAN "press record", rewind and pause live television, but CAN NOT record by date and time. This is in the current version of the software, and they indicated that an upgrade that does let you record by date and time was possible/likely.
The Highlight Threshold is a a great feature. Using a low comment threshold (say 1) and a high highlight threshold (say 3) and a comment spill of 0 gives a nice way to view everything without being overwhelmed by comments.
The GPL does not force one to share ideas, in fact explicitly allows people to make modifications for their own use which do not have to be distributed. In fact, this was one of RMS's objections to the Apple license.
The GPL requires that if you do distribute, the recipient of that distribution is not restricted in redistributing it.
Slashdot Mirror
As others have pointed out, they do have RSS feeds, but that's not quite the same as a straight HTTP interface to the same queries they expose via SOAP.
I wrote a gateway. I wrote a simple description of the HTTP interface gateway to the NOAA SOAP interface on my site.
Good questions:
a) It's not triangulation, because as you might guess, triangulation on 802.11 is extremely problematic because of occlusion, reflection and multi-path issues. That said, thinking of it in terms of triangulation isn't way off. It is definitely reliable enough to use as a layer of authentication. Depending on the deployment, the accuracy and precision can be quite high (sub-meter). Of course, even in those cases, we always recommend the use of other authentication mechanisms as well. Security is about multiple factors. Location is only one.
b) On a wireless network, because of purely passive sniffing, you also want encryption in addition to access control. WEP is a good first step, but it is obviously reasonably easily crackable. A variety of other options are coming soon (WPA, RSN, etc.)
In addition to these two sides (access control and encryption), there's a whole bunch of other security issues you need to worry about: ad-hoc networks, accidental outside associations, AP spoofing, and a number of others. We (Newbury Networks) provide location based monitoring of all of these attacks. There are a number of other good monitoring products out there including free ones like Kismet and other commercial ones like AirMagnet, AirDefense, NetworkChemistry and a handful of others. Naturally, I think our product is the best, but our product is a bit different.
My company (Newbury Networks, Inc.) makes a product that provides physical perimeter security on 802.11. It uses our location-tracking technology to identify the location of all 802.11 traffic and can then both report and classify traffic as well as deny access to devices outside your physical perimeter. While some security problems remain, this largely mitigates the "attacker in the parking lot" scenarios.
Most people assume that wireless security cannot be coupled to physical security. If you can keep people outside your building off your network, it's a whold different ball game. This essentially eliminates spoofing problems because it doesn't matter if you're spoofing if you're outside. Obivously, internal threats are still an issue and any security system should be multi-factor. Location is simply a key element that it's hard to provide for wireless.
(I hope this isn't taken as inappropriate product pushing, but I believe it is a useful and relevant solution to many wireless security problems)
I purchased my first digital camera (a Agfa ephoto307) 3 years ago, and just purchased my second. The Agfa was very nice (36 640x480 pix, long battery life, no LCD) but is a bit outdated by todays standards. When it came out, I had to write my own Linux drivers, but now gphoto supports most cameras.
I just purchased a Kodak DC280, which is an outstanding camera. 2 megapixel images, 2x optical zoom, supports CompactFlash cards, and has stunning image quality. The USB support under linux is even good, making the download times reasonable (~1 second per image) instead of the wait that serial causes (10-40 seconds per image). The "smaller" resolution (896x592) is very good as well.
One common problem with digital cameras is how quickly you can take consecutive shots. On my Agfa, it is several seconds (and it's gotten worse since it was dropped) which can be very annoying. On my Kodak, it still takes a long time to write to the compactflash card, but it has some built in RAM, which allows it to buffer this. So, your "steady state" picture taking rate is still only one every 4-8 seconds, but you can shoot of 2 or 3 in rapid succession before the temporary buffer is full. This is a key feature.
Another one I seriously considered, somewhat less expensive, is the Olympus D-340R. C|Net has some good reviews.
The major features to look for roughly in order, IMHO, are:
gphoto support (or linux driver availability)
Resolution
Pictures stored (and expandability)
Time between photos
Transfer times
Optical zoom
Battery life
Picture quality
LCD UI/other features
Decide what of these is important to you, and read some reviews. As mentioned above, C|Net is pretty good.
The DOJ has the Conclusions of Law up.
I've had a TiVo for almost a year now (since last May, I think). I love it.
:-)
To respond to and add to some of Rob's points:
Recommendations. When I first got TiVo, I wasn't so impressed with this idea. As with Rob, it recorded a lot of crap early on. Nowadays though, I often don't bother getting season passes for things unless I critically feel I can't miss them. I just give them a thumbs up or two or three, and TiVo gets them for me.
Crashes. In the entire time I've had mine, I've seen maybe 3 crashes.
Subscriptions. You can't use one subscription on two TiVos.
Season Pass Overlaps. I've had occasional problems with this as well. Version 2.0 (due out "sometime this year") contains a "season pass prioritizer" that should substantially alleviate this problem.
Reruns. The South Park problem shouldn't happen. My TiVo never records the same program twice, unless I've already deleted one copy of it. That is, you'll never have two copies of a program on the drive at the same time. If you watch your shows very promptly, you may get duplicates after you delete them. The basic problem with this is that Tribune (their data source) is not consistent about things like providing episode numbers or rerun flags.
Overall, I can genuinely say TiVo has changed the way I watch TV. I watch a lot more PBS now because it doesn't matter that Nova is on at 5am, I can watch it at 8pm that day. Instant replay is great when you miss something, which means you can watch TV without dedicating 100% of your attention to it. If you miss something, replay. Being able to watch a program as its being recorded is really amazing too. Start watching a program 15 minutes in, and you can finish it when it finishes, after fastforwarding through commercials. Also very cool is the fact that you can watch a program at 3x with closed captioning turned on. Very useful when you're watching a movie and decide a scene is dragging
Another thing Rob didn't mention is the remote. This is one of the nicest remotes I've ever seen. Ergonomic, powerful, easy to use, and complete.
A lot of people question the video quality: I'm not a videophile at all (I've lived most of my life with just good antenna reception), but I find the lowest quality fine for all the TV I watch.
Overall, TiVo is an incredible device, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
I have a 14 hour Tivo. I record everything on the highest compression rate, and while I notice the MPEG artifacts especially in high action scenes, unless you're a real videophile, it doesn't detract from most programs. So, I get 14 hours
of video on it.
Additionally, 14 hours is plenty unless you want to use it to record lots of movies and then be able to sit down whenever you want and pick one.
Despite my original skepticism, the recommendation feature is outstanding. Having the disk always full with programs I generally like is very cool.
Overall, it's a great device, well worth it.
The TiVo actually is a PowerPC Linux box, so
it IS a general purpose computer.
If they wanted to, wouldn't be out of the question
for them to sell an IR keyboard and use the box
as a web browser, or more.
The TiVo is very well designed, and I wouldn't
want to watch TV without it anymore.
While the Redhat Wealth Monitor seems a reasonable idea, their calculations are not at all reasonable.
They equate the fraction of megabytes of the Redhat distribution created by The Community with the fraction of their market cap created by
The Community, which is outright ludicrous.
While Redhat has clearly derived a lot of value
from the contributions of the community (and
correspondingly, they have contributed back),
using the 87% number that the RHWM uses is baseless. This number assigns no value to their
marketing efforts, branding, service work, packaging, sales, etc, which have a much larger
impact on their valuation.
I have one of these, and it's a great device.
I see why some people are worried, in that I
essentially never watch commercials anymore.
However, on rare occasion, I will go back to view
a commercial (movie ad, usually) that looked
interesting while fastforwarding.
It's really not an understatement to say that
this thing "totally changes the way you watch
TV". Being able to watch one recorded program
while another is recorded has a greater impact
than you would guess. Being able to pause anything, anytime is also amazingly useful.
Actually, I contacted ReplayTV tech support
and they said that without the service you CAN "press record", rewind and pause live television, but CAN NOT record by date and time. This is in
the current version of the software, and they
indicated that an upgrade that does let you record by date and time was possible/likely.
> No autosave
The linux beta at least does have autosave.
You just have to manually move the save file to
use it.
...unless you're viewing in threaded mode.
It would be nice to be able to still do indexed
spill, but in flat mode.
The Highlight Threshold is a a great feature.
Using a low comment threshold (say 1) and a
high highlight threshold (say 3) and a comment spill of 0 gives a nice way to view everything without being overwhelmed by comments.
The GPL requires that if you do distribute, the recipient of that distribution is not restricted in redistributing it.