Its relatively straight forward except for 1 thing, the only Tivos that are available on the market as new machines are VERY difficult to do software hacks on.
I hadn't realized the Series2 machines were that much harder to modify. That's a real shame.
Also the transfer you speak of is VERY slow because the tivo is stuck with the job of converting the tystream to mpeg before the transfer and it isn't very good at it. Last I read it took multiple hours to extract/transfer a single hour of video.
What you describe here is not the transfer I speak of. I extract the tyStream to my Linux desktop as-is, and convert it to mpeg2 afterward. I'm using the slower, 10baseT ethernet card, and it takes me roughly 15 minutes to extract a one-hour video stream.
The idea of using the TiVo to demultiplex the tyStream and then muliplex it to plain mpeg2 just seems silly to me; that would be far too likely to tie up resouces that the MyWorld program needs for recording.
That said you miss my point entirely, I want that functionality to be part of the Tivo UI even if the drive is external and connected to the USB ports or something.
That would be nice in theory, but as others have said, it's far too likely to attract MPAA lawyers who would destroy the company.
What I think would work really well for me is to have it set up where I could use the tivo as normal and when I wanted to archive some content I could dump it to DVD.
This is easily doable, in pieces. You can put an Ethernet card into the TiVo fairly easily (see http://9thtee.com for details). After you've done that, it's a fairly straightforward procedure to set up the TiVo so you can extract the recorded video streams from it and save them as mpeg2 files on your PC.
If you want to make a video dvd, you can split the mpeg2 file into its elemental audio and video streams and transcode those to what you need for DVD video, though I'd expect the quality might suffer. Or you could just archive the mpeg2 files onto a bunch of data dvds, or a spare hard drive, or whatever.
mm... First, this means that 75% of the connections were not intentional? Is this the equivalent of 75 people saying they're sorry for stepping on your toes, while 25 people did it on purpose?
The first time I set up a WLAN at a user group meeting, when I tried to connect with my laptop I found myself connecting to the wrong WLAN. That would certainly count as unintentional.
Moreover, freedom of speech does not require restrictions placed on the private sphere -- just the opposite. If anything, government restricting who is allowed to run a media outlet in a free market is an attack on the first amendment.
Freedom of speech is about protecting the citizen's right to be informed. The concept is a recognition that tyranny grows from controlling the media and choking off diverse and dissenting views.
While it's true that the Founding Fathers described this as limits on government power, and said nothing about corporate power, we have to keep in mind that back then, corporations were rare organizations, chartered for a limited time for specific projects to promote the public welfare; things like building a railroad across the continent, or constructing large dams. Most businesses were not incorporated, and the idea that a corporation might someday grow to be as large and as powerful as a government probably never occurred to the Founding Fathers.
With things like ClearChannel, and the growing near-monopolies of the huge media cartels, their private ownership of large tracts of media is the polar opposite of freedom of the press. It's really no different from government controlling the press; the only difference is the trivial detail that the corporation isn't technically a government, though it does wield power equivalent to that of a government.
Of course, through six degrees of seperation, you're supposed to be linked with everyone on the planet. (I question that, but without a traceroute for people, who knows?)
How many people have you come into contact with during your life? Members of your family, students and teachers from your grade school, high school, college, co-workers, friends, checkout clerks at the grocery store and the mall, etc. Probably quite a few; I'd assume it's fairly unlikely that you've associated with less than 43 other people during your entire life. More likely the number would be in the hundreds.
The "six degrees of separation" is essentially a layman's explanation of exponential growth. If you are connected to N people, and each of them is connected to N other people, etc., then with each degree of separation you get an exponentially larger group:
0 (just you) = N^0 (= 1)
1 (your associates) = N
2 (your associates' associates) = N*N
......
At the sixth level, if everyone had 43 associates, then the total group size would be 43^6, or 6,321,363,049 - rounded off, 6 billion - which happens to be the current total world population.
Of course, this doesn't account for duplication, as the connections between people are more of a web than a tree, but then with 100 associate each, you've got a group size of 1 trillion at the sixth level.
Remember the movie Dogma by Kevin Smith? Here's the rundown of it... "A female decendant of Christ...
Minor nit: she wasn't a descendant of Christ, she was a descendant of Christ's parents. Supposedly Mary and Joseph had an active family life after Jesus was born, and Linda Fiorentino's character was descended from Jesus' younger sister. Or brother, maybe; I don't recall offhand if they actually specified his or her gender.
And how many people out there still have VCR's that are flashing 12:00?
I have a theory that there's really only one class of people today that still have VCRs flashing 12:00. Those people are the parents of stand-up comedians.
If I'm remembering correctly from your "night of the long knives" comment, this has to do with the plot line featuring the biologically enhanced super-soldiers who essentially became the feudal warlords of a broken America.
Not even close. The "night of the long knives" subplot was the one where the girl came up with the notion that women were responsible for their men; that by preferentially mating with the violent jerks, women were really the ones responsible for causing the war.
Her solution was to spread the idea that it's a woman's responsibility to cull the herd; that if a man was the sort that would seek power and bring about another war, it's his mother's or his wife's responsibility to see that he doesn't live long enough to cause harm.
The "night of the long knives" was a particular night when all the women in the bad guys' camp were to simultaneously kill the men in their sleep.
This looks to me like just another scam, similar to things like handwriting analysis, horoscopes, or tarot card readings. It's frustrating when employers resort to such nonsense to screen job applicants; it's just a lose-lose situation.
Specifically, the 1998 STS-90 mission [Neurolab], among other things, studied how humans perceived centrifugal motion in the absence of an existing 1G gravity vector. This mission was designed to study the vestibular system, but others have looked at cardiovascular effects.
It seemed to me that Benford was talking about the long-term effects of centrifugal motion on the human body. Those experiments weren't keeping the subjects under continuous centrifugal motion for months at a time, so I think his point is still valid. Spinning the shuttle for a few minutes is hardly a test of long-term effects.
I first noticed that change when installing Solaris 2.6 a few years ago. Turned out it was the locale setting that defined the sort behavior; the default locale used to be "C", which corresponded to plain ASCII, and the new default was "en_US", which gives the behavior you describe.
To restore the old behavior, on Solaris and on Linux, you can set the environment variable "LC_COLLATE": export LC_COLLATE=C in your.bashrc (or.bash_profile, or/etc/profile).
dont you do this when you sign an nondiscolsure agreement (NDA)? say i interview with a company and i have to sign an nda. then i've effectivley signed away my rights to talk about anything they put in the nda--isnt this how it works?
That's not the same thing; you'd be signing that NDA before you get the interview.
The equivalent case would be if they gave you the interview first, and then at the end of the interview they claim the fact that you showed up for the interview at all indicates your legally binding and unconditional acceptance of their NDA.
I remember the rumour (started as a result of a joke told in deadpan fashion by Zemeckis) that Hoverboards were real and parents groups had prevented them from being put to market.
I remember Leslie Nielsen doing that on a behind-the-scenes TV special, around the time BTTF2 came out. I don't recall seeing Zemeckis do it.
As I recall, Nielsen explained about the parents group, and then showed a "real" hoverboard. He said, in a deadpan fashion, that it actually worked. Then he dropped it to demonstrate., and of course it just fell to the floor like a dead weight. Pretty typical of Nielsen's brand of humor.
You left off the punchline: "The house was struck
by and Icy Blue Mass, or Icy B. M. (ICBM)".
This is not actually a "news story", it's just
an old pun that's been going around for ages.
I first heard it when I was in grade school, back in 1977.
Coke bottles and cans have 8-digit barcodes, and we could scan those just fine. The register printouts even showed an 8-digit barcode, so there's no padding or anything going on.
The 8-digit barcode (UPC-E) is just a compressed form of the 12-digit barcode (UPC-A).
See
this link
for a FAQ about UPC barcode formats.
Every other version of UNIX out there has a built-in backup solution (except, unaccountably, Linux, which has no dump/restore, last I checked).
Every instance of Linux I've ever installed came with the traditional dump/restore, which had no troubles reading Solaris ufsdump images, and generated images that Solaris' ufsrestore had no trboule reading. That includes every version of RedHat since 3.1, a preview release of Caldera before that, and Slackware even earlier, going back to March 1994 when I did my first Linux install.
Hell yeah. I've always thought negative campaigning was underrated (not just effectiveness, but in terms of legitimacy). People who want "positive" campaigns are mostly politicians who are bad, and don't want to get called out on their political and personal decisions.
I've always disliked the negative ads. When I see one of them, I'm reminded of all the nasty stuff that gets passed as riders on other bills. For instance, a couple years back the RIAA slipped in a change to copright law that made music a "work-for-hire" by default, as a rider on a bill to support some sort of holiday to commemorate firemen, or something like that. Anyone voting against the RIAA rider gets targetted in the next election as being "against firemen".
When I see a negative ad slamming a candidate over their voting record, I can't help but suspect that it's a similar situation being twisted around. I have no respect for mudslinging ads.
True, but that can only go so far. I don't think people's primary moral guide is fear of punishment. It's empathy. Then perhaps social conditioning, and then maybe fear.
The mistake here is in trying to treat the corporation as a person. It's not; the "legal fiction" is amoral in the same sense that a dumb animal is amoral. It's not really a person, and it lacks human intelligence.
A corporation's structural components (jobs) are fueled by the labor of its human resources, and those resources have intelligence, but the corporation as an entity can't really leverage that intelligence usefully. Independent intelligent or moral behavior on the part of the human resources functions like a "short-circuit" in the corporate bureaucracy.
(N.B., corporate "bureaucracy/cash-flow" => human "flesh/blood")
Of course, a truly intelligent corporation might exhibit a form of moral behavior, but I suspect it would be from the perspective of what's good for the corporation, not what's good for humans. Just like our morality is about the good of humans, and not about the rights and freedoms of single-cell organisms like anthrax, e-coli, smallpox, or cells in the livers, spleens, and malignant tumors in our bodies.
There's a big difference in the two cases, of course. On the one hand, cells are not intelligent but we are; on the other hand, corporations are not intelligent, but we are.
Re:Or Alternatively, Fix Our Culture's Myopia
on
Shake-up At SonicBlue
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It is only since Reagan that this notion of Capitalism Above All Else, including Above our Democratic institutions themselves, has gained such widespread, and misguided, support, and now we are beginning to reap the consiquences of that notion and the weakend regulation and oversight inherent in it.
I'd point the finger at an event that precedes Reagan's administration by a couple of years: the 1978 Supreme Court decision that defined corporate contributions to political campaigns as "free speech" that could not be restricted. This decision gave the corporations, particularly Big Media and Big Oil, free reign to buy the 1980 Presidential election wholesale. And the five subsequent Presidential elections, of course.
We wouldn't have this problem if mother teresa ran the record companies.
The way corporate law works these days, if Mother Teresa ran the record companies, she'd be fired for failing in her fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, and someone more like Hilary Rosen or Jack Valenti would be brought in to replace her. In other words, we'd quickly be back where we are now.
"When you eliminate the impossible, whatever you have left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." -- Sherlock Holmes ("The Beryl Coronet", Arthur Conan Doyle).
This works fine if you never make mistakes, you can be sure you've really examined every possibility, and you always wind up with exactly one remaining explanation. However, the only place that ever occurs is in fiction.
In reality, there's always a strong chance that you've failed to consider some possibilities, or you've declared impossible something that actually is possible, or that after eliminating the impossible you're left with either zero or multiple possibilities.
The only bad thing is that, currently, I still find the best application for editing commercials out of shows I want to archive, to be virtualdub [a win32 app]. It runs under wine, sure, but it still kind of hurts to have to do it. At least it's GPLd, though.
I recently dropped an Ethernet card into my TiVo, and now I can pull the video off to my Linux box directly without redigitizing from analog. After doing that, I looked for a cuts-only mpeg2 editor and found
GOPchop.
It took a few tries to get it to compile, but once it did, it worked out great.
I haven't completely automated the extraction process yet; basically it's currently a three step process. (1) List the filestream id numbers corresponding to a particular tyStream; (2) Start a receiver process on the Linux box using netcat; (3) extract the tyStream on the TiVo and pipe it via netcat over to the remote receiver process. It means I need to telnet to the TiVo to kick off the extraction process, instead of having a one-click interface, but it gets the job done. Oh, and I have to pipe it through
tyc to convert it from the tyStream format to normal mpeg; apparently a tyStream has some extra stuff multiplexed in along with the mpeg audio and video.
I'm storing them on removable IDE drives; apparently most other folks burn video cds instead.
It's a bit like, if a lion eats someone whether they are guilty of murder or not. Do you shoot the lion? Historically they have done so. There are moves afoot now to say- that's the kind of behaviour we expect of lions, we shouldn't have got in its way.
That's hardly the point of shooting the lion. It has nothing to do with guilt and morality. Sure, you can argue that a lion has a right to survive, but then so do we. Generally, you don't see a lot of lions preying on human beings; it is presumed that they're not sure if humans are good eating, and they perceive us as potentially dangerous.
Once a lion has actually killed and eaten a human, it's reasonable to assume its perception of humans has changed, that it would see humans as less of a danger and more of a tasty snack option. That makes that particular individual lion a public menace, and that's why we put it down. Not because we think it can make moral decisions, but because we don't want it to eat our children.
This also applies to other animals, of course; when a pet dog or cat acquires a taste for human flesh, the animal is always destroyed.
These methods can only really determine when a given rock last solidified, becuase the daughter products can otherwise escape. Thus the oldest rock we've found for the Earth is 3.3 billion years or so, whereas the Moon dates to 4.55.
As I recall, the oldest rocks we've found on Earth solidified 3.8 billion years ago, and the earliest fossilized evidence of life is dated at 3.5 billions years ago.
The Precambrian Era, the time before multicellular life appeared, is split into three periods, which geologists measure in units of megayears (1 mya == 1 million years ago). The Precambrian Era is comprised of the Hadean period (4500 to 3800 mya, the time before the Earth solidified), the Archaean period (3800 to 2500 mya, the time before the continents stabilized), and the Proterozoic period (2500 mya to 540 mya, the time before multicellular life appeared).
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I hadn't realized the Series2 machines were that much harder to modify. That's a real shame.
What you describe here is not the transfer I speak of. I extract the tyStream to my Linux desktop as-is, and convert it to mpeg2 afterward. I'm using the slower, 10baseT ethernet card, and it takes me roughly 15 minutes to extract a one-hour video stream.
The idea of using the TiVo to demultiplex the tyStream and then muliplex it to plain mpeg2 just seems silly to me; that would be far too likely to tie up resouces that the MyWorld program needs for recording.
That would be nice in theory, but as others have said, it's far too likely to attract MPAA lawyers who would destroy the company.
This is easily doable, in pieces. You can put an Ethernet card into the TiVo fairly easily (see http://9thtee.com for details). After you've done that, it's a fairly straightforward procedure to set up the TiVo so you can extract the recorded video streams from it and save them as mpeg2 files on your PC.
If you want to make a video dvd, you can split the mpeg2 file into its elemental audio and video streams and transcode those to what you need for DVD video, though I'd expect the quality might suffer. Or you could just archive the mpeg2 files onto a bunch of data dvds, or a spare hard drive, or whatever.
The first time I set up a WLAN at a user group meeting, when I tried to connect with my laptop I found myself connecting to the wrong WLAN. That would certainly count as unintentional.
Freedom of speech is about protecting the citizen's right to be informed. The concept is a recognition that tyranny grows from controlling the media and choking off diverse and dissenting views.
While it's true that the Founding Fathers described this as limits on government power, and said nothing about corporate power, we have to keep in mind that back then, corporations were rare organizations, chartered for a limited time for specific projects to promote the public welfare; things like building a railroad across the continent, or constructing large dams. Most businesses were not incorporated, and the idea that a corporation might someday grow to be as large and as powerful as a government probably never occurred to the Founding Fathers.
With things like ClearChannel, and the growing near-monopolies of the huge media cartels, their private ownership of large tracts of media is the polar opposite of freedom of the press. It's really no different from government controlling the press; the only difference is the trivial detail that the corporation isn't technically a government, though it does wield power equivalent to that of a government.
How many people have you come into contact with during your life? Members of your family, students and teachers from your grade school, high school, college, co-workers, friends, checkout clerks at the grocery store and the mall, etc. Probably quite a few; I'd assume it's fairly unlikely that you've associated with less than 43 other people during your entire life. More likely the number would be in the hundreds.
The "six degrees of separation" is essentially a layman's explanation of exponential growth. If you are connected to N people, and each of them is connected to N other people, etc., then with each degree of separation you get an exponentially larger group:
At the sixth level, if everyone had 43 associates, then the total group size would be 43^6, or 6,321,363,049 - rounded off, 6 billion - which happens to be the current total world population.
Of course, this doesn't account for duplication, as the connections between people are more of a web than a tree, but then with 100 associate each, you've got a group size of 1 trillion at the sixth level.
Minor nit: she wasn't a descendant of Christ, she was a descendant of Christ's parents. Supposedly Mary and Joseph had an active family life after Jesus was born, and Linda Fiorentino's character was descended from Jesus' younger sister. Or brother, maybe; I don't recall offhand if they actually specified his or her gender.
I have a theory that there's really only one class of people today that still have VCRs flashing 12:00. Those people are the parents of stand-up comedians.
Not even close. The "night of the long knives" subplot was the one where the girl came up with the notion that women were responsible for their men; that by preferentially mating with the violent jerks, women were really the ones responsible for causing the war.
Her solution was to spread the idea that it's a woman's responsibility to cull the herd; that if a man was the sort that would seek power and bring about another war, it's his mother's or his wife's responsibility to see that he doesn't live long enough to cause harm.
The "night of the long knives" was a particular night when all the women in the bad guys' camp were to simultaneously kill the men in their sleep.
This looks to me like just another scam, similar to things like handwriting analysis, horoscopes, or tarot card readings. It's frustrating when employers resort to such nonsense to screen job applicants; it's just a lose-lose situation.
It seemed to me that Benford was talking about the long-term effects of centrifugal motion on the human body. Those experiments weren't keeping the subjects under continuous centrifugal motion for months at a time, so I think his point is still valid. Spinning the shuttle for a few minutes is hardly a test of long-term effects.
I first noticed that change when installing Solaris 2.6 a few years ago. Turned out it was the locale setting that defined the sort behavior; the default locale used to be "C", which corresponded to plain ASCII, and the new default was "en_US", which gives the behavior you describe.
To restore the old behavior, on Solaris and on Linux, you can set the environment variable "LC_COLLATE": export LC_COLLATE=C in your .bashrc (or .bash_profile, or /etc/profile).
That's not the same thing; you'd be signing that NDA before you get the interview.
The equivalent case would be if they gave you the interview first, and then at the end of the interview they claim the fact that you showed up for the interview at all indicates your legally binding and unconditional acceptance of their NDA.
I remember Leslie Nielsen doing that on a behind-the-scenes TV special, around the time BTTF2 came out. I don't recall seeing Zemeckis do it.
As I recall, Nielsen explained about the parents group, and then showed a "real" hoverboard. He said, in a deadpan fashion, that it actually worked. Then he dropped it to demonstrate., and of course it just fell to the floor like a dead weight. Pretty typical of Nielsen's brand of humor.
You left off the punchline: "The house was struck by and Icy Blue Mass, or Icy B. M. (ICBM)".
This is not actually a "news story", it's just an old pun that's been going around for ages. I first heard it when I was in grade school, back in 1977.
The 8-digit barcode (UPC-E) is just a compressed form of the 12-digit barcode (UPC-A). See this link for a FAQ about UPC barcode formats.
Every instance of Linux I've ever installed came with the traditional dump/restore, which had no troubles reading Solaris ufsdump images, and generated images that Solaris' ufsrestore had no trboule reading. That includes every version of RedHat since 3.1, a preview release of Caldera before that, and Slackware even earlier, going back to March 1994 when I did my first Linux install.
I've always disliked the negative ads. When I see one of them, I'm reminded of all the nasty stuff that gets passed as riders on other bills. For instance, a couple years back the RIAA slipped in a change to copright law that made music a "work-for-hire" by default, as a rider on a bill to support some sort of holiday to commemorate firemen, or something like that. Anyone voting against the RIAA rider gets targetted in the next election as being "against firemen".
When I see a negative ad slamming a candidate over their voting record, I can't help but suspect that it's a similar situation being twisted around. I have no respect for mudslinging ads.
The mistake here is in trying to treat the corporation as a person. It's not; the "legal fiction" is amoral in the same sense that a dumb animal is amoral. It's not really a person, and it lacks human intelligence.
A corporation's structural components (jobs) are fueled by the labor of its human resources, and those resources have intelligence, but the corporation as an entity can't really leverage that intelligence usefully. Independent intelligent or moral behavior on the part of the human resources functions like a "short-circuit" in the corporate bureaucracy.
(N.B., corporate "bureaucracy/cash-flow" => human "flesh/blood")
Of course, a truly intelligent corporation might exhibit a form of moral behavior, but I suspect it would be from the perspective of what's good for the corporation, not what's good for humans. Just like our morality is about the good of humans, and not about the rights and freedoms of single-cell organisms like anthrax, e-coli, smallpox, or cells in the livers, spleens, and malignant tumors in our bodies.
There's a big difference in the two cases, of course. On the one hand, cells are not intelligent but we are; on the other hand, corporations are not intelligent, but we are.
I'd point the finger at an event that precedes Reagan's administration by a couple of years: the 1978 Supreme Court decision that defined corporate contributions to political campaigns as "free speech" that could not be restricted. This decision gave the corporations, particularly Big Media and Big Oil, free reign to buy the 1980 Presidential election wholesale. And the five subsequent Presidential elections, of course.
The way corporate law works these days, if Mother Teresa ran the record companies, she'd be fired for failing in her fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, and someone more like Hilary Rosen or Jack Valenti would be brought in to replace her. In other words, we'd quickly be back where we are now.
This works fine if you never make mistakes, you can be sure you've really examined every possibility, and you always wind up with exactly one remaining explanation. However, the only place that ever occurs is in fiction.
In reality, there's always a strong chance that you've failed to consider some possibilities, or you've declared impossible something that actually is possible, or that after eliminating the impossible you're left with either zero or multiple possibilities.
I recently dropped an Ethernet card into my TiVo, and now I can pull the video off to my Linux box directly without redigitizing from analog. After doing that, I looked for a cuts-only mpeg2 editor and found GOPchop. It took a few tries to get it to compile, but once it did, it worked out great.
I haven't completely automated the extraction process yet; basically it's currently a three step process. (1) List the filestream id numbers corresponding to a particular tyStream; (2) Start a receiver process on the Linux box using netcat; (3) extract the tyStream on the TiVo and pipe it via netcat over to the remote receiver process. It means I need to telnet to the TiVo to kick off the extraction process, instead of having a one-click interface, but it gets the job done. Oh, and I have to pipe it through tyc to convert it from the tyStream format to normal mpeg; apparently a tyStream has some extra stuff multiplexed in along with the mpeg audio and video.
I'm storing them on removable IDE drives; apparently most other folks burn video cds instead.
That's hardly the point of shooting the lion. It has nothing to do with guilt and morality. Sure, you can argue that a lion has a right to survive, but then so do we. Generally, you don't see a lot of lions preying on human beings; it is presumed that they're not sure if humans are good eating, and they perceive us as potentially dangerous.
Once a lion has actually killed and eaten a human, it's reasonable to assume its perception of humans has changed, that it would see humans as less of a danger and more of a tasty snack option. That makes that particular individual lion a public menace, and that's why we put it down. Not because we think it can make moral decisions, but because we don't want it to eat our children.
This also applies to other animals, of course; when a pet dog or cat acquires a taste for human flesh, the animal is always destroyed.
As I recall, the oldest rocks we've found on Earth solidified 3.8 billion years ago, and the earliest fossilized evidence of life is dated at 3.5 billions years ago.
The Precambrian Era, the time before multicellular life appeared, is split into three periods, which geologists measure in units of megayears (1 mya == 1 million years ago). The Precambrian Era is comprised of the Hadean period (4500 to 3800 mya, the time before the Earth solidified), the Archaean period (3800 to 2500 mya, the time before the continents stabilized), and the Proterozoic period (2500 mya to 540 mya, the time before multicellular life appeared).