First, is it ok to use a stylus? If so, you're problem just got easier - you simply use the same technology that wacom uses, except you'll need to track several pens instead of one.
I'm betting, though, that you want a real 'touch' screen which registers anything hitting the surface.
Here's what you do: Use a transparent metalization process to put squares of transparant, conducting (but resistive) metal on two opposing pieces of plastic. Take a wire from each square and use a microprocessor with a lot of i/o (switched A/D converters, most likely) to detect which metal plates are being pushed together. The size of the plates determines resolution.
That's the easy, no brainer way.
The cool way (with infinite resolution ) is to use the normal method modified a bit. Normally you have two sheets covered with resistive material, one which has conductors on the vertical sides and one with conductors on horizontal sides. Increase the conductors (say, four shorter conductors on each side, and make them points instead of lines).
Send a signal to one conductor, and listen to all the other conductors for the wave front of the returning signal. Through a ton of signal processing (and sending signals from the others and measuring the response) you'll be able to detect an arbitrary number of points on the screen. You'll need to do a lot more processing to measure surface area (pressure), but you'll get there eventually.
Alternately, you get rid of it entirely and make a video system that can sense the position and movement of your hand and get rid of the 'touchyfeely' altogether. This (IMHO) would be easier and faster to develop.
I use Promise FastTrack RAID controllers in a mirror configuration (two drives, one on each cable) in 15 Novell servers. I have both 66 and 100TX2 models in service (most of them for over a year) with no problems.
I also used one on my workstation (striped, two 7200RPM 20GB drives) for the better part of last year and it sped up my computer substantially with no problems.
When a server has gone down then usually both hard drives have good, valid data. When one hard drive goes down the other keeps trucking until I replace it (offline - I didn't get hot-swap enclosures, it happens so infrequently it's not worth it).
So for the low end (ie, CHEAP) hardware RAID from Promise is right on the money. If you want something without such bad anecdotal evidence (as attested by other posts in this story) then you will have to pay more.
As always, your customers get what they pay for. So far my company's investment has paid off over and over again - I don't have to recreate the entire server from the ground up (or from a backup) when at least one hard drive is good. I've had to replace 4 servers in the last year and one or both hard drives have always survived whatever caused the server to go down. (These are low usage, but physically punished servers)
Essentially all you're showing is information, and since the information will be available to all devices all that is needed is an appropiate viewer on the target device and a 'pointer' to that information.
Enter the unifrom resource locator, a new invention of mine. All you need to send is this nifty string, and the target device will not only get the information, but it'll start an appropiate viewer for it. I'm selling them cheap, too. You can buy a hundred of these bad boys for a mere penny. There are greater discounts in quantity, but please be aware that the license requires payment for each transmitted URL (ie, it's not royalty free once you buy one URL)
Seriously, this problem has been solved, though the actual mechanics of it needs to be smoothed over.
For those thinking, "Duh, but it only works for web pages." slap yourself silly. A Uniform Resource Locator is exactly that, whether it's pointing to a server, a jpeg, an html file, any kind of document, or a port on your system which has a video stream coming from it. They can point to programs, current X sessions, windows, processes, etc.
Let's get rid of the file system/directory stucture schema and go with a completely revamped code storage method.
This has a ton of implications, but one thing that everyone seems to ask for that is difficult to solve on the old model is easy to work with if you remove the files and directories - sub-file VC. Being able to move modules from file to file, split files, move directories, etc.
The files and directories are there to help us understand the structure of the project, they were not meant to dictate the structure to us. We've locked ourselves into them so much so that we can't restructure the project without losing a lot of the benefits of VC.
Let's stuff our code into a database (which is like a more powerful file system, if you can't get your head around the idea). Atom updates can be built in. Symlinks are simple. Shifting a piece fo code to another 'file' is simple and the VC is not lost.
I can't be the first person to have thought of this - why hasn't it been done? Possible cons are:
Until the compilers and IDEs understand the new schema (regarding header files, includes, etc) the VC will also have to provide scripts to combine portions of code into files that the compilers can use. How do we store the data in the database - it would depend largely on the language. Would we put a function in a blob of a record, or maybe even do line by line records. In highly OO languages (java) we could structure the database so there are class records that link to member records that link to variable and function records, etc.
Eventually the toolchains will attach to the DB directly.
Consider how this would aid huge and tiny projects alike.
I swear, the sooner we get rid of the file system (as is) the better - not just for this, but for all our information. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
-Adam
If the seach engines have to disclose ad results..
on
ApacheConf
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Ok, so the search engines have to disclose paid results, right?
Should that apply here as well? This is simply an advertisement for windows shareware software.
That's right, it doesn't run on any other OS, and you have 30 days to pay up.
I could see someone using it for remote administration, assuming the directory with the conf file has a windows share (right!), but it's not worth the money for a simple non-production windows apache server.
This is what high refraction index plastic is for. You get a plastic that has exaclty twice the index of the regular CD-R plastic (which probably has a range that it can be, so we have some wiggle room) - one layer of plastic, one layer of CD-R material, a thin layer to sepertate the foils, another layer of foil, another layer of high index plastic.
They haven't done it because you can get several CD-Rs for the cost of one double sided CD-R, it's only a gimmick, and anyone who needs more than 650M and less than a few Gig is going to get DVD-R pretty soon.
A friend has come across a few military HARM boosters, you live in the desert, there's an old mine nearby, and you wann see if you can make your big 'ol SUV go as fast as a sports car as quickly... Right?
You don't need fancy-schmancy software. Just make sure your friend gets the first test ride. And double check the brakes, k?
I find that a good portion of the websites I visit can't send me data faster than 1Mbps anyway, so the 2Mbps down I get is only used when more than one person is browsing in my house. It's nice when I find a good server that has an ISO or file I want with a fast connection - I can download Mozilla 1.0 (10MB) in two or three minutes, but the majority of people don't need or use it.
If they raise my price, then I'll shop around and likely find that it's still the best deal. However DSL and regular dial up will get a shot in the arm, at least for a little while. I may even be motivated to get a T1 (or more) to share with my condo neighbors.
Either way, they're still raking in a cash. AT&T says 1% of their users use 16% of their bandwidth - well that means that 50% of their users are paying $50/mo for the equivilant of dial up bandwidth. Cash in the bank.
What they're selling now is bandwidth, not transfer. If they cap my transfer to 5GB per month I'll expect them to leave the bandwidth where it is or higher - it'll only make them more money since I have more oportunity to go over - and those who transfer very little will feel that they are paying less for faster service. Happiness all around.
They only needed 60,000 users to break even i think...
At $10/month with 60k subscribers they'd only get 600k/month, which might pay for 10-20 employees, nevermind satellite usage, licensing fees, etc. I doubt it's that little, they are likely going to need a few million subscribers to succeed in the long run - and that's what they're betting on.
First Mac webmail, then a web standards article. Unfortunately, Mac webmail doesn't support web standards...
To access Mac.com Webmail, you can use Microsoft Explorer version 5 or later or Netscape Navigator version 4.7, 4.76, 4.77, or 4.78. You cannot use Netscape Navigator version 6
To see this message, click on the question mark in the upper right hand of the window, then select About Mac.Com Webmail.
Dontronics is reputable place to get stuff. In the end you may want to stick with a serial port to a microcontroller, and use USB serial port cables to work with them.
These devices wouldn't apply to a neon tube in nearly the same way.
You couldn't model the map as a circuit since current would flow through as all of the circuit - you might be able to glean some information from the current in each road, but then you're still executing a search.
The helium tube is an instantaneous solution, but putting resistors and diodes in the tube wouldn't work since you're dealing with much higher voltages and lower currents.
It is kindof neat that someone had this idea and produced a working model (pictures, anyone?) But by the time a skilled laborer builds a piece of equipment which solves the problem, a computer will have computed the solution a few billion times over, including the time it took to program and input the problem.
Furthermore it doesn't solve the problem satisfactorily, for instance how do you make a one way street in a neon tube? How do you post speed limits for electrons?
There may be solutions to these questions, and more, but the computer will still solve all these problems more quickly than any person or group of people can build a device which can do so.
The larger question of whether nature can provide solutions to unsolved problems is, of course, a resounding yes. But we've known that for awhile, what's new? The problem is translating the question into a form nature can handle, then interpretig the results. As we come ever closer to biological computers we will have a better grasp of performing such experiments - the question is whether quantum computers will come first (which apparently solve every NP problem - according to the optomistic physicists, anyway;-)
You aren't paying for bytes, you are paying for time. The time the person selling took to build their character up, for instance. The end product is represented by a series of bytes, and that is what is physically transferred from person to person, but the actual product is not the username/password.
In every other case it's the same. The human genome represents millions of dollars in hardware, research, man hours, etc. Sure, you can fit the resulting data into a nice little package of X bytes, but you aren't paying for the bytes.
You must not have kids who can unlock the door. (you don't put a door lock on the bathroom door unless you can get in to free a kid who's locked themselves inside, and if your kid is as mechanically gifted as you it's not hard for them to unlock it from the outside.)
You are wrangling with something that ought to be discussed with legal counsel. It may be in your best interest to re-aim the camera, and/or use the computer to blur/black/remove/annotate portions of the picture that your neighbors object to. (ie, black out the house and put in small print: "Smelly people" or some such nonsense. Not wise, nor kind, but funny all the same.)
That being said - video recording laws are being changed, but in most states, right now, you can record pretty much anything to video (NOT AUDIO) in any place, public or private with few exceptions.
If want to stand your ground, you might at least try to be courteous and safe. Point out that your camera doesn't see into private yards, and through windows. Point out that everything you can see on camera can be seen by a person from a similar vantage point, and that they have no reasonable expectation of privacy from a person, camera, or any viewing device similarily mounted.
Once you've done that, change the view anyway and very subtly imply that any view that includes them is ruined, or you've seen all of them that you care to see. Or you could be really mean and publish as much info about them on your page as is legally allowed, maybe some extra pictures, notes about their appearance and behavior. That'll get them really riled up.
You might want to think about the flip side, though. Right now some thief could be watching their coming/going and making a schedule of when they are home, when they aren't, how they typically secure their home, etc. It could be some pedophile sitting in front of their computer waiting to see when their kid is home.
You ought to ask yourself, do you value your privacy in public places? Do you like the idea of video cameras everywhere? Perhaps these neighbors are avid readers of Slashdot and they love the YRO section. They may simply be expressing their desire for more public privacy.
I don't know what research has been performed, but UofM has a huge number of dual-boot (redhat/win2k) workstations around north campus which are available for general use. Mostly used by engineering students, but I suspect they've done some research on going further. Look around their website and ask their computing services people.
Obviously we're all excited to take this to our friends and families. Is there any effort to make a good installation CD with all the binaries, source, and a windows autorun (either open an html file on the CD or run the full talkbak installer)?
I can put one together myself, but I'm not certian what the best (most easily understood) directory structure would be... Perhaps something like this:
There are several similarites and differences between the early phone system/market and the PVR market.
By the time it became widespread the phone system and components used in various markets were standardized. Right now there is no standardization in the PVR market.
Phones, eventually, were gov't subsidized as they were considered necessary. PVRs will never be necessary - they are merely a convenience.
When the phone companies had different standards/protocols their customers had to use their phones (though they did extend that rule well beyond the standardization period). Right now we have different PVR protocols/systems and you must use their equipment. Their equipment could be used seperately from the service, but it takes special knowledge and the results may not be satisfactory (just as with the early phone devices)
There are many other devices and services which one can use to duplicate much of the functionality of the PVRs without having to deal with TIVO or ReplayTV. Hauppage makes some hardware that is suitable, and much more empowering to the user. There are several TV listing sevices. VCRs have advanced programming capabilities and if all else fails you can use LIRC to connect your VCR to your computer and duplicate all of the functionality.
The only pendulum that is 'swinging back' never swung in the first place. The owners of copyright material always had tight fists and never loosened them. They are certianly considering the situation (but are far from worried), and are putting out feelers to see what's next for them. The distributers are overreacting, as they always do when major shifts occur in how/when/where people use their material.
Just as the transition that took live shows to radio, to records, to film, to tv, to tape, to vcr, to CD, to HD, to internet,... some companies will go out of business, some new ones will spring up, the way we buy and sell copyrighted material (which, even now, are commodities) will all change. Maybe slightly, maybe drastically, but the world will continue to rotate, stuff will continue to be sold, and the consumers ultimately pay for it.
In short, the industry isn't trying to stick it to the user (though they do have to look profitable to their shareholders), they are simply (and blindly) lashing out in all directions to reduce the risk of losing the people who create material for them.
I'll throw even more info into the mix. Hauppage has 4 PVR products, only one of which is the USB version. It's true it only records at 6Mbps compression (which is a half frame) but you can get one of the three PCI PVR cards from them which do full frame 12Mbps streams. (USB is rated at 12Mbps, but that's not guranteed bandwidth per device including overhead)
I've been looking at the product without an FM radio for $145. I'm turning in my mileage report for the last seven months (2300 miles) so maybe I can convince my wife to let me splurge on one. I'll write a review here if it happens...
BTW, anything has got to be better than the all-in-wonder software from ATI on XP.
Slashdot Mirror
First, is it ok to use a stylus? If so, you're problem just got easier - you simply use the same technology that wacom uses, except you'll need to track several pens instead of one.
I'm betting, though, that you want a real 'touch' screen which registers anything hitting the surface.
Here's what you do: Use a transparent metalization process to put squares of transparant, conducting (but resistive) metal on two opposing pieces of plastic. Take a wire from each square and use a microprocessor with a lot of i/o (switched A/D converters, most likely) to detect which metal plates are being pushed together. The size of the plates determines resolution.
That's the easy, no brainer way.
The cool way (with infinite resolution ) is to use the normal method modified a bit. Normally you have two sheets covered with resistive material, one which has conductors on the vertical sides and one with conductors on horizontal sides. Increase the conductors (say, four shorter conductors on each side, and make them points instead of lines).
Send a signal to one conductor, and listen to all the other conductors for the wave front of the returning signal. Through a ton of signal processing (and sending signals from the others and measuring the response) you'll be able to detect an arbitrary number of points on the screen. You'll need to do a lot more processing to measure surface area (pressure), but you'll get there eventually.
Alternately, you get rid of it entirely and make a video system that can sense the position and movement of your hand and get rid of the 'touchyfeely' altogether. This (IMHO) would be easier and faster to develop.
-Adam
I use Promise FastTrack RAID controllers in a mirror configuration (two drives, one on each cable) in 15 Novell servers. I have both 66 and 100TX2 models in service (most of them for over a year) with no problems.
I also used one on my workstation (striped, two 7200RPM 20GB drives) for the better part of last year and it sped up my computer substantially with no problems.
When a server has gone down then usually both hard drives have good, valid data. When one hard drive goes down the other keeps trucking until I replace it (offline - I didn't get hot-swap enclosures, it happens so infrequently it's not worth it).
So for the low end (ie, CHEAP) hardware RAID from Promise is right on the money. If you want something without such bad anecdotal evidence (as attested by other posts in this story) then you will have to pay more.
As always, your customers get what they pay for. So far my company's investment has paid off over and over again - I don't have to recreate the entire server from the ground up (or from a backup) when at least one hard drive is good. I've had to replace 4 servers in the last year and one or both hard drives have always survived whatever caused the server to go down. (These are low usage, but physically punished servers)
-Adam
Essentially all you're showing is information, and since the information will be available to all devices all that is needed is an appropiate viewer on the target device and a 'pointer' to that information.
Enter the unifrom resource locator, a new invention of mine. All you need to send is this nifty string, and the target device will not only get the information, but it'll start an appropiate viewer for it. I'm selling them cheap, too. You can buy a hundred of these bad boys for a mere penny. There are greater discounts in quantity, but please be aware that the license requires payment for each transmitted URL (ie, it's not royalty free once you buy one URL)
Seriously, this problem has been solved, though the actual mechanics of it needs to be smoothed over.
For those thinking, "Duh, but it only works for web pages." slap yourself silly. A Uniform Resource Locator is exactly that, whether it's pointing to a server, a jpeg, an html file, any kind of document, or a port on your system which has a video stream coming from it. They can point to programs, current X sessions, windows, processes, etc.
Let's not go reinventing the wheel, ok? Good.
-Adam
Maybe it's time for a major shift in cod storage.
Let's get rid of the file system/directory stucture schema and go with a completely revamped code storage method.
This has a ton of implications, but one thing that everyone seems to ask for that is difficult to solve on the old model is easy to work with if you remove the files and directories - sub-file VC. Being able to move modules from file to file, split files, move directories, etc.
The files and directories are there to help us understand the structure of the project, they were not meant to dictate the structure to us. We've locked ourselves into them so much so that we can't restructure the project without losing a lot of the benefits of VC.
Let's stuff our code into a database (which is like a more powerful file system, if you can't get your head around the idea). Atom updates can be built in. Symlinks are simple. Shifting a piece fo code to another 'file' is simple and the VC is not lost.
I can't be the first person to have thought of this - why hasn't it been done? Possible cons are:
Until the compilers and IDEs understand the new schema (regarding header files, includes, etc) the VC will also have to provide scripts to combine portions of code into files that the compilers can use.
How do we store the data in the database - it would depend largely on the language. Would we put a function in a blob of a record, or maybe even do line by line records. In highly OO languages (java) we could structure the database so there are class records that link to member records that link to variable and function records, etc.
Eventually the toolchains will attach to the DB directly.
Consider how this would aid huge and tiny projects alike.
I swear, the sooner we get rid of the file system (as is) the better - not just for this, but for all our information. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
-Adam
Ok, so the search engines have to disclose paid results, right?
Should that apply here as well? This is simply an advertisement for windows shareware software.
That's right, it doesn't run on any other OS, and you have 30 days to pay up.
I could see someone using it for remote administration, assuming the directory with the conf file has a windows share (right!), but it's not worth the money for a simple non-production windows apache server.
-Adam
I get the distinct impression the slashdot editors are playing advanced "Whack-A-Server" lately.
-Adam
This is what high refraction index plastic is for. You get a plastic that has exaclty twice the index of the regular CD-R plastic (which probably has a range that it can be, so we have some wiggle room) - one layer of plastic, one layer of CD-R material, a thin layer to sepertate the foils, another layer of foil, another layer of high index plastic.
They haven't done it because you can get several CD-Rs for the cost of one double sided CD-R, it's only a gimmick, and anyone who needs more than 650M and less than a few Gig is going to get DVD-R pretty soon.
-Adam
Wait, don't tell me - let me guess:
A friend has come across a few military HARM boosters, you live in the desert, there's an old mine nearby, and you wann see if you can make your big 'ol SUV go as fast as a sports car as quickly... Right?
You don't need fancy-schmancy software. Just make sure your friend gets the first test ride. And double check the brakes, k?
-Adam
Don't rush out to buy fiber unless you need the noise isolation (glass is great for that!)
When I saw this bit of news I ran to my local fiber cable company, bought a 5km spool, and placed it in front of my monitor.
Now I don't see any of the noise from trolls on slashdot. Glass is great for noise isolation!
-Adam
I find that a good portion of the websites I visit can't send me data faster than 1Mbps anyway, so the 2Mbps down I get is only used when more than one person is browsing in my house. It's nice when I find a good server that has an ISO or file I want with a fast connection - I can download Mozilla 1.0 (10MB) in two or three minutes, but the majority of people don't need or use it.
If they raise my price, then I'll shop around and likely find that it's still the best deal. However DSL and regular dial up will get a shot in the arm, at least for a little while. I may even be motivated to get a T1 (or more) to share with my condo neighbors.
Either way, they're still raking in a cash. AT&T says 1% of their users use 16% of their bandwidth - well that means that 50% of their users are paying $50/mo for the equivilant of dial up bandwidth. Cash in the bank.
What they're selling now is bandwidth, not transfer. If they cap my transfer to 5GB per month I'll expect them to leave the bandwidth where it is or higher - it'll only make them more money since I have more oportunity to go over - and those who transfer very little will feel that they are paying less for faster service. Happiness all around.
At any rate, there'll be options.
-Adam
They only needed 60,000 users to break even i think...
At $10/month with 60k subscribers they'd only get 600k/month, which might pay for 10-20 employees, nevermind satellite usage, licensing fees, etc. I doubt it's that little, they are likely going to need a few million subscribers to succeed in the long run - and that's what they're betting on.
-Adam
First Mac webmail, then a web standards article. Unfortunately, Mac webmail doesn't support web standards...
To access Mac.com Webmail, you can use Microsoft Explorer version 5 or later or Netscape Navigator version 4.7, 4.76, 4.77, or 4.78. You cannot use Netscape Navigator version 6
To see this message, click on the question mark in the upper right hand of the window, then select About Mac.Com Webmail.
-Adam
Giga Technology USB Devices
Dontronics is reputable place to get stuff. In the end you may want to stick with a serial port to a microcontroller, and use USB serial port cables to work with them.
Many, many products still work this way.
-Adam
These devices wouldn't apply to a neon tube in nearly the same way.
You couldn't model the map as a circuit since current would flow through as all of the circuit - you might be able to glean some information from the current in each road, but then you're still executing a search.
The helium tube is an instantaneous solution, but putting resistors and diodes in the tube wouldn't work since you're dealing with much higher voltages and lower currents.
-Adam
It is kindof neat that someone had this idea and produced a working model (pictures, anyone?) But by the time a skilled laborer builds a piece of equipment which solves the problem, a computer will have computed the solution a few billion times over, including the time it took to program and input the problem.
;-)
Furthermore it doesn't solve the problem satisfactorily, for instance how do you make a one way street in a neon tube? How do you post speed limits for electrons?
There may be solutions to these questions, and more, but the computer will still solve all these problems more quickly than any person or group of people can build a device which can do so.
The larger question of whether nature can provide solutions to unsolved problems is, of course, a resounding yes. But we've known that for awhile, what's new? The problem is translating the question into a form nature can handle, then interpretig the results. As we come ever closer to biological computers we will have a better grasp of performing such experiments - the question is whether quantum computers will come first (which apparently solve every NP problem - according to the optomistic physicists, anyway
-Adam
You aren't paying for bytes, you are paying for time. The time the person selling took to build their character up, for instance. The end product is represented by a series of bytes, and that is what is physically transferred from person to person, but the actual product is not the username/password.
In every other case it's the same. The human genome represents millions of dollars in hardware, research, man hours, etc. Sure, you can fit the resulting data into a nice little package of X bytes, but you aren't paying for the bytes.
-Adam
You are neither well-formed, nor valid.
You must not have kids who can unlock the door. (you don't put a door lock on the bathroom door unless you can get in to free a kid who's locked themselves inside, and if your kid is as mechanically gifted as you it's not hard for them to unlock it from the outside.)
-Adam
You certainly know you won't be bothered by kids barging in.
You must not have kids.
-Adam
It's all fun 'n games, till someone cracks the client.
-Adam
You are neither well formed, nor valid.
You are wrangling with something that ought to be discussed with legal counsel. It may be in your best interest to re-aim the camera, and/or use the computer to blur/black/remove/annotate portions of the picture that your neighbors object to. (ie, black out the house and put in small print: "Smelly people" or some such nonsense. Not wise, nor kind, but funny all the same.)
That being said - video recording laws are being changed, but in most states, right now, you can record pretty much anything to video (NOT AUDIO) in any place, public or private with few exceptions.
If want to stand your ground, you might at least try to be courteous and safe. Point out that your camera doesn't see into private yards, and through windows. Point out that everything you can see on camera can be seen by a person from a similar vantage point, and that they have no reasonable expectation of privacy from a person, camera, or any viewing device similarily mounted.
Once you've done that, change the view anyway and very subtly imply that any view that includes them is ruined, or you've seen all of them that you care to see. Or you could be really mean and publish as much info about them on your page as is legally allowed, maybe some extra pictures, notes about their appearance and behavior. That'll get them really riled up.
You might want to think about the flip side, though. Right now some thief could be watching their coming/going and making a schedule of when they are home, when they aren't, how they typically secure their home, etc. It could be some pedophile sitting in front of their computer waiting to see when their kid is home.
You ought to ask yourself, do you value your privacy in public places? Do you like the idea of video cameras everywhere? Perhaps these neighbors are avid readers of Slashdot and they love the YRO section. They may simply be expressing their desire for more public privacy.
-Adam
I don't know what research has been performed, but UofM has a huge number of dual-boot (redhat/win2k) workstations around north campus which are available for general use. Mostly used by engineering students, but I suspect they've done some research on going further. Look around their website and ask their computing services people.
-Adam
I can put one together myself, but I'm not certian what the best (most easily understood) directory structure would be... Perhaps something like this:
- Root
- Linux
- Suse
- Redhat
- ...
- BSD
- FreeBSD
- NetBSD
- ...
- Windows
- Source
- DOCS
I'd like to have something burnable by next Wednesday for the Ann Arbor Destroyed by Mozilla party...-Adam
unsubscribe slashdot-ssh_on_windows stienman@slashdot.org
end
- By the time it became widespread the phone system and components used in various markets were standardized. Right now there is no standardization in the PVR market.
- Phones, eventually, were gov't subsidized as they were considered necessary. PVRs will never be necessary - they are merely a convenience.
- When the phone companies had different standards/protocols their customers had to use their phones (though they did extend that rule well beyond the standardization period). Right now we have different PVR protocols/systems and you must use their equipment. Their equipment could be used seperately from the service, but it takes special knowledge and the results may not be satisfactory (just as with the early phone devices)
- There are many other devices and services which one can use to duplicate much of the functionality of the PVRs without having to deal with TIVO or ReplayTV. Hauppage makes some hardware that is suitable, and much more empowering to the user. There are several TV listing sevices. VCRs have advanced programming capabilities and if all else fails you can use LIRC to connect your VCR to your computer and duplicate all of the functionality.
The only pendulum that is 'swinging back' never swung in the first place. The owners of copyright material always had tight fists and never loosened them. They are certianly considering the situation (but are far from worried), and are putting out feelers to see what's next for them. The distributers are overreacting, as they always do when major shifts occur in how/when/where people use their material.Just as the transition that took live shows to radio, to records, to film, to tv, to tape, to vcr, to CD, to HD, to internet,
In short, the industry isn't trying to stick it to the user (though they do have to look profitable to their shareholders), they are simply (and blindly) lashing out in all directions to reduce the risk of losing the people who create material for them.
blah blah blah, blah blah blah.
-Adam
I'll throw even more info into the mix. Hauppage has 4 PVR products, only one of which is the USB version. It's true it only records at 6Mbps compression (which is a half frame) but you can get one of the three PCI PVR cards from them which do full frame 12Mbps streams. (USB is rated at 12Mbps, but that's not guranteed bandwidth per device including overhead)
I've been looking at the product without an FM radio for $145. I'm turning in my mileage report for the last seven months (2300 miles) so maybe I can convince my wife to let me splurge on one. I'll write a review here if it happens...
BTW, anything has got to be better than the all-in-wonder software from ATI on XP.
-Adam