Aside from all of the wailing (what, TiVo has replaced Apple a the new "beleaguered" company?) it turns out TiVo has slipped in some goodies along with the announced feature set of their new v.7.1 software.
No, apparently not Apache but something else, what counts is it's there, it works, and it allows download of XML files containing show listings and the shows themselves. To get to it follow these steps:
Sign up for an early download of TiVo 7.1. Must have a Series 2, no DVD burner built-in (player is ok), DirecTV models aren't handled by TiVo. Basically TiVo Service Numbers beginning with 110, 130, 140, 230, 240, 264, 540, & 590.
While on TiVo's web site note your password and the "Media Access Key" (MAK) for your TiVo. You'll need these later.
Wait for 7.1 to be downloaded and installed on your machine. Continually forcing reconnects will not hurry this, indeed the cumulative server load by that sort of thing will only delay the rollout.
Once you've got 7.1 (it's downloaded, installed, you've rebooted) point a web browser at https://your.tivo's.ip.address/nowplaying/index.ht ml. For user supply tivo and the password is your "MAK".
Go wild.
What, big deal? OK, how about pulling your video off your TiVo, the much-feared video extraction?
Turns out you need to have TiVo's DirectShow decryption filter installed, and that only comes with their TiVo Desktop v.2 which is, for now, Windows 2K/XP only. You also need a decent mpeg2 codec, which MS doesn't include in Windows. TiVo recommends a couple of commercial ones but there are also free ones out there too. Or, you might have one that came with DVD software.
However, contrary to TiVo's marketing, once a.tivo file is pulled through this it can be edited, saved, even burned to DVD, with nothing more special needed. That's right, no waiting for Sonic's soon-to-be-shipped software, no magic mojo involved, trusty ole TMPGEnc and Nero and all the rest are perfectly fine. Indeed once passed through the magic DirectShow filter (and your password supplied) the.tivo files are free to be rendered into a more normal mpeg2 files.
Sure the $50 "custom" software will probably do more with automation, labeling, and such, but I'm betting nothing that can't be whipped up in a few days by TiVo's customers, likely beating the Sonic software to the punch.
Pointcast turned down an approx. $450 million buyout offer from Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp in '97. They then tried to IPO in '99 but that fell apart. It was then sold to LaunchPad Technologies (one of those Idealab shops) for $7 million.
That became Infogate and in 2003 after their stock went down to pennies was sold to that graveyard of many technologies (no, not CA, the other, AOL.)
Supposedly AOL was looking into either relaunching some sort of Pointcast-y service or integrating the technology into their Communicator client product. Neither seems to have happened (what, at AOL?!)
So it's not 'abandonware' yet, it's still a 'valuable corporate asset'; just sucked into the AOL/Time-Warner/etc. vortex of doom. In the meantime the many flavors of RSS & Atom cover most of what Pointcast or it's later descendants could do and are quickly becoming as polished, all at a lower cost of entry.
Oh, and Pointcast.com the domain sold in late 2003 for just over $16 grand. It's now one of those sad "parked" sites full of nothing-links and an offer that it, too, is for sale.
Newsmap is a Flash-based interface showing Google News in color-coded boxes scaled according to rank. It self updates, broad catagories can be seleted or deselected, supports country-specific news, etc. Use an old Windows box with Flash & MSIE set to run full-screen and you're good to go.
Doing calendars isn't easy. There are issues of time zones, reservations systems, conflict resolution, change synchronization, etc. They're nasty intractable issues cluttered with numerous conflicting 'standards' and buggy implementations. This is unfortunately another of those cases where it's easy to whinge about a lack of good systems but if you actually look at the problems they're quite formidable.
One interesting new, very well supported project, is the Open Source Applications Foundation's "Chandler". OSAF is Mitch Kapor's baby and aims to provide a next-generation General Information Manager that can interoperate both thru servers and peer to peer.
Chandeler's skillset includes email, scheduling, contacts, documents, and more, all collaboratively, cross-platform and hugely extensible. Well, that's the plan, check out the latest release for yourself.
Oh, and how does this relate to the Mozilla projects? Probably pretty well as Kapor was the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation.
At 60,000 feet, the flammability of hydrogen is a non-issue
At 60,000 feet sure, but most problems occur when trying to launch and land this sort of aircraft.
Insuring a ground crew to stand around under a huge bag of helium, even on a slightly windy day, is a lot easier then under a hydrogen one. The same goes for the neighbors: "You'll have to clear out the airport & surrounding area in case we lose control, hit a power line, etc. Oh, and if you come across a downed one of these, STAY AWAY!"
Get a clue folks: The ping time on this will be from a route 2x~13 miles long. That's not at all comparable to 2x~24,000 miles like a geostationary sat. Heck, considering the cruft many DSL & cable plants foist on folks the extra ~26 miles are nothing, especially when you consider how far most of the other devices you interact with are and how they're routed.
Satellites are expensive 'cause you've got one chance to launch the thing at high velocity, with extreme vibrations, to a location with extreme temperature variations & vacuum welding. By contrast an aerostat is in a relatively benign environment and short of catastrophic failure can be landed & launched at need for repairs & refurbishment.
Furthermore at US$20 million a pop it won't be a big deal to have reserve aerostats constantly on standby, launched or unlaunched. Therefore the reliability costs go down, the insurance costs go down, and everything becomes that much more flexible & cheaper. Indeed it'll probably become SOP to deploy additional aerostats in anticipation of severe weather events, seasonal population gatherings, etc. to supply additional capacity.
Yes, doubtless aerostats will have no-fly buffers placed around them. However the restricted volume is rather small and at their operational altitude there's precious little traffic or possible crowding, nor much likely for the next few decades. Figuring even several hundred over a continent there's still plenty of room at their heights.
These are to be filled with Helium. Non-flammable inert stuff. Airships filled with He have split in half and still been able to land land (well, half did and half crashed.) Covering an airship in rocket fuel and fueling it with explosive hydrogen, that was the ill-fated and entirely dissimilar Hindenburg.
Anything that disrupts the mono or dual-opoly high-speed telecom services most of us have available is a good thing. Indeed aerostats will be more then competitive by offering high speed like DSL/cable but without needing extensive & expensive on-the-ground infrastructure. Even considering redundancy & replacements this is competitive.
Check out Sveasoft. They've been making a very well regarded series of alternative firmware images for the popular Linksys WRT54G/GS consumer routers. The current beta, Alchemy, offers a Hotspot if paired with Chillispot and an external Radius server, and is about to go release ('any day now').
More interestingly the about to be inaugurated new beta series, Talisman, which will offer 1-click Hotspot out of the box. Sveasoft has cut a deal with a billing service (and apparently there will be alternatives possible) so with almost no effort one turn on a hotspot and start recouping some expenses (TOS permitting.)
Yes, I said beta. So it won't be an appropraite solution unless you've got some folks willing to become reasonably knowledgable on your staff and the business is open to being 'cutting edge'. On the other hand if this project is like many the firmware may well be out of beta well before the project is ever ready to be widely deployed.
Fair warning: There is a noisy bunch of folks who don't like Sveasoft's beta distribution & support policies. Me, I've no problem with 'em, and apparently the FSF doesn't either, but I figured I'd say it before the barracks-lawyers and tinfoil-hat crowd starts in.
Anyway, that noise aside their firmwares are excellent and do offer fantastic functionality for a US$40-70 series of boxes. I also find it heartening they offer a bounty system for folks developing with their firmware: If there's a feature you specially want put up some cash and see if any of them take the bait & deliver your dream-code Indeed my only complaint is their lack of a wiki for support (also 'due any day now'.)
Don't try and fight with NAT's, wonky clients, etc., just VPN the lot together and make it all look like a simple little network. Takes the whole question and approaches it from an entirely different, and sound, angle. That's not flaky; that's inspired.
Heck, not just chat but file sharing, white boarding, remote printing, and everything else between these folks will then be trivial too, probably their next request anyway.
OpenVPN is pretty easy to set up, even for non-geeks. It's certainly no harder getting a bunch of folks to open ports on their diverse router models and then configure whatever chat clients to use 'em appropriately.
Again, clever solution. Mebbe not the best one but definitely an interesting one.
I'm not gonna try and convince you, I'm not entirely convinced myself.
On the other hand I'm addicted to using my PocketPC to read books, especially in bed or en route. I've got a half dozen on it at any time (right now I'm halfway through Ben Bova's so-so "Moonbase 1" potboiler.)
And to listen to audio books (Jon Stewart's "America", up to Ch. 11.)
And podcasts (none today.)
And yes, I've usually got a movie or TV show stored on it to watch - decent quality and great for filling wait time (from last night it's "UFO", episode 5.)
I've also got an album or two of mp3s on it (today K. D. Lang's "Hymns of the 49th Parallel".)
I've also got pix of recent trips & good friends to share. (From a dinner conversation last weekend: "Which Stéphane? You know, Big Stéphane. No, that's Fuzzy Stéphane, I mean b-i-g Stephane... Oh heck,[click][tap][tap] This Stéphane! Yeah.")
Plus an RSS reader full of interesting things to keep up with.
All of these could just as well be done on a phone.
Indeed on any hunk of modern portable technology with a decent screen and enough storage, some reasonable amount of processing power, would suffice. The point is lots of folks already carry cell phones around with 'em so why not go that extra 20% and build this functionality into 'em?
Sure you may not want it. Or you may not realize you want it. Or you may never have any need for these features.
But consumer demand appears strong, this appears to be a profitable direction to the carriers & cell phone manufacturers, so where's the huhu? We can still buy (heck, at this point they're about free) a simple no-frills phone so no loss there.
But yeah, at least for me, I'm interested in someday moving to a feature-phone. For now I'll stick with my ancient super-reliable StarTac and last-generation PocketPC but in a year or two, with a bit more maturing, I could see morphing 'em into a unified package of tele-conferencing/multimedia entertainment/handy-dandy reference source with Web/IM/RSS/GPS (m-o-u-s-e-!)
Heck, with 2 GB SD cards coming down in price so fast I'm tempted to get one just to have a portable copy of Wikipedia on hand.
So Joe Schmoe - there may not be a compelling reason. 'Course, could say the same thing about an iPod too. Or camera phones. Or text messaging. Or a computer in every house. Or high-speed internet.
isa-kuruption posted on Thursday November 18, 2004 @10:20AM:
Oh, and something else I found, the FCC has declared that all cable providers MUST have firewire interfaces on their decoder devices as of May 2004.
Yeah, well, that time-machine you're posting through seems a little flaky so we'll hold off on tossing those universally available decoders with Firewire through 'till the wormhole event horizon has stabilized...
Novell is a large company. Not as large as MS (few are!) but not some little two person shop either. That one person left, even from a senior position, does not mean the sky is falling.
Internal politics, didn't like the traffic in Waltham (where Novell is now HQ'd), really did leave to "pursue other opportunities", doesn't matter. The company has set a course, invested considerable resources, indeed likely staked it's future on this: No one person leaving is going to have a huge effect.
As much as folks invest in the cult of personality Linux wouldn't come to a screeching halt without Torvalds, MS wouldn't suddenly shut down sans Gates or Ballmer, Apple would still soldier on absent Jobs, etc. Sure there may be different nuances but honestly, does anyone seriously expect the loss of a VP to completely change over a company?
Novell has reinvented itself as a Linux shop. They've expended huge amounts of effort, plus their dwindling capitol, on making this transition. They've promised their investors, sold their customers, rearranged their products and development. While it's unfortunate Stone is leaving there is no shortage of folks ready to step into his position (heck, he's stepped in & out of it several times!)
My take-away from this? There is a heatlthy enterprise Linux market with employment opportunities for tech managers on the vendor-end. Right now I bet there are more then a few resumes beiong spiffed up at IBM, Red Hat, and even MS (SCO need not apply.)
If anyone can help me I'll be tremendously grateful, and you'll have saved a buddy from a life of AOL purgatory.
He runs a social organization that, alas, has had an AOL address for years & years. They've literally a gig of email archived in AOL "Filing Cabinet" files, and no way to extract 'em. He's sticking with AOL8 and praying someone catches up and reverse-engineers their file format, but until he can get that stuff extracted he's locked in.
I've looked over the years for something that can export from an AOL "Filing Cabinet" file to some more standard format and found nothing. There are a few dead projects from back in AOL6 days that even then were buggy, but they don't work with later versions. When we've tried a few shareware apps none were successful and their authors of the if-it-works-good/if-not-sorry view.
We've tried the importing into the newer AOL email clients (and then hopefully exporting) but they're not backwards compatible with these files. We've also considered forwarding all of the email to the AOL servers and then pulling it out but manually sending it all that'd be the work of months and with AOL servers some significant percentage of the emails would simply 'disappear'.
So, if you've got a way of pulling out the contents of one of these grumble-grumble files, along with the attachments and addressing information, please speak up. If anyone would care to put up an AOL-emigration page that would be even better, help lots of trapped folks break their proprietary file format shackles.
Seems there's a helpful FAQ on just this, and it begins with:
In 2003, TiVo introduced a standalone HD TiVo prototype with two Over-the-Air (OTA 8VSB) ATSC tuners. The unit was capable of receiving, recording and performing all TiVo functions on local digital/HDTV broadcasts received through an antenna.
TiVo mentioned in their Winter 2004 pre-CES conference call that the lack of interest from any electronics companies to build such a TiVo is the reason why none have been built.
TiVo.com now includes the following statement: Currently, there are no plans for TiVo to release an HD-compatible standalone DVR..
Seems there's a helpful FAQ on just this, and it begins with:
In 2003, TiVo introduced a standalone HD TiVo prototype with two Over-the-Air (OTA 8VSB) ATSC tuners. The unit was capable of receiving, recording and performing all TiVo functions on local digital/HDTV broadcasts received through an antenna.
TiVo mentioned in their Winter 2004 pre-CES conference call that the lack of interest from any electronics companies to build such a TiVo is the reason why none have been built.
TiVo.com now includes the following statement: Currently, there are no plans for TiVo to release an HD-compatible standalone DVR..
Maybe, before they start adding new features, they should work more on getting the thing completely stable. If I read a couple of my friend's infos, it crashes. If I reconnect and it doesn't work, it crashes. I think that should be a higher priority than a damn webcam.
Demand your money back!
Oh wait...
Demand the developers do as you say!
Uh, hmmm...
Demand you be able to give developers money to do as you say!
LQ) Having gone through the licensing ordeal with Trillian, do you have any comments on some of the recent GPL-related incidents? RF) We're just trying ot handle them as we find out about them. We try to be upfront with the offenders and hope that they "do the right thing" so that we don't have to take more extreme measures. This usually works pretty well.
Umm, "...licensing ordeal with Trillian", "We try to be upfront with the offenders...", anyone care to explain/elaborate?
Should I be feeling uncomfortable about using Trillian?
Why Cambridge's Harvard Square? 'Cause it's a popular hangout for students & recently-student folks out for dinner, a show, some shopping (still has a few good bookstores.) Check out this list of area-schools and see why companies retain offices in the area just for recruiting
Of course the local hi-tech/biotech/medical/finance/insurance/governme nt industries all also bring in, and offer up, a lot of folks too. I'm only in town part-time but it does make for a heady mix of bright-types.
Its become received wisdom the IE6 sux for (among other reasons) "not supporting PNG".
Wrong.
That's a techie urban-legend. The truth is that IE6 does support all required PNG features. Therefore it "supports PNG".
Yes, IE6 doesn't support PNG transparency, at least not in any easy way. However PNG transparency is an optional part of the PNG spec. That IE6 doesn't support transparency properly is unfortunate but doesn't invalidate their meeting the required PNG spec.
Furthermore as others have pointed out there are indeed work-arounds (ugly ones) that will enable reliable PNG transparency on IE6. Also as others have pointed out (including MS staffers) even if IE7 were to ship tomorrow and support PNG et al we'd still be stuck with a huge IE6-using population for years to come.
It would be great if IE, and indeed all of the browsers, were to fully meet all relevant standards. It would also be great if they were to then go on and meet more of the optional parts of those standards, including PNG transparency. However lets hold everyone's feet to the fire on these, not pick on one author's neglecting a feature many would like while they and others are still missing more fundamental required parts of specs.
TV channels will probably die as a concept as the whole "broadcast" thang slowly dies. However the Network corporations will likely survive just fine as funding and marketing engines, just delivering their material over any sort of medium they can make money off of.
What will die along with this will be the 30-second stand-alone commercial. Instead product placement will probably become dynamic like the virtual billboards now shown in stadiums (ie the soda can in the hand of the star will appear to be whatever beverage bid highest for that slot in that market.) Or more tie-ins: "Click *here* to buy the soundtrack to this episode!", "Click *here* to buy the outfits" & "Click *here* to book a vacation here!"...
Another obvious revenue source will be more subscription services. However instead of buying blocks of programming in the form of channels the market will probably move on down to the program level. Want to watch the first run of "Star Trek: The Series XXIII"? That'll be a buck on your bill. Tomorrow it'll be half that and next week will be the freebie broadcast.
An advantage of this will be the ability of really niche programming to become a la carte.
For instance I've had my TiVo waiting a few years for a rebroadcast of Gerry & Sylvia Anderson's 70's British TV show "UFO" (the series bridging "Thunderbirds" & "Space 1999"). However hopefully in tomorrow's TV universe I'll be able to get it distributed when I want for a few bucks, or cheaper if I'm willing to be put on a wait list and get it once a critical mass of subscribers have signed up.
That sort of fan-base marketing could become very important. Small time productions that used to never get beyond their own community will slowly become available to more folks. Want to watch the local access programming in the Madeleine Islands? Sure, that'll be $5, they'll make back $1. "Wayne's World" will be open to everyone.
But "channels"? That'll be so old-school, like "long distance calls" and "analog media".
Years ago I took a position at a university computer lab. It was their first day of operation and there was a problem: To save money the Macs had been ordered without hard drives.
Three rooms of state-of-the-art machines, two with the au currant Novell Netware 2.15c servers, the other with an Apple Server. Two of the rooms with Thin-net, the other with LocalTalk. Portrait monitors, color monitors, Mac IIci's with all the options, but no hard drives.
Their solution: Boot floppies. Well, that worked, for about 15 minutes. You could indeed boot the Macs into System 6.0.8 off of floppies, and then get to the servers for your applications, but to save anything was the dreaded floppy-swap routine. Also of course the Macs were dead-slow reading their OS off of a floppy, the floppies had to be unlocked to apps could save temp files locally (hence nothing very big), and viruses were obviously gonna be a huge problem.
Solution: RAMdisk. I can't remember the author but a little searching on info-mac soon came up with an excellent shareware application that allowed one to boot up, create a RAM disk, copy the OS to it, and then make the RAM disk the active system volume and eject the floppy. Brilliant, and saved the labs (and my useless boss's career.)
The other trick, for anyone looking to use a similar setup, was a freeware init (were they "extensions" yet?) that allowed a machine to load it's Control Panels and similar items off of a folder on the server. This kept the RAM disks small as the CP's weren't local and made for a trivially updated server-based OS customization. New printer drivers? No problem, just update the locked server copy. New version of Disinfectant? Toss it on the server and as machines rebooted they'd load it, no need to remake a hundred boot floppies.
Finally, what made me really respect the author of RAMdisk? His shareware protection. When we bought a site license (it was small change) the registration directions were simple, something along the lines of anything-followed-by-three-spaces. Hugely practical in our environment and I'd kept the secret to this day (I'm sure the app is long abandoned.) It made the product a joy to work with and I soon spread the word to like facilities about the joy of the product.
Inverse-square law not withstanding you're gonna have more noise floating around then other locations will. This won't be so much an issue in the server room as much as on long cable runs, or runs at just the right (wrong) angle. And yes, as irrationial as they may be folks likes and dislikes need to be taken into account.
Advice?
Make sure your server room is getting clean power. Same for all of your closets. As this is a new facility that should've been a no-brainer by the electrical engineers but double check on the planning and then see to it that there are tests made to confirm. The lines and tower are probably swamped out by the junk coming off the manufacturing equipment but you don't want any of that, whatever the source, giving you gremlins.
Likewise make sure all of your grounds are good and everything is properly shielded. That doesn't mean putting screening over every surface, just regular testing of electrical outlets and network drops. Invest in the proper test equipment and put this on your maintenance schedule, prioritize it in your trouble-shooting procedures, doing so should keep on top of any potential problems.
Keep an eye on your neighbors. Seriously, if something goes wonky for them it might spill over to you. Have a standing order with the security crew that all activity regarding the tower & lines is to be noted and reports copied to IS. That way you folks can correlate any problems.
As others have noted, wireless might take a hit. Before doing any mission critical wireless planning wait until the buildings are done, all of the equipment installed, and everything running. Only once the plant is in regular operation is it worthwhile to get a competent site survey done for deploying wireless. (Note: "Mission critical": The access points for the conference rooms and mahogany row are conveniences where iffy behavior is acceptable. Go ahead and roll those out as part of the move-in, they'll provide you with valuable environmental data should you later want to commit to wireless technologies.)
However unreasonable its true most folks don't like being near high voltage lines. It could be the scale, the humming, suspicion of ill effects, it doesn't matter don't try and fight it. Don't bother putting the picnic tables near the lines, don't ask folks to park near 'em if you can avoid it, etc. Indeed the side of the property closest to the tower and lines is probably the best place to put tractor trailers, storage areas, and other unpopular activities.
Yeah, your cellphones on average put out more energy into your local environment then the tower and lines do. However the tower and lines are there 24/7, they're big and ultimately pretty powerful, and strange interactions do sometimes occur. Its legitimate to undertake a little proactive planning and just make extra sure electrical systems are properly configured, cable segments are well shielded and grounded, etc.
Lose sleep over any of this? No. Make sure you do everything right? Extra-yes.
Rise & Fall (& Rise?) of the Cube
on
G5 in an iMac
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Have you actually used a Cube? The button was on top, larger and more conspicuous... Waving your hand past it would shut the machine down.
The button on a monitor is right there, glowing invitingly. And it's also very sensitive, just like a Cube's. Maybe it's slightly less sensitive, but not in practical terms.
There's a b-i-g gap between waving-your-hand-past a button to trigger it and slightly-less-sensitive poking it to trigger it. You can keep arguing the point or just be honest and concede that current monitor switches != Cube switches.
It was kewl with the Cube your didn't even need to touch the darn thing. Then it got confusing. Then oftentimes annoying. (Note to Ives: Don't put proximity switches close to the CD slot...)
As to why the Cube tanked there were actually two reasons, or at least, one depending on the other. Yeah, bang-for-buck it was lacking, unless you took your stylin' bang real seriously. The other was that it was a machine ahead of it's time, or more clearly, ahead of it's OS.
The Cube was built to run MacOS X. And it didn't have it. Clearly it was meant to be the next-gen machine with the next-gen OS. Power switch? Why would you turn off a MacOS X box? At most you'd put it to sleep. Big empty box? That's so... "Wintel". Small, sleek, clever design, that's a unix workstation.
Quick test: Ask a PC user which of a series of PC's on a table they want? Usually it's the biggest chassis with the most ports, slots, and drive trays in it. However ask an old unix workstation hound and they'll pick the smallest. In that world everything (at least 'til a few years ago) was getter smaller, and faster. Newer==smaller/better/faster.
So yeah, it sucked that the Cube didn't have the OS it was designed for. Apple's hardware got ahead of their software. Or, more accurately, their OS development took a lot longer then they'd anticipated. So the Cube was half of a shiny pairing that never happened.
Of course there were lessons learned too. Yeah, high price point and no expandability aren't a good combination. But look at the desire the Cube still creates in folks! There's still no PC design that inspires such comment or techno-lust. Clearly Apple was onto something, something they've since assiduously applied across all of their lines. Not just stand-out-from-the-crowd looks, but smooth, sleek, glossy vs matte, "high end". Technology as sculpture.
Would a Cube Jr. make it in today's market? Possibly. Actually I'd more expect an eCube: small workstations schools and the like could use, booting off an X-Serve. Nothing terribly exciting feature-wise but field-maintainable, cheap, and very robust. Plug any junk monitor the school has sitting around, keep that investment, but replace the PC "big box" with something paperback book sized, quiet, and secured.
There's probably a good market there. Same as the eMac; if it takes off it could be made a consumer product too. Heck, even an enterprise product paired with XServes (thin client, anyone?). Build for an assured market:.edu. If others demand it sell it to 'em too. As long as it pays back it's R&D, manufacturing capital, and doesn't seriously cannibalize other sales, yeah, go for it.
(Expandability? Put support for peripherals being virtualized in MacOS. USB & FireWire ports redirected across the network so only a few well-cared-for devices are needed per room, or even per site. Not terribly hard but very impressive.)
In other words, you can't refute the material, so you'll attack the source. Nice
ad hominem
Actually its more I'm not interested enough to get into an extended discussion on this. Indeed, you seem to be trying to debate on this, and as I've already found your tone unpleasent I can't see why I'd bother.
Slashdot Mirror
Among the goodies folks are finding is an undocumented one: A built in web server.
No, apparently not Apache but something else, what counts is it's there, it works, and it allows download of XML files containing show listings and the shows themselves. To get to it follow these steps:
- Sign up for an early download of TiVo 7.1. Must have a Series 2, no DVD burner built-in (player is ok), DirecTV models aren't handled by TiVo. Basically TiVo Service Numbers beginning with 110, 130, 140, 230, 240, 264, 540, & 590.
- While on TiVo's web site note your password and the "Media Access Key" (MAK) for your TiVo. You'll need these later.
- Wait for 7.1 to be downloaded and installed on your machine. Continually forcing reconnects will not hurry this, indeed the cumulative server load by that sort of thing will only delay the rollout.
- Once you've got 7.1 (it's downloaded, installed, you've rebooted) point a web browser at https://your.tivo's.ip.address/nowplaying/index.h
t ml . For user supply tivo and the password is your "MAK".
- Go wild.
What, big deal? OK, how about pulling your video off your TiVo, the much-feared video extraction ?Turns out you need to have TiVo's DirectShow decryption filter installed, and that only comes with their TiVo Desktop v.2 which is, for now, Windows 2K/XP only. You also need a decent mpeg2 codec, which MS doesn't include in Windows. TiVo recommends a couple of commercial ones but there are also free ones out there too. Or, you might have one that came with DVD software.
However, contrary to TiVo's marketing, once a .tivo file is pulled through this it can be edited, saved, even burned to DVD, with nothing more special needed. That's right, no waiting for Sonic's soon-to-be-shipped software, no magic mojo involved, trusty ole TMPGEnc and Nero and all the rest are perfectly fine. Indeed once passed through the magic DirectShow filter (and your password supplied) the .tivo files are free to be rendered into a more normal mpeg2 files.
Sure the $50 "custom" software will probably do more with automation, labeling, and such, but I'm betting nothing that can't be whipped up in a few days by TiVo's customers, likely beating the Sonic software to the punch.
Pretty Kewl, eh?
That became Infogate and in 2003 after their stock went down to pennies was sold to that graveyard of many technologies (no, not CA, the other, AOL.)
Supposedly AOL was looking into either relaunching some sort of Pointcast-y service or integrating the technology into their Communicator client product. Neither seems to have happened (what, at AOL?!)
So it's not 'abandonware' yet, it's still a 'valuable corporate asset'; just sucked into the AOL/Time-Warner/etc. vortex of doom. In the meantime the many flavors of RSS & Atom cover most of what Pointcast or it's later descendants could do and are quickly becoming as polished, all at a lower cost of entry.
Oh, and Pointcast.com the domain sold in late 2003 for just over $16 grand. It's now one of those sad "parked" sites full of nothing-links and an offer that it, too, is for sale.
That was the whole point of his post: He's not interested in capturing, just playback.
Hence all of the other, useful, responses.Reading for comprehension - it'll do wonders for you...
One interesting new, very well supported project, is the Open Source Applications Foundation's "Chandler". OSAF is Mitch Kapor's baby and aims to provide a next-generation General Information Manager that can interoperate both thru servers and peer to peer.
Chandeler's skillset includes email, scheduling, contacts, documents, and more, all collaboratively, cross-platform and hugely extensible. Well, that's the plan, check out the latest release for yourself.
Oh, and how does this relate to the Mozilla projects? Probably pretty well as Kapor was the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation.
Insuring a ground crew to stand around under a huge bag of helium, even on a slightly windy day, is a lot easier then under a hydrogen one. The same goes for the neighbors: "You'll have to clear out the airport & surrounding area in case we lose control, hit a power line, etc. Oh, and if you come across a downed one of these, STAY AWAY!"
That ain't gonna fly (so to speak).
More interestingly the about to be inaugurated new beta series, Talisman, which will offer 1-click Hotspot out of the box. Sveasoft has cut a deal with a billing service (and apparently there will be alternatives possible) so with almost no effort one turn on a hotspot and start recouping some expenses (TOS permitting.)
Yes, I said beta. So it won't be an appropraite solution unless you've got some folks willing to become reasonably knowledgable on your staff and the business is open to being 'cutting edge'. On the other hand if this project is like many the firmware may well be out of beta well before the project is ever ready to be widely deployed.
Fair warning: There is a noisy bunch of folks who don't like Sveasoft's beta distribution & support policies. Me, I've no problem with 'em, and apparently the FSF doesn't either, but I figured I'd say it before the barracks-lawyers and tinfoil-hat crowd starts in.
Anyway, that noise aside their firmwares are excellent and do offer fantastic functionality for a US$40-70 series of boxes. I also find it heartening they offer a bounty system for folks developing with their firmware: If there's a feature you specially want put up some cash and see if any of them take the bait & deliver your dream-code Indeed my only complaint is their lack of a wiki for support (also 'due any day now'.)
Don't try and fight with NAT's, wonky clients, etc., just VPN the lot together and make it all look like a simple little network. Takes the whole question and approaches it from an entirely different, and sound, angle. That's not flaky; that's inspired.
Heck, not just chat but file sharing, white boarding, remote printing, and everything else between these folks will then be trivial too, probably their next request anyway.
OpenVPN is pretty easy to set up, even for non-geeks. It's certainly no harder getting a bunch of folks to open ports on their diverse router models and then configure whatever chat clients to use 'em appropriately.
Again, clever solution. Mebbe not the best one but definitely an interesting one.
Indeed on any hunk of modern portable technology with a decent screen and enough storage, some reasonable amount of processing power, would suffice. The point is lots of folks already carry cell phones around with 'em so why not go that extra 20% and build this functionality into 'em?
Sure you may not want it. Or you may not realize you want it. Or you may never have any need for these features.
But consumer demand appears strong, this appears to be a profitable direction to the carriers & cell phone manufacturers, so where's the huhu? We can still buy (heck, at this point they're about free) a simple no-frills phone so no loss there.
But yeah, at least for me, I'm interested in someday moving to a feature-phone. For now I'll stick with my ancient super-reliable StarTac and last-generation PocketPC but in a year or two, with a bit more maturing, I could see morphing 'em into a unified package of tele-conferencing/multimedia entertainment/handy-dandy reference source with Web/IM/RSS/GPS (m-o-u-s-e-!)
Heck, with 2 GB SD cards coming down in price so fast I'm tempted to get one just to have a portable copy of Wikipedia on hand.
So Joe Schmoe - there may not be a compelling reason. 'Course, could say the same thing about an iPod too. Or camera phones. Or text messaging. Or a computer in every house. Or high-speed internet.
Guess we'll find out.
In the meantime: Bush, Red Sox, and Google.
Novell is a large company. Not as large as MS (few are!) but not some little two person shop either. That one person left, even from a senior position, does not mean the sky is falling.
Internal politics, didn't like the traffic in Waltham (where Novell is now HQ'd), really did leave to "pursue other opportunities", doesn't matter. The company has set a course, invested considerable resources, indeed likely staked it's future on this: No one person leaving is going to have a huge effect.
As much as folks invest in the cult of personality Linux wouldn't come to a screeching halt without Torvalds, MS wouldn't suddenly shut down sans Gates or Ballmer, Apple would still soldier on absent Jobs, etc. Sure there may be different nuances but honestly, does anyone seriously expect the loss of a VP to completely change over a company?
Novell has reinvented itself as a Linux shop. They've expended huge amounts of effort, plus their dwindling capitol, on making this transition. They've promised their investors, sold their customers, rearranged their products and development. While it's unfortunate Stone is leaving there is no shortage of folks ready to step into his position (heck, he's stepped in & out of it several times!)
My take-away from this? There is a heatlthy enterprise Linux market with employment opportunities for tech managers on the vendor-end. Right now I bet there are more then a few resumes beiong spiffed up at IBM, Red Hat, and even MS (SCO need not apply.)
He runs a social organization that, alas, has had an AOL address for years & years. They've literally a gig of email archived in AOL "Filing Cabinet" files, and no way to extract 'em. He's sticking with AOL8 and praying someone catches up and reverse-engineers their file format, but until he can get that stuff extracted he's locked in.
I've looked over the years for something that can export from an AOL "Filing Cabinet" file to some more standard format and found nothing. There are a few dead projects from back in AOL6 days that even then were buggy, but they don't work with later versions. When we've tried a few shareware apps none were successful and their authors of the if-it-works-good/if-not-sorry view.
We've tried the importing into the newer AOL email clients (and then hopefully exporting) but they're not backwards compatible with these files. We've also considered forwarding all of the email to the AOL servers and then pulling it out but manually sending it all that'd be the work of months and with AOL servers some significant percentage of the emails would simply 'disappear'.
So, if you've got a way of pulling out the contents of one of these grumble-grumble files, along with the attachments and addressing information, please speak up. If anyone would care to put up an AOL-emigration page that would be even better, help lots of trapped folks break their proprietary file format shackles.
Thanks in advance for any help folks can provide.
Seems there's a helpful FAQ on just this, and it begins with:
Amazing what 10 seconds looking will find...Oh wait...
Demand the developers do as you say!
Uh, hmmm...
Demand you be able to give developers money to do as you say!
Or, ummm...
Do it yourself?
Should I be feeling uncomfortable about using Trillian?
- Babson College Wellesley
- Bentley College Waltham
- Berklee College of Music Boston
- Boston Architectural Center Boston
- Boston College Newton
- Boston Conservatory, The Boston
- Boston University Boston
- Brandeis University Waltham
- Bunker Hill Community College Boston
- Cambridge College Cambridge
- Emerson College Boston
- Emmanuel College Boston
- Fisher College Boston
- Harvard University Cambridge
- Hellenic College Brookline
- Lesley College Cambridge
- MIT Cambridge
- Massachusetts College of Art Boston
- Massachusetts College of Pharmacy
- Mount Ida College Newton
- New England Conservatory of Music Boston
- New England School of Law Boston
- Northeastern University Boston
- Pine Manor College Chestnut Hill
- Radcliffe College Cambridge
- Simmons College Boston
- Suffolk University Boston
- Tufts University Medford
- Wellesley College Wellesley
- Wentworth Institute of Technology Boston
- Wheelock College Boston
Of course the local hi-tech/biotech/medical/finance/insurance/governmand Allied Health Sciences Boston
Wrong.
That's a techie urban-legend. The truth is that IE6 does support all required PNG features. Therefore it "supports PNG".
Yes, IE6 doesn't support PNG transparency, at least not in any easy way. However PNG transparency is an optional part of the PNG spec. That IE6 doesn't support transparency properly is unfortunate but doesn't invalidate their meeting the required PNG spec.
Furthermore as others have pointed out there are indeed work-arounds (ugly ones) that will enable reliable PNG transparency on IE6. Also as others have pointed out (including MS staffers) even if IE7 were to ship tomorrow and support PNG et al we'd still be stuck with a huge IE6-using population for years to come.
It would be great if IE, and indeed all of the browsers, were to fully meet all relevant standards. It would also be great if they were to then go on and meet more of the optional parts of those standards, including PNG transparency. However lets hold everyone's feet to the fire on these, not pick on one author's neglecting a feature many would like while they and others are still missing more fundamental required parts of specs.
What will die along with this will be the 30-second stand-alone commercial. Instead product placement will probably become dynamic like the virtual billboards now shown in stadiums (ie the soda can in the hand of the star will appear to be whatever beverage bid highest for that slot in that market.) Or more tie-ins: "Click *here* to buy the soundtrack to this episode!", "Click *here* to buy the outfits" & "Click *here* to book a vacation here!"...
Another obvious revenue source will be more subscription services. However instead of buying blocks of programming in the form of channels the market will probably move on down to the program level. Want to watch the first run of "Star Trek: The Series XXIII"? That'll be a buck on your bill. Tomorrow it'll be half that and next week will be the freebie broadcast.
An advantage of this will be the ability of really niche programming to become a la carte.
For instance I've had my TiVo waiting a few years for a rebroadcast of Gerry & Sylvia Anderson's 70's British TV show "UFO" (the series bridging "Thunderbirds" & "Space 1999"). However hopefully in tomorrow's TV universe I'll be able to get it distributed when I want for a few bucks, or cheaper if I'm willing to be put on a wait list and get it once a critical mass of subscribers have signed up.
That sort of fan-base marketing could become very important. Small time productions that used to never get beyond their own community will slowly become available to more folks. Want to watch the local access programming in the Madeleine Islands? Sure, that'll be $5, they'll make back $1. "Wayne's World" will be open to everyone.
But "channels"? That'll be so old-school, like "long distance calls" and "analog media".
Three rooms of state-of-the-art machines, two with the au currant Novell Netware 2.15c servers, the other with an Apple Server. Two of the rooms with Thin-net, the other with LocalTalk. Portrait monitors, color monitors, Mac IIci's with all the options, but no hard drives.
Their solution: Boot floppies. Well, that worked, for about 15 minutes. You could indeed boot the Macs into System 6.0.8 off of floppies, and then get to the servers for your applications, but to save anything was the dreaded floppy-swap routine. Also of course the Macs were dead-slow reading their OS off of a floppy, the floppies had to be unlocked to apps could save temp files locally (hence nothing very big), and viruses were obviously gonna be a huge problem.
Solution: RAMdisk. I can't remember the author but a little searching on info-mac soon came up with an excellent shareware application that allowed one to boot up, create a RAM disk, copy the OS to it, and then make the RAM disk the active system volume and eject the floppy. Brilliant, and saved the labs (and my useless boss's career.)
The other trick, for anyone looking to use a similar setup, was a freeware init (were they "extensions" yet?) that allowed a machine to load it's Control Panels and similar items off of a folder on the server. This kept the RAM disks small as the CP's weren't local and made for a trivially updated server-based OS customization. New printer drivers? No problem, just update the locked server copy. New version of Disinfectant? Toss it on the server and as machines rebooted they'd load it, no need to remake a hundred boot floppies.
Finally, what made me really respect the author of RAMdisk? His shareware protection. When we bought a site license (it was small change) the registration directions were simple, something along the lines of anything-followed-by-three-spaces. Hugely practical in our environment and I'd kept the secret to this day (I'm sure the app is long abandoned.) It made the product a joy to work with and I soon spread the word to like facilities about the joy of the product.
Inverse-square law not withstanding you're gonna have more noise floating around then other locations will. This won't be so much an issue in the server room as much as on long cable runs, or runs at just the right (wrong) angle. And yes, as irrationial as they may be folks likes and dislikes need to be taken into account.
Advice?
- Make sure your server room is getting clean power. Same for all of your closets. As this is a new facility that should've been a no-brainer by the electrical engineers but double check on the planning and then see to it that there are tests made to confirm. The lines and tower are probably swamped out by the junk coming off the manufacturing equipment but you don't want any of that, whatever the source, giving you gremlins.
- Likewise make sure all of your grounds are good and everything is properly shielded. That doesn't mean putting screening over every surface, just regular testing of electrical outlets and network drops. Invest in the proper test equipment and put this on your maintenance schedule, prioritize it in your trouble-shooting procedures, doing so should keep on top of any potential problems.
- Keep an eye on your neighbors. Seriously, if something goes wonky for them it might spill over to you. Have a standing order with the security crew that all activity regarding the tower & lines is to be noted and reports copied to IS. That way you folks can correlate any problems.
- As others have noted, wireless might take a hit. Before doing any mission critical wireless planning wait until the buildings are done, all of the equipment installed, and everything running. Only once the plant is in regular operation is it worthwhile to get a competent site survey done for deploying wireless. (Note: "Mission critical": The access points for the conference rooms and mahogany row are conveniences where iffy behavior is acceptable. Go ahead and roll those out as part of the move-in, they'll provide you with valuable environmental data should you later want to commit to wireless technologies.)
- However unreasonable its true most folks don't like being near high voltage lines. It could be the scale, the humming, suspicion of ill effects, it doesn't matter don't try and fight it. Don't bother putting the picnic tables near the lines, don't ask folks to park near 'em if you can avoid it, etc. Indeed the side of the property closest to the tower and lines is probably the best place to put tractor trailers, storage areas, and other unpopular activities.
Yeah, your cellphones on average put out more energy into your local environment then the tower and lines do. However the tower and lines are there 24/7, they're big and ultimately pretty powerful, and strange interactions do sometimes occur. Its legitimate to undertake a little proactive planning and just make extra sure electrical systems are properly configured, cable segments are well shielded and grounded, etc.Lose sleep over any of this? No. Make sure you do everything right? Extra-yes.
It was kewl with the Cube your didn't even need to touch the darn thing. Then it got confusing. Then oftentimes annoying. (Note to Ives: Don't put proximity switches close to the CD slot...)
As to why the Cube tanked there were actually two reasons, or at least, one depending on the other. Yeah, bang-for-buck it was lacking, unless you took your stylin' bang real seriously. The other was that it was a machine ahead of it's time, or more clearly, ahead of it's OS.
The Cube was built to run MacOS X. And it didn't have it. Clearly it was meant to be the next-gen machine with the next-gen OS. Power switch? Why would you turn off a MacOS X box? At most you'd put it to sleep. Big empty box? That's so... "Wintel". Small, sleek, clever design, that's a unix workstation.
So yeah, it sucked that the Cube didn't have the OS it was designed for. Apple's hardware got ahead of their software. Or, more accurately, their OS development took a lot longer then they'd anticipated. So the Cube was half of a shiny pairing that never happened.
Of course there were lessons learned too. Yeah, high price point and no expandability aren't a good combination. But look at the desire the Cube still creates in folks! There's still no PC design that inspires such comment or techno-lust. Clearly Apple was onto something, something they've since assiduously applied across all of their lines. Not just stand-out-from-the-crowd looks, but smooth, sleek, glossy vs matte, "high end". Technology as sculpture.
Would a Cube Jr. make it in today's market? Possibly. Actually I'd more expect an eCube: small workstations schools and the like could use, booting off an X-Serve. Nothing terribly exciting feature-wise but field-maintainable, cheap, and very robust. Plug any junk monitor the school has sitting around, keep that investment, but replace the PC "big box" with something paperback book sized, quiet, and secured.
There's probably a good market there. Same as the eMac; if it takes off it could be made a consumer product too. Heck, even an enterprise product paired with XServes (thin client, anyone?). Build for an assured market: .edu. If others demand it sell it to 'em too. As long as it pays back it's R&D, manufacturing capital, and doesn't seriously cannibalize other sales, yeah, go for it.
(Expandability? Put support for peripherals being virtualized in MacOS. USB & FireWire ports redirected across the network so only a few well-cared-for devices are needed per room, or even per site. Not terribly hard but very impressive.)