I just don't get this attitude. I don't agree with the RIAA/MPIAA tactics, but the fact of the matter is that composers, producers, directors, actors, musicians, recording/lighting engineers, photographers, makeup artists, etc. have all put in time to produce musical content, movies, images, etc. These people deserve to be paid for their efforts. Sure, the studios tend to screw the artists over as much as they can, and I disagree with that, but the fact of the matter is they and/or the artists own the rights.
If you don't agree with the business model or the DRM, then don't buy the album but also don't steal it. Go to someplace like www.cdbaby.com and find really good independent artists distributed on smaller labels that don't screw them over.
Just because it has gotten technically easy and quick to do the musical equivalent of photocopying an entire book doesn't mean it is right or fair to do so.
My photographer spent probably 2 hours with us when we interviewed him. He and his assistant will be working for 8 hours each during our wedding, plus travel time. He'll spend more time putting together a proof book, and then sitting down with us to discuss which ones we want printed, how we want them laid out, etc. All in all, 25 - 30 man hours will be spent on our wedding. On top of this are film and developing costs, which aren't insignificant considering two people will be taking pictures for much of the 8 hour block of time. Then there is the cost of purchasing and maintaining the cameras, lenses, lighting equipment, office space, insurance, etc.
Yes, it's expensive, but there are very real costs involved, and he is very good at what he does. People have a tendency to underestimate the time, effort, and money a professional puts in behind the scenes because they've don't have the experience to realize what all goes into an event.
When we looked through the picture books that each of the locations put together, we were always able to pick out his pictures from the rest, because they have a distinctive style and quality. We're paying for that quality, but it doesn't bother me because I know we're getting top quality service and there will be no mistakes.
That said, yes there are definitely plenty of people out there who overcharge for what they provide, and it's up to the buyer to decide what they are willing to pay for.
In the real world, who owns the rights to the pictures is a negotiation between you and your photographer, and that's all. It used to be that most professionals insisted that they maintain rights and you would have to pay them for any reprints. These days, most seem to give them to you if you want them, and they've probably increased their costs to offset the lost reprint income.
Regardless, it's a negotiation. The price you pay for the service of having your event photographed is balanced against the rights each of you have to the images going forward. Either one of you can sign away your rights in consideration for the money that is paid for the service. The important thing is that both parties are clear up front on what they get in exchange for the money.
The photographer we selected for our wedding stores the negatives in a vault that the printer maintains, and we are entitled to take posession of them whenever we want to. He says people typically take them about a year after the wedding, because the printer will sell prints at the same price as if you walked in off the street with a negative to be printed. This actually works out really well, because if any of the wedding guests want prints for themselves, I don't want to get involved with the hassles of making a print myself, or moving negatives around.
After about a year, we'll go get the negatives and likely do a high quality scan for archival purposes.
With respect to the quality of the pictures, I definitely agree with this. Individuals can and do often take great pictures, but there tends to be a lot of crap pictures mixed in. Think about the yield of great pics when you take them youself.
When I looked at the negative strips from our photographer, every single one of them was a really great shot. His yield is almost 100%. That comes from years of practice and spending the amount of time on his art that only a professional or an independently wealthy person can do. That's my opinion, anyway.
Yes, this was part of the conversation with the photographer we selected. We're entitled to all the negatives, whenever we want them, although he requests that he be able to hold a few back for his own archives. There are generally multiple almost identical shots for each setup, so he will hold onto an almost duplicate we're not interested in.
Given that he is an artist, and needs to be able to show his work to prospective clients and advertise his services, I certainly don't mind that. And as was pointed out in another followup to my message, I think he does need to get a release from anyone who is in any picture he wishes to publish. Most people really don't mind, though.
Here in the SFBay area, my experience in planning a wedding this year shows the norm seems to be that the customer owns the images for personal use (i.e. friends and family who want a copy of pictures from the event), but the photographer has control for commercial use (i.e. magazine reprints).
I have a Dell Inspiron 8500 WUXGA that I bought myself (significantly cheaper than the comparable IBM at the time) and use every day for both work and personal for about 2+ years now. This thing is on and running Linux 24x7, except when I'm commuting between work and home. I have to saym I've been pretty happy with it. There was a fit and finish issue early on with the LCD cutoff switch on the lid, but some time on the phone with them resolved that. I had the power supply die once, and got a new one shipped to me second day. I had a keyboard problem and they sent someone out to my office to swap in a new keyboard (which incidently would only have request replacing the little rubber cup under the key, but that is apparently not a part they stock on its own).
I don't perceive it to be lower quality than the IBM notebooks everyone is using at the office, and the wireless on the Dells seems to be much better than the wireless on the IBMs (I think Dell's antennae in the display is probably a better approach - not sure where IBM's antennae is).
I got my fiance an HP zd7000 for Christmas, and within two months she had off colored pixels showing up in lines on her display. We had to spend hours on the phone with HP support, who seemed to be complete idiots. Their policy is apparently to reimage any hard disk that is sent in with a notebook, just in case there is a software problem; I removed the disk before sending it in. We bought the notebook with the understanding that we had 4 day turnaround on hardware support, but apparently since we actually specified the configuration we wanted instead of taking one of their preconfigured units, the 4 day turn around doesn't apply. I think we were without it for about 2 weeks. She says it runs significantly slower since she got it back, but I have no idea why.
Personally, I'll not buy from HP again, since they don't offer on-site service. I would definitely buy from Dell again, because I've been pretty happy with their service. I've pretty much come to the conclusion that, for us, it's really important to have on-site service because we use these things so much and really feel it when they're not available. That's enough for me to stay away from smaller online places that can't offer that level of support.
What does Apple offer for support? I'll probably be looking closely at them next time around.
Sorry, no idea of how quickly; my crystal ball is in for cleaning right now.:-)
We were discussing this at the office yesterday, and one of my coworkers was suggesting that if we (in Silicon Valley) break the cycle of hiring the top talent from the local schools, we'll miss out on the next generation of leaders and be seriously declined within a generation.
Personally, although I agree there is good talent from the local schools, I think there's plenty of talent coming here from elsewhere in the US (and Canada where I'm from) to keep the valley moving. Of course, the sky high cost of living around here could keep us from attracting people in.
I doubt very much that the result will be an improved teacher:student ratio. The university has to pay the instructors and TAs, and without lots of students paying tuition they'll have to cut back on how many they employ.
I agree with you about immigrant labor, though. In the last few companies I've worked for, the immigrants have always outnumbered the citizens. Still, I've had water cooler conversations with quite a few who are interested in moving back to their home countries one day and starting a company there. Either that, or they'd like to outsource work to cheap new grads in their home countries where they have connections to the schools.
The latter is more of a concern to the US economy. The more we outsource design and development to other countries, the less ability we have to do it here in the US. Eventually the people we outsource to will stop seeing an advantage in continuing to work for us and shipping the profits back to the US, and will have developed the skills to run their own enterprises. We better hope we haven't decimated our own tech workers too badly by then.
I'm not sure about 25%, but I agree that some sort of plague will likely cause an evolutionary event. For interesting reading on the subject, check out Laurie Garrett's book "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance."
I saw her speak at the University of Santa Cruz a number of years ago, and it was pretty interesting. She talked about the large number of global airplane flights that cross country boundaries daily and could easily distribute an infectious desease around the world within a few days. She also talked about the number of "mega cities" around the world, many of which don't have the developed world's standards of sanitation that could lead to development of nasty diseases.
Apparently the descendants of the population that made it through the Black Plague filter in Europe are less susceptable to HIV infection today.
Yeah, I've thought about that many times as well. Things that used to help filter people out of the gene pool such as epilepsy, visual impairment, diabetes, etc. no longer have as strong of a statistical push. I would think that would potentially lead to a higher proportion of the population having these genetic variations, since there is much less of a negative effect.
I've tied together the web interfaces for various pieces of our development environment (links back and forth between a bug report, a stack trace decoder, CVS commit logs, and viewcvs code deltas).
For the stack traces, the binary does a CRC of each file loaded into the memory map, and reports crc:offset for each return address from the stack. This allows us to automatically identify which build of the software was in use, and then retrieve the appropriate data to decode the stack trace into something human readable. QA just includes the numeric representation into the bug report, and we can click on it to see the decoding.
Another employee built something to parse CVS commit logs and figure out which nightly (or incremental) build contains the fix for a bug so the QA people know which minimum version has the fix for verification.
I use the ad blocking software, but that's mostly because ads have gotten so out of control on the commercial web sites. There's a tiny bit of content in the middle of the screen, and the rest is moving graphics, flash animations, and pop up/under windows. All of that is hugely annoying, and yet Google ads don't bother me because their understated and textual. With most sites, it seems the content is just an afterthought to the advertising.
The phone queue advertising really bugs me too. I'm already paying for my cellular service, and yet any time I call them I have to listen to adds about more ways they can squeeze money out of me. It makes me wonder if they require everyone who calls in to hear some ads, even if there's a customer servce rep sittle idle. I probably shouldn't post this, because if they're not doing it already, they will be soon.
And while I'm bitching, while using a Wells Fargo ATM a while ago, they stuck an ad in my face and required me to say yes or no to it before they'd let me progress to getting some money out. I tore the bank manager a new one over that, as well as called in to complain. It wasn't until that point the they told me you can opt out of this sort of stuff. I wonder how many people are still seeing those ads, or if they got enough negative backlash that they stopped. Bastards.
I suspect the difficulty in setting a specific number is that they're overselling bandwidth to a population of people with different usage patterns. When their general customer base is negatively impacted, they will slap the wrists of the most hoggish users. How much bandwidth will define a hoggish user is going to depend on how many users are being hogs.
Mathematically, they could just limit you to 1/Nth of the bandwidth, but that's going to be a needlessly low limit that some percentage of the population could actually exceed without a problem due to other people not using their full share.
There is also a time issue. Different periods of the day are in higher demand than others, so maxing out your connection for a couple hours is going to be more of a problem during the evening than in the middle of the night.
It actually is a difficult problem to define up front what behavior is going to be perceived as a problem by the other users of the shared infrastructure. As long as the other users aren't complaining, and you're not somehow sticking out as one of the top monopolizers of bandwidth on some monthly report, you're probably not going to get slapped. But as more users are added to the system, resulting in a greater oversubscription of bandwidth, it becomes more of an issue.
If lots of people are complaining, and there aren't a few heavy users to squeeze to free up bandwidth, then they'll have to add more upstream bandwidth to handle the higher load as part of normal growth. Right after they add more bandwidth, there's more room for heavy users again, and they're less likely to be causing a problem which will cause complaints.
I've considered setting up software raid on my Linux server, but I haven't found any doc yet about what happens in the event of an unexpected crash or poweroff part way through writing a RAID-5 stripe.
Suppose I have 4+1 disks in a RAID-5 configuration, and during a write to a stripe of the disk only two of the disks are written to before the system crashes. This leaves me with 2 disks with new content, 2 disks with old content, and a useless parity.
I found a page at RedHat that indicates that as of 2001 there was no multistage commit. Has anything changed since then? Do the Linux MD tools address this?
When management is aware of how much benefit their projects have received from being able to make use of other people's open source projects, I've found they're receptive to open sourcing internal tools that have been built that are not part of the company's core competency.
As an example, we've built some C++ classes to abstract shared and exclusive mutexes, including scope objects that acquire a lock in their constructor and release in their destructor to provide better exception safety and simplify code. We've also pushed thread cancellation safety into the mix. On top of that, we have the ability to define a global process lock ordering table based on a set of required partial orderings, and throw an exception if anything tries to take a lock out of order.
This is all combined with a thread abstraction and an x86 stack trace object that is instantiated from inside our exception object and provides a convenient way to log where a problem occurred. We've hooked this into assertions and a segv handler.
This code has been in production use for a few years now, and is rock solid.
My management is willing to open source this, I just haven't gotten around to it. (If anyone needs this sort of stuff, ping me and we'll see what we can do.)
The question is, what is a reasonable effort to maintain the safety of your data? If a company is making a good faith effort to keep their systems up to date with the latest patches, you probably don't have a reasonable case to sue them. I haven't seen anything that suggests their protection of people's data is analagous to "a rickety old warehouse in the middle of a populated area."
Don't get me wrong; it bugs me that there are companies whose sole purpose is to gather up whatever data they can find on me and sell it to whoever gives them money for it. One thing I would really love to see is a requirement that any data in their database have an attributed path back to the source of the information, so I know who is selling it to them.
Similarly, I'd love to see a law that requires any company who sends out junk mail to include in that mail a list of where they got a person's information from. If a magazine or web site knew that selling your information to a mailing list was going to cause their name to show up on all junk mail received from that mailing list (and transitively from any other mailing lists that that list was incorporated into) I suspect far fewer companies would be so eager to sell people's data for a quick buck.
Theoretically, you could do something like this over SMTP, but I don't think the performance would be good enough. Does SMTP have the ability to send multiple messages on the same socket, or do you have to open and close a socket for each message? Do you want to pay the overhead of converting every message to ASCII to send it through SMTP?
Real world messaging systems are designed to be able to handle thousands of messages per second at least. I'd hate to stuff that through an SMTP protocol.
Get a network card, and hook your tivo up to that. Mine's been doing that for a couple years now, and the only down side is that it won't let me purchase PPV with the remote anymore. I have to go to their web site or call them to buy anything. Not a big deal, since I very rarely buy PPV.
You could also get a Vonage account for about $18/month, although you have to configure the tivo to only try 9600 baud.
I'll second that recommendation. I've been using openvpn to secure both work and personal wireless networks, as well as to allow remote access. It's not very difficult to set up, particularly now that 2.0 allows the server to listen on a single port.
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Exactly, that was my point.
I just don't get this attitude. I don't agree with the RIAA/MPIAA tactics, but the fact of the matter is that composers, producers, directors, actors, musicians, recording/lighting engineers, photographers, makeup artists, etc. have all put in time to produce musical content, movies, images, etc. These people deserve to be paid for their efforts. Sure, the studios tend to screw the artists over as much as they can, and I disagree with that, but the fact of the matter is they and/or the artists own the rights.
If you don't agree with the business model or the DRM, then don't buy the album but also don't steal it. Go to someplace like www.cdbaby.com and find really good independent artists distributed on smaller labels that don't screw them over.
Just because it has gotten technically easy and quick to do the musical equivalent of photocopying an entire book doesn't mean it is right or fair to do so.
My photographer spent probably 2 hours with us when we interviewed him. He and his assistant will be working for 8 hours each during our wedding, plus travel time. He'll spend more time putting together a proof book, and then sitting down with us to discuss which ones we want printed, how we want them laid out, etc. All in all, 25 - 30 man hours will be spent on our wedding. On top of this are film and developing costs, which aren't insignificant considering two people will be taking pictures for much of the 8 hour block of time. Then there is the cost of purchasing and maintaining the cameras, lenses, lighting equipment, office space, insurance, etc.
Yes, it's expensive, but there are very real costs involved, and he is very good at what he does. People have a tendency to underestimate the time, effort, and money a professional puts in behind the scenes because they've don't have the experience to realize what all goes into an event.
When we looked through the picture books that each of the locations put together, we were always able to pick out his pictures from the rest, because they have a distinctive style and quality. We're paying for that quality, but it doesn't bother me because I know we're getting top quality service and there will be no mistakes.
That said, yes there are definitely plenty of people out there who overcharge for what they provide, and it's up to the buyer to decide what they are willing to pay for.
In the real world, who owns the rights to the pictures is a negotiation between you and your photographer, and that's all. It used to be that most professionals insisted that they maintain rights and you would have to pay them for any reprints. These days, most seem to give them to you if you want them, and they've probably increased their costs to offset the lost reprint income.
Regardless, it's a negotiation. The price you pay for the service of having your event photographed is balanced against the rights each of you have to the images going forward. Either one of you can sign away your rights in consideration for the money that is paid for the service. The important thing is that both parties are clear up front on what they get in exchange for the money.
The photographer we selected for our wedding stores the negatives in a vault that the printer maintains, and we are entitled to take posession of them whenever we want to. He says people typically take them about a year after the wedding, because the printer will sell prints at the same price as if you walked in off the street with a negative to be printed. This actually works out really well, because if any of the wedding guests want prints for themselves, I don't want to get involved with the hassles of making a print myself, or moving negatives around.
After about a year, we'll go get the negatives and likely do a high quality scan for archival purposes.
With respect to the quality of the pictures, I definitely agree with this. Individuals can and do often take great pictures, but there tends to be a lot of crap pictures mixed in. Think about the yield of great pics when you take them youself.
When I looked at the negative strips from our photographer, every single one of them was a really great shot. His yield is almost 100%. That comes from years of practice and spending the amount of time on his art that only a professional or an independently wealthy person can do. That's my opinion, anyway.
Yes, this was part of the conversation with the photographer we selected. We're entitled to all the negatives, whenever we want them, although he requests that he be able to hold a few back for his own archives. There are generally multiple almost identical shots for each setup, so he will hold onto an almost duplicate we're not interested in.
Given that he is an artist, and needs to be able to show his work to prospective clients and advertise his services, I certainly don't mind that. And as was pointed out in another followup to my message, I think he does need to get a release from anyone who is in any picture he wishes to publish. Most people really don't mind, though.
Here in the SFBay area, my experience in planning a wedding this year shows the norm seems to be that the customer owns the images for personal use (i.e. friends and family who want a copy of pictures from the event), but the photographer has control for commercial use (i.e. magazine reprints).
I have a Dell Inspiron 8500 WUXGA that I bought myself (significantly cheaper than the comparable IBM at the time) and use every day for both work and personal for about 2+ years now. This thing is on and running Linux 24x7, except when I'm commuting between work and home. I have to saym I've been pretty happy with it. There was a fit and finish issue early on with the LCD cutoff switch on the lid, but some time on the phone with them resolved that. I had the power supply die once, and got a new one shipped to me second day. I had a keyboard problem and they sent someone out to my office to swap in a new keyboard (which incidently would only have request replacing the little rubber cup under the key, but that is apparently not a part they stock on its own).
I don't perceive it to be lower quality than the IBM notebooks everyone is using at the office, and the wireless on the Dells seems to be much better than the wireless on the IBMs (I think Dell's antennae in the display is probably a better approach - not sure where IBM's antennae is).
I got my fiance an HP zd7000 for Christmas, and within two months she had off colored pixels showing up in lines on her display. We had to spend hours on the phone with HP support, who seemed to be complete idiots. Their policy is apparently to reimage any hard disk that is sent in with a notebook, just in case there is a software problem; I removed the disk before sending it in. We bought the notebook with the understanding that we had 4 day turnaround on hardware support, but apparently since we actually specified the configuration we wanted instead of taking one of their preconfigured units, the 4 day turn around doesn't apply. I think we were without it for about 2 weeks. She says it runs significantly slower since she got it back, but I have no idea why.
Personally, I'll not buy from HP again, since they don't offer on-site service. I would definitely buy from Dell again, because I've been pretty happy with their service. I've pretty much come to the conclusion that, for us, it's really important to have on-site service because we use these things so much and really feel it when they're not available. That's enough for me to stay away from smaller online places that can't offer that level of support.
What does Apple offer for support? I'll probably be looking closely at them next time around.
Sorry, no idea of how quickly; my crystal ball is in for cleaning right now. :-)
We were discussing this at the office yesterday, and one of my coworkers was suggesting that if we (in Silicon Valley) break the cycle of hiring the top talent from the local schools, we'll miss out on the next generation of leaders and be seriously declined within a generation.
Personally, although I agree there is good talent from the local schools, I think there's plenty of talent coming here from elsewhere in the US (and Canada where I'm from) to keep the valley moving. Of course, the sky high cost of living around here could keep us from attracting people in.
I doubt very much that the result will be an improved teacher:student ratio. The university has to pay the instructors and TAs, and without lots of students paying tuition they'll have to cut back on how many they employ.
I agree with you about immigrant labor, though. In the last few companies I've worked for, the immigrants have always outnumbered the citizens. Still, I've had water cooler conversations with quite a few who are interested in moving back to their home countries one day and starting a company there. Either that, or they'd like to outsource work to cheap new grads in their home countries where they have connections to the schools.
The latter is more of a concern to the US economy. The more we outsource design and development to other countries, the less ability we have to do it here in the US. Eventually the people we outsource to will stop seeing an advantage in continuing to work for us and shipping the profits back to the US, and will have developed the skills to run their own enterprises. We better hope we haven't decimated our own tech workers too badly by then.
I'm not sure about 25%, but I agree that some sort of plague will likely cause an evolutionary event. For interesting reading on the subject, check out Laurie Garrett's book "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance."
I saw her speak at the University of Santa Cruz a number of years ago, and it was pretty interesting. She talked about the large number of global airplane flights that cross country boundaries daily and could easily distribute an infectious desease around the world within a few days. She also talked about the number of "mega cities" around the world, many of which don't have the developed world's standards of sanitation that could lead to development of nasty diseases.
Apparently the descendants of the population that made it through the Black Plague filter in Europe are less susceptable to HIV infection today.
Yeah, I've thought about that many times as well. Things that used to help filter people out of the gene pool such as epilepsy, visual impairment, diabetes, etc. no longer have as strong of a statistical push. I would think that would potentially lead to a higher proportion of the population having these genetic variations, since there is much less of a negative effect.
I've tied together the web interfaces for various pieces of our development environment (links back and forth between a bug report, a stack trace decoder, CVS commit logs, and viewcvs code deltas). For the stack traces, the binary does a CRC of each file loaded into the memory map, and reports crc:offset for each return address from the stack. This allows us to automatically identify which build of the software was in use, and then retrieve the appropriate data to decode the stack trace into something human readable. QA just includes the numeric representation into the bug report, and we can click on it to see the decoding. Another employee built something to parse CVS commit logs and figure out which nightly (or incremental) build contains the fix for a bug so the QA people know which minimum version has the fix for verification.
I use the ad blocking software, but that's mostly because ads have gotten so out of control on the commercial web sites. There's a tiny bit of content in the middle of the screen, and the rest is moving graphics, flash animations, and pop up/under windows. All of that is hugely annoying, and yet Google ads don't bother me because their understated and textual. With most sites, it seems the content is just an afterthought to the advertising.
The phone queue advertising really bugs me too. I'm already paying for my cellular service, and yet any time I call them I have to listen to adds about more ways they can squeeze money out of me. It makes me wonder if they require everyone who calls in to hear some ads, even if there's a customer servce rep sittle idle. I probably shouldn't post this, because if they're not doing it already, they will be soon.
And while I'm bitching, while using a Wells Fargo ATM a while ago, they stuck an ad in my face and required me to say yes or no to it before they'd let me progress to getting some money out. I tore the bank manager a new one over that, as well as called in to complain. It wasn't until that point the they told me you can opt out of this sort of stuff. I wonder how many people are still seeing those ads, or if they got enough negative backlash that they stopped. Bastards.
That sounds entirely reasonable to me.
I suspect the difficulty in setting a specific number is that they're overselling bandwidth to a population of people with different usage patterns. When their general customer base is negatively impacted, they will slap the wrists of the most hoggish users. How much bandwidth will define a hoggish user is going to depend on how many users are being hogs.
Mathematically, they could just limit you to 1/Nth of the bandwidth, but that's going to be a needlessly low limit that some percentage of the population could actually exceed without a problem due to other people not using their full share.
There is also a time issue. Different periods of the day are in higher demand than others, so maxing out your connection for a couple hours is going to be more of a problem during the evening than in the middle of the night.
It actually is a difficult problem to define up front what behavior is going to be perceived as a problem by the other users of the shared infrastructure. As long as the other users aren't complaining, and you're not somehow sticking out as one of the top monopolizers of bandwidth on some monthly report, you're probably not going to get slapped. But as more users are added to the system, resulting in a greater oversubscription of bandwidth, it becomes more of an issue.
If lots of people are complaining, and there aren't a few heavy users to squeeze to free up bandwidth, then they'll have to add more upstream bandwidth to handle the higher load as part of normal growth. Right after they add more bandwidth, there's more room for heavy users again, and they're less likely to be causing a problem which will cause complaints.
I've considered setting up software raid on my Linux server, but I haven't found any doc yet about what happens in the event of an unexpected crash or poweroff part way through writing a RAID-5 stripe.
Suppose I have 4+1 disks in a RAID-5 configuration, and during a write to a stripe of the disk only two of the disks are written to before the system crashes. This leaves me with 2 disks with new content, 2 disks with old content, and a useless parity.
I found a page at RedHat that indicates that as of 2001 there was no multistage commit. Has anything changed since then? Do the Linux MD tools address this?
When management is aware of how much benefit their projects have received from being able to make use of other people's open source projects, I've found they're receptive to open sourcing internal tools that have been built that are not part of the company's core competency.
As an example, we've built some C++ classes to abstract shared and exclusive mutexes, including scope objects that acquire a lock in their constructor and release in their destructor to provide better exception safety and simplify code. We've also pushed thread cancellation safety into the mix. On top of that, we have the ability to define a global process lock ordering table based on a set of required partial orderings, and throw an exception if anything tries to take a lock out of order.
This is all combined with a thread abstraction and an x86 stack trace object that is instantiated from inside our exception object and provides a convenient way to log where a problem occurred. We've hooked this into assertions and a segv handler.
This code has been in production use for a few years now, and is rock solid.
My management is willing to open source this, I just haven't gotten around to it. (If anyone needs this sort of stuff, ping me and we'll see what we can do.)
It'll be called the tPod.
The question is, what is a reasonable effort to maintain the safety of your data? If a company is making a good faith effort to keep their systems up to date with the latest patches, you probably don't have a reasonable case to sue them. I haven't seen anything that suggests their protection of people's data is analagous to "a rickety old warehouse in the middle of a populated area."
Don't get me wrong; it bugs me that there are companies whose sole purpose is to gather up whatever data they can find on me and sell it to whoever gives them money for it. One thing I would really love to see is a requirement that any data in their database have an attributed path back to the source of the information, so I know who is selling it to them.
Similarly, I'd love to see a law that requires any company who sends out junk mail to include in that mail a list of where they got a person's information from. If a magazine or web site knew that selling your information to a mailing list was going to cause their name to show up on all junk mail received from that mailing list (and transitively from any other mailing lists that that list was incorporated into) I suspect far fewer companies would be so eager to sell people's data for a quick buck.
Theoretically, you could do something like this over SMTP, but I don't think the performance would be good enough. Does SMTP have the ability to send multiple messages on the same socket, or do you have to open and close a socket for each message? Do you want to pay the overhead of converting every message to ASCII to send it through SMTP?
Real world messaging systems are designed to be able to handle thousands of messages per second at least. I'd hate to stuff that through an SMTP protocol.
Yeah, check out www.9thtee.com for lots of tivo related hacks.
Get a network card, and hook your tivo up to that. Mine's been doing that for a couple years now, and the only down side is that it won't let me purchase PPV with the remote anymore. I have to go to their web site or call them to buy anything. Not a big deal, since I very rarely buy PPV.
You could also get a Vonage account for about $18/month, although you have to configure the tivo to only try 9600 baud.
I'll second that recommendation. I've been using openvpn to secure both work and personal wireless networks, as well as to allow remote access. It's not very difficult to set up, particularly now that 2.0 allows the server to listen on a single port.