It's not hypothetical! I've given two examples, and I can think of a dozen more.
Yes, but your examples were hypothetical ones. "What if there hadn't been a 'Shield' marathon? What if there had been no 'Buffy' reruns?" The fact is, programs (especially cable progams) are increasingly being show more than once in a given week. Unless a show is a prime-time network program, the chance that you'll miss an episode and not be able to catch it another time is very slim.
Program sharing would benefit very few people. Sure, lots of people would like it, but they'd be using it for a purpose that is not unclear, like the central issue of the VCR case was, but rather explicitly illegal. TiVo should wait (or should have waited, I guess) until the legal dust settles before releasing a sharing product.
For less than $300 I just built a PVR using PowerVCR II software, a modest cpu based system and an 80 gig drive.
For about the same or a few dollars more, I have a TiVo that I didn't have to build myself. Not to mention the fact that my TiVo has more features, is more user-friendly, and works more reliably than your homebrew FrankenPVR ever could.
No, you missed what the previous posters were talking about. Yes, it's easy to come up with a hypothetical scenario in which show-sharing could be a helpful feature. But how often to these scenarios actually play out in real life? Very seldom. And since sharing shows is, depending on the circumstances, either questionable or absolutely illegal, building that feature into TiVo will (a) benefit few, and (b) hurt all, when somebody hits TiVo with a lawsuit that drives them out of business.
We're saying that TiVo should completely omit the sharing feature until the law is changed to make the sharing of home recordings legal. Don't be a test case, TiVo, because it looks like you'll lose!
What Powell may not be aware of is that in saying so, he may ultimately have to break the DMCA to do it.
Except for the fact that it has nothing to do with the DMCA. Distributing copies of home recordings is a violation of plain old copyright law, law which has been on the books since 1790.
But making snide remarks about a 200-year-old law makes you look kind of like an anti-establishment wacko, while snide remarks about the DMCA are always socially acceptable.
Less useful than what? Than what you bought? Seems like TiVo has never offered any kind of video sharing feature at all, so a new feature couldn't possibly be less useful than the absence of that feature.
Oh, you must mean, "Less useful than what I, with my self-righteous sense of entitlement, feel that I deserve." Well, that's a whole different kettle of fish, isn't it?
Nah. We're talking about doing this on the cheap. For the central office-- assuming all roads lead to Rome, if you know what I mean-- you might choose to have one switch with the same number of optical ports as you have fiber links, or you could just as easily have one switch with one optical port each for every fiber link. There's zero need to do routing here. If it turns out to be cheaper to buy 6 (or whatever) switches with 12 100BASE-T ports and 1 100BASE-F port each than to buy a switch with 6 100BASE-F ports-- which will likely be the case if this guy is buying used gear-- then you can just cascade or stack all the switches together. It will work fine, because the "three hop rule" only applies to dumb repeaters, not to switches.
I repeat: there's zero need to do routing, even if it's not a hub-and-spoke network. If one building connects to the next which connects to the next, just set it up as a bus.
Remember, the most important word in the question was "cheapest."
I know it's a Friday night (in some places) but man, the responses on this Ask Slashdot really suck so far.
Short answer: you can set up a TCP/IP network over a dark fiber link for as little as a few hundred bucks, if you can find equipment for a good price. Here's how.
I'm going to make a couple of assumptions here; correct me if I'm wrong. I'm going to assume, first of all, that each link you've got access to is actually a pair of links; that's the way dark fiber is almost always sold. Second, I'm going to assume that you've actually got a dark fiber link, as opposed to buying a lambda. (Buying a lambda means that the telco is letting you use one frequency of a dense wave division multiplexed [DWDM] link. Not the same as dark fiber in the literal sense, but the same in most practical senses.) Finally, I'm going to assume that the telco has provided you with the necessary repeaters on the line so that you can actually push light from one end to the other without any additional hardware. If your telco has sold you (or given you, whatever) "dark fiber," chances are that all three of these assumptions are true.
If all of those things are true, then you're in a really good position. You can run anything across these fiber links that you could run across a shorter length of optical cable: FDDI, Ethernet (any speed), Fibre Channel, FireWire, HIPPI, whatever you want.
You said "cheapest," and what's cheap depends on what's available. If you can get your hands on a couple of old Ethernet switches with 10BASE-F or 100BASE-F (which are simply 10 Mbit and 100 Mbit Ethernet over fiber optic cable instead of copper cable) you're in business. Just plug the dark fiber into a switch at each location and poof! A single TCP/IP network running across the fiber to both sites, at 10 or 100 Mbps depending on what you can find.
My last company had, among other things, some Bay Networks (now Nortel, I think) stackable Ethernet switches with 24 100BASE-T ports and two 100BASE-F ports. I think they sold for about $2,500 when new (in 1998 or so), but should now be available for a lot less used. If you can find some of those used you'll be in good shape. Asante also makes switches like these; I've never used them, so I won't vouch for them, but you can buy them.
Another option would be to bridge Ethernet to FDDI; switches that do this should be available for really cheap, if you can find them, because FDDI fell completely out of favor in the mid-1990's. FDDI runs at 100 Mbps, just like 100BASE-F, but it has to be bridged, and sometimes this can cause problems with packet splitting and MTU sizes, especially on Cabletron switch gear. Unless you're looking at an absolutely killer deal, avoid the FDDI option.
If you want to go with something more up-to-date, you can run Gigabit Ethernet over the fiber links. It'll cost more, but you'll get better bandwidth. A good idea might be to buy a couple of cheap 100BASE-T switches with 1000BASE-T gigabit uplink ports (about $150 each), then equip each switch with a 1000BASE-T to 1000BASE-SX media converter (as little as $200 each).
Any of those solutions-- 10BASE-F, 100BASE-F, 1000BASE-SX, bridged FDDI-- would require nothing more than a switch with the right media type at each end; you wouldn't have to mess with routers or anything, and you wouldn't have to do anything fancy with your IP network. In fact, you wouldn't be limited to running just IP. You could run anything that can be carried over Ethernet: AppleTalk, NetBIOS, whatever.
If you get the gear for a reasonable price, you can run any of those networks for really, really cheap. When the links aren't being used for video, plug 'em in to the switches and go to town. When you're ready, just unplug 'em and go back to video. The link will be down, but neither the switches nor the computers will care.
Are you trying to be funny, or are you just simple? Dark fiber is just what it sounds like: fiber-optic cable in the ground that doesn't have any light passing through it. It's not in use, in other words.
Let me throw some facts into this mix. Your analysis is right on, but you need more info.
Uncompressed HDTV requires about 1.3 Gbps of bandwidth to transmit. That's the SMPTE 292M standard for serial digital 4:2:2 YUV 1080i HD. Nobody outside of the TV studio ever sees uncompressed HD.
When a network sends its broadcasts to an affiliate, it's not unusual for that signal to come down at about 45 Mbps over an OC-3. So the signal has already been compressed one time before it ever gets to your local TV station.
The 8VSB transmission standard for broadcast HDTV calls for an effective bandwidth of about 19.3 Mbps between the TV transmitter and your house. So before the signal hits the airwaves, it gets compressed a second time.
So the most your TiVo will ever need to store for over-the-air (OTA) HD is about 19.3 Mbps. That includes the 1080i signal and the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio.
For satellites and (eventually) land-based cable, the facts are a little different, but the gist is the same. I believe DirecTV is currently broadcasting at about 15 Mbps on its various HD transponders.
So all HDTV programming is compressed at least once and down to at least a ratio of about 70:1 before it ever gets to your house. This can be made to work for two reasons. First, your HDTV can't resolve all of the detail in an uncompressed HD frame. The set just isn't capable of it. Second, a good HD encoder can produce a 19 Mbps signal from a 1.3 Gbps signal that is free of visible artifacts. Note that I said a good encoder. Last week's broadcast of "Any Given Sunday" on ABC looked like hammered shit because it had been run through a poor encoder. Macroblocking everywhere. Virtually unwatchable.
So let's say your TiVo stores the incoming signal without additional compression. OTA HD (19 Mbps) requires about 2.5 MB/s of storage space, or about 8.25 GB/h. So a TiVo with an 80 GB hard drive could store nearly 10 hours of HD content, and considerably more SD content. Given that 320 GB hard drives are available, it's easy to imagine a high-end or upgraded TiVo that has room for as much as 70 or 80 hours of HD content. Not half bad.
So to sum up: "uncompressed" HD (meaning HD that is not compressed further once it gets to your house) requires slightly more than 8 GB per hour. Additional compression applied to the OTA or satellite signal is likely to result in very objectionable artifacts, unless TiVo spends a lot of money on their encoder hardware. Since people who buy HD equipment are currently on the high end of the market, it will make more sense for TiVo to spend the money on additional storage and simply omit an HD encoder from the device completely.
A 10-hour TiVo (note that these are 19 Mbps HD numbers only; SD capacities will be four to six times higher) will require one 80 GB HD or two 40 GB HD's. The upgrade path could possibly include adding 80, 160, or 320 GB hard drives to get to a final capacity of up to 80 hours (rounded up) for a few hundred dollars over the base price. Not too bad.
Q: Does Rendezvous work across routers (between multiple subnets)?
A: No. The first release of DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD) for Mac OS X concentrates on Multicast DNS (mDNS) for single-link networks because this is the environment worst served by current IP software. Future versions will add Dynamic Update and unicast query support.
Multicast DNS is intended for use on small networks with no infrastructure support, and intentionally uses link-local multicast. If a network has two links then it needs a bridge or router to connect those links, so by definition you now have a box that is (or should be) capable of providing some level of infrastructure support.
It is important to understand that DNS-SD is orthogonal to mDNS. You can use one without the other. In the example given above, the router that is connecting the two links should also include a DHCP server to assign addresses, and a little mini-DNS server which handles both standard DNS queries and Dynamic DNS Updates [RFC 3007]. The devices offering services on that network then advertise their services by using Dynamic Update to register their service records with the mini-DNS server in the router, and clients looking for services use normal unicast DNS queries addressed to that server to retrieve those service records.
the code has not been made available (although the author claims he will send it to you if you send him an email)
You know that the GPL itself requires nothing more, right? A program does not have to have its source code up on a server for it to be open source. Under the GPL, it merely has to come with a written offer to provide the source at no charge or a nominal charge. Eric's following the letter of that rule, even though he's not using the GPL. Good for him, I say.
Why don't you send him an email and see what you get back?
Take the Safari browser for example, David Hyatt is actually responding to other people's blogs about Safari and actually taking notice.
If by "actually taking notice" you mean "fixing reported bugs left and right," you're right. Hyatt's team is doing some incredible stuff. They're just chewing through bug reports.
I've emailed David asking if they plan to put WebCore and JavaScriptCore on the public CVS server so we can test newer builds. No answer yet, but I'll bet I get a "yes" back soon.
I don't see why they would bother with the video output
For the user interface. And once they had video output for the UI, adding the picture functionality was practically free, but for a little bit of software development. Adding other stuff-- like Internet access or god forbid movie playback-- would definitely not come for free.
See what I mean, why don't they just make a computer and put it in a fancy box?
Because people can already buy computers for their living rooms, and generally they're staying away in droves. People generally don't want computers in their living rooms. They don't want to be able to read email on their televisions. (Remember the stunning success of WebTV?) They want to be able to play MP3's on their stereos.
Or, to answer your question in another way, "This piece of 'stereo' equipment already has quite a bit of cooling equipment in it (to keep the CPU and the hard drive from overheating), so why not just go all the way and add an icebox to it? And since you've already got the electrical plug, and the fans, why not just add a tap water inlet and one of those cold-water dispenser things on the front? See what I mean, why don't they just make a refrigerator and put it in a fancy box?"
See my point? HP is not setting out to make a fridge. And they're not setting out to make a web-browsing, email-sending, movie-playing general purpose computer. They're setting out to sell a piece of stereo equipment for $300. Get it?
And it's considered sacred practice in Open Source and Free Software to "release early and release often" with accurate version numbers.
Hear me now and understand me later: this is a bad practice, and should be stopped. You should not release "early and often." You should release when it is done.
Here's why: converting from RGB to YUV is harder than it sounds. If you don't do it just right, you'll end up with severely distorted color. Since one of the purposes of this device is to display photos on your TV, you need a really good color-space converter. Building one from scratch, or buying a cheap one at radio shack, isn't going to cut it. Unless you like your yellows looking green and your reds purple, that is.
I think you're confused, friend. You seem to think that this is a computer. It's not. It's stereo equipment.
"If I were to get one, I would need a set-top box that has at least 30 cubic feet of storage space, an icemaker, one of those little thingies to dispense cold water from the front, and a vegetable crisper. All these other boxes just aren't enough refrigerator for me."
And I'll bet they support Ogg (they already do on the IPod).
Wrong, wrong. You can't play anything but MP3 on your iPod... today. I'll bet you a nickel you'll have AAC support real soon, but never Ogg.
There's a good argument to be made that AAC is better than either MP3 or Ogg at the same bit rate. The fact that it's part of the MPEG-4 specification is so much the better.
NTSC? That is so 20th century. Where the hell is the high-definition version with DVI and component analog outputs? I'm not greedy; even 720p will do!
Hell, if the XBOX can do 1080i and 720p output, this piece of junk-- er, extremely worth market entrant ought to be able to.
I mean it's not like the thing is recording or playing back video, for crying out loud; it just does still photos. Given that most digital cameras are recording pictures in 1600 x 1200 or bigger, even a 1280x720 output would be nice, nice. But no, we're stuck with lame-ass interlaced NTSC. Pfft. I'd rather describe my vacation snaps to my friends than show them in crappy NTSC.
Those who have discovered the bug experience the following: (1) option-clicking a link deletes ~/.
For the record, there are very few reported instances of this happening, and none of them is crystal-clear. On Apple's support boards, I think I counted three people who said that this happened to them, but none of them have thus far been able to describe what they were doing when it happened. (Their accounts sound something like Ellen's "switch" commercial, if you can believe that.)
For kicks, after I heard about this I DVD'd my entire Users folder and went about option-clicking everything in sight. I ended up with a bunch of files on my desktop, but I didn't have any problems even remotely like what has been reported.
Should you be cautious? Hell, yeah. It's beta, for Chrissakes. If it sneaks out of your office in the middle of the night, rearranges your sock drawer, eats your children, and deletes all those unwatched episodes of "Wild On" off your TiVo, it's nobody's fault but your own. But is it a disaster just waiting to happen? Apparently not.
I don't know how to reproduce it yet, but 5 out of the 6 people I work with who have Macs all had/tmp deleted (including me).
Make that 5 out of 7. I just want to cast my vote. I've been using Safari damn near constantly since it was released, and I have had neither of these serious problems. My biggest problems were one application crash and what appeared to be a corrupted plist file.
Slashdot Mirror
UPN is picking the series up
No, they're not. They passed on it several days ago.
About the only chance I have are an eventual (years away) release of a DVD for a half-season of a show
Minear says the DVD will be out much sooner than "years away."
I just created a new HotMail account just to test this, and I had not problems. Can you elaborate on what's going on?
It's not hypothetical! I've given two examples, and I can think of a dozen more.
Yes, but your examples were hypothetical ones. "What if there hadn't been a 'Shield' marathon? What if there had been no 'Buffy' reruns?" The fact is, programs (especially cable progams) are increasingly being show more than once in a given week. Unless a show is a prime-time network program, the chance that you'll miss an episode and not be able to catch it another time is very slim.
Program sharing would benefit very few people. Sure, lots of people would like it, but they'd be using it for a purpose that is not unclear, like the central issue of the VCR case was, but rather explicitly illegal. TiVo should wait (or should have waited, I guess) until the legal dust settles before releasing a sharing product.
For less than $300 I just built a PVR using PowerVCR II software, a modest cpu based system and an 80 gig drive.
For about the same or a few dollars more, I have a TiVo that I didn't have to build myself. Not to mention the fact that my TiVo has more features, is more user-friendly, and works more reliably than your homebrew FrankenPVR ever could.
No, you missed what the previous posters were talking about. Yes, it's easy to come up with a hypothetical scenario in which show-sharing could be a helpful feature. But how often to these scenarios actually play out in real life? Very seldom. And since sharing shows is, depending on the circumstances, either questionable or absolutely illegal, building that feature into TiVo will (a) benefit few, and (b) hurt all, when somebody hits TiVo with a lawsuit that drives them out of business.
We're saying that TiVo should completely omit the sharing feature until the law is changed to make the sharing of home recordings legal. Don't be a test case, TiVo, because it looks like you'll lose!
What Powell may not be aware of is that in saying so, he may ultimately have to break the DMCA to do it.
Except for the fact that it has nothing to do with the DMCA. Distributing copies of home recordings is a violation of plain old copyright law, law which has been on the books since 1790.
But making snide remarks about a 200-year-old law makes you look kind of like an anti-establishment wacko, while snide remarks about the DMCA are always socially acceptable.
Less useful than what? Than what you bought? Seems like TiVo has never offered any kind of video sharing feature at all, so a new feature couldn't possibly be less useful than the absence of that feature.
Oh, you must mean, "Less useful than what I, with my self-righteous sense of entitlement, feel that I deserve." Well, that's a whole different kettle of fish, isn't it?
For someone claiming to be a guru...
Pardon me, sir or madam, but I believe you have me confused with somebody else.
Honestly, now, let's take a survey. Who here can keep NetBIOS/NetBEUI straight, huh? Who among us hasn't given up on the whole thing?
Nah. We're talking about doing this on the cheap. For the central office-- assuming all roads lead to Rome, if you know what I mean-- you might choose to have one switch with the same number of optical ports as you have fiber links, or you could just as easily have one switch with one optical port each for every fiber link. There's zero need to do routing here. If it turns out to be cheaper to buy 6 (or whatever) switches with 12 100BASE-T ports and 1 100BASE-F port each than to buy a switch with 6 100BASE-F ports-- which will likely be the case if this guy is buying used gear-- then you can just cascade or stack all the switches together. It will work fine, because the "three hop rule" only applies to dumb repeaters, not to switches.
I repeat: there's zero need to do routing, even if it's not a hub-and-spoke network. If one building connects to the next which connects to the next, just set it up as a bus.
Remember, the most important word in the question was "cheapest."
I know it's a Friday night (in some places) but man, the responses on this Ask Slashdot really suck so far.
Short answer: you can set up a TCP/IP network over a dark fiber link for as little as a few hundred bucks, if you can find equipment for a good price. Here's how.
I'm going to make a couple of assumptions here; correct me if I'm wrong. I'm going to assume, first of all, that each link you've got access to is actually a pair of links; that's the way dark fiber is almost always sold. Second, I'm going to assume that you've actually got a dark fiber link, as opposed to buying a lambda. (Buying a lambda means that the telco is letting you use one frequency of a dense wave division multiplexed [DWDM] link. Not the same as dark fiber in the literal sense, but the same in most practical senses.) Finally, I'm going to assume that the telco has provided you with the necessary repeaters on the line so that you can actually push light from one end to the other without any additional hardware. If your telco has sold you (or given you, whatever) "dark fiber," chances are that all three of these assumptions are true.
If all of those things are true, then you're in a really good position. You can run anything across these fiber links that you could run across a shorter length of optical cable: FDDI, Ethernet (any speed), Fibre Channel, FireWire, HIPPI, whatever you want.
You said "cheapest," and what's cheap depends on what's available. If you can get your hands on a couple of old Ethernet switches with 10BASE-F or 100BASE-F (which are simply 10 Mbit and 100 Mbit Ethernet over fiber optic cable instead of copper cable) you're in business. Just plug the dark fiber into a switch at each location and poof! A single TCP/IP network running across the fiber to both sites, at 10 or 100 Mbps depending on what you can find.
My last company had, among other things, some Bay Networks (now Nortel, I think) stackable Ethernet switches with 24 100BASE-T ports and two 100BASE-F ports. I think they sold for about $2,500 when new (in 1998 or so), but should now be available for a lot less used. If you can find some of those used you'll be in good shape. Asante also makes switches like these; I've never used them, so I won't vouch for them, but you can buy them.
Another option would be to bridge Ethernet to FDDI; switches that do this should be available for really cheap, if you can find them, because FDDI fell completely out of favor in the mid-1990's. FDDI runs at 100 Mbps, just like 100BASE-F, but it has to be bridged, and sometimes this can cause problems with packet splitting and MTU sizes, especially on Cabletron switch gear. Unless you're looking at an absolutely killer deal, avoid the FDDI option.
If you want to go with something more up-to-date, you can run Gigabit Ethernet over the fiber links. It'll cost more, but you'll get better bandwidth. A good idea might be to buy a couple of cheap 100BASE-T switches with 1000BASE-T gigabit uplink ports (about $150 each), then equip each switch with a 1000BASE-T to 1000BASE-SX media converter (as little as $200 each).
Any of those solutions-- 10BASE-F, 100BASE-F, 1000BASE-SX, bridged FDDI-- would require nothing more than a switch with the right media type at each end; you wouldn't have to mess with routers or anything, and you wouldn't have to do anything fancy with your IP network. In fact, you wouldn't be limited to running just IP. You could run anything that can be carried over Ethernet: AppleTalk, NetBIOS, whatever.
If you get the gear for a reasonable price, you can run any of those networks for really, really cheap. When the links aren't being used for video, plug 'em in to the switches and go to town. When you're ready, just unplug 'em and go back to video. The link will be down, but neither the switches nor the computers will care.
Are you trying to be funny, or are you just simple? Dark fiber is just what it sounds like: fiber-optic cable in the ground that doesn't have any light passing through it. It's not in use, in other words.
Let me throw some facts into this mix. Your analysis is right on, but you need more info.
Uncompressed HDTV requires about 1.3 Gbps of bandwidth to transmit. That's the SMPTE 292M standard for serial digital 4:2:2 YUV 1080i HD. Nobody outside of the TV studio ever sees uncompressed HD.
When a network sends its broadcasts to an affiliate, it's not unusual for that signal to come down at about 45 Mbps over an OC-3. So the signal has already been compressed one time before it ever gets to your local TV station.
The 8VSB transmission standard for broadcast HDTV calls for an effective bandwidth of about 19.3 Mbps between the TV transmitter and your house. So before the signal hits the airwaves, it gets compressed a second time.
So the most your TiVo will ever need to store for over-the-air (OTA) HD is about 19.3 Mbps. That includes the 1080i signal and the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio.
For satellites and (eventually) land-based cable, the facts are a little different, but the gist is the same. I believe DirecTV is currently broadcasting at about 15 Mbps on its various HD transponders.
So all HDTV programming is compressed at least once and down to at least a ratio of about 70:1 before it ever gets to your house. This can be made to work for two reasons. First, your HDTV can't resolve all of the detail in an uncompressed HD frame. The set just isn't capable of it. Second, a good HD encoder can produce a 19 Mbps signal from a 1.3 Gbps signal that is free of visible artifacts. Note that I said a good encoder. Last week's broadcast of "Any Given Sunday" on ABC looked like hammered shit because it had been run through a poor encoder. Macroblocking everywhere. Virtually unwatchable.
So let's say your TiVo stores the incoming signal without additional compression. OTA HD (19 Mbps) requires about 2.5 MB/s of storage space, or about 8.25 GB/h. So a TiVo with an 80 GB hard drive could store nearly 10 hours of HD content, and considerably more SD content. Given that 320 GB hard drives are available, it's easy to imagine a high-end or upgraded TiVo that has room for as much as 70 or 80 hours of HD content. Not half bad.
So to sum up: "uncompressed" HD (meaning HD that is not compressed further once it gets to your house) requires slightly more than 8 GB per hour. Additional compression applied to the OTA or satellite signal is likely to result in very objectionable artifacts, unless TiVo spends a lot of money on their encoder hardware. Since people who buy HD equipment are currently on the high end of the market, it will make more sense for TiVo to spend the money on additional storage and simply omit an HD encoder from the device completely.
A 10-hour TiVo (note that these are 19 Mbps HD numbers only; SD capacities will be four to six times higher) will require one 80 GB HD or two 40 GB HD's. The upgrade path could possibly include adding 80, 160, or 320 GB hard drives to get to a final capacity of up to 80 hours (rounded up) for a few hundred dollars over the base price. Not too bad.
Thou shalt get thee to Apple's Rendezvous developer page immediately and readeth up on it, for thou doest knoweth not of why thou speaketh.
There is tons of technical info on Rendezvous. Google for it, or look at the canonical source. (You can also download source from there.)
Does it not broadcast across subnets?
This is a FAQ:
the code has not been made available (although the author claims he will send it to you if you send him an email)
You know that the GPL itself requires nothing more, right? A program does not have to have its source code up on a server for it to be open source. Under the GPL, it merely has to come with a written offer to provide the source at no charge or a nominal charge. Eric's following the letter of that rule, even though he's not using the GPL. Good for him, I say.
Why don't you send him an email and see what you get back?
Take the Safari browser for example, David Hyatt is actually responding to other people's blogs about Safari and actually taking notice.
If by "actually taking notice" you mean "fixing reported bugs left and right," you're right. Hyatt's team is doing some incredible stuff. They're just chewing through bug reports.
I've emailed David asking if they plan to put WebCore and JavaScriptCore on the public CVS server so we can test newer builds. No answer yet, but I'll bet I get a "yes" back soon.
I don't see why they would bother with the video output
For the user interface. And once they had video output for the UI, adding the picture functionality was practically free, but for a little bit of software development. Adding other stuff-- like Internet access or god forbid movie playback-- would definitely not come for free.
See what I mean, why don't they just make a computer and put it in a fancy box?
Because people can already buy computers for their living rooms, and generally they're staying away in droves. People generally don't want computers in their living rooms. They don't want to be able to read email on their televisions. (Remember the stunning success of WebTV?) They want to be able to play MP3's on their stereos.
Or, to answer your question in another way, "This piece of 'stereo' equipment already has quite a bit of cooling equipment in it (to keep the CPU and the hard drive from overheating), so why not just go all the way and add an icebox to it? And since you've already got the electrical plug, and the fans, why not just add a tap water inlet and one of those cold-water dispenser things on the front? See what I mean, why don't they just make a refrigerator and put it in a fancy box?"
See my point? HP is not setting out to make a fridge. And they're not setting out to make a web-browsing, email-sending, movie-playing general purpose computer. They're setting out to sell a piece of stereo equipment for $300. Get it?
And it's considered sacred practice in Open Source and Free Software to "release early and release often" with accurate version numbers.
Hear me now and understand me later: this is a bad practice, and should be stopped. You should not release "early and often." You should release when it is done.
Here's why: converting from RGB to YUV is harder than it sounds. If you don't do it just right, you'll end up with severely distorted color. Since one of the purposes of this device is to display photos on your TV, you need a really good color-space converter. Building one from scratch, or buying a cheap one at radio shack, isn't going to cut it. Unless you like your yellows looking green and your reds purple, that is.
I think you're confused, friend. You seem to think that this is a computer. It's not. It's stereo equipment.
"If I were to get one, I would need a set-top box that has at least 30 cubic feet of storage space, an icemaker, one of those little thingies to dispense cold water from the front, and a vegetable crisper. All these other boxes just aren't enough refrigerator for me."
See what I mean?
And I'll bet they support Ogg (they already do on the IPod).
Wrong, wrong. You can't play anything but MP3 on your iPod... today. I'll bet you a nickel you'll have AAC support real soon, but never Ogg.
There's a good argument to be made that AAC is better than either MP3 or Ogg at the same bit rate. The fact that it's part of the MPEG-4 specification is so much the better.
Video Output: NTSC, 30 FPS, 60 Hz
NTSC? That is so 20th century. Where the hell is the high-definition version with DVI and component analog outputs? I'm not greedy; even 720p will do!
Hell, if the XBOX can do 1080i and 720p output, this piece of junk-- er, extremely worth market entrant ought to be able to.
I mean it's not like the thing is recording or playing back video, for crying out loud; it just does still photos. Given that most digital cameras are recording pictures in 1600 x 1200 or bigger, even a 1280x720 output would be nice, nice. But no, we're stuck with lame-ass interlaced NTSC. Pfft. I'd rather describe my vacation snaps to my friends than show them in crappy NTSC.
I don't see any method in project builder of turning off the multiple files in one window mode of operation completely
Project Builder menu -> Preferences. Look under "Task Templates."
Those who have discovered the bug experience the following: (1) option-clicking a link deletes ~/.
For the record, there are very few reported instances of this happening, and none of them is crystal-clear. On Apple's support boards, I think I counted three people who said that this happened to them, but none of them have thus far been able to describe what they were doing when it happened. (Their accounts sound something like Ellen's "switch" commercial, if you can believe that.)
For kicks, after I heard about this I DVD'd my entire Users folder and went about option-clicking everything in sight. I ended up with a bunch of files on my desktop, but I didn't have any problems even remotely like what has been reported.
Should you be cautious? Hell, yeah. It's beta, for Chrissakes. If it sneaks out of your office in the middle of the night, rearranges your sock drawer, eats your children, and deletes all those unwatched episodes of "Wild On" off your TiVo, it's nobody's fault but your own. But is it a disaster just waiting to happen? Apparently not.
I don't know how to reproduce it yet, but 5 out of the 6 people I work with who have Macs all had /tmp deleted (including me).
Make that 5 out of 7. I just want to cast my vote. I've been using Safari damn near constantly since it was released, and I have had neither of these serious problems. My biggest problems were one application crash and what appeared to be a corrupted plist file.