I think it would be extremely beneficial to introduce SLEEP into videogames. I mean it's ridiculus. People stay up to all hours of the night (often not getting any sleep) so they can buff their chars even more. That is just bad game design.
How's that? I mean, most games aren't designed to be realistic. If that were the case, well then, why play? Reality is all over the place. Besides, the design of most games depends on some sort of time-compression: in most of the RPG type games I've played (like Final Fantisy) months pass in a matter of hours. A trip across the ocean takes a lot longer than 30 seconds, but there's no point in making the player wait 5 days, so they compress the time down to 30 seconds. Some games have the concept of sleep, but it's something that takes another 30 seconds, not the hours that the characters actually sleep.
The game company would actually make MORE money if they introduced sleep, because people would be limited to the time they could play each day. "sorry, your char is too tired. it needs to sleep for 8 hours"
Okay, I really don't understand your reasoning for that. How would they make more money by telling the gamer, "Sorry, you may have paid for this game, but you can't play anymore today because we said so." It seems like a quick way to alienate almost all your players.
Personally, I think that if people are addicted to something, that's their problem, and they need to understand that before anyone else will be able to help them. Hopefully they do so before making it my problem by crawling into their car in no state to drive. But just because someone spends all night playing a game every once and a while doesn't make them an adict anymore than someone who has a little too much to drink every now and then.
Then there's/.
-"Zow"
Re:check the right places
on
DVI Flat Panels?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You're absolutely right. I'm looking at this on one of the Dell FP-2000s running off a VGA connection at 1600x1200 -- didn't even bother with DVI due to the max resolution. Even with a VGA connection though, it looks great. Like I said in another comment, I haven't tried it with anything graphics intensive like games, but for general office usage like code and document editing, I think it's the greatest thing since Roomba (forget the fact that the FP-2000 came first).
I haven't seen any, but I don't think it'll do you any good b/c I doubt any KVM switch manufacturer is going to convert that VGA signal to DVI, at least for less than it would cost to buy a new laptop with DVI built in (if such a thing exists). Additionally, once your laptop has converted the signal to VGA, the damage (to the signal) has already been done, so you're not really gaining anything.
One solution is to get a LCD that accepts both VGA and DVI and allows you to switch between them, then just use a KVM for the keyboard & mouse. I did something similar years ago to use my 21" monitor (with a HD15 cable & RGB in) with both a PC and a mac with a D-15 connector. It was kind of clunky, but it worked.
The other solution is just to accept the VGA signal. I'm using one of the Dell 20" FPs right here at 1600x1200 on a VGA signal and it looks great. Of course, this is at work, so I don't know how good it is for games and the like, but for code/document editing, it can't be beat.
You know, I've had trouble with Tyan boards in the past -- BIOS problems (that kept the "on-board" SCSI from working), and a board that went up in a puff of white smoke one day. Never the less, I got the Tyan S2462 -- the higher end dual-Athlon board. I carefully followed AMD's specs for power and memory, and I haven't had any problems with it, save for the noise from all the fans to keep it cool. Maybe it's the fact that it's AMD's reference design and not Tyan's, I don't know.
In response to the original question, I use the integrated Adaptec SCSI and 3Com LAN and they perform just as well as, if not better than, what I've seen using separate components (purely antedotial, as opposed to lies, damn lies, and benchmarks). I've overridden the on-board AGP video with my own card, and I don't even recall if it has on-board sound -- I think so (it has everything else), but in any case, I threw in my own sound card. My point is that if you get a high-end enough board, it may have everything integrated, but it will also allow you to gracefully override any of those components.
What's more, I've got the Panasonic E20 DVD Recorder (almost identical to the E30 mentioned in the story), and let me tell you: its user interface sucks. It's weird, jumping between the DVD-R and the TiVo is like jumping between a 1986 Yugo missing second gear, and a mint Jag, in terms of useability (although the Panasonic does much better on the quarter mile than the Yugo:-)
By playing back a DVD in a player encoded for one region and burning it down in another I break the copyright!
No can do dude. I've got the previous generation of Panasonic DVD recorder (the E20), and if I try to play a DVD on my Sampo (with Macrovison disabled) and record it on the Panasonic, the Panasonic pops up an error message and refuses to start recording. (Not that I actually want to copy and DVDs, I just wanted to see if I could.)
he created a 12.5% random chance that an incoming worm would ignored the fact that a machine was already compromised and infect it again.
As I recall, he intended for it to have a 1/6 (12.5%) reinfection rate, but he messed up the math somewhere and actually ended up giving it a 5/6 chance of attempting to reinfect.
A few years back, I was on Babble, the Cure mailing list. One day someone posted that they were recently in a car accident, and had been listening to the Cure at the time: not on tape, but on the radio. Suddenly, out of the wood work came a bunch of "Me-too"'s: people that had been in auto accidents or similar, and had been listening to the Cure at the time. Some started to think that this was some kind of omen, mentioning how disconcerting it was and the like, until one guy posted a response along the lines of: "Everyone on this list is a Cure fan. Because of that, everyone will have a tendancy to either listen to Cure tapes in their car, or tune to radio stations that play the Cure." That shut everyone up fast.
The point here is that you're a Linux user. You read/. because it has a lot of stories about Linux and tweaking Linux. The fact that you were tweaking some aspect of your Linux system, went over to/. and saw a story about exactly what you were doing is not coincidential. It's a very basic statistical correlation.
Now then, had you gone over to MSN and found an artical about tweaking fonts in Linux while in the midst of doing such, I'd say it's time to pull out the tin-foil hats, pack up the kids and head for the hills.
Like many others, I've been throwing around ideas along these lines for a while. More to the point:
How do we know this hasn't already been done (and I don't just mean Kazza)?
What if the worm were to patch the security problems it found on the victim system? In the process it could "evict" any other worms or back doors on the system. Essentially, it gets the machine all to itself.
How would this worm avoid Honeypots?
I think the key to internode communication would be covert channels (see the recent thread on the SF Vuln-dev mailing list), moreso than encryption. More specifically, the worm will want to avoid disrupting the statistical characteristics of the network that its using. The best way to go about that is most likely to lay domant for a week or so after the initial infection of the system to develop a statistical model of the local network traffic.
"such as people attempting to escape human-rights-violating regimes, international terrorists, and music fans", yes people, it's offical: music lovers are now lumped together with poticical agitators and terrorists. Burn your CD collection before they get you.
All in all though, I think the main limiting factor to such an undertaking is its usefullness. I mean, what could be done with such a network while retaining its stealthy qualities? Any computation I can think of would require so many resources as to violate the steathy nature of the beast. That is, even if such a calculation is network efficient, I think the high CPU useage would tip people off. Even if you patched the system so that task manager, top, etc, didn't report the worm's CPU useage, some people would notice that their computers are noticeabily warmer, laptops have a shorter battery life, etc. If the creator of the network were to try to gain in any way through the use of stolen credit card or bank info, law enforcement would track them down when they try to use that information. So as another poster noted, this is really just a fancy way of saying "1 0wn y0u", which is really juvenile. Interesting thought exercise though.
Use Gentoo or Debian. It's the only way to protect your freedom.
Or Mandrake -- one of the goals for 9.0 that they succeeded at was the elimination of all proprietary / commercial software from all versions (meaning the shrinkwrap versions too). StarOffice was replaced with OpenOffice, Netscape was wholely replaced with Mozilla, etc. Not to knock Debian or Gentoo: I think they do a wonderful job of demonstrating what is possible given a team of dedicated volunteers. At the same time, I think Mandrake's done the best job of demonstrating that a company can be wholely dedicated to open source and still be successful.
Disclaimer: I switched from Debian to back to Mandrake because it was the easiest to get up and running on my system. Just because it's easy to install and configure doesn't just mean it's for beginners: my time is valuable. And urpmi is just as good as apt-get for my purposes.
A little off-topic, but that just reminds me of a friend who was going nuts on stereo components back in college. One day she calls me up and says, "I just bought a new speakers, don't they sound great!" and proceeded to hold the phone up next to the speakers. I didn't have the heart to tell her that with the frequency response of phones, her new speakers, that she paid way too much for, sounded like crap.
Except that I rushed out to buy this fancy LCD flatscreen, so my rendering of the "brighter and more colorful display" is limited by my darker, lower-saturation display.
Oh wow -- that rocks. Why is this the first I've heard of it? Now, admittidly, I haven't exactly gone looking, but still, I never remember hearing about this in any of the Postgres vs. the world type debates, yet this seems like a really compelling reason to use it over the other available solutions.
SQL is not a programming language -- as another reply pointed out, it is a query language. This was the impetitus (sp?) for Oracle to create PL/SQL, which is short for Procedural SQL: basically it adds basic procedural constructs like loops and conditionals to SQL. (Okay, Oracle may have bought it off someone, but it's wholely an Oracle thing now.) I've started using it more and more at work. As much as I hate using anything Oracle proprietary, if you want to program really close to the data, I haven't seen anything better. I just wish it was available for MySQL or Postgres. What would be even better is that sort of integration of SQL into Python, although I have to admit that the RDBS support for Python is much slicker than Perl's DBI, and it blows away that crap called JDBC or ODBC.
I actually still have the old mp3's that I ripped from the originals, so that's suiting me just fine until I get new copies. I like having the original CDs around for a few reasons:
The ability to recode to a different format (going from one lossy format to another just doesn't work): I used to have a bunch of my songs on MiniDisc for portability before mp3 hit the scene, so some of my favorite music has been on MiniDisc, mp3, and now ogg.
I do ocasionally go back to the CD for the liner notes.
The ability to ride my moral high horse. There, I admitted it. I'm not going to stand on the proverbial street corner (/.) and preach to the heathen masses:-), but I just think it's the right thing for me to do. Besides, I also believe in fair use (although, as another poster observed, you'll find disagreements over what constitutes fair use), and I think my philosophy makes me a more credible advocate for that cause.
As for what happened to my CDs? The last place I remember having them was the car, which my wife normally drives. Knowing her, my CDs were taking up space that she wanted for her Garth Brooks CDs, so she pitched them (deliberately or on accident). Or maybe they got ripped off. I don't know.
What's more, if I can find them used at the local record store, I'll probably get them that way, which contridicts my earilier statement that the record companies would see more money from me, at least directly. That's because I also believe in the doctorine of first sale, which allows for the resale of original copies of copyrighted works, and falls squarely into fair use. It could be argued that by reducing the number of used copies by one, I'm forcing someone else to purchase a new one. I'm not convinced of that though. What I do know is that I'll usually get hooked on an artist after picking up a couple of their CDs used and then buy everything new they put out. Furthermore, I'd probably be more interested in buying new CDs if I knew the artist actually made money off of them, but in a world where a record can go gold and still leave the artist oweing the record company money, I'll save the couple bucks going used and then go see their concert (which is where artists make all their money).
I'll never claim not to be a hypocrite, unless it's to be hypocritical.
Well, I have to take issue with whoever modded this as a troll -- flamebait maybe, but not a troll.
That said, I take issue with being called a pirate. I am staunchly against the illegal copying of copyrighted material. I do however believe in fair use. I just finished re-ripping my entire CD collection to ogg format (I previously had it in mp3 format). Why? I think ogg is a more efficient format and I have no desire to infringe on Freehausenfritter's (or whatever their name is) patent. In the process I found that I've lost a few of my CDs since I ripped them to mp3. Not sold, not gave away, just lost. So now I'm going to go out and buy new copies. That means more money in the RIAA's pocket. If I hadn't meticulously gone through my collection to rip it, I probably wouldn't have noticed a few missing from the hundreds I've acquired over the years. So that's fair use, and I think the record companies would have a hard time arguing that fair use hurts their sales.
The other reason that DRM matters I think is summed up well by the guy that posted from CMU -- I don't think I could say it better, so I'll just defer to them.
Yes. Okay, we bought ours on day 1, but didn't set it up until a few weeks later (it was my Christmas gift) -- still we were running 1.0 and it was rock solid. The stability has actually decreased over time: in the 2.x line I had to do the unplug to reset trick twice. Other than that, bug-free from day 1.
And the "Wife Acceptance Factor" isn't by coinsidence: TiVo spent years and a good chunk of their VC money on useability testing -- especially for the "Wife Acceptance Factor" of the remote (which is the remote used by the Phillips units, but not the Sony units). They ended up getting a few patents on the remote alone: it's kidney shape, size and layout make it much easier for women (who typically have smaller hands) to use. The fact that it allowed us to centrally manage almost anything in our entertainment center that my wife has any interest in using, and in the process toss 3 other remotes, really helped with the "Wife Acceptance Factor" too. Now the only remotes we have floating around are the TiVo and the DVD.
Oh, and when we bought our second TiVo, my wife nixed the Sony based on the remote alone.
As another poster observed, part of the motivation for the Series2 was to build a platform that could handle HDTV. TiVo has built a dual-DirectTV HDTV unit, but the main problem they have with it is that HDTV streams are so huge that they had to use something like 18 hard drives in order to give the unit something like 60 hours of record time, so right now they're waiting for the hard drive densities to catch up. The goal is to be able to achive the same capacity level with more like 3 hard drives. I've often said one of my main requirements for adopting HDTV is that my TiVo supports it.
Oh, and I'm one of those people with the completely flexible lifetime subscription. According to my wife, we're like TiVo customer #7 (she bought it the day it came out). And it's not just that the wording wasn't clear -- I have a message from TiVo explicitly stating the flexibility of the subscriptions back when they first started. That didn't stop us from buying a second lifetime subscription when we got our second unit: we were using both in tandem for a while.
-"Zow"
Re:I have moderator points, but...
on
Web Hospices?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Me too, but I wanted to mod it "funny". So there, we just cancelled each other out.
You were only a "Potential Customer" to begin with. They aren't loosing established business.
You have flat out stated that you are not going to buy their product. They've lost you as a (potential) customer and nothing they do now is going to change that.
The pet supply market (at least for cats, which is where a good chunk of my income goes:-) consists of a couple huge companies like Iams and Science Diet (both of which I believe are owned by even larger conglomerates), and a lot of tiny, botique-type brands. The big guys aren't going to care much what you think about one lone distibuter who accounts for.001% of their sales, and the small guys are fighting to sell where ever they can, so they don't want to cut off what is probably a significant revinue source.
Likewise, the companies probably have very little say in what goes on the frontpage of this minor Internet merchant. I imagine the conglomerants could demand to be on the frontpage if they so desired, but it's probably not worth their time.
These companies have much more important ethical issues to deal with right now, like if they should continue to supply retailers that are facing charges of animal abuse, not just some clown who's gone sue-happy.
Okay, when I first read that, I thought it said: Debian Internal Projects Sides by Andreas Tille, and I thought, "Who has a problem with Andreas Tille?"
Remove Insightful, Informative, and Interesting. They're redundant.
Does that mean they should get a -1?
Sorry, couldn't resist. All good points, although the moderation system hasn't effectively changed since M2 was introduced, so I'm not holding my breath.
I got my account (see number above) on October 18, 1998. I remember that I waited a while (like a couple months maybe) after the account system started as I really didn't have a compelling reason to get an account. In any case, extrapolating from the data point provided by singularity, it would seem that your UID is consistent with one issued in November 1998. My guess is that something failed when you first registered, so it displayed some sort of error even though it added you to the database. Make sense?
Slashdot Mirror
How's that? I mean, most games aren't designed to be realistic. If that were the case, well then, why play? Reality is all over the place. Besides, the design of most games depends on some sort of time-compression: in most of the RPG type games I've played (like Final Fantisy) months pass in a matter of hours. A trip across the ocean takes a lot longer than 30 seconds, but there's no point in making the player wait 5 days, so they compress the time down to 30 seconds. Some games have the concept of sleep, but it's something that takes another 30 seconds, not the hours that the characters actually sleep.
Okay, I really don't understand your reasoning for that. How would they make more money by telling the gamer, "Sorry, you may have paid for this game, but you can't play anymore today because we said so." It seems like a quick way to alienate almost all your players.
Personally, I think that if people are addicted to something, that's their problem, and they need to understand that before anyone else will be able to help them. Hopefully they do so before making it my problem by crawling into their car in no state to drive. But just because someone spends all night playing a game every once and a while doesn't make them an adict anymore than someone who has a little too much to drink every now and then.
Then there's /.
-"Zow"
You're absolutely right. I'm looking at this on one of the Dell FP-2000s running off a VGA connection at 1600x1200 -- didn't even bother with DVI due to the max resolution. Even with a VGA connection though, it looks great. Like I said in another comment, I haven't tried it with anything graphics intensive like games, but for general office usage like code and document editing, I think it's the greatest thing since Roomba (forget the fact that the FP-2000 came first).
-"Zow"
I haven't seen any, but I don't think it'll do you any good b/c I doubt any KVM switch manufacturer is going to convert that VGA signal to DVI, at least for less than it would cost to buy a new laptop with DVI built in (if such a thing exists). Additionally, once your laptop has converted the signal to VGA, the damage (to the signal) has already been done, so you're not really gaining anything.
One solution is to get a LCD that accepts both VGA and DVI and allows you to switch between them, then just use a KVM for the keyboard & mouse. I did something similar years ago to use my 21" monitor (with a HD15 cable & RGB in) with both a PC and a mac with a D-15 connector. It was kind of clunky, but it worked.
The other solution is just to accept the VGA signal. I'm using one of the Dell 20" FPs right here at 1600x1200 on a VGA signal and it looks great. Of course, this is at work, so I don't know how good it is for games and the like, but for code/document editing, it can't be beat.
-"Zow"
You know, I've had trouble with Tyan boards in the past -- BIOS problems (that kept the "on-board" SCSI from working), and a board that went up in a puff of white smoke one day. Never the less, I got the Tyan S2462 -- the higher end dual-Athlon board. I carefully followed AMD's specs for power and memory, and I haven't had any problems with it, save for the noise from all the fans to keep it cool. Maybe it's the fact that it's AMD's reference design and not Tyan's, I don't know.
In response to the original question, I use the integrated Adaptec SCSI and 3Com LAN and they perform just as well as, if not better than, what I've seen using separate components (purely antedotial, as opposed to lies, damn lies, and benchmarks). I've overridden the on-board AGP video with my own card, and I don't even recall if it has on-board sound -- I think so (it has everything else), but in any case, I threw in my own sound card. My point is that if you get a high-end enough board, it may have everything integrated, but it will also allow you to gracefully override any of those components.
-"Zow"
What's more, I've got the Panasonic E20 DVD Recorder (almost identical to the E30 mentioned in the story), and let me tell you: its user interface sucks. It's weird, jumping between the DVD-R and the TiVo is like jumping between a 1986 Yugo missing second gear, and a mint Jag, in terms of useability (although the Panasonic does much better on the quarter mile than the Yugo :-)
-"Zow"
No can do dude. I've got the previous generation of Panasonic DVD recorder (the E20), and if I try to play a DVD on my Sampo (with Macrovison disabled) and record it on the Panasonic, the Panasonic pops up an error message and refuses to start recording. (Not that I actually want to copy and DVDs, I just wanted to see if I could.)
-"Zow"
As I recall, he intended for it to have a 1/6 (12.5%) reinfection rate, but he messed up the math somewhere and actually ended up giving it a 5/6 chance of attempting to reinfect.
-"Zow"
A few years back, I was on Babble, the Cure mailing list. One day someone posted that they were recently in a car accident, and had been listening to the Cure at the time: not on tape, but on the radio. Suddenly, out of the wood work came a bunch of "Me-too"'s: people that had been in auto accidents or similar, and had been listening to the Cure at the time. Some started to think that this was some kind of omen, mentioning how disconcerting it was and the like, until one guy posted a response along the lines of: "Everyone on this list is a Cure fan. Because of that, everyone will have a tendancy to either listen to Cure tapes in their car, or tune to radio stations that play the Cure." That shut everyone up fast.
The point here is that you're a Linux user. You read /. because it has a lot of stories about Linux and tweaking Linux. The fact that you were tweaking some aspect of your Linux system, went over to /. and saw a story about exactly what you were doing is not coincidential. It's a very basic statistical correlation.
Now then, had you gone over to MSN and found an artical about tweaking fonts in Linux while in the midst of doing such, I'd say it's time to pull out the tin-foil hats, pack up the kids and head for the hills.
-"Zow"
Like many others, I've been throwing around ideas along these lines for a while. More to the point:
All in all though, I think the main limiting factor to such an undertaking is its usefullness. I mean, what could be done with such a network while retaining its stealthy qualities? Any computation I can think of would require so many resources as to violate the steathy nature of the beast. That is, even if such a calculation is network efficient, I think the high CPU useage would tip people off. Even if you patched the system so that task manager, top, etc, didn't report the worm's CPU useage, some people would notice that their computers are noticeabily warmer, laptops have a shorter battery life, etc. If the creator of the network were to try to gain in any way through the use of stolen credit card or bank info, law enforcement would track them down when they try to use that information. So as another poster noted, this is really just a fancy way of saying "1 0wn y0u", which is really juvenile. Interesting thought exercise though.
-"Zow"
Or Mandrake -- one of the goals for 9.0 that they succeeded at was the elimination of all proprietary / commercial software from all versions (meaning the shrinkwrap versions too). StarOffice was replaced with OpenOffice, Netscape was wholely replaced with Mozilla, etc. Not to knock Debian or Gentoo: I think they do a wonderful job of demonstrating what is possible given a team of dedicated volunteers. At the same time, I think Mandrake's done the best job of demonstrating that a company can be wholely dedicated to open source and still be successful.
Disclaimer: I switched from Debian to back to Mandrake because it was the easiest to get up and running on my system. Just because it's easy to install and configure doesn't just mean it's for beginners: my time is valuable. And urpmi is just as good as apt-get for my purposes.
-"Zow"
A little off-topic, but that just reminds me of a friend who was going nuts on stereo components back in college. One day she calls me up and says, "I just bought a new speakers, don't they sound great!" and proceeded to hold the phone up next to the speakers. I didn't have the heart to tell her that with the frequency response of phones, her new speakers, that she paid way too much for, sounded like crap.
-"Zow"
Except that I rushed out to buy this fancy LCD flatscreen, so my rendering of the "brighter and more colorful display" is limited by my darker, lower-saturation display.
-"Zow"
Oh wow -- that rocks. Why is this the first I've heard of it? Now, admittidly, I haven't exactly gone looking, but still, I never remember hearing about this in any of the Postgres vs. the world type debates, yet this seems like a really compelling reason to use it over the other available solutions.
Thanks for the pointer.
-"Zow"
SQL is not a programming language -- as another reply pointed out, it is a query language. This was the impetitus (sp?) for Oracle to create PL/SQL, which is short for Procedural SQL: basically it adds basic procedural constructs like loops and conditionals to SQL. (Okay, Oracle may have bought it off someone, but it's wholely an Oracle thing now.) I've started using it more and more at work. As much as I hate using anything Oracle proprietary, if you want to program really close to the data, I haven't seen anything better. I just wish it was available for MySQL or Postgres. What would be even better is that sort of integration of SQL into Python, although I have to admit that the RDBS support for Python is much slicker than Perl's DBI, and it blows away that crap called JDBC or ODBC.
-"Zow"
We've got that already. It's called AOL.
-"Zow"
I actually still have the old mp3's that I ripped from the originals, so that's suiting me just fine until I get new copies. I like having the original CDs around for a few reasons:
As for what happened to my CDs? The last place I remember having them was the car, which my wife normally drives. Knowing her, my CDs were taking up space that she wanted for her Garth Brooks CDs, so she pitched them (deliberately or on accident). Or maybe they got ripped off. I don't know.
What's more, if I can find them used at the local record store, I'll probably get them that way, which contridicts my earilier statement that the record companies would see more money from me, at least directly. That's because I also believe in the doctorine of first sale, which allows for the resale of original copies of copyrighted works, and falls squarely into fair use. It could be argued that by reducing the number of used copies by one, I'm forcing someone else to purchase a new one. I'm not convinced of that though. What I do know is that I'll usually get hooked on an artist after picking up a couple of their CDs used and then buy everything new they put out. Furthermore, I'd probably be more interested in buying new CDs if I knew the artist actually made money off of them, but in a world where a record can go gold and still leave the artist oweing the record company money, I'll save the couple bucks going used and then go see their concert (which is where artists make all their money).
I'll never claim not to be a hypocrite, unless it's to be hypocritical.
-"Zow"
Well, I have to take issue with whoever modded this as a troll -- flamebait maybe, but not a troll.
That said, I take issue with being called a pirate. I am staunchly against the illegal copying of copyrighted material. I do however believe in fair use. I just finished re-ripping my entire CD collection to ogg format (I previously had it in mp3 format). Why? I think ogg is a more efficient format and I have no desire to infringe on Freehausenfritter's (or whatever their name is) patent. In the process I found that I've lost a few of my CDs since I ripped them to mp3. Not sold, not gave away, just lost. So now I'm going to go out and buy new copies. That means more money in the RIAA's pocket. If I hadn't meticulously gone through my collection to rip it, I probably wouldn't have noticed a few missing from the hundreds I've acquired over the years. So that's fair use, and I think the record companies would have a hard time arguing that fair use hurts their sales.
The other reason that DRM matters I think is summed up well by the guy that posted from CMU -- I don't think I could say it better, so I'll just defer to them.
-"Zow"
Yes. Okay, we bought ours on day 1, but didn't set it up until a few weeks later (it was my Christmas gift) -- still we were running 1.0 and it was rock solid. The stability has actually decreased over time: in the 2.x line I had to do the unplug to reset trick twice. Other than that, bug-free from day 1.
-"Zow"
And the "Wife Acceptance Factor" isn't by coinsidence: TiVo spent years and a good chunk of their VC money on useability testing -- especially for the "Wife Acceptance Factor" of the remote (which is the remote used by the Phillips units, but not the Sony units). They ended up getting a few patents on the remote alone: it's kidney shape, size and layout make it much easier for women (who typically have smaller hands) to use. The fact that it allowed us to centrally manage almost anything in our entertainment center that my wife has any interest in using, and in the process toss 3 other remotes, really helped with the "Wife Acceptance Factor" too. Now the only remotes we have floating around are the TiVo and the DVD.
Oh, and when we bought our second TiVo, my wife nixed the Sony based on the remote alone.
-"Zow"
As another poster observed, part of the motivation for the Series2 was to build a platform that could handle HDTV. TiVo has built a dual-DirectTV HDTV unit, but the main problem they have with it is that HDTV streams are so huge that they had to use something like 18 hard drives in order to give the unit something like 60 hours of record time, so right now they're waiting for the hard drive densities to catch up. The goal is to be able to achive the same capacity level with more like 3 hard drives. I've often said one of my main requirements for adopting HDTV is that my TiVo supports it.
Oh, and I'm one of those people with the completely flexible lifetime subscription. According to my wife, we're like TiVo customer #7 (she bought it the day it came out). And it's not just that the wording wasn't clear -- I have a message from TiVo explicitly stating the flexibility of the subscriptions back when they first started. That didn't stop us from buying a second lifetime subscription when we got our second unit: we were using both in tandem for a while.
-"Zow"
Me too, but I wanted to mod it "funny". So there, we just cancelled each other out.
Nothing to see here, move along.
-"Zow"
I don't think that's very effective. Here's why:
-"Zow"
Okay, when I first read that, I thought it said: Debian Internal Projects Sides by Andreas Tille, and I thought, "Who has a problem with Andreas Tille?"
Time for more caffeine.
-"Zow"
Does that mean they should get a -1?
Sorry, couldn't resist. All good points, although the moderation system hasn't effectively changed since M2 was introduced, so I'm not holding my breath.
-"Zow"
I got my account (see number above) on October 18, 1998. I remember that I waited a while (like a couple months maybe) after the account system started as I really didn't have a compelling reason to get an account. In any case, extrapolating from the data point provided by singularity, it would seem that your UID is consistent with one issued in November 1998. My guess is that something failed when you first registered, so it displayed some sort of error even though it added you to the database. Make sense?
-"Zow"