I'm curious, I've always been drawn to the do-it-yourself PVR projects because there weren't any restrictions on how to use the stuff you record, and the ability to back up shows onto CD.
That being said, I'm curious if any of the commercial PVR solutions have the same lack of restrictions? Are there any tivo-like PVRs that allow you to save shows to a network drive in mpeg or some other standard format out of the box, or do they require a hack? Which ones can be hacked
jmac880 hit the nail on the head here.
I had the same idea about a jukebox changer a few years back, when hard drives were only in the 1-4 gb range. Load up one with cd-r's and you have enormous storage capacity.
The problem now, is that in the current market hard drives are dirt cheap, and are hundreds of times larger in capacity than a cd or even a DVD. It simply doesn't make economic sense to buy a DVD changer (and discs) for $400 or more when you can get somewhere in the neighborhood of a TB of hard drive space for the same amount (even lower than a $1/GB nowadays), not to mention lower seek times and more secure storage (some of those cd-rs I burned 4 years ago are almost unreadable)
Now I do think that a DVD changer would make economic sense if the larger ~27GB capacity DVDs come out soon and their price drops quickly. Then when you're talking about 25-100TB of storage in a changer it makes a lot more economic sense. For right now though, hard drives are the way to go.
Your upgrade cycle is freaky close to mine. Used AMD/Intel at home. Had a mobo problem with the ABIT KT-7 RAID, returned it for a nice stable Asus a7v-133a. All this of course was replacing my k6-2-400mhz (which is still running on an msi board)
I agree about never running the top of the line stuff. I'd rather hold back and get stable performance at a lower cost. Same with graphics cards. Sure, I have to play newer games at either 800x600 or 1024 on my geforce4, but I just can't justify spending hundreds of dollars on the newest card. Besides, every time I've gone back to a game to see what I was missing at 1600x1280, it really hasn't been much.
that is awesome:) Sadly I only have like 4 items on your list and the 1.44MB floppy is one of them... I really wish I could find a slot-loading dvd burner so I could replace the pioneer drive
Everyone has been going on about how we can't afford to go back to the moon, pay for Iraq, etc.. etc... I say, why not? Who cares if we go into even more debt? I mean honestly. Lots of people spend beyond their means... and the US economy more than has the means to pay back any sort of debt interest and all. Not to mention, they will never default on it.
So I say, let's spend the money and get off this rock once and for all. The potential benefits of making space travel/commerce easier will only make it easier to pay back whatever piddly sum they spend to go back to the moon. Even 20 billion dollars works out to what? Like $50 a person. Not to mention it'll be scaled based on income. Whatever. That's your cable bill for the month
While I'm at it I think i'm gonna go buy that Athlon64 I've been eyeing too.
Every time something like this happens, be it phone number portability, or forcing power/cable companies to share their lines, prices always go up!
In the case of phone/cable lines I have to pay $5 extra a month so I have the *option* of switching to a carrier who charges more than the monopoly (because the monopoly in question charges higher rates to competitors to lease their line). I realize the cellular network is not a monopoly, but honestly all this really did was give all the cell companies an excuse to charge more.
To all the people that pushed for number portability in the first place... why?? When you move, you have to get a new phone number anyway! why should switching cell phone carriers be any different?
While deregulation, in theory, sounds great... in real life it always seems to result in extra fees....
regarding your signature... what did you think of the movie after having read the book? I think I'd be embarrased to have that on my car since most people would only know about the movie!
Although Orrin Hatch is the last congressman I'd trust giving money to, this goes to show that members of congress could be bought.
If enough people who cared about these issues could get organized and donate $5-$20 to an election campaign, it'd be possible to outbid the RIAA. There's a lot more little guys out there then there are people in the RIAA's pocket. Again, you'd have to find the right politicians (certainly not Hatch) but it is possible. What the anti-RIAA/MPAA movement needs is a lobbying group!!
While that may be true, the information can still benefit them financially. If the downloads of a particular album are far exceeding the sales, it still tells them the artist is popular. From there, they can make huge money-making decisions... featuring them on an awards show, telling the major retailers "okay this is your $9.99 special for the week", getting manufacturers to crank out more artist merchandise, etc...
In short, while the people downloading may not be the ones purchasing; they may still be spending money on other merchandise or concerts. Or perhaps the music hasn't reached their particular price point yet. (This last point is big for me... I can't justify spending $50 for a videogame, but when it gets down to $30 I really start to consider it.)
I take the view that this is a good thing (tm) for Microsoft to do. They're big enough that they may be able to muscle the record companies into cutting them a deal for the songs. This of course will anger Apple and set off a series of lawsuits in every direction. Either way it shakes up the industry quite a bit, and that's what we need. Lots of competition. And I imagine M$ is bound to lose money anyway on this deal, since they don't have a hardware player. And if it did come down to litigation, I don't think anyone would be sorry to see lawsuits directed at the RIAA or M$
As part of the company you are in a very good position to make a difference. A number of memos from insiders explaining respectfully and rationally why it does not make sense to fight this could have some impact.
Not to mention, when this comes back around to hurt the company the investors/board of directors are going to be looking for replacements for the upper level mgmt that screwed up. Even if you are in a position where you might get laid off as a result of this, at least you'll get severence pay of some sort while you look for another job. Genie is probably for most people the first name people think of when considering garage door openers... I can't even name another brand off the top of my head. Explain that in a memo... do they really want to start to alienate customers when bad press comes around, and give another company to jump into that marketshare?
I would think the obvious solution is for an individual or a group of individuals to contribute more money to a campaign than the corporations themselves; in essence, outpurchasing them. It could happen, but so far people haven't been organized enough for it to. Else, there aren't enough rich people with similiar views (perhaps because they are executives of said corporations)
Simply use the money you would otherwise spend on things like DVDs and watching movies and start a group that lobbies politicians. The problem with this is people want their movies too much
Athens has over 2,500,000 users (from UK and Irish Academia and the NHS) and allows secure single sign on to more than 300 resources. It has also been around for years (at least 7). So all this talk of secure single sign-on being "new" seems to be a bit of misinformation as far as I can tell.
Yeah, and with **Only ONE sign in*** you too can have access to thousands of articles and millions of comments on Slashdot!!! What an innovation!
Honestly what you describe sounds nothing like what the article is talking about. This is more of a MS Passport type system they're describing
Hey and then you could make stereoscopic photos too. Get 3 and make panoramas. Heck get a bunch and set up a ring of digital cameras so you can do that rotate around a person in midair shot they do in every movie nowadays. I wonder how you'd make a timer to do that right
The HUGE problem with reversible computing (IIRC) is that it takes gobs of memory to do relatively simple operations. I believe it's called the "Garbage problem" and is the reason reversible computing hasn't taken off when it was conceived in the 60's.
Why? Because the machine has to save all the intermediate results in a computation. Conventional processors don't do this, and those intermediate results end up as heat. If that seems wierd, imagine a simple AND or OR gate... the 2 inputs become one output... then the gate has to be reset before the next clock cycle, which costs energy to do.
A good book I've read that covers the subjects of reversable and quantum computing is
Minds, Machines, and the Multiverse by Julian Brown. It's a couple years old, so it doesn't have the latest advances, but as for basic principles of Reversable and Quantum computing, it's an excellent introduction. Explains RSA, quantum logic, code breaking, q. teleportation, etc... I own a copy and enjoyed it.
While for a large business, $3000 must be dirt cheap.... for the rest of us it is WAY too expensive. I could either build a kick ass entertainment center for $3000 or their "budget" server.... I'll give you one guess to figure out which one I'd choose.
I've learned to be very skeptical of any of these articles on "budget" this or that, because they rarely are. To me, a budget server means less than $500. How about an article on how to build and configure a home network server for that price?
I also don't think that the lack of support for windows media files means it won't work at all with other services, I think the services need to give you an oportunity to convert the music to mp3 or some other less controled standard.
I'm curious... I might be totally in the dark here, but do a lot of other people actually use WMA format? I guess I'm sort of under the impression that MP3 is king, with a few OGG and AAC fans out there. I can't think of anyone I know that keeps their music in WMA format, only maybe a few random downloaded clips.
They probably take a worst case scenario, like driving through rush hour traffic in bad weather. I've actually found a lot of my longer trips are pretty close to the time they report, taking into consideration construction and stopping for lunch.
But I definitely see them being inaccurate especially on shorter trips, where those things aren't as much of a factor. Not to mention a few times when I mapped out a place a mile away and it gave me a 7+ mile route involving two major roads (even after I checked the avoid highways button)... so they must have some algorithm for determining how long it takes to drive on a particular type of street, that isn't always terribly accurate.
Yes, while downloaded music is great for throwaway tunes you're not likely to listen to again, I want my good music in a relatively permanent form, uncompressed. Yes, I might even rip that for conveniece in order to listen to it at work or something, but I still want a pressed CD.
I agree. I think that these music download services are a step in the right direction. My big problem is that I'm not purchasing a tangible good when I download music. What if my hard drive crashes? What if the company goes out of business (or abandons that division). What if my encription "key" stops working? Will I be able to use it on all my devices in some way or another? There's just too many unknowns in that purchase for me to feel comfortable, especially at a dollar a song.
At least with a CD if I drop or damage or lose it, I know it's my own fault. And I have the ability to take good care of it so I don't have to worry about that. There's just too many things out of my control with downloadable music.
I believe the On star system doesn't completely shut down the vehicle... it just limits its speed if the vehicle is stolen to something rediculuosly slow. The idea being that it's easier and safer to catch the thief.
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That being said, I'm curious if any of the commercial PVR solutions have the same lack of restrictions? Are there any tivo-like PVRs that allow you to save shows to a network drive in mpeg or some other standard format out of the box, or do they require a hack? Which ones can be hacked
The problem now, is that in the current market hard drives are dirt cheap, and are hundreds of times larger in capacity than a cd or even a DVD. It simply doesn't make economic sense to buy a DVD changer (and discs) for $400 or more when you can get somewhere in the neighborhood of a TB of hard drive space for the same amount (even lower than a $1/GB nowadays), not to mention lower seek times and more secure storage (some of those cd-rs I burned 4 years ago are almost unreadable)
Now I do think that a DVD changer would make economic sense if the larger ~27GB capacity DVDs come out soon and their price drops quickly. Then when you're talking about 25-100TB of storage in a changer it makes a lot more economic sense. For right now though, hard drives are the way to go.
I agree about never running the top of the line stuff. I'd rather hold back and get stable performance at a lower cost. Same with graphics cards. Sure, I have to play newer games at either 800x600 or 1024 on my geforce4, but I just can't justify spending hundreds of dollars on the newest card. Besides, every time I've gone back to a game to see what I was missing at 1600x1280, it really hasn't been much.
that is awesome :) Sadly I only have like 4 items on your list and the 1.44MB floppy is one of them... I really wish I could find a slot-loading dvd burner so I could replace the pioneer drive
Welcome to the club!
So I say, let's spend the money and get off this rock once and for all. The potential benefits of making space travel/commerce easier will only make it easier to pay back whatever piddly sum they spend to go back to the moon. Even 20 billion dollars works out to what? Like $50 a person. Not to mention it'll be scaled based on income. Whatever. That's your cable bill for the month
While I'm at it I think i'm gonna go buy that Athlon64 I've been eyeing too.
In the case of phone/cable lines I have to pay $5 extra a month so I have the *option* of switching to a carrier who charges more than the monopoly (because the monopoly in question charges higher rates to competitors to lease their line). I realize the cellular network is not a monopoly, but honestly all this really did was give all the cell companies an excuse to charge more.
To all the people that pushed for number portability in the first place... why?? When you move, you have to get a new phone number anyway! why should switching cell phone carriers be any different?
While deregulation, in theory, sounds great... in real life it always seems to result in extra fees. ...
regarding your signature... what did you think of the movie after having read the book? I think I'd be embarrased to have that on my car since most people would only know about the movie!
If enough people who cared about these issues could get organized and donate $5-$20 to an election campaign, it'd be possible to outbid the RIAA. There's a lot more little guys out there then there are people in the RIAA's pocket. Again, you'd have to find the right politicians (certainly not Hatch) but it is possible. What the anti-RIAA/MPAA movement needs is a lobbying group!!
In short, while the people downloading may not be the ones purchasing; they may still be spending money on other merchandise or concerts. Or perhaps the music hasn't reached their particular price point yet. (This last point is big for me... I can't justify spending $50 for a videogame, but when it gets down to $30 I really start to consider it.)
I take the view that this is a good thing (tm) for Microsoft to do. They're big enough that they may be able to muscle the record companies into cutting them a deal for the songs. This of course will anger Apple and set off a series of lawsuits in every direction. Either way it shakes up the industry quite a bit, and that's what we need. Lots of competition. And I imagine M$ is bound to lose money anyway on this deal, since they don't have a hardware player. And if it did come down to litigation, I don't think anyone would be sorry to see lawsuits directed at the RIAA or M$
Not to mention, when this comes back around to hurt the company the investors/board of directors are going to be looking for replacements for the upper level mgmt that screwed up. Even if you are in a position where you might get laid off as a result of this, at least you'll get severence pay of some sort while you look for another job. Genie is probably for most people the first name people think of when considering garage door openers... I can't even name another brand off the top of my head. Explain that in a memo... do they really want to start to alienate customers when bad press comes around, and give another company to jump into that marketshare?
Simply use the money you would otherwise spend on things like DVDs and watching movies and start a group that lobbies politicians. The problem with this is people want their movies too much
Yeah, and with **Only ONE sign in*** you too can have access to thousands of articles and millions of comments on Slashdot!!! What an innovation!
Honestly what you describe sounds nothing like what the article is talking about. This is more of a MS Passport type system they're describing
Hey and then you could make stereoscopic photos too. Get 3 and make panoramas. Heck get a bunch and set up a ring of digital cameras so you can do that rotate around a person in midair shot they do in every movie nowadays. I wonder how you'd make a timer to do that right
Why? Because the machine has to save all the intermediate results in a computation. Conventional processors don't do this, and those intermediate results end up as heat. If that seems wierd, imagine a simple AND or OR gate... the 2 inputs become one output... then the gate has to be reset before the next clock cycle, which costs energy to do.
A good book I've read that covers the subjects of reversable and quantum computing is Minds, Machines, and the Multiverse by Julian Brown. It's a couple years old, so it doesn't have the latest advances, but as for basic principles of Reversable and Quantum computing, it's an excellent introduction. Explains RSA, quantum logic, code breaking, q. teleportation, etc... I own a copy and enjoyed it.
I guess I'm just used to being able to dig around my room for half the parts I need instead of starting from scratch :)
PS. Nice job on the array!
I've learned to be very skeptical of any of these articles on "budget" this or that, because they rarely are. To me, a budget server means less than $500. How about an article on how to build and configure a home network server for that price?
I'm curious... I might be totally in the dark here, but do a lot of other people actually use WMA format? I guess I'm sort of under the impression that MP3 is king, with a few OGG and AAC fans out there. I can't think of anyone I know that keeps their music in WMA format, only maybe a few random downloaded clips.
But I definitely see them being inaccurate especially on shorter trips, where those things aren't as much of a factor. Not to mention a few times when I mapped out a place a mile away and it gave me a 7+ mile route involving two major roads (even after I checked the avoid highways button)... so they must have some algorithm for determining how long it takes to drive on a particular type of street, that isn't always terribly accurate.
quite! :-P
I agree. I think that these music download services are a step in the right direction. My big problem is that I'm not purchasing a tangible good when I download music. What if my hard drive crashes? What if the company goes out of business (or abandons that division). What if my encription "key" stops working? Will I be able to use it on all my devices in some way or another? There's just too many unknowns in that purchase for me to feel comfortable, especially at a dollar a song.
At least with a CD if I drop or damage or lose it, I know it's my own fault. And I have the ability to take good care of it so I don't have to worry about that. There's just too many things out of my control with downloadable music.
I believe the On star system doesn't completely shut down the vehicle... it just limits its speed if the vehicle is stolen to something rediculuosly slow. The idea being that it's easier and safer to catch the thief.
my original comment to the ealier story