Not only is G higher than B, but this new wireless networking is Xtreme! Don't you understand?
Haven't you seen the X Games where those guys jump the dirt bikes way up into the air and then jump over their handlebars, get back onto their seat, and then land it on the other side? OK now imagine that excitement, but with wireless networking. Are you starting to see the picture? Oh, you didn't you drink the free kool-aid on the way into Macworld Expo? Then you'll never understand, sorry.
Well they don't sell anything, they just do a pricewatch-type thing on the prices for products and get paid for some of the referrals. And they let you review things they don't get any money off of (see the Restaurants section for example).
I haven't checked out Epinions extensively in a while, but I worked there very briefly a few years ago and their ultimate goal was to let the community build the product hierarchy, which is good for them (they don't have to pay experts full-time to build/prune the product trees) and good for the consumer (you could review just about anything, as long as the community was fast and responsive). That is, as long as certain people were in charge of keeping the product hierarchy clean and correct (think dmoz.org). I don't know if they have implemented this yet, though.
They definitely don't hide bad reviews of things (see the cell phone service provider section, for instance). They pride themselves on having a great deal of unbiased reviews. They just believe that if people are given access to good reviews on a product, it will help steer them towards the right product for them, which the person will eventually buy. Sure, sometimes a bunch of bad reviews will lead people to not buy something they might normally, but that isn't usually how things play out.
I didn't know Usenet was still used by anythong other than spammers. Maybe I should check it out again.:-)
I didn't mention this, but on Epinions, in addition to the web of trust stuff, people can rate the reviews as "very helpful", "helpful", "not helpful", etc. These ratings are supposed to be more objective. You might not agree with the person's opinions, but if they did their homework and wrote a thorough and thoughtful review, you would still rate the review as "helpful". Based on these peer reviewed ratings, the reviews are sorted best first. So this in addition to the web of trust rating sets the ranking of the reviews you see.
In addition, people can post comments about the review, but those don't affect the rating at all, but allow people to leave informative feedback.
A point I forgot to mention is this: I like the "Web of Trust" because it closely mirrors what we do in everyday life. You probably have a friend whose taste in movies is pretty close to yours. When he says a new movie is good, you trust him, and you go see it. Then you probably have another friend who has terrible taste in movies and when he sees a movie and tells you that it's great and you should go see it, you just filter him out completely.
From the beginning Epinions.com thought, "That would be great/cheap content to just have people post their opinions about products, but why would you trust random people?" So they baked in a rather complex "web of trust" into their website from Day 1.
If you see someone whose reviews reflect your own opinions, you can add them to your list of trusted people. Then when you see a list of reviews, your trusted people's reviews are at the top. Furthermore, your trusted people also have people they trust and you are likely to turst those people too, just maybe not quite as much. So your trusted people's trusted people's reviews bubble up near to the top, and so on.
Also, if you see some reviewer who you think is way off base, you can block them and never see their reviews again. It's a clever scheme, and if you use the site enough, you can tailor it to serve you decent reviews quickly. And it's all based on your opinion of other people's opinions, unlike Amazon which just bubbles up reviews from people who write a lot of reviews. I think quantity of reviews is hardly a good metric to use.
I've talked to a Tivo executive who stated that the number of people with DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes that pay for and record pay-per-view movies is several orders of magnitude higher than people with plain DirecTV receivers.
This makes complete sense if you think about it. If you aren't watching a pay-per-view movie with a Tivo, you have to sit there and watch a 2 hour movie from start to finish. No pausing, no rewinding, and especially no time shifting. Most people would rather go through the hassle of going to the video store to rent a DVD or VHS tape. With Tivo you buy and record the movie, watch it as many times as you want, whenever you want, pausing and rewinding, without having to go to the video store both to get and return the movie.
A large source of DirecTV's revenue is from pay-per-view (especially adult), so this fact alone is sealing the deal between Tivo and DirecTV. So much so that the next generation DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes are made exclusively by Hughes (DirecTV) and they will most likely be practically giving these things away to customers once they make them in bulk. Once a large majority of their viewers have Tivos, they can stop doing silly things like having one pay-per-view movie on 4 different channels, each starting 30 minutes later than the previous one, which would result in more variety of pay-per-view movies, good for the consumer and DirecTV.
It seems like cable companies maybe haven't attempted to study this new technology and done these tests like the satellite companies have, which doesn't surprise me as monopolies aren't usually very fast-moving.
The Tivo profiling article was here on Slashdot, so most of us saw it. It was supposed to be a humorous article about how software that tries to be human can sometimes go wrong. It wasn't supposed to be a "Tivo is bad - Tivo will psychoanalyze you incorrectly - don't buy Tivo" article. If you read the full article you would read that it was talking about "Tivo profiling gone wrong" as being a funny plot on two different comedy shows recently, one at least being based on a true story. I find it interesting how many slashdotters have almost no sense of humor at all.
I didn't mean to imply that live tv was completely useless, and I don't think I said that. I was just responding the the poster who said that someone saying there is no need to buffer live tv is utter bullshit. I said he had a bit of a point. It's a nice feature, I'm glad Tivo has it, but if I was going to roll my own Tivo, it wouldn't be the first thing I'd implement. It might not even make the first release.
You have a point, though, that if live tv wasn't buffered, watching live vs. recorded tv would be completely different whereas with a tivo you don't have to think about it.
All I'm saying is that in my opinion buffering live tv is a nice-to-have feature, not a must-have feature despite the fact that it's the one main feature that Tivo advertises in its commercials.
Oh, and if you can constantly buffer live tv using just an MPEG-decoder with _no_ CPU usage at all, I'd like to see it.:-)
You can put a Tivo into "Standby" mode, but I don't know anyone who does that. I think all it does is stop the output to the TV. The Tivo still runs because it comes out of standby immediately, and I believe it still buffers live tv during standby, too, but I'm not positive on that because I never put mine into standby.
Yeah thanks to the magic of random file access, you can start watching delayed while still recording. This alone is possibly the coolest thing about a PVR/DVR over a VCR.
Well, considering that most people who have Tivos stop watching live TV as much and only watch shows they recorded (some stop watching any live TV at all, even for sporting events), he has a bit of a point. It might not occur to you, but your poor Tivo is constantly recording 24 hours a day, not just when you want to record a show. The Tivo's hard disk is constantly written to while you are at sleep and at work and when there's nothing but complete garbage on. And why? Just in case you turn on the TV and start watching something you might care about enough that you want to pause it or rewind it.
So while pausing Live TV seems like a cool "must have" feature, if all you watch is programs you specifically record, you still have that funtionality. Then you can vastly improve the life of the hard drive in your PVR, not to mention the CPU cycles wasted on buffering Live TV. If you want to pause Live TV, just hit the record button, then it's a recorded program and you can pause it.
Yeah, the DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes have been around for almost 2 years, but are not only known as DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes, but I believe Tivo footed the bill for some of the hardware manufacturing costs (along with Sony or Phillips or whichever consumer electronics company made the box), like they do with the regular Tivo standalones.
The new DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes are Series 2 boxes (they have USB ports on them) and are officially called "DirecTV PVR powered by Tivo". Note the "powered by", less emphasis on the Tivo. They are expected to be out in stores any day now and are only manufactured by Hughes (DirecTV). When you have a problem with these machines, you call DirecTV, not Tivo. Prevously with the Series1 if you had a problem and you called DirecTV, they would tell you to call Tivo. Little differences, but basically the new DirecTV DVRs are just DirecTV licensing the Tivo software and running most of the show.
I think you're a bit confused on the facts. I'm not an expert on the subject of UltimateTV or Dish Networks PVR, so I might be confused, too, but this is how I understand it.
The first roll out of a PVR/DVR for Dish Network was called a Dishplayer. It was co-created along with WebTV (owned by Microsoft) and had a little WebTV logo on it. The software was notoriously buggy and lost programs/forgot to record programs, etc.
So then Dish Network decided to create their own PVR without the "help" of Microsoft and released the Dish PVR 501 (and now there is a 508 with more disk space).
Meanwhile, Microsoft took their Dishplayer code and took out a lot of the bugs (maybe started over from scratch), and created UltimateTV which worked with DirecTV's system and had dual tuner, but didn't capture much market share. Microsoft ultimately disbanded the UltimateTV group and filtered most of its people into the Xbox group and hope to release some XBox/UltimateTV beast in the future.
A bit later (and a year later than was advertised) Dish Networks released it's next generation PVR, the 721 which supposedly runs on a Linux box (like Tivo) and has cool new features like dual tuner (which both UltimateTV and the DirecTV/Tivo boxes already had). This box from what I hear has even different software than the Dishplayer or the 501 series.
Dish Network has announced their next-next-generation PVR, the 921 which has all the features of the 721, but can record HDTV. They claim this beast will come out in 2003, but most people aren't holding their breath based on the release on the 721, most people aren't expecting this box to be released until 2004 most likely.
So in fact I wasn't referring to only the Dishplayer, I was referring to all generations of the Dish Network PVRs and as far as I know, none of them run UltimateTV software. I believe the only thing close to that is the Dishplayer that ran some WebTV code and that WebTV code was the predecessor for UltimateTV which was a completely seperate Microsoft product.
Like I said, I am not an expert, feel free to correct any of my points if it suits you.
I'm sorry, but I believe that you are wrong. Can you post some proof that the Dish Network has a rebranded ReplayTV?
Everything that I've ever heard about the various instances of the Dish Network PVR (the first Dishplayers, then the 501/508 series, and now the 721 series, which I believe all run different software) said that Dish did the software themselves. Searching on SonicBlue's site (parent company of ReplayTV) shows no hits having anything to do with Dish Network except that their standalone unit works with cable, DirecTV or Dish Networks. You would think that that would be something they would at least mention on their website.
Actually Dish Network has it's own home brew PVR that is fairly popular. They pretty much give away the lower-end one for free if you sign up with them. And you can get a more souped up one (dual tuner, more hard disk space) for roughly the price of a regular Tivo and it doesn't have the monthly recurring Tivo cost. The software and UI pale in comparison to the Tivo, but supposedly they have a decent market share (as far as PVRs go).
As said on here many times, though, Tivo is now licensing their software to folks like AT&T and DirecTV, so you will soon be getting a "DirecTV DVR powered by Tivo" instead of a "Tivo". It's a win-win for both sides and will most likely keep Tivo afloat.
Wow I have the exact opposite feeling. Cathy always annoyed me to no end, only to be eclipsed by Tyler. At least when she was replaced this last season, my annoyance level went down slightly. I fondly remember Season 1 when Robert Llewelyn (sp?) was the one and only decent host. *sigh*
It's how the DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes work and it's a beautiful thing. That along with only-high-quality recording (it saves the MPEG-2 directly from the satellite), and dual tuners (record two shows at once) and you weep tears of joy when you start using it.
I figured he has some little small pinhole type camera that he places in the back of the oven (which I also assume isn't actually on at the time) or refrigerator to get those shots. That's my guess anyway.
You obviously didn't read the "Barney" link in the article. If you had, you would find that the EFF was hosting a site that posted the parody, they didn't put it up themselves, the site is no longer hosted by the EFF, and there is a long standing legal precedent of parody being protected by the First Amendment.
You know, the First Amendment, one of the laws that EFF members like you and I pay the EFF to defend online.
Oh, come on. If the former Attorney General of the United States, Janet Reno can get away with hosting a Dance Party to kick off her race for Governor of Florida, I think the EFF can throw a little dance party without losing too much credit.
Anyone who has played enough of Robotron (in the arcade, stand-up form factor) can attest to the fact that you can occasionally get into the "Robotron Zone" where you can just go through level after level without dying. You stop thinking about where to run and shoot and it just happens. I knew a couple guys who could get into the Robotron Zone and achieve zone 300+.
I think for the design goal, MPEG-1 should be fine (it's just a cruddy NTSC signal, after all)
Do you watch TV on a no-name 13 inch TV with an over-the-air antenna that barely gets a good signal? Because if you have a decent TV and digital satellite or cable, NTSC video actually looks pretty good. Good enough that when I watch TV at other people's houses who have either bad/old TVs and/or analog/crappy cable, I almost can't stand it. And I'm not one of these "MP3's suck because I can hear what's missing" kind of audio/videophiles, just a normal schmoe.
If you see the difference on a good TV between MPEG-2 video (even just 480x480, SVCD quality) and VCD-quality MPEG-1 video, you wouldn't write off MPEG-2 video so quickly. It's worlds apart.
Re:Replay 4500 is also a Linux based PVR
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DishPVR 721 Review
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· Score: 1
OK I just confirmed with the guy who reverse engineered everything that the ReplayTV 4000 could do (including getting a VxWorks shell on the serial port) that the 4500 is in fact not Linux based. It is VxWorks based just like the 4000. The person who wrote the 45000 setup FAQ is just completely wrong. His guess is that the person who wrote the FAQ thinks that anything that isn't Windows or Mac must be Linux.
Re:Replay 4500 is also a Linux based PVR
on
DishPVR 721 Review
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· Score: 2
That's interesting because everything I've read on the ReplayTV 4500 seems to indicate that it's almost identical to the 4000 series, just without the "service" built-in to the price, you have to pay an extra $250 lifetime activation. This way they can sell the boxes at a cheaper retail price to compete with Tivo.
The 4000 series runs VxWorks which is not Linux or Linux-based. I severly doubt that they re-wrote all of the functionality of the 4000 to run on Linux for the 4500 series.
Then again, I don't know why their own FAQ would say in a couple places that it is Linux-based? Just because people would recognize the word Linux more than VxWorks?
Slashdot Mirror
Not only is G higher than B, but this new wireless networking is Xtreme! Don't you understand?
Haven't you seen the X Games where those guys jump the dirt bikes way up into the air and then jump over their handlebars, get back onto their seat, and then land it on the other side? OK now imagine that excitement, but with wireless networking. Are you starting to see the picture? Oh, you didn't you drink the free kool-aid on the way into Macworld Expo? Then you'll never understand, sorry.
Well they don't sell anything, they just do a pricewatch-type thing on the prices for products and get paid for some of the referrals. And they let you review things they don't get any money off of (see the Restaurants section for example).
I haven't checked out Epinions extensively in a while, but I worked there very briefly a few years ago and their ultimate goal was to let the community build the product hierarchy, which is good for them (they don't have to pay experts full-time to build/prune the product trees) and good for the consumer (you could review just about anything, as long as the community was fast and responsive). That is, as long as certain people were in charge of keeping the product hierarchy clean and correct (think dmoz.org). I don't know if they have implemented this yet, though.
They definitely don't hide bad reviews of things (see the cell phone service provider section, for instance). They pride themselves on having a great deal of unbiased reviews. They just believe that if people are given access to good reviews on a product, it will help steer them towards the right product for them, which the person will eventually buy. Sure, sometimes a bunch of bad reviews will lead people to not buy something they might normally, but that isn't usually how things play out.
I didn't know Usenet was still used by anythong other than spammers. Maybe I should check it out again. :-)
I didn't mention this, but on Epinions, in addition to the web of trust stuff, people can rate the reviews as "very helpful", "helpful", "not helpful", etc. These ratings are supposed to be more objective. You might not agree with the person's opinions, but if they did their homework and wrote a thorough and thoughtful review, you would still rate the review as "helpful". Based on these peer reviewed ratings, the reviews are sorted best first. So this in addition to the web of trust rating sets the ranking of the reviews you see.
In addition, people can post comments about the review, but those don't affect the rating at all, but allow people to leave informative feedback.
A point I forgot to mention is this: I like the "Web of Trust" because it closely mirrors what we do in everyday life. You probably have a friend whose taste in movies is pretty close to yours. When he says a new movie is good, you trust him, and you go see it. Then you probably have another friend who has terrible taste in movies and when he sees a movie and tells you that it's great and you should go see it, you just filter him out completely.
From the beginning Epinions.com thought, "That would be great/cheap content to just have people post their opinions about products, but why would you trust random people?" So they baked in a rather complex "web of trust" into their website from Day 1.
If you see someone whose reviews reflect your own opinions, you can add them to your list of trusted people. Then when you see a list of reviews, your trusted people's reviews are at the top. Furthermore, your trusted people also have people they trust and you are likely to turst those people too, just maybe not quite as much. So your trusted people's trusted people's reviews bubble up near to the top, and so on.
Also, if you see some reviewer who you think is way off base, you can block them and never see their reviews again. It's a clever scheme, and if you use the site enough, you can tailor it to serve you decent reviews quickly. And it's all based on your opinion of other people's opinions, unlike Amazon which just bubbles up reviews from people who write a lot of reviews. I think quantity of reviews is hardly a good metric to use.
I've talked to a Tivo executive who stated that the number of people with DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes that pay for and record pay-per-view movies is several orders of magnitude higher than people with plain DirecTV receivers.
This makes complete sense if you think about it. If you aren't watching a pay-per-view movie with a Tivo, you have to sit there and watch a 2 hour movie from start to finish. No pausing, no rewinding, and especially no time shifting. Most people would rather go through the hassle of going to the video store to rent a DVD or VHS tape. With Tivo you buy and record the movie, watch it as many times as you want, whenever you want, pausing and rewinding, without having to go to the video store both to get and return the movie.
A large source of DirecTV's revenue is from pay-per-view (especially adult), so this fact alone is sealing the deal between Tivo and DirecTV. So much so that the next generation DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes are made exclusively by Hughes (DirecTV) and they will most likely be practically giving these things away to customers once they make them in bulk. Once a large majority of their viewers have Tivos, they can stop doing silly things like having one pay-per-view movie on 4 different channels, each starting 30 minutes later than the previous one, which would result in more variety of pay-per-view movies, good for the consumer and DirecTV.
It seems like cable companies maybe haven't attempted to study this new technology and done these tests like the satellite companies have, which doesn't surprise me as monopolies aren't usually very fast-moving.
The Tivo profiling article was here on Slashdot, so most of us saw it. It was supposed to be a humorous article about how software that tries to be human can sometimes go wrong. It wasn't supposed to be a "Tivo is bad - Tivo will psychoanalyze you incorrectly - don't buy Tivo" article. If you read the full article you would read that it was talking about "Tivo profiling gone wrong" as being a funny plot on two different comedy shows recently, one at least being based on a true story. I find it interesting how many slashdotters have almost no sense of humor at all.
I didn't mean to imply that live tv was completely useless, and I don't think I said that. I was just responding the the poster who said that someone saying there is no need to buffer live tv is utter bullshit. I said he had a bit of a point. It's a nice feature, I'm glad Tivo has it, but if I was going to roll my own Tivo, it wouldn't be the first thing I'd implement. It might not even make the first release.
:-)
You have a point, though, that if live tv wasn't buffered, watching live vs. recorded tv would be completely different whereas with a tivo you don't have to think about it.
All I'm saying is that in my opinion buffering live tv is a nice-to-have feature, not a must-have feature despite the fact that it's the one main feature that Tivo advertises in its commercials.
Oh, and if you can constantly buffer live tv using just an MPEG-decoder with _no_ CPU usage at all, I'd like to see it.
You can put a Tivo into "Standby" mode, but I don't know anyone who does that. I think all it does is stop the output to the TV. The Tivo still runs because it comes out of standby immediately, and I believe it still buffers live tv during standby, too, but I'm not positive on that because I never put mine into standby.
Yeah thanks to the magic of random file access, you can start watching delayed while still recording. This alone is possibly the coolest thing about a PVR/DVR over a VCR.
Well, considering that most people who have Tivos stop watching live TV as much and only watch shows they recorded (some stop watching any live TV at all, even for sporting events), he has a bit of a point. It might not occur to you, but your poor Tivo is constantly recording 24 hours a day, not just when you want to record a show. The Tivo's hard disk is constantly written to while you are at sleep and at work and when there's nothing but complete garbage on. And why? Just in case you turn on the TV and start watching something you might care about enough that you want to pause it or rewind it.
So while pausing Live TV seems like a cool "must have" feature, if all you watch is programs you specifically record, you still have that funtionality. Then you can vastly improve the life of the hard drive in your PVR, not to mention the CPU cycles wasted on buffering Live TV. If you want to pause Live TV, just hit the record button, then it's a recorded program and you can pause it.
Yeah, the DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes have been around for almost 2 years, but are not only known as DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes, but I believe Tivo footed the bill for some of the hardware manufacturing costs (along with Sony or Phillips or whichever consumer electronics company made the box), like they do with the regular Tivo standalones.
The new DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes are Series 2 boxes (they have USB ports on them) and are officially called "DirecTV PVR powered by Tivo". Note the "powered by", less emphasis on the Tivo. They are expected to be out in stores any day now and are only manufactured by Hughes (DirecTV). When you have a problem with these machines, you call DirecTV, not Tivo. Prevously with the Series1 if you had a problem and you called DirecTV, they would tell you to call Tivo. Little differences, but basically the new DirecTV DVRs are just DirecTV licensing the Tivo software and running most of the show.
I think you're a bit confused on the facts. I'm not an expert on the subject of UltimateTV or Dish Networks PVR, so I might be confused, too, but this is how I understand it.
The first roll out of a PVR/DVR for Dish Network was called a Dishplayer. It was co-created along with WebTV (owned by Microsoft) and had a little WebTV logo on it. The software was notoriously buggy and lost programs/forgot to record programs, etc.
So then Dish Network decided to create their own PVR without the "help" of Microsoft and released the Dish PVR 501 (and now there is a 508 with more disk space).
Meanwhile, Microsoft took their Dishplayer code and took out a lot of the bugs (maybe started over from scratch), and created UltimateTV which worked with DirecTV's system and had dual tuner, but didn't capture much market share. Microsoft ultimately disbanded the UltimateTV group and filtered most of its people into the Xbox group and hope to release some XBox/UltimateTV beast in the future.
A bit later (and a year later than was advertised) Dish Networks released it's next generation PVR, the 721 which supposedly runs on a Linux box (like Tivo) and has cool new features like dual tuner (which both UltimateTV and the DirecTV/Tivo boxes already had). This box from what I hear has even different software than the Dishplayer or the 501 series.
Dish Network has announced their next-next-generation PVR, the 921 which has all the features of the 721, but can record HDTV. They claim this beast will come out in 2003, but most people aren't holding their breath based on the release on the 721, most people aren't expecting this box to be released until 2004 most likely.
So in fact I wasn't referring to only the Dishplayer, I was referring to all generations of the Dish Network PVRs and as far as I know, none of them run UltimateTV software. I believe the only thing close to that is the Dishplayer that ran some WebTV code and that WebTV code was the predecessor for UltimateTV which was a completely seperate Microsoft product.
Like I said, I am not an expert, feel free to correct any of my points if it suits you.
I'm sorry, but I believe that you are wrong. Can you post some proof that the Dish Network has a rebranded ReplayTV?
Everything that I've ever heard about the various instances of the Dish Network PVR (the first Dishplayers, then the 501/508 series, and now the 721 series, which I believe all run different software) said that Dish did the software themselves. Searching on SonicBlue's site (parent company of ReplayTV) shows no hits having anything to do with Dish Network except that their standalone unit works with cable, DirecTV or Dish Networks. You would think that that would be something they would at least mention on their website.
Actually Dish Network has it's own home brew PVR that is fairly popular. They pretty much give away the lower-end one for free if you sign up with them. And you can get a more souped up one (dual tuner, more hard disk space) for roughly the price of a regular Tivo and it doesn't have the monthly recurring Tivo cost. The software and UI pale in comparison to the Tivo, but supposedly they have a decent market share (as far as PVRs go).
As said on here many times, though, Tivo is now licensing their software to folks like AT&T and DirecTV, so you will soon be getting a "DirecTV DVR powered by Tivo" instead of a "Tivo". It's a win-win for both sides and will most likely keep Tivo afloat.
Wow I have the exact opposite feeling. Cathy always annoyed me to no end, only to be eclipsed by Tyler. At least when she was replaced this last season, my annoyance level went down slightly. I fondly remember Season 1 when Robert Llewelyn (sp?) was the one and only decent host. *sigh*
It's how the DirecTV/Tivo combo boxes work and it's a beautiful thing. That along with only-high-quality recording (it saves the MPEG-2 directly from the satellite), and dual tuners (record two shows at once) and you weep tears of joy when you start using it.
I figured he has some little small pinhole type camera that he places in the back of the oven (which I also assume isn't actually on at the time) or refrigerator to get those shots. That's my guess anyway.
And not a single link to goatse.cx or unrelated posts about the wonders of (the 4 year old at that time) Natalie Portman. Amazing.
You obviously didn't read the "Barney" link in the article. If you had, you would find that the EFF was hosting a site that posted the parody, they didn't put it up themselves, the site is no longer hosted by the EFF, and there is a long standing legal precedent of parody being protected by the First Amendment.
You know, the First Amendment, one of the laws that EFF members like you and I pay the EFF to defend online.
Oh, come on. If the former Attorney General of the United States, Janet Reno can get away with hosting a Dance Party to kick off her race for Governor of Florida, I think the EFF can throw a little dance party without losing too much credit.
Anyone who has played enough of Robotron (in the arcade, stand-up form factor) can attest to the fact that you can occasionally get into the "Robotron Zone" where you can just go through level after level without dying. You stop thinking about where to run and shoot and it just happens. I knew a couple guys who could get into the Robotron Zone and achieve zone 300+.
I think for the design goal, MPEG-1 should be fine (it's just a cruddy NTSC signal, after all)
Do you watch TV on a no-name 13 inch TV with an over-the-air antenna that barely gets a good signal? Because if you have a decent TV and digital satellite or cable, NTSC video actually looks pretty good. Good enough that when I watch TV at other people's houses who have either bad/old TVs and/or analog/crappy cable, I almost can't stand it. And I'm not one of these "MP3's suck because I can hear what's missing" kind of audio/videophiles, just a normal schmoe.
If you see the difference on a good TV between MPEG-2 video (even just 480x480, SVCD quality) and VCD-quality MPEG-1 video, you wouldn't write off MPEG-2 video so quickly. It's worlds apart.
OK I just confirmed with the guy who reverse engineered everything that the ReplayTV 4000 could do (including getting a VxWorks shell on the serial port) that the 4500 is in fact not Linux based. It is VxWorks based just like the 4000. The person who wrote the 45000 setup FAQ is just completely wrong. His guess is that the person who wrote the FAQ thinks that anything that isn't Windows or Mac must be Linux.
That's interesting because everything I've read on the ReplayTV 4500 seems to indicate that it's almost identical to the 4000 series, just without the "service" built-in to the price, you have to pay an extra $250 lifetime activation. This way they can sell the boxes at a cheaper retail price to compete with Tivo.
The 4000 series runs VxWorks which is not Linux or Linux-based. I severly doubt that they re-wrote all of the functionality of the 4000 to run on Linux for the 4500 series.
Then again, I don't know why their own FAQ would say in a couple places that it is Linux-based? Just because people would recognize the word Linux more than VxWorks?