City councilman Richard Conlin noted that the $1 million per week tax collection required by the SMP would be enough to eliminate fares on the city's bus network."
... but riding them would still be slow and uncomfortable, motivating all who can afford it to drive instead. Monorails may be expensive, but (unlike Portland's light rail) they're immunne to road congestion.
I tried watching current tv, but found it frustrating to find the bits I cared about. Maybe I'm just not their demographic, but sitting there for hours hoping something interesting will go by is just not how I want to spend my free time. I have TiVo to avoid that problem.
It's currently un-TiVo-able, because there's no meaningful show description data in the EPG (at least there wasn't in the first few weeks when I gave up). It would help if they could at least put certain categories on at certain times so you wouldn't have to FF through 4 hour chunks of irrelevant junk.
They don't seem to do tagging, but if they did and you could catch them with tivo keyword wishlists you'd have something like flickr for video. That is, let users tag videos in the current.tv screening room, push this out in the EPG data for the "pod", and let us catch the pods with the tags we want. Of course this means the EPG data has to have pod granularity, or something close to it.
Getting the EPG data updated fast enough might be a problem. You might have to live with a 24-hour lag (actually lag and sample rate are separate issues) on tag space. It seems like EPG updating could be much faster on DirecTV (for near-term stuff, anyway), but I'll bet there are process reasons that it's not.
This directly conflicts with their late schedule binding feature, so some portion of the pod stream would probably have to be reallocated to stuff scheduled further in advance. For example, make the first pod of every hour one of the stream of yesterday's top pods.
You can get something close to this with a del.icio.us RSS feed of tagged video, but most if us can't watch it on our TVs (yet).
Tethers are cheaper, don't have to be at the equator, and can be used elsewhere in the system for orbital transfers. It's probably also harder to crash a plane into them, since they don't reach the ground (you rendezvous with the end via aircraft).
They don't even need carbon nanotubes. You can make them out of nylon (IIRC, see papers at link).
Move your keychain file to a removable disk
on
Securing Mac OS X Tiger
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You can specify any keychain file as your default, and it can be anywhere. If that's a CF card in the PCMCIA slot, your keychain is removable. Thumb drives also work, of course, but the CF card doesn't protrude beyond the case.
Didn't the current iMac design appear before or at the same time as the mini? Seems like that's exactly what he was looking for.
He could have taped one of the firewire TV tuners to the back of it for the TV function (or streamed it over the LAN from some location with better reception than the kitchen).
I bought a couple of old iMacs on ebay for $200 each (400MHz G3s), and am using one next to my stereo to run iTunes. This works far better than the Gateway connected DVD player I bought specifically for that purpose.
A remote would be nice, but I'm too cheap to buy the one that's specifically designed for iTunes. I'd rather find some kind of IR USB dongle that can receive the codes from the remotes I already have on my coffee table, and tie that to iTunes with some applescript. I haven't found one yet. In the mean time, I can just VNC to it from my powerbook, or the other old iMac in my kitchen.
The iMac DV has a VGA port that mirrors the build-in display. Converters are available that go from VGA to svideo. I got one of those for $20 on ebay, but I think I fried it trying to find the right power supply. If that ever works, I'm hoping to use it to show home movies. I already have TiVos, so I don't need tuners in this.
The iMac would be silent but for its aging hard disk. Newer disks are much quieter. This problem will eventually solve itself.
I think people just get sloppy with the use of the word fuel. I'll bet most people here realize you don't just find hydrogen laying around ready to burn. It's a fuel from the point of view of your car or laptop, but an energy storage medium in the larger context.
Making hydrogen from oil is of course a mistake if you want to avoid the emissions associated with burning it, and the problems of relying on foreign countries to sell it to you.
So make your hydrogen from wind power, or whatever is handy near where you want to use it.
It's a mistake to toss out the whole idea of powering mobile devices with hydrogen just because the way we make hydrogen now is dirty.
I wonder if the economics of this will enable independent producers to distribute TV series without the big TV networks? Clearly you still need a big wad of VC cash to make your pilot, but aren't there other sources of that besides the networks?
Whoever is providing them, and whatever their motive is (as long as it means they need to get a coupon in your hands), they could do it over BT.
It's not like it would require extensive infrastructure in the store. The coupon dispensers they have now (which already have power in order to get your attention with the blinking light, and run the little motor that spits out another paper coupon) could also dispense digital coupons.
If you are already *in* the store, the store no longer has any incentive to offer you discounts on items.
Yet they do. I often see piles of the same flyers I'd get in the newspaper (if I still got my news on dead trees) at the store entrance. Then there are those coupon dispensers on the shelves with the flashing LEDs to get your attention. Those things already have batteries.
Video on demand. A giant multiuser TiVo in the cable headend.
I've never used one (we have PPV on DirecTV, but those shows are played on a schedule, and are only "on demand" once they're transferred into one of my TiVos), but a guy I know at nCube (who makes VOD servers) says it's growing in LA and NY.
Depending on the set-top box, you can apparently get the pause, rewind, and FF control on VOD you'd have with a DVR, though this isn't universal.
My problem with it is someone else controls what's stored, and how long it stays available (both in general, and if a certain stored show is considered objectionable by a sufficiently powerful person).
I also worry about everything becoming PPV. That makes my normally flat-rate cable bill into a variable bill that may be higher than I pay now (why would they add this if it didn't increase revenue, or reduce costs?). Maybe I'm just paranoid, but if you can measure it you can bill for it.
I wonder if the VOD provider could make enough money with a flat fee?
If VOD was available for a flat rate (for given set of programming corresponding to the channels we have now), and they really stored everything that came by for a really long time (years), then it's be the functional equivalent of a "perfect TiVo" (which has arbitrarily large storage, arbitrarily many tuners, never fails, and can never exist). That's still quite expensive, though, so unlikely to happen.
DircTivos won't record the DTV music channels either, but PPV is integrated nicely into the software. We always buy our PPV movies in big batches, and watch them later. Sometimes months later.
The other nice feature is wishlists. They let you record by actor, keyword, director, etc.... before the appear on the schedule. Tell it you want "Starship Troopers", and next time it comes by TiVo grabs it.
I skip almost all of the commercials, so by percentage they win (nearly 100%, versus some much smaller fraction).
I don't really know how much of the show I skip on average. Depends on the show. I skip almost all sports except some racing news. The specific European or Canadian business stuff is interesting in the abstract sometimes, but I usually skip most of that (I have no investments there). I suppose by minutes skipped, the news shows might come close to the commercials (averaged over a week's worth of news watching).
Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit this, but I do skip past some of the stories about the particularly hopeless situations in the world when little seems to have changed since the day before. It seems unlikely that the latest account of these repeated events will increase my understand of why they're still happening, or how they might be stopped. For that I'm be better off looking for a more in-depth treatment; be that in another show, online, or (shudder) on paper somewhere.
During the Iraq invasion, I flipped back and forth between CNN and MSNBC (each buffered from a separate tuner in one DirecTiVo) skipping everything that was an obvious repeat and stopping for some of the talking heads that had something interesting to say once before to see if they were just repeating themselves. [This was mostly a waste of time, but what's that old line about intermittent or very occasional positive reinforcement being the best motivator. At least for rats.] When I caught up to realtime and they were just repeating themselves waiting for something to happen, I'd go back to the web.
During 9/11 I had two analog TiVos with one tuner each, and didn't record so much news. Flipping between two news streams was harder. I tended to just channel-surf in realtime the old fashined way. I did go back and look for programs recorded before I knew anything was going on (I didn't find out until I looked at Slashdot that morning) to see if they'd been interrupted by the news (many were, but didn't contain anything I hadn't already seen or heard in later broadcasts).
Like the BBC World News, and the CBC news that's on every half hour? My TiVo always has the most recent instance of these stored (minus collisions with higher priority shows).
CNN headline news isn't terribly TiVo friendly, since their scheduled shows are 3 hours long (last time I checked). Besides the space issue, this enures that it collides with something more important.
Obviously if I was interested in a lot of things reported live this wouldn't work. I find I rarely care about these. Most of it is some guy standing in front of a building telling you what already happened or what might happen RSN. It seems like filler to me. Worse, for something like CNN HN, you have to sit through a bunch of irrelevant hunam interest (style, entertainment "news", etc.) crap that I would FF through if it were stored.
Local news is the same way. Theer's the very occasional relevant local new story, but most of it is about some mostly irrelevant court case, or teh latest escapades of people who might be on COPS soon. I keep one instance of a couple of these too (I'd do them all, but I only have 2 tuners in that TiVo), but mostly so when someone I know says they were on TV, I can go look for the relevant 5 seconds. Our local news (Portland, Oregon) is almost all fluff.
I think for me what's important isn't urgent, and what's urgent isn't important. Delaying news by 4-12 hours almost always has no effect. Two things I've watched live in the last several years are 9/11, and the Iraq invasion. I guess what I want is a video newspaper, so that's what I have. And it gets recycled automatically without cluttering up my kitchen table.
I tried the 30s skip mode, but found I can actually get to the end of the commercials faster without it. I also found the overshoot on the 30s advance annoying. I was either missing the beginning of a sentence in the show, or listening to the tail of some annoying commercial. I'd rather watch the junk fly by in silence.
Once in a great while an interesting image comes by in FF mode, and I actually stop and watch the commercial (usually for movies, or other TV shows). Just like flipping through a magazine.
No, wait, the news is more interesting, but people don't watch it delayed, so they can't skip ads.
I watch all my news delayed unless I discover there's something currently happening that I care about. Why would I want to be constrained by a schedule for news any more than I am for any other show?
It's nice to be able to treat a news show like a magazine, and flip past the stories I don't care about. I've come to really appreciate the table of contents at the beginning of 60 Minutes and Now.
Besides the fact that the guy's smoking dope and taxing a global network is impossible, there's no reason to give the "postage" to any government. Just give the penny (dime, whatever) to the email recipient.
If they're regular correspondent, it'll net out. Maybe your mailer gives the penny back to people you want to hear from (mailing lists) if they do most of the talking. My mailer would certainly bank the penny in each SPAM. If a message doesn't have a penny, you quarantine it like your SPAM filter does now. Of course, whitelists continue to work like they do now to exempt mailing lists, your mom, etc. from the fee to get past your filter.
This doesn't solve the SPAM problem from the ISP's point of view (at least not immediately), but if widely adopted could at least make it expensive for SPAMmers to get their message through.
Slashdot Mirror
Not even that. Just open the keychain access app, and tell it where you want your default keychain.
I tried watching current tv, but found it frustrating to find the bits I cared about. Maybe I'm just not their demographic, but sitting there for hours hoping something interesting will go by is just not how I want to spend my free time. I have TiVo to avoid that problem.
It's currently un-TiVo-able, because there's no meaningful show description data in the EPG (at least there wasn't in the first few weeks when I gave up). It would help if they could at least put certain categories on at certain times so you wouldn't have to FF through 4 hour chunks of irrelevant junk.
They don't seem to do tagging, but if they did and you could catch them with tivo keyword wishlists you'd have something like flickr for video. That is, let users tag videos in the current.tv screening room, push this out in the EPG data for the "pod", and let us catch the pods with the tags we want. Of course this means the EPG data has to have pod granularity, or something close to it.
Getting the EPG data updated fast enough might be a problem. You might have to live with a 24-hour lag (actually lag and sample rate are separate issues) on tag space. It seems like EPG updating could be much faster on DirecTV (for near-term stuff, anyway), but I'll bet there are process reasons that it's not.
This directly conflicts with their late schedule binding feature, so some portion of the pod stream would probably have to be reallocated to stuff scheduled further in advance. For example, make the first pod of every hour one of the stream of yesterday's top pods.
You can get something close to this with a del.icio.us RSS feed of tagged video, but most if us can't watch it on our TVs (yet).
Tethers are cheaper, don't have to be at the equator, and can be used elsewhere in the system for orbital transfers. It's probably also harder to crash a plane into them, since they don't reach the ground (you rendezvous with the end via aircraft). They don't even need carbon nanotubes. You can make them out of nylon (IIRC, see papers at link).
You can specify any keychain file as your default, and it can be anywhere. If that's a CF card in the PCMCIA slot, your keychain is removable. Thumb drives also work, of course, but the CF card doesn't protrude beyond the case.
Didn't the current iMac design appear before or at the same time as the mini? Seems like that's exactly what he was looking for.
He could have taped one of the firewire TV tuners to the back of it for the TV function (or streamed it over the LAN from some location with better reception than the kitchen).
Once your programming is digital and random access (I'm assuming it will be) channel switching is irrelevant.
I bought a couple of old iMacs on ebay for $200 each (400MHz G3s), and am using one next to my stereo to run iTunes. This works far better than the Gateway connected DVD player I bought specifically for that purpose.
A remote would be nice, but I'm too cheap to buy the one that's specifically designed for iTunes. I'd rather find some kind of IR USB dongle that can receive the codes from the remotes I already have on my coffee table, and tie that to iTunes with some applescript. I haven't found one yet. In the mean time, I can just VNC to it from my powerbook, or the other old iMac in my kitchen.
The iMac DV has a VGA port that mirrors the build-in display. Converters are available that go from VGA to svideo. I got one of those for $20 on ebay, but I think I fried it trying to find the right power supply. If that ever works, I'm hoping to use it to show home movies. I already have TiVos, so I don't need tuners in this.
The iMac would be silent but for its aging hard disk. Newer disks are much quieter. This problem will eventually solve itself.
I think the bird kill thing is FUD.
I think people just get sloppy with the use of the word fuel. I'll bet most people here realize you don't just find hydrogen laying around ready to burn. It's a fuel from the point of view of your car or laptop, but an energy storage medium in the larger context.
Making hydrogen from oil is of course a mistake if you want to avoid the emissions associated with burning it, and the problems of relying on foreign countries to sell it to you.
So make your hydrogen from wind power, or whatever is handy near where you want to use it.
It's a mistake to toss out the whole idea of powering mobile devices with hydrogen just because the way we make hydrogen now is dirty.
Or tethers, which are cheaper, and don't have to be geosynchronous. You do need a suborbital vehicle to reach the near end, though.
I wonder if the economics of this will enable independent producers to distribute TV series without the big TV networks? Clearly you still need a big wad of VC cash to make your pilot, but aren't there other sources of that besides the networks?
I'm on the three movie plan, and have seen all three turn over on the same day.
Terran bases are mobile.
Whoever is providing them, and whatever their motive is (as long as it means they need to get a coupon in your hands), they could do it over BT.
It's not like it would require extensive infrastructure in the store. The coupon dispensers they have now (which already have power in order to get your attention with the blinking light, and run the little motor that spits out another paper coupon) could also dispense digital coupons.
Yet they do. I often see piles of the same flyers I'd get in the newspaper (if I still got my news on dead trees) at the store entrance. Then there are those coupon dispensers on the shelves with the flashing LEDs to get your attention. Those things already have batteries.
FWIW, One of my complaints was sent to abuse@comcast.net this morning. There were very few /dev/nulls
Video on demand. A giant multiuser TiVo in the cable headend.
I've never used one (we have PPV on DirecTV, but those shows are played on a schedule, and are only "on demand" once they're transferred into one of my TiVos), but a guy I know at nCube (who makes VOD servers) says it's growing in LA and NY.
Depending on the set-top box, you can apparently get the pause, rewind, and FF control on VOD you'd have with a DVR, though this isn't universal.
My problem with it is someone else controls what's stored, and how long it stays available (both in general, and if a certain stored show is considered objectionable by a sufficiently powerful person).
I also worry about everything becoming PPV. That makes my normally flat-rate cable bill into a variable bill that may be higher than I pay now (why would they add this if it didn't increase revenue, or reduce costs?). Maybe I'm just paranoid, but if you can measure it you can bill for it.
I wonder if the VOD provider could make enough money with a flat fee?
If VOD was available for a flat rate (for given set of programming corresponding to the channels we have now), and they really stored everything that came by for a really long time (years), then it's be the functional equivalent of a "perfect TiVo" (which has arbitrarily large storage, arbitrarily many tuners, never fails, and can never exist). That's still quite expensive, though, so unlikely to happen.
DircTivos won't record the DTV music channels either, but PPV is integrated nicely into the software. We always buy our PPV movies in big batches, and watch them later. Sometimes months later.
The other nice feature is wishlists. They let you record by actor, keyword, director, etc. ... before the appear on the schedule. Tell it you want "Starship Troopers", and next time it comes by TiVo grabs it.
I skip almost all of the commercials, so by percentage they win (nearly 100%, versus some much smaller fraction).
I don't really know how much of the show I skip on average. Depends on the show. I skip almost all sports except some racing news. The specific European or Canadian business stuff is interesting in the abstract sometimes, but I usually skip most of that (I have no investments there). I suppose by minutes skipped, the news shows might come close to the commercials (averaged over a week's worth of news watching).
Perhaps I should be ashamed to admit this, but I do skip past some of the stories about the particularly hopeless situations in the world when little seems to have changed since the day before. It seems unlikely that the latest account of these repeated events will increase my understand of why they're still happening, or how they might be stopped. For that I'm be better off looking for a more in-depth treatment; be that in another show, online, or (shudder) on paper somewhere.
During the Iraq invasion, I flipped back and forth between CNN and MSNBC (each buffered from a separate tuner in one DirecTiVo) skipping everything that was an obvious repeat and stopping for some of the talking heads that had something interesting to say once before to see if they were just repeating themselves. [This was mostly a waste of time, but what's that old line about intermittent or very occasional positive reinforcement being the best motivator. At least for rats.] When I caught up to realtime and they were just repeating themselves waiting for something to happen, I'd go back to the web.
During 9/11 I had two analog TiVos with one tuner each, and didn't record so much news. Flipping between two news streams was harder. I tended to just channel-surf in realtime the old fashined way. I did go back and look for programs recorded before I knew anything was going on (I didn't find out until I looked at Slashdot that morning) to see if they'd been interrupted by the news (many were, but didn't contain anything I hadn't already seen or heard in later broadcasts).
Like the BBC World News, and the CBC news that's on every half hour? My TiVo always has the most recent instance of these stored (minus collisions with higher priority shows).
CNN headline news isn't terribly TiVo friendly, since their scheduled shows are 3 hours long (last time I checked). Besides the space issue, this enures that it collides with something more important.
Obviously if I was interested in a lot of things reported live this wouldn't work. I find I rarely care about these. Most of it is some guy standing in front of a building telling you what already happened or what might happen RSN. It seems like filler to me. Worse, for something like CNN HN, you have to sit through a bunch of irrelevant hunam interest (style, entertainment "news", etc.) crap that I would FF through if it were stored.
Local news is the same way. Theer's the very occasional relevant local new story, but most of it is about some mostly irrelevant court case, or teh latest escapades of people who might be on COPS soon. I keep one instance of a couple of these too (I'd do them all, but I only have 2 tuners in that TiVo), but mostly so when someone I know says they were on TV, I can go look for the relevant 5 seconds. Our local news (Portland, Oregon) is almost all fluff.
I think for me what's important isn't urgent, and what's urgent isn't important. Delaying news by 4-12 hours almost always has no effect. Two things I've watched live in the last several years are 9/11, and the Iraq invasion. I guess what I want is a video newspaper, so that's what I have. And it gets recycled automatically without cluttering up my kitchen table.
I tried the 30s skip mode, but found I can actually get to the end of the commercials faster without it. I also found the overshoot on the 30s advance annoying. I was either missing the beginning of a sentence in the show, or listening to the tail of some annoying commercial. I'd rather watch the junk fly by in silence.
Once in a great while an interesting image comes by in FF mode, and I actually stop and watch the commercial (usually for movies, or other TV shows). Just like flipping through a magazine.
No, wait, the news is more interesting, but people don't watch it delayed, so they can't skip ads.
I watch all my news delayed unless I discover there's something currently happening that I care about. Why would I want to be constrained by a schedule for news any more than I am for any other show?
It's nice to be able to treat a news show like a magazine, and flip past the stories I don't care about. I've come to really appreciate the table of contents at the beginning of 60 Minutes and Now.
Besides the fact that the guy's smoking dope and taxing a global network is impossible, there's no reason to give the "postage" to any government. Just give the penny (dime, whatever) to the email recipient.
If they're regular correspondent, it'll net out. Maybe your mailer gives the penny back to people you want to hear from (mailing lists) if they do most of the talking. My mailer would certainly bank the penny in each SPAM. If a message doesn't have a penny, you quarantine it like your SPAM filter does now. Of course, whitelists continue to work like they do now to exempt mailing lists, your mom, etc. from the fee to get past your filter.
This doesn't solve the SPAM problem from the ISP's point of view (at least not immediately), but if widely adopted could at least make it expensive for SPAMmers to get their message through.