And I've seriously considered getting one due to its internal drive storage capacity (4 hard drives, two optical drives). I've already modded the internals of my B&W G3, externalizing the power switch box, snapping out its back support, and attaching a 4-drive PC bay vertically on the drive tray.
If I knew I could put my B&W G3's motherboard in one of those G4 cases, I would order a case as a replacement part (if they still sell them).
I mean, didn't tivo three months ago announce something about XM radio and the ability to burn programs to DVD?
Where is it?
The Toshiba and Pioneer DVRs can burn their TiVo recordings to DVD-R.
The software and dongle to allow you to use your home PC or Mac to burn DVDs from TiVo recordings, well, I've been out of the loop for a couple of weeks.
XM, I don't have it nor plan to; I have enough monthly service expenses.
They can be done from LiveTV as well, but people generally have a hard time getting them to work when trying to do that.
That's usually because they're using them with the top banner visible, which can intercept Select, or they're using the other two codes which could result in them tu[r]ning to channel 9 or 30 instead of enabling the on-screen clock or 30-second skip respectively.
It also helps to hit Clear between any two consecutive S-P-S-*-S codes; it gets confused when it sees Select-Select.
Hmm, I might just activate my third series1 standalone now.
I paid for my HMO, but I can easily think of the $99 charge now being for the privilege of transfering my lifetime subscriptions from my other two Series1 TiVos to two Series2 TiVos. (And it made sense because the Series2 units require subscriptions whereas the old Philips units I have are subscription optional. Better to be able to cancel on the Philipses and save money if needed.)
And hey! according to their FAQ on this, my monthly units are getting discounted rates already! If I register the old 20hr (never subscribed), I'll still be paying less than before the rate change!
I wonder if I could convince them to let me have 8 units at $6.95/mo. with the two with lifetime on the same account without divorcing the lifetime units to different accounts. Otherwise, wouldn't I lose HMO video sharing benefits with the Series2 units on divorced accounts, even if at the same address?
Maybe not 10x speed, but 2x can be done for some content easily, typically cartoons which (unless they are computer rendered) are usually really only 12 frames per second to start with anyway (doubled to 24, then 3:2-converted to 30). Just cut out the redundancy.
And again, you might be able to get away with deinterlacing them down to 12 fields per second for a 5x speed-up at a cost of halving your vertical resolution. With good interpolation this might be tolerable.
Maybe because more people have broadband than digital TV?
Or maybe it is easier to be a broadband publisher and have people pull (download) content from you than get a new digital TV channel carried everywhere to push (upload) it to them (look at G4 having to buy TechTV to get greater market penetration).
You might as well ask why people adopted VHS over Beta.
Do the TiVo series 2 boxes have an ethernet port in the back (I have a series 1 DirectTiVo)?
The Series2 boxes have USB ports and the software supports hooking up USB-Ethernet adapters. Units with these installed make their "calls" to TiVo more frequently over the higher bandwidth connection. With Home Media Option (extra one-time fee, not available for DirecTiVos), you can schedule shows to record over the web and the TiVo checks for them every 15 minutes, share shows between TiVos in the same home, and share pictures and MP3s from your computer with your TiVo, playing and displaying them on your TV.
Series1 units can have a special ethernet adapter installed by the consumer. Commonly used to replace a broken internal modem in standalones and for extracting video out of hacked units.
However, bandwidth is limited in that the ports are only USB 1.1. Streamed Basic Quality video is possible now between two standalones. Higher quality video may be watched as it transfers depending on how much motion there is in the video.
If TiVo does follow through with this, I'd expect new models with 100 Mbit Ethernet ports built-in, but also hardened even more against consumer intrusion.
For typical commercial television, recording an hour show and starting to watch it 15 minutes after it started is sufficient to have all essential trick play features available for the duration of the program (unless you watch 60 Minutes only to see Andy Rooney).
But if you look at the HMO feature, which allows Series2 TiVos to download (pull) shows from each other, it too will let you start watching a show immediately over Ethernet throttled to USB 1.1 speed. If recorded at Basic Quality, viewing is possible non-stop. Sometimes, if the show has little motion, even a Best Quality stream can be transferred and watched without more than a few initial buffering stoppages (Night of the Living Dead).
This could be done as easily as opening HMO video sharing to TiVo's servers much like how TiVo provides some free MP3s and slideshow images from their servers.
And it would be nice to see some short subjects available, published through TiVo be available to be watched on a TV screen instead of a monitor. They used to provide short films along with their TiVo Takes program. TiVo being a content provider brings interesting possibilities for serial content. It would be nice to get the latest Red vs. Blue episodes downloaded to my TiVo for viewing on the TV rather than wait for the next DVD to be released.
Re:I have no SuperDrive, you insensitive clod!
on
DVD Studio Pro 3 Review
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm using a B&W G3 with a G4 upgrade(*) as well (550 MHz though), and was using a 1x DVD-R, DVD-RAM drive for which I paid too much new.
What I meant was that DVD Studio Pro works with third party drives out of the box, whereas iDVD does not, requiring additional software to enable their use. Software Apple would rather not have exist.
(*) To others thinking of doing the same, don't forget to edit the application package's Info.plist file to enable it to run on a non-AGP Mac. And the same to Compressor. And to repeat these changes every time the software is updated until you finally break down and buy an AGP-based Mac (I'm waiting for the expected dual-3 GHz G5).
Indeed, I saw this approach for a 4-dimensional 3x3x3x3 maze once. Travel between adjacent mazes was only possible if the square you were in in one matched the color of the square in an adjacent maze. (A crossword though wouldn't need to deal with color matching, which was just a way to implement the walls of the maze. A crossword would use colored squares only as a pan-dimensional crutch.)
Another problem is the terminology. Down and across is fine for 2-D, but how do you group the clues that span across multiple fields in two directions?
It might be easier to start with a 3-D puzzle where the third dimension is time. A 20x20x7 puzzle where each layer is issued on a different day of the week. Time-forward clues are only issued on the day the first letter would appear in the day's puzzle layer, and you won't know how many letters they are in advance. Answers won't be given until the day after the entire puzzle is published (or on the last day, depending on your paper's rules). Clue numbering continues sequentially layer by layer, with each day's layer being numbered as normal, plus numbers for cells starting a word that spans into the next puzzle.
More clever if it is a 21x21x21 puzzle spanning 3 weeks: last week, dead week, and finals week if a college paper.
Now, how to handle the filled cell grid symmetry rules of a proper crossword puzzle across multiple dimensions is left as an exercise for the submitter. If done right, then attentive players will be able to work out time-forward word lengths after the middle layer, so make sure the time-forward clues are extra hard to prevent early solutions.
Re:I have no SuperDrive, you insensitive clod!
on
DVD Studio Pro 3 Review
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Unlike iDVD, DSP will work with other DVD burners besides Apple-blessed SuperDrives.
However, earlier versions have had problems with some third party burners. I could not use a particular 1x DVD-R drive because it DSP would try to burn at 64x instead (the highest speed the drive says it supports according to Roxio Toast). I could not find a setting in DSP to prevent it from trying to burn at the highest "supported" speed.
I'd like a choice of who provides my water service too, but the ground can only hold so many pipes.
Do you have separate wires into your house for AT&T vs. MCI service?
More pipes aren't needed for choice. I know of at least one town where you have a choice of providers of natural gas. All of them provide the same gas through the same pipe, and all drawn from the same source; they just charge different rates. You don't pay for a particular branded product; you pay for branded access to a common product.
If they could put meters in everybody's windpipes, they'd sell atmospheric oxygen produced by their business campus landscaping.
Well, if companies cannot legally acquire biometric data from kids to sell them music, perhaps that means the quality of music will rise to meet the demands of a more mature marketplace.
I hope they don't have plans to move onto other forms of biometrics. The jokes are too obvious - "All your face are..."
Can we at least start with "the Mark of the Beats"?
I'd join in a boycot, but I don't buy any music anyway. There isn't anything worth my money I can't hear for free on radio (what little there is that I'd care to hear). The most I could do would be to buy used unencumbered music.
And how much longer will they continue to permit that? How close is legislation that requires every commercial sale of unencumbered media be re-encoded onto biometrically encumbered media? And how far until information on unencumbered media become classified as controlled information and you'd need a special license to possess it, which has to be periodically renewed with a presumption of copyright infringement fee? Will the penalties be worse than for illegal possession of controlled substances? or are they already?
Yes, I have always felt that it is the best technobabble ever written.
Heck, no, Star Trek is the hands down winner there.
Oh absolutely! It's better on the order of one to the fourth power! The writers are clearly more superior thinkers than the most intelligent deuterium ore one could ever mine! "Warp particles!" Genius!
We usurped kilo- and mega- and applied it to our word, byte. Kilo- and mega- already had their SI meanings; we didn't invent them. We then continued to grab with giga-, tera-, and even still with peta- and exa-. Or rather we complain that they should be binary in measure but in common practice they're metric.
If we were to have clean hands, we should have adopted our own unique terminology: thella-, mella-, bella-, trella-, quella-, etc.
Meanwhile we have two meanings of our own for mega-, and when applied to bits per second we have more confusion (sometimes measured metrically, sometimes binarily). Consider for example the assumption that you can convert between b/s and B/s with a factor of 8 when there could be a hidden mega-/mebi- conversion factor in there as well. It shouldn't take 5 minutes to verify.
You might as well get used to them, because those who know and care about the difference will continue to ask you to clarify whether you mean metric or binary measure. Eventually it'll be quicker for you to just use the MiB and metric-MB to make it clear at the start.
(Meanwhile there are people who believe that the reason why their 250 GB drive only comes up as 232.8 "GB" is because they lose 17.2 MB due to "formatted capacity", overhead in numbering every sector like they were pages in a book. Bullshit. Filesystem overhead for a blank disk should be well less than 1 MiB; the discrepancy is adequately explained by the metric-binary conversion.)
Well, I see someone has found a new, creative misspelling of a word that almost passes a spell checker. It should be "nefarious conniving hackers". You have surprised me today.
Sure, mirror the site, so I can appear in the access logs too and have my servers seized as well?
Hell, even accidental association seems as good as guilt these days.
It says Apple-LABELED hardware. You could stick your PC board in a Mac Classic.... Hell, you could even just slap an Apple sticker on the side and it would be legal.
And are you Apple, labeling the hardware? Does your PC board in a Mac Classic case have an Apple-applied silkscreened logo on it?
Older versions of their license agreement may have had that loophole. This phrasing closes it.
Not that I'd rat anyone out for it. I like this project and hope it continues. Meanwhile, Apple will be putting in code to prevent it from running on unsupported hardware, as they have done as far back as ProDOS.
Mac OS X is licensed only for "Apple-labeled computers"(*). So even with a retail version, installing it on a PC emulator would still be a violation of its license agreement.
(*) This is stronger than earlier agreements which licensed the software for computers bearing the Apple logo. This updated term implies that the label must be applied by Apple and not be simply an Apple sticker applied by the consumer. IANAL.
Hey, I'm not reporting it, I'm just giving people ideas!
As I said, nothing will deter the determined, but a few simple devices will deter the causal prankster. The hold latch removal is a poor solution for anything other than keeping people from getting in their vehicle while pumping fuel.
And if we're serious about curbing that behavior, then push forward a law that it will be illegal for the operator of a gas pump to re-enter the vehicle for any reason while the pump is in connection with the vehicle.
Or require vehicles or pumps to provide a grounding strap which must be connected to a gas station's common ground and the vehicle before access between fuel and tank is permitted. It is usually easier to provide a technical solution with which people must comply with in order to complete an activity than expect them to consider their own safety or that of others (e.g. automatic seatbelts).
It looks like 'Enterprise' might be moved to Fridays next year
That won't be so bad for me. No real UPN station here; Star Trek: Enterprise is carried in syndication on a Fox affilliate on Sunday evening as the only airing in the week. First UPN airing on Friday means less spoilers to avoid and better chance to take part in discussions while interest is still high.
Slashdot Mirror
And I've seriously considered getting one due to its internal drive storage capacity (4 hard drives, two optical drives). I've already modded the internals of my B&W G3, externalizing the power switch box, snapping out its back support, and attaching a 4-drive PC bay vertically on the drive tray.
If I knew I could put my B&W G3's motherboard in one of those G4 cases, I would order a case as a replacement part (if they still sell them).
I mean, didn't tivo three months ago announce something about XM radio and the ability to burn programs to DVD?
Where is it?
The Toshiba and Pioneer DVRs can burn their TiVo recordings to DVD-R.
The software and dongle to allow you to use your home PC or Mac to burn DVDs from TiVo recordings, well, I've been out of the loop for a couple of weeks.
XM, I don't have it nor plan to; I have enough monthly service expenses.
They can be done from LiveTV as well, but people generally have a hard time getting them to work when trying to do that.
That's usually because they're using them with the top banner visible, which can intercept Select, or they're using the other two codes which could result in them tu[r]ning to channel 9 or 30 instead of enabling the on-screen clock or 30-second skip respectively.
It also helps to hit Clear between any two consecutive S-P-S-*-S codes; it gets confused when it sees Select-Select.
Hmm, I might just activate my third series1 standalone now.
I paid for my HMO, but I can easily think of the $99 charge now being for the privilege of transfering my lifetime subscriptions from my other two Series1 TiVos to two Series2 TiVos. (And it made sense because the Series2 units require subscriptions whereas the old Philips units I have are subscription optional. Better to be able to cancel on the Philipses and save money if needed.)
And hey! according to their FAQ on this, my monthly units are getting discounted rates already! If I register the old 20hr (never subscribed), I'll still be paying less than before the rate change!
I wonder if I could convince them to let me have 8 units at $6.95/mo. with the two with lifetime on the same account without divorcing the lifetime units to different accounts. Otherwise, wouldn't I lose HMO video sharing benefits with the Series2 units on divorced accounts, even if at the same address?
Maybe not 10x speed, but 2x can be done for some content easily, typically cartoons which (unless they are computer rendered) are usually really only 12 frames per second to start with anyway (doubled to 24, then 3:2-converted to 30). Just cut out the redundancy.
And again, you might be able to get away with deinterlacing them down to 12 fields per second for a 5x speed-up at a cost of halving your vertical resolution. With good interpolation this might be tolerable.
Maybe because more people have broadband than digital TV?
Or maybe it is easier to be a broadband publisher and have people pull (download) content from you than get a new digital TV channel carried everywhere to push (upload) it to them (look at G4 having to buy TechTV to get greater market penetration).
You might as well ask why people adopted VHS over Beta.
Do the TiVo series 2 boxes have an ethernet port in the back (I have a series 1 DirectTiVo)?
The Series2 boxes have USB ports and the software supports hooking up USB-Ethernet adapters. Units with these installed make their "calls" to TiVo more frequently over the higher bandwidth connection. With Home Media Option (extra one-time fee, not available for DirecTiVos), you can schedule shows to record over the web and the TiVo checks for them every 15 minutes, share shows between TiVos in the same home, and share pictures and MP3s from your computer with your TiVo, playing and displaying them on your TV.
Series1 units can have a special ethernet adapter installed by the consumer. Commonly used to replace a broken internal modem in standalones and for extracting video out of hacked units.
However, bandwidth is limited in that the ports are only USB 1.1. Streamed Basic Quality video is possible now between two standalones. Higher quality video may be watched as it transfers depending on how much motion there is in the video.
If TiVo does follow through with this, I'd expect new models with 100 Mbit Ethernet ports built-in, but also hardened even more against consumer intrusion.
For typical commercial television, recording an hour show and starting to watch it 15 minutes after it started is sufficient to have all essential trick play features available for the duration of the program (unless you watch 60 Minutes only to see Andy Rooney).
But if you look at the HMO feature, which allows Series2 TiVos to download (pull) shows from each other, it too will let you start watching a show immediately over Ethernet throttled to USB 1.1 speed. If recorded at Basic Quality, viewing is possible non-stop. Sometimes, if the show has little motion, even a Best Quality stream can be transferred and watched without more than a few initial buffering stoppages (Night of the Living Dead).
This could be done as easily as opening HMO video sharing to TiVo's servers much like how TiVo provides some free MP3s and slideshow images from their servers.
And it would be nice to see some short subjects available, published through TiVo be available to be watched on a TV screen instead of a monitor. They used to provide short films along with their TiVo Takes program. TiVo being a content provider brings interesting possibilities for serial content. It would be nice to get the latest Red vs. Blue episodes downloaded to my TiVo for viewing on the TV rather than wait for the next DVD to be released.
I'm using a B&W G3 with a G4 upgrade(*) as well (550 MHz though), and was using a 1x DVD-R, DVD-RAM drive for which I paid too much new.
What I meant was that DVD Studio Pro works with third party drives out of the box, whereas iDVD does not, requiring additional software to enable their use. Software Apple would rather not have exist.
(*) To others thinking of doing the same, don't forget to edit the application package's Info.plist file to enable it to run on a non-AGP Mac. And the same to Compressor. And to repeat these changes every time the software is updated until you finally break down and buy an AGP-based Mac (I'm waiting for the expected dual-3 GHz G5).
Indeed, I saw this approach for a 4-dimensional 3x3x3x3 maze once. Travel between adjacent mazes was only possible if the square you were in in one matched the color of the square in an adjacent maze. (A crossword though wouldn't need to deal with color matching, which was just a way to implement the walls of the maze. A crossword would use colored squares only as a pan-dimensional crutch.)
Another problem is the terminology. Down and across is fine for 2-D, but how do you group the clues that span across multiple fields in two directions?
It might be easier to start with a 3-D puzzle where the third dimension is time. A 20x20x7 puzzle where each layer is issued on a different day of the week. Time-forward clues are only issued on the day the first letter would appear in the day's puzzle layer, and you won't know how many letters they are in advance. Answers won't be given until the day after the entire puzzle is published (or on the last day, depending on your paper's rules). Clue numbering continues sequentially layer by layer, with each day's layer being numbered as normal, plus numbers for cells starting a word that spans into the next puzzle.
More clever if it is a 21x21x21 puzzle spanning 3 weeks: last week, dead week, and finals week if a college paper.
Now, how to handle the filled cell grid symmetry rules of a proper crossword puzzle across multiple dimensions is left as an exercise for the submitter. If done right, then attentive players will be able to work out time-forward word lengths after the middle layer, so make sure the time-forward clues are extra hard to prevent early solutions.
Unlike iDVD, DSP will work with other DVD burners besides Apple-blessed SuperDrives.
However, earlier versions have had problems with some third party burners. I could not use a particular 1x DVD-R drive because it DSP would try to burn at 64x instead (the highest speed the drive says it supports according to Roxio Toast). I could not find a setting in DSP to prevent it from trying to burn at the highest "supported" speed.
I'd like a choice of who provides my water service too, but the ground can only hold so many pipes.
Do you have separate wires into your house for AT&T vs. MCI service?
More pipes aren't needed for choice. I know of at least one town where you have a choice of providers of natural gas. All of them provide the same gas through the same pipe, and all drawn from the same source; they just charge different rates. You don't pay for a particular branded product; you pay for branded access to a common product.
If they could put meters in everybody's windpipes, they'd sell atmospheric oxygen produced by their business campus landscaping.
Coming soon from the RIAA: Music you can't listen to!
It's already here: tune your radio to a ClearChannel station.
Well, if companies cannot legally acquire biometric data from kids to sell them music, perhaps that means the quality of music will rise to meet the demands of a more mature marketplace.
I hope they don't have plans to move onto other forms of biometrics. The jokes are too obvious - "All your face are..."
Can we at least start with "the Mark of the Beats"?
I'd join in a boycot, but I don't buy any music anyway. There isn't anything worth my money I can't hear for free on radio (what little there is that I'd care to hear). The most I could do would be to buy used unencumbered music.
And how much longer will they continue to permit that? How close is legislation that requires every commercial sale of unencumbered media be re-encoded onto biometrically encumbered media? And how far until information on unencumbered media become classified as controlled information and you'd need a special license to possess it, which has to be periodically renewed with a presumption of copyright infringement fee? Will the penalties be worse than for illegal possession of controlled substances? or are they already?
Yes, I have always felt that it is the best technobabble ever written.
Heck, no, Star Trek is the hands down winner there.
Oh absolutely! It's better on the order of one to the fourth power! The writers are clearly more superior thinkers than the most intelligent deuterium ore one could ever mine! "Warp particles!" Genius!
We usurped kilo- and mega- and applied it to our word, byte. Kilo- and mega- already had their SI meanings; we didn't invent them. We then continued to grab with giga-, tera-, and even still with peta- and exa-. Or rather we complain that they should be binary in measure but in common practice they're metric.
If we were to have clean hands, we should have adopted our own unique terminology: thella-, mella-, bella-, trella-, quella-, etc.
Meanwhile we have two meanings of our own for mega-, and when applied to bits per second we have more confusion (sometimes measured metrically, sometimes binarily). Consider for example the assumption that you can convert between b/s and B/s with a factor of 8 when there could be a hidden mega-/mebi- conversion factor in there as well. It shouldn't take 5 minutes to verify.
You might as well get used to them, because those who know and care about the difference will continue to ask you to clarify whether you mean metric or binary measure. Eventually it'll be quicker for you to just use the MiB and metric-MB to make it clear at the start.
(Meanwhile there are people who believe that the reason why their 250 GB drive only comes up as 232.8 "GB" is because they lose 17.2 MB due to "formatted capacity", overhead in numbering every sector like they were pages in a book. Bullshit. Filesystem overhead for a blank disk should be well less than 1 MiB; the discrepancy is adequately explained by the metric-binary conversion.)
So you're saying, we corrupted the terminology first; how dare they retaliate?
...and little kibibitties.
A kibibyte's bin'ry too, a power o' two.
That's what they're teaching kids in schools these days!
nefarious kniving hackers
Well, I see someone has found a new, creative misspelling of a word that almost passes a spell checker. It should be "nefarious conniving hackers". You have surprised me today.
Sure, mirror the site, so I can appear in the access logs too and have my servers seized as well?
Hell, even accidental association seems as good as guilt these days.
It says Apple-LABELED hardware. You could stick your PC board in a Mac Classic.... Hell, you could even just slap an Apple sticker on the side and it would be legal.
And are you Apple, labeling the hardware? Does your PC board in a Mac Classic case have an Apple-applied silkscreened logo on it?
Older versions of their license agreement may have had that loophole. This phrasing closes it.
Not that I'd rat anyone out for it. I like this project and hope it continues. Meanwhile, Apple will be putting in code to prevent it from running on unsupported hardware, as they have done as far back as ProDOS.
And if Microsoft ever tried to attach a condition like that to their licenses...
What, like you can only play XBOX games on unmodified XBOX-branded hardware?
Does it matter?
Mac OS X is licensed only for "Apple-labeled computers"(*). So even with a retail version, installing it on a PC emulator would still be a violation of its license agreement.
(*) This is stronger than earlier agreements which licensed the software for computers bearing the Apple logo. This updated term implies that the label must be applied by Apple and not be simply an Apple sticker applied by the consumer. IANAL.
Hey, I'm not reporting it, I'm just giving people ideas!
As I said, nothing will deter the determined, but a few simple devices will deter the causal prankster. The hold latch removal is a poor solution for anything other than keeping people from getting in their vehicle while pumping fuel.
And if we're serious about curbing that behavior, then push forward a law that it will be illegal for the operator of a gas pump to re-enter the vehicle for any reason while the pump is in connection with the vehicle.
Or require vehicles or pumps to provide a grounding strap which must be connected to a gas station's common ground and the vehicle before access between fuel and tank is permitted. It is usually easier to provide a technical solution with which people must comply with in order to complete an activity than expect them to consider their own safety or that of others (e.g. automatic seatbelts).
It looks like 'Enterprise' might be moved to Fridays next year
That won't be so bad for me. No real UPN station here; Star Trek: Enterprise is carried in syndication on a Fox affilliate on Sunday evening as the only airing in the week. First UPN airing on Friday means less spoilers to avoid and better chance to take part in discussions while interest is still high.