More to the point, you might have enough time to earn a ROI on your investment in education.
If the trend of tech is following the same trend in farming and manufacturing, it makes sense that (in order to breath life into tech as a career possibility for future generations) it needs to be made cheaper and accomplishable in a shorter time.
For example, it took farming about 80 years to go from being very profitable to needing subsidy. And it took a goodly amount of time to get a large farming operation going (sometimes generations).
Manufacturing took 40 years to complete that same cycle of going from extremely profitable to "commodity."
Now it is looking like CompSci/Tech is coming in around 20 years (or so); with outsourcing looming as the death-nell to high salaries, who's going to want to go spend 80K on education at university when they'll only be able to make a job that pays $30K? They'll never be able to pay off the investment in their education in a reasonable time.
*If* the trend continues, then I worry about how rapidly the "next thing" is going to come up and shut down... and the thing after that... and after that.
We'll be headed into a society based around *constant* training/retraining; the concept of "career" will have completely vanished.
Hmmm... I really did follow that point down the rabbit hole. 8)
And even if they don't have a holding period, you have a problem with dilution; the number of shares available on the open market would essentially increase by whatever number isn't bought back from the employees. More supply, lower price.
OR
They'd have to not offer as many shares to start, thus cutting the amount of money they can make from an IPO.
An idea from the Devil's Advocate side of the world: perhaps they don't *actually* have the code and are just trying to drum up donations using a hoax of sorts.
You'd be just as wise to put your money down on a "pre-release" copy of Duke Nuke'em Forever without doing more homework.;)
I use an RSS reader; it is a heavily modified version of rnews, which I customized for my own needs.
What my RSS reader does is it limits how often I make the request. So, it won't make a request until X minutes after the last time I made a request.
To be a good netizen, I don't set that to anything less than 30 minutes.
But the real beauty is that if I don't bother looking at the news for, say, 3 hours, it won't bother retrieving it. It will retrieve it when I look (so what if I have to wait a few seconds for it to download the feed?) and resets the timer to not check (no matter how often I reload the page) until X minutes have passed.
If people adopt an "on-demand" policy instead of scheduled, it should help push out the lifespan of this tech in its current form.
$19k for a simplistic, albeit technically interesting, game seems rather steep.
Was thinking exactly the same thing.
Instead of directly reading brainwaves, one could rig up a similar game using those cheap "bio-feedback" devices (you remember... the ones that attach to your finger and generate a tone? The "more relaxed" you are, the "lower" the tone goes).
Sure, it wouldn't be *exactly* the same, but it would be a similar concept... and for under $50.
They left out IT's favorite music...
on
IT's Musical Habits
·
· Score: 4, Funny
It doesn't say who is paying whom for the clicks or where the clicked on links appear or who's the sucker or who's paying the people to click for bucks.
Both, probably.
On the one hand, you can get paid for "clicks" through to a victim site by the owner of that site (like Google ads). Or, you artificially inflate your marketing saavy by "demonstrating" all the traffic your site generates, so you get paid to host the victim's ads.
And it isn't trivial to write a program that will always behave like a person (in terms of browsing behavior); the amount of money that would need to be invested would probably cost more than these 3rd-world workers cost. I seriously doubt the people running these scams are interested in developing software themselves.
Besides, why "invest" in a scheme that'd probably be debunked soon anyway? Better to get in fast, steal a quick couple of bucks, and get out.
Unfortunately, that's also what will make fighting this sort of thing really hard: the ones "clever" enough to pull this kind of crap off will already have moved onto the next thing while Joe Copycat gets nailed for it.
For what it is worth, I agree with the rental idea; he'll be able to get more camera for the budget. If the film makes any money (good luck with that), then there'll be opportunity later to buy better equipment.
Sheesh... wish I could mod the parent up past 5. 8)
Of course, in this case they were researching for an article for the university paper. Honestly, as long as no damage was caused, I'm not sure why they are being punished as opposed to given awards for excellent investigative journalism.
I worked with a guy once who actively tried to break into servers at work "to find security weaknesses to help the company." Of course, he never told anybody about it until he was caught, nor ever asked for permission, and was fired on the spot.
Journalism is one thing, but they certainly couldn't have gone wrong with telling the university what they were going to do before they did it. The university wouldn't even have to approve really; so long as the effort was made to get that approval they can claim innocent motivations to their actions.
Otherwise, what's to stop any university student from doing the same with the backup excuse of "I was, uh... RESEARCHING A PAPER... YEAH... that's the ticket!" ?
Actually, I am an engineer, but I agree with you on the "knows what's dangerous and what isn't" aspect to the personality type.
Maybe I don't fit that bill because I also manage my own network (although, at home). I've been trying to get family/friends onto Mozilla/Firefox for a while.
I should have elaborated on my point more. If I'm using IE in a closed, non-internet connected environment, then there are no concerns about security exploits. Now, you can replace "IE" with any application and the same basically holds true.
The reality is, of course, very different. People who would have access to IE generally also have access to the internet. So, the concern is still there that those users will need to be monitored/regulated/fixed/whatever to prevent infection entering into the corporation.
However, why would a re-write of internal apps be required? If the choice is to standardize on a different browser (or try to make it browser agnostic), then you'd have rewrite effort... the same rewrite effort as when Microsoft chooses to break backward compatibility in IE(n+1).
But until that time, I stand by my original disagreement that companies will *NEED* to spend money rewriting internal apps because of exploits on the internet.
Hate to say it, but if it became a problem, I'd suspect they'd just suspend internet access (for web browsing), draconian though it may be. 8P
because thousands of very large companies (you know, the ones which actually pay for symantec software?) standardised all of their internal applications on IE
Where's the exploit if they're hitting internal applications?
Why would those need to be rewritten?
While I agree it was short-sighted to marry to a single browser, that choice is made day-in, day-out as vendors marry products to certain OS platforms.
The bigger threat is when "Sam Receptionist" uses his IE browser for non-work activities; that can get these companies screwed.
I wouldn't call my example "flawed" as much as I would call it "specific."
The point I was trying to make (perhaps not successfully) was that the language we chose directly affects our value of what we're talking about.
Admittedly, if we both agree that a "woggle" and a "womble" are interchangeable, then there's no harm in the substitution.
But, if we agree that "woggle" is derrogatory and common usage allows them to be interchangeable, then the damage is done until the full transition is made. Basically, some will find it to detract from our society and others will not.
Note, I never really got into what was offensive. As I don't find words offensive... I find people's intentions offensive. 8) Perhaps that's one thing I've agreed with George Carlin: there really are no bad words.
You're spot on about the evolution of language. What is offensive today may or may not be offensive later. We have quite a few words that were absolutely offensive that have lost that connotation (like, have you ever been "gypped?" Or do you find that to be as strong a racial slur as it used to be?).
I think the real challenge is in answering how we deal with this evolution of language as words/phrases fall in-to/out-of favor. The FCC would regulate it to ban such language (a mistake as the list can never be absolute).
My ending point was that "the powers" will try to use protection as an argument (a weak argument, at best) to try and curb the thoughts of their populace. This is the most dangerous aspect of "regulation."
I'm tired of this blameless American society; if my fellow Americans would step up and take responsibility for dealing with what the world presents them instead of asking politicians to "make it safe," I think everyone would be better off.
Swearwords are bad, because we must protect children from scatological talk, lest they grow up to be Howard Stern.
Well, language is important enough to give careful consideration. Language is the basis of our views on the world... it gives a direct connection between a concept and a physical item.
Most importantly, the value of the thing is usually directly associated with the value connected to a word.
Do you get a different sense of respect/importance from these two sentences:
I'm going to go pick up my girlfriend. I'm going to go pick up my bitch.
Hate to say it, but the latter is becoming synonymous with the former in many urban areas.
I think it is important that we carefully use words around children so they can learn their appropriate imporance in the world.
On a related note, this was a major point of Orwell's "1984." If you can control the language of a people, you can also control the thoughts. Mostly by making "governmentally unpopular" ideas impossible to express because the language for them would no longer exist.
The real worry is that the powers that be are trying to implement that idea using the first point I've made as the "excuse."
However, that's not to say that nobody with a PC-based PVR is recording from a digital tuner. In fact there are a LOT of people with home-brew PVRs hooked up to a digital cable/satellite reciever. There are lots of tutorials written on the subject by people who have, lots of programs written to perform as the interface between PVR and tuner, etc.
Now you're mixing apples and steaks (I like the analogy. 8) ). There is no documented way of recording a digital stream from one of those sources. They're all recording the analog output from those digital devices. My point was that re-encoding/re-decoding of a previously encoded/decoded signal is not as clean as just getting the original un-decoded signal to start. Although, I'll concede there isn't always a huge difference in the playback quality (ie, it is watchable), I won't concede that "it is basically the same."
It's pretty trivial to tell the program you are using that you want to record from SVIDEO/AV input instead of the tuner. If you had a problem with that, blame it on the Windows programs you were using.
You're right... it *is* trivial to tell the program you're using to record from SVIDEO/AV input instead of the tuner. It *isn't* trivial to integrate that software with an alternate means of changing the channel. That's the point I trying to make. I've looked at a bunch of them, even on linux, and there just isn't an easy/not-really-technically-challenging way of getting them to change the channel for you. Without that functionality, you're back to basic VCR behavior - manually change the channel to X and set it to record at 10pm for 2 hours. Perhaps this is the area for most improvement in the PC PVR software arena, but for today, it is darn difficult.
But besides that, the integrated system can't hold a candle to the PC solution. Sure, it's easier to record a program, and watch it, but it's absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to do anything more advanced with it. That means a PC is inifinitely more convient, if you want to edit, want to record to CD/SVCD/DVD, etc.
Well, I can't argue with you on this point at all; you're 100% correct. Even for those who use a "hacked" TiVo/ReplayTV to download the recorded streams onto a computer are still using a computer to do the editing/whatnot. And that is going to be the deciding factor. Cable/Satellite providers are going to come out with their PVR solutions, and take away feature after feature. How can they possibly be the future if what they offer is terribly crippled?
Ooo... this gets us dangerously close to the whole copyright debate that's so hot on/. 8) What I'll say is this: yes, the cable/satellite companies and their MPAA cohorts are looking to restrict access to entertainment materials and for the same reason, money. They'll throw stuff/lies out there like "Video on demand makes it so you don't need a PVR!"
And I can't say I have a strong feeling one way or the other about it. On the one hand, you'll pay to watch some movie when you want to watch it. On the other, if that cost is relatively small, would it total up to the number of times you've watched that movie on VHS? DVD? Purchase of it in both formats? Some future format?
But, I digress. Back to the point about DVR's vs PC-based PVR's... I still think that until the cable/satellite companies embrace the idea that people want content like this on their PC's, they're going to resist making it easy to do. If I had to chose between setting up a PC-based solution for "Mom" or getting her a TiVo, despite the limitations, TiVo is gonna win out. You know, funny thing is, I don't even own a TiVo... but, I'm looking to when I move to satellite... and network the thing so I can download my streams to my computer for archiving.;)
Or another way to put it, if recording an Analog signal is going to be "good enough," then what are these companies going to (or try to) put in place to "protect" that content?
But, outside of that, IMO, most of the people with PVR solutions going through their PC are recording analog cable/analog signal... basically, ANALOG.
Have you tried recording from a digital source like a digital cable box and have it be anywhere near as simple as, say, with a PVR built into one?
I have.
For reasons I'll leave out, I had a PVR setup on Windows. In order for me to get the scheduling to work properly and in a TiVo-esque way, it required me to cobble together Girder (for sending the "channel numbers" through a serial cable attached to my digital device) and TVHolic for getting/listing the TVXML cable listings and attempting to schedule the "recording" function Now, that I'm not going to get into because I was using a Canopus ADVC-100 and Scenalyzer because it was a DV devince... kludgey, to say the least.
The end result was weeks of getting all that plugged in together to try and mimic TiVo functionality and still (however minimal it might be) getting "less perfect" recording than with a native device integrated into the receiver.
I know there are others out there, MythTV (is a great one) and it is actually simpler to setup on linux than windows... but there still isn't great integration with channel changing and those tuner cards because almost all of them assume you want to record what's coming in on the tuner card (ie, channel 42) and not channel "3" or some other AV input.
C'mon... hands down easier to use the integrated receiver/PVR with digital, and that's the way I see the industry going, don't you?
With the push to move towards digital-only signaling, the PC is going to get squeezed out.
I'm all for PC-based PVRs, but I have digital cable. The thought of re-encoding an MPEG2 stream that has already been encoded and decoded once really blows (especially when the compression they've used is so freakin' high to start).
At least with TiVo, one can record the original stream un-decoded. Even then, this isn't an option for me as I don't have satellite (it is supposed to be coming "soon" for digital cable boxes).
And I can't imagine that with the security wrapped into those digital receivers any of those companies are going to be hot to support a PC-based digital decoder card.
Hate to say it, but when it comes to quality, I think the "receiver with integrated pvr functionality" is going to win out. 8/
Seems more like a ploy to recoup costs on the third movie. Anybody else notice when the third movie came out on DVD they weren't pushing the movie for movie sake, but trying to capitalize on the "own the trilogy" angle?
Some people will collect anything. Personally, I like to collect bad habits.
Plenty of corporations are having a hard enough time rolling out security patches out to the machines on their network using a remote console (ie, can hit all those machines from one location). How likely would it be that they'd *physically* get to *each* machine, change the BIOS to ensure that it disables the USB ports and lock the BIOS?
Even outside of that logistic nightmare, you'd have to remain vigilante for new/old machines.
But even if you do get a draconian policy in place, what stops a spy from cracking open one of the cases and using the little jumper to "reset" the BIOS?
Maybe for ultra-small organizations this would make sense to try and do. But if you're in that small an organization, you have other easier methods of protecting your data.
Couldn't setting up an SPF record lead to another kind of DOS attack?
As a spammer, I could joe-job you, and even if the spam is rejected as not originating from "you," I could (potentially?) bring your server to its knees handling SPF record requests.
Or, would this be impractical anyway, given the nature of the checks?
Perhaps that's the very thing that micropayments would spur on. If everything could be reduced to micro-payments, perhaps most people would opt to pay some sort of flat-fee for access.
The real Houdini move there would be in getting people to forget that they didn't want to pay for the content in the first place by having a payment scheme twice removed (!).
You'd rather something be free than available for micropayments. But, with the choice between flat-rate and micropayments, sheeple would probably want flat rate and *feel* it is better than the micropayments: "Ahhh... look at all this content I get for a FLAT RATE! Those bastards are getting screwed and don't even know it!" Indeed... screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
We're currently working with omni-directional treadmills... which leave a lot to be desires as well as make noise that sounds like a jet engine.
I'm getting a picture in my mind of someone walking on top of a massively over-sized trackball...
Or is it more like a person inside a huge hamster ball? 8)
I would imagine it wouldn't take much dissuading... why would she want to drive traffic to katie.com?
Chances are this is already in the works; they'll change the promotion material to drive traffic to the appropriate site.
More to the point, you might have enough time to earn a ROI on your investment in education.
If the trend of tech is following the same trend in farming and manufacturing, it makes sense that (in order to breath life into tech as a career possibility for future generations) it needs to be made cheaper and accomplishable in a shorter time.
For example, it took farming about 80 years to go from being very profitable to needing subsidy. And it took a goodly amount of time to get a large farming operation going (sometimes generations).
Manufacturing took 40 years to complete that same cycle of going from extremely profitable to "commodity."
Now it is looking like CompSci/Tech is coming in around 20 years (or so); with outsourcing looming as the death-nell to high salaries, who's going to want to go spend 80K on education at university when they'll only be able to make a job that pays $30K? They'll never be able to pay off the investment in their education in a reasonable time.
*If* the trend continues, then I worry about how rapidly the "next thing" is going to come up and shut down... and the thing after that... and after that.
We'll be headed into a society based around *constant* training/retraining; the concept of "career" will have completely vanished.
Hmmm... I really did follow that point down the rabbit hole. 8)
And even if they don't have a holding period, you have a problem with dilution; the number of shares available on the open market would essentially increase by whatever number isn't bought back from the employees. More supply, lower price.
OR
They'd have to not offer as many shares to start, thus cutting the amount of money they can make from an IPO.
Looks like a lose-lose situation.
Three words.... There is a GOD!
;)
That's four words.
But, I like your math... guess that means I'll be able to share programs with 12 of my friends.
By that same token, a lot of retail stores ask for information too (like a phone number or a zip code).
You have to right to tell them, "no," however.
With the online registration *required*, you get no such option.
An idea from the Devil's Advocate side of the world: perhaps they don't *actually* have the code and are just trying to drum up donations using a hoax of sorts.
;)
You'd be just as wise to put your money down on a "pre-release" copy of Duke Nuke'em Forever without doing more homework.
Fool! The "power" obviously has you completely confused! All this arguing about the "moon" will not help you release yourself from the Matrix!
I use an RSS reader; it is a heavily modified version of rnews, which I customized for my own needs.
What my RSS reader does is it limits how often I make the request. So, it won't make a request until X minutes after the last time I made a request.
To be a good netizen, I don't set that to anything less than 30 minutes.
But the real beauty is that if I don't bother looking at the news for, say, 3 hours, it won't bother retrieving it. It will retrieve it when I look (so what if I have to wait a few seconds for it to download the feed?) and resets the timer to not check (no matter how often I reload the page) until X minutes have passed.
If people adopt an "on-demand" policy instead of scheduled, it should help push out the lifespan of this tech in its current form.
$19k for a simplistic, albeit technically interesting, game seems rather steep.
Was thinking exactly the same thing.
Instead of directly reading brainwaves, one could rig up a similar game using those cheap "bio-feedback" devices (you remember... the ones that attach to your finger and generate a tone? The "more relaxed" you are, the "lower" the tone goes).
Sure, it wouldn't be *exactly* the same, but it would be a similar concept... and for under $50.
mp3 and ogg. ;)
It doesn't say who is paying whom for the clicks or where the clicked on links appear or who's the sucker or who's paying the people to click for bucks.
Both, probably.
On the one hand, you can get paid for "clicks" through to a victim site by the owner of that site (like Google ads). Or, you artificially inflate your marketing saavy by "demonstrating" all the traffic your site generates, so you get paid to host the victim's ads.
And it isn't trivial to write a program that will always behave like a person (in terms of browsing behavior); the amount of money that would need to be invested would probably cost more than these 3rd-world workers cost. I seriously doubt the people running these scams are interested in developing software themselves.
Besides, why "invest" in a scheme that'd probably be debunked soon anyway? Better to get in fast, steal a quick couple of bucks, and get out.
Unfortunately, that's also what will make fighting this sort of thing really hard: the ones "clever" enough to pull this kind of crap off will already have moved onto the next thing while Joe Copycat gets nailed for it.
Now that's some damned sound advice.
For what it is worth, I agree with the rental idea; he'll be able to get more camera for the budget. If the film makes any money (good luck with that), then there'll be opportunity later to buy better equipment.
Sheesh... wish I could mod the parent up past 5. 8)
Of course, in this case they were researching for an article for the university paper. Honestly, as long as no damage was caused, I'm not sure why they are being punished as opposed to given awards for excellent investigative journalism.
I worked with a guy once who actively tried to break into servers at work "to find security weaknesses to help the company." Of course, he never told anybody about it until he was caught, nor ever asked for permission, and was fired on the spot.
Journalism is one thing, but they certainly couldn't have gone wrong with telling the university what they were going to do before they did it. The university wouldn't even have to approve really; so long as the effort was made to get that approval they can claim innocent motivations to their actions.
Otherwise, what's to stop any university student from doing the same with the backup excuse of "I was, uh... RESEARCHING A PAPER... YEAH... that's the ticket!" ?
Actually, I am an engineer, but I agree with you on the "knows what's dangerous and what isn't" aspect to the personality type.
Maybe I don't fit that bill because I also manage my own network (although, at home). I've been trying to get family/friends onto Mozilla/Firefox for a while.
I should have elaborated on my point more. If I'm using IE in a closed, non-internet connected environment, then there are no concerns about security exploits. Now, you can replace "IE" with any application and the same basically holds true.
The reality is, of course, very different. People who would have access to IE generally also have access to the internet. So, the concern is still there that those users will need to be monitored/regulated/fixed/whatever to prevent infection entering into the corporation.
However, why would a re-write of internal apps be required? If the choice is to standardize on a different browser (or try to make it browser agnostic), then you'd have rewrite effort... the same rewrite effort as when Microsoft chooses to break backward compatibility in IE(n+1).
But until that time, I stand by my original disagreement that companies will *NEED* to spend money rewriting internal apps because of exploits on the internet.
Hate to say it, but if it became a problem, I'd suspect they'd just suspend internet access (for web browsing), draconian though it may be. 8P
because thousands of very large companies (you know, the ones which actually pay for symantec software?) standardised all of their internal applications on IE
Where's the exploit if they're hitting internal applications?
Why would those need to be rewritten?
While I agree it was short-sighted to marry to a single browser, that choice is made day-in, day-out as vendors marry products to certain OS platforms.
The bigger threat is when "Sam Receptionist" uses his IE browser for non-work activities; that can get these companies screwed.
You hit on the point very precisely, as well.
I wouldn't call my example "flawed" as much as I would call it "specific."
The point I was trying to make (perhaps not successfully) was that the language we chose directly affects our value of what we're talking about.
Admittedly, if we both agree that a "woggle" and a "womble" are interchangeable, then there's no harm in the substitution.
But, if we agree that "woggle" is derrogatory and common usage allows them to be interchangeable, then the damage is done until the full transition is made. Basically, some will find it to detract from our society and others will not.
Note, I never really got into what was offensive. As I don't find words offensive... I find people's intentions offensive. 8) Perhaps that's one thing I've agreed with George Carlin: there really are no bad words.
You're spot on about the evolution of language. What is offensive today may or may not be offensive later. We have quite a few words that were absolutely offensive that have lost that connotation (like, have you ever been "gypped?" Or do you find that to be as strong a racial slur as it used to be?).
I think the real challenge is in answering how we deal with this evolution of language as words/phrases fall in-to/out-of favor. The FCC would regulate it to ban such language (a mistake as the list can never be absolute).
My ending point was that "the powers" will try to use protection as an argument (a weak argument, at best) to try and curb the thoughts of their populace. This is the most dangerous aspect of "regulation."
I'm tired of this blameless American society; if my fellow Americans would step up and take responsibility for dealing with what the world presents them instead of asking politicians to "make it safe," I think everyone would be better off.
Swearwords are bad, because we must protect children from scatological talk, lest they grow up to be Howard Stern.
Well, language is important enough to give careful consideration. Language is the basis of our views on the world... it gives a direct connection between a concept and a physical item.
Most importantly, the value of the thing is usually directly associated with the value connected to a word.
Do you get a different sense of respect/importance from these two sentences:
I'm going to go pick up my girlfriend.
I'm going to go pick up my bitch.
Hate to say it, but the latter is becoming synonymous with the former in many urban areas.
I think it is important that we carefully use words around children so they can learn their appropriate imporance in the world.
On a related note, this was a major point of Orwell's "1984." If you can control the language of a people, you can also control the thoughts. Mostly by making "governmentally unpopular" ideas impossible to express because the language for them would no longer exist.
The real worry is that the powers that be are trying to implement that idea using the first point I've made as the "excuse."
However, that's not to say that nobody with a PC-based PVR is recording from a digital tuner. In fact there are a LOT of people with home-brew PVRs hooked up to a digital cable/satellite reciever. There are lots of tutorials written on the subject by people who have, lots of programs written to perform as the interface between PVR and tuner, etc.
/. 8)
;)
Now you're mixing apples and steaks (I like the analogy. 8) ). There is no documented way of recording a digital stream from one of those sources. They're all recording the analog output from those digital devices. My point was that re-encoding/re-decoding of a previously encoded/decoded signal is not as clean as just getting the original un-decoded signal to start.
Although, I'll concede there isn't always a huge difference in the playback quality (ie, it is watchable), I won't concede that "it is basically the same."
It's pretty trivial to tell the program you are using that you want to record from SVIDEO/AV input instead of the tuner. If you had a problem with that, blame it on the Windows programs you were using.
You're right... it *is* trivial to tell the program you're using to record from SVIDEO/AV input instead of the tuner. It *isn't* trivial to integrate that software with an alternate means of changing the channel. That's the point I trying to make. I've looked at a bunch of them, even on linux, and there just isn't an easy/not-really-technically-challenging way of getting them to change the channel for you. Without that functionality, you're back to basic VCR behavior - manually change the channel to X and set it to record at 10pm for 2 hours. Perhaps this is the area for most improvement in the PC PVR software arena, but for today, it is darn difficult.
But besides that, the integrated system can't hold a candle to the PC solution. Sure, it's easier to record a program, and watch it, but it's absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to do anything more advanced with it. That means a PC is inifinitely more convient, if you want to edit, want to record to CD/SVCD/DVD, etc.
Well, I can't argue with you on this point at all; you're 100% correct. Even for those who use a "hacked" TiVo/ReplayTV to download the recorded streams onto a computer are still using a computer to do the editing/whatnot.
And that is going to be the deciding factor. Cable/Satellite providers are going to come out with their PVR solutions, and take away feature after feature. How can they possibly be the future if what they offer is terribly crippled?
Ooo... this gets us dangerously close to the whole copyright debate that's so hot on
What I'll say is this: yes, the cable/satellite companies and their MPAA cohorts are looking to restrict access to entertainment materials and for the same reason, money. They'll throw stuff/lies out there like "Video on demand makes it so you don't need a PVR!"
And I can't say I have a strong feeling one way or the other about it. On the one hand, you'll pay to watch some movie when you want to watch it. On the other, if that cost is relatively small, would it total up to the number of times you've watched that movie on VHS? DVD? Purchase of it in both formats? Some future format?
But, I digress. Back to the point about DVR's vs PC-based PVR's... I still think that until the cable/satellite companies embrace the idea that people want content like this on their PC's, they're going to resist making it easy to do. If I had to chose between setting up a PC-based solution for "Mom" or getting her a TiVo, despite the limitations, TiVo is gonna win out. You know, funny thing is, I don't even own a TiVo... but, I'm looking to when I move to satellite... and network the thing so I can download my streams to my computer for archiving.
Or another way to put it, if recording an Analog signal is going to be "good enough," then what are these companies going to (or try to) put in place to "protect" that content?
But, outside of that, IMO, most of the people with PVR solutions going through their PC are recording analog cable/analog signal... basically, ANALOG.
Have you tried recording from a digital source like a digital cable box and have it be anywhere near as simple as, say, with a PVR built into one?
I have.
For reasons I'll leave out, I had a PVR setup on Windows. In order for me to get the scheduling to work properly and in a TiVo-esque way, it required me to cobble together Girder (for sending the "channel numbers" through a serial cable attached to my digital device) and TVHolic for getting/listing the TVXML cable listings and attempting to schedule the "recording" function
Now, that I'm not going to get into because I was using a Canopus ADVC-100 and Scenalyzer because it was a DV devince... kludgey, to say the least.
The end result was weeks of getting all that plugged in together to try and mimic TiVo functionality and still (however minimal it might be) getting "less perfect" recording than with a native device integrated into the receiver.
I know there are others out there, MythTV (is a great one) and it is actually simpler to setup on linux than windows... but there still isn't great integration with channel changing and those tuner cards because almost all of them assume you want to record what's coming in on the tuner card (ie, channel 42) and not channel "3" or some other AV input.
C'mon... hands down easier to use the integrated receiver/PVR with digital, and that's the way I see the industry going, don't you?
With the push to move towards digital-only signaling, the PC is going to get squeezed out.
I'm all for PC-based PVRs, but I have digital cable. The thought of re-encoding an MPEG2 stream that has already been encoded and decoded once really blows (especially when the compression they've used is so freakin' high to start).
At least with TiVo, one can record the original stream un-decoded. Even then, this isn't an option for me as I don't have satellite (it is supposed to be coming "soon" for digital cable boxes).
And I can't imagine that with the security wrapped into those digital receivers any of those companies are going to be hot to support a PC-based digital decoder card.
Hate to say it, but when it comes to quality, I think the "receiver with integrated pvr functionality" is going to win out. 8/
"The Matrix Trilogy Re-Marketed?"
Seems more like a ploy to recoup costs on the third movie. Anybody else notice when the third movie came out on DVD they weren't pushing the movie for movie sake, but trying to capitalize on the "own the trilogy" angle?
Some people will collect anything.
Personally, I like to collect bad habits.
Plenty of corporations are having a hard enough time rolling out security patches out to the machines on their network using a remote console (ie, can hit all those machines from one location). How likely would it be that they'd *physically* get to *each* machine, change the BIOS to ensure that it disables the USB ports and lock the BIOS?
Even outside of that logistic nightmare, you'd have to remain vigilante for new/old machines.
But even if you do get a draconian policy in place, what stops a spy from cracking open one of the cases and using the little jumper to "reset" the BIOS?
Maybe for ultra-small organizations this would make sense to try and do. But if you're in that small an organization, you have other easier methods of protecting your data.
Couldn't setting up an SPF record lead to another kind of DOS attack?
As a spammer, I could joe-job you, and even if the spam is rejected as not originating from "you," I could (potentially?) bring your server to its knees handling SPF record requests.
Or, would this be impractical anyway, given the nature of the checks?
Perhaps that's the very thing that micropayments would spur on. If everything could be reduced to micro-payments, perhaps most people would opt to pay some sort of flat-fee for access.
The real Houdini move there would be in getting people to forget that they didn't want to pay for the content in the first place by having a payment scheme twice removed (!).
You'd rather something be free than available for micropayments. But, with the choice between flat-rate and micropayments, sheeple would probably want flat rate and *feel* it is better than the micropayments: "Ahhh... look at all this content I get for a FLAT RATE! Those bastards are getting screwed and don't even know it!" Indeed... screwed.