As I said "a SINGLE PRI". I chose those words carefully. If there are "more than one" PRI, then one can use NFAS to recover one channel per PRI -- it's recommends to have two or three D channels per group depending on size.
The Canuks can call it what ever they want, but the documented (and world accepted) standard for "PRI" means it's ISDN. It can be carried over the 24 channels of a T1 or 30 channels of an E1.
Correction: a single PRI will carry 23 calls. (23B+D) PRI's are out-of-band signaled. Without the D channel, there's no way to signal incoming or outgoing calls.
As long as what you're hanging behind it is reasonably local. There's an ecomony of scale here. Connecting one complex via a co-lo is arguablly more expensive, and much more to manage. The post isn't asking to network all the apartments in Dayton, OH. There's one, maybe two, to be networked with a managing staff of nearly zero. Your solution is over designed for the stated problem.
There are not a billion co-lo facilities around. (yet an other number pulled out of the air.) I would submit there never was as much demand as business planners figured. As for power and stability, that one bites everyone (including you.) Any company so reliant on internet connectivity for their livelihood should have backup(s) and redundancy. The colo doesn't help much... when the T1 to the office fails, they cannot get anywhere. Depending on where they've placed the mail server, they either cannot get to their email or aren't receiving anything. If your business depends on something, you should plan accordingly. In this case, we're talking about an apartment complex; so the residents can't get to their pr0n right now, too bad. There's about a 100% chance the place is not zoned commercial or has some clause in the lease prohibiting running a business from the apartment.
As for your last comment... I won't disagree with that. However, "2nd rate" isn't that far away from "1st rate" these days. As I say almost daily, "cheap is a very powerful motivator." Most people would run screaming from the room if they really knew what all goes on at their ISP.
F'ing system integrators. Always dreaming up overly complex, expensive, big solutions to some of the simplest problems.
The poster isn't building a "WAN for a 30 campus University". That is completely different from getting internet connectivity to an apartment community. The mere fact of asking slashdot how to best go about it is a clue to their lack of networking knowledge. They aren't aiming to be Earthlink. If people can plug their computer into the provided hole in the wall, fire up IE, and get to Yahoo!, then the job's done.
People who have money to throw away generally find ways to throw it away by allowing others to over design solutions (and over charge for them.) In the real world, money is a precious commodity; spending where it's not necessary is wasteful and damaging to the bottom line.
So, I'll ask again, why are the colo facilities empty?
I'll try to remember that as I wander up and down the butt-empty co-location facilities here in the Northern Virginia/Dulles Corridor area.
And while you're wander around there, tell me why it's so freakin' empty if your method is the most economical solution? I'll save you the time: it isn't the most economical solution. I see you've studied at the feet of RIAA and MPAA ("Statistics: How to Lie With Truth")
So do some math...
Maybe you should. (Or maybe your calculator needs new batteries?) If you're willing to spend money you don't have to, you're not going to be in the ISP business very long (if at all.) You've provided ZERO costs for co-lo, but gleefully throw around T1 prices which are guesses and not valid 30 day quotes. (Tier-1 providers don't have set prices. They negotiate the price. As such, the price of my UUNet T1 may be very different from the cost of your UUNet T1 despite both of them going to the same office.)
In the case of these condos, if they are out of range for DSL and cable modem service, then they are very likely a long way from a colo facility or tier-1 ISP. T1 pricing is distance based (among other things.) That 300$ p-t-p T1 is (a) very short (a few dozen miles), and (b) completely contained within a CLEC's network. RBOC's will charge every penny they are allowed by law (and sometimes more.) CLEC's have a very good record of ignoring the tariffs where possible to offer "cheap" solutions because it really doesn't cost as much as the tariff was built to cover.
Co-lo space isn't cheap. Especially for the type of crap you're suggesting. RackSpace.com isn't going to be thrilled to know you're using them as the upstream ISP for your condos. A colo facility with good connectivity is not cheap (and you are adding 2 hops to get to that tier-1.) Unthrottled and unmetered connectivity is very much not cheap (read: fucking expensive.)
BritSys lists 1U for 125$/month metered to 1Mbit/s. Bandwidth is 100$ per additional Mbit. Address space adds to that, but I didn't look for any numbers. That'll run $225+/month for one T1 plus the cost of the p-t-p T1 which, crossing a lata and maybe state line(s), will be twice your $295 figure or more. So, for around $800-900/month, you have a tier-2 or tier-3 internet connection that costs twice as much to setup and maintain. It's cheaper and easier to get an "internet T1" straight to a tier-2/3 provider. (If you're buying p-t-p connections from the cheapest source, why not be frugal in purchasing internet connectivity? After all, if "making money is the point" then needlessly spending money is a no-no.)
(And for the record, our own p-t-p T1s ("private line") are priced as "ICB" -- individual case basis -- which is sales-speak for "how much ya' got?" Greater than T1 and colo are also "ICB", however "colo" doesn't include an ethernet port. Internet T1 via frame ranges from $600-800 or $300-500+loop (colo loop = zero.) An additional/24 is $85 with acceptable justification. We are a "tier-2" provider.)
It doesn't have an "ARIN record". It has a whois record within the Shared WhoIs Project ("SWIP"). ARIN uses SWIP to account for utilization of a deligation and for building inverse DNS pointers (for a/24 to be aimed at a customer, a SWIP record for the/24 must exist.) When an ISP requests more space, ARIN will look at the SWIP records for their last allocation to determine the validity of the request.
RWhois is an alternative to SWIP. The ISP maintains their own "SWIP" records. It's debatable as to which is more complicated. Many prefer to use rwhois because they have direct control over it (vs. the crazy rules and emailed templates for SWIP.)
Technically, that's not "pre ARIN". ARIN was handing out address space as far back as 1993 -- 199/8 was deligated to ARIN May '93. And if you are not currently paying for your address space, then it isn't your space. The space can be revoked and assigned to someone else.
A friend of mine had a/16 (maybe even/8?) from way back -- long before anyone worried about running out of addresses. It was reclaimed because (a) he could not provide justification for such an allocation, and (b) there's no way he'd ever be able to pay for it.
FWIW, domain names were free for many years as well. Internic was allowed to (and actually was supposed to) charge for domains, but they didn't for many years. Then, almost over night, they starting billing for them.
Would you care to disclose the address blocks and/or organization o' anonymous coward? I guess not because you know you'll start being billed for them.
That all depends... DSL often has a split-horizon problem where broadcasts aren't flooded to other ports. In such a case, without specific configuration otherwise, the other computers would not show up in the network neighborhood. They are still browsable by direct request (\\192.168.1.1)
Dialup generally requires specific configuration to flood broadcasts (or even listen to them.) I've never known of any ISP to support this. (I configured a few netblazers to do it long ago, but that was just for grins.)
Cable modem is a different animal... Think of it as an ethernet switch that's really, really far away.:-)
And the rules for netbios neighbor lists require all the hosts in the broadcast domain to be in the same subnet (as the client believes... enter the wrong netmask and parts of the network can disappear.) I've had problems with customers wanting browsing across VPN tunnels -- it ain't gonna happen without a domain controller or wins server.
Ok, you are obviously talking out your left butt cheek...
As for IP Address space...
IP address space isn't free (for anyone!) ISPs (subject to ARIN) MUST provide "detailed" justification for assignments of/24 or larger blocks to end users. I work for an ISP. I go through this shitty processes several times a year. I know very well what goes on w.r.t. address allocations. Yes, you get address space from your ISP. For a fee. As long as you can justify the allocation. (160 condos is far too small for a direct assignment from ARIN.)
You can add $50-$100 to the monthly rent...
Any place tacking on an extra 50 to 100$ in rent for shared access to a T1 is not going to be my place of residence. There are better, faster solutions available (maybe not for these 160 condo's... I don't know where they are.) And it's not like people will not notice rent here is 100$ higher than down the street.
Bandwidth isn't that expensive...
Oh good God. If you hold any form of network related certification, please return it. "Buy in bulk"? This ain't mayonnaise, boy. This isn't 1995 either. The cost of 1U of colo space for your router will run more than the T1 you want brought back to the condos. Gee, how does two routers + T1 between them + colo rack space + colo connectivity and bandwidth cost less than one router and a T1 to some ISP? (Answer: it doesn't, and never, ever will.)
DSL uses a single pair, is far less distance limited (3352m (1.5M SDSL/CopperMountain) vs. 100m (ethernet)), and is much more forgiving of line conditions (RF, crosstalk, etc.) DSL hardware, by the fact that it's designed for connecting to the PSTN web of wires, has line isolation hardware -- a voltage spike on a single ethernet port can fry an entire switch vs. killing a single DSL port that's easily fixed by an experienced hobbiest.
I'd recommend ethernet for the shear simplicity and speed. Hardware for either solution is cheap if purchased used/previously owned.
I'd have a serious problem with not being able to communicate with any other computer(s) in the entire complex. Without the provided system, there certainly wouldn't be anything preventing it. (ie. my dialup connection can talk to my neighbor's DSL connection.)
DHCP and address translation can be a serious problem. No ISP is going to give you the address space to assign a single IP to every person, room, or apartment. The larger the allocation required, the harder and more expensive it will be to obtain. One could attempt to log the dynamic translations, but that is more of a mess. (I watched the xlate events of a PIX-525 for a company of ~750 people... for a few minutes. There no way anyone would keep logs long enough or spend the time to dig through the millions of records.)
The only problem might be that it was just a large network - anyone could see all the other computers on the network, and access shared folders (like newer versions of Windows set up by default).
He'll have the same problem with DSL.
Not necessarily. Can you "browse" all the computers connected to your DSL line? Or dialup?
This is an implementation issue. It has very little to do with the connecting technology.
I wouldn't say "clueless". They know what it is and exactly what it's going to do to their business. "Lazy" would be a better term. They really have no desire to change the way they've been doing business for the last 30+ years. VoIP is certainly neat stuff, but it's a long way from the quality and stability of the modern PSTN -- amazing given the age of the equipment and the nuts managing it (and I'm one of them.)
Speaking from experience, telco facility equipment is expensive and becomes obsolete far too quickly. As much as I'd like to use cheap linksys gear, I'd rather not incure the fines for using non-standards compliant hardware. (NEBS) (Not that I'd live long enough to talk Hell South into allow it in the first place. They are enough of a pain in the ass when it is compliant.)
The fiber is cheap compared to the cost of lighting it up. It cost the same to bury 12 stands as 1 (cost of the bundle aside), so everyone stuck a lot more stuff in the ground than they ever intended on using.
Look a little harder. The software you claim doesn't exist has been around for several years now. However, the prefered method is to install software on the active tivo -- removing the harddrive means turning off your tivo which is obviously unacceptable.
Peering really has gone the way of the doodoo. Back in the day, peering was were it was happenin'. ISPs throw a router in a rack in a packing deck somewhere (read: the most expensive 4sq.ft. on Earth) and pay the operator for some level of shared connectivity to all the other ISPs' routers. BGP private peering and even public peering (through a central "route server" or "route reflector") made for very optimal traffic flow.
Modern day: are there any "MAE"s still around? (Did they ever finish build NAP of the Americas in Miami?) Everyone connects to the teir1 ISPs like UUNet (err, MCI), Sprint, C&W, etc. and basically just hands them everything. It's very sub-optimal and there's not much that can be done to clean it up; very few ISPs (like *1*) propigate and/or use BGP metric data. This is complicated by everyone doing things the Cisco Way (tm) instead of following the RFC standard which mentions nothing about AS path being part of the route selection logic.
If TiVo goes out of business... there are a number of people who have rather detailed information on the internals of the tivo. That said, tv listing would start being available from various places in short order (dare I say minutes after the announcement?) Where do you think the Oz TV guide is coming from? Or PPV and Sports guide data tivo doesn't provide (to SAs)?
TiVo will not record the same episode... or it falls within multiple recording preferences (i.e. 3 wishlists cover it.)
And FWIW, one can purchase drives complete with OS and guide data preloaded... plug 'em in and stand back.
The tivo does not store recordings in a "proprietary (encoded) format". It's 100% perfectly spec compliant MPEG. Just because you don't have any software or hardware capable of processing a packetized elemental stream, does not make it proprietary. PES is used for ("live") broadcasting (i.e. where there isn't a nice little file there to be streamed and there isn't time to create one.) As such, almost no PC hardware or software is coded to handle it -- it's more complicated and you're very unlikely to encounter it normally.
(Yes, with the correct codec, one can play tivo mpeg streams right off the drive with ZERO modification. I have an NT 4.0 system that does so just fine.)
To quote Jesse Helms, "I can't rightly define it, but I know it when I see it." (re: art vs. porn)
It's hard to see why people like tivo (or any PVR) so much. Once you have one, you won't know how you lived life without one. I loaned one (of many) tivos to my then boss. I'll never see that tivo again:-) ('tho I do need to make the MB serial number match the case *grin*) I gave my family a DTivo for christmas and they've settled into it. (the whole "old dog, new tricks" thing applies.) They still prefer to watch things live instead of recording everything. And they still don't realize it has two tuners:-)
Personally, I like archiving things to watch. It's very handy to have your own instant replay. Frame by frame slow motion is also very useful. (I can do that with a VCR, but at a cost.)
DTV doesn't want HMO because they'd have to enable network access. And shortly there after, people would begin "stealing" their programming content in perfect digital form. Right now, the whole process is very complicated (and nearly impossible on the series 2 hardware) or isn't digital.
Don't hold your breath on getting HMO... out of how many million subscribers (and how many have tivos?), there are less than 2000 signatures. There are more tivos than that in this county much less over the entire country.
Slashdot Mirror
As I said "a SINGLE PRI". I chose those words carefully. If there are "more than one" PRI, then one can use NFAS to recover one channel per PRI -- it's recommends to have two or three D channels per group depending on size.
The Canuks can call it what ever they want, but the documented (and world accepted) standard for "PRI" means it's ISDN. It can be carried over the 24 channels of a T1 or 30 channels of an E1.
Correction: a single PRI will carry 23 calls. (23B+D) PRI's are out-of-band signaled. Without the D channel, there's no way to signal incoming or outgoing calls.
DTV is wasting an entire channel advertising it, so I very seriously doubt they are doing way with the service.
"Novell 3.51"? That's very funny.
- ...
- you can hang a lot of network behind
...
As long as what you're hanging behind it is reasonably local. There's an ecomony of scale here. Connecting one complex via a co-lo is arguablly more expensive, and much more to manage. The post isn't asking to network all the apartments in Dayton, OH. There's one, maybe two, to be networked with a managing staff of nearly zero. Your solution is over designed for the stated problem.There are not a billion co-lo facilities around. (yet an other number pulled out of the air.) I would submit there never was as much demand as business planners figured. As for power and stability, that one bites everyone (including you.) Any company so reliant on internet connectivity for their livelihood should have backup(s) and redundancy. The colo doesn't help much... when the T1 to the office fails, they cannot get anywhere. Depending on where they've placed the mail server, they either cannot get to their email or aren't receiving anything. If your business depends on something, you should plan accordingly. In this case, we're talking about an apartment complex; so the residents can't get to their pr0n right now, too bad. There's about a 100% chance the place is not zoned commercial or has some clause in the lease prohibiting running a business from the apartment.
As for your last comment... I won't disagree with that. However, "2nd rate" isn't that far away from "1st rate" these days. As I say almost daily, "cheap is a very powerful motivator." Most people would run screaming from the room if they really knew what all goes on at their ISP.
F'ing system integrators. Always dreaming up overly complex, expensive, big solutions to some of the simplest problems.
The poster isn't building a "WAN for a 30 campus University". That is completely different from getting internet connectivity to an apartment community. The mere fact of asking slashdot how to best go about it is a clue to their lack of networking knowledge. They aren't aiming to be Earthlink. If people can plug their computer into the provided hole in the wall, fire up IE, and get to Yahoo!, then the job's done.
People who have money to throw away generally find ways to throw it away by allowing others to over design solutions (and over charge for them.) In the real world, money is a precious commodity; spending where it's not necessary is wasteful and damaging to the bottom line.
So, I'll ask again, why are the colo facilities empty?
- I'll try to remember that as I wander up and down the butt-empty co-location facilities here in the Northern Virginia/Dulles Corridor area.
And while you're wander around there, tell me why it's so freakin' empty if your method is the most economical solution? I'll save you the time: it isn't the most economical solution. I see you've studied at the feet of RIAA and MPAA ("Statistics: How to Lie With Truth")- So do some math...
Maybe you should. (Or maybe your calculator needs new batteries?) If you're willing to spend money you don't have to, you're not going to be in the ISP business very long (if at all.) You've provided ZERO costs for co-lo, but gleefully throw around T1 prices which are guesses and not valid 30 day quotes. (Tier-1 providers don't have set prices. They negotiate the price. As such, the price of my UUNet T1 may be very different from the cost of your UUNet T1 despite both of them going to the same office.)In the case of these condos, if they are out of range for DSL and cable modem service, then they are very likely a long way from a colo facility or tier-1 ISP. T1 pricing is distance based (among other things.) That 300$ p-t-p T1 is (a) very short (a few dozen miles), and (b) completely contained within a CLEC's network. RBOC's will charge every penny they are allowed by law (and sometimes more.) CLEC's have a very good record of ignoring the tariffs where possible to offer "cheap" solutions because it really doesn't cost as much as the tariff was built to cover.
Co-lo space isn't cheap. Especially for the type of crap you're suggesting. RackSpace.com isn't going to be thrilled to know you're using them as the upstream ISP for your condos. A colo facility with good connectivity is not cheap (and you are adding 2 hops to get to that tier-1.) Unthrottled and unmetered connectivity is very much not cheap (read: fucking expensive.)
BritSys lists 1U for 125$/month metered to 1Mbit/s. Bandwidth is 100$ per additional Mbit. Address space adds to that, but I didn't look for any numbers. That'll run $225+/month for one T1 plus the cost of the p-t-p T1 which, crossing a lata and maybe state line(s), will be twice your $295 figure or more. So, for around $800-900/month, you have a tier-2 or tier-3 internet connection that costs twice as much to setup and maintain. It's cheaper and easier to get an "internet T1" straight to a tier-2/3 provider. (If you're buying p-t-p connections from the cheapest source, why not be frugal in purchasing internet connectivity? After all, if "making money is the point" then needlessly spending money is a no-no.)
(And for the record, our own p-t-p T1s ("private line") are priced as "ICB" -- individual case basis -- which is sales-speak for "how much ya' got?" Greater than T1 and colo are also "ICB", however "colo" doesn't include an ethernet port. Internet T1 via frame ranges from $600-800 or $300-500+loop (colo loop = zero.) An additional
It doesn't have an "ARIN record". It has a whois record within the Shared WhoIs Project ("SWIP"). ARIN uses SWIP to account for utilization of a deligation and for building inverse DNS pointers (for a /24 to be aimed at a customer, a SWIP record for the /24 must exist.) When an ISP requests more space, ARIN will look at the SWIP records for their last allocation to determine the validity of the request.
RWhois is an alternative to SWIP. The ISP maintains their own "SWIP" records. It's debatable as to which is more complicated. Many prefer to use rwhois because they have direct control over it (vs. the crazy rules and emailed templates for SWIP.)
Technically, that's not "pre ARIN". ARIN was handing out address space as far back as 1993 -- 199/8 was deligated to ARIN May '93. And if you are not currently paying for your address space, then it isn't your space. The space can be revoked and assigned to someone else.
/16 (maybe even /8?) from way back -- long before anyone worried about running out of addresses. It was reclaimed because (a) he could not provide justification for such an allocation, and (b) there's no way he'd ever be able to pay for it.
A friend of mine had a
FWIW, domain names were free for many years as well. Internic was allowed to (and actually was supposed to) charge for domains, but they didn't for many years. Then, almost over night, they starting billing for them.
Would you care to disclose the address blocks and/or organization o' anonymous coward? I guess not because you know you'll start being billed for them.
That all depends... DSL often has a split-horizon problem where broadcasts aren't flooded to other ports. In such a case, without specific configuration otherwise, the other computers would not show up in the network neighborhood. They are still browsable by direct request (\\192.168.1.1)
:-)
Dialup generally requires specific configuration to flood broadcasts (or even listen to them.) I've never known of any ISP to support this. (I configured a few netblazers to do it long ago, but that was just for grins.)
Cable modem is a different animal... Think of it as an ethernet switch that's really, really far away.
And the rules for netbios neighbor lists require all the hosts in the broadcast domain to be in the same subnet (as the client believes... enter the wrong netmask and parts of the network can disappear.) I've had problems with customers wanting browsing across VPN tunnels -- it ain't gonna happen without a domain controller or wins server.
- As for IP Address space...
IP address space isn't free (for anyone!) ISPs (subject to ARIN) MUST provide "detailed" justification for assignments of- You can add $50-$100 to the monthly rent...
Any place tacking on an extra 50 to 100$ in rent for shared access to a T1 is not going to be my place of residence. There are better, faster solutions available (maybe not for these 160 condo's... I don't know where they are.) And it's not like people will not notice rent here is 100$ higher than down the street.- Bandwidth isn't that expensive...
Oh good God. If you hold any form of network related certification, please return it. "Buy in bulk"? This ain't mayonnaise, boy. This isn't 1995 either. The cost of 1U of colo space for your router will run more than the T1 you want brought back to the condos. Gee, how does two routers + T1 between them + colo rack space + colo connectivity and bandwidth cost less than one router and a T1 to some ISP? (Answer: it doesn't, and never, ever will.)DSL uses a single pair, is far less distance limited (3352m (1.5M SDSL/CopperMountain) vs. 100m (ethernet)), and is much more forgiving of line conditions (RF, crosstalk, etc.) DSL hardware, by the fact that it's designed for connecting to the PSTN web of wires, has line isolation hardware -- a voltage spike on a single ethernet port can fry an entire switch vs. killing a single DSL port that's easily fixed by an experienced hobbiest.
I'd recommend ethernet for the shear simplicity and speed. Hardware for either solution is cheap if purchased used/previously owned.
Ever heard of a WINS server? (one is included with samba) Using DHCP, it is very easy to maintain a windows client network.
Next I suppose you'll suggest using layer 3 aware switches and block anything that isn't IP traffic? (protocol filtering in Cisco speak.)
I'd have a serious problem with not being able to communicate with any other computer(s) in the entire complex. Without the provided system, there certainly wouldn't be anything preventing it. (ie. my dialup connection can talk to my neighbor's DSL connection.)
DHCP and address translation can be a serious problem. No ISP is going to give you the address space to assign a single IP to every person, room, or apartment. The larger the allocation required, the harder and more expensive it will be to obtain. One could attempt to log the dynamic translations, but that is more of a mess. (I watched the xlate events of a PIX-525 for a company of ~750 people... for a few minutes. There no way anyone would keep logs long enough or spend the time to dig through the millions of records.)
- The only problem might be that it was just a large network - anyone could see all the other computers on the network, and access shared folders (like newer versions of Windows set up by default).
Not necessarily. Can you "browse" all the computers connected to your DSL line? Or dialup?He'll have the same problem with DSL.
This is an implementation issue. It has very little to do with the connecting technology.
I wouldn't say "clueless". They know what it is and exactly what it's going to do to their business. "Lazy" would be a better term. They really have no desire to change the way they've been doing business for the last 30+ years. VoIP is certainly neat stuff, but it's a long way from the quality and stability of the modern PSTN -- amazing given the age of the equipment and the nuts managing it (and I'm one of them.)
Speaking from experience, telco facility equipment is expensive and becomes obsolete far too quickly. As much as I'd like to use cheap linksys gear, I'd rather not incure the fines for using non-standards compliant hardware. (NEBS) (Not that I'd live long enough to talk Hell South into allow it in the first place. They are enough of a pain in the ass when it is compliant.)
The fiber is cheap compared to the cost of lighting it up. It cost the same to bury 12 stands as 1 (cost of the bundle aside), so everyone stuck a lot more stuff in the ground than they ever intended on using.
Look a little harder. The software you claim doesn't exist has been around for several years now. However, the prefered method is to install software on the active tivo -- removing the harddrive means turning off your tivo which is obviously unacceptable.
Peering really has gone the way of the doodoo. Back in the day, peering was were it was happenin'. ISPs throw a router in a rack in a packing deck somewhere (read: the most expensive 4sq.ft. on Earth) and pay the operator for some level of shared connectivity to all the other ISPs' routers. BGP private peering and even public peering (through a central "route server" or "route reflector") made for very optimal traffic flow.
Modern day: are there any "MAE"s still around? (Did they ever finish build NAP of the Americas in Miami?) Everyone connects to the teir1 ISPs like UUNet (err, MCI), Sprint, C&W, etc. and basically just hands them everything. It's very sub-optimal and there's not much that can be done to clean it up; very few ISPs (like *1*) propigate and/or use BGP metric data. This is complicated by everyone doing things the Cisco Way (tm) instead of following the RFC standard which mentions nothing about AS path being part of the route selection logic.
If TiVo goes out of business... there are a number of people who have rather detailed information on the internals of the tivo. That said, tv listing would start being available from various places in short order (dare I say minutes after the announcement?) Where do you think the Oz TV guide is coming from? Or PPV and Sports guide data tivo doesn't provide (to SAs)?
TiVo will not record the same episode... or it falls within multiple recording preferences (i.e. 3 wishlists cover it.)
And FWIW, one can purchase drives complete with OS and guide data preloaded... plug 'em in and stand back.
But they're them stinkin' Canadian dollars :-)
The tivo does not store recordings in a "proprietary (encoded) format". It's 100% perfectly spec compliant MPEG. Just because you don't have any software or hardware capable of processing a packetized elemental stream, does not make it proprietary. PES is used for ("live") broadcasting (i.e. where there isn't a nice little file there to be streamed and there isn't time to create one.) As such, almost no PC hardware or software is coded to handle it -- it's more complicated and you're very unlikely to encounter it normally.
(Yes, with the correct codec, one can play tivo mpeg streams right off the drive with ZERO modification. I have an NT 4.0 system that does so just fine.)
- If you build it yourself it'll do what you want.
No, it will do what ever you know how to make it do (or can get someone else to do for you.)To quote Jesse Helms, "I can't rightly define it, but I know it when I see it." (re: art vs. porn)
:-) ('tho I do need to make the MB serial number match the case *grin*) I gave my family a DTivo for christmas and they've settled into it. (the whole "old dog, new tricks" thing applies.) They still prefer to watch things live instead of recording everything. And they still don't realize it has two tuners :-)
It's hard to see why people like tivo (or any PVR) so much. Once you have one, you won't know how you lived life without one. I loaned one (of many) tivos to my then boss. I'll never see that tivo again
Personally, I like archiving things to watch. It's very handy to have your own instant replay. Frame by frame slow motion is also very useful. (I can do that with a VCR, but at a cost.)
DTV doesn't want HMO because they'd have to enable network access. And shortly there after, people would begin "stealing" their programming content in perfect digital form. Right now, the whole process is very complicated (and nearly impossible on the series 2 hardware) or isn't digital.
Don't hold your breath on getting HMO... out of how many million subscribers (and how many have tivos?), there are less than 2000 signatures. There are more tivos than that in this county much less over the entire country.