Warner has not made any statements that they are dropping HD-DVD, they will most likely release in both formats like Paramount plans.
The difference is slight, when you think about it.
With these media companies, what really matters is *not* supporting a format, depriving it of content. Early on, both Paramount and Warner had said they were only releasing titles on HD-DVD, which made people worry that Blu-ray would fail for lack of titles. Now... now it's looking like HD-DVD owners are going to be the ones missing out on Sony, Fox and Disney titles, with Blu-ray users being able to buy just about any movie.
What's left in the HD-DVD-only camp... Universal ? That's it? I mean, they have a good group of movies, but how long do you think they're going to hold out when *every* other studio is selling Blu-ray discs?
Forrester might just be right about this one. We'll see what happens when these suckers come to market. Either way, it's going to be an interesting couple of years for HD, what with these players, PS3, XBox360, and a mandated HD TV broadcast switchover here in the states. Hopefully the price of the displays will continue to drop, though, because I and several million other Americans are just not doing well enough to drop several thousand on a new TV set.
It would be nice to still have but you're making too big a deal out of it in this particular case.
As someone with a flat-panel G4 iMac ( USB 1.1 and Firewire, no USB 2.0 or expandability ), I have to say that for *me*, this is a *very* big deal. It makes getting a non-Firewire IPod a non-starter; I just can't do it without replacing an otherwise perfectly good computer.
Apple has it's own reasons for not making these Firewire-compatable, but by doing so, they've lost a sale.
Of course, they know I already have an older iPod mini, but still... what they don't know is I'm not about to buy a new computer any time soon, at least not just so I can have a new iPod.
I think the strain of ageism in/. is pretty shameful.
Hey, I'm not being 'ageist' when I say my grandparents aren't going to want to just look at photos on the internet... I'm being practical. They live in rural Montana on a low, fixed income. If they *could* get high-speed internet service, they wouldn't want to spend the money on it, or a computer, and it's not that they *can't* learn how to use one, it's that they'd rather not... and I'm not going to push them to do it. They have friends with computers, and my grandmother has recently gotten a digital camera with a photo printer, but it's just this simple : they'd rather have prints.
Of course, when I get them their next prints, unless I want large format, it's going to be from Wal-Mart or Costco, not my own Epson...
I could be worrying about nothing, perhaps the power levels involved in the fields are too low to cause problems, but... do I really want to be setting my iPod or other memory-chip or mini-hard-drive device on an inductive pad?
I mean, it's fine for my toothbrush ( if a tad slow an inefficient compared to a direct cable connection )... but is that cable to my iPod really such a problem, and might it not be a tad dangerous for my precious data to place it directly on an inductive surface ?
There are, in my experience, only two reasons to make prints of photos.
1) Grandparents and the technologically challenged. For me, this is really only grandparents. They want photos of their great-grand-kids, and telling them "go online to get them" doesn't work when, IF they have a computer, they're afraid to touch it.
2) large prints for framing. I'm looking forward to some sort of cheap, thin, easy digital photo frame LCD, but until then, if you want a picture hanging on the wall, you'll want a print.
That's it, though. Albums are silly- they take up space and aren't easy to find photos in. Most of the time, if we want to show a guest a photo, or see one ourself, it's to the computer we go...
I didn't read the article, but a prior lead-balloon towards the same goal had disks that you didn't open until you were ready to play, and then the oxygen started discoloring them until after a day they were unreadable.
That is the idea which made the most sense to me... last I heard, that one died because it was too hard to keep the discs from breaking down prematurely. In other words, there was a technical problem in making sure they didn't break down before they got to the consumer. I suppose they'd be a little difficult to store... no oxygen or light, etc...
[Macintosh] If you have a Macintosh computer you can copy the songs using your iTunes Player as you would normally do.
[Windows] If you have a PC place the CD into your computer and...[seven paragraphs of instructions detailing a lengthy process]
Ummmm... perhaps it'd be easier to either (a) not buy CDs from Sony or (b) buy a Macintosh ( i.e., not computers from Sony either?!? )... is it OK if I think this is all very very funny ?
If I regularly used a PC or bought a lot of new CDs, I probably wouldn't find it so amusing. As it is, it's hi-larious. This just looks bad for Sony and DRM, it's hard to see it any other way.
But what if they stopped making DVDs for sale. Waht if they went whole-sale to HD-DVD, charged $30 per disc, and also produced a "throw away" DVD that worked in any 'old' DVD player for $3-5.
Dang, you missed *the* main reason why Divx didn't succeed. It *didn't* play on "any 'old' DVD player"... and neither would these ( if they were really going to be made, which apparently they aren't ).
It's too late for something like this, and it might have never worked, since we don't really want it. Way too late now anyway- DVD penetration is already too great, and guess what? DVD players don't go belly up often enough for replacements to get a lot of these out there quickly. I'm certainly not about to run out and buy a more-expensive-than-average DVD player just to 'buy rentals'... they'll have to figure out a way to make NetFlix go away first.
Detailed is NOT what I'd call the kbase articles. These are the briefest of descriptions on what is actually wrong and being fixed.
That is certainly a valid complaint. Perhaps I should have said "more detailed". In general, they are enough information to know what the problem is, though. The real problem with them is that there doesn't appear to be a standard- I've seen some pretty detailed problem descriptions, complete with links, and I've seen one-line descriptions that were completely worthless. Still, even these descriptions are more useful than an arbitrary rating system without these descriptions, IMHO.
While I would like to see the entire related bug report, I'm sure plenty of other folks wouldn't, and many such logs might contain proprietary info anyway. The current descriptions are probably a pretty fair balance, though of course users like you and I would always like more information...
If someone is interested in researching what vulnerabilities are patched in a particular Security Update, it's easy to do- there's a knowledge base article attached to each and every one. In the software update information for the security update, there's a link to this page which lists them all and from there you can get a specific description of everything included in that update. here is the current one.
So, really, they have a rating system, but it's not dumbed-down. If you know enough ( or *think* you know enough ) to read through all of this and decide "hey, none of that really matters for me, I don't need this update", then you at least have a detailed idea of what you're passing on. Otherwise, you should probably apply all of these updates and patches anyway... maybe waiting a few days to see if anyone reports serious issues with it if you're extra paranoid about stability.
Since we all have different operating environments and practices, a strict rating scheme is a little meaningless. If you don't use Mail, a "Severe" rated patch that only patches Mail might not matter to you... really, you need to look at the description if you care about such stuff.
And what's this talk of OS X stability issues? Pu-leeeze. Maybe if you're running 10.1. Anything past 10.2.3... any instability is likely to be hardware ( likely memory) in cause.
%uptime
10:20 up 133 days
If it weren't for updates this thing would never get shut down...
Ok, my logic was clearly flawed, or at least not well parenthesised. Point was, most freeway commutes include stop & go traffic conditions, and hybrids aren't currently about saving money- they're about polluting less and using less gas- just a different type of luxury car. Still, if someone's saying a freeway commute doesn't involve stop & go traffic ( and thus a hybrid wouldn't help that commute ), they don't have typical freeways... lucky!
Whatever. Point was, most freeway commutes include stop & go traffic conditions, and hybrids aren't currently about saving money- they're about polluting less and using less gas- just a different type of luxury car.
However, on the Freeway where you're doing little stop&go (well, I suppose that depends on how bad traffic is where you are:) they don't make much sense.
That's an important caveat. If you live in Los Angeles or anywhere near San Francisco, freeway driving is likely to imply 'stop and go'... which is part of the reason why these cars are gaining popularity in those locales.
Well considering that AFAICT all the currently available gas/electric hybrids on the market get considerably worse mileage on the freeway than they do in stop and go traffic, I doubt that the argument of a long commute equaling a greater total savings always holds true.
You're assuming that 'freeway' == 'long commute' != 'stop and go'.
I do not currently have a long, freeway-based commute, but when I did, it was *frequently* stop-and-go, for at least 20-30 minutes at a time, often longer. These are times during which a hybrid would save considerable energy, as it would for most purposes be almost completely off... I believe this equation holds for the vast majority of San Francisco Bay Area commuters, as well as many rush-hour commuters in other major ( and other not-so-major, but recently overdeveloped ) metropolitan areas.
Even if your commute isn't that long and somehow avoids stop-and-go traffic, most folks do a considerable amount of driving 'around town', and while it's easy to discount the amount of fuel burnt doing that driving, it adds up. On the other hand, if you never leave the house except to drive for an hour on a freeway that is completely congestion-free... let me know where you live, I guess, and if there's just nothing out there or if you never leave the house for some other reason.
Seriously. Why is this um, "story" here? I mean, it's a cute gadget and all... but it's not terribly thrilling or new or newsworthy.
Is it the smallest, most powerful, does it run Linux? Not really? It's the price of a really nice laptop? Why is the link here again? What's good about it? I'm serious. There is no indication, just some gushy praise and a link to the company website.
It just leaves the more skeptical and seasoned Slashdot reader wondering who paid who for this Slashvertisement to be here. I'm not sure what's more lame, this or the Xbox ad earlier this morning... it's hard to say, since at least there was an 'article' ( and by that I mean IGN advertisement ) attached to that one...
I guess I'll have to actually get work done instead of read Slashdot today...
Twice now this week at 1am my TiVo prompted me about a program to record. The first time I let it assuming it was a season pass I had set up. It switched to an infomercial. It wasn't a normal recording and I had a time switching it back to the channel I was watching. Last night it happened a second time exactly the same way. When it prompts to change it doesn't tell you what it's switching to just it's some kind of TiVo extra.
That's weird, that's never happened to me. Let's see, you're (a) watching live TV (b) at 1 A.M... now there's a couple of things not a lot of Tivo users do... and (c) I assume you're not using a DirecTivo or dual tuners would prevent this problem...
Did the recorded show appear on your Now Playing list? It could be that this was some channel the Tivo was set up to record some content for the 'showcase' feature... that, or... I don't use the "Wishlist" feature, perhaps something in the infomercial description triggered the recording? My guess, though, is that it's a 'showcase' content channel... you don't mention what service you use, but that's the only thing I can imagine. Again, I've never had or heard of such a problem... and I also wasn't able to find a similar issue searching the Tivo forums... curious...
They should buy Apple (the Beatles UK company), or partner with them, and have artists who would produce music on CD through Apple (UK) and via iTunes (Apple).
That's a cute idea, but you have to think that, especially given all of the times the companies have met in court over the Apple name, that this has maybe been discussed before?
I have to guess that Yoko Ono ( the director of Apple Corps Ltd. ) might just have both an ego and personal attachment to that company to match Jobs' own attachment to his Apple company... I don't think either is willing to sell to the other. Take one of those two out of the picture, maybe, but then, that would make them different companies.
No. If Apple wants to get into the music business *proper* ( something Apple Corps prevents it from doing ), it'll have to to change it's name, form a different company, or otherwise pay off Yoko and company in a big, big way that probably doesn't make business sense... or beat them down in this good-god-could-it-take-longer legal dispute. Apple Computer would buy a movie production company first ( not saying they're going to, it's not their business )... more likely they'll work out some sort of extensive partnership deal with a suitably receptive record company.
I know that if I had a record company, I'd be trying to work out something where anyone looking to get their work promoted on iTMS would want to sign with me rather than the other guys... I believe the guy at CDBaby is having some success with that model in terms of smaller indie bands, though I doubt he'd be able to appropriately handle a larger act requiring more mainstream concert promotion... not that it couldn't be done... but it might take someone with a slightly different business model and/or more capital. Apple Corp. Ltd, though? Maybe some day that set of legal problems for Apple Computer will actualy be resolved...
How about a useful, functional grammar? One that the english language apparently lacks.
In the comments of every story, there is one concise post that is spot-on. For this story, this is that comment.
If English had a grammar that was easy or worth checking, the tool to do it would exist. As it is, the rules are so convoluted that only a masochist would attempt to put them into computer-executable code.
Re:Old Concept Revisited with more schmaltz
on
Review: Nintendogs
·
· Score: 1
I've tried spiders, which are actually fascinating pets and that might be cool in a virtual way.
Black Widows make good pets. Plus, you can have them do battle. For added fun, have one do battle with a yellowjacket.
Really, I swear, I never did this. But my brother and a friend of his, they might have... it was more entertaining than most video games I've seen... there's probably a good video game idea in there somewhere. So hands off, it's mine:-)
If you wanted to load up samba and share off the storage, you can. If you want to configure some MythTV front-end systems in different rooms, you can. If you want your MythTV box to run your DSL/CableModem, have a nice firewall, run a webserver, keep more SQL databases, YOU CAN. I doubt Tivo can offer you that kind of expandability or flexability.
All very, very, true ( although probably using your Tivo for some SQL databases isn't *too* tough ), and I'm not saying the cost is high for a Linux server with a nice video capture card. Depending on the specs of that $700 machine, I might say spend a little more for disk space, memory, etc, even.
However, I *am* saying it's expensive compared to a TiVo, even when factoring in recurring costs... and most folks aren't going to use or think of using their DVR device for *any* of the things you've mentioned. It's quite likely that people who *are* interested in that stuff would enjoy putting together their own machine anyway... some day when I have a thousand bucks or so and TiVo's DRM implementations bug me, I probably will put together a media server and a couple of clients for each TV.
More to the point, that $700 price point leaves MythTV wildly uncompetitive with Tivo for the vast majority of TV viewers, and probably even the vast majority of/. readers, sad as that may be.
http://www.magicitx.com/ has a prebuilt MythTV setup with a small form factor for about $700, with options for more memory, larger hard drive, and remote. It uses the universally accepted Hauppage PVR250 hardware encoder (I own a 350 and a 150 and they work with all freeware pvr software I've found). You will need an external infrared sender to work with digital cable or satellite receivers.
Holy crap, that seems expensive, especially when you consider the cost of a Tivo2 right now, even considering monthly fees... does it really have to be so expensive? Do Tivo and the companies that sell it's boxes lose money on every hardware sale?
those are awful ads. First off, they do almost as much pitching for the competition as they do Sun.
Oh, come on, you *have* to admit, that at the very least, the "Benchmark studies..." ad is pretty damn funny. I almost blew coffee out my nose.
note: I had to paraphrase it in the subject, there's not room for "proves that"...
they do almost as much pitching for the competition as they do Sun.
Dell is a name that everyone is familiar enough with, and enough people associate with poor-quality low-cost PCs, that mentioning their name near a word like "suck" isn't necessarily a bad move for a company selling competing server products that a business might actually depend on.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is slight, when you think about it.
With these media companies, what really matters is *not* supporting a format, depriving it of content. Early on, both Paramount and Warner had said they were only releasing titles on HD-DVD, which made people worry that Blu-ray would fail for lack of titles. Now... now it's looking like HD-DVD owners are going to be the ones missing out on Sony, Fox and Disney titles, with Blu-ray users being able to buy just about any movie.
What's left in the HD-DVD-only camp... Universal ? That's it? I mean, they have a good group of movies, but how long do you think they're going to hold out when *every* other studio is selling Blu-ray discs?
Forrester might just be right about this one. We'll see what happens when these suckers come to market. Either way, it's going to be an interesting couple of years for HD, what with these players, PS3, XBox360, and a mandated HD TV broadcast switchover here in the states. Hopefully the price of the displays will continue to drop, though, because I and several million other Americans are just not doing well enough to drop several thousand on a new TV set.
As someone with a flat-panel G4 iMac ( USB 1.1 and Firewire, no USB 2.0 or expandability ), I have to say that for *me*, this is a *very* big deal. It makes getting a non-Firewire IPod a non-starter; I just can't do it without replacing an otherwise perfectly good computer.
Apple has it's own reasons for not making these Firewire-compatable, but by doing so, they've lost a sale.
Of course, they know I already have an older iPod mini, but still... what they don't know is I'm not about to buy a new computer any time soon, at least not just so I can have a new iPod.
Hey, I'm not being 'ageist' when I say my grandparents aren't going to want to just look at photos on the internet... I'm being practical. They live in rural Montana on a low, fixed income. If they *could* get high-speed internet service, they wouldn't want to spend the money on it, or a computer, and it's not that they *can't* learn how to use one, it's that they'd rather not... and I'm not going to push them to do it. They have friends with computers, and my grandmother has recently gotten a digital camera with a photo printer, but it's just this simple : they'd rather have prints.
Of course, when I get them their next prints, unless I want large format, it's going to be from Wal-Mart or Costco, not my own Epson...
I could be worrying about nothing, perhaps the power levels involved in the fields are too low to cause problems, but... do I really want to be setting my iPod or other memory-chip or mini-hard-drive device on an inductive pad?
I mean, it's fine for my toothbrush ( if a tad slow an inefficient compared to a direct cable connection )... but is that cable to my iPod really such a problem, and might it not be a tad dangerous for my precious data to place it directly on an inductive surface ?
There are, in my experience, only two reasons to make prints of photos.
1) Grandparents and the technologically challenged. For me, this is really only grandparents. They want photos of their great-grand-kids, and telling them "go online to get them" doesn't work when, IF they have a computer, they're afraid to touch it.
2) large prints for framing. I'm looking forward to some sort of cheap, thin, easy digital photo frame LCD, but until then, if you want a picture hanging on the wall, you'll want a print.
That's it, though. Albums are silly- they take up space and aren't easy to find photos in. Most of the time, if we want to show a guest a photo, or see one ourself, it's to the computer we go...
That is the idea which made the most sense to me... last I heard, that one died because it was too hard to keep the discs from breaking down prematurely. In other words, there was a technical problem in making sure they didn't break down before they got to the consumer. I suppose they'd be a little difficult to store... no oxygen or light, etc...
[Windows] If you have a PC place the CD into your computer and...[seven paragraphs of instructions detailing a lengthy process]
Ummmm... perhaps it'd be easier to either (a) not buy CDs from Sony or (b) buy a Macintosh ( i.e., not computers from Sony either?!? )... is it OK if I think this is all very very funny ?
If I regularly used a PC or bought a lot of new CDs, I probably wouldn't find it so amusing. As it is, it's hi-larious. This just looks bad for Sony and DRM, it's hard to see it any other way.
Dang, you missed *the* main reason why Divx didn't succeed. It *didn't* play on "any 'old' DVD player"... and neither would these ( if they were really going to be made, which apparently they aren't ).
It's too late for something like this, and it might have never worked, since we don't really want it. Way too late now anyway- DVD penetration is already too great, and guess what? DVD players don't go belly up often enough for replacements to get a lot of these out there quickly. I'm certainly not about to run out and buy a more-expensive-than-average DVD player just to 'buy rentals'... they'll have to figure out a way to make NetFlix go away first.
That is certainly a valid complaint. Perhaps I should have said "more detailed". In general, they are enough information to know what the problem is, though. The real problem with them is that there doesn't appear to be a standard- I've seen some pretty detailed problem descriptions, complete with links, and I've seen one-line descriptions that were completely worthless. Still, even these descriptions are more useful than an arbitrary rating system without these descriptions, IMHO.
While I would like to see the entire related bug report, I'm sure plenty of other folks wouldn't, and many such logs might contain proprietary info anyway. The current descriptions are probably a pretty fair balance, though of course users like you and I would always like more information...
So, really, they have a rating system, but it's not dumbed-down. If you know enough ( or *think* you know enough ) to read through all of this and decide "hey, none of that really matters for me, I don't need this update", then you at least have a detailed idea of what you're passing on. Otherwise, you should probably apply all of these updates and patches anyway... maybe waiting a few days to see if anyone reports serious issues with it if you're extra paranoid about stability.
Since we all have different operating environments and practices, a strict rating scheme is a little meaningless. If you don't use Mail, a "Severe" rated patch that only patches Mail might not matter to you... really, you need to look at the description if you care about such stuff.
And what's this talk of OS X stability issues? Pu-leeeze. Maybe if you're running 10.1. Anything past 10.2.3... any instability is likely to be hardware ( likely memory) in cause.
%uptime
10:20 up 133 days
If it weren't for updates this thing would never get shut down...
Ok, my logic was clearly flawed, or at least not well parenthesised. Point was, most freeway commutes include stop & go traffic conditions, and hybrids aren't currently about saving money- they're about polluting less and using less gas- just a different type of luxury car. Still, if someone's saying a freeway commute doesn't involve stop & go traffic ( and thus a hybrid wouldn't help that commute ), they don't have typical freeways... lucky!
Damn it! Another bug!!
Whatever. Point was, most freeway commutes include stop & go traffic conditions, and hybrids aren't currently about saving money- they're about polluting less and using less gas- just a different type of luxury car.
Convince Yoko Ono and you're done.
Good luck with that. I'm just guessing, but we're looking at a battle of wills ( aka a battle of egos ) between Ono and Jobs. Don't hold your breath.
That's an important caveat. If you live in Los Angeles or anywhere near San Francisco, freeway driving is likely to imply 'stop and go'... which is part of the reason why these cars are gaining popularity in those locales.
You're assuming that 'freeway' == 'long commute' != 'stop and go'.
I do not currently have a long, freeway-based commute, but when I did, it was *frequently* stop-and-go, for at least 20-30 minutes at a time, often longer. These are times during which a hybrid would save considerable energy, as it would for most purposes be almost completely off... I believe this equation holds for the vast majority of San Francisco Bay Area commuters, as well as many rush-hour commuters in other major ( and other not-so-major, but recently overdeveloped ) metropolitan areas.
Even if your commute isn't that long and somehow avoids stop-and-go traffic, most folks do a considerable amount of driving 'around town', and while it's easy to discount the amount of fuel burnt doing that driving, it adds up. On the other hand, if you never leave the house except to drive for an hour on a freeway that is completely congestion-free... let me know where you live, I guess, and if there's just nothing out there or if you never leave the house for some other reason.
Is it the smallest, most powerful, does it run Linux? Not really? It's the price of a really nice laptop? Why is the link here again? What's good about it? I'm serious. There is no indication, just some gushy praise and a link to the company website.
It just leaves the more skeptical and seasoned Slashdot reader wondering who paid who for this Slashvertisement to be here. I'm not sure what's more lame, this or the Xbox ad earlier this morning... it's hard to say, since at least there was an 'article' ( and by that I mean IGN advertisement ) attached to that one...
I guess I'll have to actually get work done instead of read Slashdot today...
"Here I am in the belly of the beast, and I don't even care. I don't even feel like taking a whiz on this. I used to dream of taking a whiz on this."
The Venture Brothers is truly a great show. Right up there with Robot Chicken. No, better than that...
That's weird, that's never happened to me. Let's see, you're
(a) watching live TV
(b) at 1 A.M... now there's a couple of things not a lot of Tivo users do... and
(c) I assume you're not using a DirecTivo or dual tuners would prevent this problem...
Did the recorded show appear on your Now Playing list? It could be that this was some channel the Tivo was set up to record some content for the 'showcase' feature... that, or... I don't use the "Wishlist" feature, perhaps something in the infomercial description triggered the recording? My guess, though, is that it's a 'showcase' content channel... you don't mention what service you use, but that's the only thing I can imagine. Again, I've never had or heard of such a problem... and I also wasn't able to find a similar issue searching the Tivo forums... curious...
That's a cute idea, but you have to think that, especially given all of the times the companies have met in court over the Apple name, that this has maybe been discussed before?
I have to guess that Yoko Ono ( the director of Apple Corps Ltd. ) might just have both an ego and personal attachment to that company to match Jobs' own attachment to his Apple company... I don't think either is willing to sell to the other. Take one of those two out of the picture, maybe, but then, that would make them different companies.
No. If Apple wants to get into the music business *proper* ( something Apple Corps prevents it from doing ), it'll have to to change it's name, form a different company, or otherwise pay off Yoko and company in a big, big way that probably doesn't make business sense... or beat them down in this good-god-could-it-take-longer legal dispute. Apple Computer would buy a movie production company first ( not saying they're going to, it's not their business ) ... more likely they'll work out some sort of extensive partnership deal with a suitably receptive record company.
I know that if I had a record company, I'd be trying to work out something where anyone looking to get their work promoted on iTMS would want to sign with me rather than the other guys... I believe the guy at CDBaby is having some success with that model in terms of smaller indie bands, though I doubt he'd be able to appropriately handle a larger act requiring more mainstream concert promotion... not that it couldn't be done... but it might take someone with a slightly different business model and/or more capital. Apple Corp. Ltd, though? Maybe some day that set of legal problems for Apple Computer will actualy be resolved...
In the comments of every story, there is one concise post that is spot-on. For this story, this is that comment.
If English had a grammar that was easy or worth checking, the tool to do it would exist. As it is, the rules are so convoluted that only a masochist would attempt to put them into computer-executable code.
Black Widows make good pets. Plus, you can have them do battle. For added fun, have one do battle with a yellowjacket.
Really, I swear, I never did this. But my brother and a friend of his, they might have... it was more entertaining than most video games I've seen... there's probably a good video game idea in there somewhere. So hands off, it's mine :-)
All very, very, true ( although probably using your Tivo for some SQL databases isn't *too* tough ), and I'm not saying the cost is high for a Linux server with a nice video capture card. Depending on the specs of that $700 machine, I might say spend a little more for disk space, memory, etc, even.
However, I *am* saying it's expensive compared to a TiVo, even when factoring in recurring costs... and most folks aren't going to use or think of using their DVR device for *any* of the things you've mentioned. It's quite likely that people who *are* interested in that stuff would enjoy putting together their own machine anyway... some day when I have a thousand bucks or so and TiVo's DRM implementations bug me, I probably will put together a media server and a couple of clients for each TV.
More to the point, that $700 price point leaves MythTV wildly uncompetitive with Tivo for the vast majority of TV viewers, and probably even the vast majority of /. readers, sad as that may be.
Holy crap, that seems expensive, especially when you consider the cost of a Tivo2 right now, even considering monthly fees... does it really have to be so expensive? Do Tivo and the companies that sell it's boxes lose money on every hardware sale?
Oh, come on, you *have* to admit, that at the very least, the "Benchmark studies..." ad is pretty damn funny. I almost blew coffee out my nose.
note: I had to paraphrase it in the subject, there's not room for "proves that"...
they do almost as much pitching for the competition as they do Sun.
Dell is a name that everyone is familiar enough with, and enough people associate with poor-quality low-cost PCs, that mentioning their name near a word like "suck" isn't necessarily a bad move for a company selling competing server products that a business might actually depend on.
HAHAHAHAHA!!
I don't suppose you've ever met Steve Jobs, have you? No?
It shows.