The Internet, in jumping past the personal computer and into the living room television set, is starting to give viewers the possibility of bypassing traditional cable and satellite services.
TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet. It is just one of a growing group of large and small companies that are looking at high-speed Internet to deliver video content to the living room.
The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder. Although the current TiVo service allows users to watch broadcast, cable or satellite programs at any time, the new technology will make it possible for them to mix content from the Internet with those programs.
"This is the fourth electronic video service, and it is an alternative to cable, satellite and broadcast television," said Tom Wolzien, an analyst at Bernstein Investment Research and Management. Those traditional services, Mr. Wolzien said, "have been the monster gatekeepers, but this is a way for content providers to get past them."
In the new world of Internet-connected television, viewers will not have to worry about when a show is scheduled or from where it comes.
"We're fully committed to developing an entertainment experience you can't get over normal broadcast television," said Michael Ramsay, chairman and chief executive of TiVo. "This is what we think the future of television is."
A timetable for introducing the video service has not been set, nor has its price.
TiVo sustained a big blow Tuesday when DirecTV, the satellite television provider and the biggest source of new subscribers for the TiVo service, said it had sold its entire equity stake of 3.4 million shares in TiVo. Shares of TiVo dropped more than 14 percent to close at $6.41.
There is some speculation in the industry that DirecTV is moving toward developing its own digital video recorder. Several analysts suggested TiVo is moving toward Internet downloading as a way to insulate itself against potential competition from DirecTV.
Last year TiVo, which has 1.6 million subscribers who use its digital video recorder with cable or DirecTV, acquired Strangeberry, a small Silicon Valley start-up that had developed a new technology to view Internet video streams. TiVo is now developing that technology and plans to integrate it into the TiVo system next year. Video distributors like Netflix, RealNetworks and Blockbuster are also starting to explore the possibility of delivering feature-length movies via the Internet to users for viewing later.
"We're no longer in a world where innovation is stopped because somebody is the only game in town," said Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, a Seattle-based company that now streams audio and video to computer users through the Internet.
The idea of downloading and storing video for conventional television viewing has until now been pioneered by a small group of technology companies like Akimbo, a maker of an Internet digital video recorder that is based in San Mateo, Calif.
Because most Internet connections do not yet reliably support data speeds needed to view television-quality video as it is streamed, a number of the Internet video services require that programs first be downloaded and stored on a hard drive before viewing.
Now, as broadband Internet becomes widely available in homes and new wireless video networks make it simpler to move video data and streams inside the home, bigger players are starting to emerge.
For example, Microsoft demonstrated a service called IPTV at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this year. The company believes that it is possible to deliver television to rival today's cable progra
"If a user has specifically installed software in order not to see popups, why do advertisers think they will be inclined to click them if they do somehow get through?"
Any door-to-door salesman would tell you the folks with "No Salesman" signs on their front doors are almost always the easiest to sell.
Didn't think to check that out, but by golly it seems you're right.
However, on the mouse I'm currently using clicking the scroll-wheel (or, more accurately, pressing down real hard on it until a 'click' is heard and a fat-assed icon appears on screen) also initiates the scroll lock feature, so a double click is required - one to paste, one to turn off the locking.
My own opinion is that using a mouse is overrated and often encourages bad habits. Ask any vi user.;-) Would be nice after all these years to settle into a fairly standard habit for selecting/pasting text when I reach for the mouse, though. Maybe I'll settle for pressing the scroll wheel.
Alternative mouse on a laptop? Maybe someone can explain to me what a "middle click" is on a 3-button button mouse that has as its "middle" button a scroll wheel.
I don't know whether 3-button mice (sans scroll wheel) are even sold today in any great numbers.
My reading of the article is that the statement "they bought US Robotics because they were the gold standard in modems" is not correct.
USR was a complete disaster," Doyle [Lee Doyle, an IDC analyst] says. "They went out and bought a modem company at a time when modems were being integrated into chips."
Kessler [Alan Kessler, a former 3Com executive] has a different take on the deal. He says 3Com was never interested in U.S. Robotics' modem business.
"We didn't want the modems; it was USR's concentrator business that 3Com coveted, selling large [communications systems] to ISPs, carriers and telephone companies," he says. However, even though concentrators were a huge market at the time, they diminished in importance as broadband connections gained in popularity. The timing couldn't have been worse.
When I bought an 8-port Linksys switch some time ago, the first thing I was impressed by was that it was that these switches were no longer housed in a Mexican blue case made of low grade plastic. IIRC the packaging advertised a New and Improved All Metal Case -- Cisco's way of saying "Hrmph right back atcha" maybe?
I agree, somewhat superficial, but it's more than probable the change was reflective of an improved quality than a simple design modification. If the reverse had happened, and the All Metal Case had been replaced by cheap plastic, the consumer would probably think the product had gone to sh*t.
I'm thoroughly impressed. It would interesting to see a few photographs of such a setup in action.
I'm wondering, though, didn't you have to install PXE capable NICs on all the clients? I picked up a lot of used Dell PIIIs on eBay some time ago for next to nothing and am still amazed not only by how capable each of them is, but also by how much time I spent using each of them. At the same time, though, they were the only systems I'd seen that had PXE capable NICs.
Admittedly, buying "old" hardware isn't a sexy proposition, but rebuilding them with shiny new way kewl cases should be both trivial and inexpensive.
Set the beddy-bye time to 11:00pm and your wakeup time options are between 11:00pm and 12:00pm? I woke up at 3:00 in the afternoon fercyrinoutlound!
For anyone who may be confused by the term knackered:
Main Entry: knackered Pronunciation: 'na-k&rd Function: adjective Etymology: English slang knacker to kill, tire, perhaps from knacker, n. British : TIRED, EXHAUSTED
Maybe someone who's really English (i.e., not the fake Canadian type like myself) can expound on the etymology. IIRC it has something to do with killing old horses.
On an more related note, I have noticed that I read Slashdot when I start to tire of whatever it is I'm working on (or not working on). I believe it has something to do with the rhythm of 20-minutes of focused attention followed by a few minutes of wandering thoughts we all have.
Maybe someone can 'splain this to Ricky who's been trying to tune out copyright related stories to keep his sanity...
I'm wondering whether songs on iTunes, etc. are really "bought" or just "licensed"? If they're just licensed, seems to me that if without the transfer (or possibility of transfer) of ownership, the "It's Copyright Infringement Not Stealing!" debate leans in favour of the..., err... casual infringers.
"In other words, at least one hundred people were perfectly willing to shell out money -- cash, presumably -- to some random guy in front of a store, then take this guy's CD home and blindly install whatever the hell he'd given them!... Folks, talk all the shit about Microsoft that you want, but there's your security problem!"
While that may seem like a fair comment, I think in reality it's overbroad and untrue for the same reasons internet users have for years been able to download warez, service packs and slipstreamed multi-OS ISOs, etc. from a binary newsgroups with almost 100% certainty that it doesn't contain malware, or similarly purchase counterfeit CDs with complete confidence. And, quite frankly, this isn't really that different than buying RedHat CDs off eBay.
The "random" guy in a parking lot is quite simply a disinterested party, at least disinterested in the context of getting something he isn't entitled to. Commercial distributors of spyware, spammers, and script kiddies on the other hand, don't meet such a standard, and neither do the original makers of the software. Their interests can never be in line with those of the consumer, and thus involvement extends far beyond that of a $20 transaction with a stranger in a parking lot.
Your point about the lack of education is, of course, quite true, and that the mixing of that ingnorance with gullibility I also agree is a real problem. Characterising the problems in terms of a "Don't trust strangers." is, however, a bit silly. It could be that the OP was full of sh*t and fabricated the story, but if it was true, I'd be inclined to believe that if someone was trying to sell something (custom-designed or otherwise) in direct competition with a major retail establishment, he would be someone worth talking to.
Ed Note: Unless the author wishes to narrow his/her audience to a small subset of Slashdot users, standard formatting and non-cutesy sentence case is always appropriate.
There are basically three type of clusters:
Shared Nothing: In this, each computer is only connected to each other via simple IP network: no disks are shared. and each machine serves part of data. These cluster doesn't work reliably when you have to aggregations. For example, if one of the machine fails and you try to to "avg()" and if the data is spread across machines, the query would fail, since one of the machine is not available. Most enterprise apps cannot work in this config without degradation. For example, IBM study showed that 2 node cluster is slower and less reliable than 1 node system when running SAP IBM on windows and unix and MS uses this type of clustering (also called federated database approach or shared nothing approach).
Shared Disk Between Two Computers: In this case, there are multiple machines and multiple disks. Each disk is at least connected to two computers. If one of the computer fails, other takes over. no mainstream database uses this mode, but it is used by hp-nonstop. Still, each machine serves up part of the data and hence standard enterprise apps like SAP etc cannot take clustering advantage without lot of modification.
Shared Everything: In this, each disk is connected to all the machines in the cluster. Any number of machines can fail and yet the system would keep running as long as at least one machine is up. This is used by Oracle. All the machine sees all the data. Standard apps like SAP etc can be run in this kind of configs with minor modification or no modification at all. This method is also used by IBM in their mainframe database (which outsells their Windows and Unix database by huge margin).
Most enterprise apps are deployed in this type of cluster configuration. The approach one is simpler from hardware point of view. Also, for database kernel writers, this is the easiest to implement. However, the user would need to break up data judiciously and spread across machines. Also adding a node and removing a node will require re-partitioning of data. Mostly only custom apps which are fully aware of your partitioning etc will be able to take advantage.
It is also easy to make it scale for simple custom app and so most of TPC-C benchmarks are published in this configuration. Approach 3 requires special shared disk system. The database implementation is very complex. The kernel writers have to worry about two computers simultaneously accessing disks or overwriting each others data etc. This is the thing that Oracle is pushing across all platforms and IBM is pushing for its mainframes. Approach 2 is similar to approach 1 except that it adds redundancy and hence is more reliable.
"The Visby's stealth properties are not its only hi-tech component. The ship includes a command and control centre that uses a Windows NT operating system."
I think it's fair to assume that "NT" is not "NT 4", but either NT5.0 or NT5.1 (Windows 2000 and Windows XP, respectively).
"Maybe that;s because I don't know what to fill the server field with and if a group I'm interested in is on that server."
[insert huffy sounds here]
[omit obligatory "Search Google for general usenet FAQ" recommendation]
Unless you pay for a subscription service (Newscene, Easynews, etc.), most likely you're going to want to use your ISP's news server. The address for that server(s) will be in the form of "news.myISP.com" and can be obtained by calling your ISP. The concept of "subscribing" to a newsgroup means little more than downloading the headers for that group, not unlike downloading the contents of a webpage in order to view it.
I'd also recommend (for a number of reasons) you use a proper newsreader and drop the browser thing.
If some enterprising PC user wants to give something like this a go, maybe they can start with this antique vintage underwood noiseless portable typewriter of their own. Noiseless! Even better, it's advertised as "ALL KEY DO WORK AND NO STICKING."
If anyone hasn't seen Brazil, you should rush out and rent a copy tonight. Definitely one of the most brilliant movies ever made.
1. If any of your CDs are damaged, it's probably your girlfriend's fault. Or someone else's girlfriend. We all know girlz don't know how to handle CDs (or LPs for that matter), right?
2. If you live in Oregon and insist on living in a cabin "heated by a wood-burning stove", leave your CDs elsewhere. Maybe with your girlfriend.
3. The RIAA has less to worry about than they thought.
My own opinion is that it's a beautiful looking site which I think reflects on the products designed by this company.
Shame that "flash" has become synonymous with "animated advertising" to some. Maybe they'd feel better if they saw it put to the "other" uses it's known for?
To answer your question, I dunno. But here's something that's interesting. I received the following email yesterday from my DSL provider:
Dear SBC Internet Services Member:
It is extremely important that you read this message and take immediate action if you are using
Windows NT, 2000 or XP.
A computer worm... [snippage]... In response, we strongly urge you to take the following security measures:
[snippage]
If you have more than one computer using these specific Windows operating systems, you should perform these actions on all such computers that connect to the Internet. Failure to take appropriate action could result in infection of
your system and spread of this problem - and could lead to suspension of your account.
"Suspension of account"?? Maybe the times they are changing.
... in China, where there are no guaranteed freedoms, surveillance will be in situ, but here in the Land of the Free we guarantee the freedom of access but encourage surreptitious surveillance?
Not sure which is more unhealthy, but I can tell which is more honest.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hence, this treaty outlaws the universe."
Ok, so we _should_ panic?
Hopefully this link hasn't already been posted.
The Internet, in jumping past the personal computer and into the living room television set, is starting to give viewers the possibility of bypassing traditional cable and satellite services.
TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet. It is just one of a growing group of large and small companies that are looking at high-speed Internet to deliver video content to the living room.
The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder. Although the current TiVo service allows users to watch broadcast, cable or satellite programs at any time, the new technology will make it possible for them to mix content from the Internet with those programs.
"This is the fourth electronic video service, and it is an alternative to cable, satellite and broadcast television," said Tom Wolzien, an analyst at Bernstein Investment Research and Management. Those traditional services, Mr. Wolzien said, "have been the monster gatekeepers, but this is a way for content providers to get past them."
In the new world of Internet-connected television, viewers will not have to worry about when a show is scheduled or from where it comes.
"We're fully committed to developing an entertainment experience you can't get over normal broadcast television," said Michael Ramsay, chairman and chief executive of TiVo. "This is what we think the future of television is."
A timetable for introducing the video service has not been set, nor has its price.
TiVo sustained a big blow Tuesday when DirecTV, the satellite television provider and the biggest source of new subscribers for the TiVo service, said it had sold its entire equity stake of 3.4 million shares in TiVo. Shares of TiVo dropped more than 14 percent to close at $6.41.
There is some speculation in the industry that DirecTV is moving toward developing its own digital video recorder. Several analysts suggested TiVo is moving toward Internet downloading as a way to insulate itself against potential competition from DirecTV.
Last year TiVo, which has 1.6 million subscribers who use its digital video recorder with cable or DirecTV, acquired Strangeberry, a small Silicon Valley start-up that had developed a new technology to view Internet video streams. TiVo is now developing that technology and plans to integrate it into the TiVo system next year. Video distributors like Netflix, RealNetworks and Blockbuster are also starting to explore the possibility of delivering feature-length movies via the Internet to users for viewing later.
"We're no longer in a world where innovation is stopped because somebody is the only game in town," said Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, a Seattle-based company that now streams audio and video to computer users through the Internet.
The idea of downloading and storing video for conventional television viewing has until now been pioneered by a small group of technology companies like Akimbo, a maker of an Internet digital video recorder that is based in San Mateo, Calif.
Because most Internet connections do not yet reliably support data speeds needed to view television-quality video as it is streamed, a number of the Internet video services require that programs first be downloaded and stored on a hard drive before viewing.
Now, as broadband Internet becomes widely available in homes and new wireless video networks make it simpler to move video data and streams inside the home, bigger players are starting to emerge.
For example, Microsoft demonstrated a service called IPTV at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this year. The company believes that it is possible to deliver television to rival today's cable progra
"If a user has specifically installed software in order not to see popups, why do advertisers think they will be inclined to click them if they do somehow get through?"
Any door-to-door salesman would tell you the folks with "No Salesman" signs on their front doors are almost always the easiest to sell.
Didn't think to check that out, but by golly it seems you're right.
;-) Would be nice after all these years to settle into a fairly standard habit for selecting/pasting text when I reach for the mouse, though. Maybe I'll settle for pressing the scroll wheel.
However, on the mouse I'm currently using clicking the scroll-wheel (or, more accurately, pressing down real hard on it until a 'click' is heard and a fat-assed icon appears on screen) also initiates the scroll lock feature, so a double click is required - one to paste, one to turn off the locking.
My own opinion is that using a mouse is overrated and often encourages bad habits. Ask any vi user.
Alternative mouse on a laptop? Maybe someone can explain to me what a "middle click" is on a 3-button button mouse that has as its "middle" button a scroll wheel.
I don't know whether 3-button mice (sans scroll wheel) are even sold today in any great numbers.
Seems some monks are back atwork.
My reading of the article is that the statement "they bought US Robotics because they were the gold standard in modems" is not correct.
Not that it makes much difference to 3Com.When I bought an 8-port Linksys switch some time ago, the first thing I was impressed by was that it was that these switches were no longer housed in a Mexican blue case made of low grade plastic. IIRC the packaging advertised a New and Improved All Metal Case -- Cisco's way of saying "Hrmph right back atcha" maybe?
I agree, somewhat superficial, but it's more than probable the change was reflective of an improved quality than a simple design modification. If the reverse had happened, and the All Metal Case had been replaced by cheap plastic, the consumer would probably think the product had gone to sh*t.
The "mini-brand," I think, has been improved.
I'm thoroughly impressed. It would interesting to see a few photographs of such a setup in action.
I'm wondering, though, didn't you have to install PXE capable NICs on all the clients? I picked up a lot of used Dell PIIIs on eBay some time ago for next to nothing and am still amazed not only by how capable each of them is, but also by how much time I spent using each of them. At the same time, though, they were the only systems I'd seen that had PXE capable NICs.
Admittedly, buying "old" hardware isn't a sexy proposition, but rebuilding them with shiny new way kewl cases should be both trivial and inexpensive.
Set the beddy-bye time to 11:00pm and your wakeup time options are between 11:00pm and 12:00pm? I woke up at 3:00 in the afternoon fercyrinoutlound!
For anyone who may be confused by the term knackered:
Main Entry: knackered
Pronunciation: 'na-k&rd
Function: adjective
Etymology: English slang knacker to kill, tire, perhaps from knacker, n.
British : TIRED, EXHAUSTED
Maybe someone who's really English (i.e., not the fake Canadian type like myself) can expound on the etymology. IIRC it has something to do with killing old horses.
On an more related note, I have noticed that I read Slashdot when I start to tire of whatever it is I'm working on (or not working on). I believe it has something to do with the rhythm of 20-minutes of focused attention followed by a few minutes of wandering thoughts we all have.
At least that's my theory.
Maybe someone can 'splain this to Ricky who's been trying to tune out copyright related stories to keep his sanity ...
..., err ... casual infringers.
I'm wondering whether songs on iTunes, etc. are really "bought" or just "licensed"? If they're just licensed, seems to me that if without the transfer (or possibility of transfer) of ownership, the "It's Copyright Infringement Not Stealing!" debate leans in favour of the
"In other words, at least one hundred people were perfectly willing to shell out money -- cash, presumably -- to some random guy in front of a store, then take this guy's CD home and blindly install whatever the hell he'd given them! ... Folks, talk all the shit about Microsoft that you want, but there's your security problem!"
While that may seem like a fair comment, I think in reality it's overbroad and untrue for the same reasons internet users have for years been able to download warez, service packs and slipstreamed multi-OS ISOs, etc. from a binary newsgroups with almost 100% certainty that it doesn't contain malware, or similarly purchase counterfeit CDs with complete confidence. And, quite frankly, this isn't really that different than buying RedHat CDs off eBay.
The "random" guy in a parking lot is quite simply a disinterested party, at least disinterested in the context of getting something he isn't entitled to. Commercial distributors of spyware, spammers, and script kiddies on the other hand, don't meet such a standard, and neither do the original makers of the software. Their interests can never be in line with those of the consumer, and thus involvement extends far beyond that of a $20 transaction with a stranger in a parking lot.
Your point about the lack of education is, of course, quite true, and that the mixing of that ingnorance with gullibility I also agree is a real problem. Characterising the problems in terms of a "Don't trust strangers." is, however, a bit silly. It could be that the OP was full of sh*t and fabricated the story, but if it was true, I'd be inclined to believe that if someone was trying to sell something (custom-designed or otherwise) in direct competition with a major retail establishment, he would be someone worth talking to.
I think your own snooty jackass FOAD comments and enlightened snobbery would be more appreciated in alt.beer.ales.and.stouts.advocacy.
Ed Note: Unless the author wishes to narrow his/her audience to a small subset of Slashdot users, standard formatting and non-cutesy sentence case is always appropriate.
There are basically three type of clusters:
Shared Nothing: In this, each computer is only connected to each other via simple IP network: no disks are shared. and each machine serves part of data. These cluster doesn't work reliably when you have to aggregations. For example, if one of the machine fails and you try to to "avg()" and if the data is spread across machines, the query would fail, since one of the machine is not available. Most enterprise apps cannot work in this config without degradation. For example, IBM study showed that 2 node cluster is slower and less reliable than 1 node system when running SAP IBM on windows and unix and MS uses this type of clustering (also called federated database approach or shared nothing approach).
Shared Disk Between Two Computers: In this case, there are multiple machines and multiple disks. Each disk is at least connected to two computers. If one of the computer fails, other takes over. no mainstream database uses this mode, but it is used by hp-nonstop. Still, each machine serves up part of the data and hence standard enterprise apps like SAP etc cannot take clustering advantage without lot of modification.
Shared Everything: In this, each disk is connected to all the machines in the cluster. Any number of machines can fail and yet the system would keep running as long as at least one machine is up. This is used by Oracle. All the machine sees all the data. Standard apps like SAP etc can be run in this kind of configs with minor modification or no modification at all. This method is also used by IBM in their mainframe database (which outsells their Windows and Unix database by huge margin).
Most enterprise apps are deployed in this type of cluster configuration. The approach one is simpler from hardware point of view. Also, for database kernel writers, this is the easiest to implement. However, the user would need to break up data judiciously and spread across machines. Also adding a node and removing a node will require re-partitioning of data. Mostly only custom apps which are fully aware of your partitioning etc will be able to take advantage.
It is also easy to make it scale for simple custom app and so most of TPC-C benchmarks are published in this configuration. Approach 3 requires special shared disk system. The database implementation is very complex. The kernel writers have to worry about two computers simultaneously accessing disks or overwriting each others data etc. This is the thing that Oracle is pushing across all platforms and IBM is pushing for its mainframes. Approach 2 is similar to approach 1 except that it adds redundancy and hence is more reliable.
So what type are we talking about here?
The revelant quote from the article is
I think it's fair to assume that "NT" is not "NT 4", but either NT5.0 or NT5.1 (Windows 2000 and Windows XP, respectively).
"Maybe that;s because I don't know what to fill the server field with and if a group I'm interested in is on that server."
[insert huffy sounds here]
[omit obligatory "Search Google for general usenet FAQ" recommendation]
Unless you pay for a subscription service (Newscene, Easynews, etc.), most likely you're going to want to use your ISP's news server. The address for that server(s) will be in the form of "news.myISP.com" and can be obtained by calling your ISP. The concept of "subscribing" to a newsgroup means little more than downloading the headers for that group, not unlike downloading the contents of a webpage in order to view it.
I'd also recommend (for a number of reasons) you use a proper newsreader and drop the browser thing.
If some enterprising PC user wants to give something like this a go, maybe they can start with this antique vintage underwood noiseless portable typewriter of their own. Noiseless! Even better, it's advertised as "ALL KEY DO WORK AND NO STICKING."
If anyone hasn't seen Brazil, you should rush out and rent a copy tonight. Definitely one of the most brilliant movies ever made.
Love it!
1. If any of your CDs are damaged, it's probably your girlfriend's fault. Or someone else's girlfriend. We all know girlz don't know how to handle CDs (or LPs for that matter), right?
2. If you live in Oregon and insist on living in a cabin "heated by a wood-burning stove", leave your CDs elsewhere. Maybe with your girlfriend.
3. The RIAA has less to worry about than they thought.
Err ... "processes" running as services don't respond to being "killed" and last I checked Norton's AV software runs as a service.
Maybe the "Net" command?
My own opinion is that it's a beautiful looking site which I think reflects on the products designed by this company.
Shame that "flash" has become synonymous with "animated advertising" to some. Maybe they'd feel better if they saw it put to the "other" uses it's known for?
To answer your question, I dunno. But here's something that's interesting. I received the following email yesterday from my DSL provider:
"Suspension of account"?? Maybe the times they are changing.Elvis would have proud.
... in China, where there are no guaranteed freedoms, surveillance will be in situ, but here in the Land of the Free we guarantee the freedom of access but encourage surreptitious surveillance?
Not sure which is more unhealthy, but I can tell which is more honest.