I know some knowledgeable Slashdot reader can help me here. What I want to know is, what is the drawback to such a power system? It sounds like it generates quite a bit of power, and looks like a completely clean source. Are these things super expensive to build? Is it really hard to keep these things lined up with the sun to produce optimal power?
There is the issue of not being able to produce any power at night. But intelligent use of battery stores along with some supplemental traditional powered generators might take care of that, especially since power draw from the grid is (I'm guessing) much less at night.
So - what's the catch? Why aren't fields of these things going up like crazy?
I had the most bizarre experience today. I was reading the San Jose Mercury News over my morning bowl of grape-nuts and I saw a story posted about the new mouse, and within the first couple of paragraphs was THE PARENT POST QUOTED FROM SLASHDOT. Unbelievable. I've read a slashdot post from a newspaper before seeing it on the actual slashdot web site. WTF is the world coming to.
If it generates electricity by catching electrons resulting from nuclear fission, then how do you turn it off? Is it always generating electricity? Do you have to have a constant connection to ground so that it can sink any current that's not being used?
I had the same experience with Cyrix chips, so you're not alone in this.
In all reality it's the software that was buggy with respect to clock speed detection, not the chip. But still this made an already weak cheap even less useful.
Thanks very very much for the response. I'm a little confused about your rankings of the cities you mentioned but I think you're saying:
Pay:
Sydney/Melbourne > Adelaide/Brisbane
Liveability:
Brisbane > Sydney/Melbourne > Adelaide
Although I'm confused by your comments that everyone moves away from Adelaide to Sydney/Melbourne for higher pay and yet cannot afford a house. Affordability would make Adelaide a more liveable option and yet you say that everyone moves away to the less affordable places. Why?
Actually Syndey sounds like the SF Bay Area ("silicon valley"). Pay rates are high but housing is nowhere near affordable; the median house price is now $750,000 U.S. or so which is not affordable even for two people each with good jobs. So most people own condos or townhouses (smaller parts of multi-family buildings) or rent apartments.
Brisbane is not an option I had considered - isn't it in the jungle or something?
BTW I don't consider your comments to be flamebait. I realize that everyone has a different opinion about different places and I think that's perfectly OK. I'm just trying to hear from locals what the advantages and disadvantages are of different places so my wife and I can make a more informed decision about where to focus our job hunt. Thanks!
Is Adelaide nice to live in? My wife and I are thinking of emigrating to Australia from the USA and we've kind of zeroed in on Adelaide. Just as someplace different than the standard Sydney/Melbourne option. From what I've read it's got a climate very similar to where we live in the USA (the SF Bay Area). Is Adelaide a boring place? Mountain biking trails sound good, we like to do that....
If you follow a line of reasoning based on assumptions and a fundamental lack of knowledge (not just that you have, that humanity has about the laws of physics), and you arrive at an illogical conclusion (time travel), I think you ought to realize that your reasoning and asumptions are flawed, rather than believe that your conlusions are correct.
Time travel is simply not possible; forget physics. It is a logical absurdity to say that I could create a paradox by "going back" to the past and killing myself.
As a hint for the future, if you take a physics course and your extrapolations from what you've learned lead you to believe that you can make 2 plus 2 equal 4, then you probably should stop right there and study your books a little harder rather than announcing that you've found out how to make the impossible, possible.
Sorry - not to sound overly critical - but "time travel" has been one of my pet peeves for quite some time. It's worse than a religion because even people who otherwise tend to think pretty rationally get caught up in the fantasy of believing in time travel.
So, does the fact that government health campagn advertisements don't tell you that using heroin feels nice, or drinking and driving is sometimes convinient count as censorship?
No, but if the government took the health campaign advertisements of a private institution and removed the wording that explains that using heroin feels nice, or that drinking and driving is sometimes convenient, then that's censorship.
What's the difference? The government altering a third parties' speech is censorship. The government deciding what its own speech will be, is not censorship.
Obviously this is a very tricky issue because it has some aspects of censorship (the government deciding which third party speech, i.e. web sites, they will "allow" on their networks), but also has some aspects of the rights of the tax payer to provide the service that they want to pay for, and no more. Which is why there are so many dissenting opinions on Slashdot about this issue, each of which has its own merits.
I personally would rather not see the government do any filtering but I would be willing to listen more to arguments from both sides because I think it's very much not a cut-and-dried issue.
BTW, I think the "do libraries have to provide access to every publication ever made" argument is weak. It uses a faulty analogy. A better analogy would be, "do libraries have the right to cut pages out of magazines that they don't like", and I think most people would say 'no'.
My wife and I intend to move to Australia next year if we can, and I have to say I don't think I'll miss American TV much at all. I did like the original Law and Order but the rest of the crime drama/forensics shows have been derivative crap. Especially the CSI stuff, those shows are bad on so many levels it's not even funny.
They play some Australian show here on Lifetime, my wife watches it occasionally, it's about a bunch of semi-hot chicks who work on a farm or something like that. McLeod's Daughters or somesuch. Also we get some Gordon Eliott on Food Network, although not enough if you ask me, that guy is a riot.
Despite what others in Australia have complained about in this discussion, I'm looking forward to all of the Aussie rules and 12 nations and stuff on Aussie TV, we don't get nearly enough of it here, and only second rate coverate on Fox Sports World.
I've modded you '+1 Funny' in my mind. I can't do it on Slashdot because their lame mod points system only gives you mod points for a couple of days, and I only find something worth modding once every couple of weeks, by which time all my mod points have already expired...
I feel kind of guilty now. I could watch any and all of the shows that you mention any time I wanted to (I live in the USA) but I don't watch any of them. The only thing I watch is British House of Commons, and unfortunately it is sometimes pre-empted by our lame senate "debates" (watch the BHoC and you'll realize what a joke it is to use the word "senate" and "debate" in the same sentence) or other non-newsworthy events.
Maybe I'll watch an episode of Desperate Housewives or West Wing or something just to assuage my guilt...
Your understanding of the concept of "coercion" is oversimplified. You fail to take the circumstances of the supposed "coercion" into consideration.
By your definition, any time anyone does something they don't want to do, they are "coerced". So I am being "coerced" by the government not to commit murder because if I did, they would throw me in jail for the rest of my life. Right?
The word "coercion" completely loses its meaning if you really think it is supposed to be used this way.
Just curious, why do you say "radiosity is a joke"? I don't know very much at all about raytracing, but I remember years ago when the radiosity concept surfaced in practical raytracing programs and I could swear that just about everyone said that it was a *major* improvement.
How do you do the quoting of a posting in Slashdot? I can't find the button to do it, do I have to copy-paste and hand-indent everything that you wrote? Oh well here goes...
I'm not sure you're replying to me, since i didnt say much but if you are:
Yes, I was responding to your post, and in more general to the common sentiment that you are expressing that I hear all of the time.
I never said they wouldn't, the problem is that the US is currently the most powerful nation on the planet. When your government does something it's likely to affect other countries. Hell 20 years ago your government more or less routinely staged military facist coupes in third world countries. My government dont have the power to do that.
Yes I honestly think the average citizen in my country cares more about politics than in yours. I think the fact that where I live, about 80% of the people vote in the elections, while where you live I think it is around 50%, speaks for itself.
Voting turnout is a very bad way to measure political involvement. I think that it's generally known that the larger the country, the less incentive there is for any individual to vote because the perceived effect of that vote becomes less and less. In other words, if my country only had 3 people, you'd better believe I'd vote because my vote would have a huge effect. If my country has 100 billion people, I'm much less likely to vote because I can see that my vote has less of an obvious effect. The USA and your country are somewhere in between those two sizes, with the USA likely to be bigger than your country . So the USA has roughly proportionally less voter turnout, when compared to your country, as would be predicted by the effects of size on voter's perceived value of their vote. I don't think that this makes people in the USA less political, it just means that the natural effects of larger populations is to reduce the voter turnout percentage.
People in the USA are very political. There are tons of political organizations, newspapers, television and radio programs, activists groups, etc, etc. I personally don't vote in very many elections, but I don't consider myself to be apolitical because of it. I give money to political groups that represent what I believe in, which I think has a far greater effect than voting would.
And here i thought you where from the US! I'm sorry, my mistake, you're obviously from another planet. Ok, sorry for the sarcasm, but please... More or less entire europe and asia protested against the war on iraq, did it help? I realise iraq could be called a special case, but what about the Kyoto protocol? Something like 100+ countries have signed it and they all beg the US to sign, does it help? Most of the world wants the US to stop using the death penalty, does it help?
I was in Manhattan when hundreds of thousands of people marched to express their disapproval of President Bush during the Republican convention. I was also there when there were marches after marches against the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. Did those have any effect? Obviously not. My point is that it's not like people in the USA who you alluded to in your original post have any more *practical* means of affecting the policies of the USA than people in your country do.
If people in your country, or other countries in the world, *really cared* about the policies that you are talking about, then you could put *real pressure* on the USA. Simply stop buying any product made in the USA. Don't buy any more electronics, computers, movies, video games, software, minerals, grain, etc, or any other thing that the USA produces. Or, if that's too onerous, just start reducing the amount that you buy. That would certainly make the people in charge of the USA start to seriously consider your points.
But, you won't do it. Why? Because it's too hard. It's too hard to get the collective will together to do things that really make a diff
The thing is, most do. The other thing is, most people in most countries will do very little about issues which don't affect them directly. U.S. citizens are no more or less ambivalent about these issues than those citizens of any other country. There are certainly *alot* of groups who actively try to fight these kinds of injustices in the U.S. The fact that it's talked about openly in the media (maybe not the *mass* media but they're too busy with reality TV to really care) says something.
I don't know what country you are from, but I *guarantee* you that if your government did something similar, under the same sorts of circumstances, the citizenry of your country would act in pretty much the same way as those in the U.S. do. Which is this: most people would say that there is something wrong with what's going on, a smaller number would say that it's definitely unjust, and an even smaller number would actually try to do something about it.
The simple fact is that most people in the entire world care much, much more about the trivialities of their daily lives than what happens thousands of miles away from them, and is done by groups much larger and more powerful than themselves. If the citizens of your country care so much about this issue, then why aren't your citizens actively demonstrating in the streets en masse and putting pressure on your own government to put serious pressure on the U.S. of A? Do you think that only U.S. citizens have any way of controlling what the U.S. government does? Do you think that your average Joe in the USA is more likely to feel empowered to change what the U.S. government does than you do?
Do you think that people in your country care more about political issues than the people of the USA? If so, can you point out exactly what it is that your citizens do that demonstrates this?
Finally, do you think that your government, if it were as powerful as the U.S. government, wouldn't do something similar in the same situation?
How does the old saying go - "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely"? The U.S. government is one *powerful* institution. I'm generally embarrassed by it but sometimes I think that things could be *alot* worse than they are. There is definitely a sort of schizophrenia in the U.S. government - some powerful factions want to do bad things and some powerful factions want to do good things, and so in the end the USA does some good things and some bad things. I think that's pretty much what we can expect on average from any government in this world.
I forgot to factor in the compression when considering how much data has to be read from the drive per second. If the compression is 10:1 like they claim then I guess it'd only be about 15 MB per second off of the drive, which is perfectly doable. I guess then the problem becomes decompressing 15 MB per second but since it's a lossless algorithm it's probably pretty easy to undo given enough memory and a decent processor.
Sounds pretty reasonable for most movies; I guess they'd need 2 hard drives for movies longer than that, which I guess wouldn't add all that much to the cost of distribution since a 100 Gb hard drive is what, 50 bucks?
I'd be more interested in learning what kind of hard drives they have that can read 151.875 Megabytes per second continuously. I'd imagine that if you don't use a filesystem and just stream raw video off of the drive it would help because the drive wouldn't do any seeking. Still, 151.875 Megabytes sustainable must require some kind of high end SCSI drive so I guess my original supposition of $50/hard drive must be off.
I'd say that this is an idea whose time has definitely come.
How exactly are "VOD, Broadband, VoIP, FM radio, other misc data services (ie Alarm monitoring)" innovations of cable companies?
Cable companies were simply in the fortunate position to be able to re-purpose infrastructure that they had already laid down for another purpose (analog TV distribution). And the repurposing that they did took extra investment in digital set top boxes and cable modem hardware, and who knows whatever infrastructure at their head end. No innovation there at all. It's not like they "invented" the internet or any service thereon that by happy coincidence for them have added value to their service.
DirecTV with TiVo DVRs have all of the advantages that you mentioned about the SA boxes, and they're better DVRs to boot.
Please do not extrapolate anything I have said to any other employees of TiVo or the company itself. I stated very clearly that I speak for myself only.
I did not say that cable companies' business model is to innovate. I said that not having to innovate means that they don't have the same cost in providing solutions. They can only provide solutions which are behind the technical curve, but they can provide them more cheaply because of that.
This is all a generality though. There's nothing to say that TiVo couldn't provide both better and cheaper solutions by simply working harder and smarter.
Once again, I speak for myself and not TiVo or any other employee of TiVo.
Slashdot Mirror
I know some knowledgeable Slashdot reader can help me here. What I want to know is, what is the drawback to such a power system? It sounds like it generates quite a bit of power, and looks like a completely clean source. Are these things super expensive to build? Is it really hard to keep these things lined up with the sun to produce optimal power?
There is the issue of not being able to produce any power at night. But intelligent use of battery stores along with some supplemental traditional powered generators might take care of that, especially since power draw from the grid is (I'm guessing) much less at night.
So - what's the catch? Why aren't fields of these things going up like crazy?
Fry's was listing HL2 for $35 this weekend.
I had the most bizarre experience today. I was reading the San Jose Mercury News over my morning bowl of grape-nuts and I saw a story posted about the new mouse, and within the first couple of paragraphs was THE PARENT POST QUOTED FROM SLASHDOT. Unbelievable. I've read a slashdot post from a newspaper before seeing it on the actual slashdot web site. WTF is the world coming to.
Oh my god. Did you just reply to someone's complaint about the lack of craftsmanship in subversion by suggesting arch?!?!? The mind boggles ...
Your ending is better.
If it generates electricity by catching electrons resulting from nuclear fission, then how do you turn it off? Is it always generating electricity? Do you have to have a constant connection to ground so that it can sink any current that's not being used?
I had the same experience with Cyrix chips, so you're not alone in this.
In all reality it's the software that was buggy with respect to clock speed detection, not the chip. But still this made an already weak cheap even less useful.
Thanks very very much for the response. I'm a little confused about your rankings of the cities you mentioned but I think you're saying:
Pay:
Sydney/Melbourne > Adelaide/Brisbane
Liveability:
Brisbane > Sydney/Melbourne > Adelaide
Although I'm confused by your comments that everyone moves away from Adelaide to Sydney/Melbourne for higher pay and yet cannot afford a house. Affordability would make Adelaide a more liveable option and yet you say that everyone moves away to the less affordable places. Why?
Actually Syndey sounds like the SF Bay Area ("silicon valley"). Pay rates are high but housing is nowhere near affordable; the median house price is now $750,000 U.S. or so which is not affordable even for two people each with good jobs. So most people own condos or townhouses (smaller parts of multi-family buildings) or rent apartments.
Brisbane is not an option I had considered - isn't it in the jungle or something?
BTW I don't consider your comments to be flamebait. I realize that everyone has a different opinion about different places and I think that's perfectly OK. I'm just trying to hear from locals what the advantages and disadvantages are of different places so my wife and I can make a more informed decision about where to focus our job hunt. Thanks!
Is Adelaide nice to live in? My wife and I are thinking of emigrating to Australia from the USA and we've kind of zeroed in on Adelaide. Just as someplace different than the standard Sydney/Melbourne option. From what I've read it's got a climate very similar to where we live in the USA (the SF Bay Area). Is Adelaide a boring place? Mountain biking trails sound good, we like to do that ....
Your comments are off-topic and uninformative enough to seriously put question to your original assertion that you were there.
The other guy's comments were much more lucid and convincing than yours are. Give it a rest man.
If you follow a line of reasoning based on assumptions and a fundamental lack of knowledge (not just that you have, that humanity has about the laws of physics), and you arrive at an illogical conclusion (time travel), I think you ought to realize that your reasoning and asumptions are flawed, rather than believe that your conlusions are correct.
Time travel is simply not possible; forget physics. It is a logical absurdity to say that I could create a paradox by "going back" to the past and killing myself.
As a hint for the future, if you take a physics course and your extrapolations from what you've learned lead you to believe that you can make 2 plus 2 equal 4, then you probably should stop right there and study your books a little harder rather than announcing that you've found out how to make the impossible, possible.
Sorry - not to sound overly critical - but "time travel" has been one of my pet peeves for quite some time. It's worse than a religion because even people who otherwise tend to think pretty rationally get caught up in the fantasy of believing in time travel.
What's the difference? The government altering a third parties' speech is censorship. The government deciding what its own speech will be, is not censorship.
Obviously this is a very tricky issue because it has some aspects of censorship (the government deciding which third party speech, i.e. web sites, they will "allow" on their networks), but also has some aspects of the rights of the tax payer to provide the service that they want to pay for, and no more. Which is why there are so many dissenting opinions on Slashdot about this issue, each of which has its own merits.
I personally would rather not see the government do any filtering but I would be willing to listen more to arguments from both sides because I think it's very much not a cut-and-dried issue.
BTW, I think the "do libraries have to provide access to every publication ever made" argument is weak. It uses a faulty analogy. A better analogy would be, "do libraries have the right to cut pages out of magazines that they don't like", and I think most people would say 'no'.
My wife and I intend to move to Australia next year if we can, and I have to say I don't think I'll miss American TV much at all. I did like the original Law and Order but the rest of the crime drama/forensics shows have been derivative crap. Especially the CSI stuff, those shows are bad on so many levels it's not even funny.
They play some Australian show here on Lifetime, my wife watches it occasionally, it's about a bunch of semi-hot chicks who work on a farm or something like that. McLeod's Daughters or somesuch. Also we get some Gordon Eliott on Food Network, although not enough if you ask me, that guy is a riot.
Despite what others in Australia have complained about in this discussion, I'm looking forward to all of the Aussie rules and 12 nations and stuff on Aussie TV, we don't get nearly enough of it here, and only second rate coverate on Fox Sports World.
I've modded you '+1 Funny' in my mind. I can't do it on Slashdot because their lame mod points system only gives you mod points for a couple of days, and I only find something worth modding once every couple of weeks, by which time all my mod points have already expired ...
I feel kind of guilty now. I could watch any and all of the shows that you mention any time I wanted to (I live in the USA) but I don't watch any of them. The only thing I watch is British House of Commons, and unfortunately it is sometimes pre-empted by our lame senate "debates" (watch the BHoC and you'll realize what a joke it is to use the word "senate" and "debate" in the same sentence) or other non-newsworthy events.
...
Maybe I'll watch an episode of Desperate Housewives or West Wing or something just to assuage my guilt
Why is making a different car to sell to the world's sixth largest economy not "the best way of doing things economically"?
Your understanding of the concept of "coercion" is oversimplified. You fail to take the circumstances of the supposed "coercion" into consideration.
By your definition, any time anyone does something they don't want to do, they are "coerced". So I am being "coerced" by the government not to commit murder because if I did, they would throw me in jail for the rest of my life. Right?
The word "coercion" completely loses its meaning if you really think it is supposed to be used this way.
Just curious, why do you say "radiosity is a joke"? I don't know very much at all about raytracing, but I remember years ago when the radiosity concept surfaced in practical raytracing programs and I could swear that just about everyone said that it was a *major* improvement.
I'm not sure you're replying to me, since i didnt say much but if you are:
Yes, I was responding to your post, and in more general to the common sentiment that you are expressing that I hear all of the time.
I never said they wouldn't, the problem is that the US is currently the most powerful nation on the planet. When your government does something it's likely to affect other countries. Hell 20 years ago your government more or less routinely staged military facist coupes in third world countries. My government dont have the power to do that.
Yes I honestly think the average citizen in my country cares more about politics than in yours. I think the fact that where I live, about 80% of the people vote in the elections, while where you live I think it is around 50%, speaks for itself.
Voting turnout is a very bad way to measure political involvement. I think that it's generally known that the larger the country, the less incentive there is for any individual to vote because the perceived effect of that vote becomes less and less. In other words, if my country only had 3 people, you'd better believe I'd vote because my vote would have a huge effect. If my country has 100 billion people, I'm much less likely to vote because I can see that my vote has less of an obvious effect. The USA and your country are somewhere in between those two sizes, with the USA likely to be bigger than your country . So the USA has roughly proportionally less voter turnout, when compared to your country, as would be predicted by the effects of size on voter's perceived value of their vote. I don't think that this makes people in the USA less political, it just means that the natural effects of larger populations is to reduce the voter turnout percentage.
People in the USA are very political. There are tons of political organizations, newspapers, television and radio programs, activists groups, etc, etc. I personally don't vote in very many elections, but I don't consider myself to be apolitical because of it. I give money to political groups that represent what I believe in, which I think has a far greater effect than voting would.
And here i thought you where from the US! I'm sorry, my mistake, you're obviously from another planet. Ok, sorry for the sarcasm, but please... More or less entire europe and asia protested against the war on iraq, did it help? I realise iraq could be called a special case, but what about the Kyoto protocol? Something like 100+ countries have signed it and they all beg the US to sign, does it help? Most of the world wants the US to stop using the death penalty, does it help?
I was in Manhattan when hundreds of thousands of people marched to express their disapproval of President Bush during the Republican convention. I was also there when there were marches after marches against the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. Did those have any effect? Obviously not. My point is that it's not like people in the USA who you alluded to in your original post have any more *practical* means of affecting the policies of the USA than people in your country do.
If people in your country, or other countries in the world, *really cared* about the policies that you are talking about, then you could put *real pressure* on the USA. Simply stop buying any product made in the USA. Don't buy any more electronics, computers, movies, video games, software, minerals, grain, etc, or any other thing that the USA produces. Or, if that's too onerous, just start reducing the amount that you buy. That would certainly make the people in charge of the USA start to seriously consider your points.
But, you won't do it. Why? Because it's too hard. It's too hard to get the collective will together to do things that really make a diff
The thing is, most do. The other thing is, most people in most countries will do very little about issues which don't affect them directly. U.S. citizens are no more or less ambivalent about these issues than those citizens of any other country. There are certainly *alot* of groups who actively try to fight these kinds of injustices in the U.S. The fact that it's talked about openly in the media (maybe not the *mass* media but they're too busy with reality TV to really care) says something.
I don't know what country you are from, but I *guarantee* you that if your government did something similar, under the same sorts of circumstances, the citizenry of your country would act in pretty much the same way as those in the U.S. do. Which is this: most people would say that there is something wrong with what's going on, a smaller number would say that it's definitely unjust, and an even smaller number would actually try to do something about it.
The simple fact is that most people in the entire world care much, much more about the trivialities of their daily lives than what happens thousands of miles away from them, and is done by groups much larger and more powerful than themselves. If the citizens of your country care so much about this issue, then why aren't your citizens actively demonstrating in the streets en masse and putting pressure on your own government to put serious pressure on the U.S. of A? Do you think that only U.S. citizens have any way of controlling what the U.S. government does? Do you think that your average Joe in the USA is more likely to feel empowered to change what the U.S. government does than you do?
Do you think that people in your country care more about political issues than the people of the USA? If so, can you point out exactly what it is that your citizens do that demonstrates this?
Finally, do you think that your government, if it were as powerful as the U.S. government, wouldn't do something similar in the same situation?
How does the old saying go - "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely"? The U.S. government is one *powerful* institution. I'm generally embarrassed by it but sometimes I think that things could be *alot* worse than they are. There is definitely a sort of schizophrenia in the U.S. government - some powerful factions want to do bad things and some powerful factions want to do good things, and so in the end the USA does some good things and some bad things. I think that's pretty much what we can expect on average from any government in this world.
I forgot to factor in the compression when considering how much data has to be read from the drive per second. If the compression is 10:1 like they claim then I guess it'd only be about 15 MB per second off of the drive, which is perfectly doable. I guess then the problem becomes decompressing 15 MB per second but since it's a lossless algorithm it's probably pretty easy to undo given enough memory and a decent processor.
2048 x 1080 = 2211840 pixels per frame
3 bytes per pixel (24 bit color) = 6635520 bytes per frame
24 frames per second (to match the framerate of regular film) = 159252480 bytes per second = 151.875 megabytes per second
1 terabyte = 1024 * 1024 megabytes = 1048576 megabytes
Therefore 1 terabyte is 6904.204 seconds of video
6094.204 / 60 = 115.070 minutes of video
That's just over 1 hour, 55 minutes of video.
Sounds pretty reasonable for most movies; I guess they'd need 2 hard drives for movies longer than that, which I guess wouldn't add all that much to the cost of distribution since a 100 Gb hard drive is what, 50 bucks?
I'd be more interested in learning what kind of hard drives they have that can read 151.875 Megabytes per second continuously. I'd imagine that if you don't use a filesystem and just stream raw video off of the drive it would help because the drive wouldn't do any seeking. Still, 151.875 Megabytes sustainable must require some kind of high end SCSI drive so I guess my original supposition of $50/hard drive must be off.
I'd say that this is an idea whose time has definitely come.
How exactly are "VOD, Broadband, VoIP, FM radio, other misc data services (ie Alarm monitoring)" innovations of cable companies?
Cable companies were simply in the fortunate position to be able to re-purpose infrastructure that they had already laid down for another purpose (analog TV distribution). And the repurposing that they did took extra investment in digital set top boxes and cable modem hardware, and who knows whatever infrastructure at their head end. No innovation there at all. It's not like they "invented" the internet or any service thereon that by happy coincidence for them have added value to their service.
DirecTV with TiVo DVRs have all of the advantages that you mentioned about the SA boxes, and they're better DVRs to boot.
I speak for me and not TiVo again (obviously).
Please do not extrapolate anything I have said to any other employees of TiVo or the company itself. I stated very clearly that I speak for myself only.
I did not say that cable companies' business model is to innovate. I said that not having to innovate means that they don't have the same cost in providing solutions. They can only provide solutions which are behind the technical curve, but they can provide them more cheaply because of that.
This is all a generality though. There's nothing to say that TiVo couldn't provide both better and cheaper solutions by simply working harder and smarter.
Once again, I speak for myself and not TiVo or any other employee of TiVo.