I think one of the reasons they didn't include such functionality is pressure from broadcasters/advertisers. The ability to record and watch simultaneously almost inevitably entails the ability to skip commercials.
You must be confusing echostar with Myth.
Automated commercial skipping will never be a mainstay of any popular DVR. Advertisers pay for TV content. They pay a lot of money. TV is not free. Any DVR that automatically skipped commercials would be holding a loaded gun to their investor's heads. TiVO knows this, and chose to embrace, not deface, the TV advertisers.
Bottomline: you can skip commercials with a TiVO, but you have to manually FFW through each one.
The technology to watch and record at the same time is really obvious. Even the idea that this would be nice is pretty obvious. What do you want to bet that if we went back to usenet archives before TiVO we could find someone wishing he could time delay with his VCR or suggesting that this be done with a HD? TiVO just realized that this would be a sucesful product.
If wishes were horses beggars would ride.
Imagining an invention does not make an invention.
We all need to take a step into the time machine with Mr Peabody and go back to 1996. Windows 95 is a year old and the hottest software on the planet, a HUGE step up from Windows 3.1. The Mac is on its crash and burn trajectory through the powerpc lines. My hard drive is a few hundred megabytes. And some top engineers from SGI and a Time Warner's digital video division come together to form TiVO. They spend 2-3 years with tons of investment money to make the first implementation that can watch video from a hard drive while simultaneously recording from it. In doing so, they smash through digital video recording and reading barriers, and make it work together in real time. It was quite an engineering achievement for their day. And, they were rewarded with a patent.
Zoom ahead 8 years. Processors went from 200 MHz to 2 Giga hertz, a tenfold speed increase. Hard drive reading and writing rates also went up substantially. What was very difficult in 1995-1997 is pretty easy now. And the TiVO time warp patent seems obvious today.
But I guarantee if you could go back to 1997 and try to make one yourself, you would need a lot of ingenuity, and most engineers of today just couldn't make it work. It was tough.
I mean, look at other inventions. Look at the telephone. Seems bloody obvious today, doesn't it?
The US has increased consumption of energy roughly 8% PER DECADE since 1970 (26% total). That is slower than population growth, we actually use less energy per person than we did 35 years ago!
India and China, in comparison, have increased energy consumption 70% and 50% since 1990. India's population increase has been only roughly 18% in that time, and China's has grown 23%.
Looking forward in time, where are the problems going to be? The US is a large consumer, but our per capita consumption decreases with time, and our population growth is slowing (actually, we are shrinking except for the immigration issue). India and China are both increasing population, and increasing per capita usage.
I hate to say it... but it is both easy and obvious.
The patent office's reply is the standard "If it were obvious there would be some prior art"
But I think you are missing the bigger picture. TiVO's patent is not obvious when you simply take a VCR and replace the tape with a hard drive.
It is a substantial engineering challenge (or was at the time) to pull a GByte of data off a hard drive in an hour, without emptying a buffer, at the same time that you are writing a GByte of data to the hard drive, without overflowing a buffer. TiVO's engineers worked long and hard at this, and used novel hardware and software to accomplish it. If you do any real-time programming you instantly recognize the challenge. No drops in video, and reading and writing different data simultaneously.
The idea may have been obvious, but making it work required invention.
Now, once it is demonstrated by a working implementation how innovative and cool the invention was, copying it was no big deal. This was made triply easy because processors speeded up dramatically between the days in which TiVO made this work and when Echostar made it work.
The question probably comes down to how specific the patent is worded (I haven't read it). The patent office probably shouldn't have awarded a patent to time warp, in general. However, to time warp using buffers in a certain range of size, that might be patentable (additional detail specified). Using a certain range of IO pipes to feed the IO operations...that kind of thing.
I am willing to concede that for the average user, Linux or OS X is more stable and secure than XP; at the same time however, I am thankful that I am not an average user.
I have some unusual apps with large RAM requirements...
Like I said, the frequency of these apps crashing it not OS dependent.
The frequency of the OS coming down with the apps is much worse in Windows.
I don't find the idea that a power-user could fix it particularly enthralling. I've been programming computers of all types since 1982, including the Apple II, Windows for Workgroups, 95, 98, 2000, XP, NT, Mac OS 9, OS X, Unix of three flavors and multiple OS versions, and many versions of linux. I don't think you should really expect more savvy from a user than I have. I can tell when the Windows machine starts hitting the swap file. I have limited time to kill the process. My fingers go to the ctrl-alt-del key, I smash it, the task manager appears, last chance to save the sinking ship, application not responding, going down, going down.....
A common user sees at least an order of magnitude difference in the frequency of lockups. Bullshit. Got any proof of that?
I am a common user.
Or, you can ask anyone who uses both regularly for their office work. I have these impressions, and they are matched by nearly everyone I know.
Windows crashes regularly
Not on any PC I use, or have used for the last 6 years or so. Yes, the 9x line is unstable, but the NT line is not, especially since 2k. My XP Pro machine at home locks up about as often as my linux box - which is to say almost never.
You can compare stability from 95 to 98 to NT to XP and conclude it has gotten a lot better, really it has.
But you cannot compare it to OS X or linux. There is no comparison. Even my best Windows machines, if I need to use them hours daily, don't go a week between re-boots. My Mac laptop just died, I lost an 18 month uptime. Linux I regularly go years between reboots.
The frequency with which applications crash doesn't really change. In fact, java on OS X crashes ALL THE TIME. But when it crashes, I kill the process, the OS doesn't go down with the app.
In Windows, it is FAR too often that the OS does go down with the app (saying as he madly pounds ctrl-alt-del five times in a row to try to catch it before it goes unresponsive......)
Its bloody obviouys. I bought a Windows XP machine because I HAVE to use it at work. I keep OS X for doing everything I can possibly do on it that doesn't require Windows.
Still, I crash the Windows machine about once a week. OS X, never.
What crashes it? Matlab apps that use a lot of RAM. Media loaded Word documents. Java. Pretty much the same things crash on OS X, but when the apps crash on OS X I drop to a shell, kill -9, and keep right on going. On Windows it requires a hard re-boot. I don't think these impressions are hard to find,
MS isn't stable, because they don't care about stability
You can't seriously believe that.
Linux and Mac are both dramatically more stable than Windows. A common user sees at least an order of magnitude difference in the frequency of lockups. At linux the priorities are set by the programmers themselves. Any lockup that can be easily replicated by the developers is debugged rapidly and fixed. Mac is not quite so good, but they don't support nearly as much hardware, and they use an underlying architecture that is comparable to that of linux - relatively hard to crash.
For Windows, it comes down to a question of priorities. Microsoft solves its problems ONLY when they see those problems threatening their business. Despite the fact that Windows crashes regularly, people keep buying it. When people stop buying it BECAUSE it is unstable, Microsoft will spend more on marketing to convince people it is not unstable. When that doesn't work, Microsoft will, fairly rapidly, fix the problem. Any company that can bank over a billion dollars a month has enough money to make Windows stable. But, making Windows stable doesn't make them more money, it is a net loss. Once Windows' stability threatens profit margins, Windows will get fixed.
I spent an hour a day for two weeks with the Rosetta Stone on Japanese, I go to Japan regularly for business but work there at an English speaking institute.
I can say "the airplane is blue" "Hikoki-wa aoie des"
but I had to go well outside the Rosetta Stone to learn "excuse me" "sumi-masen"
Now, I learned all kinds of very basic Japanese words very quickly with the Rosetta Stone, it is pretty impressive. But, if you do language immersion you learn the things you need to use in the order of importance, and that was badly lacking in the Rosetta Stone.
I was an exchange student in high school, I went from no knowledge to a crude fluency in Spanish in three months. That is by far the best way to learn, immerse, live in a Japanese house with Japanese people and go to Japanese school. May be tough to do unless you are an exchange student, but there is no faster way to learn any language.
Re:One Point For Gmail
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Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 1
GMail is yet to allow a piece of spam into my inbox. Pine can take advantage of all manner of cool and innovative spam filters and other kinds of filters. Bayesian, white/blacklist based, custom, you name it. There's no spam in my Pine mailbox at all. Also, there are no ads. You, on the other hand, have Google providing ad content all the time you use GMail. Which is not a lot different from constantly being spammed, at least, to me.
The thing is, GMail has much more effective Bayesian filtering.
They don't only use YOUR choices for spam filtering. They use everybody else's, too. They can tell if thousands of people received the same, or largely the same, message in the same day, and know if it is spam much more effectively as a result. Basically, PINE can use mail filtering tailored for your preferences. GMail can use mail filtering tailored for your preferences, and additionally use information from other users. Spam is typically sent out massively in parallel, GMail can see that, and PINE cannot.
I tried everything I could for my email filtering. It was bad. Then I forwarded the email to my GMail account. Got some spam at first, it now has trickled to 1-2 messages per day, and 50 or so messages that get sent to my spambox per day. GMail spam filtering is MUCH better.
I'm pretty sure you haven't asked EVERY good programmer whether he or she works best alone, if only because I know at least a few who claim otherwise.
Au contraire. You show me a programmer who says he works best in pairs, and I will show you a crappy slow programmer. Real programmers hole themselves up and pull all-nighters, with a twelve pack of Mountain Dew and a steady flow of M&Ms. Socially outcast, until they emerge with a finished product. The degree of abstract thought required to do good programming is anti-social in every sense.
That's why I said every "good" programmer. Lots of dime-a-dozen code slingers may like programming in pairs. Good ones will only enter the XP program under extreme duress, and often end of scarred for life.
I am completely financially disengaged, I don't work for them, don't work for Merzenich anymore, and have no conflict of interest with their work. I've just been around it a lot...
No, not the cellular/molecular pathology per se, but the cognitive decline in Alzheimer's is of interest, yes? From the website: "Early-Stage Alzheimer's Disease: We are conducting a pilot study with UCSF in early-stage Alzheimer's disease. This study is currently enrolling participants through the UCSF Memory and Aging Center."
Its a bit of muddle. Early stage Alzheimer's is not so diagnosable today. You can't see Ab plaques or tangles. However, good diagnostic tests will be available soon, in several forms. That being the case, today, early Alzheimer's from a clinicians point of view is the same as age-related decline.
But there is a lot of age-related decline that is not well explained by Alzheimer's also.
And, whereas the literature is full of indications that reinforced behavior can help age-related decline, there really are not studies that intervene and turn back the age-related decline. Certainly, mentally active people, people with more education, etc, all show less age-related decline. But to go in and reverse the clock is something else altogether.
And yes, many people would think that reinforced behaviors would have this impact. The difference is that by carefully choosing the behaviors, and highly controlled the feedback on reward, you can tap into the system much more powerfully. People often wonder why we can see such huge changes in the brain with 1-2 hours of daily training. Our canned reply is that we engage attention, vigilance, and reward to such an extent in that 1-2 hours that it can overwhelm the rest of the daily experience. Sensory exposure without reward causes some, small, amounts of change in adults. Sensory exposure in a rewarded context is a powerful agent for change in the adult brain.
You are absolutely correct, and there is some legitimacy to this. My objection was the lack of disclosure (and being Windows only) as well as pointing out that there are healthier and cheaper ways to accomplish the same results. i.e. One does not have to buy into dumbed down science and fork over $500 to get the same results.
It is quite easy to pose the pundit.
Controlled scientific studies show over a decacde-equivalent improvement in age-related decline.
What basis do you have to claim that these effects may be obtained more simply? What have you done, or what are you referring to, that has been studied in a carefully controlled manner?
I may be uniquely qualified to comment on this, as I spent the last decade of my life, until last October, working closely with Dr. Merzenich on issues of how the brain is altered by reinforced behaviors, and know the details of the testing that has, so far, gone into their program to address age-related cognitive decline.
First, let's clear up any thought this would address Alzheimer's. It has nothing to do with neurofibrillary tangles and plaques that define Alzheimers.
What has been done so far, is to demonstrate that practicing certain types of computer guided behaviors for about an hour a day, every day, can have a fairly enormous impact on age-related cognitive decline. Attention and vigilance in rewarded behaviors, nothing more.
And you might wonder where this guy, Merzenich, gets off thinking this...well, here are some resume highlights.
1) Developed the ONLY US-developed cochlear implant at UCSF. Merzenich was the project head. The head engineer (Loeb) went to Advanced Bionics to continue the work that became the Clarion cochlear implant, and cured Rush Limbaugh's deafness (I kid), This work was led by Merzenich, and there was a team of about 6-8 other integral participants.
2) Provided a cure for the vast majority of language learning impaired children, which then became the company Scientific Learning, which has trained over 600,000 children at speech skills, with an AVERAGE improvement of 2 standard deviations in the six week training period. This is today far and away easily the most effective, and often recommended, program for children aged 4-10 who are diagnosed language learning impaired/dyslexic (partnered with Paula Tallal in this effort, as well as a team of at least a dozen other PhD scientists).
3) Member, National Academy of Sciences.
This one definitely works also. Is it a fountain of youth? Will it succeed in the market? Your guess is probably as good as mine. But for certain in the initial short-term, people who have substantially advanced cognitive decline relative to their peers can lose a decade or more of their age-related loss in a several week long training period. And that is worth getting excited about.
Huh? How about freedom to keep what I earn and use it to pay for my own medical insurance of my choice? Freedom to not run across the border to have to use a doctor of my choice? Freedom to not be poor through the sweat of my brow? My country's a great one, but it's not all roses here.
Hate to tell you this, but America's health care system is on a collison crash-and-burn course because it is badly broken. Health care costs rise, as a fraction of the total economy, yearly. Rapidly, in fact. Projections are we have another 10 years of business as usual, at best.
But that is not really the point. Every other westernized country has better health care than the USA. No, that doesn't mean the best doctors are there...it means they treat everyone, and in the USA 1 in 6 people has no medical insurance and receives minimal medical care.
Even ignoring 1 in 6 people, US residents spend 50% more on health care than people in virtually every other westernized nation. That's 50% more AFTER normalizing for GDP.
Our health care system sucks, If the Canadian or Swiss health care system means everyone gets health care, and as a nation we spend 33% less on health care, and our population health care stats improve, bring it on!
Also, I've worked with many Canadian doctors. They are great. The best Canadian doctors stack up with the best American doctors. I'm not saying I think the Canadian system is the best socialized medicine, but the US HAS to change, and their system is certainly one better option.
. . . when a group of people lets all of their scientific achievements throughout history become overshadowed by religious fundamentalism. Let's hope we don't end up going down the same route here in the States.
That's not really what happened. What happened was the Mongol Horde. Genghis Khan and his early descendants RAMPAGED over eastern Europe, including all centers of Islamic culture. They enlisted all engineers, thinkers, doctors, etc, took everything of value, and mostly burned the rest. They effectively ended the golden age of Islamic Culture and catalyzed the end of the Middle Ages in Western Europe.
The last time a non-Muslim invader stormed and took Baghdad (prior to Bush), it was a Khan. The Mongols had their own religion, but enforced subjugation of religion to the state on all whom they conquered.
Kind of my point. The advertisers have to pay to reach the audience. If the audience starts avoiding the advertiser, TV will change.
BTW, with TV going to pop-up ads, think about how lucrative an interactive pop-up ad will be, which can be done with a PVR and broadband connection like TiVO or DirecTV's PVR....
However much you may dislike commercials, you need to come to terms with the fact that TV is not in fact free, and attempts to get TV to be free by commercial-skipping PVRs will be blocked on a large scale by the TV stations themselves under pressure from the advertisers. And if that is allowed now by the way that TV companies transition from TV to commercials, they will change. Over and over again until it is not possible. Potential investors will be shoo'ed away.
Once you embrace the advertisers as the people who actually directly pay for your TV, many more doors open, and you might even be able to increase revenue by more directly connecting consumers to the people who pay for it all.
My ReplayTV 5040 does just that. I'd way it's around 80%-90% when it comes to skipping commercials (for most shows it works all the time, but some networks seem to use a slightly different method for delimiting commercial blocks that isn't as easily detected).
I stand by my Hari-Kari comment.
TiVO and ReplayTV had market shares that were much more comparable before ReplayTV committed Hari-Kari by letting users skip commercials. Who do you think pays for TV anyway? Stabbing the advertisers in the back was a bad move. The PVRs need to move to generating more ad revenue, not less, for them to be viable in the future.
That being said, I love my TiVO's 30 second skip button.
TiVO indexes the programming guide and descriptions of programs, categorizes them, and allows you to use this to set up your search and record functions. If all you want to do is record by time and date, and manually schedule each recording, then TiVO would be a waste of money. Sort of.
The thing is, TiVO is so easy to set up, even a grandmother can do it. And in business terms, that is extremely valuable.
Also, if you use some other PVR, you miss out on the TiVO experience. TiVO has broadband capabilities. You can schedule programming from your cell phone or computer. You can download shows to your iPod and watch them on a airplane, or download them to your laptop and watch them in the car.
And much more. But the untapped new advertising stream will be the kicker. When you see that little thumbs up come on while watching TV and you click through, TiVO will have gone far beyond other PVRs.
No company selling PVRs will ever make it easier to avoid commercials. It would be equivalent to committing corporate Hari-Kari. You cannot look the big money in the eye and stab them in the back at the same time.
TiVO has a deep patent portfolio that is starting to be leveraged against the companies that are ripping off their inventions. As each new box comes out, TiVO is reverse engineering it and finding patent violations.
TiVO also has 4-5 million boxes in service (far far more than number two), each with upgradeable operating systems. They can leverage this in a "google ads" kind of way to link TV content and internet-based advertising, and blow the doors off the competition.
As is often the case, people are missing the forest for the trees. People look at the PVRs as a recorder, or as a mechanism to deliver content on-demand (both of which are true). But the PVR a la TiVO will become a novel advertising stream, with click-through ads during television content that will be worth a mint and have the potential to revolutionize TV-based advertising models. Then TiVO will be giving the boxes away to get your ad revenue.
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I think one of the reasons they didn't include such functionality is pressure from broadcasters/advertisers. The ability to record and watch simultaneously almost inevitably entails the ability to skip commercials.
You must be confusing echostar with Myth.
Automated commercial skipping will never be a mainstay of any popular DVR. Advertisers pay for TV content. They pay a lot of money. TV is not free. Any DVR that automatically skipped commercials would be holding a loaded gun to their investor's heads. TiVO knows this, and chose to embrace, not deface, the TV advertisers.
Bottomline: you can skip commercials with a TiVO, but you have to manually FFW through each one.
The technology to watch and record at the same time is really obvious. Even the idea that this would be nice is pretty obvious. What do you want to bet that if we went back to usenet archives before TiVO we could find someone wishing he could time delay with his VCR or suggesting that this be done with a HD? TiVO just realized that this would be a sucesful product.
If wishes were horses beggars would ride.
Imagining an invention does not make an invention.
We all need to take a step into the time machine with Mr Peabody and go back to 1996. Windows 95 is a year old and the hottest software on the planet, a HUGE step up from Windows 3.1. The Mac is on its crash and burn trajectory through the powerpc lines. My hard drive is a few hundred megabytes. And some top engineers from SGI and a Time Warner's digital video division come together to form TiVO. They spend 2-3 years with tons of investment money to make the first implementation that can watch video from a hard drive while simultaneously recording from it. In doing so, they smash through digital video recording and reading barriers, and make it work together in real time. It was quite an engineering achievement for their day. And, they were rewarded with a patent.
Zoom ahead 8 years. Processors went from 200 MHz to 2 Giga hertz, a tenfold speed increase. Hard drive reading and writing rates also went up substantially. What was very difficult in 1995-1997 is pretty easy now. And the TiVO time warp patent seems obvious today.
But I guarantee if you could go back to 1997 and try to make one yourself, you would need a lot of ingenuity, and most engineers of today just couldn't make it work. It was tough.
I mean, look at other inventions. Look at the telephone. Seems bloody obvious today, doesn't it?
The US has increased consumption of energy roughly 8% PER DECADE since 1970 (26% total). That is slower than population growth, we actually use less energy per person than we did 35 years ago!
India and China, in comparison, have increased energy consumption 70% and 50% since 1990. India's population increase has been only roughly 18% in that time, and China's has grown 23%.
Looking forward in time, where are the problems going to be? The US is a large consumer, but our per capita consumption decreases with time, and our population growth is slowing (actually, we are shrinking except for the immigration issue). India and China are both increasing population, and increasing per capita usage.
I hate to say it... but it is both easy and obvious.
The patent office's reply is the standard
"If it were obvious there would be some prior art"
But I think you are missing the bigger picture. TiVO's patent is not obvious when you simply take a VCR and replace the tape with a hard drive.
It is a substantial engineering challenge (or was at the time) to pull a GByte of data off a hard drive in an hour, without emptying a buffer, at the same time that you are writing a GByte of data to the hard drive, without overflowing a buffer. TiVO's engineers worked long and hard at this, and used novel hardware and software to accomplish it. If you do any real-time programming you instantly recognize the challenge. No drops in video, and reading and writing different data simultaneously.
The idea may have been obvious, but making it work required invention.
Now, once it is demonstrated by a working implementation how innovative and cool the invention was, copying it was no big deal. This was made triply easy because processors speeded up dramatically between the days in which TiVO made this work and when Echostar made it work.
The question probably comes down to how specific the patent is worded (I haven't read it). The patent office probably shouldn't have awarded a patent to time warp, in general. However, to time warp using buffers in a certain range of size, that might be patentable (additional detail specified). Using a certain range of IO pipes to feed the IO operations...that kind of thing.
I am willing to concede that for the average user, Linux or OS X is more stable and secure than XP; at the same time however, I am thankful that I am not an average user.
I have some unusual apps with large RAM requirements...
Like I said, the frequency of these apps crashing it not OS dependent.
The frequency of the OS coming down with the apps is much worse in Windows.
I don't find the idea that a power-user could fix it particularly enthralling. I've been programming computers of all types since 1982, including the Apple II, Windows for Workgroups, 95, 98, 2000, XP, NT, Mac OS 9, OS X, Unix of three flavors and multiple OS versions, and many versions of linux. I don't think you should really expect more savvy from a user than I have. I can tell when the Windows machine starts hitting the swap file. I have limited time to kill the process. My fingers go to the ctrl-alt-del key, I smash it, the task manager appears, last chance to save the sinking ship, application not responding, going down, going down.....
A common user sees at least an order of magnitude difference in the frequency of lockups.
Bullshit. Got any proof of that?
I am a common user.
Or, you can ask anyone who uses both regularly for their office work. I have these impressions, and they are matched by nearly everyone I know.
Windows crashes regularly
Not on any PC I use, or have used for the last 6 years or so. Yes, the 9x line is unstable, but the NT line is not, especially since 2k. My XP Pro machine at home locks up about as often as my linux box - which is to say almost never.
You can compare stability from 95 to 98 to NT to XP and conclude it has gotten a lot better, really it has.
But you cannot compare it to OS X or linux. There is no comparison. Even my best Windows machines, if I need to use them hours daily, don't go a week between re-boots. My Mac laptop just died, I lost an 18 month uptime. Linux I regularly go years between reboots.
The frequency with which applications crash doesn't really change. In fact, java on OS X crashes ALL THE TIME. But when it crashes, I kill the process, the OS doesn't go down with the app.
In Windows, it is FAR too often that the OS does go down with the app (saying as he madly pounds ctrl-alt-del five times in a row to try to catch it before it goes unresponsive......)
Its bloody obviouys. I bought a Windows XP machine because I HAVE to use it at work. I keep OS X for doing everything I can possibly do on it that doesn't require Windows.
Still, I crash the Windows machine about once a week. OS X, never.
What crashes it? Matlab apps that use a lot of RAM. Media loaded Word documents. Java. Pretty much the same things crash on OS X, but when the apps crash on OS X I drop to a shell, kill -9, and keep right on going. On Windows it requires a hard re-boot. I don't think these impressions are hard to find,
ASK ANYONE WHO USES ALL THREE OSs REGULARLY!
MS isn't stable, because they don't care about stability
You can't seriously believe that.
Linux and Mac are both dramatically more stable than Windows. A common user sees at least an order of magnitude difference in the frequency of lockups. At linux the priorities are set by the programmers themselves. Any lockup that can be easily replicated by the developers is debugged rapidly and fixed. Mac is not quite so good, but they don't support nearly as much hardware, and they use an underlying architecture that is comparable to that of linux - relatively hard to crash.
For Windows, it comes down to a question of priorities. Microsoft solves its problems ONLY when they see those problems threatening their business. Despite the fact that Windows crashes regularly, people keep buying it. When people stop buying it BECAUSE it is unstable, Microsoft will spend more on marketing to convince people it is not unstable. When that doesn't work, Microsoft will, fairly rapidly, fix the problem. Any company that can bank over a billion dollars a month has enough money to make Windows stable. But, making Windows stable doesn't make them more money, it is a net loss. Once Windows' stability threatens profit margins, Windows will get fixed.
I spent an hour a day for two weeks with the Rosetta Stone on Japanese, I go to Japan regularly for business but work there at an English speaking institute.
I can say "the airplane is blue"
"Hikoki-wa aoie des"
but I had to go well outside the Rosetta Stone to learn
"excuse me"
"sumi-masen"
Now, I learned all kinds of very basic Japanese words very quickly with the Rosetta Stone, it is pretty impressive. But, if you do language immersion you learn the things you need to use in the order of importance, and that was badly lacking in the Rosetta Stone.
I was an exchange student in high school, I went from no knowledge to a crude fluency in Spanish in three months. That is by far the best way to learn, immerse, live in a Japanese house with Japanese people and go to Japanese school. May be tough to do unless you are an exchange student, but there is no faster way to learn any language.
GMail is yet to allow a piece of spam into my inbox.
Pine can take advantage of all manner of cool and innovative spam filters and other kinds of filters. Bayesian, white/blacklist based, custom, you name it. There's no spam in my Pine mailbox at all. Also, there are no ads. You, on the other hand, have Google providing ad content all the time you use GMail. Which is not a lot different from constantly being spammed, at least, to me.
The thing is, GMail has much more effective Bayesian filtering.
They don't only use YOUR choices for spam filtering. They use everybody else's, too. They can tell if thousands of people received the same, or largely the same, message in the same day, and know if it is spam much more effectively as a result. Basically, PINE can use mail filtering tailored for your preferences. GMail can use mail filtering tailored for your preferences, and additionally use information from other users. Spam is typically sent out massively in parallel, GMail can see that, and PINE cannot.
I tried everything I could for my email filtering. It was bad. Then I forwarded the email to my GMail account. Got some spam at first, it now has trickled to 1-2 messages per day, and 50 or so messages that get sent to my spambox per day. GMail spam filtering is MUCH better.
Digitally compress and record one show while at the same time playing a show back from the same media device...
Now, if you could VCR record one show while playing back a show from the same tape, it might qualify...
The newer TiVOs have multiple tuners, you can record multiple shows in parallel. Sweet.
TiVO will be the DVR of the future. Echostar may be much bigger now, but TiVo set forth an impressive IP portfolio at the get go.
I'm pretty sure you haven't asked EVERY good programmer whether he or she works best alone, if only because I know at least a few who claim otherwise.
Au contraire. You show me a programmer who says he works best in pairs, and I will show you a crappy slow programmer. Real programmers hole themselves up and pull all-nighters, with a twelve pack of Mountain Dew and a steady flow of M&Ms. Socially outcast, until they emerge with a finished product. The degree of abstract thought required to do good programming is anti-social in every sense.
That's why I said every "good" programmer. Lots of dime-a-dozen code slingers may like programming in pairs. Good ones will only enter the XP program under extreme duress, and often end of scarred for life.
I am completely financially disengaged, I don't work for them, don't work for Merzenich anymore, and have no conflict of interest with their work. I've just been around it a lot...
No, not the cellular/molecular pathology per se, but the cognitive decline in Alzheimer's is of interest, yes? From the website: "Early-Stage Alzheimer's Disease: We are conducting a pilot study with UCSF in early-stage Alzheimer's disease. This study is currently enrolling participants through the UCSF Memory and Aging Center."
Its a bit of muddle. Early stage Alzheimer's is not so diagnosable today. You can't see Ab plaques or tangles. However, good diagnostic tests will be available soon, in several forms. That being the case, today, early Alzheimer's from a clinicians point of view is the same as age-related decline.
But there is a lot of age-related decline that is not well explained by Alzheimer's also.
And, whereas the literature is full of indications that reinforced behavior can help age-related decline, there really are not studies that intervene and turn back the age-related decline. Certainly, mentally active people, people with more education, etc, all show less age-related decline. But to go in and reverse the clock is something else altogether.
And yes, many people would think that reinforced behaviors would have this impact. The difference is that by carefully choosing the behaviors, and highly controlled the feedback on reward, you can tap into the system much more powerfully. People often wonder why we can see such huge changes in the brain with 1-2 hours of daily training. Our canned reply is that we engage attention, vigilance, and reward to such an extent in that 1-2 hours that it can overwhelm the rest of the daily experience. Sensory exposure without reward causes some, small, amounts of change in adults. Sensory exposure in a rewarded context is a powerful agent for change in the adult brain.
You are absolutely correct, and there is some legitimacy to this. My objection was the lack of disclosure (and being Windows only) as well as pointing out that there are healthier and cheaper ways to accomplish the same results. i.e. One does not have to buy into dumbed down science and fork over $500 to get the same results.
It is quite easy to pose the pundit.
Controlled scientific studies show over a decacde-equivalent improvement in age-related decline.
What basis do you have to claim that these effects may be obtained more simply? What have you done, or what are you referring to, that has been studied in a carefully controlled manner?
I may be uniquely qualified to comment on this, as I spent the last decade of my life, until last October, working closely with Dr. Merzenich on issues of how the brain is altered by reinforced behaviors, and know the details of the testing that has, so far, gone into their program to address age-related cognitive decline.
First, let's clear up any thought this would address Alzheimer's. It has nothing to do with neurofibrillary tangles and plaques that define Alzheimers.
What has been done so far, is to demonstrate that practicing certain types of computer guided behaviors for about an hour a day, every day, can have a fairly enormous impact on age-related cognitive decline. Attention and vigilance in rewarded behaviors, nothing more.
And you might wonder where this guy, Merzenich, gets off thinking this...well, here are some resume highlights.
1) Developed the ONLY US-developed cochlear implant at UCSF. Merzenich was the project head. The head engineer (Loeb) went to Advanced Bionics to continue the work that became the Clarion cochlear implant, and cured Rush Limbaugh's deafness (I kid), This work was led by Merzenich, and there was a team of about 6-8 other integral participants.
2) Provided a cure for the vast majority of language learning impaired children, which then became the company Scientific Learning, which has trained over 600,000 children at speech skills, with an AVERAGE improvement of 2 standard deviations in the six week training period. This is today far and away easily the most effective, and often recommended, program for children aged 4-10 who are diagnosed language learning impaired/dyslexic (partnered with Paula Tallal in this effort, as well as a team of at least a dozen other PhD scientists).
3) Member, National Academy of Sciences.
This one definitely works also. Is it a fountain of youth? Will it succeed in the market? Your guess is probably as good as mine. But for certain in the initial short-term, people who have substantially advanced cognitive decline relative to their peers can lose a decade or more of their age-related loss in a several week long training period. And that is worth getting excited about.
Bloody hard to fathom what source of energy could be elevating ocean and air temps...
Maybe this one?
Huh? How about freedom to keep what I earn and use it to pay for my own medical insurance of my choice? Freedom to not run across the border to have to use a doctor of my choice? Freedom to not be poor through the sweat of my brow? My country's a great one, but it's not all roses here.
Hate to tell you this, but America's health care system is on a collison crash-and-burn course because it is badly broken. Health care costs rise, as a fraction of the total economy, yearly. Rapidly, in fact. Projections are we have another 10 years of business as usual, at best.
But that is not really the point. Every other westernized country has better health care than the USA. No, that doesn't mean the best doctors are there...it means they treat everyone, and in the USA 1 in 6 people has no medical insurance and receives minimal medical care.
Even ignoring 1 in 6 people, US residents spend 50% more on health care than people in virtually every other westernized nation. That's 50% more AFTER normalizing for GDP.
Our health care system sucks, If the Canadian or Swiss health care system means everyone gets health care, and as a nation we spend 33% less on health care, and our population health care stats improve, bring it on!
Also, I've worked with many Canadian doctors. They are great. The best Canadian doctors stack up with the best American doctors. I'm not saying I think the Canadian system is the best socialized medicine, but the US HAS to change, and their system is certainly one better option.
. . . when a group of people lets all of their scientific achievements throughout history become overshadowed by religious fundamentalism. Let's hope we don't end up going down the same route here in the States.
That's not really what happened. What happened was the Mongol Horde. Genghis Khan and his early descendants RAMPAGED over eastern Europe, including all centers of Islamic culture. They enlisted all engineers, thinkers, doctors, etc, took everything of value, and mostly burned the rest. They effectively ended the golden age of Islamic Culture and catalyzed the end of the Middle Ages in Western Europe.
The last time a non-Muslim invader stormed and took Baghdad (prior to Bush), it was a Khan. The Mongols had their own religion, but enforced subjugation of religion to the state on all whom they conquered.
Kind of my point. The advertisers have to pay to reach the audience. If the audience starts avoiding the advertiser, TV will change.
BTW, with TV going to pop-up ads, think about how lucrative an interactive pop-up ad will be, which can be done with a PVR and broadband connection like TiVO or DirecTV's PVR....
If you make it easy for the TV watcher to skip commercials, commercials will change.
The only reason TV exists in the way it does today is commercials.
ReplayTV has seen miniscule market growth compared to TiVO in large part because advertisers view ReplayTV as antagonistic and TiVO as friendly.
However much you may dislike commercials, you need to come to terms with the fact that TV is not in fact free, and attempts to get TV to be free by commercial-skipping PVRs will be blocked on a large scale by the TV stations themselves under pressure from the advertisers. And if that is allowed now by the way that TV companies transition from TV to commercials, they will change. Over and over again until it is not possible. Potential investors will be shoo'ed away.
Once you embrace the advertisers as the people who actually directly pay for your TV, many more doors open, and you might even be able to increase revenue by more directly connecting consumers to the people who pay for it all.
That is the route for a successful PVR company.
My ReplayTV 5040 does just that. I'd way it's around 80%-90% when it comes to skipping commercials (for most shows it works all the time, but some networks seem to use a slightly different method for delimiting commercial blocks that isn't as easily detected).
I stand by my Hari-Kari comment.
TiVO and ReplayTV had market shares that were much more comparable before ReplayTV committed Hari-Kari by letting users skip commercials. Who do you think pays for TV anyway? Stabbing the advertisers in the back was a bad move. The PVRs need to move to generating more ad revenue, not less, for them to be viable in the future.
That being said, I love my TiVO's 30 second skip button.
TiVO indexes the programming guide and descriptions of programs, categorizes them, and allows you to use this to set up your search and record functions. If all you want to do is record by time and date, and manually schedule each recording, then TiVO would be a waste of money. Sort of.
The thing is, TiVO is so easy to set up, even a grandmother can do it. And in business terms, that is extremely valuable.
Also, if you use some other PVR, you miss out on the TiVO experience. TiVO has broadband capabilities. You can schedule programming from your cell phone or computer. You can download shows to your iPod and watch them on a airplane, or download them to your laptop and watch them in the car.
And much more. But the untapped new advertising stream will be the kicker. When you see that little thumbs up come on while watching TV and you click through, TiVO will have gone far beyond other PVRs.
No company selling PVRs will ever make it easier to avoid commercials. It would be equivalent to committing corporate Hari-Kari. You cannot look the big money in the eye and stab them in the back at the same time.
TiVO has a deep patent portfolio that is starting to be leveraged against the companies that are ripping off their inventions. As each new box comes out, TiVO is reverse engineering it and finding patent violations.
TiVO also has 4-5 million boxes in service (far far more than number two), each with upgradeable operating systems. They can leverage this in a "google ads" kind of way to link TV content and internet-based advertising, and blow the doors off the competition.
As is often the case, people are missing the forest for the trees. People look at the PVRs as a recorder, or as a mechanism to deliver content on-demand (both of which are true). But the PVR a la TiVO will become a novel advertising stream, with click-through ads during television content that will be worth a mint and have the potential to revolutionize TV-based advertising models. Then TiVO will be giving the boxes away to get your ad revenue.