If Walmart sold you a computer, it would be cheap.
That's the problem.
If their computers are like their other merchandise, the low price is the singular selling point. I can't tell you how disappointed I've been in how shoddy some of my Walmart purchases have turned out.
The OS could well be one of the most reliable components in these PCs.
This first large scale deployment of Linux to Joe User could damage the public perception of Linux not because Linux isn't Ready for the Desktop, but rather because the associated hardware is too cheap and shoddy.
I think the proper translation from Norwegian for this announcement is:
We don't like paying as much as we do for your products.
pretty simply.
The open source, liberty, GPL, anti-MS folks can get into a lather all we like, but it's really about money.
If you've seen Service Agreement 6 terms, then you'd make an announcement like this, too. It's win-win: zealots off my back and MS might give us a price break on our crackware.
I think the original poster assumed some talent and popular appeal was a prerequisite.
Yes, it takes talent AND pure dumb luck to make it big in the recording industry. Err, well, an attractive female lead vocalist doesn't hurt your chances any either.
There have been too many cases of talented bands that don't make it big time, who never get a chance to be heard by anyone other than their local rabid fans.
I think sites like this are an excellent way for popular preference in music to be expressed and for talented but lesser-known bands to get the exposure they deserve.
It's the Right Answer to the question "I wonder who gets to pick the songs I have to hear on the radio?"
aren't there some benefits to instability, such as innovation?
Indeed there are, but you don't need to dissolve all standards and semblance of order to create a nurturing environment for creativity.
Roads are an example. They were used for foot traffic and for horse and buggy and yet the innovation of the automobile was able to build upon the network of roads quite handily.
And, that innovation of the automobile still doesn't preclude other innovations (robotic aerial drones for package delivery is my favorite) that do not make use of the road network.
Likewise with digitial communications. I think the IP utility is a good idea with plenty of mileage left in it for new ideas. If someone does comes up with a dramatically better idea for digital communications networks, then I suspect that one of the hallmarks of its success will be the ability to easily piggyback legacy IP on it.
I'm not sure I understand the basis for the authors criticism of NAT. I think it's a matter of degree; that NAT can be a sufficiently good multiplexer of services that my view of the rest of the network is not overly inhibited. OTOH, security considerations for firewall NAT tend to start with the assumption of "start with it disabled", so possibly inhibiting new services.
I've got everything taken apart and spread out all over my driveway right now, but I'm a little bit unsure of how to put it all back together again. I think one or two of the littler parts might have disappeared or got bent when they were removed.
It's supposed to rain a little later today - do you think you could come over and help me figure out where everything goes?
[Couldn't resist just paraphrasing some of the computer help requests I've gotten...]
Not anyone can waltz in and become an MD, thankfully and obviously, nor should they be able to, but still, well qualified people are turned away.
This is where the AMA's arguments about keeping the highest possible professional standards start to get them into trouble.
The public's expectations are built up to the point where MDs are practically worshipped.
Then, one of them makes a mistake (hey, it can happen, people are fallible).
Compounding the problem is that the colleagues on the state accreditation boards will close ranks and do everything possible to prevent a fellow MD from losing their professional reputation. In the worst abuses, the MD will have to go to a different state. [I won't tell you how angry I get about other problems, such as doctors with strange sexual hangups abusing their patients.]
It's little wonder that you find more and more work being done by P.A.s (Physician Assistants) and by RNs, who can do 90% of the same work but get paid only about 20% of the salary as an MD. [Kind of like a good legal secretary can do 90% of the lawyer's job for for 20% of the salary.]
Not to rag on all doctors. There are many good ones who take their responsibilities seriously, who know what's going on, who care about their patients and take the time to explain medical conditions to them. And, it takes a lot of endurance to get malpractice insurance and to fill out all the fscking forms the HMOs require for payment. It's just that the current medical establishment has built up a system that is broken.
For example, I never see anything like a consumer reports rating of doctors available to the general public. Ratings are avaiable to other physicians or only gotten by word of mouth.
For starters, I wouldn't mind seeing the class rank, GPA and school where my physician got his or her degree.
What I'd really like to know is: which physicians' are most frequently or least frequently used by their colleagues (including the RNs)?
And, just as you can never be too rich or too thin, you can never have too much storage space.
After that, move onto your network drops, benchspace, lighting, chairs, etc.
I'd advise having some locks on the doors, too, not only for the obvious security implications, but also so you have a place to hide when things go south (have a prepared placard to the effect of "We're actively working on the problem and will update you immediately as it's fixed.")
Don't worry, you get revenge when I try to print out a PostScript file with "A4" embedded in the preamble specifications on a printer loaded with "Letter" paper.
Either it's a no go or I get really wide side margins on the text and almost nonexistent margins at the top and bottom of the text.
He said he got turned back at the border once for having a B1 visa when he needed a B2, and now he can't go back. What's the deal here?
Uhm, you haven't been following the earlier posts which clearly explained how Marcelo was much wiser for his years in terms of dealing with people and personalities as well as being a technically adept kernel hacker and having the ability to think about a huge number of diverse kernel patches being applied to a production system used by millions worldwide.
Shoot, if the United States were to start letting people like Marcelo into the country there's no telling what kind of mess we'd be in!
Now, if he were slyly willing to work off the books in a meat packing plant or a demolition site for forty dollars a day he might have a better chance...
Seems like UDP would work OK on an unclogged network and have the benefit of adding less congestion compared to TCP with all of its handshaking.
For an low traffic, more or less isolated network, UDP might be a simple solution. OTOH, with PCs with 100 Mb cards so cheap these days, people could probably afford the extra buzz of TCP without noticing any appreciable degradation of performance or incurring great cost.
The day the network starts to become the least bit congested and any UDP packets get dropped, then everyone shifts to TCP and things start to really get congested.
A binary QoS mechanism exhibiting an inherent problem.
You'll just go to wherever you want, whip out your roaming software, and be on-line.
If it's really prevalent, it could get to be downright useful, nay, critical to have ubiquitous roaming access to the net.
At some point, there might even develop an anecdote of how someone used such roaming access to save someone's life, lookup poison remedies, report an incipient terrorist incident, etc.
Once the utility of an always-connected network is established, networks will start to become regarded as public thoroughfares and thwarting such access will be looked upon in the same way as throwing construction debris on the highways or jamming cell phones.
Windows and OS 9/OS X have it pretty well figured out
Windows certainly does have it figured out.
"Look, Mr Hardware Vendor, if you want your market to go from maybe 100,000 users to 500,000,000 users, then you'd better get crackin' on those Windows device drivers."
To take advantage of that motivating force all UNIX needs is a comparable market share.
The only thing going for Linux in this regard are the GPL'd drivers and software that support a world wide collaborative development effort.
Though I'm sure there are some players out there (*cough*Qwest*cough*) that are getting 999.99% downtime...
Wait a minute!
You can't fool this astute reader! Your number is above one hundred percent!
There's no possible way for Qwest to get that kind of downtime.... uhmm.... usually.... unless.. they bring down more than their own machines...hmmm - OK, I'm wrong. You're right.
How's this better than Blue Sky's donation of PostScript Type 1 versions of TeX's Computer Modern fonts that previously were only available in MetaFont and bitmapped versions?
I am glad an effort is being made to make the fundamental building blocks of language a truly open and free commodity. Commonly used fonts should be an open standard - except for exotic artistic fonts, proprietary holds on these building blocks are an undue brake on free expression and human communication. What's next, computer speech enunciations that are copyrighted and impossible to use without payment?
Good point which many probably aren't aware of in this forum.
I dislike VISA for what it does to maintain and to milk its monopoly as much as I dislike Microsoft for the same. VISA does arm twisting and revenue extraction not just from consumers, but also from participating retailers that get charged fees that, well, are as economically inelastic as what Microsoft charges for licensing fees.
As a computer geek, I'm just more cognizant of MS actions than I am of VISA. The other thing about MS is that it's monopoly stands to grow substantially more invasive, instrusive and unavoidable as Web services increase. VISA is relatively static by comparison, though people are buying groceries and fast food on the things where they didn't 10 years ago.
Now if VISA were able to subsume the role the central government and be the de facto electronic cash, then there'd be more reason for concern.
I can just see it advertised how recording every dime spent and tracing every transaction eliminates terrorism, pedophiles, drug dealing and prostitution. Every cash related movement of every individual such as Mohammed Atta would be recorded and analyzed for "suspicious activity". And the sheep I call my fellow citizens might just buy into it given enough FUD at the right time. The Islamic extremists will win as our governments become as restrictive as their own.
Of course, few research agencies are likely to lower themselves by paying attention to a commercial consumer-oriented publication.
And well should they regard commercial consumer-oriented publications with healthy skepticism.
But Consumer Reports is not a commercial publication. They take great pains not to accept advertising (as the annoying pop-up will tell you) for fear that it could potentially influence their impartiality.
Perhaps you're confused by the look-alike commercial knock-off of Consumer Reports that calls itself Consumer Digest, though it looks as if they may have gone out of business.
I had heard about a June issue of CR having the big diet evaluation in it, but never got hold of it. It would definitely be worth some reading.
Next time you want to buy a car, check out CR. Their evaluations sound kind of stodgy, but they give you the lowdown on reliability, price, crash worthiness, gas mileage and seat room in ways that the flashier publications tend to gloss over as they gush on about performance and style.
I did the Protein Power low carbohydrate diet in sympathy with my wife who wanted to lose some weight (she lost about 25 lbs on it).
On the plus side, I lost about 10-12 pounds of what very little fat I had, dropping down to probably just under 10% body fat. My cholesterol levels were excellent. (I must admit that I like fish and don't particularly like butter, so I didn't go overboard on the saturated fats.)
After the first week or two, my lean muscle mass picked up and my weightlifting ability increased slightly (after having plateaued for years).
The down sides of this regimen are
you feel like shit the first 3 days as your metabolism adjusts to life without easy carbs
it's much harder to limit carbs than it is to limit fat (convenience stores sell nothing but carbs - get jerky and nuts)
a year and a half later I've gained back those 10 pounds
go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.
While it could be argued that RIAA is just taking an expedient course of action, this is the one thing that they should have done.
Go after the burglars - don't penalize the manufacturers of crowbars.
I'd just as soon live in a free society where I have my choice of combining Napster with crowbars as long as I don't infringe on someone else's rights.
However, I will admit that trading an MP3 from a CD of mine that I've ripped to someone I don't know for a song which I don't have constitutes a commercial transaction (albeit cashless) and, while copyright exists, the possessors of the it should have the exclusive right to charge for distribution. Exactly and only that.
Yeah, but Krakatau was still limited in magnitude, despite being the largest recorded eruption in civilized history ( I think Toba in Sumatra was the largest if you include less civilized history.)
I think the rapidity with which life regenerates has a lot to do with the magnitude of the event.
The supervolcanoes, despite their devastating effects, don't seem to be quite as potentially catastrophic as collisions with space debris.
A sufficiently large comet or asteroid really could wipe out so much of higher life forms that Earth might have to re-start with single cell organisms.
mmm... I dont think you understand how RAID works.
Maybe not as well as others.
Loosely, I do understand the concept of RAID. I know there's even number qualifiers to describe the different variations of mirroring and striping strategies.
The problem, from what I understand, is addressing limits built into the specifications of the IDE interface. So, even if you have a 2 TB RAID system, if you interface it through an old IDE connector, you can't make it seem larger than a pre-set limit. Likewise, if the OS doesn't support the newer, better IDE interface, then you can't gain the size benefits of the RAID.
I don't know if a TiVo can be made to support those larger drives in hardware (it uses a UDMA-66 connector) or software (they use some tested (i.e. old) version of Linux for PPC).
This site suggests that newer Linux kernels can take advantage of the ATA-6 specification that allows sizes greater than 137 GB.
What's worked pretty well is just to buy a low end TiVo with a 20 GB drive. Then, stuff two 100 GB drives in the thing and reboot. No, it's not that easy, but detailed instructions on the procedure for doing this are available. I think there's even a CD with a specially built Linux distro that includes all the necessary tools for mucking with the special MFS filesystem they use on the Linux PPC that constitutes a TiVo.
I've thought it would be nice, though, if there were a way to connect the IDE interface of the TiVo to some uber-RAID of terabyte or so. My queries about this returned some disappointing information that IDE drives were somehow limited to no more than 128 GB, ruling out that possible solution.
The Ethernet connection to NAS sounds pretty good in a lot ways (I don't want loads of disks whirring in my media cabinet), but from what I last heard it sounded kind of iffy from the standpoint that TiVo's automated system upgrades could stomp on your local tweaks to use such an Ethernet card (I think 9thtee sells them.)
I suppose once could always go "off grid" with the TiVo and not use it to call up for the programming guide and automated software updates, but having the programming information is kind of useful. I was willing to fork over the bucks for the lifetime subscription for the guide. I don't mind supporting TiVo monetarily since they've been generally pretty mellow about hacking on their hardware.
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the best way to deal with bad laws is to change those laws. Not ignore them. change them.
Excellent observation.
The next time I have enough money to purchase my own MP I'll be sure to get them right on it.
Oh, no!
Wasn't one of those elements up for being named "Bullonium" or "Baloneyum"?
Didn't also figure prominently in the list of ingredients required to initiate cold fusion?
If Walmart sold you a computer, it would be cheap.
That's the problem.
If their computers are like their other merchandise, the low price is the singular selling point. I can't tell you how disappointed I've been in how shoddy some of my Walmart purchases have turned out.
The OS could well be one of the most reliable components in these PCs.
This first large scale deployment of Linux to Joe User could damage the public perception of Linux not because Linux isn't Ready for the Desktop, but rather because the associated hardware is too cheap and shoddy.
I think the proper translation from Norwegian for this announcement is:
pretty simply.The open source, liberty, GPL, anti-MS folks can get into a lather all we like, but it's really about money.
If you've seen Service Agreement 6 terms, then you'd make an announcement like this, too. It's win-win: zealots off my back and MS might give us a price break on our crackware.
got big out of pure luck, no talent involved
I think the original poster assumed some talent and popular appeal was a prerequisite.
Yes, it takes talent AND pure dumb luck to make it big in the recording industry. Err, well, an attractive female lead vocalist doesn't hurt your chances any either.
There have been too many cases of talented bands that don't make it big time, who never get a chance to be heard by anyone other than their local rabid fans.
I think sites like this are an excellent way for popular preference in music to be expressed and for talented but lesser-known bands to get the exposure they deserve.
It's the Right Answer to the question "I wonder who gets to pick the songs I have to hear on the radio?"
are we really ready for it to be a utility?
I'm ready for it to be a utility.
aren't there some benefits to instability, such as innovation?
Indeed there are, but you don't need to dissolve all standards and semblance of order to create a nurturing environment for creativity.
Roads are an example. They were used for foot traffic and for horse and buggy and yet the innovation of the automobile was able to build upon the network of roads quite handily.
And, that innovation of the automobile still doesn't preclude other innovations (robotic aerial drones for package delivery is my favorite) that do not make use of the road network.
Likewise with digitial communications. I think the IP utility is a good idea with plenty of mileage left in it for new ideas. If someone does comes up with a dramatically better idea for digital communications networks, then I suspect that one of the hallmarks of its success will be the ability to easily piggyback legacy IP on it.
I'm not sure I understand the basis for the authors criticism of NAT. I think it's a matter of degree; that NAT can be a sufficiently good multiplexer of services that my view of the rest of the network is not overly inhibited. OTOH, security considerations for firewall NAT tend to start with the assumption of "start with it disabled", so possibly inhibiting new services.
You do know how to rebuild an engine, don't you?
I think so.
I've got everything taken apart and spread out all over my driveway right now, but I'm a little bit unsure of how to put it all back together again. I think one or two of the littler parts might have disappeared or got bent when they were removed.
It's supposed to rain a little later today - do you think you could come over and help me figure out where everything goes?
[Couldn't resist just paraphrasing some of the computer help requests I've gotten...]
Not anyone can waltz in and become an MD, thankfully and obviously, nor should they be able to, but still, well qualified people are turned away.
This is where the AMA's arguments about keeping the highest possible professional standards start to get them into trouble.
The public's expectations are built up to the point where MDs are practically worshipped.
Then, one of them makes a mistake (hey, it can happen, people are fallible).
Compounding the problem is that the colleagues on the state accreditation boards will close ranks and do everything possible to prevent a fellow MD from losing their professional reputation. In the worst abuses, the MD will have to go to a different state. [I won't tell you how angry I get about other problems, such as doctors with strange sexual hangups abusing their patients.]
It's little wonder that you find more and more work being done by P.A.s (Physician Assistants) and by RNs, who can do 90% of the same work but get paid only about 20% of the salary as an MD. [Kind of like a good legal secretary can do 90% of the lawyer's job for for 20% of the salary.]
Not to rag on all doctors. There are many good ones who take their responsibilities seriously, who know what's going on, who care about their patients and take the time to explain medical conditions to them. And, it takes a lot of endurance to get malpractice insurance and to fill out all the fscking forms the HMOs require for payment. It's just that the current medical establishment has built up a system that is broken.
For example, I never see anything like a consumer reports rating of doctors available to the general public. Ratings are avaiable to other physicians or only gotten by word of mouth.
For starters, I wouldn't mind seeing the class rank, GPA and school where my physician got his or her degree.
What I'd really like to know is: which physicians' are most frequently or least frequently used by their colleagues (including the RNs)?
So I wonder if P2P networks be used to disseminate information that is regarded as politically incorrect?
Honestly, the promotion of free expression is more a gift of the academic origins of the internet than of the corporate uptake of it.
If we'd all been networked via bulletin board systems like AOL, Prodigy and MSN, there'd have been a lot less freedom of expression than there is now.
First,
- raised floor
- refrigerated air
- big electric circuits
then think about UPS units.And, just as you can never be too rich or too thin, you can never have too much storage space.
After that, move onto your network drops, benchspace, lighting, chairs, etc.
I'd advise having some locks on the doors, too, not only for the obvious security implications, but also so you have a place to hide when things go south (have a prepared placard to the effect of "We're actively working on the problem and will update you immediately as it's fixed.")
Don't worry, you get revenge when I try to print out a PostScript file with "A4" embedded in the preamble specifications on a printer loaded with "Letter" paper.
Either it's a no go or I get really wide side margins on the text and almost nonexistent margins at the top and bottom of the text.
He said he got turned back at the border once for having a B1 visa when he needed a B2, and now he can't go back. What's the deal here?
Uhm, you haven't been following the earlier posts which clearly explained how Marcelo was much wiser for his years in terms of dealing with people and personalities as well as being a technically adept kernel hacker and having the ability to think about a huge number of diverse kernel patches being applied to a production system used by millions worldwide.
Shoot, if the United States were to start letting people like Marcelo into the country there's no telling what kind of mess we'd be in!
Now, if he were slyly willing to work off the books in a meat packing plant or a demolition site for forty dollars a day he might have a better chance...
Seems like UDP would work OK on an unclogged network and have the benefit of adding less congestion compared to TCP with all of its handshaking.
For an low traffic, more or less isolated network, UDP might be a simple solution. OTOH, with PCs with 100 Mb cards so cheap these days, people could probably afford the extra buzz of TCP without noticing any appreciable degradation of performance or incurring great cost.
The day the network starts to become the least bit congested and any UDP packets get dropped, then everyone shifts to TCP and things start to really get congested.
A binary QoS mechanism exhibiting an inherent problem.
You'll just go to wherever you want, whip out your roaming software, and be on-line.
If it's really prevalent, it could get to be downright useful, nay, critical to have ubiquitous roaming access to the net.
At some point, there might even develop an anecdote of how someone used such roaming access to save someone's life, lookup poison remedies, report an incipient terrorist incident, etc.
Once the utility of an always-connected network is established, networks will start to become regarded as public thoroughfares and thwarting such access will be looked upon in the same way as throwing construction debris on the highways or jamming cell phones.
Windows and OS 9/OS X have it pretty well figured out
Windows certainly does have it figured out.
To take advantage of that motivating force all UNIX needs is a comparable market share.
The only thing going for Linux in this regard are the GPL'd drivers and software that support a world wide collaborative development effort.
Though I'm sure there are some players out there (*cough*Qwest*cough*) that are getting 999.99% downtime...
Wait a minute!
You can't fool this astute reader! Your number is above one hundred percent!
There's no possible way for Qwest to get that kind of downtime .... uhmm .... usually .... unless.. they bring down more than their own machines...hmmm - OK, I'm wrong. You're right.
Hmmm...
Enough nines of reliability and you can probably easily claim that network latency is responsible for the slow response a client is experiencing:)
The server can go down, be rebooted before the client thinks something is really wrong!
How's this better than Blue Sky's donation of PostScript Type 1 versions of TeX's Computer Modern fonts that previously were only available in MetaFont and bitmapped versions?
I am glad an effort is being made to make the fundamental building blocks of language a truly open and free commodity. Commonly used fonts should be an open standard - except for exotic artistic fonts, proprietary holds on these building blocks are an undue brake on free expression and human communication. What's next, computer speech enunciations that are copyrighted and impossible to use without payment?
yet you trust Visa over Microsoft.
Good point which many probably aren't aware of in this forum.
I dislike VISA for what it does to maintain and to milk its monopoly as much as I dislike Microsoft for the same. VISA does arm twisting and revenue extraction not just from consumers, but also from participating retailers that get charged fees that, well, are as economically inelastic as what Microsoft charges for licensing fees.
As a computer geek, I'm just more cognizant of MS actions than I am of VISA. The other thing about MS is that it's monopoly stands to grow substantially more invasive, instrusive and unavoidable as Web services increase. VISA is relatively static by comparison, though people are buying groceries and fast food on the things where they didn't 10 years ago.
Now if VISA were able to subsume the role the central government and be the de facto electronic cash, then there'd be more reason for concern.
I can just see it advertised how recording every dime spent and tracing every transaction eliminates terrorism, pedophiles, drug dealing and prostitution. Every cash related movement of every individual such as Mohammed Atta would be recorded and analyzed for "suspicious activity". And the sheep I call my fellow citizens might just buy into it given enough FUD at the right time. The Islamic extremists will win as our governments become as restrictive as their own.
Of course, few research agencies are likely to lower themselves by paying attention to a commercial consumer-oriented publication.
And well should they regard commercial consumer-oriented publications with healthy skepticism.
But Consumer Reports is not a commercial publication. They take great pains not to accept advertising (as the annoying pop-up will tell you) for fear that it could potentially influence their impartiality.
Perhaps you're confused by the look-alike commercial knock-off of Consumer Reports that calls itself Consumer Digest, though it looks as if they may have gone out of business.
I had heard about a June issue of CR having the big diet evaluation in it, but never got hold of it. It would definitely be worth some reading.
Next time you want to buy a car, check out CR. Their evaluations sound kind of stodgy, but they give you the lowdown on reliability, price, crash worthiness, gas mileage and seat room in ways that the flashier publications tend to gloss over as they gush on about performance and style.
I did the Protein Power low carbohydrate diet in sympathy with my wife who wanted to lose some weight (she lost about 25 lbs on it).
On the plus side, I lost about 10-12 pounds of what very little fat I had, dropping down to probably just under 10% body fat. My cholesterol levels were excellent. (I must admit that I like fish and don't particularly like butter, so I didn't go overboard on the saturated fats.)
After the first week or two, my lean muscle mass picked up and my weightlifting ability increased slightly (after having plateaued for years).
The down sides of this regimen are
go after the people who are actually doing it instead of making P2P seemingly illegal.
While it could be argued that RIAA is just taking an expedient course of action, this is the one thing that they should have done.
Go after the burglars - don't penalize the manufacturers of crowbars.
I'd just as soon live in a free society where I have my choice of combining Napster with crowbars as long as I don't infringe on someone else's rights.
However, I will admit that trading an MP3 from a CD of mine that I've ripped to someone I don't know for a song which I don't have constitutes a commercial transaction (albeit cashless) and, while copyright exists, the possessors of the it should have the exclusive right to charge for distribution. Exactly and only that.
Yeah, but Krakatau was still limited in magnitude, despite being the largest recorded eruption in civilized history ( I think Toba in Sumatra was the largest if you include less civilized history.)
I think the rapidity with which life regenerates has a lot to do with the magnitude of the event.
The supervolcanoes, despite their devastating effects, don't seem to be quite as potentially catastrophic as collisions with space debris.
A sufficiently large comet or asteroid really could wipe out so much of higher life forms that Earth might have to re-start with single cell organisms.
mmm... I dont think you understand how RAID works.
Maybe not as well as others.
Loosely, I do understand the concept of RAID. I know there's even number qualifiers to describe the different variations of mirroring and striping strategies.
The problem, from what I understand, is addressing limits built into the specifications of the IDE interface. So, even if you have a 2 TB RAID system, if you interface it through an old IDE connector, you can't make it seem larger than a pre-set limit. Likewise, if the OS doesn't support the newer, better IDE interface, then you can't gain the size benefits of the RAID.
Maybe the limit is 137 GB (not 128 that I mentioned earlier), but newer IDE disks of 160 GB are out there.
I don't know if a TiVo can be made to support those larger drives in hardware (it uses a UDMA-66 connector) or software (they use some tested (i.e. old) version of Linux for PPC).
This site suggests that newer Linux kernels can take advantage of the ATA-6 specification that allows sizes greater than 137 GB.
We wanted to archive a few shows, too.
What's worked pretty well is just to buy a low end TiVo with a 20 GB drive. Then, stuff two 100 GB drives in the thing and reboot. No, it's not that easy, but detailed instructions on the procedure for doing this are available. I think there's even a CD with a specially built Linux distro that includes all the necessary tools for mucking with the special MFS filesystem they use on the Linux PPC that constitutes a TiVo.
I've thought it would be nice, though, if there were a way to connect the IDE interface of the TiVo to some uber-RAID of terabyte or so. My queries about this returned some disappointing information that IDE drives were somehow limited to no more than 128 GB, ruling out that possible solution.
The Ethernet connection to NAS sounds pretty good in a lot ways (I don't want loads of disks whirring in my media cabinet), but from what I last heard it sounded kind of iffy from the standpoint that TiVo's automated system upgrades could stomp on your local tweaks to use such an Ethernet card (I think 9thtee sells them.)
I suppose once could always go "off grid" with the TiVo and not use it to call up for the programming guide and automated software updates, but having the programming information is kind of useful. I was willing to fork over the bucks for the lifetime subscription for the guide. I don't mind supporting TiVo monetarily since they've been generally pretty mellow about hacking on their hardware.