I'm an earlier adopter with my mythTV box and fast connection. But I'm really keen to see the move to getting TV shows over IP. Cable's bulk pricing just isn't doing it for me any more.
Washington, DC: The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a stern warning today to Televangelist Pat Robertson. Robertson had recently condemned the citizens of Dover, PA to the wrath of God for not voting in a school board that would teach Intelligent Design in classes.
"We'd like to say to the good Reverend Robertson: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to Science, you just rejected it from your life," AAAS said on its daily television show broadcast from Washington, the 3.14159 Club.
"And don't wonder why it hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. We're not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just pushed science out of your life. And if that's the case, don't ask for its help because it might not be there," they said. "In particular, you won't have a phone to call the ambulance, and it won't exist even if you could call it. And even if the doctor lived next door and you could call her, she would only bleed you and put smelly poultices on your forehead to balance your humours. And she would be a guy."
"Actually, we're just kidding," the AAAS later corrected. "Science works whether you believe in it or not. That's what's really cool about it," they said.
"What they said," indicated Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in an independent statement.
At my bank (Wells Fargo) and some others I have checked, the ATM lets you make a deposit with an envelope. You must key in the total amount being deposited, even if you put several cheques in the envelope. This in turn shows up as just one transaction in my statement, and in my download of my transactions to my computer.
More and more often when I tour a museum these days, I'll see either a computer terminal with some interactive exhibit, or a video screen or cinema to play a movie.
Hard disk drives these days are cheap. Too cheap, in that while we love paying 30 cents/GB, the reliability is getting pretty poor. Doing backups, especially automatic backups is a must, but what about RAID?
One of the problems with RAID, at least RAID-5 is that you need to have 3, and ideally 4 or 5 drives in a machine. That's a lot of drives, a lot of power, a lot of heat, a lot of noise. And many machines only have two IDE controllers so they can barely do 3 drives and can't readily do more even if they had the slots and power for them.
So I propose a software RAID-5, done over a LAN with 3 to 5 drives scattered over several machines on the LAN.
Slow as hell, of course, having to read and write your data out over the LAN even at 100mbits. Gigabit would obviously be better. But what is it we have that's taking up all this disk space -- it's video, music and photos. Things which, if just being played back, don't need to be accessed very fast. If you're not editing video or music, in particular, you can handle having it on a very slow device. (Photos are a bigger issue, as they do sometimes need fast access when building thumbnails etc.)
This could even be done among neighbours over 802.11g, with suitable encryption. In theory.
Not that there aren't some major issues to overcome. The machines must be on most of the time. (A single disk can be taken out of a RAID temporarily, and thus a single machine hosting one disk can be turned off or rebooted, but not for long periods.) If you lose access to two disks (or your LAN) you can't get access to the data. And it's going to use a lot of your network capacity, though gigabit networking is starting to get cheap. And the idea gets better...
(You might want to see Tivo's actual press release about being able to move programs from a Tivo to an iPod.)
ALVISO, CA -- NOV 21, 2005 -- TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO ), creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders, today announced an enhancement to it's system which actually allows the copying of files from one computer device to another, at least if its one of their partner devices.
You've all heard the famous "Nokia ringtone" many times (hard to describe in text, it's 10 notes, often satirized on Trigger-Happy-TV) and even the polyphonic version.
I suggest that a symphony orchestra, around warmup time, should suddenly play this song with their full glory and set of instruments. This would be funny on its own, but could then be followed by a very memorable, "please remember to turn off your cell phone now in preparation for the performance." It might actually get people to do it.
We hate waiting in line at the cashier and stores don't like paying cashiers so some have self-service cashiers which are still hard to use. So here's an idea.
Provide shoppers who wish to self-serve a scanning wand, which is battery powered and attached by coiled cable to the shopping cart. In the shopping cart, have a number of shopping bags present and numbered. Paper bags which hold a square shape are better. Also have an open area or special bag.
I don't post most EFF news here, since the EFF has a news page and 2 blogs for that, but today I'm doing it twice because congress is voting tomorrow on renewal of the PATRIOT act. There was a lot of effort to reduce the bad stuff in the bill, efforts that seemed to be getting somewhere but were ignored.
At the EFF, we're announcing today a membership drive around our various efforts for blogger's rights.
In the EFF blogs in my blogroll, you will have read this year about our legal guide for bloggers, and the various free speech cases we've done protecting publishing rights online, anonymity and assuring reporter's privilege for online journalists.
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