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The IMF, noted tool of the socialist movement, notes that the US is looking like it might take down the world’s economy. That’s warming news.
Jan. 9th, 2004
Since it’s the 20th anniversary:
128K Mac (original; later upgraded to 512K Fat Mac)
Mac SE/20
Mac SE/30
Performa 630
Performa 6400 (later ran linux on this)
G3/450 (currently next to me running OpenBSD)
G4/733
iBook tangerine clamshell
iBook SE Firewire
Powerbook 12” G4/1 GHz
Loved ‘em all.
Coming this fall: TiVo to computer functionality. It’s not what I’d like, since you don’t get full functionality — it’s some encrypted video format. Mind you, DRM is generally broken… but in any case, it’s more than we had before. I would very much like to be able to easily copy programs from my TiVo to a DVD.
Cory Doctorow, bless him, is up in arms. However, I think his analogies suck. While TiVo is a disruptive technology business, it is not much like steam engines. It’s a different delivery mechanism rather than a new media form.
And as such, right now, it’s dependent on the content providers who TiVo is attempting to pacify. TiVo, as a company, gets absolutely nothing from the legions of amateur moviemakers out there. It doesn’t have a business model without the networks. TiVo has little choice about pacifying the networks. It sucks, but it’s true.
And when Cory says “There is no market demand for TiVo’s DRM,” he’s right. But there is going to be market demand for what TiVo is offering, even if there’d be more market demand for the same thing sans DRM. TiVo has to decide if they’ll make more money by removing DRM after figuring in the cost of lawsuits.
I’m inclined to cut TiVo some slack. They’ve introduced the disruptive technology to the mainstream. Someone had to take that risk, and it wasn’t going to be the open source community. MythTV is great but it’s not the innovator; that’s TiVo. I appreciate what they’ve done.
And now I hope that someone does pre-package MythTV as a commercial offering without DRM. That’d be great. I’m just not going to savage TiVO for not going as far as I’d like.
As per Phil Ringnalda’s advice —
I’m experimenting with rebuilding individual archives when an entry gets a TrackBack ping. If you have trouble pinging me, please let me know about it. Also, you might try setting a longer value for PingTimeout in your mt.cfg file.