Archive for November, 2004

Is ‘Transitional Fair Use’ The Wave Of The Future?

November 29, 2004 at 5:31 pm · Filed under Entertainment, TV

From PVRBlog.com:

All Your TV has a great piece running now called Is ‘Transitional Fair Use’ The Wave Of The Future?. In it, they touch on HBO’s recent moves to curtail the consumer rights on recordings, where recorded episodes can’t be saved forever, and will have a mandated delete date. I’m guessing HBO thinks a large drive TiVo with a whole season of Six Feet Under would cut into DVD sales of that season, but I tend to view shows on DVD for the extras so I think they’re overdoing it if that’s the case.

Boy, it seems that between this and the TiVO ads, the entertainment industry is finally taking noticed of the PVR world. Pretty scary how long HBO was looking for save recordings to be available to consumers.

The executive was pushing for an expiration date that coincided with the premiere of the next episode. The consensus of the cable executived was that it needed to be between 2-4 weeks.

Even 2-4 weeks isn’t very reasonable. I’ve got programs on my TiVO that are several months old, that I haven’t gotten around to watching.

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The Evens On Pancake Mountain

November 29, 2004 at 3:31 pm · Filed under Music

Pretty funny stuff.

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Heavenly Creature

November 29, 2004 at 11:59 am · Filed under General

From Die Puny Human:

So, 16 year old Rachelle Waterman had a difficult life of shopping, working a $10/hr computer job, eating vodka soaked fruit, volleyball, honor roll and choir practice. No, really, her mom (who spent a lot of time doing vounteer work with children and was allegedly beloved in the community of Craig, AL) wanted to send her to fat camp. So, naturally, Rachelle enlisted the help of two 24 year old ex-boyfriends and had her murdered. Oh, yes, you budding MeFi detectives, it’s all too real. And what was the final entry of our young ringleader whose Live Journal is aptly titled My Crappy Life? before the police seized her computer?

Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered

I won’t have computer acess (sic) until the weekend or so because the police took my computer to go through the hard drive. I thank everyone for their thoughts and e-mails, I hope to talk to you when I get my computer back.

At least she wrote some bad poetry before they took the computer away.

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Latest Happenings

November 27, 2004 at 7:49 pm · Filed under General, Linux

Since Fedora Extras (Fedora.us) packages for Fedora Core 3 have been delayed until the server infrastructure is finished, I’ve held off updating my system. In the meantime, I’ve been spending some time the last few days moving the Fedora.us wiki over to the Fedora Extras server. I’m just about finished with the original content, but a lot of the information needs to be updated to reflect the new infrastructure. Depending, how things go this week, I’ll probably try to spend a couple of hours this week on that.

Saw National Treasure on Thanksgiving. Visually, it was pretty neat, but the story was fairly hum-drum. Seemed like Bruckheimer had a blender, and put in a copy of Raiders of the Last Ark, an American History text book, a couple of giant snowcats, a healthy dose of sarcasm, and just for giggles, Nicholas Cage, Sean Bean and Jon Voight. I went into the movie with very low expectations, so it wasn’t half-bad.

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Routineers

November 22, 2004 at 10:36 pm · Filed under Music

The Routineers

Picked up the Routineers cd this weekend. Haven’t seen Todd since I lived in Omaha, but figured I pick this up to see what he’s been up to. Sorta reminds me of X, but that’s probably because of the male/female singing on the record.

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Tom Delay

November 17, 2004 at 12:33 pm · Filed under Politics

Wonkette has a pretty funny write up about Tom Delay’s current troubles.

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Senate’s New Bill May Criminalize The Fast Forward Button

November 17, 2004 at 12:21 pm · Filed under General

After reading PVRblog’s story on TiVO’s plan to have ads during fast-forwading. I come across this short blurb about a new copyright bill that has a bit about skipping commercials in with a ton of other new anti-P2P laws:

However, under the proposed language, viewers would not be allowed to use software or devices to skip commericals or promotional announcements “that would otherwise be performed or displayed before, during or after the performance of the motion picture,” like the previews on a DVD

Just goes to enforce my idea that a custom built PVR is the way to go in the future.

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TiVo To Add Banner Ads To Service When Fast Forwarding

November 17, 2004 at 11:58 am · Filed under TV

From PVRblog, and Slashdot:

So here it is, the story I hinted at earlier (which went to press a night early): TiVo Is No Longer Skipping Past Advertisers.

Coming soon to the standalone TiVo OS: when you hit fast forward to skip past commercials, small banner ads will show up on your screen. You’ll be able to click them to get more info, see an informercial, or send your home address details to get more info about a product mailed to you.

I think this is a dark day for TiVo, and this new feature is aimed at pleasing TV Networks and advertisers. I doubt a single customer would ever ask for this kind of feature, and that it happens while you skip commercials just drives the point home. TiVo is no longer TV your way, it’s TV their way.

People get TiVos for different reasons, mostly it’s for the time shifting nature, but the close second most loved feature has to be the ability to fast forward through ads. The advertising TiVo has added so far has been minimal impact. The commercial showcases that show up on your main menu aren’t that bad and often have good ad shorts and information, but pushing that into the main TV watching interface seems like a spectacularly bad move. No longer are the ads an optional thing you can dig for more, they’re soon going to be pushed in front of you when you use a key feature of the product.

Now, I haven’t seen any actual demos of it in action, and this comment from earlier today claims to be from a TiVo employee and says it’ll be tasteful and unobtrusive, but I have a feeling this is a bad precident and it’ll get uglier as companies pay more for the primo space.

Also on the horizon: plans to enable purchases via your remote (fine by me, if you’re really interested, why not make it easy to buy), and someday letting networks and ad agencies mine the data on tivo use, which I also think is a fine idea if it means better shows and better advertising. But overall, I’m not happy to hear the fast forward button was sold to advertisers today. That was the killer feature for so many, and to see it changed to force ads on customers isn’t going to make those customers happy.

Boy, this is a big sell-out. This has pretty much confirmed that when my TiVO finally dies, that I’ll be building a Freevo or MythTV box.

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When Cats Attack…

November 16, 2004 at 1:50 pm · Filed under General

From ggth:

Cat Attack

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Cold Ride

November 14, 2004 at 11:44 am · Filed under Bike

Went for my first bike ride since returning to Ohio this afternoon. The temperature was in the mid-40’s today, so even wearing my cold weather gear, I was freezing the whole ride. Making the ride even more unpleasant, was the fact that the cold temperature screwed up my derailer cables, enough, that I was unable to downshift my rear derailer. I ended up only riding 15 miles, but since I stuck to the Olentangy Trail, it was manageable. I’ll have to spend some time this week on re-adjusting my cables before my next ride.

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