TiVo isn’t letting customers off the hook any longer:
Digital video-recording company TiVo Inc., famous for helping customers skip commercials on their favorite television programs, is taking steps to encourage viewers to watch them.
TiVo, based in Alviso, California, has announced plans to insert symbols that identify advertisers during commercial breaks, making them more visible even when a customer is fast forwarding through them.
(Hat tip to Kevin Miller for this disturbing piece of information.)
Tarry for the Nonce 
Let’s go back to the good ol’ days of a crappy 486 Linux box, an ATI card, and an open source tv guide….
TiVo…. what’s a tivo? Is that like a DVR? heh…its like cisco… take a 386, gut it, add some proprietary routing program, and WHAMO! you have an instant winner. You know, that old tall tale about two geeky, hippy lovers in college who lived next door to each other at Stanford…Anyone know what I’m talking about? I’ll give you a treat if you find the story.
I’ll give a bonus if you can tell me what the sun network interface hme stands for (without looking it up).
Even bigger bonus if you can tell me what the Sun stands for in Sun Microsystems… (without looking it up). This used to be alot more difficult…
And finally, I’ll give a super duper bonus if you can help me recall an email I lost long ago on how to use the sun eeprom to reset the password on a sparc box (no, not the boot off cdrom dealy… there’s a way to get into eeprom with the box running and root the box via the memory registers)…. any takers? Course, you have to have counsole access to the system…and yes, if you hit the wrong registers, BLAMO! there goes your data.
And yes, I have waaay too much time on my hands! That’s what happens when you get to a certain point with technology, you get lazy. I think Dave’s story kind a proves it…
Of course, speaking as a former Unix System Administrator… we try to find the best possible outcome with the least amount of work. Like all the really good SAs should…. Why do you think Perl is the hacker language of choice? Because its for lazy people who don’t have time to sit around long int’ing this and char *’ing that, let alone doing goofy stuff, like public static struct blah extends super foo() {}
Of course, there’s Perl OOP (or POOP, as I like to call it…I’m sure I’m not the only one), but that’s only used when you truly do not want to re-write code. Ever. heh.
Comment by Andrew P. — July 19, 2005 @ 4:24 pm
Andrew, you write the best rants.
Comment by Toly — July 19, 2005 @ 9:47 pm
Hmm, I’m not sure if I should take that as a compliment…
rant
…various definitions you couldn’t possibly have meant…
n. …
3. Chiefly British. Wild or uproarious merriment.
…
rant
n 1: a loud bombastic declamation expressed with strong emotion [syn: harangue, ranting] 2: pompous or pretentious talk or writing [syn: bombast, fustian, claptrap, blah] v : talk in a noisy, excited, or declamatory manner [syn: mouth off, jabber, spout, rabbit on, rave]
I’m assuming you meant #3. Chiefly British…
The best part is, I get a kick out of it. 🙂 (as I’m hoping you do as well, when they’re not serious, that is).
Well, either way, I prefer claptrap. That pretty much sums it up well.
Comment by Andrew P. — July 19, 2005 @ 10:40 pm
It was absolutely meant as a compliment.
Comment by Toly — July 20, 2005 @ 5:30 pm