Morph3ous’s Weblog

Video clips of Bill Clinton’s interview with Fox News as presented by The Daily Show.

An article on ConsumerFury tells how at one point Time Warner cable stated that they would not provide CableCards to customers with Tivo Series 3 PVRs. This caused much outrage, and Time Warner has appologized.

Read more after the jump.
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PC World: CableCard Technology in Trouble

I set out at the CEDIA trade show to find out how–and if–manufacturers are implementing CableCard technology. Based on what I heard today, the technology is in big trouble, and you can blame cable television companies.

MSNBC.com: Media ownership study ordered destroyed - Politics

WASHINGTON - The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.

The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

Microsoft has recently released its Zune DAP. One exciting feature is the ability to share all of your songs via wireless to your friends. There is a problem.
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YouTube Video: Venezuela’s Chavez says Bush planned 9/11 attacks

Let me just say that I highly doubt this. The video is embedded after the jump.
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I’m not going to spend too much time on this post. Maybe in the near future. I just spent a lot of time trying to analyze the National Surveillance Act of 2006.

I am impressed so far. After switching MythTV over to using OpenGL I am greeted with a nice fade-in and fade-out on the menus.

The integrated upnp server has been working perfectly (except for fast-forward, but I’ve had that problem with another upnp server too). It is nicer than my previous solution of using uShare and a renaming script to produce prettily-named symlinks to the video files. The integrated upnp server allows you to search by date recorded, title of the show, channel it was recorded from, … My old solution could only sort by title of show.

Good job Myth Team!

From BroadbandReports.com: 25 Cents to Stream a DVD Quality Film - 80 Cents for HD, a nickel for iPod TV…:

Dave Burstein crunches the numbers behind offering video via broadband and concludes that it costs a quarter to stream a DVD quality movie, 80 cents for an HD film, or a nickel for iPod or AOL TV shows. A much more reasonable analysis than the recent UK report that claimed it cost ISPs $39 to stream a two hour HD film. This compared to broadcast over the air video, which costs a few pennies per hour to distribute.

“For providing managed servers and internet bandwidth, several content delivery networks are bidding $10,000 to $12,000 per continuous gigabit per month. That’s enough for 700 1.5 megabit streams, almost DVD quality if pre-encoded in the latest MPEG-4, Flash, or Windows Media. Amazon’s choice of 2.5 megabit encoding may be raising the bar. It’s also enough for over 3,000 300 Kbps streams, appropriate for iPods or the quarter screen video AOL and ABC are distributing supported by ads.”

Burstein also comments on how players like Apple and Amazon will threaten TelcoTV’s already fragile projected profit margins.

I had downloaded the Discussion Draft of the National Surveillance Act of 2006 from a link in an article in Wired. The link pointed to one of Wired’s servers. I trust Wired as a news source; however, wished to get my hands on the primary document directly from the government.
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Wired News: NSA Bill Performs a Patriot Act

A bill radically redefining and expanding the government’s ability to eavesdrop and search the houses of U.S. citizens without court approval passed a key Senate committee Wednesday, and may be voted on by the full Senate as early as next week.

By a 10-8 vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved SB2453, the National Security Surveillance Act (.pdf), which was co-written by committee’s chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) in concert with the White House.

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