Was it President's Day this week? Great; garbage pickup delayed.

AT&T upgraded our internet from 3 Mbps to 24 Mbps download speeds, but I wish they would do the upload speed, too. It's really backwards for my taste. We don't really stream stuff; it just would be nice to have email attachments and things I upload to Photobucket, etc. go faster.

It exists because of a government function called a patent which can be used because of tools called courts.

What we are talking about is trademarks and trade names not patents. Courts are only used to deal with infringements of trademarks or patents.

Perhaps in your country they don't issue patents for medicines. They do here. That allows years upon years of Brand GOOD-DRUG advertising to sink into consumers brains. Then when the drug comes off patent and generic becomes available, the public still asks for it by the brand name and that is what they get. Of course the brand name is a trademark while the chemical name isn't. But the public has never heard the chemical name, only the brand name! So if they didn't have a patent there would be no opportunity for the decade of exclusive marketing by a trademark name to happen.

I don't know about your country Jim, but over here the average oik in the street would have difficulty reading the back of the packet!

If that is the way thet the market place works, ripping off a gullible public, then it still is a scandal, sorry!

I've resisted long enough, so I decided to join the 21st century today and get a DVR from the cable company. I'll keep my VHS/DVD recorder and hook it up to the DVR for if I want to save something.

And fun fact.. if you run out of recording space on the DVR and want to store more... almost all of them these days have an eSATA port (or firewire) on the back. Get yourself an external enclosure that uses eSATA (or firewire), plug it in with an empty HDD in it, and the DVR *should* ask if you would like to format the external drive to use as additional storage space.

I learned this on an old Scientific Atlanta a few years ago. It had 160gb internal (a WD Caviar), and would support up to 2TB on eSATA. Basically, what it will end up doing is at the start of the recording, whichever drive has more free space, that's the one that gets used to save on. At first, it will always be the external, until that gets pretty full.

Only catch is that the filesystem and all the recordings are encrypted with a key that is based on the serial number of the DVR itself--meaning if the DVR craps-out and you get another one.. all the recordings on the external are lost.

And because it is encrypted.. there is no known way to save what's on there. I did a bunch of research on that a few years back. It is an RSA-2048 key and uses at least 3DES for the encryption.

Noticed some new test apps on Beta

OpenCL_nvidia_SOG

Ran a few over night but it has me wondering what the SOG stands for?

Good morning/afternoon everyone...