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I'm not saying they haven't improved. But at the same time, do you want to trust your recordings to M$?

Me I don't.

 

I am not saying they "can't crash" Every OS out there CAN crash, Microsoft or other. I am just saying that they don't freeze and crash any where at the volume they used. (I have killed mine too, but I am usually doing something I am not supposed to or seriously seriously pushing the system hard, and it usually isn't the OS that locks, it is an App that goes out of control)

Win95/98/ME would crash sometimes if you just looked at it funny.

 

Considering that I trust the MS-OS and the underlying file system (and the RAID-10 I have in place) with 700gb of my home video's while editing them for DVD...

I guess I could trust them with recordings that I "could" get again if I really wanted to.

 

I have 3 HR10-250's. I've replaced the hard drives on each of them once. That means all 3 have at some point died, become unusable, and not recorded things they should have or not been able to play back stuff they recorded (not just once, but many times, as disk failures sometimes cause troubles rather than just cleanly dying for good once). My Windows XP Pro computer has been running since July 4, 2003 and has never blue screened, and has only had a disk drive fail once (and that was on a mirrored drive set so nothing was lost and I replaced the failed drive at my convenience). I have certainly rebooted many times while installing stuff or upgrading software. But then, my HR10-250's would reboot for those reasons too, if any new software ever were delivered to them.

If I could have full control over the equipment that could record the programming I watch I would instantly choose it over a closed-product solution where I have to accept what I'm given.

 

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I agree Windows is very stable these days and the BSOD is in the past. Despite this applications conflict with each other all the time and while the OS doesn't "crash" the individual applications can. The PVR software may be perfect but it still may fall victim to whatever else has been added to the MCE box. The platform is far to open to be a relied upon CE device.

 

During this mornings commute, I was sitting dreaming about writing a simple .NET application /service

That would poll all my DirecTV DVRs from my Windows MCE box... See what new recordings where on there... Pull them down to the central server... on a nightly basis... Then depending on what the GUI interface is like from the DDVR end basically have almost an MRV situation...

And if there is anyway that I could "delete" them from the actually DVRs... that would get even better, as then I could record programs at night, and store them on my larger hard drives in my server and PC, and get to them when I am ready to watch them...

mmmmm......

 

I just want to be clear on the R15 and the new HR20. From what I've read if you record two programs at the same time, you can't watch either while they're being recorded? That seems kinda stupid to me. That's one of the core things I do with my Tivo all the time. (I'll hop between tuners if it's an award show or something and rewind just to see who won in the categories I care about while watching a movie or show on the other Tuner also currently playing.) Next week I'll be recording House & Scrubs at the same time. It'd be nice to watch Scrubs and then clean it off then to make space (but I have it record in case something comes up and I get dragged off to fix a computer or if I'm having dinner and it takes forever to get our food/get our bill/etc.)

So just to be clear - if you record one show I assume you can check on the recording and watch the other tuner, but if you record two at once, you can't see either?
(how would you know if one of them ended early or ran long?)

I know I'll eventually have to make the move to the HR20, I just want to make sure I understand it/the features fully first.

 

From Information Week Yesterday.

Linux/Unix Vulnerabilities Outnumber Microsoft Windows' 3 To 1

Linux and Unix, including the Mac, had 2,328 vulnerabilities last year, compared with 812 vulnerabilities for Microsoft Windows, according to the U.S. government's computer security group.

By Gregg Keizer
TechWeb News

Jan 4, 2006 01:07 PM
Tallies kept by the U.S. government's computer security group show that Linux and Unix operating systems faced nearly three times the number of vulnerabilities in 2005 than did Microsoft's often-maligned Windows.

In the US-CERT (United Stated Computer Emergency Readiness Team) year-end vulnerability summary, Linux/Unix accounted for a whopping 2,328 vulnerabilities, about 45 percent of the 5,198 total.

Windows, on the other hand, sported just 812 vulnerabilities during the year, said US-CERT, or 16 percent of the total.

Another 2,058 vulnerabilities affected more than one operating system.

Although US-CERT didn't break out Mac vulnerabilities in a separate category, the Linux/Unix section listed more than 25 attributed to the Apple Computer operating system.

The end-of-year vulnerability score should be taken with a grain of salt, however, since US-CERT doesn't filter out updates (so one actual vulnerability can be counted numerous times) nor does it break out individual vulnerabilities from warnings that cover multiple bugs (as in the many Mac OS X vulnerability listings).

 

No that is incorrect... well not 100% incorrect.
You can most certainly record two things and watch either one of them while they are recording (or watch another recorded one).

The one exception to that is if you do this:
TIME / Channel Based manual records
Aka:
4:46pm to 5:01pm on Channel 206
4:47pm to 5:06pm on Channel 207

During 4:47 to 5:01 you WON'T be able to watch either what you are recording.
These are called Manual Time Based recordings, and are actually very rare to have one but even more rare to have TWO going at the same time.

Not very sure why even this limitation is there, but it is the only case when you can't watch what you are recording.

 

Then mix in the fact that the Windows OS are the #1 installed home OS out there, and Microsoft has this MASSIVE target on there back that nearly anyone out likes to take a swing out (media and technical)

So that would attribute to why whenever a flaw is found in an MS product, we see it on the 10pm news..

 

Does that mean, given your example, that if you cannot watch what you are recording and both tuners are recording and that you have essentially rendered the device inoperable between 4:47 and 5:01?

 

You can view anything else you've previously recorded.

 

Of course - should have thought of that !

 

This is sort of a pointless discussion since there's no convincing the Microsoft haters. That said, At home I've got 8 PCs running versions of Windows from Win2k to Vista, and Fedora Linux. I've also got a Mac Mini. All of them have their good and bad. My primary file and print server is a Pentium I - 200 running Win2k Server. It's been running 24/7 for the last five years with very little down time, and it has never blue screened. In my experience, the "blue screen of death" isn't as common as it used to be. And, when it did happen, it was usually caused by a third party driver, or some obscure hardware.

 

As Doug Said... you can watch something else already recorded.

And take a step back and think about it... Can you remote think of a time that you would use TWO manual records like this at the exact same time...

And if you can... how often would it happen.

The only scenerio I can think of is if I had a friend/family member that was going to be on a commercial or something and I knew the time slot on two different channels and just wanted to capture that.... But even then, I would probabl record the program that was on during that block.

 

Sorry...did you say Pentium I-200 with Win2k?
First.. dang... how did you get it to run... 2nd... Time to get yourself updated a bit there... Try to score a free Win2k3 Enterprise license at many of the Microsoft events....

(Note... I am currently working on a project to get rid of our 55 NT4-P3 500mhz systems, so I am just playing with ya)

 

It certainly would never affect me - the only manual recording I have is for the daily show

That said it is odd that this only happens with manual recording and not the rest. Why on earth would the system have two mechanisms in it for recording. I'd guess they origionally wrote the manual recording mechanism and then wrote new recording mechanisms for scheduled and SP's etc. It doesn't sound like the code is very normalized.

 

I've never done a manual recording even once since I've had any TiVo equipment -- all the way back to December 2000.

But still I think it's one of the strangest limitations for a DVR to have that I've ever seen.

 

Haaaaaaaaa! That CPU and mhz number is correct. I keep waiting for it to die, but it just keeps on going!

 

I finally threw away half a dozen or so Pentium motherboards. I still have a box fileld with various CPUs I have to sort through -- many Pentium MMX from the times I've glanced through. There's even a Pentium Pro or two around.

I've got a box filled with Pentium II Slot 1 CPU's, too... I might EBay those instead of throwing them out.