Paul's Down-Home Page

There’s been a lot of misreporting of Verizon’s new 1xEV-DO service; the WSJ yesterday called it “Wi-Fi you can tote around.” THis is way wrong, since WiFi offers 1Mbps up to 11Mbps for 802.11b, with faster speeds for 802.11g and 802.11a and 1xEV-DO seems to top out around 200Kbps or so. However, this is still a nice improvement over Verizon’s existing 1xRTT (“Express Network”) service, which tops out at 144Kbps. Alan Reiter has some speed tests of 1xEV-DO, and they look pretty promising.

News today that Disney is launching a new service called Moviebeam that uses a Samsung set-top box, datacasting over PBS or ABC broadcast stations, and a simple PVR-style package to allow movies on demand, sort of. Your box automatically receives movie streams from the local datacasting station, and when you want to watch one, you order it up on the remote, at which point you have 24hrs to watch it. See the stories at cnet and the WSJ for more details.
Of course, this isn’t a direct attack on TiVo et al, but it’s pretty clearly a shot across the bow. They’re obviously aiming squarely at the video rental market, but it would be fairly simple for Disney to expand the Samsung box’s capabilities, perhaps by integrating it with a PVR. Interestingly, Disney has arranged to carry films by a number of other major distributors; this is more inclusive than I’d suspected them of being. ABC is one of the networks that doesn’t have an investment in any PVR vendors (or technology, AFAIK), so this might be their opening move to enter the market.

Steve Crandall asks whether air cars will ever catch on. Maybe not, but Ford is working on a hydraulic power assist system that promises improved performance, better fuel economy, and lower emissions. To simplify, braking energy is used to compress hydraulic fluid and transfer it to a high-pressure accumulator. On launch, the pressurized fluid is used to apply torque to the driveshaft, giving ponderous vehicles like the E-series van or the F350 Super Duty a nice push off the line. Supposedly, we’ll start to see these appearing in fleet vehicles in the first half of 2004.

Considering how much we use it, it’s a little surprising that our TiVo (a Sony SVR2000, bought in June 2000) hasn’t fallen over and died. Jeremy’s upgrade plaint the other day helped me decide to upgrade it. I’m still vacillating over whether to add a network card or not. I think I’ll hold off, but I did order a nifty drive bracket after seeing it on PVRBlogs. This should make for a neater installation than the duct tape I originally planned to use.

The PVR Blog has everything you ever wanted to know (and then some) about personal video recorders, including TiVos and the Dish Network series. Well-written, nicely designed, lots of good information.
The MS Exchange Blog is a group blog written by three knowledgeable Exchange administrators. They have already amassed quite a bit of Exchange 2003 content, and I only expect things to get better.