Dear AT&T,

I could've sworn I remembered seeing something on my monthly iPhone bill... Ah, there it is.

" DATA PLAN IPHONE 12/02-01/01 30.00 30.00
    Data Unlimited 12/02-01/01 0.00 0.00
        Includes:
        DATA ACCESS "

See, AT&T? It's right where you printed it. Unlimited data for a predetermined cost.

Now, AT&T, if you would please GTFO of here with this talk about billing me based on usage or prepare for me to take advantage of change in ToS so I can get out of my contract without penalty.

Best regards,
A guy who's looking forward to his contract ending so he can get an Android on a network that hopefully sucks less.

TV isn't hugely important to me, if I somehow find that I desperately miss a particular 30 second segment I'm sure I can find it somewhere on the interwebs.

To address the transcoding aspect, it plays lots of formats. MPG as I mentioned already, but also mkv's. I'll eventually be transcoding all of my recordings into mkv's.

No problem.

I just record HD (mpg) streams using my HDHomeRun. They play perfectly on the BD390.

Doesn't help with your .nuv's, though. Sorry. :-(

Reputation for dying:
http://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+ring+of+death

Evil corporation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_CD_copy_protection_scandal

No confusion here.

BD390 uses something like 18 watts.

PS3 uses... substantially more. And don't they have a reputation for dying?

So let's see... Costs more, less reliable, uses more power, and is produced by a corporation that famous for being evil. Yep, you definitely picked a winner there.

As far as modifying during playback...

It supposedly supports captions with .mkv files.

At some point I need to write a script to clip commercials from and transcode Myth's recordings into mkvs with subtitles.

And before anyone asks- no, I'm not remotely concerned about inaccurate results from trusting mythcommflag to catch commercials.

Does it stream NetFlix?

Network AV streaming devices are a dime a dozen these days. NetFlix is the killer feature of the BD390.

I'm still using MythTV for recording TV, but I'm currently selling off my MythFrontends.

For viewing I've switched to an LG BD390. Much less hassle, plays everything I've thrown at (including HD streams recorded by the MythBackend) via UPnP and also does NetFlix and YouTube streaming.

I did some custom file 'fingerprinting' work some time ago when management didn't want to spring for Tripwire. For each file, the system stored both the md5sum and an shasum in addition to the file size. Figured that it was sufficiently improbable that a single altered file could collide in both hashing functions, particularly without changing in file size.

Granted, a rootkit could probably mess with return values to make it look as though the file hadn't changed at all, but at that point monitoring binaries and config files for changes isn't going to help.

How are we supposed to have a conversation about this if you're going to go and cloud the discussion with actual facts?

Oh, so they'll be teaching them how to manage systems running real operating systems like AIX, Solaris, *BSD, and various flavors of Linux. Neat.