flar
Member
Registered: Mar 2003
Location: San Francisco, CA
Posts: 44 |
quote:
Originally posted by David Bott
Sorry Jim you seem to have taken offense to it.
I'm not really taking offense to it so much as realizing that you don't really understand the distinction between what is being discussed in the current hacking forums and developing new HMO software to TiVo's published specs.
quote:
I have been a programmer for many, many years. I mean not disrespect to a programmer they programs for the betterment of a product. The the fact remains, that if you are changing software code...you are hacking it. Ne it for good, or bad. This site has all kinds of "hacks" to make it run like it does.
No. Absolutely not. I'm surprised that you don't get this distinction if you truly are a programmer. What goes on in the hacking forums is finding ways to use the TiVo products that TiVo does not document or support. TiVo has never told us how to turn on the 30 second skip, or at least not officially in any documentation that I've received with my products. But people know how to do it and they share that information. That is hacking.
On the other hand, TiVo specifically documents and supports extensions to HMO that use their published software specs. They themselves tell us how to do it and they themselves would like us to do that, not just because we find it fun to do, but because it makes their product better in a way that they specifically would like to see it made better. Programming to that published interface is absolutely not changing the software, it is providing new services that work with the existing unchanged software in a way that was specifically designed into it by the original program authors. In a related topic, when a video card manufacturer provides device drivers for a new card they've developed and you download them and install them on your computer, you are most definitely not hacking your computer to install them and the card manufacturer did not hack the drivers. You are using official published interfaces in both cases. You are simply installing new software.
quote:
Call it what you would like...hacking, development, improvements, re-coding, etc...it all can come down to the same thing.
Not really. One is "playing around with your device". The other is "answering TiVo's call to arms to provide supported enhancements".
quote:
All in all nothing more was meant by it other than to please use the areas of the site already set for such programming additions. Their really is not enough of it to warrant a new section.
Thanks
As I said in my original post, I can understand that there may not be enough of a demand for this and that the current hacking forums are the closest forum we have to this type of discussion, but what is being attempted here is absolutely not hacking...
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Jim Graham
TiVo Series 2, named AIVAS, 80 hour, lifetime service, HMO
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TiVo Community Forum Archive 1 > Forum Extras > Forum Feedback
04-18-2004 01:19 AM
