MythTV Scheduling Service Reveals Pricing 236
An anonymous reader writes "A group of open source developers have been working behind the scenes to create a new service known as Schedules Direct to provide affordable scheduling data for North American users of MythTV. Today, they've announced an initial pricing plan of $15 for a 3 month block, non-recurring. Details are still fairly light at the moment, but there's a mailing list and a FAQ available on the site — one notable tidbit is that the developers 'expect pricing to drop by the end of the initial term. Our goal is $20/year.' This comes weeks before the planned shutdown of Zap2it Labs' Data Direct service mentioned previously."
$5/mo? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:$5/mo? (Score:5, Insightful)
But:
* Not everybody has access to the services TiVo provides (they're not operating world-wide, and alternatives at least around here (in Switzerland) are nowhere near $5/mo, but are bundled with digital TV)
* Some people prefer an open-source alternative, not only to the PVR itself, but also for the data source
* Screen scraping works. Sort of. Sometimes. As soon as your scraper gets popular, the web site will change its layout to foil scraping attempts, and you can start new. It's an arms race, unfortunately, and there's no real way out of it. The networks and content providers jealously guard their data, and only license it to redistributors.
* Schedules Direct is such a licensing partner. Instead of distributing the data in proprietary format, they use standard XML. That is good.
and, most important of all:
* If you had read TFA (or even the freaking post), they're aiming to drop the price. For now, they have no idea how popular their service will be, but want to make sure they don't create a financial sinkhole. The folks behind this are from the MythTV and XMLTV community, and I'd be surprised if they see this as a get rich quick scheme. They're too realistic for that.
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The cable co. is the last entity I'd trust to get this data from.
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Second, collections of facts are not copyrightable, so I'm not sure on what basis they could sue you. But why would you want to screw up a valuable service? Is it worth $5/month not to have to program your PVR schedule by hand out of the newspaper? Because if you and other a**holes like you put them out of business, that's what you'll end up doing.
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Got a unit in the office and one in the living room? Well your price just went up (with Tivo).
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The scheduling info is free. No one is trying to hide it from you because the people who operate the channels want you to watch their stuff and they even pay (advertising) to let you know when their shows are on in the hopes that you will watch. This info should be freely
Re:That's FUCKING ridiculous !! (Score:5, Insightful)
I figure it's the same way in this case. The information is perfectly free. What you are paying for is having the information assembled and presented in a way that you can use easily. You can always do the same yourself, but what's cheaper? Your time on a regular basis or $5 a month...
Commercials? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that that's likely to happen any time soon.
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Getting the timing of the commercials is not very likely, I don't see it as an acceptably foolproof means of blocking the ads.
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I've turned off the auto-skip, but I still let it flag the commercials. It's pretty easy to reach over and mash the Z key whenever a commercial starts.
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"Properly configured" varies from channel to channel. I think they actually try to make it harder on anything trying to detect commercials.
OTOH, 30 second skip is always available and always will be. Same goes for fast forward.
The cable companies and broadcasters will always be at odds with you skipping commercials. Tivo Corp will come along for the ride here since it needs to play nice with those guys to get cablecard access.
A Tivo will always be somewhat suspect in this regard. Cable comp
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They leave the commercials in the recording in case Myth marks part of the show as commercial, so that if you realize that it skipped part of the show, you can turn off auto-commercial-skip and watch the skipped part.
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confused.... (Score:4, Insightful)
After all, it would be in the best interests of their customers, the viewers.
Re:confused.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, I never understood this. My cable box can download guide data from the cable company, but a TiVo/MythTV/whatever can't? I'm not paying again for data that's already available on my cable system.
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Then your problem is with your cable company. Try phoning them up and explaining to them that you're already paying for the EPG, and that you want to use it on another device.
Post back what you find out.
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Yup. And the reason why actually makes sense (from the cable/dish company's point of view). The guide data from your digital box is formatted to be easy to read for a human, while the data for TiVo/Myth/whatever must be formatted to be easy to read for a computer.
Humans can use the guide to look up the programs that they want to see. They might also watch the commercials with the programs. This is good for the
Re:confused.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's quite possible regardless of the hardware in use. I've still got a VHS VCR, and I skip all commercials. I've hardly watched any live TV for about 10 years now. MythTV makes this a bit more likely, but then again, so does any harddisc recorder available today.
Besides, the scheduling information isn't what makes it easy to skip commercials.
The networks normally prese
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As long as it is only a small number of people, they don't care if you don't watch the ads -- there is no way to gather statistics on whether you watch the ads or not, so it is ultimately the advertisers' problem. If a large number of people skip ads, then it would affect pricing for adverts which would make it the cable companies' problem.
So, bearing that in mind, the cable companies want you to pay them as much as po
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Yes, they pay for it with their life.
you are not their customer (Score:2)
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So you pay for satellite or cable TV, but the television networks are un-willing to provide a few bytes of information in the form of scheduling information for future programming? I mean, do they want people to pay for their content and watch advertisements or not? $5/month for the few kb worth of data you receive is ridiculous as far as I'm concerned. The TV networks should just get together and standardize on some television scheduling format and release the data themselves. After all, it would be in the best interests of their customers, the viewers.
I'm afraid you've got the wrong end of the stick. The viewers are their product. The advertisers are their customers.
More than just a schedule (Score:3, Informative)
You're right of course that OTA broadcasters could and should provide free program listings in some common format. However as things have evolved there is so little demand for such a service t
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Isn't that more about cost of living?
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I want my 100mbit/s connection now!
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>Isn't that more about cost of living?
Bandwidth prices reflect so much more than cost of living:
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Naw, if it brakes you should probably take it to Meineke...
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Re:... and you're what exits from one (Score:2)
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Site scraping works. (Score:5, Interesting)
Australian users have never really had guide data available to them, so we have basically relied on either IceTV [icetv.com.au], a (very well done) for-pay data source, or ozTivo [tuhs.org]. Recently Australian users have had a new resource, Shepherd [whuffy.com].
Shepherd is basically a bunch of scripts that are automatically updated and designed to read quite a few websites and data sources (including IceTV and ozTivo) and provides the best quality data I've seen so far. The set up is relatively easy, if you can get MythTv set up you can certainly get Shepherd set up, and doesn't require ongoing maintenance, once you get it working the script will keep itself up to date.
The TLDR version: Site Scraping can and does work well.
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Where I live, if I drive for 20 minutes in any direction (less if I drive west), I am in a new zone.
Re:Site scraping works. (Score:5, Informative)
Ok... (Score:2)
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You may like TiVo, it certainly looks nice, easy to use. But I enjoy having my Myth box because it can do so many more things, even if it is an order of magnitude more difficult to set up (but not necessarily to use). Same as I appreciate OS-X, but I think I'll stick with linux not for the price and commodity hardware, but for the customizability and the ability to tinker. Same reason as I bought my Buffa
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I've also got a 500GB external HD laying around that I could attach somewhere in the system.
Now that's 2.5TB of what I've already got attached, plus another TB I could put internal and the other 500GB that's just layi
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I love the idea of Myth, but I get everything via DirecTV these days (Sunday Ticket) and I really don't care to save shit that I've seen... how much time do you Myth guys spend in front of the tube?
Gentlemen[1], start your screen scrapers (Score:5, Interesting)
Historically, there's been no XMLTV guide data source for Australians. So there have been a litany of screen scrapers that downloaded guide web pages, massaged them into XMLTV format, and passed them on to MythTV and friends.
The only problem is, the program guides are controlled by the TV networks, and the TV networks hate us. Ouch, but true. They've made the leap of logic that, if we had program guide data on our DVRs, we can skip the commercials.[2] So they've been arguing that they own the copyright to the guide data[3] and any unauthorised use of it (i.e. screen scraping) is a breach of their terms.
The only commercial company to publish guide data for DVRs is IceTV [icetv.com.au] and they've been a lawsuit magnet from abovementioned TV networks. Not many people would pay a monthly subscription to something that could be killed at any time.
Meanwhile, in screen scraping land, it's been a game of cat-and-mouse. Find a web site that publishes guide data. Write a screen scraper (or wait for someone else to). In a few months, notice that nothing's been scheduled for a few days - the screen scraper has broken because they've (intentionally) changed the format to deter this. Find another web site. Repeat.
They did all sorts of things to deter us. Obfuscation through JavaScript. Only allowing n page views per hour. After they converted all the guide details to GIFs, we gave up. Most people have moved to IceTV or ozTiVo [tuhs.org].
The ozTiVo guide is an interesting idea. It's essentially a wiki that people manually fill in with guide data. Then you can use its XMLTV interface to get guide data out. You're reliant on other people to fill it in, and (due to above copyright issue in Australia) a lot of program details are generic or omitted. But it's workable. This is a model which other people may be interested in setting up.
Fortunately for IceTV, in the last few days, it won its court case [smh.com.au] and is now happily legit.
So, to sum up, we in Australia are actually happy to pay for quality guide data. Because we know the alternatives. If someone wants to set up a screen scraper, good luck to you - we fought the good fight and lost, but maybe you won't.
--
[1] Ladies too!
[2] No, I don't know how they came up with that either.
[3] In Australia, this has historically been a grey area.
Re:Gentlemen[1], start your screen scrapers (Score:4, Informative)
Why use TV (Score:2)
Solution: An old ReplayTV = Free data (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes BeyondTV an economical alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
I had tried all the free alternatives -- MythTV, GB-PVR, Mediaportal... none of them were particularly friendly to work with or stable, for that matter. And what good is a DVR if it crashes before it can record your shows??
IMO, the Zap2ItLabs discontinuation was one of the best sales pitches for BeyondTV. One-time software purchase, and no subscription fees. It works flawlessly with my HDHomeRun dual tuner (also highly recommended), and even came with a "free" RF remote (looks like they're still running that special at snapstream.com).
Yeah, there's no capturing encrypted signals, but I have the MOST basic cable package anyway, just to get all the major networks, plus Discovery & a few others.
Many folks (even Comcast's cable monkeys) don't realize that the cableco's must (according to FCC) transmit the rock-bottom basic cable package *in the clear* (so no special cable box is needed); you get this digital signal when you order the most basic analog package. So for 18 bucks a month, I can receive/record all the major network digital HD goodness I can stand, with commercial skipping in BeyondTV. Place shifting? No problem. It's my MPEG2 file...
My one little way of giving the Finger To The Man.
To those complaining about installing MythTV (Score:2)
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Actually, installing from source under Gentoo is probably the single easiest way to install MythTV. I've had less trouble with Gentoo than with binary installs, although they were a year or two ago now so things might have picked up.
TWW
This sounds good, but I'm lazy (Score:4, Interesting)
My biggest problem with the MythTV route was reliable scheduling information. I don't want to have to bother with the tedium of tweaking screen scraper scripts every other day. I gave up on the homemade TV box a long time ago and went with a TiVo. I bought in on one of their deals that with a three year commitment, the box was free. I like the TiVo method...tell it which programs I want at the start of the season, and then I can forget about it.
If there were a *reliable* alternative for scheduling information that I didn't have to tweak every time I turned around, even if there is a fee, I'd be tempted to try MythTV again.
But until then, my TiVo is my best friend.
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My problem with it was the past year Zap2it had lots of extended outages and a crapload of bad data.
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I can't think of a single instance in my own house where I've watched live TV in the last three years, with the exception of NASA and an occasional spur-of-the-moment PBS show.
And I do intend to give MythTV another look this winter. Although I *love* my TiVo, its obvious that for their newer machines they are not interes
Meh... it misses the point. At least for me. (Score:2)
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I wonder how difficult it would be to make changes to mythtv so that it could scrape my cable providers tv listings.
You wouldn't need to make any changes to mythtv - all you'd need to do is change one of the existing xmltv screen scrapers to do just that. The xmltv scraper is a seperate tool that's not part of mythtv, so you wouldn't even need to update it when mythtv changes.
The downside: You'd need to update it whenever you cable company changes its web site. No such hassle with the paid service.
Thank God for the BBC! (Score:5, Informative)
Here in the UK we don't have any of these problems of TV listing availability and complicated html parsing scripts which break every week. The BBC have a special web page just for XMLTV downloads [radiotimes.com], and it doesn't just cover BBC channels, but practically every channel you can receive in the UK (check the channels.dat file for a full list). The only restriction is that the data can only be used for private non-commercial purposes.
Of course, most of this is probably being paid for from our TV license fees which I know many Americans regard as being a terrible communist plot (some funding may come from the cover price of the Radio Times magazine).
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Next thing you'll know is that members of your government will start turning Catholic to gain votes.
I'll give it a shot (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll sign up for the $15. Their announcement was honest and direct. They expect a $20 a year cost but they need to "over-charge" the first quarter to help guarantee coverage of their start-up costs. I understand that. I've started a business before. It's a gamble. It's a gamble for me too to support them.
For me, it's only $15 to "see what will happen" and to support the community. If the cost drops to $20 a year like they anticipate I'll gladly pay a reliable data feed. 5 cents a day to "stick-it" to the cable companies and the advertisers and at the same time supporting the OSS community? It's a no brainer.
If the costs stay at $5 a month then I'll need to re-think my cable needs. But still, if I'm going to pay $5 for Tivo with commercials, why not $5 for MythTV without commercials? Either way, I'll pay the $15 to get started and to see what happens. I've spent that much buying a friend and I coffee at Starbucks. I'll continue to support them if the cost drops to $20 a year. That's cheep for the return I'm getting.
-[d]-
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At $20/yr, however, it isn't a big deal. It looks like schedulesdirect is non-profit, so that should help keep prices down (as long as salaries don't get too high - technically you can probabl
Re:I'll give it a shot (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's not so much a "Starbucks economics" as it is "non-Walmart economics" or "non-McDonalds economics".
If you don't want to be a cheap bastard and suffer intolerable crap then you're probably going to have to spend a few dollars. This even goes for the systems you plan to run Linux on.
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Bear in mind also that the money that this service brings in is going to be used to continue to improve MythTV. It's also going to allow commercial MythTV boxes; something that was absolutely
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I've long thought that the real solution to all this guide data nonsense was for somebody to start a company and make a deal with TMS to license the data. I guess somebody else had the same idea.
Best luck to them!
Data Competition (Score:2)
There's lots of room for competition here. Others can buy from TMS. Or from where TMS gets the data. Or from TMS competition (who is that?).
Or use a P2P system like the old CDDB [wikipedia.org]. If tens of thousands of people enter data for the next few days TV listings, then each person will have to enter only a few listings at random on average each day or so.
"What's on TV?" are facts about the real world, like the days the ci
Endangered Business model? (Score:2)
I'll pay it, here's WHY: (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been interested in this whole TV-on-the-PC scene since I first witnessed it on one of those infamous Toshiba desktops. It was cool back then, and it is still cool today.
I used Media Center for about two years, and basically loved it. I purchased the extender for my Xbox and enjoyed that too. During this time I was watching Myth and hoping it would come along and improve the experience. Unfortunately, I just couldn't get it to run. It didn't like me, and I didn't particularly think much of it. We needed counseling...
A friend of mine tipped me off to Ubuntu at about the 6.06 point. I was a die-hard RedHat fan, still pining for the days before Fedora was born, when things were simple, etc. Switching off of my bastard children of CentOS and Fedora was not looking too likely. Until that is I used Synaptec to install MythTV. It 'just worked'. Seriously. I've tweaked and tweaked and tweaked it since then, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't any more or less difficult for me than MCE was.
The features that I'd miss from Myth, were I to switch are:
1) Different sources have different schedules. I have ONE cable box, and a dedicated tuner just for The channels lower than 74 are captured by a separate dual-tuner card. This way the wife gets her movies, and the kids still get Spongebob and Pokemon. I get to have my cake and eat it too.
2) Choice of endpoints. I can watch Myth content via the web (with a flash-mod to Mythweb), on my Ubuntu partition of my laptop as a frontend, on my Windows stuff with the MythTV player, and probably in a lot of ways I haven't thought of yet. There's no vendor standing there telling me 'no', and I love it.
3) Freedom in general. I didn't like Myth's built-in-DVD player, so I use an external player. No one cared. No hacking was required. I just changed it. Likewise, I didn't want to stream gigabytes across the tubes, so I modified Mythweb to convert to flash videos instead. Much smaller and easier on the pipe-joints. I have a myriad of other choices waiting my preference should the default not fit my needs anymore. I LOVE that.
4) Commercial skip. Annoying at times, but generally super pleasant. If you've been watching Fox lately, you might be aware that there's a Simpson's Movie in theaters. That is, if you've been watching Fox's commercial space it was likely tattooed on your eyelids. I back-spaced into one once to see the trailer and was shocked. That stuff was absolutely pervasive! I thought it was a nice testament to Myth that I mostly didn't have to endure that particular media blitz. And that's just that one show...
5) Love. Myth to me still seems young. It reminds me of my kids. In that way, I feel like I'm watching a teenager enroll for his freshman year in High School. I'm a proud papa of my Myth solution at this point, and don't want to see it die or fade into obscurity.
So yeah, I'll pay it. I'd love to see it go down, as it used to be free, but I understand that things with value are often exchanged for cash. Services included. And that's okay...
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I'd certainly rather pay a couple bucks and try to keep up the screen scraping code with the guide data websites.
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I will happily pay this, considering that the alternative is to do all manual scheduling. I have no idea when or where the shows I watch are on, and that's the way I likes it!
But speaking of alternatives, how is that screen-scraper you're apparently releasing as open-source?
(And speaking of screen scraping, how's MythWeather working for you lately?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:too much (Score:4, Interesting)
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I think I see your problem.... pouring motor oil into your Mythtv might be why you're having these problems.
And I'd also be interested to know which brand of tire you're running.
You're doing it wrong (Score:2)
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Like Unix in general, MythTV is problematic to setup and then pretty much stays the way you put it. Tivos depend on the same principle actually. They're just very well packaged Linux boxes.
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I'm pretty sure I'll buy this service, partially because I'd like to avoid the hassles and problems of screen scraping, and partially because I'd like to support this project as I really appreciate them coming up with a solution, even if its not quite as ideal as before.
Anyway, its still 3x cheaper than TiVo.
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Otherwise, the recording time you will have available will be WAY behind the times.
At least an S3 Tivo can be setup that way.
A PVR is remarkably less useful if you have to constantly babysit it to keep programs from expiring or if it doesn't have enough room to accomodate the recording rules you want in the first place. Have something resembling a life or multiple competing viewing interests and the comcast micro-DVR quickly gets out
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The Debian and Ubuntu packages Just Work for me.
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You can even run it in a Window next to openoffice and firefox if you really want to.
Something like Ubuntu is really a better approach. The really tricky parts are the
hardware support for things like ivtv or lirc. For that you are much better off
with the level of polish and active development in something like Ubuntu or Gentoo.
The larger community is also there for you if you have trouble.
When they make an Ubuntu 7.10 based appliance
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Why do we keep getting comments like these?
We HAVE software to manage all dependancies, they are called package managers and almost every distro has one. You can use apt, portage, yum or whatever and I guarentee that anything that is stable and complete enough for "Joe User" to be bothered using is in there. MythTV for example is in at least Debian, Ubuntu universe, Gentoo and I'd confidently conjecture most of the other ones too. You either type the name of the piece of software, or click on something in
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This was not just my experience -- check out the AMICUS project on sourceforge. OTOH, my impression is that
MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:2)
Please mod the parent down. If it's not a troll, it sure sounds like one.
First it appeals to "Linux developers" as if "Linux" was developed by one company or group. Then it goes on to complain about compiling stuff from source! Hey, we've had these things called package managers for over a decade now. Debian has APT, there's YUM and a few others for various distros. If you want to compile stuff from source instead of just installing some binary packages [debian-multimedia.org], that's your problem. Don't go blaming the mythical "
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mythsetup does a pretty good job of walking you through selecting the TV tuner.
The main hard part is getting your video output working right. Just because NVidia has a bunch of weird options in xorg. But that's fine, 2 minutes later it was working.
Not a big deal.
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The whole point of Debian is to have EVERYTHING that's free software pre-packaged.
This includes the esoteric stuff that other distros have forgotten about or never really paid any attention to it. It may be a work in progress, but to claim that it isn't being addressed due to the whole "hobbyist" thing is simply not factually correct.
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