| Sony's new Vaio Type X
Sony just released their version of TeVo with a 1000 gigabytes, thats right 1 terabyte of space.
The Vaio Type X, is a home server that contains four 250GB hard drives. The device comes with seven TV tuners and a special interface that lets consumers see thumbnails of what they record.
The unusual configuration results from the vagaries of Japanese television. The country has seven network stations, and cable is not as common as in the United States. With Type X, people can record shows from all seven stations automatically and then delete what they don't want to watch.
The 500GB dedicated to TV is enough to record six channels for five-and-a-half days nonstop, a Sony representative said. The interface helps consumers sift through the morass. It lets customers look at thumbnails of all the programs recorded during the same time slot or search for a program by name. It also groups shows by categories--sports or children's programming, for example--selected by the owner.
A hard partition exists between the PC drives and the audiovisual drives; however, owners can manually slip a file from one side to the other.
The major drawback is that Sony does not have plans to bring the device to the United States, right now it is only available in Japan. The other drawback to the product is its cost, Vaio X costs about 4,700 bucks...
You could probably build 2 similar servers for that kind of money by yourself and still have money to spare; I priced one out on Digital Storm for 2,325; a dual Opteron 240 system, 2 740 Gig HDs, Radeon 9200SE and 2 PC3200 512Mb DDR ram chips, dual 16x DVD+RW/-RW, comes with keyboard, mouse and speakers, no monitor and 1 year warranty. I still bet you can build something cheaper than that by yourself.
__________________ And remember that great question that Pierre-Simon Laplace and Sir Isaac Newton, Andrei Markov and David Hilbert, Richard Feynman and Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein and Edmund Halley did not come to ask throughout all of their dedication and work: "Who the hell is IMing me?" 
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