Man, you're preaching to the choir. I agree with all your points, and don't personally care much for MM either. I just posted that as a little take on Fox New's slogan, nothing more. I recently got a chance to watch Outfoxed and find that topic a lot scarier than MM's stuff.
> I feel like I've been given the job in this administration > that Monica Lewinsky had in the last one
One of my favorite bumper stickers reads something like "W: now we're all wearing the blue dress".
That's what I was thinking, too, especially when I saw the 3 CDD mention. It's hard to tell how much of the price is due to high-end frills that have nothing to do with HD, and how much due to the HD tech. It will be interesting to see what price point they reach once they add HD to more mundane single CCD camcorders, the Wal-Mart specials.
Hmm, I've been thinking of getting another TiVo (or rather two Series 2 units, since my SA S1 is getting long in the tooth and SLOW). I might call them and tell them that, but that I consider $20 a month too much for two DVRs and that I'm considering switching to a generic cable company DVR.
Incidentally, how's the hackability of the S2 devices? I remember in the early days S1 owners stayed away in droves because it was supposedly harder to hack. Is show extraction happening meanwhile on the S2? I'd hate to give that up.
> The thing I'm wondering about is how much this is going to cost Tivo.
I don't think this is going to cost TiVo, but rather Netflix. I believe they're the ones that are setting up the server farms. TiVo are merely implementing the software for fetching the movies (and serving it up to other subscribers via a bittorrent-like mechanism).
I'm not sure about the technical details of OnDemand, but there are only two feasible ways it can hope to cope with the bandwidth requirements:
1. keep the selection small and intelligently simulcast as many shows as possible 2. only offer the service to a few people and hope not too many use it
There's really no way around the fact that serious, large-scale unicasting would bring their network to its knees. Immagine the worst case scenario of each subscriber watching a different OnDemand show (if they even offered that many).
> a plug in the back that can make a direct connection to TiVo's IR blaster
You mean to TiVo's serial port control. You use the IR blaster when you DON'T have such a plug. Incidentally, do you know if their HD boxes also have serial ports? I'm considering switching to Comcast HD from DirecTV, but would hate to have to start using the IR blaster.
I've read some stuff that leads me to the conclusion that
1. they'll be using pretty tight compression (mpeg4 or such) 2. they're going to implement something like Bittorrent
So a typical movie may be 1G or less, which on a decent broadband connection isn't too bad. Now consider that new blockbuster releases will be downloaded much more frequently by more TiVos on the web, and suddenly the more popular a movie is, the more efficient the bittorrent mechanism becomes. IOW, unlike with standard unicasting where download speed goes to the dogs the more popular a file is, downloading actually becomes faster the more popular a movie is.
I have to say that for a long time I've despised TiVo for having come up with one good idea and not much more since. I used to think their creative stagnation was going to be their downfall. But if they're going through with this, and if it succeeds (and I have every reason to believe it will, unless Hollywood manages to kill it), this could be the ticket to serious success for them. And it would finally be serious innovation from them again.
Well, I guess it really depends where you live. There seems to be no one carrier that's better everywhere. Where I live for example T-Mobile has great coverage in my experience, while my wife's Sprint phone was analog roaming half the time, if she even got a signal (she now switched to T-Mobile and much prefers it). Of course, one of my colleagues recently switched from T-Mobile to Verizon because of reception issues, but I'm firmly convinced the problem was his incredibly sh!tty Moto T193 phone (which I also had and can attest to its crappiness) rather than T-Mobile. The convenience of interchangeable phones and SIM cards is so significant that I wouldn't even consider any non-GSM phone system, unless it was the ONLY option.
As the only global GSM player on the US market, they's really no other choice if you want easy phone portability, a minimally interfering carrier, decent prices, and some more goodies for wireless geeks that I won't mention here. Use a GSM carrier and you can buy any old unlocked GSM phone off eBay and it will just work, regardless of whether your carrier sells that phone, likes that phone, or has even heard of that phone. It would seem geeks and GSM would be a natural fit, yet here they are griping about Verizon or Sprint. Just dump those party poopers already.
> To maintain marketshare Comcast doubled everybodies max download rate with no change in price
That's what you ASSUME, but you don't know for sure. Not supporting your assumption is the fact that BellSouth is doing NOTHING to compete--they were two years behind Comcast in offering broadband at my last house, they are quite happy with 1.5Mbps and in fact are looking at ways to sell slower access for only slightly less money. If this is a competition, Comcast must be competing with the guy with the starter pistol.
Perhaps Comcast is not competing for broadband customers, but for satellite customers? Faster broadband speed could just be an essentially no-cost icing on the digital cable cake for prospective customers.
The problem with your theory is that it assumes a market. In most places there's no market, more like an oligarchy. I also found it suspicious that for the first few years of broadband in our area there seemed to be very little overlap of Comcast's and BellSouth's coverage areas.
Ethernet killed AppleTalk most likely, not PCs. From what I've read, the 576 byte or so AppleTalk packet size wastes most of a 1500 byte Ethernet frame, making the protocol very inefficient over Ethernet. They could have fixed it, but since Apple has been involved with TCP/IP for a long time as well, it begged the question why. It just forces network admins to maintain another protocol, and from a PR perspective that would be a negative against Apples.
I agree with your general idea, but I still think you're taking too general a view of what "implementation" means. You seem to think that it means the algorithm itself, whereas most people and text books consider implementation to be the coding of an established algorithm (or pseudo-code) into an executable. Given this definition, creating the main algorithm is indeed often the most significant part of the creative process or "intellectual property" (sorry, I simply have to cringe at this term). Think of books like "Design Patterns", which originally were released in pseudo-code form (IIRC), and only later were re-released with implementations in various languages (purely for financial reasons, I'm sure). While expressing a given algorithm in C++ or Java can involve its own set of difficulties and tricks, they're on a different level and generally less patentable because more generic.
I'm sorry, but I don't get the mini-minivan phenomenon. It seems to be the van equivalent of the SUV: increase the dimensions of the vehicle into directions that don't matter. Which usually means upwards. I finally made the (highly pragmatic, and only after much soul searching) decision to get a van, mainly because of the convenience of EASILY ACCESSIBLE extra seating. With a family of four, if you have visitors and want to go for a drive, with a sedan that either means ONE passenger and lots of squeezing in the back, or two sedans. With a van you can easily get to the back seats and can take along an extra three people without discomfort.
Looking at the Opel Meriva though, it seems to have the same interior dimensions as a medium-size sedan, including the same four doors. If there is a third row of seating (not easily discernible from Opel's web site), it's got to be equivalent to the second row in a Porsche 911. I mean, what is the bloody point of having a TALL vehicle with the added wind resistance and decreased driveability (due to higher center of gravity) without any extra people room inside? I'm usually the first to bash American land yachts, but the whole market for minivans exploded in the 80s (though let's not forget the peace van) because they offered genuine advantages, not just a new look. Besides, the best minivans are not even American anyway, they're mostly Japanese. Have they honestly tried selling the Sienna or Odyssey in Europe and have been rejected by the market? I'm having serious doubts about that. I think it's more a case of manufacturers patronizing the buying public.
The real issue with Moz/FF is not the rendering speed, but how aggressively it tries to release memory again. It feels like when switching to another app and coming back to FF it often has been almost completely swapped out to disk, taking forever to respond to user input again. It's particularly bad if you minimize it and restore it again.
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Man, you're preaching to the choir. I agree with all your points, and don't personally care much for MM either. I just posted that as a little take on Fox New's slogan, nothing more. I recently got a chance to watch Outfoxed and find that topic a lot scarier than MM's stuff.
> I feel like I've been given the job in this administration
> that Monica Lewinsky had in the last one
One of my favorite bumper stickers reads something like "W: now we're all wearing the blue dress".
> right place to start a political discussion
Discussion? This is way past discussion. It's political Sidewinder time!
If the GOP can have Fox News, we can have F9/11. Not exactly fair or balanced, but hey!
That's what I was thinking, too, especially when I saw the 3 CDD mention. It's hard to tell how much of the price is due to high-end frills that have nothing to do with HD, and how much due to the HD tech. It will be interesting to see what price point they reach once they add HD to more mundane single CCD camcorders, the Wal-Mart specials.
Hmm, I've been thinking of getting another TiVo (or rather two Series 2 units, since my SA S1 is getting long in the tooth and SLOW). I might call them and tell them that, but that I consider $20 a month too much for two DVRs and that I'm considering switching to a generic cable company DVR.
Incidentally, how's the hackability of the S2 devices? I remember in the early days S1 owners stayed away in droves because it was supposedly harder to hack. Is show extraction happening meanwhile on the S2? I'd hate to give that up.
Thanks, that's interesting info.
> The thing I'm wondering about is how much this is going to cost Tivo.
I don't think this is going to cost TiVo, but rather Netflix. I believe they're the ones that are setting up the server farms. TiVo are merely implementing the software for fetching the movies (and serving it up to other subscribers via a bittorrent-like mechanism).
I'm not sure about the technical details of OnDemand, but there are only two feasible ways it can hope to cope with the bandwidth requirements:
1. keep the selection small and intelligently simulcast as many shows as possible
2. only offer the service to a few people and hope not too many use it
There's really no way around the fact that serious, large-scale unicasting would bring their network to its knees. Immagine the worst case scenario of each subscriber watching a different OnDemand show (if they even offered that many).
> a plug in the back that can make a direct connection to TiVo's IR blaster
You mean to TiVo's serial port control. You use the IR blaster when you DON'T have such a plug. Incidentally, do you know if their HD boxes also have serial ports? I'm considering switching to Comcast HD from DirecTV, but would hate to have to start using the IR blaster.
I've read some stuff that leads me to the conclusion that
1. they'll be using pretty tight compression (mpeg4 or such)
2. they're going to implement something like Bittorrent
So a typical movie may be 1G or less, which on a decent broadband connection isn't too bad. Now consider that new blockbuster releases will be downloaded much more frequently by more TiVos on the web, and suddenly the more popular a movie is, the more efficient the bittorrent mechanism becomes. IOW, unlike with standard unicasting where download speed goes to the dogs the more popular a file is, downloading actually becomes faster the more popular a movie is.
I have to say that for a long time I've despised TiVo for having come up with one good idea and not much more since. I used to think their creative stagnation was going to be their downfall. But if they're going through with this, and if it succeeds (and I have every reason to believe it will, unless Hollywood manages to kill it), this could be the ticket to serious success for them. And it would finally be serious innovation from them again.
> I only pay $6.95 a month for TiVo service. Just call them up and threaten to leave
For real, or are you just making this up?
> Now all we need are inflatable monkeys to put on the ship and we'll be set to go
Actually, that's what the Michelin man was designed for--way ahead of his time.
> Poor coverage and signal quality.
Well, I guess it really depends where you live. There seems to be no one carrier that's better everywhere. Where I live for example T-Mobile has great coverage in my experience, while my wife's Sprint phone was analog roaming half the time, if she even got a signal (she now switched to T-Mobile and much prefers it). Of course, one of my colleagues recently switched from T-Mobile to Verizon because of reception issues, but I'm firmly convinced the problem was his incredibly sh!tty Moto T193 phone (which I also had and can attest to its crappiness) rather than T-Mobile. The convenience of interchangeable phones and SIM cards is so significant that I wouldn't even consider any non-GSM phone system, unless it was the ONLY option.
As the only global GSM player on the US market, they's really no other choice if you want easy phone portability, a minimally interfering carrier, decent prices, and some more goodies for wireless geeks that I won't mention here. Use a GSM carrier and you can buy any old unlocked GSM phone off eBay and it will just work, regardless of whether your carrier sells that phone, likes that phone, or has even heard of that phone. It would seem geeks and GSM would be a natural fit, yet here they are griping about Verizon or Sprint. Just dump those party poopers already.
Yep, I can verify that. Just make sure your account is balanced, and they give you no problems with the code.
> To maintain marketshare Comcast doubled everybodies max download rate with no change in price
That's what you ASSUME, but you don't know for sure. Not supporting your assumption is the fact that BellSouth is doing NOTHING to compete--they were two years behind Comcast in offering broadband at my last house, they are quite happy with 1.5Mbps and in fact are looking at ways to sell slower access for only slightly less money. If this is a competition, Comcast must be competing with the guy with the starter pistol.
Perhaps Comcast is not competing for broadband customers, but for satellite customers? Faster broadband speed could just be an essentially no-cost icing on the digital cable cake for prospective customers.
The problem with your theory is that it assumes a market. In most places there's no market, more like an oligarchy. I also found it suspicious that for the first few years of broadband in our area there seemed to be very little overlap of Comcast's and BellSouth's coverage areas.
> thats why we use TCP/IP instead of appletalk
Ethernet killed AppleTalk most likely, not PCs. From what I've read, the 576 byte or so AppleTalk packet size wastes most of a 1500 byte Ethernet frame, making the protocol very inefficient over Ethernet. They could have fixed it, but since Apple has been involved with TCP/IP for a long time as well, it begged the question why. It just forces network admins to maintain another protocol, and from a PR perspective that would be a negative against Apples.
I agree with your general idea, but I still think you're taking too general a view of what "implementation" means. You seem to think that it means the algorithm itself, whereas most people and text books consider implementation to be the coding of an established algorithm (or pseudo-code) into an executable. Given this definition, creating the main algorithm is indeed often the most significant part of the creative process or "intellectual property" (sorry, I simply have to cringe at this term). Think of books like "Design Patterns", which originally were released in pseudo-code form (IIRC), and only later were re-released with implementations in various languages (purely for financial reasons, I'm sure). While expressing a given algorithm in C++ or Java can involve its own set of difficulties and tricks, they're on a different level and generally less patentable because more generic.
I'm sorry, but I don't get the mini-minivan phenomenon. It seems to be the van equivalent of the SUV: increase the dimensions of the vehicle into directions that don't matter. Which usually means upwards. I finally made the (highly pragmatic, and only after much soul searching) decision to get a van, mainly because of the convenience of EASILY ACCESSIBLE extra seating. With a family of four, if you have visitors and want to go for a drive, with a sedan that either means ONE passenger and lots of squeezing in the back, or two sedans. With a van you can easily get to the back seats and can take along an extra three people without discomfort.
Looking at the Opel Meriva though, it seems to have the same interior dimensions as a medium-size sedan, including the same four doors. If there is a third row of seating (not easily discernible from Opel's web site), it's got to be equivalent to the second row in a Porsche 911. I mean, what is the bloody point of having a TALL vehicle with the added wind resistance and decreased driveability (due to higher center of gravity) without any extra people room inside? I'm usually the first to bash American land yachts, but the whole market for minivans exploded in the 80s (though let's not forget the peace van) because they offered genuine advantages, not just a new look. Besides, the best minivans are not even American anyway, they're mostly Japanese. Have they honestly tried selling the Sienna or Odyssey in Europe and have been rejected by the market? I'm having serious doubts about that. I think it's more a case of manufacturers patronizing the buying public.
I bet that came for free in the trunk of the Alfa that you really bought, right?
The real issue with Moz/FF is not the rendering speed, but how aggressively it tries to release memory again. It feels like when switching to another app and coming back to FF it often has been almost completely swapped out to disk, taking forever to respond to user input again. It's particularly bad if you minimize it and restore it again.
> The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's Gum.
And the second was Wrigley himself, though this fact is much less well known.
> Perhaps it's just the mom&pop shops with their possibly
> custom software that runs with 12-digits only.
Yeah, and we all know there's hardly any of those around. Tiny fraction of the economy.
> Did anyone else originally read the subject as the iRiver PIMP-120?
Yep, I just took a gander at the slut on the screen and then my eyes immediately jumped to the PIMP label underneath.
> I wonder what that is around her neck?
What neck? Oh!