I up your negative anectode with a positive one. I'm running an ancient SMC 7004BR flashed with the latest OEM firmware with all sorts of goodies, and it's never let me down. There were a few weak firmware releases, but you just check the buzz on the relevant forums and avoid them. I have it on Comcast, and while they're generally quite stable around here, they do have periodic outages. The little box handles that quite gracefully and always comes back up nicely. I only ever have to reboot it when fiddling with settings. Of course, I pity the fool who must use PPPoE.
> It's quite likely that the company producing the hardware > isn't going to be bothered to repair a product
Now that's a platitude if ever I've seen one. What precise personal experience do you base this statement on? Linksys, Netgear and SMC certainly have a decent track record of supporting their products, sometimes well into the next few generations. Besides, most of these consumer devices are based on OEM hardware whose manufacturer usually writes the base firmware that the vendors then customize. The upshot is that even if your Linksys or SMC doesn't produce new firmware, the OEM manufacturer often does. My SMC 7004 Barricade is running firmware that provides considerably more functionality than SMC ever planned for the little box.
> Kamen really didn't say anything at all about it.
Hah! Now THAT'S a misstatement. How many talkshows did he demonstrate it on again, going on about how it's going to change urban lifestyle?
> check out his wheelchairs.
That's what I was talking about. The new model that rises on two wheels to provide access to high shelves and can tackle stairs is quite amazing. Given their price I just don't know how popular they will become.
I don't find that particular use funny either. In fact Kamen has had some great designs in the disability arena. But that's not how he marketed the Segway: it was supposed to be this great transportation paradigm-shifting phenomenon around which future cities would be built. Puh-lease! Right now it's almost exclusively a yuppie toy.
> HTTP/HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the early 90's.
Yes, which would make it a Swiss and/or French development, depending on which part of the complex he was taking a crap in when he thought of it. Otherwise a goodly number of American inventions and developments should be considered German, Chinese and Russian.
> I know there are several expandable mp3 players out there, but not CF-based.
Oh, but there are. Check out the Nex II, Nex IIe and Nex Ia. If you check usenet, you'll see that these are quite popular, though only available online I believe.
> America is the best country at creating stuff. When something gets old, > it gets out-sourced and Americans create something else new.
This is called blind faith in the past. Because everything has always worked out before, it will also in the future. This is exactly how Western Europe got into the economic bind they're in.
> coming to this country and competing for jobs in a fashion similar to today
But that's the crux of the matter, these outsourced workers AREN'T coming to this country to compete for jobs. If they did, we would have much less of a problem, because they'd be competing on equal terms. But they're competing from OVER THERE, and they have the unfair advantage of MUCH lower living costs. This is not to blame the poor sods themselves, because I'd certainly do the same thing in their place. This is just the dirty side of globalization. I am all for the "spread the wealth" part of globalization, but that's not what is happening. Manufacturers (and now software companies) are going overseas to produce the (ostensibly) same product for pennies on the dollar, only to come back here and sell it at essentially the same price as before. Who are the loosers? Both the citizens that lost the jobs to overseas, and the overseas workers, who--while probably making more than they could otherwise--still usually can't even afford to buy the product they're producing. As far as global corporations are concerned, my view is that access to a lucrative market should also bring with it more responsibilities. If you want to sell into the highly profitable First World, you should provide more than the mere benefits of the product. Otherwise you can go and try to sell it back where you produced it and see how much profit you'd make there.
My feeling is that the real backlash against globalization will come once large numbers of people realize just how many jobs are being lost to emerging countries. I always thought that globalization of trade has to occur in stages, sort of like the Eastern European countries are being trickled into the EU, a few at a time, and with staggered eonomic integration (ok, maybe the analogy isn't perfect, what with ten countries joining at once). Otherwise, if you open the floodgates between two countries with vastly different living standards, all hell will break loose.
> But we do. And the IT magazines will. It's all just part of spreading the word.
Sure, but the industry press has already been spreading the word for a long time. This issue has been written about extensively, yet we're still here. Heck, even news mags like Spiegel occasionally mention software patents. Now if Spiegel went down in protest, that might be something.
While I applaud each site's initiative, obscure nerd sites are hardly going to influence the decisions of techno-illiterate politicians likely to vote on this. Now if amazon.com, wsj.com or freshyoungboys.com closed down, they might take notice.
> The question is about propulsion, not weight-to-surface tension ratios sufficient for flotation
Unfortunately the article doesn't make that very clear. They could spell out that the issue is locomotion, not flotation. At first I thought, what the h3ll, it's obvious that they're floating because they're not breaking the surface tension. But then they kept talking about moving and skimming and swimming, so it dawned on me that they're talking about how the walker generates forward motion on a near friction-less medium. That's where the vortices come in, quasi as a surface to push against.
> Meanwhile, I'd happily pay for a subscription for good (tivo style) guide data
If it were a stand-alone service that sold the data in an open format (say as a web service), that would be acceptable. As it is I pay for the same data twice, both from TiVo and DirecTV. It seems that Guide+ is still free, though.
> Tons of R&D invested in development; research costs expected to be recouped once (their) market matures. > Product hits and causes a stir. Huge sales and good times for frontier company.
The problem with many pioneer companies seems to be that they don't have the mindset to STAY at the forefront. After that huge initial effort a certain resting-on-your-laurels mentality sets in. Perhaps they're so enamoured and impressed with their own achievement that they can't conceive of anyone else equalling or bettering them.
You can certainly observe that with TiVo. They have made no significant improvements to the base product since the beginning (though the fanatics at tivocommunity would vehemently deny this). The Series 2 hardware isn't a massive component reduction compared to the Series 1. A bit cheaper perhaps, but no cost paradigm shift. One serious feature they could have added right from the beginning would have been external storage upgrades. A 1394 port plus software to support this could have allowed people to easily add external drives. Heck, if they wanted to protect this market, they could have released their own TiVo-branded drives. But it seems that once they made that initial mental leap to the concept of a PVR, their creative juices were sapped.
>> you'll see DVRs for not much more than $100 > But it's all about the subscription fee or renting the DVR box
Guide subscriptions are also destined for the scrap heap. Low end devices are simply going to use Guide+ or free online services (such as used by XMLTV). Perhaps not as polished as what DirecTV or TiVo offer, but certainly good enough for an Apex or Memorex.
> The company's past actions reveal its intentions.
No doubt about it. The classic example is IE: they were on a frantic upgrade schedule while there was still someone to beat out there. Once Netscape was gone, all of a sudden IE stopped dead in its tracks. Nothing much has happened since v6, and now they've announced that there won't be any more upgrades of IE itself other than as part of Windows SPs.
The question with WMP is, what competitor are they going after with that one? That's definitely a lot murkier. It can't be the PVR "crowd" (of one), since it offers no such features. It can't be other media players, because it's way too obsessed with DRM to be attractive. I suspect there might be something going on with some media device vendors and the WMP Device Manager SDK, since for some devices (e.g. Rio players) the WMD DM is the only way to get media on/off the device, and they've dragged their feet forever releasing the SDK. But that's a weak strategy because the device market is HUGE and most of the vendors aren't playing Microsoft's game. So I'm still puzzled about WMP's direction.
Incidentally, MythTV is much closer to a media center than Microsoft. It's amazing how much progress that little OS project has made. It would be a pretty simple thing for them to make a custom distro that creates a minimum install to run MythTV on a virgin machine, or optionally run it straight off a Knoppix-like live CD, using whatever FS is on the underlying machine for buffering. It still needs a bit of polish, but it's almost there and it's slick already.
> They have built a nice little browser that works well and > uses a GPL rendering engine. They have improved it and released > those improvements back under GPL.
Yes, but it's still a closed platform that they jealously guard. Anytime someone threatens to encroach on their turf (i.e. if they have a similar product of their own) with a better product, their lawyers jump into action. They are in full control of the price of entry into the Mac universe, from the OS to the hardware. They are actually worse than Microsoft in that it's a single source platform--you're completely at Apple's mercy regarding what hardware you run.
I doubt that will happen. I don't think TiVo will survive the big onslaught of DVRs once it comes, or at the very least won't grow significantly. In order to do that they would have to be a lot more aggressive with product and feature development, and drop prices significantly. After all, I believe most DVR newcomers are developing their technology from scratch and TiVo isn't earning any licensing revenue there. So how exactly will they grow? They keep claiming that they still barely break even on unit costs and are only making money on service subscription. There will be a certain increase in sales with the growing popularity of DVRs, I'm sure, but from a cost perspective they will be considered high-end and expensive, so I doubt their sales will shoot through the roof. I'm sure that within a couple of years or so you'll see DVRs for not much more than $100, consisting of single-chip electronics plus a HD. That means lots of volume, and I don't think volume is TiVo's sport. So far I haven't seen TiVo too eager to foray into the low-end of the market. That's just not their business model or strength.
Oh, so you'd run SCO's UnixWare without reservations then? After all, it's THE Unix now. Technology isn't everything, the ideology of the vendor matters, too. In that respect Apple is no better than Microsoft, they just have better designers.
> if enough people buy OSX Macs and then start helping out on the OpenOffice 2.0 project
Yes, because it's PARTICUARLY the developers that are flocking to the Mac. Its rabid popularity amongst the Slashdot crowd notwithstanding, it's still mostly the non-tech types that buy into the OTHER evil empire.
> It has Great color, all in all for the $$$ it is worth it. > If you want to spend 4 times as much [...]
That's the thing, cost/benefit curves are rarely linear. The incremental benefit of spending another $2000 will buy you a lot less than those first $1000 did. It's called compromise. Especially since this tech changes at a fairly fast clip, you have to ask yourself if you want to spend $1000 or $3000 every three years or so.
> It should not be a main set, and can not be > used unless in controlled settings.
I'll agree with that, but it seems that talking about HT sort of implies that. I don't usually go to the den and fire up the whole rig to watch a sitcom or the news. To me the HT is basically a twice-a-week affair for sit-down movies and popcorn, and with that kind of usage a projector is perfect and would last a long time with a 3000 hour bulb.
What on earth is wrong with a $900 DLP such as the InFocus X1? For most mere mortals watching DVDs at night on the weekend under controlled lighting, this is a perfectly acceptable solution. Unless of course one is a purist and considers anything but the top-of-the-line pure crap. But that often smacks more of brand-obsession than perfectionism.
Slashdot Mirror
> I worry that Grandma's machine will be hijacked to send out worms and spam.
And again, how exactly is this a NAT vulnerability? After all, if you remember, that's what we're talking about here.
I up your negative anectode with a positive one. I'm running an ancient SMC 7004BR flashed with the latest OEM firmware with all sorts of goodies, and it's never let me down. There were a few weak firmware releases, but you just check the buzz on the relevant forums and avoid them. I have it on Comcast, and while they're generally quite stable around here, they do have periodic outages. The little box handles that quite gracefully and always comes back up nicely. I only ever have to reboot it when fiddling with settings. Of course, I pity the fool who must use PPPoE.
> It's quite likely that the company producing the hardware
> isn't going to be bothered to repair a product
Now that's a platitude if ever I've seen one. What precise personal experience do you base this statement on? Linksys, Netgear and SMC certainly have a decent track record of supporting their products, sometimes well into the next few generations. Besides, most of these consumer devices are based on OEM hardware whose manufacturer usually writes the base firmware that the vendors then customize. The upshot is that even if your Linksys or SMC doesn't produce new firmware, the OEM manufacturer often does. My SMC 7004 Barricade is running firmware that provides considerably more functionality than SMC ever planned for the little box.
> Kamen really didn't say anything at all about it.
Hah! Now THAT'S a misstatement. How many talkshows did he demonstrate it on again, going on about how it's going to change urban lifestyle?
> check out his wheelchairs.
That's what I was talking about. The new model that rises on two wheels to provide access to high shelves and can tackle stairs is quite amazing. Given their price I just don't know how popular they will become.
> It makes Segways less of a joke to me.
I don't find that particular use funny either. In fact Kamen has had some great designs in the disability arena. But that's not how he marketed the Segway: it was supposed to be this great transportation paradigm-shifting phenomenon around which future cities would be built. Puh-lease! Right now it's almost exclusively a yuppie toy.
Maybe they'll be friends.
> HTTP/HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the early 90's.
Yes, which would make it a Swiss and/or French development, depending on which part of the complex he was taking a crap in when he thought of it. Otherwise a goodly number of American inventions and developments should be considered German, Chinese and Russian.
> Internal Combustion Engine
In your dreams. The steam engine is not an internal combustion engine.
> Jet Engine
Shared honors with Germany, though the British radial design certainly wouldn't dominate the market later on.
> Electric Motor
Please do elaborate.
> Depth Charges
That's like bragging with DDT--in the end you just need it because you have lice.
> Viagra
Considering what it's meant to solve, I'm not so sure I'd be all that proud of that.
> I know there are several expandable mp3 players out there, but not CF-based.
Oh, but there are. Check out the Nex II, Nex IIe and Nex Ia. If you check usenet, you'll see that these are quite popular, though only available online I believe.
> America is the best country at creating stuff. When something gets old,
> it gets out-sourced and Americans create something else new.
This is called blind faith in the past. Because everything has always worked out before, it will also in the future. This is exactly how Western Europe got into the economic bind they're in.
> coming to this country and competing for jobs in a fashion similar to today
But that's the crux of the matter, these outsourced workers AREN'T coming to this country to compete for jobs. If they did, we would have much less of a problem, because they'd be competing on equal terms. But they're competing from OVER THERE, and they have the unfair advantage of MUCH lower living costs. This is not to blame the poor sods themselves, because I'd certainly do the same thing in their place. This is just the dirty side of globalization. I am all for the "spread the wealth" part of globalization, but that's not what is happening. Manufacturers (and now software companies) are going overseas to produce the (ostensibly) same product for pennies on the dollar, only to come back here and sell it at essentially the same price as before. Who are the loosers? Both the citizens that lost the jobs to overseas, and the overseas workers, who--while probably making more than they could otherwise--still usually can't even afford to buy the product they're producing. As far as global corporations are concerned, my view is that access to a lucrative market should also bring with it more responsibilities. If you want to sell into the highly profitable First World, you should provide more than the mere benefits of the product. Otherwise you can go and try to sell it back where you produced it and see how much profit you'd make there.
My feeling is that the real backlash against globalization will come once large numbers of people realize just how many jobs are being lost to emerging countries. I always thought that globalization of trade has to occur in stages, sort of like the Eastern European countries are being trickled into the EU, a few at a time, and with staggered eonomic integration (ok, maybe the analogy isn't perfect, what with ten countries joining at once). Otherwise, if you open the floodgates between two countries with vastly different living standards, all hell will break loose.
> But we do. And the IT magazines will. It's all just part of spreading the word.
Sure, but the industry press has already been spreading the word for a long time. This issue has been written about extensively, yet we're still here. Heck, even news mags like Spiegel occasionally mention software patents. Now if Spiegel went down in protest, that might be something.
While I applaud each site's initiative, obscure nerd sites are hardly going to influence the decisions of techno-illiterate politicians likely to vote on this. Now if amazon.com, wsj.com or freshyoungboys.com closed down, they might take notice.
> The question is about propulsion, not weight-to-surface tension ratios sufficient for flotation
Unfortunately the article doesn't make that very clear. They could spell out that the issue is locomotion, not flotation. At first I thought, what the h3ll, it's obvious that they're floating because they're not breaking the surface tension. But then they kept talking about moving and skimming and swimming, so it dawned on me that they're talking about how the walker generates forward motion on a near friction-less medium. That's where the vortices come in, quasi as a surface to push against.
> Meanwhile, I'd happily pay for a subscription for good (tivo style) guide data
If it were a stand-alone service that sold the data in an open format (say as a web service), that would be acceptable. As it is I pay for the same data twice, both from TiVo and DirecTV. It seems that Guide+ is still free, though.
> Tons of R&D invested in development; research costs expected to be recouped once (their) market matures.
> Product hits and causes a stir. Huge sales and good times for frontier company.
The problem with many pioneer companies seems to be that they don't have the mindset to STAY at the forefront. After that huge initial effort a certain resting-on-your-laurels mentality sets in. Perhaps they're so enamoured and impressed with their own achievement that they can't conceive of anyone else equalling or bettering them.
You can certainly observe that with TiVo. They have made no significant improvements to the base product since the beginning (though the fanatics at tivocommunity would vehemently deny this). The Series 2 hardware isn't a massive component reduction compared to the Series 1. A bit cheaper perhaps, but no cost paradigm shift. One serious feature they could have added right from the beginning would have been external storage upgrades. A 1394 port plus software to support this could have allowed people to easily add external drives. Heck, if they wanted to protect this market, they could have released their own TiVo-branded drives. But it seems that once they made that initial mental leap to the concept of a PVR, their creative juices were sapped.
>> you'll see DVRs for not much more than $100
> But it's all about the subscription fee or renting the DVR box
Guide subscriptions are also destined for the scrap heap. Low end devices are simply going to use Guide+ or free online services (such as used by XMLTV). Perhaps not as polished as what DirecTV or TiVo offer, but certainly good enough for an Apex or Memorex.
> The company's past actions reveal its intentions.
No doubt about it. The classic example is IE: they were on a frantic upgrade schedule while there was still someone to beat out there. Once Netscape was gone, all of a sudden IE stopped dead in its tracks. Nothing much has happened since v6, and now they've announced that there won't be any more upgrades of IE itself other than as part of Windows SPs.
The question with WMP is, what competitor are they going after with that one? That's definitely a lot murkier. It can't be the PVR "crowd" (of one), since it offers no such features. It can't be other media players, because it's way too obsessed with DRM to be attractive. I suspect there might be something going on with some media device vendors and the WMP Device Manager SDK, since for some devices (e.g. Rio players) the WMD DM is the only way to get media on/off the device, and they've dragged their feet forever releasing the SDK. But that's a weak strategy because the device market is HUGE and most of the vendors aren't playing Microsoft's game. So I'm still puzzled about WMP's direction.
Incidentally, MythTV is much closer to a media center than Microsoft. It's amazing how much progress that little OS project has made. It would be a pretty simple thing for them to make a custom distro that creates a minimum install to run MythTV on a virgin machine, or optionally run it straight off a Knoppix-like live CD, using whatever FS is on the underlying machine for buffering. It still needs a bit of polish, but it's almost there and it's slick already.
> They have built a nice little browser that works well and
> uses a GPL rendering engine. They have improved it and released
> those improvements back under GPL.
Yes, but it's still a closed platform that they jealously guard. Anytime someone threatens to encroach on their turf (i.e. if they have a similar product of their own) with a better product, their lawyers jump into action. They are in full control of the price of entry into the Mac universe, from the OS to the hardware. They are actually worse than Microsoft in that it's a single source platform--you're completely at Apple's mercy regarding what hardware you run.
> Once TiVo grows to be a larger corporation
I doubt that will happen. I don't think TiVo will survive the big onslaught of DVRs once it comes, or at the very least won't grow significantly. In order to do that they would have to be a lot more aggressive with product and feature development, and drop prices significantly. After all, I believe most DVR newcomers are developing their technology from scratch and TiVo isn't earning any licensing revenue there. So how exactly will they grow? They keep claiming that they still barely break even on unit costs and are only making money on service subscription. There will be a certain increase in sales with the growing popularity of DVRs, I'm sure, but from a cost perspective they will be considered high-end and expensive, so I doubt their sales will shoot through the roof. I'm sure that within a couple of years or so you'll see DVRs for not much more than $100, consisting of single-chip electronics plus a HD. That means lots of volume, and I don't think volume is TiVo's sport. So far I haven't seen TiVo too eager to foray into the low-end of the market. That's just not their business model or strength.
> Macs are good. Its all UNIX and that is good.
Oh, so you'd run SCO's UnixWare without reservations then? After all, it's THE Unix now. Technology isn't everything, the ideology of the vendor matters, too. In that respect Apple is no better than Microsoft, they just have better designers.
> if enough people buy OSX Macs and then start helping out on the OpenOffice 2.0 project
Yes, because it's PARTICUARLY the developers that are flocking to the Mac. Its rabid popularity amongst the Slashdot crowd notwithstanding, it's still mostly the non-tech types that buy into the OTHER evil empire.
> It has Great color, all in all for the $$$ it is worth it.
> If you want to spend 4 times as much [...]
That's the thing, cost/benefit curves are rarely linear. The incremental benefit of spending another $2000 will buy you a lot less than those first $1000 did. It's called compromise. Especially since this tech changes at a fairly fast clip, you have to ask yourself if you want to spend $1000 or $3000 every three years or so.
> It should not be a main set, and can not be
> used unless in controlled settings.
I'll agree with that, but it seems that talking about HT sort of implies that. I don't usually go to the den and fire up the whole rig to watch a sitcom or the news. To me the HT is basically a twice-a-week affair for sit-down movies and popcorn, and with that kind of usage a projector is perfect and would last a long time with a 3000 hour bulb.
What on earth is wrong with a $900 DLP such as the InFocus X1? For most mere mortals watching DVDs at night on the weekend under controlled lighting, this is a perfectly acceptable solution. Unless of course one is a purist and considers anything but the top-of-the-line pure crap. But that often smacks more of brand-obsession than perfectionism.