> BTW: the USPS does a tremendous job for the amount they charge for the postage.
Yeah, well, you get about what you pay for. Reliable mail service is largely an oxymoron in the US. I guess statistics alone might still weigh in its favor, but if I have anything that needs to get anywhere with any level of urgency and/or reliability, I will use FedEx over the USPS anyday. I don't know if that's still true nowadays, but when I used to use Deutsche Post in the '80s, their level of expediency and reliability was much more comparable to FedEx than the USPS. I guess service has its price.
Borland is--and has been for quite a while--a very well-balanced company: R&D is a motley crew of rebels and visionaries, while Marketing and PR are chosen from the Dark Side. Of course, Anders turned out to be Darth, but that's another story.
Knee-jerk reaction, because your original statement is most often pronounced in an accusatory context. Sorry if you didn't mean it that way. In any case, I wasn't so much being defensinve as just trying to point out that Germany is far from running the show. There are a few things it has pushed hard (along with France), such as the Euro, and a certain softening of national overtones in general. But in terms of getting its way whenever it wants, that's not even close to being the case.
How so? The ECB might be in Germany, but few of the highest EU positions of power are occupied by Germans. If you mean just by the sheer size of their population and economy, well, that's hardly their fault, is it? Although they're sure trying hard to kill their economy at the moment.
> I would rather see a way to network multiple TiVos and have them seemlessly act as one big TiVo.
I was thinking about that, too. They should be able to discover each other on the (100Mb please!) network and integrate their saved shows into one large collection. One of them should be designated the master unit, that's the one you connect to the TV and control with the remote, the others simply act as auxiliary tuners and extra storage to the master. They could even implement some kind of scheduling mechanism where the master unit automatically finds a free unit to record a particular show.
I guess the programmer in us is running away with this, fat chance of seeing something like this anytime soon.
Nope. It's half duplex to begin with, plus there are all kinds of other overheads. The effective throughput tends to be around 3-5 Mbps in most setups, and quite often less.
If you have both a stand alone and a DirecTiVo, do you pay two TiVo fees, or just one? I have a SA right now, but am considering getting one of those cheap Hughes DirecTiVos. I searched deja for an hour once, but couldn't find clear answers on this. I realize I have to pay DirecTV the second-tuner tax, but what about TiVo?
I just read their entire website (must have taken them an afternoon to create), that sounds awesome. Very light on details, and in fact maybe too much at once in an initial device to get it all right the first time. Plus, let's see what their idea of "surprisingly affordable" is. And I'm definitely curious how the three other TVs interact with the media center--presumably via slave media boxes I'd say. But I really do like the look of the one screenshot they provide, very uncluttered and to-the-point (until Comcast gets to insert their ads all over it, I'm sure).
> By being the company that offers super-easy and flexible upgrade options, it allows Joe Sixpack
> to buy a low-end model now with the assurance that when he's totally hooked on the Tivo
> experience, he can easily turn the 30hour unit into a 120hour unit...
Exactly. The thing is, most people probably wouldn't be interested in all the possible options (though most/.ers probably would), and providing it all in one unit would make the price of entry way too expensive. That's the problem with some of these new media boxes cropping up, such as the HP or Compaq (haven't checked out the price of the Moxi yet): at $1000+ they're WAY too expensive as a single-unit purchase. People are much more likely to spend $1000 in increments (upgrading or adding to a device) over several months or years, than to walk into Best Buy and plonk down 1000 smackers without blinking. Besides, from a seller's point of view, there's more money in unbundling than bundling.
That's the major caveat with some of my recommentations at the moment. Yet it is something that I think will eventually be solved one way or another--maybe through a sensible extension of fair-use laws into the 21st century, who knows. Or maybe some large manufacturers banding together against the content owners, such as Philips and others. Or maybe some large conglomerates like Sony that have their fingers both in the electronics and the content pies, being torn between losing potential revenue from one or the other, will come up with some fair use ideas that will compromise between the two camps. I really don't know, but I know that people will get more and more pissed at having all these new unfulfilled possibilities with digital media, all because of artificial restrictions.
> I know the critics would scream about piracy, but I want to be able to burn a show onto a DVD
Excactly, that's what the consumer wants, and frankly, it's the most natural extension of the base idea one can think of. I believe sooner or later this moronic phobia of piracy will have to subside one way or another, because it clearly does not serve the consumer. Not being able to do anymore something that we've done for well over a decade (tape shows on TV for later watching or showing to friends)--just because we're moving to a new medium--doesn't make any sense and doesn't sit well with consumers. People expect more choices from new technology, not less. It's the old saying all over again: just because we can (exert more control) doesn't mean we should.
> Seems to me that Tivo needs to take a page from SonicBlue's playbook
How about photocopy the whole damn book? Their whole business model sucks, "giving away" the player and "making money" (obviously not) off the guide fee. It only leads to people getting pissed off for being charged for 3+ guides (TiVo, DirecTV, Digital Cable etc.) They might as well give you the player for free and charge $50/mo for the TiVo logo.
It seems they could have a much more lucrative business if they built an entire accessory line around the base device. They should take at serious look at the game console market if they want to know how to make more money after selling the basic box. It's all in the expansion, stupid.
- Put in 1394 ports and sell external expansion hard drives that every moron can install w/o a kernel recompile. Sell a purple TiVo-branded 30GB 1394 HD for $200 or so, and you would actually make money off hardware. Don't limit the number of drives, and you'd be surprised how many drives you'd find in some homes.
I would bet that just offering external storage expansion alone would seriously improve their bottom line. They could easily co-brand an ADS 1394 enclosure, throw in a cheap 30GB HD--all for $60 to them, while selling it for $200 or $250.
- Add an Ethernet port and sell PC (and Mac) software that lets you manage the TiVo over the network: provide a more powerful (and quicker) version of the on-screen menus, save shows to PC for possible burning to CD/DVD, watch streaming video on multiple PCs from the TiVo etc. IOW, sell all the stuff hackers are working on anyway, while actually making money off it.
- Sell a purple TiVo-branded broadband router as a "broadband adapter" or under some other such Joe-Blow-appealing label. Take the opportunity that you're actually providing a killer app for home networking to become a major force in home networking. Become a pioneer in phoneline, powerline and wireless networking appliances.
- Otherwise expand the digital entertainment management idea that the TiVo introduced.
Instead, they're resting on their original laurels with nary any innovation since (save the DirecTiVo, if that's innovation). TiVo could have worked hard and become THE digital media company, but they pretty much paused their vision along with live TV. They remind me a lot of Palm.
What the heck's wafting through the ether around here? Moderations are getting ludicrous. While you might not value this guy's opinion, he hardly linked to goatsex or anything. Some other posts in this thread also got modded Offtopic and Flamebait while being perfectly servicable posts.
Languages are pluggable and use the same forms designer and property editor. Haven't used it much though, I'll have to see how overall usability of the IDE is in the long term.
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Re:The real reason the Euro is BAD NEWS
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
> Why do you all want us so badly? Is your twaddle that hot?
Well, yes it is, but that's another story. The question is, who exactly is forcing the UK to do anything they don't want to? Who sued the inch-measuring and pound-weighing shop keeper(s)? It sure wasn't Hans Krautburger from Frankfurt, it was the Brits themselves. I'm afraid you're your own worst enemy.
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The really amazing thing:
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
most noise and fanfare about the Big-Brother-EU comes from citizens of the leading Big Brother state in the world, the country that brought you the total video surveillance society, America's salesman of Echelon to Europe, in fact the country that introduced the very notion of Big Brother to the world: the UK.
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Re:The real reason the Euro is BAD NEWS
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
My German twaddle to your jingoistic British Empire wet dream anyday, AC!
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Re:The real reason the Euro is BAD NEWS
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
Well, maybe they should stick to hardware reviews, instead of quoting figures published by a communist government as hard facts. That "article" was about as substantial as a mid-summer night's dream. Go check the CIA figures, or The Economist or some other more credible source, where the employee's day job is actually in a relevant field.
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Re:The real reason the Euro is BAD NEWS
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
> Last time I looked
Again, cereal boxes don't count.
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Re:Picture of bills with US bill
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
> I think the primary motivation behind the colors of the euro notes is helping vision
> impaired people recognise them.
Following the successful introduction of the RFID, we now bring you--the talking Euro bill. Gently rub the bill and it will speak its value.
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Re:Picture of bills with US bill
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
> Seriously, why didn't they do the 2 side thing for the bills like they did for the coins?
Well, perhaps they were afraid that the French would put nudie pictures and such on their bills, raising the ire (amongst other things) of more staid nations.
Slashdot Mirror
> BTW: the USPS does a tremendous job for the amount they charge for the postage.
Yeah, well, you get about what you pay for. Reliable mail service is largely an oxymoron in the US. I guess statistics alone might still weigh in its favor, but if I have anything that needs to get anywhere with any level of urgency and/or reliability, I will use FedEx over the USPS anyday. I don't know if that's still true nowadays, but when I used to use Deutsche Post in the '80s, their level of expediency and reliability was much more comparable to FedEx than the USPS. I guess service has its price.
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That was humor, guv!
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Borland is--and has been for quite a while--a very well-balanced company: R&D is a motley crew of rebels and visionaries, while Marketing and PR are chosen from the Dark Side. Of course, Anders turned out to be Darth, but that's another story.
-
> before someone else does and calls me a "lamer" or something...
Actually, I was going to call it a Freudian slip.
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> I lived in Germany for years
Then you probably know that Germans themselves are more cynical and pessimistic about Germany than most other Europeans.
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> Why are you being so defensive?
Knee-jerk reaction, because your original statement is most often pronounced in an accusatory context. Sorry if you didn't mean it that way. In any case, I wasn't so much being defensinve as just trying to point out that Germany is far from running the show. There are a few things it has pushed hard (along with France), such as the Euro, and a certain softening of national overtones in general. But in terms of getting its way whenever it wants, that's not even close to being the case.
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> the Germans are mostly running the show anyway.
How so? The ECB might be in Germany, but few of the highest EU positions of power are occupied by Germans. If you mean just by the sheer size of their population and economy, well, that's hardly their fault, is it? Although they're sure trying hard to kill their economy at the moment.
-
> I would rather see a way to network multiple TiVos and have them seemlessly act as one big TiVo.
I was thinking about that, too. They should be able to discover each other on the (100Mb please!) network and integrate their saved shows into one large collection. One of them should be designated the master unit, that's the one you connect to the TV and control with the remote, the others simply act as auxiliary tuners and extra storage to the master. They could even implement some kind of scheduling mechanism where the master unit automatically finds a free unit to record a particular show.
I guess the programmer in us is running away with this, fat chance of seeing something like this anytime soon.
-
> Since you can get close to 11Mbps from 802.11b
Nope. It's half duplex to begin with, plus there are all kinds of other overheads. The effective throughput tends to be around 3-5 Mbps in most setups, and quite often less.
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If you have both a stand alone and a DirecTiVo, do you pay two TiVo fees, or just one? I have a SA right now, but am considering getting one of those cheap Hughes DirecTiVos. I searched deja for an hour once, but couldn't find clear answers on this. I realize I have to pay DirecTV the second-tuner tax, but what about TiVo?
-
I just read their entire website (must have taken them an afternoon to create), that sounds awesome. Very light on details, and in fact maybe too much at once in an initial device to get it all right the first time. Plus, let's see what their idea of "surprisingly affordable" is. And I'm definitely curious how the three other TVs interact with the media center--presumably via slave media boxes I'd say. But I really do like the look of the one screenshot they provide, very uncluttered and to-the-point (until Comcast gets to insert their ads all over it, I'm sure).
-
> By being the company that offers super-easy and flexible upgrade options, it allows Joe Sixpack
/.ers probably would), and providing it all in one unit would make the price of entry way too expensive. That's the problem with some of these new media boxes cropping up, such as the HP or Compaq (haven't checked out the price of the Moxi yet): at $1000+ they're WAY too expensive as a single-unit purchase. People are much more likely to spend $1000 in increments (upgrading or adding to a device) over several months or years, than to walk into Best Buy and plonk down 1000 smackers without blinking. Besides, from a seller's point of view, there's more money in unbundling than bundling.
> to buy a low-end model now with the assurance that when he's totally hooked on the Tivo
> experience, he can easily turn the 30hour unit into a 120hour unit...
Exactly. The thing is, most people probably wouldn't be interested in all the possible options (though most
-
> But can you hear the RIAA and Co...?
That's the major caveat with some of my recommentations at the moment. Yet it is something that I think will eventually be solved one way or another--maybe through a sensible extension of fair-use laws into the 21st century, who knows. Or maybe some large manufacturers banding together against the content owners, such as Philips and others. Or maybe some large conglomerates like Sony that have their fingers both in the electronics and the content pies, being torn between losing potential revenue from one or the other, will come up with some fair use ideas that will compromise between the two camps. I really don't know, but I know that people will get more and more pissed at having all these new unfulfilled possibilities with digital media, all because of artificial restrictions.
-
> I know the critics would scream about piracy, but I want to be able to burn a show onto a DVD
Excactly, that's what the consumer wants, and frankly, it's the most natural extension of the base idea one can think of. I believe sooner or later this moronic phobia of piracy will have to subside one way or another, because it clearly does not serve the consumer. Not being able to do anymore something that we've done for well over a decade (tape shows on TV for later watching or showing to friends)--just because we're moving to a new medium--doesn't make any sense and doesn't sit well with consumers. People expect more choices from new technology, not less. It's the old saying all over again: just because we can (exert more control) doesn't mean we should.
-
> Seems to me that Tivo needs to take a page from SonicBlue's playbook
How about photocopy the whole damn book? Their whole business model sucks, "giving away" the player and "making money" (obviously not) off the guide fee. It only leads to people getting pissed off for being charged for 3+ guides (TiVo, DirecTV, Digital Cable etc.) They might as well give you the player for free and charge $50/mo for the TiVo logo.
It seems they could have a much more lucrative business if they built an entire accessory line around the base device. They should take at serious look at the game console market if they want to know how to make more money after selling the basic box. It's all in the expansion, stupid.
- Put in 1394 ports and sell external expansion hard drives that every moron can install w/o a kernel recompile. Sell a purple TiVo-branded 30GB 1394 HD for $200 or so, and you would actually make money off hardware. Don't limit the number of drives, and you'd be surprised how many drives you'd find in some homes.
I would bet that just offering external storage expansion alone would seriously improve their bottom line. They could easily co-brand an ADS 1394 enclosure, throw in a cheap 30GB HD--all for $60 to them, while selling it for $200 or $250.
- Add an Ethernet port and sell PC (and Mac) software that lets you manage the TiVo over the network: provide a more powerful (and quicker) version of the on-screen menus, save shows to PC for possible burning to CD/DVD, watch streaming video on multiple PCs from the TiVo etc. IOW, sell all the stuff hackers are working on anyway, while actually making money off it.
- Sell a purple TiVo-branded broadband router as a "broadband adapter" or under some other such Joe-Blow-appealing label. Take the opportunity that you're actually providing a killer app for home networking to become a major force in home networking. Become a pioneer in phoneline, powerline and wireless networking appliances.
- Otherwise expand the digital entertainment management idea that the TiVo introduced.
Instead, they're resting on their original laurels with nary any innovation since (save the DirecTiVo, if that's innovation). TiVo could have worked hard and become THE digital media company, but they pretty much paused their vision along with live TV. They remind me a lot of Palm.
-
What the heck's wafting through the ether around here? Moderations are getting ludicrous. While you might not value this guy's opinion, he hardly linked to goatsex or anything. Some other posts in this thread also got modded Offtopic and Flamebait while being perfectly servicable posts.
-
in There's Something About Mary. These guys will be in great shape until someone claims 200:1 compression. Then it's back to the claims drawing board.
-
Languages are pluggable and use the same forms designer and property editor. Haven't used it much though, I'll have to see how overall usability of the IDE is in the long term.
-
> Why do you all want us so badly? Is your twaddle that hot?
Well, yes it is, but that's another story. The question is, who exactly is forcing the UK to do anything they don't want to? Who sued the inch-measuring and pound-weighing shop keeper(s)? It sure wasn't Hans Krautburger from Frankfurt, it was the Brits themselves. I'm afraid you're your own worst enemy.
-
most noise and fanfare about the Big-Brother-EU comes from citizens of the leading Big Brother state in the world, the country that brought you the total video surveillance society, America's salesman of Echelon to Europe, in fact the country that introduced the very notion of Big Brother to the world: the UK.
-
My German twaddle to your jingoistic British Empire wet dream anyday, AC!
-
Well, maybe they should stick to hardware reviews, instead of quoting figures published by a communist government as hard facts. That "article" was about as substantial as a mid-summer night's dream. Go check the CIA figures, or The Economist or some other more credible source, where the employee's day job is actually in a relevant field.
-
> Last time I looked
Again, cereal boxes don't count.
-
> I think the primary motivation behind the colors of the euro notes is helping vision
> impaired people recognise them.
Following the successful introduction of the RFID, we now bring you--the talking Euro bill. Gently rub the bill and it will speak its value.
-
> Seriously, why didn't they do the 2 side thing for the bills like they did for the coins?
Well, perhaps they were afraid that the French would put nudie pictures and such on their bills, raising the ire (amongst other things) of more staid nations.
-