Re:day of idiotic faux tech news...
on
TiVo Will Die
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The author goes into great detail about how smart the cable company offerings are and digital-to-analog arugments without even mentioning the fact that the majority of cable television subscribers are analog customers.
This is rapidly changing. Here in Southern California, ALL of the cable companies are offering a dominately digital service for under $40, and a rapidly uptaking channels from their analog system into their digital one. My local cable company, for example, offers a digital tier that is exactly the same price as the 51-channel "analog" service. You cannot even find the analog service in their promotion: if you were to call and order "cable", you'd get a digital-tier package with digital set-top boxes.
His point is valid, and his point is that TiVo is reacting slowly to market force changes. Here in SoCal, Adelphia and Time-Warner have been aggessively marketing their digital tier packages, and Time Warner has been adding the 1-2 punch of their sub-$10 PVR service and programming on demand. Why would I buy a TiVo now if I could get a PVR from my cable company for less than TiVo's monthly service?
Plus, Time Warner offers a service that TiVo dosen't: programming on demand. At the moment, the offerings are trim, but on their premium digital tier you can get popular programming ON DEMAND. If I hear from a friend that tonight's CSI episode was really cool, and I don't typically watch CSI, I can still get it via Time-Warner's programming on demand service after the fact.
That is exactly his point. The CONVERGENCE of cable set-top box, broadband digital cable, and PVR is going to be what kills TiVo. TiVo was an awesome first-generation product.. but the next-generation PVR will likely just be local storage of streamed content via broadband cable. And, since TiVo's arrogance locked them out of the cable market, they'll forever now be behind.
The author also failed to mention that the chairman of TiVo also sits on the board of directors at NetFlix. Imagine the possibilities there.
Sure, that's great. But, where I live, my cable company is Time-Warner. My local cable company dosen't just share a single board member with a large media producer: they are part of the same company. That has real possibility: they own the pipe, they own a piece of the content on the pipe, and they own one of the production companies producing the content on the pipe. Netflix is a red herring: who needs to ship out discs to your customers when you have a nice fat pipe between you and them that you control? Netflix is also increasingly getting competition, and it will be interesting to see five years from now where they stand, especially with Wal-Mart getting in the "mailing discs rental" business.
Again, it's about CONVERGENCE. Whoever has the most bits of the pie will likely be the winner. And, at the moment, the cable companies have the most bits, with the Dishers a close second. That makes it look like DIRECTV would be TiVo's saving grace, but as he pointed out, that's unlikely given their corporate style.
This dosen't even touch upon regulatory issues, like HDTV's "broadcast" flag, and the recent FCC proposal that may result in VHF TV disappearing from many markets in 2006.
It'll be fun to watch, but I will be surprised if TiVo is a big player in a few years.
Methinks you may be missing the point of the Jobs-run Apple.
Apple's positioning is that they have no rivals. They do not sell commodity PCs, they do not sell just any old computer.. they sell Macintoshes. They are betting the bank (on both sides: in the marketplace and on Wall Street) that enough people will "get it" to make everybody money.
This is no different than Disney's classical positioning. Walt Disney Company didn't set out to be the biggest, baddest movie studio.. they wanted to be the ONLY company producing vertically-integrated family entertainment. And, while Vivendi/Universal is catching up, Disney still has a lot of mindshare, and it's the name that pops into your head when you think of "family entertainment".
For me, as an AAPL shareholder, I can just say that I invested in Apple not because I was looking to make a quick buck, but because I believed in the company and the products they produced, and that belief would result in a safe place to stash a few thousand dollars for the long term. I know that's a lot different than the "day-trader" model, but perhaps that's what Apple is betting the bank on.
There's no punishment for them if they don't realize that its stolen property..
This is exactly why many cities (like my hometown of Orange, CA) require pawn shops to file reports with serial numbers and such of stuff they buy. Now, I'm not sure the police actually _DO_ anything with the information, but...
Re:Negifeatures && planned obsolecense
on
KISS
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· Score: 1
I don't know why people seem to have this impression that color screen phones automatically have less battery life.
I recently purchased a Nokia with a color display, and it has longer battery life than my old Nokia with a B&W screen. It is perfectly viewable in direct sunlight, and I recently left it out in the rain overnight and it survived just fine. The white LED backlighting works a gazillion times better than the old green LEDs, the phone looks nice, and it has clearer audio than the old Nokia I had (on the same network: AT&T's GSM network).
Creeping featurism is a problem in phones: but let's not look at all the new features as "bad". I, for one, like playing Bejeweled on my cell phone.
For the same reason that people live in 100-year-old houses, use 20-year-old toasters, and ten-year-old refrigerators.
Because they continue to do the job that they were originally purchased for. Yes, they are not without problems, but when the problems are minor (or are just plain annoying) it is difficult for your average consumer to justify spending $500+ on a new computer.. not to mention the inconvenience of having to move everything from the old machine to the new one.
Heck, I'll even admit that I have an old Win98SE box sitting around here. Never got around to updating it to Win2k. It gets about 10 hours a month of use, so it hasn't been a high priority.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. -- Fourth Amendment, Constitution of the United States
You should look at what "probable cause" used to mean, legally, in the United States. Tapping phones because they "suspect" somebody might be dealing drugs or be a terrorist is a long way from "probable cause." If you have "probable cause", you can (and should be able to) arrest somebody.
Nowadays, you don't even have to have "suspicion" that an individual can be involved. You can just tap all phones within x square yards of where drugs are being sold, and you can get a blanket warrant from a judge for everybody's phone.
Sounds pretty far away from what Jefferson et. al. had in mind when they penned those words.
Oh, and also, the Tenth comes to mind here.. nowhere in the Constitution is the Federal Government granted the right to tap telephones, therefore they don't have it. But that's another issue entirely.
Maybe the reason people who drink 6 cups of coffee have a lower T2 Diabetes risk is because after having that much freaking caffiene they can't hold still.
Seriously. 6 cups? Some people I know would have to run the Los Angeles Marathon to work off those jitters.
With a small thin $100 battery, I get almost 10-12 hours of battery life out of my Powerbook G4. The lack of AC isn't going to keep me from camping out...
But, hats off to yet another group of intrepred geeks. San Francisco has been a hotbed of free WiFi service for quite some time, be it organized efforts like the aformentioned SFlan or ad-hockery created by people setting up intentionally open WiFi nodes in their homes and businesses.
When I lived in SF, I got in a heated debate with a guy named Scott regarding whether all of this 802.11 ad-hockery was stealing from the phone company. He was largely a troll, never really arguing any points directly and shifting focus: but you can see the results at my website. He's even come back way after the fact and submitted comments in my comment section.
The reason I bring up this discussion is because I think Scott's misconceptions about what people are doing with 802.11 open access points brings up a serious issue. Read what he has to say: and read between the lines for the greater position that he stands behind. It's a scary thought to consider that people believe that the phone companies have a right to make money, regardless of how badly they mishandle their markets.
Highly doubtful. The previous tenant was a barber shop, who had no phone. Hence, why there was no phone wiring.
But, methinks you missed the point. Carpet and painted walls are usually part of the office: in our case, the building management paid for new flooring and a fresh coat of paint. They balked, however, at paying a measly $400 for the 50-pair of Plenum cable we installed.
Yes, it's spiteful. It's even more petty that the building management couldn't pony up a couple of hundred bucks, though, to pay for the infrastructure we built for them.
They mentioned one of the reasons in the article: concern that a competitor might be able to use the infrastructure.
Unfortunately, building managers are usually part of the problem. Take this example of a startup I dealt with. We moved into a basement suite of a large office building in the center of town. The building management knew what our business was, knew we were likely to need telephone lines. But when we finally moved in, guess what? There was no cabling from our suite to the phone room. We had to install about 250 feet of plenum-rated phone wiring.
Now, here's the problem. So, time comes for us to move to larger facilities. We were going to sell the cable as scrap. We ask for access to the common areas so we can retrieve the cable. Guess what? Building management now considers the cable "theirs" and won't provide us access to the phone room to remove it.
What did we do? Sawed it off at the entrance to our suite. Why? Because the building management wouldn't either compensate us for the price of installing the cable nor allow us to remove it. We paid for it, it's not theirs, so.. get out the hacksaw.
Unfortunately, this is far more common than you'd believe. Building managers often look at high-tech companies as a cheap way to "update infrastructure" in older buildings without paying for it. In our case, the entire building, as a result of a lot of dot.com activity, now has fiber between floors, CAT-5 throughout, multiple electrical entries, etc. Who paid for all these upgrades? Not the building, that's for sure.
Will somebody please who has GPLed code that is not in the kernel, but commonly found in Linux distributions send their ISP a DMCA takedown notice? Please?
Wow, this sounds soooo familiar. A "minority hardware" platform that provided PC compatibility by installing a card that had an x86 processor, and provided access to machine resources through virtualized hardware.
Wouldn't it be even better if this "minority hardware" computer ran a really thin operating system that was tweaked towards graphics performance and pre-emptive multitasking, and included a bus architecture that looks a lot like an early version of PCI? Then, we can rest on our laurels and do no R&D, and hire a bunch of crooked management to steer our company right in to the ol' crapper.
Nope. Can't imagine where I've seen this scenario before.
It was, actually, ironic. And hypocritical.
Definition two of irony from the American Heritage Dictionary:
Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs..
I find their assertion that they have filters that subscribers cannot turn off that are likely blocking legitimate E-Mail as incongruous with their assertions they are putting forth in the lawsuit: that another company cannot choose to do the same to them.
Oh, I forgot. You're on slashdot, so you probably didn't actually read the story..
"C I Host is very aggressive about attacking the spam issue," Faulkner said. "C I Host does not spam, and we don't tolerate spamming by our clients," said Faulkner. "In fact, we were one of the first Web hosting companies to install spam filters that our clients cannot turn off. This week alone our spam filters blocked over 16 million spam e-mails.
Am I the only one that finds this ironic? It's not okay for AOL to filter spam, but it's okay for us to. Uh huh.
Oddly enough, this exact perception is part of the problems Amateur Radio is having.
Are you aware that hams have access to spectrum everywhere in the spectrum? That many hams (like myself) regularly experiment on 1.2GHz (which is HIGHER than the main US cellular band of 800MHz) and even higher (I used to work on 10GHz years ago)?
Yep, didn't think so.
One of the few exciting things going on RIGHT NOW in the amateur community is D-STAR, a 1.2GHz digital radio system that promises not only neato "trunked radio" style features, but 128kb/s data as well.
Not every ham, fortunately, is a rag-chewing old man with a 2kW transmitter and a Morse fetish. Sadly, this is the public image of Amateur Radio, and it needs to change. This is exactly what Phil was talking about, and why the youth seems highly disinterested in ham radio as a hobby.
Even by those in the radio business, amateur radio looks like it's outlived its original purpose and scope. That's what Phil is talking about, and that's the danger ham radio faces as our numbers continue to dwindle down.
Whoever moderated this as a "Troll" really needs to get over themselves. Phil is a long-time ham, and one of the people instrumental in bringing TCP/IP to amateur packet radio, and he knows what he's talking about.
Amateur Radio has become largely a world of applicance operators and old men. There is little going on in amateur radio that wasn't going on when I first got my license in 1991. There are a few new technologies (like the previously mentioned ICOM digital 1.2GHz radio system), but these will only serve to create more appliance operators.
At one time, Amateur Radio was on the cutting edge. Phil's own KA9Q TCP/IP package stands as an example of that. But, where's the innovation now? The D-STAR digital radio system isn't anything "innovative." There has been digital two-way radio for ten years now.. many public safety systems in urban areas use similar technology. 128kbps mobile data? Big Fat Hairy Deal, Ricochet did that five years ago.
Amateur radio needs to regain it's relevance as a technological training ground. I'm not sure how to make this happen myself, but I know that this kind of patting-ourselves-on-the-back is not totally getting the job done.
The reason why "SEE ID" is a bad idea is that now you've made it EASIER for somebody to use your credit cards fraudulently.
See, real identity criminals can often obtain fake IDs. So, now they don't even have to TRY to forge your signature.. they just have to get a fake ID with the same scrawl.
Slashdot Mirror
The author goes into great detail about how smart the cable company offerings are and digital-to-analog arugments without even mentioning the fact that the majority of cable television subscribers are analog customers.
This is rapidly changing. Here in Southern California, ALL of the cable companies are offering a dominately digital service for under $40, and a rapidly uptaking channels from their analog system into their digital one. My local cable company, for example, offers a digital tier that is exactly the same price as the 51-channel "analog" service. You cannot even find the analog service in their promotion: if you were to call and order "cable", you'd get a digital-tier package with digital set-top boxes.
His point is valid, and his point is that TiVo is reacting slowly to market force changes. Here in SoCal, Adelphia and Time-Warner have been aggessively marketing their digital tier packages, and Time Warner has been adding the 1-2 punch of their sub-$10 PVR service and programming on demand. Why would I buy a TiVo now if I could get a PVR from my cable company for less than TiVo's monthly service?
Plus, Time Warner offers a service that TiVo dosen't: programming on demand. At the moment, the offerings are trim, but on their premium digital tier you can get popular programming ON DEMAND. If I hear from a friend that tonight's CSI episode was really cool, and I don't typically watch CSI, I can still get it via Time-Warner's programming on demand service after the fact.
That is exactly his point. The CONVERGENCE of cable set-top box, broadband digital cable, and PVR is going to be what kills TiVo. TiVo was an awesome first-generation product.. but the next-generation PVR will likely just be local storage of streamed content via broadband cable. And, since TiVo's arrogance locked them out of the cable market, they'll forever now be behind.
The author also failed to mention that the chairman of TiVo also sits on the board of directors at NetFlix. Imagine the possibilities there.
Sure, that's great. But, where I live, my cable company is Time-Warner. My local cable company dosen't just share a single board member with a large media producer: they are part of the same company. That has real possibility: they own the pipe, they own a piece of the content on the pipe, and they own one of the production companies producing the content on the pipe. Netflix is a red herring: who needs to ship out discs to your customers when you have a nice fat pipe between you and them that you control? Netflix is also increasingly getting competition, and it will be interesting to see five years from now where they stand, especially with Wal-Mart getting in the "mailing discs rental" business.
Again, it's about CONVERGENCE. Whoever has the most bits of the pie will likely be the winner. And, at the moment, the cable companies have the most bits, with the Dishers a close second. That makes it look like DIRECTV would be TiVo's saving grace, but as he pointed out, that's unlikely given their corporate style.
This dosen't even touch upon regulatory issues, like HDTV's "broadcast" flag, and the recent FCC proposal that may result in VHF TV disappearing from many markets in 2006.
It'll be fun to watch, but I will be surprised if TiVo is a big player in a few years.
Methinks you may be missing the point of the Jobs-run Apple.
Apple's positioning is that they have no rivals. They do not sell commodity PCs, they do not sell just any old computer.. they sell Macintoshes. They are betting the bank (on both sides: in the marketplace and on Wall Street) that enough people will "get it" to make everybody money.
This is no different than Disney's classical positioning. Walt Disney Company didn't set out to be the biggest, baddest movie studio.. they wanted to be the ONLY company producing vertically-integrated family entertainment. And, while Vivendi/Universal is catching up, Disney still has a lot of mindshare, and it's the name that pops into your head when you think of "family entertainment".
For me, as an AAPL shareholder, I can just say that I invested in Apple not because I was looking to make a quick buck, but because I believed in the company and the products they produced, and that belief would result in a safe place to stash a few thousand dollars for the long term. I know that's a lot different than the "day-trader" model, but perhaps that's what Apple is betting the bank on.
There's no punishment for them if they don't realize that its stolen property..
This is exactly why many cities (like my hometown of Orange, CA) require pawn shops to file reports with serial numbers and such of stuff they buy. Now, I'm not sure the police actually _DO_ anything with the information, but...
I don't know why people seem to have this impression that color screen phones automatically have less battery life.
I recently purchased a Nokia with a color display, and it has longer battery life than my old Nokia with a B&W screen. It is perfectly viewable in direct sunlight, and I recently left it out in the rain overnight and it survived just fine. The white LED backlighting works a gazillion times better than the old green LEDs, the phone looks nice, and it has clearer audio than the old Nokia I had (on the same network: AT&T's GSM network).
Creeping featurism is a problem in phones: but let's not look at all the new features as "bad". I, for one, like playing Bejeweled on my cell phone.
For the same reason that people live in 100-year-old houses, use 20-year-old toasters, and ten-year-old refrigerators.
Because they continue to do the job that they were originally purchased for. Yes, they are not without problems, but when the problems are minor (or are just plain annoying) it is difficult for your average consumer to justify spending $500+ on a new computer.. not to mention the inconvenience of having to move everything from the old machine to the new one.
Heck, I'll even admit that I have an old Win98SE box sitting around here. Never got around to updating it to Win2k. It gets about 10 hours a month of use, so it hasn't been a high priority.
And shame shame on whoever modded this up.
Hmm.. where have I heard this before?
Oh yeah.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. -- Fourth Amendment, Constitution of the United States
You should look at what "probable cause" used to mean, legally, in the United States. Tapping phones because they "suspect" somebody might be dealing drugs or be a terrorist is a long way from "probable cause." If you have "probable cause", you can (and should be able to) arrest somebody.
Nowadays, you don't even have to have "suspicion" that an individual can be involved. You can just tap all phones within x square yards of where drugs are being sold, and you can get a blanket warrant from a judge for everybody's phone.
Sounds pretty far away from what Jefferson et. al. had in mind when they penned those words.
Oh, and also, the Tenth comes to mind here.. nowhere in the Constitution is the Federal Government granted the right to tap telephones, therefore they don't have it. But that's another issue entirely.
Maybe the reason people who drink 6 cups of coffee have a lower T2 Diabetes risk is because after having that much freaking caffiene they can't hold still.
Seriously. 6 cups? Some people I know would have to run the Los Angeles Marathon to work off those jitters.
With a small thin $100 battery, I get almost 10-12 hours of battery life out of my Powerbook G4. The lack of AC isn't going to keep me from camping out...
..and is twice as thick and weighs twice as much.
Don't get me wrong: I have an Archos Jukebox 15. But I also own an iPod: they both have their tradeoffs.
There have been. A couple of times. The record industry has lost them. The result? A slap on the wrist, and no real change.
Sounds kinda familiar, dosen't it?
But, hats off to yet another group of intrepred geeks. San Francisco has been a hotbed of free WiFi service for quite some time, be it organized efforts like the aformentioned SFlan or ad-hockery created by people setting up intentionally open WiFi nodes in their homes and businesses.
When I lived in SF, I got in a heated debate with a guy named Scott regarding whether all of this 802.11 ad-hockery was stealing from the phone company. He was largely a troll, never really arguing any points directly and shifting focus: but you can see the results at my website. He's even come back way after the fact and submitted comments in my comment section.
The reason I bring up this discussion is because I think Scott's misconceptions about what people are doing with 802.11 open access points brings up a serious issue. Read what he has to say: and read between the lines for the greater position that he stands behind. It's a scary thought to consider that people believe that the phone companies have a right to make money, regardless of how badly they mishandle their markets.
Highly doubtful. The previous tenant was a barber shop, who had no phone. Hence, why there was no phone wiring.
But, methinks you missed the point. Carpet and painted walls are usually part of the office: in our case, the building management paid for new flooring and a fresh coat of paint. They balked, however, at paying a measly $400 for the 50-pair of Plenum cable we installed.
Yes, it's spiteful. It's even more petty that the building management couldn't pony up a couple of hundred bucks, though, to pay for the infrastructure we built for them.
They mentioned one of the reasons in the article: concern that a competitor might be able to use the infrastructure.
Unfortunately, building managers are usually part of the problem. Take this example of a startup I dealt with. We moved into a basement suite of a large office building in the center of town. The building management knew what our business was, knew we were likely to need telephone lines. But when we finally moved in, guess what? There was no cabling from our suite to the phone room. We had to install about 250 feet of plenum-rated phone wiring.
Now, here's the problem. So, time comes for us to move to larger facilities. We were going to sell the cable as scrap. We ask for access to the common areas so we can retrieve the cable. Guess what? Building management now considers the cable "theirs" and won't provide us access to the phone room to remove it.
What did we do? Sawed it off at the entrance to our suite. Why? Because the building management wouldn't either compensate us for the price of installing the cable nor allow us to remove it. We paid for it, it's not theirs, so.. get out the hacksaw.
Unfortunately, this is far more common than you'd believe. Building managers often look at high-tech companies as a cheap way to "update infrastructure" in older buildings without paying for it. In our case, the entire building, as a result of a lot of dot.com activity, now has fiber between floors, CAT-5 throughout, multiple electrical entries, etc. Who paid for all these upgrades? Not the building, that's for sure.
Why emulate an x86 machine on a mac and then run Windows? Why not run native Mac OS X versions of Office and other software?
Duh.
Will somebody please who has GPLed code that is not in the kernel, but commonly found in Linux distributions send their ISP a DMCA takedown notice? Please?
Wouldn't it be even better if this "minority hardware" computer ran a really thin operating system that was tweaked towards graphics performance and pre-emptive multitasking, and included a bus architecture that looks a lot like an early version of PCI? Then, we can rest on our laurels and do no R&D, and hire a bunch of crooked management to steer our company right in to the ol' crapper.
Nope. Can't imagine where I've seen this scenario before.
"But I'm not bitter."
Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs..
I find their assertion that they have filters that subscribers cannot turn off that are likely blocking legitimate E-Mail as incongruous with their assertions they are putting forth in the lawsuit: that another company cannot choose to do the same to them.
Oh, I forgot. You're on slashdot, so you probably didn't actually read the story..
Am I the only one that finds this ironic? It's not okay for AOL to filter spam, but it's okay for us to. Uh huh.
Oddly enough, this exact perception is part of the problems Amateur Radio is having.
Are you aware that hams have access to spectrum everywhere in the spectrum? That many hams (like myself) regularly experiment on 1.2GHz (which is HIGHER than the main US cellular band of 800MHz) and even higher (I used to work on 10GHz years ago)?
Yep, didn't think so.
One of the few exciting things going on RIGHT NOW in the amateur community is D-STAR, a 1.2GHz digital radio system that promises not only neato "trunked radio" style features, but 128kb/s data as well.
Not every ham, fortunately, is a rag-chewing old man with a 2kW transmitter and a Morse fetish. Sadly, this is the public image of Amateur Radio, and it needs to change. This is exactly what Phil was talking about, and why the youth seems highly disinterested in ham radio as a hobby.
Even by those in the radio business, amateur radio looks like it's outlived its original purpose and scope. That's what Phil is talking about, and that's the danger ham radio faces as our numbers continue to dwindle down.
Whoever moderated this as a "Troll" really needs to get over themselves. Phil is a long-time ham, and one of the people instrumental in bringing TCP/IP to amateur packet radio, and he knows what he's talking about.
Amateur Radio has become largely a world of applicance operators and old men. There is little going on in amateur radio that wasn't going on when I first got my license in 1991. There are a few new technologies (like the previously mentioned ICOM digital 1.2GHz radio system), but these will only serve to create more appliance operators.
At one time, Amateur Radio was on the cutting edge. Phil's own KA9Q TCP/IP package stands as an example of that. But, where's the innovation now? The D-STAR digital radio system isn't anything "innovative." There has been digital two-way radio for ten years now.. many public safety systems in urban areas use similar technology. 128kbps mobile data? Big Fat Hairy Deal, Ricochet did that five years ago.
Amateur radio needs to regain it's relevance as a technological training ground. I'm not sure how to make this happen myself, but I know that this kind of patting-ourselves-on-the-back is not totally getting the job done.
Chris KD6COS
Laptop + Lamination machine = Fake ID. Takes 30 seconds. Sounds pretty easy to me.
The reason why "SEE ID" is a bad idea is that now you've made it EASIER for somebody to use your credit cards fraudulently.
See, real identity criminals can often obtain fake IDs. So, now they don't even have to TRY to forge your signature.. they just have to get a fake ID with the same scrawl.
In most states, the decisions of the Small Claims Court is not binding on the court, nor can it be used to establish precidence.
In other words, just because you got a judge to go one way in your case dosen't mean that the same judge can't decide later differently.
I'd probably just shrug my shoulders and walk away. Do nothing. Three weeks later, your CTO is likely to not even remember this was an issue.
If you're really concerned for your job, install Free/Net/OpenBSD.