I keep waiting for these to show up at reasonable prices for *any* system, but I actually suspected that Apple would include it in their systems. With standalone DVD recorders sporting this technology selling for $300, I can't imagine that the chipsets are all that expensive.
I have a P43.2c system at home, and even single pass MPEG2 encoding for DVD (TMPGEnc 3.0 Xpress) runs at maybe 125% of real time. Multiple pass encoding runs at 200% of real time or worse.
What's the big obstacle to a decent MPEG2 encoder chip that can do single pass encoding at 50% of RT or 25% of RT? Admittedly you hit some ceilings on disk bandwidth trying to read DV-AVI files at 4x, but is it really that hard?
What about removing capabilities from IE to beef up security?
You think you'll get him to promise to cut off "capability"-dependent programs (and their programmers) at the knees?
Isn't it a legitimate request? One of the main problems people hammer on Windows and IE is that the product is too deep in the OS, making it nearly impossible to secure.
If you have a security failure that can't be fixed in a timely fashion without breaking the functionality, isn't it better to break the functionality instead of leaving the security broken?
So you were Amy's dad, right? How old was Amy? How pissed were you that Amy was (a) lying to you and (b) getting banged all the time by Carl?
Or did Amy just give you some BS story about how she was "still a virgin", and that she and Carl "wouldn't even sleep in the same bed, and besides, his mom said it was OK, and even so, if I want to make love to Carl I will, and you can't stop me"?
What'd Carl's parents have to say? Single mom, works the night shift? New agey parents, encourage sexual exploration? Dangerous "older" boyfriend, living in his own apartment, but happens to have a thing for young quiff?
Does she feel bad now for losing her innocense to some 2-minute teeny bopper who couldn't even find her magic button?
It sounds to me like a desktop version of the blade server phenomenon, albeit with somewhat higher density.
I'd like to see an architecture with a smart backplane that you could add CPU, network, disk or graphics I/O cards to and then arbitrarily bind the components together to make a given system, preferrably dynamically (ie, remove a CPU and IO member to create another system).
A system built around a VMWare-like system manager where everything ran in a virtualized environment would be cool too, but we'd need an architecture with fewer bottlenecks and the ability to dedicate hardware components like CPU/RAM to given VMs without having to timeslice them with other components as you would on a standard SMP systen, as well as direct/exclusive access to components like graphics cards.
RAID-0 takes advantage of the fact that the bus is faster (by several multiples) than the devices on the bus, so synchronized reads and writes to multiple devices can go faster than one single device on the bus.
A Gmail file system will likely max out the bus -- in the case, your internet connection -- long before you'd max out a connection-specific session to a Gmail server.
Who knows; perhaps there are waits associated with this or other things that would allow striping of data to be meaningful.
It's possible that marketers might want to know what kinds of things people store. Common file types, perhaps some way of annonymizing the data stored in the documents themselves (which has some pretty scary privacy issues).
Essentially what Google does for email, they could do for file storage.
When I called Penske earlier this summer to see if I could rent a moving van, I was presented with an automated menu where you just spoke in your choice, much like you would do with a person.
Ugh, those are the worst. The menu system interrupts you or keeps talking, since its voice-response system isn't as intelligent as a person's, plus they're not intelligent enough to have several logical permutations of the menu options.
Why can't they just make run of the mill CPUs at least dual-processor capable, and not force us to buy their upmarket SMP CPUs?
Was there ever a real technical reason behind this, or was it purely marketing? PII/PIII could go dual, but now it's Xeon land and way more expensive motherboards to boot. I don't remember dual P2/P3 motherboards being a whole lot more expensive than their single CPU counterparts.
I'd really like to see play counts for the songs of people who have 200 gigs of music. In addition to that I'd like to see how much they actually pay attention to the music they're listening to.
My guess is that they'd have an even, but low, playcount distribution over most of their collection; it's about 140 days of music played 24/7, presuming its done continuous play or with a decent randomizer.
My personal opinion is that people who do that don't really _listen_ to the music in the way I think about it; it's a background-type sound to them. They hear it, but don't say, follow the lyrics closely or hear particular solos. I'll occasionally put on Tangerine Dream for this kind of effect.
If I'm listening to something, it's because I'm paying attention to it -- lyrics, instrumentals, the whole ball of wax. I can't have music playing in the background if I'm doing something else; it distracts me because I like to pay attention to it (or I tune it out completely and just don't hear it all).
The other phenomena you're missing are the collectors/completists -- people who simply have to own every album by every artist they're ever exposed to. Part of the deal is simply *having* it all, and these people may never even listen to it all.
Myself, I have a 20GB iPod. It's about 3/4 full, I ripped my entire CD collection when I got it. I could easily delete 2/3s of it and not miss it -- much of it I never listen to, partly because I only listen to it when I'm walking for exercise, not in the car or elsewhere.
And I've actually had the converse problem -- too much choice and too many options. I'll start listening to something that reminds me of something else and I'll stop listening and switch to the new song, simply because I *can*. I finally sat down one day and made a huge playlist of individual songs I liked and I force myself to listen to that list in shuffle mode.
Banks supply merchant accounts for credit card processing. There may be some spammers (defined broadly to include the people selling stuff, not just bulk mailers) who take checks, cash, and money orders, but I'd wager not many.
Given the merchantability of many spam products (penis enlargement pills, cable descramblers, etc), there HAVE to be lots of complaints about these people's merchant accounts -- the bank likely MUST be running interference for them or at least playing willfull ignorance when opening new accounts.
Since when to banks have security and investigation departments to track down the source of deposits?
This is part of the broader issue that we all should have with banks involved in the credit card trade. Banks NEVER take a hit from credit card fraud -- they either make the consumer eat it or the merchant eat it, and with the pending bankruptcy laws changing, even their own sloppy lending practices are becoming free money.
That banks play dumb when it comes to fraud is neither surprising nor acceptable.
I bought a 2500A and agree with you about the dicey nature of flashing with DL firmware. I have flashed with an updated firmware that removes riplock with no problems so far.
I bought the drive for a new system because it was $79 or something about a month ago; I've been thinking of adding a second drive and with the 2510s now cheaper than what I paid for my 2500, I'll probably just buy the 2510 and just flash it with the no-riplock firmware.
Although I am kind of tempted to wait a bit and see if we'll get super cheap -R DL combo drives soon. Overall, the DL thing matters little right now -- the media is still $12 per, write speeds are relatively slow, and the quality of backups made with DVDShrink to 4.7GB media is really high anyway.
It's about time that law enforcement began to see spam for what it is -- not just an annoying bulk mailing operation, but part of a larger racketeering operation that's primarily focused on defrauding people.
I've long advocated RICO-style investigations (if not actual RICO prosecutions) of the entire world of spam. This doesn't just mean the bulk mailing operations, but the people behind the actual spamvertised businesses and their legitimate-world suppliers.
Broad-based prosecutions promising long prison time not only for spammers, and spam businesses but for people who knowingly make money off of spammers (banks, ISPs, list vendors, etc) will go a long way towards demotivating people in the legitimate business world from working with spammers/spam businesses.
Spammers and spam businesses need a certain cooperation and acceptance in the legitimate business world to make money. Without that, they'll be far less effective.
The French (and the most of the EU for that matter) didn't care about Iraqi citizens, Iraqi sovreignty, or any of the other high and mighty things they made issues about.
This was and is always about French economic influence in Iraq. The French have a fairly long history in Iraq, selling the Iraqis water systems, phone systems (and probably things they shouldn't have during the embargo). They would have preferred that the embargo get lifted, Elf-Aquataine could have come in and helped fix up the oil operations, Alcatel could have fixed the phones, and other French contracting concerns could have done the rest. They were happy to business with Saddam.
They knew that an American led invasion meant business for Texaco, MCI, and Haliburton first, with French concerns getting the crumbs.
Sure the story is better with higher quality; but once you've already told someone a story, are they likely to want to hear it again with slightly higher fidelity anytime in the next six months?
How many iterations of Lord of the Rings are there on DVD? The special, deluxe, special deluxe, deluxe special deluxe, special deluxe special...
And then there's the idea that many people purchase movies on DVD that they've seen in the theater, despite the fact that the version they saw in the theater is far higher quality than the one they bought.
I find American leftist (I hate to use liberal and confuse it with real, classical liberalism as taught in Poli Sci) distaste for firearms to be unusual and a historical abberation. As recently as the 1970s in the US, leftist groups consistently identified firearm ownership as critical to defense of their groups from right-wing opponents. The Black Panthers and the SLA all made use of firearms.
In the 70s, though, there was an increasing merging pacifism within the US left, and a likely desire to disassociate themselves of the more violent actions of groups like the SLA.
I think most of the anti-firearms aspects of current American leftism has as much to do with being "anti-conservative" as it does with being pacifist.
I'm unaware of any revolutionary or significant political movements that arose out of pacifism. Ghandhi is cited, but it's a gross oversimplification. I think Mao said it best -- political power grows out of a barrel of a gun.
They had a submarine with huge windows in "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea". It's a pretty dumb movie, but it would be really cool. Wouldn't you need major lights, though, to see anything? I'd guess that surface light is useless at about 100'.
That is not so surprising when you consider who runs the show.
It's not just Samaranch that's the problem. A lot of the members of the IOC are from countries where totalitarian decision making is the norm, so it's not surprising that the Olympics takes on a totalitarian flavor.
Add that in with corporate interests who think that fascist laws that enforce their monopolies are a good thing, and IOC members who think about graft first, sports last, and you get a pretty scary/accurate portrait of the world we live in now.
...are the video headphones/goggles. We've shrunk storage, bandwidth, and cpu to pocket size, but the darn screen either remains big to the point of sacrificing portability, or gets small, sacrificing quality and usability.
Where are we at with video goggles that let you jack into your phone/pda/ipod and see the video at a quality/size level that makes it worthwhile? This would revolutionize portable computing and enterainment.
Is it a question of technique or technology? Both?
As a general rule, technology, tools, and automobiles don't really interest chicks, unless they are conspicuous symbols of wealth, which clicks a biological imperative relating to the supportability of her and her offspring. Chicks do dig jewelry and clothes, but see above about the biological imperative.
Corporate deniability and local management amok?
on
Best Buy Sued By Ohio
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· Score: 1
There's been a lot of poop about Walmart's labor policies in the news over the past couple of years, and with the crap I've read about Best Buy I wonder if this is some kind of deliberate structuring to cause the stores to pursue a bunch of practices that are illegal, but that the corporate office can skate on.
Basically what this amounts to is setting really draconian sales quotas and expense ceilings that pretty much force any store managers to engage in all kinds of behavior that essentially "violates" company policy, but since they want to either keep their jobs or move up in the food chain they do them anyway.
Since 99% of the time they're able to get away with it, the manager wins and the company wins (and of course the customer loses). When something like this DOES happen, Best Buy corporate steps in and decries the violation of all its policies and procedures by bad local management. A fixer (someone who got in trouble at HQ, most likely) is sent down to have a bunch of meetings. A couple of managers get sacked, but generally even they manage to push shit downhill onto rank and file employees. The fixer goes home and Best Buy corporate declares victory.
The beauty for corporate is that nobody's ever told to break the rules, but locally they're given little choice -- the quotas and restrictions are such that if they act in a customer friendly way, they'll get raped in reviews. It's essentially a Tony Soprano business model -- make the nut each month, or you get whacked, and I don't care what you do to make the nut...
I've noticed that many of the people who bitch the most about spam are also the first one to produce simplistic and pedantic retorts to steps people make to do something about it. "But somebody might not get their email for a day."
Spam Whiners: Shit or get off the pot.
Either somebody does *something*, however imperfect or flawed, or they do nothing. The whining and the complaining and the doing of nothing adds up to exactly nothing but noise.
I want actions taken, and I want them taken *now*. Collateral damage? Unavoidable -- any solution strong enough to work is going to cause collateral damage. This isn't a kernel bugfix, the patch doesn't have to be formally proved at an academic conference, it has to be implemented and adjusted as needed for maximum effectiveness.
If you're not making mistakes, you're not making anything, and not doing anything about spam has been how effective?
I think it might have something to do with the gap between people who get it and everyone else. People who get Tivo see its just a start -- that a few (a dozen, by my guess) key features would make it not just good but unbelievable. To the people in control of Tivo, those extra features just complicate it for ordinary people.
It might also be that the Tivo people see just basic timeshifting of shows as the core value, and that everything else is just icing. Although as you point out, it's trivial for competitors to swoop in and replicate the core value. But if Tivo had taken the feature sets further? There'd be nobody that could touch them.
That would be ideal, although I wonder how much space it would take up completely indexed to the point of minimum disk I/O and CPU when doing searches or references. Or the opposite, with minimum disk space usage, how much CPU and disk pounding would it take to do more complicated searches?
Slashdot Mirror
I keep waiting for these to show up at reasonable prices for *any* system, but I actually suspected that Apple would include it in their systems. With standalone DVD recorders sporting this technology selling for $300, I can't imagine that the chipsets are all that expensive.
I have a P43.2c system at home, and even single pass MPEG2 encoding for DVD (TMPGEnc 3.0 Xpress) runs at maybe 125% of real time. Multiple pass encoding runs at 200% of real time or worse.
What's the big obstacle to a decent MPEG2 encoder chip that can do single pass encoding at 50% of RT or 25% of RT? Admittedly you hit some ceilings on disk bandwidth trying to read DV-AVI files at 4x, but is it really that hard?
What about removing capabilities from IE to beef up security?
You think you'll get him to promise to cut off "capability"-dependent programs (and their programmers) at the knees?
Isn't it a legitimate request? One of the main problems people hammer on Windows and IE is that the product is too deep in the OS, making it nearly impossible to secure.
If you have a security failure that can't be fixed in a timely fashion without breaking the functionality, isn't it better to break the functionality instead of leaving the security broken?
So you were Amy's dad, right? How old was Amy? How pissed were you that Amy was (a) lying to you and (b) getting banged all the time by Carl?
Or did Amy just give you some BS story about how she was "still a virgin", and that she and Carl "wouldn't even sleep in the same bed, and besides, his mom said it was OK, and even so, if I want to make love to Carl I will, and you can't stop me"?
What'd Carl's parents have to say? Single mom, works the night shift? New agey parents, encourage sexual exploration? Dangerous "older" boyfriend, living in his own apartment, but happens to have a thing for young quiff?
Does she feel bad now for losing her innocense to some 2-minute teeny bopper who couldn't even find her magic button?
It sounds to me like a desktop version of the blade server phenomenon, albeit with somewhat higher density.
I'd like to see an architecture with a smart backplane that you could add CPU, network, disk or graphics I/O cards to and then arbitrarily bind the components together to make a given system, preferrably dynamically (ie, remove a CPU and IO member to create another system).
A system built around a VMWare-like system manager where everything ran in a virtualized environment would be cool too, but we'd need an architecture with fewer bottlenecks and the ability to dedicate hardware components like CPU/RAM to given VMs without having to timeslice them with other components as you would on a standard SMP systen, as well as direct/exclusive access to components like graphics cards.
RAID-0 takes advantage of the fact that the bus is faster (by several multiples) than the devices on the bus, so synchronized reads and writes to multiple devices can go faster than one single device on the bus.
A Gmail file system will likely max out the bus -- in the case, your internet connection -- long before you'd max out a connection-specific session to a Gmail server.
Who knows; perhaps there are waits associated with this or other things that would allow striping of data to be meaningful.
It's possible that marketers might want to know what kinds of things people store. Common file types, perhaps some way of annonymizing the data stored in the documents themselves (which has some pretty scary privacy issues).
Essentially what Google does for email, they could do for file storage.
When I called Penske earlier this summer to see if I could rent a moving van, I was presented with an automated menu where you just spoke in your choice, much like you would do with a person.
Ugh, those are the worst. The menu system interrupts you or keeps talking, since its voice-response system isn't as intelligent as a person's, plus they're not intelligent enough to have several logical permutations of the menu options.
Why can't they just make run of the mill CPUs at least dual-processor capable, and not force us to buy their upmarket SMP CPUs?
Was there ever a real technical reason behind this, or was it purely marketing? PII/PIII could go dual, but now it's Xeon land and way more expensive motherboards to boot. I don't remember dual P2/P3 motherboards being a whole lot more expensive than their single CPU counterparts.
I'd really like to see play counts for the songs of people who have 200 gigs of music. In addition to that I'd like to see how much they actually pay attention to the music they're listening to.
My guess is that they'd have an even, but low, playcount distribution over most of their collection; it's about 140 days of music played 24/7, presuming its done continuous play or with a decent randomizer.
My personal opinion is that people who do that don't really _listen_ to the music in the way I think about it; it's a background-type sound to them. They hear it, but don't say, follow the lyrics closely or hear particular solos. I'll occasionally put on Tangerine Dream for this kind of effect.
If I'm listening to something, it's because I'm paying attention to it -- lyrics, instrumentals, the whole ball of wax. I can't have music playing in the background if I'm doing something else; it distracts me because I like to pay attention to it (or I tune it out completely and just don't hear it all).
The other phenomena you're missing are the collectors/completists -- people who simply have to own every album by every artist they're ever exposed to. Part of the deal is simply *having* it all, and these people may never even listen to it all.
Myself, I have a 20GB iPod. It's about 3/4 full, I ripped my entire CD collection when I got it. I could easily delete 2/3s of it and not miss it -- much of it I never listen to, partly because I only listen to it when I'm walking for exercise, not in the car or elsewhere.
And I've actually had the converse problem -- too much choice and too many options. I'll start listening to something that reminds me of something else and I'll stop listening and switch to the new song, simply because I *can*. I finally sat down one day and made a huge playlist of individual songs I liked and I force myself to listen to that list in shuffle mode.
Time for some due dilligence on your part, as well as requring your clients to not do business with spammers (in writing).
Banks supply merchant accounts for credit card processing. There may be some spammers (defined broadly to include the people selling stuff, not just bulk mailers) who take checks, cash, and money orders, but I'd wager not many.
Given the merchantability of many spam products (penis enlargement pills, cable descramblers, etc), there HAVE to be lots of complaints about these people's merchant accounts -- the bank likely MUST be running interference for them or at least playing willfull ignorance when opening new accounts.
Since when to banks have security and investigation departments to track down the source of deposits?
This is part of the broader issue that we all should have with banks involved in the credit card trade. Banks NEVER take a hit from credit card fraud -- they either make the consumer eat it or the merchant eat it, and with the pending bankruptcy laws changing, even their own sloppy lending practices are becoming free money.
That banks play dumb when it comes to fraud is neither surprising nor acceptable.
I bought a 2500A and agree with you about the dicey nature of flashing with DL firmware. I have flashed with an updated firmware that removes riplock with no problems so far.
I bought the drive for a new system because it was $79 or something about a month ago; I've been thinking of adding a second drive and with the 2510s now cheaper than what I paid for my 2500, I'll probably just buy the 2510 and just flash it with the no-riplock firmware.
Although I am kind of tempted to wait a bit and see if we'll get super cheap -R DL combo drives soon. Overall, the DL thing matters little right now -- the media is still $12 per, write speeds are relatively slow, and the quality of backups made with DVDShrink to 4.7GB media is really high anyway.
It's about time that law enforcement began to see spam for what it is -- not just an annoying bulk mailing operation, but part of a larger racketeering operation that's primarily focused on defrauding people.
I've long advocated RICO-style investigations (if not actual RICO prosecutions) of the entire world of spam. This doesn't just mean the bulk mailing operations, but the people behind the actual spamvertised businesses and their legitimate-world suppliers.
Broad-based prosecutions promising long prison time not only for spammers, and spam businesses but for people who knowingly make money off of spammers (banks, ISPs, list vendors, etc) will go a long way towards demotivating people in the legitimate business world from working with spammers/spam businesses.
Spammers and spam businesses need a certain cooperation and acceptance in the legitimate business world to make money. Without that, they'll be far less effective.
The French (and the most of the EU for that matter) didn't care about Iraqi citizens, Iraqi sovreignty, or any of the other high and mighty things they made issues about.
This was and is always about French economic influence in Iraq. The French have a fairly long history in Iraq, selling the Iraqis water systems, phone systems (and probably things they shouldn't have during the embargo). They would have preferred that the embargo get lifted, Elf-Aquataine could have come in and helped fix up the oil operations, Alcatel could have fixed the phones, and other French contracting concerns could have done the rest. They were happy to business with Saddam.
They knew that an American led invasion meant business for Texaco, MCI, and Haliburton first, with French concerns getting the crumbs.
Sure the story is better with higher quality; but once you've already told someone a story, are they likely to want to hear it again with slightly higher fidelity anytime in the next six months?
How many iterations of Lord of the Rings are there on DVD? The special, deluxe, special deluxe, deluxe special deluxe, special deluxe special...
And then there's the idea that many people purchase movies on DVD that they've seen in the theater, despite the fact that the version they saw in the theater is far higher quality than the one they bought.
SUPPORT THE FIRST AMMENDMENT.
USE THE SECOND.
I find American leftist (I hate to use liberal and confuse it with real, classical liberalism as taught in Poli Sci) distaste for firearms to be unusual and a historical abberation. As recently as the 1970s in the US, leftist groups consistently identified firearm ownership as critical to defense of their groups from right-wing opponents. The Black Panthers and the SLA all made use of firearms.
In the 70s, though, there was an increasing merging pacifism within the US left, and a likely desire to disassociate themselves of the more violent actions of groups like the SLA.
I think most of the anti-firearms aspects of current American leftism has as much to do with being "anti-conservative" as it does with being pacifist.
I'm unaware of any revolutionary or significant political movements that arose out of pacifism. Ghandhi is cited, but it's a gross oversimplification. I think Mao said it best -- political power grows out of a barrel of a gun.
They had a submarine with huge windows in "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea". It's a pretty dumb movie, but it would be really cool. Wouldn't you need major lights, though, to see anything? I'd guess that surface light is useless at about 100'.
That is not so surprising when you consider who runs the show.
It's not just Samaranch that's the problem. A lot of the members of the IOC are from countries where totalitarian decision making is the norm, so it's not surprising that the Olympics takes on a totalitarian flavor.
Add that in with corporate interests who think that fascist laws that enforce their monopolies are a good thing, and IOC members who think about graft first, sports last, and you get a pretty scary/accurate portrait of the world we live in now.
...are the video headphones/goggles. We've shrunk storage, bandwidth, and cpu to pocket size, but the darn screen either remains big to the point of sacrificing portability, or gets small, sacrificing quality and usability.
Where are we at with video goggles that let you jack into your phone/pda/ipod and see the video at a quality/size level that makes it worthwhile? This would revolutionize portable computing and enterainment.
Is it a question of technique or technology? Both?
As a general rule, technology, tools, and automobiles don't really interest chicks, unless they are conspicuous symbols of wealth, which clicks a biological imperative relating to the supportability of her and her offspring. Chicks do dig jewelry and clothes, but see above about the biological imperative.
There's been a lot of poop about Walmart's labor policies in the news over the past couple of years, and with the crap I've read about Best Buy I wonder if this is some kind of deliberate structuring to cause the stores to pursue a bunch of practices that are illegal, but that the corporate office can skate on.
Basically what this amounts to is setting really draconian sales quotas and expense ceilings that pretty much force any store managers to engage in all kinds of behavior that essentially "violates" company policy, but since they want to either keep their jobs or move up in the food chain they do them anyway.
Since 99% of the time they're able to get away with it, the manager wins and the company wins (and of course the customer loses). When something like this DOES happen, Best Buy corporate steps in and decries the violation of all its policies and procedures by bad local management. A fixer (someone who got in trouble at HQ, most likely) is sent down to have a bunch of meetings. A couple of managers get sacked, but generally even they manage to push shit downhill onto rank and file employees. The fixer goes home and Best Buy corporate declares victory.
The beauty for corporate is that nobody's ever told to break the rules, but locally they're given little choice -- the quotas and restrictions are such that if they act in a customer friendly way, they'll get raped in reviews. It's essentially a Tony Soprano business model -- make the nut each month, or you get whacked, and I don't care what you do to make the nut...
Presumably Doom 3 adds at least real 3-D worlds. Wasn't the original Doom fake 3-d in that nothing had "real" height, it just looked that way?
I've noticed that many of the people who bitch the most about spam are also the first one to produce simplistic and pedantic retorts to steps people make to do something about it. "But somebody might not get their email for a day."
Spam Whiners: Shit or get off the pot.
Either somebody does *something*, however imperfect or flawed, or they do nothing. The whining and the complaining and the doing of nothing adds up to exactly nothing but noise.
I want actions taken, and I want them taken *now*. Collateral damage? Unavoidable -- any solution strong enough to work is going to cause collateral damage. This isn't a kernel bugfix, the patch doesn't have to be formally proved at an academic conference, it has to be implemented and adjusted as needed for maximum effectiveness.
If you're not making mistakes, you're not making anything, and not doing anything about spam has been how effective?
I think it might have something to do with the gap between people who get it and everyone else. People who get Tivo see its just a start -- that a few (a dozen, by my guess) key features would make it not just good but unbelievable. To the people in control of Tivo, those extra features just complicate it for ordinary people.
It might also be that the Tivo people see just basic timeshifting of shows as the core value, and that everything else is just icing. Although as you point out, it's trivial for competitors to swoop in and replicate the core value. But if Tivo had taken the feature sets further? There'd be nobody that could touch them.
That would be ideal, although I wonder how much space it would take up completely indexed to the point of minimum disk I/O and CPU when doing searches or references. Or the opposite, with minimum disk space usage, how much CPU and disk pounding would it take to do more complicated searches?