There's a lot of people who end up in bankruptcy court because they've been sued by people who they, without criminal penalty (ie, self defense), shot and seriously wounded an armed prowler who then sues for use of excessive force.
It's not far fetched to presume that a white homeowner killing a black prolwer could become highly politicized. The kid was young, had a few petty juvie raps, bad home, and all the other "its not my fault" excuses, coupled with the homeowner being white, maybe conservative in some controversial way (ex-military, far-right political views). Add in fuzzy forensics (sloppy police work, conflicting explanations based on same evidence) and suddenly the DA is being pressured to press charges. The jury is swayed by the homeowners controversial political beliefs and the "hard luck" story of the kid -- what do you have? A homeowner convicted for essentially self-defense.
It's also not far fetched that a small-business owner could go down the tubes due to lost credibility based upon a malicious hack attack that exposed private information. I'm not talking about some guy that just deletes index.htm, I'm talking about defacement and actually removing or stealing confidential information that leads to a loss of business.
The point I was trying to make is that the previous poster claimed that loss of life or rape are NEVER less morally culpable than cracking, when in fact there are situations where cracking is actually worse in a larger ethical sense than a loss of life.
A Cybercrime should never be more punishable than murder or rape. Money is just money and should not take precedence over the life of a rape victim.
Let's think about this one. In one scenerio, a man breaks into my house. I hear some noise and grab my baseball bat. The prowler, carrying a knife he brought with him, enters my bedroom. I hit him in the head with the bat and he ends up dying of an aneurism. Due to politics beyond my control (he's black, I'm white), I'm fored to stand trial and am convicted of 2nd degree murder and get 20 years in prison.
In another scenerio, a 22 year old college student breaks into a small business' web site, defacing it and stealing credit information. The economy is weak, the business is new and barely breaking even, and costs of cleanup and reputation damage drive the business under. The 10 employees and owner are out of work, health insurance, and a couple may lose their homes. The cracker is caught and sentenced to 5 years in a minimum security prison.
On one hand, a guy defending his home in his bedroom against an armed intruder goes to jail for 20 years. In another, a person doing malicious and criminal damage manages to make two people homeless, ten employed and a going business bankrupt and gets only 5 years.
All its crying out for is a stream of guide data and a reasonable user interface and it will be a drop-in replacement (upgrade?) for just about everything Tivo does.
Most of what I record on my Tivo isn't much more than lazy VCRing. I scan the guide for about a dozen movie channels, pick what I like, and let it go. I have about a dozen season passes, but as of yet the one time one of them got moved in its timeslot, Tivo wasn't any help, it was a network overrun of a prior program -- I would have had to have padded the requested program by over 45 minutes.
For most of what I do with Tivo, the same guide data and slightly-better-than-VCR scheduling would work. Tivo's benefits are 40% being HDD based, 25% guide based, 25% good UI, and 10% unique "Tivo" features. Just about any HDD based DVR with guide data and good UI should get you 90% of what Tivo gets.
I disagree with your analysis of EZ-Pass -- in many cases the express lanes are only available for a portion of a freeway, meaning that people with EZ-Pass are "cutting ahead" of people without it, since while they may leave the "free" freeway behind cars without it, they re-enter when the express lane ends *ahead* of them by being able to go faster on a less crowded or shorter road. IIRC its exactly this way on the 91 freeway near Riverside.
And I also question how much this would piss people off. It doesn't seem to bother anyone at Disney that some people ride with little or no queuing. If I hadn't been clued into it, I wouldn't have even *noticed* or used Disney's Fastpass.
I'm just suggesting that they extend this concept so that you get *more* of it on a given visit, and that by charging signifcantly more for it you would limit the number of people using it to a number small enough that it would have a negligable impact on the standard queue.
Futhermore, there's nothing *unfair* about it -- it'd only be unfair if the passes weren't generally available to people willing to pay for it. Or is the "theme" of Cedar Point life in the Soviet Union -- everybody stands in line for everything...:)
I know about EZ-pass etc, but it doesn't fit in with this
Except that EZ-Pass is exactly like that! We all pay "admission" (taxes) to the "amusement park" (roads). If you buy an EZ-Pass, you get to jump ("express lane") the queue ("traffic jam").
Furthermore, as relatively expensive as most theme parks are (admission, food, etc) they're not attracting affluent customers (at least not based on the people I've seen). A premium pass that entitled you to much shorter lines would attract more affluent customers, which should make the park more money, which should mean more rides, which should mean overall shorter lines for everyone.
Even if you're diametrically opposed to premium queuing, how about having one or two days per month where the admission is double but the park limits admissions such that the ride waits will *always* be shorter? I'd go for that too, although I think it wouldn't do anything for enhancing revenue or overall service.
Anyway, I hope the park people are listening. I and others like me are out there and are willing to pay much more to ride the rides. They can either stay with their equality model and perhaps lose my business altogether, or they can acknowledge it and maybe gain more of my business.
I'm aware of the bugs of the SA box that TW is shilling, but I can only presume that its being pushed faster than the bugfixes but that the bugfixes will catch up over time and that these annoyances will largely go away. Strangely, I have not read a review of the SA box by someone who doesn't own a Tivo. I wonder if some of the bugs wouldn't be noticed by a non-Tivo user who approaches it from a VCR perspective.
I own a Tivo and I grant you that there are Tivo-specific features I wouldn't trade for the SA box if both were comperably priced. But they're not -- I can get the SA box for $4.95 a month at my cable package level. A 60G series 2 with lifetime is $550 after rebates. I'd need to own it and have it keep working for over 9 *years* before it would be a monetary advantage over the SA box from TW, and in the course of that time the SA box would likely be replaced with a better one at least once, while the Tivo would be probably unsupported or broken in that timeframe.
As these things catch on, the simple economics of Tivo will enable cable companies to crush them. It doesn't mean that the SA is a better box now or even later, but since when does that *cough*betamax*cough*mac* matter?
Some people will buy a better box if they can, but being better isn't enough, it also has to respect the market somewhat. Tivo needs to look at other ways to sell itself: Enhanced guide data via IMDB integration? Selling major software updates instead of subscriptions? "Xterm" Tivos for $99 that can play Tivo content stored on a full-blown Tivo (yes, its a new feature coming up but requires a much more expensive full-blown unit)?
Doubtful. The tickets would have to be very expensive and very limited in number (say you can only buy 100 tickets on any given day).
Make them expensive and limited, and even purchase ahead. It's like ~$30 for an adult admission to Valleyfair in MN (owned by Cedar Point). I'd be willing to pay $60 to get in if I knew that I could jump the queue so many times per hour or something.
Deer Valley ski area actually stops selling lift tickets on popular days; maybe this is an option for amusement parks to keep the crowds down. Obviously they won't do this (if you're willing to pay on the most crowded days, their gain, your loss).
In a way, it's like a park selling out it's guest service image.
As far as I'm concerned, they're already selling out their image by doing nothing (at least at Valleyfair) to constrain crowds or waits. An express system would only piss people off if it wasn't generally for sale to everyone. I don't drive a BMW or live in a mansion, but it doesn't piss me off that some people can.
I know plenty of people who feel the same way. I came into $500 of basically free money so I bought one with a lifetime.
I think Tivo needs to shift to being a software company, and license a base software package to hardware vendors. The guide data should be free or nearly free (eg, $2.95 a month or $25/year).
They can then make money selling new software features and updates. The market could then drive the feature sets, instead of sitting around and hoping for Tivo to implement much-sought-after features (Batch Save, Folders, etc) and having them actually deliver BS features, like watching JPGs on TV.
Their relatively high subscription cost will ultimately kill them, IMHO, especially as cable companies deliver their own PVRs. Crime-Warner is giving away a Scientific Atlanta PVR (dual tuners, etc etc) for nearly nothing to customers with higher-end packages. Same guide data as Tivo (often I've noticed the program descriptions from my SA2100 box are word-for-word identical with Tivo), and many Tivo features.
Tivo is better now, but over time the SA box will be as good for most people, and in some ways better (dual tuner, no crippled channel surfing due to IR relay delays, way cheaper than Tivo for any use less than 5 years, if it breaks they replace it, etc).
Unless Tivo re-thinks what they sell and how they sell it, a box that does what everyone thinks it should and costs well over $500 over its lifetime cannot possibly compete..
Is how people have network jacks everywhere but no phone jacks. I'm assuming you have a landline because you have DSL, but maybe I'm wrong. You could just kludge your network jack and steal the brown pair (7&8) for a phone line.
I got an Intel MP3 player as a gift from a vendor. Like most fixed-config flash-based players, its kind of limited with only 128M of storage. But its good for running or other activities where movement inhibits use of a mechanical storage device.
Anyway, I was putting the software for it on my wife's computer since she uses it more than I do and I noticed that its EOL by Intel. You can still get the software for it, but it will be useless more than likely after either some XP service pack or some future Windows version.
This is nuts! Barring a serious breakage incident, this thing could be functional for years but its only an FM radio once the inteface software that loads files onto it isn't available.
I'm starting to get more and more dubious of any gizmo I buy that *requires* a computer. The idea that a perfectly functional object is junk because the vendor stops making interface software is pretty bad.
I'd hope that vendors would start making the devices emulate generic USB/Firewire devices (eg, storage) so that the computer link isn't dependent on the software but on OS support for the generic device type, which is likely to have a much longer life.
I hate long waits too. On a business trip to SoCal I had some time and went to Disney's California Adventure. It's kind of a small park, but they have a couple OK rides.
Anyway, they have an "express pass" deal that I thought was awesome. You put your park ticket (which is magstripped or barcoded) into a machine and it kicks out an express pass which is good for about a 20 minute time period in an hour. During the time period, you basically walk right up and get on the ride. I think we might have waited at most 2 load cycles before getting on the ride in the express queue. Afterwards, you can get another for the same ride.
I know you were limited to just one express pass for a particular ride at a time, but I can't remember if I was able to get multiple express passes in the same 1 hour period for multiple rides. Unlimited would be a problem, but 2-3 shouldn't be a big deal.
I'd love to see this implemented everywhere. It probably pays for itself since instead of waiting in the queue you can wait with a softdrink or something in a better location. An even better idea would be an admission upcharge that would allow you to get multiple passes for multiple rides or something. I'd pay an extra $10 if I knew I was going to be riding more rides and skipping more lines.
Other ideas that skip the technology investments would be "premium" tickets for more money that allow you to jump 2/3s of the main queue or something. I'd go for that in a heartbeat.
I've logged 4k+ "denied" messages on my firewall today, and that doesn't include a lot of stuff that would otherwise be included because I've stuffed it on my border router and it never hits the firewall (eg, sqlsnake).
I get sweeped on about a dozen different ports (depending on what the script-kiddie-exploit-du-jour is) on a daily basis. Are these a single event or do I count the number of nodes they tried to sweep?
I posted in another thread about unionizing tech workers that one thing it might be good for is promoting an independently verified skilled workforce, the way it is done for other skilled trades like electricians.
Businesses may say "We can hire non-union talent, but we roll the dice. Hiring a union guy gets us someone guaranteed to know what they're doing."
I'd think of a tech union more like a competitive school with unlimited enrollment; you have to *prove* you're good to get membership.
As a consumer I should be looking for people who have certification or experience in the fields they represent to ensure that I have the best that my money can buy.
However, mandating by law that you need it before you can do it is just a restraint of trade obstacle put up by people who want to limit the competition they have. Look at the legal field, for example. A lot of legal work can easily be done by experienced non-lawyers, but not legally.
The same is true of the medical profession. I'm not interested in non-PhD medical attention, but I don't think that means that some people shouldn't have that option, especially if someone with lesser credentials can treat minor health problems for a lot less money.
Instead of mandating certification, I'd be more in favor of a "malpractice" solution. If you claim you can do X and are in the business of doing X and you screw up, then you owe me double damages or something that would provide a strong disincentive for dishonesty or incompetance.
I can't bring myself to see the connect between racial discrimination and business sense.
Since blacks commit crimes far out of proportion to the numbers and have much lower disposable income than whites in the US, depending on the business, you'd likely save a lot of money by denying them admittance; shoplifting in department stores is the first thing that comes to mind. I'm sure there are other businesses that lose more to black crime than they make from black customers.
In other businesses, such as fast food or discount retailing, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot, as you'd lose more than you'd save.
I've not heard of firewire upgrades for series 2s or of series 2s with firewire. All series 2s have USB, and AFAIK the "upgrades" will center around a USB->Ethernet adapter (which works now, actually, and can be used to replace dialup for daily calls).
Everybody thinks that Tivo will now support moving video on to/off of the Tivos. I *highly* doubt this will ever be permitted due to copyright fears by Tivo and due to the inherent limitations of USB as the source of connectivity. Even at basic quality we're talking in the neighborhood of 2.5Mbit/sec, which is probably pushing the limits of what can be reliably streamed over a USB link.
Even if you could drive the USB net link at max speeds (12Mbit/sec) you're talking hours to get a single basic-quality hour long mpeg onto or off of it. A firewire connection (or a GigE connector would help), but I suspect that Tivo is feeling a lot of heat from the entertainment industry to make extracting video only happen at 1x speed via analog video connections.
I think half the reason people throw things is that they're buying something that's not tailored to their needs, it's tailored to someone's idea of what would work for everyone.
Many people buy it and decide it doesn't work for them. If devices were being tailor-made for individuals, maybe people would have a higher level of satisfaction and not be inclined to chuck things.
Tivo will never allow for tranferring recordings off of the Tivo. Even the Tivo hackers who have done deep disassembly of Tivo hardware don't tread there, as they know its off limits.
Transfer of programs to Tivo may be some kind of an option, but of EXTREMELY limited value until Tivo releases some new PVR with a real GigE interface. You're not moving any video anywhere with the USB-Ethernet interface that Tivo will support.
Web-based programming of Tivo may be something that is actually coming (I believe the series 1 Tivos with hacked-in ethernet can run an add-on that does something like this), but I doubt it will be anything that requires or uses any third-party computers or software, just a small built-in web interface in the Tivo itself.
We just had a vendor in here the other day installing a system a client wants us to use for sharing/previewing TV spots. They are switching their preferred formats to WM9 and MPEG2. MPEG2 is supported because of its use as a broadcast format.
The engineer who did the equipment installation said that WM9 is preferred because of its extremely high quality at low bitrates and the bonus of ubiquitous support in Windows environments.
While they still support (and will support) Quicktime, it is no longer their preferred format.
I thought this was rather surprising, as I was unaware of "pro" tools for WM9 encoding or the availability of the codecs out outside of a Windows environment. But clearly for this application they felt that it was at the very least a superior codec.
As much as this sounds like a cool feature on the surface, it kind of disappoints me. There's a lot of obvious (and non-obvious unless you own one) features that are missing from Tivo. Playing MP3s and displaying digital photos are NOT one of them.
I'm not sure if its a sign of smart or desperate marketing to try to expand Tivo beyond its core competency. My gut reaction is that its dumb/desperate, and the idea that they will try to extend a dodgy pricing model even further by charging more for these rather pedestrian features makes it even seem more so.
I love my Tivo and want to see the TV-watching aspect improved, not a bunch of junk consumer electronics non-features added, especially not at an even higher price.
The problem is that, although we're all entitled to our beliefs, our culture increasingly holds that science is just another belief.
I thought this was something that only people way out on the fringes of religious faith subscribed to until I had a casual conversation at a party with a woman I've lived next door to for 3 years. The conversation somehow turned towards evolution and she simply denied that evolution had any validity and that the biblical creation was as, if not more, valid than evolution.
I'm not terribly "up" on this debate, but its my understanding that evolution, as a biological process, has such overwhelming scientific support that it must be considered true, while the human evolutionary tree (ape-man) has a lot of evidence in favor of it but a lot to be learned.
She was felt that evolution just didn't apply to humans, it wasn't true and we didn't evolve from apes. I imagine she had no opinion or interest in fruit flies, barn swallows or any of the obvious but non-{ape,human} examples of evolution.
My response to her was basically that she could choose to believe in anything she wanted, but choosing to not believe in things which have been demonstrated valid by scientific inquiry was kind of a dangerous business. At what point does she follow religion and ignore science? Is the world still flat? Does she believe the sun orbits the earth?
Anyway, it's a scary world and there's an increasing number of people willing to believe in all kinds of fantastic things...
I agree with the parent that watching video on a handheld-size screen wouldn't be worth it in most instances. A laptop or maybe even a palmtop DVD player is about the bare minimum size, and even then its usefulness is limited.
But just as the iPod with a built-in speaker would be useless, it's very useful with headphones. Why not a video iPod with a set of VR glasses? The only pair I've seen was kind of awful, but maybe that's the killer hardware to make the application useful.
It'd be worthwhile for long commutes, plane trips, lying in bed and not disturbing your mate, and so on. The right video glasses would even transform portable computing -- imagine a Palm or similar sized device that could be used without a display. Enabling transparency could even allow you to see *and* see video at the same time.
I'd wager that the Microsoft has the largest voice in the BSA and the biggest concerns over manditory DRM. I know I've read for years that the recording industry has rejected Microsoft's "offers" on DRM technology for music for a long time, largely because they don't like Microsoft's business practices.
I'd wager that this "BSA vs. DRM" fight is actually more of a "MS vs. Hollywood" fight when you find out who the big players are. I can't see the roll-up-your-sleeves back office database crowd really caring about DRM, since its far more focused on entertainment generally and Windows desktop OS + Music Files specifically. (Yes, I realize they probably do care about it at some technology geek level, but perhaps not at the legislative lobbying level).
I mean, maybe Apple cares and maybe a few of the multimedia software vendors care, but would Oracle, Sybase or someone like that, outside of making Microsoft's life hard?
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There's a lot of people who end up in bankruptcy court because they've been sued by people who they, without criminal penalty (ie, self defense), shot and seriously wounded an armed prowler who then sues for use of excessive force.
It's not far fetched to presume that a white homeowner killing a black prolwer could become highly politicized. The kid was young, had a few petty juvie raps, bad home, and all the other "its not my fault" excuses, coupled with the homeowner being white, maybe conservative in some controversial way (ex-military, far-right political views). Add in fuzzy forensics (sloppy police work, conflicting explanations based on same evidence) and suddenly the DA is being pressured to press charges. The jury is swayed by the homeowners controversial political beliefs and the "hard luck" story of the kid -- what do you have? A homeowner convicted for essentially self-defense.
It's also not far fetched that a small-business owner could go down the tubes due to lost credibility based upon a malicious hack attack that exposed private information. I'm not talking about some guy that just deletes index.htm, I'm talking about defacement and actually removing or stealing confidential information that leads to a loss of business.
The point I was trying to make is that the previous poster claimed that loss of life or rape are NEVER less morally culpable than cracking, when in fact there are situations where cracking is actually worse in a larger ethical sense than a loss of life.
A Cybercrime should never be more punishable than murder or rape. Money is just money and should not take precedence over the life of a rape victim.
Let's think about this one. In one scenerio, a man breaks into my house. I hear some noise and grab my baseball bat. The prowler, carrying a knife he brought with him, enters my bedroom. I hit him in the head with the bat and he ends up dying of an aneurism. Due to politics beyond my control (he's black, I'm white), I'm fored to stand trial and am convicted of 2nd degree murder and get 20 years in prison.
In another scenerio, a 22 year old college student breaks into a small business' web site, defacing it and stealing credit information. The economy is weak, the business is new and barely breaking even, and costs of cleanup and reputation damage drive the business under. The 10 employees and owner are out of work, health insurance, and a couple may lose their homes. The cracker is caught and sentenced to 5 years in a minimum security prison.
On one hand, a guy defending his home in his bedroom against an armed intruder goes to jail for 20 years. In another, a person doing malicious and criminal damage manages to make two people homeless, ten employed and a going business bankrupt and gets only 5 years.
This is what you wanted, yes?
That Panasonic PVR/DVD-RW is just dying for TiVo.
All its crying out for is a stream of guide data and a reasonable user interface and it will be a drop-in replacement (upgrade?) for just about everything Tivo does.
Most of what I record on my Tivo isn't much more than lazy VCRing. I scan the guide for about a dozen movie channels, pick what I like, and let it go. I have about a dozen season passes, but as of yet the one time one of them got moved in its timeslot, Tivo wasn't any help, it was a network overrun of a prior program -- I would have had to have padded the requested program by over 45 minutes.
For most of what I do with Tivo, the same guide data and slightly-better-than-VCR scheduling would work. Tivo's benefits are 40% being HDD based, 25% guide based, 25% good UI, and 10% unique "Tivo" features. Just about any HDD based DVR with guide data and good UI should get you 90% of what Tivo gets.
I disagree with your analysis of EZ-Pass -- in many cases the express lanes are only available for a portion of a freeway, meaning that people with EZ-Pass are "cutting ahead" of people without it, since while they may leave the "free" freeway behind cars without it, they re-enter when the express lane ends *ahead* of them by being able to go faster on a less crowded or shorter road. IIRC its exactly this way on the 91 freeway near Riverside.
:)
And I also question how much this would piss people off. It doesn't seem to bother anyone at Disney that some people ride with little or no queuing. If I hadn't been clued into it, I wouldn't have even *noticed* or used Disney's Fastpass.
I'm just suggesting that they extend this concept so that you get *more* of it on a given visit, and that by charging signifcantly more for it you would limit the number of people using it to a number small enough that it would have a negligable impact on the standard queue.
Futhermore, there's nothing *unfair* about it -- it'd only be unfair if the passes weren't generally available to people willing to pay for it. Or is the "theme" of Cedar Point life in the Soviet Union -- everybody stands in line for everything...
I know about EZ-pass etc, but it doesn't fit in with this
Except that EZ-Pass is exactly like that! We all pay "admission" (taxes) to the "amusement park" (roads). If you buy an EZ-Pass, you get to jump ("express lane") the queue ("traffic jam").
Furthermore, as relatively expensive as most theme parks are (admission, food, etc) they're not attracting affluent customers (at least not based on the people I've seen). A premium pass that entitled you to much shorter lines would attract more affluent customers, which should make the park more money, which should mean more rides, which should mean overall shorter lines for everyone.
Even if you're diametrically opposed to premium queuing, how about having one or two days per month where the admission is double but the park limits admissions such that the ride waits will *always* be shorter? I'd go for that too, although I think it wouldn't do anything for enhancing revenue or overall service.
Anyway, I hope the park people are listening. I and others like me are out there and are willing to pay much more to ride the rides. They can either stay with their equality model and perhaps lose my business altogether, or they can acknowledge it and maybe gain more of my business.
I'm aware of the bugs of the SA box that TW is shilling, but I can only presume that its being pushed faster than the bugfixes but that the bugfixes will catch up over time and that these annoyances will largely go away. Strangely, I have not read a review of the SA box by someone who doesn't own a Tivo. I wonder if some of the bugs wouldn't be noticed by a non-Tivo user who approaches it from a VCR perspective.
I own a Tivo and I grant you that there are Tivo-specific features I wouldn't trade for the SA box if both were comperably priced. But they're not -- I can get the SA box for $4.95 a month at my cable package level. A 60G series 2 with lifetime is $550 after rebates. I'd need to own it and have it keep working for over 9 *years* before it would be a monetary advantage over the SA box from TW, and in the course of that time the SA box would likely be replaced with a better one at least once, while the Tivo would be probably unsupported or broken in that timeframe.
As these things catch on, the simple economics of Tivo will enable cable companies to crush them. It doesn't mean that the SA is a better box now or even later, but since when does that *cough*betamax*cough*mac* matter?
Some people will buy a better box if they can, but being better isn't enough, it also has to respect the market somewhat. Tivo needs to look at other ways to sell itself: Enhanced guide data via IMDB integration? Selling major software updates instead of subscriptions? "Xterm" Tivos for $99 that can play Tivo content stored on a full-blown Tivo (yes, its a new feature coming up but requires a much more expensive full-blown unit)?
Doubtful. The tickets would have to be very expensive and very limited in number (say you can only buy 100 tickets on any given day).
Make them expensive and limited, and even purchase ahead. It's like ~$30 for an adult admission to Valleyfair in MN (owned by Cedar Point). I'd be willing to pay $60 to get in if I knew that I could jump the queue so many times per hour or something.
Deer Valley ski area actually stops selling lift tickets on popular days; maybe this is an option for amusement parks to keep the crowds down. Obviously they won't do this (if you're willing to pay on the most crowded days, their gain, your loss).
In a way, it's like a park selling out it's guest service image.
As far as I'm concerned, they're already selling out their image by doing nothing (at least at Valleyfair) to constrain crowds or waits. An express system would only piss people off if it wasn't generally for sale to everyone. I don't drive a BMW or live in a mansion, but it doesn't piss me off that some people can.
I know plenty of people who feel the same way. I came into $500 of basically free money so I bought one with a lifetime.
I think Tivo needs to shift to being a software company, and license a base software package to hardware vendors. The guide data should be free or nearly free (eg, $2.95 a month or $25/year).
They can then make money selling new software features and updates. The market could then drive the feature sets, instead of sitting around and hoping for Tivo to implement much-sought-after features (Batch Save, Folders, etc) and having them actually deliver BS features, like watching JPGs on TV.
Their relatively high subscription cost will ultimately kill them, IMHO, especially as cable companies deliver their own PVRs. Crime-Warner is giving away a Scientific Atlanta PVR (dual tuners, etc etc) for nearly nothing to customers with higher-end packages. Same guide data as Tivo (often I've noticed the program descriptions from my SA2100 box are word-for-word identical with Tivo), and many Tivo features.
Tivo is better now, but over time the SA box will be as good for most people, and in some ways better (dual tuner, no crippled channel surfing due to IR relay delays, way cheaper than Tivo for any use less than 5 years, if it breaks they replace it, etc).
Unless Tivo re-thinks what they sell and how they sell it, a box that does what everyone thinks it should and costs well over $500 over its lifetime cannot possibly compete..
Unless I didn't pay attention, it doesn't say if it was a DVD-R drive, just that it would combine a DVD and a Tivo.
Is how people have network jacks everywhere but no phone jacks. I'm assuming you have a landline because you have DSL, but maybe I'm wrong. You could just kludge your network jack and steal the brown pair (7&8) for a phone line.
I got an Intel MP3 player as a gift from a vendor. Like most fixed-config flash-based players, its kind of limited with only 128M of storage. But its good for running or other activities where movement inhibits use of a mechanical storage device.
Anyway, I was putting the software for it on my wife's computer since she uses it more than I do and I noticed that its EOL by Intel. You can still get the software for it, but it will be useless more than likely after either some XP service pack or some future Windows version.
This is nuts! Barring a serious breakage incident, this thing could be functional for years but its only an FM radio once the inteface software that loads files onto it isn't available.
I'm starting to get more and more dubious of any gizmo I buy that *requires* a computer. The idea that a perfectly functional object is junk because the vendor stops making interface software is pretty bad.
I'd hope that vendors would start making the devices emulate generic USB/Firewire devices (eg, storage) so that the computer link isn't dependent on the software but on OS support for the generic device type, which is likely to have a much longer life.
I hate long waits too. On a business trip to SoCal I had some time and went to Disney's California Adventure. It's kind of a small park, but they have a couple OK rides.
Anyway, they have an "express pass" deal that I thought was awesome. You put your park ticket (which is magstripped or barcoded) into a machine and it kicks out an express pass which is good for about a 20 minute time period in an hour. During the time period, you basically walk right up and get on the ride. I think we might have waited at most 2 load cycles before getting on the ride in the express queue. Afterwards, you can get another for the same ride.
I know you were limited to just one express pass for a particular ride at a time, but I can't remember if I was able to get multiple express passes in the same 1 hour period for multiple rides. Unlimited would be a problem, but 2-3 shouldn't be a big deal.
I'd love to see this implemented everywhere. It probably pays for itself since instead of waiting in the queue you can wait with a softdrink or something in a better location. An even better idea would be an admission upcharge that would allow you to get multiple passes for multiple rides or something. I'd pay an extra $10 if I knew I was going to be riding more rides and skipping more lines.
Other ideas that skip the technology investments would be "premium" tickets for more money that allow you to jump 2/3s of the main queue or something. I'd go for that in a heartbeat.
I've logged 4k+ "denied" messages on my firewall today, and that doesn't include a lot of stuff that would otherwise be included because I've stuffed it on my border router and it never hits the firewall (eg, sqlsnake).
I get sweeped on about a dozen different ports (depending on what the script-kiddie-exploit-du-jour is) on a daily basis. Are these a single event or do I count the number of nodes they tried to sweep?
I posted in another thread about unionizing tech workers that one thing it might be good for is promoting an independently verified skilled workforce, the way it is done for other skilled trades like electricians.
Businesses may say "We can hire non-union talent, but we roll the dice. Hiring a union guy gets us someone guaranteed to know what they're doing."
I'd think of a tech union more like a competitive school with unlimited enrollment; you have to *prove* you're good to get membership.
As a consumer I should be looking for people who have certification or experience in the fields they represent to ensure that I have the best that my money can buy.
However, mandating by law that you need it before you can do it is just a restraint of trade obstacle put up by people who want to limit the competition they have. Look at the legal field, for example. A lot of legal work can easily be done by experienced non-lawyers, but not legally.
The same is true of the medical profession. I'm not interested in non-PhD medical attention, but I don't think that means that some people shouldn't have that option, especially if someone with lesser credentials can treat minor health problems for a lot less money.
Instead of mandating certification, I'd be more in favor of a "malpractice" solution. If you claim you can do X and are in the business of doing X and you screw up, then you owe me double damages or something that would provide a strong disincentive for dishonesty or incompetance.
I can't bring myself to see the connect between racial discrimination and business sense.
Since blacks commit crimes far out of proportion to the numbers and have much lower disposable income than whites in the US, depending on the business, you'd likely save a lot of money by denying them admittance; shoplifting in department stores is the first thing that comes to mind. I'm sure there are other businesses that lose more to black crime than they make from black customers.
In other businesses, such as fast food or discount retailing, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot, as you'd lose more than you'd save.
I've not heard of firewire upgrades for series 2s or of series 2s with firewire. All series 2s have USB, and AFAIK the "upgrades" will center around a USB->Ethernet adapter (which works now, actually, and can be used to replace dialup for daily calls).
Everybody thinks that Tivo will now support moving video on to/off of the Tivos. I *highly* doubt this will ever be permitted due to copyright fears by Tivo and due to the inherent limitations of USB as the source of connectivity. Even at basic quality we're talking in the neighborhood of 2.5Mbit/sec, which is probably pushing the limits of what can be reliably streamed over a USB link.
Even if you could drive the USB net link at max speeds (12Mbit/sec) you're talking hours to get a single basic-quality hour long mpeg onto or off of it. A firewire connection (or a GigE connector would help), but I suspect that Tivo is feeling a lot of heat from the entertainment industry to make extracting video only happen at 1x speed via analog video connections.
I think half the reason people throw things is that they're buying something that's not tailored to their needs, it's tailored to someone's idea of what would work for everyone.
Many people buy it and decide it doesn't work for them. If devices were being tailor-made for individuals, maybe people would have a higher level of satisfaction and not be inclined to chuck things.
Tivo will never allow for tranferring recordings off of the Tivo. Even the Tivo hackers who have done deep disassembly of Tivo hardware don't tread there, as they know its off limits.
Transfer of programs to Tivo may be some kind of an option, but of EXTREMELY limited value until Tivo releases some new PVR with a real GigE interface. You're not moving any video anywhere with the USB-Ethernet interface that Tivo will support.
Web-based programming of Tivo may be something that is actually coming (I believe the series 1 Tivos with hacked-in ethernet can run an add-on that does something like this), but I doubt it will be anything that requires or uses any third-party computers or software, just a small built-in web interface in the Tivo itself.
We just had a vendor in here the other day installing a system a client wants us to use for sharing/previewing TV spots. They are switching their preferred formats to WM9 and MPEG2. MPEG2 is supported because of its use as a broadcast format.
The engineer who did the equipment installation said that WM9 is preferred because of its extremely high quality at low bitrates and the bonus of ubiquitous support in Windows environments.
While they still support (and will support) Quicktime, it is no longer their preferred format.
I thought this was rather surprising, as I was unaware of "pro" tools for WM9 encoding or the availability of the codecs out outside of a Windows environment. But clearly for this application they felt that it was at the very least a superior codec.
As much as this sounds like a cool feature on the surface, it kind of disappoints me. There's a lot of obvious (and non-obvious unless you own one) features that are missing from Tivo. Playing MP3s and displaying digital photos are NOT one of them.
I'm not sure if its a sign of smart or desperate marketing to try to expand Tivo beyond its core competency. My gut reaction is that its dumb/desperate, and the idea that they will try to extend a dodgy pricing model even further by charging more for these rather pedestrian features makes it even seem more so.
I love my Tivo and want to see the TV-watching aspect improved, not a bunch of junk consumer electronics non-features added, especially not at an even higher price.
The problem is that, although we're all entitled to our beliefs, our culture increasingly holds that science is just another belief.
I thought this was something that only people way out on the fringes of religious faith subscribed to until I had a casual conversation at a party with a woman I've lived next door to for 3 years. The conversation somehow turned towards evolution and she simply denied that evolution had any validity and that the biblical creation was as, if not more, valid than evolution.
I'm not terribly "up" on this debate, but its my understanding that evolution, as a biological process, has such overwhelming scientific support that it must be considered true, while the human evolutionary tree (ape-man) has a lot of evidence in favor of it but a lot to be learned.
She was felt that evolution just didn't apply to humans, it wasn't true and we didn't evolve from apes. I imagine she had no opinion or interest in fruit flies, barn swallows or any of the obvious but non-{ape,human} examples of evolution.
My response to her was basically that she could choose to believe in anything she wanted, but choosing to not believe in things which have been demonstrated valid by scientific inquiry was kind of a dangerous business. At what point does she follow religion and ignore science? Is the world still flat? Does she believe the sun orbits the earth?
Anyway, it's a scary world and there's an increasing number of people willing to believe in all kinds of fantastic things...
Philosophy is the foundation of knowledge. Without it we wouldn't be able to make decisions about what we should study.
I agree with the parent that watching video on a handheld-size screen wouldn't be worth it in most instances. A laptop or maybe even a palmtop DVD player is about the bare minimum size, and even then its usefulness is limited.
But just as the iPod with a built-in speaker would be useless, it's very useful with headphones. Why not a video iPod with a set of VR glasses? The only pair I've seen was kind of awful, but maybe that's the killer hardware to make the application useful.
It'd be worthwhile for long commutes, plane trips, lying in bed and not disturbing your mate, and so on. The right video glasses would even transform portable computing -- imagine a Palm or similar sized device that could be used without a display. Enabling transparency could even allow you to see *and* see video at the same time.
I'd wager that the Microsoft has the largest voice in the BSA and the biggest concerns over manditory DRM. I know I've read for years that the recording industry has rejected Microsoft's "offers" on DRM technology for music for a long time, largely because they don't like Microsoft's business practices.
I'd wager that this "BSA vs. DRM" fight is actually more of a "MS vs. Hollywood" fight when you find out who the big players are. I can't see the roll-up-your-sleeves back office database crowd really caring about DRM, since its far more focused on entertainment generally and Windows desktop OS + Music Files specifically. (Yes, I realize they probably do care about it at some technology geek level, but perhaps not at the legislative lobbying level).
I mean, maybe Apple cares and maybe a few of the multimedia software vendors care, but would Oracle, Sybase or someone like that, outside of making Microsoft's life hard?