When do you discover that this one chicken is really tasty? For most people, that's after it has been cooked. Can you clone something after it's been cooked, or does it have to begin with a still alive cell? (serious question)
OK, so we'll all be getting fake IDs saying we're 50, like many teenagers get to go to bars. Hey, I've aged pretty well, I work out, I eat healthy, and I've had some work done by a very good plastic surgeon. I only look like I'm 30, but I'm really old enough to not require a national ID card. yea... That's the ticket!
Yea, CableCard 2.0 should have done the same thing. Will my Tivo HD still work with this new standard, or will I have to buy everything all over again?
I use XP. I'm not interested in Vista. Certified for Vista doesn't make me fell like I can use this stuff... I'll also assume it won't work on my ipod. What about my Sansa with Rockbox? Still dunno. I feel safer _avoiding_ "Certified for Windows Vista" items.
By going with CDMA, Verizon was only able to enslave a portion of the market in USA. If they want to grow and expand, and enslave consumers in Europe, Asia, etc. then they have to choose to go with their standards. They're probably also miffed that they lose out on charging international call rates if we Americans go travelling, because our phones don't work anywhere else. You can still be paranoid, because surely the only reason Verizon would open up and go standard for is to increase the number of people Verizon can mush around under their giant thumb.:)
Comcast replaced the line to my own house a few years ago. They didn't do a "temporary line", they had Miss Utility come out and mark everything, then came and buried a new cable from the start. it took a month for them to connect this new wire to my house, which may not have happened if I hadn't been nagging them by phone to get out, inspect the contractor's wire dig, and put a connector on it. And I'd been complaining for 2 or 3 months about the horrible reception. Why'd they get the ground marked where other wires and pipes are if they weren't going to bury it right then? This has been there almost a month now. (9 Nov to 3 Dec now) Other places have had it that way since who knows how long, I noticed them last spring, and they looked old back then. That's not "temporary". That's BS.
Painted?? It's orange insulation instead of the standard black for whatever reason. The only orange paint is in the ground from Miss Utility, marking where other underground stuff is to avoid shovels causing total havoc. Not that these guys seem to need that anymore.:( Not my lawn, not my lawnmower, but as someone dealing with the landscaping co. for our HOA common grounds, which this and other wires do cross, it is my problem.
O'm on the board of my neighborhood Homeowner's Association. We're currently putting together a complaint to our county licensing department, the FCC, etc. due to Comcast's very poor installation practices lately. There's a growing number of isntalls in our neighborhood where they not only fail to bury the wire from the junction box to an approved depth to avoid damage from landscaping equipment, they do NOT bury it AT ALL. There's currently, right now, a bright orange wire lying loosely above ground at the opposite end of my townhouse row. This is a) ugly and b) unsafe. Kids playing can trip and get hurt. Our landscaping company is either going to avoid caring fro the lawn right there and let it get ugly and out of hand or risk damaging their equipment.
The wire near my house was installed by a guy driving a Comcast van in Nov 9 2007. I dug ouo tmy camera and took the first pic of this the next day, Nov 10. I just went out and took more pics today, Dec 2.
Oh thank god. Finally, some better choice. Hopefully we'll see phones with their original software and all features intact instead of Verizon disabling things. Woot! I hate my current phone, and almost bought another last week, maybe I'll wait a bit and see if this goes anywhere.
DVDs that contain or download 'on demand' commercials that cannot be skipped
How is it "on-demand" if 1) I do NOT want them 2) I can NOT stop/skip them 3) I did NOT press my remote's "I demand to be shown a commercial right now!" button
(I'm assuming this particular term was only in the summary here, not in the article that I didn't actually read)
And if Jobs lets the iPhone show PDF files then they've for the Kindle beat quite nicely. I seriously do not understand why Amazon wants me to convert things to their format. Especially since a lot of what I'd like to have in an ebook are work PDF files, chip specs, protocol spcs, etc. that NDAs forbid me from emailing to Amazon for conversion. I think that whole thing is absolutely silly.
Unencrypted laptops with this personal information which are lost or stolen will see their owners facing criminal charges
I'd rather have any owners carrying data that is unencrypted at all face criminal charges. There's no reason not to encrypt stuff. I have my enture documents folder on my iBook under filevault. I don't know that it's perfect, but it's better than nothing. People carrying around the personal information of large numbers of people should absolutely be using some high-grade encryption on all of it. If I plug someone's hard drive into my PC I should not be able to see anything on it. Period.
I'm not waiting for a winner. I'm waiting for affordable, full-featured all-format players/drives. I don't want to buy a player than can't play back Spiderman3, nor do I want a player that can't play back Transformers. Give me a player that plays both and I'm in. Until then, my 720p projector will only be showing me old-school standard def DVDs. Same for my computer. I'm not buying a bluray drive, and I'm not buying an HDDVD drive. Sell me a drive that does them all, and I'll start paying attention. Until then, none of my computers will have any HD disk support. Grow up. Quit trying to win stupid wars that no one wants. Stop acting like Bush. End this war, merge things together, and begin to be truely successful. I largely kept out of DVD stuff until the + and - camps allowed combo products, and much the same way and for the same reasons, I'm keeping out of HD until they make friendly the same way.
Sounds like the small number of bricks and crap is growing. We should all start video taping opening stuff to use in small claims court as evidence that we aren't trying to screw the store.
I can understand that too many actual hardware changes would pop up an activation request. But updating the driver is equivalent to new hardware? Come on, that's B.S. Surely Windows can check if hardware has changed based on PCI vendor/device IDs and perhaps serial numbers such as Mac addresses, but does it need the particular device driver to do that? How would a driver version change those hardware IDs? I'd assume that Windows defines a standard way to present that information if it does ask the driver to retrieve it, which should not change from one driver revision to the next. I give a big thumbs down to driver version being part of the "system ID" for activation checks. Sorry, but that's pretty stupid.
An update to this, today was the scheduled install as mentioned in my previous post. On the phone a few weeks ago asking for a replacemetn Verizon DVR box I asked what I'd need if I would choose to change to a Tivo and they said a cablecard, and that with the HD Tivo I would only need one, not two cards. When I talked to them again last week to schedule this cablecard install, they again said I'd only need a single cablecard. I checked Tivo's web site, and the HD Tivo indeed is capable of running a single multichannel cablecard for all tuners, while the original Series 3 is currently unable to use multichannel cards, and it must have two cablecards installed even if they each are multistream cards.
But during install, the card status indicates it is a singlestream card, nto a multistream card, meaning I'd need two of them. I was hoping to only pay rent on one multistream card. The installer made two phone calls to different people, one of them who he said was the main person for my Verizon region, and I talked to this guy a bit myself. Turns out Verizon, in Howard County Maryland at least, only has single-stream cablecards. That's what they told me anyway. So I've got two cablecards instead of one. The biggest hassle with the install was waiting for the Tivo unit to download things it needed to download, which took some time of just sitting around and waiting. But the tech was a nice guy, he did check into my multistream card questions, and didn't give me any crap about anyting. He didn't try to talk me into replacing the Verizon box with yet another Verizon box.
My biggest concern is that they're putting this down as a "defective hard drive" as why I'm returning their box. They didn't note the details of the problems I had, which were "bad recording" messages refusing to play back recorded shows and other things I've mentioned elsewhere in this topic. it'd be nice if they investigated why that happened so they can improve their software and prevent others from having these problems.
This is a neat idea. Too bad I already own an Xbox though. If you got me with HDDVD and all that from th ebeginning then maybe my 360 would be more than a games and DVD player. But that's what it is, and I've got better things to spend money on than more xbox 360 consoles. I'm not buying another one.
With the absence of proprietary code in the mix users will find themselves more inclined to trust their own administrators to make the best choices
Sorry, but I think that's putting your words into everyone else's mouths. Or fingertips, or whatever. The vast majority not only don't have this opinion about open vs proprietary code affecting how much they trust the choices their admins make, they also wouldn't have a freakin' clue as to what you're going on about in that sentence. The vast majority don't know what open-source is, how it differs from proprietary source, they don't know any reason why they'd care either way, and they'd probably give you a pretty funny look for attributing this philosophy to them.
I like Linux and open-source, and have an appreciation for it. But I don't trust my admin at work more when he talks about Linux than when he's talking about Solaris. It's his job to make the best choices of any and all products available, and I trust him to choose whichever is most appropriate for our company, even if he feels that happens to be a proprietary product. It's not my place to impose on him to only ever choose open-source, and there's cases in our work where open-source offerings are less ideal.
For Tivo: $300 one time, + $12.95 tivo service, + 2 * 3.95 cablecards = $20.85/month
Amazon has it now for $254. I got mine with free shipping and no sales tax too. Yea, it's still a big upfront cost, but a little less than $300 everywhere else.
My conclusion is the reason you can't replace the cable company's box with your own is that no one would want to.
I hate boxes. I hate piles of boxes. I'd absolutely prefer a cablecard in a TV than a TV with a basic cable box. The only reason I have the two standard boxes is because those TVs won't work on FIOS without it. I'm slightly tolerant of a DVR box because it does more than just be a TV tuner, but I'd still rather reduce the clutter.
OK, I'm on the phone with them right now. I received my HD Tivo from Amazon yesterday and had not yet called for the cablecard.
The guy I talked to didn't give me a hard time at all. I'm scheduled for the service tech this coming Monday morning to install a single multichannel cablecard to my Tivo, and I told him it was a Tivo and why I'm sending their DVR box back, reasons which I describe in another comment here somewhere, so he know's it's a third party box. This guy never said unsupported box or anything like that. I know they don't support things other than plugging in the card and authorizing it, but what more do I need? Maybe I got a good guy on a good day, I don't know, but it wasn't a bad conversation.
I do wish that Verizon's own boxes used cablecards, that way I could just swap it to the Tivo and not have to wait for their tech to start using it.
mythtv likes firewire tuners, comcast's boxes have firewire outputs.
I no longer have Comcast, I now have Verizon. And Verizon disables A/V INPUTS on their boxes, even the front-panel one on my DVR, I'm not aware of any firewire present or working for outputs.
Besides, when you use our set top, you get more features. We give away an on-screen programing guide that wouldn't be available with third-party hardware. Trust me, 200+ channels is a pain to flip through trying to find something to watch.
I don't know your system, but here's why I'm trading my Verizon HD DVR box for an HD Tivo:
1. Verizon's guide is wrong about what show is on more often than Tivos was with Comcast cable in my area. neother is wrong significantly often, but Verizon annoyed me more often than Tivo on Comcast ever did.
2. Verizon's box has a habit of turning off when I'm watching stuff. in the first 3 weeks I had it this happened 3 or 4 times. Verizon replaced the box, but did say that this was a known and common problem, which they suspected was somehow related to the new software rollout just about that time. When it turns off, it's totally off as if I'd unplugged it, and I had to wait a few minutes for it to boot up again. I missed the end of a movie because of that.
3. Verizon's DVR refused to play back a number of recordings, giving an error message that they were "Bad Recording"s. There was a different error message I can't remember on one show that wouldn't play back. it suggested perhaps they were from channels I don't subscribe to. Sorry but wrong, I do indeed get the CW and Comedy Central channels as part of my default triple-play package channel lineup. I missed a few episodes of Smallville because of this, as well as South Park and a couple other shows. I do know that a standard box won't play back an HD recording. This problem is about standard shows (Comedy Central is not an HD channel) and also affects playback on the DVR box itself connected to my HDTV. This problem is not at all acceptable. Period.
OK, by tossing this box I lose on-demand, I lose Verizon's own guide, and pay-per-view becomes a phone-order item instead of a push-button item. And I won't get the future torrent support or cellphone scheduling.
I don't care.
What do I hope to get from Tivo? I expect it will be able to play back my recordings. This is by far the most important feature of a DVR box, and Verizon's box is failing to do that way too often for me to keep paying for it.
I'm not losing out on having a guide, I just get Tivo's instead. I'm happy to do that.
I never used on-demand, so I'm not missing that.
Will I miss torrents that I never had? No. Unbox is a good enough thing to replace both future-torrent and on-demand. I'm not even sure I'll use unbox.
The only thing I can think of that I'll actually miss is the other-room playback of recordings. That's kindof nice. Tivo says they would like to offer that in the future, it sounds like a political problem not a technical one. But I do still have my series 2 Tivo for the other room which can duplicate the standard def recordings there, and this feature is not worth paying for the Verizon box which may not allow me to play back a recording even on itself.
And future-cellphone scheduling, well, Tivo allows me to schedule over the net. That's just as good.
For people scammed by their TV manufacturer or ignorant salesman, their particular situation may suck. But I am extremely happy that cablecards exist, and that the cable industry is required to allow something better than their own piss-poor box to be used. That possibility is more important to me than the "convenience" of just using my cable operator's box. The lack of an alternative to what I'm seeing in Verizon's HD DVR box would be very unfriendly to the consumer, and I very much thank congress or the FCC or whoever did it for mandating the possibility of 3rd party alternatives.
Too bad it doesn't work with my service. I myself was building a Myth box, and got two of the HD3000 tuner cards. Now that I'm done with analog cable, it's pretty useless without cablecard support.:(
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When do you discover that this one chicken is really tasty? For most people, that's after it has been cooked. Can you clone something after it's been cooked, or does it have to begin with a still alive cell? (serious question)
OK, so we'll all be getting fake IDs saying we're 50, like many teenagers get to go to bars. Hey, I've aged pretty well, I work out, I eat healthy, and I've had some work done by a very good plastic surgeon. I only look like I'm 30, but I'm really old enough to not require a national ID card. yea... That's the ticket!
Out of curiosity, why the over 50 exemption?
Yea, CableCard 2.0 should have done the same thing. Will my Tivo HD still work with this new standard, or will I have to buy everything all over again?
Now, combine this with HD-DVD and standard CD/DVD* in a single drive and I'll consider it. Make me choose one or the other and I decline them all.
I use XP. I'm not interested in Vista. Certified for Vista doesn't make me fell like I can use this stuff... I'll also assume it won't work on my ipod. What about my Sansa with Rockbox? Still dunno. I feel safer _avoiding_ "Certified for Windows Vista" items.
By going with CDMA, Verizon was only able to enslave a portion of the market in USA. If they want to grow and expand, and enslave consumers in Europe, Asia, etc. then they have to choose to go with their standards. They're probably also miffed that they lose out on charging international call rates if we Americans go travelling, because our phones don't work anywhere else. You can still be paranoid, because surely the only reason Verizon would open up and go standard for is to increase the number of people Verizon can mush around under their giant thumb. :)
Comcast replaced the line to my own house a few years ago. They didn't do a "temporary line", they had Miss Utility come out and mark everything, then came and buried a new cable from the start. it took a month for them to connect this new wire to my house, which may not have happened if I hadn't been nagging them by phone to get out, inspect the contractor's wire dig, and put a connector on it. And I'd been complaining for 2 or 3 months about the horrible reception. Why'd they get the ground marked where other wires and pipes are if they weren't going to bury it right then? This has been there almost a month now. (9 Nov to 3 Dec now) Other places have had it that way since who knows how long, I noticed them last spring, and they looked old back then. That's not "temporary". That's BS.
Painted?? It's orange insulation instead of the standard black for whatever reason. The only orange paint is in the ground from Miss Utility, marking where other underground stuff is to avoid shovels causing total havoc. Not that these guys seem to need that anymore. :( Not my lawn, not my lawnmower, but as someone dealing with the landscaping co. for our HOA common grounds, which this and other wires do cross, it is my problem.
O'm on the board of my neighborhood Homeowner's Association. We're currently putting together a complaint to our county licensing department, the FCC, etc. due to Comcast's very poor installation practices lately. There's a growing number of isntalls in our neighborhood where they not only fail to bury the wire from the junction box to an approved depth to avoid damage from landscaping equipment, they do NOT bury it AT ALL. There's currently, right now, a bright orange wire lying loosely above ground at the opposite end of my townhouse row. This is a) ugly and b) unsafe. Kids playing can trip and get hurt. Our landscaping company is either going to avoid caring fro the lawn right there and let it get ugly and out of hand or risk damaging their equipment.
The wire near my house was installed by a guy driving a Comcast van in Nov 9 2007. I dug ouo tmy camera and took the first pic of this the next day, Nov 10. I just went out and took more pics today, Dec 2.
http://mysite.verizon.net/amigabill/comcast/comcast.html
IMNSHO, Comcast sucks ass and deserves to die.
Oh thank god. Finally, some better choice. Hopefully we'll see phones with their original software and all features intact instead of Verizon disabling things. Woot! I hate my current phone, and almost bought another last week, maybe I'll wait a bit and see if this goes anywhere.
DVDs that contain or download 'on demand' commercials that cannot be skipped
How is it "on-demand" if
1) I do NOT want them
2) I can NOT stop/skip them
3) I did NOT press my remote's "I demand to be shown a commercial right now!" button
(I'm assuming this particular term was only in the summary here, not in the article that I didn't actually read)
And if Jobs lets the iPhone show PDF files then they've for the Kindle beat quite nicely. I seriously do not understand why Amazon wants me to convert things to their format. Especially since a lot of what I'd like to have in an ebook are work PDF files, chip specs, protocol spcs, etc. that NDAs forbid me from emailing to Amazon for conversion. I think that whole thing is absolutely silly.
Unencrypted laptops with this personal information which are lost or stolen will see their owners facing criminal charges
I'd rather have any owners carrying data that is unencrypted at all face criminal charges. There's no reason not to encrypt stuff. I have my enture documents folder on my iBook under filevault. I don't know that it's perfect, but it's better than nothing. People carrying around the personal information of large numbers of people should absolutely be using some high-grade encryption on all of it. If I plug someone's hard drive into my PC I should not be able to see anything on it. Period.
I'm not waiting for a winner. I'm waiting for affordable, full-featured all-format players/drives. I don't want to buy a player than can't play back Spiderman3, nor do I want a player that can't play back Transformers. Give me a player that plays both and I'm in. Until then, my 720p projector will only be showing me old-school standard def DVDs. Same for my computer. I'm not buying a bluray drive, and I'm not buying an HDDVD drive. Sell me a drive that does them all, and I'll start paying attention. Until then, none of my computers will have any HD disk support. Grow up. Quit trying to win stupid wars that no one wants. Stop acting like Bush. End this war, merge things together, and begin to be truely successful. I largely kept out of DVD stuff until the + and - camps allowed combo products, and much the same way and for the same reasons, I'm keeping out of HD until they make friendly the same way.
Sounds like the small number of bricks and crap is growing. We should all start video taping opening stuff to use in small claims court as evidence that we aren't trying to screw the store.
I can understand that too many actual hardware changes would pop up an activation request. But updating the driver is equivalent to new hardware? Come on, that's B.S. Surely Windows can check if hardware has changed based on PCI vendor/device IDs and perhaps serial numbers such as Mac addresses, but does it need the particular device driver to do that? How would a driver version change those hardware IDs? I'd assume that Windows defines a standard way to present that information if it does ask the driver to retrieve it, which should not change from one driver revision to the next. I give a big thumbs down to driver version being part of the "system ID" for activation checks. Sorry, but that's pretty stupid.
An update to this, today was the scheduled install as mentioned in my previous post. On the phone a few weeks ago asking for a replacemetn Verizon DVR box I asked what I'd need if I would choose to change to a Tivo and they said a cablecard, and that with the HD Tivo I would only need one, not two cards. When I talked to them again last week to schedule this cablecard install, they again said I'd only need a single cablecard. I checked Tivo's web site, and the HD Tivo indeed is capable of running a single multichannel cablecard for all tuners, while the original Series 3 is currently unable to use multichannel cards, and it must have two cablecards installed even if they each are multistream cards.
But during install, the card status indicates it is a singlestream card, nto a multistream card, meaning I'd need two of them. I was hoping to only pay rent on one multistream card. The installer made two phone calls to different people, one of them who he said was the main person for my Verizon region, and I talked to this guy a bit myself. Turns out Verizon, in Howard County Maryland at least, only has single-stream cablecards. That's what they told me anyway. So I've got two cablecards instead of one. The biggest hassle with the install was waiting for the Tivo unit to download things it needed to download, which took some time of just sitting around and waiting. But the tech was a nice guy, he did check into my multistream card questions, and didn't give me any crap about anyting. He didn't try to talk me into replacing the Verizon box with yet another Verizon box.
My biggest concern is that they're putting this down as a "defective hard drive" as why I'm returning their box. They didn't note the details of the problems I had, which were "bad recording" messages refusing to play back recorded shows and other things I've mentioned elsewhere in this topic. it'd be nice if they investigated why that happened so they can improve their software and prevent others from having these problems.
This is a neat idea. Too bad I already own an Xbox though. If you got me with HDDVD and all that from th ebeginning then maybe my 360 would be more than a games and DVD player. But that's what it is, and I've got better things to spend money on than more xbox 360 consoles. I'm not buying another one.
With the absence of proprietary code in the mix users will find themselves more inclined to trust their own administrators to make the best choices
Sorry, but I think that's putting your words into everyone else's mouths. Or fingertips, or whatever. The vast majority not only don't have this opinion about open vs proprietary code affecting how much they trust the choices their admins make, they also wouldn't have a freakin' clue as to what you're going on about in that sentence. The vast majority don't know what open-source is, how it differs from proprietary source, they don't know any reason why they'd care either way, and they'd probably give you a pretty funny look for attributing this philosophy to them.
I like Linux and open-source, and have an appreciation for it. But I don't trust my admin at work more when he talks about Linux than when he's talking about Solaris. It's his job to make the best choices of any and all products available, and I trust him to choose whichever is most appropriate for our company, even if he feels that happens to be a proprietary product. It's not my place to impose on him to only ever choose open-source, and there's cases in our work where open-source offerings are less ideal.
For Tivo: $300 one time, + $12.95 tivo service, + 2 * 3.95 cablecards = $20.85/month
Amazon has it now for $254. I got mine with free shipping and no sales tax too. Yea, it's still a big upfront cost, but a little less than $300 everywhere else.
My conclusion is the reason you can't replace the cable company's box with your own is that no one would want to.
I hate boxes. I hate piles of boxes. I'd absolutely prefer a cablecard in a TV than a TV with a basic cable box. The only reason I have the two standard boxes is because those TVs won't work on FIOS without it. I'm slightly tolerant of a DVR box because it does more than just be a TV tuner, but I'd still rather reduce the clutter.
OK, I'm on the phone with them right now. I received my HD Tivo from Amazon yesterday and had not yet called for the cablecard.
The guy I talked to didn't give me a hard time at all. I'm scheduled for the service tech this coming Monday morning to install a single multichannel cablecard to my Tivo, and I told him it was a Tivo and why I'm sending their DVR box back, reasons which I describe in another comment here somewhere, so he know's it's a third party box. This guy never said unsupported box or anything like that. I know they don't support things other than plugging in the card and authorizing it, but what more do I need? Maybe I got a good guy on a good day, I don't know, but it wasn't a bad conversation.
I do wish that Verizon's own boxes used cablecards, that way I could just swap it to the Tivo and not have to wait for their tech to start using it.
mythtv likes firewire tuners, comcast's boxes have firewire outputs.
I no longer have Comcast, I now have Verizon. And Verizon disables A/V INPUTS on their boxes, even the front-panel one on my DVR, I'm not aware of any firewire present or working for outputs.
Besides, when you use our set top, you get more features. We give away an on-screen programing guide that wouldn't be available with third-party hardware. Trust me, 200+ channels is a pain to flip through trying to find something to watch.
I don't know your system, but here's why I'm trading my Verizon HD DVR box for an HD Tivo:
1. Verizon's guide is wrong about what show is on more often than Tivos was with Comcast cable in my area. neother is wrong significantly often, but Verizon annoyed me more often than Tivo on Comcast ever did.
2. Verizon's box has a habit of turning off when I'm watching stuff. in the first 3 weeks I had it this happened 3 or 4 times. Verizon replaced the box, but did say that this was a known and common problem, which they suspected was somehow related to the new software rollout just about that time. When it turns off, it's totally off as if I'd unplugged it, and I had to wait a few minutes for it to boot up again. I missed the end of a movie because of that.
3. Verizon's DVR refused to play back a number of recordings, giving an error message that they were "Bad Recording"s. There was a different error message I can't remember on one show that wouldn't play back. it suggested perhaps they were from channels I don't subscribe to. Sorry but wrong, I do indeed get the CW and Comedy Central channels as part of my default triple-play package channel lineup. I missed a few episodes of Smallville because of this, as well as South Park and a couple other shows. I do know that a standard box won't play back an HD recording. This problem is about standard shows (Comedy Central is not an HD channel) and also affects playback on the DVR box itself connected to my HDTV. This problem is not at all acceptable. Period.
OK, by tossing this box I lose on-demand, I lose Verizon's own guide, and pay-per-view becomes a phone-order item instead of a push-button item. And I won't get the future torrent support or cellphone scheduling.
I don't care.
What do I hope to get from Tivo? I expect it will be able to play back my recordings. This is by far the most important feature of a DVR box, and Verizon's box is failing to do that way too often for me to keep paying for it.
I'm not losing out on having a guide, I just get Tivo's instead. I'm happy to do that.
I never used on-demand, so I'm not missing that.
Will I miss torrents that I never had? No. Unbox is a good enough thing to replace both future-torrent and on-demand. I'm not even sure I'll use unbox.
The only thing I can think of that I'll actually miss is the other-room playback of recordings. That's kindof nice. Tivo says they would like to offer that in the future, it sounds like a political problem not a technical one. But I do still have my series 2 Tivo for the other room which can duplicate the standard def recordings there, and this feature is not worth paying for the Verizon box which may not allow me to play back a recording even on itself.
And future-cellphone scheduling, well, Tivo allows me to schedule over the net. That's just as good.
For people scammed by their TV manufacturer or ignorant salesman, their particular situation may suck. But I am extremely happy that cablecards exist, and that the cable industry is required to allow something better than their own piss-poor box to be used. That possibility is more important to me than the "convenience" of just using my cable operator's box. The lack of an alternative to what I'm seeing in Verizon's HD DVR box would be very unfriendly to the consumer, and I very much thank congress or the FCC or whoever did it for mandating the possibility of 3rd party alternatives.
Too bad it doesn't work with my service. I myself was building a Myth box, and got two of the HD3000 tuner cards. Now that I'm done with analog cable, it's pretty useless without cablecard support. :(