TiVo should just get out of the hardware business completely. They've never done very well at it -- their product isn't terribly reliable, and they've never been able to figure out a way to sell it for more than it costs to make it.
Besides, it isn't the hardware that makes people loyal TiVo users. I mean, anybody can slap together a digital video recorder. What gets people excited is the clever stuff the software. Not the obvious stuff, like "record every episode of Days of Our Lives" -- that's only slightly more sophisticated than what a VCR does. It's the really clever stuff. Like "they keep watching nature shows, so I'm going to record them without being told, if I have the spare disk space."
You license that software to other PVR makers. And you let anybody willing to pay $10/month subscribe to the data stream. Fewer expenses, just as much money. And no stupid cable/satellite companies saying "take out that feature or we won't pay you a pittance to resell your boxes."
If hard drives were the weak point in the TV design, it wouldn't be all that bad. HDs don't cost a lot to replace, after all.
Early TiVos were notorious for being shipped with flaky modems. But what really screws people over is the fact that the software upgrade process isn't failsafe. That is, software upgrades often fail, leaving the system nonfunctional, or nearly so, with no way to back things out. Hackers can re-image the system on their own, but most customers don't have that kind of skill. And you don't even have to option of refusing an upgrade!
and why I would never buy any piece of hardware that relies on a subscription.
Neither would I, but I did buy a TiVo. You don't have to pay a monthly fee -- you can get lifetime service for a flat fee. And it's the subscription that makes the product worth having, because the box uses the subscription to constantly dig up shows for you. Without it, the TiVo is just a glorified VCR.
When I decided to get the box, my thought was, "A lifetime subscription costs less than two years of monthly subscription. Obviously I'm going to have the box for more than two years, or I shouldn't buy it at all." The flaw in my reasoning was that my box didn't last two years before it died.
First, I have to take issue with the claim that such technology, concepts, and products are not enough for a successful business. I think their success to this point is evidence enough of the power of this kind of product.
"Their success to this point"???!!! For a private company, success means profits. If not actual profits, then hopes of profits in the forseeable future. As the story mentions, they've lost half a billion dollars, and show no sign of going into the black.
TiVo lovers (I used to be one myself) think this product is terminally cool because, when a TiVo box works correctly, it makes TV watching 100 times more enjoyable. But that, by itself, is not "success". Tivo lovers, though fanatical, are few and far between. TiVo has simply made too many mistakes. The platform is too klugy, so there's always been reliability issues. And if it does break, you have to send it back to the factory, for fees that approach the original purchase price. Even if nothing ever went wrong, most consumers just don't see such an expensive gadget as being worthwhile for what it does. This company is circling the drain.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but good "technology, concepts, and products" is not a guarantee of success. There are other factors: marketing, management, timing, access to markets, and just plain luck. The few techies that get rich making some amazing breakthrough get all the press -- but most innovative tech companies fail.
Which is true of all business. You can get very, very rich, but not without taking very, very big risks.
That's a big if. I don't think "it doesn't run on Windows" is that big a factor in choosing software. It's rather the other way around -- everybody has a huge lockin on Microsoft products, and they buy Windows because most Microsoft products are Windows products.
We've had pretty good alternatives to Word and Excel available on Windows for years. But the retraining and file compatibility issues prevent most people from going over.
Now if people suddenly start abandoning Word, Excel, Outlook, and Internet Explorer for cross-platform alternatives, then sure, everybody would start asking "Why are we paying all those licensing fees for Windows when Linux is free?" Don't see that happening any time soon.
I don't know Finnish, but if the etymolgy of "Thorvalds" is Germanic, than it means "Thor's Woods". I can't think of a cute joke to make out of that, but I'm sure somebody else will!
Never mind the capes. The whole notion of OS as a holy crusade is counterproductive. Fortunately Tridgell and Thorvalds have always seen OS as alternative development model, not as a great social reform.
Now that Firefox and Thunderbird have taken on a life of their own, is "Netscape" still relevant?
That question pretty much answers itself. What I find really strange is that anybody at AOL is even working on Netscape, given AOL's dwindling (and never high to begin with) comittment to the product. Possible explanations: what's left of the staff at Netscape is going through the motions just to justify their continued employment; AOL is going through the motions to justify to Time-Warner stockholders all the money they spent buying out Netscape.
All of a sudden, Slashdotters are looking at SF movies (Tron) and shows (original Star Trek) made 20 or 30 years ago, and calling them "low tech. Very silly. The effects used then were the best effects available at the time. I'm sure The Matrix will look just as "low tech" in 30 years.
And exactly how does that make him any different from any other professional pundit? That's a class of person whose very success depends on being despised.
Both sound like they're well worth seeing. I notice that The Cat Returns is a sort of sequel to Whisper of the Heart, which really sounds interesting. And there's a DVD with English subtitles. But alas, it's Region 2 Only!
Speaking of subtitles: I make it a rule to always watch Miyasaki movies in Japanese with English subtitles. That way you get a pretty authentic version of the dialog, even if the translators sometimes trip over English idioms. When you listen to the Disney soundtrack, you get a lot of gratuitous -- often obnoxious -- additions.
The key word here seems to be "download". There are any number of ways you can ship photos to your father, but I imagine you've already thought of those. I'm guessing you want your latest photos available to your father without much delay -- and without it being difficult for him to access them.
I can think of a couple of solutions. For example: You get a cheap desktop or laptop computer. You use it for nothing but your father electronic picture downloader. You turn it on, and it automatically runs a web browser with a script that does a slideshow of all the photos on a particular web site. (A little serial port or IrDA hacking could maybe interface the slideshow with your father's existing gadgetry; otherwise you can just put the whole thing on a timer.) The web site belongs to you, and you just upload new photos to it whenever you want your father to see them. With a little work, you could also add audio files for narratives and background music.
That's just one idea -- a little brainstorming would produce a couple more. If you lack the expertise to do the necessary software hacking, I'm sure you could find some volunteer labor. (I'd be pleased to offer my own skills.) The same goes for hardware hacking, though for that you'd need somebody on the scene.
I very much admire Miyazaki's work, especially when he writes original stories. But it bothers me that in the west, we hear so much about Miyazaki and so little about other Studio Ghibli animators. I've never had a chance to see a single non-Miyazaki Ghibli movie, and I suspect that they all have some of the artistry and attention to detail that blows away Miyazaki fans.
It's also important to remember that the Ghibli approach to animation requires massive effort by a huge team of creative people. Again, these people are mostly ignored in the west, where we have to bad habit of giving the director all the credit for creating a movie, and ignore all the writers, designers, and other talented, original people.
Actually, that's not true. The problem is that browsers are darned sloppy about implementing W3C standards. They're getting better (especially Mozilla- and Konqueror-based browsers), but it's an ongoing problem, especially since 95% of the users are still on IE.
Nor do I agree with that coding for IE puts you on "thin ice". It's a flaky program, but it's reasonably consistent. Ironically, you get less consistency with IE if you try to code to the standards, because then you probably switch the browser from "quirks mode" to "standards mode" -- and the latter mode is much more buggy!
Which is not to say that I advocate coding for IE. It's bad for us all to create Microsoft lockin if you can avoid it. (You can't always avoid it, alas.) When I hack HTML and CSS, I code to the W3C standards -- but always with an eye to flawed implementations of those standards.
Well, I'm certainly not going to argue that anybody should use IE for anything they don't absolutely have to. But most people are a long way from being able to simply do without it.
But how many more pockets do I have? I have my cell phone on my belt, pda in one, wallet, ipod... come on!
They keep trying to do the all-in-one thing, but there are some fundamental conflicts. Multitasking phone management, PDA-centric tasks, and your MP3 playlist all one one little screen is a pain. Not to mention battery issues -- if you run down the battery on your MP3 player, you're just stuck without tunes for a while. But if that also runs down your cell phone and PDA...
Everybody's ideal solution is different (you could always buy a safari jacket, but few people are that dweebish). Here's mine: instead of a cell phone, you have a little black box that's your portable wireless access point. You still have to find room for it in your pocket, but you never take it out, except to recharge it -- there's no control except the on-off, and no display at all. It uses Bluetooth to talk to your PDA and your headset. With voice recognition, you can use the headset to place and answer calls. To program the thing, you use your PDA, which also uses it to connect to the Internet. Maybe you have a separate MP3 player to avoid running down any of the other devices, or maybe you care more about pocket space, so you combine the MP3 player with one of the other devices. (There are already PDAs that double as MP3 players.) Then you've only got two devices in your pocket, and one in your ear. And one of those devices only comes out when you recharge it. Simple enough?
The beauty of this approach is that all these devices already exist, except for the wireless access point. And there's only one reason it doesn't: cell phone makers focus on adding features, when they should be focusing on interoperability. But then, they make more money charging you for extra features on their own product than they could make providing interoperability with other peoples' products.
You didn't say what you felt the bug was, and the most apparent difference was of the alt tag handling, so I assumed that's what you were referring to.
But the alt handling has nothing to do with Javascript. Oh well, I suppose I should have been more specific.
Why should I do that? The script works fine, even in Firefox. I simply was pointing out that Firefox is not "bug free". I doubt if any serious piece of software is.
The IE bug is that it displays, when you hover over the image, "click here to send me email". It is getting that from the alt tag on your image, and shouldn't.
Perhaps you're right. I actually don't care -- I only put in the alt tag to be standards compliant. But the failure of Firefox to properly implement window.status is definitely a bug.
So if you're forced to run Windows, you should just give up on security and reliability? If your system can't be absolutely cool, you're a hopeless loser, so nothing else matters? Spoken like somebody who doesn't have to earn a living.
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Besides, it isn't the hardware that makes people loyal TiVo users. I mean, anybody can slap together a digital video recorder. What gets people excited is the clever stuff the software. Not the obvious stuff, like "record every episode of Days of Our Lives" -- that's only slightly more sophisticated than what a VCR does. It's the really clever stuff. Like "they keep watching nature shows, so I'm going to record them without being told, if I have the spare disk space."
You license that software to other PVR makers. And you let anybody willing to pay $10/month subscribe to the data stream. Fewer expenses, just as much money. And no stupid cable/satellite companies saying "take out that feature or we won't pay you a pittance to resell your boxes."
Early TiVos were notorious for being shipped with flaky modems. But what really screws people over is the fact that the software upgrade process isn't failsafe. That is, software upgrades often fail, leaving the system nonfunctional, or nearly so, with no way to back things out. Hackers can re-image the system on their own, but most customers don't have that kind of skill. And you don't even have to option of refusing an upgrade!
When I decided to get the box, my thought was, "A lifetime subscription costs less than two years of monthly subscription. Obviously I'm going to have the box for more than two years, or I shouldn't buy it at all." The flaw in my reasoning was that my box didn't last two years before it died.
TiVo lovers (I used to be one myself) think this product is terminally cool because, when a TiVo box works correctly, it makes TV watching 100 times more enjoyable. But that, by itself, is not "success". Tivo lovers, though fanatical, are few and far between. TiVo has simply made too many mistakes. The platform is too klugy, so there's always been reliability issues. And if it does break, you have to send it back to the factory, for fees that approach the original purchase price. Even if nothing ever went wrong, most consumers just don't see such an expensive gadget as being worthwhile for what it does. This company is circling the drain.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but good "technology, concepts, and products" is not a guarantee of success. There are other factors: marketing, management, timing, access to markets, and just plain luck. The few techies that get rich making some amazing breakthrough get all the press -- but most innovative tech companies fail.
Which is true of all business. You can get very, very rich, but not without taking very, very big risks.
We've had pretty good alternatives to Word and Excel available on Windows for years. But the retraining and file compatibility issues prevent most people from going over.
Now if people suddenly start abandoning Word, Excel, Outlook, and Internet Explorer for cross-platform alternatives, then sure, everybody would start asking "Why are we paying all those licensing fees for Windows when Linux is free?" Don't see that happening any time soon.
I don't know Finnish, but if the etymolgy of "Thorvalds" is Germanic, than it means "Thor's Woods". I can't think of a cute joke to make out of that, but I'm sure somebody else will!
Never mind the capes. The whole notion of OS as a holy crusade is counterproductive. Fortunately Tridgell and Thorvalds have always seen OS as alternative development model, not as a great social reform.
All of a sudden, Slashdotters are looking at SF movies (Tron) and shows (original Star Trek) made 20 or 30 years ago, and calling them "low tech. Very silly. The effects used then were the best effects available at the time. I'm sure The Matrix will look just as "low tech" in 30 years.
And exactly how does that make him any different from any other professional pundit? That's a class of person whose very success depends on being despised.
Speaking of subtitles: I make it a rule to always watch Miyasaki movies in Japanese with English subtitles. That way you get a pretty authentic version of the dialog, even if the translators sometimes trip over English idioms. When you listen to the Disney soundtrack, you get a lot of gratuitous -- often obnoxious -- additions.
Well, I've got to wonder about anybody who spends 4 months camping out in front of a movie theater. Is any movie that good?
For that matter, Miyazaki does a better job of creating a sense of place and an illusion of reality than most live-action filmmakers.
I can think of a couple of solutions. For example: You get a cheap desktop or laptop computer. You use it for nothing but your father electronic picture downloader. You turn it on, and it automatically runs a web browser with a script that does a slideshow of all the photos on a particular web site. (A little serial port or IrDA hacking could maybe interface the slideshow with your father's existing gadgetry; otherwise you can just put the whole thing on a timer.) The web site belongs to you, and you just upload new photos to it whenever you want your father to see them. With a little work, you could also add audio files for narratives and background music.
That's just one idea -- a little brainstorming would produce a couple more. If you lack the expertise to do the necessary software hacking, I'm sure you could find some volunteer labor. (I'd be pleased to offer my own skills.) The same goes for hardware hacking, though for that you'd need somebody on the scene.
It's also important to remember that the Ghibli approach to animation requires massive effort by a huge team of creative people. Again, these people are mostly ignored in the west, where we have to bad habit of giving the director all the credit for creating a movie, and ignore all the writers, designers, and other talented, original people.
Nor do I agree with that coding for IE puts you on "thin ice". It's a flaky program, but it's reasonably consistent. Ironically, you get less consistency with IE if you try to code to the standards, because then you probably switch the browser from "quirks mode" to "standards mode" -- and the latter mode is much more buggy!
Which is not to say that I advocate coding for IE. It's bad for us all to create Microsoft lockin if you can avoid it. (You can't always avoid it, alas.) When I hack HTML and CSS, I code to the W3C standards -- but always with an eye to flawed implementations of those standards.
Of course I'm a douchebag. I admitted I was wrong, and around here that's a social mistake of the first order! ;)
Well, I'm certainly not going to argue that anybody should use IE for anything they don't absolutely have to. But most people are a long way from being able to simply do without it.
Everybody's ideal solution is different (you could always buy a safari jacket, but few people are that dweebish). Here's mine: instead of a cell phone, you have a little black box that's your portable wireless access point. You still have to find room for it in your pocket, but you never take it out, except to recharge it -- there's no control except the on-off, and no display at all. It uses Bluetooth to talk to your PDA and your headset. With voice recognition, you can use the headset to place and answer calls. To program the thing, you use your PDA, which also uses it to connect to the Internet. Maybe you have a separate MP3 player to avoid running down any of the other devices, or maybe you care more about pocket space, so you combine the MP3 player with one of the other devices. (There are already PDAs that double as MP3 players.) Then you've only got two devices in your pocket, and one in your ear. And one of those devices only comes out when you recharge it. Simple enough?
The beauty of this approach is that all these devices already exist, except for the wireless access point. And there's only one reason it doesn't: cell phone makers focus on adding features, when they should be focusing on interoperability. But then, they make more money charging you for extra features on their own product than they could make providing interoperability with other peoples' products.
I stand corrected. Not sure I agree with having this option off by default, though.
Why should I do that? The script works fine, even in Firefox. I simply was pointing out that Firefox is not "bug free". I doubt if any serious piece of software is.
So if you're forced to run Windows, you should just give up on security and reliability? If your system can't be absolutely cool, you're a hopeless loser, so nothing else matters? Spoken like somebody who doesn't have to earn a living.