I had a Cisco router lose the smoke built into it's power supply once. Fortunately it was one of two routers running in parallel, so for the 4 hours it took to get a replacement, we were actually up all the time.
Woo... those deep deep technical terms again, like "melted". OMG, that's so deep it's not even in my CCIE books. Well at least it's back to solid form now.
Yup. But DNS seems to be one of the most poorly managed things on the net. When it's only done half-right, most people can still get to most places and they think it's correct, but subtle problems do exist in many ways, especially with caching, and most admins have no clue about what or why or even realize it's a DNS problem, saying "It can't be DNS, I can get there".
I do attack the methodology. Just not here because the topic here is not about the methodology. Here, people have used those false numbers as if they were truthful, and I don't accept that.
We don't need better programming languages, we need better programmers. Those who try to code too quickly and fail to think about what they are doing are the ones that bring us buffer overflows. And now you want to encourage these same people to code with a language they are told will speed up their programming? They better not be coding anything for medical instruments, airplane controls and navigation, nor any military systems... even if they are using Java.
Since when was a language able to make up for neglect?
Why do you classify these jobs (web design and system administration) as not...jobs which require more skills.? Is it because you see them being mostly currently filled by people with lower skill levels? Just what job functions do you see as...jobs which require more skills.?
IMHO, you'd be insane to start a CPU design company, and possibly even a software company, even here in the US... unless you're going for a small niche that won't attract the Intel's, AMD's, Transmeta's, IBM's, Oracles, Microsoft's, of the world to compete head on against whatever you come up with.
I'd agree about keeping the skilled workers here. And there are certainly advantages for us to bring the skilled foreign workers here (though in reality I've found quite many of them less skilled than out of work people here, because the foreign workers are also known to be good brown nosers, and unlikely to sue for anything). But let's get people back into the workforce here, and get those w/o jobs who want them employed. People*time is a resource we are currently wasting. And that includes web designers and system administrators (and there are some out there who are exceptionally skilled in their field).
People who truly have given up, and don't want to be employed anymore, of course should not be counted. But those who decline to seek government assistance, perhaps because they are smart enough to have savings to live on, or can go back home to live with the parents, or even did grab a part time job dumping fries into a vat or stocking the shelves at the supermarket, should be counted. But they are not the way the system works.
The tweak that was made a few years ago did change the unemployment rate result about 3 to 4 percent. The political analysis of the time primarily focused on it being a means to let labor unions bargain from a stronger position. Face it, lower unemployment figures do drive up wages and salaries. That's not necessarily a bad thing for "the people", but the less accurate the measurement is, the less stable the economy will be because other measurements will be more inconsistent depending on whether they work with, or work around, the unemployment figures. For example, consumer buying went down right after the unemployment went down, which is an inconsistency that can destabilize things.
What we need are accurate figures that correctly categorize how many people are in each of the various groups of unemployment (even if living off smartly retained savings) or underemployment (i.e. working to pay the rent but not in their proper career path).
Of course I don't want the US technology industry to be hurt. And you make a good argument for why we should bring in H1B's. But given the fact that there were quite many very experienced technical people looking for working during even the peak, tells me that the difficulty in finding good people was not as a result of there being a lack of numbers. There were likely other factors such as not wanting to spend the time working within a rather bad system we have of actually finding people, as well as people just plain not willing to relocate to places like California, which perhaps did deplete its resources (we know they tend to deplete other things like electric generating capacity).
I got a few job enticements to go to California for pay as high as $275k/yr. I'm glad I didn't waste my time with that. They sure seemed too good to be true. I bet those are the places that failed first.
I don't think those companies want the high turnover. So they're sure to be using the risk of leaving soon factor at a higher weight when making the decision to hire someone. I know I would. It's the non-techies that in general will make the better employees in those jobs. Good workers are hard to find (at least legal ones), and when you have a choice in hiring, you choose the better ones for what the job is. And it ain't flipping CPU chips at McD's.
So what makes you think I am in California? I am not.
So what makes you think I live in a homeless shelter? I do not.
So what makes you think I am whining about my situation? I have not.
So what makes you think I am not in the midwest? Actually, I'm not, I'm in Texas, the state that sells power to California.
So what makes you think I'm unemployed? Well, maybe technically. But I do have 2 part time contracts and am building my own business. I don't need that job at McDonalds. If I took it, I'd be depriving you.
I'm not sure what numbers you're looking at. For some jobs like McDonalds, sure, I can see 100% in many places. But there are lots of stores I go to frequently and the same people have been there for years. At the local electronics store (not Radio Shack), half the people working there last month were there 7 years ago when I first went to the place. Maybe the other half does turn over entirely in a year, but there is a solid core staff there. I sure hope they get paid well (but somehow, I doubt it).
I didn't say it was proof. The whole process is very empirical anyway. The point is that there are more people out of jobs than the unemployment figures tell about. If you want to know how many, you have to find a way to measure them somewhere. The drop in consumer demand is one possible way to do that. But also beware of the shift. For example the demand for essentials like housing, food, and soap (well maybe not soap for some) will remain up or at least not drop as much, while the demand for optional and luxury goods will drop a lot. Just watch the figures on the financial web sites and see what is going on. It's not pretty, but at least it kinda looks like it has begun to level out. But you can be sure (well, I sure hope so, anyway) that it won't be as crazy as before.
Last month at the local Internet Society meeting, over 50% of the jobs that hiring managers were seeking to fill were for e-commerce positions involving programming in Java. Java was 3 times in demand as PHP and C++ combined, and nothing else was. Of course that's one small meeting job/forum. And they were all server side jobs. There is apparently nothing going right now for client side Java. Besides, I have all that disabled and I know a lot of other people do, too.
But maybe you're right. I've heard some horror stories with regard to various Java facilities. So maybe those Java jobs that can be gotten will end up being doomed because nothing will end up working and the company will go bust. I think I'm still glad I didn't get into Java.
Obviously you are the clueless one. You missed the quotes around the term "junk". That means that's the common phraseology used.
I never said there was a couple years of training involved. There is some, and it varies by job. There are jobs even better than cash register, but they need a week or two of "training" which means they are non-productive until the training period is over, and it costs the employer money. The "year or two" is how long the management hopes the employee will stay on. If they are sure the candidate will be leaving as soon as the tech jobs pick up again, and another candidate perceives this job as a good career for the next 5 to 10 years, guess which one the smart employer will hire. I've been on both sides of employing, and I know how it works. And back when employers were not afraid to tell candidates why they were not chosen (back before all the lawsuit threats) some of the things I heard frequently are "overqualified" and "this would not challenge you enough" and "you'll be bored here". Good hiring managers know how to measure people (though I suspect a lot of that didn't happen during the peak of the crazy dot-compensation-extreme days).
I'm glad for you that you do have at least some other skills, like sales. Most techies would never survive in sales, if they could even land such a job, not even retail sales. To those who can, of course they should.
Sorry, I can't moderate and post the same thread. Besides, you're at 4 as of when I'm replying. That and I didn't get any points today, anyway:-)
One of the problems in the technical fields is that there has been a huge influx of new products, tools, languages, features, and systems to learn. Then businesses end up making (usually stupid, and often horrendously assinine) decisions about which of these things to commit themselves to, then when they look for a techie, they demand only someone who has precisely that set of skills. If one skill is missing they can't "hit the ground running". And if they have excess skills, they are "too expensive". This greatly complicated the effort to find technical talent. For every 100,000 people out there with hireable technical talent, maybe 5 to 10 actually were exactly what they were looking for (because they were so picky about an exact match) and of course they were not in the local city.
When a whole company goes under, as many have done, those who are let go happen to be everyone. It doesn't matter if you are clueless or a genius. And in big companies, the same thing also happened on a project basis. The decisions of who to let go had almost nothing to do with whether you were clueless or a genius. If you were on a project that got scrapped, then you got the pink slip. It's easy for a company to do this because it's perfectly defensible. If they had instead shuffled people around to try to keep the geniuses, that means they would have had to let some clueless go in continuing projects. And that would have opened them to legal liabilities because quite often people sue over these matters. The people who were let go were the ones specifically associated with a job that was eliminated.
By the way, the unemployment rate here in the US is figured on the basis of how many people are eligible for and seek government assistance, not how many people would take a job if there was one. This was done by the Clinton administration to prop up labor unions and help them bargain for higher pay.
The unemployment rate is NOT 3.2%. During the first year of the Clinton administration, the government changed the formula for how they determine unemployment. Essentially it comes down to measuring people only if they specifically seek government assistance of some kind as a result of unemployment, and only if they do so within 6 months of being let go. And when their unemployment benefits run out (about 3 years now I think), they not only no longer get anything, they don't get counted any more, either.
Unemployment is really closer to 6% or 7% right now, and upwards of 30% in some technical fields like Internet, E-commerce, and Telecom. Need to verify this? Go to the retail/consumer stores like Sears or Walmart or Best Buy and ask the managers how their sales have been doing the past year.
I don't believe it was. Perhaps they evetually came to realize that the supposed IT worker shortage was a big fraud manufacturered to force techies to accept lower pay.
But wait... if the pay was so high, doesn't that mean their were more jobs and fewer people, like ECON 101 taught us? Not really. There were a number of issues that tipped the scales to make the appearance of higher demand... when in fact even during the peak, lots of techies had trouble finding work. One problem was that the suits jumped into the Internet mess so fast, they had no time to learn enough to even figure out who was smart and who wasn't. The very recruiting process they loved so much was falling apart because not enough non-techies knew enough of the new technical stuff to understand the techies to figure out who to hire. Then the bigger companies couldn't attract people with stock options very well. Sure they had stock options available, but those companies were too big (diluted with assets) to ever have spectacular growth.
The job market was just totally distorted, and is in shambles now as a result. The cause? Mismanagement on an enourmous scale caused by the rush of the ignorant to buy into the Internet craze.
Hunting for a job is itself a full time job, especially as bad as the market is right now. Even headhunters are losing their jobs.
If you do have to go to work in some job that pays very little, the problem with that is that it takes so many hours at the job just to make enough money to pay the rent and buy some food, that there is no time left to do job hunting for a real job for which your technical skills apply. When you do get an interview (and remember, count on at least 20 interviews on average before you get an offer) you have to take time off work, you lose some of the precious pay, and you risk losing that job as well. Do that 10 times and you can count on being back on the street.
You say the jobs are there... no, these are "junk" jobs. In fact, getting such jobs isn't even that easy. The managers will know you're not the kind of person to stick around for a couple years to make the training worth while. The "real" jobs... are just not there right now, unless you know one of the fad skills which are in overdemand, like Java.
Reality is, a lot of the techies are not needing to support families. So they can at least go work on hunting for a real job... while living in the shelter.
Lots of people are reporting that their Linux version sucked. Mind explaining why that is?
There are a lot of companies I never hear of. I don't go around looking for stuff I don't need. At least they never spammed me.
I find CVS to be of excellent quality. But Bugzilla, I don't find that to be very good at all. I really haven't used the professional versions. Are they as portable?
When you start with a programming staff that is clueless about making a product portable from the outset, and then try to retrofit it to a single distribution of Linux, instead of trying to make it portable to all of Unix during the Unix porting, or even during the original development, then I can fully understand why the product must have been crap (even for Windows).
By the way, their marketing must have sucked, too, because I never heard of them. I'm not opposed to buying software for Linux, even if it is binary only. I have done so in the past. The only exception is I won't load a binary only module into my kernel. But these guys simply missed the boat, in both development and marketing, it seems.
This is often the problem with products which start out for Windows and later get retrofitted to Linux. The original developer(s) only know Windows and probably never wrote portable code in their lives. And then when they think Linux might be something to market for, they make the second mistake of choosing a particular distribution, and again screw up the whole idea of portable software, making something that doesn't work on other distributions, or other Unix(-like) systems which lots of people do use.
Of course, there is also one issue to consider. Competition in the open source free software community is tough. The price can't be beat, the quality of a lot of it is superior to anything you can get commercially (usually because it's not released until it's really ready, after lots of smart people beta test it), and the support comes from people who in the community who are real programmers and actually use it, instead of someone who couldn't get a job doing programming.
So I say "bye bye" to FREEDOM Internet Privacy Suite. Obviously I didn't need ya, and you've finally realized that yourselves.
There are plenty of things it can do without being subscribed to a service.
When I first heard about this in the previous article, I had hoped it was a mistake. But the response I read, while revealing such a mistake, also revealed the real reason I will now never consider buying a TiVo. That reason is that their whole marketing plan is to get subscribers for marketing purposes. So as far as I'm concerned, TiVo is out and doomed... not the box, per se... the company.
I don't own one. I was thinking about getting one. But now I never will.
Slashdot Mirror
A choice today is djbdns.
Nor are servers and ads.
I had a Cisco router lose the smoke built into it's power supply once. Fortunately it was one of two routers running in parallel, so for the 4 hours it took to get a replacement, we were actually up all the time.
Woo ... those deep deep technical terms again, like "melted". OMG, that's so deep it's not even in my CCIE books. Well at least it's back to solid form now.
Yup. But DNS seems to be one of the most poorly managed things on the net. When it's only done half-right, most people can still get to most places and they think it's correct, but subtle problems do exist in many ways, especially with caching, and most admins have no clue about what or why or even realize it's a DNS problem, saying "It can't be DNS, I can get there".
So why is it that most ISPs hire less qualified people? Is it because you get what you pay for?
I do attack the methodology. Just not here because the topic here is not about the methodology. Here, people have used those false numbers as if they were truthful, and I don't accept that.
We don't need better programming languages, we need better programmers. Those who try to code too quickly and fail to think about what they are doing are the ones that bring us buffer overflows. And now you want to encourage these same people to code with a language they are told will speed up their programming? They better not be coding anything for medical instruments, airplane controls and navigation, nor any military systems ... even if they are using Java.
Since when was a language able to make up for neglect?
Why do you classify these jobs (web design and system administration) as not ...jobs which require more skills.? Is it because you see them being mostly currently filled by people with lower skill levels? Just what job functions do you see as ...jobs which require more skills.?
IMHO, you'd be insane to start a CPU design company, and possibly even a software company, even here in the US ... unless you're going for a small niche that won't attract the Intel's, AMD's, Transmeta's, IBM's, Oracles, Microsoft's, of the world to compete head on against whatever you come up with.
I'd agree about keeping the skilled workers here. And there are certainly advantages for us to bring the skilled foreign workers here (though in reality I've found quite many of them less skilled than out of work people here, because the foreign workers are also known to be good brown nosers, and unlikely to sue for anything). But let's get people back into the workforce here, and get those w/o jobs who want them employed. People*time is a resource we are currently wasting. And that includes web designers and system administrators (and there are some out there who are exceptionally skilled in their field).
People who truly have given up, and don't want to be employed anymore, of course should not be counted. But those who decline to seek government assistance, perhaps because they are smart enough to have savings to live on, or can go back home to live with the parents, or even did grab a part time job dumping fries into a vat or stocking the shelves at the supermarket, should be counted. But they are not the way the system works.
The tweak that was made a few years ago did change the unemployment rate result about 3 to 4 percent. The political analysis of the time primarily focused on it being a means to let labor unions bargain from a stronger position. Face it, lower unemployment figures do drive up wages and salaries. That's not necessarily a bad thing for "the people", but the less accurate the measurement is, the less stable the economy will be because other measurements will be more inconsistent depending on whether they work with, or work around, the unemployment figures. For example, consumer buying went down right after the unemployment went down, which is an inconsistency that can destabilize things.
What we need are accurate figures that correctly categorize how many people are in each of the various groups of unemployment (even if living off smartly retained savings) or underemployment (i.e. working to pay the rent but not in their proper career path).
Of course I don't want the US technology industry to be hurt. And you make a good argument for why we should bring in H1B's. But given the fact that there were quite many very experienced technical people looking for working during even the peak, tells me that the difficulty in finding good people was not as a result of there being a lack of numbers. There were likely other factors such as not wanting to spend the time working within a rather bad system we have of actually finding people, as well as people just plain not willing to relocate to places like California, which perhaps did deplete its resources (we know they tend to deplete other things like electric generating capacity).
I got a few job enticements to go to California for pay as high as $275k/yr. I'm glad I didn't waste my time with that. They sure seemed too good to be true. I bet those are the places that failed first.
I don't think those companies want the high turnover. So they're sure to be using the risk of leaving soon factor at a higher weight when making the decision to hire someone. I know I would. It's the non-techies that in general will make the better employees in those jobs. Good workers are hard to find (at least legal ones), and when you have a choice in hiring, you choose the better ones for what the job is. And it ain't flipping CPU chips at McD's.
So what makes you think I am in California? I am not.
So what makes you think I live in a homeless shelter? I do not.
So what makes you think I am whining about my situation? I have not.
So what makes you think I am not in the midwest? Actually, I'm not, I'm in Texas, the state that sells power to California.
So what makes you think I'm unemployed? Well, maybe technically. But I do have 2 part time contracts and am building my own business. I don't need that job at McDonalds. If I took it, I'd be depriving you.
I'm not sure what numbers you're looking at. For some jobs like McDonalds, sure, I can see 100% in many places. But there are lots of stores I go to frequently and the same people have been there for years. At the local electronics store (not Radio Shack), half the people working there last month were there 7 years ago when I first went to the place. Maybe the other half does turn over entirely in a year, but there is a solid core staff there. I sure hope they get paid well (but somehow, I doubt it).
I didn't say it was proof. The whole process is very empirical anyway. The point is that there are more people out of jobs than the unemployment figures tell about. If you want to know how many, you have to find a way to measure them somewhere. The drop in consumer demand is one possible way to do that. But also beware of the shift. For example the demand for essentials like housing, food, and soap (well maybe not soap for some) will remain up or at least not drop as much, while the demand for optional and luxury goods will drop a lot. Just watch the figures on the financial web sites and see what is going on. It's not pretty, but at least it kinda looks like it has begun to level out. But you can be sure (well, I sure hope so, anyway) that it won't be as crazy as before.
Last month at the local Internet Society meeting, over 50% of the jobs that hiring managers were seeking to fill were for e-commerce positions involving programming in Java. Java was 3 times in demand as PHP and C++ combined, and nothing else was. Of course that's one small meeting job/forum. And they were all server side jobs. There is apparently nothing going right now for client side Java. Besides, I have all that disabled and I know a lot of other people do, too.
But maybe you're right. I've heard some horror stories with regard to various Java facilities. So maybe those Java jobs that can be gotten will end up being doomed because nothing will end up working and the company will go bust. I think I'm still glad I didn't get into Java.
Obviously you are the clueless one. You missed the quotes around the term "junk". That means that's the common phraseology used.
I never said there was a couple years of training involved. There is some, and it varies by job. There are jobs even better than cash register, but they need a week or two of "training" which means they are non-productive until the training period is over, and it costs the employer money. The "year or two" is how long the management hopes the employee will stay on. If they are sure the candidate will be leaving as soon as the tech jobs pick up again, and another candidate perceives this job as a good career for the next 5 to 10 years, guess which one the smart employer will hire. I've been on both sides of employing, and I know how it works. And back when employers were not afraid to tell candidates why they were not chosen (back before all the lawsuit threats) some of the things I heard frequently are "overqualified" and "this would not challenge you enough" and "you'll be bored here". Good hiring managers know how to measure people (though I suspect a lot of that didn't happen during the peak of the crazy dot-compensation-extreme days).
I'm glad for you that you do have at least some other skills, like sales. Most techies would never survive in sales, if they could even land such a job, not even retail sales. To those who can, of course they should.
Sorry, I can't moderate and post the same thread. Besides, you're at 4 as of when I'm replying. That and I didn't get any points today, anyway :-)
One of the problems in the technical fields is that there has been a huge influx of new products, tools, languages, features, and systems to learn. Then businesses end up making (usually stupid, and often horrendously assinine) decisions about which of these things to commit themselves to, then when they look for a techie, they demand only someone who has precisely that set of skills. If one skill is missing they can't "hit the ground running". And if they have excess skills, they are "too expensive". This greatly complicated the effort to find technical talent. For every 100,000 people out there with hireable technical talent, maybe 5 to 10 actually were exactly what they were looking for (because they were so picky about an exact match) and of course they were not in the local city.
When a whole company goes under, as many have done, those who are let go happen to be everyone. It doesn't matter if you are clueless or a genius. And in big companies, the same thing also happened on a project basis. The decisions of who to let go had almost nothing to do with whether you were clueless or a genius. If you were on a project that got scrapped, then you got the pink slip. It's easy for a company to do this because it's perfectly defensible. If they had instead shuffled people around to try to keep the geniuses, that means they would have had to let some clueless go in continuing projects. And that would have opened them to legal liabilities because quite often people sue over these matters. The people who were let go were the ones specifically associated with a job that was eliminated.
By the way, the unemployment rate here in the US is figured on the basis of how many people are eligible for and seek government assistance, not how many people would take a job if there was one. This was done by the Clinton administration to prop up labor unions and help them bargain for higher pay.
The unemployment rate is NOT 3.2%. During the first year of the Clinton administration, the government changed the formula for how they determine unemployment. Essentially it comes down to measuring people only if they specifically seek government assistance of some kind as a result of unemployment, and only if they do so within 6 months of being let go. And when their unemployment benefits run out (about 3 years now I think), they not only no longer get anything, they don't get counted any more, either.
Unemployment is really closer to 6% or 7% right now, and upwards of 30% in some technical fields like Internet, E-commerce, and Telecom. Need to verify this? Go to the retail/consumer stores like Sears or Walmart or Best Buy and ask the managers how their sales have been doing the past year.
I don't believe it was. Perhaps they evetually came to realize that the supposed IT worker shortage was a big fraud manufacturered to force techies to accept lower pay.
But wait ... if the pay was so high, doesn't that mean their were more jobs and fewer people, like ECON 101 taught us? Not really. There were a number of issues that tipped the scales to make the appearance of higher demand ... when in fact even during the peak, lots of techies had trouble finding work. One problem was that the suits jumped into the Internet mess so fast, they had no time to learn enough to even figure out who was smart and who wasn't. The very recruiting process they loved so much was falling apart because not enough non-techies knew enough of the new technical stuff to understand the techies to figure out who to hire. Then the bigger companies couldn't attract people with stock options very well. Sure they had stock options available, but those companies were too big (diluted with assets) to ever have spectacular growth.
The job market was just totally distorted, and is in shambles now as a result. The cause? Mismanagement on an enourmous scale caused by the rush of the ignorant to buy into the Internet craze.
Hunting for a job is itself a full time job, especially as bad as the market is right now. Even headhunters are losing their jobs.
If you do have to go to work in some job that pays very little, the problem with that is that it takes so many hours at the job just to make enough money to pay the rent and buy some food, that there is no time left to do job hunting for a real job for which your technical skills apply. When you do get an interview (and remember, count on at least 20 interviews on average before you get an offer) you have to take time off work, you lose some of the precious pay, and you risk losing that job as well. Do that 10 times and you can count on being back on the street.
You say the jobs are there... no, these are "junk" jobs. In fact, getting such jobs isn't even that easy. The managers will know you're not the kind of person to stick around for a couple years to make the training worth while. The "real" jobs ... are just not there right now, unless you know one of the fad skills which are in overdemand, like Java.
Reality is, a lot of the techies are not needing to support families. So they can at least go work on hunting for a real job ... while living in the shelter.
Lots of people are reporting that their Linux version sucked. Mind explaining why that is?
There are a lot of companies I never hear of. I don't go around looking for stuff I don't need. At least they never spammed me.
I find CVS to be of excellent quality. But Bugzilla, I don't find that to be very good at all. I really haven't used the professional versions. Are they as portable?
When you start with a programming staff that is clueless about making a product portable from the outset, and then try to retrofit it to a single distribution of Linux, instead of trying to make it portable to all of Unix during the Unix porting, or even during the original development, then I can fully understand why the product must have been crap (even for Windows).
By the way, their marketing must have sucked, too, because I never heard of them. I'm not opposed to buying software for Linux, even if it is binary only. I have done so in the past. The only exception is I won't load a binary only module into my kernel. But these guys simply missed the boat, in both development and marketing, it seems.
This is often the problem with products which start out for Windows and later get retrofitted to Linux. The original developer(s) only know Windows and probably never wrote portable code in their lives. And then when they think Linux might be something to market for, they make the second mistake of choosing a particular distribution, and again screw up the whole idea of portable software, making something that doesn't work on other distributions, or other Unix(-like) systems which lots of people do use.
Of course, there is also one issue to consider. Competition in the open source free software community is tough. The price can't be beat, the quality of a lot of it is superior to anything you can get commercially (usually because it's not released until it's really ready, after lots of smart people beta test it), and the support comes from people who in the community who are real programmers and actually use it, instead of someone who couldn't get a job doing programming.
So I say "bye bye" to FREEDOM Internet Privacy Suite. Obviously I didn't need ya, and you've finally realized that yourselves.
There are plenty of things it can do without being subscribed to a service.
When I first heard about this in the previous article, I had hoped it was a mistake. But the response I read, while revealing such a mistake, also revealed the real reason I will now never consider buying a TiVo. That reason is that their whole marketing plan is to get subscribers for marketing purposes. So as far as I'm concerned, TiVo is out and doomed ... not the box, per se ... the company.
I don't own one. I was thinking about getting one. But now I never will.