The biggest difference would be that instead of millions of run-off-the-mill configured-the-same-way insecure-by-default multipurpose Windows boxes we would have millions specialized Linux appliances - media players, media servers, write-a-doc laptops, etc.
Nope. We'd have millions of run-of-the-mill configured-the-same-way insecure-by-default multipurpose Redhat boxes instead. We already have that to some extent now, and have for several years. Yes, the uber *nix geeks and OSS zealots and college students with tons of time on their hands do play around and modify Linux, stripping out unnecessary stuff and making interesting things. However, for the majority of computer users, the computer is a tool. If they're going to run Linux, they're going to toss in a Redhat CD (and that CD could be several years old -- people still run Windows 95, you know), run through the install, most likely pick the "Everything" install option so they don't have to worry about not having something, and then forget about it. Is that bad? Yes and no. That process is only secure if the different consumer-oriented distros make out-of-the-box security priority number one. However, there's nothing inherently wrong with that mode of computer use. Not everybody (ie, almost nobody) wants to spend all of their free time messing around with their computer. They want it to just work.
In the end, if Linux were to become dominant over Windows, you're going to end up in the exact same scenario. And the solution to that will be the same as it is today -- user education and better accountability from the software developers. "Switch to Linux!" is not a solution now, and "Switch to <something else>!" is not a solution for the future.
And they were to know this during the install routine how?
They would know this if they didn't just blindly click through the dialogs. If you took two minutes of time to browse through the options you can choose to install/not to install/to only install on first use, you couldn't help but find the Office Assistant option.
Seriously, if you want them to stick around, be active. Form your own version of the NRA for violent games. The NRA has successfully thwarted scads of anti-gun legislation over the years, and they are simply an organization of individuals who cherish the right to own guns.
The difference being the precedent set by the Constitution allowing the possession of firearms (obstensibly for militia purposes, but if you read closely it's also to protect the citizenry from the government), while it says nothing about owning violent video games. As well, guns can be useful tools (hunting) as well as entertainment (recreational shooting) and protection (duh). Video games are just entertainment, though in some cases they can be educational (and sometimes subliminal, like America's Army... jointhearmy). You could maybe make a case for video games under free speech, but it's not as clear-cut as the right to bear arms.
I'm not saying that violent video games should be prohibited to minors. In fact, I believe the opposite. However, I just wanted to make the point that the NRA has some fairly potent legal backing while a violent video game version of the NRA would not.
Most people working in an office environment DO NOT install their own software.
So your argument is moot.
No it's not. It just means that the IT department who is doing the installation should better understand what they're installing. The people you're referring to are the same people that wouldn't use the help functionality anyway, so it doesn't matter whether they have the hand-holding Office Assistant or the standard HTML help to work with. In either case, they're going to call IT.
I don't even know if it's an option anymore, although if it is, I must have deselected last time I installed Office XP.
You can still choose to install the Office Assistants, but you've always been able to choose not to install them. I've never had to deal with Clippy, from Office 97 through Office XP. Of course, most people prefer to just bitch and moan rather than do something about the problem, so it's not surprising that people are still complaining about Office Assistants.
My ATM/debit card works as a VISA. Its a debit card. It works in every German ATM (Deutsche Bank, Sparkasse, etc) I ever used it in. You're behind the times. Get a debit card, they exist AND work in virtually every country/location that accepts VISA.
Debit cards are different than the direct debit banking I was referring to. The former is indistinguishable from a credit card from the perspective of retailer, with the only difference being that the money is drawn directly from your bank account rather than sending you a monthly bill. The latter is a direct draw on your bank account, without any card or similar. It's roughly analogous to using your ATM card to buy goods, but not quite the same.
Personally, I'd rather have a credit card. I'm a responsible spender, but credit gives the option of carrying a balance if I need to. And when I pay off the bill in full each month (as I'm accustomed to do), it's functionally equivalent to a debit card.
Ever heard of credit cards? Visa and Master Card at least are accepted the world around (with some caveats, of course). I know it's popular in Europe to use direct debitting of your bank account, but the rest of us don't have a nationalized banking industry that can force such standardizations. We like it that way, because it gives us choices in banks even if it does hinder us somewhat on the direct debitting front.
Get a major credit card, learn how to use it responsibly, and join the 20th century.
This should have been in your install documentation anyway. Every contracted program I have ever dealt with has included install documentation. Most of it also includes referneces on how to install any required software. If your documentation needed revising, then admid to it. If they just needed to read the documantation, then tell them that. Don't just give someone a CD with a database and demand your paycheck.
Installation documentation is for the lazy. They should've had a proper MSI package that would install the database directly, without any intervention (well, maybe a gui on the installer asking a few easy-to-understand questions, or a few documented properties on the installer command line). Handing over a dump of a database, with or without documentation is weak, especially since it's hardly difficult to write an installer. Especially if you're smart about your database deployment (ie, consider detaching a clean copy of your development database, packaging up the.?df files, and re-attaching it to the production server via an MSI, rather than a shitload of files containing the schema that needs to be loaded).
Linux users upgrade to the newest version and would no longer be in violation
Yeah, right. That's not going to happen. Assuming that there is infringing code, that the code is relatively minor, and that kernel developers can quickly replace it with non-infringing code, there's still the problem of getting users to use that code. Sure, the few thousand crazies that update their kernel on every RC version or Alan Cox patch will be first in line, but they're a very small minority. Even if Linus decides to release a new kernel version just for those changes (probably likely, if it needs to be done), you're still only dealing with a minority of people that stay on top of minor kernel version changes.
Now you're left with two distinct types of users, both much more prevalent than the previous examples. First, you have people running Linux on production machines or machines that otherwise need to remain stable. Not only does updating the kernel mean downtime for a reboot (if you're only allowed ~15 minutes of downtime a year, a reboot can cut into a huge chunk of that budget), but this is new code. Adequate stress testing would need to be performed, pushing deployment back several weeks (assuming that no issues crop up to delay the deployment). The remaining type of user encompasses everything from the greenest newbie to non-zealot power users. They're the people that either don't know (newbies) or don't care (people that want to get work done, rather than spending all of their time compiling and deploying kernels). The latter can be mitigated somewhat with the auto-update tools available now, but those still require user intervention.
What that all boils down to is that SCO may have some leverage even if the kernel developers do quickly remove any infringing code. And that's not even covering issues like the need for distribution makers to release new versions, and potentially the need to pull remaining boxed software stock to avoid continuing infringement by selling software with an old kernel.
I fixed it for you. I'm sure you meant that copying is greed, because you're too goddamned greedy to pay for works you want, whether it be music, movies, software, magazines, or what have you.
FiringSquad? The site founded by Dennis "Thresh" Fong? The uber-Quake player whose only qualifications to create a hardware review site is that he's used a lot of the hardware in his game playing? I think I'd skip FiringSquad. ExtremeTech and ArsTechnica are good, though.
But as it is, people want me to spend more time trying to protect my computers then I would spend just doing an OS reinstall...that it probably needed anyway. No sir, not worth it.
The way I figure it, you can spend two hours protecting your system, or you can spend two hours times N reinstalling. I'd rather take two hours up front, and have to reinstall less often because of security breaches.
If I had something worth protecting, I would agree. But if someone sinister really wants to attack my computer while I'm in the middle of a mad game of scrabble with my Wife...then I'll fix whatever they broke and take the needed security precautions.
Bad call, for two reasons. First, security is not just to protect your stuff worth protecting. Your network itself is a valuable resource to hackers. Second, you can't always just "fix whatever they broke", because you don't know what they left behind. That's why even "white hat" hackers are bad when they go breaking into other people's computers -- they really may not have done anything but added a text file saying "You have been hax0red, here's how and what to fix", but you don't know that's all they did.
This lax attitude towards security is why there are so many DDoS networks out there built from the computers of ignorant cable and DSL users.
I don't run WEP, but secure my network by changing the default ip address of my router and disabling DHCP. So you have to know the correct subnet to use to get on my network and assign your own ip address.
Why don't you run WEP? Linksys's APs have pretty good implementations of WEP (well, their 802.11b hardware, anyway -- I tried their 802.11g AP earlier this year, and 128bit WEP was horribly broken). It's no less secure than what you have now, and at least if someone does get lucky and breaks your obscurity security, they'd still have to jump through one more hoop.
If you just don't want to come up with a 128bit key, write a small script or app to generate a random key for you. Write it down, store it in a safe place, and bring it out when you need to add another WiFi device to the network.
Do your part for Internet Free Speech. Boycott Toms Hardware Guide.
And if you don't give a rat's ass about Internet Free Speech, boycott Tom's Hardware because they suck. Articles are spread across too many pages simply to create ad revenue, articles are poorly written and researched, the editors often seem to take a cue from Slashdot, and to top it all off THG is hardly impartial. If you want good hardware coverage, get it somewhereelse.
I don't expect, or want, my microwave to do stir-frys or chop vegetables. Different jobs, different tools. Same with software.
The real question is, do you use emacs? Having lots of small apps that do one thing really well is good for scripting, but not for interactive usability. However, implement it correctly and you can have the best of both worlds. Ie, you can use Outlook's object model separately from using Outlook itself, so you can use that for scripting rather than running something like "mail" and piping an echo into it, or similar.
It's real, they are missing the big picutre. MS looses money on every XBox sold. If they signed a Linux Bootloader that would be an endorsment of a way to loose money and I wouldn't doubt it to be against their own EULA for uses of the XBox.
I really don't think Microsoft releases their money on every XBox sold. More likely, they fail to retain money on each XBox. I don't know whether to pity you for confusing "loose" and "lose" not once but twice, or to praise you for being consistent with your misspelling. Of course, making the same mistake twice means you really do seem to think that "lose" is spelled "loose", which is really sad.
Just like every other PA, that is just not in any way funny. It makes absolutely no sense. It just leaves me with the sense that it was supposed to be offensive but the comic is so badly written I can't even tell why.
The same could be said about any given UF comic, except that the PA comic would invariably have better art. Anyway, the reason I linked to that specific comic is because it was a comment on a stunt pulled by Illiad (I also could've linked to this one, which was made when Illiad et al started whoring themselves out with their "UF Media" thing, or I could've linked to this one, which has a cameo by a PvP character and depicts said character beating the crap out of Illiad). Now, let's take a fewrandomstrips. Where's the funny? None of those strips are funny. Now, here's some funnyPenny Arcadestrips chosen mostly at random (by randomly scrolling through the archive drop down list). Most of those are funny. The last one you'd only understand if you were a gamer and had played Daytona USA, but the news post from that strip explains it. Then you see the funny.
User Friendly is like Dilbert, but less funny, and with crappier art, and lame geek storylines that even most geeks find ridiculous. But if you like it, good for you.
What, are you supposed to just grab the door and climb in as it whizzes by, or what? Does it circle the 7-11 for you on autopilot while you're inside getting your Hostess cupcakes and lottery tickets?
Assuming that this guy isn't a crackpot, what makes you think that the perpetual motion would have anything to do with the movement of the vehicle? I'd guess his perpetual motion engine would be used as any other engine, except this one you wouldn't turn off. In other words, when you need to stop, you'd simply disengage the driveshaft. The perpetual motion machine would continue moving perpetually, you just wouldn't be translating that into rotation of the car's wheels.
(Yes, I know the parent was supposed to be funny. I thought it was funny, too. Just thought I'd mention that, in case others took him seriously. Like that could happen.)
Microsoft has benifitted from the fragmentation of Java, through their distribution of an outdated, poorly functional version. And prior to that, they benifitted from their attempts to prevent Java from being a write-once, run-anywhere language.
As has already been pointed out in many posts, you're wrong. First, Microsoft was forced by Sun to not build newer versions of their JVM. In other words, it's Sun's fault that Microsoft's JVM is stuck on 1.1, not Microsoft's. As well, Microsoft didn't break any functionality in Java, they only extended it (well, JNI to the contrary, but you're not going to be using JNI for a browser applet are you?). Yes, they were a little sneaky about the extensions, and about using Windows-specific code by default from their J++ IDE, but that didn't stop you from writing Java code that was compatible with every other JVM.
You can argue that Microsoft has done some shadey things with Java, but you certainly can't blame them for not keeping their JVM up to date.
Paper only lasts as a longer-term archive if stored properly; I don't know what causes disc media to rot, but I bet that good storage would solve the problem.
There are several forms of rot that have been seen on CDs and laser discs, and supposedly they've mostly been fixed now. The issues usually stemmed from the laquer covering the aluminum substrate or the glue used to bond double-sided discs (as in laser discs, but could apply to early DVDs). These were clearly manufacturing defects, so no amount of proper storage could really prevent it. DVDs are relatively new, but a google search for "DVD rot" shows a number of hits as well, so they're apparently not immune. Things should get better with better manufacturing processes. However, optical media do need to be stored properly to last. But then, that goes for everything, doesn't it?
I'd have thought that by now people would have started building the thing into the actual sets.
That's an easy one. People are far more likely to buy a $400 set top box than a $2000 TV. As well, people are more likely to agree to pay a subscription fee for a cheaper piece of hardware. If you put this into their TV set and then tell them they have to pay extra to get full functionality, they'll look at you funny and then call you an idiot if you think they're going to buy a $2000 TV that requires them to keep on paying. Finally, a STB is portable. If I want to have the Tivo in my bedroom on the small TV, but move it to the big TV in the entertainment room when I want to watch certain recorded shows, I can. If it's built into my TV in the entertainment room, I can't watch it in the bedroom, and vice versa (yeah, you can solve that with a networking solution, but then that requires another box, or another TV set with more built-in functionality, for more money).
Could TiVO partner with a TV manufacturer to build the functionality into a model line? Sure. Should they? Probably. Will they? Probably not.
Unlike videotape, DVD will not degrade over time when exposed to heat and humidity.
But CDs and DVDs do degrade over time. Not in video quality, since that's all digital, but the storage medium itself has been known to rot (mostly CDs and laser discs, since DVDs really haven't been around long enough to see any noticeable deterioration). Sure, they last much longer than tape, and don't degrade with repeated viewings, but to say that they won't degrade at all is naive.
Are there any good long-term storage solutions? I'm talking on the order of decades, not years. Paper's done a pretty good job so far, but even that degrades, and it's a little hard to store digital information in an easily retrievable format on paper.
On the other hand, all the webcomics it specifically mentioned offer "exclusive content" if you pay for their "on-line subscriptions." Neither Penny Arcade, nor Megatokyo do this.
You're right that Megatokyo doesn't do this (Piro makes his money off of merchandising, not subscriptions), but Penny Arcade offers exclusive content through the Penny Arcade Club (subscription). You get lots of stuff, like the Over Easy comic, desktop wallpapers, original art, etc. I guess Penny Arcade could even provide exclusive comic strips since they tend to have an aversion to continuity, but a story-based web comic really shouldn't offer story-related strips on a subscriber-only basis if they offer free strips as well. Either make it all subscriber-only, or don't do any of the story exclusively to subscribers.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. We'd have millions of run-of-the-mill configured-the-same-way insecure-by-default multipurpose Redhat boxes instead. We already have that to some extent now, and have for several years. Yes, the uber *nix geeks and OSS zealots and college students with tons of time on their hands do play around and modify Linux, stripping out unnecessary stuff and making interesting things. However, for the majority of computer users, the computer is a tool. If they're going to run Linux, they're going to toss in a Redhat CD (and that CD could be several years old -- people still run Windows 95, you know), run through the install, most likely pick the "Everything" install option so they don't have to worry about not having something, and then forget about it. Is that bad? Yes and no. That process is only secure if the different consumer-oriented distros make out-of-the-box security priority number one. However, there's nothing inherently wrong with that mode of computer use. Not everybody (ie, almost nobody) wants to spend all of their free time messing around with their computer. They want it to just work.
In the end, if Linux were to become dominant over Windows, you're going to end up in the exact same scenario. And the solution to that will be the same as it is today -- user education and better accountability from the software developers. "Switch to Linux!" is not a solution now, and "Switch to <something else>!" is not a solution for the future.
They would know this if they didn't just blindly click through the dialogs. If you took two minutes of time to browse through the options you can choose to install/not to install/to only install on first use, you couldn't help but find the Office Assistant option.
The difference being the precedent set by the Constitution allowing the possession of firearms (obstensibly for militia purposes, but if you read closely it's also to protect the citizenry from the government), while it says nothing about owning violent video games. As well, guns can be useful tools (hunting) as well as entertainment (recreational shooting) and protection (duh). Video games are just entertainment, though in some cases they can be educational (and sometimes subliminal, like America's Army ... jointhearmy). You could maybe make a case for video games under free speech, but it's not as clear-cut as the right to bear arms.
I'm not saying that violent video games should be prohibited to minors. In fact, I believe the opposite. However, I just wanted to make the point that the NRA has some fairly potent legal backing while a violent video game version of the NRA would not.
No it's not. It just means that the IT department who is doing the installation should better understand what they're installing. The people you're referring to are the same people that wouldn't use the help functionality anyway, so it doesn't matter whether they have the hand-holding Office Assistant or the standard HTML help to work with. In either case, they're going to call IT.
You can still choose to install the Office Assistants, but you've always been able to choose not to install them. I've never had to deal with Clippy, from Office 97 through Office XP. Of course, most people prefer to just bitch and moan rather than do something about the problem, so it's not surprising that people are still complaining about Office Assistants.
Debit cards are different than the direct debit banking I was referring to. The former is indistinguishable from a credit card from the perspective of retailer, with the only difference being that the money is drawn directly from your bank account rather than sending you a monthly bill. The latter is a direct draw on your bank account, without any card or similar. It's roughly analogous to using your ATM card to buy goods, but not quite the same.
Personally, I'd rather have a credit card. I'm a responsible spender, but credit gives the option of carrying a balance if I need to. And when I pay off the bill in full each month (as I'm accustomed to do), it's functionally equivalent to a debit card.
Ever heard of credit cards? Visa and Master Card at least are accepted the world around (with some caveats, of course). I know it's popular in Europe to use direct debitting of your bank account, but the rest of us don't have a nationalized banking industry that can force such standardizations. We like it that way, because it gives us choices in banks even if it does hinder us somewhat on the direct debitting front.
Get a major credit card, learn how to use it responsibly, and join the 20th century.
Installation documentation is for the lazy. They should've had a proper MSI package that would install the database directly, without any intervention (well, maybe a gui on the installer asking a few easy-to-understand questions, or a few documented properties on the installer command line). Handing over a dump of a database, with or without documentation is weak, especially since it's hardly difficult to write an installer. Especially if you're smart about your database deployment (ie, consider detaching a clean copy of your development database, packaging up the .?df files, and re-attaching it to the production server via an MSI, rather than a shitload of files containing the schema that needs to be loaded).
Yeah, right. That's not going to happen. Assuming that there is infringing code, that the code is relatively minor, and that kernel developers can quickly replace it with non-infringing code, there's still the problem of getting users to use that code. Sure, the few thousand crazies that update their kernel on every RC version or Alan Cox patch will be first in line, but they're a very small minority. Even if Linus decides to release a new kernel version just for those changes (probably likely, if it needs to be done), you're still only dealing with a minority of people that stay on top of minor kernel version changes.
Now you're left with two distinct types of users, both much more prevalent than the previous examples. First, you have people running Linux on production machines or machines that otherwise need to remain stable. Not only does updating the kernel mean downtime for a reboot (if you're only allowed ~15 minutes of downtime a year, a reboot can cut into a huge chunk of that budget), but this is new code. Adequate stress testing would need to be performed, pushing deployment back several weeks (assuming that no issues crop up to delay the deployment). The remaining type of user encompasses everything from the greenest newbie to non-zealot power users. They're the people that either don't know (newbies) or don't care (people that want to get work done, rather than spending all of their time compiling and deploying kernels). The latter can be mitigated somewhat with the auto-update tools available now, but those still require user intervention.
What that all boils down to is that SCO may have some leverage even if the kernel developers do quickly remove any infringing code. And that's not even covering issues like the need for distribution makers to release new versions, and potentially the need to pull remaining boxed software stock to avoid continuing infringement by selling software with an old kernel.
I fixed it for you. I'm sure you meant that copying is greed, because you're too goddamned greedy to pay for works you want, whether it be music, movies, software, magazines, or what have you.
You said
but then you also said
If your device is capable of running Linux, it's capable of controlling a USB port. Why, then, wouldn't USB be a useful connection type?
FiringSquad? The site founded by Dennis "Thresh" Fong? The uber-Quake player whose only qualifications to create a hardware review site is that he's used a lot of the hardware in his game playing? I think I'd skip FiringSquad. ExtremeTech and ArsTechnica are good, though.
The way I figure it, you can spend two hours protecting your system, or you can spend two hours times N reinstalling. I'd rather take two hours up front, and have to reinstall less often because of security breaches.
Bad call, for two reasons. First, security is not just to protect your stuff worth protecting. Your network itself is a valuable resource to hackers. Second, you can't always just "fix whatever they broke", because you don't know what they left behind. That's why even "white hat" hackers are bad when they go breaking into other people's computers -- they really may not have done anything but added a text file saying "You have been hax0red, here's how and what to fix", but you don't know that's all they did.
This lax attitude towards security is why there are so many DDoS networks out there built from the computers of ignorant cable and DSL users.
Why don't you run WEP? Linksys's APs have pretty good implementations of WEP (well, their 802.11b hardware, anyway -- I tried their 802.11g AP earlier this year, and 128bit WEP was horribly broken). It's no less secure than what you have now, and at least if someone does get lucky and breaks your obscurity security, they'd still have to jump through one more hoop.
If you just don't want to come up with a 128bit key, write a small script or app to generate a random key for you. Write it down, store it in a safe place, and bring it out when you need to add another WiFi device to the network.
And if you don't give a rat's ass about Internet Free Speech, boycott Tom's Hardware because they suck. Articles are spread across too many pages simply to create ad revenue, articles are poorly written and researched, the editors often seem to take a cue from Slashdot, and to top it all off THG is hardly impartial. If you want good hardware coverage, get it somewhere else.
The real question is, do you use emacs? Having lots of small apps that do one thing really well is good for scripting, but not for interactive usability. However, implement it correctly and you can have the best of both worlds. Ie, you can use Outlook's object model separately from using Outlook itself, so you can use that for scripting rather than running something like "mail" and piping an echo into it, or similar.
(emphasis is mine)
I really don't think Microsoft releases their money on every XBox sold. More likely, they fail to retain money on each XBox. I don't know whether to pity you for confusing "loose" and "lose" not once but twice, or to praise you for being consistent with your misspelling. Of course, making the same mistake twice means you really do seem to think that "lose" is spelled "loose", which is really sad.
Where's LoseNotLooseGuy when you need him?
The same could be said about any given UF comic, except that the PA comic would invariably have better art. Anyway, the reason I linked to that specific comic is because it was a comment on a stunt pulled by Illiad (I also could've linked to this one, which was made when Illiad et al started whoring themselves out with their "UF Media" thing, or I could've linked to this one, which has a cameo by a PvP character and depicts said character beating the crap out of Illiad). Now, let's take a few random strips. Where's the funny? None of those strips are funny. Now, here's some funny Penny Arcade strips chosen mostly at random (by randomly scrolling through the archive drop down list). Most of those are funny. The last one you'd only understand if you were a gamer and had played Daytona USA, but the news post from that strip explains it. Then you see the funny.
User Friendly is like Dilbert, but less funny, and with crappier art, and lame geek storylines that even most geeks find ridiculous. But if you like it, good for you.
Assuming that this guy isn't a crackpot, what makes you think that the perpetual motion would have anything to do with the movement of the vehicle? I'd guess his perpetual motion engine would be used as any other engine, except this one you wouldn't turn off. In other words, when you need to stop, you'd simply disengage the driveshaft. The perpetual motion machine would continue moving perpetually, you just wouldn't be translating that into rotation of the car's wheels.
(Yes, I know the parent was supposed to be funny. I thought it was funny, too. Just thought I'd mention that, in case others took him seriously. Like that could happen.)
As has already been pointed out in many posts, you're wrong. First, Microsoft was forced by Sun to not build newer versions of their JVM. In other words, it's Sun's fault that Microsoft's JVM is stuck on 1.1, not Microsoft's. As well, Microsoft didn't break any functionality in Java, they only extended it (well, JNI to the contrary, but you're not going to be using JNI for a browser applet are you?). Yes, they were a little sneaky about the extensions, and about using Windows-specific code by default from their J++ IDE, but that didn't stop you from writing Java code that was compatible with every other JVM.
You can argue that Microsoft has done some shadey things with Java, but you certainly can't blame them for not keeping their JVM up to date.
There are several forms of rot that have been seen on CDs and laser discs, and supposedly they've mostly been fixed now. The issues usually stemmed from the laquer covering the aluminum substrate or the glue used to bond double-sided discs (as in laser discs, but could apply to early DVDs). These were clearly manufacturing defects, so no amount of proper storage could really prevent it. DVDs are relatively new, but a google search for "DVD rot" shows a number of hits as well, so they're apparently not immune. Things should get better with better manufacturing processes. However, optical media do need to be stored properly to last. But then, that goes for everything, doesn't it?
That's an easy one. People are far more likely to buy a $400 set top box than a $2000 TV. As well, people are more likely to agree to pay a subscription fee for a cheaper piece of hardware. If you put this into their TV set and then tell them they have to pay extra to get full functionality, they'll look at you funny and then call you an idiot if you think they're going to buy a $2000 TV that requires them to keep on paying. Finally, a STB is portable. If I want to have the Tivo in my bedroom on the small TV, but move it to the big TV in the entertainment room when I want to watch certain recorded shows, I can. If it's built into my TV in the entertainment room, I can't watch it in the bedroom, and vice versa (yeah, you can solve that with a networking solution, but then that requires another box, or another TV set with more built-in functionality, for more money).
Could TiVO partner with a TV manufacturer to build the functionality into a model line? Sure. Should they? Probably. Will they? Probably not.
But CDs and DVDs do degrade over time. Not in video quality, since that's all digital, but the storage medium itself has been known to rot (mostly CDs and laser discs, since DVDs really haven't been around long enough to see any noticeable deterioration). Sure, they last much longer than tape, and don't degrade with repeated viewings, but to say that they won't degrade at all is naive.
Are there any good long-term storage solutions? I'm talking on the order of decades, not years. Paper's done a pretty good job so far, but even that degrades, and it's a little hard to store digital information in an easily retrievable format on paper.
You're right that Megatokyo doesn't do this (Piro makes his money off of merchandising, not subscriptions), but Penny Arcade offers exclusive content through the Penny Arcade Club (subscription). You get lots of stuff, like the Over Easy comic, desktop wallpapers, original art, etc. I guess Penny Arcade could even provide exclusive comic strips since they tend to have an aversion to continuity, but a story-based web comic really shouldn't offer story-related strips on a subscriber-only basis if they offer free strips as well. Either make it all subscriber-only, or don't do any of the story exclusively to subscribers.