I've seen your name pop up a few times, and you've clearly put a lot of effort into the helix community as well. I hope you meet some success with that, though open source projects rest a bit more heavily on reputation of folks/companies involved then you might imagine, and real is not in the category yet of companies geeks get excited about hearing from.
I don't doubt there are good people at Real, we hear from them from time to time. But it seems as if the guy at the top is the same guy from the past, unable to understand that real poisoned the water in at least the highly technical community, and in the end he still calls the shots. Who knows when the next big switch might happen.
Real should have taken market leading position + TRUST to rock the world. Better behavior past 5 years would have been a wow.
You guys are doing fine, but the cachet isn't there after your blowtorch to your brand. If apple starts stepping bigger outside of the mac space you might just get toasted, even in the service area. In the end TRUST is going to count for a lot longer term.
No one has time to read every single privacy policy / term of service etc. We run with companies we can trust. That's good business, and I think consumers do the same thing.
I gave Realplayer 10 a shot, and signed up with Starz which looks to be a great deal.
Realplayer kept on claiming I was disconnected from the net (not true) and rather then retrying the connection itself poped up a dialog box. Clicking it every few seconds quickly wore thin. This despite two different broadband providers at home, and another shot from work.
Then when I tried to cancel online and filled in all the forms, I was told I had to call customer service (AFTER I filled out the forms) to actually cancel my service. I had to smile at the usual Real approach to things. Realplayer looks nicer, but the culture change is not there yet.
Anyways, thanks for the response and conversation, and apologies for the bug report through non-standard channels. Good luck!
The basic point is customer credability is earned, not claimed.
Not to beat a dead horse, but Real as a company seem to have some of the worst standards out there in terms of how they treat their customers.
They purposly took the most agressive approach to making money, and the least user friendly approach (ie, message center important alerts which always turned out to be about superpass combos, they used to spam me non-stop without letup, taking over associations left and right on express installs).
Behind these decisions to screw over users were people who said, make it impossible to disable / uninstall this feature.
My question was (and was rated +5 but not picked), "Until the people change, why should we think you've changed? Have you fired people? Admitted past mistakes? Will future features be honest features, or 'features' designed to make us all miserable?"
Interesting stuff to think of the people making these types of decisions...
As a note, if you ever want to know which companies take over computers in non userfriendly ways go to a senior center and look at the computers. Claria / Realplayer / Spyware paradise.
Saw the trailer a few times, the whole plot / effects looked cheesy, even though I normally love CGI. Hard to beleive the movie is that much better then the trailer.
Is the plane some kind of super plane? In the trailer it doesn't make sense that he is able to avoid getting hit while flying it for example.
In this time of ethics (and their lack) at the corporate level, how do you feel Real measures up in having EARNED (not just claimed) customer trust.
Do you compare yourselves to folks like Google who even my mother trusts totally?
I ask this in light of your consistent corporate behavior, which has included:
- You used to spam me to no end. And this spamming was EPIC, I still can not believe how much junk you, and how impossible it was to stop getting it.
- Your player started taking over my system, including "important" pop up messages in my "message center" that were nothing but commercial pitches. Do you have any idea what is important in people's lives? Not buying more goldpass/superpass combo's!
- This behavior was clearly calculated, and the options to disable this bloated junk was extremely hard to access or enable (it poped up a warning dialog).
- The fact that corporate help desk folks shudder when end users express install the end user version of the real player virus on their PC's.
- The fact that when I visit older folks I inevitably find that their system has been taken over by Real, and that in addition to the desktop, system tray, message center junk, the associations they have selected (IMAGES in Realplayer? please) make no sense.
Have you focused on serving your customers, or screwing the folks who installed your software for as much cash as you could get from them while hiding behind claims of "features" and "benefits".
Before you claim trust, you have to change the people behind the claim.
It is really surprising that we have interlaced standards in the HDTV specs.
Basically, 1080i = 540 lines / refresh. 720p has 720 lines per refresh.
The problem with interlacing is that it introduces or exacerbates certain visual artifacts. This is one of the reasons some of the networks are sticking with 720p for their HDTV broadcasts.
Whether this interlaced standard is a carryover from the consumer electronics folks or not, I would stick with 720p until something nicer comes out. Be interesting to know the history here. Computer LCD makers are well settled on progressive displays at this point.
Is 1080p in the standard? I didn't think it was....
As probably many other folks did when they heard about Ingres going open source, they wondered, "what exactly can Ingres do?". After all, code talk and talk walks.
That's why I was a bit sad to see that we didn't get a clearer articulation of the ingres feature / benefit list, other then "There is no question that Ingres is the most functional and best database in the open source market today".
Not only does this assume that all workloads are created equal, but in the land of marketspeak, a fair number of folks have enjoyed getting a bit more detail beyond slogans like "best" and "most functional".
What I would love is some first hand reports from folks who've used Ingres. Reading their documentation (which looks pretty complete) they have a bunch of nice features.
Native multi-master replication? Blistering performance on a cross platform architecture?
The sad thing with Real is that they've done such a good job of poisening the waters with previous releases.
When they thought they could play with the big boys (apple, microsoft) they would spam the living daylights out of people, they would load up their player with so much junk it blew your mind, they tookever system settings, popped up message center windows with marketing "alerts".
For a lot of early adopter folks in the open source space it's hard to forget the horrors of real's "customer friendly" policies.
Now they are realizing that they are unlikely to beat Microsoft at it's own game. So they have deceided to try and play with the nice kids. I wonder if management has changed. This feels to me less like a top down thing then someone in the company evangalizing a new approach.
If they had played clean from the start, with their branding etc they would have rocked as a linux player.
I think Novell actually is going to show how a clean playing company can leverage the open source world. They've really done the right thing so far through it all (SCO etc).
The thing that surprised me though looking at it was that it seemed that there was a sudden rally at the end of the day, allowing SCOX to close slightly up. The stock went down all day and then *suddenly* popped back up to where it started. This makes me think that someone bought a whole lot of shares.
SCO? Didn't they set up a system so that they could try to prop up their stock price with their investors money?
TiVo requiring POTS line
on
VoIP Questioned
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
Where in the world is this coming from. TiVo says on their site that they need to be able to connect to via phone OR broadband to do their initial setup. NOWHERE does it say that somehow VoIP doesn't work. Frankly, it would seem that if you can connect via broadband, and VoIP uses broadband, you would be fine.
Good to know we have a hotshot paid tech journalist on the case rather then a bunch of unpaid message board posters:)
The idea of the TRO is just that, temporary. It is designed to give this guy a chance to move his business. It won't break the internet in any way.
There should be room under ARIN for these types of move periods. Fair enough, it breaks up a block. If it is for a short period (say 3 months tops), why not allow room for an added 100 routing entries. Avoids being held hostage by a nasty upstream.
Ahh, didn't realize I'd soon be getting spam and "important alerts" on my mobile phone. This sucks! Real I think managed to make a pretty good name for itself as the scummiest, let's take over your desktop and flood you with junk type company there was.
I remember 5-6 years ago now I gave them my address and I was bombarded with junk, and there was simply no way to get off (this is when I still considered them a reasonable company). Sad to see strong companies like RedHat and Novell joining with these guys.
He mentions (rightly I think) that it would be nice to have worked out ipsec better rather than drive it's basic functionality down to the link layer of all the different things that would need security.
Why hasn't IPSec taken off more (or some other similar setup)? I don't know enough to know what the tough bits might be.
RIM has sued tons of companies on patent infrigment (they patented every little thing they could). For example.
Research In Motion, makers of the RIM Blackberry smart pager, has filed suit against Handspring alleging that Handspring's Treo communicators violate one of their patents. Specifically, RIM claims to have a patent on the curved keyboard layout used by three of the four Treo devices (the Treo 180g uses Graffiti character recognition instead) as well as on the rounded buttons. No information is available regarding what damages RIM is seeking.
So I have a bit less sympathy for them. What goes around comes around.
This group has a long history of being microsoft funded and packed with neocons. Non-partisan? I had to laugh when I saw CmdrTaco put that there.
On the IBM point, IBM already has a giant patent portfolio. GIANT.
The difference with IBM is while they'll make money on their portfolio, they are not a dying company who'es only source of revenue are patents. They've played exceeding well with the linux world, have expressed their dislike of patents in the past, and distribute Linux so have agreed to the GPL.
Even Home Simpson could see this is a bunch of BS.
But this is the fault of the usefullness of the service, any service offering this amount of space (ie, the one I currently pay money for) is prone to the same issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey Kevin,
I've seen your name pop up a few times, and you've clearly put a lot of effort into the helix community as well. I hope you meet some success with that, though open source projects rest a bit more heavily on reputation of folks/companies involved then you might imagine, and real is not in the category yet of companies geeks get excited about hearing from.
I don't doubt there are good people at Real, we hear from them from time to time. But it seems as if the guy at the top is the same guy from the past, unable to understand that real poisoned the water in at least the highly technical community, and in the end he still calls the shots. Who knows when the next big switch might happen.
Real should have taken market leading position + TRUST to rock the world. Better behavior past 5 years would have been a wow.
You guys are doing fine, but the cachet isn't there after your blowtorch to your brand. If apple starts stepping bigger outside of the mac space you might just get toasted, even in the service area. In the end TRUST is going to count for a lot longer term.
No one has time to read every single privacy policy / term of service etc. We run with companies we can trust. That's good business, and I think consumers do the same thing.
I gave Realplayer 10 a shot, and signed up with Starz which looks to be a great deal.
Realplayer kept on claiming I was disconnected from the net (not true) and rather then retrying the connection itself poped up a dialog box. Clicking it every few seconds quickly wore thin. This despite two different broadband providers at home, and another shot from work.
Then when I tried to cancel online and filled in all the forms, I was told I had to call customer service (AFTER I filled out the forms) to actually cancel my service. I had to smile at the usual Real approach to things. Realplayer looks nicer, but the culture change is not there yet.
Anyways, thanks for the response and conversation, and apologies for the bug report through non-standard channels. Good luck!
The basic point is customer credability is earned, not claimed.
Not to beat a dead horse, but Real as a company seem to have some of the worst standards out there in terms of how they treat their customers.
They purposly took the most agressive approach to making money, and the least user friendly approach (ie, message center important alerts which always turned out to be about superpass combos, they used to spam me non-stop without letup, taking over associations left and right on express installs).
Behind these decisions to screw over users were people who said, make it impossible to disable / uninstall this feature.
My question was (and was rated +5 but not picked),
"Until the people change, why should we think you've changed? Have you fired people? Admitted past mistakes? Will future features be honest features, or 'features' designed to make us all miserable?"
Interesting stuff to think of the people making these types of decisions...
As a note, if you ever want to know which companies take over computers in non userfriendly ways go to a senior center and look at the computers. Claria / Realplayer / Spyware paradise.
Saw the trailer a few times, the whole plot / effects looked cheesy, even though I normally love CGI. Hard to beleive the movie is that much better then the trailer.
Is the plane some kind of super plane? In the trailer it doesn't make sense that he is able to avoid getting hit while flying it for example.
Options != vested stock
As long as share price > 0, vested stock HAS VALUE!
In this time of ethics (and their lack) at the corporate level, how do you feel Real measures up in having EARNED (not just claimed) customer trust.
Do you compare yourselves to folks like Google who even my mother trusts totally?
I ask this in light of your consistent corporate behavior, which has included:
- You used to spam me to no end. And this spamming was EPIC, I still can not believe how much junk you, and how impossible it was to stop getting it.
- Your player started taking over my system, including "important" pop up messages in my "message center" that were nothing but commercial pitches. Do you have any idea what is important in people's lives? Not buying more goldpass/superpass combo's!
- This behavior was clearly calculated, and the options to disable this bloated junk was extremely hard to access or enable (it poped up a warning dialog).
- The fact that corporate help desk folks shudder when end users express install the end user version of the real player virus on their PC's.
- The fact that when I visit older folks I inevitably find that their system has been taken over by Real, and that in addition to the desktop, system tray, message center junk, the associations they have selected (IMAGES in Realplayer? please) make no sense.
Have you focused on serving your customers, or screwing the folks who installed your software for as much cash as you could get from them while hiding behind claims of "features" and "benefits".
Before you claim trust, you have to change the people behind the claim.
It is really surprising that we have interlaced standards in the HDTV specs.
Basically, 1080i = 540 lines / refresh.
720p has 720 lines per refresh.
The problem with interlacing is that it introduces or exacerbates certain visual artifacts. This is one of the reasons some of the networks are sticking with 720p for their HDTV broadcasts.
Whether this interlaced standard is a carryover from the consumer electronics folks or not, I would stick with 720p until something nicer comes out. Be interesting to know the history here. Computer LCD makers are well settled on progressive displays at this point.
Is 1080p in the standard? I didn't think it was....
Anyways, fun stuff.
As probably many other folks did when they heard about Ingres going open source, they wondered, "what exactly can Ingres do?". After all, code talk and talk walks.
That's why I was a bit sad to see that we didn't get a clearer articulation of the ingres feature / benefit list, other then "There is no question that Ingres is the most functional and best database in the open source market today".
Not only does this assume that all workloads are created equal, but in the land of marketspeak, a fair number of folks have enjoyed getting a bit more detail beyond slogans like "best" and "most functional".
What I would love is some first hand reports from folks who've used Ingres. Reading their documentation (which looks pretty complete) they have a bunch of nice features.
Native multi-master replication?
Blistering performance on a cross platform architecture?
Fill us in...
I've found that support for longer version SHA's is surprisingly minimal. I'd personally like to be at SHA-256 for many items.
I'd also love to see ASCII armoring of the hash, rather then the hex fingerprints, which I beleive would result in a more compact hash.
The work that went into putting together AES was really fantastic.
I'm just looking forward to a similar effort around an advanced hashing standard.
Where would an effort like this form?
I'll get them for hours at a time at work. Lot's of fun. One of those "upgrades" that downgrades.
The sad thing with Real is that they've done such a good job of poisening the waters with previous releases.
When they thought they could play with the big boys (apple, microsoft) they would spam the living daylights out of people, they would load up their player with so much junk it blew your mind, they tookever system settings, popped up message center windows with marketing "alerts".
For a lot of early adopter folks in the open source space it's hard to forget the horrors of real's "customer friendly" policies.
Now they are realizing that they are unlikely to beat Microsoft at it's own game. So they have deceided to try and play with the nice kids. I wonder if management has changed. This feels to me less like a top down thing then someone in the company evangalizing a new approach.
If they had played clean from the start, with their branding etc they would have rocked as a linux player.
I think Novell actually is going to show how a clean playing company can leverage the open source world. They've really done the right thing so far through it all (SCO etc).
The thing that surprised me though looking at it was that it seemed that there was a sudden rally at the end of the day, allowing SCOX to close slightly up. The stock went down all day and then *suddenly* popped back up to where it started. This makes me think that someone bought a whole lot of shares.
SCO? Didn't they set up a system so that they could try to prop up their stock price with their investors money?
Where in the world is this coming from. TiVo says on their site that they need to be able to connect to via phone OR broadband to do their initial setup. NOWHERE does it say that somehow VoIP doesn't work. Frankly, it would seem that if you can connect via broadband, and VoIP uses broadband, you would be fine.
:)
Good to know we have a hotshot paid tech journalist on the case rather then a bunch of unpaid message board posters
The idea of the TRO is just that, temporary. It is designed to give this guy a chance to move his business. It won't break the internet in any way.
There should be room under ARIN for these types of move periods. Fair enough, it breaks up a block. If it is for a short period (say 3 months tops), why not allow room for an added 100 routing entries. Avoids being held hostage by a nasty upstream.
I totally agree. Wish I had some mod points.
Ahh, didn't realize I'd soon be getting spam and "important alerts" on my mobile phone. This sucks! Real I think managed to make a pretty good name for itself as the scummiest, let's take over your desktop and flood you with junk type company there was.
I remember 5-6 years ago now I gave them my address and I was bombarded with junk, and there was simply no way to get off (this is when I still considered them a reasonable company). Sad to see strong companies like RedHat and Novell joining with these guys.
He mentions (rightly I think) that it would be nice to have worked out ipsec better rather than drive it's basic functionality down to the link layer of all the different things that would need security.
Why hasn't IPSec taken off more (or some other similar setup)? I don't know enough to know what the tough bits might be.
Would happily pay $20/year or so for IMAP access to my account.
Perhaps because we are using unapproved browsers?
I got a connection speed test of 778kbs which they said FAILED their criteria for 600kbs.
Who knows what they are thinking, a classic Real networks move.
So I have a bit less sympathy for them. What goes around comes around.
There's a bit of irony in having a 15 charachter password (random) and then telling it to someone else. Perhaps reduce it to 8 chars.
"Overall, one should choose the best file system based upon the properties of the files they are dealing with for the best performance possible!"
There you have the results!
This group has a long history of being microsoft funded and packed with neocons. Non-partisan? I had to laugh when I saw CmdrTaco put that there.
On the IBM point, IBM already has a giant patent portfolio. GIANT.
The difference with IBM is while they'll make money on their portfolio, they are not a dying company who'es only source of revenue are patents. They've played exceeding well with the linux world, have expressed their dislike of patents in the past, and distribute Linux so have agreed to the GPL.
Even Home Simpson could see this is a bunch of BS.
A good point.
But this is the fault of the usefullness of the service, any service offering this amount of space (ie, the one I currently pay money for) is prone to the same issue.