Because if you're unemployed, that means you did something to lose a job. Might not be the employees fault in most cases, but there's probably a stat that says that unemployed workers aren't as effective as hiring someone already employed.
There is also a work socialization issue I've seen discussed. People that have been out of work for more than a few months take some considerable time to readjust to being in a work place. I can relate to that, having taken a one year sabbatical around 20 years ago and then going back to work full time. Its pretty amazing how much absolute stupidity you can get used to when you're living in it every day. Step out of it for a while and you notice when you get back in.
You assume correctly. Most of the people doing this stuff are in their 20's with perfect eyesight.
I can tell as a 50 year old father that all the stuff for kids has instructions written in 4 point font in a 1 square inch area, with six inches of white space around it. Also every tag with a product serial number on it is a 2x1" sticker with a number on it in 2 point font.
I could branch off into how we as a nation can no longer perforate either, but thats not critical at this juncture.
Its also about using the proper words so the language doesn't devolve into a bunch of valley-girl speak and text shortcuts.
The front page of my local paper included two perfectly well spelled words that were not accurate in context, both in headlines. Written by an alleged professional writer and reviewed by an alleged professional editor. While I'm quite far from the grammar Nazi, it would be nice to preserve our language. Seeing "candidate hurtles over problems" and stuff like "and walla, its done" is disappointing. The word is 'voila' and its french for 'there is is', by my 9th grade french class recollection.
A little less of a problem with flexibility and a little more concern about devolution of progress when we use the wrong words and pronounce them incorrectly, or even better steal one from another language, spell it wrong, and then continue to devolve its spelling and pronunciation.
But we did operate for 8 years with a president who pronounced the word 'nucular', even though there is an 'e' and the 'l' does come before it, and it contains no 'u'. As I understand it, he knew the correct pronunciation but chose to use the one that the 40-something percent of stupid people use so he could connect better with them. There must be at least 4 possible discussion threads on how ridiculously wrong all of that is.
It gets stupider. A huge percentage of households have no video game consoles at all, or an older console like a playstation 2, an original xbox or some other, and a lot of households have more than one. We have three 360's, a ps3 and two wii's. My sons three best friends have one wii between their three households. Guess whose house they spend all day at...
So calculating a real dominant market share analysis is a tad more complicated than doing some simple division.
Sony already learned a lesson on building a $500+ console...nobody buys it because the wii is 1/4 the price and the xbox without hard drive or kinect isnt much more expensive than that. However, Sony management is filled with idiots who will always make mistakes and repeat errors, and hold the sanctity of their content at a point where regardless of the impact to the customer, they'll always shoot for 100% content protection even if it means making the product unusable by the customer. Ask your friends at Bestbuy or Fry's how much fun they had with customers returning gazoodles of blu-ray players and "defective" disks because they changed codes and implemented new protections and all of the customers who didn't know how to update firmware or who didn't have a network and network attached player were stuck with a non playing movie. I won't even delve into the sony ps3 network fiasco that resulted in my daily netflix box (the ps3) ending up in a closet for 3 months, replaced by a roku player. I'll always remember that fondly, Sony.
I think nintendo got lucky with the Wii. Really, really lucky. I dont think the wii U is going to bring them the same sort of luck. If the ps4 is over $400-450 and doesn't have some absolutely killer feature, it'll sell badly until they drop the price, just like the ps3 did.
In looking at the 720 and its persistent allegations of cranking up the content protection and finding ways to resist used games a la Sony...well...if thats the case then I don't want it at any price. I'm not really willing to pay $50 or even $35 for new release games. I'm into paying $10-15 for a used game. Since the used games need a $5-10 code to play online or use important DLC, they're now worth $5-10 less to me, as are the new games because the publisher already stole part of the resale value right up front.
At some point the industry has to figure out a way to profitably connect game and content publishers to the public without all of the electronic 'protections' that never work anyhow. While not simple, I've looked at all the stuff you can do to hack consoles to play games and watch movies for free. Anyone that wants to can do it. So they're just inflicting a huge hassle on the 98% of people who would never bother, while concurrently screwing up people who cant afford high priced new release games.
Sometimes the only way to win the game is not to play. I think I'll just keep buying old used games for the 360 from the pre DLC era and let these guys faces hit the pavement a few times, see how it goes after that.
Microsoft is not a monopoly and neither is Intel. Both companies enjoy competitors with products at generally lower costs that are perfect substitutes for their products.
A monopoly exists when a customer has NO other reasonable choice or the monopolist is able to completely control their market and their competitors profitability.
I frankly think of Microsoft as a one trick pony whose pony is about to expire, quite the opposite of a monopoly.
Excellent. We've gone from entitlement to extortion. If your company said you can use the network for anything at no cost and without being watched as a perk, and then they take that away, then complain. Otherwise YOU decided that stealing company resources are a reasonable way of improving your compensation.
This is right up there with padding your expense report or stealing office supplies. You can certainly do it and probably get away with making a few bucks, but you're just as likely to get caught and canned.
I'm really enjoying watching the justification of using company resources without limitations because they're cheaper than paying for it yourself.
No wonder so many people get fired. Entitlement and no ability to recognize what is and isn't theirs.
Where do you draw the line? Would you pull a hose or electrical wire from the building to your house because it'd be a lot more expensive to have the electric or water company come out and turn on the service?
Because you're paying them to use their data lines, and agreeing with their snooping in the process...unless the OP's work is charging him a monthly ISP fee with a TOS, then I don't think thats a very deep comparison.
When you're at work, doing work, I imagine you're not supposed to be using the company network for your own personal day to day stuff. Get a netbook or a tablet or a phone with 3g and do your own work on your own hardware on your own network that you paid for.
Then let your employer snoop on and look at whatever data is running around their network. They're entitled to, to make sure you aren't doing anything illegal, passing on company secrets or information, etc.
I ran a big piece of the IT shop for one of the largest companies in the world. We looked at everything, all the time, everywhere. And that was a while ago...
And yet it happened anyhow, in one form or another. Is it too much to ask that I be allowed to use my own definition for excessive repetition? After all, I'm not trying to force it on someone else, yet someone elses definition of repetition is now forced on me, yet only in the comment subject area. Its sort of like saying "Yes, you can protest, but only in this small area over here where nobody can see you", isnt it?
Oh wait, anyone else ever know that putting something like 'PPPPPLLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAGUE?!?" as a comment subject produces a "filter error: Too much repetition". Isn't it reasonable to expect that a mature person who can operate a computer and engage in discussion groups well aware enough of what constitutes too much or too little repetition?
Because I can clearly say it in the message body, just not the subject. Yet, its exactly what I wanted the subject to be!
Why do we need yet another phone OS when we already had a bunch. Market voted for android and ios. Sorry Microsoft, but the boats already sailed. I dont care because I dont want to care. You and nokia and rim all blew it by being too late, too hard or too expensive. Its done. Move along now. Nothing to see here.
How do you tell if the programmer you're talking to is an extrovert or an introvert? If he's looking at his shoes when he talks to you, he's an introvert. If he's looking at your shoes when he's talking to you, he's an extrovert.
You nailed it. The basic premise is flawed. Even the fastest cell phone cpu would be challenged to keep up with a dual core atom, let alone some of the better cpu's you can find in a sub $300 laptop.
My wifes 2005 lexus turns off the screen when you're going over ~5mph and won't turn it back on until you slow down below 5. There's an 'emergency call' button on the screen and you can dial using a little stick on the side of the wheel at any speed, but its one-touch dialing with your hands on the wheel.
So 8 years later with phones full of gps's and accelerometers, we cant do the same thing? Just turn off everything except incoming calls and 911 dialouts and allow speech dialing out. I'm pretty sure 95% of the smart phone makers could build and implement this in a day.
But as with anything, its not happening because the customer doesn't want it, the manufacturers and carriers don't either, and the data to support the entire thesis appears to be missing. By that I mean that no study has ever shown that talking on a phone while driving is dangerous. The "its as bad as drunk driving!!1!" study actually showed that neither driving at.08 or driving while talking on the phone had a meaningful effect on driving quality. The problem is that people read the headline, but not the study. When the california highway patrol was tasked with studying traffic accidents to determine cell phone causation, they found not only no causation, but not even particularly good correlation. Since the legislature ordered the study to back up the claims made by legislation they had already written, they ordered the CHP to change the study parameters to have a cell phone be the accident cause if one were simply present in either car at the time of an accident. That one worked, and they got the result they wanted. Thats how they do 'alcohol related' stuff as well. If a sober driver loses control of a car and hits a woman on the sidewalk drinking a glass of wine, thats considered an alcohol related accident.
The truth is that we're easily distracted and driving can become rather boring. So we fill that boredom with distractions. I can say with great authority after having driven for 35 years all over the country, that we had the same stupid drivers doing the same stupid things behind the wheel in the 60's, the 70's, and the 80's when cell phones didn't even exist. I've seen no change whatsoever in driving quality over the past 4 decades. So take away this distraction and we'll simply pick another one.
I've seen people reading books and newspapers, with small tv's set on the dashboard, putting on makeup, eating, smoking, playing with the radio/cd player, reading billboards, checking out people on the sidewalk or in other cars, etc.
I'd be a lot happier if they made it a $2000 fine or a 30 day license revocation for tailgaters, people who swerve from one lane to the other and people who commit 5 moving violations in 5 minutes or less. I see that last one pretty regularly. Those are the people who'll cause a lot of accidents.
I think you gave up on the solution a bit too easily. People make their purchases based on two principles: the elimination of doubt and trust in the other person. The more doubt and the less trust, the less likely a sale occurs.
Who helps eliminate doubts and create trust with technical programmer customers better than a programming sales rep? I'm pretty sure the non technical sales-charmer type isnt a big trust builder either.
Yeah, they required me to put the drive by itself in a pc, set it to IDE mode, and make a boot disk to do the firmware upgrade and then another one to do a secure erase. Then they told me not to restore any backups to it, but to install win7 from scratch.
I put it on the shelf until a few more firmwares came out.
But the point is if you don't do validation testing (or ENOUGH validation testing), you're going to pay 3-4x over when you have to fix problems and make diving catches to remediate the issues.
I simplified my entire life by using an xbox 360 and a playstation 3 for gaming, and a blu-ray player for movies. If I have a rip I just burn it and stick it in the blu-ray player.
While there are occasional bugs in the console games, I've rarely experienced them.
If as a programmer I can do something that crashes your driver or blows up your machine, then the problem was with the driver, not the application programmer.
I was a systems programmer for 30 years. I wrote a ton of OS and driver code, especially drivers. If you could break the machine or cause stupid things to happen by having your app do something improper with the driver, then that was my fault.
I don't think they're trying to drive themselves out of business, they just aren't that competent but their competitors are.
This smells like a cost savings move to me, I guess the positive spin is that they might take longer to go out of business if they cut costs.
What'll actually happen is they'll get a bad rep for having problems that sit around too long. Seems they have OCZ disease...too excited to release new products and start making money and not smart or thorough enough to validation test their products. I got tired of being someone elses unpaid validation tester. I bought a 6670 and found that out of the box with the latest drivers it couldn't even play a blu-ray without tearing. I'm sure it was just a setting or I just needed another driver, but I'm not going to go through that trouble. A frickin HD video card made and sold in 2011-2012 should play a blu-ray in stunning quality right out of the box. OCZ dropped the vertex 2 and vertex 3 on an unsuspecting customer base, who I'm sure liked the frequent data corruption.
From now on I only buy from companies that do extensive validation testing and get good customer reviews. AMD smells badly in that regard right now. I suspect it'll get worse as they edge closer to chapter 11.
...I've been a directv subscriber since around 1994 when they had 50,000 customers and have their current HD DVR technology.
Pro's: nice picture quality, lots of channels, plenty of downloadable shows.
Cons: Cant stream anything except youtube from a search. No netflix. No hulu. Have to download all shows which can take quite a while and can only start viewing when you have buffered a lot. Most hardware platforms are slower than molasses going uphill on a cold monday morning, and if your brand new HR24 craps out, chances are they'll ship you a replacement HR 20/21/22 that are basically too slow to use. You hit a button on the remote and a while later something happens. Completely opposed to and unsupporting of anything coming through the box that isn't directv supplied and branded.
In short, unacceptable for 2012, poised for a major faceplant from someone elses set top box. Obstructionism and protectionism only work until someone has something as good for less money that works better. I don't think thats Apple TV because I can't see anyone seriously spending a couple of bucks per tv show. Netflix and hulu are incomplete. But as soon as someone puts out a streaming package with full sports, all local broadcast and pretty much everything I can get from directv minus the big dish and tons of wires and little boxes for under $100...directv will start hemorrhaging money and subscribers.
Having had the chance to speak to a number of directv senior and middle management, they consider the customer a barely necessary evil and have absolutely no idea as to how to treat customers. When you're the best show in town, you can get away with that.
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Because if you're unemployed, that means you did something to lose a job. Might not be the employees fault in most cases, but there's probably a stat that says that unemployed workers aren't as effective as hiring someone already employed.
There is also a work socialization issue I've seen discussed. People that have been out of work for more than a few months take some considerable time to readjust to being in a work place. I can relate to that, having taken a one year sabbatical around 20 years ago and then going back to work full time. Its pretty amazing how much absolute stupidity you can get used to when you're living in it every day. Step out of it for a while and you notice when you get back in.
You assume correctly. Most of the people doing this stuff are in their 20's with perfect eyesight.
I can tell as a 50 year old father that all the stuff for kids has instructions written in 4 point font in a 1 square inch area, with six inches of white space around it. Also every tag with a product serial number on it is a 2x1" sticker with a number on it in 2 point font.
I could branch off into how we as a nation can no longer perforate either, but thats not critical at this juncture.
Now see, I'd pay extra for that feature. No, not the glasses. I often say that some expensive item would only be worth it if I could fark it.
Its also about using the proper words so the language doesn't devolve into a bunch of valley-girl speak and text shortcuts.
The front page of my local paper included two perfectly well spelled words that were not accurate in context, both in headlines. Written by an alleged professional writer and reviewed by an alleged professional editor. While I'm quite far from the grammar Nazi, it would be nice to preserve our language. Seeing "candidate hurtles over problems" and stuff like "and walla, its done" is disappointing. The word is 'voila' and its french for 'there is is', by my 9th grade french class recollection.
A little less of a problem with flexibility and a little more concern about devolution of progress when we use the wrong words and pronounce them incorrectly, or even better steal one from another language, spell it wrong, and then continue to devolve its spelling and pronunciation.
But we did operate for 8 years with a president who pronounced the word 'nucular', even though there is an 'e' and the 'l' does come before it, and it contains no 'u'. As I understand it, he knew the correct pronunciation but chose to use the one that the 40-something percent of stupid people use so he could connect better with them. There must be at least 4 possible discussion threads on how ridiculously wrong all of that is.
It gets stupider. A huge percentage of households have no video game consoles at all, or an older console like a playstation 2, an original xbox or some other, and a lot of households have more than one. We have three 360's, a ps3 and two wii's. My sons three best friends have one wii between their three households. Guess whose house they spend all day at...
So calculating a real dominant market share analysis is a tad more complicated than doing some simple division.
Sony already learned a lesson on building a $500+ console...nobody buys it because the wii is 1/4 the price and the xbox without hard drive or kinect isnt much more expensive than that. However, Sony management is filled with idiots who will always make mistakes and repeat errors, and hold the sanctity of their content at a point where regardless of the impact to the customer, they'll always shoot for 100% content protection even if it means making the product unusable by the customer. Ask your friends at Bestbuy or Fry's how much fun they had with customers returning gazoodles of blu-ray players and "defective" disks because they changed codes and implemented new protections and all of the customers who didn't know how to update firmware or who didn't have a network and network attached player were stuck with a non playing movie. I won't even delve into the sony ps3 network fiasco that resulted in my daily netflix box (the ps3) ending up in a closet for 3 months, replaced by a roku player. I'll always remember that fondly, Sony.
I think nintendo got lucky with the Wii. Really, really lucky. I dont think the wii U is going to bring them the same sort of luck. If the ps4 is over $400-450 and doesn't have some absolutely killer feature, it'll sell badly until they drop the price, just like the ps3 did.
In looking at the 720 and its persistent allegations of cranking up the content protection and finding ways to resist used games a la Sony...well...if thats the case then I don't want it at any price. I'm not really willing to pay $50 or even $35 for new release games. I'm into paying $10-15 for a used game. Since the used games need a $5-10 code to play online or use important DLC, they're now worth $5-10 less to me, as are the new games because the publisher already stole part of the resale value right up front.
At some point the industry has to figure out a way to profitably connect game and content publishers to the public without all of the electronic 'protections' that never work anyhow. While not simple, I've looked at all the stuff you can do to hack consoles to play games and watch movies for free. Anyone that wants to can do it. So they're just inflicting a huge hassle on the 98% of people who would never bother, while concurrently screwing up people who cant afford high priced new release games.
Sometimes the only way to win the game is not to play. I think I'll just keep buying old used games for the 360 from the pre DLC era and let these guys faces hit the pavement a few times, see how it goes after that.
Microsoft is not a monopoly and neither is Intel. Both companies enjoy competitors with products at generally lower costs that are perfect substitutes for their products.
A monopoly exists when a customer has NO other reasonable choice or the monopolist is able to completely control their market and their competitors profitability.
I frankly think of Microsoft as a one trick pony whose pony is about to expire, quite the opposite of a monopoly.
Excellent. We've gone from entitlement to extortion. If your company said you can use the network for anything at no cost and without being watched as a perk, and then they take that away, then complain. Otherwise YOU decided that stealing company resources are a reasonable way of improving your compensation.
This is right up there with padding your expense report or stealing office supplies. You can certainly do it and probably get away with making a few bucks, but you're just as likely to get caught and canned.
I'm really enjoying watching the justification of using company resources without limitations because they're cheaper than paying for it yourself.
No wonder so many people get fired. Entitlement and no ability to recognize what is and isn't theirs.
Where do you draw the line? Would you pull a hose or electrical wire from the building to your house because it'd be a lot more expensive to have the electric or water company come out and turn on the service?
Because you're paying them to use their data lines, and agreeing with their snooping in the process...unless the OP's work is charging him a monthly ISP fee with a TOS, then I don't think thats a very deep comparison.
When you're at work, doing work, I imagine you're not supposed to be using the company network for your own personal day to day stuff. Get a netbook or a tablet or a phone with 3g and do your own work on your own hardware on your own network that you paid for.
Then let your employer snoop on and look at whatever data is running around their network. They're entitled to, to make sure you aren't doing anything illegal, passing on company secrets or information, etc.
I ran a big piece of the IT shop for one of the largest companies in the world. We looked at everything, all the time, everywhere. And that was a while ago...
And yet it happened anyhow, in one form or another. Is it too much to ask that I be allowed to use my own definition for excessive repetition? After all, I'm not trying to force it on someone else, yet someone elses definition of repetition is now forced on me, yet only in the comment subject area. Its sort of like saying "Yes, you can protest, but only in this small area over here where nobody can see you", isnt it?
that is all.
Oh wait, anyone else ever know that putting something like 'PPPPPLLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAGUE?!?" as a comment subject produces a "filter error: Too much repetition". Isn't it reasonable to expect that a mature person who can operate a computer and engage in discussion groups well aware enough of what constitutes too much or too little repetition?
Because I can clearly say it in the message body, just not the subject. Yet, its exactly what I wanted the subject to be!
Why do we need yet another phone OS when we already had a bunch. Market voted for android and ios. Sorry Microsoft, but the boats already sailed. I dont care because I dont want to care. You and nokia and rim all blew it by being too late, too hard or too expensive. Its done. Move along now. Nothing to see here.
How do you tell if the programmer you're talking to is an extrovert or an introvert? If he's looking at his shoes when he talks to you, he's an introvert. If he's looking at your shoes when he's talking to you, he's an extrovert.
Last time I wrote code the language was 'c', so if he's doing 'p' then yeah, that'd be pretty freaking awesome.
You nailed it. The basic premise is flawed. Even the fastest cell phone cpu would be challenged to keep up with a dual core atom, let alone some of the better cpu's you can find in a sub $300 laptop.
More solutions in search of a problem...
My wifes 2005 lexus turns off the screen when you're going over ~5mph and won't turn it back on until you slow down below 5. There's an 'emergency call' button on the screen and you can dial using a little stick on the side of the wheel at any speed, but its one-touch dialing with your hands on the wheel.
So 8 years later with phones full of gps's and accelerometers, we cant do the same thing? Just turn off everything except incoming calls and 911 dialouts and allow speech dialing out. I'm pretty sure 95% of the smart phone makers could build and implement this in a day.
But as with anything, its not happening because the customer doesn't want it, the manufacturers and carriers don't either, and the data to support the entire thesis appears to be missing. By that I mean that no study has ever shown that talking on a phone while driving is dangerous. The "its as bad as drunk driving!!1!" study actually showed that neither driving at .08 or driving while talking on the phone had a meaningful effect on driving quality. The problem is that people read the headline, but not the study. When the california highway patrol was tasked with studying traffic accidents to determine cell phone causation, they found not only no causation, but not even particularly good correlation. Since the legislature ordered the study to back up the claims made by legislation they had already written, they ordered the CHP to change the study parameters to have a cell phone be the accident cause if one were simply present in either car at the time of an accident. That one worked, and they got the result they wanted. Thats how they do 'alcohol related' stuff as well. If a sober driver loses control of a car and hits a woman on the sidewalk drinking a glass of wine, thats considered an alcohol related accident.
The truth is that we're easily distracted and driving can become rather boring. So we fill that boredom with distractions. I can say with great authority after having driven for 35 years all over the country, that we had the same stupid drivers doing the same stupid things behind the wheel in the 60's, the 70's, and the 80's when cell phones didn't even exist. I've seen no change whatsoever in driving quality over the past 4 decades. So take away this distraction and we'll simply pick another one.
I've seen people reading books and newspapers, with small tv's set on the dashboard, putting on makeup, eating, smoking, playing with the radio/cd player, reading billboards, checking out people on the sidewalk or in other cars, etc.
I'd be a lot happier if they made it a $2000 fine or a 30 day license revocation for tailgaters, people who swerve from one lane to the other and people who commit 5 moving violations in 5 minutes or less. I see that last one pretty regularly. Those are the people who'll cause a lot of accidents.
Same here. Worked hard and cheap for a while, then worked hard and for a lot of money once I had the street cred.
I think you gave up on the solution a bit too easily. People make their purchases based on two principles: the elimination of doubt and trust in the other person. The more doubt and the less trust, the less likely a sale occurs.
Who helps eliminate doubts and create trust with technical programmer customers better than a programming sales rep? I'm pretty sure the non technical sales-charmer type isnt a big trust builder either.
Yeah, they required me to put the drive by itself in a pc, set it to IDE mode, and make a boot disk to do the firmware upgrade and then another one to do a secure erase. Then they told me not to restore any backups to it, but to install win7 from scratch.
I put it on the shelf until a few more firmwares came out.
But the point is if you don't do validation testing (or ENOUGH validation testing), you're going to pay 3-4x over when you have to fix problems and make diving catches to remediate the issues.
Oh come on. First you make sure the helicopter is over water, shoot with the chain gun, crash, then sinkage.
I simplified my entire life by using an xbox 360 and a playstation 3 for gaming, and a blu-ray player for movies. If I have a rip I just burn it and stick it in the blu-ray player.
While there are occasional bugs in the console games, I've rarely experienced them.
If as a programmer I can do something that crashes your driver or blows up your machine, then the problem was with the driver, not the application programmer.
I was a systems programmer for 30 years. I wrote a ton of OS and driver code, especially drivers. If you could break the machine or cause stupid things to happen by having your app do something improper with the driver, then that was my fault.
I don't think they're trying to drive themselves out of business, they just aren't that competent but their competitors are.
This smells like a cost savings move to me, I guess the positive spin is that they might take longer to go out of business if they cut costs.
What'll actually happen is they'll get a bad rep for having problems that sit around too long. Seems they have OCZ disease...too excited to release new products and start making money and not smart or thorough enough to validation test their products. I got tired of being someone elses unpaid validation tester. I bought a 6670 and found that out of the box with the latest drivers it couldn't even play a blu-ray without tearing. I'm sure it was just a setting or I just needed another driver, but I'm not going to go through that trouble. A frickin HD video card made and sold in 2011-2012 should play a blu-ray in stunning quality right out of the box. OCZ dropped the vertex 2 and vertex 3 on an unsuspecting customer base, who I'm sure liked the frequent data corruption.
From now on I only buy from companies that do extensive validation testing and get good customer reviews. AMD smells badly in that regard right now. I suspect it'll get worse as they edge closer to chapter 11.
...I've been a directv subscriber since around 1994 when they had 50,000 customers and have their current HD DVR technology.
Pro's: nice picture quality, lots of channels, plenty of downloadable shows.
Cons: Cant stream anything except youtube from a search. No netflix. No hulu. Have to download all shows which can take quite a while and can only start viewing when you have buffered a lot. Most hardware platforms are slower than molasses going uphill on a cold monday morning, and if your brand new HR24 craps out, chances are they'll ship you a replacement HR 20/21/22 that are basically too slow to use. You hit a button on the remote and a while later something happens. Completely opposed to and unsupporting of anything coming through the box that isn't directv supplied and branded.
In short, unacceptable for 2012, poised for a major faceplant from someone elses set top box. Obstructionism and protectionism only work until someone has something as good for less money that works better. I don't think thats Apple TV because I can't see anyone seriously spending a couple of bucks per tv show. Netflix and hulu are incomplete. But as soon as someone puts out a streaming package with full sports, all local broadcast and pretty much everything I can get from directv minus the big dish and tons of wires and little boxes for under $100...directv will start hemorrhaging money and subscribers.
Having had the chance to speak to a number of directv senior and middle management, they consider the customer a barely necessary evil and have absolutely no idea as to how to treat customers. When you're the best show in town, you can get away with that.