With rising affluence, what people consider a living wage also rises much faster than subsidence level wages. The wage for the average day laborer might only have gone up a bit, but what middle class workers such as programmers or engineers would like to earn is probably rising much faster. For them, a living wave now probably includes being able to buy a cell phone, maybe a scooter or car, a bigger apartment, a few nights on the town,... And these things are likely not that much cheaper than in the US or Europe because they cater to a relatively affluent group of people. Some of my Indian (in the US) coworkers joked that the rents for a/c apartments with working plumbing and other amenities in Mumbay were actually higher than what they paid in a mid-size college town in the US. Yes, you could rent a carboard shack for $5/month, but nobody who can afford not to would.
Given that the Federal (US) government is required by the OMB to switch to IPv6 by June 2008, I seriously hope you are not looking to do any business with them or any federal contractor after that date.
On the other hand, in typical US government fashion, according to the GAO implementation speed is seriously behind schedule.
The new layout looks great with my settings: Simple Design, Low Bandwidth, No Icons. Much cleaner, the text is finally smaller and the white space is better distributed. But I guess some people can't live without the eye candy.
I thought he might have something until I got to the exploding car part. Everything up to that is very unlikely, but probably doable for a determined attacker with local access. And there might even be some companies who put part of their SCADA on the internet--all of them deserve whatever they get. But changing medications and "car specifications so they explode after a few weeks"? Give me a break. Cars do not explode due to spec changes--short of including a pound of C4 and a triggering device in the spec. The worst might be putting a virus or trojan into the engine electronics that would lock the engine. And while cyberterrorists broke into a pharmaceutical company's central computer and changed the recipe for a pill to kill people on the Brit MI5 spy series, systems like that are not online and there is something called quality assurance--as in testing each batch before it goes out to the customers. So an attacker would need local access to the production facility, the automated QA, the manual testing,.... . I think this guy is watching to much TV. He would just have disqualified himself in any sane governmental organization. Thank god the DHS is not one of them.
There are serious cyber threats, though, denial-of-service attacks, attacks on online trading systems,... But that was probably not as dramatic as exploding cars.
I think this must be somewhat caused by electronic polution from earth. The only way to restore the magnetosphere is limiting our emmissions of electromagnetic gas.
We should found a grass roots movement to pressure the government to step in and protest in front of the cooperations that are the biggest generators of electromagnetic gas pollution.
Also, I think the government needs to allocate a large amount of money for contractors in the most important congressional districts to develop technology to reduce electromagnetic gas pollution.
(Those who don't understand sarcasm are doomed to repeat it)
I am sure MIT can work out the technical issues, but how are they proposing to make sure that the laptops stay in the schools and with the kids?
While most people in developing countries are scrupulously honest--far more than in developed countries in my experience--, this laptop will be by far the most valuable thing many families, schools, or even villages will own. And it comes in an easily portable package. In many countries, $100 represents the annual income or multiple monthly incomes for families. So there will be a lot of temptation to sell or hawk it in dire circumstances. For example if selling the laptop means getting medicine, or paying for an operation, or paying for food in a drought, what would you do? No mention of WWJD? Let your mom die to be able to hold on to your MIT laptop?
There might be ways to instill enough community pride for this not to be a problem, but even then, they will still be a huge temptation for the few bad apples. Think some urban hoodlums being able to get out their pickup, drive to a village, break into a school, scoop up $3000 of laptops and selling to someone who either hawks them to more affluent people or puts them on eBay for the tech geeks in the US, Europe or Japan.
Remember, in a lot of places on the planned distribution list, people dismantle power lines to sell the copper, or burn down a village by drilling into an oil pipeline to tab 5 gallons of gas.
Cabling them to the desks is not an option if you've even seen what the desks in rural African schools look like, there are no secure rooms, and even if, the locks are more valuable elsewhere. Harsh penalties would be very counterproductive, non-liberal, and would only be enforced very selectively. The only way would be flooding the countries to such a degree that the devices would be essentially worthless. That means: enough for every citizen, plus all the ones someone can sell on eBay.
I know someone will bring up cell phones, but the big difference is that the phone has little intrinsic value--what's valuable is the contract.
Three nice books, but I'm still in favor of starting everyone out with Learning the UNIX Operating System. Anyone can do it in a few hours and it will save days of frustration down the road. It's probably the only one that gives you just about all the information you can absorb in one go. And with no fat or carbs added.
You know, I love it when pundits don't even read their talking points before posting them. What part of "usually with a lawful warrant" didn't you understand. Yes, wiretapping has been goign on as long as there were wires. But the end run the current administration is doing around courts, FISA, Congress, and civil rights is pretty much unprecendented.
Far and away Dr. Bunsen. Gyro Gearloose (Ok, he's an engineer, so what?) The Brain Lt. Col. Samantha Carter (they will do another Stargate movie, right?) Dr. Frank-N-Furter And purely for looks, Dr. Christmas Jones
dick: "i guess it looks as if you're reorganizing your records.. um.. what's this? chronological?"
rob: "no."
dick: "not alphabetical."
rob: "nope."
dick: "what?"
rob: "autobiographical."
dick: "no fucking way!"
rob: "yep! i can tell you how i got from deep purple to howling wolf in just 25 moves."
dick: "oh my god!"
rob: "and, if i wanted to find the song "landslide" by fleetwood mac i have to remember that i bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile but i didn't give it to them for personal reasons."
You are selling enterprise hardware to companies that don't use DHCP? Also, if you sell "enterprise level" hardware, shouldn't there be some sysadmin on the other end setting it up and supporting it? If you have to explain IP setup to _users_ you or your customers have bigger problems than Mac users who can't find the command prompt.
By the way, you might try to tell your Mac, Linux and Unix users to open a terminal instead of a command prompt.
1) 180Mbps is the theoretical throughput if the devices are right next to each other.
Probably not for the ultrageeks, but full motion DVD streams at up to 10.08 Mbps. So for most home users 180Mbps with all kinds of degradation will still allow them to run stuff at speeds where other parts (last mile,...) will be the bottleneck, not the wireless network.
2) Even then, you STILL won't get that speed. A typical cat 5 cable and switch will give you 99.9% of the theoretical max.
You might blow a few hundred exabyte over your network, 99.9% of people won't
3) The latency is higher (gaming)
If you are playing an MMOG, the latency of your home network pales against the latency outside your house, even if you hook directly into L3 networks.
4) It's harder to configure.
Really? That's a UI problem. I find it easier to configure my wireless than crawl back into the closet I use as a server room.
5) It's less secure.
But properly configured, it is more secure than most people need. And the NSA can listen to your wired network.--Which is why a lot of high security instalaltions use fibre optics.
6) It's constantly changing.
Oh, and wired networks aren't? God, I am old enough to remember CAT-10 10MB, 100MB, Gigabit. All of them needed new routers and occasionally new cables.
7) It is expensive.
How is a $29-100 WiFi router more expensive than a wired one plus a few hundred yards or cable plus ripping open the walls to put in cable conduits? You might not mind blue wires running all over the place, I certainly do.
8) Linux drivers are hard to find.
Ok, but that's on Linux developers. Also, 95% of to population are not running Linux on their home network.
9) ISPs won't support it. What does the ISP have to do with it? They see my router--what happend after that is my business.
So even with their inflated accounting, they come up with a loss of about 15% of the global revenue of the US movie industry? Give me a break.
By the way, other estimated of worldwide movie industry revenues go up to $450bln when one includes mechandise and other sales. Of course, that also counts Bollywood and other non-US producers.
>The constitution is not an inclusive list of our rights.
Judge Scalia--you know the guy on the Supreme Court--would violently disagree.
"Question comes up: is there a constitutional right to homosexual conduct? Not a hard question for me. It's absolutely clear that nobody ever thought when the Bill of Rights was adopted that it gave a right to homosexual conduct. Homosexual conduct was criminal for 200 years in every state. Easy question." --Judge Scalia in a speech at Freiburg University, March 8, 2006
Have you even tried using IE7's standard search? I had to check compatibility of one of our AJAX products with IE7 beta 2 and the Windows Life (Live?) search is horrible. It first goes to the Live home page, takes about 5 seconds to load it halfway, then aborts the page load to switch to the search page and takes another few seconds to load that one. All in all, something that should take a split second is now a half minute exercise.
If they don't fix that and a few dozen other annoyances (asinine repetitive security warnings!!!!!) before they release IE7, that war is over before it begins.
Assuming you live in the US, you obviously don't have a social security number, drivers license, birth certificate, or passport, and you have never been sick, or attended school; and have yet to pay taxes? Newsflash: the government holds a lot of data about you. Unfortunately, the data is currently linked by an universal and extremly weak key, namely a 9 digit number that you probably have passed out many times over to people who are as trustworthy as used car salesmen.
Come to think of it, more than a few probably were used car salesmen...
On a slightly more serious note: probably the same way that coral fossiles from roughly the same period ended up in Kaibab Limestone on the Colorado plateau at 7000 feet above sea level. -- Either plate tectonics or the devil sprinkled them to confuse the minds of men.
Exactly. Also works great with the right car radio. Anyway, at home I'd prefer PC->Airport Express->Stereo. Fewer wires, more disk space, better control and better sound than any of the iPod speakers for less than half the price.
It's probably a sign that many residents don't know how to buy or install a wireless card. Talk to some cable company istaller occasionally. They get called to plug in the cable in the back of the computer because customers don't know where it is supposed to go. Even though there are only one or two jacks an Ethernet cable will fit into and either of them works.
Re:Enviornmentalists Are Harming The Enviornment
on
Tilting At Windmills
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Wow, you just described zealots to a t. With minimal replacements (and not fixing any of your typos):
This is just another example of a larger trend. GPL zealots and GPL groups sabatoging free software progress by insisting on perfection. By refusing to comprimise or to throw their weight behind the less damaging projects/praise those who implement them GPL zealots sabatoge their own cause.
I mean consider this from the perspective of a company, or even country thinking of implementing some measures to minimize the IP harm of their actions. If they know that they will still get bad press from the GPL lobby for the damage/harm they are still doing rather than praise for improving their act they have little incentive to improve. In fact making small steps which will be met with criticisms that they don't go far enough can actually make for worse publicity than doing nothing at all.
This is part of a greater refusal on the part of GPL zealots to prioritize and to admit that their values, while important, need to trade off with human values. For instance by refusing to even consider (maybe it won't turn out to be worth it but it should be considered) other open source licenses enviornmentalists guarantee that we will continue to use proprietary software and risk Trusted Computing. Sure it might be possible in theory to acheive this goal by all using our own GPL'd software and other solutions in practice this has a great deal of problems and people are resistant to this level of change. Only by favoring comprimise and slight improvement where politically possible can we get real progress.
Worse, by refusing to prioritize the GPL movement makes sure many people don't take them seriously. Go look at the pages of major GPL groups or read their newsletters. You see articles written in the same alarmist tone and message of impending disastor as the warnings about global warming. No wonder people don't take threats to privacy as seriously as they should when implicitly the GPL groups put it at the same level as the sort of IP protection that has been occuring for years with limited impact.
If we want to get anything done the GPL advocacy groups need to buckle down and make some hard choices. They need to stop appearing to favor the GPL over people and instead tell people why saving free software is in people's best interest. Also they need to clearly prioritize and tell us that constant surveylance is far more serious than threats to habitate and wildlife and praise free software projects EVEN IF THEY ARE NOT GPL.
Actually, you don't need a phone line and haven't for years. Tivo works just fine hooked up to a router. I still have one lying around somewhere, but don't use it anymore because of the DVR built into my cable box. And that, not the mythical TVs with built in DVRs is what's killing Tivo.
Their patent is patently rediculous, but they do have some great technology that they should be able to sell or license. For example here are a few things that Tivo can do that my cable DVR cannot:
-schedule shows based on field or actors -autodelete reliably and in the right order -correctly identify first run shows only -jump back a few seconds when fast forwarding to make up for the delay between me seeing where I want to go and pressing the button
But none of these is worth $80/year to me and Tivo has other problems like occasionally getting the lineup completely wrong. I can't remember if they ever managed to schedule a show on G4 or the BBC correctly. Another one is that without modding, their hard drives are way to small.
Uh, have you or anybody in your companies management looked at Sarabanes-Oxley or similar laws in other countries recently? If you don't keep your corporate email for the prescribed amount of time (which is incidentally longer than Gmail has existed), any judge is going to bitch slap you into next week for obstruction of justice. And the penalties on that are usually more than anything you can rack up for simple corporate fraud. Actually, you don't even have be in involved in any criminal or civil cases to get into trouble for not retaining email, a simple tax audit can get you into enough hot water.
Now, that is not to say that any retention policy shouldn't include procedures for getting rid of backups and stored email after the period mandated by law.
I know Steve Jobs has said that their customers do not want to watch TV on their Macs, but wouldn't be an Mac mini Tivo be a killer application? Much smaller than a media center PC, much more programmable than a Tivo, build in DVD player, iTunes, streaming audio via Airport Express....
I'd buy one, but that might not be enough of a market.
Slashdot Mirror
With rising affluence, what people consider a living wage also rises much faster than subsidence level wages. The wage for the average day laborer might only have gone up a bit, but what middle class workers such as programmers or engineers would like to earn is probably rising much faster. For them, a living wave now probably includes being able to buy a cell phone, maybe a scooter or car, a bigger apartment, a few nights on the town,... And these things are likely not that much cheaper than in the US or Europe because they cater to a relatively affluent group of people.
Some of my Indian (in the US) coworkers joked that the rents for a/c apartments with working plumbing and other amenities in Mumbay were actually higher than what they paid in a mid-size college town in the US. Yes, you could rent a carboard shack for $5/month, but nobody who can afford not to would.
Here is a picture.
For the humor impared, google "Hanford" and "DOE"
Given that the Federal (US) government is required by the OMB to switch to IPv6 by June 2008, I seriously hope you are not looking to do any business with them or any federal contractor after that date.
On the other hand, in typical US government fashion, according to the GAO implementation speed is seriously behind schedule.
The new layout looks great with my settings: Simple Design, Low Bandwidth, No Icons. Much cleaner, the text is finally smaller and the white space is better distributed. But I guess some people can't live without the eye candy.
I thought he might have something until I got to the exploding car part. Everything up to that is very unlikely, but probably doable for a determined attacker with local access. And there might even be some companies who put part of their SCADA on the internet--all of them deserve whatever they get. But changing medications and "car specifications so they explode after a few weeks"? Give me a break. Cars do not explode due to spec changes--short of including a pound of C4 and a triggering device in the spec. The worst might be putting a virus or trojan into the engine electronics that would lock the engine. And while cyberterrorists broke into a pharmaceutical company's central computer and changed the recipe for a pill to kill people on the Brit MI5 spy series, systems like that are not online and there is something called quality assurance--as in testing each batch before it goes out to the customers. So an attacker would need local access to the production facility, the automated QA, the manual testing, .... . I think this guy is watching to much TV. He would just have disqualified himself in any sane governmental organization. Thank god the DHS is not one of them.
There are serious cyber threats, though, denial-of-service attacks, attacks on online trading systems,... But that was probably not as dramatic as exploding cars.
I think this must be somewhat caused by electronic polution from earth. The only way to restore the magnetosphere is limiting our emmissions of electromagnetic gas.
We should found a grass roots movement to pressure the government to step in and protest in front of the cooperations that are the biggest generators of electromagnetic gas pollution.
Also, I think the government needs to allocate a large amount of money for contractors in the most important congressional districts to develop technology to reduce electromagnetic gas pollution.
(Those who don't understand sarcasm are doomed to repeat it)
I am sure MIT can work out the technical issues, but how are they proposing to make sure that the laptops stay in the schools and with the kids?
While most people in developing countries are scrupulously honest--far more than in developed countries in my experience--, this laptop will be by far the most valuable thing many families, schools, or even villages will own. And it comes in an easily portable package. In many countries, $100 represents the annual income or multiple monthly incomes for families. So there will be a lot of temptation to sell or hawk it in dire circumstances. For example if selling the laptop means getting medicine, or paying for an operation, or paying for food in a drought, what would you do? No mention of WWJD? Let your mom die to be able to hold on to your MIT laptop?
There might be ways to instill enough community pride for this not to be a problem, but even then, they will still be a huge temptation for the few bad apples. Think some urban hoodlums being able to get out their pickup, drive to a village, break into a school, scoop up $3000 of laptops and selling to someone who either hawks them to more affluent people or puts them on eBay for the tech geeks in the US, Europe or Japan.
Remember, in a lot of places on the planned distribution list, people dismantle power lines to sell the copper, or burn down a village by drilling into an oil pipeline to tab 5 gallons of gas.
Cabling them to the desks is not an option if you've even seen what the desks in rural African schools look like, there are no secure rooms, and even if, the locks are more valuable elsewhere. Harsh penalties would be very counterproductive, non-liberal, and would only be enforced very selectively. The only way would be flooding the countries to such a degree that the devices would be essentially worthless. That means: enough for every citizen, plus all the ones someone can sell on eBay.
I know someone will bring up cell phones, but the big difference is that the phone has little intrinsic value--what's valuable is the contract.
Three nice books, but I'm still in favor of starting everyone out with Learning the UNIX Operating System. Anyone can do it in a few hours and it will save days of frustration down the road. It's probably the only one that gives you just about all the information you can absorb in one go. And with no fat or carbs added.
You know, I love it when pundits don't even read their talking points before posting them. What part of "usually with a lawful warrant" didn't you understand. Yes, wiretapping has been goign on as long as there were wires. But the end run the current administration is doing around courts, FISA, Congress, and civil rights is pretty much unprecendented.
Far and away Dr. Bunsen.
Gyro Gearloose (Ok, he's an engineer, so what?)
The Brain
Lt. Col. Samantha Carter (they will do another Stargate movie, right?)
Dr. Frank-N-Furter
And purely for looks, Dr. Christmas Jones
dick: "i guess it looks as if you're reorganizing your records .. um .. what's this? chronological?"
.."
rob: "no."
dick: "not alphabetical."
rob: "nope."
dick: "what?"
rob: "autobiographical."
dick: "no fucking way!"
rob: "yep! i can tell you how i got from deep purple to howling wolf in just 25 moves."
dick: "oh my god!"
rob: "and, if i wanted to find the song "landslide" by fleetwood mac i have to remember that i bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile but i didn't give it to them for personal reasons."
dick: "that sounds
rob: "comforting."
dick: "yes."
rob: "it is."
Ok, you are probably trolling, but anyway...
You are selling enterprise hardware to companies that don't use DHCP? Also, if you sell "enterprise level" hardware, shouldn't there be some sysadmin on the other end setting it up and supporting it? If you have to explain IP setup to _users_ you or your customers have bigger problems than Mac users who can't find the command prompt.
By the way, you might try to tell your Mac, Linux and Unix users to open a terminal instead of a command prompt.
Some thoughts on your ten points
1) 180Mbps is the theoretical throughput if the devices are right next to each other.
Probably not for the ultrageeks, but full motion DVD streams at up to 10.08 Mbps. So for most home users 180Mbps with all kinds of degradation will still allow them to run stuff at speeds where other parts (last mile,...) will be the bottleneck, not the wireless network.
2) Even then, you STILL won't get that speed. A typical cat 5 cable and switch will give you 99.9% of the theoretical max.
You might blow a few hundred exabyte over your network, 99.9% of people won't
3) The latency is higher (gaming)
If you are playing an MMOG, the latency of your home network pales against the latency outside your house, even if you hook directly into L3 networks.
4) It's harder to configure.
Really? That's a UI problem. I find it easier to configure my wireless than crawl back into the closet I use as a server room.
5) It's less secure.
But properly configured, it is more secure than most people need. And the NSA can listen to your wired network.--Which is why a lot of high security instalaltions use fibre optics.
6) It's constantly changing.
Oh, and wired networks aren't? God, I am old enough to remember CAT-10 10MB, 100MB, Gigabit. All of them needed new routers and occasionally new cables.
7) It is expensive.
How is a $29-100 WiFi router more expensive than a wired one plus a few hundred yards or cable plus ripping open the walls to put in cable conduits? You might not mind blue wires running all over the place, I certainly do.
8) Linux drivers are hard to find.
Ok, but that's on Linux developers. Also, 95% of to population are not running Linux on their home network.
9) ISPs won't support it.
What does the ISP have to do with it? They see my router--what happend after that is my business.
So even with their inflated accounting, they come up with a loss of about 15% of the global revenue of the US movie industry? Give me a break.
By the way, other estimated of worldwide movie industry revenues go up to $450bln when one includes mechandise and other sales. Of course, that also counts Bollywood and other non-US producers.
>The constitution is not an inclusive list of our rights.
Judge Scalia--you know the guy on the Supreme Court--would violently disagree.
"Question comes up: is there a constitutional right to homosexual conduct? Not a hard question for me. It's absolutely clear that nobody ever thought when the Bill of Rights was adopted that it gave a right to homosexual conduct. Homosexual conduct was criminal for 200 years in every state. Easy question." --Judge Scalia in a speech at Freiburg University, March 8, 2006
Have you even tried using IE7's standard search? I had to check compatibility of one of our AJAX products with IE7 beta 2 and the Windows Life (Live?) search is horrible. It first goes to the Live home page, takes about 5 seconds to load it halfway, then aborts the page load to switch to the search page and takes another few seconds to load that one. All in all, something that should take a split second is now a half minute exercise.
If they don't fix that and a few dozen other annoyances (asinine repetitive security warnings!!!!!) before they release IE7, that war is over before it begins.
Assuming you live in the US, you obviously don't have a social security number, drivers license, birth certificate, or passport, and you have never been sick, or attended school; and have yet to pay taxes? Newsflash: the government holds a lot of data about you. Unfortunately, the data is currently linked by an universal and extremly weak key, namely a 9 digit number that you probably have passed out many times over to people who are as trustworthy as used car salesmen.
Come to think of it, more than a few probably were used car salesmen...
On a slightly more serious note: probably the same way that coral fossiles from roughly the same period ended up in Kaibab Limestone on the Colorado plateau at 7000 feet above sea level. -- Either plate tectonics or the devil sprinkled them to confuse the minds of men.
Exactly. Also works great with the right car radio. Anyway, at home I'd prefer PC->Airport Express->Stereo. Fewer wires, more disk space, better control and better sound than any of the iPod speakers for less than half the price.
It's probably a sign that many residents don't know how to buy or install a wireless card. Talk to some cable company istaller occasionally. They get called to plug in the cable in the back of the computer because customers don't know where it is supposed to go. Even though there are only one or two jacks an Ethernet cable will fit into and either of them works.
Wow, you just described zealots to a t. With minimal replacements (and not fixing any of your typos):
This is just another example of a larger trend. GPL zealots and GPL groups sabatoging free software progress by insisting on perfection. By refusing to comprimise or to throw their weight behind the less damaging projects/praise those who implement them GPL zealots sabatoge their own cause.
I mean consider this from the perspective of a company, or even country thinking of implementing some measures to minimize the IP harm of their actions. If they know that they will still get bad press from the GPL lobby for the damage/harm they are still doing rather than praise for improving their act they have little incentive to improve. In fact making small steps which will be met with criticisms that they don't go far enough can actually make for worse publicity than doing nothing at all.
This is part of a greater refusal on the part of GPL zealots to prioritize and to admit that their values, while important, need to trade off with human values. For instance by refusing to even consider (maybe it won't turn out to be worth it but it should be considered) other open source licenses enviornmentalists guarantee that we will continue to use proprietary software and risk Trusted Computing. Sure it might be possible in theory to acheive this goal by all using our own GPL'd software and other solutions in practice this has a great deal of problems and people are resistant to this level of change. Only by favoring comprimise and slight improvement where politically possible can we get real progress.
Worse, by refusing to prioritize the GPL movement makes sure many people don't take them seriously. Go look at the pages of major GPL groups or read their newsletters. You see articles written in the same alarmist tone and message of impending disastor as the warnings about global warming. No wonder people don't take threats to privacy as seriously as they should when implicitly the GPL groups put it at the same level as the sort of IP protection that has been occuring for years with limited impact.
If we want to get anything done the GPL advocacy groups need to buckle down and make some hard choices. They need to stop appearing to favor the GPL over people and instead tell people why saving free software is in people's best interest. Also they need to clearly prioritize and tell us that constant surveylance is far more serious than threats to habitate and wildlife and praise free software projects EVEN IF THEY ARE NOT GPL.
For a minute there I read "Apple to Build Second Coming". And it only seemed a bit strange.
Actually, you don't need a phone line and haven't for years. Tivo works just fine hooked up to a router. I still have one lying around somewhere, but don't use it anymore because of the DVR built into my cable box. And that, not the mythical TVs with built in DVRs is what's killing Tivo.
Their patent is patently rediculous, but they do have some great technology that they should be able to sell or license. For example here are a few things that Tivo can do that my cable DVR cannot:
-schedule shows based on field or actors
-autodelete reliably and in the right order
-correctly identify first run shows only
-jump back a few seconds when fast forwarding to make up for the delay between me seeing where I want to go and pressing the button
But none of these is worth $80/year to me and Tivo has other problems like occasionally getting the lineup completely wrong. I can't remember if they ever managed to schedule a show on G4 or the BBC correctly. Another one is that without modding, their hard drives are way to small.
Uh, have you or anybody in your companies management looked at Sarabanes-Oxley or similar laws in other countries recently? If you don't keep your corporate email for the prescribed amount of time (which is incidentally longer than Gmail has existed), any judge is going to bitch slap you into next week for obstruction of justice. And the penalties on that are usually more than anything you can rack up for simple corporate fraud. Actually, you don't even have be in involved in any criminal or civil cases to get into trouble for not retaining email, a simple tax audit can get you into enough hot water.
Now, that is not to say that any retention policy shouldn't include procedures for getting rid of backups and stored email after the period mandated by law.
I know Steve Jobs has said that their customers do not want to watch TV on their Macs, but wouldn't be an Mac mini Tivo be a killer application? Much smaller than a media center PC, much more programmable than a Tivo, build in DVD player, iTunes, streaming audio via Airport Express....
I'd buy one, but that might not be enough of a market.