HDTV already includes compression--quite a bit of it. I can think of no reason why TiVo would bother to uncompress the signal before storage. TiVo already directly stores compressed digital bitstreams with its DirecTV-integrated receivers. Receiving a broadcast digital TV signal should be no different. The only time TiVo should need to separately compress a signal is when it's receiving plain old analog TV, just as current standalone TiVos already do.
In other words, the storage space required for a program will most likely depend on the format in which it was originally broadcast. TiVo will most likely not muck with the original formatting.
Any TiVo owner will immediately spot this little issue: namely, that 93GB of disk space equals 5 hours 8 minutes of record time at best quality. Even if the space available for PVR functions is 75% of 93GB (as implied in the screenshot), that's still about five hours for 70GB of disk space.
Maybe MCE's definition of "best" quality is dramatically higher than TiVo's, but TiVo can store about 9 hours at "best" quality on a 30GB HD. On a machine with 70GB of disk space, it would easily be able to record over 20 hours at best quality. Why can MCE only squeeze a quarter as much video onto the same amount of space?
Also, I find it ironic that MCE has such grievous hardware requirements. It requires a TV tuner card with hardware MPEG-2 encoding, yet still requires a really fast CPU, fast RAM and a fast, big hard drive. Admittedly, TiVo's aren't sharing their hardware with other apps (in most cases), but first-generation TiVos managed to squeak by with a 50MHz PowerPC and 4400RPM hard drives. Surely, MS can squeeze stutter-free performance out of moderately powerful CPUs and HDs, can't they?
The older I get (I'm 35), the more I realize that the only really important things in my life are the people in it. I'm lucky, though. I like my job and I'm paid well and treated well, but my job doesn't define my life. The people in my life are the most important thing in my life. My family and friends matter the most to me, but my employees, cow-orkers and the people I regularly buy things from also matter to me.
As someone wiser than me once pointed out, the question you should be asking yourself is: What do you want people to say about you when you're gone?
At the time, Intel stated that the lower price of the 486SX wasn't just a marketing ploy, but representative of the fact that the FPU required significantly more (and more complicated) QC testing than the integer logic on the CPU, so the lower price reflected the lower cost to manufacture. Not that anybody believed that, mind you. Intel also claimed the FDIV bug in early Pentiums was incredibly rare and not worth worrying about.
And don't forget that in Hollywood, script re-writes can get ridiculous. Does anybody remember that Beverly Hills Cop was originally offered to Sylvester Stallone? He decided to make some changes to the script. By the time he was done, his movie bore no resemblance to the original script, so the producers took their story elsewhere while Stallone continued to work his script until he came up with Cobra.
The problem with converting great stories to great movies is that the things that make books or short stories great are different from the things that make movies great. Usually, a successful adaptation either leaves a lot out or is based on a short story. Anything longer needs to be edited down to a manageable length, even if you're going to turn it into a miniseries.
The Champlin Fighter Museum is in Mesa, which is in the eastern part of the Phoenix metro area. Another great aircraft museum is the USAF Museum in Dayton, OH at Wright-Patterson AFB. They have the only surviving XB-70 Valkyrie, an X-15, Apollo 15's command module and a whole wing just for Presidential aircraft that I didn't get a chance to visit.
I loved Heinlein's earlier works and as a kid, I absolutely devoured his juvenile stuff.
I enjoyed much of his later work until I began to realize that it was virtually all the same. I Will Fear No Evil is basically The Number of the Beast but with a few changes thrown in. Well, all right, that's an exaggeration.
Fear explores gender roles and what happens to them when a person quite unintentionally undergoes a sex change, while Number explores the nature and origin of social mores and how unquestioned adherence to them could actually become detrimental at some point in the future, but essentially, they're both just ways for Heinlein to say that sexual taboos and stereotypes are all artificial constructs and we should just drop the pretense and fuck anyone we want (men, women, siblings, clones, parents, animals, machines, etc.) because it feels good and disease and mutant children aren't really a concern any more.
Obviously, this all began with Stranger In A Strange Land, but everything after Stranger was just variations on a theme and it got old. Perhaps if he'd bothered to actually flesh out new characters for each book, instead of putting a fresh coat of paint on the same supermen and superwomen that appeared in nearly all of his later books....
I agree that Niven and Pournelle's collaborations have resulted in some terrific stories. However, Legacy of Heorot also involved a third author: Steven Barnes.
I met Barnes and Niven at a book-signing for Legacy and got to ask them a few questions about another of their collaborations: Dream Park. Niven and Pournelle are a lot of fun and Footfall is probably the greatest thing they ever did together, but Dream Park absolutely destroys anything else Niven, Pournelle or Barnes have ever done separately or in collaboration. I have read pretty much every Known Space novel, story and anthlogy I could find and I dearly love Ringworld, Protector and the Smoke Ring series, but Dream Park beats them all.
IMHO, Ayn Rand is overrated. At a friend's urgent coaxing, I finally read Atlas Shrugged a few years ago. That book is certainly not SF, as the technological "innovations" that help propel the plot are extremely bland and mind-numbingly unimaginative. The book is pretty much just a heavy-handed parable that repeatedly bludgeons the reader with its points long after they have become obvious and tiresome.
If Rand were a more talented writer, she could have written Atlas as an allegory or a compelling story in its own right with the subtext of her political message woven subtly into its fabric. Instead, the book is a hamfisted piece of propaganda which bored the hell out of me. And I'm an unabashed pseudo-laissez-faire capitalist!
Of all the reasons to have a transplant, getting a new face might be the stupidest one I've ever heard.
Recently, doctors have begun experimental arm transplants for amputees. The first ever recipient had to have the transplanted arm removed and has said on record that if he'd known then what he knows now, he would have decided against the transplant.
In addition to the risk of rejection, there's the very real danger caused by anti-rejection drugs which suppress the immune system. Scientists believe that immune-suppressing drugs that keep transplant recipients from rejecting their new organs or other items increase their risks of dying from infection significantly. I can't remember the exact statistic, but ISTR that a transplant recipient has something like a one in ten chance of dying within 7 years. Is it worth it to risk your life over a new face? I realize that patients with severe facial damage may want to take that risk, but overall, I'd say it's not worth the risk. Transplants should be reserved for life-saving operations, otherwise the risks are too high.
You're right - customers are a real problem, damn them.
Clearly, the issues you point out suck and when I was a salesdroid or manager at Radio Shack, I'd never have tolerated that kind of crap from cow-orkers or employees. I'm also quite frankly astonished that Circuit City refuses to sell stuff to people who return too much stuff, because just letting word get around for that kind of thing can seriously damage a store's reputation.
That said, the post about the cost of refunds isn't to be taken lightly. We routinely dealt with something we called "Rental Shack." Basically, a guy in Florida would buy a radar detector before leaving on a trip to Wisconsin. Once he got to Wisconsin, he'd return the radar detector, claiming his wife had already bought one, or some similar excuse. Or a college student would buy a high-dollar programmable calculator a week before finals and return it the week after finals claiming that it was more than he needed and he was going to wait and see what his classes required the next semester.
I once had a lady attempt to return a product we hadn't sold for four years and that had been discontinued because the FCC wouldn't let us make anything that shitty any more. When I told her I couldn't give her her money back for something we hadn't sold for four years and that she had just picked up at a garage sale, she was indignant. "Sears would give my money back," she said. "This isn't Sears," was the only response I could give her.
There's certainly no excuse for salespeople lying to or failing to serve their customers, but a lot of people have no idea just how draining a job sales can be. Especially when you work on commission and the guy you just spent an hour with demoing camcorders went down the street to Crap Warehouse and bought a Fujunko 9000 and now he wants you to show him how to hook it up in exchange for the measly commission you'll make selling him $20 worth of cables.
He used to copy random names down from the phonebook when the store was slow!
You poor bastards. If only somebody had taught you how to ask without freaking out the customer. I never cheated and I never got less than 90%.
Here's how it worked:
Me: Okay, sir, what's your name?
Customer: Al Smith
Me: Okay, great. And your address?
Customer: Why do you want that?
Me: So we can let you know when stuff goes on sale.
Customer: Oh, okay. 1999 W. Mahogany way, Beverly Hills 90210.
Me: Great. Thanks.
It literally was that easy. I averaged about 94%-95% without breaking a sweat. I taught all my employees to use that method and the ones who couldn't pull off 90% were just not asking.
...at least 50% of the people asked got hostile to the employee...
I don't know what the percentage was recently, but when I worked there--back in the late 80s and early 90s--the percentage was extremely low. Maybe one out of 20 people was annoyed at being asked or showed any kind of frustration about it. Another 2-3% might just refuse without being annoyed. It was no big deal. Most of the time, if the employee didn't make a big deal out of it, then neither did the customer.
I learned from my own experience that the best method was to just be as casual and matter-of-fact about the whole process as possible. The vast majority didn't mind giving out their name and address, and in fact, most people gave it to you with even asking why you wanted it. Maybe 20% of people asked why you wanted the information. I told them up-front, "It's so we can let you know when stuff goes on sale." Most of those people thought that was a perfectly acceptable reason and gave me their name and address. On average, about 5-7 people out of a hundred refused. It was no big deal, except for employees who refused to ask or got freaked out by the process and in turn got customers all paranoid.
I felt bad for customers who'd previously been harrassed about it and in turn got all worked up over it by the time I got around to asking them. Usually, I was able to calm them down by explaining that it was no big deal. Even with my completely laid-back attitude about it, I routinely had about a 92%-95% success rate and I never faked any addresses.
Yes, you got added to a mailing list--Radio Shack's. Nobody else got your address. They were religious about that and if anybody ever suggested to the people in marketing that it was otherwise, they witnessed somebody turning purple with apoplexy.
They jealously guarded their lists because they viewed their mailing list as a competitive advantage. Nationwide, marketers who send direct mail advertisements are ecstatic if they get a response rate of 1/2 a percent. Radio Shack had something like a 40% response rate on its direct mail advertisements. They weren't about to give that up to anybody else.
Hell, it won "Best of Show" at CES in January and they still haven't shipped a product. Their claim to having a deal with Dish Network also turned out to be completely bogus. Then, they nearly went bankrupt, fired their founder/CEO and got sold to Digeo.
Don't get me wrong. The stuff Moxi demo'd at CES in January was incredible and if they can pull off even a fraction of it, they'll eat TiVo for lunch (assuming TiVo doesn't respond with similar features). However, their kitchen-sink approach is hugely ambitious and it'll be tough for them to ship all the cool stuff they demo'd at CES, such as wireless distribution. That, coupled with the fact that they're selling boxes only through cable companies and other TV service providers, rather than as standalone devices, will probably keep the feature set minimized.
So don't hold your breath about getting everything they're capable of delivering.
Come on, once the Hurd is finished, GNU/Hurd will be years ahead of GNU/Linux, Windows NT, or Mac OSX.
Don't you mean if it's ever finished, it ought to be years ahead of whatever operating systems are in use on the by-then-ubiquitous quantum computers? Don't get me wrong, I love the idea that the HURD is pushing the limits of what OSes can and can't do, but it's much closer to a research project than an operating system. It's so ambitious that it can't ever just freeze the feature set and issue a release.
We've seen this kind of thing before. Borland suffered from it with its Windows port of dBase. Every time they were about to release, they'd discover some other new thing they just had to build into it, so they'd burn the codebase to the ground and start over. I don't remember when Borland finally released dBase for Windows, but it was at least two or three years late and by the time it shipped, FoxPro for Windows had stolen its market and dBase was irrelevant.
The point isn't that the HURD isn't cool (it is), the point is that the HURD takes too long to get where it's going, so by the time it gets there, it's no longer good enough. Who cares how cool the underlying OS features are if it can't support partitions greater than 2GB or common devices like USB mice?
I agree with the common point made here. If the HURD had shipped years ago, even as an incomplete OS, it would at least have some chance of improving and getting more people to contribute code. As it stands now, only the Stallman^H^H^H^H^H^H stalwart are involved and the project continues to drag on forever.
"...And in other news, Valve Software still declines to announce a release date for its mythical TeamFortress 2 product...."
TiVo is to VCRs what microwave ovens are to campfires.
Does your campfire have a "popcorn" button? Does it automatically rotate your food? Does it have adjustable power levels? No? My microwave does.
VCRs can't automatically record everything you watch into a 30 minute endless loop tape that you can rewind while watching live TV to see something and then have it continue to record live TV while you're doing that so you can fast-forward back to live action.
VCRs can't figure out when your favorite TV show got preempted for a stupid self-congratulatory awards show.
VCRs can't tell when your favorite show is a "very special" double-length episode.
VCRs can't figure out when your favorite show got moved to a new night, or the network decided to show it twice a week because another show in another important time slot bombed and got canceled.
VCRs can't search for and record anything that contains Pierce Brosnan, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Vin Diesel.
VCRs can't search for and record anything you want about SCUBA diving, cooking, auto repair or whatever.
VCRs can't automatically find you a blank space on a tape when it's time to record something.
VCRs can't allow you to start watching a show they're already recording from the beginning before they're done recording it.
VCRs can't automatically erase old tapes when you need the space to record a new show.
VCRs can't be told not to record re-runs.
VCRs don't have fast-forward overshoot compensation.
Well, that's about all I can think of off the top of my head. Maybe somebody else would like to pick up the clue bat and administer some more clue to you.
Actually, for first-generation TiVos, TiVo did incur costs for every unit sold. They were subsidizing the production costs of the units in order to quickly generate a large subscriber base. This proved to be a bad long-term business model, although it did help seed the market with a decent sized core of early adopters before they abandoned it. Second-generation TiVos (Series 2 TiVos) are not subsidized.
While Sony has indeed spent big dollars to license TiVo's code for custom Sony products, Philips has abandoned TiVo. TiVo is actively working to license its code to other consumer electronics manufacturers, but in the meantime, the Series 2 standalone TiVos you can buy at Best Buy are TiVo-branded devices.
The new DirecTV-integrated models that should be out this month will be HNS (Hughes Network Systems)-branded devices. HNS is DirecTV's house brand. There may eventually be other brands, but that's not a given at this point. DirecTV has completely taken over the marketing and billing for DirecTV-integrated services, which is why the monthly cost has dropped to $4.99 (or free with some DirecTV packages).
as others have pointed out, you're under no obligation to buy the service
This is incorrect. Any TiVo device that shipped with the 2.0 or newer software installed requires service activation in order to function at all. Specifically, the first models to ship with 2.0 software were DirecTV-integrated units, but standalone boxes shipping with 2.0 or newer also require activation of the service.
...TiVo hacker community, which, if not explicitly supported by TiVo, is at least openly tolerated.
Second-generation TiVos are significantly less hacker-friendly than were first-generation units. Series 2 TiVos refuse to run code that hasn't been signed by TiVo, including custom kernels.
That said, I still love my TiVo and you can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I'll probably pick up a Series 2 DirecTV-integrated model soon. I've personally bought two TiVos as gifts for friends and family and rave about TiVo to anybody who'll listen.
Perhaps an article in Advertising Age is predisposed to predicting the doom of devices that can render TV commercials obsolete.
This may be OT, but mixed-mode doesn't have anything to do with how your clients authenticate. It has to do with what types of domain controllers you have. If you have nothing but Win2k DCs, you can run in native mode.
I'm running my ActiveDirectory in native mode and I have plenty of "downlevel" clients authenticating using the old NTLM protocols.
You haven't the foggiest notion how different watching TV with a TiVo really is. I won't beat you over the head with it, because it's been beaten to death in other threads here, but trust me, you're judging TiVo from an incomplete understanding of its capabilities and advantages. If you truly don't need the stuff it offers, then you don't need one. Period. At any price. Or with any features.
It takes a *lot* more than a built-in program guide to make a TiVo. TiVo's ability to record every new episode of a show--regardless of what the network (or local affiliate) decides to do to its time slot--is a huge feature. If it weren't for TiVo, I wouldn't have seen a single episode of the current season of The Drew Carey Show. My local ABC affiliate shows it at 10:30 on Sunday nights for some reason.
In addition, your reasons for not buying a TiVo are really weak. What benefit do you get from having a built-in digital cable tuner? TiVo will work with your existing cable box to change stations. Why is the inability to transfer a lifetime subscription a deal breaker? If you tried TiVo, you'd probably be fine with the lifetime sub cost or paying the monthly fee. As it is, it seems you're just making excuses.
Second generation DirecTV TiVos are going to ship in November. Some places are already taking preorders. It looks like they'll cost $200 - $300, depending on where you get them.
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HDTV already includes compression--quite a bit of it. I can think of no reason why TiVo would bother to uncompress the signal before storage. TiVo already directly stores compressed digital bitstreams with its DirecTV-integrated receivers. Receiving a broadcast digital TV signal should be no different. The only time TiVo should need to separately compress a signal is when it's receiving plain old analog TV, just as current standalone TiVos already do.
In other words, the storage space required for a program will most likely depend on the format in which it was originally broadcast. TiVo will most likely not muck with the original formatting.
Any TiVo owner will immediately spot this little issue: namely, that 93GB of disk space equals 5 hours 8 minutes of record time at best quality. Even if the space available for PVR functions is 75% of 93GB (as implied in the screenshot), that's still about five hours for 70GB of disk space.
Maybe MCE's definition of "best" quality is dramatically higher than TiVo's, but TiVo can store about 9 hours at "best" quality on a 30GB HD. On a machine with 70GB of disk space, it would easily be able to record over 20 hours at best quality. Why can MCE only squeeze a quarter as much video onto the same amount of space?
Also, I find it ironic that MCE has such grievous hardware requirements. It requires a TV tuner card with hardware MPEG-2 encoding, yet still requires a really fast CPU, fast RAM and a fast, big hard drive. Admittedly, TiVo's aren't sharing their hardware with other apps (in most cases), but first-generation TiVos managed to squeak by with a 50MHz PowerPC and 4400RPM hard drives. Surely, MS can squeeze stutter-free performance out of moderately powerful CPUs and HDs, can't they?
The older I get (I'm 35), the more I realize that the only really important things in my life are the people in it. I'm lucky, though. I like my job and I'm paid well and treated well, but my job doesn't define my life. The people in my life are the most important thing in my life. My family and friends matter the most to me, but my employees, cow-orkers and the people I regularly buy things from also matter to me.
As someone wiser than me once pointed out, the question you should be asking yourself is: What do you want people to say about you when you're gone?
At the time, Intel stated that the lower price of the 486SX wasn't just a marketing ploy, but representative of the fact that the FPU required significantly more (and more complicated) QC testing than the integer logic on the CPU, so the lower price reflected the lower cost to manufacture. Not that anybody believed that, mind you. Intel also claimed the FDIV bug in early Pentiums was incredibly rare and not worth worrying about.
PC Gamer reviewed the 9700 four months ago.
Perhaps next, we'll be seeing stories posted about how Saddam Hussein caved in and let UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq.
And don't forget that in Hollywood, script re-writes can get ridiculous. Does anybody remember that Beverly Hills Cop was originally offered to Sylvester Stallone? He decided to make some changes to the script. By the time he was done, his movie bore no resemblance to the original script, so the producers took their story elsewhere while Stallone continued to work his script until he came up with Cobra.
The problem with converting great stories to great movies is that the things that make books or short stories great are different from the things that make movies great. Usually, a successful adaptation either leaves a lot out or is based on a short story. Anything longer needs to be edited down to a manageable length, even if you're going to turn it into a miniseries.
The Champlin Fighter Museum is in Mesa, which is in the eastern part of the Phoenix metro area. Another great aircraft museum is the USAF Museum in Dayton, OH at Wright-Patterson AFB. They have the only surviving XB-70 Valkyrie, an X-15, Apollo 15's command module and a whole wing just for Presidential aircraft that I didn't get a chance to visit.
I loved Heinlein's earlier works and as a kid, I absolutely devoured his juvenile stuff.
I enjoyed much of his later work until I began to realize that it was virtually all the same. I Will Fear No Evil is basically The Number of the Beast but with a few changes thrown in. Well, all right, that's an exaggeration.
Fear explores gender roles and what happens to them when a person quite unintentionally undergoes a sex change, while Number explores the nature and origin of social mores and how unquestioned adherence to them could actually become detrimental at some point in the future, but essentially, they're both just ways for Heinlein to say that sexual taboos and stereotypes are all artificial constructs and we should just drop the pretense and fuck anyone we want (men, women, siblings, clones, parents, animals, machines, etc.) because it feels good and disease and mutant children aren't really a concern any more.
Obviously, this all began with Stranger In A Strange Land, but everything after Stranger was just variations on a theme and it got old. Perhaps if he'd bothered to actually flesh out new characters for each book, instead of putting a fresh coat of paint on the same supermen and superwomen that appeared in nearly all of his later books....
I agree that Niven and Pournelle's collaborations have resulted in some terrific stories. However, Legacy of Heorot also involved a third author: Steven Barnes.
I met Barnes and Niven at a book-signing for Legacy and got to ask them a few questions about another of their collaborations: Dream Park. Niven and Pournelle are a lot of fun and Footfall is probably the greatest thing they ever did together, but Dream Park absolutely destroys anything else Niven, Pournelle or Barnes have ever done separately or in collaboration. I have read pretty much every Known Space novel, story and anthlogy I could find and I dearly love Ringworld, Protector and the Smoke Ring series, but Dream Park beats them all.
IMHO, Ayn Rand is overrated. At a friend's urgent coaxing, I finally read Atlas Shrugged a few years ago. That book is certainly not SF, as the technological "innovations" that help propel the plot are extremely bland and mind-numbingly unimaginative. The book is pretty much just a heavy-handed parable that repeatedly bludgeons the reader with its points long after they have become obvious and tiresome.
If Rand were a more talented writer, she could have written Atlas as an allegory or a compelling story in its own right with the subtext of her political message woven subtly into its fabric. Instead, the book is a hamfisted piece of propaganda which bored the hell out of me. And I'm an unabashed pseudo-laissez-faire capitalist!
Of all the reasons to have a transplant, getting a new face might be the stupidest one I've ever heard.
Recently, doctors have begun experimental arm transplants for amputees. The first ever recipient had to have the transplanted arm removed and has said on record that if he'd known then what he knows now, he would have decided against the transplant.
In addition to the risk of rejection, there's the very real danger caused by anti-rejection drugs which suppress the immune system. Scientists believe that immune-suppressing drugs that keep transplant recipients from rejecting their new organs or other items increase their risks of dying from infection significantly. I can't remember the exact statistic, but ISTR that a transplant recipient has something like a one in ten chance of dying within 7 years. Is it worth it to risk your life over a new face? I realize that patients with severe facial damage may want to take that risk, but overall, I'd say it's not worth the risk. Transplants should be reserved for life-saving operations, otherwise the risks are too high.
You're right - customers are a real problem, damn them.
Clearly, the issues you point out suck and when I was a salesdroid or manager at Radio Shack, I'd never have tolerated that kind of crap from cow-orkers or employees. I'm also quite frankly astonished that Circuit City refuses to sell stuff to people who return too much stuff, because just letting word get around for that kind of thing can seriously damage a store's reputation.
That said, the post about the cost of refunds isn't to be taken lightly. We routinely dealt with something we called "Rental Shack." Basically, a guy in Florida would buy a radar detector before leaving on a trip to Wisconsin. Once he got to Wisconsin, he'd return the radar detector, claiming his wife had already bought one, or some similar excuse. Or a college student would buy a high-dollar programmable calculator a week before finals and return it the week after finals claiming that it was more than he needed and he was going to wait and see what his classes required the next semester.
I once had a lady attempt to return a product we hadn't sold for four years and that had been discontinued because the FCC wouldn't let us make anything that shitty any more. When I told her I couldn't give her her money back for something we hadn't sold for four years and that she had just picked up at a garage sale, she was indignant. "Sears would give my money back," she said. "This isn't Sears," was the only response I could give her.
There's certainly no excuse for salespeople lying to or failing to serve their customers, but a lot of people have no idea just how draining a job sales can be. Especially when you work on commission and the guy you just spent an hour with demoing camcorders went down the street to Crap Warehouse and bought a Fujunko 9000 and now he wants you to show him how to hook it up in exchange for the measly commission you'll make selling him $20 worth of cables.
He used to copy random names down from the phonebook when the store was slow!
You poor bastards. If only somebody had taught you how to ask without freaking out the customer. I never cheated and I never got less than 90%.
Here's how it worked:
Me: Okay, sir, what's your name?
Customer: Al Smith
Me: Okay, great. And your address?
Customer: Why do you want that?
Me: So we can let you know when stuff goes on sale.
Customer: Oh, okay. 1999 W. Mahogany way, Beverly Hills 90210.
Me: Great. Thanks.
It literally was that easy. I averaged about 94%-95% without breaking a sweat. I taught all my employees to use that method and the ones who couldn't pull off 90% were just not asking.
I don't know what the percentage was recently, but when I worked there--back in the late 80s and early 90s--the percentage was extremely low. Maybe one out of 20 people was annoyed at being asked or showed any kind of frustration about it. Another 2-3% might just refuse without being annoyed. It was no big deal. Most of the time, if the employee didn't make a big deal out of it, then neither did the customer.
I learned from my own experience that the best method was to just be as casual and matter-of-fact about the whole process as possible. The vast majority didn't mind giving out their name and address, and in fact, most people gave it to you with even asking why you wanted it. Maybe 20% of people asked why you wanted the information. I told them up-front, "It's so we can let you know when stuff goes on sale." Most of those people thought that was a perfectly acceptable reason and gave me their name and address. On average, about 5-7 people out of a hundred refused. It was no big deal, except for employees who refused to ask or got freaked out by the process and in turn got customers all paranoid.
I felt bad for customers who'd previously been harrassed about it and in turn got all worked up over it by the time I got around to asking them. Usually, I was able to calm them down by explaining that it was no big deal. Even with my completely laid-back attitude about it, I routinely had about a 92%-95% success rate and I never faked any addresses.
Yes, you got added to a mailing list--Radio Shack's. Nobody else got your address. They were religious about that and if anybody ever suggested to the people in marketing that it was otherwise, they witnessed somebody turning purple with apoplexy.
They jealously guarded their lists because they viewed their mailing list as a competitive advantage. Nationwide, marketers who send direct mail advertisements are ecstatic if they get a response rate of 1/2 a percent. Radio Shack had something like a 40% response rate on its direct mail advertisements. They weren't about to give that up to anybody else.
And do you still like Sharon Stone as Calpernia?
Hell, it won "Best of Show" at CES in January and they still haven't shipped a product. Their claim to having a deal with Dish Network also turned out to be completely bogus. Then, they nearly went bankrupt, fired their founder/CEO and got sold to Digeo.
Don't get me wrong. The stuff Moxi demo'd at CES in January was incredible and if they can pull off even a fraction of it, they'll eat TiVo for lunch (assuming TiVo doesn't respond with similar features). However, their kitchen-sink approach is hugely ambitious and it'll be tough for them to ship all the cool stuff they demo'd at CES, such as wireless distribution. That, coupled with the fact that they're selling boxes only through cable companies and other TV service providers, rather than as standalone devices, will probably keep the feature set minimized.
So don't hold your breath about getting everything they're capable of delivering.
Come on, once the Hurd is finished, GNU/Hurd will be years ahead of GNU/Linux, Windows NT, or Mac OSX.
Don't you mean if it's ever finished, it ought to be years ahead of whatever operating systems are in use on the by-then-ubiquitous quantum computers? Don't get me wrong, I love the idea that the HURD is pushing the limits of what OSes can and can't do, but it's much closer to a research project than an operating system. It's so ambitious that it can't ever just freeze the feature set and issue a release.
We've seen this kind of thing before. Borland suffered from it with its Windows port of dBase. Every time they were about to release, they'd discover some other new thing they just had to build into it, so they'd burn the codebase to the ground and start over. I don't remember when Borland finally released dBase for Windows, but it was at least two or three years late and by the time it shipped, FoxPro for Windows had stolen its market and dBase was irrelevant.
The point isn't that the HURD isn't cool (it is), the point is that the HURD takes too long to get where it's going, so by the time it gets there, it's no longer good enough. Who cares how cool the underlying OS features are if it can't support partitions greater than 2GB or common devices like USB mice?
I agree with the common point made here. If the HURD had shipped years ago, even as an incomplete OS, it would at least have some chance of improving and getting more people to contribute code. As it stands now, only the Stallman^H^H^H^H^H^H stalwart are involved and the project continues to drag on forever.
"...And in other news, Valve Software still declines to announce a release date for its mythical TeamFortress 2 product...."
Okay, repeat after me:
TiVo is to VCRs what microwave ovens are to campfires.
Does your campfire have a "popcorn" button? Does it automatically rotate your food? Does it have adjustable power levels? No? My microwave does.
Well, that's about all I can think of off the top of my head. Maybe somebody else would like to pick up the clue bat and administer some more clue to you.
Actually, for first-generation TiVos, TiVo did incur costs for every unit sold. They were subsidizing the production costs of the units in order to quickly generate a large subscriber base. This proved to be a bad long-term business model, although it did help seed the market with a decent sized core of early adopters before they abandoned it. Second-generation TiVos (Series 2 TiVos) are not subsidized.
While Sony has indeed spent big dollars to license TiVo's code for custom Sony products, Philips has abandoned TiVo. TiVo is actively working to license its code to other consumer electronics manufacturers, but in the meantime, the Series 2 standalone TiVos you can buy at Best Buy are TiVo-branded devices.
The new DirecTV-integrated models that should be out this month will be HNS (Hughes Network Systems)-branded devices. HNS is DirecTV's house brand. There may eventually be other brands, but that's not a given at this point. DirecTV has completely taken over the marketing and billing for DirecTV-integrated services, which is why the monthly cost has dropped to $4.99 (or free with some DirecTV packages).
as others have pointed out, you're under no obligation to buy the service
This is incorrect. Any TiVo device that shipped with the 2.0 or newer software installed requires service activation in order to function at all. Specifically, the first models to ship with 2.0 software were DirecTV-integrated units, but standalone boxes shipping with 2.0 or newer also require activation of the service.
Second-generation TiVos are significantly less hacker-friendly than were first-generation units. Series 2 TiVos refuse to run code that hasn't been signed by TiVo, including custom kernels.
That said, I still love my TiVo and you can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I'll probably pick up a Series 2 DirecTV-integrated model soon. I've personally bought two TiVos as gifts for friends and family and rave about TiVo to anybody who'll listen.
Perhaps an article in Advertising Age is predisposed to predicting the doom of devices that can render TV commercials obsolete.
This may be OT, but mixed-mode doesn't have anything to do with how your clients authenticate. It has to do with what types of domain controllers you have. If you have nothing but Win2k DCs, you can run in native mode.
I'm running my ActiveDirectory in native mode and I have plenty of "downlevel" clients authenticating using the old NTLM protocols.
You haven't the foggiest notion how different watching TV with a TiVo really is. I won't beat you over the head with it, because it's been beaten to death in other threads here, but trust me, you're judging TiVo from an incomplete understanding of its capabilities and advantages. If you truly don't need the stuff it offers, then you don't need one. Period. At any price. Or with any features.
It takes a *lot* more than a built-in program guide to make a TiVo. TiVo's ability to record every new episode of a show--regardless of what the network (or local affiliate) decides to do to its time slot--is a huge feature. If it weren't for TiVo, I wouldn't have seen a single episode of the current season of The Drew Carey Show. My local ABC affiliate shows it at 10:30 on Sunday nights for some reason.
In addition, your reasons for not buying a TiVo are really weak. What benefit do you get from having a built-in digital cable tuner? TiVo will work with your existing cable box to change stations. Why is the inability to transfer a lifetime subscription a deal breaker? If you tried TiVo, you'd probably be fine with the lifetime sub cost or paying the monthly fee. As it is, it seems you're just making excuses.
Second generation DirecTV TiVos are going to ship in November. Some places are already taking preorders. It looks like they'll cost $200 - $300, depending on where you get them.