I got one of these to use as a portable storage box. I prefer this to a laptop because I can use standard components in it (100Gig HD, Plextor CD-RW, PIII-1000, 512M RAM). I use it mainly when I'm doing consulting onsite, most of the time headless just as a personal file server of sorts. I always have all of my files with me and don't have to worry about filling up a (comparatively) small laptop hard drive. I've also used it when having to do presentations and product demos. Thanks to vmware, I have just about any operating system I need on here.
I bought a Fender OEM handle like they use on their amps and screwed it into the top. It works great! I get to a site, plug in power and network, turn it on and go. Not to mention the comments I get about it. Even though it kind of looks like a frankenstein box, it has its own charm in person.
For the right application, this is a great little box. It's not meant to be everything to everybody. If it's not what you're looking for, go get something else. But don't put it down because you're trying to make it into something it was never intended to be. Admit to yourself that you could imagine a situation where a system like this could be usefull and move on.
This is not meant as a troll, but they need to come up with a better name for the product itself. I tell people who've never heard of it that I'm working on a project with MySQL and the first impression is that it is some simple little personal database program that I found on a shareware cd with 5000 other crappy programs on it in a bin at compusa for $1.99.
You know the kind of program I'm talking about; MyResume, MyPhotoAlbum, etc.
I must point out at this time that I love working with MySQL and mod_perl for database driven web sites. It suits me just fine for that purpose, so I'm not trying to be insulting. It just doesn't sound, um, what's the word... serious?
Sorry about the generalizations I made, but you must admit that for MOST people it would be a burdon and well worth the $10 a month. I do plenty of things that other people might think are pointless wastes of time because an "easier way" to do it exists (Hey, I use vi!) just because I like it that way.
If spending time recreating something you can get for $10 a month floats your boat, great. Some people might enjoy the challange. But it sounds like you are capable of using your time to come up with the next wheel instead of reinventing one that already exists. And I doubt you could make it as seamless and enjoyable as TiVo, self-gratification for a job well done aside.
First of all, you're not just paying for guide data. You also get free updates to the software that, over the last 3 that I've gotten, have added some major functionality to the unit. You also get excellent customer support if it's ever needed.
The guide data that they provide is not cheap. They have to pay quite a bit for it. Remember, it's not just when shows are airing on the major networks. It has to track every cable company in America. What packages they offer, and what channels are included in each package so they know what is available to you. And when lineup changes occur at each of these cable companies. And all the thousands of local channels they have to know everything about.
Not to be rude, but you won't even come close. Sure, you may end up with a pretty cool DVR, but not much more.
I once thought like you do. You have to own a TiVo for awhile to understand the little intricacies of what it does to fully appreciate it. I could type all day trying to convince you of this, but you wouldn't completely understand it until you tried it.
Best of look to you. I'm sure what you come up with will be a great achievement and provide you with lots of entertainment. Just not as much as a TiVo.;)
You must not have a job, or a life. Isn't your time worth anything at all? I know mine is. Yeah, I could research every two weeks if my cable company is making any lineup changes to the packages I subscribe to. I could go to one of the many online tv grids and figure out when my favorite shows are coming on and program all of those dates and times manually. I could write some app that compared the virtues of the shows that I recorded so it could figure out other things that I might be interested in. I could grep through the collected tv listings to find shows that contain words from my Wishlists.
But I don't. You know why? Because it makes more sense to pay them $10 a month than to spend even an hour each month doing all this stuff manually.
I'm going to assume that you are either a poor student, or someone just starting out. When you start bringing in a little more than sustinance wages you'll find that you're willing to pay for a bit of convenience.
I got a TiVo because I thought it would be a cool toy. I was right, but there is so much more. I actually watch less TV now than I did before, but the quality of that TV time has increased dramatically. I get to watch what I want, when I want, and I don't have to think about planning it. That's what people want, even if they don't know it yet.
TiVo does the best it can do with the directory information it is given, and the problems aren't really that bad. There's not a whole lot they can do when a football game runs over, or some breaking news story overrides normal programming. The data is collected weeks before. And what if a station airs a show 5 minutes early each time it plays? They should put that information in their listings. Many already do.
There is no way TiVo or any other company could keep track of the idiosyncrasies of every local channel in America. Want to make the problem a little easier to deal with? Contact the network or station that doesn't keep their times synchronized or publishes incorrect guide data and let them know how you feel about it.
As PVR's become more pervasive, you will find that most broadcasters will pay more attention to detail if they want to keep their viewers happy.
How about content almost on demand? I certainly would use a system that allowed me to select movies from a huge list of available titles, have Tivo download them in the background and notify me when each was ready for viewing. I would assume that you got, say, three viewings and the content would be locked. You could either "rent" it again, or choose to delete it. It would be MUCH more convenient than going to the video store all the time, and no return fees!
>Actually first party companies don't make money on peripherals.
No, but look at the market they are in. They have stiff competition between several products that all have benefits. They're potential customer may also be very wary of spending a fortune on one of the new fangled PVR's. "Will I even use this thing?"
What if they follow all of the EXCELLENT advise in the above post...
By being the company that offers super-easy and flexible upgrade options, it allows Joe Sixpack to buy a low-end model now with the assurance that when he's totally hooked on the Tivo experience, he can easily turn the 30hour unit into a 120hour unit by going down to Circuit City, buying an external hard drive that looks great stacked, going home, and plugging in power and a daisy chain cable to the Tivo.
He should also be able to replace modules to deal with upgrades and expansion. Would I buy a "next generation" Tivo for ~$400? No, probably not. But I sure would seriously consider buying an upgrade module for my existing unit at ~$100-$150 if it offered some decent options without taking away any of the freedom that I enjoy now.
You're assuming that most consumers have broadband access... they don't. At least not in the US, which is Tivo's target population.
If you add a NIC, and a modem, and (of course) a wireless NIC when you only need one of them you start getting into real money that drives the initial price of the unit way up. What they need is to offer externally pluggable communications modules. They should build NAT into all of them to facilitate home networking. If you choose the modem module, it should dial the 800 number by default, but allow you to set it up to dial your ISP whenever someone on your home network needs access or it needs to download updates.
There are so many great things they could do. I bought my Tivo about a year ago and absolutely love it. I chose Tivo because of their willingness to allow folks to mess with the system.
And all it takes is for Microsoft to put something in the next version of xxxxx that will totally break it. Possibly even included in a security patch.
I wouldn't be surprised if MS has (or soon will have) a clause in the Office license agreement that states that you must run the software on a Certified(tm) platform to be legal, or at least supported.
And won't this increase the number of pages that have to be generated? I understood that pages where generated from the database and then static pages where delivered whenever possible. If everyone requires a page to be generated, won't that increase the load on the servers substantially?
Aren't they going to be surprised when they find that there was a one character difference between all the copies of this mail that where sent out so the leak could be identified?
> Really, this is similar to saying, "why pay for a
> newspaper every morning when I can swipe one from
> the guy on the subway?
It's the same argument you've been hearing for years about why pirating software is ok. In your scenerio, the guy on the subway paid for that paper. If I steal it from him, he will have to spend more money buying a second copy for himself. If I download some 1's and 0's arranged in a pleasent way, I'm not really taking anything from anyone.
Lost sales? Not really. Most pirates are kids who don't have the money anyway. I download a lot of stuff, mostly to play with then delete. If I find some gem that I will use to be more productive in my work, I will definately buy it.
Hey, that hitting ctrl with your palm is a great idea! I don't know why that never occured to me. No more moving my hands to do an escape!
As a consultant, I spend a lot of time sitting on different machines. While it may make sense to remap your keys to what you find usable, it makes it very hard when confronted with a new box every day. That's why I've chosen not to make any changes to my keyboard layout. It's kind of constant, like having vi(m) around.
My favorite vi tagline, stolen from somewhere:
"vi is like masturbation. It's not as good as the alternative, but it's always there."
Now when are they going to let me use vi inside of textarea boxes on Mozilla?
A client of mine once commented on how fast I was able to navigate in Windows. His followup was very insightful. He said, "It seems that in order to navigate in a graphical environment quickly, you have to forget that you have a mouse available to you."
I love vim. I find myself with jjjjjjjj's and kkkkkkk's all over the place when I'm not in vim.
I just wish my esc key wasn't way up there. It needs to be in the caps lock position.
That's why I don't like the $1 coins. It makes me feel like I don't have any money, just change. I know the value is the same, but it's a huge psychological difference. It devalues the dollar in the American psyche.
I could have $2 in change scattered on the floor of my bedroom, but that dollar in my wallet just feels more valuable.
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I got one of these to use as a portable storage box. I prefer this to a laptop because I can use standard components in it (100Gig HD, Plextor CD-RW, PIII-1000, 512M RAM). I use it mainly when I'm doing consulting onsite, most of the time headless just as a personal file server of sorts. I always have all of my files with me and don't have to worry about filling up a (comparatively) small laptop hard drive. I've also used it when having to do presentations and product demos. Thanks to vmware, I have just about any operating system I need on here.
I bought a Fender OEM handle like they use on their amps and screwed it into the top. It works great! I get to a site, plug in power and network, turn it on and go. Not to mention the comments I get about it. Even though it kind of looks like a frankenstein box, it has its own charm in person.
For the right application, this is a great little box. It's not meant to be everything to everybody. If it's not what you're looking for, go get something else. But don't put it down because you're trying to make it into something it was never intended to be. Admit to yourself that you could imagine a situation where a system like this could be usefull and move on.
This is not meant as a troll, but they need to come up with a better name for the product itself. I tell people who've never heard of it that I'm working on a project with MySQL and the first impression is that it is some simple little personal database program that I found on a shareware cd with 5000 other crappy programs on it in a bin at compusa for $1.99.
You know the kind of program I'm talking about; MyResume, MyPhotoAlbum, etc.
I must point out at this time that I love working with MySQL and mod_perl for database driven web sites. It suits me just fine for that purpose, so I'm not trying to be insulting. It just doesn't sound, um, what's the word... serious?
.
Sorry about the generalizations I made, but you must admit that for MOST people it would be a burdon and well worth the $10 a month. I do plenty of things that other people might think are pointless wastes of time because an "easier way" to do it exists (Hey, I use vi!) just because I like it that way.
If spending time recreating something you can get for $10 a month floats your boat, great. Some people might enjoy the challange. But it sounds like you are capable of using your time to come up with the next wheel instead of reinventing one that already exists. And I doubt you could make it as seamless and enjoyable as TiVo, self-gratification for a job well done aside.
Peace.
.
First of all, you're not just paying for guide data. You also get free updates to the software that, over the last 3 that I've gotten, have added some major functionality to the unit. You also get excellent customer support if it's ever needed.
The guide data that they provide is not cheap. They have to pay quite a bit for it. Remember, it's not just when shows are airing on the major networks. It has to track every cable company in America. What packages they offer, and what channels are included in each package so they know what is available to you. And when lineup changes occur at each of these cable companies. And all the thousands of local channels they have to know everything about.
It's really not as easy as it may appear.
.
Not to be rude, but you won't even come close. Sure, you may end up with a pretty cool DVR, but not much more.
;)
I once thought like you do. You have to own a TiVo for awhile to understand the little intricacies of what it does to fully appreciate it. I could type all day trying to convince you of this, but you wouldn't completely understand it until you tried it.
Best of look to you. I'm sure what you come up with will be a great achievement and provide you with lots of entertainment. Just not as much as a TiVo.
You must not have a job, or a life. Isn't your time worth anything at all? I know mine is. Yeah, I could research every two weeks if my cable company is making any lineup changes to the packages I subscribe to. I could go to one of the many online tv grids and figure out when my favorite shows are coming on and program all of those dates and times manually. I could write some app that compared the virtues of the shows that I recorded so it could figure out other things that I might be interested in. I could grep through the collected tv listings to find shows that contain words from my Wishlists.
But I don't. You know why? Because it makes more sense to pay them $10 a month than to spend even an hour each month doing all this stuff manually.
I'm going to assume that you are either a poor student, or someone just starting out. When you start bringing in a little more than sustinance wages you'll find that you're willing to pay for a bit of convenience.
I got a TiVo because I thought it would be a cool toy. I was right, but there is so much more. I actually watch less TV now than I did before, but the quality of that TV time has increased dramatically. I get to watch what I want, when I want, and I don't have to think about planning it. That's what people want, even if they don't know it yet.
.
TiVo does the best it can do with the directory information it is given, and the problems aren't really that bad. There's not a whole lot they can do when a football game runs over, or some breaking news story overrides normal programming. The data is collected weeks before. And what if a station airs a show 5 minutes early each time it plays? They should put that information in their listings. Many already do.
There is no way TiVo or any other company could keep track of the idiosyncrasies of every local channel in America. Want to make the problem a little easier to deal with? Contact the network or station that doesn't keep their times synchronized or publishes incorrect guide data and let them know how you feel about it.
As PVR's become more pervasive, you will find that most broadcasters will pay more attention to detail if they want to keep their viewers happy.
.
And it's always cool to be in their beta programs. TiVo is a great company to deal with. They really listened to what we had to say.
.
How about content almost on demand? I certainly would use a system that allowed me to select movies from a huge list of available titles, have Tivo download them in the background and notify me when each was ready for viewing. I would assume that you got, say, three viewings and the content would be locked. You could either "rent" it again, or choose to delete it. It would be MUCH more convenient than going to the video store all the time, and no return fees!
>Actually first party companies don't make money on peripherals.
No, but look at the market they are in. They have stiff competition between several products that all have benefits. They're potential customer may also be very wary of spending a fortune on one of the new fangled PVR's. "Will I even use this thing?"
What if they follow all of the EXCELLENT advise in the above post...
By being the company that offers super-easy and flexible upgrade options, it allows Joe Sixpack to buy a low-end model now with the assurance that when he's totally hooked on the Tivo experience, he can easily turn the 30hour unit into a 120hour unit by going down to Circuit City, buying an external hard drive that looks great stacked, going home, and plugging in power and a daisy chain cable to the Tivo.
He should also be able to replace modules to deal with upgrades and expansion. Would I buy a "next generation" Tivo for ~$400? No, probably not. But I sure would seriously consider buying an upgrade module for my existing unit at ~$100-$150 if it offered some decent options without taking away any of the freedom that I enjoy now.
You're assuming that most consumers have broadband access... they don't. At least not in the US, which is Tivo's target population.
If you add a NIC, and a modem, and (of course) a wireless NIC when you only need one of them you start getting into real money that drives the initial price of the unit way up. What they need is to offer externally pluggable communications modules. They should build NAT into all of them to facilitate home networking. If you choose the modem module, it should dial the 800 number by default, but allow you to set it up to dial your ISP whenever someone on your home network needs access or it needs to download updates.
There are so many great things they could do. I bought my Tivo about a year ago and absolutely love it. I chose Tivo because of their willingness to allow folks to mess with the system.
.
They could easily encrypt the content on the removeable drive with the key of the Tivo that originally recorded the signal.
Not that I support the Man or anything, but it could be done.
.
I'll agree with you that the winner was ok, but what's up with the runner up entry? That was just bad. I don't see how you could defend it.
.
I just wish that I had a name like Mr. Perlman. Even Larry Wall would be envious!
.
And all it takes is for Microsoft to put something in the next version of xxxxx that will totally break it. Possibly even included in a security patch.
I wouldn't be surprised if MS has (or soon will have) a clause in the Office license agreement that states that you must run the software on a Certified(tm) platform to be legal, or at least supported.
.
And won't this increase the number of pages that have to be generated? I understood that pages where generated from the database and then static pages where delivered whenever possible. If everyone requires a page to be generated, won't that increase the load on the servers substantially?
.
No, that would be rebar.
.
So now they have guys sneaking by the barbed wire with alligator clips to gain access to their lan, right?
.
Ah, so YOU where the AC! Nice followup. ;)
.
Aren't they going to be surprised when they find that there was a one character difference between all the copies of this mail that where sent out so the leak could be identified?
Hmmmmmmmmm....
.
> Really, this is similar to saying, "why pay for a
> newspaper every morning when I can swipe one from
> the guy on the subway?
It's the same argument you've been hearing for years about why pirating software is ok. In your scenerio, the guy on the subway paid for that paper. If I steal it from him, he will have to spend more money buying a second copy for himself. If I download some 1's and 0's arranged in a pleasent way, I'm not really taking anything from anyone.
Lost sales? Not really. Most pirates are kids who don't have the money anyway. I download a lot of stuff, mostly to play with then delete. If I find some gem that I will use to be more productive in my work, I will definately buy it.
.
Mais, I did a cat /dev/random > decss.c and got this!
.
Hey, that hitting ctrl with your palm is a great idea! I don't know why that never occured to me. No more moving my hands to do an escape!
As a consultant, I spend a lot of time sitting on different machines. While it may make sense to remap your keys to what you find usable, it makes it very hard when confronted with a new box every day. That's why I've chosen not to make any changes to my keyboard layout. It's kind of constant, like having vi(m) around.
My favorite vi tagline, stolen from somewhere:
"vi is like masturbation. It's not as good as the alternative, but it's always there."
Now when are they going to let me use vi inside of textarea boxes on Mozilla?
.
A client of mine once commented on how fast I was able to navigate in Windows. His followup was very insightful. He said, "It seems that in order to navigate in a graphical environment quickly, you have to forget that you have a mouse available to you."
I love vim. I find myself with jjjjjjjj's and kkkkkkk's all over the place when I'm not in vim.
I just wish my esc key wasn't way up there. It needs to be in the caps lock position.
That's why I don't like the $1 coins. It makes me feel like I don't have any money, just change. I know the value is the same, but it's a huge psychological difference. It devalues the dollar in the American psyche.
I could have $2 in change scattered on the floor of my bedroom, but that dollar in my wallet just feels more valuable.
.