What about Tivo To Go, online scheduling, audible confirmation of button clicks, and multiple room support (record on one watch on another)? I had to switch to a Comcast DVR for High Def and sorely miss those features... almost enough to return the Comcast box and use the TiVo with standard def programming.
Of course I haven't and that's what Comcast is counting on.
The thing is that it's not just kids anymore. Have you walked down the street in a major city recently? In the 80s and 90s you would very rarely see anyone over 20 or perhaps 25 wearing headphones. Now you see every age group and of every economic status sprouting the lovely white ear buds. I've seen 50 year old executives wearing them. I've seen young MDs in scrubs wearing them. Hell I've even seen a homeless guy wearing them.
The point is that people are wearing them for more time per use, more years of use, at louder levels in closer proximity to their eardrum (ear buds vs over ear) than they used to.
I call bullshit. I bought a 1500 sq ft 3 bedroom colonial in a close suburb 6 years ago under this very premise. We wanted 3 bedrooms so we could turn one into a home office and still have room for the occasional overnight guest. Fast forward 6 years and we're downsizing, looking for a smaller place - either a loft or a one or two bedroom condo in the city. We looked at how we live and decided that we never used the home office once we both had laptops and WiFi, we rarely use the dining and living rooms. For as often as we have guests stay the night they can either sleep on an air mattress or we can put them up in a hotel for less money than the increased mortgage payments. PLUS we won't spend as much time commuting - he can walk or bike to the office and I will cut 20 mins off of a 45 minute drive.
I would recommend buying what you need and planning on moving in 5 years (which is actually the average in the US) or if your living situation changes (birth/death/major job or income change). Yes you will pay a real estate commision on the sale, but you won't have to pay an inflated morgage every month. If you really WANT to pay an inflated mortgage every month go ahead - you'll just wind up paying extra principal and that's (in general) A Good Thing [tm] and substantially better than being barely able to cover your mortgage.
The problem of course is that dreaded last mile. Since the FCC has decided that telcos and cable companies do not need to share their lines you have an effective monopoly on the existing infrastructure. Any competitor trying to enter the market would have to build out infrastructure reaching each and every home they want to service, and do you know how expensive that is to do?
If you want to go wireless then you have a bunch of options - satellite, terrestrial fixed with existing technology, lighter than air dirigibles floating over major metropolitan areas (assuming you can get FAA approval for unmanned flights), cellular based services over 3G networks, etc. All are pricey and have their own set of problems and none of them are going to be as ubiquitous as cable and DSL for some time.
Expect to see few real competitors until WiMax is standardized and the per unit costs begin dropping. Even then you will have to be licensed to offer the service since it will use licensed spectrum, and there is a limited amount of that available.
Meanwhile the rest of the world gets faster and faster access for less and less money every year. Grrrrr.
Not sure I buy it... at least not yet
on
Apple to Buy out Palm?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The fact of the matter is that a Treo is a very expensive phone no matter how you look at it. The cheapest one is around the same price as a high end iPod even with a new cell contract and carrier subsidy. On the surface that would mean a substantial revenue source for Apple if this were to come to pass. BUT every single person I know that has a Treo or other smartphone of some sort (BB, Windows Mobile, Nokia Communicator, etc) already has an iPod. For current customers that's not a big deal and for the most part has no discernable effect on iPod sales - after all most of those people don't tend to go through the trouble of selling their old phones or iPods on ebay.
For FUTURE sales it's a different story though... If Apple were to buy Palm and/or introduce the iPhone then a measurable number of people that have neither iPod nor smart phone would buy the iPhone instead of two separate devices, and that means less iPods sold. Thus there would be an impact on future revenues.
I don't believe that Apple will be buying Palm. Remember that Palm no longer owns PalmOS, so all I can think of that Palm brings to the table is the Palm and Treo brands, domain knowledge around smart phones, and existing relationships with contract manufacturers and carriers.
It is my belief that Apple will introduce the iPhone, and that it's just a matter of time. When they do they will probably contract with someone like HTC to make a custom phone, exclusively for Apple, then load it with Apple's own software. Further, it will either be appropriately crippled to not undercut the Nano, tied to an MVNO so they get ongoing revenue from the monthly subscription, all you can eat subscription iTunes downloads service, or will coincide with some other clever strategy to drive additional revenue growth.
Assuming they're using the OpenWRT firmware as the basis for their firmware it is quite likely that the ethernet LAN is separated from the WiFi network. If you want to have a secure link between a WiFi connected machine and something on the ethernet LAN you'd need to open a pinhole and then do some sort of VPN.
OpenWRT is pretty sweet, and FON's concept is actually appealing. But as someone else said there's this nationwide free WiFi network with the ssid "linksys" that's free, anonymous and available in virtually every major metropolitan area - though mostly in the residential areas for some strange reason.:)
You want it to watch for MP3s you copy into a directory (ostensibly as you download them)? You could easily write a script to do that, import them into iTunes and then move or delete them. That's why there's COM (on Windows) and AppleScript interfaces.
What's also interesting is one of the buried links... to the BBC which begins by saying "The risk of a landslide in the Canary Islands causing a tidal wave (tsunami) able to devastate America's east coast is vastly overstated."
It seems that even scientists can't seem to agree on the level of risk of this actually happening. Until they do I'm not leaving Boston for the midwest.
Re:Is THIS the future of TV?
on
The Other VoIP
·
· Score: 1
TiVo does that.
Wish lists will automatically record shows with actors, directors, or keywords that you specify, keeping them around for as long as you specify. And it works with almost all cable boxes.
"new technology could compromise the copyrights of shows that broadcasters send over the airwaves in digital form"
What they're worried about is the High Def versions of the shows and movies. Think about the kind of bandwidth necessary to transmit a regular show - TiVo estimates about a gig an hour for their native format. Converted that format to MPG they stay about the same.
An HD broadcast tops out aroung 11 GB per hour.
Do you honestly think that these guys are worried about people trading 17 GB files? (using 90 min movie as an example)
My read: They want to limit consumers ability to copy content around. Nobody is going to buy a D-VHS recorder when TiVo is much more convenient and user friendly, and they know it. If nobody buys D-VHS recorders then consumers will wind up buying the same content two, three or more times and they get to pad their wallets with the profits.
Say it with me boys and girls - this one is all about the money. You've got it and they want it.
One of the points of the Liberty Alliance is that you, the end user choose whether to Federate your accounts or not, and you get to choose to break that Federation. Take a spin through the backgrounder paper on Liberty - there's a lot of tech, but there's also quite a bit of thinking about privacy and security there.
History lesson time... Been there, done that. MS used to bundle an OEM'd anti-virus package with DOS (at least in v6.22). A quick google turned up this [pmt.org] and more interestingly this from MS[microsoft.com].
As of Windows 95 AV was back as a third party issue. I've often wondered whether they dropped it because of (a) concern about potential liability, (b) the implied "our OS is not secure" marketing issues, (c) simply too much tech support trouble, (d) all of the above or (e) something else entirely.
The transfer contact info just by shaking hands alread exists and doesn't require wiring. Naturally the tech is only in the lab at the moment, but that will change. Google up "personal area network" and look at some of hits.
This is going to happen, the questions are just when, and how will we control when and how much of our the information is being shared. I certainly don't want to wander down the street and wind up with the contact information of every person I bump into, and (more importantly) I don't want them to get mine.
From the article: "Once we had a prototype, we started doing research into who might want to use a product like this,"
So you thought up a "cool" idea, spent a bunch of dollars making it work and then went looking for someone that would find it useful? Good plan.
If you are doing this via the tip jar method then why have a PC to enforce quotas? Most of the reasonably recent router/access points support minimal port filtering so you can block outbound SMTP and KaZaA etc. This reduces the initial investment to less than $100, and monthly ongoing costs to the cost of a DSL line.
While it's cool to have a PC running Linux to do other stuff (accounting, monitoring, perhaps even authentication in the future) I'd be loathe to make it a mission critical component of the infrastructure since there's nobody around to fix it if for example it had a hardware failure. That $500 (or $150 as someone else suggested) would probably be better spent on a backup Access Point/Router.
"AOL may be optimizing some of your computer settings to enhance your experience on AOL".
In addition if you look at the screen you can see some sort of application launcher for the apps AOL bundles. It appears that the normal XP start bar and icons are there as well, but the above quote from the details page clearls leaves them with the ability to change system settings which could easily include adding or removing software.
Try copy/paste. If you can't copy the text content then how about a screen shot (Alt-Print Screen). Until the OS only runs signed drivers and doesn't expose this stuff over remote control apps like VNC or Windows Terminal services there's always going to be a back door.
Since the idea doesn't seem to be to completely protect against a smart user it would appear that they're just trying to cover the casual forwarding along by managers.
In any case I know that I for one have no intention of accepting mail like this. "Sorry, my IT department won't let me install that software" is going to be my flat response to any mail in this new format.:)
As far as I'm concerned I'd be happy to see 90% of the check-out aisles converted to self checkout. The cashiers at my local Stop and Shop as lazy, slow and rude. I've found that self checkout gets me out the door faster than a cashier check out UNLESS I'm buying lots of produce (no bar code).
I wonder if this law could be applied to the VoIP phone services that charge for a certain number of minutes regardless of whether they were inbound or outbound.
By my reading it would. And given number portability it would be a way for anyone to get their number off of the telemarketing lists.
It's an interesting premise, but what insurance company would be willing to get involved in this?
From a pure profit motive, just thinking out loud about the numbers...
Say 100,000 people signed up. Any one of them could be sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but let's assume for a moment that the RIAA always settle for $2000. Further let's assume that 1% of the people with this insurance get sued. At these numbers, without any profit or overhead you'd need $20 per person to cover the costs. Which seems reasonable.
The problem is that the liability is essentially unbounded. If the RIAA refused to settle for $2000 and went for $10,000 now you need $100 per person.
Now add on the fact that the insured know they're violating the law and have gotten insurance against it. Buying insurance against being sued by the RIAA isn't going to look all that good in the eyes of the court, so those settlement numbers could go WAY up.
I'm not saying we're not going to see this insurance. I'm just suggesting that it probably isn't going to be all that cheap.
Interestingly enough AOL's blocking of Trillian last year (?) was the main impetus for almost everyone I know to start using Yahoo! Most of my department uses Trillian, so it was just a few clicks to a new account and we were off and running.
Now Yahoo pulls the same thing and we're all updating our contact lists with correct AIM IDs for each other.
I understand their need to make money on the advertising, and the desire to block spam, but it seems to me that this just reduces the value of their network.
Yes - "Backup generators have been installed as part of the upgrade, ensuring that network service will never be compromised and 911 service will continue to function in an emergency."
But that would have required you to actually READ the linked articles before posting.
I find it amusing that people trot out the "lock in" when they talk about software they've purchased and then compare it to service model. Somehow people seem to forget that the whole point of the service model is precisely TO lock you in and keep getting money from you every month.
plus since they have your data you pretty well held hostage unless the vendor offers you a way to pull your data cleanly out... something that I'm sure will be right on the top of their development roadmap.
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What about Tivo To Go, online scheduling, audible confirmation of button clicks, and multiple room support (record on one watch on another)? I had to switch to a Comcast DVR for High Def and sorely miss those features... almost enough to return the Comcast box and use the TiVo with standard def programming.
Of course I haven't and that's what Comcast is counting on.
The thing is that it's not just kids anymore. Have you walked down the street in a major city recently? In the 80s and 90s you would very rarely see anyone over 20 or perhaps 25 wearing headphones. Now you see every age group and of every economic status sprouting the lovely white ear buds. I've seen 50 year old executives wearing them. I've seen young MDs in scrubs wearing them. Hell I've even seen a homeless guy wearing them.
The point is that people are wearing them for more time per use, more years of use, at louder levels in closer proximity to their eardrum (ear buds vs over ear) than they used to.
I call bullshit. I bought a 1500 sq ft 3 bedroom colonial in a close suburb 6 years ago under this very premise. We wanted 3 bedrooms so we could turn one into a home office and still have room for the occasional overnight guest. Fast forward 6 years and we're downsizing, looking for a smaller place - either a loft or a one or two bedroom condo in the city. We looked at how we live and decided that we never used the home office once we both had laptops and WiFi, we rarely use the dining and living rooms. For as often as we have guests stay the night they can either sleep on an air mattress or we can put them up in a hotel for less money than the increased mortgage payments. PLUS we won't spend as much time commuting - he can walk or bike to the office and I will cut 20 mins off of a 45 minute drive.
I would recommend buying what you need and planning on moving in 5 years (which is actually the average in the US) or if your living situation changes (birth/death/major job or income change). Yes you will pay a real estate commision on the sale, but you won't have to pay an inflated morgage every month. If you really WANT to pay an inflated mortgage every month go ahead - you'll just wind up paying extra principal and that's (in general) A Good Thing [tm] and substantially better than being barely able to cover your mortgage.
A new competitor absolutely could.
The problem of course is that dreaded last mile. Since the FCC has decided that telcos and cable companies do not need to share their lines you have an effective monopoly on the existing infrastructure. Any competitor trying to enter the market would have to build out infrastructure reaching each and every home they want to service, and do you know how expensive that is to do?
If you want to go wireless then you have a bunch of options - satellite, terrestrial fixed with existing technology, lighter than air dirigibles floating over major metropolitan areas (assuming you can get FAA approval for unmanned flights), cellular based services over 3G networks, etc. All are pricey and have their own set of problems and none of them are going to be as ubiquitous as cable and DSL for some time.
Expect to see few real competitors until WiMax is standardized and the per unit costs begin dropping. Even then you will have to be licensed to offer the service since it will use licensed spectrum, and there is a limited amount of that available.
Meanwhile the rest of the world gets faster and faster access for less and less money every year. Grrrrr.
For FUTURE sales it's a different story though... If Apple were to buy Palm and/or introduce the iPhone then a measurable number of people that have neither iPod nor smart phone would buy the iPhone instead of two separate devices, and that means less iPods sold. Thus there would be an impact on future revenues.
I don't believe that Apple will be buying Palm. Remember that Palm no longer owns PalmOS, so all I can think of that Palm brings to the table is the Palm and Treo brands, domain knowledge around smart phones, and existing relationships with contract manufacturers and carriers.
It is my belief that Apple will introduce the iPhone, and that it's just a matter of time. When they do they will probably contract with someone like HTC to make a custom phone, exclusively for Apple, then load it with Apple's own software. Further, it will either be appropriately crippled to not undercut the Nano, tied to an MVNO so they get ongoing revenue from the monthly subscription, all you can eat subscription iTunes downloads service, or will coincide with some other clever strategy to drive additional revenue growth.
OpenWRT is pretty sweet, and FON's concept is actually appealing. But as someone else said there's this nationwide free WiFi network with the ssid "linksys" that's free, anonymous and available in virtually every major metropolitan area - though mostly in the residential areas for some strange reason. :)
You want it to watch for MP3s you copy into a directory (ostensibly as you download them)? You could easily write a script to do that, import them into iTunes and then move or delete them. That's why there's COM (on Windows) and AppleScript interfaces.
It seems that even scientists can't seem to agree on the level of risk of this actually happening. Until they do I'm not leaving Boston for the midwest.
Wish lists will automatically record shows with actors, directors, or keywords that you specify, keeping them around for as long as you specify. And it works with almost all cable boxes.
The TivoWebPlus does this and more, and you can do it anywhere on the internet.
All you need is your TiVo connected to your network.
What they're worried about is the High Def versions of the shows and movies. Think about the kind of bandwidth necessary to transmit a regular show - TiVo estimates about a gig an hour for their native format. Converted that format to MPG they stay about the same.
An HD broadcast tops out aroung 11 GB per hour.
Do you honestly think that these guys are worried about people trading 17 GB files? (using 90 min movie as an example)
My read: They want to limit consumers ability to copy content around. Nobody is going to buy a D-VHS recorder when TiVo is much more convenient and user friendly, and they know it. If nobody buys D-VHS recorders then consumers will wind up buying the same content two, three or more times and they get to pad their wallets with the profits.
Say it with me boys and girls - this one is all about the money. You've got it and they want it.
One of the points of the Liberty Alliance is that you, the end user choose whether to Federate your accounts or not, and you get to choose to break that Federation. Take a spin through the backgrounder paper on Liberty - there's a lot of tech, but there's also quite a bit of thinking about privacy and security there.
One such device already exists and runs Linux. See Roku Labs HD1000.
As of Windows 95 AV was back as a third party issue. I've often wondered whether they dropped it because of (a) concern about potential liability, (b) the implied "our OS is not secure" marketing issues, (c) simply too much tech support trouble, (d) all of the above or (e) something else entirely.
This is going to happen, the questions are just when, and how will we control when and how much of our the information is being shared. I certainly don't want to wander down the street and wind up with the contact information of every person I bump into, and (more importantly) I don't want them to get mine.
From the article: "Once we had a prototype, we started doing research into who might want to use a product like this,"
So you thought up a "cool" idea, spent a bunch of dollars making it work and then went looking for someone that would find it useful? Good plan.
While it's cool to have a PC running Linux to do other stuff (accounting, monitoring, perhaps even authentication in the future) I'd be loathe to make it a mission critical component of the infrastructure since there's nobody around to fix it if for example it had a hardware failure. That $500 (or $150 as someone else suggested) would probably be better spent on a backup Access Point/Router.
"AOL may be optimizing some of your computer settings to enhance your experience on AOL".
In addition if you look at the screen you can see some sort of application launcher for the apps AOL bundles. It appears that the normal XP start bar and icons are there as well, but the above quote from the details page clearls leaves them with the ability to change system settings which could easily include adding or removing software.
If I can see it I can get it out of the computer.
:)
Try copy/paste. If you can't copy the text content then how about a screen shot (Alt-Print Screen). Until the OS only runs signed drivers and doesn't expose this stuff over remote control apps like VNC or Windows Terminal services there's always going to be a back door.
Since the idea doesn't seem to be to completely protect against a smart user it would appear that they're just trying to cover the casual forwarding along by managers.
In any case I know that I for one have no intention of accepting mail like this. "Sorry, my IT department won't let me install that software" is going to be my flat response to any mail in this new format.
As far as I'm concerned I'd be happy to see 90% of the check-out aisles converted to self checkout. The cashiers at my local Stop and Shop as lazy, slow and rude. I've found that self checkout gets me out the door faster than a cashier check out UNLESS I'm buying lots of produce (no bar code).
If my local S&S had these I'd use it in a second.
I wonder if this law could be applied to the VoIP phone services that charge for a certain number of minutes regardless of whether they were inbound or outbound.
By my reading it would. And given number portability it would be a way for anyone to get their number off of the telemarketing lists.
WooHoo - yay Vonage!
It's an interesting premise, but what insurance company would be willing to get involved in this?
From a pure profit motive, just thinking out loud about the numbers...
Say 100,000 people signed up. Any one of them could be sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but let's assume for a moment that the RIAA always settle for $2000. Further let's assume that 1% of the people with this insurance get sued. At these numbers, without any profit or overhead you'd need $20 per person to cover the costs. Which seems reasonable.
The problem is that the liability is essentially unbounded. If the RIAA refused to settle for $2000 and went for $10,000 now you need $100 per person.
Now add on the fact that the insured know they're violating the law and have gotten insurance against it. Buying insurance against being sued by the RIAA isn't going to look all that good in the eyes of the court, so those settlement numbers could go WAY up.
I'm not saying we're not going to see this insurance. I'm just suggesting that it probably isn't going to be all that cheap.
Interestingly enough AOL's blocking of Trillian last year (?) was the main impetus for almost everyone I know to start using Yahoo! Most of my department uses Trillian, so it was just a few clicks to a new account and we were off and running.
Now Yahoo pulls the same thing and we're all updating our contact lists with correct AIM IDs for each other.
I understand their need to make money on the advertising, and the desire to block spam, but it seems to me that this just reduces the value of their network.
Yes - "Backup generators have been installed as part of the upgrade, ensuring that network service will never be compromised and 911 service will continue to function in an emergency."
But that would have required you to actually READ the linked articles before posting.
plus since they have your data you pretty well held hostage unless the vendor offers you a way to pull your data cleanly out... something that I'm sure will be right on the top of their development roadmap.