I think the biggest obstacle for digital video recorders to become mainstream is the price point. Until they can get knocked down to VCR territory in that respect, they will just be geek toys for the most part. Whether or not that can happen, though, is the question, since they are already losing money on the hardware (which is why Replay is getting out of that side of the business).
I think it could be argued that understanding the infinite scale of the universe can help us see that life at any level is something precious, rare, and valuable - something that shouldn't be squandered. And that perhaps if we find a little bit of humility in looking at something so vast, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Just looking at the latest server logs from the site I manage explains the lack of plugins for alternate OS's. Out of 1.7 million requests, only around 3500 came from the various Unix variants. Even Slashdot has said that Windows browsers make up a majority of their traffic, and this is a Unix stronghold. It doesn't take a braindead marketroid to figure out the numbers here...
A huge downside for me is that NN6 only supports HTTP 1.1 through the proxy, which means that you can't use the Junkbuster proxy. Sadly, that means I'm stuck with IE unless I want to return to the land of the neverending banner ad.
Mars Attacks was one joke repeated again and again for an hour and a half. It's truly mystifying just how terrible it is considering the incredible talent of both the director and the cast.
Maybe Tim Burton was over-inspired by the true schlockmeister after directing Ed Wood...
You'll get no argument from me - I think that if Tivo had a bit of foresight they would have included it just for the geek appeal (they've already scored big by letting the underground 'hack away' at the box without bothering them).
But I think this was a short-term, bottom-line kind of choice.
As for why TiVo never put Ethernet support in the thing, it was a corporate decision. TiVo has deals with a few major networks, including NBC. These nets hate having their stuff put on the internet minus ads. Ethernet would make this easier. Since the phone connection is toll free or local, they decided to go with a phone-only system. I dont blame them.
I don't think that's the reason at all, since once their format is cracked it wouldn't be hard to just swap hard drives and upload from a different machine. Instead, I think it's simply a matter of cost. The Tivo is already a niche item, but within that niche how many folks have broadband? And since they aren't making money on the boxes themselves, why up the cost another $20 to serve a tiny audience?
God forbid that customers should actually know under what circumstances they are eligible for a refund. Or what it might take to get past the first couple of clueless tiers of tech support.
It'd be nice if @Home spent its money trying to improve their support instead of using it to feed the lawyers to crush their own customers.
I think that this is just an attempt by the original MacWeek author to cover up the fact that OSX is basically a souped-up window manager for a 'Unix core' instead of a from-scratch solution that was promised way-back in the Copland fiasco.
This is one reason why Congress attempted to grant the President the power to 'line-item veto' specific parts of legislation in 1996. The Supreme Court, however, struck it down in 1998, saying that Congress just can't hand over powers to the President through a simple law - it requires an amendment to the Constitution.
The process of using federal dollars to implement national policy at the state level is old hat, though. A couple of past examples were when the mandatory drinking age was raised to 21 and the speed limit was issued (in both cases Congress would withhold highway $$$ until states complied).
And to boot, the fact that what you are doing is meaningful can itself be a source of stress. If you work a meaningless "punch the clock" job where you walk away at night and stop thinking about it completely, that can be a lot less stressful than leaving a meaningful job when you feel you need to be doing more.
I think a better question might be why they spent all of this time and effort to create a machine that would give Mars an atmosphere then not bother to turn it on themselves...
Any class that had lecture notes when I was in college was one of those 450 student monsters where the prof just recited what you would have learned had you read the required reading anyhow. By banning lecture notes, you keep students from discovering just how useless the lectures (and often the classes themselves) are...
I just don't think that your rights should be determined solely by how much money you have to protect them, whether that's through funding campaigns, lobbying Congress or throwing obscene amounts at the legal process. And that's not aimed specifically at MS, since every major corporation does it.
The next President has the potential to be incredibly influential in terms of the makeup of the court if several justices retire as expected. Personally the prospect of an even more conservative court (it's pretty split down the middle now) is enough to get me to vote for Gore. The more the court favors individual rights versus the rights of corporations, the sounder I'll sleep at night...
Just imagine if every snide workplace comment you heard daily was reported by the mainstream press to represent your company's opinion. I'm sorry, but for this to make/. is beyond lame. I think this site has too much influence for Taco and co. to not at least dig *a little bit* before reporting anything that is submitted.
The question with universal accessibility is how much is that tiny percentage of your audience worth to you if you have limited time and/or resources? Personally I go *way* out of my way making our site's pages accessible in just about any browser, but it's a ton of extra work both in terms of testing and design for less than 3% of my total audience. There are a lot of places, however, where that isn't a priority (take a look at/. in Netscape 2 if you want an example).
Ummm, this seems kind of basic, but when Red Hat has a greater market share than the rest of the packages they chart combined, how can it possibly match their growth in a percentage? I can create my own distribution, install it on three machines and claim 300% growth, but that really doesn't mean anything...
I'd much rather see some hard numbers that might actually tell me something about how real this growth is...
While I hope that Apple can make OS X work, I can't really see it changing the landscape at all. What the Mac is missing, and I don't think they'll ever get back, is the innovative application development that made it succeed in the first place. Applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, Excel, PageMaker, Director, and Quark are what sold the platform above and beyond the OS. How many killer apps start on the Mac these days, and does anyone think that OS X is going to reverse this trend?
Amazon has an O'Reilly title called 'Programming Php' due for release in January 2001 by the same authors of the pocket reference and the O'Reilly mySQL book.
There's been a lot of discussion on DVD forums lately about how, with a lot of the crazy bargains disappearing online, there's no compelling reason to shop on the net. If you tack on sales tax to the shipping costs, the price point advantage disappears completely and it becomes an even harder sale.
Will internet commerce disappear? Hardly, but I think measures like this certainly will slow it down.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the biggest obstacle for digital video recorders to become mainstream is the price point. Until they can get knocked down to VCR territory in that respect, they will just be geek toys for the most part. Whether or not that can happen, though, is the question, since they are already losing money on the hardware (which is why Replay is getting out of that side of the business).
I think it could be argued that understanding the infinite scale of the universe can help us see that life at any level is something precious, rare, and valuable - something that shouldn't be squandered. And that perhaps if we find a little bit of humility in looking at something so vast, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Yeah, and I'm sure that corporations will institute such changes out of pure altruism...
Just looking at the latest server logs from the site I manage explains the lack of plugins for alternate OS's. Out of 1.7 million requests, only around 3500 came from the various Unix variants. Even Slashdot has said that Windows browsers make up a majority of their traffic, and this is a Unix stronghold. It doesn't take a braindead marketroid to figure out the numbers here...
A huge downside for me is that NN6 only supports HTTP 1.1 through the proxy, which means that you can't use the Junkbuster proxy. Sadly, that means I'm stuck with IE unless I want to return to the land of the neverending banner ad.
Mars Attacks was one joke repeated again and again for an hour and a half. It's truly mystifying just how terrible it is considering the incredible talent of both the director and the cast.
Maybe Tim Burton was over-inspired by the true schlockmeister after directing Ed Wood...
You'll get no argument from me - I think that if Tivo had a bit of foresight they would have included it just for the geek appeal (they've already scored big by letting the underground 'hack away' at the box without bothering them).
But I think this was a short-term, bottom-line kind of choice.
I don't think that's the reason at all, since once their format is cracked it wouldn't be hard to just swap hard drives and upload from a different machine. Instead, I think it's simply a matter of cost. The Tivo is already a niche item, but within that niche how many folks have broadband? And since they aren't making money on the boxes themselves, why up the cost another $20 to serve a tiny audience?
God forbid that customers should actually know under what circumstances they are eligible for a refund. Or what it might take to get past the first couple of clueless tiers of tech support.
It'd be nice if @Home spent its money trying to improve their support instead of using it to feed the lawyers to crush their own customers.
I think that this is just an attempt by the original MacWeek author to cover up the fact that OSX is basically a souped-up window manager for a 'Unix core' instead of a from-scratch solution that was promised way-back in the Copland fiasco.
This is one reason why Congress attempted to grant the President the power to 'line-item veto' specific parts of legislation in 1996. The Supreme Court, however, struck it down in 1998, saying that Congress just can't hand over powers to the President through a simple law - it requires an amendment to the Constitution.
The process of using federal dollars to implement national policy at the state level is old hat, though. A couple of past examples were when the mandatory drinking age was raised to 21 and the speed limit was issued (in both cases Congress would withhold highway $$$ until states complied).
Yeah, but at least MST3K was more than just a half-hour of smashing things...
And to boot, the fact that what you are doing is meaningful can itself be a source of stress. If you work a meaningless "punch the clock" job where you walk away at night and stop thinking about it completely, that can be a lot less stressful than leaving a meaningful job when you feel you need to be doing more.
I think a better question might be why they spent all of this time and effort to create a machine that would give Mars an atmosphere then not bother to turn it on themselves...
Any class that had lecture notes when I was in college was one of those 450 student monsters where the prof just recited what you would have learned had you read the required reading anyhow. By banning lecture notes, you keep students from discovering just how useless the lectures (and often the classes themselves) are...
I just don't think that your rights should be determined solely by how much money you have to protect them, whether that's through funding campaigns, lobbying Congress or throwing obscene amounts at the legal process. And that's not aimed specifically at MS, since every major corporation does it.
The next President has the potential to be incredibly influential in terms of the makeup of the court if several justices retire as expected. Personally the prospect of an even more conservative court (it's pretty split down the middle now) is enough to get me to vote for Gore. The more the court favors individual rights versus the rights of corporations, the sounder I'll sleep at night...
Just imagine if every snide workplace comment you heard daily was reported by the mainstream press to represent your company's opinion. I'm sorry, but for this to make /. is beyond lame. I think this site has too much influence for Taco and co. to not at least dig *a little bit* before reporting anything that is submitted.
The question with universal accessibility is how much is that tiny percentage of your audience worth to you if you have limited time and/or resources? Personally I go *way* out of my way making our site's pages accessible in just about any browser, but it's a ton of extra work both in terms of testing and design for less than 3% of my total audience. There are a lot of places, however, where that isn't a priority (take a look at /. in Netscape 2 if you want an example).
Ummm, this seems kind of basic, but when Red Hat has a greater market share than the rest of the packages they chart combined, how can it possibly match their growth in a percentage? I can create my own distribution, install it on three machines and claim 300% growth, but that really doesn't mean anything...
I'd much rather see some hard numbers that might actually tell me something about how real this growth is...
While I hope that Apple can make OS X work, I can't really see it changing the landscape at all. What the Mac is missing, and I don't think they'll ever get back, is the innovative application development that made it succeed in the first place. Applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, Excel, PageMaker, Director, and Quark are what sold the platform above and beyond the OS. How many killer apps start on the Mac these days, and does anyone think that OS X is going to reverse this trend?
It makes it so much easier to find out where those black helicopters are headed...
Amazon has an O'Reilly title called 'Programming Php' due for release in January 2001 by the same authors of the pocket reference and the O'Reilly mySQL book.
There's been a lot of discussion on DVD forums lately about how, with a lot of the crazy bargains disappearing online, there's no compelling reason to shop on the net. If you tack on sales tax to the shipping costs, the price point advantage disappears completely and it becomes an even harder sale.
Will internet commerce disappear? Hardly, but I think measures like this certainly will slow it down.
"R2D2's fallen and he can't get up!"