Re:CD sales and concert attendance both down
on
RIAA vs The Economy
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· Score: 1
The same outlets that used to carry mostly music now sell DVDs and games, all of which now come on very similar disks.
You have to wonder what the impact of product displacement has been on CD sales. If the same stores are now selling DVDs and games, the shelf space used by those has probably displaced some CDs. Less product on display; less product sold.
The $2 bill has been around since 1776 (printing authorized by the Continental Congress). Thomas Jefferson is pictured on the front. (Presumably someone else was on the front of the 1776 $2 bill.) The latest $2 bill series originated in 1996. According to the US Treasury Department, as of 1999 there were $1,166,091,458 worth of $2 bills in circulation.
In my lifetime, the only place $2 bills ever got much circulation was at the horse track. Historically, $2 was the minimum bet, so having a single bill to cover that amount came in handy. It probably also made for easier payoffs before the days of computers and instant odds calculations.
It's not snobbish. It's about establishing reasonable conditions for a valid test.
My father spent 40 years working in a machine shop, long before the days of OSHA and any concerns about protecting worker's hearing. He can't hear higher frequencies at all and his hearing is seriously degraded over much of the rest of the normal range, especially in the range typical of human speech.
Now, would you want my father to be making generalized judgments about the quality of various encoders and bit rates? His hearing is so far from what is considered normal that any judgment he made on sound quality would be applicable only to him. There's no way you could legitimately generalize his conclusion to the population as a whole.
Similarly, a sound system that does not reproduce recorded audio with something reasonably close to a flat frequency response can not be used to make generalized judgments about encoders and bit rates. Conclusions reached on that equipment can only reasonably be applied to that equipment.
Several years ago there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about HP's design effort with what became the BusinessJet line of printers. One of the reasons "regular" inkjet cartridges are so expensive is that the print head is integral to the cartridge. As is clear from the abundance of aftermarket ink cartridge refill kits, the print heads tend to far outlast the ink that's in the cartridges. One of HP's design goals with the new line of printers was to separate the ink supply from the print heads so the customer wouldn't have to pay for new print heads when all they needed was more ink. They also wanted to have separate ink tanks for each of the colors so when the customer ran out of one color they didn't have to replace all the inks. The ink tanks were made much larger than normal so, as the article stated, the average customer would NEVER have to replace the ink cartridges. These were clearly consumer oriented goals.
I remember this article because I decided right then that I would buy one of these printers when they became available. (The article was printed a few months before the first printer in the new line was ready for market.) Well, I didn't get the printer right away, but I did eventually pick up one of the lower end units from the BusinessJet line. I really liked the idea of large, separate ink tanks that could be replaced individually -- in the unlikely event I would run out of ink before the printer fell off the trailing edge of technology.
Now I find out my comparatively expensive BusinessJet printer is programmed to force me to replace the cartridges (and apparently the print heads) on some schedule determined by HP and totally unrelated to the amount of ink in the cartridge (or the wear on the print head). As someone else pointed out, this is a very short-sighted attempt to extract more money from the customer. This BusinessJet is the last HP printer I'll ever buy.
The only problem with that theory is that it assumes the quality of all playbacks was exceedingly poor and we could differentiate one from the other because the CD was used as a reference
It assumes nothing of the sort. I'll say it one more time. It is not valid to make generic claims about encoders and bit rates based on listening tests performed on speakers that do a poor job of reproducing ANY music. You aren't hearing a true reproduction of any of the tracks so any comparison is going to be faulty. Do the same test using some good speakers or a top quality headphone and then get back to us.
I'm saying if the quality of the speakers is sufficiently poor, it is not valid to draw generic conclusions about audio compression and sound quality from those speakers. Any conclusion would apply ONLY to those speakers.
I have a pocket radio that has a 1" speaker built in. I would not expect a comparison of two FM stations on that radio to be of any value when trying to determine which of the two stations is going to sound the best on my 125W/channel home system with the dual 300W, 15-inch subwoofers.
I'm not an expert at this, but here's my take. The psychoacoustic aspect of audio compression takes masking into account. That is, psychoacoustics says sound A will mask sound B so you can leave sound B out and no one will know the difference. The problem with this theory, at least in regards to low quality speakers, is that it assumes you can actually hear sound A. If the reproduction equipment is sufficiently inadequate you may well never hear sound A.
Now you might be thinking that if sound B is masked by sound A, and the poor equipment keeps you from hearing sound A, you wouldn't hear sound B either, even if it were there. This is where my lack of being an expert at this begins to tell, but I strongly suspect such is not necessarily the case. For this type of compression to accomplish anything significant, A and B would need to be at different frequencies.
So, if the low quality speakers do a poor job of reproducing sound A but a decent job of reproducing sound B, when you listen to the CD you'll hear B (even though you wouldn't if the speakers were perfect). When you listen to the more highly compressed audio that has eliminated B because it should be masked by A, it sounds different from the CD because B isn't there. When you listen to the 320kbps version it sounds more like the CD because the only thing eliminated were the really high frequencies you couldn't hear (and the poor quality speakers couldn't reproduce) anyway.
The point is that $20 crap speakers aren't going to do a reasonable job of reproducing the original, let alone the encoded versions. It's like drawing conclusions about the best gasoline for a Ferrari by testing the gas in a Yugo. The equipment you had isn't adequate to draw any meaningful conclusion pertaining to equipment other than $20 speakers.
I'm not knocking your speakers, BTW. I've got a fine pair of $10 speakers sitting right here. They're okay for playing games. But if I wanted to do some encoder comparisons, at the very least I'd break out the Sennheisers if not connect the computer to my home theater system. These speakers would be worthless for testing high quality audio.
That $250 Tivo is a 40 hour model, 20 hours or less if you want a decent picture. Start saving an HD signal and you're looking at maybe a 5 hour capacity. Nobody's going to buy that. To maintain the same 20 hour capacity for HD at good quality you're going to need a nominal 160 hour capacity. From what I can see at the Tivo site, they don't even sell a box with more than 80 hour capacity. So you probably have to figure a bit more engineering cost in there.
On top of that, you're going to need to greatly boost the CPU capacity of the box because now it needs to encode a signal containing four times as much information.
And let's not forget the box now needs to output an HD signal. (There's no point in recording HD if you can't display it in HD.) I think you're going to need a bit more circuitry for that.
It's really not valid to say this part costs $x and this part costs $y so putting them in the same box should be $x+y. Engineers have to figure out how to make it all play together and fit in a nice box. Then somebody has to design a sleek outside that practically screams "high tech!" And there will be added support costs for all the new gizmos you're adding to the box. All this costs money which is refected in the price of the product.
If you can build a box that will record at least 20 hours of HDTV off digital cable and display it at HD quality, and put that box on the shelf at a price of $900, I'd say you need to go into business.
You said you needed three things: digital cable-ready, built in DVD recorder, HD record capability. Together, I think you're looking at close to $2000 retail to put all that in the same box configured to be truly usable. The HD capability in particular is going to run the cost up a lot.
I don't know about your cable company, but mine has some package deals that really cut the cost of the second cable box. The last time I changed service I went in with one cable box paying $X. I walked out with two cable boxes, more channels, and paying $X-5. Didn't make sense to me but I was more than willing to accept it.
This is great. You're too cheap to get a second cable box so you can watch and record at the same time, but you won't consider a PVR until it has features that will drive the cost to about $2,000.
If you had a PVR you would quickly realize you NEVER watch live TV anymore. The ability to watch according to your schedule and to instantly skip over commercials is just too useful. I have two cable boxes -- one for the ReplayTV and the other so I can watch live. The only thing I use the second one for is HBO. Even HDTV didn't bring enough to the table to make it worth sitting through the commercials.
If you truly understood these features there's no way you would ever say you don't want to use them. Why would you not want to have the PVR adjust its record schedule automatically when the network decides to change the schedule around? Why would you not want the PVR to automatically record all the episodes of regardless of when it's on or what channel it's on?
I watch a lot more TV than I used to, but it's all TV I WANT to watch. I no longer sit in front of the TV cycling endlessly through the channels in search of something worth watching.
If I had to give up my ReplayTV, I'd probably give up TV entirely.
I just want to use it like a VCR - record when I want to, manually or via a schedule.
Like most people who've never lived with a ReplayTV or Tivo, you have no appreciation for what the schedule information adds to the device. I've been trying to explain ReplayTV to people for years and they still go away thinking it's just a fancy VCR with a large capacity. Anyone who's had one for more than a couple hours knows this couldn't be further from the truth.
If D&M wants to push the ReplayTV, the first thing they need to do is put together a 30-minute infomercial. The implications of the schedule information and the way the unit uses it would take at least that long to explain in a way people can fully appreciate.
What's the chance of setting up a perl script to automatically find Junk Mail Kings and sign them up for the service? I'm sure many of these 250,000 would be junk mail kings. Just set them on each other!
I think they might notice if 250,000 new requests for catalogs came in all at once. Nice idea in the abstract though.
I put the disconnected tones at the beginning of my outgoing message. I also changed my message to "We're sorry, the number you have dialed is still in service. If you'd like to leave a message..." Within a month I went from 20 "unknown caller" calls a day to just a few a week. Fortunately, my answering machine is caller ID enabled and can play different outgoing messages for specific callers so my friends and family don't hear the disconnect tones. It probably would have created some confusion otherwise.
After Shareaza developer Mike Stokes has shown an attitude towards the GDF that could very well be called hostile, things got a little out of hand.
I believe this seriously mischaracterizes the events. I've been following the_gdf traffic on this topic since day one. Mike Stokes has never posted anything on the_gdf that wasn't reasoned, professional, and intended to foster cooperation in implementing what he sees as a better protocol. The attitude and hostility in the_gdf came entirely from elsewhere. He clearly took an approach to this that was not entirely in keeping with the_gdf tradition, but there has never been any "attitude" from Mike.
As you mentioned in point 4), the same, unfortunately, can not be said for some of the Shareaza fans. Most of the problems started when members of the_gdf took postings by the fans as being representative of the opinions of Mike Stokes.
The published interview is about as balanced as a Linux press-release issued by Microsoft.
Why would you expect an interview to be balanced? An interview is an expression of one person's opinion.
The article clearly stated that this was part one of two parts, the second part presenting the opposing views.
This seems to me as a fairly egotistical kid hijacking the Gnutella name for his own purposes, then charactising eveybody else as bitter about his wonderful new tchnology.
If you had read the venom pouring forth from some members of the_gdf you'd realize "bitter" is a rather severe understatement. There are definitely some egotistical kids involved in all this, but I think your labelling has been misdirected.
Gnutella has implemented a system similar to the Kazaa supernodes. Someone suffering a severe case of oxymoronism dubbed them "ultrapeers". It doesn't fully cache the inferior node content like Kazaa, but it does keep a giant hash table for each "leaf node". (Oxymorons are best when flavored with mixed metaphor.) The ultrapeers shield the leaf nodes from most of the query traffic, routing to the leaf node only the queries that appear to have a high likelihood of being successful.
There are still people using older versions of modern clients and some antiquated clients are still in use, but most of the gnutella network has moved away from the "all computers are the same" model.
The new protocol implemented by Shareaza (and hopefully by several other open-minded developers) provides for an exhaustive search of the entire network using a combination of direct client-to-hub and hub-to-hub communication. The hubs and clients can both still communicate with standard gnutella ultrapeers (and regular peers if one desires), so there is full integration of the new protocol with the old.
The new protocol is much more resistant to DOS attacks because queries do not flood the network. Also, a client must establish a trust relationship with each hub with which it intends to communicate. This won't prevent a DOS attack, but it will most certainly slow it down.
I used PLATO in '74. I don't specifically recall term-talk, but I do remember having a direct chat with someone 1500 miles away and thinking that was very cool.
What's amazing to me are the number of negative reviews that get posted. I give Amazon a lot of credit for taking the long view that an informed customer is more likely to be a repeat customer. As someone else mentioned, like some of the so-called information that gets posted on/., you have to approach the Amazon reviews with more than a bit of skepticism. Though it's usually pretty easy to separate the "I'm too stupid to use this product" reviews from the legitimate criticism.
I used to have my own software company and had signed up for some IBM vendor program. They sent me endless marketing literature and literally tens of thousands of dollars worth of free software. I couldn't make heads or tails out of 95% of it. You had to already know what all their software did before the literature made any sense.
The funniest thing I ever got from them was a presentation on OS/2 that would only run under Windows. Marketing genius like that was largely responsible for OS/2's demise.
I can't argue about the "displaced" feeling. That's rather the point of the whole thing, to get displaced past all those commercials and re-placed in whatever you were watching.;-)
Seriously, I've had my ReplayTV for about two years and doubt I'd watch hardly any TV at all if it weren't for that 30-sec-skip button. The average commercial is 30 seconds, that button skips ahead 30 seconds... odd coincidence that.
I recently got a HDTV cable tuner and have been watching a bit of live TV for the HD razzle-dazzle. I love the HD picture, but I suspect this watching live won't last long due to the lack of a 30-sec-skip button.
It also won't help you if despite all your care in packing the drives, one suffers a head crash enroute, even tho you don't remember hitting any bumps. (I've had that happen.)
That must have been one HELL of a bump. With the head parked most drives have a shock rating well in excess of 100G. One of the Maxtor drives I just checked is rated for a 2ms shock of 250G.
Burnt CD's (like you'd use at home) have a shelf-life of about 10 years. Then the medium starts to oxidize (the metallic film, not the plastic itself), and flakes..
TDK rates their CD-R lifespan at more than 70 years when stored at 30C (~86F). Kodak claims a 95% confidence that 95% of Kodak media will have a lifetime greater than 217 years if stored at 25C, 40% humidity. One would assume the cheap generics will last not quite as long as the Kodak CD-Rs, though I suspect they'll last longer than I will if kept at room temperature and out of bright light.
Also, I've seen a friend using the 30-sec-skip style, and it's annoying because they always have to hit the 8-sec-back button something like 5 times after overshooting the beginning of the proram.
You don't HAVE to hit the 8-sec-back button (it's actually the 7-sec-back button). ReplayTV has ffwd and rwnd just like Tivo. People use the 30-second-skip and the quick-rewind because they're convenient, not because there isn't another choice. Admittedly, you become accustomed to using the quick-rewind button for small overshoots on the 30-second-skip and sometimes find yourself pressing it quite a few times when using the rewind button would have been a quicker alternative. But that's a matter of conditioning, not a limitation of the device.
The right to replace a certain number of national ads with local ads is part of the deal negotiated when the local cable company signs up to carry the channel. Pretty much every cable system in existance does this on the cable-only channels.
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You have to wonder what the impact of product displacement has been on CD sales. If the same stores are now selling DVDs and games, the shelf space used by those has probably displaced some CDs. Less product on display; less product sold.
The $2 bill has been around since 1776 (printing authorized by the Continental Congress). Thomas Jefferson is pictured on the front. (Presumably someone else was on the front of the 1776 $2 bill.) The latest $2 bill series originated in 1996. According to the US Treasury Department, as of 1999 there were $1,166,091,458 worth of $2 bills in circulation.
In my lifetime, the only place $2 bills ever got much circulation was at the horse track. Historically, $2 was the minimum bet, so having a single bill to cover that amount came in handy. It probably also made for easier payoffs before the days of computers and instant odds calculations.
It's not snobbish. It's about establishing reasonable conditions for a valid test.
My father spent 40 years working in a machine shop, long before the days of OSHA and any concerns about protecting worker's hearing. He can't hear higher frequencies at all and his hearing is seriously degraded over much of the rest of the normal range, especially in the range typical of human speech.
Now, would you want my father to be making generalized judgments about the quality of various encoders and bit rates? His hearing is so far from what is considered normal that any judgment he made on sound quality would be applicable only to him. There's no way you could legitimately generalize his conclusion to the population as a whole.
Similarly, a sound system that does not reproduce recorded audio with something reasonably close to a flat frequency response can not be used to make generalized judgments about encoders and bit rates. Conclusions reached on that equipment can only reasonably be applied to that equipment.
Several years ago there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about HP's design effort with what became the BusinessJet line of printers. One of the reasons "regular" inkjet cartridges are so expensive is that the print head is integral to the cartridge. As is clear from the abundance of aftermarket ink cartridge refill kits, the print heads tend to far outlast the ink that's in the cartridges. One of HP's design goals with the new line of printers was to separate the ink supply from the print heads so the customer wouldn't have to pay for new print heads when all they needed was more ink. They also wanted to have separate ink tanks for each of the colors so when the customer ran out of one color they didn't have to replace all the inks. The ink tanks were made much larger than normal so, as the article stated, the average customer would NEVER have to replace the ink cartridges. These were clearly consumer oriented goals.
I remember this article because I decided right then that I would buy one of these printers when they became available. (The article was printed a few months before the first printer in the new line was ready for market.) Well, I didn't get the printer right away, but I did eventually pick up one of the lower end units from the BusinessJet line. I really liked the idea of large, separate ink tanks that could be replaced individually -- in the unlikely event I would run out of ink before the printer fell off the trailing edge of technology.
Now I find out my comparatively expensive BusinessJet printer is programmed to force me to replace the cartridges (and apparently the print heads) on some schedule determined by HP and totally unrelated to the amount of ink in the cartridge (or the wear on the print head). As someone else pointed out, this is a very short-sighted attempt to extract more money from the customer. This BusinessJet is the last HP printer I'll ever buy.
I'm saying if the quality of the speakers is sufficiently poor, it is not valid to draw generic conclusions about audio compression and sound quality from those speakers. Any conclusion would apply ONLY to those speakers.
I have a pocket radio that has a 1" speaker built in. I would not expect a comparison of two FM stations on that radio to be of any value when trying to determine which of the two stations is going to sound the best on my 125W/channel home system with the dual 300W, 15-inch subwoofers.
I'm not an expert at this, but here's my take. The psychoacoustic aspect of audio compression takes masking into account. That is, psychoacoustics says sound A will mask sound B so you can leave sound B out and no one will know the difference. The problem with this theory, at least in regards to low quality speakers, is that it assumes you can actually hear sound A. If the reproduction equipment is sufficiently inadequate you may well never hear sound A.
Now you might be thinking that if sound B is masked by sound A, and the poor equipment keeps you from hearing sound A, you wouldn't hear sound B either, even if it were there. This is where my lack of being an expert at this begins to tell, but I strongly suspect such is not necessarily the case. For this type of compression to accomplish anything significant, A and B would need to be at different frequencies.
So, if the low quality speakers do a poor job of reproducing sound A but a decent job of reproducing sound B, when you listen to the CD you'll hear B (even though you wouldn't if the speakers were perfect). When you listen to the more highly compressed audio that has eliminated B because it should be masked by A, it sounds different from the CD because B isn't there. When you listen to the 320kbps version it sounds more like the CD because the only thing eliminated were the really high frequencies you couldn't hear (and the poor quality speakers couldn't reproduce) anyway.
The point is that $20 crap speakers aren't going to do a reasonable job of reproducing the original, let alone the encoded versions. It's like drawing conclusions about the best gasoline for a Ferrari by testing the gas in a Yugo. The equipment you had isn't adequate to draw any meaningful conclusion pertaining to equipment other than $20 speakers.
I'm not knocking your speakers, BTW. I've got a fine pair of $10 speakers sitting right here. They're okay for playing games. But if I wanted to do some encoder comparisons, at the very least I'd break out the Sennheisers if not connect the computer to my home theater system. These speakers would be worthless for testing high quality audio.
That $250 Tivo is a 40 hour model, 20 hours or less if you want a decent picture. Start saving an HD signal and you're looking at maybe a 5 hour capacity. Nobody's going to buy that. To maintain the same 20 hour capacity for HD at good quality you're going to need a nominal 160 hour capacity. From what I can see at the Tivo site, they don't even sell a box with more than 80 hour capacity. So you probably have to figure a bit more engineering cost in there.
On top of that, you're going to need to greatly boost the CPU capacity of the box because now it needs to encode a signal containing four times as much information.
And let's not forget the box now needs to output an HD signal. (There's no point in recording HD if you can't display it in HD.) I think you're going to need a bit more circuitry for that.
It's really not valid to say this part costs $x and this part costs $y so putting them in the same box should be $x+y. Engineers have to figure out how to make it all play together and fit in a nice box. Then somebody has to design a sleek outside that practically screams "high tech!" And there will be added support costs for all the new gizmos you're adding to the box. All this costs money which is refected in the price of the product.
If you can build a box that will record at least 20 hours of HDTV off digital cable and display it at HD quality, and put that box on the shelf at a price of $900, I'd say you need to go into business.
You said you needed three things: digital cable-ready, built in DVD recorder, HD record capability. Together, I think you're looking at close to $2000 retail to put all that in the same box configured to be truly usable. The HD capability in particular is going to run the cost up a lot.
I don't know about your cable company, but mine has some package deals that really cut the cost of the second cable box. The last time I changed service I went in with one cable box paying $X. I walked out with two cable boxes, more channels, and paying $X-5. Didn't make sense to me but I was more than willing to accept it.
This is great. You're too cheap to get a second cable box so you can watch and record at the same time, but you won't consider a PVR until it has features that will drive the cost to about $2,000.
If you had a PVR you would quickly realize you NEVER watch live TV anymore. The ability to watch according to your schedule and to instantly skip over commercials is just too useful. I have two cable boxes -- one for the ReplayTV and the other so I can watch live. The only thing I use the second one for is HBO. Even HDTV didn't bring enough to the table to make it worth sitting through the commercials.
If you truly understood these features there's no way you would ever say you don't want to use them. Why would you not want to have the PVR adjust its record schedule automatically when the network decides to change the schedule around? Why would you not want the PVR to automatically record all the episodes of regardless of when it's on or what channel it's on?
I watch a lot more TV than I used to, but it's all TV I WANT to watch. I no longer sit in front of the TV cycling endlessly through the channels in search of something worth watching.
If I had to give up my ReplayTV, I'd probably give up TV entirely.
If D&M wants to push the ReplayTV, the first thing they need to do is put together a 30-minute infomercial. The implications of the schedule information and the way the unit uses it would take at least that long to explain in a way people can fully appreciate.
I put the disconnected tones at the beginning of my outgoing message. I also changed my message to "We're sorry, the number you have dialed is still in service. If you'd like to leave a message..." Within a month I went from 20 "unknown caller" calls a day to just a few a week. Fortunately, my answering machine is caller ID enabled and can play different outgoing messages for specific callers so my friends and family don't hear the disconnect tones. It probably would have created some confusion otherwise.
As you mentioned in point 4), the same, unfortunately, can not be said for some of the Shareaza fans. Most of the problems started when members of the_gdf took postings by the fans as being representative of the opinions of Mike Stokes.
The article clearly stated that this was part one of two parts, the second part presenting the opposing views.
If you had read the venom pouring forth from some members of the_gdf you'd realize "bitter" is a rather severe understatement. There are definitely some egotistical kids involved in all this, but I think your labelling has been misdirected.
Gnutella has implemented a system similar to the Kazaa supernodes. Someone suffering a severe case of oxymoronism dubbed them "ultrapeers". It doesn't fully cache the inferior node content like Kazaa, but it does keep a giant hash table for each "leaf node". (Oxymorons are best when flavored with mixed metaphor.) The ultrapeers shield the leaf nodes from most of the query traffic, routing to the leaf node only the queries that appear to have a high likelihood of being successful.
There are still people using older versions of modern clients and some antiquated clients are still in use, but most of the gnutella network has moved away from the "all computers are the same" model.
The new protocol implemented by Shareaza (and hopefully by several other open-minded developers) provides for an exhaustive search of the entire network using a combination of direct client-to-hub and hub-to-hub communication. The hubs and clients can both still communicate with standard gnutella ultrapeers (and regular peers if one desires), so there is full integration of the new protocol with the old.
The new protocol is much more resistant to DOS attacks because queries do not flood the network. Also, a client must establish a trust relationship with each hub with which it intends to communicate. This won't prevent a DOS attack, but it will most certainly slow it down.
I used PLATO in '74. I don't specifically recall term-talk, but I do remember having a direct chat with someone 1500 miles away and thinking that was very cool.
What's amazing to me are the number of negative reviews that get posted. I give Amazon a lot of credit for taking the long view that an informed customer is more likely to be a repeat customer. As someone else mentioned, like some of the so-called information that gets posted on /., you have to approach the Amazon reviews with more than a bit of skepticism. Though it's usually pretty easy to separate the "I'm too stupid to use this product" reviews from the legitimate criticism.
I used to have my own software company and had signed up for some IBM vendor program. They sent me endless marketing literature and literally tens of thousands of dollars worth of free software. I couldn't make heads or tails out of 95% of it. You had to already know what all their software did before the literature made any sense.
The funniest thing I ever got from them was a presentation on OS/2 that would only run under Windows. Marketing genius like that was largely responsible for OS/2's demise.
I can't argue about the "displaced" feeling. That's rather the point of the whole thing, to get displaced past all those commercials and re-placed in whatever you were watching. ;-)
Seriously, I've had my ReplayTV for about two years and doubt I'd watch hardly any TV at all if it weren't for that 30-sec-skip button. The average commercial is 30 seconds, that button skips ahead 30 seconds... odd coincidence that.
I recently got a HDTV cable tuner and have been watching a bit of live TV for the HD razzle-dazzle. I love the HD picture, but I suspect this watching live won't last long due to the lack of a 30-sec-skip button.
You don't HAVE to hit the 8-sec-back button (it's actually the 7-sec-back button). ReplayTV has ffwd and rwnd just like Tivo. People use the 30-second-skip and the quick-rewind because they're convenient, not because there isn't another choice. Admittedly, you become accustomed to using the quick-rewind button for small overshoots on the 30-second-skip and sometimes find yourself pressing it quite a few times when using the rewind button would have been a quicker alternative. But that's a matter of conditioning, not a limitation of the device.
The right to replace a certain number of national ads with local ads is part of the deal negotiated when the local cable company signs up to carry the channel. Pretty much every cable system in existance does this on the cable-only channels.