I honestly don't care who's DRM scheme it is. I hat eto see this type of lending program fail. With publishers recent push to keep electronic version out of the hands of more than one person, it seems to me that they are backtracking on long established practice. I can always purchase book and when I am done with it, I can give it to a friend or family member and they can read it and so on. Now with Digital books, because of the new scheme, If I purchase one, I am the only person who can ever read it. I cannot lend it to someone or donate it a library (well there are a couple of ebooks donation programs, but they are difficult to use and you never own the book). To see it work from the other way around, a library purchasing the ebook and allowing many people to read it, is wonderful and should be fostered, no matter who's DRM scheme is used. Bickering of what schemes is only goign to play into the hands of publishers. I hate to see people state they will never use it simmply because it has an MS branding. You hurt all of us that way. We need it to work first and get established, then we can bicker over the software.
It's too bad you gave up. Thanks for the link though. I wouldn't argue the google project is good and cool and easy to use, but the Nasa project is many many times more rich and featured thatn the google viewer. Perhaps it's the depth of the available content in the Nasa project that makes it so much larger, but it is worth the extra effort of installing it. It is really cool. The best world viewer I have seen to date. I don't care if it's MS driven or whatever, the content in it makes it a worthwhile investment in the time it takes to download it. Fancy, EULA's? I only had to update the Directx portion of managed code, it took a few seconds and then install the application, seven clicks as I counted it. GTA San Andreas was a harder install than that as it was eight clicks. George Jetson syndrome maybe?
So causing the average wage to increase, which fell through the floor after the dot com crash is a bad thing? I personally would enjoy getting paid more again.
Hiring up a boat load of talent to cause a tech labor shortage is a bad thing too? I think there are a lot of unemployed and underemployed techies out there who would benefit greatly by this.
The perspective here seems to be from a corporate standpoint, one that doesn't want to pay it's people any more money and wants to be able to replace them easily at a whim. I would hardly call Google evil for that.
"why not just use seagulls with lasers on their heads?"
hmm. Why not replace their heads with lasers. Of course that might cause a serious problem with the danged ones that hang around McDonalds and come after your fries.
"Mommy! Mommy! That seagull just took all my fingers off!"
"CX717 can temporarily alleviate the effects of prolonged periods of sleep deprivation"
The statement above is from the article also. I find the use of the word "reversal" and "temporary" relief from in direct contradiction of each other. Which is it? Much of the article is dedicated to describing the effects as similar to existing drugs and stimulants. So what is the point then?
Closed door Cortex Pharmaceuticals corporate meeting: "Yea! If we repackage caffeine, give it a cool name and call it a prescription drug, we can collect insurance dollars and charge 10,000 times what you pay at your local truckstop" "Good work team! We can all collect our six figure bonuses now for finding a new way to scam the public out of money."
Are pharmaceutical companies the tobacco companies of tomorrow or is it the other way around? I forget.;)
What is the sense of titling the movie in english if if all of the script/speech inside is giberish(ie unknown foreign language)? Secondly, I personally love to watch foreign language movies so I can miss everything that is going on in the movie because I have to read subtitles, NOT! Even some lousy japanese voiceovers would have been better than that crap.
Interesting presumption, but it's wrong. How do you think they plan on getting the broadband carrier frequencies to your home? A transformer doesn't effect the frequency at all. voltages are effected by a (power) transformer, not frequencies. It's basic electrical.
What no one talks about and most people don't realize is that this is going to raise the number of KW's (Kilowatt Hours) you are using/getting charged for in your home. It might be a small difference, but spread over the large number of customers and time, it will be huge. The only way to stop the problem is for the power companies to invest in filters for each and every customer to chop the carrier frequency off the top of the power being delivered. That's simply not going to happen. The companies have purposefully kept this issue out of the public eye so that they do not have to make that investment.
What am I talking about? It's related to what is called 'power factor'. When your devices that you use in your home consume power in a way that causes the phase of the sine wave to shift (lag), even slightly, your 'in-home' power becomes slightly out of phase with the power being delivered. This in turn causes you to consume more power as the current rises to bring the out of phase voltage in line with the delivered voltage. The issue is most generally caused by induction devices, such as motors. Factories and such will most always install capacitor banks to offset the induction induced phase shift and therefore keep their power consumption in check.
How does broadband over power lines effect your total consumption? Well, unlike a simple induction compensation issue, you cannot simply add capacitance to overcome the problem. The 'dirty' power being delivery will cause many of your devices in your home to run slightly more inefficiently, causing them to lag slightly farther behind the delivered phase of the power coming into your home. On an individual appliance basis, perhaps hardly noticable, on a total home basis, noticable at the least. Power supplies will have to work a bit harder to 'clean' the incoming power. Blenders (higher speed motors) will have a slighly harder time keeping their rotors in sync with their induction fields. Slight as it may be, over time you will pay more, unless you can get them to clean up that power before it hits you meter.
In short, if they are allowed to proceed, it's another win win for the power companies. They sell more power, reagrdless of whether you purchase or use the broadband and if you do purchase the broadband, more revenue coming into their pockets. Most people won't even realize they have been hoodwinked.
I hope places like Six Flags latch onto this stuff. (I did get to see it before the site went down). The projected image looks much more solid than I would have guessed it would be. That's good news. Maybe now Rollercoasters and such can have a whole new level of fear and excitement added to them. Imagine hurtling down that drop at 120mph, right toward what appears to be a solid wall, no coaster tracks veering off to one side to ease your mind. Or perhaps a person standing in front of your car as you careen toward it. Maybe (holographic) people flying out of the car ahead of you as you careen around a bend. Such cool and nasty fearful things we could do to scare the pants of people now.
"I do hold a degree(s), in the field in which I work"
I'm confused by your sentence above... have you forgotten whether or not you had more than one degree?"
Easily explained. It's one of those situations that no matter how you say it, someone will say you did so incorrectly. If you earn a Bachelors degree in Engineering and then later earn a Masters in Computer Science (without gaining a Bachelors of CS first). Some would say you hold a Masters in CS and ignore the fact there is also a Bachelor's also, others would argue that it is two degrees, because the Masters does not necessarily have to be based in the same curriculum as the Bachelors. So I wrote it in a fashion that I thought would perhaps satisfy most of both groups. Apparently you are not one of them.
"why is research only valid if it comes from an academic institution?"
I am not sure either how this thought process became so prevalent in the US. It seems that unless you are backed by or hold some sort of certificate of authority from an academic institution, you don't get a chance or the work you do is dismissed as untrustworthy. That is true these days on so many levels, it's scary. Even when you have a hard and fast track record of out-performing academically backed or educated institutions or individuals, the performance is dismissed by many. Is it because those who are 'attached' are threatened in some way? Is it so hard to believe that people and institutions can succeed and think and prosper without the assistance or help of academia? We as a society are severely hobbling our progress by doing this. Many of our greatest thinkers and inventors and scientists in this country (and the world) were actually non-degreed or had immense difficulty and or failures with the academic systems. An academic education or academic backing is simply there to provide an extra step toward success, nothing more. Lack of it is not an indicator of not having the ability to be successful at all. Far, far too many people seem to look at it in the reverse light that it was never intended to be viewed.
BTW- If you think this is a rant by a non-degreed individual, non-post graduate individual, you are wrong. I do hold a degree(s), in the field in which I work, and I feel that it has little or no bearing on my ability to perform my tasks successfully. I work with people every day who have a higher level of education or the same level from a more prestigious institution than I, and I find many of them, well, quite frankly, stupid. I also find many of the people who have succeeded, without the help or backing of academic institutions have a greater demonstrated ability to harness the information presented to them and make efficient use of it. They had to get where they are.
Oh, I hear you loud and clear. I do chose to shop at stores that do not require me to become a member of some club to get there discount prices. It grates on my endlessly that stores do not see fit to give me their best prices simply because I would choose to shop there. If that is their policy, then I choose not to. I do not use credit cards, at all. and I do not have any store memberships, right down to sam's club and walmart. I do challenge this activity on all levels and am not hypocritical in my activities and practices. It is the apathy of the public that allows business to track our movements and purchases, it short giving away their freedom. For what? A discount that they should be given anyways for spending their hard earned cash with that vendor to begin with. I understand you are being sarcastic and merely pointing out what most people fail to see. I do however see it myself and choose not to particiapte. I have nothing to hide, but I am not going to freely give my personal information away. I think these practices on businesses part skew the very information they are trying to collect to begin with. HOw can you say that I prefer Brand x bread if I am forced to do my shopping at store A that only sells brand x at that store. It's not the case. If I shopped at store b then I might buy brand y instead. They skew their own efforts to understand their shoppers with their 'caging' of my ability to choose freely. So to what end? Only to gather my personel inforamion to no real benefit to them in the end. If more people understood what was really happening, I would hazard to guess more people would also opt out of the game as I have.
I feel so sorry for the advertisers, NOT! They can't track my buying habits and see what sites I frequent. Too f'ing bad! If they can't learn to keep stats on their end of the machine (server side), then perhaps they need better programmers and should start paying their own staff better. There is absolutely no need for an advertiser to keep information on MY machine unless they are trying to track me personally. That is over the limit, out of bounds, in my book. Cookies are great for login information and per session information containers as is noted in a number of comments here, but when advertisers abuse them by tracking my personal and cross session information, they create a problem. They made their own bed, now they have to deal with it. I find it hilarious that they are whining about not being able to try individual users and trying to spin it as a bad thing for users for them to lose this ability. They don't need personal/individual information. They can use their server side information just fine.
The music recording industry has a headlock on that as they promise huge rewards to artists who sign exclusive contracts with them. That leaves the consumers out in the cold as far as forcing a change. It's a lose lose situation in that case for consumers. The TV industry isn't setup that way though. Perhaps to their own dismay right now. I hope we don't see protectionist actions on their parts to change that as I think much of the consumer base is pretty apathetic and will remain so as long as they get their 'free' broadcast tv. Tivo and the like, tackles that in a unique way right now, simply by allowing you to shift your viewing times. As long as they don't raise the ire of the broadcasters too much (by making it too easy to skip the comercial content), they will have a medium to play with and a wedge to start them moving don a change in how content is provided. Tivo is taking the right direction here, in following that 'crack' so to speak.
As far as Real Estate Brokers go, I agree. There are methods to deal with them, but they are expensive in the sense that it takes a great deal of time and effort on both the buyers and sellers side to overcome the hurdles. Thats both in the information and salable prices realms. I bought my current home without any Real Estate Broker involvement. That saved thousands on both sides, mine and the sellers. The unavoidable cost though is with the vulture lawyers who you are forced to hire to write up and file all of the horrendous legal documents required by the convoluted laws we now have. That alone cost 4 figures. Enough to make you sick. Without it though, you play financial jeopardy and open yourself up to losing that high dollar item (home) you are purchase. I could go into othe naked rape that lending institutions present, but that is a whole other rant. They rape the poor and middle class, whereas the wealth can avoid the triple dip (you will pay an average of three times the sale price of your home over the course of a loan from a lender) that the banks take from you. Out laws and economy is set up to punish those with little or no cash and greatly reward those who have deep pockets. We haven't any hope of changing that either.
Further more the numbers you are using, you are using wrong. Their overall balance sheet isn't great, but that is a snapshot of past losses included. No one is argueing it hasn't been an uphill battle for them, but they are obviously quickly overcoming those previous losses. The only thing that can stop thier growth now is customers turning away from their service and that is clearly not the case as thier own growth numbers show. As long as that continues, companies like ESPN are going to have to bow to concerns such as Tivo presents. The number you show support my case and not yours.
"They've been in the black for the last three years."
You were arguing they hadn't turned a profit. Your statement says, "in the black" which means no red ink or loss. By your own link the number says 15.80M of positive gross profit. They also show 35%+ of revenue growth. Any company would give their eye teeth for that. You still miss the point though. Content creators are at the disposal of customer demand. When customers start demanding their services in this method, then they will also have to bow to the delivery engines offerings, and that is lower profit for the content creators. They make a huge profit now, so some will likely be willing to accept lower profits so that the can keep their audience market share. Those that don't will be left to a smaller and smaller audience as time goes forward. Any other view is simply not accepting reality
You need an economics course. Once ESPN losses even a portion of their market share, they won't be a ble to pay the big dollars for those contracts. They won't be the only one in that boat. You can never conquer a market from the top down unless you have massive massive capital. Even MS would have to stretch it in this arena. Tivo will have to cause the people looking for the side sports stuff and sportscenter style programming to come to them. That can be done with a number of small start-ups you want audience more than dollars. Once places like ESPN lose those viewers, they will lose commercial dollars and the cascade begins (can't pay as much for big sport contracts). The eventuallity is that it is going to have to change, and it will change from the bottom up, not the top down. Even Rupert Murdoc will tell you that. He tried with all of his massive dollars behind him and still doesn't have the control he wanted.
Pay an extra fee to access the downloads? I am not sure where you got that from. YOu also completely missed the point about ESPN and such. The push will come from the other way around. When ESPN realizes that they cannot continue to gouge to sell their services, their expectations will have to be lowered. You are even more misinformed in that tivo has not shown a proit, they have, abliet small, but they are obviously on the right track.
The article suggests that the service will not survive if it cannot present a better financial prospect to the big dogs in the game who are earning more money with the current commercial driven market. History in capitalism denotes a different reality however. The success of the service will depend on whether the big dogs are threatened by delivery of services by companies who are willing to accept a lesser profit. This is how capitalism is supposed to work. Introducing a better technology that people want for less money. They use ESPN as an example as to why it would fail unless they can generate more dollars to attract players like ESPN. When a sports delivery service, that cannot reach the audience they they want, is willing to earn a smaller profit signs on with this and people get the information they want from the smaller service, ESPN will start to feel some real pain as their market share dwindles. They would then be the ones to be forced to adopt the new delivery service, despite the lower profits, to survive themselves. The only power ESPN has in this case is to try to keep people paying the higher fees by intimidation and doom casting at Tivo and the likes. In the long run ESPN wand their buddies may very well be forced to play the cheaper game we as consumers actually want. ESPN and other large commercial driven providers are not goig to buy in. We as consumers have to send the message that 'homey don't play that no more'
" Microsoft office:
+15,000 bribes
-0 complaints from others for not being able to read MS office files.
-5,000 MS government subsidized licenses
-10,000 crashes in windows XP
sum +-0
staroffice:
+0 bribes
-5,000 complaints from others for not being able to read MS office files.
-0 licenses
-10,000 crashes in windoze XP
sum -15,000 "
Can't you see? He is a windows lover. He is pointing out that it is cheaper to run windows, because everyone knows the brides don't exist nor do the subsidies. So he is using purposefully and obviously subversive math to prove, in a round about way, that windows is better. Sneeky windows lovers are the worst.
" If the author's point was to show how Google can be used to invade privacy,"
I don't believe there is any question about that. Showing how google can be used to in thaqt regard was the whole intent IMHO. The hissy fit only came into play because of who was chosen as the target, the big man at Google. I love the Google Search engine (so far) but think this is a political game that does not suit them and is frankly wrong on Google's part. That is whaty a good search engine should do, bring together all of the publically available information regarding the target of your search.
"Or is he just afraid people will learn he likes Elton John."
lol, yea and his music too! (did I say that out loud?);)
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly don't care who's DRM scheme it is. I hat eto see this type of lending program fail. With publishers recent push to keep electronic version out of the hands of more than one person, it seems to me that they are backtracking on long established practice. I can always purchase book and when I am done with it, I can give it to a friend or family member and they can read it and so on. Now with Digital books, because of the new scheme, If I purchase one, I am the only person who can ever read it. I cannot lend it to someone or donate it a library (well there are a couple of ebooks donation programs, but they are difficult to use and you never own the book). To see it work from the other way around, a library purchasing the ebook and allowing many people to read it, is wonderful and should be fostered, no matter who's DRM scheme is used. Bickering of what schemes is only goign to play into the hands of publishers. I hate to see people state they will never use it simmply because it has an MS branding. You hurt all of us that way. We need it to work first and get established, then we can bicker over the software.
" If it took you seven seconds, you clearly didn't read the EULA. "
And you clearly didn't read my post as I said seven clicks, not seven seconds.
It's too bad you gave up. Thanks for the link though. I wouldn't argue the google project is good and cool and easy to use, but the Nasa project is many many times more rich and featured thatn the google viewer. Perhaps it's the depth of the available content in the Nasa project that makes it so much larger, but it is worth the extra effort of installing it. It is really cool. The best world viewer I have seen to date. I don't care if it's MS driven or whatever, the content in it makes it a worthwhile investment in the time it takes to download it. Fancy, EULA's? I only had to update the Directx portion of managed code, it took a few seconds and then install the application, seven clicks as I counted it. GTA San Andreas was a harder install than that as it was eight clicks. George Jetson syndrome maybe?
Those darned forgien language anti-virus signature updates never seem to work right.
So causing the average wage to increase, which fell through the floor after the dot com crash is a bad thing? I personally would enjoy getting paid more again.
Hiring up a boat load of talent to cause a tech labor shortage is a bad thing too? I think there are a lot of unemployed and underemployed techies out there who would benefit greatly by this.
The perspective here seems to be from a corporate standpoint, one that doesn't want to pay it's people any more money and wants to be able to replace them easily at a whim. I would hardly call Google evil for that.
"why not just use seagulls with lasers on their heads?"
hmm. Why not replace their heads with lasers. Of course that might cause a serious problem with the danged ones that hang around McDonalds and come after your fries.
"Mommy! Mommy! That seagull just took all my fingers off!"
"CX717 can temporarily alleviate the effects of prolonged periods of sleep deprivation"
;)
The statement above is from the article also. I find the use of the word "reversal" and "temporary" relief from in direct contradiction of each other. Which is it? Much of the article is dedicated to describing the effects as similar to existing drugs and stimulants. So what is the point then?
Closed door Cortex Pharmaceuticals corporate meeting: "Yea! If we repackage caffeine, give it a cool name and call it a prescription drug, we can collect insurance dollars and charge 10,000 times what you pay at your local truckstop"
"Good work team! We can all collect our six figure bonuses now for finding a new way to scam the public out of money."
Are pharmaceutical companies the tobacco companies of tomorrow or is it the other way around? I forget.
"Well that's a problem for you Americans"
;)
Echo, echo, echo. Isn't that what I said?
"guess what - people outside the US actually have their own languages!"
Perhaps if I hadn't made it past Kindergarden, I would not have realized that for myself. I am so glad you addressed that issue.
"FYI it's in Finnish as in Finland"
And I always thought that was a fish, not a country, gosh!
What is the sense of titling the movie in english if if all of the script/speech inside is giberish(ie unknown foreign language)? Secondly, I personally love to watch foreign language movies so I can miss everything that is going on in the movie because I have to read subtitles, NOT! Even some lousy japanese voiceovers would have been better than that crap.
Interesting presumption, but it's wrong. How do you think they plan on getting the broadband carrier frequencies to your home? A transformer doesn't effect the frequency at all. voltages are effected by a (power) transformer, not frequencies. It's basic electrical.
What no one talks about and most people don't realize is that this is going to raise the number of KW's (Kilowatt Hours) you are using/getting charged for in your home. It might be a small difference, but spread over the large number of customers and time, it will be huge. The only way to stop the problem is for the power companies to invest in filters for each and every customer to chop the carrier frequency off the top of the power being delivered. That's simply not going to happen. The companies have purposefully kept this issue out of the public eye so that they do not have to make that investment.
What am I talking about? It's related to what is called 'power factor'. When your devices that you use in your home consume power in a way that causes the phase of the sine wave to shift (lag), even slightly, your 'in-home' power becomes slightly out of phase with the power being delivered. This in turn causes you to consume more power as the current rises to bring the out of phase voltage in line with the delivered voltage. The issue is most generally caused by induction devices, such as motors. Factories and such will most always install capacitor banks to offset the induction induced phase shift and therefore keep their power consumption in check.
How does broadband over power lines effect your total consumption? Well, unlike a simple induction compensation issue, you cannot simply add capacitance to overcome the problem. The 'dirty' power being delivery will cause many of your devices in your home to run slightly more inefficiently, causing them to lag slightly farther behind the delivered phase of the power coming into your home. On an individual appliance basis, perhaps hardly noticable, on a total home basis, noticable at the least. Power supplies will have to work a bit harder to 'clean' the incoming power. Blenders (higher speed motors) will have a slighly harder time keeping their rotors in sync with their induction fields. Slight as it may be, over time you will pay more, unless you can get them to clean up that power before it hits you meter.
In short, if they are allowed to proceed, it's another win win for the power companies. They sell more power, reagrdless of whether you purchase or use the broadband and if you do purchase the broadband, more revenue coming into their pockets. Most people won't even realize they have been hoodwinked.
I saw my mom having sex once, I never saw the same after that. Is that the same thing?
I hope places like Six Flags latch onto this stuff. (I did get to see it before the site went down). The projected image looks much more solid than I would have guessed it would be. That's good news. Maybe now Rollercoasters and such can have a whole new level of fear and excitement added to them. Imagine hurtling down that drop at 120mph, right toward what appears to be a solid wall, no coaster tracks veering off to one side to ease your mind. Or perhaps a person standing in front of your car as you careen toward it. Maybe (holographic) people flying out of the car ahead of you as you careen around a bend. Such cool and nasty fearful things we could do to scare the pants of people now.
"I do hold a degree(s), in the field in which I work"
I'm confused by your sentence above... have you forgotten whether or not you had more than one degree?"
Easily explained. It's one of those situations that no matter how you say it, someone will say you did so incorrectly. If you earn a Bachelors degree in Engineering and then later earn a Masters in Computer Science (without gaining a Bachelors of CS first). Some would say you hold a Masters in CS and ignore the fact there is also a Bachelor's also, others would argue that it is two degrees, because the Masters does not necessarily have to be based in the same curriculum as the Bachelors. So I wrote it in a fashion that I thought would perhaps satisfy most of both groups. Apparently you are not one of them.
"why is research only valid if it comes from an academic institution?"
I am not sure either how this thought process became so prevalent in the US. It seems that unless you are backed by or hold some sort of certificate of authority from an academic institution, you don't get a chance or the work you do is dismissed as untrustworthy. That is true these days on so many levels, it's scary. Even when you have a hard and fast track record of out-performing academically backed or educated institutions or individuals, the performance is dismissed by many. Is it because those who are 'attached' are threatened in some way? Is it so hard to believe that people and institutions can succeed and think and prosper without the assistance or help of academia? We as a society are severely hobbling our progress by doing this. Many of our greatest thinkers and inventors and scientists in this country (and the world) were actually non-degreed or had immense difficulty and or failures with the academic systems. An academic education or academic backing is simply there to provide an extra step toward success, nothing more. Lack of it is not an indicator of not having the ability to be successful at all. Far, far too many people seem to look at it in the reverse light that it was never intended to be viewed.
BTW- If you think this is a rant by a non-degreed individual, non-post graduate individual, you are wrong. I do hold a degree(s), in the field in which I work, and I feel that it has little or no bearing on my ability to perform my tasks successfully. I work with people every day who have a higher level of education or the same level from a more prestigious institution than I, and I find many of them, well, quite frankly, stupid. I also find many of the people who have succeeded, without the help or backing of academic institutions have a greater demonstrated ability to harness the information presented to them and make efficient use of it. They had to get where they are.
Oh, I hear you loud and clear. I do chose to shop at stores that do not require me to become a member of some club to get there discount prices. It grates on my endlessly that stores do not see fit to give me their best prices simply because I would choose to shop there. If that is their policy, then I choose not to. I do not use credit cards, at all. and I do not have any store memberships, right down to sam's club and walmart. I do challenge this activity on all levels and am not hypocritical in my activities and practices. It is the apathy of the public that allows business to track our movements and purchases, it short giving away their freedom. For what? A discount that they should be given anyways for spending their hard earned cash with that vendor to begin with. I understand you are being sarcastic and merely pointing out what most people fail to see. I do however see it myself and choose not to particiapte. I have nothing to hide, but I am not going to freely give my personal information away. I think these practices on businesses part skew the very information they are trying to collect to begin with. HOw can you say that I prefer Brand x bread if I am forced to do my shopping at store A that only sells brand x at that store. It's not the case. If I shopped at store b then I might buy brand y instead. They skew their own efforts to understand their shoppers with their 'caging' of my ability to choose freely. So to what end? Only to gather my personel inforamion to no real benefit to them in the end. If more people understood what was really happening, I would hazard to guess more people would also opt out of the game as I have.
I feel so sorry for the advertisers, NOT! They can't track my buying habits and see what sites I frequent. Too f'ing bad! If they can't learn to keep stats on their end of the machine (server side), then perhaps they need better programmers and should start paying their own staff better. There is absolutely no need for an advertiser to keep information on MY machine unless they are trying to track me personally. That is over the limit, out of bounds, in my book. Cookies are great for login information and per session information containers as is noted in a number of comments here, but when advertisers abuse them by tracking my personal and cross session information, they create a problem. They made their own bed, now they have to deal with it. I find it hilarious that they are whining about not being able to try individual users and trying to spin it as a bad thing for users for them to lose this ability. They don't need personal/individual information. They can use their server side information just fine.
The music recording industry has a headlock on that as they promise huge rewards to artists who sign exclusive contracts with them. That leaves the consumers out in the cold as far as forcing a change. It's a lose lose situation in that case for consumers. The TV industry isn't setup that way though. Perhaps to their own dismay right now. I hope we don't see protectionist actions on their parts to change that as I think much of the consumer base is pretty apathetic and will remain so as long as they get their 'free' broadcast tv. Tivo and the like, tackles that in a unique way right now, simply by allowing you to shift your viewing times. As long as they don't raise the ire of the broadcasters too much (by making it too easy to skip the comercial content), they will have a medium to play with and a wedge to start them moving don a change in how content is provided. Tivo is taking the right direction here, in following that 'crack' so to speak.
As far as Real Estate Brokers go, I agree. There are methods to deal with them, but they are expensive in the sense that it takes a great deal of time and effort on both the buyers and sellers side to overcome the hurdles. Thats both in the information and salable prices realms. I bought my current home without any Real Estate Broker involvement. That saved thousands on both sides, mine and the sellers. The unavoidable cost though is with the vulture lawyers who you are forced to hire to write up and file all of the horrendous legal documents required by the convoluted laws we now have. That alone cost 4 figures. Enough to make you sick. Without it though, you play financial jeopardy and open yourself up to losing that high dollar item (home) you are purchase. I could go into othe naked rape that lending institutions present, but that is a whole other rant. They rape the poor and middle class, whereas the wealth can avoid the triple dip (you will pay an average of three times the sale price of your home over the course of a loan from a lender) that the banks take from you. Out laws and economy is set up to punish those with little or no cash and greatly reward those who have deep pockets. We haven't any hope of changing that either.
Further more the numbers you are using, you are using wrong. Their overall balance sheet isn't great, but that is a snapshot of past losses included. No one is argueing it hasn't been an uphill battle for them, but they are obviously quickly overcoming those previous losses. The only thing that can stop thier growth now is customers turning away from their service and that is clearly not the case as thier own growth numbers show. As long as that continues, companies like ESPN are going to have to bow to concerns such as Tivo presents. The number you show support my case and not yours.
"They've been in the black for the last three years."
You were arguing they hadn't turned a profit. Your statement says, "in the black" which means no red ink or loss. By your own link the number says 15.80M of positive gross profit. They also show 35%+ of revenue growth. Any company would give their eye teeth for that. You still miss the point though. Content creators are at the disposal of customer demand. When customers start demanding their services in this method, then they will also have to bow to the delivery engines offerings, and that is lower profit for the content creators. They make a huge profit now, so some will likely be willing to accept lower profits so that the can keep their audience market share. Those that don't will be left to a smaller and smaller audience as time goes forward. Any other view is simply not accepting reality
You need an economics course. Once ESPN losses even a portion of their market share, they won't be a ble to pay the big dollars for those contracts. They won't be the only one in that boat. You can never conquer a market from the top down unless you have massive massive capital. Even MS would have to stretch it in this arena. Tivo will have to cause the people looking for the side sports stuff and sportscenter style programming to come to them. That can be done with a number of small start-ups you want audience more than dollars. Once places like ESPN lose those viewers, they will lose commercial dollars and the cascade begins (can't pay as much for big sport contracts). The eventuallity is that it is going to have to change, and it will change from the bottom up, not the top down. Even Rupert Murdoc will tell you that. He tried with all of his massive dollars behind him and still doesn't have the control he wanted.
Pay an extra fee to access the downloads? I am not sure where you got that from. YOu also completely missed the point about ESPN and such. The push will come from the other way around. When ESPN realizes that they cannot continue to gouge to sell their services, their expectations will have to be lowered. You are even more misinformed in that tivo has not shown a proit, they have, abliet small, but they are obviously on the right track.
The article suggests that the service will not survive if it cannot present a better financial prospect to the big dogs in the game who are earning more money with the current commercial driven market. History in capitalism denotes a different reality however. The success of the service will depend on whether the big dogs are threatened by delivery of services by companies who are willing to accept a lesser profit. This is how capitalism is supposed to work. Introducing a better technology that people want for less money. They use ESPN as an example as to why it would fail unless they can generate more dollars to attract players like ESPN. When a sports delivery service, that cannot reach the audience they they want, is willing to earn a smaller profit signs on with this and people get the information they want from the smaller service, ESPN will start to feel some real pain as their market share dwindles. They would then be the ones to be forced to adopt the new delivery service, despite the lower profits, to survive themselves. The only power ESPN has in this case is to try to keep people paying the higher fees by intimidation and doom casting at Tivo and the likes. In the long run ESPN wand their buddies may very well be forced to play the cheaper game we as consumers actually want. ESPN and other large commercial driven providers are not goig to buy in. We as consumers have to send the message that 'homey don't play that no more'
" Microsoft office:
+15,000 bribes
-0 complaints from others for not being able to read MS office files.
-5,000 MS government subsidized licenses
-10,000 crashes in windows XP
sum +-0
staroffice:
+0 bribes
-5,000 complaints from others for not being able to read MS office files.
-0 licenses
-10,000 crashes in windoze XP
sum -15,000
"
Can't you see? He is a windows lover. He is pointing out that it is cheaper to run windows, because everyone knows the brides don't exist nor do the subsidies. So he is using purposefully and obviously subversive math to prove, in a round about way, that windows is better. Sneeky windows lovers are the worst.
" If the author's point was to show how Google can be used to invade privacy,"
;)
I don't believe there is any question about that. Showing how google can be used to in thaqt regard was the whole intent IMHO. The hissy fit only came into play because of who was chosen as the target, the big man at Google. I love the Google Search engine (so far) but think this is a political game that does not suit them and is frankly wrong on Google's part. That is whaty a good search engine should do, bring together all of the publically available information regarding the target of your search.
"Or is he just afraid people will learn he likes Elton John."
lol, yea and his music too! (did I say that out loud?)