16 year old company has had two profitable years--both due to patent settlements. It has half the subscribers it had ten years ago and four times the employees. It may be a great device but it has always been a lousy business for post-ipo investors.
Tivo has been a financial disaster from the start for everyone but the founders, ipo underwriters and employees. QPlay repeats that pattern but spares public shareholders' pocketbooks.
...a perfectly engineered wing would break at 150.000001% Anything stronger is over-engineered and represents an unnecessary weight penalty. (Other versions of the 777 video make this same point; the engineers were sweating the fact that the wing did NOT break at 151, 152 or 153) The reason for breaking the 787 wing is to prove that it is not over-engineered. The problem is the geometry of the carbon fiber wing flexion may allow the tips to flex and touch without representing meaningful aerodynamic loading. Once you've pulled the tips past vertical you've entered he realm of the hoop wing and exited the realm of meaningful testing and data.
That's the one. And look at the Media Switch portion of the claim. That is the key to TiVo--Replay did not have one. TiVo's original Media Switch ASIC could split and remix 8 streams, deleting and inserting content as it went. Recording a single stream is easy, especially if you are devoting a general purpose CPU, dedicated video chip and a half gig of RAM to the task. Producing a consumer-grade device that does that for under $99 is hard. Doing that for a device that can record and play back simultaneously two or more analog streams...requires a Media Switch. That's what the battle is all about. EchoStar could have removed that part from their device and the suit would have been over years ago. Only that would cripple the device beyond what consumers expect. Single stream DVRs are easy to engineer, and do not violate TiVo's patents. They're just useless for what people want.
So much passion, so little understanding
on
TiVo to Offer SDK
·
· Score: 1
TiVo's TCO has not budged in 5 years...still ~$500-600 assuming the box 'dies' between 3-4 years as it is designed to do. Yeah, then you can hack in new drives, but joe consumer can not.
TiVo's value proposition has not changed since March 31, 1999 when the first box shipped (to Mike Ramsey's house) and it 'beat RePlay' to market by 6 weeks. It time shifts, FF's through commercials and schedules season passes...the rest is fluff that does not sell units.
Everything TiVo does today except ToGo was in the first box or on a list that Howard Look carried around on a clipboard in 1999.
TiVo has spent about $500/customer of investor money.
TiVo has no content. TiVo re-sells Tribune Media Services scheduling information for $13/mo...which is more than your local newspaper charges you to have that and a newspaper delivered to you door by a human.
TiVo still makes boxes on which it loses money.
TiVo employs 200-300 engineers at ~$130K/yr...and goes about that far in the red each year.
So, now they think the developer community will do fir them what they could not do for themselves? Make TiVo profitable.
No amount of good ideas will counteract bad business decisions at the top of the company.
Like everything else with TiVo since the product first shipped, Great Idea...executed 5 years too late.
Ah, someone who gets it!
They have always lost money on the boxes. The man who drove the cost of design down, TaWei Chen, left the company last year with a license to make Tivos run a service in China.
The service itself actually takes fewer than 5 people to administer.
Now ask yourself what the ~300 engineers on the payroll have been doing in the 5 years since launch? Bug fixes?
Desktop searching is less useful than you might imagine. Truly losing track of a local document is not as common as, say, losing track of an image--now there's a hard search problem!
This is where Google has the real edge over Copernic: http://www.copernic.com/ By integrating with their browser tools, Google causes every GDS search to automatically incorporate desktop results, rolled-up, at the top of the returned Google page. You see *both* local and global results for everything you look-up.
This reinforces the utility of local search every time you use Google, where Copernic just sits there on the taskbar, waiting for the occasional use. So does GDS, but I'll wager you'll rarely use it.
Compared to the number of times you web search and are surprised to see local hits incorporated in the return, local search will be insignificant.
Reinforcement of utility is important to adoption. Even if you don't mean to, getting local drive results every time you Google will feel gratifying.
Advice to Copernic: sell out to Yahoo now.
That's right...I just put up an antenna and--can you believe it--started receiving network broadcast HDTV in 1080i with a 12 foot diagonal image FOR FREE! First wireless networking, now wireless television. What will those clever technologists think of next?
Sure, I needed some equipment: Try a $900 InFocus X1 projector, a $350 DaLite Screen, a $400 MIT MDR-200 HDTV tuner and a Terk-55 antenna. That leaves me $300 towards an all-in-one home theater system...or HDTiVo some day...assuming I only want to pay 20% of what Shelly Palmer did.
This is not about the broadcast flag and only vaguely about fair use and your rights as a consumer.
This is about TiVo establishing their right to redistribute content ths same way your local cable provider redistributes you local broadcast station. CATV tested these limits in the midwest in the fifties with tall towers and local coax. Ted Turner broke the mold with TBS and CNN making Atlanta a global distribution hub. TiVo is taking this to the Internet, as a new means of redistributing content. They just push the cable headend out to your TiVo box and let you serve your friends and your common programming interests. Thus the requirement for subscriber ID's. TiVo needs to know who, anonymously aggregated, is watching what--because, like all television networks, they will rise or fall as a business by proving market demographics, both to advertizers and to content vendors who will want to get on their network--to distribuet movies. Don't be confused by the appeal to the FCC--this is part of TiVo's on again-off again struggle to find a business model they can defend.
I assume if you resize the shared window the ghosting only occupies the resized window--thus, addressing another common user difficulty: whose desktop/app am I looking at? Mine or yours?
I actually just glossed over a major issue--are we sharing a desktop or an application? Once you get over the thrill of empowerment, all sorts of security and privacy issues percolate into consciousness. If you allow the user to decide, or switch modes, then de-conflicting the visual cues becomes imperative to avoiding confusion.
If I get this correctly--and it appears most everyone else does not--I see your alpha-blended image as if you were sitting in my place; similarly, you see mine. Not flipped, or virtualized, but 'reflected' as if we were sitting in each other's place.
Anyone who has worked developing and using and testing collaborative solutions will recognize that there is, potentially, a real AHA! here.
VNC, NetMeeting and WebEx and all that clever crap is limited or useless, except in the hands of sophisticated people doing support or in very narrowly defined lecture settings, because these applications all abstract the notion of the absent party.
You know I am moving the cursor on your machine because on your screen it has a red box around it, while I see an unboxed cursor. I may be talking to you over a voice channel, and we learn to abstract a collaborative session in our heads from voice and visual cues.
If you think ordinary mortals can learn and map that cue-based interaction to natural behavior so they can just work together on a document then you labor in ignorance.
The AHA! here is that the absent party is not abstracted, they are substituted via alpha-blending. Hard to say without seeing and feeling this is in action, but my hunch is this is literally a big step forward from the user perspective. People will get whom is doing what without confusion.
Contemporary marketing practice would argue UNC make the code open source but patent and license the cute little red finger-tracker-dealies for this use.
When the Bell system was broken up, the phone system's allocation scheme for area codes and prefix blocks was disrupted. Phone service providers were issued blocks of 10,000 phone numbers with a given prefix, from which they allocated local customers. There was no method for reclaiming unused portions of blocks from independent phone companies. So long as one number from a block remained in use, that prefix block could not be reallocated. THAT is why we suddenly needed new area codes--not because we had run out of unused phone numbers. At the time the new area codes were issued, the actual in service phone numbers comprised less than 50% of the available pool.
The first thing your TiVo does when it calls home to mother TiVo (via the modem) is a clock sync. Fix it or suffer...or watch more Fox TV--they time-shift all their programs to keep you from surfing.
'Norton' Commander was conceived of and written by John Socha, who was Chief Architect at Peter Norton (aka Betty Crocker) Computing and who is justifiably proud of this simple, elegant creation.
The Ashland Fiber Network (mentioned elsewhere) was proposed to cost $3.5M and take 3 years to build and become profitable. Despite warnings that the business projections were a pipe-dream, it was pushed through the city council. We are now 5 years in to the project. It is still not finished, has cost $10M, and has attracted a fraction of the projected users--in part due to aggressive pricing and upgrading by the competing cable company and inept marketing. The budget overuns finally belied the projections so plainly that they cost the AFN Manager his head. Pulling the last 100 ft. to each house has been contracted out. Ashland owns it's own power grid (the poles are public property) so right-of-way was no issue and going overground is easy. But much of the town has had utilities undergrounded, so the streets had to be cut to pull the fiber--underground customers got done last, and cost the most to install.
None of these are technical problems. Any business in town can have gigabit connectivity if it needs it, at agressive pricing, and homes get broadband at competitive pricing--bearing in mind the town still has to buy bulk OC connnectivity from the phone company to reach the backbone in nearby Medford.
AFN, after political wrangling, agreed to re-sell NET services through local ISPs, and thus avoided 'competing' with them. AFN sells t.v. direct--with a local, appointed committee arbitrating what content is appropriate to carry.
To date, no business has relocated here because of high-bandwidth connectivity...so the 'Economic Developement' argument remains...ummm...unsubstantiated. Of course it was great for the existing tech businesses; they got a public subsidy to improve connectivity and lower cost. Would you believe they all supported this?
Ah, yes, the schools got connected first and cheap or free--good politics as well as civic-mindedness there. The schools need more than bandwidth...but that is another non-technical issue.
Competition for cable tv subscribers forced prices down for 2 years, and helped people recover some of the tax investment. Now both AFN and Charter Cable are raising rates.
Check out Palo Alto...they tried and failed at this as a business.
Technically, this is quite do-able and the AFN guys could provide a wealth of information.
Just be careful what lies--er, marketing language--you use to promote the project. While it is easier, politically, to lie than to spend time persuading people of the benefits, lying will bite you in the ass eventually.
The point is, chips are not recycleable. Turning them back into sand and trace toxins--and let's not forget the clay, gold, aluminum, plastic and other packaging materials--does nothing for the entropy equation.
Once a chip stops being used, it is truly useless.
So, the justification for the disproportionate mass of consumables to finished goods must lie in the actual advantage conferred during a chip's useful life...plus some measure of belief to grease the skids of socializing cost and risk.
Actual advantage would manifest itself in entropic payback--do those chips help save labor? energy? time? enable a future where such savings are possible for more people?
Making chip-making clean is a technical problem. Making chips entropically worth the price is what keeps most Slashdotters in the chips.
Slashdot Mirror
...and 90,000 hours practicing. Still learning.
16 year old company has had two profitable years--both due to patent settlements. It has half the subscribers it had ten years ago and four times the employees. It may be a great device but it has always been a lousy business for post-ipo investors.
Tivo has been a financial disaster from the start for everyone but the founders, ipo underwriters and employees. QPlay repeats that pattern but spares public shareholders' pocketbooks.
Next time try googling before you post here.
...a perfectly engineered wing would break at 150.000001% Anything stronger is over-engineered and represents an unnecessary weight penalty. (Other versions of the 777 video make this same point; the engineers were sweating the fact that the wing did NOT break at 151, 152 or 153) The reason for breaking the 787 wing is to prove that it is not over-engineered. The problem is the geometry of the carbon fiber wing flexion may allow the tips to flex and touch without representing meaningful aerodynamic loading. Once you've pulled the tips past vertical you've entered he realm of the hoop wing and exited the realm of meaningful testing and data.
That's the one. And look at the Media Switch portion of the claim. That is the key to TiVo--Replay did not have one. TiVo's original Media Switch ASIC could split and remix 8 streams, deleting and inserting content as it went. Recording a single stream is easy, especially if you are devoting a general purpose CPU, dedicated video chip and a half gig of RAM to the task. Producing a consumer-grade device that does that for under $99 is hard. Doing that for a device that can record and play back simultaneously two or more analog streams...requires a Media Switch. That's what the battle is all about. EchoStar could have removed that part from their device and the suit would have been over years ago. Only that would cripple the device beyond what consumers expect. Single stream DVRs are easy to engineer, and do not violate TiVo's patents. They're just useless for what people want.
TiVo's TCO has not budged in 5 years...still ~$500-600 assuming the box 'dies' between 3-4 years as it is designed to do. Yeah, then you can hack in new drives, but joe consumer can not.
TiVo's value proposition has not changed since March 31, 1999 when the first box shipped (to Mike Ramsey's house) and it 'beat RePlay' to market by 6 weeks. It time shifts, FF's through commercials and schedules season passes...the rest is fluff that does not sell units.
Everything TiVo does today except ToGo was in the first box or on a list that Howard Look carried around on a clipboard in 1999.
TiVo has spent about $500/customer of investor money.
TiVo has no content. TiVo re-sells Tribune Media Services scheduling information for $13/mo...which is more than your local newspaper charges you to have that and a newspaper delivered to you door by a human.
TiVo still makes boxes on which it loses money.
TiVo employs 200-300 engineers at ~$130K/yr...and goes about that far in the red each year.
So, now they think the developer community will do fir them what they could not do for themselves? Make TiVo profitable.
No amount of good ideas will counteract bad business decisions at the top of the company.
Like everything else with TiVo since the product first shipped, Great Idea...executed 5 years too late.
Ah, someone who gets it! They have always lost money on the boxes. The man who drove the cost of design down, TaWei Chen, left the company last year with a license to make Tivos run a service in China. The service itself actually takes fewer than 5 people to administer. Now ask yourself what the ~300 engineers on the payroll have been doing in the 5 years since launch? Bug fixes?
Desktop searching is less useful than you might imagine. Truly losing track of a local document is not as common as, say, losing track of an image--now there's a hard search problem! This is where Google has the real edge over Copernic: http://www.copernic.com/ By integrating with their browser tools, Google causes every GDS search to automatically incorporate desktop results, rolled-up, at the top of the returned Google page. You see *both* local and global results for everything you look-up. This reinforces the utility of local search every time you use Google, where Copernic just sits there on the taskbar, waiting for the occasional use. So does GDS, but I'll wager you'll rarely use it. Compared to the number of times you web search and are surprised to see local hits incorporated in the return, local search will be insignificant. Reinforcement of utility is important to adoption. Even if you don't mean to, getting local drive results every time you Google will feel gratifying. Advice to Copernic: sell out to Yahoo now.
That's right...I just put up an antenna and--can you believe it--started receiving network broadcast HDTV in 1080i with a 12 foot diagonal image FOR FREE! First wireless networking, now wireless television. What will those clever technologists think of next? Sure, I needed some equipment: Try a $900 InFocus X1 projector, a $350 DaLite Screen, a $400 MIT MDR-200 HDTV tuner and a Terk-55 antenna. That leaves me $300 towards an all-in-one home theater system...or HDTiVo some day...assuming I only want to pay 20% of what Shelly Palmer did.
This is not about the broadcast flag and only vaguely about fair use and your rights as a consumer. This is about TiVo establishing their right to redistribute content ths same way your local cable provider redistributes you local broadcast station. CATV tested these limits in the midwest in the fifties with tall towers and local coax. Ted Turner broke the mold with TBS and CNN making Atlanta a global distribution hub. TiVo is taking this to the Internet, as a new means of redistributing content. They just push the cable headend out to your TiVo box and let you serve your friends and your common programming interests. Thus the requirement for subscriber ID's. TiVo needs to know who, anonymously aggregated, is watching what--because, like all television networks, they will rise or fall as a business by proving market demographics, both to advertizers and to content vendors who will want to get on their network--to distribuet movies. Don't be confused by the appeal to the FCC--this is part of TiVo's on again-off again struggle to find a business model they can defend.
I assume if you resize the shared window the ghosting only occupies the resized window--thus, addressing another common user difficulty: whose desktop/app am I looking at? Mine or yours? I actually just glossed over a major issue--are we sharing a desktop or an application? Once you get over the thrill of empowerment, all sorts of security and privacy issues percolate into consciousness. If you allow the user to decide, or switch modes, then de-conflicting the visual cues becomes imperative to avoiding confusion.
If I get this correctly--and it appears most everyone else does not--I see your alpha-blended image as if you were sitting in my place; similarly, you see mine. Not flipped, or virtualized, but 'reflected' as if we were sitting in each other's place. Anyone who has worked developing and using and testing collaborative solutions will recognize that there is, potentially, a real AHA! here. VNC, NetMeeting and WebEx and all that clever crap is limited or useless, except in the hands of sophisticated people doing support or in very narrowly defined lecture settings, because these applications all abstract the notion of the absent party. You know I am moving the cursor on your machine because on your screen it has a red box around it, while I see an unboxed cursor. I may be talking to you over a voice channel, and we learn to abstract a collaborative session in our heads from voice and visual cues. If you think ordinary mortals can learn and map that cue-based interaction to natural behavior so they can just work together on a document then you labor in ignorance. The AHA! here is that the absent party is not abstracted, they are substituted via alpha-blending. Hard to say without seeing and feeling this is in action, but my hunch is this is literally a big step forward from the user perspective. People will get whom is doing what without confusion. Contemporary marketing practice would argue UNC make the code open source but patent and license the cute little red finger-tracker-dealies for this use.
When the Bell system was broken up, the phone system's allocation scheme for area codes and prefix blocks was disrupted. Phone service providers were issued blocks of 10,000 phone numbers with a given prefix, from which they allocated local customers. There was no method for reclaiming unused portions of blocks from independent phone companies. So long as one number from a block remained in use, that prefix block could not be reallocated. THAT is why we suddenly needed new area codes--not because we had run out of unused phone numbers. At the time the new area codes were issued, the actual in service phone numbers comprised less than 50% of the available pool.
The first thing your TiVo does when it calls home to mother TiVo (via the modem) is a clock sync. Fix it or suffer...or watch more Fox TV--they time-shift all their programs to keep you from surfing.
'Norton' Commander was conceived of and written by John Socha, who was Chief Architect at Peter Norton (aka Betty Crocker) Computing and who is justifiably proud of this simple, elegant creation.
The Ashland Fiber Network (mentioned elsewhere) was proposed to cost $3.5M and take 3 years to build and become profitable. Despite warnings that the business projections were a pipe-dream, it was pushed through the city council. We are now 5 years in to the project. It is still not finished, has cost $10M, and has attracted a fraction of the projected users--in part due to aggressive pricing and upgrading by the competing cable company and inept marketing. The budget overuns finally belied the projections so plainly that they cost the AFN Manager his head. Pulling the last 100 ft. to each house has been contracted out. Ashland owns it's own power grid (the poles are public property) so right-of-way was no issue and going overground is easy. But much of the town has had utilities undergrounded, so the streets had to be cut to pull the fiber--underground customers got done last, and cost the most to install. None of these are technical problems. Any business in town can have gigabit connectivity if it needs it, at agressive pricing, and homes get broadband at competitive pricing--bearing in mind the town still has to buy bulk OC connnectivity from the phone company to reach the backbone in nearby Medford. AFN, after political wrangling, agreed to re-sell NET services through local ISPs, and thus avoided 'competing' with them. AFN sells t.v. direct--with a local, appointed committee arbitrating what content is appropriate to carry. To date, no business has relocated here because of high-bandwidth connectivity...so the 'Economic Developement' argument remains...ummm...unsubstantiated. Of course it was great for the existing tech businesses; they got a public subsidy to improve connectivity and lower cost. Would you believe they all supported this? Ah, yes, the schools got connected first and cheap or free--good politics as well as civic-mindedness there. The schools need more than bandwidth...but that is another non-technical issue. Competition for cable tv subscribers forced prices down for 2 years, and helped people recover some of the tax investment. Now both AFN and Charter Cable are raising rates. Check out Palo Alto...they tried and failed at this as a business. Technically, this is quite do-able and the AFN guys could provide a wealth of information. Just be careful what lies--er, marketing language--you use to promote the project. While it is easier, politically, to lie than to spend time persuading people of the benefits, lying will bite you in the ass eventually.
The point is, chips are not recycleable. Turning them back into sand and trace toxins--and let's not forget the clay, gold, aluminum, plastic and other packaging materials--does nothing for the entropy equation. Once a chip stops being used, it is truly useless. So, the justification for the disproportionate mass of consumables to finished goods must lie in the actual advantage conferred during a chip's useful life...plus some measure of belief to grease the skids of socializing cost and risk. Actual advantage would manifest itself in entropic payback--do those chips help save labor? energy? time? enable a future where such savings are possible for more people? Making chip-making clean is a technical problem. Making chips entropically worth the price is what keeps most Slashdotters in the chips.