apple does good things with its powers! Instead of taking cash to promote a CD, they only offer promotion in return for "exclusives" and discounts
This is similar to how Walmart delivers such good "value" - it demands discounts from suppliers desperate to get products on its shelf. In many cases, these discounts mean that a supplier is actually selling some items to Walmart at below cost. So how to maintain margins? Increase prices to other retailers. Effectively, Walmart is obtaining a cash subsidy from the supplier, and extracting it from other retailers.
This is also what itunes is doing by leveraging its strong retail presence to demand "discounts".
1 cm3/ of water is of course 1 gram, or 1 mL, a cube of water 1cm on each side which, when absorbing 1 calorie of energy, will exhibit a temperature raise of 1 Celsius.
Okay, so I listened to all of the conversation between a person who was quoted a price in cents/kilobyte, and several Verizon representatives, all of whom are so addled by reliance on their computer screens that they are unable to grasp that they are mis-quoting a price by one hundredfold by failing to convert between dollars and cents. Then it got me thinking about why they should find it so difficult to multiply and divide by 100. It's not that that can't perform the arithmetical calculation, it's just that they are experience a disconnect linking this operation with their intuition about how much something should cost. What we call "numbers" are in fact two different things: symbols that we manipulate using mechanical and representative operations, and sensations that we intuitively experience and comprehend.
Why should it be so difficult for these Verizon people, all apparently USians, to handle such a simple operation as taking powers of ten? I think it's to do with a lack of basic Metric education in the US. It seems obvious to me that in a culture where Metric conversion techniques are not routinely taught to schoolchildren, then the casual manipulation of powers of ten and powers of a hundred must become (when compared to other cultures) significantly less easy, common and apparently mind-numbingly abstruse and esoteric for a significant proportion of adults.
The unusual resistance of the U.S. to Metrication is both a symptom of and a driver of adult innumeracy.
Metric instills a basic intuition about powers of ten and orders of magnitude. Or at least, it will tend to, relative to indifferently scaled arbitrary measurements. Once you build this mental framework, it can be easily integrated into novel experiential learning.
I am unfortunately old enough to have begun primary school in a country using Imperial measurements that then switched to Metric. I can still recall being taught arithmetic as a young child, and being shown how to convert between ounces and pounds, and pounds and stone. That sucked, and made no sense.
Being indoctrinated into Metric within a few years reduced my cognitive load apppreciably, while enlarging my ability to estimate weights and measures. By exposing children to tanglible object weights such as 1g, 10g, 100g, 500g, 1kg, 5 kg and so on, one forms a consistent appreciation of mass. The same is true of learning distance.
I had to re-take basic physics and chemistry in a US university recently. I was quite shocked at how a significant proportion of the students had little conception of how much 1 ml was, or 10g, or 1m. It makes them even less able to relate the scientific measurements they read about and note down in lab to their own experience. Seriously, it's a problem. Many of them had less cognitive ability to deal with weights and measures than a typical 10-year-old European child. USians now have the worst of both worlds: thanks to globalisation, pretty much all their commodities now carry measurements in grams and litres, but they are not really taught how to think Metric in school and so have little idea of how to work with them.
Powers of ten make life easier. I now saying that being taught Metric would have avoided this Verizon arithmetic abortion, but I think it might have increased the probability of finding a rep who got it.
Some might say that the basic reason for the communication disconnect is that dollars and cents are "different", but I think comment in and of itself betrays a lack of Metric education.
I think the problem is that the Verizon people were incapable of intuiting on a fundamental level that the two are in fact the same thing, currency, but that the $ sign is a 100x multiplier of the unit. Or that the sign is a 100 divider of the $ unit.
As a pedagogy, Metric is based on the idea of as few fundamental units as possible, and everything else being created through powers of ten. It sim
I've been doing this with my ReplayTV for years now. I made the decision to go replay instead of Tivo back then
My thinking exactly. Tivo people are so ridiculously grateful for any minor improvement in their locked-down systems that something so basic as sending a show you recorded around your own house unencumbered by anti-viewer DRM strikes them as "progress". My 2001-era ReplayTV has been doing that for years. It's like watching children get excited over finding a shiny shell on a beach full of them.
It was quite simple. Years ago I looked at the two systems. One, the Tivo, did have nice chirpy sounds with the UI, but I noted the lack of built-in ethernet, show sharing, and a heavy reliance on DRM. The other, ReplayTV, was about as open a consumer device as you could buy back then. It was a simple choice. Chirpy UI sounds versus free ownership of the way I wanted to watch TV. I bought Replay. With DVArchive, WiRNS, and VLC I have always been able to watch and control them using the web, and watch, send, and transcode shows over LAN or WAN.
My decision was vindicated a few years ago when I attended a trade show where one of the Tivo guys was speaking to an audience of content owners and advertisers. Basically, he told them that Tivo was there for them and saw "huge value" in helping them to manage their content push to the audience. Tivo has always been about serving the media companies first, and serving them up a loyal audience.
Given the outright failure of other music services
I think this statement is a mistake that manages to buy into Apple propaganda without thinking about any numbers. Yes, itunes clearly has the largest single share of the single-fee download licence ("downloads") market. However, it does not offer monthly download all-you-can-eat licences ("subscriptions"). Most of the other services (AOL, Yahoo Music Unlimited, Napster, Rhapsody, etc etc etc etc) offer hybrids with both forms of licence available. Their combined subscriber numbers are in the millions. That's several million people each month, paying on average $10 or so. Just 1 million people at $10 each over 12 months is $120m revenue. And that's before income derived from "downloads" or advertising. Both they and Apple pay vig to the music business and deduct expenses. However, for every subscriber that !Apple adds, Apple has to sell 10-20 tracks to derive the same margin.
Anyway, this is getting too in-depth. But my point is that if these "other" music services have been "outright" failures, why then are there more and more of them popping up? Obviously, many of these companies have run the numbers and figured they can make them work with limited downside or risk.
This analysis also omits digital satellite services that deliver subscriptions not using IP but using broadcast frequencies. Sirius and XM have healthy and large revenue streams.
Finally, all the music services (Downloads, subscriptions, and hybrid models) are still a blip when compared with the revenue from ringtones and mobile downloads. Maybe 10-20% of the entire "digital music" market. These figures need to be seen in context.
if the copyright owner licenses someone to make a copy
In the case of iTunes, the copyright owner has not licenced you to make a mechanical reproduction, or copy. With Apple's backup, there is no licensing of mechanical reproduction. That is why it is a backup, and does not enjoy first sale rights.
Your backup of Apple DRM-crippled files is not "a particular, lawfully made copy of the protected work". But hey, if you think otherwise, why not make a few and go around selling them? After all, why bother paying serious mechanical reproduction rights if you can just licence such a thing from Apple for $1?
You might first want to check Apple's specific disclaimer concerning your rights of re-sale in the iTunes ToS:
Any burning (if applicable) or exporting capabilities are solely an accommodation to you and shall not constitute a grant or waiver (or other limitation or implication) of any rights of the copyright owners in any audio or video content, sound recording, underlying musical composition, or artwork embodied in any Product.
You can argue that where first sale applies (specifically the US, and not most other WIPO treay countries), you have a right to re-sell the hard drive upon which the original download resides. In that case, you're obligated to destroy all your "backups" and derivatives of the files, or to transfer them to the new owner. However, Apple's ToS specifically mitigates against this kind of licence transfer. iTunes is very specific in stating, over and over, that you are not buyig products, but licencing a service. You will notice that the full title of iTunes is in fact the "iTunes Music Store SERVICE".
In EU countries, which do not use the concept of "first sale" but instead rely on the expansive "rights exhaustion" (mainly because of the union of anglo-saxon and roman law), you're on firmer ground in terms of re-selling that hard disk with the downloads. But that's why Apple has beenrunning into more difficulties with EU countries insisting that the iPod ecosystem be more open and less monopolistic.
Yes you can sell it. Have you never been to a used CD store?
Manufactured CDs are pressed by companies that have purchased mechanical reproduction rights to recordings. The physical object so licenced can be re-sold as property. However, the recording contained on it does not have any subsequent transferrable mechanical reproduction rights. You cannot legally sell your own copies of such-licenced CDs. What you would be selling are what are known as unauthorised copies, or bootlegs. Any copies you make of Apple's licenced downloads translated into any other media and try to sell are similarly unauthorised.
Don't believe me? Why not make yourself a shiny CD of some of those Apple tracks and go try and sell it to a used CD store. They will laugh you right out of the joint.
Similarly, you could make a CD of pay-per-month M$ "Janus" downloads and go try and sell it. You will get the same response. The similarity of response from vendors concerning your ability to resell the "backups" of these licenced downloads should tell you something about what it is you actually "own".
You betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what Apple is licencing to you. You are not buying transferrable property, you are paying for a licence. The key difference is that M$ offers two main licencing schemes: pay-per-download (similar to Apple's) and pay-per-month. Apple does not currently offer a similar technology to offer pay-per-month download licences for its FairPlay DRM system.
You're not allowed to copy them. You're allowed to back them up, which is your statutory right anyway. Read your licence - you licence the original file for playback on Apple-authorised devices, and you can make archival backups.
You do not own the song. Can you sell it? Can you bequeath it to your heirs? It is not property. You own nothing.
Which part of "beta" and "as soon as" did you miss and felt that your only option was to increase the overall entropy of the universe by basically repeating what I just said?
I have yet to find a player that gives me the functionality of itunes, either
That's just because you haven't tried Media Center. I enjoy its more expressive SmartLists, and use it to sync between the Archos, iRiver, and iPod players. MC is what iTunes wants to be when it grows up.
You sound like you are very sure, but you are wrong. Rockbox has supported video on my Archos for several years now. It's an impressive feat, considering the extremely limited CPU available. I don't doubt that as soon as the major plumbing work for Rockbox on the beta iRiver and iPod platforms is finished, video will be implemented.
What Apple is betting on is that the user experience on Mac OS X is enough better that, when users get to try OSX and Windows side-by-side, they'll prefer OSX.
This new Apple "Boot Camp" seems like a death knell for the Macintosh and its Unix-based OSX as a viable alternative platform for packaged software such as Office, Adobe, and so on. Dual boot systems are disastrous for alternative OS PCs. How many Amigas do you see around today? Dual booting between Amiga and DOS hindered the development of stand-alone software for that platform. By doing this, Apple reduces the attractiveness of OSX as a release platform for major software. Why bother doing an OSX version when you can just tell your "Mac" customers to run your program in Windows? It may help Apple sell more Macs in the short term, but in the long term it further removes Apple's distinctiveness and transforms it even more into just another boutique PC vendor similar to Alienware, sorry, Dell.
If that were true, we'd all be watching TV from our refrigerators.
People don't sit down in front of their fridges.
People do carry around mobiles in their pockets.
People have a limited number of pockets.
Apple - Always Late, Always Cautious
on
iPod Video Dissection
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Apple took huge risks to earn this reward, but that's how business is: those who risk the most earn the most rewards, if they earn at all.
Actually, Apple has always been a few years behind the curve when it comes to mp3 players - unwilling to jump into a new market but instead preferrig to wait for others to prove its viability and take the legal flak.
Saehan's 1998 MPMan F10 - the world's first flash memory mp3 player.
Diamond's 1998 Rio PMP300 - first major US company taken to court by the RIAA for providing mp3 hardware.
Compaq's 1999 Personal Jukebox - 1st hard-drive based mp3 player.
Archos's 2002 Multimedia Jukebox - first portable video/photo player and recorder.
the more my lifetime subscription to SonicBlue and my commercial-crushing early-model RTV4504
I'll second that. I was lucky enough to get two RTV5040s for $150 during the lifetime sub changeover debacle a few years ago. Every time I read about a "fantastic" new feature for Tivo (like, transferring shows to handhelds, streaming over internet, web-based control) I'm thinking 'What? Didn't Replay do that back in 2000?'
Only MythTV coes close to Replays, and it is just too brittle to pass the "Wife Test". Replay is just "fire and forget".
I had a unit that did not have a number to call to get guide information
Really? Because both my Replays are humming along nicely, pulling their Guide information down off "the Internets". Maybe you've heard of it. My Replays were and are just plug and go. I even pull down Replay Guide info onto my PC using DVArchive, and can then view, schedule, and reschedule recording info from any web browser. Moral of the story: even if you have some ancient Replay from the 90s that must use a phone line you can still get guide information. DNNA rolled the guide service in to its $3000+ Escient product line so it seems like it will continue to run for a long time.
TiVo WAS an amazing product at one time. Truly cutting edge and brilliant. Now it's just a sad, dying company grasping to try and retain some sort of market.
No, that was ReplayTV. Tivo was like Replay's dim younger cousin, always eager to play nice with "The Man".
I can zip really quickly down to the approximate area, then slow down, and zero in on the right one.
With Rockbox I get to do that on several different players, and more importantly I get to specify the amount of scroll acceleration and "inertia" I like. But don't worry, the Rockbox Ipod port is progressing nicely...
I was surprised a few weeks ago when I was visiting someone in Florida and ended up in the house of two retirees and they were Netflix devotees. We're talking 70+ here, one of them a former government spook, and now their main hobby is ripping Netflix discs and recording them using one of their two DVD recorders. What impressed me most, and what is lacking with most Netflix "backup" fans, is that being retired fulltime and eminently logical, they had a precise and exhaustive catalog system for their thousands of rips. Every disc arranged with index tags, and a card noting actors, content, and so on.
When I told them they were being throttled they were pretty mad about it...
Slashdot Mirror
apple does good things with its powers! Instead of taking cash to promote a CD, they only offer promotion in return for "exclusives" and discounts
This is similar to how Walmart delivers such good "value" - it demands discounts from suppliers desperate to get products on its shelf. In many cases, these discounts mean that a supplier is actually selling some items to Walmart at below cost. So how to maintain margins? Increase prices to other retailers. Effectively, Walmart is obtaining a cash subsidy from the supplier, and extracting it from other retailers.
This is also what itunes is doing by leveraging its strong retail presence to demand "discounts".
1 cm3/ of water is of course 1 gram, or 1 mL, a cube of water 1cm on each side which, when absorbing 1 calorie of energy, will exhibit a temperature raise of 1 Celsius.
Okay, so I listened to all of the conversation between a person who was quoted a price in cents/kilobyte, and several Verizon representatives, all of whom are so addled by reliance on their computer screens that they are unable to grasp that they are mis-quoting a price by one hundredfold by failing to convert between dollars and cents. Then it got me thinking about why they should find it so difficult to multiply and divide by 100. It's not that that can't perform the arithmetical calculation, it's just that they are experience a disconnect linking this operation with their intuition about how much something should cost. What we call "numbers" are in fact two different things: symbols that we manipulate using mechanical and representative operations, and sensations that we intuitively experience and comprehend.
Why should it be so difficult for these Verizon people, all apparently USians, to handle such a simple operation as taking powers of ten? I think it's to do with a lack of basic Metric education in the US. It seems obvious to me that in a culture where Metric conversion techniques are not routinely taught to schoolchildren, then the casual manipulation of powers of ten and powers of a hundred must become (when compared to other cultures) significantly less easy, common and apparently mind-numbingly abstruse and esoteric for a significant proportion of adults.
The unusual resistance of the U.S. to Metrication is both a symptom of and a driver of adult innumeracy.
Metric instills a basic intuition about powers of ten and orders of magnitude. Or at least, it will tend to, relative to indifferently scaled arbitrary measurements. Once you build this mental framework, it can be easily integrated into novel experiential learning.
I am unfortunately old enough to have begun primary school in a country using Imperial measurements that then switched to Metric. I can still recall being taught arithmetic as a young child, and being shown how to convert between ounces and pounds, and pounds and stone. That sucked, and made no sense.
Being indoctrinated into Metric within a few years reduced my cognitive load apppreciably, while enlarging my ability to estimate weights and measures. By exposing children to tanglible object weights such as 1g, 10g, 100g, 500g, 1kg, 5 kg and so on, one forms a consistent appreciation of mass. The same is true of learning distance.
I had to re-take basic physics and chemistry in a US university recently. I was quite shocked at how a significant proportion of the students had little conception of how much 1 ml was, or 10g, or 1m. It makes them even less able to relate the scientific measurements they read about and note down in lab to their own experience. Seriously, it's a problem. Many of them had less cognitive ability to deal with weights and measures than a typical 10-year-old European child. USians now have the worst of both worlds: thanks to globalisation, pretty much all their commodities now carry measurements in grams and litres, but they are not really taught how to think Metric in school and so have little idea of how to work with them.
Powers of ten make life easier. I now saying that being taught Metric would have avoided this Verizon arithmetic abortion, but I think it might have increased the probability of finding a rep who got it.
Some might say that the basic reason for the communication disconnect is that dollars and cents are "different", but I think comment in and of itself betrays a lack of Metric education.
I think the problem is that the Verizon people were incapable of intuiting on a fundamental level that the two are in fact the same thing, currency, but that the $ sign is a 100x multiplier of the unit. Or that the sign is a 100 divider of the $ unit.
As a pedagogy, Metric is based on the idea of as few fundamental units as possible, and everything else being created through powers of ten. It sim
I've been doing this with my ReplayTV for years now. I made the decision to go replay instead of Tivo back then
My thinking exactly. Tivo people are so ridiculously grateful for any minor improvement in their locked-down systems that something so basic as sending a show you recorded around your own house unencumbered by anti-viewer DRM strikes them as "progress". My 2001-era ReplayTV has been doing that for years. It's like watching children get excited over finding a shiny shell on a beach full of them.
It was quite simple. Years ago I looked at the two systems. One, the Tivo, did have nice chirpy sounds with the UI, but I noted the lack of built-in ethernet, show sharing, and a heavy reliance on DRM. The other, ReplayTV, was about as open a consumer device as you could buy back then. It was a simple choice. Chirpy UI sounds versus free ownership of the way I wanted to watch TV. I bought Replay. With DVArchive, WiRNS, and VLC I have always been able to watch and control them using the web, and watch, send, and transcode shows over LAN or WAN.
My decision was vindicated a few years ago when I attended a trade show where one of the Tivo guys was speaking to an audience of content owners and advertisers. Basically, he told them that Tivo was there for them and saw "huge value" in helping them to manage their content push to the audience. Tivo has always been about serving the media companies first, and serving them up a loyal audience.
Given the outright failure of other music services
I think this statement is a mistake that manages to buy into Apple propaganda without thinking about any numbers. Yes, itunes clearly has the largest single share of the single-fee download licence ("downloads") market. However, it does not offer monthly download all-you-can-eat licences ("subscriptions"). Most of the other services (AOL, Yahoo Music Unlimited, Napster, Rhapsody, etc etc etc etc) offer hybrids with both forms of licence available. Their combined subscriber numbers are in the millions. That's several million people each month, paying on average $10 or so. Just 1 million people at $10 each over 12 months is $120m revenue. And that's before income derived from "downloads" or advertising. Both they and Apple pay vig to the music business and deduct expenses. However, for every subscriber that !Apple adds, Apple has to sell 10-20 tracks to derive the same margin.
Anyway, this is getting too in-depth. But my point is that if these "other" music services have been "outright" failures, why then are there more and more of them popping up? Obviously, many of these companies have run the numbers and figured they can make them work with limited downside or risk.
This analysis also omits digital satellite services that deliver subscriptions not using IP but using broadcast frequencies. Sirius and XM have healthy and large revenue streams.
Finally, all the music services (Downloads, subscriptions, and hybrid models) are still a blip when compared with the revenue from ringtones and mobile downloads. Maybe 10-20% of the entire "digital music" market. These figures need to be seen in context.
In the case of iTunes, the copyright owner has not licenced you to make a mechanical reproduction, or copy. With Apple's backup, there is no licensing of mechanical reproduction. That is why it is a backup, and does not enjoy first sale rights.
Your backup of Apple DRM-crippled files is not "a particular, lawfully made copy of the protected work". But hey, if you think otherwise, why not make a few and go around selling them? After all, why bother paying serious mechanical reproduction rights if you can just licence such a thing from Apple for $1?
You might first want to check Apple's specific disclaimer concerning your rights of re-sale in the iTunes ToS:
You can argue that where first sale applies (specifically the US, and not most other WIPO treay countries), you have a right to re-sell the hard drive upon which the original download resides. In that case, you're obligated to destroy all your "backups" and derivatives of the files, or to transfer them to the new owner. However, Apple's ToS specifically mitigates against this kind of licence transfer. iTunes is very specific in stating, over and over, that you are not buyig products, but licencing a service. You will notice that the full title of iTunes is in fact the "iTunes Music Store SERVICE".
In EU countries, which do not use the concept of "first sale" but instead rely on the expansive "rights exhaustion" (mainly because of the union of anglo-saxon and roman law), you're on firmer ground in terms of re-selling that hard disk with the downloads. But that's why Apple has beenrunning into more difficulties with EU countries insisting that the iPod ecosystem be more open and less monopolistic.
Yes you can sell it. Have you never been to a used CD store?
Manufactured CDs are pressed by companies that have purchased mechanical reproduction rights to recordings. The physical object so licenced can be re-sold as property. However, the recording contained on it does not have any subsequent transferrable mechanical reproduction rights. You cannot legally sell your own copies of such-licenced CDs. What you would be selling are what are known as unauthorised copies, or bootlegs. Any copies you make of Apple's licenced downloads translated into any other media and try to sell are similarly unauthorised.
Don't believe me? Why not make yourself a shiny CD of some of those Apple tracks and go try and sell it to a used CD store. They will laugh you right out of the joint.
Similarly, you could make a CD of pay-per-month M$ "Janus" downloads and go try and sell it. You will get the same response. The similarity of response from vendors concerning your ability to resell the "backups" of these licenced downloads should tell you something about what it is you actually "own".
You betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what Apple is licencing to you. You are not buying transferrable property, you are paying for a licence. The key difference is that M$ offers two main licencing schemes: pay-per-download (similar to Apple's) and pay-per-month. Apple does not currently offer a similar technology to offer pay-per-month download licences for its FairPlay DRM system.
You're not allowed to copy them. You're allowed to back them up, which is your statutory right anyway. Read your licence - you licence the original file for playback on Apple-authorised devices, and you can make archival backups.
You do not own the song. Can you sell it? Can you bequeath it to your heirs? It is not property. You own nothing.
1) It's still pay-to-play (you stop paying, songs stop playing)
2) Won't play on 78% of the players in circulation (i.e. iPods)
You know all those shiny Apple DRM-crippled AAC files you paid for? Stop paying for iPods and eventually they'll "stop playing" for you portably.
I have various flavours of archived inboxes and mboxes, stretching back to rather disorganized BSD PDP-11 in 1987.
Don't delete anything. You'd be surprised at what becomes valuable or worthy of a chuckle 20 years later. Or archeology given long enough.
See also: midden.
during your recordings you can "30-second" skip through the commercials.
Hmm. My ReplayTV skips right over commercials, invisibly, silently, and with no fuss, and no silly 30-second button clicking.
We're talking iPod here son
Which part of "beta" and "as soon as" did you miss and felt that your only option was to increase the overall entropy of the universe by basically repeating what I just said?
Think aspirationally!
iTunes is simply the best music software there is. Period.
Your ignorance is understandable only if you've never tried Media Center.
I have yet to find a player that gives me the functionality of itunes, either
That's just because you haven't tried Media Center. I enjoy its more expressive SmartLists, and use it to sync between the Archos, iRiver, and iPod players. MC is what iTunes wants to be when it grows up.
For good reason - it doesn't support video.
You sound like you are very sure, but you are wrong. Rockbox has supported video on my Archos for several years now. It's an impressive feat, considering the extremely limited CPU available. I don't doubt that as soon as the major plumbing work for Rockbox on the beta iRiver and iPod platforms is finished, video will be implemented.
What Apple is betting on is that the user experience on Mac OS X is enough better that, when users get to try OSX and Windows side-by-side, they'll prefer OSX.
This new Apple "Boot Camp" seems like a death knell for the Macintosh and its Unix-based OSX as a viable alternative platform for packaged software such as Office, Adobe, and so on. Dual boot systems are disastrous for alternative OS PCs. How many Amigas do you see around today? Dual booting between Amiga and DOS hindered the development of stand-alone software for that platform. By doing this, Apple reduces the attractiveness of OSX as a release platform for major software. Why bother doing an OSX version when you can just tell your "Mac" customers to run your program in Windows? It may help Apple sell more Macs in the short term, but in the long term it further removes Apple's distinctiveness and transforms it even more into just another boutique PC vendor similar to Alienware, sorry, Dell.
If that were true, we'd all be watching TV from our refrigerators.
People don't sit down in front of their fridges.
People do carry around mobiles in their pockets.
People have a limited number of pockets.
Apple took huge risks to earn this reward, but that's how business is: those who risk the most earn the most rewards, if they earn at all.
Actually, Apple has always been a few years behind the curve when it comes to mp3 players - unwilling to jump into a new market but instead preferrig to wait for others to prove its viability and take the legal flak.
Saehan's 1998 MPMan F10 - the world's first flash memory mp3 player.
Diamond's 1998 Rio PMP300 - first major US company taken to court by the RIAA for providing mp3 hardware.
Compaq's 1999 Personal Jukebox - 1st hard-drive based mp3 player.
Archos's 2002 Multimedia Jukebox - first portable video/photo player and recorder.
the more my lifetime subscription to SonicBlue and my commercial-crushing early-model RTV4504
I'll second that. I was lucky enough to get two RTV5040s for $150 during the lifetime sub changeover debacle a few years ago. Every time I read about a "fantastic" new feature for Tivo (like, transferring shows to handhelds, streaming over internet, web-based control) I'm thinking 'What? Didn't Replay do that back in 2000?'
Only MythTV coes close to Replays, and it is just too brittle to pass the "Wife Test". Replay is just "fire and forget".
I had a unit that did not have a number to call to get guide information
Really? Because both my Replays are humming along nicely, pulling their Guide information down off "the Internets". Maybe you've heard of it. My Replays were and are just plug and go. I even pull down Replay Guide info onto my PC using DVArchive, and can then view, schedule, and reschedule recording info from any web browser. Moral of the story: even if you have some ancient Replay from the 90s that must use a phone line you can still get guide information. DNNA rolled the guide service in to its $3000+ Escient product line so it seems like it will continue to run for a long time.
the MythWeb plugin that comes with MythTV allows you to schedule shows from any browser, anywhere
That's cool. Sounds like DVArchive on ReplayTV.
TiVo WAS an amazing product at one time. Truly cutting edge and brilliant. Now it's just a sad, dying company grasping to try and retain some sort of market.
No, that was ReplayTV. Tivo was like Replay's dim younger cousin, always eager to play nice with "The Man".
I can zip really quickly down to the approximate area, then slow down, and zero in on the right one.
With Rockbox I get to do that on several different players, and more importantly I get to specify the amount of scroll acceleration and "inertia" I like. But don't worry, the Rockbox Ipod port is progressing nicely...
the iTunes application for managing your music is leaps and bounds better than the alternatives.
You're justified in saying that only if you've never used Media Center.
I was surprised a few weeks ago when I was visiting someone in Florida and ended up in the house of two retirees and they were Netflix devotees. We're talking 70+ here, one of them a former government spook, and now their main hobby is ripping Netflix discs and recording them using one of their two DVD recorders. What impressed me most, and what is lacking with most Netflix "backup" fans, is that being retired fulltime and eminently logical, they had a precise and exhaustive catalog system for their thousands of rips. Every disc arranged with index tags, and a card noting actors, content, and so on.
When I told them they were being throttled they were pretty mad about it...