

Another Scott Adams business idea: Home servers - rglullis
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/home_servers/

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noonespecial
Wow. For Scott that was very ummm.. Cringely-like.

 _As an aside, the system would only need to back up a database of what
movies, music, and video games you own, and not the actual content. If you
ever needed to do a recovery, your record of ownership would allow you to
download the content again for free..._

 _...Obviously all the technology to make this happen already exists. It's a
matter of getting the cost down, negotiating all of the various licenses, and
building an interface that is easy to use._

Actually, on second thought, the lunar X-Prize is a much easier task.

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SamAtt
I was pretty disappointed. Usually his posts have interesting insights and are
well thought out. That's what makes them worthwhile. This post was the exact
opposite of that.

It's an insight that pretty much everyone who knows anything about computers
has had in the past and even the most basic scrutiny turns up a major flaw in
his idea, namely that media companies make a huge chunk of their income from
buyers who lost their original copies and are forced to buy new ones.

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mmc
"media companies make a huge chunk of their income from buyers who lost their
original copies and are forced to buy new ones."

That's new to me - is there a reference somewhere for how big a chunk this is?

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cmos
I started a company with a friend of mine in 1998 to do this... we're still
not quite there, and it turns out we could only sell it to really rich people
through high end custom dealers.

The 'dream' of a wired + automated house is oddly far away for people outside
of the 'wealthy' and 'do it yourself' categories. In many ways the entire
consumer electronics industry is so _not_ focused on the 'end customer
experience' to the point of just being downright insulting to their customer
base.

What does it mean to treat your customers badly? Try not trusting them at all.
Treat them like thieves. Put in artificial rules for using your products that
make it confusing for even us geeky folks. Refuse to agree on anything except
methods for screwing over your customers.

The last straw for me was HDMI. It is crippling the high end of the industry
as it is impossible to distribute throughout a home. It is fraught with basic
incompatibilities from one manufacturer to another. It's entire existence is
to phase out analog output of high definition audio and video. The 'marketing'
approach to the public is 'see, we put everything on one cable' but in all
reality, it's just DVI with digital audio that's encrypted so you can't make
legal, analog recordings for your personal use.

So the good news is there is a lot of room, even beyond the Apple effect, for
small companies to make an impact. The existing state of the old school
Consumer Electronics industry is pathetic and will likely not be able to churn
out anything but louder amplifiers and better resolution displays.

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sachinag
I get the argument against HDMI, but to insinuate that "it's all one cable" is
just marketing speak is crazy. It's a legitimate and useful feature benefit -
it reduces clutter and the fewer component types there are on a device, the
more ports it can support. At this point, the best differentiator of most sub
$3,000 HDTVs is how many HDMI ports it has and where they're located on the
device.

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cmos
I wouldn't dismiss the advantages to putting audio, video and lightweight
control on one cable. It does help to reduce confusion and clutter.

My issue is that the goal of HDMI wasn't moving audio and video to one cable.
The goal was to add encryption so that it becomes illegal to try to record off
it. (whereas it's perfectly legal to record unencrypted analog + digital
signals for personal use)

The selling point to the public is a single, pretty cable to make everyone's
lives better. We won't know the trap we've fallen into until years from now
when we can't even buy a display _without_ an encrypted input. To make a
device display anything I need to conform to an industry group to get a key to
encrypt my data.

But what if the industry group doesn't like my product and denies me a key?
What if it has large 'fees' to keep out small companies? So much for a small
company building the next pong, atari 2600 or apple I.

So the 'single cable' is the perfect trap. It's true that today's LCD's are
measured on how many HDMI ports they have. Later in life we'll be bidding for
older LCD screens and projectors with analog inputs on ebay. (hopefully an
exaggeration)

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wmf
Realistically, I'm not sure recording uncompressed HD video is a good idea
anyway. Given that the video probably arrived in some compressed format, you
should record/copy _that_ , not decompress it and record/recompress it.

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Periodic
That would be ideal, but increasingly that is encrypted and DRMed as well,
which further has limits on what you can do with it. It's no longer enough to
decode the video once and pass it around the house. Now they want a fully
encrypted pathway to make sure you aren't playing it in your bedroom while you
watch it in the livingroom too.

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biohacker42
Scott's updated HD streaming requirements require some seriously beefy
hardware. This does exists for high end home entertainment systems. And by
high end I mean real high end custom build stuff for rich people, not just
early adopters like us.

Also DRM outlaws a lot of cool technology like that. It is stunning that the
media conglomerates have successfully legislated their own deeply flaws
business plans.

If they had successful done that with the VCR, we still wouldn't have DVDs.
Ah, but back then Sony didn't own a movie studio.

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dkarl
The iPhone as the universal remote is an obvious and bloody brilliant idea. I
hope my future TV, stereo, etc. come with Bluetooth and an iPhone app to
control them.

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dmix
You can control Plex app with your iPhone (music/videos). You can also control
X10 applicances (lights, blinds, coffee maker) with your iPhone as well.

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bradlane
LinuxMCE/Pluto Home can do this, according to their websites. However, I don't
have any experience with it personally, so i don't know how well it does
everything.

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kgrin
More importantly, that's hardly a consumer-grade solution, which is really
what Adams is talking about. ("consumer-grade" meaning relatively affordable,
reasonably straightforward to install and control, etc.)

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Wilfred
The LinuxMCE is no thing of beauty yet, though. Here's hoping this changes
soon.

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dmix
> _The closest thing on the market is a so-called home media center that will
> distribute movies, music, and your own content to multiple rooms. It doesn't
> handle lights, video games, security, heat, AC, or home computing._

Home servers can already do all of that using home automation devices (X10).
You can hook them up to your home media center and access your homes
lights/security/heat anywhere via a web interface.

I haven't done this in practice but I've read quite a bit on it. It's still
not consumer friendly yet though, but it sounds like a great geek project.

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tom_rath
Wasn't that TiVo's business plan before they decided to focus laser-sharp on
TV instead of a generic difficult-to-describe home server?

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keefe
I think there is already a large body of work on home automation... the media
stuff, I think mythtv is a good starting point.

