darryl ramm's blog

Sorry TiVO. I have two older Hughes HR10-250 DirecTV HD TiVO recorders and both of them are running over 1,000 days without dialing into TiVo. These were the state of the art when they came out, I grabbed them off the very first shipments to BestBuy. Except for their really slow menu system they work great.

I just refuse to play TiVO games and give TiVO my viewing information and since I don’t purchase any pay for view events there is just no need to connect. And especially post Rupert Murdoch’s aquisiton of DirecTV there is no way I see the TiVO hating DirecTV folks ever following up on pursing requirements to connect the TiVO units to a land line so they can do their daily calls. Sure they’d love to have the pay per view business but if you are no using that anyhow…

Besides being painfilly slow at times the TiVO user interface on these boxes is better than any other DVR/set top box I’ve used. So I’m not looking forward to what happens if one of these boxes dies.

TiVO was an impressive company with great products and technology but suffered the same problem as companies like Healthion that come into established (and technology backwards) marketplaces and try to shake things up against entenched players. You just know with ad skipping fears and copyright concerns and the past laggard behavior of media companies they were going to have a tough ride. Then companies like DirecTV did not want TiVO in the middle of their food chain. I’d like to see TiVO survive and they are clearly playing around with business models trying to work but since the little TV watched in our house is all DirecTV there is no TiVO in my future.

It is pretty embarrassing when the premier news publication in Silicon Valley can’t get basic email to their readers right. Like not a clue.

I used to get one useful news summary email each morning from the Mercury News. I found it useful and I was more than happy to put up with the advertisements. Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting spammed a few times by the Mercury News with sponsored email from them on behalf of advertisers but the worst is that they seem to be doing insane experiments on their readers with poorly formatted html email. So badly formatted I will not read it. I’m using Yahoo!Mail Beta, but this stuff looks awful under Microsoft Outlook. It looks better under gmail but that’ s because gmail strips the background image, the text formatting and column layout is still awful.

I mean why would anybody with even the slightest clue about html portability try to stick background images in html emails? The screen shots show yesterday’s email rendered in Yahoo!Mail (Beta) and in Microsoft Outlook 2003.

There is just no need for attempting the overly complicated html formatting they are trying to do, and even if the design changes were justified there is no need to be slamming experiments out to all their reader base until have the formatting stable. Oh and you would think that they had email preferences for receiving plain text emails instead of mis-formatted html. Think again (or good luck finding them if they exist). That link at the top “If you cannot see this newsletter correctly, please see out online version here” needs the “If” replaced with a “Since”. Sigh.