August 28, 2006
Our little household has been glum since the arrival of our awesome Philips plasma 42″ television. You might ask why, as it’s a triumph of image quality and a consumerist coup de grace all in one.
It can mostly be summed up in the words: “Comcast sucks so really really hard.” Our trusty old TiVo couldn’t hack the high-def recording of shows, so we gently booted it via Craigslist and then assumed the position to Take It from Comcast in re: their DVR. The fact that they didn’t even give us a power cord for the thing when David picked it up (requiring a trip back) should be a testament to their stellar customer concern.
MMmkkkay, so anyone with the Comcast DVR knows. It is a steaming pile of bugs. It complains a lot, it crashes a lot, it neglects to record scheduled shows kind of most of the time, and tends to bitch when we try to add more things–that is, anything–to record to the queue. Not to mention that the cable box part of it shows us every channel ever invented, notwithstanding that we only subscribe to about 1 out ouf every 65 of them. I could write novels about the mental incapacities of whatever lower primate cobbled together the user interface for this nightmare.
Especially fabulous is how our cable bill bumps up against $120 a month these days (granted that includes the Internets). This coupled with the DVR’s New Cruelty of dropping sound and freezing the video every five seconds on many recorded programs puts me in a position where it’s hard to refuse attacking the thing with a cudgel.
So, I hear through the Interweb that the much-anticipated, damn-slow-in-coming Series 3 TiVo might be squeezing down through the last pipes of development (via Engadget). This one has multiple tuners (i.e. records multiple things at once) and can do HD and, in short doesn’t suck. Well, hallelujiah.
Except.
The rumored price of the bastard is $799. It’s going to come down to how much we hate the Comcast idiocy.
Plus there’s David, whose weekly attempt at Linux distribution install was a sound beating this week when he tried to put ubuntu and myth on a Dell. Which brings me to my second weak point: what the Hell is wrong with Linux? Ready for the desktop my ass. It’s bloody hard to deal with. I’m not supposed to say these things. I’m supposed to heartily support open source. But it’s not ready for my desktop or my living room, thanks.
It’s to the point where I think OSes can be summed up thusly:
* Mac: It just works.
* Windows: It absolutely never works in any way.
* Linux: It refuses to work. Oh, wait. It worked a minute ago. Oh, they haven’t released the driver for “it works” yet. You’ll have to recompile your kernel to get “it works.” It’s really supposed to work. It almost works. Crap, I don’t have sound.
Any number of notes:
1. Installing Linux and Myth (I assume you mean TV) isn’t that hard. But why would you want to bother?
2. Blame ATI. They’ve got this up their proverbial sleeves, and refuse to release it until Vista comes out.
3. Wait for Vista. Buy one (or two) of the aforementioned little boxes of love. Install MAME32 and FCE Ultra and Project64 and Bleem. Rip your CDs to FLAC and install Foobar. Stick it in a D.Vine case. Stare at it in a rack next to the rest of your HT gear. Rip open a hole in space-time with your awesomeness slash Pray it doesn’t crash.
At least thats my plan.
Tivo is for pussies anyway.
In re: #1, I think my point is that it shouldn’t be hard at all. :) Vista, indeed.
Just drop change and buy the fucking TiVo. They know what they’re doing.
Sasha
Linux sucks, Gee, I’d like to use my digital camera, but the Linux box doesn’t know it has USB ports. Comcast sucks, just plain, FUCKING sucks, die, die, DIE. Tivo sucks for being so fucking slow. Seriously, what’s the problem, HD you morons, Tivo might as well be making betamaxes or something. Sasha is right, Tivo knows what they’re doing, and there are no doubt very skilled blacksmiths still making swords somewhere, but it’s not really relevant to HDTV and the 21st century.