Another Scott Adams business idea: Home servers | Hacker News Reader

Another Scott Adams business idea: Home servers

dilbert.com

19 pointsrglullis20 comments

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.

Lunar? The fricken lets-get-to-jupiter x-prize is an easier task than "negotiating all of the various licenses".

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.

"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?

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've said it before but that's the part of the SDK3.0 that I think could get very interesting.

I thought about using the iPhone as a universal remote control since it doesn't have an IR emitter, there would need to be something in between, most likely a computer. The SDK3.0, the way I understand the third-party accessory part at least, could open up many possibilities on that side.

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.

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.)

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

linux is free dude.. and runs on commodity hardware. The installation.. is a one time process, so if you sold boxes with it already installed would not be an issue, and the controls are very intuitive. Linux mce is very comparable to boxee.. something you install to use as media center software. If they can figure out boxee, I don't think mce is that far off.

>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.

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?

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

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