Several years ago, went down this road. Did the research, setup a test box, went through the upgrade-now-its-broken-my-wife-wondering-why-her-shows-(not recorded/not playing/plays badly/hard to program/etc).

In the end, I decided that the tv's end point was an "appliance". Ie, like the toaster, microwave, etc... It should just work.

To that end, I went with Tivo. Then TivoS2, and now, TivoHD.

It records shows, can schedule, between the two, I an record 4 shows concurrently in sd/hd. I can xfer the content to my pc fileserver wherebit can be restreamed to the tivo ala the various streaming client/server apps. I can strea netflix to both boxes.

Could I have built and maintained a mythtv/freevo/etc box? Sure. But in my case, it made more sense to go the appliance route and focus on what mattered: content.

Ymmv.

It's interesting that the realization comes after the ink has started to dry on the proverbial paperwork.

As others have already pointed out, you have to choose what you are willing to put up with. No solution has zero issues or problems, just different ones.

In all cases, your risk of data/ip theft? Greater than zero. It will never be zero, short of you getting all copies and all peoples who have had contact with it and lock them in an underground room for all eternity.

* Presumably, you have some form of agreement(written contract) with the outsourced IT group. If you don't, you should _address_ that issue.
* You should have insurance for your company, so that in the event of fraud, theft, etc... and your business goes belly up, you have the means to cover your debts.
* You should be just as equally concerned about data loss as you are about data theft. Ie, make sure you have enough copies of your data/IP.

Regardless of whether you have in-house staff or outsourced staff, you should have some means of auditing your environment to address and reduce the risks involved. If nothing else, it will give you visibility into the types of areas of knowledge that someone other than your IT admin would know and be able to pick up the pieces should one of the problem scenarios appear.

Assuming you decide you are happy with your current support situation, get them to produce a human readable run-book for you, so that should they go out of business, bail, or otherwise default on the agreement, you will be able to bring someone in to take over. Schedule time for someone other than the primary support person to use the runbook to perform downtime/maintenance tasks/etc with the runbook. If there are any issues or problems, have the outsourcing company update it. Make it part of the understood and written agreement. You want to be able to rebuild, in the case of any failures.

Quick summary:
- validate/verify terms of agreement with existing IT support partner
- affirm creation of run-book with support partner and verify that it is valid and up to date with regularly scheduled DR/maintenance tasks
- have an on-site "intern" learn the tasks and serve as your in-house backup IT resource. Presumably, this person can also do double duty, if they happen to be a coder/content developer/PM with prior admin experience, etc. That person is your plan "B". This makes the runbook that much more important.
- NDA(s) and the legal expertise on retainer will help alot in terms of enforcement and collection on damages, but it will not prevent theft.
- Know what your company's plan "B" is in case of theft. Should you be segregating your information? Should you be encrypting your communication? Is the fact that some of your coders are bringing in USB flash devices and bringing work home a problem in your mind in relation to remote IT support?

There are plenty of issues and potential areas for IP theft/leak/sabotage to occur.

Legal agreements will help you when dealing with another company entity, but those legal agreements will do precious little if the theft/release of your IP causes your business to go down the drain.

Seriously, if you have a sick and injured animal, you try to help it recover. But if that animal is deemed unfit to coexist with people and other animals... like food aggression, attacking people, or literally biting the hand that feeds it...

Well, that animal needs to be put to sleep.

It's irrelevant what the $$ amount is, if the sole purpose of the company now is to keep sucking money into it's expenditure hole and apparently tossing back up this kind of behaviour.

Even if the company survives the economic issues we're living in, would the company itself be viable as a service company, given the kind of image/pr suicide it's been committing?

Forget about too big to fail. Let's start looking at companies that are too tained/corrupted to be allowed to succeed.

The term "loss leader" comes to mind.

The game looks nice, but once you get people used to free, it is hard to wean them off of it. :(

The problem with facebook... or any other social network, is that their own profits are paramount, and trumps the profit potential of all others.

If ad revenue is a primary income stream, then you need a bigger piece of the pie. And if that's the case, then the facebook application needs to be ONE of MANY avenues into the game, so that you can migrate people to your own web platform, where you control and stand to maximize your proceeds from advertisements and the like.

If you can't make enough to survive being a serf on someone else's land, it's time to get some land of your own...

As others have noted, it's fairly straightforward:

1) label your cards. Use a perm marker, not a sticker.

2) backup your cards to a central storage, like your computer's drive, as well as onto DVD(s).

3) Reduce the number of actual cards you keep around by moving data and consolidating onto larger cards and getting rid of the smaller and older cards. Why risk card failure or worse yet... cards that are no longer supported?

I used to have to manage around a dozen cards, but over time, I've learned that the best way to keep things manageable is to keep the card count down:

DSLR: 4 cards ( 16 GB compact flash cards )
Digicam: 1 card ( 8GB SDHC )
Celphones: 2 cards ( microSD / SDHC 4GB )

No dinking arond with 512MB or 1GB cards. Just have the one card and backup/flush the data when you don't need it anymore.

While you CAN archive onto flash media, it is much more expensive to do that than to archive onto say... a pair of external USB hard drives. As you outgrow them, migrate to a new pair of larger drives, wiping and reusing the previous pair for something else. This way, you always have two seperate copies. Keep one in a safe place, until you need to add files to it.

You can also make use of a centralized storage mechanism in conjunction with an online data warehousing service like Amazon's S3, which charges on the order of $0.10-$0.15/GB to store per month.