Rothschild pronounced the DVR to be dying in the same way that Apple lies about technological directions, which is solely to stilt the public's thinking to focus on the supposed superiority of their own products. When the DTV/TIVO marriage tanked, DTV built their own DVR. TIVO lost a major teat to suck from. Inventing a new hardware paradigm for TIVO- a paper-logical one; it's TIVO's way of sprinkling some Apple white lies. Yes, it's logical to get rid of a separate set-top component box, but your TV-integrated-TIVO is a proprietary solution that only a fool would buy into. Either the TV or it's parasitical TIVO component dies? You shitcan the whole unit. TIVO is going to top the cost of the TV but $300-$500, and that premium will prevent it from competing. Also the TIVO component, unless able to couple closely with cable/satellite services, will function separately, not have that integrated feel of a sat/DVR or cable/DVR, and nobody wants a feeble solution.

He's an unregistered animagus who has escaped from, er, you know.

Steam is still DRM, just spelled differently. If EA hadn't had the install count limitation on the original shipped product, there would be little difference to consumers- aside from having physical media, than buying the thing from Steam. It's news, but not really much to get excited about, except for recognition of complaints being heard by EA.

There is USA Mobility. We still use them, but are dropping them when our next statement is due (we pre-pay yearly to avoid piddly monthly statements).

Here's my beef: they cut off our service with zero warning. They claim to have sent us our yearly invoice in July, again in August, and a late statement in September. We received nothing in the mail. I learned all of this in September when our services were cut off and I called their customer service. The last statement I received was a credit notice in our favor in July. Well, I put through payment to them which took about two weeks to have the check cut and mailed (corporate machine), but still could not get our service turned on because we "now" owe them a lousy $25 reconnect fee because we didn't pay within 90 days. That 90 days put our account in a status where they "no longer trusted our credit". What irks me is that we've been a customer with them since the 90's, and we're one of the "Fortune 500"- meaning we don't slack on payments or crap like that.

No amount of logic would sink in to the customer service drone, or the supervisor I asked to talk to, and calmly explained the whole mess to. He simply stonewalled me. We drop a four-figure check in their lap, and due to an absurd circumstance that wasn't our fault, they won't reactivate our service for a lousy $25?

I've had many other problems with USA Mobility in the last year, changing frequencies with no warning and dropping pager from our account, then having to call them for "reprogramming".

I'm taking our business elsewhere.