Slashdot links a forbes article written by our old friend John Dvorak on the use, er… rather missuse of Tivo. “Is it any different to steal programming by skipping the commercials (which paid for the programs) than it is to download a song? On top of that, both UltimateTV and TiVo charge customers $10 a month to use the device. None of that money goes to the networks or programmers whose material is being re-recorded and saved to the hard disk.”
Once again the venerable Dvorak displays his ultimate skill: Kissing gigantic corporate media conglomerates wrinkled asses.
Having honed his skills for serving up this sort of short-sighted, technophobic, and obviously ill thought out editorial on years of writing for Ziff Davis. He has developed an uncanny ability to be able to covertly promote the companies that not only advertise with his employers, but simultaneously appear as this techno/guru/advocate voice of reason.
I stopped subscribing to any PC publication of any kind back in about 1993, because of the absolute inane garbage that spewed forth from this guy. I’m sad to see he’s still at it… even sadder to see that he still gets paid (a lot) for writing it. It was my hope that the pubs like Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech, and Ars Technica would put him on a golf course permanently. It was silly of me to think that the rest of the readers and browsers followed me.