ShareThisThe not-so-nice reader mail has stuffed the box. Time for you to vent and me to try to explain why you're wrong and I'm right. (Just kidding.)Q. Your rant about TivoHD was totally off the mark. It is not Tivo's fault that cable cards don't work. You should be ranting at the cable companies, not Tivo. Besides, if you use a Multi-card instead of two single cards you're far more likely to get it to work right. Comcast got mine working after a couple of visits and I have been happy ever since.A. Okay, wait a second. Thousands of people are having issues with Cable Cards (to the point where if you call Tivo's customer support line, the first thing you hear on the menu is "If you have any questions about Cable Cards, press 1". ) Secondly, my cable company doesn't offer M-cards and won't provide them, even if I bought one. I wish they did. Lastly, I don't want odds on getting a hugely expensive piece of equipment to work correctly. I want it to work out of the box, 100 percent of the time for every purchaser, like my Series II Tivo did. The Tivo forum and the thousands of posts show that is not the case about the HD Tivos. I am sure the issues will get ironed out. I just don't want to spend hundreds of dollars to be a product beta tester for Tivo.Q. Why didn't you just get a PVR from your cable company instead of a Tivo?A. It's not a Tivo, which is the best thing since Apollo 11 for my generation.Q. You said you can insert a USB flash drive and Windows Vista will use it as additional RAM. When I do that nothing happens with my flash drive.A. That only works with newer flash drives that meet speed specifications. If it does, Vista will pop up a box asking you if you want to use the drive for storage or to speed up your system.Q. You said there would be a service pack for Windows Vista released last week. Where is it?A. There is and there was. However, Service Pack 1 at this point is designed for IT professionals and those testing systems for compatibility reasons. If you enjoy living on the edge you can get the service pack on the Microsoft Web site. Keep in mind your desktop background will change to read "EVALUATION COPY" and you must install the real version of the service pack when it comes out to get rid of it. And, read this twice, your system may become unstable, you may lose all of your data, your wedding pictures, your master's thesis, your diary, every single thing you hold dear, so don't blame me if you install it. Read that again. It is not designed, yet, for production systems. The production patch is due in a few months.Q. In your raving about Digital Rights Management you know you can just burn your Itunes songs to a CD and do what you want with them, right?A. I do, but not legally, which is the whole point. James Derk is owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm and tech columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim(at)cyberdads.com
Rants and raves about technology
Submitted by administrator on Tue, 01/08/2008 - 11:59
Paying taxes unites us. It also divides us. People can pay five and even six times more in state and local taxes than other folks in similar circumstances making similar incomes.
Who's got your number?
In one of the fastest-growing forms of identity theft, crooks are stealing tax refunds by swiping personal information and using it to trick the Internal Revenue Service.
