Another Scott Adams business idea: Home servers

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.)

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.

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.