Buy a new external hard drive, get the 2009 movie “Star Trek” for free. That’s the deal with select units of the new 500 GB FreeAgent Go drive from Seagate. The drive comes with 21 movies from Paramount, including “Star Trek” which you can watch for free once you’ve registered your purchase. The other 20 [...]
BIG difference between a single purpose device that happens to run a Linux or Windows OS underneath and a general purpose personal computer.
I never have to touch or think about software upgrades/patches/versions/drivers/etc with my DVRs. I turn them on and they work. Zero overhead. Almost the same with my PS3, except I do have to manually select system upgrade periodically when it tells me one is available. Other than that - zero overhead.
As soon as you make the OS and software user maintained then I'm not interested. As an example, I've been using Windows home server for 2 years or more and couldn't be happier. Why? Because I never have to maintain it. I've never had to reboot it or manually install any software or updates. It just runs automatically. Why? Because even though it runs windows, it's a modified version that only runs the Home Server software. You only use the Home Server console to interact with it. I'm reasonably sure that it's an app that MS bought from someone else, because a) it never crashes and b) the gui doesn't look like a typical MS gui.
My response was meant as tongue-in-cheek, of course ... I know what you mean though.
For me, I'm willing to sacrifice the time it takes to keep it updated in exchange for the additional "power" and flexibility it gives me in the types of content I can enjoy.
One of the main reasons is that I keep a large portion of my content digitized (no swapping hard media). And the most flexible way to create, store and recall items from my digital library is via a connected PC (or Mac Mini, Apple TV, etc.).
I got that, just trying to provide more details. I don't have a need for the extra features and I don't really archive any media so for me the overhead would be somewhat worthless.
I was referring to people who hook up their laptop just to watch Blu-ray movies. Seems pointless to me.
