How is IsoHunt supposed to know if it's (a) a scan of a Madonna CD artwork (illegal) (b) a picture you made with a camera of a Madonna statue (c) a picture of your girlfriend you like to nickname "Madonna" (d) a picture of the cover of a book that has Madonna in the name.
Or, if I make a movie of myself and friend at a party, dancing on Prince's music, and I label it "Prince - Purple rain.avi" should IsoHunt remove it because it may be the actual video of the song or should IsoHunt staff be forced to download it and count how many seconds of Purple Rain actually are (if any) so that they can determine if it's fair use (less than 30 seconds of song) or not?
If it's more than 30 seconds, do they use the Canadian laws where IsoHunt is, or MY laws, which may consider any length of song fair use?
It is why your children can't be allowed to use the Internet without supervision - someone will approach them with some unsavory proposal. Anyone doing this "in real life" would either be beaten to death or arrested, depending on who caught up with them first (a parent or the police). On the Internet, I can seduce your children, I can commit fraud, libel and anything else I choose and you can do nothing about it.
Obviously, you did not have a computer when you were a kid.
Yes, children can be seduced on the Internet but if you would be bothered to sit down with your kids and explain them about these kinds of people and what's appropriate and what's not, you wouldn't even need to supervise them, because they'll learn to recognize what's good and what's bad.
Just like promoting abstinence as birth control for teenagers, hiding children from the dangers of the world and supervising them constantly JUST WON'T WORK. You need to be patient and explain children about all these things and prepare them for life.
My parents were too embarrassed to teach me about sex and about these things and just hoped I would learn at school... well, I just learned about sex way before it came to learn at school by staying and watching softcore erotic movies on TV after parents went to sleep.
By the way, if you really want to protect your precious snowballs you should start burning your books because I can guarantee it your kids will look at your medicine/anatomy/romance books and look at pictures or read them, and they'll find about what you're trying to hide from them either way.
So why is free bad? It sounds really nice, just having everything for free. More money for everything else. Doesn't this just make us all richer? Sure, everyone except the creator. Somehow they got the idea that they were going to be paid. Well, payday is almost over. And when it is over for real they better like the new "everything for free" situation because there is no way you are going to convince people to go back to the old way.
The creator doesn't get paid sh*t anyway. The movie director, the artists in the movie, the band, they're all under a contract and paid a fixed amount of money. The label or movie studio gets their copyrights in return for giving them money in advance and for promoting the movie/records.
If the movie will be available for free, the poor movie studio will probably only make 100 million dollars from cinemas and associated merchandise instead of 150 million dollars.
Maybe if the actors in the movie would not be paid millions of dollars like Angelina Jolie or others are paid, movies would be cheaper to make but I can guarantee you the movie studios will still be upset about losing money, because they're in it for the profit.
IsoHunt acts as a search engine and returns torrent files that can be either "legal" or "illegal".
No search engine can determine with 100% accuracy if something is legal or not, not even Google.
If I record a movie in my own garden, I can release the video on my website or even on The Pirate Bay with a license saying that only the people in my home town have the right to download the video and the rest don't.
IsoHunt will index the torrent file nevertheless and from your point of view, IsoHunt indexes an illegal torrent that should be taken down, but from my (the creator) point of view it's perfectly legal.
It's the USER'S RESPONSIBILITY to read the terms of the license, the description of the torrent file I made and download the movie if he believes he's allowed to.
So what I'm saying is that a movie or song or any binary data can be copyrighted but also can be legal to download it, it's illegal to distribute/download/upload/whatever something you don't have rights to do that and IsoHunt or any other search engine can't know that.
You can use Google nowadays for much worse things than copyright infringement, things like how to make a lockpick, how to prepare cocaine, how to steal a car, how to make a gun... but apparently a company's loss is important enough to stop something very useful to a lot of people.
It's not even worth to start commenting about cases where a company makes a movie making millions in US but doesn't feel it's worth releasing a DVD or a VHS to a small country, because they estimate they'll sell very few copies there and the profits will be smaller than the distribution and fabrication costs.
When this company retains copyright over something but yet keeps that something locked and unavailable to where I am, is that company really losing any money or suffers any losses if someone copies and gives away that stuff for free in that country? Should that company be allowed to keep copyright for 90 years on that? What was copyright supposed to be for, anyway?
Well, in theory we could have 72x CD drives or even DVD drives, it's just that they're too expensive to make.
A few years ago there was a company called Zen Research who invented a tehnology called TrueX which used 7 read heads to read the disc and it reconstructed the data from all seven read heads in the drive's cache.
An actual CD-ROM drive that implemented this was Kenwood 72x (http://www.tweak3d.net/reviews/kenwood/72x/) but they chose to reduce the rotational speed instead of higher throughput (perhaps the processor that gathered data from those 7 heads was also too slow to allow faster speed).
Nowadays, someone could probably license that technology and use it on DVD drives but the margins are so low already they wouldn't make a profit.
This server actually had 250 GB hard drives when this picture was taken, but nowadays you can imagine them being replaced with 750-1TB drives.
It's not that hard to buy 2-4 500$ Areca RAID controllers with 8-12 SATA ports each and a 4U server case and have a server with loads of disk space.
There's even well known companies like Leaseweb who offer dedicated servers on their pages with 24x1TB drives by default because customers with sites like Youtube clones need them.
But in this case, the servers were not with 65 TB but there were 10 servers who in total had 65TB and they only managed to take down 1 server.
Nope. MSN Messenger has the "iexplore.exe" string hardcoded in the exe file. Just check it with a hex viewer. Yet another Microsoft intentional lock-in.
You don't need a browser to get a browser on your computer.
Microsoft can simply design a small "Welcome to Windows" wizard, which connects to a MS FTP server and downloads a XML file (for example something like ftp.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/browserlist.xml) with a list of browsers.
User can then browse the list, select one and the wizard will simply download the setup from the location specified in the XML file and start the setup.
Alternatively, you could just go to an IT store and get a free Firefox CD or go to a friend and copy the setup application on a memory stick.
You should complain to Microsoft then for keeping the format locked and requiring exorbitant fees to create applications capable of creating HLP files.
HLP files are basically a collection of RTF files with an index, yet the full format is obscure and not documented properly unless you get a license from MS.
They probably took it out of Windows 7 because there were some bugs... buffer overflows, that clipart format bug which could affect HLP files because you can embed those buggy images inside RTF docs... and they were no longer interested in offering an alternative to the CHM - compiled HTML format.
They just need to create a new hh.exe executable (or whatever is used to open those help files in the background) and list it as important update for a specific application (Office, whatever) in Windows Updates.
The updated help application can very well use a custom made DLL file or several DLL files or internal code to render the contents of the help file. A simple library capable of showing text, links and jpg/gif images on a window is not that hard to do.
As long as these DLL files are only used by this help application I don't care.
It's not our fault that Microsoft intentionally did the help system and other Windows systems around IE to lock users into it. Users shouldn't suffer because of it.
Maybe you're too young but in WIndows 95, there was already a help system implemented (with HLP files, not the CHM files) that allowed people to go between help pages easily but didn't use IE.
If it would have been at least 1$ cheaper and/or actually available in stores, it would have been more successful.
At least in my country Romania, where all stores receive free advertising money, billboards, promotional content and get lower prices if they don't sell computers with Linux pre-installed, every store only advertises Home and Premium versions of operating systems. The N versions are never in stock and if you really want to order them, it takes probably two weeks for the store to receive it from the Microsoft importer in the capital of the country.
Well, anyways unless people buy it for a company computer, people get laptops or computers with FreeDOS preinstalled (as there's law in the country saying all pc's must have OS installed) and then they pirate the OS or use Ubuntu or other flavors of Linux.
It's one thing to impose Microsoft the need of offering that N version, if you don't impose them to advertise it in equal amount with the regular version and to actually manufacture the physical discs.
I would personally buy a Windows 7 version without IE but completely without it, not just having iexplore.exe removed.
I would then laugh when I see Yahoo Messenger no longer works, the help system in Windows no longer works, Visual Studio's help no longer works, all the junk internal websites using proprietary IE stuff at my old work place no longer working and so on and so forth.
Actually, I would dare to say it's the people's fault for storing sensitive files in the Documents folder in the first place.
Sensitive data should be read from a network drive only when needed, and there should be a log with who opened it, who saved it and so on, much like a SVN/CVS whatever.
Also, a very important rule that every company should teach programmers and employees is NEVER STORE DOCUMENTS ON THE BOOT PARTITION.
If for some reason Windows goes berserk/crashes/you get infected with a virus, the easiest solution is to simply reinstall the operating system, formatting the boot partition.
Most often someone will forget about some documents on the boot partition and will lose stuff.
Teaching this solves the "automatic sharing of My Documents by p2p software" automatically, as people will no longer use it to store stuff.
Sorry but TPB is in Sweden where there's no DCMA. DCMA only applies to US.
I'm from Romania and if I would get a DCMA to one of my websites I would also ignore it as it does not apply.
TPB is not obliged in any way to take down anything, as they're not the ones guilty of copyright issues.
Companies have to contact the website member that posted the torrent and request them to delete the torrent, it's that simple. Instead, they are arrogant and assume everything they do in US is law everywhere and get angry when they become the joke.
Google returns results that start with "http", so does Piratebay.
You can't argue that TPB returns only torrent files, as Google can also return as results PDF, DOC, HTML, PHP and other formats. Especially PDF files returned by Google can be copyrighted, but that doesn't mean Google facilitates copyright infringement.
As I understand it, TPB has long held that the website does not contain any copyrighted material, and that they don't distribute any copyrighted material. I guess what I'm getting is that the prosecution is trying to prove that pointing out the location of copyrighted material is a crime.
I've actually had a long conversation about this at lunch and it really bugs me that there is even this legal concept...
It is virtually impossible to determine if you're pointing to the location of copyrighted material.
The Pirate Bay would have to download each torrent in part and check the contents and see if it's actually copyrighted.
You can't just assume that Madonna.mp3 is a track by Madonna, it could just as well be a podcast about pictures about Madonna for example.
You can't check everything and see if it's copyrighted or not as there is no database with copyright information anywhere.
And, even if it were, that podcast with Madonna mentioned a paragraph above could be copyrighted by the upload may have license to distribute it for free, and is willing to provide a copy of the license on request. What to you do, you just remove the stuff because it's copyrighted?
There are also lots of other examples of how stupid this whole thing is. I'll just give one more example for something that really bugs me.
Let's think for example of a popular book of Jules Verne that is uploaded on The Pirate Bay.
From the US point of view it should be removed because it's protected by publishing copyright (75 years since printing or something) but in Spain or France or Russia for example the copyright has expired a long time ago. So is it copyright infringement or not? Shouldn't the end user responsible for the decision?
There are lots of books mentioned on Project Gutenberg that are not yet included in the archive because some countries still have copyrights. It's just ridiculous to have copyrights for books written in 1850's but that's another story.
Also, should UK people be prosecuted because they download content from The Pirate Bay that is shown on BBC? Should other people from other countries have problems for downloading stuff shown on their local national TV for which they pay a license?
The reason it can't saturate the 2 SATA interfaces is most likely the custom chip they use, probably a Xilinx FPGA chip like the one i-Ram used.
Had they invested lots of cash in making a custom chip (but this takes time, months), it may have been faster but I assume they either believed it won't be a success, or got greedy and wanted to put something on the market fast or they assumed it's fast enough to make some fast cash.
Right now the only problem I see is the short 4 hour battery time and maybe the low transfer speed to CF cards (it needs about 20 minutes to transfer 16GB to backup card).
They should supply this device with a USB or PS2 cable adapter thingy, because most BIOSES are configured by default to power keyboards/mouse devices and some usb ports (or can easily be configured to do so and power draw is not so much - 12W is probably too much for that adapter but the device doesn't use that much when computer is turned off).
I personally find VLC to be quite buggy on Windows. In fact, if I test now to create a stream and send it to a broadcast server, I'll either have no sound or VLC would crash with runtime errors after a few minutes.
Especially about 2 years ago when I last did broadcasts with Real Producer, everything was a breeze, I don't think VLC even had streaming features then..
I've successfully used Real Producer then with great success and also in more recent times using Adobe Live Media Encoder coupled with Ustream.tv, to broadcast the CNN Obama debates to more than 3000 people at a time.
As title says, Real has a nice streaming server called Real Helix and a producer (tool that creates the stream and sends it to the server for other people to view from server) called Real Producer.
There is a free version for both Real Server and Real Producer Basic.
I believe you're not allowed to use the software commercially. As you use it for school and for noncommercial purposes you should be fine. It may also be worth to send an email to Real because they may have discounts for educational licenses. Anyway, Real Producer is about 100$
You just have to install the server on any computer with good network card because that's the computer that all classrooms will download the stream from. Your stream will be about 200-300KB/s for each user but you can change it as you want, for better or lower quality.
You install Real Producer on a somewhat powerful (a Core2Duo will be enough) computer with a TV tuner. Start the software, select the tv tuner as video and audio input, configure where to upload the stream and the bitrate and you're all set.
There are tutorials to help you on Real's website.
I've done this broadcasting football games at 80+ people in a college dormitory, on a 100mbps network so it definitely works.
The AVI container is very old and does not support certain things that modern codecs use.
For example, it was not designed for variable bitrate MP3. Of course, vbr MP3's work but it's a hack and only works because people doing MP3 decoders added additional code to make it work.
Same goes for x264. Some features of the encoding algorithm are not supported in the standard. Like B-Frames for example. Again, it works because they guys making the video codecs made it work in AVI. x264 programmers don't even do a Video For Windows codec, precisely because of these limitations. The codec people use on Media Player is made by a third party and it so happens those developers added support for AVI and workarounds.
AVI also doesn't support more than 2 audio files and lots of subtitles. With MKV you can have several video tracks, lots of audio tracks, lots of subtitles, chapters and so on...
Just make your own shoutcast server and set the url to your friend.
Since it's streaming MP3 it's harder for the other guy to save it and it also won't send personal information to the people listening to it (except the case where Apple would watermark the sound somehow)
Yeah... too bad America has proven it can't mobilize itself in case of some natural disaster. It's enough to see what happened in New Orleans and how fast it's being rebuilt.
Yeah, and if that "friend" wears gloves so leaves no fingerprints? What do you do? You lose a few days in courts and you lose a few hundred/thousand dollars in lawyer fees and get aggravated.
The whole system is really dumb and it's amazing how easy you can get in trouble.
A few years ago this wouldn't have been a problem because there were no speeding cameras. Just another problem that shouldn't be in the first place just because some folks need some easy money.
In Germany you can go as high as you want on Autobahn and as far as I know the number of accidents is very low, so I guess speed doesn't hurt if you build the road properly.
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Yeah, well, let him sue me and see how much DCMA applies in Greece or Ukraine or Russia or my country. Maybe he'll learn that DMCA applies only in US.
The Pirate Bay (TPB) offers an "optional" tracker that can be used for either legal or illegal purposes.
You can however post a torrent on TPB without any of the Pirate Bay trackers, so in this case TPB will act just like IsoHunt.
And how would you do that?
Let's say you have "Madonna.jpg"
How is IsoHunt supposed to know if it's
(a) a scan of a Madonna CD artwork (illegal)
(b) a picture you made with a camera of a Madonna statue
(c) a picture of your girlfriend you like to nickname "Madonna"
(d) a picture of the cover of a book that has Madonna in the name.
Or, if I make a movie of myself and friend at a party, dancing on Prince's music, and I label it "Prince - Purple rain.avi" should IsoHunt remove it because it may be the actual video of the song or should IsoHunt staff be forced to download it and count how many seconds of Purple Rain actually are (if any) so that they can determine if it's fair use (less than 30 seconds of song) or not?
If it's more than 30 seconds, do they use the Canadian laws where IsoHunt is, or MY laws, which may consider any length of song fair use?
It is why your children can't be allowed to use the Internet without supervision - someone will approach them with some unsavory proposal. Anyone doing this "in real life" would either be beaten to death or arrested, depending on who caught up with them first (a parent or the police). On the Internet, I can seduce your children, I can commit fraud, libel and anything else I choose and you can do nothing about it.
Obviously, you did not have a computer when you were a kid.
Yes, children can be seduced on the Internet but if you would be bothered to sit down with your kids and explain them about these kinds of people and what's appropriate and what's not, you wouldn't even need to supervise them, because they'll learn to recognize what's good and what's bad.
Just like promoting abstinence as birth control for teenagers, hiding children from the dangers of the world and supervising them constantly JUST WON'T WORK. You need to be patient and explain children about all these things and prepare them for life.
My parents were too embarrassed to teach me about sex and about these things and just hoped I would learn at school... well, I just learned about sex way before it came to learn at school by staying and watching softcore erotic movies on TV after parents went to sleep.
By the way, if you really want to protect your precious snowballs you should start burning your books because I can guarantee it your kids will look at your medicine/anatomy/romance books and look at pictures or read them, and they'll find about what you're trying to hide from them either way.
So why is free bad? It sounds really nice, just having everything for free. More money for everything else. Doesn't this just make us all richer? Sure, everyone except the creator. Somehow they got the idea that they were going to be paid. Well, payday is almost over. And when it is over for real they better like the new "everything for free" situation because there is no way you are going to convince people to go back to the old way.
The creator doesn't get paid sh*t anyway. The movie director, the artists in the movie, the band, they're all under a contract and paid a fixed amount of money. The label or movie studio gets their copyrights in return for giving them money in advance and for promoting the movie/records.
If the movie will be available for free, the poor movie studio will probably only make 100 million dollars from cinemas and associated merchandise instead of 150 million dollars. Maybe if the actors in the movie would not be paid millions of dollars like Angelina Jolie or others are paid, movies would be cheaper to make but I can guarantee you the movie studios will still be upset about losing money, because they're in it for the profit.
Sorry, no.
IsoHunt acts as a search engine and returns torrent files that can be either "legal" or "illegal".
No search engine can determine with 100% accuracy if something is legal or not, not even Google.
If I record a movie in my own garden, I can release the video on my website or even on The Pirate Bay with a license saying that only the people in my home town have the right to download the video and the rest don't.
IsoHunt will index the torrent file nevertheless and from your point of view, IsoHunt indexes an illegal torrent that should be taken down, but from my (the creator) point of view it's perfectly legal.
It's the USER'S RESPONSIBILITY to read the terms of the license, the description of the torrent file I made and download the movie if he believes he's allowed to.
So what I'm saying is that a movie or song or any binary data can be copyrighted but also can be legal to download it, it's illegal to distribute/download/upload/whatever something you don't have rights to do that and IsoHunt or any other search engine can't know that.
You can use Google nowadays for much worse things than copyright infringement, things like how to make a lockpick, how to prepare cocaine, how to steal a car, how to make a gun... but apparently a company's loss is important enough to stop something very useful to a lot of people.
It's not even worth to start commenting about cases where a company makes a movie making millions in US but doesn't feel it's worth releasing a DVD or a VHS to a small country, because they estimate they'll sell very few copies there and the profits will be smaller than the distribution and fabrication costs.
When this company retains copyright over something but yet keeps that something locked and unavailable to where I am, is that company really losing any money or suffers any losses if someone copies and gives away that stuff for free in that country? Should that company be allowed to keep copyright for 90 years on that? What was copyright supposed to be for, anyway?
Well, in theory we could have 72x CD drives or even DVD drives, it's just that they're too expensive to make.
A few years ago there was a company called Zen Research who invented a tehnology called TrueX which used 7 read heads to read the disc and it reconstructed the data from all seven read heads in the drive's cache.
An actual CD-ROM drive that implemented this was Kenwood 72x (http://www.tweak3d.net/reviews/kenwood/72x/) but they chose to reduce the rotational speed instead of higher throughput (perhaps the processor that gathered data from those 7 heads was also too slow to allow faster speed).
Nowadays, someone could probably license that technology and use it on DVD drives but the margins are so low already they wouldn't make a profit.
Here you go: http://savedonthe.net/image/191/disksvin.jpg
This server actually had 250 GB hard drives when this picture was taken, but nowadays you can imagine them being replaced with 750-1TB drives.
It's not that hard to buy 2-4 500$ Areca RAID controllers with 8-12 SATA ports each and a 4U server case and have a server with loads of disk space.
There's even well known companies like Leaseweb who offer dedicated servers on their pages with 24x1TB drives by default because customers with sites like Youtube clones need them.
But in this case, the servers were not with 65 TB but there were 10 servers who in total had 65TB and they only managed to take down 1 server.
Nope. MSN Messenger has the "iexplore.exe" string hardcoded in the exe file. Just check it with a hex viewer. Yet another Microsoft intentional lock-in.
You don't need a browser to get a browser on your computer.
Microsoft can simply design a small "Welcome to Windows" wizard, which connects to a MS FTP server and downloads a XML file (for example something like ftp.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/browserlist.xml) with a list of browsers.
User can then browse the list, select one and the wizard will simply download the setup from the location specified in the XML file and start the setup.
Alternatively, you could just go to an IT store and get a free Firefox CD or go to a friend and copy the setup application on a memory stick.
You should complain to Microsoft then for keeping the format locked and requiring exorbitant fees to create applications capable of creating HLP files.
HLP files are basically a collection of RTF files with an index, yet the full format is obscure and not documented properly unless you get a license from MS.
They probably took it out of Windows 7 because there were some bugs... buffer overflows, that clipart format bug which could affect HLP files because you can embed those buggy images inside RTF docs... and they were no longer interested in offering an alternative to the CHM - compiled HTML format.
They just need to create a new hh.exe executable (or whatever is used to open those help files in the background) and list it as important update for a specific application (Office, whatever) in Windows Updates.
The updated help application can very well use a custom made DLL file or several DLL files or internal code to render the contents of the help file. A simple library capable of showing text, links and jpg/gif images on a window is not that hard to do.
As long as these DLL files are only used by this help application I don't care.
It's not our fault that Microsoft intentionally did the help system and other Windows systems around IE to lock users into it. Users shouldn't suffer because of it.
Maybe you're too young but in WIndows 95, there was already a help system implemented (with HLP files, not the CHM files) that allowed people to go between help pages easily but didn't use IE.
If it would have been at least 1$ cheaper and/or actually available in stores, it would have been more successful.
At least in my country Romania, where all stores receive free advertising money, billboards, promotional content and get lower prices if they don't sell computers with Linux pre-installed, every store only advertises Home and Premium versions of operating systems. The N versions are never in stock and if you really want to order them, it takes probably two weeks for the store to receive it from the Microsoft importer in the capital of the country.
Well, anyways unless people buy it for a company computer, people get laptops or computers with FreeDOS preinstalled (as there's law in the country saying all pc's must have OS installed) and then they pirate the OS or use Ubuntu or other flavors of Linux.
It's one thing to impose Microsoft the need of offering that N version, if you don't impose them to advertise it in equal amount with the regular version and to actually manufacture the physical discs.
I would personally buy a Windows 7 version without IE but completely without it, not just having iexplore.exe removed.
I would then laugh when I see Yahoo Messenger no longer works, the help system in Windows no longer works, Visual Studio's help no longer works, all the junk internal websites using proprietary IE stuff at my old work place no longer working and so on and so forth.
Actually, I would dare to say it's the people's fault for storing sensitive files in the Documents folder in the first place.
Sensitive data should be read from a network drive only when needed, and there should be a log with who opened it, who saved it and so on, much like a SVN/CVS whatever.
Also, a very important rule that every company should teach programmers and employees is NEVER STORE DOCUMENTS ON THE BOOT PARTITION.
If for some reason Windows goes berserk/crashes/you get infected with a virus, the easiest solution is to simply reinstall the operating system, formatting the boot partition.
Most often someone will forget about some documents on the boot partition and will lose stuff.
Teaching this solves the "automatic sharing of My Documents by p2p software" automatically, as people will no longer use it to store stuff.
Sorry but TPB is in Sweden where there's no DCMA. DCMA only applies to US.
I'm from Romania and if I would get a DCMA to one of my websites I would also ignore it as it does not apply.
TPB is not obliged in any way to take down anything, as they're not the ones guilty of copyright issues.
Companies have to contact the website member that posted the torrent and request them to delete the torrent, it's that simple.
Instead, they are arrogant and assume everything they do in US is law everywhere and get angry when they become the joke.
Google returns results that start with "http", so does Piratebay.
You can't argue that TPB returns only torrent files, as Google can also return as results PDF, DOC, HTML, PHP and other formats.
Especially PDF files returned by Google can be copyrighted, but that doesn't mean Google facilitates copyright infringement.
As I understand it, TPB has long held that the website does not contain any copyrighted material, and that they don't distribute any copyrighted material. I guess what I'm getting is that the prosecution is trying to prove that pointing out the location of copyrighted material is a crime.
I've actually had a long conversation about this at lunch and it really bugs me that there is even this legal concept...
It is virtually impossible to determine if you're pointing to the location of copyrighted material.
The Pirate Bay would have to download each torrent in part and check the contents and see if it's actually copyrighted.
You can't just assume that Madonna.mp3 is a track by Madonna, it could just as well be a podcast about pictures about Madonna for example.
You can't check everything and see if it's copyrighted or not as there is no database with copyright information anywhere.
And, even if it were, that podcast with Madonna mentioned a paragraph above could be copyrighted by the upload may have license to distribute it for free, and is willing to provide a copy of the license on request. What to you do, you just remove the stuff because it's copyrighted?
There are also lots of other examples of how stupid this whole thing is. I'll just give one more example for something that really bugs me.
Let's think for example of a popular book of Jules Verne that is uploaded on The Pirate Bay.
From the US point of view it should be removed because it's protected by publishing copyright (75 years since printing or something) but in Spain or France or Russia for example the copyright has expired a long time ago.
So is it copyright infringement or not? Shouldn't the end user responsible for the decision?
There are lots of books mentioned on Project Gutenberg that are not yet included in the archive because some countries still have copyrights. It's just ridiculous to have copyrights for books written in 1850's but that's another story.
Also, should UK people be prosecuted because they download content from The Pirate Bay that is shown on BBC? Should other people from other countries have problems for downloading stuff shown on their local national TV for which they pay a license?
I'll settle with ACTA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement)
Compare 350$ (device) + 300$ for memory for a 32GB drive versus 4 x 600$ Intel SSDs.
The reason it can't saturate the 2 SATA interfaces is most likely the custom chip they use, probably a Xilinx FPGA chip like the one i-Ram used.
Had they invested lots of cash in making a custom chip (but this takes time, months), it may have been faster but I assume they either believed it won't be a success, or got greedy and wanted to put something on the market fast or they assumed it's fast enough to make some fast cash.
Right now the only problem I see is the short 4 hour battery time and maybe the low transfer speed to CF cards (it needs about 20 minutes to transfer 16GB to backup card).
They should supply this device with a USB or PS2 cable adapter thingy, because most BIOSES are configured by default to power keyboards/mouse devices and some usb ports (or can easily be configured to do so and power draw is not so much - 12W is probably too much for that adapter but the device doesn't use that much when computer is turned off).
I personally find VLC to be quite buggy on Windows. In fact, if I test now to create a stream and send it to a broadcast server, I'll either have no sound or VLC would crash with runtime errors after a few minutes.
Especially about 2 years ago when I last did broadcasts with Real Producer, everything was a breeze, I don't think VLC even had streaming features then..
I've successfully used Real Producer then with great success and also in more recent times using Adobe Live Media Encoder coupled with Ustream.tv, to broadcast the CNN Obama debates to more than 3000 people at a time.
As title says, Real has a nice streaming server called Real Helix and a producer (tool that creates the stream and sends it to the server for other people to view from server) called Real Producer.
There is a free version for both Real Server and Real Producer Basic.
Here's the page:
http://www.realnetworks.com/products/free_trial.html.
I believe you're not allowed to use the software commercially. As you use it for school and for noncommercial purposes you should be fine.
It may also be worth to send an email to Real because they may have discounts for educational licenses.
Anyway, Real Producer is about 100$
You just have to install the server on any computer with good network card because that's the computer that all classrooms will download the stream from. Your stream will be about 200-300KB/s for each user but you can change it as you want, for better or lower quality.
You install Real Producer on a somewhat powerful (a Core2Duo will be enough) computer with a TV tuner. Start the software, select the tv tuner as video and audio input, configure where to upload the stream and the bitrate and you're all set.
There are tutorials to help you on Real's website.
I've done this broadcasting football games at 80+ people in a college dormitory, on a 100mbps network so it definitely works.
Another alternative (though I didn't test this) would be to use an open source Flash streaming server like Red5 ( http://osflash.org/red5 ) and use the free Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder 3 ( http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/flashmediaencoder/ ) to record and send the stream to the Flash server.
The AVI container is very old and does not support certain things that modern codecs use.
For example, it was not designed for variable bitrate MP3. Of course, vbr MP3's work but it's a hack and only works because people doing MP3 decoders added additional code to make it work.
Same goes for x264. Some features of the encoding algorithm are not supported in the standard. Like B-Frames for example. Again, it works because they guys making the video codecs made it work in AVI.
x264 programmers don't even do a Video For Windows codec, precisely because of these limitations. The codec people use on Media Player is made by a third party and it so happens those developers added support for AVI and workarounds.
AVI also doesn't support more than 2 audio files and lots of subtitles. With MKV you can have several video tracks, lots of audio tracks, lots of subtitles, chapters and so on...
Just make your own shoutcast server and set the url to your friend.
Since it's streaming MP3 it's harder for the other guy to save it and it also won't send personal information to the people listening to it (except the case where Apple would watermark the sound somehow)
Yeah... too bad America has proven it can't mobilize itself in case of some natural disaster. It's enough to see what happened in New Orleans and how fast it's being rebuilt.
Yeah, and if that "friend" wears gloves so leaves no fingerprints? What do you do? You lose a few days in courts and you lose a few hundred/thousand dollars in lawyer fees and get aggravated.
The whole system is really dumb and it's amazing how easy you can get in trouble.
A few years ago this wouldn't have been a problem because there were no speeding cameras. Just another problem that shouldn't be in the first place just because some folks need some easy money.
In Germany you can go as high as you want on Autobahn and as far as I know the number of accidents is very low, so I guess speed doesn't hurt if you build the road properly.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Accident_record