TPB is not really a music discovery service. You have to know the name of the track to find it. Last.fm is a discovery service. I've listened to over 7,000 different tracks via their streaming service.
Last.fm needs more fine grained control over their stream contents. Some tracks in my library have been streamed 200 times and others never get streamed. There is no way to stop these tracks that are getting streamed too much other than banning them. But I kind of like the track so I don't want to ban it. I just don't want to hear it over and over.
You can beat this with an array of Pogoplugs at $99 each. They draw under 5W and have 512MB RAM, 512MB flash and GbE. Stick a 64GB USB stick into it. They about about 3in square.
I laugh all the time when I see small companies and individuals worrying about patents and NDAs. You're just making the lawyers rich. Almost all projects like this fail. Don't spend a bunch of money protecting something that has the odds stacked against it. Instead spend that money on making sure that customers actually want what you are building. A highly protected concept that no one wants is worthless. Even worse is 10,000 boards in a warehouse that no one wants.
Don't worry about China, it is an unwinable situation. If you go to China and no one copies you, that's bad news - they think you are going to fail. If you get copied that's actually good news. Staying in the US won't help. Once you are a little successful someone will send one of your devices to China and they will still clone it. A top engineer can clone most mass market hardware after looking at it for a couple of hours.
Marketing, customer service, channel, branding, web presence, retail partnerships, etc - these are things that can't easily be cloned. If a clone form China beats you it is because you failed in these areas.
There are billions of ideas but it is rare for an individual idea to have true value. The value is in the company that surrounds the idea. You have to build the company to extract the value. Microsoft is where they are today because they control the OEM software market with an iron first, not because they have brilliant software ideas.
Everyone should do at least one startup in their life. As the saying goes - you can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket.
"The Corporate and Criminal Fraud Accountability Act is part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, enforced by the Department of Labor. It protects employees of publicly-traded corporations from retaliation for reporting alleged violations of any rule or regulation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, or any provision of Federal law relating to fraud against shareholders. Not only does this landmark Act criminalize employer retaliation, it also requires publicly-traded corporations to create procedures for internal whistle blowing. Additionally, it requires attorneys to become internal whistle blowers."
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Computing is a young industry and it is easy for multiple independent inventions of the same idea to occur. People reinvent things all of the time without knowing that someone else has done it first.
Execution is the most valuable. Timing is the next most valuable. A great idea that is invented too early is called "Science Fiction".
Another problem is gating events. There are millions of ideas out there that are useless because they aren't buildable. Then a gating event occurs and all of those useless ideas suddenly become viable. For example, the thousands of patents that took old ideas and added the phrase "on the Internet". Those were not new inventions, that was the consequence of a gating event.
Patent trolls are leeches. If they were skilled at anything except lawyering, they'd build companies around their great patents instead of trying to steal someone else's execution of the idea.
Build something and sell it. Then your idea is valuable. Secrecy is worthless.
Satellite could implement ban/next by changing the model. They could also fix the problem with drop outs of which I get dozens as I drive around. I'm letting my Sirius expire when the contract is up.
An alternative model would eliminate the existing channels. It would use the much higher bandwidth as a single channel to fill 8GB of local flash cache. Then an app in the radio would reconstruct the channels out of the cache.
Ban/next now become local operations. When you ban a song you knock it out of the cache and the cache then fills with something else. Over time it would learn what you liked. The incoming music would be pattern matched against your ban/like history. Drop outs are gone because the channels play from the cache.
RIAA is the main problem. They consider cached systems like this "copies" and want a much higher royalty.
If he really believes what he says then he should simply stop releasing PC games and go console only. Of course there's a another whole set of problems when you go that route. Sounds to me more like a big case of WOW envy.
DRM in the hands for the consumer will always be cracked. It is pointless to try and chase it.
Re:Finally, developers' ignorance and childish
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 1
This already exists. It's called HTML and HTTP.
How X got to where it is
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Three main trends got X to where it is.
1) Proprietary hardware. NVidia and ATI didn't release specs. That resulted in what little dev talent there was being used to do reverse engineering. ATI has gone a long ways towards fixing this. 2) Insistence on cross platform support. Cross platform support means no device drivers - everything in user space. There are all kinds of security issues with everything in user space. This also mean no integration with the underlying kernel. OOPS isn't visible, VT interaction, mode setting, no intergration with framebuffer, etc. Insistence on cross platform means that one OS can prevent progress from occurring on the others. There seems to be some movement on this issue. 3) Failure to endorse OpenGL-ES as the core driver system. The embedded world went OpenGL-ES and ignores X (N810 is an exception). There is money in the embedded world and not in the desktop. The money went to OpenGL-ES.
From a developer's point of view the architecture of X has not evolved in a way where a developer can work on one chunk of the code without having comprehensive knowledge of the entire system. Requiring that level of knowledge really reduces the number of potential developers. Finally there is a giant amount of NIH that goes on.
Verizon phone are not locked, it's just that no one else has a CDMA based network. The other networks are GSM so CDMA phones won't work.
I do agree that removing file transfer is annoying. Their "excuse" is to stop unauthorized downloads (ala Paris Hilton). Newer Verizon phones have removable media.
Search for hack sites, all of their branding/restrictions can be bypassed.
I don't have my bill with me but I recall the total with fees to be around 15-20 dollars. Many of the fees are percentages so by lowering it to $10 all of the fees went down proportionately.
My $99 triple play is about $180 but I have two HD DVRs, some movie packages, and $10 extra for 20/5 internet.
Comcast and FIOS pricing is essentially identical. But you get better reception, more channels and higher speed internet with FIOS. Plus no packet inspection and interference.
I'm anxiously awaiting the 110 new HD channels we're supposed to be getting any day now on FIOS.
Triple play does well in high neighborhoods because the land line is used for monitoring alarm systems. In the FIOS $99 triple play only $10 of it goes to the land line.
FIOS also makes calls between your land line and Verizon cellphone free.
I'm going with death wish. FIOS is obviously targeting the high end neighborhoods first. They are picking off all of the most profitable customers. People in those neighbors tend to be technically sophisticated so 80%+ of them switch to FIOS. Comcast's antics are only hastening the switch.
FIOS phone works with the power out. There is a big battery in the ONT. How long it lasts is a function of what kind of phones you have and how long you talk on them. Somewhere between 8hrs and a week.
Of course the last time I lost power it was because a tree fell and knocked over the telephone pole. Battery doesn't help in that case.
All of the big ISPs have the same restriction. You can run them but the common ports are blocked.
I do find it very ironic that FIOS has the policy of allowing unlimited quasi-legal P2P use while at the same time blocking legal activities such as web, mail, ftp servers. Blocking the common server ports is going to get them a lawsuit sooner or later.
I have complained about this at fairly high levels in the FIOS organization. The official reason for blocking is to stop viruses and misconfigured mail servers. They admit that allowing these servers would have no significant traffic impact compared to the P2P load.
You can use your own router with FIOS. Originally they were installing it that way. Buy a used Motorola NIM-100 ($40) on Ebay. It is a passive MOCA to Ethernet bridge. Then plug your own router into the NIM-100. The ActionTec router is running Linux. Search on the net and there are write ups on how to log into it. You probably just need to tweak something to get it to handle more sessions.
There is another solution too. Call up Verizon and have them activate the Ethernet port on your ONT. When getting a new FIOS install you can chose either Moca or Ethernet install. The default is Moca since most houses lack Ethernet cabling. Moca routes the Internet access around the house on coax, the ActionTec and NIM-100 convert this signal to normal Ethernet.
FIOS offers 100/100 business class service if you have money to burn.
I get audio drop outs with FIOS, but I got audio and video drop outs with Comcast. FIOS picture is way better than Comcast. Big thing coming with FIOS in the next couple of months is 100 real HDTV channels (same group that is currently available on satellite). FIOS does not recompress HDTV, they put it on the fiber the same way it comes off form the network feeds. I don't see how cable is going to do 100 real HDTV channels (not like's Comcast's lie of 1,000 HD channels --- which is really 1,000 HD ondemand titles).
I have FIOS and get the same 20/5 every time I check it. Of course 99% of sites I visit won't send me data at 20Mb but that's not Verizon's fault. Why stick with DSL, you can't beat the triple play (Internet, phone - free US long distance, TV - around 500 channels) for $99 month on FIOS. Sign up now and they throw in a free LCD HDTV or camcorder too. Now if they'd just drop the QAM encryption on all of the channels so that I could use MythTV instead of their DVR....
You might also want to point out that this would turn the ISPs into police and give them some of the powers of police. Policing should stay in the hands of government. If the government really wants to police this they can follow proper legal procedures for establishing a wire tap, proving guilt, etc. It is a very slippery slope allowing ISPs to monitor traffic and make decisions based on what they see in the traffic. What if they decide to start monitoring MP's email and publish interesting tidbits?
A better answer is for the content industry to come up with a new business model. Obviously the world has changed and their old one doesn't work anymore.
Nokia N800 or N810 is a very good solution. I have about 10 SD cards. I fill the SD cards with movies before I leave. You can put 3-4 on a 2GB card by using the tool that cuts them down to the right size for the device screen. I watch movies on the plane ride and delete them. Then fill the cards up with photos while on the trip. Make sure camera takes same SD card as Nokia. Don't mail anything home. Just drop by an Internet cafe and copy the cards onto your web server.
If you're rich (or someone else is paying) N800/N810 can connect to cellphone as a Bluetooth modem. This option is about a hundred times as expensive as the Internet cafe.
I have the 770, N800 and N810. I just got my N810. All are excellent for traveling. I would be concerned about taking the N810 into harsh environments. N800 seems to be sealed up better. I have about 10 2GB flash cards. Fill them up when you are in the bush and then use an Internet cafe to send them to your web server. No need to mail them home, they will take weeks to get there if they get there at all. Get a camera which takes SD cards so that you can use the N800 to look at them and delete the junk.
Slashdot Mirror
TPB is not really a music discovery service. You have to know the name of the track to find it. Last.fm is a discovery service. I've listened to over 7,000 different tracks via their streaming service.
Last.fm needs more fine grained control over their stream contents. Some tracks in my library have been streamed 200 times and others never get streamed. There is no way to stop these tracks that are getting streamed too much other than banning them. But I kind of like the track so I don't want to ban it. I just don't want to hear it over and over.
The Pogoplug power supply is on a separate PCB, you can just unplug and discard it.
Application is for webservers, the Beagleboard video hardware is just going to draw a bunch of power.
The Marvell ARM CPU scores 2/3 of Intel Atom on integer benchmarks. It doesn't have an FPU.
You can beat this with an array of Pogoplugs at $99 each. They draw under 5W and have 512MB RAM, 512MB flash and GbE. Stick a 64GB USB stick into it. They about about 3in square.
Pogoplug is same thing as a Marvell SheevaPlug.
I laugh all the time when I see small companies and individuals worrying about patents and NDAs. You're just making the lawyers rich. Almost all projects like this fail. Don't spend a bunch of money protecting something that has the odds stacked against it. Instead spend that money on making sure that customers actually want what you are building. A highly protected concept that no one wants is worthless. Even worse is 10,000 boards in a warehouse that no one wants.
Don't worry about China, it is an unwinable situation. If you go to China and no one copies you, that's bad news - they think you are going to fail. If you get copied that's actually good news. Staying in the US won't help. Once you are a little successful someone will send one of your devices to China and they will still clone it. A top engineer can clone most mass market hardware after looking at it for a couple of hours.
Marketing, customer service, channel, branding, web presence, retail partnerships, etc - these are things that can't easily be cloned. If a clone form China beats you it is because you failed in these areas.
There are billions of ideas but it is rare for an individual idea to have true value. The value is in the company that surrounds the idea. You have to build the company to extract the value. Microsoft is where they are today because they control the OEM software market with an iron first, not because they have brilliant software ideas.
Everyone should do at least one startup in their life. As the saying goes - you can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket.
You have recourse and need to talk to a lawyer.
"The Corporate and Criminal Fraud Accountability Act is part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, enforced by the Department of Labor. It protects employees of publicly-traded corporations from retaliation for reporting alleged violations of any rule or regulation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, or any provision of Federal law relating to fraud against shareholders. Not only does this landmark Act criminalize employer retaliation, it also requires publicly-traded corporations to create procedures for internal whistle blowing. Additionally, it requires attorneys to become internal whistle blowers."
Dual band 802.11n, not 2.4Ghz 11n, of course it was faster.
Free space optic might be a solution to wireless HDMI. Put an LED light in the room and modulate it in the Mhz range. Humans will never notice.
Of course I've never understood why people want wireless HDMI. You still have to wire power to the monitor.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Computing is a young industry and it is easy for multiple independent inventions of the same idea to occur. People reinvent things all of the time without knowing that someone else has done it first.
Execution is the most valuable. Timing is the next most valuable. A great idea that is invented too early is called "Science Fiction".
Another problem is gating events. There are millions of ideas out there that are useless because they aren't buildable. Then a gating event occurs and all of those useless ideas suddenly become viable. For example, the thousands of patents that took old ideas and added the phrase "on the Internet". Those were not new inventions, that was the consequence of a gating event.
Patent trolls are leeches. If they were skilled at anything except lawyering, they'd build companies around their great patents instead of trying to steal someone else's execution of the idea.
Build something and sell it. Then your idea is valuable. Secrecy is worthless.
Satellite could implement ban/next by changing the model. They could also fix the problem with drop outs of which I get dozens as I drive around. I'm letting my Sirius expire when the contract is up.
An alternative model would eliminate the existing channels. It would use the much higher bandwidth as a single channel to fill 8GB of local flash cache. Then an app in the radio would reconstruct the channels out of the cache.
Ban/next now become local operations. When you ban a song you knock it out of the cache and the cache then fills with something else. Over time it would learn what you liked. The incoming music would be pattern matched against your ban/like history. Drop outs are gone because the channels play from the cache.
RIAA is the main problem. They consider cached systems like this "copies" and want a much higher royalty.
Check out Lagotek, they have ready built this.
This news is from February.
More detail here...
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb08/5995
If he really believes what he says then he should simply stop releasing PC games and go console only. Of course there's a another whole set of problems when you go that route. Sounds to me more like a big case of WOW envy.
DRM in the hands for the consumer will always be cracked. It is pointless to try and chase it.
This already exists. It's called HTML and HTTP.
Three main trends got X to where it is.
1) Proprietary hardware. NVidia and ATI didn't release specs. That resulted in what little dev talent there was being used to do reverse engineering. ATI has gone a long ways towards fixing this.
2) Insistence on cross platform support. Cross platform support means no device drivers - everything in user space. There are all kinds of security issues with everything in user space. This also mean no integration with the underlying kernel. OOPS isn't visible, VT interaction, mode setting, no intergration with framebuffer, etc. Insistence on cross platform means that one OS can prevent progress from occurring on the others. There seems to be some movement on this issue.
3) Failure to endorse OpenGL-ES as the core driver system. The embedded world went OpenGL-ES and ignores X (N810 is an exception). There is money in the embedded world and not in the desktop. The money went to OpenGL-ES.
From a developer's point of view the architecture of X has not evolved in a way where a developer can work on one chunk of the code without having comprehensive knowledge of the entire system. Requiring that level of knowledge really reduces the number of potential developers. Finally there is a giant amount of NIH that goes on.
Verizon phone are not locked, it's just that no one else has a CDMA based network. The other networks are GSM so CDMA phones won't work.
I do agree that removing file transfer is annoying. Their "excuse" is to stop unauthorized downloads (ala Paris Hilton). Newer Verizon phones have removable media.
Search for hack sites, all of their branding/restrictions can be bypassed.
I don't have my bill with me but I recall the total with fees to be around 15-20 dollars. Many of the fees are percentages so by lowering it to $10 all of the fees went down proportionately.
My $99 triple play is about $180 but I have two HD DVRs, some movie packages, and $10 extra for 20/5 internet.
Comcast and FIOS pricing is essentially identical. But you get better reception, more channels and higher speed internet with FIOS. Plus no packet inspection and interference.
I'm anxiously awaiting the 110 new HD channels we're supposed to be getting any day now on FIOS.
Triple play does well in high neighborhoods because the land line is used for monitoring alarm systems. In the FIOS $99 triple play only $10 of it goes to the land line.
FIOS also makes calls between your land line and Verizon cellphone free.
I'm going with death wish. FIOS is obviously targeting the high end neighborhoods first. They are picking off all of the most profitable customers. People in those neighbors tend to be technically sophisticated so 80%+ of them switch to FIOS. Comcast's antics are only hastening the switch.
Plot CMCSA vs VZ stocks for the last year.
FIOS phone works with the power out. There is a big battery in the ONT. How long it lasts is a function of what kind of phones you have and how long you talk on them. Somewhere between 8hrs and a week.
Of course the last time I lost power it was because a tree fell and knocked over the telephone pole. Battery doesn't help in that case.
All of the big ISPs have the same restriction. You can run them but the common ports are blocked.
I do find it very ironic that FIOS has the policy of allowing unlimited quasi-legal P2P use while at the same time blocking legal activities such as web, mail, ftp servers. Blocking the common server ports is going to get them a lawsuit sooner or later.
I have complained about this at fairly high levels in the FIOS organization. The official reason for blocking is to stop viruses and misconfigured mail servers. They admit that allowing these servers would have no significant traffic impact compared to the P2P load.
You can use your own router with FIOS. Originally they were installing it that way. Buy a used Motorola NIM-100 ($40) on Ebay. It is a passive MOCA to Ethernet bridge. Then plug your own router into the NIM-100. The ActionTec router is running Linux. Search on the net and there are write ups on how to log into it. You probably just need to tweak something to get it to handle more sessions.
There is another solution too. Call up Verizon and have them activate the Ethernet port on your ONT. When getting a new FIOS install you can chose either Moca or Ethernet install. The default is Moca since most houses lack Ethernet cabling. Moca routes the Internet access around the house on coax, the ActionTec and NIM-100 convert this signal to normal Ethernet.
FIOS offers 100/100 business class service if you have money to burn.
I get audio drop outs with FIOS, but I got audio and video drop outs with Comcast. FIOS picture is way better than Comcast. Big thing coming with FIOS in the next couple of months is 100 real HDTV channels (same group that is currently available on satellite). FIOS does not recompress HDTV, they put it on the fiber the same way it comes off form the network feeds. I don't see how cable is going to do 100 real HDTV channels (not like's Comcast's lie of 1,000 HD channels --- which is really 1,000 HD ondemand titles).
I have FIOS and get the same 20/5 every time I check it. Of course 99% of sites I visit won't send me data at 20Mb but that's not Verizon's fault. Why stick with DSL, you can't beat the triple play (Internet, phone - free US long distance, TV - around 500 channels) for $99 month on FIOS. Sign up now and they throw in a free LCD HDTV or camcorder too. Now if they'd just drop the QAM encryption on all of the channels so that I could use MythTV instead of their DVR....
You might also want to point out that this would turn the ISPs into police and give them some of the powers of police. Policing should stay in the hands of government. If the government really wants to police this they can follow proper legal procedures for establishing a wire tap, proving guilt, etc. It is a very slippery slope allowing ISPs to monitor traffic and make decisions based on what they see in the traffic. What if they decide to start monitoring MP's email and publish interesting tidbits?
A better answer is for the content industry to come up with a new business model. Obviously the world has changed and their old one doesn't work anymore.
Nokia N800 or N810 is a very good solution. I have about 10 SD cards. I fill the SD cards with movies before I leave. You can put 3-4 on a 2GB card by using the tool that cuts them down to the right size for the device screen. I watch movies on the plane ride and delete them. Then fill the cards up with photos while on the trip. Make sure camera takes same SD card as Nokia. Don't mail anything home. Just drop by an Internet cafe and copy the cards onto your web server.
If you're rich (or someone else is paying) N800/N810 can connect to cellphone as a Bluetooth modem. This option is about a hundred times as expensive as the Internet cafe.
I have the 770, N800 and N810. I just got my N810. All are excellent for traveling. I would be concerned about taking the N810 into harsh environments. N800 seems to be sealed up better. I have about 10 2GB flash cards. Fill them up when you are in the bush and then use an Internet cafe to send them to your web server. No need to mail them home, they will take weeks to get there if they get there at all. Get a camera which takes SD cards so that you can use the N800 to look at them and delete the junk.