XM has the better sound quality but Sirius seems to have the better content in many circumstances, in my opinion. For example, XM's metal channel went online-only some time ago, whereas Sirius' Hard Attack is both on the satellite and online has great shows with artist interviews, different sub-genres, etc.
What bugs me is that in the drive to be profitable, I can see the bean counters taking over eventually, marginalizing everything that's great about satellite -- delivering specialized, commercial-free(ish) content... similar to cable or pay TV.
IBM, HP, Sun, etc. already offer broad IP indemnity for customers that use (vendor approved, often Redhat or Novell) Linux on their hardware. It wasn't news for them, and FSF isn't threatening them.
It's ludicrous to punish Novell for doing a service for their customers that is intended to make them feel *safe* using Linux. The fact is that many large companies are frightened that they will be sued for patent infringment if they use OSS, especially Linux. Yes, a massive cry of outrage will happen if something like that ever occurs, but a) cornered software companies can be vicious and have tremendous staying power if they feel they have nothing to lose, see SCO; b) the more risk averse companies may fire the people that chose Linux and jettison it ASAP, dealing a blow to FOSS adoption in the enterprise.
To mitigate their risks, some companies have very specific lists of approved OSS packages, vetted by lawyers for potential infringement claims. Open source Java toolkits may have less of a chance of patent infringement, so tend to be blessed more easily (and often are bundled with commercial app servers anyway, who may indemnify what's in the package, though only specific versions).
The problem is that Microsoft claims patents on absurdly broad things -- filesystems (since disproven), memory management, etc. Non-technical legal departments may or may not explore these in detail -- the quick thing to do would to tell the CIO: "no Linux". Or they may scratch the surface of these patents and see them for the joke that many of them are. We know that Microsoft has already threatened large IT shops with possible patent suits in the future (under NDA, no les), and likely offered them indemnity. Few have taken them up on this, though it seems Novell was gullible enough to bite.
Novell is merely engaging in a quaint, pre-GPL business practice; indemnifying their customers against potential legal issues even when they consider the probabilities remote.
Quaint?
One of the major reasons that Linux is being adopted at an increasing rate is that large vendors such as IBM, HP, and Sun are offering blanket IP indemnity on Linux. They're not making specific deals with Microsoft, however, so I suppose it's less of a news item.
But the GPL is, essentially, all about giving code ownership of itself.
Except that copyright owners can still do whatever they want with the code & future derivatives....
Where we ought to be headed, my guess, is towards sentient code that owns itself
Why? Code has value only in a context of human relationships. Code is not an end in itself.
innovation is not invention
on
iPhone Roundup
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· Score: 1
Innovation is an economic term, it's about taking a good idea and applying it to something new to the market. It can be accomplished by exploiting new knowledge , or changing demographics, or changing attitudes, or unexpected successes/failures.
The difference between Apple and others is that they're usually the first "innovator" but rarely the inventor. With integrated Ethernet & USB on the iMac, for example, they were the innovator. With Firewire, they were both. With the iPod, they were the major innovator of the jog wheel applied as the central navigation feature, but certainly not the first consumer product to use one (I've seen VCR remotes with them).
Multi-touch may have been invented by others, but there's a lot to be said for the bundling of software around such a feature.
Outside of Best Buy last night in downtown Toronto, there were probably around 300 people, and I'd say 35-40% were women. Lots of couples, noteably, though some were in groups of friends. Mostly people in their 20's, with some in their 30's or up. The teenagers weren't likely to be hanging around downtown Toronto at midnight.
Right, my mistake, on the 2.5 million being an estimate.
But the graph you listed isn't total sales, it's U.S. sales. Microsoft shipped 1.5 million units (via wikipedia) worldwide by EOY 2005. I wouldn't say that's missing their initial 90 day estimate by more than half (as one would have to count Jan/Feb 2006).
Depends. For Ontario, I drive north to Sudbury and Manitoulin Island a fair amount and I get EDGE access along most of 400/69/17 with a few GPRS spots and a few dead spots. The further one is from the corridor or an urban center, the worse the coverage, unfortunately. Southwestern Ontario seems covered
Just google "2.5 million xbox 360" and you'll see many links. They lowered their estimates from 3 million to 2.5 million in the first 90 days of launch.
They're also estimated as the #1 console in the 2006 holiday season with 2 million units (vs. Wii's 1.8 million).
Since Rogers is the only real GSM/EDGE provider in Canada, they'll likely carry the iPhone. They also co-brand their Hi-Speed Internet with Yahoo!, so this business arrangement seems to be set up to work well.
The price will be interesting in Canada, however. I am betting iPhone will likely be C$499/4gb and C$599/8gb with a 3 year contract. To contrast, I paid $499 for my Blackberry 8700r with Rogers in Canada, with a 3 year contract, in mid 2006. (I believe it's at $299 now.)
It's a lot, but my Blackberry doesn't have 8gb of space either, nor WiFi, or a great browser.
Now the only question is whether one can deal with typing on a non-tactile keyboard.
Lest you say that the Register is not a trusty new source, Canada's leading paper, The Globe and Mail ran a 2/3 page story on this today in the Business section.
I question Forrester's reliability, on the other hand. But the press does love a controversy.
I get the track now, I don't have to rip it (I'm lazy)
I can buy individual songs when I would never buy the album
It works with my iPod (I also use eMusic, btw)
It works with both my Mac & Windows (most DRM won't work with Mac or won't allow several computers)
I can even share my songs with several friends (authorizing their computers to play my iTunes purchased songs
When browsing I might find an artist on an iMix I didn't know about
Why I buy from HMV (on 333 Yonge in Toronto):
They have one of the best Metal, Industrial, and Electronica CD selections in the city, if not the country
I like to support local stores when I can
They sell a major metal magazine based down the street (BW&BK)
They have more obscure artists that iTunes doesn't carry
When browsing I might find an artist on display I didn't know about
They have staff that loves the music I'm into, gives good recs, and has autograph signing sessions with some bands
I can pickup boxsets, special editions, memorabilia, and DVD's while I'm at it
They both have their strengths and weaknesses, but I will note this: iTunes blows away your "run of the mill" music store based on sheer laziness factor. You need a music store that has lots of extras to beat out the experience of shopping from your living room. Kinda like movie theatres vs. home movies.
There's no correlation between how advanced computers get, how much we invest in them, and how productive we become. Productivity is a human equation -- it's how we use, manage, and create incentives around knowledge & technology that will determine our productivity. Evidence is that we don't manage it well, as there isn't really much of a link between the large technology expenditures that grew over the past 20 years & any increased profits, increased wages, or increased leisure time, since the 1970's.
The article summary is misleading. The article author claims he has had personal productivity improvements of 10-fold every 10 years. Computing and IT has not caused tremendous measurable productivity strides -- one may argue it (among other factors) has brought, since the late 1990's, productivity growth back to the level of the 1950's and 1960's, but prior to this, from 1970 through 1995, developed world productivity was _slowing_.
As the largest ISP in America (if not the world) for a time, it was the Wal Mart of the Internet for many years, and remains very popular. My dad recently got cable internet but still has too much invested into 8+ years at AOL to abandon his addresses & communities, so he continued to pay Bring-Your-Own-Access fee.
Rogers in Canada has video on demand, which is pretty popular (especially for porn) -- TV shows run at around $2-4 each, movies run $6, porn is $9-12 each. And you can only access the movie for 24 hours.
On the other hand, what still continues to work is the Movie Network On Demand (also supported by rogers) is sort of the equivalent of HBO here -- they're subscription based, if you subscribe to the network you get the on demand service. Unfortunately it's still streamed, so if they stop offering a movie, you can't watch it anymore (unless you recorded it).
Let's also look at pay-per-view (PPV) movies which run $5+ and run on 20+ stations.
It strikes me that iTunes is going to have a big impact movie rentals, PPV, and VOD services as-is, which is a growing market.
As for watching 1-3 shows A DAY, you're apparently either really big into news, game shows, or re-runs. Or is there REALLY that much interesting new stuff on TV??? (that would be 15-20 weekly shows you regularly watch, wow)
Market implies "share of market", which implies there is a form of monetary exchange taking place for a product. Sure, sales data != install base, but it definitely indicates market share.
What open source DOES do is shrink the size of the market due to commoditization. Apache drastically shrunk the market for licensing web servers, for example. People still pay for them, but usually indirectly (IIS) or for niches (embedded, Java-based, etc.)
Rogers Home Phone, if run through the Hybrid Fibre-Coaxial (HFC) network, is a separately provisioned VLAN from TV and Internet. They have their own dedicated bandwidth. If any one of those services goes down, the others are not affected. Typically, only physical damage to the network would cause an outage for all three. I would also note, however, that Rogers Home Phone also is a rebranding of the Call-Net / Sprint Canada local service in areas that support it. There's also a legacy VoIP-over-Internet service that's offered (carried over from the acquisition) but they don't really market it.
The main reason for the bandwidth shaping & caps, to my understanding, is the sheer volume of BitTorrent traffic on the Rogers network (I've heard notes of 40 to 60%!). In an asymmetric network, upstream traffic is limited, thus heavy P2P hurts all neighbours that are associated with an HFC plant. Originally Rogers crippled BitTorrent upstream by detecting connections via multiple hosts, except on port 1720. Lately I've found they've improved the shaping to be much more reasonable across all ports (but it's still not as good as years past) and increased the overall bandwidth cap.
Rumors are that they're going to create offerings with even higher bandwidth caps. And really, why not? If people are willing to pay for the impact of their use, let'em fill 60 gigs a day. Though, given today's average rates, one has to wonder the nature of such activity -- high traffic like that usually is indicative of either running a business (in which you should not be using residential services!) or trading large amounts of media, which may or may not be copyrighted. ISPs have to strike a balance here - they want to protect consumers' rights to privacy , as more bandwidth = more $$$. At the same time, they're under political pressure to spy on their customers to find pirates.
Note, while I'm a former Rogers employee, which might lend some credibility to this, but I really have no proprietary knowledge of their actual plans and/or challenges related to the caps, this is based on my reading, conversations, and speculation.
I would estimate that Microsoft Excel spreadsheets manages a good 15-20% of the world's economic activity. Those replacements have a long way to go to catch up.
Is Excel "misused"? It's certainly contorted in ways never originally conceived of, but that's why people like it. Kind of like a PC.
Those are all technical protocols -- file transfer, connectivity, academic directories, file formats, etc.. The web is something a non-technical person can fathom, similar to how Alexander Graham Bell "invented" the telephone (I know there were others- but his legacy was what endured). There's evidence that the web will endure to a similar level (if not the actual protocols, the notion of distributed hypermedia as the primary application of the Internet).
Databases are not created equal. Abstraction layers are often more trouble than they're worth., and they encourage doing more work in code instead of letting the database handle the heavy lifting. I'm speaking as a veteren of Apple/NeXT EOF, Persistence PowerTier, CocoBase, Hibernate, Kodo, TOPLink, EJB 1, 2, and 3, and object databases such as GemStone. ADO.NET , as an example, has about the right level of abstraction one usually needs.
This is not to say thay are useless. They are productivity tools, and can be useful ones in certain contexts. But it's a complete misnomer that they should always be used, allow you to not know much about the database, or use the database as a dump object store.
Amazon, interestingly enough, uses a LInux/Oracle RAC data warehouse, for data analysis. It is one of the larger deployments in the world, at over 15 terabytes. I found this article, but there have been many over the years, some on Oracle's site.
And, to re-iterate, Oracle RAC is shared-disk...;-)
That said, what you're discussing isn't shared nothing - it isn't even degenerate shared nothing. If it was, then there wouldn't be any state to share.
This was partially my point, though I was wrong in saying it was "degenerate". What I meant to say is that few actually implement shared nothing -- they say they do, but they really don't. And the reason is mostly due to the tradeoffs between fault tolerance and concurrency management that make it difficult to use for transactional data management.
Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Teradata, MySQL, etc. are all "shared nothing".
Er, no, they aren't. Shared nothing is about keeping no state outside the query. Read-write databases accessable by more than one point are by definition never part of this methodology. They cannot be.
Pfister refers to the first three of these as "shared nothing" in his book, and I'm sure there's literature going back 15+ years that refer to DB2 UDB (the parallel edition originally on RS/6000) as a 'shared nothing' database architecture -- perhaps wrongly, but that would be news to me.
I extrapolated this in noting that each of the above databases use "function shipping" as their implementation approach to clustering -- state is shared at the query level, and each node owns its own patch of data, so no piece of data is accessible by more than one point. Replicas, for fault tolerance, exist outside of the database architecture and is delegated to the storage subsystem (RAID, EMC Symmetrix, etc.).
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XM has the better sound quality but Sirius seems to have the better content in many circumstances, in my opinion. For example, XM's metal channel went online-only some time ago, whereas Sirius' Hard Attack is both on the satellite and online has great shows with artist interviews, different sub-genres, etc.
What bugs me is that in the drive to be profitable, I can see the bean counters taking over eventually, marginalizing everything that's great about satellite -- delivering specialized, commercial-free(ish) content... similar to cable or pay TV.
IBM, HP, Sun, etc. already offer broad IP indemnity for customers that use (vendor approved, often Redhat or Novell) Linux on their hardware. It wasn't news for them, and FSF isn't threatening them.
It's ludicrous to punish Novell for doing a service for their customers that is intended to make them feel *safe* using Linux. The fact is that many large companies are frightened that they will be sued for patent infringment if they use OSS, especially Linux. Yes, a massive cry of outrage will happen if something like that ever occurs, but a) cornered software companies can be vicious and have tremendous staying power if they feel they have nothing to lose, see SCO; b) the more risk averse companies may fire the people that chose Linux and jettison it ASAP, dealing a blow to FOSS adoption in the enterprise.
To mitigate their risks, some companies have very specific lists of approved OSS packages, vetted by lawyers for potential infringement claims. Open source Java toolkits may have less of a chance of patent infringement, so tend to be blessed more easily (and often are bundled with commercial app servers anyway, who may indemnify what's in the package, though only specific versions).
The problem is that Microsoft claims patents on absurdly broad things -- filesystems (since disproven), memory management, etc. Non-technical legal departments may or may not explore these in detail -- the quick thing to do would to tell the CIO: "no Linux". Or they may scratch the surface of these patents and see them for the joke that many of them are. We know that Microsoft has already threatened large IT shops with possible patent suits in the future (under NDA, no les), and likely offered them indemnity. Few have taken them up on this, though it seems Novell was gullible enough to bite.
Novell is merely engaging in a quaint, pre-GPL business practice; indemnifying their customers against potential legal issues even when they consider the probabilities remote.
Quaint?
One of the major reasons that Linux is being adopted at an increasing rate is that large vendors such as IBM, HP, and Sun are offering blanket IP indemnity on Linux. They're not making specific deals with Microsoft, however, so I suppose it's less of a news item.
But the GPL is, essentially, all about giving code ownership of itself.
Except that copyright owners can still do whatever they want with the code & future derivatives....
Where we ought to be headed, my guess, is towards sentient code that owns itself
Why? Code has value only in a context of human relationships. Code is not an end in itself.
Innovation is an economic term, it's about taking a good idea and applying it to something new to the market. It can be accomplished by exploiting new knowledge , or changing demographics, or changing attitudes, or unexpected successes/failures.
The difference between Apple and others is that they're usually the first "innovator" but rarely the inventor. With integrated Ethernet & USB on the iMac, for example, they were the innovator. With Firewire, they were both. With the iPod, they were the major innovator of the jog wheel applied as the central navigation feature, but certainly not the first consumer product to use one (I've seen VCR remotes with them).
Multi-touch may have been invented by others, but there's a lot to be said for the bundling of software around such a feature.
Outside of Best Buy last night in downtown Toronto, there were probably around 300 people, and I'd say 35-40% were women. Lots of couples, noteably, though some were in groups of friends. Mostly people in their 20's, with some in their 30's or up. The teenagers weren't likely to be hanging around downtown Toronto at midnight.
Bunnies! Floppy, hoppy, bunnies!
Right, my mistake, on the 2.5 million being an estimate.
But the graph you listed isn't total sales, it's U.S. sales. Microsoft shipped 1.5 million units (via wikipedia) worldwide by EOY 2005. I wouldn't say that's missing their initial 90 day estimate by more than half (as one would have to count Jan/Feb 2006).
Depends. For Ontario, I drive north to Sudbury and Manitoulin Island a fair amount and I get EDGE access along most of 400/69/17 with a few GPRS spots and a few dead spots. The further one is from the corridor or an urban center, the worse the coverage, unfortunately. Southwestern Ontario seems covered
Just google "2.5 million xbox 360" and you'll see many links. They lowered their estimates from 3 million to 2.5 million in the first 90 days of launch.
They're also estimated
as the #1 console in the 2006 holiday season with 2 million units (vs. Wii's 1.8 million).
Since Rogers is the only real GSM/EDGE provider in Canada, they'll likely carry the iPhone. They also co-brand their Hi-Speed Internet with Yahoo!, so this business arrangement seems to be set up to work well.
/4gb and C$599 /8gb with a 3 year contract. To contrast, I paid $499 for my Blackberry 8700r with Rogers in Canada, with a 3 year contract, in mid 2006. (I believe it's at $299 now.)
The price will be interesting in Canada, however. I am betting iPhone will likely be C$499
It's a lot, but my Blackberry doesn't have 8gb of space either, nor WiFi, or a great browser.
Now the only question is whether one can deal with typing on a non-tactile keyboard.
Lest you say that the Register is not a trusty new source, Canada's leading paper, The Globe and Mail ran a 2/3 page story on this today in the Business section.
I question Forrester's reliability, on the other hand. But the press does love a controversy.
Why I buy from HMV (on 333 Yonge in Toronto):
They both have their strengths and weaknesses, but I will note this: iTunes blows away your "run of the mill" music store based on sheer laziness factor. You need a music store that has lots of extras to beat out the experience of shopping from your living room. Kinda like movie theatres vs. home movies.
There's no correlation between how advanced computers get, how much we invest in them, and how productive we become. Productivity is a human equation -- it's how we use, manage, and create incentives around knowledge & technology that will determine our productivity. Evidence is that we don't manage it well, as there isn't really much of a link between the large technology expenditures that grew over the past 20 years & any increased profits, increased wages, or increased leisure time, since the 1970's.
The article summary is misleading. The article author claims he has had personal productivity improvements of 10-fold every 10 years. Computing and IT has not caused tremendous measurable productivity strides -- one may argue it (among other factors) has brought, since the late 1990's, productivity growth back to the level of the 1950's and 1960's, but prior to this, from 1970 through 1995, developed world productivity was _slowing_.
There is some bizarre behaviour in France -- a weird mix of distrust of government, yet 3/4 of students want to be civil servants for some reason....
As the largest ISP in America (if not the world) for a time, it was the Wal Mart of the Internet for many years, and remains very popular. My dad recently got cable internet but still has too much invested into 8+ years at AOL to abandon his addresses & communities, so he continued to pay Bring-Your-Own-Access fee.
Rogers in Canada has video on demand, which is pretty popular (especially for porn) -- TV shows run at around $2-4 each, movies run $6, porn is $9-12 each. And you can only access the movie for 24 hours.
On the other hand, what still continues to work is the Movie Network On Demand (also supported by rogers) is sort of the equivalent of HBO here -- they're subscription based, if you subscribe to the network you get the on demand service. Unfortunately it's still streamed, so if they stop offering a movie, you can't watch it anymore (unless you recorded it).
Let's also look at pay-per-view (PPV) movies which run $5+ and run on 20+ stations.
It strikes me that iTunes is going to have a big impact movie rentals, PPV, and VOD services as-is, which is a growing market.
As for watching 1-3 shows A DAY, you're apparently either really big into news, game shows, or re-runs. Or is there REALLY that much interesting new stuff on TV??? (that would be 15-20 weekly shows you regularly watch, wow)
Market implies "share of market", which implies there is a form of monetary exchange taking place for a product. Sure, sales data != install base, but it definitely indicates market share.
What open source DOES do is shrink the size of the market due to commoditization. Apache drastically shrunk the market for licensing web servers, for example. People still pay for them, but usually indirectly (IIS) or for niches (embedded, Java-based, etc.)
Rogers Home Phone, if run through the Hybrid Fibre-Coaxial (HFC) network, is a separately provisioned VLAN from TV and Internet. They have their own dedicated bandwidth. If any one of those services goes down, the others are not affected. Typically, only physical damage to the network would cause an outage for all three. I would also note, however, that Rogers Home Phone also is a rebranding of the Call-Net / Sprint Canada local service in areas that support it. There's also a legacy VoIP-over-Internet service that's offered (carried over from the acquisition) but they don't really market it.
The main reason for the bandwidth shaping & caps, to my understanding, is the sheer volume of BitTorrent traffic on the Rogers network (I've heard notes of 40 to 60%!). In an asymmetric network, upstream traffic is limited, thus heavy P2P hurts all neighbours that are associated with an HFC plant. Originally Rogers crippled BitTorrent upstream by detecting connections via multiple hosts, except on port 1720. Lately I've found they've improved the shaping to be much more reasonable across all ports (but it's still not as good as years past) and increased the overall bandwidth cap.
Rumors are that they're going to create offerings with even higher bandwidth caps. And really, why not? If people are willing to pay for the impact of their use, let'em fill 60 gigs a day. Though, given today's average rates, one has to wonder the nature of such activity -- high traffic like that usually is indicative of either running a business (in which you should not be using residential services!) or trading large amounts of media, which may or may not be copyrighted. ISPs have to strike a balance here - they want to protect consumers' rights to privacy , as more bandwidth = more $$$. At the same time, they're under political pressure to spy on their customers to find pirates.
Note, while I'm a former Rogers employee, which might lend some credibility to this, but I really have no proprietary knowledge of their actual plans and/or challenges related to the caps, this is based on my reading, conversations, and speculation.
I would estimate that Microsoft Excel spreadsheets manages a good 15-20% of the world's economic activity. Those replacements have a long way to go to catch up.
Is Excel "misused"? It's certainly contorted in ways never originally conceived of, but that's why people like it. Kind of like a PC.
Those are all technical protocols -- file transfer, connectivity, academic directories, file formats, etc.. The web is something a non-technical person can fathom, similar to how Alexander Graham Bell "invented" the telephone (I know there were others- but his legacy was what endured). There's evidence that the web will endure to a similar level (if not the actual protocols, the notion of distributed hypermedia as the primary application of the Internet).
Databases are not created equal. Abstraction layers are often more trouble than they're worth., and they encourage doing more work in code instead of letting the database handle the heavy lifting. I'm speaking as a veteren of Apple/NeXT EOF, Persistence PowerTier, CocoBase, Hibernate, Kodo, TOPLink, EJB 1, 2, and 3, and object databases such as GemStone. ADO.NET , as an example, has about the right level of abstraction one usually needs.
This is not to say thay are useless. They are productivity tools, and can be useful ones in certain contexts. But it's a complete misnomer that they should always be used, allow you to not know much about the database, or use the database as a dump object store.
Thanks for the pointer Mnesia, great reading.
Amazon, interestingly enough, uses a LInux/Oracle RAC data warehouse, for data analysis. It is one of the larger deployments in the world, at over 15 terabytes. I found this article, but there have been many over the years, some on Oracle's site.
;-)
And, to re-iterate, Oracle RAC is shared-disk...
That said, what you're discussing isn't shared nothing - it isn't even degenerate shared nothing. If it was, then there wouldn't be any state to share.
This was partially my point, though I was wrong in saying it was "degenerate". What I meant to say is that few actually implement shared nothing -- they say they do, but they really don't. And the reason is mostly due to the tradeoffs between fault tolerance and concurrency management that make it difficult to use for transactional data management.
Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Teradata, MySQL, etc. are all "shared nothing".
Er, no, they aren't. Shared nothing is about keeping no state outside the query. Read-write databases accessable by more than one point are by definition never part of this methodology. They cannot be.
Pfister refers to the first three of these as "shared nothing" in his book, and I'm sure there's literature going back 15+ years that refer to DB2 UDB (the parallel edition originally on RS/6000) as a 'shared nothing' database architecture -- perhaps wrongly, but that would be news to me.
I extrapolated this in noting that each of the above databases use "function shipping" as their implementation approach to clustering -- state is shared at the query level, and each node owns its own patch of data, so no piece of data is accessible by more than one point. Replicas, for fault tolerance, exist outside of the database architecture and is delegated to the storage subsystem (RAID, EMC Symmetrix, etc.).