The issue is that we were offered a software update to software that you didn't have installed.
Apple is now leveraging their software updater to distribute new software - that is not by definition an update.
You did have a choice in selecting IE 6 over 7, I have a couple clients that still have IE 6 deployed enterprise wide. If you chose the "automatic" updates then it will get automatically installed. Also, it *was* an update, not a new product.
The issue is the intent behind this sort of action. Is it a software updater or a software installer? Because the two are different - and it should be clear what we are signing up for.
And I agree with you - I went out and got a mac last weekend so I can work on some cool apps that I won't be able to do otherwise.
But I just don't like the tone - it's completely counter to everything going on in development today. And while the SDK is pretty cool there are some absurd omissions that I guess I'm not supposed to talk about. I'm sure we'll find more, but of course Apple does not want to be criticized - which I find childish.
Actually, they are not allowed to talk about a beta version of the SDK they agreed to an NDA to use, on a public list.
Read the post - it's still really counter to any sort of openness, even for a beta. One would think that you would want to support discussion around any sort of beta product, under any forum so as to spur enthusiasm for the platform. This continues to be a problem with Apple, HI 1990 called and it wants it's business strategy back!
yeah - but they are not the *phone*. you need to test your apps on target hardware, if you can't it is a real problem as each handset has it's own capabilities. also, i am interested in building applications that utilize the on board camera but i cannot do that until there is hardware. so... now that apple actually has an SDK (and private frameworks that i now nearly have legitimate access too) i can do all that i'm after. w00t.
The only part of the Java API that is worse than the Apple SDK is the GUI part.
The "only" thing... lol. Java does not belong on the iPhone - it brings almost nothing to the table for the iPhone other than being able to run a bunch of ugly ass quirky apps on a superior piece of hardware all in the name of "cross platform". For all of sun's engineering prowess (which is not unsubstantial) they do not get what "end user experience" means. If they did, Java would have advanced user interface options - I mean, it's been around for over 15 years...
Yeah, they were both insanely big - Blue-ray more so though. I bought the HD player because i knew it would work, and i didn't feel BR was ready for prime time. Sadly, the war is over and it's still a little broken. I'm just glad VC-1 will live on...
Back in the day, beta was the superior format - at least from a quality perspective. VHS won out because... we'll I don't really know - I was too young.
I own an HD-DVD player - but the Blue-Ray *disk* format is superior and more extensible than the HD-DVD disk. Blue-ray will increase in capacity with time, as it was designed to do. HD-DVD didn't really have this in mind it was for the most part, easier to implement and designed specifically for carrying HD video content. Blue-ray carries with it an entire execution environment within the player - one of the reasons for the difficulty that vendors have had complying with the specification.
Note that the disk format has nothing at all to do with the content format. Almost all HD-DVD's contain SMPTE VC-1 content, but there is a mix of VC-1 and H.264 within Blue-ray disks. Blue-ray and hd-dvd are capable of playing other stream types.
The "Blue-ray" logo really represents just a particular disk format and a player that has a certain set of capabilities.
Yes and this is the problem, 5 GB is nothing, it is a few albums, a few movies a few cnn or bbc videos, some streaming music, web and e-mail. And the inital 7.2 is great, but it just means that everything is accelerated, so you may not care if a page loads in.05 seconds as opposed to 30. But you might care if the 4 GB ISO image you need to download from MSDN is transferring at 30 K/s as opposed to 1 MB/s. Unfortunately with such schemes there is no control over how and when you can use the speed.
I'm not sure they are - I think they are looking at all the services that run over their networks youtube, cnn, iTunes, content etc. and feel that for some reason that they are entitled to a cut of the action. They want to be a virtual middle man. As I understand it (perhaps incorrectly) this is the basis of the net neutrality issue.
sure everyone wants to see more profit - but the way to do that is as it has been before, add more bandwith and charge according to the speed tiers. The problem is that they have all opened up the home pipe to it's maximum (except maybe fios), so they look to other ways to extract value, instead of creating new services and monetizing them. though VoIP phones bundling with cable is a way to achieve this. It is just too bad they don't see that they also need to be competitive too lol.
A start would be to unify data plans across all mediums, dial up, phone, home bb and provide a package that has a lower aggregate rate so that you can retain more customers across multiple business lines. ATT is in the best place to provide something like this.
Another area is international data - lower the price and I might actually use it more...
"Bandwidth in the US pretty much sucks. The lack of cheap&abundant bandwidth is motivator for things like P2P, not iTunes or Netflix. Using the internet to distribute media is just filling a market need/demand. The "innovation" of iTunes and Netflix is the DRM part, not the bandwidth part."
The innovation lies in the fact that you can watch a streaming movie on your TV in 30 minutes - this very notion was simply infeasible 3 years ago. Media is no longer required. That in itself is a HUGE shift for the video distribution industry, it's also a huge shift in the way we consume media.
There is absolutely nothing "innovative" about DRM. To say so shows a lack of understanding of the subject matter.
I don't know where you live but Boston has 20Mb/s down and 2 Mb/s up for 60 dollars a month. I think this is a great deal, but others may have different views. I regularly see 2.1 + MB/s transfers. That's fast enough play DVD quality content in full quality, in real time. It's also fast enough to play a single unicast HD stream. The thing that bothers me is that it is also fast enough to download a GB disk image in 20 minutes. Typically caps are ~ 5 - 10 - 20 GB for a month, so that puts me in a situation where i can blow through an entire quota in about 2 hours. Yippe.
p2p is not motivated by bandwidth, it's motivation is ubiquitous distribution and high availablity. This is mostly due to the fact that a server is a single point of failure. If the server goes down (usually because someone figured out it was hosting something that it should not be) there is no fail over, unless you have clustering which doesn't usually happen for this type of "content". p2p of course, solves this problem by making everyone a server.
however, p2p may be more reliable but bits *do not* get to you faster. a single dedicated server transmission from a proper provider will almost always be faster.
if you are referring to the fact that upstream bandwidth sucks - I think that is to be expected as homes are generally views as clients of the network and not servers.
"Yes, traffic caps are a bad thing. Isn't Comcast's filtering&disruption of P2P traffic a de facto traffic cap?"
No, it is network level interference - no good and not legal.
"So I run BT on port 80 or port 123 or port 443. "No Mr. ISP that isn't P2P traffic, it's http or ntp traffic" You get the idea and hopefully see the pitfalls."
You can do that - ultimately, those are server ports - and you are consuming more bandwidth than you should so you'll get dinged.
"No caps... caps? You want both? You're either confused or a troll. If the latter, good job... you got modded up to 3, insightful"
You fail to understand what i'm proposing. It is not a "cap" per se - you may or may not be subject to the limitation. At no point during this process does your account get terminated (as happens on occasion today), or are you charged more for your connection (which is effectively how the "capped" products work now). No, you still have your connection and you are rate limited - to sometime more reasonable.
The intent is to go after the 5%, if they are in fact, a problem for the network.
Personally I see the providers just looking for a way to "innovate" - which really comes down to trying to extract more cash from their customers. In the end this is really going to hurt people like me, who depend on a fast connection for work, and who move a lot of legitimate bytes around.
"Or they could just do the sensible thing, cut out all the bullshit "unlimited" advertising and start selling customers a set block of gigabytes."
I can assure you, you don't want this. You assume that the ISP's are going to give you a "reasonable" block of data to transfer on a monthly basis and a reasonable price - they are not. They will use this pricing scheme to "extract value" from their customer base in the form of quotas that are properly tiered so as to be just below the common usage tier. The result will be many customers need to go a step higher, and are charged more, for considerably less than they had access to before. Do you really want to worry about whether the next movie you get off of iTunes is going to pop your quota? Or the next stream you setup?
Honestly, bandwidth in the US is what is causing a great deal of innovation at the moment - look at iTunes and Netflix now offering entire movies as either downloads or streaming. Caps will only stifle the adoption and innvoation of this type of technolgy. Customers will think twice about the double cost of streaming a video - the cost to their cap, and the cost of the service. There are I'm sure other bandwith based applications out there that we have not even thought of.
The answer is just in disclaiming that running certain types of services like bittorrent coupled with excessive transfer on a connection can lead to service degredation, not termination. They just need to put a process in place to handle this situation. Time warner claims that "5% of their customers use 50% of their bandwidth" - well - that seems pretty damn easy to fix doesn't it? Exceed a certain monthly transfer rate, send out a warning via e-mail - usage continues - put a cap that is far lower than their original amount.
In addition they don't really say that they are running out of bandwidth, so I'm not sure I see where the problem is.
So apple sells direct to customers... what if they treat ATT as a "customer" that buys a few hundred thousand phones. So apple has "sold" those phones to ATT and they expect to sell those phones - but given the gulf between the sales and the activations it seems that ATT is not in fact, selling those phones.
Do you know what Steam is short for? Steaming pile of shit.
That is perhaps the worst piece of software I've used.
It takes forever to load (on a dual dual core with a raid 0 (2x 150 raptors) and a 8800). 3rd party games are completely unsupported (oh but they will sell them to you). I bought Call of Duty 4 and could not play it for weeks. Even halflife had issues with crashing and such. Apparently the anti cheat software wasn't compatible with vista 64. meanwhile back at the "support" forums all of my requests sometimes took over 5 days to be answered. they were along the lines of "why doesn't the game work" along with a detailed description of the problem - there were not really any answers, just a link to a worthless FAQ. I asked for my money back... they could not do that either. Not during the entire process was there a phone number or a live chat available. Backwards much?
Fortunately I tried to play the other day and there was a magical update to the anti cheat module and it worked. What a terrible experience though.
What complete and utter bullshit. You can't have it both ways, being uncompromising on e.g. viewing quality, while compromising on e.g. having to wait an unknown number of days to see a particular title that may or may not be available on HD-DVD
What are you talking about? Have you even used Netflix? There is only one title *ever* that I had to wait for and it was some obscure anime. The rest of the movies come the next day after a movie is received. Also, the Apple store will not get new releases until 30 days after its release to disk. You'll be the one waiting.
It doesn't really matter if a title is available on HD-DVD as my DVD player can up convert to 1080i. Depending on who did the encoding - mileage varies but it is always better than some already over compressed file being scaled to fit a larger screen.
Would you also criticize a good quality restaurant for coming up with nothing better than serving good food?
Great analogy - if we were to compare Apple's iTunes store you'd find that it was a dining establishment that serves mediocre food (720p), had a limited menu (just over 1,000 movie selections) and costs too much (price per rental).
If we were to frame the same analogy for Netflix you'd find that it was a dining establishment that serves the best quality food (1080p), had a very large selection of whatever you want (movie selections) and is relatively inexpensive (price for subscription).
Good selection of movies - could well become better than any rental store or subscription service in time due to their limitations of relying on physical media.
Good selection of movies - NOT. Apple is just breaking over 1,000 movies, finally. Last year Walmart (nearly 960) (which is now closed the UI was terrible) carried more movies than iTunes at launch. Netflix by comparison carries over 17,000 movies.
Selection much?
Reasonable price and conditions.
Unfortunately, the price is not reasonable, the rental is 1/2 the price to actually go see it in the movie theater, and the quality is 33% of the cinematic 4K standard and 66% of the 1080p standard (measured in vertical scan lines).
Fantastically quick delivery.
Depends where you live and how much you want to pay for your internet connection.
with 1080i upscaled quality
OK, This is simply false. Perhaps you haven't read the spec sheet - it's actually quite hard to find - but I will help you out. The Apple TV is not a very capable device when it come to movie playback. Sure you can show some pictures, play music, watch some encoded video. Compared to the device that you would normally use to play movies, like a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD it is significantly less performant. Notice that the Apple TV only supports 1280x720 at 24 fps, and 960x540 at 30 fps. By contrast some of the better TVs on the market currently support 1920 x 1080 @ 120 Hz in progressive scan mode.
Finally, the Apple TV *does not* upscale. It's maximum output is 1280x720 @ 24 Hz. That's really my beef with the Apple TV it's 2 and a half years *behind* the current technology. You can buy an High Def player for less than the Apple TV costs it occurs to me now that had Apple put a blu-ray player in their Apple TV it would be a slam dunk.
excellent quality for an online service, comparable to HDTV broadcasts, better than DVD.
There are other online services that provide similar quality and similar speed of delivery if that's what you want. They also do everything the Apple TV does and more (xbox360).
Not at *all* comparable to a 1080i broadcast. You don't own a 1080p/hdmi set do you? or have digital cable? There is a huge difference.
And it is still not comparable to a nicely encoded Super bit DVD disc (10 Mbps/s) that is unconverted.
The pinnacle though is 1080p on disc - there is no substitute (except maybe real life).
Rental pricing scheme means that in addition to my
But... Steve knows exactly what you want - what you need, even before you do. Maybe you just haven't figured it out yet.
I mean, I was absolutely *sure* that I didn't want my airport extreme to use the.1 address on my network - but now that I reconfigured my LAN every thing works great! Thanks Steve!
My point with the comment about expiring is that Apple had to go to the effort of creating the expiration scheme. Not only did they go to the effort of creating it - but the expiration window is very restrictive. 24 hours to watch a movie? Say what? Even block buster in 1987 had a less restrictive return policy. The other fact is that there is again, no reason for it. The file you download is virtual, its a bunch of bits - there is no physical object that is being tied up as another poster mentioned. So what's the opportunity cost? And why is the price the same as the cost to "rent" a physical object. It *should* be cheaper by definition - there are less physcial resources used. Sure there was a cost in terms of man hours but that cost goes down for each rental rented. Unlike other rental institutions which have actual physical, fixed costs to distribute their wares.
I am truly puzzled why Apple would try to re-invent the rental model of the late 80's and 90's. It just doesn't make any sense. The value prop of the Apple TV has not changed sufficiently to spur adoption. At > 3 rentals a month netflix is a better option. There is nothing innovative about this model as you postulate. It's the same crap repackaged and foisted on Apple fan boys such as yourself to consume.
Aligning the view window and the expiration window would have been better, more customer friendly.
I keep looking to Apple to have business models and pricing structures that are as innovative as their hardware - but they continue to show that their customers are not #1. Most recently, Amazon had to force their hand with regard to DRM, instead of Apple, the market leader in online music distribution driving the initiative of their own accord.
If you want to watch these movies on your TV you need an Apple TV (which was a point I made earlier you did not reference) or you can use your computer but I don't watch TV on my computer so I don't really consider that an option.
You must be one of those "the best option on the market isn't good enough for me, because my standards are so much higher" types.
No, the best option on the market is 1080p across ALL markets. 1080p set, 1080p player. That's not "sooo much higher" as you state, in fact it's an industry standard. Apple TV and iTunes doesn't deliver this. It would have been nice actually, if Steve had unveiled 1080p or even 1080i content. That might have been a bit more innovative. As it is, I can wait one day or two if I'm returning and get a disc with better quality from netflix. Also, with a disc player, ALL of my content is going to look better because it is upconverted. In the long run it will be cheaper too.
So tell me again why this is a good deal? Oh wait, it's not.
Again, it goes back to Apple not really living up to the same level of innovation as their industrial design.
You must be one of those "the best option on the market isn't good enough for me, because my standards are so much higher" types. Way to try to put me in a nice cozy little mental box and write me off - I now know my place in the world, thanks for clearing that up.
Bet you're fun to work with, too.
Depends if you are good at what you do. I suspect you would not find out, "good enough" isn't really in my vocabulary.
they've revamped the Apple TV after the first attempt didn't get a great reaction, they've cut deals with all the movie studios, they let people do the obvious thing with movies, namely watch them on the TV.
yeah, for 24 from start or 30 days after which time you are SOL. There is no reason for them to expire but they do. Someone had to do extra work to make it that way.
second, your "rentals" are no good anywhere but your TV or your iPlod.
Finally the rentals are 720p which speaks for itself if you have a 1080p set.
I'm also not a fan of the 300 dollar investment for a device that is half as capable as the HD-DVD player i own.
I don't think I've ever in my career worked with anybody who was able to keep high output AND high quality AND all the time.
We have project based work - so it comes and it goes. Everyone needs downtime for sure. There are times - "go" time if you will - where sleep is a wish and the notion of being on an island alone for a year is a plesant one. During those times - we write quality code because it is what is expected of us and it is our job. We also do it quickly for the same reason. Quality code and speed is about discipline and not letting the dark side get to you. Oh, and Bawls too.
today's outsourcing is yesterday's working new graduates to death, with about the same quality level for code produced etc.
I would argue it's much, much worse than this. Depending on where you go, the code quality will be even worse, and will continue to be worse - there is no feedback mechanism to correct really poor coding, worse yet, problem solving abilities.
If this was a PHB forum I would be expecting comments along the lines of 'who cares about quality'
Quality is vital to the success of long lived applications, I agree. Though there are millions of examples of where quality does not matter. At the end of the day - if the application works properly the builders job got done. It is really an "artistic" decsison to persue the "proper" path. It may not have gotten done how you or I would like, but it works none the less. This why I think that many of the attributes raised in the article are valid - good engineering comes from a belief in a particular way of doing things. A system even. Those that don't care about the art and craft of programming are unlikely to produce an artistic product.
I am not sure I would be able to work as architect full time without ever writing any code
I don't think it is possible to be a good architect and not write code. As with houses, one must know the materials and it's capabilities before incorporating it into a new design. If you don't do very creative work, then perhaps you can get away with little coding, but the tech industry is not exactly static. Sometimes things don't work quite the way we think they should.
If you use anything that's not a well known 'standard' with an active development community
I don't, and I stay away from things like the plague. I also prefer to buy components where appropriate, especially for things where the amount of effort is clearly not worth the purchase price. Where I think I can reduce complexity and ease implementation I write my own frameworks.
because, if you have been in that situation, often you end up with code that works well for what you specified in 1.0, but that is basically unmantainable and unexpandable, and often unsupportable (when said framework is not the buzzword-du-jour anymore, you find bugs in it, and nobody is interested in fixing them).
I would argue that this is why you and I continue to be employed. We make sure that the project lasts, and that framework-du-jour is in fact a viable solution to the problem, and that it does not create a real hazard to the longevity of the project.
The high school guys are perfectly acceptable so long as they a) write good code b) willing to learn c) are motivated. No one can know everything so that's why the more senior members can raise the quality of the work.
Some high school guys are not going to want to raise the quality of the work - it's about finding those that have the innate talent and enthusiasm and perhaps got lost on the road that society deems the "proper" route through life.
As an aside - there are some jobs that you need a CS major or someone with higher educational training (or someone with the correct on the job experience) - you need the math and the science that they were taught - these jobs are not for the high school guys - but then you wouldn't hire a baker to build you a new CRM
"I lived and breathed programming and computers for many years of my life, however now I am in my late 30s and I try to have a much healthier work-life balance, I don't see why this should be a negative at all."
Work-life balance = less code written.
So you might be a great programmer - but you just don't write enough great code for me to hire you. There are other environments where this is perfectly fine. Beware the indians and russians that don't have a work life balance, who write more code, and are potentially more motivated.
Hopefully you've made the transition to an architect role that is less demanding with better compensation...
"If I hired according to this post I'd basically be getting a bunch of socially clueless high school dropouts who talk code all day long, have no life, and just live for the latest buzzword framework that comes out, bah!"
Well, if they can make all those frameworks work, and well - what's the problem?
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is that we were offered a software update to software that you didn't have installed.
Apple is now leveraging their software updater to distribute new software - that is not by definition an update.
You did have a choice in selecting IE 6 over 7, I have a couple clients that still have IE 6 deployed enterprise wide. If you chose the "automatic" updates then it will get automatically installed. Also, it *was* an update, not a new product.
The issue is the intent behind this sort of action. Is it a software updater or a software installer? Because the two are different - and it should be clear what we are signing up for.
Ah well, you get what you pay for!
Then again, I just had to fix my vista machine from the endless reboot of death. ^ ^
And I agree with you - I went out and got a mac last weekend so I can work on some cool apps that I won't be able to do otherwise.
But I just don't like the tone - it's completely counter to everything going on in development today. And while the SDK is pretty cool there are some absurd omissions that I guess I'm not supposed to talk about. I'm sure we'll find more, but of course Apple does not want to be criticized - which I find childish.
Actually, they are not allowed to talk about a beta version of the SDK they agreed to an NDA to use, on a public list.
Read the post - it's still really counter to any sort of openness, even for a beta. One would think that you would want to support discussion around any sort of beta product, under any forum so as to spur enthusiasm for the platform. This continues to be a problem with Apple, HI 1990 called and it wants it's business strategy back!
yeah - but they are not the *phone*. you need to test your apps on target hardware, if you can't it is a real problem as each handset has it's own capabilities. also, i am interested in building applications that utilize the on board camera but i cannot do that until there is hardware. so... now that apple actually has an SDK (and private frameworks that i now nearly have legitimate access too) i can do all that i'm after. w00t.
The only part of the Java API that is worse than the Apple SDK is the GUI part.
The "only" thing... lol. Java does not belong on the iPhone - it brings almost nothing to the table for the iPhone other than being able to run a bunch of ugly ass quirky apps on a superior piece of hardware all in the name of "cross platform". For all of sun's engineering prowess (which is not unsubstantial) they do not get what "end user experience" means. If they did, Java would have advanced user interface options - I mean, it's been around for over 15 years...
Yeah, they were both insanely big - Blue-ray more so though. I bought the HD player because i knew it would work, and i didn't feel BR was ready for prime time. Sadly, the war is over and it's still a little broken. I'm just glad VC-1 will live on...
Back in the day, beta was the superior format - at least from a quality perspective. VHS won out because... we'll I don't really know - I was too young.
I own an HD-DVD player - but the Blue-Ray *disk* format is superior and more extensible than the HD-DVD disk. Blue-ray will increase in capacity with time, as it was designed to do. HD-DVD didn't really have this in mind it was for the most part, easier to implement and designed specifically for carrying HD video content. Blue-ray carries with it an entire execution environment within the player - one of the reasons for the difficulty that vendors have had complying with the specification.
Note that the disk format has nothing at all to do with the content format. Almost all HD-DVD's contain SMPTE VC-1 content, but there is a mix of VC-1 and H.264 within Blue-ray disks. Blue-ray and hd-dvd are capable of playing other stream types.
The "Blue-ray" logo really represents just a particular disk format and a player that has a certain set of capabilities.
Glad to see the non-noob tech prevail.
Yes and this is the problem, 5 GB is nothing, it is a few albums, a few movies a few cnn or bbc videos, some streaming music, web and e-mail. And the inital 7.2 is great, but it just means that everything is accelerated, so you may not care if a page loads in .05 seconds as opposed to 30. But you might care if the 4 GB ISO image you need to download from MSDN is transferring at 30 K/s as opposed to 1 MB/s. Unfortunately with such schemes there is no control over how and when you can use the speed.
I'm not sure they are - I think they are looking at all the services that run over their networks youtube, cnn, iTunes, content etc. and feel that for some reason that they are entitled to a cut of the action. They want to be a virtual middle man. As I understand it (perhaps incorrectly) this is the basis of the net neutrality issue.
sure everyone wants to see more profit - but the way to do that is as it has been before, add more bandwith and charge according to the speed tiers. The problem is that they have all opened up the home pipe to it's maximum (except maybe fios), so they look to other ways to extract value, instead of creating new services and monetizing them. though VoIP phones bundling with cable is a way to achieve this. It is just too bad they don't see that they also need to be competitive too lol.
A start would be to unify data plans across all mediums, dial up, phone, home bb and provide a package that has a lower aggregate rate so that you can retain more customers across multiple business lines. ATT is in the best place to provide something like this.
Another area is international data - lower the price and I might actually use it more...
"Bandwidth in the US pretty much sucks. The lack of cheap&abundant bandwidth is motivator for things like P2P, not iTunes or Netflix. Using the internet to distribute media is just filling a market need/demand. The "innovation" of iTunes and Netflix is the DRM part, not the bandwidth part."
The innovation lies in the fact that you can watch a streaming movie on your TV in 30 minutes - this very notion was simply infeasible 3 years ago. Media is no longer required. That in itself is a HUGE shift for the video distribution industry, it's also a huge shift in the way we consume media.
There is absolutely nothing "innovative" about DRM. To say so shows a lack of understanding of the subject matter.
I don't know where you live but Boston has 20Mb/s down and 2 Mb/s up for 60 dollars a month. I think this is a great deal, but others may have different views. I regularly see 2.1 + MB/s transfers. That's fast enough play DVD quality content in full quality, in real time. It's also fast enough to play a single unicast HD stream. The thing that bothers me is that it is also fast enough to download a GB disk image in 20 minutes. Typically caps are ~ 5 - 10 - 20 GB for a month, so that puts me in a situation where i can blow through an entire quota in about 2 hours. Yippe.
p2p is not motivated by bandwidth, it's motivation is ubiquitous distribution and high availablity. This is mostly due to the fact that a server is a single point of failure. If the server goes down (usually because someone figured out it was hosting something that it should not be) there is no fail over, unless you have clustering which doesn't usually happen for this type of "content". p2p of course, solves this problem by making everyone a server.
however, p2p may be more reliable but bits *do not* get to you faster. a single dedicated server transmission from a proper provider will almost always be faster.
if you are referring to the fact that upstream bandwidth sucks - I think that is to be expected as homes are generally views as clients of the network and not servers.
"Yes, traffic caps are a bad thing. Isn't Comcast's filtering&disruption of P2P traffic a de facto traffic cap?"
No, it is network level interference - no good and not legal.
"So I run BT on port 80 or port 123 or port 443. "No Mr. ISP that isn't P2P traffic, it's http or ntp traffic" You get the idea and hopefully see the pitfalls."
You can do that - ultimately, those are server ports - and you are consuming more bandwidth than you should so you'll get dinged.
"No caps... caps? You want both? You're either confused or a troll. If the latter, good job... you got modded up to 3, insightful"
You fail to understand what i'm proposing. It is not a "cap" per se - you may or may not be subject to the limitation. At no point during this process does your account get terminated (as happens on occasion today), or are you charged more for your connection (which is effectively how the "capped" products work now). No, you still have your connection and you are rate limited - to sometime more reasonable.
The intent is to go after the 5%, if they are in fact, a problem for the network.
Personally I see the providers just looking for a way to "innovate" - which really comes down to trying to extract more cash from their customers. In the end this is really going to hurt people like me, who depend on a fast connection for work, and who move a lot of legitimate bytes around.
"Or they could just do the sensible thing, cut out all the bullshit "unlimited" advertising and start selling customers a set block of gigabytes."
I can assure you, you don't want this. You assume that the ISP's are going to give you a "reasonable" block of data to transfer on a monthly basis and a reasonable price - they are not. They will use this pricing scheme to "extract value" from their customer base in the form of quotas that are properly tiered so as to be just below the common usage tier. The result will be many customers need to go a step higher, and are charged more, for considerably less than they had access to before. Do you really want to worry about whether the next movie you get off of iTunes is going to pop your quota? Or the next stream you setup?
Honestly, bandwidth in the US is what is causing a great deal of innovation at the moment - look at iTunes and Netflix now offering entire movies as either downloads or streaming. Caps will only stifle the adoption and innvoation of this type of technolgy. Customers will think twice about the double cost of streaming a video - the cost to their cap, and the cost of the service. There are I'm sure other bandwith based applications out there that we have not even thought of.
The answer is just in disclaiming that running certain types of services like bittorrent coupled with excessive transfer on a connection can lead to service degredation, not termination. They just need to put a process in place to handle this situation. Time warner claims that "5% of their customers use 50% of their bandwidth" - well - that seems pretty damn easy to fix doesn't it? Exceed a certain monthly transfer rate, send out a warning via e-mail - usage continues - put a cap that is far lower than their original amount.
In addition they don't really say that they are running out of bandwidth, so I'm not sure I see where the problem is.
Are the designs to the Space Shuttle even worth stealing? It's thus far proven to be an expensive and unreliable launch platform.
You tell me... is the only working aircraft capable of atmospheric flight at 17,000 mph worth taking a look at?
Let me introduce you to the Dell XPS 1330...
So apple sells direct to customers... what if they treat ATT as a "customer" that buys a few hundred thousand phones. So apple has "sold" those phones to ATT and they expect to sell those phones - but given the gulf between the sales and the activations it seems that ATT is not in fact, selling those phones.
Well now, I didn't expect that one...
Do you know what Steam is short for? Steaming pile of shit.
That is perhaps the worst piece of software I've used.
It takes forever to load (on a dual dual core with a raid 0 (2x 150 raptors) and a 8800). 3rd party games are completely unsupported (oh but they will sell them to you). I bought Call of Duty 4 and could not play it for weeks. Even halflife had issues with crashing and such. Apparently the anti cheat software wasn't compatible with vista 64. meanwhile back at the "support" forums all of my requests sometimes took over 5 days to be answered. they were along the lines of "why doesn't the game work" along with a detailed description of the problem - there were not really any answers, just a link to a worthless FAQ. I asked for my money back... they could not do that either. Not during the entire process was there a phone number or a live chat available. Backwards much?
Fortunately I tried to play the other day and there was a magical update to the anti cheat module and it worked. What a terrible experience though.
What complete and utter bullshit. You can't have it both ways, being uncompromising on e.g. viewing quality, while compromising on e.g. having to wait an unknown number of days to see a particular title that may or may not be available on HD-DVD
What are you talking about? Have you even used Netflix? There is only one title *ever* that I had to wait for and it was some obscure anime. The rest of the movies come the next day after a movie is received. Also, the Apple store will not get new releases until 30 days after its release to disk. You'll be the one waiting.
It doesn't really matter if a title is available on HD-DVD as my DVD player can up convert to 1080i. Depending on who did the encoding - mileage varies but it is always better than some already over compressed file being scaled to fit a larger screen.
Would you also criticize a good quality restaurant for coming up with nothing better than serving good food?
Great analogy - if we were to compare Apple's iTunes store you'd find that it was a dining establishment that serves mediocre food (720p), had a limited menu (just over 1,000 movie selections) and costs too much (price per rental).
If we were to frame the same analogy for Netflix you'd find that it was a dining establishment that serves the best quality food (1080p), had a very large selection of whatever you want (movie selections) and is relatively inexpensive (price for subscription).
Good selection of movies - could well become better than any rental store or subscription service in time due to their limitations of relying on physical media.
Good selection of movies - NOT. Apple is just breaking over 1,000 movies, finally. Last year Walmart (nearly 960) (which is now closed the UI was terrible) carried more movies than iTunes at launch. Netflix by comparison carries over 17,000 movies.
Selection much?
Reasonable price and conditions.
Unfortunately, the price is not reasonable, the rental is 1/2 the price to actually go see it in the movie theater, and the quality is 33% of the cinematic 4K standard and 66% of the 1080p standard (measured in vertical scan lines).
Fantastically quick delivery.
Depends where you live and how much you want to pay for your internet connection.
with 1080i upscaled quality
OK, This is simply false. Perhaps you haven't read the spec sheet - it's actually quite hard to find - but I will help you out. The Apple TV is not a very capable device when it come to movie playback. Sure you can show some pictures, play music, watch some encoded video. Compared to the device that you would normally use to play movies, like a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD it is significantly less performant. Notice that the Apple TV only supports 1280x720 at 24 fps, and 960x540 at 30 fps. By contrast some of the better TVs on the market currently support 1920 x 1080 @ 120 Hz in progressive scan mode.
Finally, the Apple TV *does not* upscale. It's maximum output is 1280x720 @ 24 Hz. That's really my beef with the Apple TV it's 2 and a half years *behind* the current technology. You can buy an High Def player for less than the Apple TV costs it occurs to me now that had Apple put a blu-ray player in their Apple TV it would be a slam dunk.
excellent quality for an online service, comparable to HDTV broadcasts, better than DVD.
There are other online services that provide similar quality and similar speed of delivery if that's what you want. They also do everything the Apple TV does and more (xbox360).
Not at *all* comparable to a 1080i broadcast. You don't own a 1080p/hdmi set do you? or have digital cable? There is a huge difference.
And it is still not comparable to a nicely encoded Super bit DVD disc (10 Mbps/s) that is unconverted.
The pinnacle though is 1080p on disc - there is no substitute (except maybe real life).
Rental pricing scheme means that in addition to my
But... Steve knows exactly what you want - what you need, even before you do. Maybe you just haven't figured it out yet.
.1 address on my network - but now that I reconfigured my LAN every thing works great! Thanks Steve!
I mean, I was absolutely *sure* that I didn't want my airport extreme to use the
My point with the comment about expiring is that Apple had to go to the effort of creating the expiration scheme. Not only did they go to the effort of creating it - but the expiration window is very restrictive. 24 hours to watch a movie? Say what? Even block buster in 1987 had a less restrictive return policy. The other fact is that there is again, no reason for it. The file you download is virtual, its a bunch of bits - there is no physical object that is being tied up as another poster mentioned. So what's the opportunity cost? And why is the price the same as the cost to "rent" a physical object. It *should* be cheaper by definition - there are less physcial resources used. Sure there was a cost in terms of man hours but that cost goes down for each rental rented. Unlike other rental institutions which have actual physical, fixed costs to distribute their wares.
I am truly puzzled why Apple would try to re-invent the rental model of the late 80's and 90's. It just doesn't make any sense. The value prop of the Apple TV has not changed sufficiently to spur adoption. At > 3 rentals a month netflix is a better option. There is nothing innovative about this model as you postulate. It's the same crap repackaged and foisted on Apple fan boys such as yourself to consume.
Aligning the view window and the expiration window would have been better, more customer friendly.
I keep looking to Apple to have business models and pricing structures that are as innovative as their hardware - but they continue to show that their customers are not #1. Most recently, Amazon had to force their hand with regard to DRM, instead of Apple, the market leader in online music distribution driving the initiative of their own accord.
If you want to watch these movies on your TV you need an Apple TV (which was a point I made earlier you did not reference) or you can use your computer but I don't watch TV on my computer so I don't really consider that an option.
You must be one of those "the best option on the market isn't good enough for me, because my standards are so much higher" types.
No, the best option on the market is 1080p across ALL markets. 1080p set, 1080p player. That's not "sooo much higher" as you state, in fact it's an industry standard. Apple TV and iTunes doesn't deliver this. It would have been nice actually, if Steve had unveiled 1080p or even 1080i content. That might have been a bit more innovative. As it is, I can wait one day or two if I'm returning and get a disc with better quality from netflix. Also, with a disc player, ALL of my content is going to look better because it is upconverted. In the long run it will be cheaper too.
So tell me again why this is a good deal? Oh wait, it's not.
Again, it goes back to Apple not really living up to the same level of innovation as their industrial design.
You must be one of those "the best option on the market isn't good enough for me, because my standards are so much higher" types.
Way to try to put me in a nice cozy little mental box and write me off - I now know my place in the world, thanks for clearing that up.
Bet you're fun to work with, too.
Depends if you are good at what you do. I suspect you would not find out, "good enough" isn't really in my vocabulary.
well put
they've revamped the Apple TV after the first attempt didn't get a great reaction, they've cut deals with all the movie studios, they let people do the obvious thing with movies, namely watch them on the TV.
yeah, for 24 from start or 30 days after which time you are SOL. There is no reason for them to expire but they do. Someone had to do extra work to make it that way.
second, your "rentals" are no good anywhere but your TV or your iPlod.
Finally the rentals are 720p which speaks for itself if you have a 1080p set.
I'm also not a fan of the 300 dollar investment for a device that is half as capable as the HD-DVD player i own.
Code is slow, ideas are not.
It is possible to make it fast - but this will not happen overnight.
Long boot times?
I benched my system at 14 seconds from end of BIOS init to login...
Interesting comments...
I don't think I've ever in my career worked with anybody who was able to keep high output AND high quality AND all the time.
We have project based work - so it comes and it goes. Everyone needs downtime for sure. There are times - "go" time if you will - where sleep is a wish and the notion of being on an island alone for a year is a plesant one. During those times - we write quality code because it is what is expected of us and it is our job. We also do it quickly for the same reason. Quality code and speed is about discipline and not letting the dark side get to you. Oh, and Bawls too.
today's outsourcing is yesterday's working new graduates to death, with about the same quality level for code produced etc.
I would argue it's much, much worse than this. Depending on where you go, the code quality will be even worse, and will continue to be worse - there is no feedback mechanism to correct really poor coding, worse yet, problem solving abilities.
If this was a PHB forum I would be expecting comments along the lines of 'who cares about quality'
Quality is vital to the success of long lived applications, I agree. Though there are millions of examples of where quality does not matter. At the end of the day - if the application works properly the builders job got done. It is really an "artistic" decsison to persue the "proper" path. It may not have gotten done how you or I would like, but it works none the less. This why I think that many of the attributes raised in the article are valid - good engineering comes from a belief in a particular way of doing things. A system even. Those that don't care about the art and craft of programming are unlikely to produce an artistic product.
I am not sure I would be able to work as architect full time without ever writing any code
I don't think it is possible to be a good architect and not write code. As with houses, one must know the materials and it's capabilities before incorporating it into a new design. If you don't do very creative work, then perhaps you can get away with little coding, but the tech industry is not exactly static. Sometimes things don't work quite the way we think they should.
If you use anything that's not a well known 'standard' with an active development community
I don't, and I stay away from things like the plague. I also prefer to buy components where appropriate, especially for things where the amount of effort is clearly not worth the purchase price. Where I think I can reduce complexity and ease implementation I write my own frameworks.
because, if you have been in that situation, often you end up with code that works well for what you specified in 1.0, but that is basically unmantainable and unexpandable, and often unsupportable (when said framework is not the buzzword-du-jour anymore, you find bugs in it, and nobody is interested in fixing them).
I would argue that this is why you and I continue to be employed. We make sure that the project lasts, and that framework-du-jour is in fact a viable solution to the problem, and that it does not create a real hazard to the longevity of the project.
The high school guys are perfectly acceptable so long as they a) write good code b) willing to learn c) are motivated. No one can know everything so that's why the more senior members can raise the quality of the work.
Some high school guys are not going to want to raise the quality of the work - it's about finding those that have the innate talent and enthusiasm and perhaps got lost on the road that society deems the "proper" route through life.
As an aside - there are some jobs that you need a CS major or someone with higher educational training (or someone with the correct on the job experience) - you need the math and the science that they were taught - these jobs are not for the high school guys - but then you wouldn't hire a baker to build you a new CRM
Rule #2: The code doesn't write itself.
"I lived and breathed programming and computers for many years of my life, however now I am in my late 30s and I try to have a much healthier work-life balance, I don't see why this should be a negative at all."
Work-life balance = less code written.
So you might be a great programmer - but you just don't write enough great code for me to hire you. There are other environments where this is perfectly fine. Beware the indians and russians that don't have a work life balance, who write more code, and are potentially more motivated.
Hopefully you've made the transition to an architect role that is less demanding with better compensation...
"If I hired according to this post I'd basically be getting a bunch of socially clueless high school dropouts who talk code all day long, have no life, and just live for the latest buzzword framework that comes out, bah!"
Well, if they can make all those frameworks work, and well - what's the problem?