If you consider video; If you are going between two frames of video, and you're using temporal compression, then only the sections of the image that change get updated, and not the entire image. The rest of the data is dropped, and movie size becomes that much smaller.
Overall, though, you're never going to get 100:1 across the entire film even with throwing away data, so how does this work?
It all comes down to this: The industry is scared shitless about digital. I can tape something on extremely high quality SuperBeta or SuperVHS, go to a duplicating house and make thousands of copies, but take it to the digital realm, and it's a different story. Why is this? Because you now control the distribution channel in a digital way -- there's no duplicating house to shut down, only some semi-anonymous Internet connection.
They fear the napster-like possibilities that exist in non-analog systems. That somehow if an ethernet port exists, data can leave the system in ways not previously known -- although we all know this to be false, considering the common availabilty of an incredible amount of ways to distribute video.
FUD like this will cause us to lose more and more rights, especially when it comes to home taping and other forms of copy in the intellectual property realm. -sigh-
First off, the headline for this issue is incredibly wrong, and it's yet another attempt to sensationalize an otherwise dull story. Thanks again, slashdot. (grr) You've bencome the Weekly World News of computing.
The problem with the litigious society that we live in is that regardless of the patent's wording, if Pause has the money and ability to 'protect' their patent, they could sue TiVo into the ground. It's sad that companies these days do not win on merit, they win lawsuits by depleting resources.
I guess noone bothered to read the entire article to see the real reason behind the decline:
Around the Net
Microsoft gains around five and a half per cent of web hosts this month, and almost 2% of active sites. Primarily this is a result of two large US installations converting from Solaris.
The large free hosting company Namezero, hosted on the Exodus network, has migrated its front end systems to Windows 2000, as has part of the Network Solutions domain registration system. Network Solutions has moved physically from Digex, to Interland, [where Microsoft held a minority interest, prior to the sale to Micron] as part of the process.
Source: netcraft
Everytime I see an article here on slashdot, it's the same way. People only quote 5% of the article, then say something huge, life-threatening, and open-source devestating is about to happen. Sigh.
Having the requisite skills or being the only person in the company with those skills does not make you 'unfireable'.
Plenty of companies in many cities (not just here in SF) are currently firing key personnel and replacing them with sales and marketing people because they believe that that's going to save their company; these companies have too much technology and not enough sales. In a few short months, these same companies are going to realize that there's noone to support the technology that they're selling.
I believe that this will cause a large hiring blitz soon.
In a related action, I know of many hotline servers that were disconnected by their ISP for sharing commercial Macintosh/PC Files, at the requst of software company's legal departments.
Under the DMCA, ISP's can't stonewall -- once they recieve notice that copyright infringement is taking place on their network, the only way to make themselves less liable is to disconnect the circuit.
Personally, I think this becomes 'guilty before being proven innocent', and is yet another reason why the DMCA/NET acts are terribly constructed laws.
I recieved spam from earthlink on an account that noone had the email address to. I don't even use the account for any purpose other than my monthly bill reciept from them.
I also pose another interesting theory - what if ISPs have moles that are selling current user lists to spam houses? It seems to be the case.
This breaks quite a few features on TiVo that are useful:
Season Passes -- you need to know the upcoming schedule to make this go.
Suggestions -- Without knowledge of the entire database, ratings, and upcoming showings, collaborative filtering fails.
The abilitiy to search by director, actor, etc.
In a perfect world, there would be an ability to subscribe to any database out there and use the TiVo functions as a recorder, but this creates an even larger number of problems:
Revenue streams - The reason why you can buy a TiVo so cheaply is that the cost of the box is supplanted by the income from ongoing subscriptions. I had a meeting with RePlay TV some time ago, and as it turns out the box is sold at a loss (well, it's not sold anymore, but still, it was sold at a loss and I believe the TiVo is sold at a loss as well.)
Payment - Someone has to prepare, review, and organize the catalog data. Short of an IMDB for current live TV listings (which are put together by an aggregator at the moment, and then TiVo buys that data) put together by the public, this isn't going to happen.
I agree with your ideas, but in practice, they don't work.
But again, this is what the real issue is. It's an issue of distribution, and that's it.
Record companies, through payola and networking push songs to the top of the charts. If you destroy the distribution channels, they don't make money, and this is their biggest fear -- not the loss of revenues, but the loss of their industry because they are simply no longer needed.
I have a better idea. Like the original intentions of patent and copyright law, which were developed to spawn innovation and creativity, why not open source a ton of music tools?
If we put 10% of the effort into the development of tools to write music (decent sequencers, synths, and software that rivals commercial packages) we'd be somewhere. But why doesn't this happen? Because writing good software and good music is difficult!
The people who know what they want out of the software and the people who write it are often in two seperate camps, and we never get commercial-quality code out of open source projects (at least in the GUI/client space). Only recently has the open source movement (if you can call a loosely affiliated pile of people a movement) has realized that they need production quality code to survive.
I don't only mean high-quality utilities and servers (don't worry, we have tons of that.) What I think the community has to focus on now is clients and high-quality software for users. Not enough work has been made in that space, and it's about time we start looking at what we can do beyond Linux and Emacs.;)
It's interesting to hear people make statements about this when they're new to designing large scale clusters of machines. Dealing with issues such as "How do we get access to the box remotely?" and "How can I see what the machine is doing" are problems that people have solved with console servers for years. We do this all the time with our clusters of Sun Netra boxes, and you can do, even with a linux box.
Any decent Cisco box (get a cheap 25xx series router) can be used as a remote access console server if the machines you are plugging into support serial consoles. You just need to insert a 64 port async card into the 25xx router and then cable up all of the serial ports.
I'd hope that the machine has a bios that can support a serial console; Few systems do, and this is a trend I'd like to see fixed as people start producing more and more linux boxes. Even if the BIOS doesn't support that, you can at least edit inittab to give you a pty on com1: and then use your console server to talk to that.
You're incorrect. If they used a watermark technology, they would be able to tag the content, and watermarks work even if you go from analog to digital and back to analog again. They persist through multiple copies, even transmission of the content over a phone line or airwaves.
The way c|net billed this article really hurts, especially since I'm an open source developer. He paints us in a very dangerous light, attempting to use the media to make our efforts look bad.
"Redmond, Washington, Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating-system chief, Jim Allchin, says that freely distributed software code such as rival Linux could stifle innovation and that legislators need to understand the threat."
How is it a threat? The only person we're a threat to is Microsoft and people who want to control the flow of information. Essentially Mr. Allchin is asking legislators to stop people from creating Open Source software.
Also, did you catch the typo at the end of the article? Here it is:
Microsoft only began significant lobbying efforts in the last few years. The Redmond, Washington-based company also talks to lawmakers about issues including the need for more visas for people with computer skills and computer privacy and security.
They want more foreign people with more computer stills, and more 'privacy' and 'security'. I think we need to import privacy and security now that we've legislated it clear out of the United States.;)
If companies had a way, johhny mnemonic style, to encrypt the data in people's heads, they would. Alas, they cannot, and this leads us to other issues.
Frequently I hear co-workers saying things such as, "On my last job we did it this way" or "We ran program X there and it didn't work so we switched to program Y". So much for NDA's.
NDAs don't work, they don't hold up in court, and they don't bind anyone to anything. The collective thoughts, decisions, and opinions formed in peoples heads through the use of any medium (be it electronic, textual, or social) create experience, and NDA's can't make you sign that away.
In response to Vixie's actions, they seem to be following a trend that started a few years ago -- take public information, make it private, charge for it. This happened with most of the GNU tools (look at how many commercial compliers use gcc as a base and sell you a shitty GUI on top) and it's starting to happen with heavily relied on Unix tools (bind, tripwire, etc.)
We should have full disclosure on BIND bugs. Too many people rely on it.
Think of it this way. DirectTV produces the H cards, and they know exactly how many cards have left their building, how many accounts subscribed, how many unsubscribed/got lost/got cut off/etc. They know exactly how much money they are losing, and the only thing they don't know (well they might now after the Black Sunday ECM) is how many subbed cards were hacked for full access.
The HU cards will be broken (they already have been if you ask some), and so will their sucessors. What will change is the knowledge and financial resources required to break them.
In regards to the people who say most of the direct TV crackers were script kiddies, I disagree. Lots of scripts were available, but on most IRC channels and web sites people demonstrated a decent, if not in-depth understanding of the techonologies involved. It's not that hard to understand what DTV was doing, and with an emulator and ECM logs, you're set.
Slashdot Mirror
If you consider video; If you are going between two frames of video, and you're using temporal compression, then only the sections of the image that change get updated, and not the entire image. The rest of the data is dropped, and movie size becomes that much smaller.
Overall, though, you're never going to get 100:1 across the entire film even with throwing away data, so how does this work?
"who sent you?"
"You did. Thirty years from now you sent me back to be your boyfriend, here, in this time."
It's scary to think that we've come far enough that the possibility of selecting for the 'karma-whoring' trait will soon be with us.
Maybe they can sue my fridge, or the toilet, because both allow me to 'skip' commercials.
It all comes down to this: The industry is scared shitless about digital. I can tape something on extremely high quality SuperBeta or SuperVHS, go to a duplicating house and make thousands of copies, but take it to the digital realm, and it's a different story. Why is this? Because you now control the distribution channel in a digital way -- there's no duplicating house to shut down, only some semi-anonymous Internet connection.
They fear the napster-like possibilities that exist in non-analog systems. That somehow if an ethernet port exists, data can leave the system in ways not previously known -- although we all know this to be false, considering the common availabilty of an incredible amount of ways to distribute video.
FUD like this will cause us to lose more and more rights, especially when it comes to home taping and other forms of copy in the intellectual property realm. -sigh-
BML does exactly this.
http://www.bradfitz.com/bml/
Companies can't complain in this aspect, because it's like consumer reports, and that's protected free speech.
The problem with the litigious society that we live in is that regardless of the patent's wording, if Pause has the money and ability to 'protect' their patent, they could sue TiVo into the ground. It's sad that companies these days do not win on merit, they win lawsuits by depleting resources.
These are the new holy wars of the mind.
Check out omnirax. I'm using the Prostation right now, which has four 19" racks, a huge table space, and then some:
http://www.omnirax.com
The F2 is pretty badass as well.
Plenty of companies in many cities (not just here in SF) are currently firing key personnel and replacing them with sales and marketing people because they believe that that's going to save their company; these companies have too much technology and not enough sales. In a few short months, these same companies are going to realize that there's noone to support the technology that they're selling.
I believe that this will cause a large hiring blitz soon.
Under the DMCA, ISP's can't stonewall -- once they recieve notice that copyright infringement is taking place on their network, the only way to make themselves less liable is to disconnect the circuit.
Personally, I think this becomes 'guilty before being proven innocent', and is yet another reason why the DMCA/NET acts are terribly constructed laws.
I recieved spam from earthlink on an account that noone had the email address to. I don't even use the account for any purpose other than my monthly bill reciept from them. I also pose another interesting theory - what if ISPs have moles that are selling current user lists to spam houses? It seems to be the case.
This breaks quite a few features on TiVo that are useful:
Season Passes -- you need to know the upcoming schedule to make this go.
Suggestions -- Without knowledge of the entire database, ratings, and upcoming showings, collaborative filtering fails.
The abilitiy to search by director, actor, etc.
In a perfect world, there would be an ability to subscribe to any database out there and use the TiVo functions as a recorder, but this creates an even larger number of problems:
Revenue streams - The reason why you can buy a TiVo so cheaply is that the cost of the box is supplanted by the income from ongoing subscriptions. I had a meeting with RePlay TV some time ago, and as it turns out the box is sold at a loss (well, it's not sold anymore, but still, it was sold at a loss and I believe the TiVo is sold at a loss as well.)
Payment - Someone has to prepare, review, and organize the catalog data. Short of an IMDB for current live TV listings (which are put together by an aggregator at the moment, and then TiVo buys that data) put together by the public, this isn't going to happen.
I agree with your ideas, but in practice, they don't work.
But again, this is what the real issue is. It's an issue of distribution, and that's it. Record companies, through payola and networking push songs to the top of the charts. If you destroy the distribution channels, they don't make money, and this is their biggest fear -- not the loss of revenues, but the loss of their industry because they are simply no longer needed.
I also believe there was a show on Unsolved Mysteries about this kid. They had to call in the DoE to clean up the mess.
Hey, go install CygWin. It'll work :)
You might not get the X windows stuff, but you'll get the CLI.
If we put 10% of the effort into the development of tools to write music (decent sequencers, synths, and software that rivals commercial packages) we'd be somewhere. But why doesn't this happen? Because writing good software and good music is difficult!
The people who know what they want out of the software and the people who write it are often in two seperate camps, and we never get commercial-quality code out of open source projects (at least in the GUI/client space). Only recently has the open source movement (if you can call a loosely affiliated pile of people a movement) has realized that they need production quality code to survive.
I don't only mean high-quality utilities and servers (don't worry, we have tons of that.) What I think the community has to focus on now is clients and high-quality software for users. Not enough work has been made in that space, and it's about time we start looking at what we can do beyond Linux and Emacs. ;)
Silly you, you haven't been to burning man. We do wonders with solar and wind power, and there's tons of wind and solar out there in the ocean.
Any decent Cisco box (get a cheap 25xx series router) can be used as a remote access console server if the machines you are plugging into support serial consoles. You just need to insert a 64 port async card into the 25xx router and then cable up all of the serial ports.
I'd hope that the machine has a bios that can support a serial console; Few systems do, and this is a trend I'd like to see fixed as people start producing more and more linux boxes. Even if the BIOS doesn't support that, you can at least edit inittab to give you a pty on com1: and then use your console server to talk to that.
You're incorrect. If they used a watermark technology, they would be able to tag the content, and watermarks work even if you go from analog to digital and back to analog again. They persist through multiple copies, even transmission of the content over a phone line or airwaves.
"Redmond, Washington, Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating-system chief, Jim Allchin, says that freely distributed software code such as rival Linux could stifle innovation and that legislators need to understand the threat."
How is it a threat? The only person we're a threat to is Microsoft and people who want to control the flow of information. Essentially Mr. Allchin is asking legislators to stop people from creating Open Source software.
Also, did you catch the typo at the end of the article? Here it is: Microsoft only began significant lobbying efforts in the last few years. The Redmond, Washington-based company also talks to lawmakers about issues including the need for more visas for people with computer skills and computer privacy and security. They want more foreign people with more computer stills, and more 'privacy' and 'security'. I think we need to import privacy and security now that we've legislated it clear out of the United States.Yes, but they released their changes back into the world for everyone to use (aside from the TiVo Application itself! That's different.)
Here:
http://www.tivo.com/linux/index.html
If companies had a way, johhny mnemonic style, to encrypt the data in people's heads, they would. Alas, they cannot, and this leads us to other issues.
Frequently I hear co-workers saying things such as, "On my last job we did it this way" or "We ran program X there and it didn't work so we switched to program Y". So much for NDA's.
NDAs don't work, they don't hold up in court, and they don't bind anyone to anything. The collective thoughts, decisions, and opinions formed in peoples heads through the use of any medium (be it electronic, textual, or social) create experience, and NDA's can't make you sign that away.
In response to Vixie's actions, they seem to be following a trend that started a few years ago -- take public information, make it private, charge for it. This happened with most of the GNU tools (look at how many commercial compliers use gcc as a base and sell you a shitty GUI on top) and it's starting to happen with heavily relied on Unix tools (bind, tripwire, etc.)
We should have full disclosure on BIND bugs. Too many people rely on it.
The HU cards will be broken (they already have been if you ask some), and so will their sucessors. What will change is the knowledge and financial resources required to break them.
In regards to the people who say most of the direct TV crackers were script kiddies, I disagree. Lots of scripts were available, but on most IRC channels and web sites people demonstrated a decent, if not in-depth understanding of the techonologies involved. It's not that hard to understand what DTV was doing, and with an emulator and ECM logs, you're set.