The P2P functionality is there just to easy off the bandwidth requirements for the server. If no user is watching or has the video, it will stream normally from the server. This works extremely well with popular videos or live streams.
You can never know for sure, unless you've went through all the patents. However I'm sure since it's On2 their lawyers have looked at it.
However, it doesn't mean it's completely patent free. Google still owns all the patents and gives a patent license to use it. They're promising it's royalty-free.
Towes explained that Stratus users will first have to agree to participate in a P2P-enabled Flash swarm, similar to how they are now asked to indicate whether Flash can use their webcam. If users do not want to share bandwidth, the broadcaster has the option to offer a regular stream, a degraded stream or no stream at all.
As far as HTML5 Video goes, a new upcoming Flash will make things even more interesting and mix them up. The final version of Adobe Flash 10.1 supports P2P to reduce the bandwidth costs for site owners. It works out of the box too, so users can still get the video normally streamed, but it will seriously lower bandwidth usage and hence costs for video streaming sites. This same P2P feature also works for both on-demand and live video aswell as Flash based multiplayer games.
Live streaming should have some common specs too, but P2P streaming requires such to be made into the standard so it works for all. It's a quite large feature for site owners too, since it dramatically lowers bandwidth costs.
I don't think we will still see Flash going away, even if we at some point can even decide about the codec used for HTML5 Video. There's still too many features Flash has that HTML5 Video doesn't support at all.
This is why you don't use unnecessary things like Aero (and graphical displays) on servers. Granted Aero isn't enabled by default on Windows Server 2008, but it's still all unnecessary. Servers are meant to be configured and left running with minimal installs. You can do everything you need to from a command line, and sftp for editing those configuration files. When you have a minimalistic install there's also much less change of some random software having an exploitable bug.
You may think such games and spending on them is stupid, but if it gives some value to the user (fun, feel of accomplished, whatever), what's wrong with it? People like different things.
The article also notes that Zynga and other companies who make Facebook games are allowed to use other direct payment options too. Facebook is providing this as an extra, and it since it's Facebook itself you can probably trust it more (all the privacy things aside now)
It's called the free-to-play MMO model (or 'freemium' but I can't say that with a straight face) and was pioneered years ago. The new way to hook customers is to graft it onto an existing gullible userbase via a social network-virtual grindwork status convergence paradigm.
And almost every asian MMO uses this model and they like it and it's working good for them. We western geeks just have got used to buying the whole game at once, but this model works a lot better with casual gamers and especially girl players.
The GP thinks its a bad model. So what? You and me and rest of the slashdotters can continue our normal games. There's enough space for both and both genres mostly cater to different kind of players.
Opera has been really successful with providing a browser that feels light to use but is still powerful and full of native features. That's probably the reason why Opera feels so constant and fast - all the features are build-in and have the same level of quality. While a better addon system would be good, besides ad blocker (which I use Ad Muncher for), there's not really any features that are missing. And the whole GUI and usage feels a lot more robust than Firefox's XUL-based interface.
Exactly, and could someone please tell me how this
"Don't you know black duck eggs are a delicacy in China?" Winkler said Stan asked. "I can't get black duck eggs in San Francisco, let alone this little piece of crap town in the middle of nowhere." Stan's conclusion was that the Chinese restaurant was a front for a Chinese espionage operation targeting the Fortune 5 business.
gives the conclusion that it's a Chinese cyber espionage front? I mean, seriously?
But just because you can do some thing the hard and geeky way, doesn't mean you should. There are good reasons to store them on a file server, but having that same storage on the copier easies off many people that don't really need external file storage just for saving the copiers queue.
You can record something as long as you aren't directly recording or photographing a specific person without his consent. That is for personal purposes - something like recording for TV or publicly broadcasting are a different matter.
And yes, they are selectively enforced, accounting common sense and the persons purpose too.
What Google did to the data is exactly the same thing you have done if you've ever recorded video or audio in a public place. You have data (sound and images) of people in public. If these people had unsecured wireless, they were sending their data into the street for the world to hear.
Where are you from? Because many EU countries actually have laws regarding recording video and audio of people even in public places. You cannot just say "but it was a public place", there are restrictions to it. For example you cannot film or take and publish pictures of a person without consent (unless public figure/celebrity), at least so that he or she is identifiable from those.
For example in Sweden stores that contain security cameras *must clearly note so* outside the store. By law you are required to tell people if you are recording them.
In many EU countries there is also expectation of certain privacy even in public places.
Yeah because theres no possibility someone caused it without any involvement from him.
Besides, how do you think some businessman with nice tan would compare to some overweight person who person who sits on computer all day long? Not looking good for us slashdotters.
Google is the one that said "Oops, we got this stuff by mistake & are going to delete it as soon as we let everyone know".
If police came knocking on my door and said I'm under investigation for downloading child porn, you think it would be ok for me to say "don't worry, it was a mistake and I'm going to be deleting it soon" and they wouldn't want my computer and hard drives to investigate it?
Besides, German police didn't want all of their data. They wanted one hard drive so they could investigate what Google has done, if they have broken laws and if they should get fines for it, and probably disallowing further scanning. You know, investigation is what law enforcement does when someone has broke the laws.
You want the data turned over to the government? That is the absolute last thing I would want if google inappropriately collected my wifi activity. The government should supervise the destruction, not be given the data set to do with as they please...
If you'd actually read the article you would notice that they only wanted one hard drive to see what kind of data Google had collected and if they were breaking laws, and if they should be fined for it and told to stop doing so.
You know, police usually needs evidence so it can actually investigate and come to conclusion. Google refusing and destroying evidence is breaking even more laws and doesn't really show that Google is acting lawfully.
Germany as it is after WWII isn't exactly the same Germany it was before it. Allies set up the new government, laws and everything else. In fact, I think it taught a lot of Germans and other Europeans the need for privacy.
Besides, Hitler was really from Austria, not Germany.
There's nothing wrong with laws also giving fines for misusing the unsecured connections and sniffing the traffic in it.
And as it is, it's currently unlawful. You can say that proper security is needed (it is), but the fact is that Google broke laws.
Your home connection to your ISP is also mostly unsecured. Would it be ok for me to tap into that? After all, you weren't using encrypted VPN or encrypted connection to your ISP, so it's only your own fault, right? I didn't think so.
I seriously hope more EU countries will demand the same thing. It's outrageous how Google blatantly breaks laws, especially privacy ones, and get nothing for it.
Whoever in the EU parliament will impose big fines for Google breaking privacy laws gets my vote. It seems it's the only way Google will learn. They have previously too pissed of Germany on privacy issues.
US may not do the same, but Europeans take privacy seriously. We have had our governments to completely different agendas many times in the history. It also doesn't help one thing that Google is an US company and US government can get access to all of our data even while those people aren't US citizens. Don't use Google services you say? That's a little bit hard when they have their cars driving around sniffing web traffic.
Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner, criticized Google for not cooperating with German privacy officials.
"It is not acceptable that a company operating in the E.U. does not respect E.U. rules," she said in a statement released by her office.
Of course you don't know it for sure, but if they did that they would be risking their reputation too. It would be stupid to risk their main business just to get that extra one dollar. In the long run it would cost them a lot more. At most it would be an opt-in like thing.
I'm not saying all software you buy is like that, but since the base monetarization method is completely different, theres a much larger change for that. All of that is of course hidden in EULA or privacy policy.
Because you know that the company funds the development by selling the product to their customers, not by selling their customer data to advertisers.
Most of these companies also have very strict privacy policies where they state that they wont sell or give your information to a third party or for advertising purposes.
Yes, it's the basis of their business model. They need all that information to serve their advertisers better. This means they're also constantly looking for new ways to get even more and more information. Even if some of their services currently aren't related to advertising (like their free DNS service), there's no guarantee that they cannot be in the future. They're awfully easy to integrate later when they have grown, and with publicly traded companies you never know what is going to happen in the future. Especially when they're looking for new ways to generate advertising revenue.
Notice that all of their services are related to obtaining information, usage statistics, datamining and serving advertisement. YouTube too is a great resource for advertisers, as soon as online video matures a little bit more (though they're already working on it).
Not that it's a bad business model - but if you value your privacy, you might want to consider forgetting freeloading for a moment and buying software. You know, the business model that is based on customers paying for the software instead of selling their soul for advertisers. Google is the new adware business, they have just hidden it better.
Slashdot Mirror
The P2P functionality is there just to easy off the bandwidth requirements for the server. If no user is watching or has the video, it will stream normally from the server. This works extremely well with popular videos or live streams.
You can never know for sure, unless you've went through all the patents. However I'm sure since it's On2 their lawyers have looked at it.
However, it doesn't mean it's completely patent free. Google still owns all the patents and gives a patent license to use it. They're promising it's royalty-free.
User can agree or disagree to participate in it
Towes explained that Stratus users will first have to agree to participate in a P2P-enabled Flash swarm, similar to how they are now asked to indicate whether Flash can use their webcam. If users do not want to share bandwidth, the broadcaster has the option to offer a regular stream, a degraded stream or no stream at all.
As far as HTML5 Video goes, a new upcoming Flash will make things even more interesting and mix them up. The final version of Adobe Flash 10.1 supports P2P to reduce the bandwidth costs for site owners. It works out of the box too, so users can still get the video normally streamed, but it will seriously lower bandwidth usage and hence costs for video streaming sites. This same P2P feature also works for both on-demand and live video aswell as Flash based multiplayer games.
Live streaming should have some common specs too, but P2P streaming requires such to be made into the standard so it works for all. It's a quite large feature for site owners too, since it dramatically lowers bandwidth costs.
I don't think we will still see Flash going away, even if we at some point can even decide about the codec used for HTML5 Video. There's still too many features Flash has that HTML5 Video doesn't support at all.
and Windows Server 2008 R2
This is why you don't use unnecessary things like Aero (and graphical displays) on servers. Granted Aero isn't enabled by default on Windows Server 2008, but it's still all unnecessary. Servers are meant to be configured and left running with minimal installs. You can do everything you need to from a command line, and sftp for editing those configuration files. When you have a minimalistic install there's also much less change of some random software having an exploitable bug.
You may think such games and spending on them is stupid, but if it gives some value to the user (fun, feel of accomplished, whatever), what's wrong with it? People like different things.
The article also notes that Zynga and other companies who make Facebook games are allowed to use other direct payment options too. Facebook is providing this as an extra, and it since it's Facebook itself you can probably trust it more (all the privacy things aside now)
It's called the free-to-play MMO model (or 'freemium' but I can't say that with a straight face) and was pioneered years ago. The new way to hook customers is to graft it onto an existing gullible userbase via a social network-virtual grindwork status convergence paradigm.
And almost every asian MMO uses this model and they like it and it's working good for them. We western geeks just have got used to buying the whole game at once, but this model works a lot better with casual gamers and especially girl players.
The GP thinks its a bad model. So what? You and me and rest of the slashdotters can continue our normal games. There's enough space for both and both genres mostly cater to different kind of players.
Opera has been really successful with providing a browser that feels light to use but is still powerful and full of native features. That's probably the reason why Opera feels so constant and fast - all the features are build-in and have the same level of quality. While a better addon system would be good, besides ad blocker (which I use Ad Muncher for), there's not really any features that are missing. And the whole GUI and usage feels a lot more robust than Firefox's XUL-based interface.
How the hell one draws the conclusion that it's a cyber espionage front from selling eggs below average cost? Yeah, that seems logical.
Exactly, and could someone please tell me how this
"Don't you know black duck eggs are a delicacy in China?" Winkler said Stan asked. "I can't get black duck eggs in San Francisco, let alone this little piece of crap town in the middle of nowhere." Stan's conclusion was that the Chinese restaurant was a front for a Chinese espionage operation targeting the Fortune 5 business.
gives the conclusion that it's a Chinese cyber espionage front? I mean, seriously?
But just because you can do some thing the hard and geeky way, doesn't mean you should. There are good reasons to store them on a file server, but having that same storage on the copier easies off many people that don't really need external file storage just for saving the copiers queue.
You can record something as long as you aren't directly recording or photographing a specific person without his consent. That is for personal purposes - something like recording for TV or publicly broadcasting are a different matter.
And yes, they are selectively enforced, accounting common sense and the persons purpose too.
What Google did to the data is exactly the same thing you have done if you've ever recorded video or audio in a public place. You have data (sound and images) of people in public. If these people had unsecured wireless, they were sending their data into the street for the world to hear.
Where are you from? Because many EU countries actually have laws regarding recording video and audio of people even in public places. You cannot just say "but it was a public place", there are restrictions to it. For example you cannot film or take and publish pictures of a person without consent (unless public figure/celebrity), at least so that he or she is identifiable from those.
For example in Sweden stores that contain security cameras *must clearly note so* outside the store. By law you are required to tell people if you are recording them.
In many EU countries there is also expectation of certain privacy even in public places.
Yeah because theres no possibility someone caused it without any involvement from him.
Besides, how do you think some businessman with nice tan would compare to some overweight person who person who sits on computer all day long? Not looking good for us slashdotters.
Google is the one that said "Oops, we got this stuff by mistake & are going to delete it as soon as we let everyone know".
If police came knocking on my door and said I'm under investigation for downloading child porn, you think it would be ok for me to say "don't worry, it was a mistake and I'm going to be deleting it soon" and they wouldn't want my computer and hard drives to investigate it?
Besides, German police didn't want all of their data. They wanted one hard drive so they could investigate what Google has done, if they have broken laws and if they should get fines for it, and probably disallowing further scanning. You know, investigation is what law enforcement does when someone has broke the laws.
You want the data turned over to the government? That is the absolute last thing I would want if google inappropriately collected my wifi activity. The government should supervise the destruction, not be given the data set to do with as they please...
If you'd actually read the article you would notice that they only wanted one hard drive to see what kind of data Google had collected and if they were breaking laws, and if they should be fined for it and told to stop doing so.
You know, police usually needs evidence so it can actually investigate and come to conclusion. Google refusing and destroying evidence is breaking even more laws and doesn't really show that Google is acting lawfully.
They only wanted one HDD to see what kind of data Google collected, not all of them.
Germany as it is after WWII isn't exactly the same Germany it was before it. Allies set up the new government, laws and everything else. In fact, I think it taught a lot of Germans and other Europeans the need for privacy.
Besides, Hitler was really from Austria, not Germany.
There's nothing wrong with laws also giving fines for misusing the unsecured connections and sniffing the traffic in it.
And as it is, it's currently unlawful. You can say that proper security is needed (it is), but the fact is that Google broke laws.
Your home connection to your ISP is also mostly unsecured. Would it be ok for me to tap into that? After all, you weren't using encrypted VPN or encrypted connection to your ISP, so it's only your own fault, right? I didn't think so.
I seriously hope more EU countries will demand the same thing. It's outrageous
how Google blatantly breaks laws, especially privacy ones, and get nothing for it.
Whoever in the EU parliament will impose big fines for Google breaking privacy laws gets my vote. It seems it's the only way Google will learn. They have previously too pissed of Germany on privacy issues.
US may not do the same, but Europeans take privacy seriously. We have had our governments to completely different agendas many times in the history. It also doesn't help one thing that Google is an US company and US government can get access to all of our data even while those people aren't US citizens. Don't use Google services you say? That's a little bit hard when they have their cars driving around sniffing web traffic.
Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner, criticized Google for not cooperating with German privacy officials.
"It is not acceptable that a company operating in the E.U. does not respect E.U. rules," she said in a statement released by her office.
This is what Google should learn.
Of course you don't know it for sure, but if they did that they would be risking their reputation too. It would be stupid to risk their main business just to get that extra one dollar. In the long run it would cost them a lot more. At most it would be an opt-in like thing.
I'm not saying all software you buy is like that, but since the base monetarization method is completely different, theres a much larger change for that. All of that is of course hidden in EULA or privacy policy.
Because you know that the company funds the development by selling the product to their customers, not by selling their customer data to advertisers.
Most of these companies also have very strict privacy policies where they state that they wont sell or give your information to a third party or for advertising purposes.
Yes, it's the basis of their business model. They need all that information to serve their advertisers better. This means they're also constantly looking for new ways to get even more and more information. Even if some of their services currently aren't related to advertising (like their free DNS service), there's no guarantee that they cannot be in the future. They're awfully easy to integrate later when they have grown, and with publicly traded companies you never know what is going to happen in the future. Especially when they're looking for new ways to generate advertising revenue.
Notice that all of their services are related to obtaining information, usage statistics, datamining and serving advertisement. YouTube too is a great resource for advertisers, as soon as online video matures a little bit more (though they're already working on it).
Not that it's a bad business model - but if you value your privacy, you might want to consider forgetting freeloading for a moment and buying software. You know, the business model that is based on customers paying for the software instead of selling their soul for advertisers. Google is the new adware business, they have just hidden it better.
They patent everything because the system requires them to. You should blame the whole patent system instead.