At universities, this has replaced e-mail as a primary form of communication. I ask people I meet for an e-mail address. They tell me to look them up on facebook. At a university, you would literally be cutting out much of your social life if you never used facebook, because most of the people at the school expect that you will communicate with them through it. It's like saying that if you don't like the subscriptions and lock-ins that the cell companies require in the US, that you just don't use a cell phone. The price of ignoring it is huge.
By the way, it isn't a trojan. A trojan is software that convinces the user to install it by looking like something else that the user might want to install. While this may certainly qualify as malware, it isn't a trojan.
Most PCs ship without professionally produced malware installed. While everyone might *wish* that their PC came with such software, only a small percentage of customers are actually lucky enough to get their malware free of charge. Mac users, don't feel bad that your system won't come with it. You get iLife.:-)
So I listen to a lot of classical music, which I encode at a high bit rate. One "song" can be 30 or 40 minutes and 50 or 60 MB or more. Do I get more bandwidth than someone who listens to pop?
The typical size of a picture on my computer is probably around 1600x1200. Do I get more bandwidth than someone with smaller pictures?
My e-mails are usually pretty small, unless someone sends me a large attachment. Which of my e-mails are we using as the e-mail unit?
The "platform" that Goooooogle uses was not developed by Microsoft. The Internet originated with DARPA. Other companies developed the routing and networking infrastructure. The Web originated at CERN, on a NeXT machine. Web browsing was common on Unix machines long before it was available or easily usable on Windows machines. Windows didn't even support TCP/IP natively when the browser was developed. The web server also originated at CERN, although the first popular one (NCSA HTTPD) originated at UIUC's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Microsoft was late to the game, late to recognize the usefulness or importance of the Internet, attempted on a number of occasions to try to gain control of the Internet as a platform, and has done little or nothing to advance the Internet on its own (except for adding extensions to standards that would lock people into its own platform.)
The cell companies in the US are near monopolies. Getting a phone without a contract is extremely expensive. Contracts lock you in to a provider for two years, and the cost of switching is extremely high. Since the cell companies only allow you to use certain phones on their network, and since many of them use incompatible networks, there is effectively no competition.
It's the same reason that cable TV is so expensive. Lack of real competition. Sure, you can choose Direct TV instead, but they don't have to price themselves substantially lower than the competition.
Zap2It has a TV Guide-like web page that tells you your personal TV listings. Is this the same thing that they are shutting down? Or is there some other service that they are talking about?
Many services on the internet would not be viable if you had to pay per bit or packet. They would simply be too expensive. For example, want to download a Linux ISO? You might think twice if you might wind up paying an extra few dollars every time you did that. The ISPs do not want customers who will use their service heavily. They want users who pay a lot of money but place little load on their system to keep their overhead down. In the US, some cell phone companies have started dropping subscribers who don't upgrade their phones often enough or subscribe to premium services, because they don't make *enough* money off of those to be worthwhile. These companies only want to deal with their most profitable customers.
The ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc) see P2P as competition for services that they offer, either currently, or in the future. Why get video or other data for free (after having payed your ISP for access) when they can charge you for it, control what you get access to, and charge a premium for premium content? The ISPs by law can not examine what data is being transmitted without loosing common carrier status (at which point, they get a lot more government regulation). So they do the traffic shaping to get around the regulation issue while degrading any possible competition to their own premium services. This is what the whole net neutrality fight is really about. The ISPs want more money for selling you content. Claiming that they don't have enough bandwidth is just an excuse.
Even worse, the guy now has a felony conviction on his record, which will probably make it very hard for him to get many jobs, loans, or anything else where they do a background check on you. He's basically had his life ruined because he was using a free service that the coffee shop was willingly providing (and advertising!) as a free service for anyone who wanted it!
1) Post a link to some (harmless) page 2) Owner of that page changes it to something the Chinese government considers nonharmless 3) You get arrested 4) Profit?
Isn't it obvious? People who are underage may only drink from clear, plastic bottles! By using a cup, she was promoting drinking from opaque liquid carrying devices.
Let's not forget that cell phones put out an extremely low power signal. The energy in that signal that would hit any particular point (think of the intersection of a bee and a sphere of signal expanding from the cell phone) decreases with the square of the distance from the phone (inverse square law) If the bee is more than an tiny distance from the phone, the bee would never notice anything, because the energy levels would be so low.
On the other hand, that big shiny ball in the sky that emits huge amounts of radiation on many different wavelengths hits the bee with much more energy.
The PC market is considerably larger than it was when XP started shipping, so you would expect more sales. The question is what percentage of the market has purchased a vista upgrade or a new machine with vista compared to the same for XP? Note that nearly all consumer machines are now offered only with Vista. So given the choice between Vista and Vista, people who want a new machine are oddly choosing...Vista.
It's unclear to me from the article whether these devices would be watermarking video provided by the ISP, cable company (or other TV broadcaster), etc. so that they would know, for example, that you're retransmitting video broadcast to your set. Or does this mean that if you transfer a video file (which might or might not be something that you own the copyright for), and it happens to pass through the wrong DSL modem, the modem will alter the bits in the file to embed the watermark. If it is the second, I can't imagine why I would want to buy or use such a device. I expect my network equipment to pass my data unaltered. It has no idea what I'm actually sending, and altering my files is essentially causing data corruption!
Suppose that I send my family home video. Does it watermark that? What if I send a large file of important non-video data that it thinks is video. Does it corrupt my file?
It seems like they are simply trying to eliminate customers who are unprofitable, or not very profitable. They have to invest much less money if they get rid of the people who actually USE their service, rather than just downloading the occasional e-mail or web page. You can offer unlimited bandwidth if no one uses it. This is very much like the cell carriers dropping support for users of older phone technologies because those users don't purchase extra services.
"At Macrovision we are willing to lead this industry effort. We offer to assist Apple in the issues and problems with DRM that you state in your letter. Should you desire, we would also assume responsibility for FairPlay as a part of our evolving DRM offering and enable it to interoperate across other DRMs, thus increasing consumer choice and driving commonality across devices."
ie. "Please, Apple. Give us the keys to your iPod and let us make money from your copy protection scheme while you abandon it" Huh?
The slides showed Tubes sending Word files, spreadsheets, and other data through the tubes. But Senator Ted Stevens clearly described the capability to send entire Internets through the Tubes. If this can't send Internets, it is clearly not a complete Tube implementation.
Fiji: Microsoft gets an extension from the teacher to turn in its Vista homework late.
Vienna: Microsoft takes a philosophy class. Wonders why it did everything a certain way for the past 15 years. Gets high. Oooo...look at all the pretty colors and new interface paradigms.
I already pay a lot of money for cell phone access. You charge me minutes and money for data access time. If I have to waste some of my money and minutes on advertisements, I will switch cell phone providers. I do not need to be told where to find hotels or shown ads. If I want one, I'll look it up.
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At universities, this has replaced e-mail as a primary form of communication. I ask people I meet for an e-mail address. They tell me to look them up on facebook. At a university, you would literally be cutting out much of your social life if you never used facebook, because most of the people at the school expect that you will communicate with them through it. It's like saying that if you don't like the subscriptions and lock-ins that the cell companies require in the US, that you just don't use a cell phone. The price of ignoring it is huge.
By the way, it isn't a trojan. A trojan is software that convinces the user to install it by looking like something else that the user might want to install. While this may certainly qualify as malware, it isn't a trojan.
Most PCs ship without professionally produced malware installed. While everyone might *wish* that their PC came with such software, only a small percentage of customers are actually lucky enough to get their malware free of charge. Mac users, don't feel bad that your system won't come with it. You get iLife. :-)
So I listen to a lot of classical music, which I encode at a high bit rate. One "song" can be 30 or 40 minutes and 50 or 60 MB or more. Do I get more bandwidth than someone who listens to pop?
The typical size of a picture on my computer is probably around 1600x1200. Do I get more bandwidth than someone with smaller pictures?
My e-mails are usually pretty small, unless someone sends me a large attachment. Which of my e-mails are we using as the e-mail unit?
The "platform" that Goooooogle uses was not developed by Microsoft. The Internet originated with DARPA. Other companies developed the routing and networking infrastructure. The Web originated at CERN, on a NeXT machine. Web browsing was common on Unix machines long before it was available or easily usable on Windows machines. Windows didn't even support TCP/IP natively when the browser was developed. The web server also originated at CERN, although the first popular one (NCSA HTTPD) originated at UIUC's National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Microsoft was late to the game, late to recognize the usefulness or importance of the Internet, attempted on a number of occasions to try to gain control of the Internet as a platform, and has done little or nothing to advance the Internet on its own (except for adding extensions to standards that would lock people into its own platform.)
Oh...and Goooooogle runs on Linux.
The cell companies in the US are near monopolies. Getting a phone without a contract is extremely expensive. Contracts lock you in to a provider for two years, and the cost of switching is extremely high. Since the cell companies only allow you to use certain phones on their network, and since many of them use incompatible networks, there is effectively no competition.
It's the same reason that cable TV is so expensive. Lack of real competition. Sure, you can choose Direct TV instead, but they don't have to price themselves substantially lower than the competition.
Zap2It has a TV Guide-like web page that tells you your personal TV listings. Is this the same thing that they are shutting down? Or is there some other service that they are talking about?
Many services on the internet would not be viable if you had to pay per bit or packet. They would simply be too expensive. For example, want to download a Linux ISO? You might think twice if you might wind up paying an extra few dollars every time you did that. The ISPs do not want customers who will use their service heavily. They want users who pay a lot of money but place little load on their system to keep their overhead down. In the US, some cell phone companies have started dropping subscribers who don't upgrade their phones often enough or subscribe to premium services, because they don't make *enough* money off of those to be worthwhile. These companies only want to deal with their most profitable customers.
The ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc) see P2P as competition for services that they offer, either currently, or in the future. Why get video or other data for free (after having payed your ISP for access) when they can charge you for it, control what you get access to, and charge a premium for premium content? The ISPs by law can not examine what data is being transmitted without loosing common carrier status (at which point, they get a lot more government regulation). So they do the traffic shaping to get around the regulation issue while degrading any possible competition to their own premium services. This is what the whole net neutrality fight is really about. The ISPs want more money for selling you content. Claiming that they don't have enough bandwidth is just an excuse.
2 CEOs enter...
One CEO leaves.
Even worse, the guy now has a felony conviction on his record, which will probably make it very hard for him to get many jobs, loans, or anything else where they do a background check on you. He's basically had his life ruined because he was using a free service that the coffee shop was willingly providing (and advertising!) as a free service for anyone who wanted it!
1) Post a link to some (harmless) page
2) Owner of that page changes it to something the Chinese government considers nonharmless
3) You get arrested
4) Profit?
Just like chairs, couches, and other inanimate objects, animate, but non-thinking and non-feeling machines want to be anthropomorphized.
Isn't it obvious? People who are underage may only drink from clear, plastic bottles! By using a cup, she was promoting drinking from opaque liquid carrying devices.
OS X's Automator does exactly this...
Genentech is almost entirely Mac, and is the largest biotech company in the world. Market cap: $85.34 billion
Let's not forget that cell phones put out an extremely low power signal. The energy in that signal that would hit any particular point (think of the intersection of a bee and a sphere of signal expanding from the cell phone) decreases with the square of the distance from the phone (inverse square law) If the bee is more than an tiny distance from the phone, the bee would never notice anything, because the energy levels would be so low.
On the other hand, that big shiny ball in the sky that emits huge amounts of radiation on many different wavelengths hits the bee with much more energy.
This simply doesn't make sense.
Sounds like the sun needs a good dermatologist!
The PC market is considerably larger than it was when XP started shipping, so you would expect more sales. The question is what percentage of the market has purchased a vista upgrade or a new machine with vista compared to the same for XP? Note that nearly all consumer machines are now offered only with Vista. So given the choice between Vista and Vista, people who want a new machine are oddly choosing...Vista.
It's unclear to me from the article whether these devices would be watermarking video provided by the ISP, cable company (or other TV broadcaster), etc. so that they would know, for example, that you're retransmitting video broadcast to your set. Or does this mean that if you transfer a video file (which might or might not be something that you own the copyright for), and it happens to pass through the wrong DSL modem, the modem will alter the bits in the file to embed the watermark. If it is the second, I can't imagine why I would want to buy or use such a device. I expect my network equipment to pass my data unaltered. It has no idea what I'm actually sending, and altering my files is essentially causing data corruption!
Suppose that I send my family home video. Does it watermark that? What if I send a large file of important non-video data that it thinks is video. Does it corrupt my file?
It seems like they are simply trying to eliminate customers who are unprofitable, or not very profitable. They have to invest much less money if they get rid of the people who actually USE their service, rather than just downloading the occasional e-mail or web page. You can offer unlimited bandwidth if no one uses it. This is very much like the cell carriers dropping support for users of older phone technologies because those users don't purchase extra services.
"At Macrovision we are willing to lead this industry effort. We offer to assist Apple in the issues and problems with DRM that you state in your letter. Should you desire, we would also assume responsibility for FairPlay as a part of our evolving DRM offering and enable it to interoperate across other DRMs, thus increasing consumer choice and driving commonality across devices."
ie. "Please, Apple. Give us the keys to your iPod and let us make money from your copy protection scheme while you abandon it" Huh?
The slides showed Tubes sending Word files, spreadsheets, and other data through the tubes. But Senator Ted Stevens clearly described the capability to send entire Internets through the Tubes. If this can't send Internets, it is clearly not a complete Tube implementation.
Fiji: Microsoft gets an extension from the teacher to turn in its Vista homework late.
Vienna: Microsoft takes a philosophy class. Wonders why it did everything a certain way for the past 15 years. Gets high. Oooo...look at all the pretty colors and new interface paradigms.
I already pay a lot of money for cell phone access. You charge me minutes and money for data access time. If I have to waste some of my money and minutes on advertisements, I will switch cell phone providers. I do not need to be told where to find hotels or shown ads. If I want one, I'll look it up.