How is it that all of these spammers somehow rationalize their actions by saying they'll never do porn or adult content? As if porn is somehow less ethical then stealing other people's resources and innundating inboxes with unwanted crap.
Like many of you I was stunned that this story is receiving covereage without any comment on the potential environmental impact of disposable DVD's.
A quick search of Google turned up the following:
http://enduse.lbl.gov/Info/VideoImpacts.pdf
Flexplay approached a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs to perform an environmental assessment of the disposable DVD technology.
This report is truly amusing. The scientist acknowledges that he was not given enough time to perform a standard Life Cycle Assessment on disposable DVDs, so instead he calculated the amount of pollution that would be prevented if disposable DVDs were depoloyed as a video rental option. He theorizes that if 10% of all consumers renting DVDs did not have to make a return trip to the video store the envirnmental impact of increased junk being sent to a land fill would be offset by a decrease in pollution.
What a hoot. I guess Flexplay didn't bother to explain their marketing strategy. It appears that these disks are being deployed as promotional items which are handed out for free and are never intended to be returned.
Flexplay is also persuing the Hotel market. Just how much pollution would be prevented if a guest didn't have to walk down to the lobby to return their rental?
If this is the best defense that Flexplay can come up with then we must believe that the potential evironmental impact will be pretty bad.
Are we really willing to trash our planet in the battle against piracy? Hollywood's answer seems to be a resounding YES.
I'm not surprised so many/.ers fear Lasik. I mean think about it. There's no telling what OS those machines use. I think it's high time we all got together and started a Linux Lasik project. Imagine the possibilities of Open Source vision correction. The high price of this procedure would be eliminated. The Lasik corporation would no longer have a semi-monopoly on services. There would be home Lasik kits in no time!
-Record everything in best quality. Sure you have 60 hours, but that's at the lowest quality. You reallt only have 15-20 at highest quality.
The DirectTiVo has no quality setting. All recordings are made at the highest quality. The integration of the DirectTV tuner w/the TiVo box allows TiVo to record and play back the compressed DirectTV signal.
Yeah, that is a weird argument. It kind of implies that they're only going to release crap because it's not worth pirating. But once the DRM is in place lookout -- here comes the good stuff. I guess poor quality content is just a crude form of DRM.
It also seems to equate high quality content with big budget production, which these days is rarely the case.
Guess again. They've actually got quite a bit of original programming. Take a look at the number of emmy nominations their series get (23 alone for Six Feet Under).
I'll pay for NBC et al when they produce enough quality programming to justify the cost.
At what point does the government have the power to dictate that an entire industry must change it's technology? It's not as if this is an issue of public safety. I just don't understand how the Feds create these kinds of requirements.
It's not about a moral high ground - it's about a conflicting business models. How many companies are betting their futures on the belief that consumers will have cheap and ubiquitous broadband internet access? If that broadband turns out to be not-so-cheap the future may never arrive.
It's interesting that most of these broadband metering schemes have come from cable companies -- I suppose theys tand to lose the most if someone ever manages to roll out video on demand over broadband.
This is one comment that I hear commonly but just don't get. Have you ever actually called Microsoft tech support? My experiences have been dismal at best. MS Tech support is nothing to rave about. It's certainly NOT a valid reason to make a platform decision.
Can you say Quality of Service? Gnutella is cool, but there's no telling what you might find - or rather when you might find it. Combine that with the fact that your source might go offline (ie, Blue Screen) before your download completes.
Also, emusic.com has nice clean and consistent ID3 tags. A must if you've got a Nomad Jukebox or iPod. That alone is worth $10 a month to me.
Emusic is the best bargain on the net. I keep wondering how long their new corporate parent (Universal I believe) will allow the service to run in it's current state. I think it may only be a matter of time befroe EMusic is modified to fit this new "business model" (I use the term loosely).
Seriously, it's almost as if these new music services were designed to fail in a big way. The record industry will shut them down in no time saying "See, we tried. It turns out consumers don't really want to download music". When in fact consumers don't want the restrictions and limitations being forced on them.
I'm unclear on what the Cable companies are really objecting to.
Is it:
a) NAT
b) 802.11b
c) Customers who use too much bandwidth
The wireless network issue seems to be a red herring thrown in to provide justification for attacking NAT. It's pretty clear that they're actually more concerned about families and small businesses using NAT to connect multiple computers to a single cable modem. It's only natural that a broadband connection be used this way. As others have pointed out, the cable companies are thinking like cable companies (funny how that works).
I love the claim that CAT will allow these companies to provide better customer care. They don't seem to understand the basics of IP networking and now they want to implement a proprietary protocol to assist them in troubleshooting devices on my network! Right.
It's clear these companies have gotten themselves into a business they don't really understand. This article is the best argument for DSL that I've run across in a long while.
I think what we really need is an OpenTivo system. Seems like it would be possible to either modify an existing Tivo to call an alternative service provider (an OpenTivo server) or better yet, a standard distribution that could be used to build OpenTivo boxes.
Tivo's a great idea, but it's clear that PVR's are going to be a commodity item in the next few years (video tapes are dead media). Someone needs to start working on a standardized open program guide as well.
Of course OpenTivo should have built-in ethernet and P2P filesharing ala napster. We all need to start sharing Junkyard Wars and Tenchi with our friends.
Slashdot Mirror
How is it that all of these spammers somehow rationalize their actions by saying they'll never do porn or adult content? As if porn is somehow less ethical then stealing other people's resources and innundating inboxes with unwanted crap.
Like many of you I was stunned that this story is receiving covereage without any comment on the potential environmental impact of disposable DVD's.
A quick search of Google turned up the following:
http://enduse.lbl.gov/Info/VideoImpacts.pdf
Flexplay approached a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs to perform an environmental assessment of the disposable DVD technology.
This report is truly amusing. The scientist acknowledges that he was not given enough time to perform a standard Life Cycle Assessment on disposable DVDs, so instead he calculated the amount of pollution that would be prevented if disposable DVDs were depoloyed as a video rental option. He theorizes that if 10% of all consumers renting DVDs did not have to make a return trip to the video store the envirnmental impact of increased junk being sent to a land fill would be offset by a decrease in pollution.
What a hoot. I guess Flexplay didn't bother to explain their marketing strategy. It appears that these disks are being deployed as promotional items which are handed out for free and are never intended to be returned.
Flexplay is also persuing the Hotel market. Just how much pollution would be prevented if a guest didn't have to walk down to the lobby to return their rental?
If this is the best defense that Flexplay can come up with then we must believe that the potential evironmental impact will be pretty bad.
Are we really willing to trash our planet in the battle against piracy? Hollywood's answer seems to be a resounding YES.
I'm not surprised so many /.ers fear Lasik. I mean think about it. There's no telling what OS those machines use. I think it's high time we all got together and started a Linux Lasik project. Imagine the possibilities of Open Source vision correction. The high price of this procedure would be eliminated. The Lasik corporation would no longer have a semi-monopoly on services. There would be home Lasik kits in no time!
-Record everything in best quality. Sure you have 60 hours, but that's at the lowest quality. You reallt only have 15-20 at highest quality.
The DirectTiVo has no quality setting. All recordings are made at the highest quality. The integration of the DirectTV tuner w/the TiVo box allows TiVo to record and play back the compressed DirectTV signal.
Yeah, that is a weird argument. It kind of implies that they're only going to release crap because it's not worth pirating. But once the DRM is in place lookout -- here comes the good stuff. I guess poor quality content is just a crude form of DRM.
It also seems to equate high quality content with big budget production, which these days is rarely the case.
"HBO might have *some* original programming"
Guess again. They've actually got quite a bit of original programming. Take a look at the number of emmy nominations their series get (23 alone for Six Feet Under).
I'll pay for NBC et al when they produce enough quality programming to justify the cost.
At what point does the government have the power to dictate that an entire industry must change it's technology? It's not as if this is an issue of public safety. I just don't understand how the Feds create these kinds of requirements.
Uh . . . explain your rant please. I've seen just as much bad ASP, PHP and JSP as I've seen bad CFML. It's the coder not the code.
It's not about a moral high ground - it's about a conflicting business models. How many companies are betting their futures on the belief that consumers will have cheap and ubiquitous broadband internet access? If that broadband turns out to be not-so-cheap the future may never arrive.
It's interesting that most of these broadband metering schemes have come from cable companies -- I suppose theys tand to lose the most if someone ever manages to roll out video on demand over broadband.
This is one comment that I hear commonly but just don't get. Have you ever actually called Microsoft tech support? My experiences have been dismal at best. MS Tech support is nothing to rave about. It's certainly NOT a valid reason to make a platform decision.
No offense against Jackie Chan, but he's too tall to play Krillin. I see Danny Devito as Krillin (remember this will be a hollywood production).
And 2 posts reminding you that you forgot the 10 posts from people translating "Rolig liten hattgubbe".
Can you say Quality of Service? Gnutella is cool, but there's no telling what you might find - or rather when you might find it. Combine that with the fact that your source might go offline (ie, Blue Screen) before your download completes.
Also, emusic.com has nice clean and consistent ID3 tags. A must if you've got a Nomad Jukebox or iPod. That alone is worth $10 a month to me.
Emusic is the best bargain on the net. I keep wondering how long their new corporate parent (Universal I believe) will allow the service to run in it's current state. I think it may only be a matter of time befroe EMusic is modified to fit this new "business model" (I use the term loosely).
Seriously, it's almost as if these new music services were designed to fail in a big way. The record industry will shut them down in no time saying "See, we tried. It turns out consumers don't really want to download music". When in fact consumers don't want the restrictions and limitations being forced on them.
I'm unclear on what the Cable companies are really objecting to.
Is it:
a) NAT
b) 802.11b
c) Customers who use too much bandwidth
The wireless network issue seems to be a red herring thrown in to provide justification for attacking NAT. It's pretty clear that they're actually more concerned about families and small businesses using NAT to connect multiple computers to a single cable modem. It's only natural that a broadband connection be used this way. As others have pointed out, the cable companies are thinking like cable companies (funny how that works).
I love the claim that CAT will allow these companies to provide better customer care. They don't seem to understand the basics of IP networking and now they want to implement a proprietary protocol to assist them in troubleshooting devices on my network! Right.
It's clear these companies have gotten themselves into a business they don't really understand. This article is the best argument for DSL that I've run across in a long while.
I think what we really need is an OpenTivo system. Seems like it would be possible to either modify an existing Tivo to call an alternative service provider (an OpenTivo server) or better yet, a standard distribution that could be used to build OpenTivo boxes.
Tivo's a great idea, but it's clear that PVR's are going to be a commodity item in the next few years (video tapes are dead media). Someone needs to start working on a standardized open program guide as well.
Of course OpenTivo should have built-in ethernet and P2P filesharing ala napster. We all need to start sharing Junkyard Wars and Tenchi with our friends.
Hop to it! What are you waiting for?