If the ISPs were behind it, they'd simply mandate it in their TOS, and everyone would be caught by it
Regulation without enforcement is useless, and the ISPs can't enforce this. A landlord with a $14 keychain can.
It's the same reason why apartment complexs have and enforce policies against sharing cable. It's already against the cable company's rules, but the cable companies are powerless to stop it, or even tell that it's happening. That is why they either pay the complex for (illegal) sattelite dish restrictions and cable sharing restrictions. If they don't pay kickbacks, they threaten not to service the complex unless the restrictions are in place.
If you think tenancy laws matter one bit here, you've probably never lived in a very large complex. You talk about picking your battles... Lashing out against your argument is nothing. Try fighting every little breach of regulation by your landlord (or more likely: property manager). They know exactly how far they can go so that it isn't worth your time or money to take them to court, and they really push the limit.
Congratulations on being a typical over-reacting ad hominem throwing slashbot.
I feel my comment was appropriate in the context of the thread. If you chose to take it personally that's your problem. To a third party reading this story I think it accomplishes exactly what I intended.
And if I want random strangers passing by to be able to connect?
What about systems that show you a gateway page unencrypted to help you gain encrypted access? Whould those be illegal?
How about you go to hell and stop telling me how to live my life. I love how people are all about civil liberties until it comes to something that they like, and then it's OK to force people to behave that way.
Here's another way for you to think about this: These rules are being put into place because the appartment complex is probably getting kickbacks from the local cable or DSL provider and they want to make sure they collect the maximum possible number of subscription fees. These rules are solely in place to protect the profits of the local monopoly. Congratulations on being a big business shill.
The guy buys exactly what he walked into the shop to buy, because he made his decision before he left for the store...
People don't make £150 buying decisions at the register of a gaming store. People don't buy consoles based on what they see in the display case.
The fact of the matter is (much to the dismay of the anti-Sony crowd on Slashdot) that even at the high price, there are going ot be enough rabid buyers out there for the initial allotment of PS3s, and those buyers aren't motivated by games or timeframe, or money. They simply *need* their PS3.
That's in the short term.
In the long term, the system with the best games will, as always, win. Unless you have a crystal ball with which you can see 3 years into the future, you're lying if you say you know how it will turn out. Any of the three systems can win, and any of them can fail.
All the stupid flamewars caused by these trolling slashdot stories are irrelevant. All of the sytems of this generation, just like the last generation, are going to sell out at launch. Even the rediculously overpriced PSP sold out at launch. Every time somebody talks about how Sony is shooting themselves in the foot with their launch strategy, they see dollar signs and laugh at you behind your back.
Even if no one hangs on to seed after they have downloaded the complete file, they still add to the aggregate bandwidth available as long as they're downloading,
Yup. I understand bittorrent. You, however, don't. I'm not sure which client you use, but almost all of them allow you to set the maximum upload rate to zero, and the ones that don't allow you to set it so low as to barely cover the acks. Without a quota system or compensation, what is my incentive to increase that above the minimum? The foolish hope that if I do it, others will too?
I think you misstated your position here. You don't have a lack of desire to act charitably towards MPAA members, you have an active desire to avoid anything that might be construed as helpful to them, regardless of whether or not it really costs you anything.
Either you're giving me more credit than I deserve, or you're saying I'm unduely vindictive towards the MPAA. Either way, you're wrong. I don't want to give my upstream bandwidth away for free to anybody else either. Whether or not it really costs me anything? Sure it does. Maybe it doesn't cost you anything because your machine would be on and your connection would be idle otherwise, but I actually use my upstream bandwidth to earn me a return on my internet connectivity investment. Regardless of what it does or doesn't cost you now, if the scheme you promote were ever to become popular you would not only have costs, but they would be insurmountable. You would have to choose which of your data is important enough to spend some of your finite upstream bandwidth on, and you would be at the mercy of other people's priorties in regards to the same decision. At least when the limiting factor is currency you can just go earn more, but you only have a finite number of bits per unit time available for barter.
but I *do* have to expend my own resources to purchase stuff at stores
But (presumably) you're already doing that to get these downloadable movies before uploading even gets into the picture. In fact you're probably doing it twice. Once with your wallet and again with your DVD burner.
You can either pay in cash, or you can pay part in cash and part in bandwidth you provide.
I'd rather pay with a uniform currency. Otherwise you will be the victim of people gaming the system. Espcially you, since you seem to write off the costs of bandwidth and electricity.
It absolutely would. Have you never downloaded a torrent that had several very fast seeds, and then got, for example, slashdotted? Sudden surges of interest can overwhelm even very fast pipes; bittorrent solves that problem.
I love when people argue a point by changing the point. In that situation, the original distributor would hardly be providing a majority of the bandwidth anymore (assuming that the peers bother to seed, as they have no real incentive to without either a quota system or some form of compensation). It would also make for a very poor distribution scheme for niche movies. There are much better technologies for this type of thing that don't rely on the generosity of end users and would actually use less backbone bandwidth than P2P. For example, multicast, which is technically superior for the task but generally unavailable for the types of *cough* content generally shared over P2P networks.
Regardless of my lack of desire to act charitably towards others that I have either no or negative levels of trust with, in the long run - for social reasons - P2P technologies will never work in situations where one participant stands to benefit signifigantly more than the others. In those cases (we'll keep up the bittorrent terminology here) the only incentives to seed are misplaced trust or a profound lack of understanding of how the system actually works.
CRN is reporting that Dell had about a dozen reports of burned laptops before they announced last year's battery recall.
I'm not surprised, since there is a good chance that out of the thousands and thousands of laptops they sell, a couple bad batteries could be a fluke, and you need a bigger sample to see a trend... It's hard to fault them for this unless you make money off page impressions...
On the other hand, if this were an Apple story it would have made the front page as it's own story, and would be parroted across the web. Funny how that stuff goes.
You don't know what you're getting yourself into. You may as well negotiate with terrorists. So you've made the consession that you'll pay their distribution costs. Now why shouldn't they try to get you to agree to serial copy management. Or maybe watermarking. Or a proprietary codec that plays an ad each time you load the driver? And it'll just get worse from there...
It's an all or nothing battle. Either you pay them and they provide you with a reasonable product, or you give an inch and they take a mile. There is no middle ground. The slippery slope is a 10,000 foot cliff.
Hello. MPAA? BitTorrent is the ideal mechanism to make distribution cheap
There's not a chance in hell I'm using my precious upstream bandwidth to help the MPAA member companies turn a profit. If they use a peer to peer distribution model, I better get compensation for my bandwidth in the form of cash, or credit for more movies. That credit better be linearly proportional to the amount of data I upload.
Especially when you use a database of pre-canned paragraphs. You don't think that these guys write their analisis from scratch, do you?
The hardest part is building your contact list. That's why these guys have jobs.... Not because they're accurate, or because they write well. It's simply because they can fill their PDA's contact list to capacity.
Generally all you need is a business checking account. This is common when doing business with any wholsale distributor, video game or otherwise. Your town may or may not charge a fee to register a business name. My town charges $5.
Do you have to commit to a certain number of units over a period of tim?
At launch time, anything goes with these contracts. Who knows what they'll ask of you, and it may not be the same as the deal they give to somebody else. I'm not familliar with the current terms for these launches since I haven't been a reseller for almost five years now (and I don't even think they've come up with them yet), but I'm sure that how many you're willing to commit to sell will be a factor in how many they'll let you have at launch. In general, though, the answer is no. If you wanted to sell PS2s in your independant game shop right now, you could sell one every six months and they wouldn't care. You're going to have sucky margins on such low volume though.
Happens to lose a bit of data? Give me a break.
on
Dvorak Rants on CSS
·
· Score: 1
If your Internet connection happens to lose a bit of CSS data, you get a mess on your screen.
Contact SCEA and Nintendo of America, and convince them that you can resell enough units and associated games and accessories that you're worth doing business with.
SCEA: 800-345-7669 NoA: 425-882-2040
As a small entity, you will be asked to guarantee a certain volume. Margins will be based on your volume, and there will be contractually enforced monetary penalties for not meeting quotas.
The WiFi is useless if you ask me... If the online service is anything like Live, they can stuff it (Subscription fee, plus micro-payments, plus advertising. Absurd and unacceptable.).
As for the hard drive, it remains to be seen if you can hook up external storage. If you can, why spend the money on the more expensive PS3 when you can spend that money on hundereds of gigabytes of third-party storage instead?
Regardless of all that, I hope Sony sells TONS of the cheaper model. If a majority of BluRay players don't support HDCP it'll be that much better for the rest of us.
Many of the people who flame endlessly about outsourcing are the same people who flame endlessly about libertarianism and how great the free market is.
I think that you are confusing the difference between people who converse in the same forums as being the same people. Anti-outsourcing people are typically fairly protectionist, and anti-free-market.
The rest of what you say is spot on though... Well, except for this part:
Back in the dotcom boom I came across a consultant 'programmer' who did not know C, Fortran or Java. The only 'programming language' he knew was Delphi.
What are you saying here? There was at one point (still is to a much lesser degree in the case of Delphi) a place for these programmers. Mostly in the banking and insurance industries. These are just programmers after all. Would you think less of, say, a Mandarin/English translator because he didn't speak French, Spanish, or Arabic? After all, a translator isn't a linguist... The type of guy you're talking about would be the perfect guy for translating a software spec into Delphi code.
There are plenty of sites that allow google to index their content, but don't allow caching. There are even quite a few that show their content to the googlebot, but then require you subscribe to read the page content when you click through the google link.
Regardless, most of these sites would probably just close down if they were forced to pay a fee for the lyrics. The advertising probably barely covers the hosting fees. If you consider the fee structures the recording industry has come up with in the past for online distribution I doubt it will be anywhere even close to affordable to pay for with advertising. See internet radio for an example.
Revenues won't increase if they manage to pull this off... There is a finite amount of money people are able to afford to spend on entertainment over any given period of time. The only way they get an increase out of this is if people decide some other entertainment purchase is less worthy than buying lyrics access, and change their buying habits. I think the only likely candidate for the corresponding sales drop is CDs. If people have to buy the lyrics they want, they'll either not buy them, buy less CDs so they can afford it, or pirate the music to afford it.
Either you've never used one of these devices, or you're a troll (or both). I can't figure out which it is. If even one of those things in the list in that article was actually true about any signifigant number of 650s, they wouldn't be popular. There was a sound quality issue with some 650s early on, but it was addressed with a software patch. The 600 did have all sorts of issues, and it is plain incorrect to apply those criticisms to the 650.
Your com.com article is only talking about PDAs. Both Windows Mobile and PalmOS run on more than just PDAs (which is also why I included Blackberry. Symbian should be considered too). Regardless, that was 2004... Before the Treo 650 was released. Now it's one of the most popular executive toys ever.
Also, in case you haven't been paying attention, varios parts of that RIM case have been thrown out, and oters have been settled. Blackberries are not illegal.
One last thing... Palm isn't dumping PalmOS. Since the hardware and software companies split they're now free to sell devices that run other OSes. Apparently Microsoft felt they had to get their software onto the Treo, since it was beating the snot out of them in the market. They sell a PalmOS version of the same device. It's too early to say which is going to be more popular, but I know which one I'm buying... Here's a hint. It's the one with the user interface that doesn't suck and can be easily and completely operated sans stylus.
Aah pedantry. I guess I can't complain because I do it too... What I meant to say, and even implied, was 'if they have a palmtop computing platform...' E-mail capable phones (one of Windows Mobile's markets) count.
It wasn't that strange a comment at all unless you're picking nits.
Microsoft doesn't even have second place in that market. Find me a guy with a real management job that doesn't have either a Blackberry or a Treo 650 as his/her palmtop computing platform, and I'll show you a Microsoft employee, or review site owner.
I agree, but at the same time, turing this feature off is equally as logical as removing the delete key from the system.
You already have a level of trust with your users. Why doesn't that trust extend to a new techology with the same level of associated potential concequences (data loss)?
The only possible answers to that question are that you don't really trust your users at all (in which case you're a moron for giving them any access before giving them training), or that you don't understand the new technology. Which is it?
Slashdot Mirror
install a Linksys router between you and your ISP's modem
Or, you know... a non-Linksys one?
If the ISPs were behind it, they'd simply mandate it in their TOS, and everyone would be caught by it
Regulation without enforcement is useless, and the ISPs can't enforce this. A landlord with a $14 keychain can.
It's the same reason why apartment complexs have and enforce policies against sharing cable. It's already against the cable company's rules, but the cable companies are powerless to stop it, or even tell that it's happening. That is why they either pay the complex for (illegal) sattelite dish restrictions and cable sharing restrictions. If they don't pay kickbacks, they threaten not to service the complex unless the restrictions are in place.
If you think tenancy laws matter one bit here, you've probably never lived in a very large complex. You talk about picking your battles... Lashing out against your argument is nothing. Try fighting every little breach of regulation by your landlord (or more likely: property manager). They know exactly how far they can go so that it isn't worth your time or money to take them to court, and they really push the limit.
Congratulations on being a typical over-reacting ad hominem throwing slashbot.
I feel my comment was appropriate in the context of the thread. If you chose to take it personally that's your problem. To a third party reading this story I think it accomplishes exactly what I intended.
And if I want random strangers passing by to be able to connect?
What about systems that show you a gateway page unencrypted to help you gain encrypted access? Whould those be illegal?
How about you go to hell and stop telling me how to live my life. I love how people are all about civil liberties until it comes to something that they like, and then it's OK to force people to behave that way.
Here's another way for you to think about this: These rules are being put into place because the appartment complex is probably getting kickbacks from the local cable or DSL provider and they want to make sure they collect the maximum possible number of subscription fees. These rules are solely in place to protect the profits of the local monopoly. Congratulations on being a big business shill.
The guy buys exactly what he walked into the shop to buy, because he made his decision before he left for the store...
People don't make £150 buying decisions at the register of a gaming store. People don't buy consoles based on what they see in the display case.
The fact of the matter is (much to the dismay of the anti-Sony crowd on Slashdot) that even at the high price, there are going ot be enough rabid buyers out there for the initial allotment of PS3s, and those buyers aren't motivated by games or timeframe, or money. They simply *need* their PS3.
That's in the short term.
In the long term, the system with the best games will, as always, win. Unless you have a crystal ball with which you can see 3 years into the future, you're lying if you say you know how it will turn out. Any of the three systems can win, and any of them can fail.
All the stupid flamewars caused by these trolling slashdot stories are irrelevant. All of the sytems of this generation, just like the last generation, are going to sell out at launch. Even the rediculously overpriced PSP sold out at launch. Every time somebody talks about how Sony is shooting themselves in the foot with their launch strategy, they see dollar signs and laugh at you behind your back.
Even if no one hangs on to seed after they have downloaded the complete file, they still add to the aggregate bandwidth available as long as they're downloading,
Yup. I understand bittorrent. You, however, don't. I'm not sure which client you use, but almost all of them allow you to set the maximum upload rate to zero, and the ones that don't allow you to set it so low as to barely cover the acks. Without a quota system or compensation, what is my incentive to increase that above the minimum? The foolish hope that if I do it, others will too?
I think you misstated your position here. You don't have a lack of desire to act charitably towards MPAA members, you have an active desire to avoid anything that might be construed as helpful to them, regardless of whether or not it really costs you anything.
Either you're giving me more credit than I deserve, or you're saying I'm unduely vindictive towards the MPAA. Either way, you're wrong. I don't want to give my upstream bandwidth away for free to anybody else either. Whether or not it really costs me anything? Sure it does. Maybe it doesn't cost you anything because your machine would be on and your connection would be idle otherwise, but I actually use my upstream bandwidth to earn me a return on my internet connectivity investment. Regardless of what it does or doesn't cost you now, if the scheme you promote were ever to become popular you would not only have costs, but they would be insurmountable. You would have to choose which of your data is important enough to spend some of your finite upstream bandwidth on, and you would be at the mercy of other people's priorties in regards to the same decision. At least when the limiting factor is currency you can just go earn more, but you only have a finite number of bits per unit time available for barter.
but I *do* have to expend my own resources to purchase stuff at stores
But (presumably) you're already doing that to get these downloadable movies before uploading even gets into the picture. In fact you're probably doing it twice. Once with your wallet and again with your DVD burner.
You can either pay in cash, or you can pay part in cash and part in bandwidth you provide.
I'd rather pay with a uniform currency. Otherwise you will be the victim of people gaming the system. Espcially you, since you seem to write off the costs of bandwidth and electricity.
It absolutely would. Have you never downloaded a torrent that had several very fast seeds, and then got, for example, slashdotted? Sudden surges of interest can overwhelm even very fast pipes; bittorrent solves that problem.
I love when people argue a point by changing the point. In that situation, the original distributor would hardly be providing a majority of the bandwidth anymore (assuming that the peers bother to seed, as they have no real incentive to without either a quota system or some form of compensation). It would also make for a very poor distribution scheme for niche movies. There are much better technologies for this type of thing that don't rely on the generosity of end users and would actually use less backbone bandwidth than P2P. For example, multicast, which is technically superior for the task but generally unavailable for the types of *cough* content generally shared over P2P networks.
Regardless of my lack of desire to act charitably towards others that I have either no or negative levels of trust with, in the long run - for social reasons - P2P technologies will never work in situations where one participant stands to benefit signifigantly more than the others. In those cases (we'll keep up the bittorrent terminology here) the only incentives to seed are misplaced trust or a profound lack of understanding of how the system actually works.
I also don't mind paying shipping costs when I order DVDs from on-line retailers, and I don't mind buying a car, fuel, etc. to drive to the store.
You also, apparently, don't see why your analogy is totally broken.
If they are providing the vast majority of the bandwidth, having it be bittorrent-like wouldn't make much of a difference anyway.
CRN is reporting that Dell had about a dozen reports of burned laptops before they announced last year's battery recall.
I'm not surprised, since there is a good chance that out of the thousands and thousands of laptops they sell, a couple bad batteries could be a fluke, and you need a bigger sample to see a trend... It's hard to fault them for this unless you make money off page impressions...
On the other hand, if this were an Apple story it would have made the front page as it's own story, and would be parroted across the web. Funny how that stuff goes.
You don't know what you're getting yourself into. You may as well negotiate with terrorists. So you've made the consession that you'll pay their distribution costs. Now why shouldn't they try to get you to agree to serial copy management. Or maybe watermarking. Or a proprietary codec that plays an ad each time you load the driver? And it'll just get worse from there...
It's an all or nothing battle. Either you pay them and they provide you with a reasonable product, or you give an inch and they take a mile. There is no middle ground. The slippery slope is a 10,000 foot cliff.
I shouldn't have to pay to get them to stop behaving badly. They should just stop behaving badly.
Hello. MPAA? BitTorrent is the ideal mechanism to make distribution cheap
There's not a chance in hell I'm using my precious upstream bandwidth to help the MPAA member companies turn a profit. If they use a peer to peer distribution model, I better get compensation for my bandwidth in the form of cash, or credit for more movies. That credit better be linearly proportional to the amount of data I upload.
Easy!
Especially when you use a database of pre-canned paragraphs. You don't think that these guys write their analisis from scratch, do you?
The hardest part is building your contact list. That's why these guys have jobs.... Not because they're accurate, or because they write well. It's simply because they can fill their PDA's contact list to capacity.
Generally all you need is a business checking account. This is common when doing business with any wholsale distributor, video game or otherwise. Your town may or may not charge a fee to register a business name. My town charges $5.
Do you have to commit to a certain number of units over a period of tim?
At launch time, anything goes with these contracts. Who knows what they'll ask of you, and it may not be the same as the deal they give to somebody else. I'm not familliar with the current terms for these launches since I haven't been a reseller for almost five years now (and I don't even think they've come up with them yet), but I'm sure that how many you're willing to commit to sell will be a factor in how many they'll let you have at launch. In general, though, the answer is no. If you wanted to sell PS2s in your independant game shop right now, you could sell one every six months and they wouldn't care. You're going to have sucky margins on such low volume though.
If your Internet connection happens to lose a bit of CSS data, you get a mess on your screen.
Is that because one of the tubes has a leak?
Contact SCEA and Nintendo of America, and convince them that you can resell enough units and associated games and accessories that you're worth doing business with.
SCEA: 800-345-7669
NoA: 425-882-2040
As a small entity, you will be asked to guarantee a certain volume. Margins will be based on your volume, and there will be contractually enforced monetary penalties for not meeting quotas.
The WiFi is useless if you ask me... If the online service is anything like Live, they can stuff it (Subscription fee, plus micro-payments, plus advertising. Absurd and unacceptable.).
As for the hard drive, it remains to be seen if you can hook up external storage. If you can, why spend the money on the more expensive PS3 when you can spend that money on hundereds of gigabytes of third-party storage instead?
Regardless of all that, I hope Sony sells TONS of the cheaper model. If a majority of BluRay players don't support HDCP it'll be that much better for the rest of us.
Many of the people who flame endlessly about outsourcing are the same people who flame endlessly about libertarianism and how great the free market is.
I think that you are confusing the difference between people who converse in the same forums as being the same people. Anti-outsourcing people are typically fairly protectionist, and anti-free-market.
The rest of what you say is spot on though... Well, except for this part:
Back in the dotcom boom I came across a consultant 'programmer' who did not know C, Fortran or Java. The only 'programming language' he knew was Delphi.
What are you saying here? There was at one point (still is to a much lesser degree in the case of Delphi) a place for these programmers. Mostly in the banking and insurance industries. These are just programmers after all. Would you think less of, say, a Mandarin/English translator because he didn't speak French, Spanish, or Arabic? After all, a translator isn't a linguist... The type of guy you're talking about would be the perfect guy for translating a software spec into Delphi code.
There are plenty of sites that allow google to index their content, but don't allow caching. There are even quite a few that show their content to the googlebot, but then require you subscribe to read the page content when you click through the google link.
Regardless, most of these sites would probably just close down if they were forced to pay a fee for the lyrics. The advertising probably barely covers the hosting fees. If you consider the fee structures the recording industry has come up with in the past for online distribution I doubt it will be anywhere even close to affordable to pay for with advertising. See internet radio for an example.
Revenues won't increase if they manage to pull this off... There is a finite amount of money people are able to afford to spend on entertainment over any given period of time. The only way they get an increase out of this is if people decide some other entertainment purchase is less worthy than buying lyrics access, and change their buying habits. I think the only likely candidate for the corresponding sales drop is CDs. If people have to buy the lyrics they want, they'll either not buy them, buy less CDs so they can afford it, or pirate the music to afford it.
there's little point denying it.
Either you've never used one of these devices, or you're a troll (or both). I can't figure out which it is. If even one of those things in the list in that article was actually true about any signifigant number of 650s, they wouldn't be popular. There was a sound quality issue with some 650s early on, but it was addressed with a software patch. The 600 did have all sorts of issues, and it is plain incorrect to apply those criticisms to the 650.
Your com.com article is only talking about PDAs. Both Windows Mobile and PalmOS run on more than just PDAs (which is also why I included Blackberry. Symbian should be considered too). Regardless, that was 2004... Before the Treo 650 was released. Now it's one of the most popular executive toys ever.
Also, in case you haven't been paying attention, varios parts of that RIM case have been thrown out, and oters have been settled. Blackberries are not illegal.
One last thing... Palm isn't dumping PalmOS. Since the hardware and software companies split they're now free to sell devices that run other OSes. Apparently Microsoft felt they had to get their software onto the Treo, since it was beating the snot out of them in the market. They sell a PalmOS version of the same device. It's too early to say which is going to be more popular, but I know which one I'm buying... Here's a hint. It's the one with the user interface that doesn't suck and can be easily and completely operated sans stylus.
Aah pedantry. I guess I can't complain because I do it too... What I meant to say, and even implied, was 'if they have a palmtop computing platform...' E-mail capable phones (one of Windows Mobile's markets) count.
It wasn't that strange a comment at all unless you're picking nits.
Win-CE beat Palm
Say what?
Microsoft doesn't even have second place in that market. Find me a guy with a real management job that doesn't have either a Blackberry or a Treo 650 as his/her palmtop computing platform, and I'll show you a Microsoft employee, or review site owner.
regardless of the cause
My point exactly.
I agree, but at the same time, turing this feature off is equally as logical as removing the delete key from the system.
You already have a level of trust with your users. Why doesn't that trust extend to a new techology with the same level of associated potential concequences (data loss)?
The only possible answers to that question are that you don't really trust your users at all (in which case you're a moron for giving them any access before giving them training), or that you don't understand the new technology. Which is it?