When you think about it, the there are a few similarities between the RIAA and a shambling herd of zombies.
Both believe that they have a right to our brains, when in fact, they have no such right.
They don't have any brains to speak of, which probably explains the zeal with which they pursue ours.
As somewhat uncaring entities, both will not hesitate to destroy other people, even the progress of civilization itself in carrying out their vague goals.
Both are pretty stupid. They are slow to react to external threats and changes, and seem to respond with aggressive action, rather than adapting with inventive and innovative ideas.
So? Do the manufacturers of the 70 million consumer devices that support DivX somehow know something MS doesn't?
Licensing costs aren't all that much in the long run. What if it would help them sell half a million more 360 units? And even two or three games were sold for each of those? Costs would be recouped in a hurry. If I could connect to a simple Windows/Samba share and play DivX/XviD content, I'd buy one today. As it is, I'm not compelled by it over other options, so I'll wait for the best system to emerge. I just can't see the "it would cost too much" argument; they obviously want to leverage other products at the same time, so they have intentionally ignored certain possibilities.
Like when you are discussing a potential plan or project, constantly use "our" instead of "my" and "the", and use "we" instead of "I" or "you". That way, when our project or plan catastrophically fails, we can spread the blame around on everyone!
I never said that they need to let people upload their own codecs. How is licensing and supporting DivX any different than doing the same for MPEG-4 and H.264?
Note that MS is in the business of making money - and no one is making money doing what you mention - XBMC is a FREE program.
I understand that MS is in the business of making money, and I applaud it. They are certainly doing right by their shareholders. I'm sure they did a cost benefit analysis and came up with the setup that they offer as the one that can leverage the most money. But because of the way they have done it, there are four instances (that I personally know of) where potential consumers have skipped the 360 because it didn't do what XBMC could do. Instead, they will probably get Wiis all around.
This situation can't be unique, but I'm not sure how prevalent it is; I don't know the numbers. If MS had included the functionality of XBMC within the 360, codecs and all, I'd wager that they would have dominated the living room. Would that have been worth more? We may never know.
And yeah, I'm kinda angry, cause if I want a next-gen system, now I need two boxes to do what it took one to do before. I won't be pissed anymore when/if a decent softmod surfaces for the 360. I might pick one up at that point, if I don't have something else.
You know, the streaming performance would be a lot better if they just allowed native decoding through codecs on the 360, instead of us needing these damn hacks to transcode a simple file. For fuck's sake, we're being shoehorned into Microsoft's own little locked in world. Transcoding? What really grinds my gears is that it's so unecessary; there are just these artificial blocks set in our way by Microsoft.
XBMC on the original XBox has ruined any of the flaccid, crippled media functionality that Microsoft has deemed "appropriate" for us. The setup I have operates at a tenth of the hardware and software cost with ten times the functionality when compared to that which Microsoft has cooked up. Microsoft's attempts at wringing every last bit of money out of the consumer, while sorely lacking any sort of courage to support more media types that might offend the "content producers", has completely turned me off to the 360. Even to the point of me thinking less of the video games and the product as a whole, because the crippling is so blatant.
Why would I use Microsoft's lacking product, when I could just get something like this, and stream my media at will? I've put XBMC in three times already in other peoples' houses, and it's kept them from getting a 360.
I would definitely be willing to make room for a 700 gallon or so tank; I wonder what the feeding, cleaning, and environmental requirements for a production version will be.
Me too. And I'm pretty sure I don't only speak for myself when I say that I want details, not a stupid Yahoo article.
Individually we are quite clever animals, but we're also the only creature which will pollute our own drinking water, our own air and poison our own food.
The phrase "Always drink upstream from the herd." comes to mind. Trouble is that today, we're always downstream from someone.
For his part, Chris Wetherell, a software engineer at Google, said one of the scenarios that kept him awake at night was offline access to the browser and what that meant from a security perspective, particularly on the user-to-user front.
It's statements like these that make me think he must be an absolute blast at parties.
Microsoft may learn from its mistakes, but sometimes it seems that it is somewhat zealous in identifying what things it actually perceives as them. For example, take the XBMC situation on the Xbox. Instead of identifying that they could simply build the functionality into the 360, they tack on additional hardware with all sorts of gotchas.
There is no reason for it besides making money, which is fine for the shareholders, but bad for the consumers. If not for this unnecessary complexity and expense, I'd have gotten a 360 already to replace my Xbox. Perhaps there are more consumers out there that will pay for this feature (and deal with the extra setup) than there are consumers, like me, for which its exclusion would preclude them from buying the system. But it's not in the interest of the consumer.
Now, you've got things like this, and I'm considering replacing my Xbox (running XBMC) with one of those. Microsoft may have lost a potential sale of both a 360 system and multiple games, since playing video from my media server is more important to me nowadays than video games.
So I'm going to guess that if they went through the trouble of hacking it three more times, it was probably an inside job to some extent.
I captured the traffic with a network sniffer. Specifically, the IRC traffic sent in cleartext, and they were all chatting in French. So unless they were local students routing traffic through French IP addresses and all speaking in French, I kinda assumed they were in France.
But the incompetent admin is probably more to blame. This all happened when there was no firewall in place and every computer had a public IP. I had to explain why a firewall and NAT was necessary. It was a hacker/cracker playground.
I suppose that most Microsoft shops wouldn't even know if they were breached, because most breaches don't actually desctroy data, they just steal it.
It's so much worse than that.
Back in my younger days at a summer tech job for a US school district, I found that an NT4 SQL server had been compromised a group of people. They were based out of France, I think, from what I could tell from the IP addresses, and had actually set themselves up quite nicely, with organized file structure and their own IRC and FTP server running on it. They were using it as a repository to store files and a few French movies. After I told the sysadmin in place at the time about it, I was stunned when he said, "Well, are they hurting anything?"
After some persuasion on my part, he rebuilt the server. Three times. After it kept getting hacked by the same people.
Seems like your TCO would be less if you can roll out services in a given area and have access to over three and half times the potential customers. If costs are less, it's easier to roll out services faster.
So with the percentages being what they are, do we know if they actually make a net profit on these ventures? Or is it just a campaign (with an associated cost) that they carry out to scare most users into avoiding P2P? If it's motivated by profit, enough people resisting would make it stop quickly. If it's driven by reducing average P2P usage, I imagine cost benefit that they attribute to it is much higher than simple profit.
There are lots of reasons. The speakers you listen on might be different quality than other people. It could be that more of your mp3s are encoded at a variable bitrate, which sound better compared to the fixed bitrate ones. Some encoders suck and produce poor quality sound as well. While your particular ears could be less responsive, there are lots of reasons an mp3 can sound bad compared to the CD audio.
Personally, I can tell a difference on the better speaker system in my car. Sometimes, I feel like I want to turn up the volume because I get the feeling that I'm "not hearing" something. I'm guessing that it's the frequency cutoff on the lower bitrates, but honestly, I don't know the real reason. All I know for sure is that I don't get the mild instinct to turn up the volume when I listen to mp3s encoded at, say, an average ~224kbit or higher, and at that point I can't really hear any difference from the original CD.
If you're going to be indefinitely held while being tortured, until you die or are killed, all the software features in the world aren't going to help you. It's more useful in places where "plausible deniability" can be used to get you out of trouble, not in countries or organizations where the concept is irrelevant.
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Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
When you think about it, the there are a few similarities between the RIAA and a shambling herd of zombies.
Uncanny!
My media server doesn't care what kind of "optical disc" Disney backs.
I would assume they didn't want to pay the fee and they wanted to push their own media format just like Sony did with Blu-Ray on the PS3.
That's pretty much what I just said!
"they obviously want to leverage other products at the same time, so they have intentionally ignored certain possibilities."
Windows Media is one of their products.
So? Do the manufacturers of the 70 million consumer devices that support DivX somehow know something MS doesn't?
Licensing costs aren't all that much in the long run. What if it would help them sell half a million more 360 units? And even two or three games were sold for each of those? Costs would be recouped in a hurry. If I could connect to a simple Windows/Samba share and play DivX/XviD content, I'd buy one today. As it is, I'm not compelled by it over other options, so I'll wait for the best system to emerge. I just can't see the "it would cost too much" argument; they obviously want to leverage other products at the same time, so they have intentionally ignored certain possibilities.
exclusively happy surprise sex
My favorite is simple pronoun switching.
Like when you are discussing a potential plan or project, constantly use "our" instead of "my" and "the", and use "we" instead of "I" or "you". That way, when our project or plan catastrophically fails, we can spread the blame around on everyone!
Once you get used to it, it's easy to do!
I never said that they need to let people upload their own codecs. How is licensing and supporting DivX any different than doing the same for MPEG-4 and H.264?
Note that MS is in the business of making money - and no one is making money doing what you mention - XBMC is a FREE program.
I understand that MS is in the business of making money, and I applaud it. They are certainly doing right by their shareholders. I'm sure they did a cost benefit analysis and came up with the setup that they offer as the one that can leverage the most money. But because of the way they have done it, there are four instances (that I personally know of) where potential consumers have skipped the 360 because it didn't do what XBMC could do. Instead, they will probably get Wiis all around.
This situation can't be unique, but I'm not sure how prevalent it is; I don't know the numbers. If MS had included the functionality of XBMC within the 360, codecs and all, I'd wager that they would have dominated the living room. Would that have been worth more? We may never know.
And yeah, I'm kinda angry, cause if I want a next-gen system, now I need two boxes to do what it took one to do before. I won't be pissed anymore when/if a decent softmod surfaces for the 360. I might pick one up at that point, if I don't have something else.
You know, the streaming performance would be a lot better if they just allowed native decoding through codecs on the 360, instead of us needing these damn hacks to transcode a simple file. For fuck's sake, we're being shoehorned into Microsoft's own little locked in world. Transcoding? What really grinds my gears is that it's so unecessary; there are just these artificial blocks set in our way by Microsoft.
XBMC on the original XBox has ruined any of the flaccid, crippled media functionality that Microsoft has deemed "appropriate" for us. The setup I have operates at a tenth of the hardware and software cost with ten times the functionality when compared to that which Microsoft has cooked up. Microsoft's attempts at wringing every last bit of money out of the consumer, while sorely lacking any sort of courage to support more media types that might offend the "content producers", has completely turned me off to the 360. Even to the point of me thinking less of the video games and the product as a whole, because the crippling is so blatant.
Why would I use Microsoft's lacking product, when I could just get something like this, and stream my media at will? I've put XBMC in three times already in other peoples' houses, and it's kept them from getting a 360.
Bloody hell Microsoft, get with the program.
Yeah, China's gotta do something with that 1 trillion+ $USD in the bank.
I would definitely be willing to make room for a 700 gallon or so tank; I wonder what the feeding, cleaning, and environmental requirements for a production version will be.
Me too. And I'm pretty sure I don't only speak for myself when I say that I want details, not a stupid Yahoo article.
Individually we are quite clever animals, but we're also the only creature which will pollute our own drinking water, our own air and poison our own food.
The phrase "Always drink upstream from the herd." comes to mind. Trouble is that today, we're always downstream from someone.
For his part, Chris Wetherell, a software engineer at Google, said one of the scenarios that kept him awake at night was offline access to the browser and what that meant from a security perspective, particularly on the user-to-user front.
It's statements like these that make me think he must be an absolute blast at parties.
Microsoft may learn from its mistakes, but sometimes it seems that it is somewhat zealous in identifying what things it actually perceives as them. For example, take the XBMC situation on the Xbox. Instead of identifying that they could simply build the functionality into the 360, they tack on additional hardware with all sorts of gotchas.
There is no reason for it besides making money, which is fine for the shareholders, but bad for the consumers. If not for this unnecessary complexity and expense, I'd have gotten a 360 already to replace my Xbox. Perhaps there are more consumers out there that will pay for this feature (and deal with the extra setup) than there are consumers, like me, for which its exclusion would preclude them from buying the system. But it's not in the interest of the consumer.
Now, you've got things like this, and I'm considering replacing my Xbox (running XBMC) with one of those. Microsoft may have lost a potential sale of both a 360 system and multiple games, since playing video from my media server is more important to me nowadays than video games.
I've been counting since sometime in 2004, and I've still got plenty of unused fingers.
Don't be modest. Everyone likes the smell of their own brand.
So I'm going to guess that if they went through the trouble of hacking it three more times, it was probably an inside job to some extent.
I captured the traffic with a network sniffer. Specifically, the IRC traffic sent in cleartext, and they were all chatting in French. So unless they were local students routing traffic through French IP addresses and all speaking in French, I kinda assumed they were in France.
But the incompetent admin is probably more to blame. This all happened when there was no firewall in place and every computer had a public IP. I had to explain why a firewall and NAT was necessary. It was a hacker/cracker playground.
I suppose that most Microsoft shops wouldn't even know if they were breached, because most breaches don't actually desctroy data, they just steal it.
It's so much worse than that.
Back in my younger days at a summer tech job for a US school district, I found that an NT4 SQL server had been compromised a group of people. They were based out of France, I think, from what I could tell from the IP addresses, and had actually set themselves up quite nicely, with organized file structure and their own IRC and FTP server running on it. They were using it as a repository to store files and a few French movies. After I told the sysadmin in place at the time about it, I was stunned when he said, "Well, are they hurting anything?"
After some persuasion on my part, he rebuilt the server. Three times. After it kept getting hacked by the same people.
In about 30 days and with absolutely no resistance, you could create a family-safe internet.
And even better, in another 30 days it would collapse as every user gets booted for minor infractions!
I agree, but is it much of a surprise that broadband penetration is higher when EU population density is 112 / sq km and the USA population density is at 31 / sq km?
Seems like your TCO would be less if you can roll out services in a given area and have access to over three and half times the potential customers. If costs are less, it's easier to roll out services faster.
So with the percentages being what they are, do we know if they actually make a net profit on these ventures? Or is it just a campaign (with an associated cost) that they carry out to scare most users into avoiding P2P? If it's motivated by profit, enough people resisting would make it stop quickly. If it's driven by reducing average P2P usage, I imagine cost benefit that they attribute to it is much higher than simple profit.
We gotta find a way to stop all those cows farting.
Ask and ye shall receive.
There are lots of reasons. The speakers you listen on might be different quality than other people. It could be that more of your mp3s are encoded at a variable bitrate, which sound better compared to the fixed bitrate ones. Some encoders suck and produce poor quality sound as well. While your particular ears could be less responsive, there are lots of reasons an mp3 can sound bad compared to the CD audio.
Personally, I can tell a difference on the better speaker system in my car. Sometimes, I feel like I want to turn up the volume because I get the feeling that I'm "not hearing" something. I'm guessing that it's the frequency cutoff on the lower bitrates, but honestly, I don't know the real reason. All I know for sure is that I don't get the mild instinct to turn up the volume when I listen to mp3s encoded at, say, an average ~224kbit or higher, and at that point I can't really hear any difference from the original CD.
The earth is only 6000 years old, Bob.
Maybe he means 15000 dog years. Then it would fit.
If you're going to be indefinitely held while being tortured, until you die or are killed, all the software features in the world aren't going to help you. It's more useful in places where "plausible deniability" can be used to get you out of trouble, not in countries or organizations where the concept is irrelevant.