...but no-one wants my money!
Downloading a DVD quality movie takes about 20 seconds (250mbps here), fiddling with my tv remote to start the movie over dlna takes another 5 seconds
When i insert a DVD, it takes 10s for boot up, another 5 sec to load the DVD, 20s of warnings that do not apply to me (Europe), 10 sec of warnings that do apply to me (selling/distributing pirated copies is illegal here, downloading is not), 2 minutes of fast forwarding (if possible) through the trailers, 10s for the menu to load, 10s for the movie to load, 30s of studio logos....
So if i want to pirate the movie, it takes me (from the idea to actual movie) ~25 seconds. When i don't want to pirate the movie, it takes me 185 seconds (if I'm lucky) in addition to the trip to video store?
There are no streaming services available here (i would be more than happy to pay for Netflix) and movie studios keep making paying for their work harder and harder....
For BluRay, the time to start BR disc / download and play from net is about the same for me, but i can go make a sandwich while downloading instead of manically hitting "FF/Next/Play" on my remote
Here's what i have:
* i3 2120T with no cooling
* Some Asus micro-ATX board
* 2x4gb of ram
* 2x3 tb Hdd
* Pico PSU
* Media center case with 1 12cm case-fan (the only fan in system)
As a result i have a media server that serves all other systems (primary tv via HDMI, rest via DLNA or fileshares), that is always on (seedbox), can play 60fps 1080p with no problems and takes almost no power (12w idle/seeding, 14w playing 1080p, 75w peak at startup)
Drop legacy and force extensions? Sounds like M$/Apple (but in this case it's the opposite) this will lead to "Oh, I'm sorry your App X can't connect to the Internet anymore, you know it's already 3.5 years old? Time to buy a newer version!"
But seriously, in the foreseeable future (lets say 10 years) we wont get to a state where mobile devices can be allays on-line, listening for server pushes and not drain the battery in 4 hours.
"You forgot google.com open in your mobile browser? It servers you right that your battery lasted 2 hours... and here is the bill for the 500mb bandwidth it consumed while at it"
This returns a massive profit of 0,007$/h (considering the machine is running 24/7) per virtual machine
If you factor in the power and infrastructure bills you are at loss...
Now this is more like it:
0. Sneak into someone else's server room
1. Install virtual machine
2. Install Chrome
3. Write Python script to browse web continuously
4. ???^h^h^h Sell cache
5. Profit!
I'm a hobby developer for WP7 with 2 of my friends.
The first thing we do on every release is upload our app to various torrent sites and seed the hell out of it.
If someone has jailbroken their phone and is capable of and interested in finding, downloading and installing a pirated app on their phone, they are lost revenue for us anyway. Our only hope of revenue from these users is to provide them with good enough app so that they keep using it and might buy it (and advertise the app within their circle of friends, who might not be competent enough to pirate the app)
If it is easier to buy the app on appstore than to pirate it, then pirates are good for you
I can't say for sure that we wouldn't have made it without piracy, but currently we have 5 simple apps out and with total cost of 2000$ for launch advertising (and "free" work for 2-3 weeks at nights, after our daily jobs) per app, we gross around 6500$ every month
Since we seed our apps ourselves, we see that approximately 20% of installations are pirated (~2000 torrent downloads vs ~10000 sales via store every month) but we are sure that without the 20% "lost" sales, we wouldn't make the top charts of legal downloads... ever....
It might take a while to get 1Gbs+ Internet to most homes, but for LAN i feel GbE as a bottleneck today.
When I use DLNA to stream HD content to 3 TV's (one in kitchen, one in living room and 1 or 2 in kids rooms) and use N spec wifi at the same time, the DLNA lags sometimes. By calculations there should be some bandwith left over but not much. The lagging is probably caused by unexpected overheads and GbE switches preforming at "GbE in theory" speeds, but with the world moving towards a phase where every single gadget/device is connected to LAN/Internet this will become a large problem shortly.
The project will likely take 5 or more years to complete. I remember having 4mbps/512kbps ADSL line 5 years ago and there is no way i would call that "usable" today.
I've had 150mbps/100mbps cable for a year now, this seems fine at the moment but in 5 years? considering how technology keeps on advancing and using up more-and-more bandwidth i really doubt there will be that many users for 100mbps net in 5 years.
In my opinion they should take the money, invest it in backbone networks and let local telco's compete on rented cables (take Stockholm for example, similar scenario resulted in 4$/mo 100mbps net for the whole city 2 years ago)
There are two huge problems with this kind of subscription system:
1. How do would they charge you?
- They could book the maximum possible amount ($15.95) up-front but that would result in constant booking on your CC
- They could charge you every time you enter the next level in payment structure, but this would increase the payment overhead fivefold
- They could charge after a period of playing but that would result in massive number of botters/farmers using fake CC details
2. This is exactly the kind of subscription model that APB had and was one of the main reasons for their failure.
People don't like to be presented with options like: "will you be playing 1-10, 10-20 or 20+ hours this month?". MMO's are supposed to be entertainment for free time. Planning ahead "10-20" hours of entertainment will make it feel like work.
It is much more fun to pay $15 and play as much as you like than to constantly worry if I'm going to loose money by playing too little or too much.
Consider opening a media file, with your trusted program from SMB.
If the attacker has planted a malicious.dll file in the same SMB share and your "trusted" media playing application is vulnerable then you have just compromised yourself.
I was part of a team that created similar (but a lot simpler) algorithms over 5 years ago.
15 years ago you could create a algorithm and let it run for years and it still would be profitable.
5 years ago the same algorithm stayed profitable for about a minute. After that "someone" started guessing your actions and cutting your profit, in few minutes your algorithm would only generate losses, while profiting others.
Initially our program traded with options and futures and most strategies were based on correlation of different goods/markets, a bit later on we had a pool of algorithms running in paralel, with constant reevauluation of profitability of each algorithm. In the end the most profitable algorithms were the ones that acted against all logic and should have generated imense losses in "classic" market. It was all about guessing what others will guess what you will do next and acting against it.
The company ended it's operations 3 years ago since it couldn't keep up with time (By then it was all about latency and proximity to ex datacenters).
We did consider building a high-frequnecy trading datacenter next to ex datacenter but the plan was shelved due to uncertanty what our competitors would do. (HF trading is really simple.. you don't need any complicated algorithms... just wait for any buyer to send an order to market, with market price and huge quantity (near or orver current cap for given level) and since ex will take few ms. to allocate the order you can, within that time place 2 smaller orders one for buying at given price and one for selling at next level. If your quantity is 10% or less of the clients quantity and you can act within 1-2ms (incl. latency) there is a good chanse that your order will be prefered over the larger order...)
I've got a choice:
* 41$ a month for 100mbps internet, 80+ digital tv channels and phone from out local telco
* 39$ a month for 100mbps internet, 80+ digital tv channels and phone from out local cable company
I chose cable since telco requires you to use a set-top box in addition to your tv (yey for another remote!)
At the moment Zynga makes most of it's money from scamming users to download fake anti-viruses and subscribing users to services that are costly and nearly impossible to un-subscribe from.
Facebook virtual currency will put a stop to this and ensure that users who want to buy virtual currency will get just that, with no addition of malware.
Taking 30% cut from it is greedy but hey... i'd rather pay the 30% fee (which is invisible to end-user anyway) than get my credit card emptied out by some Russian group who distributes malware via Zynga
Russia has experimented with nuking underwater oil-spills and has been rather successful (they managed to close the well on 4 of 5 tries).
(http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=et&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kp.ru%2Fdaily%2F24482%2F640124%2F&sl=ru&tl=en)
The problem with this one is the massive oil reserve under the seabed.
Should it rupture and release billions of barrels of oil that is under immense pressure, a Yellowstone scale extinction event would occur.
Whatever the actual leak size is (5000 barrels according to official sources, 25000-80000 according to expert opinions based on videos or 165000+ according to original disaster plan (prior to creating the site, BP provided documentation to government showing that it would take at least 165000 barrels/day leak for the oil spill to reach the shore)) the damage it will do, unplugged for another 10 years is not comparable to accidentally releasing it all at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
...but no-one wants my money!
Downloading a DVD quality movie takes about 20 seconds (250mbps here), fiddling with my tv remote to start the movie over dlna takes another 5 seconds
When i insert a DVD, it takes 10s for boot up, another 5 sec to load the DVD, 20s of warnings that do not apply to me (Europe), 10 sec of warnings that do apply to me (selling/distributing pirated copies is illegal here, downloading is not), 2 minutes of fast forwarding (if possible) through the trailers, 10s for the menu to load, 10s for the movie to load, 30s of studio logos....
So if i want to pirate the movie, it takes me (from the idea to actual movie) ~25 seconds. When i don't want to pirate the movie, it takes me 185 seconds (if I'm lucky) in addition to the trip to video store?
There are no streaming services available here (i would be more than happy to pay for Netflix) and movie studios keep making paying for their work harder and harder....
For BluRay, the time to start BR disc / download and play from net is about the same for me, but i can go make a sandwich while downloading instead of manically hitting "FF/Next/Play" on my remote
Here's what i have:
* i3 2120T with no cooling
* Some Asus micro-ATX board
* 2x4gb of ram
* 2x3 tb Hdd
* Pico PSU
* Media center case with 1 12cm case-fan (the only fan in system)
As a result i have a media server that serves all other systems (primary tv via HDMI, rest via DLNA or fileshares), that is always on (seedbox), can play 60fps 1080p with no problems and takes almost no power (12w idle/seeding, 14w playing 1080p, 75w peak at startup)
Drop legacy and force extensions? Sounds like M$/Apple (but in this case it's the opposite) this will lead to "Oh, I'm sorry your App X can't connect to the Internet anymore, you know it's already 3.5 years old? Time to buy a newer version!"
But seriously, in the foreseeable future (lets say 10 years) we wont get to a state where mobile devices can be allays on-line, listening for server pushes and not drain the battery in 4 hours.
"You forgot google.com open in your mobile browser? It servers you right that your battery lasted 2 hours... and here is the bill for the 500mb bandwidth it consumed while at it"
This returns a massive profit of 0,007$/h (considering the machine is running 24/7) per virtual machine
If you factor in the power and infrastructure bills you are at loss...
Now this is more like it:
0. Sneak into someone else's server room
1. Install virtual machine
2. Install Chrome
3. Write Python script to browse web continuously
4. ???^h^h^h Sell cache
5. Profit!
I'm a hobby developer for WP7 with 2 of my friends. The first thing we do on every release is upload our app to various torrent sites and seed the hell out of it.
If someone has jailbroken their phone and is capable of and interested in finding, downloading and installing a pirated app on their phone, they are lost revenue for us anyway.
Our only hope of revenue from these users is to provide them with good enough app so that they keep using it and might buy it (and advertise the app within their circle of friends, who might not be competent enough to pirate the app)
If it is easier to buy the app on appstore than to pirate it, then pirates are good for you
I can't say for sure that we wouldn't have made it without piracy, but currently we have 5 simple apps out and with total cost of 2000$ for launch advertising (and "free" work for 2-3 weeks at nights, after our daily jobs) per app, we gross around 6500$ every month
Since we seed our apps ourselves, we see that approximately 20% of installations are pirated (~2000 torrent downloads vs ~10000 sales via store every month) but we are sure that without the 20% "lost" sales, we wouldn't make the top charts of legal downloads... ever....
It might take a while to get 1Gbs+ Internet to most homes, but for LAN i feel GbE as a bottleneck today.
When I use DLNA to stream HD content to 3 TV's (one in kitchen, one in living room and 1 or 2 in kids rooms) and use N spec wifi at the same time, the DLNA lags sometimes. By calculations there should be some bandwith left over but not much. The lagging is probably caused by unexpected overheads and GbE switches preforming at "GbE in theory" speeds, but with the world moving towards a phase where every single gadget/device is connected to LAN/Internet this will become a large problem shortly.
The project will likely take 5 or more years to complete.
I remember having 4mbps/512kbps ADSL line 5 years ago and there is no way i would call that "usable" today.
I've had 150mbps/100mbps cable for a year now, this seems fine at the moment but in 5 years? considering how technology keeps on advancing and using up more-and-more bandwidth i really doubt there will be that many users for 100mbps net in 5 years.
In my opinion they should take the money, invest it in backbone networks and let local telco's compete on rented cables (take Stockholm for example, similar scenario resulted in 4$/mo 100mbps net for the whole city 2 years ago)
There are two huge problems with this kind of subscription system:
1. How do would they charge you?
- They could book the maximum possible amount ($15.95) up-front but that would result in constant booking on your CC
- They could charge you every time you enter the next level in payment structure, but this would increase the payment overhead fivefold
- They could charge after a period of playing but that would result in massive number of botters/farmers using fake CC details
2. This is exactly the kind of subscription model that APB had and was one of the main reasons for their failure.
People don't like to be presented with options like: "will you be playing 1-10, 10-20 or 20+ hours this month?". MMO's are supposed to be entertainment for free time. Planning ahead "10-20" hours of entertainment will make it feel like work.
It is much more fun to pay $15 and play as much as you like than to constantly worry if I'm going to loose money by playing too little or too much.
Consider opening a media file, with your trusted program from SMB. If the attacker has planted a malicious .dll file in the same SMB share and your "trusted" media playing application is vulnerable then you have just compromised yourself.
There won't be any functioning games left for 360 in 5 years, so you don't have to worry about that.
I was part of a team that created similar (but a lot simpler) algorithms over 5 years ago.
15 years ago you could create a algorithm and let it run for years and it still would be profitable.
5 years ago the same algorithm stayed profitable for about a minute. After that "someone" started guessing your actions and cutting your profit, in few minutes your algorithm would only generate losses, while profiting others.
Initially our program traded with options and futures and most strategies were based on correlation of different goods/markets, a bit later on we had a pool of algorithms running in paralel, with constant reevauluation of profitability of each algorithm. In the end the most profitable algorithms were the ones that acted against all logic and should have generated imense losses in "classic" market. It was all about guessing what others will guess what you will do next and acting against it.
The company ended it's operations 3 years ago since it couldn't keep up with time (By then it was all about latency and proximity to ex datacenters).
We did consider building a high-frequnecy trading datacenter next to ex datacenter but the plan was shelved due to uncertanty what our competitors would do. (HF trading is really simple.. you don't need any complicated algorithms... just wait for any buyer to send an order to market, with market price and huge quantity (near or orver current cap for given level) and since ex will take few ms. to allocate the order you can, within that time place 2 smaller orders one for buying at given price and one for selling at next level. If your quantity is 10% or less of the clients quantity and you can act within 1-2ms (incl. latency) there is a good chanse that your order will be prefered over the larger order...)
I've got a choice:
* 41$ a month for 100mbps internet, 80+ digital tv channels and phone from out local telco
* 39$ a month for 100mbps internet, 80+ digital tv channels and phone from out local cable company
I chose cable since telco requires you to use a set-top box in addition to your tv (yey for another remote!)
At the moment Zynga makes most of it's money from scamming users to download fake anti-viruses and subscribing users to services that are costly and nearly impossible to un-subscribe from.
Facebook virtual currency will put a stop to this and ensure that users who want to buy virtual currency will get just that, with no addition of malware.
Taking 30% cut from it is greedy but hey... i'd rather pay the 30% fee (which is invisible to end-user anyway) than get my credit card emptied out by some Russian group who distributes malware via Zynga
Russia has experimented with nuking underwater oil-spills and has been rather successful (they managed to close the well on 4 of 5 tries). (http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=et&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kp.ru%2Fdaily%2F24482%2F640124%2F&sl=ru&tl=en) The problem with this one is the massive oil reserve under the seabed. Should it rupture and release billions of barrels of oil that is under immense pressure, a Yellowstone scale extinction event would occur. Whatever the actual leak size is (5000 barrels according to official sources, 25000-80000 according to expert opinions based on videos or 165000+ according to original disaster plan (prior to creating the site, BP provided documentation to government showing that it would take at least 165000 barrels/day leak for the oil spill to reach the shore)) the damage it will do, unplugged for another 10 years is not comparable to accidentally releasing it all at the same time.