Offer a choice - a set-top box for £219, or a decoder that plugs into the X-Box for £19. Say it's much cheaper than the box because it mostly runs as software on the X-Box's processor, so it needs far fewer and simpler components. That would have the desired effect, and I think it'd be hard to prosecute.
I doubt the mobile phone companies will be interested though since they have been stuck with a rather large bill for the 3G licenses which no customers seem intested in using.
It's not that we're not interested, it's just that there's nothing for us to buy yet! I think GPRS is the only new technology that's appeared since that auction, and that's really not what 3G is about.
According to Nokia:
* 3G is being on a train and watching clips from your favorite soap
* 3G is being out and sending images back to headquarters
* 3G is using your phone to take holiday pictures to instantly send to friends at home
* 3G is using your phone for a videoconference in a taxi
I think we'd best wait until there's a product that actually does this before declaring that customers aren't interested in the technology!
Well, we had ITV Digital vs. Sky Digital, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News International. It was never a remotely equal battle. In fact MS is probably one of the few companies big enough to take on Murdoch. And just think - two vast cross-media companies, each with billions of pounds to spend, slugging it out in cut-throat competition for market share. Sounds like heaven for the happy consumer caught in the crossfire. As long as one of the companies doesn't actually win, of course.
Maybe it's just me, but isn't this a fairly obvious move for MS? Microsoft clearly wants to diversify out of the study and into the front room, hence the X-Box. Meanwhile, according to this article, ITV Digital is looking for someone to take over 1.3M set-top boxes. If I'm not much mistaken, those boxes can be reprogrammed remotely, so this is a perfect opportunity for MS to extend their own brand of integrated services into the living room.
If you ask me, they should also release an X-Box with a built in decoder. I despise Microsoft, and I'm perfectly happy with my PS2, but I'd be very likely to pay £199 for an X-Box that came with Sky One for a year.
Sure, it COULD be done, but would it really be doing the users of those computers any favors?
Perhaps not. But such people typically only really use computers for Word, web and email, so the upheaval shouldn't be too great. And arguably it would be repaid in improved efficiency and stability.
Moreover, every time someone did this it would take momentum away from MS and move us closer to a more equitable future. So potentially it could be doing everyone who uses a computer a huge favour in the long run.
The most frustrating thing about RealOne Player is, it's actually a really good player (IMO). Much more stable and cleaner in use than WMP, and does vaguely sensible things, like staying on top while video is playing, but allowing itself to be behind while stopped.
But you have to spend forever changing options and setting up your firewall to stop it pestering you the whole time with crap you don't care about. It's like they got a load of great programmers to write it, but accidentally fed them marketing food for a month before anyone noticed.
Still, I use it in preference to WMP. And, thanks to ZoneAlarm, Real Inc. don't even know. He he he.
I read in today's Sunday Telegraph that the chess pieces were magnetic, and each square on the board had a metal flap attached to the underside which was held up by the magnet. The chap in the box could see which flap had dropped and which had flipped up and so work out which piece had been moved where and replicate it on his own (probably miniature) chessboard. The same article also described that the Turk's arm was actually part of a pantograph, so the man inside just had to move a pointer to the relevant place on his chess-board and the Turk's hand would move to the same place on the outside board. He then simply had to squeeze the bulb/lever that made the Turk close its hand, move the pantograph pointer to the new square, and let go. A very ingenious and (I would imagine) well-executed piece of engineering.
Afraid I threw the paper away, and I can't find the article on the web, but I'm 99% certain this is all from Tom Standage's book.
I quite like the phrase "gain insidiously." That does seem quite apt.
But I can't accept that "depriving those who sell [music] of the money they would otherwise obtain" necessarily equates to stealing. For one thing, I wouldn't have bought most of the songs I've downloaded (though I'd be FAR more likely to if I could buy them singly rather than being forced to buy a whole album for £10+ - the industry shoots itself in the foot badly there). And anyway, I'm really not sure I've "stolen" the face-value cost of the music. Imagine I spent ten minutes recording myself playing the ukelele, and offered the recording for sale for £1,000,000. If you downloaded it off Napster, would you really consider you'd stolen a million pounds from me?
> > No pity for the majority. > > And you work in computer configuration and repair?
Actually, he seems to be in a German industrial band. "No pity for the majority" is the English translation of Kein Mitlied Für Die Mehrheit. Strange, and barely relevant, but true.
Stealing is defined in UK law as "wrongful appropriation of goods or services with the intention permanently to deprive." Which dictionary are you using?
I don't know WTF in the UK that last-poster-but-one is getting his CDs, but it sure ain't in the High Street. The standard price for a non-"Chart" CD at V.Shop is £15, and £16.99 is not uncommon in (eg) HMV. You can maybe save a few quid by going to Woolworth's or something, but £10 is definitely special offer territory. And conversely, when I was in the States in February, $20 really was a common price for a CD - though I did manage to find a few I wanted in BestBuy for $14.99.
Why do people do this? What could possibly be their true motivation?
I think their true motivation is entirely honourable - to see individuals and companies rewarded fairly for their work/innovation.
They just don't... how can I put it. They don't think like us. And, to be fair, it's easy to imagine them reading this page, with all of us instantly trying to think up ways to screw up their idea, and thinking "Why do people do this? What could possibly be their true motivation?" And indeed I imagine they'd reach a rather less favourable view of us (greedy anarchists) than we have of them (clueless buffoons).
Then again, I'm not sure I'd trust a plugin from someone like that not to scan everything I look at and on my drive unless I could see the source for it.
Presumably it'll take about.03 seconds after it's released for someone to capture and analyse the data it sends home. And about.04 seconds for someone to write a script that pretends to be this plug-in and sends FAST every URL on the web in turn.
From the article: if a user finds him or herself on a Web site that sells illegal software -- be it music, games, movies or programs -- one click on the "F" will pull up a box....
I have to say, I've seen thousands of warez sites in my time, and almost none of them were actually trying to sell me anything beyond adverts. The vast, vast majority of pirate software is traded for free: the pirates get nothing out of it beyond kudos, and access to yet more warez. I suspect FAST are trying to make the pirates look more evil than they really are.
And anyway, the vast majority of pirate software isn't traded on the web. Dalnet, KaZaA and Hotline are all a much, much better bet than spending hours going round and round in circles following fake linkes, porn links, topsites etc...
Only businesses will be able to use the net and the size of those businesses will scale with the cost per packet. Eventually, only the rich and large corporations will be on the net and by then it won't be worth using.
I very much doubt the net will die like this. Why would MS throw away a limitless revenue stream to move into a specialist market? Never mind the fact that it's opposed to their vision of "any time, any place and on any device," a business model that involved pushing people off the net would diminish the value of the service over time! More likely, I'd have thought, they'd make the cost of data transfer low enough that people couldn't be bothered to complain or work around it, and clean up on the quiet as the net continues to grow. Charge a penny per gigabyte, and watch the pile of pennies grow exponentially...
I don't know why everyone here hates patents...Once of the really great things about a patent is its allows a person with less money not to get crushed by an IBM when the have a good idea.
It's great that we can prevent IBM from competing with us. We just don't like it that a company as big as IBM can do the same back to us.
That's not necessarily a double-standard: IBM has massive market leverage, so its actions have much more of an impact on us than ours do on them.
The line between IP protection and monopolistic practice is not an easy one to draw these days.
Couldn't speak for Americans - I'm British. I'm just not advocating Communism because it's not (so far as I'm aware) been shown to work better than Capitalism in terms of increasing quality of life for all.
As for the previous poster - I did assume that companies wouldn't resort to blatantly illegal acts. But there are lots of companies (Nike, Nestle, Shell et al) who do carry on some pretty unconscionable things in the name of profit. And they're all (sadly) considered more successful than NoMoreNicksLeft Corp.
I guess these companies aren't secure about the quality of their products...
That's a bit harsh. They're not doing this instead of making products. In fact, as I understand the article, their products have to be successful for this to work.
If you were in business and you spotted a potentially limitless income source in addition to your present core business, wouldn't you leap at it, regardless of how certain you were of your product?
Of course, this is the thing about corporations: there's no "income cap" like there's a karma cap, so there's always an incentive to go on pursuing more and more money by any legal (well, normally) means. I'm not advocating Communism, just observing that the businesses we consider most successful have generally got there not only thanks to good products but also a certain rapacity.
I just don't see how using 2% of a $120 cpu to do the work of a $1 chip is in the consumers favor. It seems like all this does is increase manufacturer profit while marginally reducing consumer cost.
It's in the consumer's favour insofar as it enables the manufacturer to cut the final cost of their device. Leaving out that "$1 chip" can in practice equate to a £10+ difference in final cost (compare prices of hard and soft modems here): so in effect you get back something between 7% and 25% of the cost of your processor, in return for (according to your figures) a 2% performance drop.
And modern computers are sufficiently fast, and Windows performs so incredibly inconsistently, that a 2% impact is (to me) entirely unnoticeable anyway.
It's another on a list of inconveniences. When you install Linux for the first time (especially on a laptop) you may already be worrying about finding drivers for its own particular idiosyncratic display chipset, sound chipset, Ethernet chipset, etc. If you can't even dial in to look for them, it may just be the last straw that makes you go hell with it, I'll reinstall XP and then everything will work.
Linux may not have any one big fatal flaw, but these little inconveniences add up. Even if people aren't using WiFi, the fact that it won't work will reinforce the impression that if you install Linux you'll lose out on cool/useful capabilities. It is a serious disincentive in these days when Windows plug and play actually works.
My mouse used to do all its motion sensing mechanically: now MS is pushing a vidcap-based application instead. And it won't run on my old mouse, so I've had to buy a whole new mouse to use it. Bloody MS.
To forcibly try to bring this thread (sort of) back towards the topic, it's interesting to note that in the story, the poster comments that he can't find a BlueTooth SDIO card in "this sad little corner of the world."
I understand his feelings entirely: but when we're feeling peeved because we have to wait a bit or pay a bit extra for the latest geek innovation, it is always worth considering how hard it must be to get a BlueTooth SDIO card in Baghdad, or Kabul, or Ramallah.
Of course, this is a tech/science site, and it would be ridiculous if every story had to be approached geopolitically. But we've all had our perceptions shaken up a bit lately. Perhaps the tagline should really be "News for Nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter." Might lend us a little perspective.
Anyway, sorry if this is a bit off-topic. Just wanted to share.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Offer a choice - a set-top box for £219, or a decoder that plugs into the X-Box for £19. Say it's much cheaper than the box because it mostly runs as software on the X-Box's processor, so it needs far fewer and simpler components. That would have the desired effect, and I think it'd be hard to prosecute.
I doubt the mobile phone companies will be interested though since they have been stuck with a rather large bill for the 3G licenses which no customers seem intested in using.
It's not that we're not interested, it's just that there's nothing for us to buy yet! I think GPRS is the only new technology that's appeared since that auction, and that's really not what 3G is about.
According to Nokia:
* 3G is being on a train and watching clips from your favorite soap
* 3G is being out and sending images back to headquarters
* 3G is using your phone to take holiday pictures to instantly send to friends at home
* 3G is using your phone for a videoconference in a taxi
I think we'd best wait until there's a product that actually does this before declaring that customers aren't interested in the technology!
Well, we had ITV Digital vs. Sky Digital, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News International. It was never a remotely equal battle. In fact MS is probably one of the few companies big enough to take on Murdoch. And just think - two vast cross-media companies, each with billions of pounds to spend, slugging it out in cut-throat competition for market share. Sounds like heaven for the happy consumer caught in the crossfire. As long as one of the companies doesn't actually win, of course.
Maybe it's just me, but isn't this a fairly obvious move for MS? Microsoft clearly wants to diversify out of the study and into the front room, hence the X-Box. Meanwhile, according to this article, ITV Digital is looking for someone to take over 1.3M set-top boxes. If I'm not much mistaken, those boxes can be reprogrammed remotely, so this is a perfect opportunity for MS to extend their own brand of integrated services into the living room.
If you ask me, they should also release an X-Box with a built in decoder. I despise Microsoft, and I'm perfectly happy with my PS2, but I'd be very likely to pay £199 for an X-Box that came with Sky One for a year.
Sure, it COULD be done, but would it really be doing the users of those computers any favors?
Perhaps not. But such people typically only really use computers for Word, web and email, so the upheaval shouldn't be too great. And arguably it would be repaid in improved efficiency and stability.
Moreover, every time someone did this it would take momentum away from MS and move us closer to a more equitable future. So potentially it could be doing everyone who uses a computer a huge favour in the long run.
The most frustrating thing about RealOne Player is, it's actually a really good player (IMO). Much more stable and cleaner in use than WMP, and does vaguely sensible things, like staying on top while video is playing, but allowing itself to be behind while stopped.
But you have to spend forever changing options and setting up your firewall to stop it pestering you the whole time with crap you don't care about. It's like they got a load of great programmers to write it, but accidentally fed them marketing food for a month before anyone noticed.
Still, I use it in preference to WMP. And, thanks to ZoneAlarm, Real Inc. don't even know. He he he.
I read in today's Sunday Telegraph that the chess pieces were magnetic, and each square on the board had a metal flap attached to the underside which was held up by the magnet. The chap in the box could see which flap had dropped and which had flipped up and so work out which piece had been moved where and replicate it on his own (probably miniature) chessboard. The same article also described that the Turk's arm was actually part of a pantograph, so the man inside just had to move a pointer to the relevant place on his chess-board and the Turk's hand would move to the same place on the outside board. He then simply had to squeeze the bulb/lever that made the Turk close its hand, move the pantograph pointer to the new square, and let go. A very ingenious and (I would imagine) well-executed piece of engineering.
Afraid I threw the paper away, and I can't find the article on the web, but I'm 99% certain this is all from Tom Standage's book.
I sspct lssy cmprssion s rthr mr ntcbl wth txt thn wth pctrs.
I quite like the phrase "gain insidiously." That does seem quite apt.
But I can't accept that "depriving those who sell [music] of the money they would otherwise obtain" necessarily equates to stealing. For one thing, I wouldn't have bought most of the songs I've downloaded (though I'd be FAR more likely to if I could buy them singly rather than being forced to buy a whole album for £10+ - the industry shoots itself in the foot badly there). And anyway, I'm really not sure I've "stolen" the face-value cost of the music. Imagine I spent ten minutes recording myself playing the ukelele, and offered the recording for sale for £1,000,000. If you downloaded it off Napster, would you really consider you'd stolen a million pounds from me?
> > No pity for the majority.
>
> And you work in computer configuration and repair?
Actually, he seems to be in a German industrial band. "No pity for the majority" is the English translation of Kein Mitlied Für Die Mehrheit. Strange, and barely relevant, but true.
Stealing is defined in UK law as "wrongful appropriation of goods or services with the intention permanently to deprive." Which dictionary are you using?
I don't know WTF in the UK that last-poster-but-one is getting his CDs, but it sure ain't in the High Street. The standard price for a non-"Chart" CD at V.Shop is £15, and £16.99 is not uncommon in (eg) HMV. You can maybe save a few quid by going to Woolworth's or something, but £10 is definitely special offer territory. And conversely, when I was in the States in February, $20 really was a common price for a CD - though I did manage to find a few I wanted in BestBuy for $14.99.
Signed by Microsoft ??
God, I had no idea we were so far gone. That's seriously scary.
I've always pronounced it "w'four-threez." Is that wrong?? God, no wonder people always seemed a bit suspicious when I told them I was l'three-threet!
Why do people do this? What could possibly be their true motivation?
I think their true motivation is entirely honourable - to see individuals and companies rewarded fairly for their work/innovation.
They just don't... how can I put it. They don't think like us. And, to be fair, it's easy to imagine them reading this page, with all of us instantly trying to think up ways to screw up their idea, and thinking "Why do people do this? What could possibly be their true motivation?" And indeed I imagine they'd reach a rather less favourable view of us (greedy anarchists) than we have of them (clueless buffoons).
Then again, I'm not sure I'd trust a plugin from someone like that not to scan everything I look at and on my drive unless I could see the source for it.
.03 seconds after it's released for someone to capture and analyse the data it sends home. And about .04 seconds for someone to write a script that pretends to be this plug-in and sends FAST every URL on the web in turn.
Presumably it'll take about
From the article: if a user finds him or herself on a Web site that sells illegal software -- be it music, games, movies or programs -- one click on the "F" will pull up a box....
I have to say, I've seen thousands of warez sites in my time, and almost none of them were actually trying to sell me anything beyond adverts. The vast, vast majority of pirate software is traded for free: the pirates get nothing out of it beyond kudos, and access to yet more warez. I suspect FAST are trying to make the pirates look more evil than they really are.
And anyway, the vast majority of pirate software isn't traded on the web. Dalnet, KaZaA and Hotline are all a much, much better bet than spending hours going round and round in circles following fake linkes, porn links, topsites etc...
Only businesses will be able to use the net and the size of those businesses will scale with the cost per packet. Eventually, only the rich and large corporations will be on the net and by then it won't be worth using.
I very much doubt the net will die like this. Why would MS throw away a limitless revenue stream to move into a specialist market? Never mind the fact that it's opposed to their vision of "any time, any place and on any device," a business model that involved pushing people off the net would diminish the value of the service over time! More likely, I'd have thought, they'd make the cost of data transfer low enough that people couldn't be bothered to complain or work around it, and clean up on the quiet as the net continues to grow. Charge a penny per gigabyte, and watch the pile of pennies grow exponentially...
I don't know why everyone here hates patents...Once of the really great things about a patent is its allows a person with less money not to get crushed by an IBM when the have a good idea.
It's great that we can prevent IBM from competing with us. We just don't like it that a company as big as IBM can do the same back to us.
That's not necessarily a double-standard: IBM has massive market leverage, so its actions have much more of an impact on us than ours do on them.
The line between IP protection and monopolistic practice is not an easy one to draw these days.
Couldn't speak for Americans - I'm British. I'm just not advocating Communism because it's not (so far as I'm aware) been shown to work better than Capitalism in terms of increasing quality of life for all.
As for the previous poster - I did assume that companies wouldn't resort to blatantly illegal acts. But there are lots of companies (Nike, Nestle, Shell et al) who do carry on some pretty unconscionable things in the name of profit. And they're all (sadly) considered more successful than NoMoreNicksLeft Corp.
I guess these companies aren't secure about the quality of their products...
That's a bit harsh. They're not doing this instead of making products. In fact, as I understand the article, their products have to be successful for this to work.
If you were in business and you spotted a potentially limitless income source in addition to your present core business, wouldn't you leap at it, regardless of how certain you were of your product?
Of course, this is the thing about corporations: there's no "income cap" like there's a karma cap, so there's always an incentive to go on pursuing more and more money by any legal (well, normally) means. I'm not advocating Communism, just observing that the businesses we consider most successful have generally got there not only thanks to good products but also a certain rapacity.
I just don't see how using 2% of a $120 cpu to do the work of a $1 chip is in the consumers favor. It seems like all this does is increase manufacturer profit while marginally reducing consumer cost.
It's in the consumer's favour insofar as it enables the manufacturer to cut the final cost of their device. Leaving out that "$1 chip" can in practice equate to a £10+ difference in final cost (compare prices of hard and soft modems here): so in effect you get back something between 7% and 25% of the cost of your processor, in return for (according to your figures) a 2% performance drop.
And modern computers are sufficiently fast, and Windows performs so incredibly inconsistently, that a 2% impact is (to me) entirely unnoticeable anyway.
It's another on a list of inconveniences. When you install Linux for the first time (especially on a laptop) you may already be worrying about finding drivers for its own particular idiosyncratic display chipset, sound chipset, Ethernet chipset, etc. If you can't even dial in to look for them, it may just be the last straw that makes you go hell with it, I'll reinstall XP and then everything will work.
Linux may not have any one big fatal flaw, but these little inconveniences add up. Even if people aren't using WiFi, the fact that it won't work will reinforce the impression that if you install Linux you'll lose out on cool/useful capabilities. It is a serious disincentive in these days when Windows plug and play actually works.
My mouse used to do all its motion sensing mechanically: now MS is pushing a vidcap-based application instead. And it won't run on my old mouse, so I've had to buy a whole new mouse to use it. Bloody MS.
To forcibly try to bring this thread (sort of) back towards the topic, it's interesting to note that in the story, the poster comments that he can't find a BlueTooth SDIO card in "this sad little corner of the world."
:)
I understand his feelings entirely: but when we're feeling peeved because we have to wait a bit or pay a bit extra for the latest geek innovation, it is always worth considering how hard it must be to get a BlueTooth SDIO card in Baghdad, or Kabul, or Ramallah.
Of course, this is a tech/science site, and it would be ridiculous if every story had to be approached geopolitically. But we've all had our perceptions shaken up a bit lately. Perhaps the tagline should really be "News for Nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter." Might lend us a little perspective.
Anyway, sorry if this is a bit off-topic. Just wanted to share.