Oops. Seems I was out of date, and they added the ReplayTV subscription option late last year. It also seems the monthly subscription fee I quoted for TiVo is incorrect ($12.95/month now).
"Not being the U.S I have no idea, but does ReplayTV not operate on the same basis as Tivo E.g. you pay a subscription to recieve the programme data?"
With TiVo, you either pay after the fact -- either a monthly subscription fee ($10/month) or a larger one-time fee that covers the lifetime of the unit ($250).
With the ReplayTV units, the service is "free", but the retail price of the units are a few hundred dollars more expensive (or at least they were when I compared prices). So even though there's no explicit subscription fee, you're essentially paying for the same thing as a TiVo with lifetime service.
"With Sonic Blue down, TIVO is next in the sights."
I have to disagree. There's a fairly clear delination between the features that got Sonic Blue in trouble (automatic commercial skip; sharing shows with people over the internet) and the features that TiVo supports. Furthermore, TiVo's been fairly careful about both partnering with networks (through such features as the TiVo Showcase, which allows networks to advertise specific special shows) and limiting the ability of people to pull TV recordings off the device (as it's enough of a hassle that you're probably better off just using a separate TV capture card in your PC).
The most important thing is that what the TiVo does is generally no different (or even less powerful) than that of a VCR -- at least from the perspective of avoiding advertising and sharing shows. A VCR lets you timeshift programs and then fast-forward through the advertisements. Ditto for a TiVo. In contrast, ReplayTV let you make the commercials automatically disappear. A VCR lets you record a program and then pass that single copy on to friends. A TiVo doesn't even let you do that, though you can view that copy from anywhere in the house. In contrast, ReplayTV let you send out up to ~15(?) separate copies of the show while retaining the original.
So overall, I think you fears are unfounded. TiVo just doesn't have the risky exposure that Sonic Blue had with the Replay units. Even the suit against Sonic Blue was on shaky legal ground, so TiVo should be sitting high and dry.
(As a minor aside, I'd like to clarify my comparison between TiVo and a VCR above. Generally, when people refer to TiVo as a better version of a VCR, I have to correct them. TiVo is better than having a VCR, a couple dozen scrap tapes, a copy of TV Guide, and a trained monkey who knows how to change the tapes and record shows. It blows the entire VCR paradigm out of the water. However, with respect to the issues at hand -- avoiding commercials in television shows supported by advertising and the sharing shows with friends -- the VCR analogy is still fairly applicable.)
The main advantage this service has is that you don't have to worry about recording a show for it to be available. If 3 different shows that you wanted to watch all aired at the same time, you'd theoretically be able to watch them all. If you found out about a show the day after it aired (due to office water cooler chatting or whatnot), you'd be able to watch it.
On the other hand, given the overly restrictive nature of the device, this advantage may only look good on paper. If they can only secure the rights to a few dozen shows, and if they can't serve up last night's episode (due to restrictions on "new" content), then it'll be a mess.
However, depending on cost and how restrictive the service is in practice, I might be tempted to subscribe as a complement to my Tivo. I'd also be interested if it carried content that isn't currently being broadcast -- for example, season 1 of Angel, which was aired back before I started watching the show. Unfortunately, content producers might fear the effect that would have on the DVD market.
Re:Good for occasional gamer
on
Games on Demand
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"But for the hardcore gamer, I think they'd prefer to have the game in hand."
This service would allow them to best decide which games they actually want to have in hand.
"But can I be completely certain that won't change with some new hires, or when the financial picture is looking a little rocky, or when they've been acquired by some bigger, not-at-all trustworthy company?"
If you're that concerned, you can connect a dumb terminal to the serial port of the Tivo and check just what data it's including in the upload batches. People in this forum would be able to help you further.
"It currently costs roughly $4-5/USD to put a cd into the hands of consumers in the record stores, which does take into account shipping, packaging, printing, and so on. The remaining $10-15/USD that you pay is.. PROFIT."
Nonono. It's only PROFIT once the production costs are paid off.
"Please do some research first. CDs do not cost $15.00/USD each to produce and master."
I never said they each cost $15 to produce. However, until you pay off the production costs, you're still in the hole on each CD sold. It was my argument that someone who wishes to make an unlimited number of duplicates of a CD should have to pay the production costs of that album. Making unlimited duplicates essentially negates the label's ability to distribute the production costs over a number of CDs.
"You just reinforced my point. These were obviously leaked from the studio itself, so how are "piraters" and p2p/filesharing services to blame?"
Whether it's leaked by someone working in the studio or a consumer or a reviewer doesn't change the fact that someone without authorization is redistributing the file.
"The more-important piece of this, is that the music WAS BOUGHT by someone, who then took it upon themselves to rip it and upload it to the internet somewhere. The band did get paid for their work, for that copy."
That's an absurd argument. An album costs tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce. A single copy of that album costs $15 or so. It should be fairly obvious that the money being spent by the purchaser doesn't justify creating and releasing an unlimited number of copies of that album.
Besides, it's not always a purchased copy that's used as the source of the copyright infringement. There was a Slashdot article a little while ago that talked about how Eminem's album was #1 on a chart that tracked CD plays done on computers. The catch? His album wasn't even out yet -- he made it to #1 just from people listening to illegal copies.
"There just isn't a unique identifier in each RF ID tag (at least not the ones that I've read about)."
I'm pretty sure that at least one of the RF ID articles has mentioned the possibility of including unique identification numbers on each chip. It's a useful feature from a non-privacy aspect in that it would allow for fine-tuned, automated inventory (as opposed to dealing with the problem of trying to figure out just how many chips are broadcasting that they are product #238).
Futhermore, the chips have 1024 bits (128 bytes) of storage. If you were to divide that up with a 32 bit company id, a 32 bit item id, and a 64 bit unique serial number, that would allow 4 billion companies to have 4 billion different products each with up to 18 quintillion different units. As long as your chip making machine is capable of automatically incrementing the serial number as it writes out each chip, there's no technical reason not to implement this system.
So I'd at least be a little vigilant. Privacy concerns may be the only thing that prevents us from being potentially trackable with this system. Fortunately, I suspect that retailers are much more interested in the benign uses (inventory tracking and such), so I have a feeling that a decent compromise will be reached (i.e. the deactivation of chips post-sale) as long as consumers stay vocal about wanting their privacy protected.
There's one difficulty in using this as a marketing tool. The original GTA game is nowhere close to being representative of the latest generation of GTA games. In fact, my experience with GTA1 was actually a reason against purchasing GTA3 for me -- while GTA1 was fun, the gameplay was a little too arcadish (in the sense of having the game reset to a starting state too often) for me to enjoy. It was only after hearing about GTA3 from a bunch of other people that I decided to give it a go.
So while there's certainly positive marketing to be gained from giving away a game, there's still the risk in that the game being given away is not nearly as cool as the games it's being used to sell.
"Seems like the same thing to me, except we're talking about blog space instead of airplay. If I was a blogger who had this proposal come to me, I'd report them to the FBI. Or am I totally off base here?"
You're totally off base here. The problem with payola is that the radio stations have a government granted monopoly allowing them license to utilize a finite public good. In a given area, there's a relatively small limit on the number of stations that can broadcast at a given time. Because of this, a pay-for-airplay system unfairly excludes a number of songs from the market and restricts the ability of the airwaves to be used to best benefit the citizenry to which they ultimately belong.
Furthermore, radio stations are still allowed to accept compensation for traditional advertisements. It's understood that even though the stations are utilizing a public good, such activity still requires funding. As such, it's permitted that the run paid advertisements during their programming. However, it's just not permitted for them to subvert the "serving the public" obligation (i.e. playing music) with that programming being driven by money.
Finally, blogs aren't a closed market. Any idiot can throw up a webserver and jump into the fray. There are two privileges that the "popular" blogger enjoys: 1) More bandwidth (as they've presumably invested in better hosting as part of their growth) and 2) More eyeballs. Neither one of these is out of reach a new entry into the market. While some sites (such as Slashdot) enjoy part of their success from being the first on the field, there's no intrinsic factors in the medium that prevent newcomers from one day achieving comparable success.
So overall, it's just plain old product placement. Purists may be upset with it (and may question the artistic integrity of the blogger over it), but there's no wrongdoing here barring future potential misconduct on the part of a blogger (such as lying about the product or utilizing a blog server that prohibits commercial content).
"GTA VC used the GTAIII engine, but it was also THE SAME FRIGGING GAME. The THPS engine's been passed around quite a bit, but then again, all those XTREME sports games are the SAME FRIGGING GAMES, too."
Uh, don't GTA3 and THPS3 both use the Renderware engine? And yet those two aren't "THE SAME FRIGGING GAME".
"next time I install software and register it to
"nobody@mindyourownbusiness.com".."
Rather than indirectly harassing the innocent third-party that runs
mindyourownbusiness.com, you're better off using an address the ends
in example.com. That domain is guaranteed to always be invalid.
What the hell? Windows ain't exactly expensive, especially relative to the amount of money spent by someone who's moderatly-to-heavily into current games.
I mean I can understand this accusation if the previous poster had said something like "just use photoshop for resizing images" (where the cost of the software package far exceeds the advantage of using it for "trivial" applications). But this? This is just silly.
"I have been getting spam addressed to [my_unix_username]@[my_machinename].cs.man.ac.uk"
Do you have ident running? Could a website you connected to have used ident to get your username and then prepended it to the reverse lookup of your IP?
"Samuri Jack flailed around for a good 10-15 minutes killing some robots, and in the end the death count was Samuri Jack, flesh wound, and the Robots - 10,000 nonfunctional. Sounds like typical Lucas"
A lot of the Samurai Jack episodes are a lot less oriented on mindless combat. There's a good degree of variation between the episodes, but some of the better ones are downright artistic in their presentation and story.
"How hard would it be for those companies using MS SQL to switch to a different SQL distro?"
Since the infringement seems to be related to third parties who customize MS SQL (rather than just using it as a SQL database), I suspect that the people who're most vulnerable to being accused of patent infringement are the same people who are most tied to the specific architecture of MS SQL.
"sends an error message to the spammer... Like the one you get when
there is no address with that name."
The problem is that spammers who're searching for valid addresses
generally check whether or not an error occurs at the SMTP level.
When the message is in your mailbox, it's already too late.
First, the spammer connects directly to your server and checks how you
handle invalid addresses (by sending an email to an almost guaranteed
bogus account). If your mail server rejects mail to the test address,
the spammer then begins doing a dictionary-based attack. If any mail
gets through, that address goes on the spammer's list of valid
targets.
"Just remove the extension from all mp3 files, re-add them when the
audit is over."
Except that you'll still get caught if they use a program that checks the magic number within each of the files. file(1) on my Linux box has no problem recognizing mp3s. It'll even tell you the bitrate.
According to that page, the corporate specified temperature for
McDonald's coffee at the time of the incident was between 180 and 190
degrees. I believe the home-brewed coffee is generally around 140
degrees.
Besides these points, it might also be wise to include a clause allowing you to also view the credit report that they receive. There was a story on NPR recently about a guy who lost out on a job that sounded like a sure thing and included a credit report. For some reason, the company just never called him back.
It was only a few years later that he discovered that a small, resolved issue of child support was misreported on his credit history, and it made him look like a deadbeat dad who owed $40k.
"If every company lost say, a million $ worth of patents, but in doing so gained access to billions of $ worth of patents - then that would be a net gain for everyone, wouldn't it?"
In the short term, yes. In the long term, you've removed a lot of incentive for companies to spend money on research and development. They'd primarily be interested in improvements in manufacturing techniques (which can be kept as internal secrets) rather than improvements in product functionality (which can be copied from a competitor).
Slashdot Mirror
Oops. Seems I was out of date, and they added the ReplayTV subscription option late last year. It also seems the monthly subscription fee I quoted for TiVo is incorrect ($12.95/month now).
With TiVo, you either pay after the fact -- either a monthly subscription fee ($10/month) or a larger one-time fee that covers the lifetime of the unit ($250).
With the ReplayTV units, the service is "free", but the retail price of the units are a few hundred dollars more expensive (or at least they were when I compared prices). So even though there's no explicit subscription fee, you're essentially paying for the same thing as a TiVo with lifetime service.
I have to disagree. There's a fairly clear delination between the features that got Sonic Blue in trouble (automatic commercial skip; sharing shows with people over the internet) and the features that TiVo supports. Furthermore, TiVo's been fairly careful about both partnering with networks (through such features as the TiVo Showcase, which allows networks to advertise specific special shows) and limiting the ability of people to pull TV recordings off the device (as it's enough of a hassle that you're probably better off just using a separate TV capture card in your PC).
The most important thing is that what the TiVo does is generally no different (or even less powerful) than that of a VCR -- at least from the perspective of avoiding advertising and sharing shows. A VCR lets you timeshift programs and then fast-forward through the advertisements. Ditto for a TiVo. In contrast, ReplayTV let you make the commercials automatically disappear. A VCR lets you record a program and then pass that single copy on to friends. A TiVo doesn't even let you do that, though you can view that copy from anywhere in the house. In contrast, ReplayTV let you send out up to ~15(?) separate copies of the show while retaining the original.
So overall, I think you fears are unfounded. TiVo just doesn't have the risky exposure that Sonic Blue had with the Replay units. Even the suit against Sonic Blue was on shaky legal ground, so TiVo should be sitting high and dry.
(As a minor aside, I'd like to clarify my comparison between TiVo and a VCR above. Generally, when people refer to TiVo as a better version of a VCR, I have to correct them. TiVo is better than having a VCR, a couple dozen scrap tapes, a copy of TV Guide, and a trained monkey who knows how to change the tapes and record shows. It blows the entire VCR paradigm out of the water. However, with respect to the issues at hand -- avoiding commercials in television shows supported by advertising and the sharing shows with friends -- the VCR analogy is still fairly applicable.)
The main advantage this service has is that you don't have to worry about recording a show for it to be available. If 3 different shows that you wanted to watch all aired at the same time, you'd theoretically be able to watch them all. If you found out about a show the day after it aired (due to office water cooler chatting or whatnot), you'd be able to watch it.
On the other hand, given the overly restrictive nature of the device, this advantage may only look good on paper. If they can only secure the rights to a few dozen shows, and if they can't serve up last night's episode (due to restrictions on "new" content), then it'll be a mess.
However, depending on cost and how restrictive the service is in practice, I might be tempted to subscribe as a complement to my Tivo. I'd also be interested if it carried content that isn't currently being broadcast -- for example, season 1 of Angel, which was aired back before I started watching the show. Unfortunately, content producers might fear the effect that would have on the DVD market.
This service would allow them to best decide which games they actually want to have in hand.
If you're that concerned, you can connect a dumb terminal to the serial port of the Tivo and check just what data it's including in the upload batches. People in this forum would be able to help you further.
You can call up Tivo's customer service and opt-out of their data collection.
Nonono. It's only PROFIT once the production costs are paid off.
"Please do some research first. CDs do not cost $15.00/USD each to produce and master."
I never said they each cost $15 to produce. However, until you pay off the production costs, you're still in the hole on each CD sold. It was my argument that someone who wishes to make an unlimited number of duplicates of a CD should have to pay the production costs of that album. Making unlimited duplicates essentially negates the label's ability to distribute the production costs over a number of CDs.
"You just reinforced my point. These were obviously leaked from the studio itself, so how are "piraters" and p2p/filesharing services to blame?"
Whether it's leaked by someone working in the studio or a consumer or a reviewer doesn't change the fact that someone without authorization is redistributing the file.
That's an absurd argument. An album costs tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce. A single copy of that album costs $15 or so. It should be fairly obvious that the money being spent by the purchaser doesn't justify creating and releasing an unlimited number of copies of that album.
Besides, it's not always a purchased copy that's used as the source of the copyright infringement. There was a Slashdot article a little while ago that talked about how Eminem's album was #1 on a chart that tracked CD plays done on computers. The catch? His album wasn't even out yet -- he made it to #1 just from people listening to illegal copies.
I'm pretty sure that at least one of the RF ID articles has mentioned the possibility of including unique identification numbers on each chip. It's a useful feature from a non-privacy aspect in that it would allow for fine-tuned, automated inventory (as opposed to dealing with the problem of trying to figure out just how many chips are broadcasting that they are product #238).
Futhermore, the chips have 1024 bits (128 bytes) of storage. If you were to divide that up with a 32 bit company id, a 32 bit item id, and a 64 bit unique serial number, that would allow 4 billion companies to have 4 billion different products each with up to 18 quintillion different units. As long as your chip making machine is capable of automatically incrementing the serial number as it writes out each chip, there's no technical reason not to implement this system.
So I'd at least be a little vigilant. Privacy concerns may be the only thing that prevents us from being potentially trackable with this system. Fortunately, I suspect that retailers are much more interested in the benign uses (inventory tracking and such), so I have a feeling that a decent compromise will be reached (i.e. the deactivation of chips post-sale) as long as consumers stay vocal about wanting their privacy protected.
So while there's certainly positive marketing to be gained from giving away a game, there's still the risk in that the game being given away is not nearly as cool as the games it's being used to sell.
That's probably because it was already posted.
You're totally off base here. The problem with payola is that the radio stations have a government granted monopoly allowing them license to utilize a finite public good. In a given area, there's a relatively small limit on the number of stations that can broadcast at a given time. Because of this, a pay-for-airplay system unfairly excludes a number of songs from the market and restricts the ability of the airwaves to be used to best benefit the citizenry to which they ultimately belong.
Furthermore, radio stations are still allowed to accept compensation for traditional advertisements. It's understood that even though the stations are utilizing a public good, such activity still requires funding. As such, it's permitted that the run paid advertisements during their programming. However, it's just not permitted for them to subvert the "serving the public" obligation (i.e. playing music) with that programming being driven by money.
Finally, blogs aren't a closed market. Any idiot can throw up a webserver and jump into the fray. There are two privileges that the "popular" blogger enjoys: 1) More bandwidth (as they've presumably invested in better hosting as part of their growth) and 2) More eyeballs. Neither one of these is out of reach a new entry into the market. While some sites (such as Slashdot) enjoy part of their success from being the first on the field, there's no intrinsic factors in the medium that prevent newcomers from one day achieving comparable success.
So overall, it's just plain old product placement. Purists may be upset with it (and may question the artistic integrity of the blogger over it), but there's no wrongdoing here barring future potential misconduct on the part of a blogger (such as lying about the product or utilizing a blog server that prohibits commercial content).
Uh, don't GTA3 and THPS3 both use the Renderware engine? And yet those two aren't "THE SAME FRIGGING GAME".
Rather than indirectly harassing the innocent third-party that runs mindyourownbusiness.com, you're better off using an address the ends in example.com. That domain is guaranteed to always be invalid.
What the hell? Windows ain't exactly expensive, especially relative to the amount of money spent by someone who's moderatly-to-heavily into current games.
I mean I can understand this accusation if the previous poster had said something like "just use photoshop for resizing images" (where the cost of the software package far exceeds the advantage of using it for "trivial" applications). But this? This is just silly.
Do you have ident running? Could a website you connected to have used ident to get your username and then prepended it to the reverse lookup of your IP?
A lot of the Samurai Jack episodes are a lot less oriented on mindless combat. There's a good degree of variation between the episodes, but some of the better ones are downright artistic in their presentation and story.
Since the infringement seems to be related to third parties who customize MS SQL (rather than just using it as a SQL database), I suspect that the people who're most vulnerable to being accused of patent infringement are the same people who are most tied to the specific architecture of MS SQL.
I believe you're referring to the fuzz papers. They basically threw a bunch of random garbage at different commands and then watched for core dumps.
The problem is that spammers who're searching for valid addresses generally check whether or not an error occurs at the SMTP level. When the message is in your mailbox, it's already too late.
First, the spammer connects directly to your server and checks how you handle invalid addresses (by sending an email to an almost guaranteed bogus account). If your mail server rejects mail to the test address, the spammer then begins doing a dictionary-based attack. If any mail gets through, that address goes on the spammer's list of valid targets.
Except that you'll still get caught if they use a program that checks the magic number within each of the files. file(1) on my Linux box has no problem recognizing mp3s. It'll even tell you the bitrate.
Some facts about the McDonald's case.
According to that page, the corporate specified temperature for McDonald's coffee at the time of the incident was between 180 and 190 degrees. I believe the home-brewed coffee is generally around 140 degrees.
It was only a few years later that he discovered that a small, resolved issue of child support was misreported on his credit history, and it made him look like a deadbeat dad who owed $40k.
In the short term, yes. In the long term, you've removed a lot of incentive for companies to spend money on research and development. They'd primarily be interested in improvements in manufacturing techniques (which can be kept as internal secrets) rather than improvements in product functionality (which can be copied from a competitor).