Although radio waves were discovered in the 19th century, doing audio broadcasts over radio waves is a 20th century technology. Of course, when a technology was discovered doesn't really effect whether or not it's a worthwhile technology, as evidenced by how popular things like wheels, fire, irrigation, and flour are. The more nuanced discussion about the relative value of radio going on elsewhere in the comments to this article is much more worthwhile.
So in your opinion, the ideal juror is one with no knowledge about anything?
The first duty of a jury is to ascertain what are and are not the facts of the case. Juries are often presented with conflicting evidence. They have the responsibility to use any and all knowledge and mental facilities at their disposal to judge what is correct.
If someone gets on the stand and testifies that they saw the defendent driving west on Main street towards the crime scene and the juror knows that Main street is a one-way street which runs to the east, should they immediately excuse themselves from the jury because of their expert knowledge about roadways?
In the end, there is no such thing as "expert knowledge". There's just knowledge. The only thing which makes "expert knowledge" is being paid to try to convince people of what you know. So how do you draw the line? Do you exclude automotive engineers from hit-and-run trials? What about people who know how to drive? People who drive the same make of car? Same make and model? Same make, model, and year? People who have been in a traffic accident? Traffic Engineers? Should police officers never sit on a jury evaluating a crime? Should psychologists never sit on a jury if people were involved in the issue?
It's a slippery slope towards juries which are selected for a lack of knowledge, which is no longer a jury of one's peers. Either the jurors are allowed to use the facts which they know to make decisions or they are restricted to a process of guessing based on intuition. Guessing is going to favor testimony from skilled con-men over the truth every time and would undermine the effectiveness of our entire justice system.
In short, disallowing jurors because they have some knowledge which could potentially be of some relevance in the case would be disasterous.
The DMCA only applies to encrypted contents of things. It specifically says that for a protection mechanism to be covered, the digital information must be unplayable before the mechanism does something and then playable afterwards. So something like a DVD where the contents are encrypted counts. Something like autorun software which prevents you from playing a CD or even the broadcast flag would not count since the content is playable whether or not the DRM stuff happens.
The DMCA is an awful piece of legislation but it doesn't make absolutely any DRM avoidance illegal, only circumventing encryption on things without authorization.
However, there is no lower bound on the difficulty of the encryption, though, so one could argue that using rot-13 to unencrypt someone's copy-protected rot-13 encoded message would be a DMCA violation unless you had the permission of the copyright owner.
If Nintendo was really targetting the casual gamer, they would build in more of the features like DVD players and the like that would appeal to people who aren't that into games. Thus far, Nintendo's systems have been more likely than their competitors to be bought only by the more serious gamer. Someone who researches games and wants to explore the most interesting and novel games might buy a GameCube so that they can play games like Donkey Kongo or Pikmin. Someone who doesn't is more likely to buy a PS2 because they'll see its DVD playing abiilities and its much wider selection of games (even if a much greater percentage of PS2 games are crap).
Now, Nintendo has said that they're trying to grow the gaming market by making novel games which are approachable to beginners which is part of the point of the controller for the revolution, but this is more an attempt to convert non-gamers into gamers than it is about targetting just the casual gamer. By innovating, they're clearly expecting this innovation to be supported by a certain portion of the serious gamer market. Existing casual gamers are much less likely to be willing to try out things like freaky new controllers.
Yes, but you don't need to agree to the EULA. You've already got the right to play any CD you own and to make fair use copies of it. What's the benefit in agreeing to the EULA?
In general, companies are promoting the idea that you must agree to some licensing to be able to use the copies of things that you own, but this is not, in general, true. You can't make copies of things without permission because this right is explicitly denied you by copyright law. The ability to play things or run software or exercise your fair use rights is not. Hence you don't need license from anyone else to do these things.
Actually early web browsers handled not just http, but also other older less-flexible hyper-linked information services such as gopher and WAIS. These services pretty well had most everything that the early http-web had except for pretty formating and dynamically generated pages. So, if one defines the web as "the publically accessible collection of hyper-linked documents" then the web existed prior to HTML, it just wasn't thought of as being "the web". And, obviously, it was HTML and HTTP which really caused the web to catch on.
The RIAA has been stealing my money. I used to have a bunch of fives and tens and twenties. Now I don't have them any more. The RIAA has lots of fives and tens and twenties. Clearly, they should be arrested and all that money given back to me.
What do you mean you want to know when they stole it from me and how? I told you what they stole. What more is there?
Actually, they didn't -allow- digital, they shoved it down consumer's throats. CDs were cheaper to press and were selling at higher prices than LPs, so the record companies wanted consumers to switch. But when CDs were first introduced, CD players cost hundreds of dollars and record players were fairly cheap. As a result, only a few hifi types were switching over.
Record stores work on a different model than many stores. They don't have to buy the records outright. Instead they can buy them, but if they don't sell, they can return them to the record company and get the money back. (Book stores use a similar model as well.) However, the record companies wanted people to buy CDs and not vinyl. So they stopped accepting returns on vinyl. This meant that if a record store was going to get some vinyl records from a distributor, they had to be highly certain that the records would sell. But with CDs, they didn't have to worry. As a result, in just a few years time, the "record store" was replaced by the "CD and tape store" which later became the "CD store".
We don't have CDs because consumers demanded them. We have them because the record labels forced them on record stores. Now, having made their bed, they're unhappy with it. Any problems which the record companies are having with file sharing, they should blame significantly on their startling lack of foresight. They told us that we should buy CDs specifically -because- we could make flawless copies of them. Then, when we do it, they get go run to congress in a tizzy.
I'm sorry. I misread the article. This isn't about the client end, its about the server end, and good, easy-to-use solutions for that are basically non-existent, so this is a step in the right direction.
Look, there are at least 12 other BT + RSS clients. A dozen. The idea has been done. About a year ago I put together a list which was canonical at the time, but at this point, I know of at least three others that I hadn't gotten around to adding to the list.
So, although I've got nothing against this one, it's not as if having one more client changes anything. The article makes it sound revolutionary. If nothing else, both Torrentocracy and Videora have been posted on Slashdot previously.
1) IP laws vary from country to country, and the laws in the UK are not the norm. In most countries, employer's ownership of intellectual property is covered by the contract between the employer and the employee and not national laws. Also, it is generally acknowledged that working as a photographer for a newspaper does not mean that the newspaper owns your holiday pictures. Likewise, working as a software engineer for a company which makes business-to-business e-commerce software does not mean that the company would own the copyrights to drivers you would write for Linux. They are not related to your job. So unless you employment contract specifically says that they own any and all code you write in their employ or unless you are trying to work on an open source project which is very closely related to your job, then it's not relevant.
2) Saying that Open Source projects don't have a core architect only shows that he's never worked on one. Most every open source project has a very small group of people (usually just one) who has final say on what goes in and what doesn't. Sure, anyone can fork it, but in practice this doesn't happen very often. Further, the open source projects I've been involved in are much more likely to care about sticking with the chosen design methodologies than commercial software since open source projects don't have time pressure in order to fix bugs for customers or push out a new release by an arbitrary deadline in order to get the profits in line with analysts predictions so that the stock price stays high. There's never a question of "do we do it right or do we save thousands of dollars by getting it done now?"
3) The fact of the matter is that there is no problem with the level of professionalism in open source projects. Not every one is very professional, but neither is every commercial project. There is no shortage of open source projects with very solid, well written code. It's not clear quite what he means by "professionalism" here anyway. It's likely just a weasel-word used to intimate that those who do not produce software professionally, i.e. get paid to write software, don't do as good a job.
But then worse, he completely and entirely lies about what caused the console game crash in the early eighties. It didn't have a thing to do with video game quality. It had to do with a mismatch between projections of growth in the industry and actual growth. If you actually read any reputable history of what happened with console gaming companies in the early eighties, not a one of them will mention game quality. What happened was that the demand for gaming consoles and their games had been growing at 50% per year for several years. Then, one year, it only grew 17%. Now, 17% in one year is pretty good growth. Not anything indicating that the games were poorly made or the like. But if you're expecting 50% growth and you get 17% growth, this means that you've produced ~28% too many cartridges. For those of you familiar with basic economics, this means that the value of cartridges had to fall, and not necessarily just 28%. What actually happened is that the sale prices of game cartridges fell by more than 50%, which, as manufacturing, promotion, and shipping costs hadn't fallen, meant that the industry lost a huge amount of money. This is Econ 101: supply and demand. It did not have a thing to do with "unprofessional programming" and suggesting it did is simply lying.
4) As for Innovation, there are quite a few innovative open source projects. Although it's true that open source projects which serve as a direct replacement for commercial software projects are often well known, it does not follow that there are not innovative Open Source projects out there. In truth, there's no shortage of innovative open source projects. Many of them aren't terribly well known precisely because they are so innovative, so I can't well come up with an exhaustive list. But here are some obvious, well-known, innovative Open Source projects: BitTorrent, SVN (and
I just finished reading the decision, and the DMCA portion is nonsense. I mean, complete and utter nonsense. Essentially, they rule that Battle.net's checking the CD keys was an effective anti-circumvention measure which protected access to a copyrighted work. No, not the game itself, since you can play the game without Battle.net, but instead the "Battle.net mode" of the game. The court ruled that the multiplayer version of the game when played over Battle.net is a separate protected work than the game played single-player or multiplayer on a LAN.
Now, to begin with the idea that a running version of a program is covered because it's source code is copyrighted is ridiculous. By that standard, using a slug in an arcade machine should be a DMCA violation since you've circumvented measures which prevent you from playing a copyrighted game without paying. The court totally fails to pay attention to the portion which describes what it means to effectively prevent access to a copyrighted work. In this case the work in question is compiled software, and its ability to run does not depend on Battle.net. The DMCA specifies that for a technological process to be considered to control access to a copyrighted work, there must be a transformative process. Prior to this process, the copyrighted work must be unable to be used. For instance, before being decrypted, DVDs simply cannot be watched because the contents are scrambled by encryption. Embedding an if statement at the front of computer code does not meet that definition. It doesn't even come close. The code for the Battle.net portion of the program is not encoded and does not need to be decoded. It can be run with or without having submitted a CD key to Battle.net. It just won't be as useful if you can't access Battle.net. What happens is that if Battle.net doesn't like your CD key, it does not let you sign on. All that Battle.net is preventing access to is Battle.net. So this decision is clearly ignorant of the technical facts of the case. When you actually look at it in the light of the correct facts, what the court has ruled amounts to the idea that they broke the DMCA by "circumventing" access controls which protected Battle.net by writing their own server. That doesn't make a lick of sense.
Further, to rule that a particular mode of a program is a separate protected work is ridiculous. In this particular case the "mode" was merely a means of match-making through this particular service, and since LAN play provided precisely the same game play, just with people actually near you, it's very difficult for me to see how a match-making mode would qualify as a special part of the game worthy of its own copyright. In what sense is Battle.net access an expression of creative ideas?
Sheesh. I mean, come on, there's no way this is serious. He attributes all sorts of outlandish ideas to the previous poster, none of which were in any way said or implied. He only stopped just short of "You think that all movie executives should be beheaded?"
These are truly the worse movies ever. They're movies about post-apocalyptic roller-skating battle nuns. POST-APOCALYPTIC ROLLER-SKATING BATTLE NUNS!!!
Here's the plot summary of The Roller Blade Warriors from IMDB for example: In the future, a warrior nun on roller skates must rescue a seer, who is to be sacrificed by a band of mutants.
Now, I haven't seen all of these movies, but the ones I've seen have been so attrociously bad as to be incomprehensible. The acting is awful. The dialogue ranges from bizarre to stupid. The cinematography is okay. The plot is nonsense. The characters are also nonsensical. I've seen a lot of bad movies. These are far and away the worst.
Although, I should note that we haven't yet worked up the guts to watch the other films from the same director, Hell Comes To Frogtown and it's sequels.
Well, except that advertising, like all goods, has its value determined by supply and demand.
Specifically, there are two markets going on here: 1) advertisers are selling advertising to places which want to advertise (which we'll call advertising consumers) 2) advertisers are buying advertising from users (which we'll call advertising users)
The problem is that the first and second markets can quickly get out of sync. In the first market, the supply is the number of advertisements available. In the second market, it is the amount of attention available. The supply in the second market is not quite constant, but very limited, so it is approximately constant. The supply in the first market, however, is limitted only by the ability of advertisers to cram advertising in everywhere that they can.
So what happens is that the natural forces of competition between advertisers in the first market to maximize their own profits results in an increase in supply in the first market. This can happen more easily in advertising since advertising is not primarily a physical good, so its production is not significantly constrained by cost. More advertising becomes available. Except that this increase in the supply in the first market is not coupled with any increase in supply in the second market.
So the demand rises in the second market, but the supply does not. What happens is that the advertisers wind up either paying a higher price in the second market or delivers less of the second market product to each consumer in the first market, i.e. delivers less consumer attention per advertisement. If the latter, then what will happen is that the value that the advertising customers derive from the advertising will drop, which will generally lead them to demand more advertising for the same price, creating more downwards pressure on advertising prices.
So, logically, the only way out of an ever increasing downward spiral of more advertising at lower and lower prices is to increase the price paid per customer attention. One way that this is happening is that customers are making it harder to get advertising to them. The advertising firm has to spend more time and effort getting an advertisement in front of someone who is attempting to block it.
Making advertisements less intrusive or less frequent is another way to increase the costs paid per customer, but that is generally going to decrease the supply of advertising available to a given advertiser in the first market, so most firms are reluctant to do that since it would be bad for them in the short-term.
So anyway, the basic problem is that advertisers, for market reasons, want to push more and more advertising on users, while users want increased compensation for that advertising if they are going to see more ads. When users see more ads without an increase in the value of the content they are receiving for seeing those ads, they feel ripped off and respond by doing a form of social contract renegotiation technologically available to them. Of course, the result of this is that they take the content without paying the cost, but then advertising has always been an unenforcable contract, and that's a natural risk of the advertising market.
Anyway, my overall point is this:
All of this is caused by market forces. If the advertisers want this changed, they need to find a way to adjust to the market forces. Simply scolding users for not being happy with the price that the advertisers want for their goods is not going to have any effect what-so-ever. Talk is cheap and scolding users is doubly so.
There are a few which have special temporary wavers to not broadcast digitally for a little bit due to economic hardship or something.
And as mentioned elsewhere, there are also some stations which are broadcasting digital signals much weaker than their analog ones since a full powered broadcast is quite expensive. This will likely change once more people have digital tuners.
The problem is that they also don't care about the limitations caused by the phone companies. Traditional telephone companies have often refused to allow VOIP providers to connect to 911 emergency service. Ordering one person to tango doesn't get you very far.
Actually, if you look at the history, most of the content companies lobbied against the digital switchover. They felt that things were just fine as they were. TV is the main competitor of the movies. Anything which improves television is going to cut into their movie market. Only once the switchover was approved and actually started to be implemented did they begin to argue for the broadcast flag. It only got added a year ago, after all commercial stations were already required to have digital broadcasts. The broadcast flag also doesn't plug the "analog hole" because it still allows a low resolution output of the signal. The same composite video out that your current TV provides to your VCR can be used on your new TV even when the broadcast flag is on. You just can't provide high definition video signals to non-5c compliant devices.
The broadcasters were also mostly against it because they, at very least, have to buy new transmission equipment, operate two broadcast antennas for a while, potentially provide more programming, and deal with a host of new technical issues.
Really, only two groups benefit from this: consumers who get better TV (and with digital tuners mandated to be in all TVs over 27 inches soon, the cost of tuners is going to come down sharply) and equipment makers who get to sell everyone a new TV and/or converter box.
Connection to people you know is king. The web is not the kill application for the internet: email is. Surveys have repeatedly shown that the average internet user cares much about email and IM than they do about news or entertainment sites. Everyone on the internet emails. Only some people browse the web.
My grandmother is probably not ever going to watch your videoblog. She's not curious. She doesn't go poking around the internet looking for entertainment. But she is almost certainly going to watch my videoblog (assuming that her retirement home eventually wires the houses for broadband like they keep talking about). I'm her grandson. She likes seeing my life.
What we're talking about is not replacing entertainment television, it's transforming television into a two-way medium.
The entire point of the project which this article links to is to make things as easy as possible. Combining BitTorrent and RSS is not new. There are roughly a dozen download clients already (I have a list at http://www.asyserver.com/~kirwin/cgi-bin/fakessi.p l?vb/btrssoptions.shtml and that's not even complete due to recent client and server software releases which I have not caught up with). I myself already run such an internet TV station/videoblog at http://www.asyserver.com/~kirwin/vb/ but they are trying to make the clients for both ends of the process easier for the normal user to approach.
There is no reason that the average user needs to care about the specifics of how video programs actually get there so long as they can push a button and watch them. You don't have to know anything about satellite transmission to sign up for The Dish Network or about fibre optics to subscribe to cable. With appropriate clients, users won't -need- to know anythign about RSS feeds.
It may be that their attempts to build simplified clients meant for the average user will fail, but saying that they cannot suceed because users aren't technical enough to use it is not a valid criticism of a project whose whole point is to make things accessible to non-technical users.
You fundamentally misunderstand why consumer chip speeds are increasing. Chip speed is not now and never has been driven economically by the home/office desktop market. It likely never will be.
Chip speed increases are driven economically by the high end market: scientific processing, special effects and other high-end multimedia work, high speed databases, data mining, compilation farms, that sort of thing. Those are the consumers who drive the cycle of increasing speed because those are the consumers who want more speed enough to buy comuters which cost several thousand dollars and lots of them. The high-end gamer and guy who just loves power account for a small fraction of it, but if they go away, it's not going to make much difference. Plus, they probably aren't going away.
The research and development costs to design a chip and to increase the number of transistors which they can fit on a wafer are driven by this market. If a chip maker does not recover their design costs within the first year on the market, they aren't ever going to. The high-end market is where they make the bulk of the profit.
What happens after that first year is that normal desktop users then get last year's top of the line chips. Last year's top of the line chips are always going to be significantly cheap than this year's. The silicon wafers on which chips are printed have defects. If there are 4 defects randomly placed on a wafer and there are four chips on that wafer, the odds are that you'll probably get one functioning chip from that wafer. However, as Moore's Law (the number of semiconductors on a wafer will double every 18 months) applies, you start to be able to fit more chips on a wafer using the same chip design. So, 18 months later, you'll have 8 chips on that wafer. You'll then get 4 or 5 useful chips out of it. In another 18 months, you'll have 16 chips, and you'll get 12 or 13 useful ones. And the design costs are already paid for.
This is why get a slightly older chip is so much cheaper, and always will be. Now, even if the consumer market doesn't really care much about power, it's still the case that they're going to buy a faster chip than a slower one if the cost difference is negligible. I mean, there's pretty much no one who would rather pay $1 for a 1Ghz chip than $2 for a 2Ghz chip. Who's going to not pay the extra dollar when spending several hundred for a system? Also, there's a limit to how much you want to lag your consumer chips behind the high-end market, because if the chips get small enough it gets tough to get all the pins attached (literally). So the consumer chips will never lag behind the high-end ones by much so long as the number of transistors is still increasing, and the number of transistors is going to keep increasing so long as the high-end market is still there (and no final size limit is discovered).
Slashdot Mirror
Although radio waves were discovered in the 19th century, doing audio broadcasts over radio waves is a 20th century technology. Of course, when a technology was discovered doesn't really effect whether or not it's a worthwhile technology, as evidenced by how popular things like wheels, fire, irrigation, and flour are. The more nuanced discussion about the relative value of radio going on elsewhere in the comments to this article is much more worthwhile.
Keith
So in your opinion, the ideal juror is one with no knowledge about anything?
The first duty of a jury is to ascertain what are and are not the facts of the case. Juries are often presented with conflicting evidence. They have the responsibility to use any and all knowledge and mental facilities at their disposal to judge what is correct.
If someone gets on the stand and testifies that they saw the defendent driving west on Main street towards the crime scene and the juror knows that Main street is a one-way street which runs to the east, should they immediately excuse themselves from the jury because of their expert knowledge about roadways?
In the end, there is no such thing as "expert knowledge". There's just knowledge. The only thing which makes "expert knowledge" is being paid to try to convince people of what you know. So how do you draw the line? Do you exclude automotive engineers from hit-and-run trials? What about people who know how to drive? People who drive the same make of car? Same make and model? Same make, model, and year? People who have been in a traffic accident? Traffic Engineers? Should police officers never sit on a jury evaluating a crime? Should psychologists never sit on a jury if people were involved in the issue?
It's a slippery slope towards juries which are selected for a lack of knowledge, which is no longer a jury of one's peers. Either the jurors are allowed to use the facts which they know to make decisions or they are restricted to a process of guessing based on intuition. Guessing is going to favor testimony from skilled con-men over the truth every time and would undermine the effectiveness of our entire justice system.
In short, disallowing jurors because they have some knowledge which could potentially be of some relevance in the case would be disasterous.
Keith
And how could the "psychological impact" be worse than not havin a face? The patient is going to "look different" no matter what is done.
The previously accepted medical procedure was to blind the patient.
Keith
No you didn't.
The DMCA only applies to encrypted contents of things. It specifically says that for a protection mechanism to be covered, the digital information must be unplayable before the mechanism does something and then playable afterwards. So something like a DVD where the contents are encrypted counts. Something like autorun software which prevents you from playing a CD or even the broadcast flag would not count since the content is playable whether or not the DRM stuff happens.
The DMCA is an awful piece of legislation but it doesn't make absolutely any DRM avoidance illegal, only circumventing encryption on things without authorization.
However, there is no lower bound on the difficulty of the encryption, though, so one could argue that using rot-13 to unencrypt someone's copy-protected rot-13 encoded message would be a DMCA violation unless you had the permission of the copyright owner.
Keith
If Nintendo was really targetting the casual gamer, they would build in more of the features like DVD players and the like that would appeal to people who aren't that into games. Thus far, Nintendo's systems have been more likely than their competitors to be bought only by the more serious gamer. Someone who researches games and wants to explore the most interesting and novel games might buy a GameCube so that they can play games like Donkey Kongo or Pikmin. Someone who doesn't is more likely to buy a PS2 because they'll see its DVD playing abiilities and its much wider selection of games (even if a much greater percentage of PS2 games are crap).
Now, Nintendo has said that they're trying to grow the gaming market by making novel games which are approachable to beginners which is part of the point of the controller for the revolution, but this is more an attempt to convert non-gamers into gamers than it is about targetting just the casual gamer. By innovating, they're clearly expecting this innovation to be supported by a certain portion of the serious gamer market. Existing casual gamers are much less likely to be willing to try out things like freaky new controllers.
Keith
Yes, but you don't need to agree to the EULA. You've already got the right to play any CD you own and to make fair use copies of it. What's the benefit in agreeing to the EULA?
In general, companies are promoting the idea that you must agree to some licensing to be able to use the copies of things that you own, but this is not, in general, true. You can't make copies of things without permission because this right is explicitly denied you by copyright law. The ability to play things or run software or exercise your fair use rights is not. Hence you don't need license from anyone else to do these things.
Keith Irwin
Actually early web browsers handled not just http, but also other older less-flexible hyper-linked information services such as gopher and WAIS. These services pretty well had most everything that the early http-web had except for pretty formating and dynamically generated pages. So, if one defines the web as "the publically accessible collection of hyper-linked documents" then the web existed prior to HTML, it just wasn't thought of as being "the web". And, obviously, it was HTML and HTTP which really caused the web to catch on.
Keith
The RIAA has been stealing my money. I used to have a bunch of fives and tens and twenties. Now I don't have them any more. The RIAA has lots of fives and tens and twenties. Clearly, they should be arrested and all that money given back to me.
What do you mean you want to know when they stole it from me and how? I told you what they stole. What more is there?
Keith
Actually, they didn't -allow- digital, they shoved it down consumer's throats. CDs were cheaper to press and were selling at higher prices than LPs, so the record companies wanted consumers to switch. But when CDs were first introduced, CD players cost hundreds of dollars and record players were fairly cheap. As a result, only a few hifi types were switching over.
Record stores work on a different model than many stores. They don't have to buy the records outright. Instead they can buy them, but if they don't sell, they can return them to the record company and get the money back. (Book stores use a similar model as well.) However, the record companies wanted people to buy CDs and not vinyl. So they stopped accepting returns on vinyl. This meant that if a record store was going to get some vinyl records from a distributor, they had to be highly certain that the records would sell. But with CDs, they didn't have to worry. As a result, in just a few years time, the "record store" was replaced by the "CD and tape store" which later became the "CD store".
We don't have CDs because consumers demanded them. We have them because the record labels forced them on record stores. Now, having made their bed, they're unhappy with it. Any problems which the record companies are having with file sharing, they should blame significantly on their startling lack of foresight. They told us that we should buy CDs specifically -because- we could make flawless copies of them. Then, when we do it, they get go run to congress in a tizzy.
Keith
I'm sorry. I misread the article. This isn't about the client end, its about the server end, and good, easy-to-use solutions for that are basically non-existent, so this is a step in the right direction.
Keith
Look, there are at least 12 other BT + RSS clients. A dozen. The idea has been done. About a year ago I put together a list which was canonical at the time, but at this point, I know of at least three others that I hadn't gotten around to adding to the list.
So, although I've got nothing against this one, it's not as if having one more client changes anything. The article makes it sound revolutionary. If nothing else, both Torrentocracy and Videora have been posted on Slashdot previously.
Keith
1) IP laws vary from country to country, and the laws in the UK are not the norm. In most countries, employer's ownership of intellectual property is covered by the contract between the employer and the employee and not national laws. Also, it is generally acknowledged that working as a photographer for a newspaper does not mean that the newspaper owns your holiday pictures. Likewise, working as a software engineer for a company which makes business-to-business e-commerce software does not mean that the company would own the copyrights to drivers you would write for Linux. They are not related to your job. So unless you employment contract specifically says that they own any and all code you write in their employ or unless you are trying to work on an open source project which is very closely related to your job, then it's not relevant.
2) Saying that Open Source projects don't have a core architect only shows that he's never worked on one. Most every open source project has a very small group of people (usually just one) who has final say on what goes in and what doesn't. Sure, anyone can fork it, but in practice this doesn't happen very often. Further, the open source projects I've been involved in are much more likely to care about sticking with the chosen design methodologies than commercial software since open source projects don't have time pressure in order to fix bugs for customers or push out a new release by an arbitrary deadline in order to get the profits in line with analysts predictions so that the stock price stays high. There's never a question of "do we do it right or do we save thousands of dollars by getting it done now?"
3) The fact of the matter is that there is no problem with the level of professionalism in open source projects. Not every one is very professional, but neither is every commercial project. There is no shortage of open source projects with very solid, well written code. It's not clear quite what he means by "professionalism" here anyway. It's likely just a weasel-word used to intimate that those who do not produce software professionally, i.e. get paid to write software, don't do as good a job.
But then worse, he completely and entirely lies about what caused the console game crash in the early eighties. It didn't have a thing to do with video game quality. It had to do with a mismatch between projections of growth in the industry and actual growth. If you actually read any reputable history of what happened with console gaming companies in the early eighties, not a one of them will mention game quality. What happened was that the demand for gaming consoles and their games had been growing at 50% per year for several years. Then, one year, it only grew 17%. Now, 17% in one year is pretty good growth. Not anything indicating that the games were poorly made or the like. But if you're expecting 50% growth and you get 17% growth, this means that you've produced ~28% too many cartridges. For those of you familiar with basic economics, this means that the value of cartridges had to fall, and not necessarily just 28%. What actually happened is that the sale prices of game cartridges fell by more than 50%, which, as manufacturing, promotion, and shipping costs hadn't fallen, meant that the industry lost a huge amount of money. This is Econ 101: supply and demand. It did not have a thing to do with "unprofessional programming" and suggesting it did is simply lying.
4) As for Innovation, there are quite a few innovative open source projects. Although it's true that open source projects which serve as a direct replacement for commercial software projects are often well known, it does not follow that there are not innovative Open Source projects out there. In truth, there's no shortage of innovative open source projects. Many of them aren't terribly well known precisely because they are so innovative, so I can't well come up with an exhaustive list. But here are some obvious, well-known, innovative Open Source projects: BitTorrent, SVN (and
I just finished reading the decision, and the DMCA portion is nonsense. I mean, complete and utter nonsense. Essentially, they rule that Battle.net's checking the CD keys was an effective anti-circumvention measure which protected access to a copyrighted work. No, not the game itself, since you can play the game without Battle.net, but instead the "Battle.net mode" of the game. The court ruled that the multiplayer version of the game when played over Battle.net is a separate protected work than the game played single-player or multiplayer on a LAN.
Now, to begin with the idea that a running version of a program is covered because it's source code is copyrighted is ridiculous. By that standard, using a slug in an arcade machine should be a DMCA violation since you've circumvented measures which prevent you from playing a copyrighted game without paying. The court totally fails to pay attention to the portion which describes what it means to effectively prevent access to a copyrighted work. In this case the work in question is compiled software, and its ability to run does not depend on Battle.net. The DMCA specifies that for a technological process to be considered to control access to a copyrighted work, there must be a transformative process. Prior to this process, the copyrighted work must be unable to be used. For instance, before being decrypted, DVDs simply cannot be watched because the contents are scrambled by encryption. Embedding an if statement at the front of computer code does not meet that definition. It doesn't even come close. The code for the Battle.net portion of the program is not encoded and does not need to be decoded. It can be run with or without having submitted a CD key to Battle.net. It just won't be as useful if you can't access Battle.net. What happens is that if Battle.net doesn't like your CD key, it does not let you sign on. All that Battle.net is preventing access to is Battle.net. So this decision is clearly ignorant of the technical facts of the case. When you actually look at it in the light of the correct facts, what the court has ruled amounts to the idea that they broke the DMCA by "circumventing" access controls which protected Battle.net by writing their own server. That doesn't make a lick of sense.
Further, to rule that a particular mode of a program is a separate protected work is ridiculous. In this particular case the "mode" was merely a means of match-making through this particular service, and since LAN play provided precisely the same game play, just with people actually near you, it's very difficult for me to see how a match-making mode would qualify as a special part of the game worthy of its own copyright. In what sense is Battle.net access an expression of creative ideas?
Keith Irwin
Sheesh. I mean, come on, there's no way this is serious. He attributes all sorts of outlandish ideas to the previous poster, none of which were in any way said or implied. He only stopped just short of "You think that all movie executives should be beheaded?"
He's just trying to get a response.
Keith
It's obvious you've never watched Red vs. Blue.
Keith
Bah. Check out the Roller Blade movies (not Roller Ball), such as Roller Blade, Roller Blade Warriors, The Roller Blade Seven, The Legend of the Rollerblade Seven, and Return of the Roller Blade Seven.
These are truly the worse movies ever. They're movies about post-apocalyptic roller-skating battle nuns. POST-APOCALYPTIC ROLLER-SKATING BATTLE NUNS!!!
Here's the plot summary of The Roller Blade Warriors from IMDB for example:
In the future, a warrior nun on roller skates must rescue a seer, who is to be sacrificed by a band of mutants.
Now, I haven't seen all of these movies, but the ones I've seen have been so attrociously bad as to be incomprehensible. The acting is awful. The dialogue ranges from bizarre to stupid. The cinematography is okay. The plot is nonsense. The characters are also nonsensical. I've seen a lot of bad movies. These are far and away the worst.
Although, I should note that we haven't yet worked up the guts to watch the other films from the same director, Hell Comes To Frogtown and it's sequels.
Keith
Well, except that advertising, like all goods, has its value determined by supply and demand.
Specifically, there are two markets going on here: 1) advertisers are selling advertising to places which want to advertise (which we'll call advertising consumers)
2) advertisers are buying advertising from users (which we'll call advertising users)
The problem is that the first and second markets can quickly get out of sync. In the first market, the supply is the number of advertisements available. In the second market, it is the amount of attention available. The supply in the second market is not quite constant, but very limited, so it is approximately constant. The supply in the first market, however, is limitted only by the ability of advertisers to cram advertising in everywhere that they can.
So what happens is that the natural forces of competition between advertisers in the first market to maximize their own profits results in an increase in supply in the first market. This can happen more easily in advertising since advertising is not primarily a physical good, so its production is not significantly constrained by cost. More advertising becomes available. Except that this increase in the supply in the first market is not coupled with any increase in supply in the second market.
So the demand rises in the second market, but the supply does not.
What happens is that the advertisers wind up either paying a higher price in the second market or delivers less of the second market product to each consumer in the first market, i.e. delivers less consumer attention per advertisement. If the latter, then what will happen is that the value that the advertising customers derive from the advertising will drop, which will generally lead them to demand more advertising for the same price, creating more downwards pressure on advertising prices.
So, logically, the only way out of an ever increasing downward spiral of more advertising at lower and lower prices is to increase the price paid per customer attention. One way that this is happening is that customers are making it harder to get advertising to them. The advertising firm has to spend more time and effort getting an advertisement in front of someone who is attempting to block it.
Making advertisements less intrusive or less frequent is another way to increase the costs paid per customer, but that is generally going to decrease the supply of advertising available to a given advertiser in the first market, so most firms are reluctant to do that since it would be bad for them in the short-term.
So anyway, the basic problem is that advertisers, for market reasons, want to push more and more advertising on users, while users want increased compensation for that advertising if they are going to see more ads. When users see more ads without an increase in the value of the content they are receiving for seeing those ads, they feel ripped off and respond by doing a form of social contract renegotiation technologically available to them. Of course, the result of this is that they take the content without paying the cost, but then advertising has always been an unenforcable contract, and that's a natural risk of the advertising market.
Anyway, my overall point is this:
All of this is caused by market forces. If the advertisers want this changed, they need to find a way to adjust to the market forces. Simply scolding users for not being happy with the price that the advertisers want for their goods is not going to have any effect what-so-ever. Talk is cheap and scolding users is doubly so.
Keith Irwin
All of them are digital.
There are a few which have special temporary wavers to not broadcast digitally for a little bit due to economic hardship or something.
And as mentioned elsewhere, there are also some stations which are broadcasting digital signals much weaker than their analog ones since a full powered broadcast is quite expensive. This will likely change once more people have digital tuners.
Keith Irwin
Already in progress here:e nture.cgi?board=OSP
9 04
http://boards.thethrillhammer.com/cgi-bin/forum/v
Being dicussed here:
http://www.shouldexist.org/story/2004/3/1/8946/31
And there was a place for it here:
http://opensourcepron.net/
But registration doesn't appear to work.
Keith
The problem is that they also don't care about the limitations caused by the phone companies. Traditional telephone companies have often refused to allow VOIP providers to connect to 911 emergency service. Ordering one person to tango doesn't get you very far.
Keith
Actually, if you look at the history, most of the content companies lobbied against the digital switchover. They felt that things were just fine as they were. TV is the main competitor of the movies. Anything which improves television is going to cut into their movie market. Only once the switchover was approved and actually started to be implemented did they begin to argue for the broadcast flag. It only got added a year ago, after all commercial stations were already required to have digital broadcasts. The broadcast flag also doesn't plug the "analog hole" because it still allows a low resolution output of the signal. The same composite video out that your current TV provides to your VCR can be used on your new TV even when the broadcast flag is on. You just can't provide high definition video signals to non-5c compliant devices.
The broadcasters were also mostly against it because they, at very least, have to buy new transmission equipment, operate two broadcast antennas for a while, potentially provide more programming, and deal with a host of new technical issues.
Really, only two groups benefit from this: consumers who get better TV (and with digital tuners mandated to be in all TVs over 27 inches soon, the cost of tuners is going to come down sharply) and equipment makers who get to sell everyone a new TV and/or converter box.
Keith Irwin
Connection to people you know is king. The web is not the kill application for the internet: email is. Surveys have repeatedly shown that the average internet user cares much about email and IM than they do about news or entertainment sites. Everyone on the internet emails. Only some people browse the web.
My grandmother is probably not ever going to watch your videoblog. She's not curious. She doesn't go poking around the internet looking for entertainment. But she is almost certainly going to watch my videoblog (assuming that her retirement home eventually wires the houses for broadband like they keep talking about). I'm her grandson. She likes seeing my life.
What we're talking about is not replacing entertainment television, it's transforming television into a two-way medium.
Keith Irwin
The entire point of the project which this article links to is to make things as easy as possible. Combining BitTorrent and RSS is not new. There are roughly a dozen download clients already (I have a list at http://www.asyserver.com/~kirwin/cgi-bin/fakessi.p l?vb/btrssoptions.shtml and that's not even complete due to recent client and server software releases which I have not caught up with). I myself already run such an internet TV station/videoblog at http://www.asyserver.com/~kirwin/vb/
but they are trying to make the clients for both ends of the process easier for the normal user to approach.
There is no reason that the average user needs to care about the specifics of how video programs actually get there so long as they can push a button and watch them. You don't have to know anything about satellite transmission to sign up for The Dish Network or about fibre optics to subscribe to cable. With appropriate clients, users won't -need- to know anythign about RSS feeds.
It may be that their attempts to build simplified clients meant for the average user will fail, but saying that they cannot suceed because users aren't technical enough to use it is not a valid criticism of a project whose whole point is to make things accessible to non-technical users.
Keith Irwin
You fundamentally misunderstand why consumer chip speeds are increasing. Chip speed is not now and never has been driven economically by the home/office desktop market. It likely never will be.
Chip speed increases are driven economically by the high end market: scientific processing, special effects and other high-end multimedia work, high speed databases, data mining, compilation farms, that sort of thing. Those are the consumers who drive the cycle of increasing speed because those are the consumers who want more speed enough to buy comuters which cost several thousand dollars and lots of them. The high-end gamer and guy who just loves power account for a small fraction of it, but if they go away, it's not going to make much difference. Plus, they probably aren't going away.
The research and development costs to design a chip and to increase the number of transistors which they can fit on a wafer are driven by this market. If a chip maker does not recover their design costs within the first year on the market, they aren't ever going to. The high-end market is where they make the bulk of the profit.
What happens after that first year is that normal desktop users then get last year's top of the line chips. Last year's top of the line chips are always going to be significantly cheap than this year's. The silicon wafers on which chips are printed have defects. If there are 4 defects randomly placed on a wafer and there are four chips on that wafer, the odds are that you'll probably get one functioning chip from that wafer. However, as Moore's Law (the number of semiconductors on a wafer will double every 18 months) applies, you start to be able to fit more chips on a wafer using the same chip design. So, 18 months later, you'll have 8 chips on that wafer. You'll then get 4 or 5 useful chips out of it. In another 18 months, you'll have 16 chips, and you'll get 12 or 13 useful ones. And the design costs are already paid for.
This is why get a slightly older chip is so much cheaper, and always will be. Now, even if the consumer market doesn't really care much about power, it's still the case that they're going to buy a faster chip than a slower one if the cost difference is negligible. I mean, there's pretty much no one who would rather pay $1 for a 1Ghz chip than $2 for a 2Ghz chip. Who's going to not pay the extra dollar when spending several hundred for a system? Also, there's a limit to how much you want to lag your consumer chips behind the high-end market, because if the chips get small enough it gets tough to get all the pins attached (literally). So the consumer chips will never lag behind the high-end ones by much so long as the number of transistors is still increasing, and the number of transistors is going to keep increasing so long as the high-end market is still there (and no final size limit is discovered).
Keith Irwin
They go through all the existing cats (Ocelot, Lion, Tiger, Lynx, Puma, Leopard, Cheetah, Bobcat, Fishing Cat, House Cat, Liger) and then:
They move on to the Thundercats.
Personally, I'm really looking forward to 10.17: Liono. I hear it has some great features. But 10.24: Snarfer, that's really gonna be the shit.
Then, once they're out of Thundercats, that's when they move on to Thundercats villains.
I've heard great things about 10.32: Mum-Ra the Everliving.
Keith