Or to think about it another way: if Americans pooled all the money we spend on CDs, iTunes fees, etc. in just one single year, we could buy all the music, and actually get to keep it and do whatever we want with it.
That value of $6 billion will keep falling until we have a SCO of music that has only rights to old music left that it will use to make up annoying lawsuits.
But that old music matters; an awful lot of people care about it, and it isn't going away. It isn't like software where you can phase out an old legacy system once you have the new one online. People are probably still going to be listening to the Beatles decades from now.
The Logitech Revue has an Intel CE4100 SOC, which is about on par with the Atom processor in terms of CPU power, but can also do the full monte of 1080p hardware video decoding (and I think HDMI 1.3 audio bitstreaming as well). It was already down to $99 last time I checked, and if it drops further it could be a very attractive platform to play around with. (I believe someone has already rooted it.) It could serve as a very nice media streamer if someone ported XBMC to it, or with a streamlined Linux distro it might make an acceptable and extremely cheap PC for someone whose needs are limited to browsing, email, and watching videos.
According to Yahoo Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SNE), Sony's market cap is $17.49 billion. Apple's is $360.14 billion. So, yes, Sony is tiny compared to Apple from a financial perspective. The number of employees won't necessarily give Sony a major advantage against Apple where it matters.
So, EMI accounts for about one-third of the music sales in the country, and it's worth about $2 billion. That means the entire recording industry, copyrights and all, is worth about $6 billion total? Google could buy the whole thing out of its pocket change if it wanted to (and if regulators let it).
Heck, if we had one multi-billionaire who was devoted to the free content movement, he/she could put an end to the RIAA and music copyrights once and for all for a relatively small price.
Remind me again why these idiots have so much political power? Lots of other industries are worth a hell of a lot more than $6 billion and we never hear of Congress bending nearly this far backward for most of them. Even Senate malapportionment can't be an excuse here, since the music industry is overwhelmingly California-based and they have only two Senators just like every other state.
Sorry, OSX is inherently more secure than Windows. There was a guy who provided a free anti-virus program for Mac until Microsoft introduced Macro Viruses for Office which immediately caused the number of Mac viruses to jump to over 1,000. Now that's not saying that Windows isn't trying to catch up on security. The reality today is that many viruses are targeting installed software like Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash and the various browsers.
But the exploits you mention above have nothing to do with the OS at all. Office security bugs are not the same as Windows security bugs (except that they are the responsibility of the same company to fix). Indeed, as you pointed out, these same security problems affected Office on OSX as well as Windows. Likewise, if Adobe produces crappy software that allows arbitrary code execution due to vulnerabilities, how is this the fault of Windows? And unless you force users into a walled garden like iOS (which many users could not tolerate), you can't stop third party programs from doing bad stuff if the user *specifically authorized* said programs to run.
I think many security flaws we see today stem from the Unix security model all modern OSes inherited. The idea that the program is the user and should get all the user's permissions may have made some sense in the 1970s, but is absurd now. Still, Windows is no worse than OSX or Linux on this front. Ideally, I'd like to see a situation where apps can be sandboxed to only allow them to access the resources the user specifically permits. I know there are ways to do this now with fancy hacks, but none of them are ready for average users at this time. App developers should have to tell the OS through a manifest what resources their program needs, and the user should be able to review this and sanity-check it, or even specifically disable particular things. (For instance, they should be able to enforce through the OS that a specific application can't connect to the Internet, or can only read files from certain directories.)
I agree with your recommendations until you get to "Always use a router." I always use a commercial-grade firewall (SonicWALL TZ 100, for example) instead. The rest of your suggestions I don't follow except the last, "Don't download and run random crap."
Those rules are meant for the average Windows user. Of course if you have a professional hardware firewall that is going to be a superior alternative, but for the average user, a router you can buy for $30-$100 at Best Buy offers improved security and easy usability. For advanced users the rules could be summed up as "use common sense" – we already have a pretty good idea of what stuff is necessary to avoid malware and why.
That entirely depends on what price tag you put on an hour of downtime.
The cost of a virus? The joke that is System Restore from trying to recover from malware?
First of all, there are malware exploits for OSX as well as for Windows. Sure, there aren't as many, but that is because of Apple's much lower market share, not due to some inherent advantage of the system. There was certainly a time when Windows was much less secure than competing OSes, but that time ended some years ago.
The vast majority of malware exploits on newer versions of Windows can be avoided if the user follows a handful of simple, common-sense rules:
Run as a limited user and elevate only when needed
Run Microsoft Security Essentials
Let Windows Updates install and leave the firewall on (this happens automatically on the default configuration)
Always use a router to connect to the Internet (so you get NAT and hardware firewalling) rather than plugging directly into the cable/DSL modem
Don't install Java unless you really need it. Especially, don't let it install the browser plugin unless absolutely necessary.
Use ad-blocking software on your browser
Don't download and run random crap from the Internet
How many malware exploits for Windows do you know of that didn't involve at least one (and usually more) violation of the above rules?
"'There's a tremendous amount of R&D going into a different kind of TV set,' CEO Howard Stringer told the WSJ (in a paywalled article).... [W]hat Apple and Sony agree on is that the traditional TV paradigm must evolve if the segment is to become profitable again. A new model is 'what weâ(TM)re all looking for,' Stringer confirmed, suggesting that 'we canâ(TM)t continue selling TV sets [the way we have been]. Every TV set we all make loses money.'"
Somehow this doesn't make me very enthusiastic about the prospect of "a new kind of TV." Sounds like they're just trying to come up with excuses to charge more money for essentially the same products. They don't seem to have any specific ideas about what to do aside from "we need to make more money."
Yes, FreeBSD could be a viable alternative due to its native ZFS support. In fact the FreeNAS distro is designed specifically for this. The Illumos/Nexenta releases based on OpenSolaris are also promising.
What you're proposing is the wrong way around: the rule is the rule; these labs don't exist for the pleasure of working there.
Los Alamos needs intelligent scientists - i.e. people with very, very high IQs. Virtually anyone working as a scientist at Los Alamos is smart enough to make millions as a quant on Wall Street, if they wanted to.
Is Los Alamos paying them millions? No. Therefore, they must be compensated in a non-financial manner - for example, by giving them a wide degree of workplace autonomy. If you insist on paying government-level wages *and* miring everyone in layers of meaningless, soul-killing bureaucracy, you can't expect your employees to be any better than mediocre.
Btrfs? How does it not take data integrity seriously? It supports checksums and redundancy on user data and metadata blocks.
According to Wikipedia: "Btrfs supports a very limited form of transaction without ACID semantics: rollback is not possible, only one transaction may run at a time and transactions are not atomic with respect to storage." No argument that it's still probably better than anything else Linux has, but ZFS is the gold standard of file systems.
Well, duh. Maybe if Oracle released ZFS under the GPL, it would be in the Linux kernel.
That doesn't explain why no one did a ground-up implementation of ZFS on Linux (there is a public spec) or why no file system designed for Linux itself has taken data integrity at all seriously.
I shouldn't pick on Linux exclusively, though, since neither Microsoft nor Apple seem to care about data integrity in their file systems either. The persistence of NTFS on Windows is just embarrassing.
You can use VA-API or another such framework to pass the H.264 stream directly to the hardware for decoding. There are of course also software codecs in ffmpeg, but these carry patent implications, at least in the US. Sending the bitstream to hardware (which has already paid the license fee on the manufacturer side) should be safe.
Why does your application need to run in a browser at all? Wouldn't it make more sense just to use standard.NET, compile it as an exe, and push it out to your users?
With Windows 8 going to flop unless MS does something to save the desktop portion in it, you can bet history will repeat itself in the 2010's being known as the decade of Win7 and IE 8
Windows 7 supports IE9 just fine. All that the corporate IT admin has to do is approve the update on WSUS. The real problem is that a lot of companies are stuck on XP for now; many of them will be there through 2014 when extended support ends, and some of them will continue muddling on even past then. XP doesn't support IE9, so these users will be stuck on IE8 forever until the computers die or the CIO finally bites the bullet and orders the upgrade. (Or until they decide to use Firefox or Chrome, but that is unlikely - IE isn't the best browser, but it does have the best Active Directory integration, which is extremely important to businesses.)
On the other hand, these are work computers, so the lack of support for flashy animations may not matter.
I wonder how much piracy would happen if publishers just trusted their users and released videos without horrible amounts of DRM
Almost certainly it would be no more nor less than what happens now. Anyone who wants to get bootlegged video content can do so very easily. DVD-ripping programs have been readily available for about a decade now, and everyone knows how to use Bittorrent. Putting DRM on streaming is silly; that horse left the barn long ago.
The problem is that for certain purposes, Linux just isn't a viable alternative because it does not contain production-quality support for ZFS. If you're building a NAS device, this is (or should be) a deal-breaker. All the existing Linux file systems suck, and even btrfs doesn't seem to take data integrity nearly as seriously as ZFS does.
And what makes you think that the IPv6 off-the-shelf routers won't default to a stateful firewall? In fact, I can't see any vendor not enabling that by default, and advertizing it in big bold letters (not the techno-jargon, but "Buy this box and keep the hackers out"). And the ISPs are likely to include such functionality in their cable/DSL modem, since they could benefit from fewer zombies on the network.
Do you really think the average end-user has any idea what a stateful firewall is? Hell, I work in the IT field, but generally don't deal with this side of things and couldn't give a detailed breakdown on the difference between a stateful and non-stateful firewall.
Currently, non-technical users can get reasonably decent protection just by plugging in an off-the-shelf router, since it does NAT and this requires a firewall by default. If IPv6 leads to users plugging unsecured devices directly into the public Internet, it will be step backward in security, not forward. Technobabble doesn't change that.
The vast majority of Windows 8 users will be new or inexperienced computer users. And it will be great for them.
No, they won't, and no it won't. The majority of Windows 8 users will have experience with previous versions of Windows, and the unnecessary changes will confuse the hell out of many of them.
There really aren't too many first-time computer users left, at least not in the First World.
I dream how YouTube will stop using that piece of shit... and go for 100% WebM and let IE suck on a WebM plugin..
Sorry, but WebM is inferior to H.264 in virtually every way. That said, there's no reason why YouTube couldn't determine what the browser supports, and target its output that way. Flash-compatible systems get that, others get HTML5 in either H.264 if available or WebM if not.
I don't understand why the open source browsers don't simply allow H.264 to be decoded through the hardware's built-in functionality. Nearly every GPU (discrete or integrated) made in the last 5+ years supports this.
I find that you need dozens of windows a hard thing to wrap my head around, I can't possibly imagine why, but I'm not going to doubt you since the way I work is similar (just with maybe four or five windows - add email and browser and it's up to 6 or 7).
I can't speak for the original poster, but I don't use tabbed browsing (and never will) so I routinely have over a dozen browser windows open at once.
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According to Slate, professional assassins are basically a Hollywood myth.
Unity has been described by the developers as being in active development up to this point.
Rolling out beta products as if they were finished is one of the major reasons why Linux on the desktop sucks.
First you get it working stably and completely, then you add it as an option, and then you set it as default if people like it.
Or to think about it another way: if Americans pooled all the money we spend on CDs, iTunes fees, etc. in just one single year, we could buy all the music, and actually get to keep it and do whatever we want with it.
That value of $6 billion will keep falling until we have a SCO of music that has only rights to old music left that it will use to make up annoying lawsuits.
But that old music matters; an awful lot of people care about it, and it isn't going away. It isn't like software where you can phase out an old legacy system once you have the new one online. People are probably still going to be listening to the Beatles decades from now.
The Logitech Revue has an Intel CE4100 SOC, which is about on par with the Atom processor in terms of CPU power, but can also do the full monte of 1080p hardware video decoding (and I think HDMI 1.3 audio bitstreaming as well). It was already down to $99 last time I checked, and if it drops further it could be a very attractive platform to play around with. (I believe someone has already rooted it.) It could serve as a very nice media streamer if someone ported XBMC to it, or with a streamlined Linux distro it might make an acceptable and extremely cheap PC for someone whose needs are limited to browsing, email, and watching videos.
According to Yahoo Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SNE), Sony's market cap is $17.49 billion. Apple's is $360.14 billion. So, yes, Sony is tiny compared to Apple from a financial perspective. The number of employees won't necessarily give Sony a major advantage against Apple where it matters.
So, EMI accounts for about one-third of the music sales in the country, and it's worth about $2 billion. That means the entire recording industry, copyrights and all, is worth about $6 billion total? Google could buy the whole thing out of its pocket change if it wanted to (and if regulators let it).
Heck, if we had one multi-billionaire who was devoted to the free content movement, he/she could put an end to the RIAA and music copyrights once and for all for a relatively small price.
Remind me again why these idiots have so much political power? Lots of other industries are worth a hell of a lot more than $6 billion and we never hear of Congress bending nearly this far backward for most of them. Even Senate malapportionment can't be an excuse here, since the music industry is overwhelmingly California-based and they have only two Senators just like every other state.
Sorry, OSX is inherently more secure than Windows. There was a guy who provided a free anti-virus program for Mac until Microsoft introduced Macro Viruses for Office which immediately caused the number of Mac viruses to jump to over 1,000. Now that's not saying that Windows isn't trying to catch up on security. The reality today is that many viruses are targeting installed software like Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash and the various browsers.
But the exploits you mention above have nothing to do with the OS at all. Office security bugs are not the same as Windows security bugs (except that they are the responsibility of the same company to fix). Indeed, as you pointed out, these same security problems affected Office on OSX as well as Windows. Likewise, if Adobe produces crappy software that allows arbitrary code execution due to vulnerabilities, how is this the fault of Windows? And unless you force users into a walled garden like iOS (which many users could not tolerate), you can't stop third party programs from doing bad stuff if the user *specifically authorized* said programs to run.
I think many security flaws we see today stem from the Unix security model all modern OSes inherited. The idea that the program is the user and should get all the user's permissions may have made some sense in the 1970s, but is absurd now. Still, Windows is no worse than OSX or Linux on this front. Ideally, I'd like to see a situation where apps can be sandboxed to only allow them to access the resources the user specifically permits. I know there are ways to do this now with fancy hacks, but none of them are ready for average users at this time. App developers should have to tell the OS through a manifest what resources their program needs, and the user should be able to review this and sanity-check it, or even specifically disable particular things. (For instance, they should be able to enforce through the OS that a specific application can't connect to the Internet, or can only read files from certain directories.)
I agree with your recommendations until you get to "Always use a router." I always use a commercial-grade firewall (SonicWALL TZ 100, for example) instead. The rest of your suggestions I don't follow except the last, "Don't download and run random crap."
Those rules are meant for the average Windows user. Of course if you have a professional hardware firewall that is going to be a superior alternative, but for the average user, a router you can buy for $30-$100 at Best Buy offers improved security and easy usability. For advanced users the rules could be summed up as "use common sense" – we already have a pretty good idea of what stuff is necessary to avoid malware and why.
Not enough money to switch to Mac...
That entirely depends on what price tag you put on an hour of downtime.
The cost of a virus? The joke that is System Restore from trying to recover from malware?
First of all, there are malware exploits for OSX as well as for Windows. Sure, there aren't as many, but that is because of Apple's much lower market share, not due to some inherent advantage of the system. There was certainly a time when Windows was much less secure than competing OSes, but that time ended some years ago.
The vast majority of malware exploits on newer versions of Windows can be avoided if the user follows a handful of simple, common-sense rules:
How many malware exploits for Windows do you know of that didn't involve at least one (and usually more) violation of the above rules?
"'There's a tremendous amount of R&D going into a different kind of TV set,' CEO Howard Stringer told the WSJ (in a paywalled article). ... [W]hat Apple and Sony agree on is that the traditional TV paradigm must evolve if the segment is to become profitable again. A new model is 'what weâ(TM)re all looking for,' Stringer confirmed, suggesting that 'we canâ(TM)t continue selling TV sets [the way we have been]. Every TV set we all make loses money.'"
Somehow this doesn't make me very enthusiastic about the prospect of "a new kind of TV." Sounds like they're just trying to come up with excuses to charge more money for essentially the same products. They don't seem to have any specific ideas about what to do aside from "we need to make more money."
What about freebsd or debian GNU/kFreeBSD?
Yes, FreeBSD could be a viable alternative due to its native ZFS support. In fact the FreeNAS distro is designed specifically for this. The Illumos/Nexenta releases based on OpenSolaris are also promising.
What you're proposing is the wrong way around: the rule is the rule; these labs don't exist for the pleasure of working there.
Los Alamos needs intelligent scientists - i.e. people with very, very high IQs. Virtually anyone working as a scientist at Los Alamos is smart enough to make millions as a quant on Wall Street, if they wanted to.
Is Los Alamos paying them millions? No. Therefore, they must be compensated in a non-financial manner - for example, by giving them a wide degree of workplace autonomy. If you insist on paying government-level wages *and* miring everyone in layers of meaningless, soul-killing bureaucracy, you can't expect your employees to be any better than mediocre.
Btrfs? How does it not take data integrity seriously? It supports checksums and redundancy on user data and metadata blocks.
According to Wikipedia: "Btrfs supports a very limited form of transaction without ACID semantics: rollback is not possible, only one transaction may run at a time and transactions are not atomic with respect to storage." No argument that it's still probably better than anything else Linux has, but ZFS is the gold standard of file systems.
Well, duh. Maybe if Oracle released ZFS under the GPL, it would be in the Linux kernel.
That doesn't explain why no one did a ground-up implementation of ZFS on Linux (there is a public spec) or why no file system designed for Linux itself has taken data integrity at all seriously.
I shouldn't pick on Linux exclusively, though, since neither Microsoft nor Apple seem to care about data integrity in their file systems either. The persistence of NTFS on Windows is just embarrassing.
Is there even a legal H.264 codec for Linux yet?
You can use VA-API or another such framework to pass the H.264 stream directly to the hardware for decoding. There are of course also software codecs in ffmpeg, but these carry patent implications, at least in the US. Sending the bitstream to hardware (which has already paid the license fee on the manufacturer side) should be safe.
Why does your application need to run in a browser at all? Wouldn't it make more sense just to use standard .NET, compile it as an exe, and push it out to your users?
With Windows 8 going to flop unless MS does something to save the desktop portion in it, you can bet history will repeat itself in the 2010's being known as the decade of Win7 and IE 8
Windows 7 supports IE9 just fine. All that the corporate IT admin has to do is approve the update on WSUS. The real problem is that a lot of companies are stuck on XP for now; many of them will be there through 2014 when extended support ends, and some of them will continue muddling on even past then. XP doesn't support IE9, so these users will be stuck on IE8 forever until the computers die or the CIO finally bites the bullet and orders the upgrade. (Or until they decide to use Firefox or Chrome, but that is unlikely - IE isn't the best browser, but it does have the best Active Directory integration, which is extremely important to businesses.)
On the other hand, these are work computers, so the lack of support for flashy animations may not matter.
I wonder how much piracy would happen if publishers just trusted their users and released videos without horrible amounts of DRM
Almost certainly it would be no more nor less than what happens now. Anyone who wants to get bootlegged video content can do so very easily. DVD-ripping programs have been readily available for about a decade now, and everyone knows how to use Bittorrent. Putting DRM on streaming is silly; that horse left the barn long ago.
The problem is that for certain purposes, Linux just isn't a viable alternative because it does not contain production-quality support for ZFS. If you're building a NAS device, this is (or should be) a deal-breaker. All the existing Linux file systems suck, and even btrfs doesn't seem to take data integrity nearly as seriously as ZFS does.
While it's true that Silverlight can do more than streaming video, that is the only thing anyone ever uses it for in the real world.
And what makes you think that the IPv6 off-the-shelf routers won't default to a stateful firewall? In fact, I can't see any vendor not enabling that by default, and advertizing it in big bold letters (not the techno-jargon, but "Buy this box and keep the hackers out"). And the ISPs are likely to include such functionality in their cable/DSL modem, since they could benefit from fewer zombies on the network.
Hopefully you are correct.
Do you really think the average end-user has any idea what a stateful firewall is? Hell, I work in the IT field, but generally don't deal with this side of things and couldn't give a detailed breakdown on the difference between a stateful and non-stateful firewall.
Currently, non-technical users can get reasonably decent protection just by plugging in an off-the-shelf router, since it does NAT and this requires a firewall by default. If IPv6 leads to users plugging unsecured devices directly into the public Internet, it will be step backward in security, not forward. Technobabble doesn't change that.
The vast majority of Windows 8 users will be new or inexperienced computer users. And it will be great for them.
No, they won't, and no it won't. The majority of Windows 8 users will have experience with previous versions of Windows, and the unnecessary changes will confuse the hell out of many of them.
There really aren't too many first-time computer users left, at least not in the First World.
I dream how YouTube will stop using that piece of shit... and go for 100% WebM and let IE suck on a WebM plugin..
Sorry, but WebM is inferior to H.264 in virtually every way. That said, there's no reason why YouTube couldn't determine what the browser supports, and target its output that way. Flash-compatible systems get that, others get HTML5 in either H.264 if available or WebM if not.
I don't understand why the open source browsers don't simply allow H.264 to be decoded through the hardware's built-in functionality. Nearly every GPU (discrete or integrated) made in the last 5+ years supports this.
I find that you need dozens of windows a hard thing to wrap my head around, I can't possibly imagine why, but I'm not going to doubt you since the way I work is similar (just with maybe four or five windows - add email and browser and it's up to 6 or 7).
I can't speak for the original poster, but I don't use tabbed browsing (and never will) so I routinely have over a dozen browser windows open at once.