I think it's that "our area" that is the major driving force behind the popularity of BitTorrent TV downloads, especially when you look at the global scope. I download US TV episodes all the time since I'm in the UK and the chances of me avoiding all spoilers for the 18 months or so it takes US shows to get to over the pond is pretty much nil, if they make it at all. I still watch the UK airings for the higher video quality, and I still buy the DVDs for some of the shows, so the studios most definitely are not out of pocket. I have absolutely no illusions that a court would see things that way of course, which is why this is precisely the kind of service that I've been waiting for since iTMS first arrived. But you watch; you just *know* that the studio execs are going to try and keep the staggered global release schedule in place for some reason, despite the fact that digital distribution makes it completely redundant.
I couldn't agree more, and kudos to ABC for being one of the first TV media companies to break ranks and try and embrace the inevitable future as well. Now if Apple can get other studios onboard and also flatten the staggered global release schedule for new series (which is completely pointless on a digital distribution network) then media nirvana can take a step closer. What on *earth* have the execs at the affiliates being doing the past few years that they've missed the fact that the music business in is absolute turmoil over digital distribution? They can hardly claim that they were so busy producing Reality and Car-Crash TV shows that they didn't realise the inevitability that they were next and Hollywood is going to follow.
Feh, who am I kidding. That's exactly what they are going to do, all the while frantically trying to buy legislation to protect their business model, no matter how shortsighted and dumb it makes them look.
I'd never agree to use a root DNS server hosted in a non-democratic country.
You'd better sign off the Internet now then, because according to http://www.root-servers.org/ quite a few of them are located in what you would probably class as "non-democratic countries", and far less than half are within the US.
Um. No. Not even close. Not even all of the root DNS servers managed by US companies and organisations are located in the US due to the fairly recent attempts to DDoS the root servers. There might only be one IP listed for [A-M].ROOT-SERVERS.NET, but each of those IPs has multiple physical hosts behind it that are distributed across the globe. At the present time, less than half of the actual boxes performing the root DNS service are located within the USA, so I think we can realistically expect one hell of a lot of political posturing over the next several months. Given the importance of the Internet to governments and Big Business, this could well turn out to be a bigger political issue than Kyoto.
I'm assuming that they are going to be using a Tarantella style front-end to run the remote applications via the browser from a huge farm of X servers at Google, in which case both the application and the data being worked on would indeed be on the Google servers. It might sound appallingly slow, but we use Tarantella like this to provide our customers with a view of chip designs as we produce the wafer masks and performance is more than adequate. Slightly slower than native, but not so that you would notice, and that's with a CAD package and serious graphical data from data files in the tens of GB, so OpenOffice.org should be fine.
Given the partnership with Sun, I think it's safe to say that the only application that may need to be installed is going to be a recent copy of Sun's JRE to run the web X11-client when you connect, which isn't too bad. You can of course load data from and save data to your local hard drive so Google won't need to retain a local copy, although this could well be an option given the huge storage network Google must have for GMail etc. Yes, that does make this a good place for three letter agencies to do some eavesdropping, but that assumes that Google won't raise holy hell about wiretapping laws if they try to do so on the quiet and that the paranoid or criminally inclined will be using the system anyway. Which they almost certainly won't be, at least, not unless they actually want to make a fast track reservation at Club Fed.
I'm not so sure about that. Sure, they've been beaten to the punch, but you can bet that if this takes off then Microsoft will release their own version of the technology. The big difference will be that if you want to use Microsoft WebOffice you will need to pay, it might be per use or per month, but you *will* have to pay, and that kind of on-going revenue stream isn't so much Microsoft's worst nightmare as their wettest dream.
Oh, I did I mention that all your data will belong to Microsoft?
"Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in."
That's a whole different kettle of fish to the saying the ISS was a mistake. Several NASA officials are on record to the effect that NASA didn't want to build the ISS in such a low orbit, but agreed to do so in order to accomodate the Russians. Some of that might be coloured by the failure of Skylab, but it was also to enable the station to be of use of the ISS as a launch point to the Moon and beyond. It's kind of ironic that with the ISS project starting to show serious signs of floundering that it's NASA that's currently having problems getting to it, despite the lower than desired orbit, and the focus of manned spaceflight has once again returned to visiting the Moon and reaching Mars.
I see there is already a growing list of known bad trackers out there, so this is just going to turn into a game of Whack-a-Mole between the parties responsible for the bad tracker and the downloaders. Problem is, there are an awfully large number of people trying to download the files; it's not going to take very long at all before bad trackers are detected and their IPs permanantly blocked. I'd expect this to happen even quicker on Torrent listing sites that allow their users to provide feedback on a per Torrent basis or have forums for feedback. And since we're talking about a community built on sharing data, I doubt that the individual sites are going to be keeping their lists to themselves either...
Not withstanding the fact that bandwidth is cheap. If someone finds their latest Torrent download has frozen at 98%, they are probably just going to shrug it off and find another Torrent, only by this point there will have been enough time for forums to get some feedback about which Torrents are actually good. All this is going to buy the Studios is a short delay in the time it takes someone to get their files, probably less than a day for even the highest quality feature film. Plus, they'll almost certainly be cursing the studios even more for the delay instead of thinking "Gee, maybe I should go and spend some money".
Somehow, I suspect that this is yet another instance of a media company being taken to the cleaners with a "magic bullet" solution by a group of snake oil salesmen. Heck, it might even be some of the same bunch that told them DRM would prevent people taking unauthorised copies of audios CDs, and we all know how well that's working out for them. I can't help but wonder what the situation would be like if instead of assuming all of their customers were crooks they had spent that money on providing tangible extras people might actually want and/or reducing prices...
That would be the so called "Red Book" specification which defines the audio CD format and certainly does not include copy protection in the spec. Most copy protection schemes out there involve deliberately breaking the Red Book specification by tampering with the data to prevent the audio being copied to PCs etc. Since adherance to the specifications is explicitly required to qualify for the "Compact Disc" logo on the box and disc, this is why you don't see that logo on music CDs as much as you used to. As an aside, simply auto-running an application from a data track, whether to try and "add value" by providing some multimedia content or make a lame attempt at DRM, is within the bounds of the relevant format ("Yellow Book", IIRC).
All of which, given the title, is going to make it somwehat ironic if Texas' upcoming CD entitled "Red Book" includes any form of copy protection...
It's not so much that there isn't a patch this month, as that Microsoft has decided to hold off on releasing a patch due to stability concerns, which is laudable. So, while we have no patches this month, we also have a known unpatched, remotely exploitable hole in Internet Explorer until the eventual release. The big question is, will Microsoft release an out of cycle patch to fix the issue, or will be have a full month of PCs getting owned just because they visited the wrong URL using IE6?
Don't let the word "Java" put you off and click here. It definitely scales that high with ease, does all the mail transfer protocols that you require, has webmail plus it can interface to SMS, SpamAssassin and AV tools. Not to mention the rest of the Sun Java Enterprise System of course, especially the LDAP server which makes delegated account administration much easier. Most importantly for you it scales very well indeed and supports clustering which should help with your uptime requirements.
That said, it's a beast of a system, not the easiest thing in the world to administrate by a long shot and Sun's commitment to further development seems a little "lacking" lately. It's also not especially cheap, but you should be able to negotiate some massive discounts on a deployment of that scale (well, what did you expect from Sun?). You should definitely also be thinking about getting a few people on Sun certification courses if you do go down that route.
Plenty of big companies, even those with most of their workers outsourced to China, could do this quite easily if they were so inclined. The trick would be to whitelist the IP addresses that they actually need to do business out of the tens of millions of IP addresses assigned to China, and then block the rest. If you wanted to be really slick, then you could even route traffic from the questionable IP blocks through a dedicated firewall to avoid bogging down the rest of your traffic with a huge list of firewall rulesets.
Sure, this approach isn't going to be practical in businesses that deal with large numbers of companies or agencies in China, but if you are just dealing with a handful of companies then you are fine. Plus, the chances are that even if your company is heavily involved with China, then it might not be for some of the other rowdy IP blocks on the Internet and could apply the blocks there instead. Or just concentrate on the large blocks of IPs assigned to home users; with the prevalance of BotNets at the moment, that's where the vast majority of the hostile traffic seems to be coming from anyway.
It seems that the system needs some data to establish a baseline and before that happens the default rating is "raised concern". My personal mailserver is in this category, while my work server which has been seen is "Inoffensive" and a healthy shade of green. There are a few other glitches to be ironed out, but all in all this looks like it will be very useful anti-spam resource once a decent amount of data has been collated.
"Liquid". HELLADS actually stands for "High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System", despite what Yahoo! would have you believe. Maybe Yahoo! are employing ex-Slashdot editors now; they do seem to copy everything else Google does...;)
Free development of new features, some of which you might not otherwise have thought of yourselves if you can get a development community started.
Free beta testing across a broader range of users and operating environments which should identify and enable the fixing of bugs far sooner.
Free positive P.R. for your company, especially if things really take off.
Free advertising for your company as well if you brand the package with your company logo and colours by default. Lots of people don't bother taking that kind of stuff out if it's not too obtrusive.
There's far more things that can be free than just "beer", and it's libre too, so you can even have some free Karma.
Realistically though some of that is going to need kickstarting which will require some small financial and time outlay. Things like provisioning the initial website and forums for your applications users to bounce ideas and code back and forth. Some man hours, probably yours, to apply patches and integrate new features until such time as you hopefully have an active enough community to let others external to the company help maintain the code on their own time and dime. Be realistic and give them some negatives too, albeit with a positive spin, to show that you've thought things through and demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the expense.
Oh, and if you do eventually get the product GPL'd, submit the news to Slashdot as a "Slashback"; that should give your fledgling userbase and development community a running start!
Nah, that'll never work. You'd just have a quick.cum boom and a bust.
Personally, I'd think they'd have far more success with this idea of tying up all of the porn into one gTLD if they had proposed a ".bush" gTLD and then perverted it... That way we'd really have the problem licked; all of the pron and endless Pro/Anti NeoCon rhetoric caged into one easily filterable place should anyone choose to do so.
Not that I think the idea is ever really going to work even if it does get approved though.
I not so sure a consumer version really needs a command line utility anyway.
Sorry, perhaps I should have said "desktop" version instead. Sure, the average home user probably doesn't even know that CMD.EXE exists, but that version of Windows also becomes the corporate desktop OS. I was actually looking forward to having a half-decent shell scripting environment on Windows because it does have a lot of administrative uses. Far more functionality in login scripts primarily, but also for command line file management, which should make the admin of networked Windows desktops much easier.
Because it comes with a lot of unneccessary baggage when all you want to do is write login/admin scripts that are beyond CMD.EXE and detest WSH.EXE with a passion. Or just do some file management tasks, which I generally can do far quicker from a command line than any GUI tool I've found so far, but again find CMD.EXE retarded. I would use Cygwin, but since I have SSH and Reflection/X on my own Windows boxes I find it much easier to run *NIX applications on a *NIX box.
You might want to take a look at JP Software's 4NT and Take Command products here, and then combine it with the Windows ports of many GNU tools that can be found here. Between the two, you can do pretty much everything that you can do in BASH and then some, the only drawbacks being that it's not portable and pipes on Windows *still can't be parallelised. There is a port of csh for Windows knocking about too, but aside from a general lack of stability in the version I tried some time ago, csh seems to have far more portability issues than the other *NIX shells.
All of the promised new and potentially interesting "pillars" of Longhorn/Vista have been snipped, and now they have cut the promised wonder-shell from the consumer version too? The only thing left that Vista now seems to offer over XP is a new interface theme and the probabilty that you will also need a new PC in order to meet it's realistic hardware requirements. I could get all of that right now without the hardware upgrade using any of several Windows desktop "enhancement" tools. Oh, and IE7, which will also be available for XP anyway for those who haven't already switched over to Firefox or Opera. Seriously, is there *anything* else in Windows Vista that I might actually want to upgrade for?
Is this really the best response that Microsoft can come up with at a time when there is so much increased dissatisfaction with their endless upgrade cycle? If it is, then the F/OSS communities should probably increase their efforts to target the corporate desktop, because Microsoft doesn't appear to have anything of substance for several years! I'll bet Steve Jobs is laughing too; he's certainly picked the right time to go through the traumas of switching architecture.
Not only that, but apparently "[women] are more susceptible to breast and ovarian cancers.". So, are New Scientist implying that there is a chance that men going to Mars could actually develop breast/ovarian cancer or that they are going to change into women, *then* develop breast/ovarian cancer?
They probably meant "also", but seriously, doesn't *anyone* proof-read anymore?
Even if the "open access point" defense does work, the access point owner will go through a lot more trouble than it's worth to prove themselves innocent.
But that's just it, isn't it? Although it's starting to look a little tattered around the edges, most western democracies still subscribe to the "innocent until proven guilty" line. Plus, as the Michael Jackson trial showed, if there is a single shred of reasonable doubt then the judge/jury is supposed to return a verdict of not guilty. In theory, this is even supposed to apply even if your personal belief is that the accused is guilty as sin, although perhaps not in practice.
So, by those two legal tenets, the onus should lie on the music industry to prove that it really was you sharing the files, or at least were aware of the sharing going on, as in your drug dealer analogy. If there are no "unauthorized" music files on your PC, nor any evidence that there ever were, then that's reasonable doubt in my book. Even if there were said files on the PC, there is a already a legal precedent in the UK for acquittal in a computer crime case on the grounds that the PC had been compromised and may have been used without the owner's knowledge. In that case, I personally think that the claim was bunk, but even so I'd have to admit that it still would qualify as reasonable doubt in my book and I've have gone for a not guilty verdict if I was on the jury.
Of course, IANAL, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the one testing this theory either.
That not necessarily as bad as it sounds. Yes, the sites will break, but the fix should hopefully be simply to bypass most, and hopefully all, of the IE specific hacks and let IE7 see the same code as other, more standards compliant browsers. Not that Firefox, Opera et al are without their own quirks, but this should hopefully result in code that is much easier maintain going forward.
Unless of course, you are talking about those web designers and HTML design application writers who only support IE and made full use of all the Microsoft non-standard extensions... Well, fsck them when (not if) their sites and applications go seriously south with IE7; it's their shortsighted kowtowing to Microsoft's non-standards that got us into this mess in the first place. Maybe once they've endured some of the pain that the rest of us have been going through the last several years they'll learn an important lesson about sticking to the standards instead of trying to get a few extra bells and whistles. Or not.
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I think it's that "our area" that is the major driving force behind the popularity of BitTorrent TV downloads, especially when you look at the global scope. I download US TV episodes all the time since I'm in the UK and the chances of me avoiding all spoilers for the 18 months or so it takes US shows to get to over the pond is pretty much nil, if they make it at all. I still watch the UK airings for the higher video quality, and I still buy the DVDs for some of the shows, so the studios most definitely are not out of pocket. I have absolutely no illusions that a court would see things that way of course, which is why this is precisely the kind of service that I've been waiting for since iTMS first arrived. But you watch; you just *know* that the studio execs are going to try and keep the staggered global release schedule in place for some reason, despite the fact that digital distribution makes it completely redundant.
Feh, who am I kidding. That's exactly what they are going to do, all the while frantically trying to buy legislation to protect their business model, no matter how shortsighted and dumb it makes them look.
I guess this means that you now have to prove that you can "walk the walk" before you can "talk the talk" now?
You'd better sign off the Internet now then, because according to http://www.root-servers.org/ quite a few of them are located in what you would probably class as "non-democratic countries", and far less than half are within the US.
Um. No. Not even close. Not even all of the root DNS servers managed by US companies and organisations are located in the US due to the fairly recent attempts to DDoS the root servers. There might only be one IP listed for [A-M].ROOT-SERVERS.NET, but each of those IPs has multiple physical hosts behind it that are distributed across the globe. At the present time, less than half of the actual boxes performing the root DNS service are located within the USA, so I think we can realistically expect one hell of a lot of political posturing over the next several months. Given the importance of the Internet to governments and Big Business, this could well turn out to be a bigger political issue than Kyoto.
Given the partnership with Sun, I think it's safe to say that the only application that may need to be installed is going to be a recent copy of Sun's JRE to run the web X11-client when you connect, which isn't too bad. You can of course load data from and save data to your local hard drive so Google won't need to retain a local copy, although this could well be an option given the huge storage network Google must have for GMail etc. Yes, that does make this a good place for three letter agencies to do some eavesdropping, but that assumes that Google won't raise holy hell about wiretapping laws if they try to do so on the quiet and that the paranoid or criminally inclined will be using the system anyway. Which they almost certainly won't be, at least, not unless they actually want to make a fast track reservation at Club Fed.
Oh, I did I mention that all your data will belong to Microsoft?
That's a whole different kettle of fish to the saying the ISS was a mistake. Several NASA officials are on record to the effect that NASA didn't want to build the ISS in such a low orbit, but agreed to do so in order to accomodate the Russians. Some of that might be coloured by the failure of Skylab, but it was also to enable the station to be of use of the ISS as a launch point to the Moon and beyond. It's kind of ironic that with the ISS project starting to show serious signs of floundering that it's NASA that's currently having problems getting to it, despite the lower than desired orbit, and the focus of manned spaceflight has once again returned to visiting the Moon and reaching Mars.
Not withstanding the fact that bandwidth is cheap. If someone finds their latest Torrent download has frozen at 98%, they are probably just going to shrug it off and find another Torrent, only by this point there will have been enough time for forums to get some feedback about which Torrents are actually good. All this is going to buy the Studios is a short delay in the time it takes someone to get their files, probably less than a day for even the highest quality feature film. Plus, they'll almost certainly be cursing the studios even more for the delay instead of thinking "Gee, maybe I should go and spend some money".
Somehow, I suspect that this is yet another instance of a media company being taken to the cleaners with a "magic bullet" solution by a group of snake oil salesmen. Heck, it might even be some of the same bunch that told them DRM would prevent people taking unauthorised copies of audios CDs, and we all know how well that's working out for them. I can't help but wonder what the situation would be like if instead of assuming all of their customers were crooks they had spent that money on providing tangible extras people might actually want and/or reducing prices...
All of which, given the title, is going to make it somwehat ironic if Texas' upcoming CD entitled "Red Book" includes any form of copy protection...
It's not so much that there isn't a patch this month, as that Microsoft has decided to hold off on releasing a patch due to stability concerns, which is laudable. So, while we have no patches this month, we also have a known unpatched, remotely exploitable hole in Internet Explorer until the eventual release. The big question is, will Microsoft release an out of cycle patch to fix the issue, or will be have a full month of PCs getting owned just because they visited the wrong URL using IE6?
That said, it's a beast of a system, not the easiest thing in the world to administrate by a long shot and Sun's commitment to further development seems a little "lacking" lately. It's also not especially cheap, but you should be able to negotiate some massive discounts on a deployment of that scale (well, what did you expect from Sun?). You should definitely also be thinking about getting a few people on Sun certification courses if you do go down that route.
Given the current situation in Iraq I think it's actually more likely to be "fanat.iq"...
Sure, this approach isn't going to be practical in businesses that deal with large numbers of companies or agencies in China, but if you are just dealing with a handful of companies then you are fine. Plus, the chances are that even if your company is heavily involved with China, then it might not be for some of the other rowdy IP blocks on the Internet and could apply the blocks there instead. Or just concentrate on the large blocks of IPs assigned to home users; with the prevalance of BotNets at the moment, that's where the vast majority of the hostile traffic seems to be coming from anyway.
It seems that the system needs some data to establish a baseline and before that happens the default rating is "raised concern". My personal mailserver is in this category, while my work server which has been seen is "Inoffensive" and a healthy shade of green. There are a few other glitches to be ironed out, but all in all this looks like it will be very useful anti-spam resource once a decent amount of data has been collated.
"Liquid". HELLADS actually stands for "High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System", despite what Yahoo! would have you believe. Maybe Yahoo! are employing ex-Slashdot editors now; they do seem to copy everything else Google does... ;)
- Free development of new features, some of which you might not otherwise have thought of yourselves if you can get a development community started.
- Free beta testing across a broader range of users and operating environments which should identify and enable the fixing of bugs far sooner.
- Free positive P.R. for your company, especially if things really take off.
- Free advertising for your company as well if you brand the package with your company logo and colours by default. Lots of people don't bother taking that kind of stuff out if it's not too obtrusive.
There's far more things that can be free than just "beer", and it's libre too, so you can even have some free Karma.Realistically though some of that is going to need kickstarting which will require some small financial and time outlay. Things like provisioning the initial website and forums for your applications users to bounce ideas and code back and forth. Some man hours, probably yours, to apply patches and integrate new features until such time as you hopefully have an active enough community to let others external to the company help maintain the code on their own time and dime. Be realistic and give them some negatives too, albeit with a positive spin, to show that you've thought things through and demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the expense.
Oh, and if you do eventually get the product GPL'd, submit the news to Slashdot as a "Slashback"; that should give your fledgling userbase and development community a running start!
Personally, I'd think they'd have far more success with this idea of tying up all of the porn into one gTLD if they had proposed a ".bush" gTLD and then perverted it... That way we'd really have the problem licked; all of the pron and endless Pro/Anti NeoCon rhetoric caged into one easily filterable place should anyone choose to do so.
Not that I think the idea is ever really going to work even if it does get approved though.
Sorry, perhaps I should have said "desktop" version instead. Sure, the average home user probably doesn't even know that CMD.EXE exists, but that version of Windows also becomes the corporate desktop OS. I was actually looking forward to having a half-decent shell scripting environment on Windows because it does have a lot of administrative uses. Far more functionality in login scripts primarily, but also for command line file management, which should make the admin of networked Windows desktops much easier.
Because it comes with a lot of unneccessary baggage when all you want to do is write login/admin scripts that are beyond CMD.EXE and detest WSH.EXE with a passion. Or just do some file management tasks, which I generally can do far quicker from a command line than any GUI tool I've found so far, but again find CMD.EXE retarded. I would use Cygwin, but since I have SSH and Reflection/X on my own Windows boxes I find it much easier to run *NIX applications on a *NIX box.
You might want to take a look at JP Software's 4NT and Take Command products here, and then combine it with the Windows ports of many GNU tools that can be found here. Between the two, you can do pretty much everything that you can do in BASH and then some, the only drawbacks being that it's not portable and pipes on Windows *still can't be parallelised. There is a port of csh for Windows knocking about too, but aside from a general lack of stability in the version I tried some time ago, csh seems to have far more portability issues than the other *NIX shells.
Is this really the best response that Microsoft can come up with at a time when there is so much increased dissatisfaction with their endless upgrade cycle? If it is, then the F/OSS communities should probably increase their efforts to target the corporate desktop, because Microsoft doesn't appear to have anything of substance for several years! I'll bet Steve Jobs is laughing too; he's certainly picked the right time to go through the traumas of switching architecture.
They probably meant "also", but seriously, doesn't *anyone* proof-read anymore?
But that's just it, isn't it? Although it's starting to look a little tattered around the edges, most western democracies still subscribe to the "innocent until proven guilty" line. Plus, as the Michael Jackson trial showed, if there is a single shred of reasonable doubt then the judge/jury is supposed to return a verdict of not guilty. In theory, this is even supposed to apply even if your personal belief is that the accused is guilty as sin, although perhaps not in practice.
So, by those two legal tenets, the onus should lie on the music industry to prove that it really was you sharing the files, or at least were aware of the sharing going on, as in your drug dealer analogy. If there are no "unauthorized" music files on your PC, nor any evidence that there ever were, then that's reasonable doubt in my book. Even if there were said files on the PC, there is a already a legal precedent in the UK for acquittal in a computer crime case on the grounds that the PC had been compromised and may have been used without the owner's knowledge. In that case, I personally think that the claim was bunk, but even so I'd have to admit that it still would qualify as reasonable doubt in my book and I've have gone for a not guilty verdict if I was on the jury.
Of course, IANAL, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the one testing this theory either.
Unless of course, you are talking about those web designers and HTML design application writers who only support IE and made full use of all the Microsoft non-standard extensions... Well, fsck them when (not if) their sites and applications go seriously south with IE7; it's their shortsighted kowtowing to Microsoft's non-standards that got us into this mess in the first place. Maybe once they've endured some of the pain that the rest of us have been going through the last several years they'll learn an important lesson about sticking to the standards instead of trying to get a few extra bells and whistles. Or not.