Anyone who doesn't do financial due diligence on their key suppliers is an idiot... this is true for ASPs, just as it is for manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, and other key functions companies often have someone else take care of.
Besides, it's usually only the fly-by-night companies that disappear completely when they go bankrupt... most established companies keep operations going for a least a few rounds while they attempt to restructure debt, etc... Plenty of time to get data back. Keeping the lights on is often a LOT cheaper than trying to sell / grow a business.
In any case, financial strength should be a considerable factor in choosing an ASP. If you choose some two-bit operation that could disappear suddenly, that's your own fault. I'm not saying that there aren't risks or that ASPs are some sort of magical panacea... but there are risks in running your own stuff too.
In most cases, ASPs are not cheaper than doing it yourself. Check out a few major ASP websites- www.usi.net, www.corio.com, etc.... You'll find that there's very little mention of cost.
What you'll find is all about reliability and assurance. The premise is that an ASP can build out a first-class data center, backup systems, network infrastructure, etc... and split the costs over a large number of customers, offering a highly reliable service for a comparable cost to doing it yourself. If you're a really huge business, you can afford this stuff yourself, but if you're a small or mid-size business, the startup investment of building out a really good infrastructure (from generator-backed UPS to SAN systems) for yourself won't be justified.
Smart ASPs allow their customer to scrutinize their operations- they provide detailed reports on their perfmance, and grant customers the right to audit their own systems to ensure that they are complying with their contractual obligations.
In a lot of ways, working with an ASP can actually reduce risk because there's a contract that specifies precisely what service will be delivered (which is usually heavily negotiated).
What if your internal IT department didn't have proper backups? The average company is not in business to run e-mail servers and such, and while many companies have excellent IT, in many others it's an afterthought. If it's tax time, do you think the accountants have any more *control* over getting a crashed server back up internally than they do if it's an ASP? The ASP's entire existence is dependent on doing these things well... a failure like this could kill their reputation, trust, and therefore business. If it's an IT department, oh well, someone gets fired. Trust me- ASPs are *incented* not to have this kind of thing happen.
Yahoo and Hotmail are NOT indicative of services designed for businesses. You're right that anyone using them for mission-critical business data is an idiot. You get what you pay for.
This may be an issue for free / cheap consumer services, but I've seen the contracts the corporations sign with ASPs, and data ownership (including what happens to the data in the circumstance of contract or service termination) is ALWAYS in there and favorable to the corporation.
A key difference of using an ASP (compared to internal IT) is that contract. It spells out expectations and committments explicitly, and if they are not met, penalties. In my experience, corporate lawyers have a full understanding of the implications of that, and the contracts are long and detailed, covering everything from traditional IT SLAs to intellectual property, business continuity, and privacy / confidentiality.
In some ways, a corporation can have *more* "business" control over data and such with an ASP because the contract puts it all on the table.
Again, this does not apply to the bogus unnegotiated click-through agreements on consumer services, but you get what you pay for.
What do you think you're doing? It can only be a good thing of the knee-jerk, mindless flames / trolls masquerading as questions get posted here, rather than in the other forum where they might actually be submitted. Do we really want the questions of people too clueless even to read the/. blurb before posting to go there?
Again, it's a *specific* method of utilizing an MPEG coprocessor that apparently has some additional intelligence about circular audio / video buffers, indexing in the buffers, processing timestamp data from digital video feeds, and a bunch of other stuff that makes it a lot different (and likely better) that what your typical PC video encoder card is up to.
I can already hear the flamethrowers warming up from people who haven't bothered to read the press release or the patent filing. In an attempt to head off what will undoubtably be some common misconceptions:
1. The patent does not cover timeshifting- it covers a specific implementation of timeshifting. They reference use of VCRs and hard-disk based video recording systems in the prior-art section.
2. The primary gist seems to be the use of a MPEG-specific coprocessor in a certain way that unloads the main CPU from having to do any video encoding / decoding work. IANAL but this does not seem to cover PVR functionality implemented in a PC, given the way most videocards are implemented.
3. There's a lot of other stuff in there about refinements to the technique- sniffing out program start / stop info by scanning closed captioning information, and so on. Seems legitimately innovative to me.
Of course, if you believe the whole patent system is bunk all of this is irrelevant, but it doesn't look like anything to freak out about. However, it does reference a previous patent on hard-drive video recording dating back to 1994 that might be more troublesome... but I haven't read it.
I've heard the MP3s some of my friends download. Thanks to Xing, most of them sound like utter crap. I'm no "golden ear", but when I can tell a major difference on POS computer speakers (without comparing to original source) I know that it's bad.
I admit it- I'm a music junkie, and through my CD purchases, have been supporting the RIAA. I'm a very good customer of theirs. I feel very ambivalent about Napster, and have never shared an MP3 with anyone.
BUT- as soon as I unwrap a CD I rip and encode it as a high quality MP3. It goes back into the case, and from that point on I primarily listen only to the MP3, whether it be on my stereo, computer, laptop, or Rio (don't have a car player).
I know I'm a geek through and through and that relatively few other people in this country exercise their "fair use" this way. I've been extremely scrupulous in upholding the rights of the copywright owners, I've fattened their wallets, and what am I going to get for it? They're going to try to f**k me over.
I will be the first in line to download the "crack" when it comes, DMCA or not. They're turning me into a "criminal".
As is pointed out 1000 times in the responses to any article about Transmeta, reducing processor power consumption alone won't give you a notebook with great battery life. The display has been a big reason for that.
If OLEDs live up to their promise, low-power processors like Crusoe will become much more attractive.
Seriously... think about it. Tivo has the potential to be come as (or more) influential than Nielson ratings- ie, what their data says could determine what is programmed.
Which means that if all "geeks" (replace with demographic term of your choice) opt out, "geek" viewing choices will not be reflected in the data, and "geek" programming will become less financially attractive to networks (because they think nobody's watching it).
They block TCP Port 25, but they allow relaying through their mail servers for other domains IF you're part of their network. You can read about it at http://help.earthlink.net/port25.
I'd bet that they are putting some form of blocking / throttling intelligence into their mail servers. Sure, you could do this in filters with a sophisticated enough firewall, but I'm not aware of any products that have that level of sophistication AND can handle the kind of traffic they do at a reasonable expense. Mail servers are designed to understand mail, so it's much easier to put the intelligence there.
Coverage for the service plan is really weak. Although "Georgia" is listed in the quote below from the Visor website, I live 5 miles from downtown Atlanta, and my zipcode isn't covered. What's the point of rolling out a device like this with such weak coverage? So many of the people that need something like this travel extensively.
Regional Rollout
Handspring will be rolling out service coverage on a regional basis over the next several months, beginning with Pacific Bell Wireless and BellSouth Mobility. We currently have coverage in California, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. We expect to be adding both VoiceStream and Powertel in the new year.
I know that there's some rules that, if followed, allow things like Shoutcast and other Internet-only music broadcasting to be legal (in theory). I'm not aware of Shoutcast stations being required to pay fees to RIAA members. Will this change that (or at least the legal status of Shoutcast?)
She's a graduate student, and wanted to be able to type up notes in class. She already had a Visor, and since she walks to school, she didn't want to lug around a laptop the size we could afford (smaller being more expensive). There's also the matter that nobody else uses a computer in class- she didn't want to be conspicuous hooking a big machine.
She's been using the Stowaway / Visor combination for a whole semester now, and it's been perfect, with two exceptions. First, it wasn't any use in her Greek class (nonalphabetical character set). Second, the cool-ass folding keyboard attracted much more attention for the first few weeks than a laptop would.:-)
Even though the Stowaway feels sort of flimsy when unfolded, it seems quite durable when packed away (she carries it in the pocket of her backpack, which gets banged around a bit). Even with heavy use, it's holding up very well- no obvious wear.
It took me a few minutes with the thing to figure out how it got so skinny and still have decent key travel. The secret is that all of the keys are actually depressed when it's folded up. Very clever engineering indeed.
Trinitron is a tube technology. This thing is for projection systems. Perhaps it could be scaled down to tube-size, but that certainly isn't the focus (ahem) of the article, which talks aobut its use in theatre scale systems (with a brief mention of home projection).
The article didn't say that.
on
Open Networking
·
· Score: 3
The article said "Rain and walls also clog the pipes." This is different than saying 802.11b won't go through walls at all.
I'm typing on my laptop using a Lucent 802.11b card now, and I can tell you that walls do "clog" 2.4GHz signals. My data rate drops from 11Mb/s to 2Mb/s if I walk out my back door and sit on my porch.
These "community network" folks are pushing weak signals at distances they weren't designed for. Walls would do significant damage to their signal strength.
She's completely computer-illiterate, and she has been using an I-Opener for e-mail pretty successfully. She's lost most of her hearing, so it's really made it possible for her to communicate with family more regularly and easily than she could on the phone. A PC is waaay too complicated for her- she learned to learn by rote, and the fact that I could fit click-by-click instructions for doing I-Opener e-mail on one side of a piece of paper is the only reason she uses it successfully.
I think the lesson here is that the market for peripherals for the permanently computer illiterate is not big enough to sustain a company like I-Opener. Too bad, because there aren't a lot of good alternatives for them.
You make much of Bush's experience as governor of Texas. But being governer of Texas actually doesn't mean much- as a remnant of reconstruction-era politics, Texas has one of the constitutionally weakest gubernatorial offices in the country, with the governer wielding less real power than the lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller or land commissioner.
So, on the whole I think that web services are a good thing, but it seems to me that this will subtly undermine the intent of the GPL.
Think about it- the protections in the GPL are entirely founded on the idea that the primary potential commercial benefit from software comes from redistributing it in compiled form- shipping bits. The GPL provides protections so that "Free" (as in Freedom) code is not exploited in closed source programs (which traditionally are closed so that the company can sell them).
If the software is provided as a service and never leaves the company's doors, they can use and modify the Free code all they want in "closed source" programs without running afoul of the GPL. What formerly stopped software companies from doing this is that selling the software was the only way to make money off of it. But now, you can put up some servers in a datacenter, and make all the money you did before (even more!) and pilfer all the Free software you want to do it.
I also work in the application service industry, and I'm not sure you completely grasp what's happening here.
The fact is that most businesses (especially small and medium-sized ones) have no idea what to do with "control over the software you use". Whether there's a "real" shortage of IT skill or not, it's simply not affordable for many companies to install, operate and maintain the kind of complex application infrastructure that will be necessary to compete. Especially a smaller company.
I'm not convinced that this stuff applies to apps like Office, and UDDI actually has very little to do with that kind of app. It's focused on the back-end communication between components of various apps. For example, rather than buying credit card authorization software for your e-commerce website or having to recode to the proprietary standards a web hosting service would require, you could do a directory lookup for appropriate services and download a complete XML description of the interface which is easy to plug into (and switch out for a competitive provider if the service sucks).
Also, there's nothing that says that the company that wrote the software is going to be the company running it. Sure, Microsoft will have office.net and exchange.net, but so will a ton of other companies. So what if you can't get your hands on the bits? This hasn't been an impediment to sites like Yahoo or Mapquest.
The real question is what will become of the GPL, which is based on the traditional "product" model of software and assumes that the primary commercial benefit to software comes from redistributing binaries. But that's a topic for another post.
Blockbuster's renting them. The store my brother works at had 5 available for $20 / 5 days. And they were all there when we rented one Saturday evening... it's a (relatively) cheap way to get a fix without waiting in line or paying big $$$$.
Slashdot Mirror
This post was intended as a reply to "Unsurprising"...
Quote:
"If this was a rocky asteroid, then it probably measured between 1 and 2 meters across and weighed 30 or so metric tons."
That sounds at least "car sized" by any definition I can think of.
If a car-sized meteor*ite* landed, it would definitely been bigger news...
Anyone who doesn't do financial due diligence on their key suppliers is an idiot... this is true for ASPs, just as it is for manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, and other key functions companies often have someone else take care of.
Besides, it's usually only the fly-by-night companies that disappear completely when they go bankrupt... most established companies keep operations going for a least a few rounds while they attempt to restructure debt, etc... Plenty of time to get data back. Keeping the lights on is often a LOT cheaper than trying to sell / grow a business.
In any case, financial strength should be a considerable factor in choosing an ASP. If you choose some two-bit operation that could disappear suddenly, that's your own fault. I'm not saying that there aren't risks or that ASPs are some sort of magical panacea... but there are risks in running your own stuff too.
In most cases, ASPs are not cheaper than doing it yourself. Check out a few major ASP websites- www.usi.net, www.corio.com, etc.... You'll find that there's very little mention of cost.
What you'll find is all about reliability and assurance. The premise is that an ASP can build out a first-class data center, backup systems, network infrastructure, etc... and split the costs over a large number of customers, offering a highly reliable service for a comparable cost to doing it yourself. If you're a really huge business, you can afford this stuff yourself, but if you're a small or mid-size business, the startup investment of building out a really good infrastructure (from generator-backed UPS to SAN systems) for yourself won't be justified.
Smart ASPs allow their customer to scrutinize their operations- they provide detailed reports on their perfmance, and grant customers the right to audit their own systems to ensure that they are complying with their contractual obligations.
In a lot of ways, working with an ASP can actually reduce risk because there's a contract that specifies precisely what service will be delivered (which is usually heavily negotiated).
What if your internal IT department didn't have proper backups? The average company is not in business to run e-mail servers and such, and while many companies have excellent IT, in many others it's an afterthought. If it's tax time, do you think the accountants have any more *control* over getting a crashed server back up internally than they do if it's an ASP? The ASP's entire existence is dependent on doing these things well... a failure like this could kill their reputation, trust, and therefore business. If it's an IT department, oh well, someone gets fired. Trust me- ASPs are *incented* not to have this kind of thing happen.
Yahoo and Hotmail are NOT indicative of services designed for businesses. You're right that anyone using them for mission-critical business data is an idiot. You get what you pay for.
This may be an issue for free / cheap consumer services, but I've seen the contracts the corporations sign with ASPs, and data ownership (including what happens to the data in the circumstance of contract or service termination) is ALWAYS in there and favorable to the corporation.
A key difference of using an ASP (compared to internal IT) is that contract. It spells out expectations and committments explicitly, and if they are not met, penalties. In my experience, corporate lawyers have a full understanding of the implications of that, and the contracts are long and detailed, covering everything from traditional IT SLAs to intellectual property, business continuity, and privacy / confidentiality.
In some ways, a corporation can have *more* "business" control over data and such with an ASP because the contract puts it all on the table.
Again, this does not apply to the bogus unnegotiated click-through agreements on consumer services, but you get what you pay for.
What do you think you're doing? It can only be a good thing of the knee-jerk, mindless flames / trolls masquerading as questions get posted here, rather than in the other forum where they might actually be submitted. Do we really want the questions of people too clueless even to read the /. blurb before posting to go there?
Notice I said "in a certain way"
Again, it's a *specific* method of utilizing an MPEG coprocessor that apparently has some additional intelligence about circular audio / video buffers, indexing in the buffers, processing timestamp data from digital video feeds, and a bunch of other stuff that makes it a lot different (and likely better) that what your typical PC video encoder card is up to.
I can already hear the flamethrowers warming up from people who haven't bothered to read the press release or the patent filing. In an attempt to head off what will undoubtably be some common misconceptions:
1. The patent does not cover timeshifting- it covers a specific implementation of timeshifting. They reference use of VCRs and hard-disk based video recording systems in the prior-art section.
2. The primary gist seems to be the use of a MPEG-specific coprocessor in a certain way that unloads the main CPU from having to do any video encoding / decoding work. IANAL but this does not seem to cover PVR functionality implemented in a PC, given the way most videocards are implemented.
3. There's a lot of other stuff in there about refinements to the technique- sniffing out program start / stop info by scanning closed captioning information, and so on. Seems legitimately innovative to me.
Of course, if you believe the whole patent system is bunk all of this is irrelevant, but it doesn't look like anything to freak out about. However, it does reference a previous patent on hard-drive video recording dating back to 1994 that might be more troublesome... but I haven't read it.
I've heard the MP3s some of my friends download. Thanks to Xing, most of them sound like utter crap. I'm no "golden ear", but when I can tell a major difference on POS computer speakers (without comparing to original source) I know that it's bad.
I admit it- I'm a music junkie, and through my CD purchases, have been supporting the RIAA. I'm a very good customer of theirs. I feel very ambivalent about Napster, and have never shared an MP3 with anyone.
BUT- as soon as I unwrap a CD I rip and encode it as a high quality MP3. It goes back into the case, and from that point on I primarily listen only to the MP3, whether it be on my stereo, computer, laptop, or Rio (don't have a car player).
I know I'm a geek through and through and that relatively few other people in this country exercise their "fair use" this way. I've been extremely scrupulous in upholding the rights of the copywright owners, I've fattened their wallets, and what am I going to get for it? They're going to try to f**k me over.
I will be the first in line to download the "crack" when it comes, DMCA or not. They're turning me into a "criminal".
As is pointed out 1000 times in the responses to any article about Transmeta, reducing processor power consumption alone won't give you a notebook with great battery life. The display has been a big reason for that.
If OLEDs live up to their promise, low-power processors like Crusoe will become much more attractive.
Seriously... think about it. Tivo has the potential to be come as (or more) influential than Nielson ratings- ie, what their data says could determine what is programmed.
Which means that if all "geeks" (replace with demographic term of your choice) opt out, "geek" viewing choices will not be reflected in the data, and "geek" programming will become less financially attractive to networks (because they think nobody's watching it).
They block TCP Port 25, but they allow relaying through their mail servers for other domains IF you're part of their network. You can read about it at http://help.earthlink.net/port25. I'd bet that they are putting some form of blocking / throttling intelligence into their mail servers. Sure, you could do this in filters with a sophisticated enough firewall, but I'm not aware of any products that have that level of sophistication AND can handle the kind of traffic they do at a reasonable expense. Mail servers are designed to understand mail, so it's much easier to put the intelligence there.
Coverage for the service plan is really weak. Although "Georgia" is listed in the quote below from the Visor website, I live 5 miles from downtown Atlanta, and my zipcode isn't covered. What's the point of rolling out a device like this with such weak coverage? So many of the people that need something like this travel extensively.
From the visor website:
Regional Rollout
Handspring will be rolling out service coverage on a regional basis over the next several months, beginning with Pacific Bell Wireless and BellSouth Mobility. We currently have coverage in California, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. We expect to be adding both VoiceStream and Powertel in the new year.
I know that there's some rules that, if followed, allow things like Shoutcast and other Internet-only music broadcasting to be legal (in theory). I'm not aware of Shoutcast stations being required to pay fees to RIAA members. Will this change that (or at least the legal status of Shoutcast?)
She's a graduate student, and wanted to be able to type up notes in class. She already had a Visor, and since she walks to school, she didn't want to lug around a laptop the size we could afford (smaller being more expensive). There's also the matter that nobody else uses a computer in class- she didn't want to be conspicuous hooking a big machine.
:-)
She's been using the Stowaway / Visor combination for a whole semester now, and it's been perfect, with two exceptions. First, it wasn't any use in her Greek class (nonalphabetical character set). Second, the cool-ass folding keyboard attracted much more attention for the first few weeks than a laptop would.
Even though the Stowaway feels sort of flimsy when unfolded, it seems quite durable when packed away (she carries it in the pocket of her backpack, which gets banged around a bit). Even with heavy use, it's holding up very well- no obvious wear.
It took me a few minutes with the thing to figure out how it got so skinny and still have decent key travel. The secret is that all of the keys are actually depressed when it's folded up. Very clever engineering indeed.
Trinitron is a tube technology. This thing is for projection systems. Perhaps it could be scaled down to tube-size, but that certainly isn't the focus (ahem) of the article, which talks aobut its use in theatre scale systems (with a brief mention of home projection).
The article said "Rain and walls also clog the pipes." This is different than saying 802.11b won't go through walls at all.
I'm typing on my laptop using a Lucent 802.11b card now, and I can tell you that walls do "clog" 2.4GHz signals. My data rate drops from 11Mb/s to 2Mb/s if I walk out my back door and sit on my porch.
These "community network" folks are pushing weak signals at distances they weren't designed for. Walls would do significant damage to their signal strength.
The point is that there are hardly any ports.
She's completely computer-illiterate, and she has been using an I-Opener for e-mail pretty successfully. She's lost most of her hearing, so it's really made it possible for her to communicate with family more regularly and easily than she could on the phone. A PC is waaay too complicated for her- she learned to learn by rote, and the fact that I could fit click-by-click instructions for doing I-Opener e-mail on one side of a piece of paper is the only reason she uses it successfully.
I think the lesson here is that the market for peripherals for the permanently computer illiterate is not big enough to sustain a company like I-Opener. Too bad, because there aren't a lot of good alternatives for them.
You make much of Bush's experience as governor of Texas. But being governer of Texas actually doesn't mean much- as a remnant of reconstruction-era politics, Texas has one of the constitutionally weakest gubernatorial offices in the country, with the governer wielding less real power than the lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller or land commissioner.
So, on the whole I think that web services are a good thing, but it seems to me that this will subtly undermine the intent of the GPL.
Think about it- the protections in the GPL are entirely founded on the idea that the primary potential commercial benefit from software comes from redistributing it in compiled form- shipping bits. The GPL provides protections so that "Free" (as in Freedom) code is not exploited in closed source programs (which traditionally are closed so that the company can sell them).
If the software is provided as a service and never leaves the company's doors, they can use and modify the Free code all they want in "closed source" programs without running afoul of the GPL. What formerly stopped software companies from doing this is that selling the software was the only way to make money off of it. But now, you can put up some servers in a datacenter, and make all the money you did before (even more!) and pilfer all the Free software you want to do it.
Am I wrong?
I also work in the application service industry, and I'm not sure you completely grasp what's happening here.
The fact is that most businesses (especially small and medium-sized ones) have no idea what to do with "control over the software you use". Whether there's a "real" shortage of IT skill or not, it's simply not affordable for many companies to install, operate and maintain the kind of complex application infrastructure that will be necessary to compete. Especially a smaller company.
I'm not convinced that this stuff applies to apps like Office, and UDDI actually has very little to do with that kind of app. It's focused on the back-end communication between components of various apps. For example, rather than buying credit card authorization software for your e-commerce website or having to recode to the proprietary standards a web hosting service would require, you could do a directory lookup for appropriate services and download a complete XML description of the interface which is easy to plug into (and switch out for a competitive provider if the service sucks).
Also, there's nothing that says that the company that wrote the software is going to be the company running it. Sure, Microsoft will have office.net and exchange.net, but so will a ton of other companies. So what if you can't get your hands on the bits? This hasn't been an impediment to sites like Yahoo or Mapquest.
The real question is what will become of the GPL, which is based on the traditional "product" model of software and assumes that the primary commercial benefit to software comes from redistributing binaries. But that's a topic for another post.
Blockbuster's renting them. The store my brother works at had 5 available for $20 / 5 days. And they were all there when we rented one Saturday evening... it's a (relatively) cheap way to get a fix without waiting in line or paying big $$$$.