I don't know if he was purposely dishonest, but his prices were far too high for what he was providing. The first chapter was free, each subsequent chapter had a price for download. The overall price was roughly the same as a hardcover edition yet all you got was an electronic copy. This doomed it to failure in my mind and the prices seemed outrageous enough that it looked to be an experiment designed to prove that there's no market for electronic distribution.
Compare this to efforts like Tad William's Shadowmarch or Baen's free downloads. Tad's is failing because he's not making enough to cover the bandwidth costs, support costs and his salary but its not due to an overly inflated price. Baen's is succeeding because they're using it purely to drive up sales of otherwise overlooked hard copy books.
The price seems a little steep, I can rent a DVD for under $3.99 which will have much better quality than a 700 megabyte rip will. There's convenience, I don't have to drag myself to the rental place, but I don't think that it outweighs the degradation of quality. Factor in the download time for 700 megabytes and it seems like a pretty clear loser to me. I can't be bothered to pirate movies as it is, so I don't see this being a winner for me at least.
This offer will only be appealing to broadband users, I don't know the current market penetration but I'd be suprised if it was greater than 1%. Of that portion of broadband users available downloading anything of that size for what effectively is an impulse purchase will only be attractive to a small subset of this group.
I think this is going to lose money, I also think its going to be used as an indicator that they're losing money to piracy. I don't think this is an actual dishonest effort, like Stephen King's electronic publishing effort, but I still think its doomed to failure.
There used to be a search tool called Archie for searching FTP sites. It was an interactive tool when I first started using it but later as the number of people on the net increased a lot of Archie sites resorted to email interfaces. Now email interfaces for search engines might become useful again, though for different reasons.
It wouldn't be hard for somebody to create an email interface to google or altavista, though there would be significant bandwidth costs associated with it. A query could return an HTML email containing the 50 highest rated sites. In the event sites are blocked alternate commands could even return a cached copy of a particular site.
An email interface would be more difficult to block since its easy to generate sites that only provide a transmit/store/forward interface to the real email server.
Corporations care more about profits than on whether they're fucked by Microsoft. They make more money by putting up with Microsoft's demands than they would if they took a stand against them.
One of the parent corporations pointed out that his company gave HP a 1/2 million dollar contract because of there linux support. This doesn't indicate that HP makes significant money on linux. I might find a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk, it doesn't indicate that I'm better off searching for money on the sidewalk rather than giving up a life of leisure and taking a paycheck from The Man.
Mad cow disease. There's been outbreaks of something at least similar to mad cow disease for quite a while in areas outside of the U.K. This includes the United States where there are also cattle mutilations.
Now, suppose a rancher recognizes the symptoms. If he goes public he'll jeapordize his and other ranchers livelihood. If he does the right thing and slaughters his herd he'll be out a lot of money. If he claims that somebody (or something) else slaughters his herd than he can possibly get money from insurance.
There's chronic wasting disease, which is similar to Mad Cow Disease, in Wisconsin deer. They both have similar symptoms and are caused by prions.
The RIAA alleges that they're losing billions to peer-to-peer networking. In reality they're probably losing something, but I don't know how it can be quantified. They're losing potential profits, but its not realistic to say that every person who downloaded the latest hit song would've otherwise bought the CD.
The costs of having the FBI step up their efforts against the peers involved in peer-to-peer networking is quantifiable though. Since, in general, no money exchanges hands should the FBI be involved? Since the RIAA hasn't made an honest effort to quantify their actual losses as opposed to hand-waving and paper losses should they be involved? My opinion is that they shouldn't be involved unless you can demonstrate that actual finances are changing hands. Just like the FBI doesn't go after all the copyright violations in childrens nurseries such as unauthorized representations of Mickey Mouse or Whinnie the Pooh.
Seriously, most people don't even know what internet radio is. If the RIAA says that internet radio is piracy most of the public will just nod their heads and say "Go get 'em!".
North American. I grew up in Canada, me and my buddies would stop for Big Gulps on the way home from school. I don't know how we escaped slipping into diabetic coma in retrospect.
No, not necessarily. If the copyright was assigned to RMS then he could do something. If the author retained the copyright then its his responsibility to do something about it.
You can buy extremely high quality ink (or cheap ink) in bulk and use a continuous ink system. A lot of professional shops make use of these. Once I run the free cartridge that came with my Epson 1280 out I'll be adding one to my system.
The ink becomes a lot cheaper. I'll be using the archival inks from inkjetmall.com as well as their continuous ink system.
I don't think that Apple cares if you can boot MacOS 9 via a third party application. What Apple cares about is that they don't have to support MacOS 9 running natively on new hardware. I'm thinking back to the various Macs and operating systems versions I've run on them, and often an enabler would be required to run on the newest systems.
If Apple can make modern hardware look like a generic Mac under MacOS X then they only have to port MacOS 9 once and never spend engineering resources on enablers. They'll still do this for MacOS X, but thats where they plan to make money and gain market share.
though I'm not sure that I agree with it. First, MacOS X adoption is essential for Apple. The adoption rate directly influences what software gets ported to MacOS X. Look at Microsoft's recent comments ahout OfficeX. From their point of view their lack of sales is attributable to poor adoption of MacOS X. This is probably false, more likely its due to Office X not being worth the money, but facts don't matter.
Second, it will in the long run cut down on their support costs. "Officially" supporting two operating systems is more expensive than supporting one. In the short term they will have to do this, but at some point they'll be able to cut back on MacOS Classic support.
Third, it may allow them more freedom in hardware design. MacOS Classic has often required enabler extensions to run on new hardware. MacOS X obviously needs some level of tweaking as well. If they can relegate Classic to running in a stable virtual Mac running under MacOS X its a win for Apple. They can concentrate on making MacOS X, their actual breadwinner, run better and halt development on MacOS Classic.
Engineers often publish. Go to any engineering library and look up the engineering periodicals. Electrical engineering alone must have thousands of publications through the IEEE. I subscribe to 9 or so, there are very exact details of electronic circuits, signal processing algorithms, algorithms for circuit design, algorithms for logic minimization etc.
Other fields have similar organizations that they publish to, I'm just most familiar with IEEE and specifically circuit design.
I can't find my polarizers, so I can't test this, but I think you could rig something up with a cheap CCD webcam. If you look at a poorly lit image from a CCD there's an awful lot of noise, and the image sort of rides on top of this noise. If you took your cheap CCD webcam and kept reducing the light to it till you got mostly noise it'd be simple to capture and generate random data from. I was thinking of a shoebox with the sensor inside, USB cable coming through a small light-tight hole. Make a hole in front of the lens and stick a pair of polarizers in front of that hole. Rotate the polarizers to get a light intensity such that you get lots of noise.
If you snap a frame you'll get some random bits. Somebody could break the randomness by shining a really bright light through the polarizers, but as long as you can control access to the shoe box you'd be fine.
I understand where you're coming from, but lets say we raise the bar on accessing the information. At what point is the bar high enough that an extremist says "Golly... it's just not worth it, I think I'll just head home"?
If you're thinking from the point of view of the average couch-potato anarchist who gets a stiffy from downloading factually incorrect information then it doesn't need to be very high. If you're an extremist, with an agenda, and part of that agenda involves murder then I don't think that you can raise the bar high enough to both protect us from threats and allow scientific research to carry on.
There's also the problem of the way scientific minds work, or at least good ones. You can withhold a piece of information, B, but from the other pieces of information A, C and D, an expert in the field can work out B.
Perhaps you could buy yourself time before an enemy knows B, but you won't prevent its eventual discovery. There are great minds outside of the U.S., and there are great minds in the U.S. that for various reasons might disclose the information regardless of prohibitions against it.
I'm not saying that they're on par with consumer cameras. In fact I say that they're not. Lots of people think that the pixel count is everything, so they'll smugly contend that their 800 dollar Fuji digital camera smokes a Nikon D1X. So, from a pixel count perspective the cameras seem equivalent but from a pixel quality standpoint there is a tremendous difference.
How is this insightful? PNG does have better image quality. Due to this better image quality its compression sucks in comparision. JPEG uses lossy compression, so some image quality is sacrificed for tremendous savings in disk space. PNG uses lossless compression, so its image quality is much higher but it also produces huge images compared to JPEG.
To address the editors "comment", there is a market for these camera backs, but its not consumers. These, or Nikon D1X or Canon D30's are being increasingly used for photography in advertising.
They're available, but they're very expensive. Kodak has the DCS line, which is an expensive option for expensive camera bodies, such as the Nikon F5 or medium/large format cameras. The Nikon F5 model has 6 million pixels which on the face of it is on par with a ~$1000.00 point and shoot digital camera.
A pixel doesn't mean anything unless its providing useful imaging however, and a digital camera back such as this can provide many more useful pixels than a consumer model and also has a colour depth of 12 bits.
Compared to a consumer digital camera the CCD area on these are huge, which means that each pixel receives more light. The list price is $7995.00.
Here are a couple of links to reviews and Kodak's web site:
There patent does apply to lossless compression as well. One of their claims is applying shorter bit lengths to patterns that appear more frequently. This is any form of lossless compression. It's also.zip,.gz,.bz2 etc.
First off, this will have to go to the courts before they see a dime for JPEG. Hopefully it'll be tossed out of court with heaps of derision.
Second, PNG won't replace JPEG. JPEG files are much smaller, the image is transformed and essentially divided into bins of information. The bins with the least information are tossed. This reduced set of information is then compressed with techniques similar to zip or gzip. The lossy part (those bins we tossed) translates to a much smaller file size than PNG.
If you replace all your JPEG with PNG all you're doing is changing who you're going to pay (assuming this claim isn't thrown out)
I can see at least one claim in there patent (I did a very brief look), assigning shorter codes to statistically more frequent patterns should have been thrown out during the patent review process. That's arithmetic compression.
There's been some news on the licensing front. Slashdot should post it in about a month or so. The first 50000 users are free, then beyond that there's a per user fee and its capped at 1 million dollars. There are some more details here.
Apple has now released a tool called QuickTime Broadcaster which accomplishes the same task, except this product is free
Hopefully, Apple will realize how profitable a Windows or Linux version could be.
I think they realize exactly how profitable a Windows or Linux version would be: BIL. It's free, so they don't earn back development costs any faster with wider distribution. In fact, they just lose more since there has to be a porting effort to each of the other operating systems. I'm assuming its downloadable, so they lose money on bandwidth costs.
No, I understand SMP. The tasks get divided between two processors. One particular application my cousin showed me was actually accelerated all by itself when run on two processors. I was probably confusing multi-threaded with SMP:P
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I don't know if he was purposely dishonest, but his prices were far too high for what he was providing. The first chapter was free, each subsequent chapter had a price for download. The overall price was roughly the same as a hardcover edition yet all you got was an electronic copy. This doomed it to failure in my mind and the prices seemed outrageous enough that it looked to be an experiment designed to prove that there's no market for electronic distribution.
Compare this to efforts like Tad William's Shadowmarch or Baen's free downloads. Tad's is failing because he's not making enough to cover the bandwidth costs, support costs and his salary but its not due to an overly inflated price. Baen's is succeeding because they're using it purely to drive up sales of otherwise overlooked hard copy books.
The price seems a little steep, I can rent a DVD for under $3.99 which will have much better quality than a 700 megabyte rip will. There's convenience, I don't have to drag myself to the rental place, but I don't think that it outweighs the degradation of quality. Factor in the download time for 700 megabytes and it seems like a pretty clear loser to me. I can't be bothered to pirate movies as it is, so I don't see this being a winner for me at least.
This offer will only be appealing to broadband users, I don't know the current market penetration but I'd be suprised if it was greater than 1%. Of that portion of broadband users available downloading anything of that size for what effectively is an impulse purchase will only be attractive to a small subset of this group.
I think this is going to lose money, I also think its going to be used as an indicator that they're losing money to piracy. I don't think this is an actual dishonest effort, like Stephen King's electronic publishing effort, but I still think its doomed to failure.
There used to be a search tool called Archie for searching FTP sites. It was an interactive tool when I first started using it but later as the number of people on the net increased a lot of Archie sites resorted to email interfaces. Now email interfaces for search engines might become useful again, though for different reasons.
It wouldn't be hard for somebody to create an email interface to google or altavista, though there would be significant bandwidth costs associated with it. A query could return an HTML email containing the 50 highest rated sites. In the event sites are blocked alternate commands could even return a cached copy of a particular site.
An email interface would be more difficult to block since its easy to generate sites that only provide a transmit/store/forward interface to the real email server.
Corporations care more about profits than on whether they're fucked by Microsoft. They make more money by putting up with Microsoft's demands than they would if they took a stand against them.
One of the parent corporations pointed out that his company gave HP a 1/2 million dollar contract because of there linux support. This doesn't indicate that HP makes significant money on linux. I might find a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk, it doesn't indicate that I'm better off searching for money on the sidewalk rather than giving up a life of leisure and taking a paycheck from The Man.
Mad cow disease. There's been outbreaks of something at least similar to mad cow disease for quite a while in areas outside of the U.K. This includes the United States where there are also cattle mutilations.
Now, suppose a rancher recognizes the symptoms. If he goes public he'll jeapordize his and other ranchers livelihood. If he does the right thing and slaughters his herd he'll be out a lot of money. If he claims that somebody (or something) else slaughters his herd than he can possibly get money from insurance.
There's chronic wasting disease, which is similar to Mad Cow Disease, in Wisconsin deer. They both have similar symptoms and are caused by prions.
The costs of having the FBI step up their efforts against the peers involved in peer-to-peer networking is quantifiable though. Since, in general, no money exchanges hands should the FBI be involved? Since the RIAA hasn't made an honest effort to quantify their actual losses as opposed to hand-waving and paper losses should they be involved? My opinion is that they shouldn't be involved unless you can demonstrate that actual finances are changing hands. Just like the FBI doesn't go after all the copyright violations in childrens nurseries such as unauthorized representations of Mickey Mouse or Whinnie the Pooh.
Seriously, most people don't even know what internet radio is. If the RIAA says that internet radio is piracy most of the public will just nod their heads and say "Go get 'em!".
North American. I grew up in Canada, me and my buddies would stop for Big Gulps on the way home from school. I don't know how we escaped slipping into diabetic coma in retrospect.
No, not necessarily. If the copyright was assigned to RMS then he could do something. If the author retained the copyright then its his responsibility to do something about it.
You can buy extremely high quality ink (or cheap ink) in bulk and use a continuous ink system. A lot of professional shops make use of these. Once I run the free cartridge that came with my Epson 1280 out I'll be adding one to my system.
The ink becomes a lot cheaper. I'll be using the archival inks from inkjetmall.com as well as their continuous ink system.
I don't think that Apple cares if you can boot MacOS 9 via a third party application. What Apple cares about is that they don't have to support MacOS 9 running natively on new hardware. I'm thinking back to the various Macs and operating systems versions I've run on them, and often an enabler would be required to run on the newest systems.
If Apple can make modern hardware look like a generic Mac under MacOS X then they only have to port MacOS 9 once and never spend engineering resources on enablers. They'll still do this for MacOS X, but thats where they plan to make money and gain market share.
though I'm not sure that I agree with it. First, MacOS X adoption is essential for Apple. The adoption rate directly influences what software gets ported to MacOS X. Look at Microsoft's recent comments ahout OfficeX. From their point of view their lack of sales is attributable to poor adoption of MacOS X. This is probably false, more likely its due to Office X not being worth the money, but facts don't matter.
Second, it will in the long run cut down on their support costs. "Officially" supporting two operating systems is more expensive than supporting one. In the short term they will have to do this, but at some point they'll be able to cut back on MacOS Classic support.
Third, it may allow them more freedom in hardware design. MacOS Classic has often required enabler extensions to run on new hardware. MacOS X obviously needs some level of tweaking as well. If they can relegate Classic to running in a stable virtual Mac running under MacOS X its a win for Apple. They can concentrate on making MacOS X, their actual breadwinner, run better and halt development on MacOS Classic.
Engineers often publish. Go to any engineering library and look up the engineering periodicals. Electrical engineering alone must have thousands of publications through the IEEE. I subscribe to 9 or so, there are very exact details of electronic circuits, signal processing algorithms, algorithms for circuit design, algorithms for logic minimization etc.
Other fields have similar organizations that they publish to, I'm just most familiar with IEEE and specifically circuit design.
I can't find my polarizers, so I can't test this, but I think you could rig something up with a cheap CCD webcam. If you look at a poorly lit image from a CCD there's an awful lot of noise, and the image sort of rides on top of this noise. If you took your cheap CCD webcam and kept reducing the light to it till you got mostly noise it'd be simple to capture and generate random data from. I was thinking of a shoebox with the sensor inside, USB cable coming through a small light-tight hole. Make a hole in front of the lens and stick a pair of polarizers in front of that hole. Rotate the polarizers to get a light intensity such that you get lots of noise.
If you snap a frame you'll get some random bits. Somebody could break the randomness by shining a really bright light through the polarizers, but as long as you can control access to the shoe box you'd be fine.
I understand where you're coming from, but lets say we raise the bar on accessing the information. At what point is the bar high enough that an extremist says "Golly... it's just not worth it, I think I'll just head home"?
If you're thinking from the point of view of the average couch-potato anarchist who gets a stiffy from downloading factually incorrect information then it doesn't need to be very high. If you're an extremist, with an agenda, and part of that agenda involves murder then I don't think that you can raise the bar high enough to both protect us from threats and allow scientific research to carry on.
There's also the problem of the way scientific minds work, or at least good ones. You can withhold a piece of information, B, but from the other pieces of information A, C and D, an expert in the field can work out B.
Perhaps you could buy yourself time before an enemy knows B, but you won't prevent its eventual discovery. There are great minds outside of the U.S., and there are great minds in the U.S. that for various reasons might disclose the information regardless of prohibitions against it.
I'm not saying that they're on par with consumer cameras. In fact I say that they're not. Lots of people think that the pixel count is everything, so they'll smugly contend that their 800 dollar Fuji digital camera smokes a Nikon D1X. So, from a pixel count perspective the cameras seem equivalent but from a pixel quality standpoint there is a tremendous difference.
How is this insightful? PNG does have better image quality. Due to this better image quality its compression sucks in comparision. JPEG uses lossy compression, so some image quality is sacrificed for tremendous savings in disk space. PNG uses lossless compression, so its image quality is much higher but it also produces huge images compared to JPEG.
To address the editors "comment", there is a market for these camera backs, but its not consumers. These, or Nikon D1X or Canon D30's are being increasingly used for photography in advertising.
A pixel doesn't mean anything unless its providing useful imaging however, and a digital camera back such as this can provide many more useful pixels than a consumer model and also has a colour depth of 12 bits.
Compared to a consumer digital camera the CCD area on these are huge, which means that each pixel receives more light. The list price is $7995.00.
Here are a couple of links to reviews and Kodak's web site:
There patent does apply to lossless compression as well. One of their claims is applying shorter bit lengths to patterns that appear more frequently. This is any form of lossless compression. It's also .zip, .gz, .bz2 etc.
First off, this will have to go to the courts before they see a dime for JPEG. Hopefully it'll be tossed out of court with heaps of derision.
Second, PNG won't replace JPEG. JPEG files are much smaller, the image is transformed and essentially divided into bins of information. The bins with the least information are tossed. This reduced set of information is then compressed with techniques similar to zip or gzip. The lossy part (those bins we tossed) translates to a much smaller file size than PNG.
If you replace all your JPEG with PNG all you're doing is changing who you're going to pay (assuming this claim isn't thrown out)
I can see at least one claim in there patent (I did a very brief look), assigning shorter codes to statistically more frequent patterns should have been thrown out during the patent review process. That's arithmetic compression.
There's been some news on the licensing front. Slashdot should post it in about a month or so. The first 50000 users are free, then beyond that there's a per user fee and its capped at 1 million dollars. There are some more details here.
No, I understand SMP. The tasks get divided between two processors. One particular application my cousin showed me was actually accelerated all by itself when run on two processors. I was probably confusing multi-threaded with SMP :P
Thanks! I hadn't heard that they were producing for the QuickSilver series yet.