It really isn't, I want my media center to playback all my media.
I have a place to store it (my server), and I have a place to record/encode/create it (my desktop). I want an easy way to get to my media, and to use my media.
If you don't like the research, refuse the treatments when you are sick in the hospital. Why do some religious types feel they need to impart their beliefs on everyone else?
Don't agree with or like abortion - fine - don't have one. Don't like what you hear on the radio or see on TV - fine also, change the channel.
Just don't tell me what to do - I have a brain in my skull and I know how to use it independently.
"In a landmark 1984 decision called Sony Corporation v. Universal Studios, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that creators and distributors of technology could not be held liable under copyright law as long as a technology was capable of substantial non-copyright-infringing uses. Known as the "Betamax doctrine" because the decision upheld Sony's right to sell Betamax video recorders, the court's decision has guided technological innovation for almost two decades."
Granted, we are talking about Swedish law, not US law, but you'd think the principles are the same: If something can be used for non-infringing purposes, it should be legal. Even with the name "The Pirate Bay", the search engine is useful for finding lots of material, not just copyrighted material.
Short of mind reading, I think it would be hard to PROVE the intent of developing the site was to facilitate copyright infringement. Their defense is simple: We saw an unmet need for a specific type of search functionality - a boutique Google if you will, and we developed a business around it.
-ted
Funny you should mention Media Center Edition...
on
Time for a Vista Do-Over?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I was looking to buy a Media Center recently. Microsoft's view of the way "TV" should be sucks. Every Media Center PC I looked at had a large case, loud fan, and hugely complicated remote control or worse, a wireless keyboard.
Great for geeks, horrible for the rest of the people living in my house.
I bought an Apple TV, and I couldn't be happier. Sure, it doesn't record live TV, but for $9.00/month I get an HD DVR from my cable company.
I put all my DVDs, music, and photos on the Apple TV, and it is easily navigated with a simple remote.
Microsoft just doesn't get it. They need to fire their product designers and hire some guys that think like normal humans do.
I've been supporting and administering Microsoft networks for over a decade now. With every new Microsoft operating system release I can think of (except Windows ME) there have been a few features that could sell the operating system.
This time, with Vista, there are none. I don't really know what Microsoft spent 5 years developing, but from a user's perspective, there isn't much reason to buy Vista.
I've got Vista in the lab right now, and I can't really justify the expense to start moving our network (a mix of machines, some approaching 5 years old) to Vista.
I've found pirated material via Google, Yahoo, Teoma, Altavista, and others. If courts world-wide decide that search engines that merely index and catalog illegal or copyrighted material can be held liable for the trade of illegal or copyrighted material, then that will be a HUGE problem for every company that has search as its core business.
What about hiring a prostitute from an escort/dating service listed in the phonebook? Can the publishers of the phonebook be charged as accomplices to the crime?
This case will have profound consequences for anyone in the search or directory business.
As ultra portables go, my D420 is almost perfect. Small, light, plenty of power, replaceable battery, solid state drive, external optical drive....etc.
The D430 is a current model, and can be had for less money.
Unfortunately, if you want/need to run Mac OS, the MBA is the only game in town.
Markets are brutally efficient - you can only charge what the market will bear.
There are ways to manipulate markets, and the most reliable way to manipulate a market is to create scarcity. Many large players try to create scarcity to prop up prices (precious stones, agriculture, energy generation...etc)
Unfortunately for the music industry, music is not scarce at all. As much as the music industry tries to create scarcity, there is just too much content, and too many ways to consume it (radio, TV, satellite, cell phone, internet, coffee houses...etc). If you don't believe me, try to go one day without listening to music anywhere - you probably can't do it.
This lack of scarcity has, in market terms, devalued recorded music. Recorded music is almost worthless in today's music consuming market.
Music PERFORMANCES, however, are very scarce in comparison. I've seen people spend upwards of $300 per ticket to go see certain artists perform live. The market has decided that live performances are scarce and worth MUCH more than recorded music.
And that's the only way the music industry will make money. Give the music away, and hope that people will come out to see the performers play.
Any other strategy is doomed to fail, and the market has already come to that conclusion.
Those responsible would get their asses sued or go to jail (ask the ENRON guys). As an IT manager in corporate America, I can tell you that SARB-OX, GLBA, and HIPAA, requires us to keep all audit trails, backups, and emails for AT LEAST 7 years. We keep our stuff at Iron Mountain for 10 years, just to be safe.
Why doesn't our Government have to adhere to the same standards? These laws were enacted to provide transparency and accountability to public companies, financial firms, and the health care industry.
It would be sensible for those rules to be applied to ALL government agencies. Government works for the people. The people should demand that all Government data (emails, meeting minutes, documents....etc) should be archived for a VERY long period of time. There should also be CRIMINAL penalties for failure to comply. It might keep politicians honest if they knew that EVERYTHING could come back to haunt them later.
I'm not an encryption expert, but I have used my fair share of VPN gear and tunneling software.
Mathematician friends of mine tell me that most modern encryption methods put brute-force cracking well out of range of the most modern computing hardware - even distributed cracking is extremely difficult with a sufficiently large key size.
So if modern encryption techniques are so secure, what is to stop everyone from encrypting all their traffic?
Once that happens, how does AT&T propose to filter traffic it can not examine?
Judging by past cable company actions, this will not lower anyone's costs except the cable company's costs.
Do you really think that ANY cable company will offer lower priced packages for those that DON'T use a ton of bandwidth? If they did, according to their own numbers, 95% of their subscriber base would end up paying less than they do now since they don't use very much bandwidth. Those light users would pay only for what they need - just enough to check email and browse the web.
Cable companies will implement tiered pricing for one reason only - to push heavy users off the system (to lower their costs) and to maximize profits from the light users.
It's not about "ensuring network performance" or "lowering subscriber costs" - it's about cable companies not liking the deal they cut with their customers, and reneging on the deal.
Too bad our spineless, corporate controlled government, can't regulate the companies charged with the stewardship of our public resources. Without that regulatory oversight, anti-consumer policies like this will continue to hurt the public.
Agreed, the movie companies are there to maximize profits, as are all businesses.
But are you really maximizing profits by not selling something?
I'm sure the movie industry would sell more "tickets" by offering the movies in theaters and through on-demand channels. The movie companies need to revenue share with theaters, why not revenue share with the cable companies? My model assumes that on-demand prices for new releases would be similar to theater prices.
Sure, when two people go to see the movies, the movie company sells two tickets. I'm not exactly sure how you price on-demand new releases to compensate for multiple viewers.
Most people like us I speak to, forget about many new releases by the time they make it to the on-demand services.
I can't believe their current business model maximizes profits. Movie companies are either stupid, or they are trying to keep movie theater owners happy by giving them exclusive access to new releases.
Last night I showed my wife the beauty of Apple TV - she thought the Movie trailers were a really cool feature.
Then she asked "why can't we download these movies right now"?
The movie and music industries need to realize that restricting content only shrinks the market for your products. With every instance of artificial restrictions, I can easily name many situations where the distributor of that content lost a potential sale:
Movies released to theaters - OLD model good for teens, not good for parents with young kids, a home theater and high speed internet. I would love to see new releases, but we can't really get to the theater (and we hate going there anyway). Why not let me "rent" the movie at my house? (I have digital cable with on-demand movies, but the list of movies is not current with new releases.)
DVD region codes: I've seen schools and libraries pass on content only made available to other parts of the world due to region code restrictions on DVD hardware.
Online distribution of digital media mostly sucks - too many competing DRM formats makes buying media confusing. If I buy a track on iTunes, my Audiotron player in my living room can't play it. (Yes I found a way around that, but most "normal" people won't).
etc, etc...
I would gladly pay for all the media I consume, if the distribution companies made that possible for me. DRM is the worst possible solution to the media industry's problems - it costs them money, hurts legitimate customers, doesn't stop piracy, and hinders the growth of their market. ANY MBA that paid attention in business school would see DRM for what it is; an industry-sinking boat anchor.
Presidential wish list (not in order of importance):
1. Flat Tax - Individual - everyone pays 15% of their income in tax - no exemptions, no deductions.
2. Flat Tax - Corporate - for profit companies pay 20% of their profits in tax - no exemptions, no deductions.
(If we can't run the Federal Government on that amount of money, then Government spending needs to shrink.)
3. Re-architect our military to DEFEND our homeland - not to fix/police the world. Take significant savings to fund the next item:
4. Universal Health Care for all - doctors dictate treatment - no one is denied treatment or coverage.
5. Universal Higher Education - all that want to attend college may - at no cost.
6. National Energy Policy - develop all reasonable options for meeting our countries energy needs (nuclear, solar, wind, nat gas, oil and coal) via RFPs filled by private industry. Create National Energy Policy commission (comprised of independent scientists) to evaluate options based on cost/benefit/need.
7. Abolish FCC, or re-architect FCC to provide for open access to public owned resources. The FCC would "grant for a limited time" the ability of companies to operate public resources like radio/TV/fiber optic lines laid on public ground. Periodically, companies would need to compete to "renew" their operational agreements of these resources. The FCC would have the authority and budget to roll out telecom infrastructure nationwide (or hire a company to do that).
8. Create REAL barriers between Church and State. Prevent public funding of religious activities or groups. Remove government from the "marriage business". No restrictions on who can marry or why - that is a religious decision. Everyone is paying 15% taxes anyway so Marriage/Family deductions are irrelevant. Abortion would remain legal.
I never said that virtualization had no place in a datacenter. I love virtualization for a number of applications - our testing lab would be 3 or 4 times as big as it is without virtualization.
I agree, certain applications can be made more robust with HA principles applied to virtualization farms, and restoring hardware independent images is great from a disaster recovery perspective.
The problem I tried to illustrate (a bit poorly) is that virtualization, to most non-technical management types, means "more stuff on less boxes = lower costs". That is what makes me want to jump out of a window. Virtualization is often times recommended for the wrong reasons - just to save a few bucks.
SETI is a great project for a number of reasons, but I haven't heard anyone explain what will happen if SETI actually finds something.
Visiting the source of the signal seems unlikely in our lifetime (or our kids lifetime), and transmitting radio signals back to the source will take a REALLY long time.
So if we find little green men (or women) what do we do about it?
Yes, I'm the cranky IT guy. I'm responsible for the stability, scalability, and security of our IT resources. Every time I hear about someone pushing virtual servers it makes me want to jump out of a window.
Items that need to be redundant, should not be virtualized on shared hardware. I've heard people want to virtualize redundant instances of directory services, databases, proxy servers...etc. I call this the "putting all your eggs in one,central-point-of-failure, hardware basket".
Virtualization has its place, but thanks to falling hardware costs, sometimes it is worth dedicating small, cheap, boxes to a specific task.
Right, because there is no LEGAL reason for using large amounts of bandwidth.
I pay extra for my internet connection and host my wife's website - which happens to host videos. Lots of bandwidth.
I have a VPN tunnel to work - sometimes I download gigs of data to and from work. Lots of bandwidth.
We use remote backup software from some of our locations - all SSL encrypted. Lots of bandwidth - this traffic gets sent to many redundant off-site backup locations through out the world.
Are you suggesting that I stop doing all of these things or tolerate my ISP shutting me off just because I was doing these things?
You may enjoy being bent over by your ISP, but I won't tolerate it.
Dan Glickman is the proverbial Pointy Haired Boss (PHB). He sits behind a desk at work, probably surfing the web through a websense filter and assumes that similar filtering can be applied to peer to peer traffic.
PHBs like Glickman seldom realize the technical limitations of any given technology. All filtering technologies work by inspecting the data as it crosses the wire. If you can not inspect the data - GAME OVER.
ISPs know that if every peer to peer application switches to SSL encrypted traffic, there is no way to differentiate P2P traffic, from other encrypted traffic like your credit card's web site, your bank's web site, your SSL VPN tunnel to work....etc. As an ISP you can't reasonably block SSL traffic since it would break to many commonly used things for Joe Sixpack.
I don't expect ISPs to play along with this at all. ISPs know filtering will piss off their customers, reduce revenues, and for a short term reduction in P2P traffic. Once the P2P application vendors SSL encrypt their traffic the ISPs are powerless to inspect the packets.
In short ISPs take all the risk for ZERO gain. If the ISPs have a brain in their skulls, they will tell the MPAA to get stuffed.
Don't forget, one good movie can make $100 million in a couple of weekends at the box office. I'm sure these execs make much more than that in one year after bonus time.
Sure, it's a nice chunk of change, but why sacrifice the company's future for a small short term gain?
Maybe the execs think it won't be an issue until they are long gone.
Let me get this straight - Microsoft is paying movie studio execs to release movies on competing formats to fragment and destroy physical media. The only reason Microsoft cares about this is they want to become the sole distributor of movies via their online technologies.
AND STUDIO EXECS ARE BUYING INTO THIS? ARE THEY STUPID?
Look at the music industry - the iTunes store has become the standard by which music is distributed online and the music companies HATE it. By giving up control of the distribution, they also gave up control of pricing. The music studios wanted variable pricing in iTunes - Steve and Co. said "stick it where the sun don't shine". (OK Apple really didn't say that, but they might as well have.)
Now the movie execs are going to hand over distribution control to Microsoft for $100 million here and there? Someone should tell the movie studio execs that a Microsoft "partnership" almost always ends in an ass-reaming - and Microsoft isn't the one getting reamed.
Ask all Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" partners how well that turned out.
It seems fitting they have a picture of Harvey Keitel playing The Wolf character from Pulp Fiction hung on the wall.
I've had to clean up after a large scale Microsoft failure a few times, and it the whole process did seem like going on "Brain Detail" in the back of a car.
The entire Iraq mess can be laid at the feet of our 43 president.
He is commander in chief, that is his military to command. Sure, president Bush has advisers, both technical and military, but ultimately, at the end of the day, after all the intelligence has been analyzed, he is responsible for ordering the troops to war.
Everyone else can finger point and double-talk, but the orders come from the top. With great power comes great responsibility.
I don't care if everyone beneath him fucked up their jobs - it is his responsibility to weed out the incompetents and poor performers, not protect them because they are "loyal".
If you want someone to blame, look no further than our President.
Slashdot Mirror
It really isn't, I want my media center to playback all my media.
I have a place to store it (my server), and I have a place to record/encode/create it (my desktop). I want an easy way to get to my media, and to use my media.
-ted
You're stuck in the Apple ecosystem
Uh, no i'm not. I have about 10 computers in my house, one is a mac. The remainder run a mix of Linux and Windows.
The machine I use to sync my Apple TV is a Windows Vista box that is a member of a Windows 2003 domain.
-ted
If you don't like the research, refuse the treatments when you are sick in the hospital. Why do some religious types feel they need to impart their beliefs on everyone else?
Don't agree with or like abortion - fine - don't have one. Don't like what you hear on the radio or see on TV - fine also, change the channel.
Just don't tell me what to do - I have a brain in my skull and I know how to use it independently.
-ted
From the EFF website:
http://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/20030530_eff_pr.php
"In a landmark 1984 decision called Sony Corporation v. Universal Studios, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that creators and distributors of technology could not be held liable under copyright law as long as a technology was capable of substantial non-copyright-infringing uses. Known as the "Betamax doctrine" because the decision upheld Sony's right to sell Betamax video recorders, the court's decision has guided technological innovation for almost two decades."
Granted, we are talking about Swedish law, not US law, but you'd think the principles are the same: If something can be used for non-infringing purposes, it should be legal. Even with the name "The Pirate Bay", the search engine is useful for finding lots of material, not just copyrighted material.
Short of mind reading, I think it would be hard to PROVE the intent of developing the site was to facilitate copyright infringement. Their defense is simple: We saw an unmet need for a specific type of search functionality - a boutique Google if you will, and we developed a business around it.
-ted
I was looking to buy a Media Center recently. Microsoft's view of the way "TV" should be sucks. Every Media Center PC I looked at had a large case, loud fan, and hugely complicated remote control or worse, a wireless keyboard.
Great for geeks, horrible for the rest of the people living in my house.
I bought an Apple TV, and I couldn't be happier. Sure, it doesn't record live TV, but for $9.00/month I get an HD DVR from my cable company.
I put all my DVDs, music, and photos on the Apple TV, and it is easily navigated with a simple remote.
Microsoft just doesn't get it. They need to fire their product designers and hire some guys that think like normal humans do.
-ted
I've been supporting and administering Microsoft networks for over a decade now. With every new Microsoft operating system release I can think of (except Windows ME) there have been a few features that could sell the operating system.
This time, with Vista, there are none. I don't really know what Microsoft spent 5 years developing, but from a user's perspective, there isn't much reason to buy Vista.
I've got Vista in the lab right now, and I can't really justify the expense to start moving our network (a mix of machines, some approaching 5 years old) to Vista.
That's Vista's real problem.
-ted
I've found pirated material via Google, Yahoo, Teoma, Altavista, and others. If courts world-wide decide that search engines that merely index and catalog illegal or copyrighted material can be held liable for the trade of illegal or copyrighted material, then that will be a HUGE problem for every company that has search as its core business.
What about hiring a prostitute from an escort/dating service listed in the phonebook? Can the publishers of the phonebook be charged as accomplices to the crime?
This case will have profound consequences for anyone in the search or directory business.
-ted
As ultra portables go, my D420 is almost perfect. Small, light, plenty of power, replaceable battery, solid state drive, external optical drive....etc.
The D430 is a current model, and can be had for less money.
Unfortunately, if you want/need to run Mac OS, the MBA is the only game in town.
-ted
Markets are brutally efficient - you can only charge what the market will bear.
There are ways to manipulate markets, and the most reliable way to manipulate a market is to create scarcity. Many large players try to create scarcity to prop up prices (precious stones, agriculture, energy generation...etc)
Unfortunately for the music industry, music is not scarce at all. As much as the music industry tries to create scarcity, there is just too much content, and too many ways to consume it (radio, TV, satellite, cell phone, internet, coffee houses...etc). If you don't believe me, try to go one day without listening to music anywhere - you probably can't do it.
This lack of scarcity has, in market terms, devalued recorded music. Recorded music is almost worthless in today's music consuming market.
Music PERFORMANCES, however, are very scarce in comparison. I've seen people spend upwards of $300 per ticket to go see certain artists perform live. The market has decided that live performances are scarce and worth MUCH more than recorded music.
And that's the only way the music industry will make money. Give the music away, and hope that people will come out to see the performers play.
Any other strategy is doomed to fail, and the market has already come to that conclusion.
-ted
Those responsible would get their asses sued or go to jail (ask the ENRON guys). As an IT manager in corporate America, I can tell you that SARB-OX, GLBA, and HIPAA, requires us to keep all audit trails, backups, and emails for AT LEAST 7 years. We keep our stuff at Iron Mountain for 10 years, just to be safe.
Why doesn't our Government have to adhere to the same standards? These laws were enacted to provide transparency and accountability to public companies, financial firms, and the health care industry.
It would be sensible for those rules to be applied to ALL government agencies. Government works for the people. The people should demand that all Government data (emails, meeting minutes, documents....etc) should be archived for a VERY long period of time. There should also be CRIMINAL penalties for failure to comply. It might keep politicians honest if they knew that EVERYTHING could come back to haunt them later.
What's good for the goose.....
-ted
I'm not an encryption expert, but I have used my fair share of VPN gear and tunneling software.
Mathematician friends of mine tell me that most modern encryption methods put brute-force cracking well out of range of the most modern computing hardware - even distributed cracking is extremely difficult with a sufficiently large key size.
So if modern encryption techniques are so secure, what is to stop everyone from encrypting all their traffic?
Once that happens, how does AT&T propose to filter traffic it can not examine?
-ted
Judging by past cable company actions, this will not lower anyone's costs except the cable company's costs.
Do you really think that ANY cable company will offer lower priced packages for those that DON'T use a ton of bandwidth? If they did, according to their own numbers, 95% of their subscriber base would end up paying less than they do now since they don't use very much bandwidth. Those light users would pay only for what they need - just enough to check email and browse the web.
Cable companies will implement tiered pricing for one reason only - to push heavy users off the system (to lower their costs) and to maximize profits from the light users.
It's not about "ensuring network performance" or "lowering subscriber costs" - it's about cable companies not liking the deal they cut with their customers, and reneging on the deal.
Too bad our spineless, corporate controlled government, can't regulate the companies charged with the stewardship of our public resources. Without that regulatory oversight, anti-consumer policies like this will continue to hurt the public.
-ted
Agreed, the movie companies are there to maximize profits, as are all businesses.
But are you really maximizing profits by not selling something?
I'm sure the movie industry would sell more "tickets" by offering the movies in theaters and through on-demand channels. The movie companies need to revenue share with theaters, why not revenue share with the cable companies? My model assumes that on-demand prices for new releases would be similar to theater prices.
Sure, when two people go to see the movies, the movie company sells two tickets. I'm not exactly sure how you price on-demand new releases to compensate for multiple viewers.
Most people like us I speak to, forget about many new releases by the time they make it to the on-demand services.
I can't believe their current business model maximizes profits. Movie companies are either stupid, or they are trying to keep movie theater owners happy by giving them exclusive access to new releases.
-ted
Last night I showed my wife the beauty of Apple TV - she thought the Movie trailers were a really cool feature.
Then she asked "why can't we download these movies right now"?
The movie and music industries need to realize that restricting content only shrinks the market for your products. With every instance of artificial restrictions, I can easily name many situations where the distributor of that content lost a potential sale:
Movies released to theaters - OLD model good for teens, not good for parents with young kids, a home theater and high speed internet. I would love to see new releases, but we can't really get to the theater (and we hate going there anyway). Why not let me "rent" the movie at my house? (I have digital cable with on-demand movies, but the list of movies is not current with new releases.)
DVD region codes: I've seen schools and libraries pass on content only made available to other parts of the world due to region code restrictions on DVD hardware.
Online distribution of digital media mostly sucks - too many competing DRM formats makes buying media confusing. If I buy a track on iTunes, my Audiotron player in my living room can't play it. (Yes I found a way around that, but most "normal" people won't).
etc, etc...
I would gladly pay for all the media I consume, if the distribution companies made that possible for me. DRM is the worst possible solution to the media industry's problems - it costs them money, hurts legitimate customers, doesn't stop piracy, and hinders the growth of their market. ANY MBA that paid attention in business school would see DRM for what it is; an industry-sinking boat anchor.
-ted
Presidential wish list (not in order of importance):
1. Flat Tax - Individual - everyone pays 15% of their income in tax - no exemptions, no deductions.
2. Flat Tax - Corporate - for profit companies pay 20% of their profits in tax - no exemptions, no deductions.
(If we can't run the Federal Government on that amount of money, then Government spending needs to shrink.)
3. Re-architect our military to DEFEND our homeland - not to fix/police the world. Take significant savings to fund the next item:
4. Universal Health Care for all - doctors dictate treatment - no one is denied treatment or coverage.
5. Universal Higher Education - all that want to attend college may - at no cost.
6. National Energy Policy - develop all reasonable options for meeting our countries energy needs (nuclear, solar, wind, nat gas, oil and coal) via RFPs filled by private industry. Create National Energy Policy commission (comprised of independent scientists) to evaluate options based on cost/benefit/need.
7. Abolish FCC, or re-architect FCC to provide for open access to public owned resources. The FCC would "grant for a limited time" the ability of companies to operate public resources like radio/TV/fiber optic lines laid on public ground. Periodically, companies would need to compete to "renew" their operational agreements of these resources. The FCC would have the authority and budget to roll out telecom infrastructure nationwide (or hire a company to do that).
8. Create REAL barriers between Church and State. Prevent public funding of religious activities or groups. Remove government from the "marriage business". No restrictions on who can marry or why - that is a religious decision. Everyone is paying 15% taxes anyway so Marriage/Family deductions are irrelevant. Abortion would remain legal.
9. End farm subsidies.
That's my wish list - I can dream right?
-ted
I never said that virtualization had no place in a datacenter. I love virtualization for a number of applications - our testing lab would be 3 or 4 times as big as it is without virtualization.
I agree, certain applications can be made more robust with HA principles applied to virtualization farms, and restoring hardware independent images is great from a disaster recovery perspective.
The problem I tried to illustrate (a bit poorly) is that virtualization, to most non-technical management types, means "more stuff on less boxes = lower costs". That is what makes me want to jump out of a window. Virtualization is often times recommended for the wrong reasons - just to save a few bucks.
-ted
SETI is a great project for a number of reasons, but I haven't heard anyone explain what will happen if SETI actually finds something.
Visiting the source of the signal seems unlikely in our lifetime (or our kids lifetime), and transmitting radio signals back to the source will take a REALLY long time.
So if we find little green men (or women) what do we do about it?
-ted
Yes, I'm the cranky IT guy. I'm responsible for the stability, scalability, and security of our IT resources. Every time I hear about someone pushing virtual servers it makes me want to jump out of a window.
Items that need to be redundant, should not be virtualized on shared hardware. I've heard people want to virtualize redundant instances of directory services, databases, proxy servers...etc. I call this the "putting all your eggs in one,central-point-of-failure, hardware basket".
Virtualization has its place, but thanks to falling hardware costs, sometimes it is worth dedicating small, cheap, boxes to a specific task.
-ted
Right, because there is no LEGAL reason for using large amounts of bandwidth.
I pay extra for my internet connection and host my wife's website - which happens to host videos. Lots of bandwidth.
I have a VPN tunnel to work - sometimes I download gigs of data to and from work. Lots of bandwidth.
We use remote backup software from some of our locations - all SSL encrypted. Lots of bandwidth - this traffic gets sent to many redundant off-site backup locations through out the world.
Are you suggesting that I stop doing all of these things or tolerate my ISP shutting me off just because I was doing these things?
You may enjoy being bent over by your ISP, but I won't tolerate it.
-ted
Dan Glickman is the proverbial Pointy Haired Boss (PHB). He sits behind a desk at work, probably surfing the web through a websense filter and assumes that similar filtering can be applied to peer to peer traffic.
PHBs like Glickman seldom realize the technical limitations of any given technology. All filtering technologies work by inspecting the data as it crosses the wire. If you can not inspect the data - GAME OVER.
ISPs know that if every peer to peer application switches to SSL encrypted traffic, there is no way to differentiate P2P traffic, from other encrypted traffic like your credit card's web site, your bank's web site, your SSL VPN tunnel to work....etc. As an ISP you can't reasonably block SSL traffic since it would break to many commonly used things for Joe Sixpack.
I don't expect ISPs to play along with this at all. ISPs know filtering will piss off their customers, reduce revenues, and for a short term reduction in P2P traffic. Once the P2P application vendors SSL encrypt their traffic the ISPs are powerless to inspect the packets.
In short ISPs take all the risk for ZERO gain. If the ISPs have a brain in their skulls, they will tell the MPAA to get stuffed.
-ted
Don't forget, one good movie can make $100 million in a couple of weekends at the box office. I'm sure these execs make much more than that in one year after bonus time.
Sure, it's a nice chunk of change, but why sacrifice the company's future for a small short term gain?
Maybe the execs think it won't be an issue until they are long gone.
-ted
Let me get this straight - Microsoft is paying movie studio execs to release movies on competing formats to fragment and destroy physical media. The only reason Microsoft cares about this is they want to become the sole distributor of movies via their online technologies.
AND STUDIO EXECS ARE BUYING INTO THIS? ARE THEY STUPID?
Look at the music industry - the iTunes store has become the standard by which music is distributed online and the music companies HATE it. By giving up control of the distribution, they also gave up control of pricing. The music studios wanted variable pricing in iTunes - Steve and Co. said "stick it where the sun don't shine". (OK Apple really didn't say that, but they might as well have.)
Now the movie execs are going to hand over distribution control to Microsoft for $100 million here and there? Someone should tell the movie studio execs that a Microsoft "partnership" almost always ends in an ass-reaming - and Microsoft isn't the one getting reamed.
Ask all Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" partners how well that turned out.
-ted
It seems fitting they have a picture of Harvey Keitel playing The Wolf character from Pulp Fiction hung on the wall.
I've had to clean up after a large scale Microsoft failure a few times, and it the whole process did seem like going on "Brain Detail" in the back of a car.
-ted
The entire Iraq mess can be laid at the feet of our 43 president.
He is commander in chief, that is his military to command. Sure, president Bush has advisers, both technical and military, but ultimately, at the end of the day, after all the intelligence has been analyzed, he is responsible for ordering the troops to war.
Everyone else can finger point and double-talk, but the orders come from the top. With great power comes great responsibility.
I don't care if everyone beneath him fucked up their jobs - it is his responsibility to weed out the incompetents and poor performers, not protect them because they are "loyal".
If you want someone to blame, look no further than our President.
-ted
BMW's ultimate service means zero maintenance costs for 50,000 miles:
http://www.bmwusa.com/Owners/BMWUltimateService/default
You are right about the fuel costs - but her commuting costs were about 6 times the fuel cost in your example.
-ted