Last time I checked, studios used region coding so foreign countries couldn't buy DVDs of movies not even released theatrically in their respective country yet. This is done so as to not rob the movie of any money to be made in its theatrical run.
Last time I checked senior executives of large multinationals engaged in criminal conspiracies told lies to avoid prosecution.
The fact is that most of the material out on DVD and zone encoded is from the back catalogue. New movie releases are only a small fraction of the DVDs that are on sale.
The only possible explanation for the zone system is to allow differential pricing, to allow the studios to charge more in one zone than in another. That is illegal and there is no reason that the EU should not fine the studios a few billion dollars apiece.
Tivo is a doomed company. The 'razor and blades' strategy is a profitable one but always fails when someone can buy a razor that does not need new blades. With Tivo the 'subscription' service is simply rental for the machine. There is no reason why TV schedule information should cost the amount they charge. $10 a year would leave them a huge profit on the service component. Tivo lose cash on every box they sell to get people hooked on the service.
Tivo's lack of 30 second skip removes 60% of the reason to buy one. As does the closed nature of the box. It is not possible to move data from one Tivo device to another via wireless ethernet, it is not even possible to add extra drives to the box - not without inordinate hassle.
Tivo will die, good riddance. They will be replaced by cheap commodity appliances from manufacturers that do not charge inflated subscription fees, or by better TV tuner card software for PCs. Why do people who would never buy a crippleware 'email appliance' leap to the defence of the grasping business model of Tivo?
How did that post get into the Web Bugs thread ?? Did IE have a nervous breakdown?
Why I don't own a Tivo (and probably never will)
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Tivo is a doomed company. The 'razor and blades' strategy is a profitable one but always fails when someone can buy a razor that does not need new blades. With Tivo the 'subscription' service is simply rental for the machine. There is no reason why TV schedule information should cost the amount they charge. $10 a year would leave them a huge profit on the service component. Tivo lose cash on every box they sell to get people hooked on the service.
Tivo's lack of 30 second skip removes 60% of the reason to buy one. As does the closed nature of the box. It is not possible to move data from one Tivo device to another via wireless ethernet, it is not even possible to add extra drives to the box - not without inordinate hassle.
Tivo will die, good riddance. They will be replaced by cheap commodity appliances from manufacturers that do not charge inflated subscription fees, or by better TV tuner card software for PCs. Why do people who would never buy a crippleware 'email appliance' leap to the defence of the grasping business model of Tivo?
Zeinfeld responds that he wishes freematt would join his whacko friends in sealand and partake of whatever armaments governments feel fit to launch in his general direction.
The British government hasn't recognized anything as sovereign until the Foreign Office says so, either explicitly or by establishing formal diplomatic relations.
Absolutely. The British government has recognized that it has lost ownership of the platform but has never recognized the platform as sovereign.
A judge did rule a long time ago that the platform was outside English costal waters and was therefore outside the juridiction of the English courts. That does not entail any statement about sovereignty. Glasgow is outside the juridsiction of the English courts but is still under the British Crown.
The judge's rulling has since been superceeded when the UK government ratified a convention that set uniform boundaries for all the signatories. Under the convention UK sovereignty (and hence English) actually extended to include the platform. The platform is now within UK teritorial waters.
Incidentally, man made platforms do not count for purposes of sovereignty. Otherwise countries could extend their teritorial waters by building strategically placed barges.
A man made platform such as an oil rig falls under marine law and has to be registered in a national shipping registry. Otherwise any state that chooses can exercise sovereignty over it.
Being a stateless platform does not mean that sealand is subject to no national laws, if it were in fact the case (it is not) all that status would mean is that Sealand is not subject to any national protection. The place was taken over by pirates a while back and not surprisingly no government lifted a finger to protect the inhabitants.
US wackos with guns who are still living in shelters in Montana, convinced the Y2K virus is going to bring down civilization will disagree. I could not care less. As another poster pointed out, Sealand will be permitted to exist up to the point they start to be a conduit for organized crime at which point they will be raided.
Or did you think he had a copy of the Oxford Elvish Dictionary to refer to?
Well he did have a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, he edited the OED for many years. If there was an Oxford Elvish Dictionary, he would have written it.
Someone once questioned his use of the spelling 'dwarves' when the OED specified 'dwarfs', Tolkien replied "I wrote the OED".
In terms of linguistics, Tolkien was the foremost authority in his day on Middle English and the etymology of the English language. He was responsible for keeping study of Middle English compulsory in the English sylabus (together with C.S. Lewis?). Thus he was infamous amongst the undergrads for forcing them to read 'Beowulf'.
The LOTR was essentially an attempt to create an English mythology to replace the one lost as a result of the Norman invasion and the medieval christian church.
LG is a bigger player than Sony. They are the largest actual manufacturer of electronic goods. Sony, Matushita, etc do less actual manufacture these days and outsource the work to companies like LG.
LG does not market much under its own brand. The only place where I know of that happening is the UK where the Dixons/Currys chain replaced their in house 'Matsui' label with an exclusive distribution deal with LG. They did a similar deal with Samsung many years ago when nobody in Europe knew who they were.
I'd guess they make about 95% of audio equipment sold worldwide.:-)
I doubt if those companies make more than 30% combined. They market upwards of 80% - China and India ae huge markets with significant local players.
SDMI is in trouble for reasons that were obvious two years ago when I went to their meetings, the only way SDMI can succeed is if every country in the world passes a law making non-SDMI players illegal. The hardware manufacturers have very little incentive to actually implement SDMI, they have a marginal interest in pretending they might.
I suspect that the list of companies leaving is simply the list of compaines whose subscriptions were not renewed. I can't see anyone going out of their way to declare in public the private contempt they express for SDMI.
In 1999 the group was running arround like headless chickens declaring that they had to solve the problem by Christmas or it was all over.
One of the most ridiculous features of SDMI is that it prohibits absolutely any form of microphone built into the package. So it will be illegal to have a portable dictation machine that also plays SDMI MP3s.
My strong belief is that there will be convergence between video cameras and MP3 players, just as there is already convergence between digital cameras and MP3. The idea of prohibiting a line in or mic in jack to such devices is pure fantasy.
What I want is a device about the size of a cigarete packet that has a CPU, battery and compact flash II socket. It would record 20 mnutes of video onto an IBM (or other manufacturer) minidrive. There would be sockets for headphones, line-out, camera, microphone and line-in, plus USB of course. The base unit would strap to the waist belt with only lightweight peripherals to plug into it - just like modern cell phones.
An algorithm that was pretty simple appeared in the Dr Who annual of 1978 (or thereabouts). It was the sort of thing one might do at the age of 12 but which rapidly becomes tedious thereafter.
A much simpler algorithm is
Open Palm VII
Start Calendar
Consult relevant day in calendar
The SAS survival handbook lists hundreds of ways to stay alive in artic wastes armed with only a rusty can opener. Me I go down to the supermarket.
Technology is good, folk should try it sometime.
Get out the sticky backed plastic
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Brits will understand the reference. The case looks awful, if the guy was going to use wood screws he could have at least counter sunk them and stuck some infill plugs over them - it could have looked pretty good if he choose something like ebony for the plugs, but oak would have served.
Much better would be to do the job properly and use a dovetail joint.
I know the guy is living off welfare and had to save up for the case by collecting empty bottles and selling a kidney but I don't see why the result should be held up as an example to the rest of us. If we are going to have designer cases they should look better than standard ones. That case looks worse than the average homebrew of the 70s.
If we are going to do non-standard case stories lets at least see pretty ones.
Wrong! It is not that they will be branded as Criminals, it is just that special needs of each indiviudal will be more accurately identified and education and training and will be tailored accordingly.
And what is the betting that those special needs would turn out to be a prison cell?
Given that the US government would rather spend money imprisoning drug users than on recovery programs and has over the past ten years transfered money from the eductation system to the prison system the idea your ideas are hopelessly naive.
Given the efficiency with which credit rating companies maintain records (at least 30% are wrong) and the efficiency with which Florida maintained its electoral roll (at least 10,000 people wrongfully excluded) the idea that data mining technology will solve our problems is facile. Far from being a future solution I suspect that mining of personal data is likely to end up like the Nuclear industry, a technological pariah.
I agree that Stephensen et. al are better prognosticators, however their work is not simply prediction. I discussed this with Gibbson on a talk show, the idiot presenter was claiming that the invention of the Web was a fulfillment of Gibbson's predictions. I pointed out that nobody in their right minds would want to create the type of dysfunctional society that Gibbson had described. Gibbson replied that his dystopia represented a 'Regeanesque nightmare'.
Pundits and futureologists love to present their ideas as if they are something that society has no choice in. US pundits in particular love to convince us that the future will be dictated by corporations. I guess it is something of an ego trip combined with the fact that 'what will be' makes a better title for a book than 'what might be'.
The fact is that we do have a choice about the society we live in and we can choose the form of technology we will support. It is not luddism to oppose the baleful and arbitrary influence that the likes of TRW and Equifax now exercise. Nor is it luddism to observe that the DVD zones system, SDMI and the like can and should be rejected.
It is not even a case of government interference or not. SDMI cannot work without legislation to mandate its use. It is the abusers of technology that run to the government all the time. The suggestion that the government might support the citizens rather than the corporations who buy legislators raises cries of horror.
CASE was in my view pretty much a failure. I have seen many software projects fail due to a software methodology. No methodology is a substitute for people who really know what they are doing. In many cases CASE is simply a means of organizing fifty people to do the work of five. CASE is popular with PHBs but so was ISO 9000 and we all know what a success that is.
I suspect this futurologist's predictions will be popular with the same sort of people who like CASE - corporate control freaks. Well best play to the audience who pays you $35K per day I guess.
Before going into flame mode folk might like to consider that Windows-XP also includes a firewall/glorified packet filter and that the change probably reflects a transfer of functionality out of the stack and into a separate module.
The folk who are flailing arround condemining 'incomplete sockets implementation' should consider that the IETF never endorsed BSD sockets as a standard. The ability to forge packets is arguably a fault in the BSD sockets spec and Microsoft was arguably correct in implementing checks on the IP source packets it will generate.
Slashdotters who posted MSFT flames could do to repeat 100 times 'the UNIX way is not always the right way'.
In days of yore we VMS folk used to flame UNIX precisely because this sloppy type of programming was pervasive.
It would be interesting to know what facilities the firewall in Windows-XP provides for filtering and monitoring forged packets. It would also be interesting to know how difficult it is to disable the firewall.
As one poster has pointed out however the fact that most cable hookups tend to have source address checking probably saves the day. Also the fact that many home users have NAT boxes to share their cable connection arround the house probably provides some protection.
A point that folk have been missing is that the DoC invented ICANN because the reactionaries in the Senate would have exploded if they had tried to give the task to the UN.
The ITU is now a part of the UN but predates it by a few decades. It is the body that hands out frequencies, telephone country codes, satelite orbit slots, that sort of thing. It exists to do exactly the sort of beureacratic pen pushing that that type of task requires.
The advantage of having the UN control the root would have been that as a treaty organization it would be imune from the onslaught of lawsuits that the trademark owners threatened.
ICANN does not have immunity, nor does it have the funds to fight lawsuits. So it is little surprise that they act as the craven suplicants of the trademark owners.
The ITU is not exactly without critics but by and large it has far fewer critics than ICANN despite performing far more controvertial tasks.
The US invented ICANN to attempt to keep control of the Internet root. However in practice an attempt by the US to do something derranged would simply cause the root to pass out of their control. Imagine if the US decided to drop.uk or.de out of the root, the non-US ISPs would switch to an alternative root very quickly and most of the US ISPs would follow.
The only reason for keeping the root small is that it preserves this ability to switch the root over should that be necessary. If the root had 2,000,000 names in it it would not be possible to transfer it.
That may be, but it's completely irrelevant. The internet isn't designed to use IPv6 yet, it doesn't follow that IPv6 will destabilize the internet.
The Internet is designed to support IPv6 and IPv6 was expressly designed to provide for a gradual deployment that does not destabilize the Internet.
DNS on the other hand was designed with the assumption of a unique owner per name and all existing applications act on that assumption. Fracturing the root would if successful cause all the names in the fracture to be worthless or less than worthless.
Consider the value of a new.net name vs a dotcom name. If you buy a dotcom name for $35 you can build a brand image arround it. There are plenty of pronouncable sylable strings left. If you buy a new.net name at least 95% of the Internet will not be able to resolve it. Anyone fancy building a brand arround such a name?
The only hope for the irregular domains is to eventually get them sanctioned by ICANN and incorporated into the root. The only value in a new.net name is the hope that that might occur.
Should someone really get exclusive ownership of a desirable TLD just because they took a large amount of money for names before the tld was granted?
Domain names are in effect trademarks in their own right, the value of foobar.com is that someone can send mail to system@foobar.com and connect to the right mail server. Domain names are the routing unit of the Internet.
Internet DRAFTS, not RFCs
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One point nobody seems to have picked up yet, the documents in question are no more than Internet Drafts, they are the personal opinion of the author. The obligatory preface states explicity that they do not represent IETF policy, are not guaranteed to become standards and will be consigned to the bit bucket in six months time.
The documents do not therefore represent a fight between the IETF and ICANN, nor do they represent the position that the IETF would take. They are simply one person's personal view.
The threads reflect the common misconception that DNS is a yellow pages directory. It is not, it is a name service that maps names that are intended to have a meaning fixed over the long term to Internet Protocol addresses that for various reasons are subject to change over relatively short periods of time.
The IETF has developed a yellow pages type protocol - CNRP. With CNRP you can type in 'sex' and the client will search as many catalogue servers as you like for pr0n. Queries can also be made more specific, tailoring your search for strip clubs to your geographic locality, fetishes etc.
With CNRP it is possible for multiple people to bind to the same index term. With DNS the entire engineering purpose is lost if that happens.
The Internet Drafts contain a massive logical falacy. They assume that conflict between 'alternative' roots can be avoided. This is not the case. Most of the new.net domains are also hosted by other irregular roots. In many cases the other alternate roots were up and running earlier than new.net. The idea that 'destabilization' can be avoided by a central actor presupposes that that actor exists and is respected to some degree.
Use of the alternative roots is negligible to nil. Nobody uses an alternative root for hyperlinks in public web sites or for email. The only possible use for the alternative roots is as a poor substitute for CNRP - as a service lookup. Since DNS is designed to support the type of use made of it that hyperlinks and email do and is not designed as a yellow pages the only people to be incommoded should ICANN issue a TLD that collides with an irregular one are the operators of the root and the people who paid them money thinking they would buy names.
We could check with Paul Vixie to be sure (keeping in mind he is, um, "a man of strong opinions":)) but I don't think it would be too tough to scale BIND up to 17576 TLDs
Paul has done some great stuff but the capabilities of BIND are not relevant to the debate. BIND does the hard job of supporting DNS servers that applications can point their query at and have the DNS server work out how to resolve it. BIND can also be used to set up a DNS resolver. However the tlds and the root servers are pure resolvers. They don't need to cache, they don't need to pass on queries. They are simply in memory databases that respond to what we scientists call a humungous number of queries a second.
As a matter of fact there is no technical obstacle to having an unrestricted top level directory. In fact dotcom is pretty much that already - it has the vast bulk of the names and most of the lookups are in dotcom. VeriSign would be more than happy to run such a system for a modest fee per name.
Politically the obstacles are enormous. ICANN will stay in control of the root provided that they do not do anything really stupid. Throwing Cuba out of the root on state dept. orders or throwing the country TLDs out for not paying the dues ICANN would like to levy would cause the root to fracture.
Unfortunately arbitrary resolution procedures that are stacked in favor of domain name grabbers with tenuous trademark claims is not going to be sufficient to split the root.
However it is fortunate that the root will not split just for the benefit of the likes of Idealab! startups thrown together with little thought to try to make some bucks but which really add no value.
NSI gets anywhere from $6-$35 per year for each one. That's $240,000,000 to $1,400,000,000 dollars anually, and they don't even maintain the servers.
Untrue, VeriSign (owner of NSI) DOES run the servers for.com,.org and.net. They also run half of the roots and in particular the A-Root which is the master.
Running the DNS toplevel servers is a non-trivial task. It is not simply a question of downloading the latest version of Bind and sticking it onto an Intel box running Linux.
The central problem with the domain name system is that people are using it as a yellow pages directory when what it is designed to do is much closer to the service that maps 1-800 numbers to the actual telephone lines.
The Internet is NOT designed to have two different owners of a DNS zone.
If what people really want is a yellow pages lookup system then what they should look at is CNRP - common name resolution protocol.
Incidentaly, the drafts are personal contributions by a guy called Simon Higgs who I have not heard of before. He is not speaking for the IETF and the article should not make it appear that the IETF has endorsed the draft, it has not and furthermore given that it does not appear to be addressed to any of the IETF process tracks the IETF cannot endorse it.
The Linux kernel is GPL (with the binary module exception, admittedly).
The 'Lesser' or Library GPL omits the control freak clause. If you talk to (or to more accurate are talked at by) RMS he will explain at considerable length why the control freak GPL license that forces everything it touches to become GPL is the only option.
I don't know anyone who has any difficulty with the LGPL except for RMS. The name change from Library to 'Lesser' was to discourage its use.
The point is moot, since RMS doesn't claim to speak for Open Source.
I think it was quite obvious in my original post that I was arguing that Microsoft took a potshot at RMS and Free Software because doing so was the easiest means of attacking open source software. You may not consider RMS a spokesperson for open source and it is entirely likely that MSFT do not either. However it is to their advantage to present him as such for their PR ends.
I would not call RMS unwilling to compromise, completely incapable of understanding the point of view that would lead to compromise would be nearer the mark.
He tried to persuade me that building a cyclotron in space was a good plan (make it cheaper since there is plenty of vaccum in space was his idea).
The Open Source movement really have to understand that it has moved beyond RMS and that the decision to junk the GPL was essential for the success of the movement.
If Apache had been GPL it could not have been sold commercially with add-ons like the SSL encryption module. If Linux had been GPL it could not have been marketed by companies like IBM.
The GPL is a self obsessed piece of control freakery. The whole point of GPL is that everything it touches must also become GPL.
The open source movement promotes free software in an entirely different way. Instead of insisting that every addition must add to the RMS empire the true open source licenses work by simply allowing the cost of software to fall to the marginal cost of production - which is pretty close to zero.
If Open Source were a political movement then we would keep RMS away from the podium as assiduously as the alleged President's handlers keep George Bush away from press interviews.
Microsoft are using an old political trick - choosing their opponent. It is the same trick the 'religious' reich use when they dredge up some loopy crackpot who would otherwise be ignored to attack for promoting 'political correctness'. It is the same trick liberals use when they dredge up octogenarian+ advocates of seggregation such as Jessie Helms and Strom Thurmond and claim that they are representative of the modern leadership of the Republican party.
Yes, I agree the price is pretty sick.. but what do you expect? Where are all the other portable solutions that fill the gap the Peerless meets?
Well Archos sell a nifty MP3 player built arround a hard drive that can be had for $250 or thereabouts with discounts that also doubles as a 6Gb USB drive. Not only does it not require the overpriced docking station you can use it to play tunes.
Don't even bring up the "portable" firewire and USB hard drives, because not only are they MUCH larger, they are MUCH heavier, and require MUCH MUCH MUCH MORE POWER.
Nope, thing runs for 8 hours on the internal batteries (NiMH) and is smaller than my Palm VII on two dimensions whilst being only slightly thicker.
Now IOM are offering slightly more capacity, but Archos have been out for several months now and I'll wager that a 12Gb disk will not be long coming.
For long term archival storage I just go down to CostCo and plonk a 60Gb drive in my cart, take it home, run a backup then take it offline and store it in the firesafe. Total cost $180, I keep a second in my desk drawer in the office. Vastly cheaper than any tape system and much more reliable.
I cannot imagine any need that I have that the IOM drive solves for me. I use my archos box for really big file transfers and CompactFlash (or the Internet) for the rest.
IBMs 1Gb compact flash drive has enough capacity for any imaginable still photography needs I might have. If they could get the price down low they would also be good enough for my video needs too.
As an exercise I actually tried taking videos with a simulated 2Gb cartridge - I cut a box of 10 DV tapes down to 2 minutes so that I had to keep changing the cartridge. It was not all that bad.
My prefered video solution would still consist of a detached CCD head and optics connected to a hip mounted battery pack and hard drive.
The MPAA is not stupid enough to admit that the reason they invented region encoding was for an illegal price maintenance scheme. The fairy tale that RCE has to do with different release dates is disproved by the fact that 90% of material released on DVD is from the back catalogue yet it is all region encoded.
Unfortunately making region free players available has only a limited effect on preventing the differential pricing since retailers can only practically sell the disks from their own region. People like myself who buy 30+ discs at a time can go through Amazon.com but that route does not offer savings for foreign buyers of small numbers of discs. Perhaps people will start clubbing together to plaqce large orders (and swap the discs afterwards).
Ultimately region encoding will fail since the cost of DVD players will inevitably plummet. There is no reason a DVD player should cost more than a CD player ($50 or less). Even a portable player with a screen is unlikely to cost more than $150 in a couple of years (LiIon battery extra).
Standing up to monopolistic exploiters is what governments are for. The MPAA has a very US centric mindset in which all government problems are solved the way they are solved in the US - with large cash bribes (sorry campaign contributions).
The EU and the Australian government will prove much harder to intimidate. The WTO treaty does not compromise their ability to punish an international cartel. The studios have extensive assets in the EU and Australia and no treaty stops a sovereign government imposing a fine for restraint of trade.
I would say that approximately 30% of the stuff we worked on at CERN has been realized. The commercial side of the web has caused it to grow fast in some areas (most notably executable size), it has also hindered some developments.
Cascading Style Sheets were originally developed by Hakon Lie in 1994. Netscape were not interested in the idea at all, they wanted to tie lots of proprietary features to HTML that would lock people into their browser. CSS would make it easy for sites to support both Netscape and IE, so they were firmly against them.
Netscape were also against tables initially. They considered them unnecessary, the real problem was that their parser was yacc based and support for the tables syntax was really hard. They had been taught all the LR(1) stuff in comp sci class but did not realize that since Goldfarb would not have known an LR(1) grammar from a poke in the eye with a sharp stick attempts to parse SGML with an LR(1) parser are doomed to failure since SGML is context sensitive.
Instead of useful stuff like CSS we got a crappy scripting language that for the first three years was so baddly implemented that many browsers would crash when they hit the wrong type of javascript.
The CSS problem could have worked better if the content negotiation scheme had been implemented properly. WAP has a workable scheme, most HTML browsers do not.
My view was (and still is) that the style sheet should be applied on the server side and that web authoring tools such as Frontpage should
support both direct entry of text in XML and design of XSL stylesheet converters. I have yet to see a decent package that does not cost a ridiculous amount.
Hopefully the tenth birthday will at least put a stop to those stupid 'Internet Time' stories written by sad hacks with no brains. If the development of the Web was any slower it would grind to a halt. Trying to get anything done still takes at least a year. Paint dries faster.
I don't see the need to send documents around in Word format (which version do you have again?) if they don't have to be modified. PDF Files are just as useful, and there's excellent readers for every platform.
It is kind of hard for one of your co-workers to edit a file if you sent it in PDF. In fact most uses of PDF these days appear to be to attempt to prevent editing of the finshed document.
I shocked one of our legal folk by taking a pdf document and editing the source. Time for digital signatures.
Most companies exchange Word and PowerPoint internally as the unit of information exchange. XML may one day be an alternative but I have yet to find an XML editor anywhere close to Word for a reasonable price. Yeah I know that vi is open sauce... yada yada yada...
I hate AOL for the same reason I hate the Mac, it is a user interface where the single overriding design objective is to support use by pin heads. UNIX goes too far the other way, it is entirely possible to support power users without the Richie & Thompson philosophy of writing 'user-hostile' software.
Folk on the board seem to think that running the dot.com TLD is simply a matter of putting BIND on a LINUX box and leaving it to run. The fact is that DNS was never designed to handle domains with tens of millions of names.
Turn off the root name servers and the Internet grinds to a halt over about 24 hours.
The offer to run.biz for 90% of the VeriSign fee for dotcom is not half as generous as it appears. Serving dotcom is much more expensive because it has more of the high traffic sites. Aslo all the browsers are at this point programmed to look in dotcom as part of the search algorithm. The dotbiz domain will have much less traffic per name so the bid looks pretty high.
Equally the assumption that DNS needs to be hierarchical is now bogus. The fact that dotcom can be supported demonstrates that a flat namespace could be supported - dotcom has consistently contained approximately as many names as all the TLDS put together had 9-12 months before.
Of course in a flat namespace.web and.biz lose interest since comapnies would shift to names like www.microsoft. and www.cnn.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked senior executives of large multinationals engaged in criminal conspiracies told lies to avoid prosecution.
The fact is that most of the material out on DVD and zone encoded is from the back catalogue. New movie releases are only a small fraction of the DVDs that are on sale.
The only possible explanation for the zone system is to allow differential pricing, to allow the studios to charge more in one zone than in another. That is illegal and there is no reason that the EU should not fine the studios a few billion dollars apiece.
Tivo's lack of 30 second skip removes 60% of the reason to buy one. As does the closed nature of the box. It is not possible to move data from one Tivo device to another via wireless ethernet, it is not even possible to add extra drives to the box - not without inordinate hassle.
Tivo will die, good riddance. They will be replaced by cheap commodity appliances from manufacturers that do not charge inflated subscription fees, or by better TV tuner card software for PCs. Why do people who would never buy a crippleware 'email appliance' leap to the defence of the grasping business model of Tivo?
How did that post get into the Web Bugs thread ?? Did IE have a nervous breakdown?
Tivo's lack of 30 second skip removes 60% of the reason to buy one. As does the closed nature of the box. It is not possible to move data from one Tivo device to another via wireless ethernet, it is not even possible to add extra drives to the box - not without inordinate hassle.
Tivo will die, good riddance. They will be replaced by cheap commodity appliances from manufacturers that do not charge inflated subscription fees, or by better TV tuner card software for PCs. Why do people who would never buy a crippleware 'email appliance' leap to the defence of the grasping business model of Tivo?
Zeinfeld responds that he wishes freematt would join his whacko friends in sealand and partake of whatever armaments governments feel fit to launch in his general direction.
Absolutely. The British government has recognized that it has lost ownership of the platform but has never recognized the platform as sovereign.
A judge did rule a long time ago that the platform was outside English costal waters and was therefore outside the juridiction of the English courts. That does not entail any statement about sovereignty. Glasgow is outside the juridsiction of the English courts but is still under the British Crown.
The judge's rulling has since been superceeded when the UK government ratified a convention that set uniform boundaries for all the signatories. Under the convention UK sovereignty (and hence English) actually extended to include the platform. The platform is now within UK teritorial waters.
Incidentally, man made platforms do not count for purposes of sovereignty. Otherwise countries could extend their teritorial waters by building strategically placed barges.
A man made platform such as an oil rig falls under marine law and has to be registered in a national shipping registry. Otherwise any state that chooses can exercise sovereignty over it.
Being a stateless platform does not mean that sealand is subject to no national laws, if it were in fact the case (it is not) all that status would mean is that Sealand is not subject to any national protection. The place was taken over by pirates a while back and not surprisingly no government lifted a finger to protect the inhabitants.
US wackos with guns who are still living in shelters in Montana, convinced the Y2K virus is going to bring down civilization will disagree. I could not care less. As another poster pointed out, Sealand will be permitted to exist up to the point they start to be a conduit for organized crime at which point they will be raided.
Well he did have a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, he edited the OED for many years. If there was an Oxford Elvish Dictionary, he would have written it.
Someone once questioned his use of the spelling 'dwarves' when the OED specified 'dwarfs', Tolkien replied "I wrote the OED".
In terms of linguistics, Tolkien was the foremost authority in his day on Middle English and the etymology of the English language. He was responsible for keeping study of Middle English compulsory in the English sylabus (together with C.S. Lewis?). Thus he was infamous amongst the undergrads for forcing them to read 'Beowulf'.
The LOTR was essentially an attempt to create an English mythology to replace the one lost as a result of the Norman invasion and the medieval christian church.
LG does not market much under its own brand. The only place where I know of that happening is the UK where the Dixons/Currys chain replaced their in house 'Matsui' label with an exclusive distribution deal with LG. They did a similar deal with Samsung many years ago when nobody in Europe knew who they were.
I'd guess they make about 95% of audio equipment sold worldwide. :-)
I doubt if those companies make more than 30% combined. They market upwards of 80% - China and India ae huge markets with significant local players.
SDMI is in trouble for reasons that were obvious two years ago when I went to their meetings, the only way SDMI can succeed is if every country in the world passes a law making non-SDMI players illegal. The hardware manufacturers have very little incentive to actually implement SDMI, they have a marginal interest in pretending they might.
I suspect that the list of companies leaving is simply the list of compaines whose subscriptions were not renewed. I can't see anyone going out of their way to declare in public the private contempt they express for SDMI.
In 1999 the group was running arround like headless chickens declaring that they had to solve the problem by Christmas or it was all over.
One of the most ridiculous features of SDMI is that it prohibits absolutely any form of microphone built into the package. So it will be illegal to have a portable dictation machine that also plays SDMI MP3s.
My strong belief is that there will be convergence between video cameras and MP3 players, just as there is already convergence between digital cameras and MP3. The idea of prohibiting a line in or mic in jack to such devices is pure fantasy.
What I want is a device about the size of a cigarete packet that has a CPU, battery and compact flash II socket. It would record 20 mnutes of video onto an IBM (or other manufacturer) minidrive. There would be sockets for headphones, line-out, camera, microphone and line-in, plus USB of course. The base unit would strap to the waist belt with only lightweight peripherals to plug into it - just like modern cell phones.
A much simpler algorithm is
The SAS survival handbook lists hundreds of ways to stay alive in artic wastes armed with only a rusty can opener. Me I go down to the supermarket.
Technology is good, folk should try it sometime.
Much better would be to do the job properly and use a dovetail joint.
I know the guy is living off welfare and had to save up for the case by collecting empty bottles and selling a kidney but I don't see why the result should be held up as an example to the rest of us. If we are going to have designer cases they should look better than standard ones. That case looks worse than the average homebrew of the 70s.
If we are going to do non-standard case stories lets at least see pretty ones.
And what is the betting that those special needs would turn out to be a prison cell?
Given that the US government would rather spend money imprisoning drug users than on recovery programs and has over the past ten years transfered money from the eductation system to the prison system the idea your ideas are hopelessly naive.
Given the efficiency with which credit rating companies maintain records (at least 30% are wrong) and the efficiency with which Florida maintained its electoral roll (at least 10,000 people wrongfully excluded) the idea that data mining technology will solve our problems is facile. Far from being a future solution I suspect that mining of personal data is likely to end up like the Nuclear industry, a technological pariah.
Pundits and futureologists love to present their ideas as if they are something that society has no choice in. US pundits in particular love to convince us that the future will be dictated by corporations. I guess it is something of an ego trip combined with the fact that 'what will be' makes a better title for a book than 'what might be'.
The fact is that we do have a choice about the society we live in and we can choose the form of technology we will support. It is not luddism to oppose the baleful and arbitrary influence that the likes of TRW and Equifax now exercise. Nor is it luddism to observe that the DVD zones system, SDMI and the like can and should be rejected.
It is not even a case of government interference or not. SDMI cannot work without legislation to mandate its use. It is the abusers of technology that run to the government all the time. The suggestion that the government might support the citizens rather than the corporations who buy legislators raises cries of horror.
CASE was in my view pretty much a failure. I have seen many software projects fail due to a software methodology. No methodology is a substitute for people who really know what they are doing. In many cases CASE is simply a means of organizing fifty people to do the work of five. CASE is popular with PHBs but so was ISO 9000 and we all know what a success that is.
I suspect this futurologist's predictions will be popular with the same sort of people who like CASE - corporate control freaks. Well best play to the audience who pays you $35K per day I guess.
The folk who are flailing arround condemining 'incomplete sockets implementation' should consider that the IETF never endorsed BSD sockets as a standard. The ability to forge packets is arguably a fault in the BSD sockets spec and Microsoft was arguably correct in implementing checks on the IP source packets it will generate.
Slashdotters who posted MSFT flames could do to repeat 100 times 'the UNIX way is not always the right way'.
In days of yore we VMS folk used to flame UNIX precisely because this sloppy type of programming was pervasive.
It would be interesting to know what facilities the firewall in Windows-XP provides for filtering and monitoring forged packets. It would also be interesting to know how difficult it is to disable the firewall.
As one poster has pointed out however the fact that most cable hookups tend to have source address checking probably saves the day. Also the fact that many home users have NAT boxes to share their cable connection arround the house probably provides some protection.
The ITU is now a part of the UN but predates it by a few decades. It is the body that hands out frequencies, telephone country codes, satelite orbit slots, that sort of thing. It exists to do exactly the sort of beureacratic pen pushing that that type of task requires.
The advantage of having the UN control the root would have been that as a treaty organization it would be imune from the onslaught of lawsuits that the trademark owners threatened.
ICANN does not have immunity, nor does it have the funds to fight lawsuits. So it is little surprise that they act as the craven suplicants of the trademark owners.
The ITU is not exactly without critics but by and large it has far fewer critics than ICANN despite performing far more controvertial tasks.
The US invented ICANN to attempt to keep control of the Internet root. However in practice an attempt by the US to do something derranged would simply cause the root to pass out of their control. Imagine if the US decided to drop .uk or .de out of the root, the non-US ISPs would switch to an alternative root very quickly and most of the US ISPs would follow.
The only reason for keeping the root small is that it preserves this ability to switch the root over should that be necessary. If the root had 2,000,000 names in it it would not be possible to transfer it.
The Internet is designed to support IPv6 and IPv6 was expressly designed to provide for a gradual deployment that does not destabilize the Internet.
DNS on the other hand was designed with the assumption of a unique owner per name and all existing applications act on that assumption. Fracturing the root would if successful cause all the names in the fracture to be worthless or less than worthless.
Consider the value of a new.net name vs a dotcom name. If you buy a dotcom name for $35 you can build a brand image arround it. There are plenty of pronouncable sylable strings left. If you buy a new.net name at least 95% of the Internet will not be able to resolve it. Anyone fancy building a brand arround such a name?
The only hope for the irregular domains is to eventually get them sanctioned by ICANN and incorporated into the root. The only value in a new.net name is the hope that that might occur.
Should someone really get exclusive ownership of a desirable TLD just because they took a large amount of money for names before the tld was granted?
Domain names are in effect trademarks in their own right, the value of foobar.com is that someone can send mail to system@foobar.com and connect to the right mail server. Domain names are the routing unit of the Internet.
The documents do not therefore represent a fight between the IETF and ICANN, nor do they represent the position that the IETF would take. They are simply one person's personal view.
The threads reflect the common misconception that DNS is a yellow pages directory. It is not, it is a name service that maps names that are intended to have a meaning fixed over the long term to Internet Protocol addresses that for various reasons are subject to change over relatively short periods of time.
The IETF has developed a yellow pages type protocol - CNRP. With CNRP you can type in 'sex' and the client will search as many catalogue servers as you like for pr0n. Queries can also be made more specific, tailoring your search for strip clubs to your geographic locality, fetishes etc.
With CNRP it is possible for multiple people to bind to the same index term. With DNS the entire engineering purpose is lost if that happens.
The Internet Drafts contain a massive logical falacy. They assume that conflict between 'alternative' roots can be avoided. This is not the case. Most of the new.net domains are also hosted by other irregular roots. In many cases the other alternate roots were up and running earlier than new.net. The idea that 'destabilization' can be avoided by a central actor presupposes that that actor exists and is respected to some degree.
Use of the alternative roots is negligible to nil. Nobody uses an alternative root for hyperlinks in public web sites or for email. The only possible use for the alternative roots is as a poor substitute for CNRP - as a service lookup. Since DNS is designed to support the type of use made of it that hyperlinks and email do and is not designed as a yellow pages the only people to be incommoded should ICANN issue a TLD that collides with an irregular one are the operators of the root and the people who paid them money thinking they would buy names.
Paul has done some great stuff but the capabilities of BIND are not relevant to the debate. BIND does the hard job of supporting DNS servers that applications can point their query at and have the DNS server work out how to resolve it. BIND can also be used to set up a DNS resolver. However the tlds and the root servers are pure resolvers. They don't need to cache, they don't need to pass on queries. They are simply in memory databases that respond to what we scientists call a humungous number of queries a second.
As a matter of fact there is no technical obstacle to having an unrestricted top level directory. In fact dotcom is pretty much that already - it has the vast bulk of the names and most of the lookups are in dotcom. VeriSign would be more than happy to run such a system for a modest fee per name.
Politically the obstacles are enormous. ICANN will stay in control of the root provided that they do not do anything really stupid. Throwing Cuba out of the root on state dept. orders or throwing the country TLDs out for not paying the dues ICANN would like to levy would cause the root to fracture.
Unfortunately arbitrary resolution procedures that are stacked in favor of domain name grabbers with tenuous trademark claims is not going to be sufficient to split the root.
However it is fortunate that the root will not split just for the benefit of the likes of Idealab! startups thrown together with little thought to try to make some bucks but which really add no value.
Untrue, VeriSign (owner of NSI) DOES run the servers for .com, .org and .net. They also run half of the roots and in particular the A-Root which is the master.
Running the DNS toplevel servers is a non-trivial task. It is not simply a question of downloading the latest version of Bind and sticking it onto an Intel box running Linux.
The central problem with the domain name system is that people are using it as a yellow pages directory when what it is designed to do is much closer to the service that maps 1-800 numbers to the actual telephone lines.
The Internet is NOT designed to have two different owners of a DNS zone.
If what people really want is a yellow pages lookup system then what they should look at is CNRP - common name resolution protocol.
Incidentaly, the drafts are personal contributions by a guy called Simon Higgs who I have not heard of before. He is not speaking for the IETF and the article should not make it appear that the IETF has endorsed the draft, it has not and furthermore given that it does not appear to be addressed to any of the IETF process tracks the IETF cannot endorse it.
The 'Lesser' or Library GPL omits the control freak clause. If you talk to (or to more accurate are talked at by) RMS he will explain at considerable length why the control freak GPL license that forces everything it touches to become GPL is the only option.
I don't know anyone who has any difficulty with the LGPL except for RMS. The name change from Library to 'Lesser' was to discourage its use.
The point is moot, since RMS doesn't claim to speak for Open Source.
I think it was quite obvious in my original post that I was arguing that Microsoft took a potshot at RMS and Free Software because doing so was the easiest means of attacking open source software. You may not consider RMS a spokesperson for open source and it is entirely likely that MSFT do not either. However it is to their advantage to present him as such for their PR ends.
I would not call RMS unwilling to compromise, completely incapable of understanding the point of view that would lead to compromise would be nearer the mark.
He tried to persuade me that building a cyclotron in space was a good plan (make it cheaper since there is plenty of vaccum in space was his idea).
The Open Source movement really have to understand that it has moved beyond RMS and that the decision to junk the GPL was essential for the success of the movement.
If Apache had been GPL it could not have been sold commercially with add-ons like the SSL encryption module. If Linux had been GPL it could not have been marketed by companies like IBM.
The GPL is a self obsessed piece of control freakery. The whole point of GPL is that everything it touches must also become GPL.
The open source movement promotes free software in an entirely different way. Instead of insisting that every addition must add to the RMS empire the true open source licenses work by simply allowing the cost of software to fall to the marginal cost of production - which is pretty close to zero.
If Open Source were a political movement then we would keep RMS away from the podium as assiduously as the alleged President's handlers keep George Bush away from press interviews.
Microsoft are using an old political trick - choosing their opponent. It is the same trick the 'religious' reich use when they dredge up some loopy crackpot who would otherwise be ignored to attack for promoting 'political correctness'. It is the same trick liberals use when they dredge up octogenarian+ advocates of seggregation such as Jessie Helms and Strom Thurmond and claim that they are representative of the modern leadership of the Republican party.
Well Archos sell a nifty MP3 player built arround a hard drive that can be had for $250 or thereabouts with discounts that also doubles as a 6Gb USB drive. Not only does it not require the overpriced docking station you can use it to play tunes.
Don't even bring up the "portable" firewire and USB hard drives, because not only are they MUCH larger, they are MUCH heavier, and require MUCH MUCH MUCH MORE POWER.
Nope, thing runs for 8 hours on the internal batteries (NiMH) and is smaller than my Palm VII on two dimensions whilst being only slightly thicker.
Now IOM are offering slightly more capacity, but Archos have been out for several months now and I'll wager that a 12Gb disk will not be long coming.
For long term archival storage I just go down to CostCo and plonk a 60Gb drive in my cart, take it home, run a backup then take it offline and store it in the firesafe. Total cost $180, I keep a second in my desk drawer in the office. Vastly cheaper than any tape system and much more reliable.
I cannot imagine any need that I have that the IOM drive solves for me. I use my archos box for really big file transfers and CompactFlash (or the Internet) for the rest.
IBMs 1Gb compact flash drive has enough capacity for any imaginable still photography needs I might have. If they could get the price down low they would also be good enough for my video needs too.
As an exercise I actually tried taking videos with a simulated 2Gb cartridge - I cut a box of 10 DV tapes down to 2 minutes so that I had to keep changing the cartridge. It was not all that bad.
My prefered video solution would still consist of a detached CCD head and optics connected to a hip mounted battery pack and hard drive.
Unfortunately making region free players available has only a limited effect on preventing the differential pricing since retailers can only practically sell the disks from their own region. People like myself who buy 30+ discs at a time can go through Amazon.com but that route does not offer savings for foreign buyers of small numbers of discs. Perhaps people will start clubbing together to plaqce large orders (and swap the discs afterwards).
Ultimately region encoding will fail since the cost of DVD players will inevitably plummet. There is no reason a DVD player should cost more than a CD player ($50 or less). Even a portable player with a screen is unlikely to cost more than $150 in a couple of years (LiIon battery extra).
Standing up to monopolistic exploiters is what governments are for. The MPAA has a very US centric mindset in which all government problems are solved the way they are solved in the US - with large cash bribes (sorry campaign contributions).
The EU and the Australian government will prove much harder to intimidate. The WTO treaty does not compromise their ability to punish an international cartel. The studios have extensive assets in the EU and Australia and no treaty stops a sovereign government imposing a fine for restraint of trade.
Cascading Style Sheets were originally developed by Hakon Lie in 1994. Netscape were not interested in the idea at all, they wanted to tie lots of proprietary features to HTML that would lock people into their browser. CSS would make it easy for sites to support both Netscape and IE, so they were firmly against them.
Netscape were also against tables initially. They considered them unnecessary, the real problem was that their parser was yacc based and support for the tables syntax was really hard. They had been taught all the LR(1) stuff in comp sci class but did not realize that since Goldfarb would not have known an LR(1) grammar from a poke in the eye with a sharp stick attempts to parse SGML with an LR(1) parser are doomed to failure since SGML is context sensitive.
Instead of useful stuff like CSS we got a crappy scripting language that for the first three years was so baddly implemented that many browsers would crash when they hit the wrong type of javascript.
The CSS problem could have worked better if the content negotiation scheme had been implemented properly. WAP has a workable scheme, most HTML browsers do not.
My view was (and still is) that the style sheet should be applied on the server side and that web authoring tools such as Frontpage should support both direct entry of text in XML and design of XSL stylesheet converters. I have yet to see a decent package that does not cost a ridiculous amount.
Hopefully the tenth birthday will at least put a stop to those stupid 'Internet Time' stories written by sad hacks with no brains. If the development of the Web was any slower it would grind to a halt. Trying to get anything done still takes at least a year. Paint dries faster.
It is kind of hard for one of your co-workers to edit a file if you sent it in PDF. In fact most uses of PDF these days appear to be to attempt to prevent editing of the finshed document.
I shocked one of our legal folk by taking a pdf document and editing the source. Time for digital signatures.
Most companies exchange Word and PowerPoint internally as the unit of information exchange. XML may one day be an alternative but I have yet to find an XML editor anywhere close to Word for a reasonable price. Yeah I know that vi is open sauce... yada yada yada...
I hate AOL for the same reason I hate the Mac, it is a user interface where the single overriding design objective is to support use by pin heads. UNIX goes too far the other way, it is entirely possible to support power users without the Richie & Thompson philosophy of writing 'user-hostile' software.
Turn off the root name servers and the Internet grinds to a halt over about 24 hours.
The offer to run .biz for 90% of the VeriSign fee for dotcom is not half as generous as it appears. Serving dotcom is much more expensive because it has more of the high traffic sites. Aslo all the browsers are at this point programmed to look in dotcom as part of the search algorithm. The dotbiz domain will have much less traffic per name so the bid looks pretty high.
Equally the assumption that DNS needs to be hierarchical is now bogus. The fact that dotcom can be supported demonstrates that a flat namespace could be supported - dotcom has consistently contained approximately as many names as all the TLDS put together had 9-12 months before.
Of course in a flat namespace .web and .biz lose interest since comapnies would shift to names like www.microsoft. and www.cnn.