I understood this. But how many other archives are there out on the net that would be cheaper? I'll bet there are on the order of dozens, if you were interested in doing this and didn't have millions to spend, that you could buy.
And now with the prospect of being able to post these things via google, there is total anonymity (so it will be harder to catch pedophiles), and, what is just as bad (since it encourages new pedophiles), the easy access to an enormous cache of porn.
Don't kid yourself (no pun)-- there has been anonymous remailing available for Usenet for years (the attack on the anonymous remailers is relatively recent.) Deja makes an effort to record who you are, so it's not terribly anonymous. If you want to post anonymously (which is your right, according to most courts in the land), you'll find a way to do it.
Begin rant: And agh, I'm sick of goddamn child-porn being the number one justification for net-censorship. Yeah, I don't like the idea of guys getting off on pictures of little kids, and I think it's a great idea to go after the bastards who produce the stuff. But really, fighting a prohibition-style war on those few individuals with sick fantasy lifes is going to do a lot more harm than good. For every actual producer of child-porn snagged, hundreds of people will suffer unnecessarily: people who lose their right to anonymity and are persecuted for telling the truth about their employer, companies who try to protect their customers, innocent citizens who have their mail sniffed by Carnivore (sorry, DCS-1000SE or whatever), not to mention the thousands of people who were born with a deviant set of sexual preferences and-- thank god-- are able to confine themselves to getting their rocks off over nothing more serious than a few pictures.
Nobody will speak out against any excess necessary to prevent the distribution of child pornography, because even taking a stand inspires many people to view you as condoning the exploitation of little kids. Witness the recent uproar over virtual child-porn-- essentially, artistic representations of fictional situations. Law enforcement officials saying "well, unless you can prove that the picture is a fake, we'll have to prosecute." When we're willing toss out the most basic legal principles, who are we serving? End rant
Actually, what I'm curious about is: why couldn't Google and other companies build their own usenet service? It's not that hard. Does Deja have patents (!?), or is the brand name worth that much?
And if that lady had been a little bit more aware of what could be done with the technology, she would have taken as much care with her internet access as she did with her paycheck, mail and phone calls. In other words, she was one of the unlucky few who was caught with their pants down because this possibility wasn't widely considered. Her story will serve to inform future criminals that they just need to be careful with their internet access, and they don't need to worry about being caught.
Meanwhile other people whose only crime is speaking out against their employer (for example) will be vulnerable to unjustified subpoenas, among other things.
As for the middle [marketing]: they've never been as good at this as they've claimed, and the Net provides a new medium that, by all accounts, they fail to understand.
They've been wonderful at marketing. Have you looked at the charts lately? Sales are concentrating on a relatively small number of heavily promoted groups. Note that one producer is responsible for two or three of the best selling acts in the business today.
I don't think the net is going to change the mass-market as much as people think it is. What it is going to do is allow the rest of the world access to more targeted channels; in other words, MTV will still promote Christina Aguilera and Eminem-- but there will be many more alternatives to MTV. Even though sales of the kinds of music I listen to will never approach those of Britney Spears, I will at least be able to hear those bands with a much higher signal-to-noise ratio.
I think those people who imagine that this is going to destroy the record industry are badly mistaken. It will allow artists more choice, it will allow customers to avoid the crap (and record companies will eventually get in on this) but it isn't going to end their domination (unless, possibly, they get wiped out by their mishandling of copyright issues.)
Sony rarely waves $3 million in anyone's face, unless they're already a major star. Try a couple of hundred thousand, all of which will be consumed by album production costs at a major studio. And that's if you're lucky enough to get signed.
Really, the only serious reason to get signed is to take advantage of the record labels' promotional machines; they will be especially helpful if you belong to a tough-looking-but-sensitive male ensemble with a library of snappy dance moves. For those bands that fall outside this category, any way of making it without the record companies' help would be a great thing.
The idea that a SM58 is going to produce sound quality even remotely similar to a studio condenser is absurd.
Absolutely. But good condenser microphones are starting to get cheaper (Conneaut Audio Devices) and affordable high-quality mixing boards are much cheaper (remember those monster boards you had to have?) Most home studios can get by with a recording area, a couple of decent condenser microphones, decent preamps and a good set of ADCs. It won't be Abbey Road, but the quality will be very good. The real problems with most of the home-studio recordings I've heard have much less to do with equipment quality than from just plain poor mixing and production.
but wouldn't it be cheaper
to just point one of the multitude of scientific
antennas at a DirectTV satellite.
Unless the ISS is in a geosynchronous orbit, you'd be outaluck when the station left the western hemisphere. I'm sure Europe and Asia have some pretty good satellite channels, just don't plan on watching 'The Real World/Road Rules Marathon' all the way through.
There's a certain amount of error inherent in GPS location, even now that the government isn't deliberately introducing it. But aside from that, what's to stop highway departments from sending GPS-equipped cars down the major roads to produce more accurate maps? Or maybe I'm not completely understanding the problem.
When you put your files in a shared directory that's available to the outside world, you agree to put up with whatever attention that gets you. If someone puts up a public web page, I consider it my right to peruse the information stored there. Being consistent with that logic, it's hard to blame advertisers for scanning your published file information. The Napster IM feature is sort of annoying, though. Targeted advertising's not so bad-- but keep it on the page and stop popping up annoying message windows.
Not the goats, I'm sure, but as more and more genetically engineered creatures (mice, rats etc.) get out of the lab, what happens to the ecosystem? I'm not terribly worried about supermice taking over the world, but... will we be seeing luminescent rodents in the sewers before 2050? Actually, on second thought this could be quite useful...
I wonder if they take any precautions to insure that genetically modified animals are unable to reproduce? Obviously they're only producing females, but can they still mate with unaltered males? Seems this would be relatively easy to deal with, but you don't hear about it.
Nobody is going to lay down parallel infrastructure when they can get the government to force the owners to allow them to use the existing infrastructure.
Well, that's not really true. Look at cable and wireless, both of which are basically providing infrastructure parallel to the local phone system. All that aside, I agree that it's not economical to build too many (say, 20) competing local systems, but there's certainly no reason you couldn't build many long-distance systems.
The reason I don't see government-owned infrastructure working out is just plain lack of competition. State run companies have been terribly slow to respond to or predict demand. All over the world, newly sprung-up mobile phone companies are doing more business than the state-controlled monopolies in large part because they actually try to compete.
This is also a good point, however, the current phone system is in place, the costs are reasonable.
Well, yes and no. The costs are actually very unreasonable when you consider what it costs a Telco to move the raw data encapsulated in one minute's conversation (it's a lot less than 7 cents.) What makes the charges more reasonable is the quality of service you get, and the convenience of accessing the service through your phone. If you choose to get your service through your computer, you sacrifice both of these things. You're essentially buying your fish off the boat instead of waiting for it to be breaded, frozen and displayed attractively in the supermarket freezer.
But you're right, in this case, its not strictly stealing _until_ TOS'es get modified to prohibit the practice of this 'phone service'.
Actually, violating the TOS'es wouldn't make you a criminal, you would just be in violation of your contract with the phone company. It would only (in theory) be criminalized if there were some overwhelming need for society to regulate citizens' behavior for everyone's good. At present, phone companies can regulate their own network charges and refuse to give service to people who violate TOS'es. The customers, for their part, can do business with other companies that are more open to transferring raw data closer to the real cost. In my opinion, the real damage to society occurs when the customer doesn't have that option anymore.
Surely the phone companies have not planned that you upend their business model, whereas in the last paragraph, you are simply making a selection _within_ the airline's business model.
But that's exactly what you're doing here. MCI offers both voice long-distance and data services. Both fit within the company's business model; although they would like you to buy the more expensive service for your voice needs, they apparently don't believe they can force you.
Maybe I'm just being awkward in trying to find the 'fair play' in life, but if I don't tow the line here, then I have no moral authority to show outrage when the business world doesn't either. So therefore, I pay for my phone calls.
And it's a noble sentiment. But by allowing phone companies to maintain their overpriced, broken business model, we're really not helping anyone. Average consumers like us will pay increasingly unrealistic charges, and eventually some other company will come along and demolish the slow, comfortable phone companies.
If you're curious why I'm so passionate about this, it's because I spent several years in the employ of a large phone company. It was precisely the belief that customers had some obligation to fill their coffers that led to their ugly financial situation today.
My _own_ downfall is that I feel that the supposed demographics of this page _should_ include folks with a bit of morals or perhaps simply the ability to resist the urge to steal.
You're obviously trolling a bit, but I'll bite. "Stealing" is a pretty strong term to throw around. If I choose to walk or ride a bike instead of taking the bus, am I "stealing" from the bus company? Of course not. There's a cheaper way to do something, so rather than pay for the expensive packaged product, I'm willing to suffer a bit more inconvenience and do it all myself. If the bus company wants my business back, they can do what they must to make their service more attractive to me-- that's the beauty of capitalism. It doesn't work if consumers are somehow morally obligated to utilize the service in question.
The only way using VoIP would be stealing is if I were somehow illegally obtaining my network connection-- which I'm not. When you pay for an ISP, a good chunk of your monthly charge goes to pay the carriers (people like Sprint, AT&T, MCI, etc.) They may suffer some loss of profit because they can't mark up every 9600bps voice stream to many times its cost, but I'm not stealing their money (and if they were somehow losing money on the deal, they would hike the network access fees.)
As an example, airlines regularly charge much higher fees if you choose to fly midweek or on short notice. This is generally designed to snag business customers and make them pay higher rates than ordinary consumers. But if I choose to plan my business travel over weekends and insure that I make my reservations well in advance, am I stealing from the airlines? Of course not; I'm not breaking the law in any way. If their business model isn't working out, they can always change it. Welcome to the glorious world of capitalism.
The telcos wouldn't make a whole lot of money selling the hardware. Too many people make phones, and they're way too simple to build for anyone to make a lot of money on them.
The bandwidth? They would have to get a lot of people into DSL, then reckon for the fact that those people will cancel their local-phone service (why pay for both?) In the end, they don't end up too far ahead.
The government will either rapidly or gradually assume control of the phone system, and like the roads, we'll assume 'free' use of them in exchange for tax dollars.
And yet this seems to be exactly the opposite of what's now happening in many European countries, where state Telco monopolies are now being privatized. I think one of the reasons the roads/communications analogy breaks down is that it's possible, even easy, to build parallel communications infrastructure. We're much better off with MCI/AT&T/Sprint/Quest etc. than we would be with a single, socialized communications system. Multiple infrastructures often result in a glut of bandwidth, which lends itself to new and creative uses like 800 numbers and the net. Single-entity controlled networks are often expensive and underpowered.
Now, there are some great things that the European telcos have done. Take the Minitel, for instance-- France providing a graphical terminal to every citizen free of charge. Unfortunately, due to the phone company's high rates, it was still damned expensive to use the Minitel and the technology never really developed.
I don't mean to sound particularly pro-business, because I'm not. At the present moment, I see unfettered Telco consolidation as the most realistic threat to our ability to easily communicate. No single infrastructure is ever going to be the answer, whether it's united under government or business control.
It's not really free. You're paying for the cost of the internet connection, and the local phone lines. What you're eliminating is the phone company's markup. It's like baking your own bread instead of buying it in the supermarket. Takes longer and maybe it's not sliced as evenly, but it's cheaper and there's nothing evil about it.
You see, data requires better quality lines than voice, so many older copper lines that run long distance would need to be replaced or upgraded to keep up with the required digital load.
True, but circuit-switched copper networks aren't cheap at all. The only reason they're economical vs. fiber is the capital investment needed to replace them. It's inevitable that most of those copper lines/switches are going to need replacement anyway at some point in the near future, and they're not going to be replaced with more circuit-switched copper (if your Telco has any financial sense.)
A check against the proliferation of VOIP services is the unreliability and limited bandwidth of the internet today. Telcos don't have to adjust to everyone using their computers to make phone calls right away, they have time to build the infrastructure and spread the costs over a number of years (it wouldn't do to crank up data costs, thus driving customers away from that growing market.) Most Telcos know that consumer long-distance as a revenue stream is going the way of the dodo, they just want to make the transition a little bit more graceful.
"The net will prosper when it is no longer the preserve of geeks, and when the speed of connections and size of bandwidth are secondary to the quality of the experience it delivers."
Damn straight. And I want my holographic TV, too. Wish those geeks would stop forcing me to worry about bandwidth and computation and optics. None of the CEOs I've met seem to worry about that stuff.
Reading things like this makes me wonder just what it takes to get published. Certainly not expertise or deep understanding.
I think one of the differences between the two is that Sun started with Java and built a framework from there (actually, they didn't really build it, they did a bunch, other people did some, it just accumulated.).NET just happens to be working in the opposite way; beginning with an overall design, then fleshing out the details. The reason there's no really good equivalent for.NET at Sun is that no single framework was created at the start. You end up having to refer to the Java-framework-conglomerate as Java simply for lack of a better term. I'm no Java zealot, by the way. Whether Sun's idea or MS's idea will work better, I don't know.
I am certainly not going to be able to buy every book I want to read. If I borrow it from a library, and say, 30 other people do, they have effectively sold 1/30th of a copy to each of us, against a like 0 if we each had to buy it.
I hate to play devil's advocate, because I agree with you in principle. But video rental is a bad example, as Blockbuster currently pays the studios some number of $$ for each rental.
And while I understand that most people wouldn't buy the book, even if two or three of those thirty people did shell out the bucks, the publishing industry increases its margins. In any case, I think they'd like to see libraries becoming more like Blockbuster. It's a terrible thing, especially when you consider what libraries already pay, and that the notion of a 'free' library can't work under those conditions.
Who said anyone's conspiring to get anyone? If I ran a corporation and I had the opportunity to forge a profitable business relationship with hardware manufacturers and content producers, I'd be silly not to jump on it. No conspiracy theory, with which I must say you seem to be overly concerned (perhaps you've been spending too much time on Slashdot.)
Actually, this thread began when you certified that MS doesn't make soundcards. Whether that's been true or not (actually, it's not exactly true, as one of the other replies to your post points out), it doesn't imply that MS will never move into that space. Considering that MS has a history of using their OS dominance to move into new business areas, it's naive to imagine that they wouldn't consider this as a possibility.
The problem with "forget it and live your life" is that involves ignoring the possibility that Microsoft might try to leverage Windows to gain entry or control over new business space. We know that this has never happened in the past, but it might.
Probably the most important point is that the nature of this technology is such that MS would have to discriminate among sound card drivers to some degree; there's no point in rolling out Secure Channel if MS can't guarantee that the drivers it signs meet anti-copying requirements. This would presumably involve a license with Microsoft, and possibly a non-trivial licensing fee.
Now one can only assume that MS will not have the time to go through the code of every soundcard driver and component submitted for authorization (and really, would you want to give MS the code to your proprietary driver?) Therefore, they will have to rely on the requesting companies to guarantee security on their components. It's difficult, if not impossible for small developers and freeware developers to provide this guarantee (how do you enforce it?), so one could imagine that these developers would be at a disadvantage when applying for certification. If MS has a previous close relationship with a large company, which has a certain amount of exposure if it breaks the licensing agreement, that company will probably be able to obtain authorizations more readily than a less important competitor. One can assume that any internal MS products would obtain rapid authorization (the code is in-house and available ahead of time.) This applies to sound processing components, which Microsoft does make, not only to sound drivers. There are already many allegations that MS has threatened to withhold products and services from OEMs for various reasons. Again, not that any of these incidents actually occurred, but...
I digress. Now, you can see that nobody here is "out to get" anyone. It's just a natural consequence of the business model that some corporations will have an advantage due to their closeness with Microsoft. To use the awful car example, if Microsoft cars only run on authorized gas, the large gas chains will certainly have an advantage over the smaller ones. I can forget about using my neighbor's homebrewed Ethanol. And as there's no machinery in place (aside from legal action) to guarantee that MS provides authorizations and licenses equally, there is an ugly possibility that maybe, just possibly, Microsoft would gain an unfair advantage.
No, all my pet conspiracy theories currently involve specially marked packages of Doritos.
There was an allegation that about 7 years ago Microsoft did use undocumented API calls in their only internal software. This came out during the court case which resulted in the consent decree of 1995.
You're probably referring to the calls described in Andrew Schulman's book. Actually, there's not a shred of evidence that Microsoft now maintains an impermeable membrane between their OS design and applications people. In fact, several of their departments perform both tasks.
No offense intended. My point is that there's a big difference between a "conspiracy theory" (who even brought this term into the discussion, by the way?) and good business. Major corporations make partnerships with other corporations. In a lot of cases, those agreements give a partnered corporation a major business advantage over some other unpartnered corporation. For instance, if Microsoft gives a company access to undocumented features in the Windows API, that company can write better software than its competition. Microsoft does this. It is a fact. And they obtain benefits from it. It's certainly nothing new.
So every time MS introduces a new feature that would force software manufacturers to request dispensation from MS in order to insure their software/hardware functions with Windows, MS gains a business advantage. It's a conspiracy only insofar as Microsoft wants to make money, and what for-profit corporation doesn't? If you're a major soundcard manufacturer, and partnering with MS is the only way to guarantee your cards will be compatible with Win2XXX, why in god's name wouldn't you? And if that partnership gives you a serious (and potentially devastating) business advantage over your (probably smaller) competition, why wouldn't you be willing to give something back to Microsoft (royalties, agreement not to build drivers for other OSes, agreement not to build soundcards that can bypass the DRM.) This is standard operating procedure for business, and a lot of the time there's nothing wrong with it. When the granting company happens to be a monopoly, however, things get really ugly.
Slashdot Mirror
I understood this. But how many other archives are there out on the net that would be cheaper? I'll bet there are on the order of dozens, if you were interested in doing this and didn't have millions to spend, that you could buy.
Don't kid yourself (no pun)-- there has been anonymous remailing available for Usenet for years (the attack on the anonymous remailers is relatively recent.) Deja makes an effort to record who you are, so it's not terribly anonymous. If you want to post anonymously (which is your right, according to most courts in the land), you'll find a way to do it.
Begin rant: And agh, I'm sick of goddamn child-porn being the number one justification for net-censorship. Yeah, I don't like the idea of guys getting off on pictures of little kids, and I think it's a great idea to go after the bastards who produce the stuff. But really, fighting a prohibition-style war on those few individuals with sick fantasy lifes is going to do a lot more harm than good. For every actual producer of child-porn snagged, hundreds of people will suffer unnecessarily: people who lose their right to anonymity and are persecuted for telling the truth about their employer, companies who try to protect their customers, innocent citizens who have their mail sniffed by Carnivore (sorry, DCS-1000SE or whatever), not to mention the thousands of people who were born with a deviant set of sexual preferences and-- thank god-- are able to confine themselves to getting their rocks off over nothing more serious than a few pictures.
Nobody will speak out against any excess necessary to prevent the distribution of child pornography, because even taking a stand inspires many people to view you as condoning the exploitation of little kids. Witness the recent uproar over virtual child-porn-- essentially, artistic representations of fictional situations. Law enforcement officials saying "well, unless you can prove that the picture is a fake, we'll have to prosecute." When we're willing toss out the most basic legal principles, who are we serving? End rant
Actually, what I'm curious about is: why couldn't Google and other companies build their own usenet service? It's not that hard. Does Deja have patents (!?), or is the brand name worth that much?
Meanwhile other people whose only crime is speaking out against their employer (for example) will be vulnerable to unjustified subpoenas, among other things.
They've been wonderful at marketing. Have you looked at the charts lately? Sales are concentrating on a relatively small number of heavily promoted groups. Note that one producer is responsible for two or three of the best selling acts in the business today.
I don't think the net is going to change the mass-market as much as people think it is. What it is going to do is allow the rest of the world access to more targeted channels; in other words, MTV will still promote Christina Aguilera and Eminem-- but there will be many more alternatives to MTV. Even though sales of the kinds of music I listen to will never approach those of Britney Spears, I will at least be able to hear those bands with a much higher signal-to-noise ratio.
I think those people who imagine that this is going to destroy the record industry are badly mistaken. It will allow artists more choice, it will allow customers to avoid the crap (and record companies will eventually get in on this) but it isn't going to end their domination (unless, possibly, they get wiped out by their mishandling of copyright issues.)
Really, the only serious reason to get signed is to take advantage of the record labels' promotional machines; they will be especially helpful if you belong to a tough-looking-but-sensitive male ensemble with a library of snappy dance moves. For those bands that fall outside this category, any way of making it without the record companies' help would be a great thing.
Absolutely. But good condenser microphones are starting to get cheaper (Conneaut Audio Devices) and affordable high-quality mixing boards are much cheaper (remember those monster boards you had to have?) Most home studios can get by with a recording area, a couple of decent condenser microphones, decent preamps and a good set of ADCs. It won't be Abbey Road, but the quality will be very good. The real problems with most of the home-studio recordings I've heard have much less to do with equipment quality than from just plain poor mixing and production.
Unless the ISS is in a geosynchronous orbit, you'd be outaluck when the station left the western hemisphere. I'm sure Europe and Asia have some pretty good satellite channels, just don't plan on watching 'The Real World/Road Rules Marathon' all the way through.
There's a certain amount of error inherent in GPS location, even now that the government isn't deliberately introducing it. But aside from that, what's to stop highway departments from sending GPS-equipped cars down the major roads to produce more accurate maps? Or maybe I'm not completely understanding the problem.
Actually, I think you'd have to have a license from Monsanto to plow that snow...
When you put your files in a shared directory that's available to the outside world, you agree to put up with whatever attention that gets you. If someone puts up a public web page, I consider it my right to peruse the information stored there. Being consistent with that logic, it's hard to blame advertisers for scanning your published file information. The Napster IM feature is sort of annoying, though. Targeted advertising's not so bad-- but keep it on the page and stop popping up annoying message windows.
I wonder if they take any precautions to insure that genetically modified animals are unable to reproduce? Obviously they're only producing females, but can they still mate with unaltered males? Seems this would be relatively easy to deal with, but you don't hear about it.
Well, that's not really true. Look at cable and wireless, both of which are basically providing infrastructure parallel to the local phone system. All that aside, I agree that it's not economical to build too many (say, 20) competing local systems, but there's certainly no reason you couldn't build many long-distance systems.
The reason I don't see government-owned infrastructure working out is just plain lack of competition. State run companies have been terribly slow to respond to or predict demand. All over the world, newly sprung-up mobile phone companies are doing more business than the state-controlled monopolies in large part because they actually try to compete.
Well, yes and no. The costs are actually very unreasonable when you consider what it costs a Telco to move the raw data encapsulated in one minute's conversation (it's a lot less than 7 cents.) What makes the charges more reasonable is the quality of service you get, and the convenience of accessing the service through your phone. If you choose to get your service through your computer, you sacrifice both of these things. You're essentially buying your fish off the boat instead of waiting for it to be breaded, frozen and displayed attractively in the supermarket freezer.
But you're right, in this case, its not strictly stealing _until_ TOS'es get modified to prohibit the practice of this 'phone service'.
Actually, violating the TOS'es wouldn't make you a criminal, you would just be in violation of your contract with the phone company. It would only (in theory) be criminalized if there were some overwhelming need for society to regulate citizens' behavior for everyone's good. At present, phone companies can regulate their own network charges and refuse to give service to people who violate TOS'es. The customers, for their part, can do business with other companies that are more open to transferring raw data closer to the real cost. In my opinion, the real damage to society occurs when the customer doesn't have that option anymore.
Surely the phone companies have not planned that you upend their business model, whereas in the last paragraph, you are simply making a selection _within_ the airline's business model.
But that's exactly what you're doing here. MCI offers both voice long-distance and data services. Both fit within the company's business model; although they would like you to buy the more expensive service for your voice needs, they apparently don't believe they can force you.
Maybe I'm just being awkward in trying to find the 'fair play' in life, but if I don't tow the line here, then I have no moral authority to show outrage when the business world doesn't either. So therefore, I pay for my phone calls.
And it's a noble sentiment. But by allowing phone companies to maintain their overpriced, broken business model, we're really not helping anyone. Average consumers like us will pay increasingly unrealistic charges, and eventually some other company will come along and demolish the slow, comfortable phone companies.
If you're curious why I'm so passionate about this, it's because I spent several years in the employ of a large phone company. It was precisely the belief that customers had some obligation to fill their coffers that led to their ugly financial situation today.
You're obviously trolling a bit, but I'll bite. "Stealing" is a pretty strong term to throw around. If I choose to walk or ride a bike instead of taking the bus, am I "stealing" from the bus company? Of course not. There's a cheaper way to do something, so rather than pay for the expensive packaged product, I'm willing to suffer a bit more inconvenience and do it all myself. If the bus company wants my business back, they can do what they must to make their service more attractive to me-- that's the beauty of capitalism. It doesn't work if consumers are somehow morally obligated to utilize the service in question.
The only way using VoIP would be stealing is if I were somehow illegally obtaining my network connection-- which I'm not. When you pay for an ISP, a good chunk of your monthly charge goes to pay the carriers (people like Sprint, AT&T, MCI, etc.) They may suffer some loss of profit because they can't mark up every 9600bps voice stream to many times its cost, but I'm not stealing their money (and if they were somehow losing money on the deal, they would hike the network access fees.)
As an example, airlines regularly charge much higher fees if you choose to fly midweek or on short notice. This is generally designed to snag business customers and make them pay higher rates than ordinary consumers. But if I choose to plan my business travel over weekends and insure that I make my reservations well in advance, am I stealing from the airlines? Of course not; I'm not breaking the law in any way. If their business model isn't working out, they can always change it. Welcome to the glorious world of capitalism.
The bandwidth? They would have to get a lot of people into DSL, then reckon for the fact that those people will cancel their local-phone service (why pay for both?) In the end, they don't end up too far ahead.
And yet this seems to be exactly the opposite of what's now happening in many European countries, where state Telco monopolies are now being privatized. I think one of the reasons the roads/communications analogy breaks down is that it's possible, even easy, to build parallel communications infrastructure. We're much better off with MCI/AT&T/Sprint/Quest etc. than we would be with a single, socialized communications system. Multiple infrastructures often result in a glut of bandwidth, which lends itself to new and creative uses like 800 numbers and the net. Single-entity controlled networks are often expensive and underpowered.
Now, there are some great things that the European telcos have done. Take the Minitel, for instance-- France providing a graphical terminal to every citizen free of charge. Unfortunately, due to the phone company's high rates, it was still damned expensive to use the Minitel and the technology never really developed.
I don't mean to sound particularly pro-business, because I'm not. At the present moment, I see unfettered Telco consolidation as the most realistic threat to our ability to easily communicate. No single infrastructure is ever going to be the answer, whether it's united under government or business control.
It's not really free. You're paying for the cost of the internet connection, and the local phone lines. What you're eliminating is the phone company's markup. It's like baking your own bread instead of buying it in the supermarket. Takes longer and maybe it's not sliced as evenly, but it's cheaper and there's nothing evil about it.
True, but circuit-switched copper networks aren't cheap at all. The only reason they're economical vs. fiber is the capital investment needed to replace them. It's inevitable that most of those copper lines/switches are going to need replacement anyway at some point in the near future, and they're not going to be replaced with more circuit-switched copper (if your Telco has any financial sense.)
A check against the proliferation of VOIP services is the unreliability and limited bandwidth of the internet today. Telcos don't have to adjust to everyone using their computers to make phone calls right away, they have time to build the infrastructure and spread the costs over a number of years (it wouldn't do to crank up data costs, thus driving customers away from that growing market.) Most Telcos know that consumer long-distance as a revenue stream is going the way of the dodo, they just want to make the transition a little bit more graceful.
Damn straight. And I want my holographic TV, too. Wish those geeks would stop forcing me to worry about bandwidth and computation and optics. None of the CEOs I've met seem to worry about that stuff.
Reading things like this makes me wonder just what it takes to get published. Certainly not expertise or deep understanding.
I think one of the differences between the two is that Sun started with Java and built a framework from there (actually, they didn't really build it, they did a bunch, other people did some, it just accumulated.) .NET just happens to be working in the opposite way; beginning with an overall design, then fleshing out the details. The reason there's no really good equivalent for .NET at Sun is that no single framework was created at the start. You end up having to refer to the Java-framework-conglomerate as Java simply for lack of a better term. I'm no Java zealot, by the way. Whether Sun's idea or MS's idea will work better, I don't know.
I hate to play devil's advocate, because I agree with you in principle. But video rental is a bad example, as Blockbuster currently pays the studios some number of $$ for each rental.
And while I understand that most people wouldn't buy the book, even if two or three of those thirty people did shell out the bucks, the publishing industry increases its margins. In any case, I think they'd like to see libraries becoming more like Blockbuster. It's a terrible thing, especially when you consider what libraries already pay, and that the notion of a 'free' library can't work under those conditions.
Actually, this thread began when you certified that MS doesn't make soundcards. Whether that's been true or not (actually, it's not exactly true, as one of the other replies to your post points out), it doesn't imply that MS will never move into that space. Considering that MS has a history of using their OS dominance to move into new business areas, it's naive to imagine that they wouldn't consider this as a possibility. The problem with "forget it and live your life" is that involves ignoring the possibility that Microsoft might try to leverage Windows to gain entry or control over new business space. We know that this has never happened in the past, but it might.
Probably the most important point is that the nature of this technology is such that MS would have to discriminate among sound card drivers to some degree; there's no point in rolling out Secure Channel if MS can't guarantee that the drivers it signs meet anti-copying requirements. This would presumably involve a license with Microsoft, and possibly a non-trivial licensing fee.
Now one can only assume that MS will not have the time to go through the code of every soundcard driver and component submitted for authorization (and really, would you want to give MS the code to your proprietary driver?) Therefore, they will have to rely on the requesting companies to guarantee security on their components. It's difficult, if not impossible for small developers and freeware developers to provide this guarantee (how do you enforce it?), so one could imagine that these developers would be at a disadvantage when applying for certification. If MS has a previous close relationship with a large company, which has a certain amount of exposure if it breaks the licensing agreement, that company will probably be able to obtain authorizations more readily than a less important competitor. One can assume that any internal MS products would obtain rapid authorization (the code is in-house and available ahead of time.) This applies to sound processing components, which Microsoft does make, not only to sound drivers. There are already many allegations that MS has threatened to withhold products and services from OEMs for various reasons. Again, not that any of these incidents actually occurred, but...
I digress. Now, you can see that nobody here is "out to get" anyone. It's just a natural consequence of the business model that some corporations will have an advantage due to their closeness with Microsoft. To use the awful car example, if Microsoft cars only run on authorized gas, the large gas chains will certainly have an advantage over the smaller ones. I can forget about using my neighbor's homebrewed Ethanol. And as there's no machinery in place (aside from legal action) to guarantee that MS provides authorizations and licenses equally, there is an ugly possibility that maybe, just possibly, Microsoft would gain an unfair advantage.
There was an allegation that about 7 years ago Microsoft did use undocumented API calls in their only internal software. This came out during the court case which resulted in the consent decree of 1995.
You're probably referring to the calls described in Andrew Schulman's book. Actually, there's not a shred of evidence that Microsoft now maintains an impermeable membrane between their OS design and applications people. In fact, several of their departments perform both tasks.
So every time MS introduces a new feature that would force software manufacturers to request dispensation from MS in order to insure their software/hardware functions with Windows, MS gains a business advantage. It's a conspiracy only insofar as Microsoft wants to make money, and what for-profit corporation doesn't? If you're a major soundcard manufacturer, and partnering with MS is the only way to guarantee your cards will be compatible with Win2XXX, why in god's name wouldn't you? And if that partnership gives you a serious (and potentially devastating) business advantage over your (probably smaller) competition, why wouldn't you be willing to give something back to Microsoft (royalties, agreement not to build drivers for other OSes, agreement not to build soundcards that can bypass the DRM.) This is standard operating procedure for business, and a lot of the time there's nothing wrong with it. When the granting company happens to be a monopoly, however, things get really ugly.