I hope it can be made quite accurate; I've often thought something like this would massively increase my productivity - I'd love to be able to perform tasks without having to take my hand of the keyboard to use the mouse. If I could look at an area of the screen and just hit a key to left/right click it'd make a lot of my common mouse tasks obsolete.
I see this as a HUGE win. I DESPISE the Windows client for iTunes. It is utter crap on the order of the Quicktime client (not as bad as that, but then, nothing is as bad as that). Apple us totally and completely incompetent when it comes to Windows programming. Question mark?
Their complete and utter incompetency isn't exactly evident when it comes to the market share of the iPod and the number of Windows users that are quite happily running iTunes (oblivious to aforementioned incompetencies).
It's like an entity that spent billions of dollars building infrastructure now feels like they have some right to charge money for people that want to use it.
Yes, I know it was done with taxpayer money. But taxpayers decided to vote in a government that made it clear they were going to privatise it, and now it's a typical corporate entity - one that owns almost all the telecommunications infrastructure in the country - and now everyone has to cop it sweet.
I find it hard to believe that this Mark Pesce bloke moved to Australia without realising that it has, like, 10% of the population of the USA and thus probably isn't as technologically effete. It's like an Australian moving to Japan or Korea and being surprised that, shit, if you pack 10x the amount of people into 1/10th the space, it's easier to more connect people with cables.
.. and go after them for copyright violation. Unless you specifically put your media under a Creative Commons license or something similar, I think you'd have a fair case for saying they've been using your work in a commercial, for-profit sense - and you should get royalties based on the number of times they've played it.
I find it absolutely disgusting - but not at ALL surprising - that big media think they can use the Internet as a source of free content.
I know it's hip to hate them, but really, can you imagine the mess that would ensue if autopatcher or whoever accidentally (or intentionally) put in a bogus update and it was distributed out to people and it destroyed or compromised their PC?
Yes, they could digitally sign their updates or release md5s or something, but at the end of the day it's a third party application that they have no reason to trust giving their customers updates to their operating system - updates that could potentially cause a lot of problems.
There's no doubt who the finger would be pointed at - MS. They want their customers to update using their mechanism so if anything breaks, they can at least try to figure out why, instead of having to unravel a ball of changes made to their OS by some random third party updating system.
If it's illegal to unlock the phone, that means I dont own it. Am I leasing it? How the hell else is it possible for me to outright purcahse something and not be able to do whetever the hell i want with it (besides to commit something that is already a crime obviously -like throwing it at someone). This appears to be the critical distinction between a lot of things at the moment, where the words "as-a-service" can be appended on the end of the product and then you have what the seller of the product REALLY means.
There's too much stuff you can buy now that you don't own. CDs, DVDs, software, mobile phones - I don't want to have to read the cover of a DVD to find out whether or not I have the right to watch this with a group of no more than 20 people, or lend it to no more than 4 friends a month, or whatever. Do I own the fucking thing or not? If I do, then what I do with it should be pretty much up to me.
Obviously there's some "within reason" component of this - eg, I should be able to make a complete copy of a DVD, format shift it, and do whatever I want with the contents - but I shouldn't then be able to give that copy to a million people.
Is it that hard to make the subject reflect the actual state of affairs? They haven't restarted allofmp3.com yet. All they've said is "The service will be resumed in the foreseeable future."
Everybody just used the admin account again. Not even the fact that each could have their own desktop didn't entice them to use their own accounts; instead, they had one desktop full of five people's crud. Did they end up just using the admin account because of loser applications that require administrative access to install, though? Or was it more psychological/force of habit to use the "better" account?
Windows apps need to start installing in user space by default. Installing into the "system" is such a pain in the ass.
Stop ranting on about how great 'free' software is. Its a nice concept, but theres a reason it hasn't taken over the world, think about it. I think a lot of it is because open source software (generally) has no marketing. Firefox is a good example of what happens when a few marketing dollars are thrown at an open source project. Let's not forget BitTorrent, too. Open source doesn't suck as much as you think!
I don't think you're wrong - it's obvious that a lot of solid commercial products kick the shit out of their open source counterparts.
But most people simply can't even ENVISAGE something like the OpenMoko - they're so completely used to taking it in the ass from massive telcos and getting useless non-portable software on their devices and paying hundreds, if not thousands of dollars every few years because of vendor lock that they can't even imagine an alternative. They just accept it, pay the price, and move on with their lives.
I hope the OpenMoko comes out, takes off, and kicks ass. I'm tempted to buy one or two for some developer friends to bribe them into working on it. I think if the hardware is solid and it gets a decent hacker following, you'll see awesome applications come out and it'll be a force to be reckoned with.
But I also hope it comes out so I can perform simple tasks like backing up my mobile contacts and messages without needing to buy a proprietary cable and software package from my telco. So I can install an application to play video without having to pay for it. So I can make an mp3 a ring tone without having to buy it from my telco, or iTunes, or whatever.
OpenMoko represents freedom of a sort we've never, ever had before. I'll be doing what I can to spread the word about it.
Ad's pay for nothing. They're just a shell game that hides the true cost to you. Right - it hides the cost by removing it as an actual, tangible, money-based cost.
You still pay. Twice.
You pay for the ad in your time and attention and you pay for the increased price of the product to pay for the ad. I'm not sure what you mean here; I'm talking about using advertising to replace, not supplement, the cost of a product.
You pay $15 a month (or whatever) to access youtube.
I'd rather ads, thanks. If they get too obtrusive, I'll vote with my feet and go elsewhere - but I'm sure not going to go to a site that charges me to access if there's one I can go to for free, and the price I pay is a brief ad.
The point isn't "cutting corners", the point is learning by testing and learning with actual hardware, rather than testing with paper. No one was in any danger at any point during this test. You would have a point if you could claim they were cutting corners in *safety culture*, but they're not. They're not strapping people into test vehicles. There is no human risk here at all. I'd also add - when time comes to fly, I'd rather be in something that I know has ALREADY crashed a few times, because it probably means they've fixed whatever caused it:) I don't want to be flying in the revision before something goes wrong.
In Australia, this has been a massive problem for ever. The early days of broadband Internet saw you paying something like $60 / month for 300MB (yes, MB) of data. After that you got billed extra. 20 cents a megabyte, or something ridiculous like that.
That was years ago. Eventually we got 3GB a month as the "standard", and then once more and more DSL ISPs started kicking around and offering competing plans, we're not at 10GB.
Now the common practice is to offer (X)MB a month, and then when you exceed that you get bandwidth-throttled down so you can't smash your link any more. Seems to work fairly well, especially now as most of the plans are quite high - but we're still seeing ISPs having to regularly change their prices, bandwidth limits, etc as they adjust to the sheer increase in traffic as more and more people a) get online and b) discover they can download stuff for free.
Bandwidth has always been a limited commodity over here - lots of the stuff Aussies want isn't in Australia. So we've always had these restrictions and have jealously looked at the US and other countries as you guys have downloaded hundreds of gigs a month on your much faster connections.
So, now, we are (or at least, I am:) finding it somewhat entertaining that you guys are going backwards:) You'll want to make sure your ISP has a decent local mirroring service (a couple TB of Linux ISOs, gaming files, etc).
I'm with the 80%: I have the right to block what I want and allow what I want. I'm not 'taking your content' (the same excuse that the RIAA makes for declining CD sales), I have the right to use whatever is connected to the internet. That's fine, but you missed my point - I'm saying that because of people like you that just want to take stuff and not even go to the absolutely minuscule effort of letting people deliver ads to the sites that you want, you're just making it more likely advertisers figure out a more effective way to put ads in your face - maybe like this, perhaps. Or interstitials. Or just going to subscription-based content.
I'm sick of all the sites that claim bandwidth-costs as an excuse to stuff their pages full with ads and rake in $k's. Well, through the grace of a corporate sponsor, we have no bandwidth costs, but our bandwidth costs would be significant - we move more than 30Tb a month of data.
Fortunately, your sort of lazy and frankly rude attitude is not prevalent - yet - and advertising is still making sites enough money so we don't have to worry about these changes.
There are a lot of arguments either way, but at the end of the day, I value the excellent free content and information I get from sites like Slashdot, and I have no problems seeing their ads - some of which are interesting to me (things like Splunk which I prolly never would have heard about if not from an ad on Slashdot).
As the operator of a site that 100% depends on advertising revenue for its continued existence, I find this topic extremely interesting, even though on Slashdot you can predict pretty accurately what the responses are going to be. 80% saying that they should have the right to block ads, maybe 10% website operators explaining why we don't want you to, and 10% of people looking at both sides.
The obvious next step here, and one I've been warning our user base (some of whom are up front about their ad blocking policies, despite the fact they're more than happy to accept our free services) about for quite some time is a new generation of ad code from advertisers that runs directly from the host webserver - making it more difficult to block.
Obviously then the next step will be for ad blockers to need to more accurately identify parts of the page to block, and then strategies will change again, and so forth. I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.
We'll also see more sites becoming registration only, more interstitial ads, etc.
I agree with the people that say over-the-top advertising is horrible. But rather than block the ads and keep "taking" their content, why not just avoid that site altogether?
The problem is why should UK taxpayers pay for people in other countries to have free media that they didn't pay for? I would never have bought BBC TV show DVDs if I hadn't seen them "on the Internet".
Actually, there is no reason they couldn't use Ogg/Theora/Dirac as a WMP plugin. The DRM is a wrapped around the file and independent from the codec used. This, to me, is a much much bigger question than anything else. The INSTANT someone like the BBC starts using Dirac and proves an independently developed open source video codec can stand on its own two feed in the Real World, everyone can get away from using proprietary bullshit codecs that cost zillions of dollars to license and use.
We do a lot of work with video, so I get to see first hand how much it costs when you want to start doing video work and you're paying for all these patent-encumbered things like mp4, mpeg2, vc1, etc. All the open source tools for working with them are generally ridiculously better, but they're not "legitimate" as they're not licensed by the proper licensing authorities.
Getting out of this huge hole could mean Dirac replacing Flash/vp6/etc (and the upcoming silverlight) as the web streaming standard, meaning everyone can just use awesome open source tools for it. It could mean we can finally stop using the hacked and legally dubious xvid.
Content restriction nazis can still happily go with Windows Media for their DRM purposes, but at least the rest of us will have a nice, stable, alternative. Assuming, of course, Dirac doesn't suck:)... one thing I haven't checked yet. But I'm hoping if someone starts using it to get some mainstream content, we'll see a horde of video codec hackers descend upon it like a plague of goodness and optimise the crap out of it.
I bet Lockhead Martin and the other defense contractors aren't complaining though, our tax dollars keep their industry a highly paid one! indeed; I have to wonder if the dollars was taken out of the equation (eg, make all military contractors non-profit government entities) exactly how keen people would be to keep up this whole war thing.
Given government's past trends to be relatively easily swayed by vast sums of money, and the vast sums of money going to defense contractors, in my (admittedly extremely limited) view it seems like its a pretty nice circular arrangement they all have going there. The only people that lose are the kids that keep getting sent off to fight, I guess. And the tax payers. And everyone affected by war, both at home and abroad.
Well, ok, I guess everyone except politicians and defense contractors.
One difference. They don't operate any of the servers people actually use. Unless they can convice the server operators (most of whom they can't legally even admit exists, which will make negotiations somewhat awkward) to adopt their closed protocol, who will notice any optional dead protocols their 'official' but little used client supports? Well, from what I can tell, BitTorrent, Inc (the company) exists for one reason - to make money from licensing their extremely powerful brand name to movie executives.
I'm sure Bram (assuming he has any say in the direction of BitTorrent, Inc) and the other execs of BT realise all the things mentioned in this thread. I assume all these changes are merely a precursor to them being able to provide a DRM-equipped BitTorrent distribution system for movie companies.
Anyone else that uses BT probably wouldn't notice any difference. If uTorrent ever auto-updates itself to a new version I have to pay for or whatever, I'll switch to some other client.
I went to mirror this and can't see anything on the website that indicates it has been released under a Creative Commons (or similar) license. The only thing on their site I can find is that they have "sold the film to the Danish Broadcasting Corporation", so I assume now that company owns the rights to the video.
I assume that it is freely redistributable, given that it is a torrent, but it'd be nice if the authors could make this clear on the website. (It could be embedded in the video at the end or something but I don't have time to check.)
Slashdot Mirror
I hope it can be made quite accurate; I've often thought something like this would massively increase my productivity - I'd love to be able to perform tasks without having to take my hand of the keyboard to use the mouse. If I could look at an area of the screen and just hit a key to left/right click it'd make a lot of my common mouse tasks obsolete.
Their complete and utter incompetency isn't exactly evident when it comes to the market share of the iPod and the number of Windows users that are quite happily running iTunes (oblivious to aforementioned incompetencies).
It's like an entity that spent billions of dollars building infrastructure now feels like they have some right to charge money for people that want to use it.
Yes, I know it was done with taxpayer money. But taxpayers decided to vote in a government that made it clear they were going to privatise it, and now it's a typical corporate entity - one that owns almost all the telecommunications infrastructure in the country - and now everyone has to cop it sweet.
I find it hard to believe that this Mark Pesce bloke moved to Australia without realising that it has, like, 10% of the population of the USA and thus probably isn't as technologically effete. It's like an Australian moving to Japan or Korea and being surprised that, shit, if you pack 10x the amount of people into 1/10th the space, it's easier to more connect people with cables.
.. and go after them for copyright violation. Unless you specifically put your media under a Creative Commons license or something similar, I think you'd have a fair case for saying they've been using your work in a commercial, for-profit sense - and you should get royalties based on the number of times they've played it.
I find it absolutely disgusting - but not at ALL surprising - that big media think they can use the Internet as a source of free content.
I know it's hip to hate them, but really, can you imagine the mess that would ensue if autopatcher or whoever accidentally (or intentionally) put in a bogus update and it was distributed out to people and it destroyed or compromised their PC?
Yes, they could digitally sign their updates or release md5s or something, but at the end of the day it's a third party application that they have no reason to trust giving their customers updates to their operating system - updates that could potentially cause a lot of problems.
There's no doubt who the finger would be pointed at - MS. They want their customers to update using their mechanism so if anything breaks, they can at least try to figure out why, instead of having to unravel a ball of changes made to their OS by some random third party updating system.
Are you in the US? Probably should take a look around some time :)
Assuming this goes to court and they lose - what is the penalty? Surely they at least have to pay the court costs of Google and the others?
There's too much stuff you can buy now that you don't own. CDs, DVDs, software, mobile phones - I don't want to have to read the cover of a DVD to find out whether or not I have the right to watch this with a group of no more than 20 people, or lend it to no more than 4 friends a month, or whatever. Do I own the fucking thing or not? If I do, then what I do with it should be pretty much up to me.
Obviously there's some "within reason" component of this - eg, I should be able to make a complete copy of a DVD, format shift it, and do whatever I want with the contents - but I shouldn't then be able to give that copy to a million people.
Is it that hard to make the subject reflect the actual state of affairs? They haven't restarted allofmp3.com yet. All they've said is "The service will be resumed in the foreseeable future."
Not exactly what you're after but worth a mention anyway, I reckon:
PathSync by Cockos (Justin Frankel of Winamp fame's new company).
It has some automation features as well; haven't used them so can't vouch for them.
Windows apps need to start installing in user space by default. Installing into the "system" is such a pain in the ass.
I don't think you're wrong - it's obvious that a lot of solid commercial products kick the shit out of their open source counterparts.
But most people simply can't even ENVISAGE something like the OpenMoko - they're so completely used to taking it in the ass from massive telcos and getting useless non-portable software on their devices and paying hundreds, if not thousands of dollars every few years because of vendor lock that they can't even imagine an alternative. They just accept it, pay the price, and move on with their lives.
I hope the OpenMoko comes out, takes off, and kicks ass. I'm tempted to buy one or two for some developer friends to bribe them into working on it. I think if the hardware is solid and it gets a decent hacker following, you'll see awesome applications come out and it'll be a force to be reckoned with.
But I also hope it comes out so I can perform simple tasks like backing up my mobile contacts and messages without needing to buy a proprietary cable and software package from my telco. So I can install an application to play video without having to pay for it. So I can make an mp3 a ring tone without having to buy it from my telco, or iTunes, or whatever.
OpenMoko represents freedom of a sort we've never, ever had before. I'll be doing what I can to spread the word about it.
You pay for the ad in your time and attention and you pay for the increased price of the product to pay for the ad. I'm not sure what you mean here; I'm talking about using advertising to replace, not supplement, the cost of a product.
...comment sense isn't.
You pay $15 a month (or whatever) to access youtube.
I'd rather ads, thanks. If they get too obtrusive, I'll vote with my feet and go elsewhere - but I'm sure not going to go to a site that charges me to access if there's one I can go to for free, and the price I pay is a brief ad.
far too kind; I think 'bullshit' is much more appropriate. Totally agree and it is getting ridiculous.
In Australia, this has been a massive problem for ever. The early days of broadband Internet saw you paying something like $60 / month for 300MB (yes, MB) of data. After that you got billed extra. 20 cents a megabyte, or something ridiculous like that.
:) finding it somewhat entertaining that you guys are going backwards :) You'll want to make sure your ISP has a decent local mirroring service (a couple TB of Linux ISOs, gaming files, etc).
That was years ago. Eventually we got 3GB a month as the "standard", and then once more and more DSL ISPs started kicking around and offering competing plans, we're not at 10GB.
Now the common practice is to offer (X)MB a month, and then when you exceed that you get bandwidth-throttled down so you can't smash your link any more. Seems to work fairly well, especially now as most of the plans are quite high - but we're still seeing ISPs having to regularly change their prices, bandwidth limits, etc as they adjust to the sheer increase in traffic as more and more people a) get online and b) discover they can download stuff for free.
Bandwidth has always been a limited commodity over here - lots of the stuff Aussies want isn't in Australia. So we've always had these restrictions and have jealously looked at the US and other countries as you guys have downloaded hundreds of gigs a month on your much faster connections.
So, now, we are (or at least, I am
Fortunately, your sort of lazy and frankly rude attitude is not prevalent - yet - and advertising is still making sites enough money so we don't have to worry about these changes.
There are a lot of arguments either way, but at the end of the day, I value the excellent free content and information I get from sites like Slashdot, and I have no problems seeing their ads - some of which are interesting to me (things like Splunk which I prolly never would have heard about if not from an ad on Slashdot).
As the operator of a site that 100% depends on advertising revenue for its continued existence, I find this topic extremely interesting, even though on Slashdot you can predict pretty accurately what the responses are going to be. 80% saying that they should have the right to block ads, maybe 10% website operators explaining why we don't want you to, and 10% of people looking at both sides.
The obvious next step here, and one I've been warning our user base (some of whom are up front about their ad blocking policies, despite the fact they're more than happy to accept our free services) about for quite some time is a new generation of ad code from advertisers that runs directly from the host webserver - making it more difficult to block.
Obviously then the next step will be for ad blockers to need to more accurately identify parts of the page to block, and then strategies will change again, and so forth. I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.
We'll also see more sites becoming registration only, more interstitial ads, etc.
I agree with the people that say over-the-top advertising is horrible. But rather than block the ads and keep "taking" their content, why not just avoid that site altogether?
Funnily enough, they always leave out that maybe too much complaining about things hurting the children, might actually be hurting the children more.
We do a lot of work with video, so I get to see first hand how much it costs when you want to start doing video work and you're paying for all these patent-encumbered things like mp4, mpeg2, vc1, etc. All the open source tools for working with them are generally ridiculously better, but they're not "legitimate" as they're not licensed by the proper licensing authorities.
Getting out of this huge hole could mean Dirac replacing Flash/vp6/etc (and the upcoming silverlight) as the web streaming standard, meaning everyone can just use awesome open source tools for it. It could mean we can finally stop using the hacked and legally dubious xvid.
Content restriction nazis can still happily go with Windows Media for their DRM purposes, but at least the rest of us will have a nice, stable, alternative. Assuming, of course, Dirac doesn't suck
Given government's past trends to be relatively easily swayed by vast sums of money, and the vast sums of money going to defense contractors, in my (admittedly extremely limited) view it seems like its a pretty nice circular arrangement they all have going there. The only people that lose are the kids that keep getting sent off to fight, I guess. And the tax payers. And everyone affected by war, both at home and abroad.
Well, ok, I guess everyone except politicians and defense contractors.
I'm sure Bram (assuming he has any say in the direction of BitTorrent, Inc) and the other execs of BT realise all the things mentioned in this thread. I assume all these changes are merely a precursor to them being able to provide a DRM-equipped BitTorrent distribution system for movie companies.
Anyone else that uses BT probably wouldn't notice any difference. If uTorrent ever auto-updates itself to a new version I have to pay for or whatever, I'll switch to some other client.
I went to mirror this and can't see anything on the website that indicates it has been released under a Creative Commons (or similar) license. The only thing on their site I can find is that they have "sold the film to the Danish Broadcasting Corporation", so I assume now that company owns the rights to the video.
I assume that it is freely redistributable, given that it is a torrent, but it'd be nice if the authors could make this clear on the website. (It could be embedded in the video at the end or something but I don't have time to check.)