http://c2.com/ppr/titles.html or http://hillside.net/patterns/EgPatterns.html
for example: 'Stars: A Pattern Language for Query Optimized Schema' and the ARCUS 'Design of Business Information Systems' pattern language.
The latter covers object-relational access layers and the like. Another useful thing to look at (in that your question asked about temporal patterns) is Ralph Johnsons paper on the accounting system he wrote with his students. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TransactionsAndAccounts
In defense of patterns (since someone here attacked them): they encourage people to write down what they consider to be best practises in analysis and design, and to say why. Is this so wrong? As Santayana famously said: those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.
BZZT! Wrong. BT spends NOTHING. Scipher are a company that enforces patents. They've taken this one on from BT because they think they can milk the cash cow. If Scipher (a company of IP Lawyers) didn't think there was money to be made out of this one I don't think we'd ever have heard about it.
The reason I posted this story is that I hope - as other people have said - that this is the patent that finally gets the US to wake up to how stupid their patent law is (I know youse guys know this).
However - I have my suspicions that the leader in this fiasco was Scipher. They are a company whose sole raison d'etre is to get money from patents, and probably take a fat cut. It would be in their interests to find too-broad patents and approach the owning company with an offer to enforce them. Take a look at their website (http://www.scipher.com/).
BTW several people have suggested in this thread that the lifetime of a patent is 7 or 10 years. In the UK its 14 years, and it doesnt expire if you don't sue - it expires if you don't pay the upkeep. You don't have to defend it every time either, unlike trademarks, but you do have to make an effort to develop the technology. I assume the rules are somewhat similar in the US.
Bottom line is that this patent has at least 3 years left to run.
Actually I didn't say/annoying/ - the editor put that in. But it was one of the most annoying registration screens I've ever used. Evening telephone number??!??
I refrained from putting up the full text because my original story (which did have that) was rejected.(probably because at the time I couldnt find a usable link back to the story)
This is really a side issue. When you say wvware converts bold (style) to bold tags you're only looking at the html converter. Html conversion is always going to be poor because there isnt a one-to-one mapping to word features. (which is no excuse for word 97 converting 'heading 1' to html font tags, and 'h1' to bold style!). However, wvware's real strength is the conversion to a neutral xml format which you can mess with to your heart's content. You're generally better off starting with the xml then using a (XSL-T) stylesheet to get nice html out of it - and write your own CSS.
BTW I've contributed code to wvware and there were, last time I looked, features of the spec which remain unimplemented (I was only doing optimisation patches so I don't know if the features really were undocumented - but Caolan had put in comments to the effect that he didn't know what some flags were for).
Frankly I don't care if wvware doesn't make the document look (in html or whatever) like the original, which a lot of people seem to want; its real job is to extract the data from that crazy format into one which mortals can use. If we can extract the style tags, then convert them to something sane in a.n.other tool, what more do you need?
Theres been quite a few attempts at integrating NT and NIS security (check out the Samba mailing lists, or the comp.protocols.smb archive on Deja). The client side techniques concentrate on replacing the authentication DLL in NT (eg with 'nisgina'), for example:
http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~doug/gina.html
See this article for more info: http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-11/ lw-11-integration_p.html
The only server side alternate I know of is to use Samba as a PDC, not supported in any stable release. Theres discussions of this in (IIRC) the samba-technical mail archives. http://www.samba.org/
Clearly server side fixes are preferable due to rollout costs but they aren't there yet. No -let me correct myself. Clearly MS writing an interoperable security system is preferable but they choose not to.
I looked at this a couple of years ago for our network (mixed solaris, 98, 95, NT), the Samba PDC wasnt reliable enough and altering the client PC's wasnt an option; so sorry I can't help more. Best of luck -
The obvious question no-one's asked yet is who's coding up reference implementations of the algorithms? (NB I'm posting this before reading the patents themselves, so I guess this may be in there already) From the patent titles and troubles I've had in the past some of that there code would be dandy in Ghostscript, and as everybody has pointed out there are things in there that would be good in printer drivers. Is there anywhere registering people's intent to code these up?
While being probably illegal in the UK for the copyright reasons stated elsewhere, use of this service is potentially damaging to your financial health for other reasons:
- lack of a digital transmission license for the UK or EEA means a minimum £50,000 fine (ouch) - this could be construed as purveying unauthorised decoders for conditional services which carries a penalty of up to 2 years in prison, and/or a fine. - using the service without a television license can get you a £1000 fine. This is certainly the case with those Hauppage cards, I think the courts would take a pretty dim view of digital retransmission as well. The television license stuff doesnt apply for screens below a certain size diagonal (9"?) which might help your cause (slightly) if the quality of retransmission is low.
While people have argued that this isnt broadcast, the white paper that led to the various television Acts in 1998 (Broadcasting, Conditional Services, etc) made it pretty clear that it was intended to cover any point-to-point transmission. The UK already had video on demand trials in Swindon that year so licensing pretty much exactly this service is already handled in UK law, and you dont want any of that on you.
--Baz (ps: IANAL. check http://www.hmso.gov.uk/ for relevant Acts and Statutory Instruments online)
They talk about it being hand-built, so I don't think you'll find this one commercially.
You should maybe talk to someone like Nortel. Big in-memory databases are pretty common for telephone switching gear; they may have some appropriate hardware.
BTW there was a/. article a while back on Samsung 1 Gb ram chips. http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/28/1230243.shtm l
Thats encoding for URIs, not just CGI, and your description is wrong. Theres a safe character set used for URIs which is more than just the alphanumerics, and the %xx stuff is is used to represent arbitrary octet sequences as character sequences in this set. Its not assumed that each octet is a char, thats up to the recieving application. Read rfc2396, where it actually says this.
BTW '+' is an abomination - its not actually in the spec (go check if you don't believe me). It was in an internet-draft that didnt make it to the RFC stage, but some 'early adopter' foisted it upon us, so most browsers support it.
There has been some work on DNS standards to include unicode names, which would then be used in URLs, although the proposal there is somewhat different (essentially '-xx' instead of '%xx'). See http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-oscar sson-i18ndns-00.txt
This sounds like a reasonable idea to begin with, but if you think about it, its not that great.
If you block ads from other sites, how will the ads make it onto your pages? By frames and overlays. Which brings us to the transclusion issue: what about sites that frame other sites? If you block these, then some real, useful sites will stop working...but it still won't stop advertisers.
Here's a business model for ya: Joe Schmo has a site he wants to fund by advertising. He doesnt have a big server though, and the advertisers worry about ad-blocking.
Result? Ad company sets up a proxy webserver (in the style of 'crit.org') which pulls Joe's content onto their server, caches it, and displays it. Ads are on the same server - say in/ads. You can't block them, Joe gets published on a high-performance server for free (I'm guessing this would be the base ad deal, with money accruing for a higher hit count), and all that hot air over ad blocking was worthless.
x10.com is currently selling a wirelessmp3 streamer.
For all that people are talking about HPNA being a no brainer and that it uses existing wiring...my house is 100 years old and there is only one phone socket. I could tear out skirting boards and put in more but for me (and, I guess, for many others) wireless networking is a better answer.
Unfortunately the conspicuous lack of technical specs for the x10 kit means I won't be buying from them... (e.g: what kind of connectors does the kit use? If its audio and the mp3Anywhere contains a codec then I can use this with linux...).
Back about 93 or 94 I was working on parallel processing systems, and Parsytec did us a demo of their new modular transputer box. It came in two models, water cooled and (IIRC) freon cooled. The water cooling was done using heat pipes like those mentioned by other posters, but the mechanism seems slightly different.
The ones I saw (the Parsytec guy had one of the heat pipes in his pocket he'd use for demos) relied on liquid water depressurised so that its boiling point was the desired running temp. The heat was dissipated by vaporizing the water (i.e. taking up a lot of energy to change the temperature of the water, as it becomes steam - much more than it would take to heat either water or steam). One end of the pipe was at the T8 and the other was in the air duct.
The pipes themselves were about the size of a slim pen, made of some metal, and (obviously) sealed. To demonstrate them in action, the guy stirred his hot coffee with it, then blew across the top - the coffee became tepid. Pretty cool stuff (if you'll pardon the pun).
I only mention this because other posters seem to be talking about pure-vapour or pure-liquid pipes.
One of the comments in the article was that you can do research on this that couldn't be done before because people couldn't get enough telescope time. I don't think the conclusion follows, but there are certainly telescopes you can get time on and control online. See: http://www.eia.brad.ac.uk/rti/automated.html for a list of some examples. I don't have the link here but IIRC there was a story about 6 months back about a school using one of these to discover a new comet.
You're correct that you're innocent until proven guilty unless its proven beyond reasonable doubt (for criminal offences) or on the balance of probabilities (for civil offences). However, recently barristers (lawyers in court, US folks) have been allowed to get away with making statements which assume the opposite.
In cases where you have a DNA match to a criminal, there is (say) a 1 in a million chance of this happening at random. Barristers come out with this figure and it impresses the hell out of a jury. However, if we assume that you are innocent, as we are supposed to, then with 55 million people in the UK the chances of you being the guilty party on this evidence alone is actually 1 in 55.
The massive swing in the odds is what we mean by assuming you're innocent until proven guilty, but its only in cases where the odds are measurable, such as DNA testing, that the figures are actually used in court. And they are persistenly used in the 'guilty until proved innocent' way.
Just thought I'd get that off my chest. Anyway, getting back on topic - support STAND and write to your MP. If you follow the links to the bits about the public and industry consultancy on this bill, you'll find that the questionnaire was actually written for another bill that this one has sprung off; and this entire measure (snooping email, PKI etc) was not discussed. Remember this when you hear Brother Jack on Question Time droning on about how widely they consulted technical experts before writing this bill...
You're just handing things from one committee to another. A process which guarantees what you're trying to achieve, is to write up the requirements then hold a competition for the best design, and implementation.
This isnt a fanciful notion. Exactly this technique is being used by NIST to descide on the AES standard.
Bruce Scheiner's analysis of IPSec here: http://www.counterpane.com/ipsec.html is not only a good exposition of the differences between the two approaches to getting a standard (in encryption), but also a counterexample if you think that IETF are always getting things right.
OTOH 'rough consensus and running code' (the IETF motto) moves you forward faster than the ISO standardize-everything-up-front technique. You also have a fighting chance that a single mind will have come up with the design, in the process of creating the running code.
Cookies are not meant to be persistent across browser sessions, only within one. (see RFC 2109, cookies are described as 'short lived' and the author says 'the default behaviour is to discard the cookie when the user agent exits'). Cookies dont kill people, netscape and IE kill people.
Lynx Does It Right - there is no cookies file, and it warns you about promiscuous cookies.
I am currently logged in using a cookie, and posting this message - in Lynx.:o)
IBM say here: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/k53/clever.html
That there are over 100,000 idenfiable communities on the net. The 'Clever' algorithm identifies the communities using an extended idea of context...
My comment is, its interesting that Clever would be unlikely to identify the Katzegories[1] above , because the hyperlinks between (say) cocacola.com and fordmotors.com - as big corporates - are only in our heads.
Though it might be nice to see it try.
-Baz
[1] go on steal my neologism, I dare you. Soylent Meme is people...
Most interesting thing about the article: when he says the copyright association members 'dominate the world'. Dang, I was planning to do that tonight...same as every night...
But on a more serious note, his comment about the Superbowl distribution deal was so dumb it bears commenting on. He was basically saying that removing regionalized contracts (or regionalisation a la DVD) on webcasts would reduce the market value to the NFL of the superbowl.
Hang on. Who pays for the contracts the broadcasters buy? Isnt it *advertisers*? And if I could advertise to a particular *person*, not just a *region*, wouldnt that be worth more? Webcasting allows you to pick up a user profile (via cookies etc) and use this to identify what other stuff a user watches, and (on a registered service) their age and income group, on *top* of their country of origin. You can then use this info to tailor advertising and product placement to the people that are actually watching.
There was also a suggestion that more people watching a broadcast by the same broadcaster would lose the NFL money. Hang on...what about hit counts? Webcasters should know, better than anyone but pay-per-view retailers, how many people are in the audience. A savvy NFL marketing droid would sell a contract for *worldwide* rights for webcasting, on a per-viewer basis, with a min. number of viewers paid for up-front.
The broadcaster then sells the targeted world audience to advertisers, who would lap it up. I have somewhat mixed feelings over targeted adverising - at least as a bald geek I'll get mindstorms adverts instead of shampoo:o) but its an intrusion into my privacy. However, it IS the future. In the same way that Mr Valenti IS the past.
The alistapart site is actually about it being illegal on *federal* sites, but with so much clout its bound to have an impact.
Here in the UK the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act makes very similar provisions, the accepted implication being that an unusable *intranet* site which (say) presented a tool which was an essential part of your job would be discriminatory, if there was a reasonable alternative which was not used.
Under the terms of section 19 of the Act, its very likely that internet sites for web-only banks (for instance) fall foul of this too.
No test cases launched on this front yet, but its only a matter of time.
This made me smile a lot. You are *evil*!!! I pity the poor guy on the end of the phone, y'know it was his big break after flipping burgers for all those years...
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at
http://c2.com/ppr/titles.html or http://hillside.net/patterns/EgPatterns.html
for example: 'Stars: A Pattern Language for Query Optimized Schema' and the ARCUS 'Design of Business Information Systems' pattern language.
The latter covers object-relational access layers and the like. Another useful thing to look at (in that your question asked about temporal patterns) is Ralph Johnsons paper on the accounting system he wrote with his students. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TransactionsAndAccounts
In defense of patterns (since someone here attacked them): they encourage people to write down what they consider to be best practises in analysis and design, and to say why. Is this so wrong? As Santayana famously said: those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.
BZZT! Wrong. BT spends NOTHING. Scipher are a company that enforces patents. They've taken this one on from BT because they think they can milk the cash cow. If Scipher (a company of IP Lawyers) didn't think there was money to be made out of this one I don't think we'd ever have heard about it.
The reason I posted this story is that I hope - as other people have said - that this is the patent that finally gets the US to wake up to how stupid their patent law is (I know youse guys know this).
However - I have my suspicions that the leader in this fiasco was Scipher. They are a company whose sole raison d'etre is to get money from patents, and probably take a fat cut. It would be in their interests to find too-broad patents and approach the owning company with an offer to enforce them. Take a look at their website (http://www.scipher.com/).
BTW several people have suggested in this thread that the lifetime of a patent is 7 or 10 years. In the UK its 14 years, and it doesnt expire if you don't sue - it expires if you don't pay the upkeep. You don't have to defend it every time either, unlike trademarks, but you do have to make an effort to develop the technology. I assume the rules are somewhat similar in the US.
Bottom line is that this patent has at least 3 years left to run.
Actually I didn't say /annoying/ - the editor put that in. But it was one of the most annoying registration screens I've ever used. Evening telephone number??!??
I refrained from putting up the full text because my original story (which did have that) was rejected.(probably because at the time I couldnt find a usable link back to the story)
This is really a side issue. When you say wvware converts bold (style) to bold tags you're only looking at the html converter. Html conversion is always going to be poor because there isnt a one-to-one mapping to word features. (which is no excuse for word 97 converting 'heading 1' to html font tags, and 'h1' to bold style!). However, wvware's real strength is the conversion to a neutral xml format which you can mess with to your heart's content. You're generally better off starting with the xml then using a (XSL-T) stylesheet to get nice html out of it - and write your own CSS.
BTW I've contributed code to wvware and there were, last time I looked, features of the spec which remain unimplemented (I was only doing optimisation patches so I don't know if the features really were undocumented - but Caolan had put in comments to the effect that he didn't know what some flags were for).
Frankly I don't care if wvware doesn't make the document look (in html or whatever) like the original, which a lot of people seem to want; its real job is to extract the data from that crazy format into one which mortals can use. If we can extract the style tags, then convert them to something sane in a.n.other tool, what more do you need?
The cease and desist letter is here:i f
http://www.digitaldivas.com/gol/images/letter.g
The link in the article was cut and paste from the Digital Diva's site and won't work except for there.
Theres been quite a few attempts at integrating NT and NIS security (check out the Samba mailing lists, or the comp.protocols.smb archive on Deja). The client side techniques concentrate on replacing the authentication DLL in NT (eg with 'nisgina'), for example:
/ lw-11-integration_p.html
http://www.arch.usyd.edu.au/~doug/gina.html
See this article for more info:
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-11
The only server side alternate I know of is to use Samba as a PDC, not supported in any stable release. Theres discussions of this in (IIRC) the samba-technical mail archives.
http://www.samba.org/
Clearly server side fixes are preferable due to rollout costs but they aren't there yet. No -let me correct myself. Clearly MS writing an interoperable security system is preferable but they choose not to.
I looked at this a couple of years ago for our network (mixed solaris, 98, 95, NT), the Samba PDC wasnt reliable enough and altering the client PC's wasnt an option; so sorry I can't help more. Best of luck -
-Baz
Doh. Forget I said any of that, and go read the Advogato article - my question is answered there.
The obvious question no-one's asked yet is who's coding up reference implementations of the algorithms? (NB I'm posting this before reading the patents themselves, so I guess this may be in there already)
From the patent titles and troubles I've had in the past some of that there code would be dandy in Ghostscript, and as everybody has pointed out there are things in there that would be good in printer drivers. Is there anywhere registering people's intent to code these up?
--Baz
While being probably illegal in the UK for the copyright reasons stated elsewhere, use of this service is potentially damaging to your financial health for other reasons:
- lack of a digital transmission license for the UK or EEA means a minimum £50,000 fine (ouch)
- this could be construed as purveying unauthorised decoders for conditional services which carries a penalty of up to 2 years in prison, and/or a fine.
- using the service without a television license can get you a £1000 fine. This is certainly the case with those Hauppage cards, I think the courts would take a pretty dim view of digital retransmission as well.
The television license stuff doesnt apply for screens below a certain size diagonal (9"?) which might help your cause (slightly) if the quality of retransmission is low.
While people have argued that this isnt broadcast, the white paper that led to the various television Acts in 1998 (Broadcasting, Conditional Services, etc) made it pretty clear that it was intended to cover any point-to-point transmission. The UK already had video on demand trials in Swindon that year so licensing pretty much exactly this service is already handled in UK law, and you dont want any of that on you.
--Baz (ps: IANAL. check http://www.hmso.gov.uk/ for relevant Acts and Statutory Instruments online)
http://www.spo.eds.com/edsr/papers/unixmaya.html
/. article a while back on Samsung 1 Gb ram chips. http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/28/1230243.shtm l
They talk about it being hand-built, so I don't think you'll find this one commercially.
You should maybe talk to someone like Nortel. Big in-memory databases are pretty common for telephone switching gear; they may have some appropriate hardware.
BTW there was a
HTH -- Baz
Thats encoding for URIs, not just CGI, and your description is wrong. Theres a safe character set used for URIs which is more than just the alphanumerics, and the %xx stuff is is used to represent arbitrary octet sequences as character sequences in this set. Its not assumed that each octet is a char, thats up to the recieving application. Read rfc2396, where it actually says this.
r sson-i18ndns-00.txt
BTW '+' is an abomination - its not actually in the spec (go check if you don't believe me). It was in an internet-draft that didnt make it to the RFC stage, but some 'early adopter' foisted it upon us, so most browsers support it.
There has been some work on DNS standards to include unicode names, which would then be used in URLs, although the proposal there is somewhat different (essentially '-xx' instead of '%xx'). See http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-osca
This sounds like a reasonable idea to begin with, but if you think about it, its not that great.
/ads. You can't block them, Joe gets published on a high-performance server for free (I'm guessing this would be the base ad deal, with money accruing for a higher hit count), and all that hot air over ad blocking was worthless.
If you block ads from other sites, how will the ads make it onto your pages? By frames and overlays. Which brings us to the transclusion issue: what about sites that frame other sites? If you block these, then some real, useful sites will stop working...but it still won't stop advertisers.
Here's a business model for ya: Joe Schmo has a site he wants to fund by advertising. He doesnt have a big server though, and the advertisers worry about ad-blocking.
Result? Ad company sets up a proxy webserver (in the style of 'crit.org') which pulls Joe's content onto their server, caches it, and displays it. Ads are on the same server - say in
Cheers,
Baz
For all that people are talking about HPNA being a no brainer and that it uses existing wiring...my house is 100 years old and there is only one phone socket. I could tear out skirting boards and put in more but for me (and, I guess, for many others) wireless networking is a better answer.
Unfortunately the conspicuous lack of technical specs for the x10 kit means I won't be buying from them... (e.g: what kind of connectors does the kit use? If its audio and the mp3Anywhere contains a codec then I can use this with linux...).
Doh! Shouldve read some more comments, there are a few very informative ones up there which describe exactly what I saw.
Back about 93 or 94 I was working on parallel processing systems, and Parsytec did us a demo of their new modular transputer box. It came in two models, water cooled and (IIRC) freon cooled. The water cooling was done using heat pipes like those mentioned by other posters, but the mechanism seems slightly different.
The ones I saw (the Parsytec guy had one of the heat pipes in his pocket he'd use for demos) relied on liquid water depressurised so that its boiling point was the desired running temp. The heat was dissipated by vaporizing the water (i.e. taking up a lot of energy to change the temperature of the water, as it becomes steam - much more than it would take to heat either water or steam). One end of the pipe was at the T8 and the other was in the air duct.
The pipes themselves were about the size of a slim pen, made of some metal, and (obviously) sealed. To demonstrate them in action, the guy stirred his hot coffee with it, then blew across the top - the coffee became tepid. Pretty cool stuff (if you'll pardon the pun).
I only mention this because other posters seem to be talking about pure-vapour or pure-liquid pipes.
One of the comments in the article was that you can do research on this that couldn't be done before because people couldn't get enough telescope time. I don't think the conclusion follows, but there are certainly telescopes you can get time on and control online. See:
http://www.eia.brad.ac.uk/rti/automated.html
for a list of some examples. I don't have the link here but IIRC there was a story about 6 months back about a school using one of these to discover a new comet.
In cases where you have a DNA match to a criminal, there is (say) a 1 in a million chance of this happening at random. Barristers come out with this figure and it impresses the hell out of a jury. However, if we assume that you are innocent, as we are supposed to, then with 55 million people in the UK the chances of you being the guilty party on this evidence alone is actually 1 in 55.
The massive swing in the odds is what we mean by assuming you're innocent until proven guilty, but its only in cases where the odds are measurable, such as DNA testing, that the figures are actually used in court. And they are persistenly used in the 'guilty until proved innocent' way.
Just thought I'd get that off my chest. Anyway, getting back on topic - support STAND and write to your MP. If you follow the links to the bits about the public and industry consultancy on this bill, you'll find that the questionnaire was actually written for another bill that this one has sprung off; and this entire measure (snooping email, PKI etc) was not discussed. Remember this when you hear Brother Jack on Question Time droning on about how widely they consulted technical experts before writing this bill...
- Baz
http://www.cosource.com/cgi-bin/cos.pl/wish/info/2 87
I think the chances of that project seeing the light of day are (ahem) slim.
-Baz
This isnt a fanciful notion. Exactly this technique is being used by NIST to descide on the AES standard.
Bruce Scheiner's analysis of IPSec here: http://www.counterpane.com/ipsec.html is not only a good exposition of the differences between the two approaches to getting a standard (in encryption), but also a counterexample if you think that IETF are always getting things right.
OTOH 'rough consensus and running code' (the IETF motto) moves you forward faster than the ISO standardize-everything-up-front technique. You also have a fighting chance that a single mind will have come up with the design, in the process of creating the running code.
-Baz
Lynx Does It Right - there is no cookies file, and it warns you about promiscuous cookies.
I am currently logged in using a cookie, and posting this message - in Lynx. :o)
That there are over 100,000 idenfiable communities on the net. The 'Clever' algorithm identifies the communities using an extended idea of context...
My comment is, its interesting that Clever would be unlikely to identify the Katzegories[1] above , because the hyperlinks between (say) cocacola.com and fordmotors.com - as big corporates - are only in our heads.
Though it might be nice to see it try.
-Baz
[1] go on steal my neologism, I dare you. Soylent Meme is people...
But on a more serious note, his comment about the Superbowl distribution deal was so dumb it bears commenting on. He was basically saying that removing regionalized contracts (or regionalisation a la DVD) on webcasts would reduce the market value to the NFL of the superbowl.
Hang on. Who pays for the contracts the broadcasters buy? Isnt it *advertisers*? And if I could advertise to a particular *person*, not just a *region*, wouldnt that be worth more? Webcasting allows you to pick up a user profile (via cookies etc) and use this to identify what other stuff a user watches, and (on a registered service) their age and income group, on *top* of their country of origin. You can then use this info to tailor advertising and product placement to the people that are actually watching.
There was also a suggestion that more people watching a broadcast by the same broadcaster would lose the NFL money. Hang on...what about hit counts? Webcasters should know, better than anyone but pay-per-view retailers, how many people are in the audience. A savvy NFL marketing droid would sell a contract for *worldwide* rights for webcasting, on a per-viewer basis, with a min. number of viewers paid for up-front.
The broadcaster then sells the targeted world audience to advertisers, who would lap it up. I have somewhat mixed feelings over targeted adverising - at least as a bald geek I'll get mindstorms adverts instead of shampoo :o) but its an intrusion into my privacy. However, it IS the future. In the same way that Mr Valenti IS the past.
illegal on *federal* sites, but with so much
clout its bound to have an impact.
Here in the UK the 1995 Disability Discrimination
Act makes very similar provisions, the accepted
implication being that an unusable *intranet* site which (say) presented a tool which was
an essential part of your job would be discriminatory, if there was a reasonable
alternative which was not used.
Under the terms of section 19 of the Act,
its very likely that internet sites for web-only
banks (for instance) fall foul of this too.
No test cases launched on this front yet,
but its only a matter of time.
-Baz
This made me smile a lot. You are *evil*!!!
I pity the poor guy on the end of the phone,
y'know it was his big break after flipping
burgers for all those years...