I have a lot of friends that used to work for dotSafe, and it sounds like this is a law requiring ISPs to provide such as service.
All they had was an ISP that had an XStop server... so if this gets signed, buy up that's company's stock (dunno what that company is, or even if they're public)
Ironically, DotSafe's customer base was from a Mormon town... Mesa, AZ.
I use Movielink because I don't have to leave my couch to do it, and who needs 5 days for $5? The 700kbps downloads are more than acceptible quality... if I was going to give a scale from 1 being VCD and 10 being DVD, I'd put it at a 7. Firmly better than the old VCR tapes.
You would think that your skill level comes through in a verbal interview, but you'd be surprised. I just finished up our hiring process for a new programmer at work, and the position was for C#/.net. We did weed out people first by resume, then by phone interview, and then by traditional interviews. We had the whole range of applicants from no college to some college to multiple PHDs applying.
Testing was an afterthought... but I wanted to get a feel for the programmer's style before we got to working together.
I gave all of the good candidates the same test: a simple ASP.Net page that I had written that populates a drop-down list using code, and change that to populate it using an xml file provided instead. I gave links to all of the documentation of relevant objects.
Only one applicant got the answer correct and elegant happened to be someone we didn't expect: a recent college graduate who was already working tech-support in-house who didn't know c# or.net, but stayed up all night figuring it out. I got lots of answers back... many that didn't even compile (we're talking 9 lines of code here, and everyone else listed asp.net on their resumes!), and the more educated the person, the more conveluted the answer seemed to get.
You gotta change the copyright law to change that. It used to have nothing to do with when an artists dies, it was something like 14 years for a copyright.
Changes to the law within our lifetime has made copyrights last until death + 99 years.
And although the record company will continue to make money, who ever inherits 2pac's estate should be getting the royalties from his work, unless he signed some bad contracts that would automatically release all of his work to his label in the event of his death.
I don't think that happened because 2pac could have at least afforded a bad attorney, and I'd be looking into a few leads at his label during his murder investigation if that was the case.
Last time I talked to my dad, it sounds like he makes more off ebay now than he does off his store front. He runs a small-town hobby shop. He was almost giving away some of his more rare merchandise that had been occupying his shelves for a few years. As soon as he got on ebay, some of his goods (particularly playmobil) were selling for $50 instead of 75 cents (NOT KIDDING).
I know business must be good, he's paying my sister to handle the ebay business... a job she took over taking a job as a teacher, something she just finished college for a couple of years back.
Ebay really takes the a lot of the cost out of trying new merchandise out, since if it doesn't fly off the shelves, the typical worst case scenerio is you get most of your money back online.
This is talking about China, which is where the real piracy problems are (well, there and eastern Europe). DRM is one of the responses to this piracy, and is an attempt to cut costs resulting from losts sales due to piracy. Cutting into real piracy reduces the pressure for content companies to implement these DRM system that you're worried about.
but while we're talking about Soviets, one of the main differences pointed out to myself as a grade school kid between American and the Soviet Union was that we didn't have to show papers to travel here. Ever have the pleasure of losing your wallet in America before?
Remember, with these systems you still have a choice. Unplug and go home. Go start a local band, there's not much mainstream out there worth paying attention to anyway. The battles over the freedoms you're talking about were lost a long time ago.
porn pushes through technology, and while it may decide which 2nd gen DVD we go to, what will be more interesting is which movie download services take this content and run with it.
Most people aren't fond of going to the sex shop to pick these things up, and if you can download an HDTV quality porno in less than an hour or so, why bother?
Got into Java because of applets... fun to make a website with a little custom control in it. And the language was a nice improvement over C++ since you don't have to manage your memory. There's a lot of stupidness in the language, but it wasn't too bad.
And development overall in a real-world environment wasn't bad at all. In face I've written in Windows and deployed on Linux for multiple projects now.
However, with Java client apps it's write-once, debug-everywhere, since every VM has its quirks you have to troubleshoot, and suddenly I have several versions of my software to troubleshoot (last time I did that was circa 99, so maybe it's better now)
My last java project was a system of servlets for Tomcat which were needed to be up 24/7. The thing works, but the memory leaks were terrible, even making sure I set everything to null after using it, it was a memory bleeding dog.
My current job uses primarily C# on Windows server, and I'm much more impressed with.Net than java, despite being biased against Microsoft for the most part. The language features are much more clean, like my favorite: foreach (SomeObject i in SomeCollection) but there's a ton of language features that I don't want to get into here.
It's the stability and deployment that really got me. I can just compile my code to a DLL (and a couple of stub.asmx files) and throw it up on a webserver in the/bin folder, and I can have me a webservice, or a simple way to access compiled code from a script.
I still have to reboot windows 2003, but that's just because I keep my patches up-to-date. If I neglect to patch a server, it would stay up longer than the Java boxes. And this stuff runs much faster... almost as fast a C. Sounds absolutely nuts, but it's true.
I don't believe recording for purposes of archival into a personal library is covered by the current fair-use laws. Just liking taping your rentals from Blockbuster, the laws themselves are not changing, and if you're already using DVD, your reality isn't changing either (DVD and DRM both employ digital encryption). It will be just as easy to tape a show to your VCR from your new Internet device, and it won't be any more difficult as it is now.
It just won't be any easier than now to make analog copies either.
Because you can't alter the deal without committing fraud. Committing fraud is very bad business. I could also sell a TV set that self-destructs in 2 years so you have to buy another one, but that's equally as illegal.
To grant access to your content, we issue a license, which contains the decryption keys for your content. (the storage of these keys using hardware identifiers is the part of DRM that's "security through obscurity", but it's worked thus far).
This license contains either a certain number of plays, hours, days, an end date, how many times you're allowed to transfer the file, where you can transfer it, etc. If I change my mind and start issuing single play licenses and for files that you paid for 2 day rentals, that's illegal and wrong.
There's an endless number of real-world metaphors you could use, but what it comes down to is that if you're a cell-phone company who takes a year contract upfront and then disconnects the service after two days, your company is going to go under in a matter of weeks.
And I can tell you exactly what happens when our customers think they're getting screwed. They call up their credit card companies and get a chargeback, so we lose the money they paid for several videos, and then get a $25 fee on top of it. And if our chargebacks and refunds combined go over 1.5% of our gross revenues, our merchant account will be pulled, and we're out of business.
but such is life. As they say, guns don't kill people, people kill people. It all comes down to trust at some point, and that didn't work out for the content companies on the Internet very well, unfortunately.
Anyway I think I'm probably closer to a curious Anakin for the moment, but we'll see where I'm at in a few years:) Part of the reason I took this job was to pose the same questions you're asking me to upper management, so I can play the role of consumer advocate.
I'm not seeing how "2-day download rental" is misleading if the files you download don't work after two days.
As far as recording? I don't know, this device isn't about being a Tivo, it's about being an internet marketplace like iTunes. Why anyone would want this thing as a $1000 tivo is beyond me.
Sure, but as long as the terms are upfront and clear, I'm not seeing how these statements are contradictory.
When you buy software at an electronic stores, a common policy is that you can't returned unopened software. If they tell me that upfront, I have a choice to make about that, but I don't see how that's unfair.
You're not supposed to be able to buy your own copy of Media Center Edition. Most venders will let you if you buy hardware along with your copy, however. The idea is they only want quality machines out running their systems. I think they should manufacture these things themselves like Apple personally, but this is a nice middle ground that they're going for at the moment.
I believe the new eMachine systems will be around $500 by the end of the year. I've seen home-built systems on ebay that looked perfectly viable for under $400.
I'm upgrading my 400 celeron box to a 3000+ sempron with 512mb ram for under $200 to be my media center.
I've been developing for it even and we haven't got the thing to crash. Can't say that about my MythTV linux box at home, had to reboot that about once every week or so.
And this is while I'm intentionally abusing the MediaCenter app, ripping DVDs in the background, and running multiple Windows Media Encoder apps at the same time.
Now, I didn't say the system was running fast, but it doesn't crash.
I code for Microsoft's Windows Media Rights Management for a living, which is their (licensed anyway) DRM implementation.
We have complete control as to what rights we grant you for the content. Usually our clients allow content to be burned to DVD if the file is allowed to be accessed permanently, and you can't burn rentals to DVD, since that would lead to copyright violations.
But this is just for downloaded content within MediaCenter. All of the Tivo features with the MCE2005 are not DRM'd files if the broadcast flag is not set, so you can copy your football game over bittorrent all you want.
The DRM is fair. I see slashdotters always arguing about how DRM isn't fair, just like unenforced laws are called unfair once the enforcement starts.
they're going to use it with their online environment, and unless they decide to turn off the security options with IE (it comes installed in secure mode that makes you manually accept every url you want to navigate to) and start surfing porn outside of their MediaCenter sandboxes, they won't have to reinstall.
The VP of business development was the guy who setup our development test machine here for XP MCE2005, which should tell you about the skill-level of user this software is focusing on. And he had no complaints, said it was a pleasure to setup.
When this will take off is when they have good quality commerical boxes for under $500. I expect to see that price-range available by Christmas from the cheap manufactures of the likes of eMachines, who recently announced they will be producing MediaCenters.
Once Dell has a $399 MediaCenter PC that you can use to rent movies online for cheaper than Blockbuster (who is part owner of CinemaNow so they aren't going to fight it) this thing is really going to take off.
Seriously, give this thing a try. I'm not Microsoft fan, but this is a good product, with a well thought out business relationship with content vendors.
All of the companies we're putting online with Media Center Edition is offering DVDs at discounted rates. You trade having no physical media and going to encrypted content for better choices and cheaper prices.
I think you're right, DRM on standardized media such as DVDs and CDs will die out, but DRM will become more popular when content is distributed digitally.
I have helped a couple of people selling videos of English lessons on CD's that are DRM encrypted, and the users love it, but the system is very fair and the advertising is up front about the protection used on the disk. The users are prompted for a serial number that unlocks that content 2 times (like microsoft's activations) which grants the user a permanent license for those machines.
Entertainment execs can be paranoid and greedy, and are always about 3 to 4 years behind technology. They'll change their mind about screwing with grandma's stardard formats if she returns it.
Re:I find distributions like Knoppix stupid
on
Knoppix 3.7 Released
·
· Score: 1
12 minutes? I couldn't get Knoppix to boot as fast as XP, but it was more like 90 seconds on an Athlon 1800+
Slashdot Mirror
heh, Indiana has a law against sex outside of the missionary position... now that's futility
I have a lot of friends that used to work for dotSafe, and it sounds like this is a law requiring ISPs to provide such as service.
All they had was an ISP that had an XStop server... so if this gets signed, buy up that's company's stock (dunno what that company is, or even if they're public)
Ironically, DotSafe's customer base was from a Mormon town... Mesa, AZ.
I use Movielink because I don't have to leave my couch to do it, and who needs 5 days for $5? The 700kbps downloads are more than acceptible quality... if I was going to give a scale from 1 being VCD and 10 being DVD, I'd put it at a 7. Firmly better than the old VCR tapes.
This would be India outsourcing DRM work to the United States, not the other way around.
You would think that your skill level comes through in a verbal interview, but you'd be surprised. I just finished up our hiring process for a new programmer at work, and the position was for C#/.net. We did weed out people first by resume, then by phone interview, and then by traditional interviews. We had the whole range of applicants from no college to some college to multiple PHDs applying.
.net, but stayed up all night figuring it out. I got lots of answers back... many that didn't even compile (we're talking 9 lines of code here, and everyone else listed asp.net on their resumes!), and the more educated the person, the more conveluted the answer seemed to get.
Testing was an afterthought... but I wanted to get a feel for the programmer's style before we got to working together.
I gave all of the good candidates the same test: a simple ASP.Net page that I had written that populates a drop-down list using code, and change that to populate it using an xml file provided instead. I gave links to all of the documentation of relevant objects.
Only one applicant got the answer correct and elegant happened to be someone we didn't expect: a recent college graduate who was already working tech-support in-house who didn't know c# or
You gotta change the copyright law to change that. It used to have nothing to do with when an artists dies, it was something like 14 years for a copyright.
Changes to the law within our lifetime has made copyrights last until death + 99 years.
And although the record company will continue to make money, who ever inherits 2pac's estate should be getting the royalties from his work, unless he signed some bad contracts that would automatically release all of his work to his label in the event of his death.
I don't think that happened because 2pac could have at least afforded a bad attorney, and I'd be looking into a few leads at his label during his murder investigation if that was the case.
I pay for the Yahoo pop3 access, and using it with Mail.app I don't get any spam, and I give out my email address like crazy.
Last time I talked to my dad, it sounds like he makes more off ebay now than he does off his store front. He runs a small-town hobby shop. He was almost giving away some of his more rare merchandise that had been occupying his shelves for a few years. As soon as he got on ebay, some of his goods (particularly playmobil) were selling for $50 instead of 75 cents (NOT KIDDING).
I know business must be good, he's paying my sister to handle the ebay business... a job she took over taking a job as a teacher, something she just finished college for a couple of years back.
Ebay really takes the a lot of the cost out of trying new merchandise out, since if it doesn't fly off the shelves, the typical worst case scenerio is you get most of your money back online.
This is talking about China, which is where the real piracy problems are (well, there and eastern Europe). DRM is one of the responses to this piracy, and is an attempt to cut costs resulting from losts sales due to piracy. Cutting into real piracy reduces the pressure for content companies to implement these DRM system that you're worried about.
but while we're talking about Soviets, one of the main differences pointed out to myself as a grade school kid between American and the Soviet Union was that we didn't have to show papers to travel here. Ever have the pleasure of losing your wallet in America before?
Remember, with these systems you still have a choice. Unplug and go home. Go start a local band, there's not much mainstream out there worth paying attention to anyway. The battles over the freedoms you're talking about were lost a long time ago.
porn pushes through technology, and while it may decide which 2nd gen DVD we go to, what will be more interesting is which movie download services take this content and run with it.
Most people aren't fond of going to the sex shop to pick these things up, and if you can download an HDTV quality porno in less than an hour or so, why bother?
LOAD "*",8,1 was giving me "Bad command or file name" repeatedly...
Oh man does that bring back memories! Took me an hour to figure out that I just have to type in the program's name!
Got into Java because of applets... fun to make a website with a little custom control in it. And the language was a nice improvement over C++ since you don't have to manage your memory. There's a lot of stupidness in the language, but it wasn't too bad.
.Net than java, despite being biased against Microsoft for the most part. The language features are much more clean, like my favorite:
.asmx files) and throw it up on a webserver in the /bin folder, and I can have me a webservice, or a simple way to access compiled code from a script.
And development overall in a real-world environment wasn't bad at all. In face I've written in Windows and deployed on Linux for multiple projects now.
However, with Java client apps it's write-once, debug-everywhere, since every VM has its quirks you have to troubleshoot, and suddenly I have several versions of my software to troubleshoot (last time I did that was circa 99, so maybe it's better now)
My last java project was a system of servlets for Tomcat which were needed to be up 24/7. The thing works, but the memory leaks were terrible, even making sure I set everything to null after using it, it was a memory bleeding dog.
My current job uses primarily C# on Windows server, and I'm much more impressed with
foreach (SomeObject i in SomeCollection)
but there's a ton of language features that I don't want to get into here.
It's the stability and deployment that really got me. I can just compile my code to a DLL (and a couple of stub
I still have to reboot windows 2003, but that's just because I keep my patches up-to-date. If I neglect to patch a server, it would stay up longer than the Java boxes. And this stuff runs much faster... almost as fast a C. Sounds absolutely nuts, but it's true.
I don't believe recording for purposes of archival into a personal library is covered by the current fair-use laws. Just liking taping your rentals from Blockbuster, the laws themselves are not changing, and if you're already using DVD, your reality isn't changing either (DVD and DRM both employ digital encryption). It will be just as easy to tape a show to your VCR from your new Internet device, and it won't be any more difficult as it is now.
It just won't be any easier than now to make analog copies either.
Because you can't alter the deal without committing fraud. Committing fraud is very bad business. I could also sell a TV set that self-destructs in 2 years so you have to buy another one, but that's equally as illegal.
:) Part of the reason I took this job was to pose the same questions you're asking me to upper management, so I can play the role of consumer advocate.
To grant access to your content, we issue a license, which contains the decryption keys for your content. (the storage of these keys using hardware identifiers is the part of DRM that's "security through obscurity", but it's worked thus far).
This license contains either a certain number of plays, hours, days, an end date, how many times you're allowed to transfer the file, where you can transfer it, etc. If I change my mind and start issuing single play licenses and for files that you paid for 2 day rentals, that's illegal and wrong.
There's an endless number of real-world metaphors you could use, but what it comes down to is that if you're a cell-phone company who takes a year contract upfront and then disconnects the service after two days, your company is going to go under in a matter of weeks.
And I can tell you exactly what happens when our customers think they're getting screwed. They call up their credit card companies and get a chargeback, so we lose the money they paid for several videos, and then get a $25 fee on top of it. And if our chargebacks and refunds combined go over 1.5% of our gross revenues, our merchant account will be pulled, and we're out of business.
but such is life. As they say, guns don't kill people, people kill people. It all comes down to trust at some point, and that didn't work out for the content companies on the Internet very well, unfortunately.
Anyway I think I'm probably closer to a curious Anakin for the moment, but we'll see where I'm at in a few years
I'm not seeing how "2-day download rental" is misleading if the files you download don't work after two days.
As far as recording? I don't know, this device isn't about being a Tivo, it's about being an internet marketplace like iTunes. Why anyone would want this thing as a $1000 tivo is beyond me.
hopefully Windows Update will come installed to automatically update security without reboots at some point!
Microsoft is getting better at the security game because they suddenly started to care after it started to affect their bottom line.
Sure, but as long as the terms are upfront and clear, I'm not seeing how these statements are contradictory.
When you buy software at an electronic stores, a common policy is that you can't returned unopened software. If they tell me that upfront, I have a choice to make about that, but I don't see how that's unfair.
You're not supposed to be able to buy your own copy of Media Center Edition. Most venders will let you if you buy hardware along with your copy, however. The idea is they only want quality machines out running their systems. I think they should manufacture these things themselves like Apple personally, but this is a nice middle ground that they're going for at the moment.
I believe the new eMachine systems will be around $500 by the end of the year. I've seen home-built systems on ebay that looked perfectly viable for under $400.
I'm upgrading my 400 celeron box to a 3000+ sempron with 512mb ram for under $200 to be my media center.
I've been developing for it even and we haven't got the thing to crash. Can't say that about my MythTV linux box at home, had to reboot that about once every week or so.
And this is while I'm intentionally abusing the MediaCenter app, ripping DVDs in the background, and running multiple Windows Media Encoder apps at the same time.
Now, I didn't say the system was running fast, but it doesn't crash.
I code for Microsoft's Windows Media Rights Management for a living, which is their (licensed anyway) DRM implementation.
We have complete control as to what rights we grant you for the content. Usually our clients allow content to be burned to DVD if the file is allowed to be accessed permanently, and you can't burn rentals to DVD, since that would lead to copyright violations.
But this is just for downloaded content within MediaCenter. All of the Tivo features with the MCE2005 are not DRM'd files if the broadcast flag is not set, so you can copy your football game over bittorrent all you want.
The DRM is fair. I see slashdotters always arguing about how DRM isn't fair, just like unenforced laws are called unfair once the enforcement starts.
they're going to use it with their online environment, and unless they decide to turn off the security options with IE (it comes installed in secure mode that makes you manually accept every url you want to navigate to) and start surfing porn outside of their MediaCenter sandboxes, they won't have to reinstall.
The VP of business development was the guy who setup our development test machine here for XP MCE2005, which should tell you about the skill-level of user this software is focusing on. And he had no complaints, said it was a pleasure to setup.
When this will take off is when they have good quality commerical boxes for under $500. I expect to see that price-range available by Christmas from the cheap manufactures of the likes of eMachines, who recently announced they will be producing MediaCenters.
Once Dell has a $399 MediaCenter PC that you can use to rent movies online for cheaper than Blockbuster (who is part owner of CinemaNow so they aren't going to fight it) this thing is really going to take off.
Seriously, give this thing a try. I'm not Microsoft fan, but this is a good product, with a well thought out business relationship with content vendors.
All of the companies we're putting online with Media Center Edition is offering DVDs at discounted rates. You trade having no physical media and going to encrypted content for better choices and cheaper prices.
You guys are living in the 90's.
I think you're right, DRM on standardized media such as DVDs and CDs will die out, but DRM will become more popular when content is distributed digitally.
I have helped a couple of people selling videos of English lessons on CD's that are DRM encrypted, and the users love it, but the system is very fair and the advertising is up front about the protection used on the disk. The users are prompted for a serial number that unlocks that content 2 times (like microsoft's activations) which grants the user a permanent license for those machines.
Entertainment execs can be paranoid and greedy, and are always about 3 to 4 years behind technology. They'll change their mind about screwing with grandma's stardard formats if she returns it.
12 minutes? I couldn't get Knoppix to boot as fast as XP, but it was more like 90 seconds on an Athlon 1800+