I think it is kinda true:)
From what I have read on the Tasmanian trial roll out, they are providing an ADSL service for those that don't want full speed. The advantage is that they can continue to use their existing ADSL modem/router.
Saying that only new houses would be able to get the Ethernet service is wrong, however. Cable TV is available to older houses that don't have a cable outlet or a satellite dish; When you sign-up they come and install it for you. Installing an Ethernet socket in an existing house is no more difficult than a cable TV point - a couple of hundred dollars, or maybe nothing if you sign a minimum term contract.
You have to remember that the NBN isn't just about home users; it will be available to the vast majority of business premises as well. Our company already uses 1GB network connections between our offices and our data centre. We are located in state capitals so we can get that bandwidth at reasonable prices, but if we had an office in a smaller town we would be out of luck. Having 1GB/s available means that smaller businesses will have access to lots of new services; hosted/cloud servers, off-site backup, HD video conferencing...
As other posters have said, most home users don't even need 100 Mb/s but there may be some who do and there will certainly be some businesses that do. The major cost component of the NBN is physically installing the fibre. Installing copper would cost about the same. Arguing against the cost of the NBN based on the speeds it supports being unnecessary is like arguing against the cost of building a suburban street because someone says it can support a 65 ton tank at its maximum design capacity. Although the maximum capacity will never be needed, a lower capacity road would cost the same.
While I am not convinced that a government can manage a project of this size without cost blow outs, at least the Labour government has a vision to provide a universal level of infrastructure. The Liberal plan will leave us with the same patchy mix of over-serviced cities and under-serviced rural areas.
As for why focusing on wireless is a bad idea, refer to the very informative posts in this thread on the relationship between speed and the spectrum required. If we can't deliver better than 20Mb/s over a few kilometres using copper. how can we expect wireless to do better when it is a much more restricted medium.
The exact method will vary depending on the OS and platform, but generally the first thing authorities will do is use a disk cloner to create an image for forensic purposes. Once they have the cloned image they can use a variety of techniques without modifying the original. This ensures that the original system can be re-cloned if the copy gets damaged. It also ensures that an original unaltered image is available to both sides in the event of a court case.
I think that what they were worried about is that it encourages people to record their station with a PVR and then skip the advertising.
TIVO in Australia has ad skipping disabled. To carry the new "Freeview" logo and gain access to the enhanced Freeview EPG (when it becomes available!) an STB cannot permit ad skipping.
A non-freeview box with IceTV gives both ad skipping and a good EPG
From my reading of the decision, it looks like this would apply to the train timetable (but IANAL).
What the court has said is that although collections of facts can be copyrighted, the question is to the degree of originality in the expression of those facts.
In the case of the TV guide, the alleged infringement consisted of two pieces of information; the program title and the time of transmission. The title is supplied by the program's creator; not Channel 9 and the time can only be expressed in a standard way (Channel 9 could hardly claim copyright of "7:30 pm"); Channel 9 has therefore not exercised creativity or originality.
The train timetable is much the same. There are two pieces of information; a station name (which is much like the program name) and a departure time. Cityrail has not exercised any creativity or originality in the expression of this information.
It is the lack of originality of expression that results in the information not being copyright; it is not a fair use claim, so the amount of information copied does not matter.
I agree totally - I think most people would agree that times have changed and that the entertainment industry needs to adopt its business model to the new reality if it was explained in that way; but what we hear is "music `theft' is going to destroy music" when what they really mean is "music `theft' is going to destroy our business model". While I am sure the promise of fame and fortune attracts some people to music, most musicians I know play music because they enjoy it. Even if the current music industry dies I am sure humans will continue making music as we have for thousands of years and that someone will figure out how they can make a living doing it.
It always amused me how the popular analogy from the other camp was "Oh, so if you want a car, it's okay to steal it is it?" So they can get all high and moral. But when you break it down and say "Okay, I'm going to make an exact duplicate of your car, never once depriving you of the usage of it. It will not inconvenience you in any way." The argument rather falls flat on it's face.
Let's assume that you have the magic Star Trek matter replicator and can make a copy of the car, although it is true that you haven't deprived the owner of the car, you have deprived the manufacturer of the car. Car manufacturers do not charge the sum of the input resources; they charge extra in order to recoup the value of their design, the costs of building the factory and yes, a profit; so if you could replicate the car you have pretty much the precise analogy of copying/sharing a copyrighted item - There has clearly been a financial impact to the car manufacturer.
Of course the number of people who would replicate a free Ferrari vs. the number of people who would actually purchase one are clearly not the same, so it would be wrong of Ferrari to claim that every replicated car was a lost sale and the same is true of the entertainment industry (although that is not how they see it).
I thought the article brought some interesting arguments and attempted to break down the highly polarised way in which this issue is typically presented; The entertainment industry claims that every copy cost them a billion dollars and is the same as stealing the Mona Lisa (or some such hyperbole) and file sharers claim that the entertainment industry is a bunch of monopolistic assholes who charge too much and give nothing to the artists anyway so why not steal it.
What I think is interesting about the car theft analogy is that entertainment industry seems to ignore the fact that while car theft is wrong, it does still happen. While people take reasonable steps to prevent car theft they are unwilling to, say, encase their cars in concrete (Which I guess still wouldn't prevent a thief with a big enough crane from taking the car). The entertainment industry seems to think they should be immune from theft and work with their lobbyists to further increase their (artificial) monopoly protection (which further alienates from many people) rather than accepting that a certain amount of theft will happen and working to find a new business model that works in the digital world. The success of music stores like iTunes shows that some people will still buy music if the price vs. convenience equation stacks up. (And yes for some people even 1c is too much to pay)
Hi,
Have you looked at this: http://www.pocketmac.net/products/pmblackberry/ ?
It is now a free download. It claims to fully support both Entourage and the native Mac apps (Address Book, iCal etc),
Apologies if you have tried it and found it wanting.
Paul
I am not defending the unauthorised copying of music - I myself have purchased a number of songs from iTunes, complete with DRM - and you are technically correct - this person did choose to become a "pirate". The fact is that through a poor implementation of something that doesn't help stop piracy anyway Rhino's customer found out that it was a better experience to get the illegal version; hardly a smart business plan.
You cannot link the amount of music available for illegal download with the number of thieves. In a hard goods market (shoplifed CDs for example) there is a correlation between the available of illicit material available and the level of illegal activity. This doesn't necessarily apply with digital goods. In fact there is a very good chance that the people supplying the unauthorised copies were never the digtial music store's customer. The illegal copies probably came from a CD. One person rips and shares the CD, others download and share the CD - none of them actually purchased the digital files; they were never a customer.
CDs at a music store are protected by anti-theft packaging, but they remove it for you once you purchase the CD; People accept this as a slight inconvenience (I know have had the odd cracked CD case when the "lock" is removed). Imagine if you had to produce your store receipt every time you wanted to play the CD (oh and sometimes the clerk forgets to give you the receipt, or it gets washed in your pocket or you just can't find it); people wouldn't accept this. In fact this would create a larger market for pirate CDs by providing a reason for otherwise honest people to consider the pirate product.
"Service your customers well or someone else will." - The online music store had a great opportunity here - they could reduce the time between desire and gratification. The customer decided he would like this music, goes looking, finds he can buy it online & purchases - should have been a great customer experience. The "old way" would be to get in the car, drive to the mall, find out that the music store doesn't have the CD (It isn't "top 40"), order it in, wait, drive back to collect it. There are a number of points at which the customer could say "meh, too hard". They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory (well, actually they got the $10 anyway, so maybe they don't care that he couldn't actually listen to the music:) ).
...(The other solution to this is that since the iPod is the de-facto standard for personal music players at this point Apple could just pony up the money to license the WMA codecs. I'm sure that Microsoft would take the money no matter where it came from)
Unfortunately there are a couple of issues with this:
Steve Jobs' ego would not permit it;)
More importantly, it is more than just putting the WMA codec on the iPod - From an Apple perspective it has to work on the Mac as well as the PC, so the full Windows Media DRM would need to be ported to Mac OSX somehow. And all of the stores that sell DRMd WMAs currently check for IE and use ActiveX - so all the stores would need to change to support the Macs (And lets face it none of the Mac users would buy from them anyway!)
Also, if you RTFA you will see that the user couldn't even get the songs to play on the PC on which he had downloaded them. According to Rhino "support" he needed to disable firewalls or even use different ISPs until he could somehow get the magic license files to download - The point is the guy was happy to give Rhino $10 for the music, but DRM, which assumes that the customer is a "crimial", made the whole experience painful for the customer and lost them the customer.
My analogy would be visiting a department store. They have a sign saying that they can search your bags, but in practice they give it a quick glance or do nothing. They only really search your bag if they are suspicious. Imagine if you were subjected to a full strip-search every time you shopped there - how long would you remain a customer?
The computer I originally downloaded them on no longer exists, so I have no way to deauthorize it. This means that I am down one of the 5 computers that I can authorize my songs to play on. When I realized this, I decided that I will never again purchase any music files that have any DRM on them whatsoever.
While I would also prefer to see iTunes content without DRM, this is another case where FairPlay is better than the rest. You can always de-authorize one or more of your 5 computers.. Refer here. To de-authorize a single computer you need to have that computer. If, as in your case, you don't have access to that computer you can always de-authorize all computers and then re-authorize. While this is a bit painful, you don't have to worry about it until you try to authorize the 6th computer; until then let the "dead" machine just sit in the list
Compare this with WMA files where you have re-installed the operating system without backing up the encryption keys.
Paul
Also, remember fire codes.
If you use a qualified security contractor/consultant as the poster suggested, they should think of this for you, but you need to consider doors that are in the emergency exit path - These doors cannot be locked in the event of a power failure. They will need to be fitted with free-exit handles or break glass releases. These doors should also be fitted with a 24 hour monitored alarm that activates when the door is released manually, not just a local siren.
I have one of those LG Combined washer/dryer things and they are a great washer but a crappy dryer.
Rather than use hot air like most dryers, they use water somehow - In a way this is nice because they don't exhaust humid air into the room (assuming you can't vent to the outside somehow) - but it takes about 3 hours to dry a load and uses more water than you save by using the more efficient front-loader style machine. Also you can't start washing the next load until the drying is finished.
Unfortunately we didn't realise these limitations until after we had bought the machine - as a result we now have one of these sitting on top of the washer - it has the auto sensing thing and the anti-wrinkle feature too!
It would seem to refer to Patent #6928433. It was filed back in 2001, however I would have thought that this sort of hierarchical organisation existed before then.
And then go directly to Jail...Well not really, but this is still likely to be a violation of the copyright in the image. All the manipulation in the world doesn't change the fact that you started with someone elses work. Obviously there are exceptions to this, public domain, creative commons licenses etc.
A little plug here, for a great range of royalty free stock images check out iStockphoto. Images from as little as 0.50c
A number of people have mentioned the importance of a good lens to getting a good image and I totally agree, but the software inside the camera is also very important.
It is the software that performs the metering and ultimately controls the image you are going to get. One of the major advantage that the DSLRs from Canon and Nikon have is that they can use the software that these companies have developed for their film bodies, bodies that are used by a large percentage of the professional 35mm market.
When I switched from an EOS film body to an EOS 10D I found the switch was quite simple because the camera's controls and metering behaved just like the EOS bodies I had been using for years.
I also own a little Canon Digital Ixus for snapshots and although it takes great photos for its size, things like shutter lag and its simplified metering and focussing can be really annoying.
-----
Need affordable stock photography? Check out iStockphoto.com
Except, that you need to realise that many of these registries are located in remote locations, with bandwidth back to the data centre around 128-256 Kbits/sec. In this situation Sunrays require a local SUN server which adds quite a bit to costs.
Actually, the Macs are replacing SunRays in some locations. What people forget about SunRays is that they require a fairly beefy SUN server to be on the same LAN as them. This means that the RTA has to deploy SUN servers in remote locations - something that they can avoid with the Apple computers.
Also, the applications in the registries are a little more complicated than standard POS - the cameras used to capture license photos are controlled by the current terminals (and will be controlled by the Mac)
already includes substantially the same clauses as the DMCA. In particular: circumvention devices.
This act has already been used successfully (on appeal) to take action against a person selling Playstation Mod Chips. The original judge found, correctly IMHO, that the Mod Chip was not a circumvention device because it did not prevent the copy being made (and this is the point where copyright is violated), simply the copy being played back. This was overturned on appeal.
In most cases yes. Apps on the Mac fall in to two broad categories:
Apps that are installed just by dragging them off their distribution media
Apps that have an installer
Apps in the first category (like Mozilla) are great, you just drag the application icon to your disk (or to the trash to "uninstall"). This is because an appliction on the mac is really a directory/folder containing the things the app needs.
Apps in the second category often update system folders (having first asked for your administrator password - we have Unix privillege separation here) or need to copy to a number of folders, but if you can determine what the installer did you can reproduce the installation just by copying the same files - there is no magic here. (There are also tools for windows that will "observe" an installation, including registry updates, so that the app can be "deployed" to thousands of desktops in a corporate by automated distribution software.)
Amazingly Microsoft Office X for Mac is a "drag and drop" install - just drag the folder off the CD onto your hard disk. The "service packs" for Office X are installer based however - they need to check for pre-requisitve Office versions and copy selected files.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is kinda true :)
From what I have read on the Tasmanian trial roll out, they are providing an ADSL service for those that don't want full speed. The advantage is that they can continue to use their existing ADSL modem/router.
Saying that only new houses would be able to get the Ethernet service is wrong, however. Cable TV is available to older houses that don't have a cable outlet or a satellite dish; When you sign-up they come and install it for you. Installing an Ethernet socket in an existing house is no more difficult than a cable TV point - a couple of hundred dollars, or maybe nothing if you sign a minimum term contract.
You have to remember that the NBN isn't just about home users; it will be available to the vast majority of business premises as well. Our company already uses 1GB network connections between our offices and our data centre. We are located in state capitals so we can get that bandwidth at reasonable prices, but if we had an office in a smaller town we would be out of luck. Having 1GB/s available means that smaller businesses will have access to lots of new services; hosted/cloud servers, off-site backup, HD video conferencing...
As other posters have said, most home users don't even need 100 Mb/s but there may be some who do and there will certainly be some businesses that do. The major cost component of the NBN is physically installing the fibre. Installing copper would cost about the same. Arguing against the cost of the NBN based on the speeds it supports being unnecessary is like arguing against the cost of building a suburban street because someone says it can support a 65 ton tank at its maximum design capacity. Although the maximum capacity will never be needed, a lower capacity road would cost the same.
While I am not convinced that a government can manage a project of this size without cost blow outs, at least the Labour government has a vision to provide a universal level of infrastructure. The Liberal plan will leave us with the same patchy mix of over-serviced cities and under-serviced rural areas.
As for why focusing on wireless is a bad idea, refer to the very informative posts in this thread on the relationship between speed and the spectrum required. If we can't deliver better than 20Mb/s over a few kilometres using copper. how can we expect wireless to do better when it is a much more restricted medium.
The exact method will vary depending on the OS and platform, but generally the first thing authorities will do is use a disk cloner to create an image for forensic purposes. Once they have the cloned image they can use a variety of techniques without modifying the original. This ensures that the original system can be re-cloned if the copy gets damaged. It also ensures that an original unaltered image is available to both sides in the event of a court case.
It ENCOURAGES PEOPLE TO WATCH THEIR STATION!
I think that what they were worried about is that it encourages people to record their station with a PVR and then skip the advertising.
TIVO in Australia has ad skipping disabled. To carry the new "Freeview" logo and gain access to the enhanced Freeview EPG (when it becomes available!) an STB cannot permit ad skipping.
A non-freeview box with IceTV gives both ad skipping and a good EPG
What the court has said is that although collections of facts can be copyrighted, the question is to the degree of originality in the expression of those facts.
In the case of the TV guide, the alleged infringement consisted of two pieces of information; the program title and the time of transmission. The title is supplied by the program's creator; not Channel 9 and the time can only be expressed in a standard way (Channel 9 could hardly claim copyright of "7:30 pm"); Channel 9 has therefore not exercised creativity or originality.
The train timetable is much the same. There are two pieces of information; a station name (which is much like the program name) and a departure time. Cityrail has not exercised any creativity or originality in the expression of this information.
It is the lack of originality of expression that results in the information not being copyright; it is not a fair use claim, so the amount of information copied does not matter.
I agree totally - I think most people would agree that times have changed and that the entertainment industry needs to adopt its business model to the new reality if it was explained in that way; but what we hear is "music `theft' is going to destroy music" when what they really mean is "music `theft' is going to destroy our business model". While I am sure the promise of fame and fortune attracts some people to music, most musicians I know play music because they enjoy it. Even if the current music industry dies I am sure humans will continue making music as we have for thousands of years and that someone will figure out how they can make a living doing it.
Let's assume that you have the magic Star Trek matter replicator and can make a copy of the car, although it is true that you haven't deprived the owner of the car, you have deprived the manufacturer of the car. Car manufacturers do not charge the sum of the input resources; they charge extra in order to recoup the value of their design, the costs of building the factory and yes, a profit; so if you could replicate the car you have pretty much the precise analogy of copying/sharing a copyrighted item - There has clearly been a financial impact to the car manufacturer.
Of course the number of people who would replicate a free Ferrari vs. the number of people who would actually purchase one are clearly not the same, so it would be wrong of Ferrari to claim that every replicated car was a lost sale and the same is true of the entertainment industry (although that is not how they see it). I thought the article brought some interesting arguments and attempted to break down the highly polarised way in which this issue is typically presented; The entertainment industry claims that every copy cost them a billion dollars and is the same as stealing the Mona Lisa (or some such hyperbole) and file sharers claim that the entertainment industry is a bunch of monopolistic assholes who charge too much and give nothing to the artists anyway so why not steal it.
What I think is interesting about the car theft analogy is that entertainment industry seems to ignore the fact that while car theft is wrong, it does still happen. While people take reasonable steps to prevent car theft they are unwilling to, say, encase their cars in concrete (Which I guess still wouldn't prevent a thief with a big enough crane from taking the car). The entertainment industry seems to think they should be immune from theft and work with their lobbyists to further increase their (artificial) monopoly protection (which further alienates from many people) rather than accepting that a certain amount of theft will happen and working to find a new business model that works in the digital world. The success of music stores like iTunes shows that some people will still buy music if the price vs. convenience equation stacks up. (And yes for some people even 1c is too much to pay)
Hi, Have you looked at this: http://www.pocketmac.net/products/pmblackberry/ ? It is now a free download. It claims to fully support both Entourage and the native Mac apps (Address Book, iCal etc), Apologies if you have tried it and found it wanting. Paul
You cannot link the amount of music available for illegal download with the number of thieves. In a hard goods market (shoplifed CDs for example) there is a correlation between the available of illicit material available and the level of illegal activity. This doesn't necessarily apply with digital goods. In fact there is a very good chance that the people supplying the unauthorised copies were never the digtial music store's customer. The illegal copies probably came from a CD. One person rips and shares the CD, others download and share the CD - none of them actually purchased the digital files; they were never a customer.
CDs at a music store are protected by anti-theft packaging, but they remove it for you once you purchase the CD; People accept this as a slight inconvenience (I know have had the odd cracked CD case when the "lock" is removed). Imagine if you had to produce your store receipt every time you wanted to play the CD (oh and sometimes the clerk forgets to give you the receipt, or it gets washed in your pocket or you just can't find it); people wouldn't accept this. In fact this would create a larger market for pirate CDs by providing a reason for otherwise honest people to consider the pirate product.
"Service your customers well or someone else will." - The online music store had a great opportunity here - they could reduce the time between desire and gratification. The customer decided he would like this music, goes looking, finds he can buy it online & purchases - should have been a great customer experience. The "old way" would be to get in the car, drive to the mall, find out that the music store doesn't have the CD (It isn't "top 40"), order it in, wait, drive back to collect it. There are a number of points at which the customer could say "meh, too hard". They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory (well, actually they got the $10 anyway, so maybe they don't care that he couldn't actually listen to the music :) ).
...(The other solution to this is that since the iPod is the de-facto standard for personal music players at this point Apple could just pony up the money to license the WMA codecs. I'm sure that Microsoft would take the money no matter where it came from)Unfortunately there are a couple of issues with this:
Also, if you RTFA you will see that the user couldn't even get the songs to play on the PC on which he had downloaded them. According to Rhino "support" he needed to disable firewalls or even use different ISPs until he could somehow get the magic license files to download - The point is the guy was happy to give Rhino $10 for the music, but DRM, which assumes that the customer is a "crimial", made the whole experience painful for the customer and lost them the customer.
My analogy would be visiting a department store. They have a sign saying that they can search your bags, but in practice they give it a quick glance or do nothing. They only really search your bag if they are suspicious. Imagine if you were subjected to a full strip-search every time you shopped there - how long would you remain a customer?
Also, remember fire codes. If you use a qualified security contractor/consultant as the poster suggested, they should think of this for you, but you need to consider doors that are in the emergency exit path - These doors cannot be locked in the event of a power failure. They will need to be fitted with free-exit handles or break glass releases. These doors should also be fitted with a 24 hour monitored alarm that activates when the door is released manually, not just a local siren.
I have one of those LG Combined washer/dryer things and they are a great washer but a crappy dryer. Rather than use hot air like most dryers, they use water somehow - In a way this is nice because they don't exhaust humid air into the room (assuming you can't vent to the outside somehow) - but it takes about 3 hours to dry a load and uses more water than you save by using the more efficient front-loader style machine. Also you can't start washing the next load until the drying is finished. Unfortunately we didn't realise these limitations until after we had bought the machine - as a result we now have one of these sitting on top of the washer - it has the auto sensing thing and the anti-wrinkle feature too!
It would seem to refer to Patent #6928433. It was filed back in 2001, however I would have thought that this sort of hierarchical organisation existed before then.
While your post was kind of funny, the reaction from the humor impared was funnier.
And then go directly to Jail...Well not really, but this is still likely to be a violation of the copyright in the image. All the manipulation in the world doesn't change the fact that you started with someone elses work. Obviously there are exceptions to this, public domain, creative commons licenses etc.
A little plug here, for a great range of royalty free stock images check out iStockphoto. Images from as little as 0.50c
It is the software that performs the metering and ultimately controls the image you are going to get. One of the major advantage that the DSLRs from Canon and Nikon have is that they can use the software that these companies have developed for their film bodies, bodies that are used by a large percentage of the professional 35mm market.
When I switched from an EOS film body to an EOS 10D I found the switch was quite simple because the camera's controls and metering behaved just like the EOS bodies I had been using for years.
I also own a little Canon Digital Ixus for snapshots and although it takes great photos for its size, things like shutter lag and its simplified metering and focussing can be really annoying.
-----
Need affordable stock photography? Check out iStockphoto.com
Except, that you need to realise that many of these registries are located in remote locations, with bandwidth back to the data centre around 128-256 Kbits/sec. In this situation Sunrays require a local SUN server which adds quite a bit to costs.
Actually, the Macs are replacing SunRays in some locations. What people forget about SunRays is that they require a fairly beefy SUN server to be on the same LAN as them. This means that the RTA has to deploy SUN servers in remote locations - something that they can avoid with the Apple computers. Also, the applications in the registries are a little more complicated than standard POS - the cameras used to capture license photos are controlled by the current terminals (and will be controlled by the Mac)
This act has already been used successfully (on appeal) to take action against a person selling Playstation Mod Chips. The original judge found, correctly IMHO, that the Mod Chip was not a circumvention device because it did not prevent the copy being made (and this is the point where copyright is violated), simply the copy being played back. This was overturned on appeal.
- Apps that are installed just by dragging them off their distribution media
- Apps that have an installer
Apps in the first category (like Mozilla) are great, you just drag the application icon to your disk (or to the trash to "uninstall"). This is because an appliction on the mac is really a directory/folder containing the things the app needs.Apps in the second category often update system folders (having first asked for your administrator password - we have Unix privillege separation here) or need to copy to a number of folders, but if you can determine what the installer did you can reproduce the installation just by copying the same files - there is no magic here. (There are also tools for windows that will "observe" an installation, including registry updates, so that the app can be "deployed" to thousands of desktops in a corporate by automated distribution software.)
Amazingly Microsoft Office X for Mac is a "drag and drop" install - just drag the folder off the CD onto your hard disk. The "service packs" for Office X are installer based however - they need to check for pre-requisitve Office versions and copy selected files.
And the downside is?
I note that a bunch of these items are not yet shipping, including the Phantom Gaming System that came in 3rd in this years Vaporware Awards