You might be interested in reading another comment I posted in this same discussion. Basically, I think there is a fundamental and growing difference in the entertainment industry between companies (the news companies, most major TV networks) who are responsive to consumer demand and try to follow/track demand as closely as possible and tailor their offerings to it, and companies like Universal that want to manufacture demand itself. Currently there are many organizations (like GE's NBC Universal) that do both, but I think that just masks the conflict, it doesn't mean it's not there.
I think this is why you get TV networks that are much less restrictive and controlling about their content than the movie studios are; the studios have a business model that relies on control and engineered 'supply shortages' to create demand, while the networks exist to push as much content out (along with ads) as they possibly can, at the lowest possible cost.
At the extremes, it's a 'manufacturing' versus 'service' industry conflict. Broadcasting, as exemplified by the 24-hour news channels, are a service. The value is in the continued stream of information, not in discrete copies of a particular recording (except for special cirumstances, e.g. recording of a particular event, or if the anchor does something embarrassing). Music and movie companies, on the other hand, are "IP factories." They design, produce, market, and profit from the sale of 'media widgets,' discrete quantities of content that have a measurable value, separate from their value as part of a service or stream of information.
The network gurus had the IPV4 routing setup in such a way that if you connected to an IP address that was available via Abilene, the data would go that path.
Interesting.
I guess, in my mind, if a network is using the same address space as the public Internet, than it basically "is" the Internet; it's just a high-speed portion of it. When I heard people talking about Internet2/Abilene as if it were a separate network, I assumed it used a totally separate addressing scheme or at least separate address space.
I'm not trying to diminish what the folks involved in this project have done, but it sounds like the distinction between "the Internet" and "Internet2" are somewhat arbitrary. (Not that you couldn't say the same thing about any other network using regular IANA IP addresses, and in fact I would.)
Handling and setting up the routing for such a system must have been interesting, though. (It's always seemed like a black art to me, but isn't that the sort of thing that BGP and modern routers are supposed to help handle automatically? A router which wasn't able to choose between two paths, one vastly faster than the other, wouldn't be much good.)
Anything that brings more bandwidth out to more places and people is an inherently good thing, in my book. (Well, unless they're using unpatched Windows boxes, in which case it's probably very bad.)
What's funnier is that I actually quoted it in my original question, with a link to the same page. You'll find it in my original (GGP) post located just after the phrase "buzzword-laden fluff."
explain why a bunch of heavily paid microsoft researchers cannot do the same thing.
Two words: backwards compatibility.
What kills Microsoft and produces problem after problem is their requirement (driven by perceived customer need) to have long backwards compatibility. They can't 'clean slate' things as often as Mac OS or Linux can.
If some part of Linux is demonstrated to be insecure by design, chances are somebody will decide it's ugly and rewrite the thing. Sure it might get patched, but eventually some programmer is going to decide that it's crufty enough to offend him, and just start over. Because you have a lot of people looking at the code, this happens often -- if the code isn't simple or elegant, another programmer may decide to try their hand at redoing it.
The people working on Windows are probably no smarter nor stupider than Linux developers, but they don't have the option of sitting down and re-implementing broken stuff. So instead, things get patched, and patched, and cruft grows, unseen except by a few people that understand it. There isn't the impetus to redevelop, because fewer people are working on the code; and broad changes are discouraged because of the need to retain compatibility and prevent a stable environment to commercial developers.
Providing a stable environment is Windows' major benefit to developers besides its userbase, but it also makes it architecturally inflexible and prone to design failures rather than simple code bugs. While any platform or piece of software can have bugs, and those bugs can be fixed, only a flexible one that's not overly concerned about backwards compatibility can fix architectural flaws when they become apparent.
Agreed, which is why I've decided for the moment to stick with my aging NEC 3-tube CRT projector until it finally gives up the ghost. At that point, I'll take another look at HDTV panels.
Aligning CRT PJ tubes is a royal PITA, but it gives me less of a headache than trying to figure out some of the asinine design decisions that seem to be inherent in moderately-priced HDTVs today.
If we have implantable computers -- real brain/computer interfaces, not just electrodes wired to pleasure and pain centers -- I'd rather have one myself than give Fido one.
I have a long history of Alzheimers in my family, and unless there are some good treatments or augmentative systems at that point, I plan on playing Russian Roulette until I lose at the first sign of dementia.
But yeah, a dog that could buy me beer would be cool.
Why is that? I'm willing to bet mandatory use of such tech would save at least 2000-3000 lives every year on the highways; after all, it's not the speeding but the tailgating that kills you.
There are lots of technologies out there that would almost certainly save lives if implemented, but aren't because they'd be too expensive.
In the scheme of things, human life has a measurable value, and it's not as high as some people would like to think.
Except that shopping for HDTVs is difficult, because most stores I've been to this season have them set up displaying non-HD content. At one Best Buy I visited, the guy admitted that their antenna didn't pick up any HD channels very well, so the only thing he could show us was 480p.
At another one, everyone was crowded around the one "good looking" TV, because it was the only one displaying an HD image. All the other TVs had been tuned to an analog channel, and looked like crap by comparison.
Until the major-market stores get their act together, it's going to be very difficult to shop for or compare HDTVs in any meaningful way. I went out to look at them in person because I thought it was ridiculous to shop for a TV without going and judging the PQ of various models in person, but I left feeling that it would just be better to shop from specs -- any subjective evaluation would have been rendered meaningless by the poor setup and conditions in stores. (The solution would have been to go to a "real" home theater store, but since I'm probably not going to pay their prices (as much as I'd like to support an independent/local, and feel guilty about it) I've hesitated to visit any.)
Everything about HD is screwy right now. Manufacturers don't know what people want, so there are products out there that are either flat-out crappy or just mis-designed; stores aren't bothering to train their employees about how to explain or sell the new technology, making the job of a potential buyer even harder; not to mention that average people range seem to be ambivalent about the whole upgrade business. HDTV isn't like color, where once you saw it, you understood the change and could go out and buy one; it's an obvious upgrade when it's done right, but it can be a morass if it's not.
And what's more, given the borderline advertising practices of many companies, a 1024x768 display will probably be advertised as "720p!" too, even though it's really not. But because most people don't know the corresponding horizontal resolution that's supposed to go with 720p, they'll never notice.
I wonder if you have a 1366x768 display, if you could bypass the internal scaler by feeding it a DVI signal from an HTPC, and then use the HTPC to position the 1280x720p frame in the center of the 1366x768 one, thus giving you an unscaled image?
Any TV designer who automatically scales 1280x768 up to 1366x768 without an option to turn it off and just display it with black bars ought to be shot.
What they're doing really isn't all that cool. They're basically running a BT tracker, but rather than loading it up with all the content that people actually want -- and which also happens to be illegal to distribute -- they're going to only put stuff they have the rights to distribute on it. This tracker will have a fancy web interface, but really it's no different than ThePirateBay, from a technical aspect.
So here's the "underpants gnomes" breakdown of their business plan, as I see it:
1) Release buzzword-laden ("social!" "video!" "peer-to-peer!") press release; attract investors and capital. 2) Use capital to broker deals with content providers to allow you to use some of their stuff. 3) Start bittorrent tracker with fancy web interface, using content from 2. 4) Hope that users will upload videos of themselves doing dumb things, thus creating more content than you can afford to license. 5) ??? 6) Profit.
Somewhere between 3 and 4, they also create a new version of their established product, which attempts to turn it from a lowly bittorrent client into a steaming pile of featuritis, in order to make it more 'iTunesy.'
Azureus 3.0 (launching later this year) joins movie and music fans with filmmakers and artists to create a rich, social, and completely new entertainment experience.
Yeah, because that sounds like exactly what I'm looking for in my cross-platform bittorrent client. Or not.
Unfortunately I suspect that Azureus-the-company probably already has the "Azureus" name trademarked, so any fork would have to come up with a new name...but better to be the 'IceWeasel' of torrent programs than to turn into some bloated 'rich social client' mess.
I fully expect that in a few years, devices like those TBCs will be unlawful to purchase if you're not a video professional; like scanners that can receive the 800MHz cell band. Video hardware that strips DRM, even "accidentally," will become contraband, like hacked Satellite TV descrambler cards.
I have heard that in the Soviet Union, every photocopier was serially numbered and registered. I could easily see a future in this country where that is the case for any device capable of removing the DRM from content. How else are you going to keep people from just buying 'professional' gear? They'll serialize them, register them to a list of approved owners, maybe toss a hefty tax and right-to-inspect on them, too.
Call me paranoid, but it's not hard to extrapolate an endgame like that from the Macrovision laws, and proposed Analog Hole legislation. Coupled with the tendency of our government to try and turn the screws when a law is demonstrated to be ineffective, versus taking a step back and reconsidering why it doesn't work (which might be an admission of failure); I think we could be filling out BATF forms in order to buy a time-base corrector before we know it.
Nice try, but they got rid of those little "loopholes" with the passing of the DMCA. There's no exception for the traditional rights to Fair Use.
Once they manage to put some form of DRM -- no matter how trivial -- on all major media distribution schemes, they will have effectively eliminated Fair Use, except for the anointed few that the Copyright Office deems worthy of receiving exceptions. And at least in my world, anything that you have to receive regular permission from an authority in order to do -- permission which can be denied at any time -- is hardly a right.
Well, the tactic would work while shopping, you're just not thinking bold enough.
It's more like this. Walk into store with a machine gun, tell the owner that you're going to kill his family, kill him, and take all his stuff. Wait for him to beg for mercy; act like you're touched by his display. Relent, and agree to only take his stuff. Bask in adoration for your mercy and kindness.
So can anyone fill me in on what Internet2 actually does? The WP entry on the topic suggests that there is no network known as Internet2 per se, but one called Abilene, which I assume is what the Slashdot articles are mostly talking about. The Internet2 about page is mostly buzzword-laden fluff ("Internet2 members leverage our high-performance network infrastructure and extensive worldwide partnerships to support and enhance their educational and research missions").
What does the Internet2 consortium actually do? And what can users actually do with the networks they've built? Do they work transparently, just providing higher-speed IP data service between certain institutions that are in the network, for their normal Internet traffic? Or do they use new protcols/applications completely?
From a user's perspective, what does Internet2 (or Abilene) "look" like?
In the U.S., the pro-copyright lobby hasn't been quite so audacious as they were trying to be in Australia; here they've been more subtle, and thus have avoided much public controversy. Via the DMCA, they made it illegal to upload DVDs or next-generation audio formats to an iPod (unless you've re-purchased it specifically), and created an artificial distinction completely without precedent between works protected by DRM, and unprotected works. Then they got Congress to extend the term of Copyright, to prevent any of their generations-old horde of cultural IP from leaking out into the public domain.
The U.S. and Australia have much the same disease, it's just that they seem to have gotten hit with a more virulent form, and thus noticed it; here we seem to have the creeping, cancerlike version, and for the most part are still ignoring it and hoping it'll go away.
Considering that CBS has already said that clips on YouTube are helping their business you wonder why Universal bothers.
CBS and Universal operate in fundamentally different modes within the entertainment/'content' business. CBS basically responds to consumer and viewer demand -- delivering news and less-than-cutting-edge television entertainment -- while Universal has made a killing by staying on the bleeding edge. Universal doesn't follow demand, they manufacture it.
Thus while CBS is perfectly fine having YouTube create a market for their stuff, Universal is far more controlling. Their success depends on complete control of distribution and publicity; they want to micromanage everything, playing with artifically-induced scarcity so as to maximize the effect and appeal of their brands and products. Anything that relinquishes any amount of control over media distribution to the public is a Bad Thing to them.
If you think of 'the curve' of public interest, CBS is a fairly conservative organization and basically stays just behind it, while Universal wants to be out front. This requires a far more aggressive and controlling attitude when it comes to their content.
I think eventually you're going to see a schism in the entertainment business, between companies that are responsive to demand, and basically look at what's popular and try to respond to it, without a whole lot of risk (and who are basically receptive to any new technology that reduces costs), and companies that try to project themselves ahead of demand and actually manufacture popularity, a fundamentally riskier (but potentially more profitable) endeavor that lends itself to maximizing control over the entire process, from creation to viewing. For many years, these two business models have coexisted -- companies owning movie studios and record labels also owning television networks -- but I'm not sure it's as natural an alliance as it appears.
I think the major difference is that the movie/music/"content" industry has, since the Betamax case, spent probably close to a billion dollars lobbying Congress and getting laws passed which together change the dynamic of the playing field from what it was like in the 1980s.
They learned from where Jack Valenti failed (from their perspective) and are now a lot smarter when it comes to using the government as a cudgel against their own customers.
In short, the industry is smarter now, and they have had 20-odd years to make the environment more politically receptive to their point of view, on all levels.
Isn't this what competition is about?... We can not just hope that M$ will stop playing dirty, it makes them billions of dollars and whenever that much money is thrown around who wouldn't round a few corners to make sure that the private chopper always has enough gas?
In a word, no. Competition should be about various parties working against each other on a basically level playing field, using the actual advantages of their respective products and offerings. Once people start to "round a few corners" (or start tilting the table) it's not fair pool. Once someone starts playing dirty, they shouldn't be treated as a fair competitor anymore.
Complexity can be hidden, but there are costs.
on
The Case for OpenID
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think the other respondent hit the nail on the head.
Most people (aka, 'your mom') won't know that they're using an OpenID at all. Instead, they'll probably just think of it as the ID of whatever service provides the OpenID authentication. So LiveJournal or whatever, but potentially in the future a more mainstream provider like Yahoo. I'd expect that sites which used OpenID and catered to a non-technical audience might even disguise the fact that it's OpenID (instead, "Sign in with your LiveJournal ID here!").
To a user, logging in with an OpenID should be just as seamless as logging in using their Microsoft Passport or Yahoo ID, except that it would work at more sites. There's no reason for the backend infrastructure to be exposed to a casual user. One of the criteria for success of any authentication system ought to be transparency and ease of use. If it doesn't offer that, it's a failed system by virtue of irrelevance.
As I was writing, a thought came to mind. These OpenID/cross-site-ID systems seem like they'd be a huge avenue for phishing attacks. How do you prevent someone from setting up a blog, and putting a Login field on it ("Sign in to comment with your LiveJournal/Bloglines/WhateverID!") and just harvest people's L/Ps as they're entered? Maybe I'm missing something about the system but if all the libraries for authentication and communication with the OpenID user's authenticator (whoever is 'vouching' for the OpenID user, e.g. LiveJournal) are done on the server, then the server has to be trusted with the user's OpenID username and password, or at least it would look like that to the user. It seems like there might have to be quite a bit of interface design and user education to keep people from blindly typing a master password into untrusted forms that would result in their whole identity being taken by a spammer.
Humm, interesting thought. So you think that using two cards in tandem would be more reliable than using one hybrid (analog+digital) card?
I had heard a lot of noise about problems in v4l when you have more than one card (see the comments in the thread right above yours), so I hadn't really been looking at that angle at all. Though in some ways, it produces a more flexible setup.
It's somewhat ironic to me that there is better support (apparently) for some Windows-centric TV tuner cards (AverMedia, Hauppage), than for the ones made by pcHDTV specifically for Linux. I'm not sure what the lesson there is. I feel sorta bad for the pcHDTV folks, because from reading their forums I get the impression that they're really trying to do the right thing and support Linux well, and I'd love to support them financially, but it seems like providing in-house drivers for a community-developed application stack is a losing game: I wonder if they would be better not developing any drivers at all, and just releasing technical specs and letting the community do the driver development in sync with the backend.
To be fair, it only says that Microsoft want to "make [Windows] available" on the device, not pre-install it.
Here's my theory: MS wants to create a version of Windows for these devices, which it can let out into the wild, where it will be relentlessly pirated. They hope that the first thing that people do with their shiny new OLPC is zap the Linux install and dump Windows XP Micro (or whatever) on there instead -- even if it's pirated. It may not make them any money immediately, but it might give them a future customer, or at least prevent someone from growing up as a Linux user.
Or maybe, rather than relying on piracy, they could co-opt governments and teachers as a way of forcing Windows down onto students' computers. They'd "give" "free" copies of Windows (taking it as a charitable contribution no doubt) to schools, along with some sort of incentive package. Maybe a free 'real PC' for the teacher, running a full version of Windows. It would have educational software on it, but in order to be useful, all the students would need to be running the Windows OLPC version. So they can effectively leverage schools to use their power to eliminate Linux and replace it with Windows, even if Windows is less functional for the students themselves. All they have to do is make it a sweet enough looking deal for the government or administration, which they can easily do by making it look like a substantial "gift" on paper -- even though most of that dollar value will be in software. A "free" $99 copy of Windows has to be better than a $0 copy of Linux, right?
I had more hopes for OLPC when Microsoft was just ignoring it. Microsoft's attentions are like the Eye of Sauron -- you really don't want it resting on you for any length of time, and when it does, it probably means something bad is going to happen.
Any chance you want to list the set of hardware you were looking at?
I've been interested for a while in building a MythTV STB, but I've just been put off by the hardware issues. It seems like every video input card has some little niggling issue that might or might not make it work or break... I understand that part of the "fun" is setting it up, but maybe I've just turned into an old fogey. I'm not going to buy hardware unless I'm sure it's going to work, and work well, with the software.
A while ago, I was all set to get a pcHDTV HD-5500 because it's allegedly built from the ground up to be Linux-compatible, but even it had issues and didn't "just work" in many applications. (I've read posts by the developer and they blame the constant changes by the MythTV team to the backend that breaks drivers and forces the manufacturer into a constant cat-and-mouse redevelopment game in order to keep Linux users happy.)
I want something that can do ATSC, Clear QAM, and NTSC Analog cable, so that I can plug it into my Comcast line and get all my current (unencrypted) analog channels, plus whatever they're broadcasting in the clear via QAM, and I'd like it to do ATSC in case I decide to ditch cable in the future. I haven't found any hardware that seems sure to do that.
I've said elsewhere that I think there's a market for someone to put together an 'Anti-Tivo,' basically a TiVO without any of its absurd DMCA-driven restrictions. Sure, it would technically be illegal, but no more so than any Linux PC that plays DVDs right now. (And no more so than a modded Playstation, and they sell them on Craigslist all the time.)
I'd love to have a Linux STB, but even for someone who isn't a Linux noob, the field is very confusing and full of "works, sorta" products.
"Sometimes it's easy to break an invention down to its key components," Starkweather says. "That's why patent writing is an art, not a science, and requires creativity."'
The only things this sentence misses are the stage directions, which should have him sitting in a high-backed leather chair, petting a cat, and subsequent maniacal laughter...
Slashdot Mirror
You might be interested in reading another comment I posted in this same discussion. Basically, I think there is a fundamental and growing difference in the entertainment industry between companies (the news companies, most major TV networks) who are responsive to consumer demand and try to follow/track demand as closely as possible and tailor their offerings to it, and companies like Universal that want to manufacture demand itself. Currently there are many organizations (like GE's NBC Universal) that do both, but I think that just masks the conflict, it doesn't mean it's not there.
I think this is why you get TV networks that are much less restrictive and controlling about their content than the movie studios are; the studios have a business model that relies on control and engineered 'supply shortages' to create demand, while the networks exist to push as much content out (along with ads) as they possibly can, at the lowest possible cost.
At the extremes, it's a 'manufacturing' versus 'service' industry conflict. Broadcasting, as exemplified by the 24-hour news channels, are a service. The value is in the continued stream of information, not in discrete copies of a particular recording (except for special cirumstances, e.g. recording of a particular event, or if the anchor does something embarrassing). Music and movie companies, on the other hand, are "IP factories." They design, produce, market, and profit from the sale of 'media widgets,' discrete quantities of content that have a measurable value, separate from their value as part of a service or stream of information.
The network gurus had the IPV4 routing setup in such a way that if you connected to an IP address that was available via Abilene, the data would go that path.
Interesting.
I guess, in my mind, if a network is using the same address space as the public Internet, than it basically "is" the Internet; it's just a high-speed portion of it. When I heard people talking about Internet2/Abilene as if it were a separate network, I assumed it used a totally separate addressing scheme or at least separate address space.
I'm not trying to diminish what the folks involved in this project have done, but it sounds like the distinction between "the Internet" and "Internet2" are somewhat arbitrary. (Not that you couldn't say the same thing about any other network using regular IANA IP addresses, and in fact I would.)
Handling and setting up the routing for such a system must have been interesting, though. (It's always seemed like a black art to me, but isn't that the sort of thing that BGP and modern routers are supposed to help handle automatically? A router which wasn't able to choose between two paths, one vastly faster than the other, wouldn't be much good.)
Anything that brings more bandwidth out to more places and people is an inherently good thing, in my book. (Well, unless they're using unpatched Windows boxes, in which case it's probably very bad.)
What's funnier is that I actually quoted it in my original question, with a link to the same page. You'll find it in my original (GGP) post located just after the phrase "buzzword-laden fluff."
explain why a bunch of heavily paid microsoft researchers cannot do the same thing.
Two words: backwards compatibility.
What kills Microsoft and produces problem after problem is their requirement (driven by perceived customer need) to have long backwards compatibility. They can't 'clean slate' things as often as Mac OS or Linux can.
If some part of Linux is demonstrated to be insecure by design, chances are somebody will decide it's ugly and rewrite the thing. Sure it might get patched, but eventually some programmer is going to decide that it's crufty enough to offend him, and just start over. Because you have a lot of people looking at the code, this happens often -- if the code isn't simple or elegant, another programmer may decide to try their hand at redoing it.
The people working on Windows are probably no smarter nor stupider than Linux developers, but they don't have the option of sitting down and re-implementing broken stuff. So instead, things get patched, and patched, and cruft grows, unseen except by a few people that understand it. There isn't the impetus to redevelop, because fewer people are working on the code; and broad changes are discouraged because of the need to retain compatibility and prevent a stable environment to commercial developers.
Providing a stable environment is Windows' major benefit to developers besides its userbase, but it also makes it architecturally inflexible and prone to design failures rather than simple code bugs. While any platform or piece of software can have bugs, and those bugs can be fixed, only a flexible one that's not overly concerned about backwards compatibility can fix architectural flaws when they become apparent.
Agreed, which is why I've decided for the moment to stick with my aging NEC 3-tube CRT projector until it finally gives up the ghost. At that point, I'll take another look at HDTV panels.
Aligning CRT PJ tubes is a royal PITA, but it gives me less of a headache than trying to figure out some of the asinine design decisions that seem to be inherent in moderately-priced HDTVs today.
If we have implantable computers -- real brain/computer interfaces, not just electrodes wired to pleasure and pain centers -- I'd rather have one myself than give Fido one.
I have a long history of Alzheimers in my family, and unless there are some good treatments or augmentative systems at that point, I plan on playing Russian Roulette until I lose at the first sign of dementia.
But yeah, a dog that could buy me beer would be cool.
Why is that? I'm willing to bet mandatory use of such tech would save at least 2000-3000 lives every year on the highways; after all, it's not the speeding but the tailgating that kills you.
There are lots of technologies out there that would almost certainly save lives if implemented, but aren't because they'd be too expensive.
In the scheme of things, human life has a measurable value, and it's not as high as some people would like to think.
Except that shopping for HDTVs is difficult, because most stores I've been to this season have them set up displaying non-HD content. At one Best Buy I visited, the guy admitted that their antenna didn't pick up any HD channels very well, so the only thing he could show us was 480p.
At another one, everyone was crowded around the one "good looking" TV, because it was the only one displaying an HD image. All the other TVs had been tuned to an analog channel, and looked like crap by comparison.
Until the major-market stores get their act together, it's going to be very difficult to shop for or compare HDTVs in any meaningful way. I went out to look at them in person because I thought it was ridiculous to shop for a TV without going and judging the PQ of various models in person, but I left feeling that it would just be better to shop from specs -- any subjective evaluation would have been rendered meaningless by the poor setup and conditions in stores. (The solution would have been to go to a "real" home theater store, but since I'm probably not going to pay their prices (as much as I'd like to support an independent/local, and feel guilty about it) I've hesitated to visit any.)
Everything about HD is screwy right now. Manufacturers don't know what people want, so there are products out there that are either flat-out crappy or just mis-designed; stores aren't bothering to train their employees about how to explain or sell the new technology, making the job of a potential buyer even harder; not to mention that average people range seem to be ambivalent about the whole upgrade business. HDTV isn't like color, where once you saw it, you understood the change and could go out and buy one; it's an obvious upgrade when it's done right, but it can be a morass if it's not.
And what's more, given the borderline advertising practices of many companies, a 1024x768 display will probably be advertised as "720p!" too, even though it's really not. But because most people don't know the corresponding horizontal resolution that's supposed to go with 720p, they'll never notice.
I wonder if you have a 1366x768 display, if you could bypass the internal scaler by feeding it a DVI signal from an HTPC, and then use the HTPC to position the 1280x720p frame in the center of the 1366x768 one, thus giving you an unscaled image?
Any TV designer who automatically scales 1280x768 up to 1366x768 without an option to turn it off and just display it with black bars ought to be shot.
What they're doing really isn't all that cool. They're basically running a BT tracker, but rather than loading it up with all the content that people actually want -- and which also happens to be illegal to distribute -- they're going to only put stuff they have the rights to distribute on it. This tracker will have a fancy web interface, but really it's no different than ThePirateBay, from a technical aspect.
So here's the "underpants gnomes" breakdown of their business plan, as I see it:
1) Release buzzword-laden ("social!" "video!" "peer-to-peer!") press release; attract investors and capital.
2) Use capital to broker deals with content providers to allow you to use some of their stuff.
3) Start bittorrent tracker with fancy web interface, using content from 2.
4) Hope that users will upload videos of themselves doing dumb things, thus creating more content than you can afford to license.
5) ???
6) Profit.
Somewhere between 3 and 4, they also create a new version of their established product, which attempts to turn it from a lowly bittorrent client into a steaming pile of featuritis, in order to make it more 'iTunesy.'
From the "About Azureus Inc." page:Yeah, because that sounds like exactly what I'm looking for in my cross-platform bittorrent client. Or not.
Unfortunately I suspect that Azureus-the-company probably already has the "Azureus" name trademarked, so any fork would have to come up with a new name...but better to be the 'IceWeasel' of torrent programs than to turn into some bloated 'rich social client' mess.
I fully expect that in a few years, devices like those TBCs will be unlawful to purchase if you're not a video professional; like scanners that can receive the 800MHz cell band. Video hardware that strips DRM, even "accidentally," will become contraband, like hacked Satellite TV descrambler cards.
I have heard that in the Soviet Union, every photocopier was serially numbered and registered. I could easily see a future in this country where that is the case for any device capable of removing the DRM from content. How else are you going to keep people from just buying 'professional' gear? They'll serialize them, register them to a list of approved owners, maybe toss a hefty tax and right-to-inspect on them, too.
Call me paranoid, but it's not hard to extrapolate an endgame like that from the Macrovision laws, and proposed Analog Hole legislation. Coupled with the tendency of our government to try and turn the screws when a law is demonstrated to be ineffective, versus taking a step back and reconsidering why it doesn't work (which might be an admission of failure); I think we could be filling out BATF forms in order to buy a time-base corrector before we know it.
Time to buy your "pre-ban" equipment now...
Nice try, but they got rid of those little "loopholes" with the passing of the DMCA. There's no exception for the traditional rights to Fair Use.
Once they manage to put some form of DRM -- no matter how trivial -- on all major media distribution schemes, they will have effectively eliminated Fair Use, except for the anointed few that the Copyright Office deems worthy of receiving exceptions. And at least in my world, anything that you have to receive regular permission from an authority in order to do -- permission which can be denied at any time -- is hardly a right.
Well, the tactic would work while shopping, you're just not thinking bold enough.
It's more like this. Walk into store with a machine gun, tell the owner that you're going to kill his family, kill him, and take all his stuff. Wait for him to beg for mercy; act like you're touched by his display. Relent, and agree to only take his stuff. Bask in adoration for your mercy and kindness.
So can anyone fill me in on what Internet2 actually does? The WP entry on the topic suggests that there is no network known as Internet2 per se, but one called Abilene, which I assume is what the Slashdot articles are mostly talking about. The Internet2 about page is mostly buzzword-laden fluff ("Internet2 members leverage our high-performance network infrastructure and extensive worldwide partnerships to support and enhance their educational and research missions").
What does the Internet2 consortium actually do? And what can users actually do with the networks they've built? Do they work transparently, just providing higher-speed IP data service between certain institutions that are in the network, for their normal Internet traffic? Or do they use new protcols/applications completely?
From a user's perspective, what does Internet2 (or Abilene) "look" like?
In the U.S., the pro-copyright lobby hasn't been quite so audacious as they were trying to be in Australia; here they've been more subtle, and thus have avoided much public controversy. Via the DMCA, they made it illegal to upload DVDs or next-generation audio formats to an iPod (unless you've re-purchased it specifically), and created an artificial distinction completely without precedent between works protected by DRM, and unprotected works. Then they got Congress to extend the term of Copyright, to prevent any of their generations-old horde of cultural IP from leaking out into the public domain.
The U.S. and Australia have much the same disease, it's just that they seem to have gotten hit with a more virulent form, and thus noticed it; here we seem to have the creeping, cancerlike version, and for the most part are still ignoring it and hoping it'll go away.
Considering that CBS has already said that clips on YouTube are helping their business you wonder why Universal bothers.
CBS and Universal operate in fundamentally different modes within the entertainment/'content' business. CBS basically responds to consumer and viewer demand -- delivering news and less-than-cutting-edge television entertainment -- while Universal has made a killing by staying on the bleeding edge. Universal doesn't follow demand, they manufacture it.
Thus while CBS is perfectly fine having YouTube create a market for their stuff, Universal is far more controlling. Their success depends on complete control of distribution and publicity; they want to micromanage everything, playing with artifically-induced scarcity so as to maximize the effect and appeal of their brands and products. Anything that relinquishes any amount of control over media distribution to the public is a Bad Thing to them.
If you think of 'the curve' of public interest, CBS is a fairly conservative organization and basically stays just behind it, while Universal wants to be out front. This requires a far more aggressive and controlling attitude when it comes to their content.
I think eventually you're going to see a schism in the entertainment business, between companies that are responsive to demand, and basically look at what's popular and try to respond to it, without a whole lot of risk (and who are basically receptive to any new technology that reduces costs), and companies that try to project themselves ahead of demand and actually manufacture popularity, a fundamentally riskier (but potentially more profitable) endeavor that lends itself to maximizing control over the entire process, from creation to viewing. For many years, these two business models have coexisted -- companies owning movie studios and record labels also owning television networks -- but I'm not sure it's as natural an alliance as it appears.
How is that situation different from this one?
I think the major difference is that the movie/music/"content" industry has, since the Betamax case, spent probably close to a billion dollars lobbying Congress and getting laws passed which together change the dynamic of the playing field from what it was like in the 1980s.
They learned from where Jack Valenti failed (from their perspective) and are now a lot smarter when it comes to using the government as a cudgel against their own customers.
In short, the industry is smarter now, and they have had 20-odd years to make the environment more politically receptive to their point of view, on all levels.
I think the other respondent hit the nail on the head.
Most people (aka, 'your mom') won't know that they're using an OpenID at all. Instead, they'll probably just think of it as the ID of whatever service provides the OpenID authentication. So LiveJournal or whatever, but potentially in the future a more mainstream provider like Yahoo. I'd expect that sites which used OpenID and catered to a non-technical audience might even disguise the fact that it's OpenID (instead, "Sign in with your LiveJournal ID here!").
To a user, logging in with an OpenID should be just as seamless as logging in using their Microsoft Passport or Yahoo ID, except that it would work at more sites. There's no reason for the backend infrastructure to be exposed to a casual user. One of the criteria for success of any authentication system ought to be transparency and ease of use. If it doesn't offer that, it's a failed system by virtue of irrelevance.
As I was writing, a thought came to mind. These OpenID/cross-site-ID systems seem like they'd be a huge avenue for phishing attacks. How do you prevent someone from setting up a blog, and putting a Login field on it ("Sign in to comment with your LiveJournal/Bloglines/WhateverID!") and just harvest people's L/Ps as they're entered? Maybe I'm missing something about the system but if all the libraries for authentication and communication with the OpenID user's authenticator (whoever is 'vouching' for the OpenID user, e.g. LiveJournal) are done on the server, then the server has to be trusted with the user's OpenID username and password, or at least it would look like that to the user. It seems like there might have to be quite a bit of interface design and user education to keep people from blindly typing a master password into untrusted forms that would result in their whole identity being taken by a spammer.
Humm, interesting thought. So you think that using two cards in tandem would be more reliable than using one hybrid (analog+digital) card?
I had heard a lot of noise about problems in v4l when you have more than one card (see the comments in the thread right above yours), so I hadn't really been looking at that angle at all. Though in some ways, it produces a more flexible setup.
It's somewhat ironic to me that there is better support (apparently) for some Windows-centric TV tuner cards (AverMedia, Hauppage), than for the ones made by pcHDTV specifically for Linux. I'm not sure what the lesson there is. I feel sorta bad for the pcHDTV folks, because from reading their forums I get the impression that they're really trying to do the right thing and support Linux well, and I'd love to support them financially, but it seems like providing in-house drivers for a community-developed application stack is a losing game: I wonder if they would be better not developing any drivers at all, and just releasing technical specs and letting the community do the driver development in sync with the backend.
To be fair, it only says that Microsoft want to "make [Windows] available" on the device, not pre-install it.
Here's my theory: MS wants to create a version of Windows for these devices, which it can let out into the wild, where it will be relentlessly pirated. They hope that the first thing that people do with their shiny new OLPC is zap the Linux install and dump Windows XP Micro (or whatever) on there instead -- even if it's pirated. It may not make them any money immediately, but it might give them a future customer, or at least prevent someone from growing up as a Linux user.
Or maybe, rather than relying on piracy, they could co-opt governments and teachers as a way of forcing Windows down onto students' computers. They'd "give" "free" copies of Windows (taking it as a charitable contribution no doubt) to schools, along with some sort of incentive package. Maybe a free 'real PC' for the teacher, running a full version of Windows. It would have educational software on it, but in order to be useful, all the students would need to be running the Windows OLPC version. So they can effectively leverage schools to use their power to eliminate Linux and replace it with Windows, even if Windows is less functional for the students themselves. All they have to do is make it a sweet enough looking deal for the government or administration, which they can easily do by making it look like a substantial "gift" on paper -- even though most of that dollar value will be in software. A "free" $99 copy of Windows has to be better than a $0 copy of Linux, right?
I had more hopes for OLPC when Microsoft was just ignoring it. Microsoft's attentions are like the Eye of Sauron -- you really don't want it resting on you for any length of time, and when it does, it probably means something bad is going to happen.
And promoting physical fitness, well being, and cooperation with others?
Explain baseball.
Any chance you want to list the set of hardware you were looking at?
... I understand that part of the "fun" is setting it up, but maybe I've just turned into an old fogey. I'm not going to buy hardware unless I'm sure it's going to work, and work well, with the software.
I've been interested for a while in building a MythTV STB, but I've just been put off by the hardware issues. It seems like every video input card has some little niggling issue that might or might not make it work or break
A while ago, I was all set to get a pcHDTV HD-5500 because it's allegedly built from the ground up to be Linux-compatible, but even it had issues and didn't "just work" in many applications. (I've read posts by the developer and they blame the constant changes by the MythTV team to the backend that breaks drivers and forces the manufacturer into a constant cat-and-mouse redevelopment game in order to keep Linux users happy.)
I want something that can do ATSC, Clear QAM, and NTSC Analog cable, so that I can plug it into my Comcast line and get all my current (unencrypted) analog channels, plus whatever they're broadcasting in the clear via QAM, and I'd like it to do ATSC in case I decide to ditch cable in the future. I haven't found any hardware that seems sure to do that.
I've said elsewhere that I think there's a market for someone to put together an 'Anti-Tivo,' basically a TiVO without any of its absurd DMCA-driven restrictions. Sure, it would technically be illegal, but no more so than any Linux PC that plays DVDs right now. (And no more so than a modded Playstation, and they sell them on Craigslist all the time.)
I'd love to have a Linux STB, but even for someone who isn't a Linux noob, the field is very confusing and full of "works, sorta" products.
"Sometimes it's easy to break an invention down to its key components," Starkweather says. "That's why patent writing is an art, not a science, and requires creativity."'
The only things this sentence misses are the stage directions, which should have him sitting in a high-backed leather chair, petting a cat, and subsequent maniacal laughter...