Welcome to the wonderful world of vendor-supplied memory. All the big Wintel vendors rape you equally when you buy their RAM, except for the occasional promotion for "FREE 128MB RAM with system purchase, for a limited time!!!" that you see in the mags and in all the mailorder catalogs.
It's not just Apple.
However, to give you a bit of good news, all Macs sold in the last several years have user-installable RAM, and with the exception of the original (Rev. A through D) iMac, it's very easy to do - easier than in many PC's.
The new G4's use standard PC133 SDRAM, all other model desktops use PC100 (the Cube and iMac), and the TiBook uses PC100 SO-DIMMs, the iBook (old and new models) uses PC66 SO-DIMMs, though PC100 works fine, too.
PC133 SO-DIMMS seem a tad flaky so far - I just got a Gateway 9500 laptop at work and still haven't gotten a 3rd party 256MB SO-DIMM that will work with it (we've tried Samsung, Micron, and Hitachi, with Infineon on the way). Apple will probably start using them with a TiBook revision at some point, after the interoperability issues vanish.
My wife and I have three TV sets in our house - a 27" in the living room, a 19" in our bedroom, and an old 13" in the guest room. All we have for cable is the basic antenna service - and that's just because our reception otherwise sucks horribly. Here's what we watch:
Most evenings, we watch either the 10PM news or the 11PM news.
About once a week, we stay up for a while and watch Letterman.
She likes the occasional cheesy drama (I believe she's currently on a "Dawson's Creek" kick), and I usually watch WWF SmackDown! on Thursdays (I can't help it - I've been a wrestling mark for years).
Besides all that, I watch some sports - I like to watch Red Sox games and I'll watch most Patriots games and the Giants when I can get them.
We also like the occasional Discovery Channel program (Steve Irwin rules!), and she and I both love the Stooges (which proves that I married the perfect woman).
Why do I bring this up? Because for one, when you add it all up, we watch so little TV on a weekly recurring basis that we could easily learn to live without it, I think. I've considered getting a widescreen TV, but I'm so pissed off at the MPAA that I haven't bought a DVD in almost a year, and I only rent them when I get free coupons from West Coast or Blockbuster. The last time we went to the theater was in February to see CTHD. So I can live with my "obsolete" TV sets just fine.
And how do we survive without all this broadcast media? Well, today we read books, newspapers, and magazines, work at our jobs, do fun activities together, and go places other than theaters. I get current news and weather off the Web, and it's on my own schedule, not broadcast schedules. We went on vacation a couple of months ago and survived nicely without watching TV. We'll do it again (go away with no TV) a couple of times over the summer.
My point here is that the broadcasters need us more than they seem to realize. We're not just statistics or "consumers", we're people, dammit, and if push comes to shove, and we're only allowed to partake of their media on their terms, maybe we're not the only ones who can get by without them.
Memo to the big media conglomerates: You need us a lot more than we need you. If you're smart, you'll stop pushing us. Don't piss us off too much. You may have lots of money and power, but without our eyeballs, you've got nothing.
There was an opportunity for Eazel, but not as a file manager/GNOME shell with a vague "sell online services" model. The Eazel team, in a more sane VC climate than existed when they were initially funded (in the peak of the Linux craze), could have been a piece of a more diverse, well-funded Linux packaging company (RedHat comes immediately to mind). Or they could have gone the extra step, and built a Eazel-branded distro, using Nautilus as the maintenance toolkit.
The "average" users out there are still waiting for a easy to install, easy to maintain, and easy to update distro that's stable, doesn't generate odd, spurious errors on occasion, and can be set up as easily as Windows on most hardware (Windows may have it's faults once it's up, but it is easy to install). Eazel could have gone down that path and made Nautilus the cornerstone of a whole new distribution, but they passed up the opportunity - or worse, they didn't even see it as an opportunity.
There are a lot of ways to make money in the Linux distro biz - it's pretty easy to be big and corporate, like RedHat, Caldera, or SuSE. Those companies are large enough to have diversified revenue streams, multiple products, and a services business that they can draw ongoing revenue from. There's also a nice niche that can be taken up by small, "garage" companies, where a couple of smart people with no VC funding can make a good living selling and/or servicing Linux.
And if you look at how the big software projects are organized, the only reason a lot of the entities exist is to provide legal shelter to the project tems who hack on it - the KDE Foundation and Debian are great examples of that. Ximian has a goal to make money from GNOME - hopefully they can, but I wouldn't count on it. Their best hope as a company is to get underwritten by the folks who benefit from their code (like RedHat, Sun, etc.) - and make enough to pay their hackers.
Eazel was aimed smack-dab in the squishy middle, trying to make a garage business out of VC money. In hindsight, it was doomed from the start, even before the market crashed.
Retail environments, at least most of the ones I've dealt with, don't generally buy an off-the-shelf PC and then select their POS software. They buy a full system - and they usually buy it from a company that specializes in retail systems integration. A lot of them don't know what the underlying system is and don't care, so long as it works well and saves them money.
The vast majority of these machines are not going to be Internet-connected in any way at all, and are not readily accessible to script kiddies in the first place. Chains will use either low-speed frame relay lines or dial-up to report numbers back to HQ, not an Internet connection. They also don't need "support for all sorts of devices", just the ones that are sold with the system in the first place. I don't need half a dozen different credit card slip printers - just one good, working, reasonably priced one. And I'd buy them in bulk for each terminal. A lot of how Windows became such a blivet to begin with was by having to support everything under the sun.
I mean, that's an argument that was used against Apple for years by the Windows minions - Windows had (at least, before Office became pretty much the only alternative) dozens of available word processors and spreadsheets, and the Mac (read today as "Linux") only had (has) a handful. OK, this may be true, but how many do you need at once? I'd rather have one good word processor on my platform of choice, for instance, than a dozen crappy ones. POS systems are even more of the same - when a register is booted it generally runs nothing but that app. The distro of Linux isn't even relevant - it'll be customized to the maximum possible and stripped of anything that can increase support work.
While not exactly FUD, this whitepaper mainly fights a war that retailers don't care about. And a lot of the "main street" type businesses that might buy off-the-shelf POSware aren't going to be caring about Microsoft's message because they don't even research it far enough.
Heck, there's even thriving Mac POS vendors - there's enough room for everybody. Too bad Microsoft doesn't appear to understand it. They must be more threatened than I thought.
True, all those BeOS users may wind up looking for a home, but if they didn't amount to enough users to sustain Be, how will they sustain Amiga?
I think the Mac (of which I am a user) has about as small a market presence as you can get and still be viable (as a hardware-oriented company) - Apple will always have a built-in market just by defining themselves as "the alternative" to Windows hegemony. Linux is an operating system, and development costs are minimal if you want to have your own distro. This gives the companies that do nothing but press CD's a chance to make money (with no costs), but the bigger companies like RedHat and Caldera need to make money in services and integration (as the FSF intended), rather than on code alone. Because Linux has a use in the server space, this is feasible - Amiga isn't looking like a server OS to me, it's looking like a "power user" OS. And they plan to make hardware as well, tuned to their OS and using PowerPC processors.
Be tried that, too - and if you look up, you can see Be's flame trails heading for the ocean as we speak. Other than the more well-known name, I don't see anything different for Amiga, either. I do wonder, though - will this coming Amiga death finally be the last one? Their corporate logo should be a cat, since they've gone through so many lives.
I'm taking that into account, but only to a point (plus over-simplifying for discussion purposes). Though it's not exactly a linear curve, there still is a rapid increase in costs that does not exist in the broadcast model. The other thing to consider in calculating infrastructure costs is that it's not quite a matter of replacing the phone banks with a PRI - you need hardware to support it, and you need to make capital expenditures that, if you're running on an upgrade treadmill, never really do pay for themselves. I assume in my earlier post that the cost savings are $3/user-month from 10K subs to 100K subs, but unless that makes you profitable it doesn't matter.
The calculations that free ISP providers made figured they would grow to critical mass and that the subscribers would be worth a whole lot more to advertisers than they really were. The problem was that the more they grew, the more they lost. Although the fixed costs do diminish somewhat (in the central infrastructure portion) on a per-user basis as your userbase grows, the local loop/special modem/truck roll costs in the DSL business stay just as expensive for one as they do for one million. Which is why the only free ISP's that are hanging on by a thread are Juno and NetZero (Bluelight.com doesn't count - KMart just took it on to avoid Christmastime disaster when Spinway died) - the dial-up costs do scale better than the DSL costs could. There are profitable ISP's out there - lots of them. But they all charge for their services, even the "bare-bones" $9/month ISPs with no tech support, no personal web hosting, and outsourced Usenet. You can deliver dial-up ISP service pretty darned cheaply, but not cheaply enough to give it away. And forget about giving away DSL service - I mean, that's like giving away cable TV service in terms of costs.
It's just such a shaky economic model to begin with that I'm surprised it even got funded - despite the "we'll fund anything, no questions asked" attitude of the last few years. In the end, TANSTAAFL.
The only problem with the Free ISP model was that all the companies that offered it were based on the fantasies of crack-addled minds. That's the only possible explanation. I mean, just because people are accustomed to Free Stuff On The Internet, it does not mean that the Internet itself can be free. One reason that broadcast TV works as a free access model is that there is no need to build out infrastructure to connect each subscriber (unlike the ISP business). Cable TV, OTOH, charges a premium to access each home, because they need...
Infrastructure!
Just like the free ISP's did. What a coincidence! Something like a TV or radio benefits from the Network Effect (or Metcalfe's Law) because the broadcasting to the first TV costs millions of dollars (for the studios, transmitters, etc.), but it costs $0 per set after that. The more sets, the more money the broadcaster makes.
In the ISP business, though, it costs money to support each subscriber - in technical support, fixed wiring costs, phone/modem server costs (for dial-up networks), wholesale DSL costs (for folks like WinFire), and bandwidth. These costs don't magically get cheaper with size - they continue to grow. If you lose $5 per subscriber-month, then you lose $50,000 per month with 10K subscribers, and assuming (generously) that you can reduce your expenses by $3 per subsciber-month at 100,000 subscribers, you're still losing $200,000 per month at that level. It doesn't make sense now, and it didn't make sense then, either.
My local paper (the Boston Globe) has a consumer column that runs on Sundays. A few weeks ago it spotlighted the demise of free ISP's, and featured quotes from several customers of defunct free ISP's who "felt screwed". I tell you, I never laughed so hard reading anything other than comics in a newspaper.
After I recovered my breath, I then wrote a reasoned response to the consumer advocate and explained Economics 101 (which, unfortunately, I think most self-styled consumer advocates either skipped or flunked). Essentially, you can't sell a dollar for 90 cents and make it up in volume. Not surprisingly, I did not hear back directly from him, though he did cite my letter briefly in a follow-up column a few weeks later.
At least, that's how I see it. Basically, if the OS kernel supplies sufficient compatibility that more or less "standard" tools, shells, and apps will run with minimal or no modification (short of mods for processor families), then it's Unix. It doesn't matter if an OS can use the little Unix (tm) symbol or not.
The other side of my view, though, is that if Unix compatibility is provided through a bolt-on layer (like the POSIX layer to Windows NT that was built just to get government check-offs), it ain't the real thing. So MacOS X is Unix - Aqua and the "Macishness" of X are bolted onto Unix, not the other way around.
This standard of mine also makes Linux and all the BSDs = Unix, and I believe it would also cover the Hurd as well. And Apple's old A/UX (the 68K Unix they had for servers in the early '90s) qualifies - the Finder ran as a process under A/UX, not the other way around.
Tenon's otherwise excellent MachTen, though, would not be a true Unix (despite being compatible with damn near everything) since it runs on top of MacOS (through 9.x) and doesn't own the machine. It's a bolt-on - just far better than Microsoft's kludge.
To paraphrase the late Justice Potter Stewart, "I may not be able to define Unix, but I know it when I see it". And I see Unix when I look at MacOS X.
It's simple. There was a window of opportunity for a real next-generation console, but it slammed shut the day Playstation 2 shipped. With Xbox going into the PC hardware side of the gaming market, and Sony dominating the "entertainment center" approach, there's only room for one or two more players, max. Nintendo is on their way to the market, and even Sega couldn't keep up. How's a product like Indrema going to make any splash at all in mid-to-late 2001 against that competition?
If they had shipped a product last summer, there might have been a niche to exploit, but it was too late. The other possibility would have been an alliance with TiVo - both companies had Linux-based equipment (albeit on different processor platforms) and perhaps a hybrid TiVo/Indrema gaming console/TV recorder could have carved out a place in the market. Though the cost of the hardware would have gone up quite a bit accordingly.
As much as an Open Source gaming system would have been cool, better the company die now while there's less money at stake than build a lot of consoles that sit on shelves because they don't play Playstation, Xbox, or Dolphin games.
That was my goof on the Nielsens - I had an early-morning brain cramp. I knew it was Arbitron, lord knows I've heard Imus rant about it enough times during drive-time.
When you have technology in place to broadcast only the content and block the ads, make sure you run a "this is ad time that you'd hear if AFTRA wasn't a bunch of ninnies" PSA during the breaks so people don't think the stream died.
I'd suspect that the more specialized the fare, the easier it is to find a streaming audience. Talk shows, sports programming (like regional sports stations), and specialty music would seem like obvious things that would find a Net audience - Top 40 I'd expect nobody to stream if they have a radio available (since there's a Top 40 station in pretty much every market). Christopher Lydon, according to an article I read a few days ago, is drawing about 2000 listeners per streamcast so far (he's done a handful) since leaving WBUR and The Connection. However, that's a fraction of the radio audience. Ironically, a couple of radio stations are now broadcasting the webcast of a show that used to be broadcast. It makes your head spin...
Internet-based radio streams are useful as a way for a radio station to widen their audience somewhat, and a way for people to listen to their hometown radio when they're away. I strongly doubt, though, that Internet broadcasting (except maybe in a very few cases) of a radio station gathers anywhere near even 5% of that station's over-the-air audience.
The interesting thing, though, is that it's easier to measure the audience on the Internet - just count server connections and you've got a pretty accurate audience measurement. As opposed to the satistical sampling of radio diaries by Nielsen. So if stations could sell those additional numbers and pay unions/labels appropriately, then it'd be worth it to stream.
The problem there is that I suspect Internet listeners are going to be (because of the dispersion) listeners that advertisers don't want. A large proportion of radio ads are local, and only have appeal to the local audience. If I'm listening to a Boston radio station in San Francisco over the Internet, does Bernie & Phyl's Furniture really care that I'm listening? They don't go any farther west than Westboro - heck, Springfield is out of their market, let alone San Francisco!
Basically, that's the problem - if an Internet simulcast gets a lot of listeners, it's often going to be because those listeners aren't in the market and therefore won't buy the stuff in the ads. The unions and record companies want stations to pay based on audience, the statons would rather pay for that part of the audience that they can actually sell to.
They need to meet somewhere in the middle - but if our experience to date with the record lables is any indicator, that won't happen.
It's in their NorthPoint update page (http://www.xo.com/savemydsl/), item number 3. I also got an e-mail from them about it last Friday, and a snail mail on Monday, along with a phone call at home as well. Their plan is to move Home Office users to Telocity, 640K/90K ADSL if we so choose.
Home Office/NorthPoint service users are off-contract as of 4/27 (free dial-up until then if desired, woo-hoo), I'm not sure if they used other providers for that as well, but it's no longer a product offering in any form. I'd assume that if they offered it through Covad or their own network, those customers won't be dumped but they aren't adding any new ones.
A large part of the problem is the structure that DSL is sold under. The DSL infrastructure CLECs all have to lease their unbundled copper from the ILEC, who is generally also in the DSL business as well and has a financial incentive to make the process as difficult as possible (eliminating the competition). Then the CLEC doesn't (except for Covad's Covad.net) even sell directly to the consumer - all they get to take is a middleman's bite without the retail markup. That retail markup, un turn, is very low because the ILEC is competing with a lower cost basis and driving the price down.
Business-grade DSL (SDSL with speeds of 768K and up) could theoretically be sold at higher margins than consumer-grade DSL, since business DSL is a market the ILEC's are avoiding (they don't want to cannibalize the lucrative T-1 business). This would give the DSL CLECs a chance to make some actual profit per line - but the catch is that they all built out their networks in the pre-2000 funding market and need a higher volume than just small business DSL can readily provide. So they all have been trying to land consumers for the cash flow (though the margins are nonexistent), only to lose money on every one (but they make it up in VOLUME!).
Covad may have a shot at survival just because they'll probably be the last national-scale DSL CLEC standing. A few smaller, regional-scale companies may be able to find niches as well, though it failed miserably for Vitts up here in New England. And through smart business (and/or deep pockets) some ISP's that offer DSL may be able to make a living - Telocity and Speakeasy have a pretty good chance (deep pockets for Telocity, and conservative growth plans at Speakeasy), as do companies like XO that have DSL as a single offering out of many.
There are companies that can make a profit with DSL, but they can't do it by going up against the ILEC. ILECs are on a completely different scale, with comparatively unlimited funds to write off while they crush you.
My own high-speed odyssey began with Flashcom/NorthPoint in mid 1999, and I stayed with them until it was obvious that Flashcom was on the way down (I had pretty good service and the price was decent). I switched to XO (for the deep pockets - Craig McCaw is their sugar daddy), and they provisioned a 768K SDSL line (for a little less than Flashcom was charging for 200K). It was also with NorthPoint, though - the Verizon merger fell through while the install was under way, ironically. I had no problems until NorthPoint went dark last Thursday evening, and XO announced they were getting out of the Home Office business.
So last Friday morning I called AT&T Broadband to see about cable - I live in Salem MA where cable Internet has only been available for about a month. They had a better price, free installation, and could come install this past Monday, which they did. So I simply moved my DNS to Zoneedit (which supports DDNS), and was back on the Net before my inbound mail from the weekend timed out and bounced. AT&T Roadrunner (my service) has no particular restriction on what I do with my line or if I run servers - the only restrictions are that I not run any commercial services with my servers and that I not do anything illegal. No problem. They also block the NetBIOS ports by default, though you can have them unblocked if you really want. And they don't "support" NAT routers, but they don't restrict their use. In fact, when I read the MAC address to the fellow registering my router, he asked me which model router I had and how I liked it (he recognized the vendor ID). He also set up a host mapping for me as well.
What this implies is that ultimately the more "progressive" cable ISP's (like RoadRunner) will get a lot of the business that would otherwise have gone to DSL providers when you have a choice as consumers become more informed (gradually) and home networking becomes more popular. Where there are no choices, you'll have to settle for an @Home-type ISP or whatever the market brings you, which is a pity. Your only other choice will be DSL from the ILEC unless you're a mid-sized business and therefore have SDSL for around $200 and up from a niche CLEC as an option.
Using Sealand is a useful and viable way to ensure privacy, but is not designed with something like Napster in mind. They have to buy bandwidth from either companies willing to run fiber to their location (guaranteed to be from a EC nation), or satellite links to a satellite in range of what their dishes can see (also pretty much guaranteed to be, at the very least, a WIPO nation). The purpose of Havenco appears to be more oriented towards activities that are legal but require high security.
By virtually all standards, Napster _is_ illegal as it stands (I'm not stating that this is right or wrong by saying that - my own opinion doesn't count here), and therefor not suitable to run at Havenco.
Where OpenNap servers _could_ be run, though, is in some of the countries that already have limited or nonexistent copyright enforcement mechanisms - China and Russia come to mind immediatly as nations where piracy is winked at (and in China, piracy is managed by the government). If someone wanted to make an arrangement in one of those countries, it would be a great deal easier to protect and run a Napster clone. If the country where the company and server are located isn't a WIPO nation, then RIAA enforcement becomes an order of magnitude more difficult. Sealand's legal status is shaky enough to make it a poor choice.
Way back in the "good old days", I remember the first browser I ran (remember when there were dozens to choose from?), and I was looking for websites that seemed like they might be interesting. When I saw the Coffee Cam, the little lightbulb in my head finally went off - it was the first real application I had seen that used any of the web's potential. Sure, cameras had been networked before (as had that coffee pot), but the Coffee Cam was the first thing I saw that took advantage of the ability of a browser to handle mixed media in a manner suitable for virtually any platform. Before the cam, web pages were mostly just text with in-line graphics - there were no interactive or dynamic elements.
By itself, it didn't do much (I mean, it was just a refreshing picture of a coffee pot), but it was the direct precursor of a lot of things we now take for granted.
It was also arguably (along with the Fish Cam) the immediate ancestor of JenniCam, and all the other webcams out there. As for me, it encouraged me to give up HyperCard for HTML.
I have a G400 Max DualHead on my Windows box, too - it's a good card that can even game pretty well (for mere mortals like myself who get no benefit from 900fps Quake III). My Linux box has a 3Dfx 3000, and the newest nVidia card I have is an old TNT. That's because of the driver issue.
What's interesting here is that I remember when Matrox was the whipping boy because they were aggressively closed-source, as was ATI. Today, ATI at least offers some support to the developer community, and Matrox has become a model citizen, relatively speaking.
Meanwhile, nVidia has closed what they did have open previously. Ironic, eh?
Part of the problem is where the companies focus their attention. Of the remaining Big Three (ATI, nVidia, and Matrox), nVidia is the only one who actively markets their chipsets to J.Random Cardmaker. 3Dfx started out in the same business as nVidia, then made the fatal mistake of buying a card maker (STB), and trying to leverage the manufacturing plant and distribution channel into selling 3Dfx-branded cards instead of letting others do the work for them.
It must have seemed like a compelling argument to the 3Dfx management at the time - why sell chipsets for around $30 to a manufacturer who then gobbles up the real profit, when we can control all the money ourselves? What they failed to anticipate was that a few things would all converge to crush the life out of 3Dfx as a result:
1- nVidia would dramatically ramp up their product line and take over the performance title.
2- People would start clamoring for 32-bit video before 3Dfx could deliver.
3- Competitive pressures would knock the bottom out of the low-end and midrange video card markets - no profit margin left. And 3Dfx didn't make it into that space in time.
4- Brand-building gets expensive - nVidia doesn't have to advertise at all, really. The card makers who buy nVidia chips do it for them. ATI doesn't have to advertise as much - the retail product is only a piece of the business, they do a ton of OEM. And Matrox has the 2D performance ("business") market locked up pretty well - they aren't playing too heavily in the 3D world.
So with all that figured in, 3Dfx, when the dust settled, had:
A shrinking retail presence.
No significant OEM business.
And no 3rd party card manufacturers to consume the chips.
Each of the remaining players plays to a different niche now - that's why there's still room for three big players. ATI has their All-in-one retail products and the OEM channel, Matrox has 2-D and dual-head for the mainstream Windows market, and nVidia has all the Taiwanese board makers and the gamers market.
The nice thing is that all these companies have to stay on their toes, because one of their competitors could invade at any time. Remember, ATI took a pretty big bite out of everyone when Radeon came out, only to have nVidia make up for it with GeForce 2. Matrox is always rumored to be coming up with super-fast stuff in the labs. So anyone could dethrone nVidia in the future - it's just right now nVidia's sitting fat and happy. They just can't afford to get too comfy up there.
We're an MS Enterprise licensing customer - for our licensing fee (which isn't bad), we get the rights to any version of desktop Windows, and version of Office up to Professional, and all server/BackOffice CALs we need.
Outlook and Exchange come with the territory - it's be tougher for us to substitute a different mail system than the payback would justify.
Personally, I'd prefer a nice IMAP-based system that is less vulnerable to begin with, but if you manage the system carefully you can make the MS stuff work acceptably well - which is nice when you work at a company that's drank the Microsoft-branded Kool-Aid.
In 1998, a few months after I took the sysadmin job at my company, we had an infestation of the Class macro virus. It was a pain to clean up and deal with, but my staff and I took care of it in about a day - no data was lost.
After that, we put up an SMTP scanner/gateway between our Exchange server and the rest of the world. I set up filters to automatically block anything executable at all via e-mail, including stuff like.SHS and.VBS files. We have not had an infection of any sort since then - the antivirus portion of the gateway is updated with every update released (engines and definitions), and the clients are updated through management software that updates automatically as well - and the clients are locked into the most paranoid settings available.
The downside is that I'm the "no fun" admin (since we block all the fun programs from e-mail), but on the other hand I've counted 26 copies of the "Kournikova" worm today alone that have bounced off our server harmlessly. I think it was worth it for sure. Since I'm stuck with Windows for the forseeable future, I'm happy with what I can do to prevent these from affecting us.
So our ongoing cost to really deal with viruses is $0. But I do have software costs (annual licenses), plus some time spent devising our strategy and implementing it. But that's part of the job - I can't really call it "virus costs".
I doubt that's a very large group of users (there may well be a decent number of people who can't get a channel they want, but not that many are willing to mod their receiver over it), but I would be inclined to feel sympathetically towards them. What channels do they lock out geographically (besides local network affiliates)?
If you want to design and build your own DirecTV-compatible dish and receiver from components, and write software for it that decodes the video stream, then hooking it up to your TV set and watching for free is not theft in my book. The signals are, as you point out, passing through your property, and you were smart enough to figure out how to do something with them. Enjoy. Hell, get Dish Network too, while you're at it.
But taking DirecTV's own receiver, only made for the purpose of viewing their service by subscription, and then modifying it for free service is theft, plain and simple. By your standard, there should only be free broadcast service (over-the-air commecial TV), because anything else is and should be open for the taking to anyone who can hack a receiver or get their hands on a modded card.
If that's the case, forget pay-per-view (what - life without Wrestlemania?), forget all the premium commercial-free services like HBO - and forget pretty much any reception at all anywhere other than in and near urban areas.
There's a big difference between fair use and theft of service. I should be able to record off my DTV, time-shift as I like with my VCR or Tivo, and not rely on analog streams to do so if everything I have is digital. But there's nothing inherently wrong with paying to get that signal into my house to begin with, so long as I can re-use what I paid for. A different point entirely.
On one side, you have folks who hack the hardware to get free service.
On the other side, you have a company that sells a dish and programming, at pretty reasonable prices compared to cable rates, and wants to get paid for their goods.
Given that's it's at an interesting intellectual game at best to figure out how to hack a DTV smart card system, and theft of service at worst, it just appears that DirecTV has figured out how to win the cat and mouse game once and for all. Good for them. If DirecTV was the only form of television service available (ie., a monopoly), I'd look on theft of service a little more tolerantly, but there's all sorts of TV alternatives out there - broadcast, cable, and other satelite providers.
This is different from, say, the i-Opener hack because the i-Opener hack was fundamentally about hardware. Buying the box did not incur an obligation to use the service (due to a mistake on Netpliance's part), and the hack didn't allow you to steal their service - it allowed you to re-purpose the hardware. That would be like hacking a DirecTV box to work with Dish Network instead. A cool, "because it's there" hack.
So if DirecTV won the war, more power to them. There may be a fine line between hacking and theft at times, but hacking a DTV smart card for free service is definitely on the wrong side of that line.
Besides, stuff like descramblers and smartcards are usually what spammers are filling my emailbox with, and I hate spammers!:-)
I think part of the urge to mod-up cases and the like is the inevitable reaction to the sheer cheapness of hardware today. Once upon a time (up to a year or so ago!), the way to show off your "cool hardware-god-ness" was to trick out your PC with an overclocked processor, state-of-the-art cooling, an overdriven chipset, video card, etc. An overclocked box was a way to make a statement about your skills and save money, too (for some).
Nowadays a 1GHz Athlon processor costs less than $250 - and that RAM that would help kickstart a machine's performance costs about $60 for 128MB worth. Disk storage is cheap, too. When a killer machine costs well under $1000, about the only thing left to differentiate yourself is the case mod. Sure, you and I both have a 1 GHz Athlon, but I have a cool neon-lit window on my case - how about you? (for the record - I haven't done any case mods other than adding fans, and they don't count)
People laughed at Steve Jobs when he started selling iMacs (who'd ever want a fruity-looking computer?), but the success of Apple's line of systems makes the point: when all things are relatively equal (as they were until the latest Wintel price plunges re-opened the gap), people will go for style. If a cool-looking iMac is selling for about the same money a good consumer PC sells for, a lot of people will choose the iMac because of looks.
Case Modding is really just a variation on this theme.
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-Josh Turiel
When I have jobs open, I'll hire anyone qualified
on
Racism At Microsoft?
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· Score: 3
I think this case is a load of bunk, based on my experience and the examples I've seen in the industry (and Microsoft has historically been more enlightened than most - they just want big brains and not much more). What some people forget is that being qualified doesn't mean you get the job - you get it if you're the _most_ qualified. And if there's always someone better qualified than you, you never get the job. That's when you leave to get onto some other company's track - and hope the other company has people you can in turn leapfrog. When I've hired in the past (as I do at my current company, and did at my past employer), I could care less about race, gender, or sexual preference. I look for the following attributes:
1: Are their skills appropriate for the job?
2: Are their salary expectations in line with what I can pay, and am willing to pay?
3: Do they have the right amount of experience for the job?
4: Do they have a personality that will enable them to get along with their prospective co-workers on the "team"?
As tie-breakers, I'll look at things like certifications (do they have any, and are they relevant). I don't care about race or gender - send me people that can do the job and they'll get the job, assuming they're the best candidate. Period. And, excepting some troglodytes who are, I'm sure, in some companies, the bulk of IT hiring meets that standard.
Over the years, I've hired white, black, and hispanic, men and women, gay and straight. And there would almost certainly have been more categories represented in that list if I'd had them available to choose from - I've had good people work for me in all those categories! I'd have been an idiot and I'd be doing my company a disservice if I excluded any potentially good employee on the basis of race, or any other irrelevant factor that doesn't affect job performance.
You're dead right on the software side of things (unfortunately - software should be ownable). But there are fine degrees of distinction on the other two examples you gave here.
You do own your car outright. However, you have to pay a fee to use your car on the roads owned by the government, and you need their permission to do so. The fee is the registration and title (and any other fees that your state and/or munincipality choose to charge you). Don't want to pay the fees or get a license? Fine - you can buy and own a car, but you can only drive it on the private dirt track you own in back of your house - take it on the street and your ass goes in a sling.
As for the land itself - you own the land, but the government, in theory (I won't go off on this tangent despite my temptation), provides the services (like roads, contract and deed enforcement, rights-of-way, etc.) that enables that deed to the land to have any value. As a result, you may be charged taxes and/or fees on that land - theoretically that pays for the government to protect your claim to the land.
A book is property with even fewer restrictions - you are not allowed to copy it (outside of portions for "fair use"), but you otherwise own it. And you can dispose of it as you please.
Borland used to have a license they called the "just like a book" license - it said, simply, that the software was like a book in that you could lend it, use it, or do what you wished, but only one person at a time could actually use it. Just like a book. It was less than a page, easy to read and understand, and is no longer used because (presumably) with increased size the Borland lawyers became more paranoid.
Ironic, then, that the book makers want to be more like software makers.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the wonderful world of vendor-supplied memory. All the big Wintel vendors rape you equally when you buy their RAM, except for the occasional promotion for "FREE 128MB RAM with system purchase, for a limited time!!!" that you see in the mags and in all the mailorder catalogs.
It's not just Apple.
However, to give you a bit of good news, all Macs sold in the last several years have user-installable RAM, and with the exception of the original (Rev. A through D) iMac, it's very easy to do - easier than in many PC's.
The new G4's use standard PC133 SDRAM, all other model desktops use PC100 (the Cube and iMac), and the TiBook uses PC100 SO-DIMMs, the iBook (old and new models) uses PC66 SO-DIMMs, though PC100 works fine, too.
PC133 SO-DIMMS seem a tad flaky so far - I just got a Gateway 9500 laptop at work and still haven't gotten a 3rd party 256MB SO-DIMM that will work with it (we've tried Samsung, Micron, and Hitachi, with Infineon on the way). Apple will probably start using them with a TiBook revision at some point, after the interoperability issues vanish.
- -Josh Turiel
My wife and I have three TV sets in our house - a 27" in the living room, a 19" in our bedroom, and an old 13" in the guest room. All we have for cable is the basic antenna service - and that's just because our reception otherwise sucks horribly. Here's what we watch:
Most evenings, we watch either the 10PM news or the 11PM news.
About once a week, we stay up for a while and watch Letterman.
She likes the occasional cheesy drama (I believe she's currently on a "Dawson's Creek" kick), and I usually watch WWF SmackDown! on Thursdays (I can't help it - I've been a wrestling mark for years).
Besides all that, I watch some sports - I like to watch Red Sox games and I'll watch most Patriots games and the Giants when I can get them.
We also like the occasional Discovery Channel program (Steve Irwin rules!), and she and I both love the Stooges (which proves that I married the perfect woman).
Why do I bring this up? Because for one, when you add it all up, we watch so little TV on a weekly recurring basis that we could easily learn to live without it, I think. I've considered getting a widescreen TV, but I'm so pissed off at the MPAA that I haven't bought a DVD in almost a year, and I only rent them when I get free coupons from West Coast or Blockbuster. The last time we went to the theater was in February to see CTHD. So I can live with my "obsolete" TV sets just fine.
And how do we survive without all this broadcast media? Well, today we read books, newspapers, and magazines, work at our jobs, do fun activities together, and go places other than theaters. I get current news and weather off the Web, and it's on my own schedule, not broadcast schedules. We went on vacation a couple of months ago and survived nicely without watching TV. We'll do it again (go away with no TV) a couple of times over the summer.
My point here is that the broadcasters need us more than they seem to realize. We're not just statistics or "consumers", we're people, dammit, and if push comes to shove, and we're only allowed to partake of their media on their terms, maybe we're not the only ones who can get by without them.
Memo to the big media conglomerates: You need us a lot more than we need you. If you're smart, you'll stop pushing us. Don't piss us off too much. You may have lots of money and power, but without our eyeballs, you've got nothing.
- -Josh Turiel
There was an opportunity for Eazel, but not as a file manager/GNOME shell with a vague "sell online services" model. The Eazel team, in a more sane VC climate than existed when they were initially funded (in the peak of the Linux craze), could have been a piece of a more diverse, well-funded Linux packaging company (RedHat comes immediately to mind). Or they could have gone the extra step, and built a Eazel-branded distro, using Nautilus as the maintenance toolkit.
The "average" users out there are still waiting for a easy to install, easy to maintain, and easy to update distro that's stable, doesn't generate odd, spurious errors on occasion, and can be set up as easily as Windows on most hardware (Windows may have it's faults once it's up, but it is easy to install). Eazel could have gone down that path and made Nautilus the cornerstone of a whole new distribution, but they passed up the opportunity - or worse, they didn't even see it as an opportunity.
There are a lot of ways to make money in the Linux distro biz - it's pretty easy to be big and corporate, like RedHat, Caldera, or SuSE. Those companies are large enough to have diversified revenue streams, multiple products, and a services business that they can draw ongoing revenue from. There's also a nice niche that can be taken up by small, "garage" companies, where a couple of smart people with no VC funding can make a good living selling and/or servicing Linux.
And if you look at how the big software projects are organized, the only reason a lot of the entities exist is to provide legal shelter to the project tems who hack on it - the KDE Foundation and Debian are great examples of that. Ximian has a goal to make money from GNOME - hopefully they can, but I wouldn't count on it. Their best hope as a company is to get underwritten by the folks who benefit from their code (like RedHat, Sun, etc.) - and make enough to pay their hackers.
Eazel was aimed smack-dab in the squishy middle, trying to make a garage business out of VC money. In hindsight, it was doomed from the start, even before the market crashed.
- -Josh Turiel
Retail environments, at least most of the ones I've dealt with, don't generally buy an off-the-shelf PC and then select their POS software. They buy a full system - and they usually buy it from a company that specializes in retail systems integration. A lot of them don't know what the underlying system is and don't care, so long as it works well and saves them money.
The vast majority of these machines are not going to be Internet-connected in any way at all, and are not readily accessible to script kiddies in the first place. Chains will use either low-speed frame relay lines or dial-up to report numbers back to HQ, not an Internet connection. They also don't need "support for all sorts of devices", just the ones that are sold with the system in the first place. I don't need half a dozen different credit card slip printers - just one good, working, reasonably priced one. And I'd buy them in bulk for each terminal. A lot of how Windows became such a blivet to begin with was by having to support everything under the sun.
I mean, that's an argument that was used against Apple for years by the Windows minions - Windows had (at least, before Office became pretty much the only alternative) dozens of available word processors and spreadsheets, and the Mac (read today as "Linux") only had (has) a handful. OK, this may be true, but how many do you need at once? I'd rather have one good word processor on my platform of choice, for instance, than a dozen crappy ones. POS systems are even more of the same - when a register is booted it generally runs nothing but that app. The distro of Linux isn't even relevant - it'll be customized to the maximum possible and stripped of anything that can increase support work.
While not exactly FUD, this whitepaper mainly fights a war that retailers don't care about. And a lot of the "main street" type businesses that might buy off-the-shelf POSware aren't going to be caring about Microsoft's message because they don't even research it far enough.
Heck, there's even thriving Mac POS vendors - there's enough room for everybody. Too bad Microsoft doesn't appear to understand it. They must be more threatened than I thought.
- -Josh Turiel
True, all those BeOS users may wind up looking for a home, but if they didn't amount to enough users to sustain Be, how will they sustain Amiga?
I think the Mac (of which I am a user) has about as small a market presence as you can get and still be viable (as a hardware-oriented company) - Apple will always have a built-in market just by defining themselves as "the alternative" to Windows hegemony. Linux is an operating system, and development costs are minimal if you want to have your own distro. This gives the companies that do nothing but press CD's a chance to make money (with no costs), but the bigger companies like RedHat and Caldera need to make money in services and integration (as the FSF intended), rather than on code alone. Because Linux has a use in the server space, this is feasible - Amiga isn't looking like a server OS to me, it's looking like a "power user" OS. And they plan to make hardware as well, tuned to their OS and using PowerPC processors.
Be tried that, too - and if you look up, you can see Be's flame trails heading for the ocean as we speak. Other than the more well-known name, I don't see anything different for Amiga, either. I do wonder, though - will this coming Amiga death finally be the last one? Their corporate logo should be a cat, since they've gone through so many lives.
- -Josh Turiel
I'm taking that into account, but only to a point (plus over-simplifying for discussion purposes). Though it's not exactly a linear curve, there still is a rapid increase in costs that does not exist in the broadcast model. The other thing to consider in calculating infrastructure costs is that it's not quite a matter of replacing the phone banks with a PRI - you need hardware to support it, and you need to make capital expenditures that, if you're running on an upgrade treadmill, never really do pay for themselves. I assume in my earlier post that the cost savings are $3/user-month from 10K subs to 100K subs, but unless that makes you profitable it doesn't matter.
The calculations that free ISP providers made figured they would grow to critical mass and that the subscribers would be worth a whole lot more to advertisers than they really were. The problem was that the more they grew, the more they lost. Although the fixed costs do diminish somewhat (in the central infrastructure portion) on a per-user basis as your userbase grows, the local loop/special modem/truck roll costs in the DSL business stay just as expensive for one as they do for one million. Which is why the only free ISP's that are hanging on by a thread are Juno and NetZero (Bluelight.com doesn't count - KMart just took it on to avoid Christmastime disaster when Spinway died) - the dial-up costs do scale better than the DSL costs could. There are profitable ISP's out there - lots of them. But they all charge for their services, even the "bare-bones" $9/month ISPs with no tech support, no personal web hosting, and outsourced Usenet. You can deliver dial-up ISP service pretty darned cheaply, but not cheaply enough to give it away. And forget about giving away DSL service - I mean, that's like giving away cable TV service in terms of costs.
It's just such a shaky economic model to begin with that I'm surprised it even got funded - despite the "we'll fund anything, no questions asked" attitude of the last few years. In the end, TANSTAAFL.
- -Josh Turiel
The only problem with the Free ISP model was that all the companies that offered it were based on the fantasies of crack-addled minds. That's the only possible explanation. I mean, just because people are accustomed to Free Stuff On The Internet, it does not mean that the Internet itself can be free. One reason that broadcast TV works as a free access model is that there is no need to build out infrastructure to connect each subscriber (unlike the ISP business). Cable TV, OTOH, charges a premium to access each home, because they need...
Infrastructure!
Just like the free ISP's did. What a coincidence! Something like a TV or radio benefits from the Network Effect (or Metcalfe's Law) because the broadcasting to the first TV costs millions of dollars (for the studios, transmitters, etc.), but it costs $0 per set after that. The more sets, the more money the broadcaster makes.
In the ISP business, though, it costs money to support each subscriber - in technical support, fixed wiring costs, phone/modem server costs (for dial-up networks), wholesale DSL costs (for folks like WinFire), and bandwidth. These costs don't magically get cheaper with size - they continue to grow. If you lose $5 per subscriber-month, then you lose $50,000 per month with 10K subscribers, and assuming (generously) that you can reduce your expenses by $3 per subsciber-month at 100,000 subscribers, you're still losing $200,000 per month at that level. It doesn't make sense now, and it didn't make sense then, either.
My local paper (the Boston Globe) has a consumer column that runs on Sundays. A few weeks ago it spotlighted the demise of free ISP's, and featured quotes from several customers of defunct free ISP's who "felt screwed". I tell you, I never laughed so hard reading anything other than comics in a newspaper.
After I recovered my breath, I then wrote a reasoned response to the consumer advocate and explained Economics 101 (which, unfortunately, I think most self-styled consumer advocates either skipped or flunked). Essentially, you can't sell a dollar for 90 cents and make it up in volume. Not surprisingly, I did not hear back directly from him, though he did cite my letter briefly in a follow-up column a few weeks later.
- -Josh Turiel
At least, that's how I see it. Basically, if the OS kernel supplies sufficient compatibility that more or less "standard" tools, shells, and apps will run with minimal or no modification (short of mods for processor families), then it's Unix. It doesn't matter if an OS can use the little Unix (tm) symbol or not.
The other side of my view, though, is that if Unix compatibility is provided through a bolt-on layer (like the POSIX layer to Windows NT that was built just to get government check-offs), it ain't the real thing. So MacOS X is Unix - Aqua and the "Macishness" of X are bolted onto Unix, not the other way around.
This standard of mine also makes Linux and all the BSDs = Unix, and I believe it would also cover the Hurd as well. And Apple's old A/UX (the 68K Unix they had for servers in the early '90s) qualifies - the Finder ran as a process under A/UX, not the other way around.
Tenon's otherwise excellent MachTen, though, would not be a true Unix (despite being compatible with damn near everything) since it runs on top of MacOS (through 9.x) and doesn't own the machine. It's a bolt-on - just far better than Microsoft's kludge.
To paraphrase the late Justice Potter Stewart, "I may not be able to define Unix, but I know it when I see it". And I see Unix when I look at MacOS X.
- -Josh Turiel
It's simple. There was a window of opportunity for a real next-generation console, but it slammed shut the day Playstation 2 shipped. With Xbox going into the PC hardware side of the gaming market, and Sony dominating the "entertainment center" approach, there's only room for one or two more players, max. Nintendo is on their way to the market, and even Sega couldn't keep up. How's a product like Indrema going to make any splash at all in mid-to-late 2001 against that competition?
If they had shipped a product last summer, there might have been a niche to exploit, but it was too late. The other possibility would have been an alliance with TiVo - both companies had Linux-based equipment (albeit on different processor platforms) and perhaps a hybrid TiVo/Indrema gaming console/TV recorder could have carved out a place in the market. Though the cost of the hardware would have gone up quite a bit accordingly.
As much as an Open Source gaming system would have been cool, better the company die now while there's less money at stake than build a lot of consoles that sit on shelves because they don't play Playstation, Xbox, or Dolphin games.
- -Josh Turiel
That was my goof on the Nielsens - I had an early-morning brain cramp. I knew it was Arbitron, lord knows I've heard Imus rant about it enough times during drive-time.
When you have technology in place to broadcast only the content and block the ads, make sure you run a "this is ad time that you'd hear if AFTRA wasn't a bunch of ninnies" PSA during the breaks so people don't think the stream died.
I'd suspect that the more specialized the fare, the easier it is to find a streaming audience. Talk shows, sports programming (like regional sports stations), and specialty music would seem like obvious things that would find a Net audience - Top 40 I'd expect nobody to stream if they have a radio available (since there's a Top 40 station in pretty much every market). Christopher Lydon, according to an article I read a few days ago, is drawing about 2000 listeners per streamcast so far (he's done a handful) since leaving WBUR and The Connection. However, that's a fraction of the radio audience. Ironically, a couple of radio stations are now broadcasting the webcast of a show that used to be broadcast. It makes your head spin...
- -Josh Turiel
Internet-based radio streams are useful as a way for a radio station to widen their audience somewhat, and a way for people to listen to their hometown radio when they're away. I strongly doubt, though, that Internet broadcasting (except maybe in a very few cases) of a radio station gathers anywhere near even 5% of that station's over-the-air audience.
The interesting thing, though, is that it's easier to measure the audience on the Internet - just count server connections and you've got a pretty accurate audience measurement. As opposed to the satistical sampling of radio diaries by Nielsen. So if stations could sell those additional numbers and pay unions/labels appropriately, then it'd be worth it to stream.
The problem there is that I suspect Internet listeners are going to be (because of the dispersion) listeners that advertisers don't want. A large proportion of radio ads are local, and only have appeal to the local audience. If I'm listening to a Boston radio station in San Francisco over the Internet, does Bernie & Phyl's Furniture really care that I'm listening? They don't go any farther west than Westboro - heck, Springfield is out of their market, let alone San Francisco!
Basically, that's the problem - if an Internet simulcast gets a lot of listeners, it's often going to be because those listeners aren't in the market and therefore won't buy the stuff in the ads. The unions and record companies want stations to pay based on audience, the statons would rather pay for that part of the audience that they can actually sell to.
They need to meet somewhere in the middle - but if our experience to date with the record lables is any indicator, that won't happen.
- -Josh Turiel
It's in their NorthPoint update page (http://www.xo.com/savemydsl/), item number 3. I also got an e-mail from them about it last Friday, and a snail mail on Monday, along with a phone call at home as well. Their plan is to move Home Office users to Telocity, 640K/90K ADSL if we so choose.
Home Office/NorthPoint service users are off-contract as of 4/27 (free dial-up until then if desired, woo-hoo), I'm not sure if they used other providers for that as well, but it's no longer a product offering in any form. I'd assume that if they offered it through Covad or their own network, those customers won't be dumped but they aren't adding any new ones.
- -Josh Turiel
A large part of the problem is the structure that DSL is sold under. The DSL infrastructure CLECs all have to lease their unbundled copper from the ILEC, who is generally also in the DSL business as well and has a financial incentive to make the process as difficult as possible (eliminating the competition). Then the CLEC doesn't (except for Covad's Covad.net) even sell directly to the consumer - all they get to take is a middleman's bite without the retail markup. That retail markup, un turn, is very low because the ILEC is competing with a lower cost basis and driving the price down.
Business-grade DSL (SDSL with speeds of 768K and up) could theoretically be sold at higher margins than consumer-grade DSL, since business DSL is a market the ILEC's are avoiding (they don't want to cannibalize the lucrative T-1 business). This would give the DSL CLECs a chance to make some actual profit per line - but the catch is that they all built out their networks in the pre-2000 funding market and need a higher volume than just small business DSL can readily provide. So they all have been trying to land consumers for the cash flow (though the margins are nonexistent), only to lose money on every one (but they make it up in VOLUME!).
Covad may have a shot at survival just because they'll probably be the last national-scale DSL CLEC standing. A few smaller, regional-scale companies may be able to find niches as well, though it failed miserably for Vitts up here in New England. And through smart business (and/or deep pockets) some ISP's that offer DSL may be able to make a living - Telocity and Speakeasy have a pretty good chance (deep pockets for Telocity, and conservative growth plans at Speakeasy), as do companies like XO that have DSL as a single offering out of many.
There are companies that can make a profit with DSL, but they can't do it by going up against the ILEC. ILECs are on a completely different scale, with comparatively unlimited funds to write off while they crush you.
My own high-speed odyssey began with Flashcom/NorthPoint in mid 1999, and I stayed with them until it was obvious that Flashcom was on the way down (I had pretty good service and the price was decent). I switched to XO (for the deep pockets - Craig McCaw is their sugar daddy), and they provisioned a 768K SDSL line (for a little less than Flashcom was charging for 200K). It was also with NorthPoint, though - the Verizon merger fell through while the install was under way, ironically. I had no problems until NorthPoint went dark last Thursday evening, and XO announced they were getting out of the Home Office business.
So last Friday morning I called AT&T Broadband to see about cable - I live in Salem MA where cable Internet has only been available for about a month. They had a better price, free installation, and could come install this past Monday, which they did. So I simply moved my DNS to Zoneedit (which supports DDNS), and was back on the Net before my inbound mail from the weekend timed out and bounced. AT&T Roadrunner (my service) has no particular restriction on what I do with my line or if I run servers - the only restrictions are that I not run any commercial services with my servers and that I not do anything illegal. No problem. They also block the NetBIOS ports by default, though you can have them unblocked if you really want. And they don't "support" NAT routers, but they don't restrict their use. In fact, when I read the MAC address to the fellow registering my router, he asked me which model router I had and how I liked it (he recognized the vendor ID). He also set up a host mapping for me as well.
What this implies is that ultimately the more "progressive" cable ISP's (like RoadRunner) will get a lot of the business that would otherwise have gone to DSL providers when you have a choice as consumers become more informed (gradually) and home networking becomes more popular. Where there are no choices, you'll have to settle for an @Home-type ISP or whatever the market brings you, which is a pity. Your only other choice will be DSL from the ILEC unless you're a mid-sized business and therefore have SDSL for around $200 and up from a niche CLEC as an option.
Or dialup. Isn't that encouraging?
- -Josh Turiel
Using Sealand is a useful and viable way to ensure privacy, but is not designed with something like Napster in mind. They have to buy bandwidth from either companies willing to run fiber to their location (guaranteed to be from a EC nation), or satellite links to a satellite in range of what their dishes can see (also pretty much guaranteed to be, at the very least, a WIPO nation). The purpose of Havenco appears to be more oriented towards activities that are legal but require high security.
By virtually all standards, Napster _is_ illegal as it stands (I'm not stating that this is right or wrong by saying that - my own opinion doesn't count here), and therefor not suitable to run at Havenco.
Where OpenNap servers _could_ be run, though, is in some of the countries that already have limited or nonexistent copyright enforcement mechanisms - China and Russia come to mind immediatly as nations where piracy is winked at (and in China, piracy is managed by the government). If someone wanted to make an arrangement in one of those countries, it would be a great deal easier to protect and run a Napster clone. If the country where the company and server are located isn't a WIPO nation, then RIAA enforcement becomes an order of magnitude more difficult. Sealand's legal status is shaky enough to make it a poor choice.
- -Josh Turiel
Way back in the "good old days", I remember the first browser I ran (remember when there were dozens to choose from?), and I was looking for websites that seemed like they might be interesting. When I saw the Coffee Cam, the little lightbulb in my head finally went off - it was the first real application I had seen that used any of the web's potential. Sure, cameras had been networked before (as had that coffee pot), but the Coffee Cam was the first thing I saw that took advantage of the ability of a browser to handle mixed media in a manner suitable for virtually any platform. Before the cam, web pages were mostly just text with in-line graphics - there were no interactive or dynamic elements.
By itself, it didn't do much (I mean, it was just a refreshing picture of a coffee pot), but it was the direct precursor of a lot of things we now take for granted.
It was also arguably (along with the Fish Cam) the immediate ancestor of JenniCam, and all the other webcams out there. As for me, it encouraged me to give up HyperCard for HTML.
- -Josh Turiel
I have a G400 Max DualHead on my Windows box, too - it's a good card that can even game pretty well (for mere mortals like myself who get no benefit from 900fps Quake III). My Linux box has a 3Dfx 3000, and the newest nVidia card I have is an old TNT. That's because of the driver issue.
What's interesting here is that I remember when Matrox was the whipping boy because they were aggressively closed-source, as was ATI. Today, ATI at least offers some support to the developer community, and Matrox has become a model citizen, relatively speaking.
Meanwhile, nVidia has closed what they did have open previously. Ironic, eh?
- -Josh Turiel
Part of the problem is where the companies focus their attention. Of the remaining Big Three (ATI, nVidia, and Matrox), nVidia is the only one who actively markets their chipsets to J.Random Cardmaker. 3Dfx started out in the same business as nVidia, then made the fatal mistake of buying a card maker (STB), and trying to leverage the manufacturing plant and distribution channel into selling 3Dfx-branded cards instead of letting others do the work for them.
It must have seemed like a compelling argument to the 3Dfx management at the time - why sell chipsets for around $30 to a manufacturer who then gobbles up the real profit, when we can control all the money ourselves? What they failed to anticipate was that a few things would all converge to crush the life out of 3Dfx as a result:
1- nVidia would dramatically ramp up their product line and take over the performance title.
2- People would start clamoring for 32-bit video before 3Dfx could deliver.
3- Competitive pressures would knock the bottom out of the low-end and midrange video card markets - no profit margin left. And 3Dfx didn't make it into that space in time.
4- Brand-building gets expensive - nVidia doesn't have to advertise at all, really. The card makers who buy nVidia chips do it for them. ATI doesn't have to advertise as much - the retail product is only a piece of the business, they do a ton of OEM. And Matrox has the 2D performance ("business") market locked up pretty well - they aren't playing too heavily in the 3D world.
So with all that figured in, 3Dfx, when the dust settled, had:
A shrinking retail presence.
No significant OEM business.
And no 3rd party card manufacturers to consume the chips.
Each of the remaining players plays to a different niche now - that's why there's still room for three big players. ATI has their All-in-one retail products and the OEM channel, Matrox has 2-D and dual-head for the mainstream Windows market, and nVidia has all the Taiwanese board makers and the gamers market.
The nice thing is that all these companies have to stay on their toes, because one of their competitors could invade at any time. Remember, ATI took a pretty big bite out of everyone when Radeon came out, only to have nVidia make up for it with GeForce 2. Matrox is always rumored to be coming up with super-fast stuff in the labs. So anyone could dethrone nVidia in the future - it's just right now nVidia's sitting fat and happy. They just can't afford to get too comfy up there.
- -Josh Turiel
We're an MS Enterprise licensing customer - for our licensing fee (which isn't bad), we get the rights to any version of desktop Windows, and version of Office up to Professional, and all server/BackOffice CALs we need.
Outlook and Exchange come with the territory - it's be tougher for us to substitute a different mail system than the payback would justify.
Personally, I'd prefer a nice IMAP-based system that is less vulnerable to begin with, but if you manage the system carefully you can make the MS stuff work acceptably well - which is nice when you work at a company that's drank the Microsoft-branded Kool-Aid.
- -Josh Turiel
In 1998, a few months after I took the sysadmin job at my company, we had an infestation of the Class macro virus. It was a pain to clean up and deal with, but my staff and I took care of it in about a day - no data was lost.
.SHS and .VBS files. We have not had an infection of any sort since then - the antivirus portion of the gateway is updated with every update released (engines and definitions), and the clients are updated through management software that updates automatically as well - and the clients are locked into the most paranoid settings available.
After that, we put up an SMTP scanner/gateway between our Exchange server and the rest of the world. I set up filters to automatically block anything executable at all via e-mail, including stuff like
The downside is that I'm the "no fun" admin (since we block all the fun programs from e-mail), but on the other hand I've counted 26 copies of the "Kournikova" worm today alone that have bounced off our server harmlessly. I think it was worth it for sure. Since I'm stuck with Windows for the forseeable future, I'm happy with what I can do to prevent these from affecting us.
So our ongoing cost to really deal with viruses is $0. But I do have software costs (annual licenses), plus some time spent devising our strategy and implementing it. But that's part of the job - I can't really call it "virus costs".
- -Josh Turiel
I doubt that's a very large group of users (there may well be a decent number of people who can't get a channel they want, but not that many are willing to mod their receiver over it), but I would be inclined to feel sympathetically towards them. What channels do they lock out geographically (besides local network affiliates)?
- -Josh Turiel
If you want to design and build your own DirecTV-compatible dish and receiver from components, and write software for it that decodes the video stream, then hooking it up to your TV set and watching for free is not theft in my book. The signals are, as you point out, passing through your property, and you were smart enough to figure out how to do something with them. Enjoy. Hell, get Dish Network too, while you're at it.
But taking DirecTV's own receiver, only made for the purpose of viewing their service by subscription, and then modifying it for free service is theft, plain and simple. By your standard, there should only be free broadcast service (over-the-air commecial TV), because anything else is and should be open for the taking to anyone who can hack a receiver or get their hands on a modded card.
If that's the case, forget pay-per-view (what - life without Wrestlemania?), forget all the premium commercial-free services like HBO - and forget pretty much any reception at all anywhere other than in and near urban areas.
There's a big difference between fair use and theft of service. I should be able to record off my DTV, time-shift as I like with my VCR or Tivo, and not rely on analog streams to do so if everything I have is digital. But there's nothing inherently wrong with paying to get that signal into my house to begin with, so long as I can re-use what I paid for. A different point entirely.
- -Josh Turiel
On one side, you have folks who hack the hardware to get free service.
:-)
On the other side, you have a company that sells a dish and programming, at pretty reasonable prices compared to cable rates, and wants to get paid for their goods.
Given that's it's at an interesting intellectual game at best to figure out how to hack a DTV smart card system, and theft of service at worst, it just appears that DirecTV has figured out how to win the cat and mouse game once and for all. Good for them. If DirecTV was the only form of television service available (ie., a monopoly), I'd look on theft of service a little more tolerantly, but there's all sorts of TV alternatives out there - broadcast, cable, and other satelite providers.
This is different from, say, the i-Opener hack because the i-Opener hack was fundamentally about hardware. Buying the box did not incur an obligation to use the service (due to a mistake on Netpliance's part), and the hack didn't allow you to steal their service - it allowed you to re-purpose the hardware. That would be like hacking a DirecTV box to work with Dish Network instead. A cool, "because it's there" hack.
So if DirecTV won the war, more power to them. There may be a fine line between hacking and theft at times, but hacking a DTV smart card for free service is definitely on the wrong side of that line.
Besides, stuff like descramblers and smartcards are usually what spammers are filling my emailbox with, and I hate spammers!
- -Josh Turiel
I think part of the urge to mod-up cases and the like is the inevitable reaction to the sheer cheapness of hardware today. Once upon a time (up to a year or so ago!), the way to show off your "cool hardware-god-ness" was to trick out your PC with an overclocked processor, state-of-the-art cooling, an overdriven chipset, video card, etc. An overclocked box was a way to make a statement about your skills and save money, too (for some).
Nowadays a 1GHz Athlon processor costs less than $250 - and that RAM that would help kickstart a machine's performance costs about $60 for 128MB worth. Disk storage is cheap, too. When a killer machine costs well under $1000, about the only thing left to differentiate yourself is the case mod. Sure, you and I both have a 1 GHz Athlon, but I have a cool neon-lit window on my case - how about you? (for the record - I haven't done any case mods other than adding fans, and they don't count)
People laughed at Steve Jobs when he started selling iMacs (who'd ever want a fruity-looking computer?), but the success of Apple's line of systems makes the point: when all things are relatively equal (as they were until the latest Wintel price plunges re-opened the gap), people will go for style. If a cool-looking iMac is selling for about the same money a good consumer PC sells for, a lot of people will choose the iMac because of looks.
Case Modding is really just a variation on this theme.
- -Josh Turiel
I think this case is a load of bunk, based on my experience and the examples I've seen in the industry (and Microsoft has historically been more enlightened than most - they just want big brains and not much more). What some people forget is that being qualified doesn't mean you get the job - you get it if you're the _most_ qualified. And if there's always someone better qualified than you, you never get the job. That's when you leave to get onto some other company's track - and hope the other company has people you can in turn leapfrog. When I've hired in the past (as I do at my current company, and did at my past employer), I could care less about race, gender, or sexual preference. I look for the following attributes:
1: Are their skills appropriate for the job?
2: Are their salary expectations in line with what I can pay, and am willing to pay?
3: Do they have the right amount of experience for the job?
4: Do they have a personality that will enable them to get along with their prospective co-workers on the "team"?
As tie-breakers, I'll look at things like certifications (do they have any, and are they relevant). I don't care about race or gender - send me people that can do the job and they'll get the job, assuming they're the best candidate. Period. And, excepting some troglodytes who are, I'm sure, in some companies, the bulk of IT hiring meets that standard.
Over the years, I've hired white, black, and hispanic, men and women, gay and straight. And there would almost certainly have been more categories represented in that list if I'd had them available to choose from - I've had good people work for me in all those categories! I'd have been an idiot and I'd be doing my company a disservice if I excluded any potentially good employee on the basis of race, or any other irrelevant factor that doesn't affect job performance.
- -Josh Turiel
You're dead right on the software side of things (unfortunately - software should be ownable). But there are fine degrees of distinction on the other two examples you gave here.
You do own your car outright. However, you have to pay a fee to use your car on the roads owned by the government, and you need their permission to do so. The fee is the registration and title (and any other fees that your state and/or munincipality choose to charge you). Don't want to pay the fees or get a license? Fine - you can buy and own a car, but you can only drive it on the private dirt track you own in back of your house - take it on the street and your ass goes in a sling.
As for the land itself - you own the land, but the government, in theory (I won't go off on this tangent despite my temptation), provides the services (like roads, contract and deed enforcement, rights-of-way, etc.) that enables that deed to the land to have any value. As a result, you may be charged taxes and/or fees on that land - theoretically that pays for the government to protect your claim to the land.
A book is property with even fewer restrictions - you are not allowed to copy it (outside of portions for "fair use"), but you otherwise own it. And you can dispose of it as you please.
Borland used to have a license they called the "just like a book" license - it said, simply, that the software was like a book in that you could lend it, use it, or do what you wished, but only one person at a time could actually use it. Just like a book. It was less than a page, easy to read and understand, and is no longer used because (presumably) with increased size the Borland lawyers became more paranoid.
Ironic, then, that the book makers want to be more like software makers.
- -Josh Turiel