I dont' think Bittorrent or any other p2p technology makes sense for commercial distribution, because it's inherently wasteful of last-mile bandwidth, which is scarce.
Bittorrent/P2P makes sense because it distributes the bandwidth requirement across various last-mile connections, not a single high-bandwidth connection. So the distributors of content save money by not having to pay so much for their bandwidth requirements. The cable and DSL companies may get the short end of the stick if their capacity models aren't based on heavy utilization of P2P my a majority of their subscribers. That said, the increased demand generated by these services MAY increase their subscriptions and thereby increase their revenues and also their ability to improve their infrastructure or offer additional premium-priced services (bigger pipes, gauranteed service levels, etc.)
I do think that for commercial distribution using P2P to work you will need bittorrent to understand service levels and when download performance drops below a certain level the client begins to download from the primary node owned by the distributor. That way you never end up with a situation where you can't get what you want because only a small # of people have it.
Currently p2p is thriving despite that inefficiency because IP laws prevent centralized distribution, but with authorized content distribution that won't be the case.
I think the reason we don't see distribution of movies, media, etc. thriving right now (it's certainly growing though!) is because the DRM doesn't satisfy the producers and consumers and the cost of entry is pretty significant because you have to invest so much in bandwidth because every customer is downloading everything from you directly.
I agree, speed is nice, but at this point, I'm more interested in WiMax (omnidirectional distance) and roaming Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi in your car?). Those technologies will revolutionize the way we use Wi-Fi and the Internet.. then speed and security will be a top issue again.
I, being the proactive person that I am, have placed two warning signs in my front yard. One states, that the unencrypted open wireless broadband access point in my house is not for public use, the other warns that the radiation emitted by said device may cause cancer, impotence, hunger, pregnancy, and/or death, BEWARE!
Here here... I'd go a step further and save all of the files as LaTex files so you can easily convert them to whatever format you want. If the CIOs don't have the necessary software to convert/read LaTex files this will be a great opportunity to tell them to RTFM, write the code themselves, or atleast install the right software using apt-get or portage. So not only do they learn about the rating system they'll learn a lot about the community too.
The point isn't that chaos would have ensued. It's that this was reported as major headline and average people don't read the articles in much detail, let alone keep up with a particular scientific issue for any exteneded period of time. The end-result of this type of reporting is that the average person becomes confused: are there 9 or 10... or did I just hear about 11 planets? Also, by seeing a large amount of pre-tested scientific speculation trumpeted as a big find they may begin to question the validity of science... if 9 out 10 science stories are proven to be bogus (assuming reporting prior to validation and thorough testing) then science in general is just a shot in the dark and is equal to any other form of speculation, Scientology, Greek Mythology, or whatever else is the thought of the day. The point is science is supposed to provide tested facts and reasoned theories, more testing is a good thing when the knowledge itself brings little value to the average person.
The astronomer who made the discovery has more details on this website. It wasn't discovered 2 years ago, just around Christmas of 2004. And it sounds like he and his team had already released some initial abstracts to a scientific audience (so they weren't hiding anything).
I think an announcement of the possibility of a tenth planet, larger than Pluto, would be quite newsworthy,
The press would have reported this using the following headlines:
Astronomer Claims 10th Planet Found 10th Planet Found? New Planet Discovered
Because this sells advertisements. MAYBE, they would have commented about the fact that this was a preliminary discovery in the body of the article. All that said, if you read the astronomer's material on the website and the articles published by the press you see how horid their reporting actually is.
Releasing this information wouldn't have been a bad thing per se, but the original post I responded to specifically attacked them for NOT releasing the information, calling their behavior unethical. My position is that they did not act unethically.
The Inquirer article is actually just rehashing what the South African Sunday Independant reported. That publication seems to have more credibility (or at least didn't make any Uranus jokes... was that a joke?)
The people involved in this should be banned from using public equipment due to their clear lack of ethics!
No, they should be commended for not rushing out their findings until they had been properly analyzed and validated. The public doesn't track or care about retracted or falsified scientific studies, so to come out with unchecked data would end up confusing most people if the conclusion made based on that data was proven to be incorrect. And it's not like this was some big discovery that was actually going to change the average person's life... they aren't sitting on the cure for cancer or something.
Tuna can be cooked with much less power, but unforunately by slow cooking it you lose a lot of the natural flavoring. That's why this, the preferred solution by most gourmet chefs, cooks the tuna in a few millionths of a second.
One explanation could be that supporting hardware without an OS is more expensive, possibly due to increased support calles from newbie's who can't get their OS to work or from cheap-skates who don't understand why they can't seem to boot the system (or install their pirated copy of Windows). It could also be, that if an alternative OS is installed that it costs more for to test, install, and support per sale than Windows, so the costs have to be higher.
I think this could be investigated, but it seems to me that the ONLY negative illegal outcome would be that MS is demanding that any OEM who installs Windows sell those boxes for less than equivalent non-Windows boxes. This type of blatent anti-competitive behavior doesn't seem like something MS would do considering their troubles w/ the law in the U.S. and E.U. in the past. They would, I guess, have to mask this behavior somehow. Does anyone have any details about this... does this condition really exist or is it just anti-MS FUD?
Interesting, but the connection wasn't 11-Mbps. It was actually only 3kbs. This is an interesting project, I'm certainly not trying to bash the work their doing. Just want to point out that the goal of the original post was broadband wi-fi, and the article you linked to was just trying to pass data over a very long distance wirelessly.
A few snippets from the article. Non IP data were succesfully transmitted over 350 km. Speed: 3kbs troughput.
Their goal is to create a radiomodem that is capable of 64Kbs in a multislotted system
I could be wrong, but don't the regulations apply to how long you have to keep the information, not where you have to keep it? So in this case, if the government had consolidated all of this information onto a new server, thereby still keeping it, they would have been in compliance with the regulations, but still managed to release all of the personal information.
Time is scarce. If you didn't have copyright/patents and protections for control of the distrubiton of the output from your time then you would have very little incentive to invent, or would have very little time to invent because you'd have to be working somewhere else to sustain you.
People should be paid for making NEW information patterns.
How would you propose this happen? It's a nice idea, but I don't see how it actually could be implemented. Who would pay for the new idea? Why would they pay for it, when someone else may pay for it and then they could use it for free? Would you pay for all ideas regardless of their value? How would you determine value?
The GPL is a flag for Open Source software developers to rally around, but it has no teeth and anyways by violating the GPL no one is actually harmed in any way. In fact, much of the software that is developed by violating the GPL is in fact useful to end users so they're more likely to use a FOSS product in the future.
I have heard that there is a small startup (in Oakland?) that is developing software that will take source code and manipulate it so that source code and compiled output are different enough from the original to be nearly undetectable. In addition to this software I believe they're planning on providing consulting and development services to take the Open Source code and manipulate it even further to obfuscate the code.
This is exciting, because most FOSS software isn't accessible to the general public, but by reducing the costs required to produce software by using an existing code base we should see many new products that are actually afordable and useable by the end user population. Of course, I'm sure some people will copy and distribute this software over the Internet, but that's not a big deal either as we've already established.
I was talking with a good friend of mine from Bratislava about this a couple weeks ago and he was pretty angry. He thought this violated the rights of the people who wrote the code and the end-users because the software wasn't free as in speech. I argued that this may be the case, but it doesn't really matter because the producers would have developed the software anyways, and the end-users are in 99% of the cases not going to even want to manipulate the source code. Furthermore this is a civil issue, so if there is a coypright violation that has real impact on a developer then they'll just take it to the courts. My friend couldn't argue with this one. He agreed that many open source developers, particularly in the U.S., have day jobs that pay them 10x what he makes and are so wealthy that they can easily hire a lawyer to defend their IP rights. He was concerned about the rights of the myriad of developers around the world who don't make as much as the uber-rich American developers. I agreed that it would be very very hard for the "little guy" to properly defend his IP, but suggested that by using GPLed code and releasing it as a closed source product, they could in fact create a small revenue stream that would help them advance their education, research, or general standard of living. He liked that idea a lot.
Since the U.S. doesn't actually manufacture anything tangible anymore
Not true. Ford, GM, and many other manufacturing corporation. What is true is that a large part of the U.S. economy is a service economy and also is based on revenues from Intellectual Property. So for the U.S. there is a real value in ensuring that each copy of a product is purchased.
"intellectual property" then becomes all the more important for maintaining control in a capitalistic economy still based on scarcity.
As before, "all" is wrong. IP revnues are important, because if the U.S. lost major corporations that created IP hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens would be unemployed. Including those that made the IP, worked for the companies that distributed the IP, all the supporting companies (legal, healthcare, etc.).
Scarcity isn't part of a capitalistic system, it's a general state of things. There are only some many of any one thing to go around. Capitalism is the best method for allocating scarce resources.
Copyright infringement, then, is "economic terrorism" and a threat to national security.
Now you're just rambling and exagerating. Organized and major copyright infringement should be stopped. But it's not "economic terrorism" and anyone who tries to use that type of wording in any legitimate way is spouting off non-sensical rhetoric.
One such way that I've thought could be good is for the artists to just with-hold new albums, and saying they need $X amount and once that is reached they will release it for everyone to share. I'm sure that they fans would quickly fund the artist, this way the artist would get money for their art
Stupid blind consumers will buy a product sight unseen. I read reviews, try to find legal samples on the Internet, maybe here it on the radio, ask friends or people w/ similar musical tastes about the band. I would never pay in advance for disc that wasn't actually even recorded yet. You've probably already plunked down $50 for Duke Nukem Forever. Even the best artists produce crap sometimes, or at least music many people will not like. And what incentive would they have to make a really great disc?
why should I give money away and then people who haven't get to download the music/movie for free
No, many of the people who don't like your idea realize it would never work.
That's what prices are for. If you don't like the price, don't pay it. Businesses will learn very quickly if spreading the cost out across all of their products is better than charging those that use the service. In this case, I suspect the minor (if any?) increase in price per product doesn't result in a significant drop in the # of buyers to warrent charging outright for the service, and in fact may result in more buyers meaning that no increase in price is required.
MS has been saying that to be safe don't run exe's off the net and disable activeX,
Microsoft has been saying don't run unknown EXEs and ActiveX controls. They do sign all of their controls so for those of us who check before we run something we can validate that they're actually from Microsoft or some other trusted party before we run the app/control.
Should I be worried? Does anyone know if being exposed to 2.4 GHz emissions might also be harmful?
I wish I could give you more information, but the last thing I saw was the phone number of a workers comp. lawyer in the yellow pages. Now I am nearly blind, unable to work, and entitled to $75 million from cell phone makers, wi-fi makers, waffle makers, and McDonalds.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree with you.
I dont' think Bittorrent or any other p2p technology makes sense for commercial distribution, because it's inherently wasteful of last-mile bandwidth, which is scarce.
Bittorrent/P2P makes sense because it distributes the bandwidth requirement across various last-mile connections, not a single high-bandwidth connection. So the distributors of content save money by not having to pay so much for their bandwidth requirements. The cable and DSL companies may get the short end of the stick if their capacity models aren't based on heavy utilization of P2P my a majority of their subscribers. That said, the increased demand generated by these services MAY increase their subscriptions and thereby increase their revenues and also their ability to improve their infrastructure or offer additional premium-priced services (bigger pipes, gauranteed service levels, etc.)
I do think that for commercial distribution using P2P to work you will need bittorrent to understand service levels and when download performance drops below a certain level the client begins to download from the primary node owned by the distributor. That way you never end up with a situation where you can't get what you want because only a small # of people have it.
Currently p2p is thriving despite that inefficiency because IP laws prevent centralized distribution, but with authorized content distribution that won't be the case.
I think the reason we don't see distribution of movies, media, etc. thriving right now (it's certainly growing though!) is because the DRM doesn't satisfy the producers and consumers and the cost of entry is pretty significant because you have to invest so much in bandwidth because every customer is downloading everything from you directly.
I agree, speed is nice, but at this point, I'm more interested in WiMax (omnidirectional distance) and roaming Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi in your car?). Those technologies will revolutionize the way we use Wi-Fi and the Internet.. then speed and security will be a top issue again.
I, being the proactive person that I am, have placed two warning signs in my front yard. One states, that the unencrypted open wireless broadband access point in my house is not for public use, the other warns that the radiation emitted by said device may cause cancer, impotence, hunger, pregnancy, and/or death, BEWARE!
You are obviously correct. And after checking up on this on the straight dope, I think I may use the more formal...
hear, all ye good people, hear what this brilliant and eloquent speaker has to say!
I think that'll go over real well around here.
Here here... I'd go a step further and save all of the files as LaTex files so you can easily convert them to whatever format you want. If the CIOs don't have the necessary software to convert/read LaTex files this will be a great opportunity to tell them to RTFM, write the code themselves, or atleast install the right software using apt-get or portage. So not only do they learn about the rating system they'll learn a lot about the community too.
The point isn't that chaos would have ensued. It's that this was reported as major headline and average people don't read the articles in much detail, let alone keep up with a particular scientific issue for any exteneded period of time. The end-result of this type of reporting is that the average person becomes confused: are there 9 or 10... or did I just hear about 11 planets? Also, by seeing a large amount of pre-tested scientific speculation trumpeted as a big find they may begin to question the validity of science... if 9 out 10 science stories are proven to be bogus (assuming reporting prior to validation and thorough testing) then science in general is just a shot in the dark and is equal to any other form of speculation, Scientology, Greek Mythology, or whatever else is the thought of the day. The point is science is supposed to provide tested facts and reasoned theories, more testing is a good thing when the knowledge itself brings little value to the average person.
The astronomer who made the discovery has more details on this website. It wasn't discovered 2 years ago, just around Christmas of 2004. And it sounds like he and his team had already released some initial abstracts to a scientific audience (so they weren't hiding anything).
I think an announcement of the possibility of a tenth planet, larger than Pluto, would be quite newsworthy,
The press would have reported this using the following headlines:
Astronomer Claims 10th Planet Found
10th Planet Found?
New Planet Discovered
Because this sells advertisements. MAYBE, they would have commented about the fact that this was a preliminary discovery in the body of the article. All that said, if you read the astronomer's material on the website and the articles published by the press you see how horid their reporting actually is.
Releasing this information wouldn't have been a bad thing per se, but the original post I responded to specifically attacked them for NOT releasing the information, calling their behavior unethical. My position is that they did not act unethically.
The link to the original South African Sunday Independant article.
The Inquirer article is actually just rehashing what the South African Sunday Independant reported. That publication seems to have more credibility (or at least didn't make any Uranus jokes... was that a joke?)
The people involved in this should be banned from using public equipment due to their clear lack of ethics!
No, they should be commended for not rushing out their findings until they had been properly analyzed and validated. The public doesn't track or care about retracted or falsified scientific studies, so to come out with unchecked data would end up confusing most people if the conclusion made based on that data was proven to be incorrect. And it's not like this was some big discovery that was actually going to change the average person's life... they aren't sitting on the cure for cancer or something.
I think tuna can be cooked with far less power.
Tuna can be cooked with much less power, but unforunately by slow cooking it you lose a lot of the natural flavoring. That's why this, the preferred solution by most gourmet chefs, cooks the tuna in a few millionths of a second.
to power the beowulf cluster I just imagined.
Laugh kids... it's kinda funny.
-- said Alastair MacGibbon as he donned his cape and dashed out the door for another day of crime fighting.
One explanation could be that supporting hardware without an OS is more expensive, possibly due to increased support calles from newbie's who can't get their OS to work or from cheap-skates who don't understand why they can't seem to boot the system (or install their pirated copy of Windows). It could also be, that if an alternative OS is installed that it costs more for to test, install, and support per sale than Windows, so the costs have to be higher.
I think this could be investigated, but it seems to me that the ONLY negative illegal outcome would be that MS is demanding that any OEM who installs Windows sell those boxes for less than equivalent non-Windows boxes. This type of blatent anti-competitive behavior doesn't seem like something MS would do considering their troubles w/ the law in the U.S. and E.U. in the past. They would, I guess, have to mask this behavior somehow. Does anyone have any details about this... does this condition really exist or is it just anti-MS FUD?
Good drink and loud music is more important than accuracy on /. any day!
Interesting, but the connection wasn't 11-Mbps. It was actually only 3kbs. This is an interesting project, I'm certainly not trying to bash the work their doing. Just want to point out that the goal of the original post was broadband wi-fi, and the article you linked to was just trying to pass data over a very long distance wirelessly.
A few snippets from the article.
Non IP data were succesfully transmitted over 350 km. Speed: 3kbs troughput.
Their goal is to create a radiomodem that is capable of 64Kbs in a multislotted system
I could be wrong, but don't the regulations apply to how long you have to keep the information, not where you have to keep it? So in this case, if the government had consolidated all of this information onto a new server, thereby still keeping it, they would have been in compliance with the regulations, but still managed to release all of the personal information.
Time is scarce. If you didn't have copyright/patents and protections for control of the distrubiton of the output from your time then you would have very little incentive to invent, or would have very little time to invent because you'd have to be working somewhere else to sustain you.
People should be paid for making NEW information patterns.
How would you propose this happen? It's a nice idea, but I don't see how it actually could be implemented. Who would pay for the new idea? Why would they pay for it, when someone else may pay for it and then they could use it for free? Would you pay for all ideas regardless of their value? How would you determine value?
The GPL is a flag for Open Source software developers to rally around, but it has no teeth and anyways by violating the GPL no one is actually harmed in any way. In fact, much of the software that is developed by violating the GPL is in fact useful to end users so they're more likely to use a FOSS product in the future.
I have heard that there is a small startup (in Oakland?) that is developing software that will take source code and manipulate it so that source code and compiled output are different enough from the original to be nearly undetectable. In addition to this software I believe they're planning on providing consulting and development services to take the Open Source code and manipulate it even further to obfuscate the code.
This is exciting, because most FOSS software isn't accessible to the general public, but by reducing the costs required to produce software by using an existing code base we should see many new products that are actually afordable and useable by the end user population. Of course, I'm sure some people will copy and distribute this software over the Internet, but that's not a big deal either as we've already established.
I was talking with a good friend of mine from Bratislava about this a couple weeks ago and he was pretty angry. He thought this violated the rights of the people who wrote the code and the end-users because the software wasn't free as in speech. I argued that this may be the case, but it doesn't really matter because the producers would have developed the software anyways, and the end-users are in 99% of the cases not going to even want to manipulate the source code. Furthermore this is a civil issue, so if there is a coypright violation that has real impact on a developer then they'll just take it to the courts. My friend couldn't argue with this one. He agreed that many open source developers, particularly in the U.S., have day jobs that pay them 10x what he makes and are so wealthy that they can easily hire a lawyer to defend their IP rights. He was concerned about the rights of the myriad of developers around the world who don't make as much as the uber-rich American developers. I agreed that it would be very very hard for the "little guy" to properly defend his IP, but suggested that by using GPLed code and releasing it as a closed source product, they could in fact create a small revenue stream that would help them advance their education, research, or general standard of living. He liked that idea a lot.
It's a very exciting time.
Since the U.S. doesn't actually manufacture anything tangible anymore
Not true. Ford, GM, and many other manufacturing corporation. What is true is that a large part of the U.S. economy is a service economy and also is based on revenues from Intellectual Property. So for the U.S. there is a real value in ensuring that each copy of a product is purchased.
"intellectual property" then becomes all the more important for maintaining control in a capitalistic economy still based on scarcity.
As before, "all" is wrong. IP revnues are important, because if the U.S. lost major corporations that created IP hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens would be unemployed. Including those that made the IP, worked for the companies that distributed the IP, all the supporting companies (legal, healthcare, etc.).
Scarcity isn't part of a capitalistic system, it's a general state of things. There are only some many of any one thing to go around. Capitalism is the best method for allocating scarce resources.
Copyright infringement, then, is "economic terrorism" and a threat to national security.
Now you're just rambling and exagerating. Organized and major copyright infringement should be stopped. But it's not "economic terrorism" and anyone who tries to use that type of wording in any legitimate way is spouting off non-sensical rhetoric.
One such way that I've thought could be good is for the artists to just with-hold new albums, and saying they need $X amount and once that is reached they will release it for everyone to share. I'm sure that they fans would quickly fund the artist, this way the artist would get money for their art
Stupid blind consumers will buy a product sight unseen. I read reviews, try to find legal samples on the Internet, maybe here it on the radio, ask friends or people w/ similar musical tastes about the band. I would never pay in advance for disc that wasn't actually even recorded yet. You've probably already plunked down $50 for Duke Nukem Forever. Even the best artists produce crap sometimes, or at least music many people will not like. And what incentive would they have to make a really great disc?
why should I give money away and then people who haven't get to download the music/movie for free
No, many of the people who don't like your idea realize it would never work.
There must be a better way.
Shoot to kill on first sight!
That's what prices are for. If you don't like the price, don't pay it. Businesses will learn very quickly if spreading the cost out across all of their products is better than charging those that use the service. In this case, I suspect the minor (if any?) increase in price per product doesn't result in a significant drop in the # of buyers to warrent charging outright for the service, and in fact may result in more buyers meaning that no increase in price is required.
MS has been saying that to be safe don't run exe's off the net and disable activeX,
Microsoft has been saying don't run unknown EXEs and ActiveX controls. They do sign all of their controls so for those of us who check before we run something we can validate that they're actually from Microsoft or some other trusted party before we run the app/control.
Should I be worried? Does anyone know if being exposed to 2.4 GHz emissions might also be harmful?
I wish I could give you more information, but the last thing I saw was the phone number of a workers comp. lawyer in the yellow pages. Now I am nearly blind, unable to work, and entitled to $75 million from cell phone makers, wi-fi makers, waffle makers, and McDonalds.