I don't particularly want to watch movies on my computer, but my computer runs linux anyway so i would have to buy a windows license and install some kind of virtualization, which is very wrong. Or i could pirate windows, but then i could just pirate the movies too.
I want to watch movies on my tv, connected to which i have a satellite receiver. It has an ethernet port, and is able to stream media files in a variety of formats from an SMB or NFS share. I would like to use this, perfectly capable device and yet netflix arbitrarily decided that my device doesn't suit them.
I want to watch movies when i want, on whatever i want. I am willing to pay for the service, but the only "service" that lets me do this doesn't charge anything.
Inability to download and play offline.. Inability to use whatever device *i* choose..
The BBC is a subscription-based service provider which streams content to you. They do so using broadcast television signals complying with the DVB-T and DVB-S standards. The specifications required are openly available to the public, and you are free to use any compatible device to view the stream.
DRM doesn't work at all, but hackers are also pragmatic... The content on netflix is usually outdated, most things are released on dvd, bluray or shown on broadcast tv long before they are available on netflix. Why would anyone bother to crack a netflix stream, when they already have an equivalent or better source for the same media?
The DRM inherently impacts on the features performance and usability...
Features - unable to record and watch later, or transfer to an arbitrary device of your choosing, unable to create edits etc. Performance - extra overhead of having to decrypt the data etc. Usability - more to go wrong, harder to create your own frontend or use a third party one.
I used to only block particularly obnoxious ads (those with sound mostly, or any form of popup that disrupts what your doing)... But then i found there were simply too many obnoxious ads that it was easier to block them all. I never had a problem with simple banners or text ads, and would never have considered blocking them.
What i found particularly offensive was video ads for movies that started automatically playing (thus distracting me with the noise and wasting a substantial amount of bandwidth), and which were for movies that i couldn't even legally see in my location!
Incidentally advertisers generally pay per click not per view, and those who block ads are generally those who would never have clicked on them in the first place.
Lack of experience? ChromeOS is a subset of linux, people are already sufficiently familiar with the parts of linux it does include.
Yes there have been bugs in the linux kernel, but remember that most distribution kernels are generic builds with a large number of drivers and functionality available. If you configure your own kernel, you can turn off what you don't need and this is what google will have done with chromeos. The basic common functionality will be well debugged and see a lot less code churn.
For a lot of people, the interfaces they use on a daily basis have already been written in HTML and CSS... I know many people who use a computer for:
email (webmail) facebook twitter occasional searches for information via google im (usually the one provided by facebook) porn
All of these are usable via chromeos right now, and enable someone to just get on with it without having to worry about malware or keeping their os up to date (or even caring what an os is).
ChromeOS shares enough similarities with Linux and the Chrome browser that people will already have a decent level of familiarity with it... And $3.14 million is a pretty decent incentive to try.
The problem is 'computers' are far too complex devices for the average end user, it is irresponsible to let most people connect such a complex device to a public resource when they have no idea how it works. Content-sipping machines managed by a third party are what the average user should have, 'computers' should be reserved for geeks who understand how to use them.
Why would it stop indiscriminate spam? Hacked boxes? Spam coming from foreign systems outside of the jurisdiction of those imposing the tax? All it would do is punish legitimate organisations who send a lot of email.
Limiting it to a particular codec is stupidity, disallows extensibility and creates lock-in.
Limiting to a single codec makes perfect sense, that way you guarantee that every implementation supports the standard codec(s). You can always create updated versions of the spec later which support different codecs, and then users are left in no doubt over compatibility. If you allow arbitrary codecs then you might as well not have a standard, since you have no idea what codecs any given implementation will support.
Microsoft's intent is to be able to have platform-specific, patent-protected codecs so they can block interoperability with other platforms.
Wrong again. CU-RTC-Web does no such thing, dont make up shit just because you dont know what you are talking about.
They do nothing to prevent this, thus leaving the door open for doing it in the future. Given MS' past history the chances of them doing so are extremely high and it would be foolish for anyone else to take the risk. Mandating a specific codec does act to block implementations from coming up with their own proprietary codecs for lock-in purposes.
Because Apple don't have a monopoly, you can ignore Apple entirely and suffer no ill effects. Noone will start sending you files that require an ipad to open, noone will start telling you that network policy requires that you can only connect an ipad to it, no websites are being designed that are intentionally only usable from an ipad.
You can entirely ignore Apple, and get along just fine and do the same things with your android or windows based devices.
Apple may be big, but not big enough to distort the market in order to make it difficult for competitors.
Because MS have sufficient market share to distort the market (resulting in third party sites and applications tied to their browser to the exclusion of any others), no other OS does. MS are also big enough they cannot be ignored, linux and mac users are often sent files in proprietary MS formats, or forced to deal with similar crap. It's very rare that people who have chosen otherwise are forced to deal with linux or mac.
When MS are just one of many, and you can safely ignore them without being forced to deal with their proprietary crap then perhaps regulators can leave them alone. No single company should ever have the power to distort a market like this.
There tend to be more freeloaders who work in offices... If you're at home then people want to see evidence that your work is getting done, whereas if your in the office turning up on time is often taken for such evidence. I've known a great many people who turn up to the office, only to browse the web, play games, chat or conduct their own business all day, all while sitting at their desk where management assumes they are working.
Because by showing up at someone's desk, or calling them on the phone you are making the statement "stop whatever you are doing and devote your attention to me right now". Such actions should be reserved for situations which are urgent, for anything else you can email and someone will respond when its convenient to do so.
A distraction like this also breaks your concentration, so the loss of productivity extends beyond the distraction itself as it takes you time to recover what you were doing before...
It's more that NT for Alpha had a far more limited, and thus far better tested set of drivers, and the machines were only mid to highend - no lowend questionable hardware to worry about. The same reason Apple have a reputation for stability, despite these days being based on mostly the same components as any other x86 vendor.
Well, x86 chips used to be used only in cheap toys, and serious workstations and servers ran m68k, VAX, Sparc, MIPS or ALPHA etc...
What keeps x86 alive however is closed source binaries, only the original authors can port them to a new architecture and they may not be able to, or may not want to (eg due to not enough users - chicken and egg problem), and so because of the lack of software very few people buy the new processor either.
For those of us not tied to closed source binaries, non x86 architectures come and go... You used to get top performance from Alpha, then from IA64, and now you can get better power efficiency from ARM. I run my small home server on ARM because its low power and quiet.
The lowend cisco devices are just general purpose processors, and usually not even very highend ones at that. Their firewalls are the same too, generic low spec x86 servers that will routinely have a fraction of the processing power of the servers sat behind them. It's only the highend that's worth having, and really highend routers are quite a niche market.
But since this story is about embedded uses, users don't buy operating systems either, they buy the entire device. Embedded devs on the other hand do select a kernel, and will often build their own userland to go on top of it.
Companies won't port games unless they see enough potential customers, and they have traditionally made the assumption that there are very few linux game players and that the few there are would just dual boot to play games anyway. If enough people buy the linux games available on steam, then you will get more being made, and you will also see developers creating their initial games with portability in mind (eg using opengl instead of directx etc) to decrease the cost of porting.
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I don't particularly want to watch movies on my computer, but my computer runs linux anyway so i would have to buy a windows license and install some kind of virtualization, which is very wrong. Or i could pirate windows, but then i could just pirate the movies too.
I want to watch movies on my tv, connected to which i have a satellite receiver. It has an ethernet port, and is able to stream media files in a variety of formats from an SMB or NFS share. I would like to use this, perfectly capable device and yet netflix arbitrarily decided that my device doesn't suit them.
I want to watch movies when i want, on whatever i want. I am willing to pay for the service, but the only "service" that lets me do this doesn't charge anything.
Inability to download and play offline..
Inability to use whatever device *i* choose..
The BBC is a subscription-based service provider which streams content to you. They do so using broadcast television signals complying with the DVB-T and DVB-S standards. The specifications required are openly available to the public, and you are free to use any compatible device to view the stream.
DRM doesn't work at all, but hackers are also pragmatic...
The content on netflix is usually outdated, most things are released on dvd, bluray or shown on broadcast tv long before they are available on netflix. Why would anyone bother to crack a netflix stream, when they already have an equivalent or better source for the same media?
The DRM inherently impacts on the features performance and usability...
Features - unable to record and watch later, or transfer to an arbitrary device of your choosing, unable to create edits etc.
Performance - extra overhead of having to decrypt the data etc.
Usability - more to go wrong, harder to create your own frontend or use a third party one.
Why not? they ride roughshod over the customers by implementing drm schemes and ever extending copyright terms in the first place.
I used to only block particularly obnoxious ads (those with sound mostly, or any form of popup that disrupts what your doing)... But then i found there were simply too many obnoxious ads that it was easier to block them all.
I never had a problem with simple banners or text ads, and would never have considered blocking them.
What i found particularly offensive was video ads for movies that started automatically playing (thus distracting me with the noise and wasting a substantial amount of bandwidth), and which were for movies that i couldn't even legally see in my location!
Incidentally advertisers generally pay per click not per view, and those who block ads are generally those who would never have clicked on them in the first place.
Lack of experience? ChromeOS is a subset of linux, people are already sufficiently familiar with the parts of linux it does include.
Yes there have been bugs in the linux kernel, but remember that most distribution kernels are generic builds with a large number of drivers and functionality available. If you configure your own kernel, you can turn off what you don't need and this is what google will have done with chromeos. The basic common functionality will be well debugged and see a lot less code churn.
Only it has a browser, exactly the thing that was successfully cracked in the other contests.
For a lot of people, the interfaces they use on a daily basis have already been written in HTML and CSS...
I know many people who use a computer for:
email (webmail)
facebook
twitter
occasional searches for information via google
im (usually the one provided by facebook)
porn
All of these are usable via chromeos right now, and enable someone to just get on with it without having to worry about malware or keeping their os up to date (or even caring what an os is).
The keyboard, which you could log if you compromised the host.
ChromeOS shares enough similarities with Linux and the Chrome browser that people will already have a decent level of familiarity with it... And $3.14 million is a pretty decent incentive to try.
The problem is 'computers' are far too complex devices for the average end user, it is irresponsible to let most people connect such a complex device to a public resource when they have no idea how it works.
Content-sipping machines managed by a third party are what the average user should have, 'computers' should be reserved for geeks who understand how to use them.
Why would it stop indiscriminate spam?
Hacked boxes?
Spam coming from foreign systems outside of the jurisdiction of those imposing the tax?
All it would do is punish legitimate organisations who send a lot of email.
It's quite ridiculous to claim data to be "private" when you are broadcasting it unencrypted via wifi...
Limiting it to a particular codec is stupidity, disallows extensibility and creates lock-in.
Limiting to a single codec makes perfect sense, that way you guarantee that every implementation supports the standard codec(s). You can always create updated versions of the spec later which support different codecs, and then users are left in no doubt over compatibility.
If you allow arbitrary codecs then you might as well not have a standard, since you have no idea what codecs any given implementation will support.
Microsoft's intent is to be able to have platform-specific, patent-protected codecs so they can block interoperability with other platforms.
Wrong again. CU-RTC-Web does no such thing, dont make up shit just because you dont know what you are talking about.
They do nothing to prevent this, thus leaving the door open for doing it in the future. Given MS' past history the chances of them doing so are extremely high and it would be foolish for anyone else to take the risk.
Mandating a specific codec does act to block implementations from coming up with their own proprietary codecs for lock-in purposes.
Because Apple don't have a monopoly, you can ignore Apple entirely and suffer no ill effects. Noone will start sending you files that require an ipad to open, noone will start telling you that network policy requires that you can only connect an ipad to it, no websites are being designed that are intentionally only usable from an ipad.
You can entirely ignore Apple, and get along just fine and do the same things with your android or windows based devices.
Apple may be big, but not big enough to distort the market in order to make it difficult for competitors.
Because MS have sufficient market share to distort the market (resulting in third party sites and applications tied to their browser to the exclusion of any others), no other OS does.
MS are also big enough they cannot be ignored, linux and mac users are often sent files in proprietary MS formats, or forced to deal with similar crap. It's very rare that people who have chosen otherwise are forced to deal with linux or mac.
When MS are just one of many, and you can safely ignore them without being forced to deal with their proprietary crap then perhaps regulators can leave them alone. No single company should ever have the power to distort a market like this.
There tend to be more freeloaders who work in offices...
If you're at home then people want to see evidence that your work is getting done, whereas if your in the office turning up on time is often taken for such evidence. I've known a great many people who turn up to the office, only to browse the web, play games, chat or conduct their own business all day, all while sitting at their desk where management assumes they are working.
Because by showing up at someone's desk, or calling them on the phone you are making the statement "stop whatever you are doing and devote your attention to me right now". Such actions should be reserved for situations which are urgent, for anything else you can email and someone will respond when its convenient to do so.
A distraction like this also breaks your concentration, so the loss of productivity extends beyond the distraction itself as it takes you time to recover what you were doing before...
It's more that NT for Alpha had a far more limited, and thus far better tested set of drivers, and the machines were only mid to highend - no lowend questionable hardware to worry about.
The same reason Apple have a reputation for stability, despite these days being based on mostly the same components as any other x86 vendor.
Well, x86 chips used to be used only in cheap toys, and serious workstations and servers ran m68k, VAX, Sparc, MIPS or ALPHA etc...
What keeps x86 alive however is closed source binaries, only the original authors can port them to a new architecture and they may not be able to, or may not want to (eg due to not enough users - chicken and egg problem), and so because of the lack of software very few people buy the new processor either.
For those of us not tied to closed source binaries, non x86 architectures come and go... You used to get top performance from Alpha, then from IA64, and now you can get better power efficiency from ARM. I run my small home server on ARM because its low power and quiet.
The lowend cisco devices are just general purpose processors, and usually not even very highend ones at that. Their firewalls are the same too, generic low spec x86 servers that will routinely have a fraction of the processing power of the servers sat behind them.
It's only the highend that's worth having, and really highend routers are quite a niche market.
But since this story is about embedded uses, users don't buy operating systems either, they buy the entire device.
Embedded devs on the other hand do select a kernel, and will often build their own userland to go on top of it.
Linux has always had choice over UI, there is no reason someone couldn't create something similar if users actually wanted it.
Companies won't port games unless they see enough potential customers, and they have traditionally made the assumption that there are very few linux game players and that the few there are would just dual boot to play games anyway.
If enough people buy the linux games available on steam, then you will get more being made, and you will also see developers creating their initial games with portability in mind (eg using opengl instead of directx etc) to decrease the cost of porting.