How do you propose Google, Mozilla and Opera continue to give away their browser for free if they have to pay 10 cents for every user of it? How are open source developers supposed to pay 10 cents for everyone who uses their code?
This is basically an attempt to kill free software, because in a free market price competition would eventually turn software into an utterly unprofitable business, where software is all given away free.
Do you think *anyone* would use these browsers if they weren't free? Users would have to pay for their OS, and use whatever browser it came with. This would lead to another IE6, where the browser stagnates for many years because it has no competition.
Users who wanted to use a free OS would be unable to access all parts of the web, forcing them to either pay up, be left out or become "pirates".
The ascent of Firefox and now Chrome has been nothing but good for the web as a whole, because they broke the IE6 stranglehold there is finally innovation happening on the web again... CSS is moving forwards, HTML5 is well on its way to being widespread, MS have been forced to start improving their browser and it's much easier for other organisations to make useful web browsing devices.
Could the iPhone have existed 10 years ago when the majority of sites were designed only for IE? Probably not, people would have considered it to be a half assed browsing experience (like WAP and other mobile browsers were) and it would have died out.
How about having to pay 20-30 cents per copy of linux (thats an infinite price increase in many cases)... And if you start there, where does it stop? A few years from now you might have to license so much proprietary crap that free software simply ceases to exist.
Google should not get any condemnation whatsoever, they are promoting an open standard at the expense of a proprietary one... Would you condemn Sun for promoting the ODF format via OpenOffice?
Google may have created WebM, but they have released full documentation and code under liberal enough terms, since when have MS done anything like this? Where a standard came from isn't important, how open the standard is, that's what matters.
It has traditionally been possible to both view the web and to contribute towards it by creating sites or operating a server, and all using free software. It is also possible for you to create your own software to interact with the web, either as a client or a server, and all the documentation needed for you to do so is freely available.
If H.264 starts becoming common, then that freedom is lost and it's a slippery slope...
And if H.264 were released as a totally royalty free standard, just like HTML, Javascript, CSS and all the other web standards then it wouldn't be a problem.
Also most of those companies don't produce web browsers... Only Apple and MS produce browsers that support H.264, Mozilla, Google and Opera produce browsers which support WebM.
The Internet has thrived because it's built on open standards, while proprietary networks attempting to compete with it have either died out or been relegated to just providing access to the real internet. The idea of a key component of the web becoming proprietary and requiring a license fee to use is the start of a very slippery slope, and it ends with any web browser or device including one being priced stupidly high because you have to pay royalties to a whole heap of companies that just sit around collecting them and not doing anything useful.
Some of us live in small apartments and simply don't have anywhere to store big piles of optical media... On the other hand, so long as we acquire drm-free music we can easily make a bit perfect copy onto a small, large capacity and very convenient hard drive or two.
Nothing to stop you from downloading lossless audio files, and such files could easily be made available which were far superior in quality to a standard CD.
But as you point out, once you reach "good enough" then convenience and/or cheapness will trump quality. Most people listen to their music on extremely lousy equipment anyway, so the difference between compressed and uncompressed is often irrelevant in many cases.
But the real reason for closing the plant is because sony want to sell the same music, at a lower quality, but for the same price (Despite the massively lower production costs - ie no need to run factories like this).
Assuming the source server is faster than the destination and all links in between can keep up, then perhaps FTP can work out faster for a single file.. But then again, why use FTP and not just HTTP? Using HTTP works far better with NAT gateways and the like.
Also, keep in mind the original post which talked about chopping a file up into segments for FTP, bittorrent handles segments internally and will recover corrupted data far more granularly than 15mb files, as well as easily handling downloads from multiple sources in situations where the source server is slower than the client.
And why would you want to use FTP at all for anything, if you really must download from a single server why not use rsync over ssh, or even http? FTP offers no advantages whatsoever, only disadvantages.
So what you're saying is that splitting a file into annoying segments is a kludge to get around obsolete transfer protocols that do not do checksumming of data and cannot do arbitrary partial downloads?
If distributing using bittorrent or rsync, then these problems simply don't exist. It looks like splitting the files up is actually an attempt to gain some of the features offered by bittorrent (being able to source segments from multiple places to speed up downloads, and being able to download arbitrary segments as necessary)... That's like spending $100k fixing up a rusty old lowend car and improving its performance, instead of buying a decent $100k car.
Why would anyone want to use a dated protocol like FTP in preference to a modern one like bittorrent? At the very least they should be using SFTP or SCP for security reasons anyway, especially over the internet... Hating someone simply because they choose to use a modern protocol for their downloading, and have abandoned the antiquated protocols you use is ridiculous. Do these same people also hate fibre optic cables because they prefer copper? Perhaps they also love their monochrome television sets and despise anyone who dares use a color set...
I'm surprised anyone uses FTP at all anymore, it has extremely limited partial downloading (you can only append), all the transfers as well as the data connection go over the network in the clear, the protocol is very unfriendly towards nat - and attempts to add security such as FTPS make the nat problem worse.
criminals somehow don't choose to disregard their own safety when they violently attack others
This bit actually is true, criminals will always try to attack easy prey... If you're armed with RPGs and AK47s, and your attacking a ship manned by an unarmed crew then you are pretty safe, an unarmed crew isn't going to harm a gang of armed men.
I would hardly call it unnecessary... Let's not forget that these are pirates looking to board your ship and hold you hostage, they might even decide to kill or torture you. Shooting them is a very sensible act of self defence.
When pirates existed in the past, ships would routinely be armed with cannon in order to fight off pirate attacks.
Or smaller, heavily armed ships that travel along with the merchant ship for all but the last few miles into port. They can wait in international waters until the merchant ship departs port. We could call these ships `escorts'.
Also if a company leaks information such as card details, make *them* liable for any fraud which occurs as a result... When a mass fraud happens, it's quite easy to work out that all the stolen cards were used with the same company.
Considering that as a vodafone customer you can travel to 30 countries and use a network owned by the same company, the roaming rates are pretty extortionate when you actually try to do so.
The PCI requirements aren't great, many are short sighted, flawed or just plain wrong...
Also if you're a small company, they will hit you over the head and force you to comply with their requirements, if you're a huge company like vodafone you get cut a lot more slack because they don't want to lose your business.
Most PCI consultants are geared up towards "how can we get through this with the minimum of disruption" rather than "how can we improve security", they comply with the letter of the pci regulations but not necessarily the spirit, and will often try to find loopholes.
A signature must match the one that's prominently displayed on the back of the card ready for the thief to copy... That's assuming the merchant actually checks, because usually they don't bother. And if large transactions flag too much attention, just make lots of small transactions instead.
And how much time did you spend trying to find where "their webpages" were? How could you be sure that "their webpages" actually contained genuine applications, and were not scams or malware?
Some people are technically literate enough, have enough spare time to jump through these hoops and can actually be bothered. Most people however, are lacking in one of those three areas and would rather have everything in one place being managed by someone who knows what they're doing.
Personally i think that all phones (and any other electronic device capable of running additional software beyond what it came with) should be configured by default to fetch software from repositories operated by the hardware or os supplier. Ofcourse, there should always be an *advanced option* allowing users to install their own software or to change the default repositories, but these options should only ever be used by technically literate people who understand what they're doing. The vast majority of users would be far better off by sticking to the defaults.
Yes, the app store / repository model massively benefits consumers, the hassle of looking for applications manually on the internet, running the risk of finding scams or malware instead of real applications.
It doesn't have to be locked to a single provider, open package managers have existed a lot longer, its just that apple has marketed the app store much better. I've been saying for years that end users would love the linux package manager model if only they knew it existed.
Incidentally, google's motivation with android is not to dominate the mobile space so much as to ensure their internet services don't get forced out the market by an aggressive competitor (eg microsoft)... The only reason msn has *any* market share at all (and the fact it still has relatively little is testament to how inferior their offerings are) is because MS have pushed it as the default homepage for years. If they'd had an offering that was good enough, not necessarily better than google but just good enough to keep people from looking for alternatives then google would be nowhere today.
I can't say i've used windows phone 7 myself, nor have i been tempted to try, and neither has anyone i know... When talking about phones, there are a lot of things putting people off windows phone 7...
It looks ugly in the commercials, the big bland tiles that don't quite all fit on the screen, not very enticing...
It's associated with windows, microsoft seem to view this as a good thing and try to associate all their products with windows but it's really not, windows is associated with crashing, viruses and the other unpleasantness.. Now on desktops people assume that this unpleasantness is unavoidable because they don't realise alternatives to windows exist, but on phones consumers know that there are better options. Also when you advertise a device as running windows, people will assume it therefore runs the same software that their windows based desktop does (and some of the advertising i've seen actually infers this)... Many people buy a windows ce based arm laptop, or a windows mobile phone and are severely disappointed to discover that this is not the case despite what the advertising leads them to believe. A mobile OS is a different product doing a different thing, give it a different name!
It misses basic features like cut+paste and multitasking... This isn't so much of a big deal as most users don't even know about such things, but its more of a problem than when Apple started out... When the first iphone went on sale many of the people who bought it were coming from dumb phones where such features didn't exist and were therefore not missed anyway. Today things are different, many more people already have smartphones and there is plenty of advertising in the mass media which mentions things like multitasking and cut+paste, wether users know what this means or even need these features the fact is windows phone 7 doesn't have it and is therefore perceived as inferior.
Not only does it not get any smaller, after the first round of compression (assuming it wasn't done using a ridiculously weak algorithm), compressing it again will typically make the files bigger as you now have extra metadata added which is associated with the compression format.
This is why things like rar'd video files, as commonly found on torrent sites are so ridiculous, the video is already compressed so running it through rar just wastes cpu cycles and disk space all round.
Apple aren't going anywhere... Once the market settles down you will likely see iOS taking a significant portion of the highend, with various android handsets occupying the lower ground. I imagine RIM will get pushed into a niche with business users as they don't really have a very good consumer offering. Also remember that android is a platform used by multiple manufacturers while iOS is used by only one, there may be many more iphone 4s out there than any given model of android phone even if android as a platform has far more market share.
But consider other countries, where the iphone is already available on every network in the country, either officially via a carrier subsidised handset or unofficially by simply using an unlocked handset. It's only really the US where the iphone is restricted to a small subset of networks.
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How do you propose Google, Mozilla and Opera continue to give away their browser for free if they have to pay 10 cents for every user of it?
How are open source developers supposed to pay 10 cents for everyone who uses their code?
This is basically an attempt to kill free software, because in a free market price competition would eventually turn software into an utterly unprofitable business, where software is all given away free.
Do you think *anyone* would use these browsers if they weren't free?
Users would have to pay for their OS, and use whatever browser it came with. This would lead to another IE6, where the browser stagnates for many years because it has no competition.
Users who wanted to use a free OS would be unable to access all parts of the web, forcing them to either pay up, be left out or become "pirates".
The ascent of Firefox and now Chrome has been nothing but good for the web as a whole, because they broke the IE6 stranglehold there is finally innovation happening on the web again... CSS is moving forwards, HTML5 is well on its way to being widespread, MS have been forced to start improving their browser and it's much easier for other organisations to make useful web browsing devices.
Could the iPhone have existed 10 years ago when the majority of sites were designed only for IE? Probably not, people would have considered it to be a half assed browsing experience (like WAP and other mobile browsers were) and it would have died out.
How about having to pay 20-30 cents per copy of linux (thats an infinite price increase in many cases)...
And if you start there, where does it stop? A few years from now you might have to license so much proprietary crap that free software simply ceases to exist.
Google should not get any condemnation whatsoever, they are promoting an open standard at the expense of a proprietary one...
Would you condemn Sun for promoting the ODF format via OpenOffice?
Google may have created WebM, but they have released full documentation and code under liberal enough terms, since when have MS done anything like this? Where a standard came from isn't important, how open the standard is, that's what matters.
It has traditionally been possible to both view the web and to contribute towards it by creating sites or operating a server, and all using free software. It is also possible for you to create your own software to interact with the web, either as a client or a server, and all the documentation needed for you to do so is freely available.
If H.264 starts becoming common, then that freedom is lost and it's a slippery slope...
And if H.264 were released as a totally royalty free standard, just like HTML, Javascript, CSS and all the other web standards then it wouldn't be a problem.
Also most of those companies don't produce web browsers... Only Apple and MS produce browsers that support H.264, Mozilla, Google and Opera produce browsers which support WebM.
The Internet has thrived because it's built on open standards, while proprietary networks attempting to compete with it have either died out or been relegated to just providing access to the real internet. The idea of a key component of the web becoming proprietary and requiring a license fee to use is the start of a very slippery slope, and it ends with any web browser or device including one being priced stupidly high because you have to pay royalties to a whole heap of companies that just sit around collecting them and not doing anything useful.
Some of us live in small apartments and simply don't have anywhere to store big piles of optical media...
On the other hand, so long as we acquire drm-free music we can easily make a bit perfect copy onto a small, large capacity and very convenient hard drive or two.
Nothing to stop you from downloading lossless audio files, and such files could easily be made available which were far superior in quality to a standard CD.
But as you point out, once you reach "good enough" then convenience and/or cheapness will trump quality. Most people listen to their music on extremely lousy equipment anyway, so the difference between compressed and uncompressed is often irrelevant in many cases.
But the real reason for closing the plant is because sony want to sell the same music, at a lower quality, but for the same price (Despite the massively lower production costs - ie no need to run factories like this).
Efficient in what way?
Assuming the source server is faster than the destination and all links in between can keep up, then perhaps FTP can work out faster for a single file.. But then again, why use FTP and not just HTTP? Using HTTP works far better with NAT gateways and the like.
Also, keep in mind the original post which talked about chopping a file up into segments for FTP, bittorrent handles segments internally and will recover corrupted data far more granularly than 15mb files, as well as easily handling downloads from multiple sources in situations where the source server is slower than the client.
And why would you want to use FTP at all for anything, if you really must download from a single server why not use rsync over ssh, or even http? FTP offers no advantages whatsoever, only disadvantages.
MSN never was the biggest, but the point is that noone would use it at all were it not configured as the default in IE...
So what you're saying is that splitting a file into annoying segments is a kludge to get around obsolete transfer protocols that do not do checksumming of data and cannot do arbitrary partial downloads?
If distributing using bittorrent or rsync, then these problems simply don't exist. It looks like splitting the files up is actually an attempt to gain some of the features offered by bittorrent (being able to source segments from multiple places to speed up downloads, and being able to download arbitrary segments as necessary)... That's like spending $100k fixing up a rusty old lowend car and improving its performance, instead of buying a decent $100k car.
Why would anyone want to use a dated protocol like FTP in preference to a modern one like bittorrent? At the very least they should be using SFTP or SCP for security reasons anyway, especially over the internet... Hating someone simply because they choose to use a modern protocol for their downloading, and have abandoned the antiquated protocols you use is ridiculous. Do these same people also hate fibre optic cables because they prefer copper? Perhaps they also love their monochrome television sets and despise anyone who dares use a color set...
I'm surprised anyone uses FTP at all anymore, it has extremely limited partial downloading (you can only append), all the transfers as well as the data connection go over the network in the clear, the protocol is very unfriendly towards nat - and attempts to add security such as FTPS make the nat problem worse.
criminals somehow don't choose to disregard their own safety when they violently attack others
This bit actually is true, criminals will always try to attack easy prey... If you're armed with RPGs and AK47s, and your attacking a ship manned by an unarmed crew then you are pretty safe, an unarmed crew isn't going to harm a gang of armed men.
I would hardly call it unnecessary...
Let's not forget that these are pirates looking to board your ship and hold you hostage, they might even decide to kill or torture you. Shooting them is a very sensible act of self defence.
When pirates existed in the past, ships would routinely be armed with cannon in order to fight off pirate attacks.
Or smaller, heavily armed ships that travel along with the merchant ship for all but the last few miles into port. They can wait in international waters until the merchant ship departs port.
We could call these ships `escorts'.
If a ship deploys such expensive technology as this, they must have something valuable... So lets send more pirate ships to capture it.
Also if a company leaks information such as card details, make *them* liable for any fraud which occurs as a result...
When a mass fraud happens, it's quite easy to work out that all the stolen cards were used with the same company.
Considering that as a vodafone customer you can travel to 30 countries and use a network owned by the same company, the roaming rates are pretty extortionate when you actually try to do so.
The PCI requirements aren't great, many are short sighted, flawed or just plain wrong...
Also if you're a small company, they will hit you over the head and force you to comply with their requirements, if you're a huge company like vodafone you get cut a lot more slack because they don't want to lose your business.
Most PCI consultants are geared up towards "how can we get through this with the minimum of disruption" rather than "how can we improve security", they comply with the letter of the pci regulations but not necessarily the spirit, and will often try to find loopholes.
A signature must match the one that's prominently displayed on the back of the card ready for the thief to copy... That's assuming the merchant actually checks, because usually they don't bother. And if large transactions flag too much attention, just make lots of small transactions instead.
And how much time did you spend trying to find where "their webpages" were?
How could you be sure that "their webpages" actually contained genuine applications, and were not scams or malware?
Some people are technically literate enough, have enough spare time to jump through these hoops and can actually be bothered. Most people however, are lacking in one of those three areas and would rather have everything in one place being managed by someone who knows what they're doing.
Personally i think that all phones (and any other electronic device capable of running additional software beyond what it came with) should be configured by default to fetch software from repositories operated by the hardware or os supplier. Ofcourse, there should always be an *advanced option* allowing users to install their own software or to change the default repositories, but these options should only ever be used by technically literate people who understand what they're doing. The vast majority of users would be far better off by sticking to the defaults.
Yes, the app store / repository model massively benefits consumers, the hassle of looking for applications manually on the internet, running the risk of finding scams or malware instead of real applications.
It doesn't have to be locked to a single provider, open package managers have existed a lot longer, its just that apple has marketed the app store much better. I've been saying for years that end users would love the linux package manager model if only they knew it existed.
Incidentally, google's motivation with android is not to dominate the mobile space so much as to ensure their internet services don't get forced out the market by an aggressive competitor (eg microsoft)... The only reason msn has *any* market share at all (and the fact it still has relatively little is testament to how inferior their offerings are) is because MS have pushed it as the default homepage for years. If they'd had an offering that was good enough, not necessarily better than google but just good enough to keep people from looking for alternatives then google would be nowhere today.
I can't say i've used windows phone 7 myself, nor have i been tempted to try, and neither has anyone i know... When talking about phones, there are a lot of things putting people off windows phone 7...
It looks ugly in the commercials, the big bland tiles that don't quite all fit on the screen, not very enticing...
It's associated with windows, microsoft seem to view this as a good thing and try to associate all their products with windows but it's really not, windows is associated with crashing, viruses and the other unpleasantness.. Now on desktops people assume that this unpleasantness is unavoidable because they don't realise alternatives to windows exist, but on phones consumers know that there are better options.
Also when you advertise a device as running windows, people will assume it therefore runs the same software that their windows based desktop does (and some of the advertising i've seen actually infers this)... Many people buy a windows ce based arm laptop, or a windows mobile phone and are severely disappointed to discover that this is not the case despite what the advertising leads them to believe. A mobile OS is a different product doing a different thing, give it a different name!
It misses basic features like cut+paste and multitasking... This isn't so much of a big deal as most users don't even know about such things, but its more of a problem than when Apple started out... When the first iphone went on sale many of the people who bought it were coming from dumb phones where such features didn't exist and were therefore not missed anyway. Today things are different, many more people already have smartphones and there is plenty of advertising in the mass media which mentions things like multitasking and cut+paste, wether users know what this means or even need these features the fact is windows phone 7 doesn't have it and is therefore perceived as inferior.
Not only does it not get any smaller, after the first round of compression (assuming it wasn't done using a ridiculously weak algorithm), compressing it again will typically make the files bigger as you now have extra metadata added which is associated with the compression format.
This is why things like rar'd video files, as commonly found on torrent sites are so ridiculous, the video is already compressed so running it through rar just wastes cpu cycles and disk space all round.
Apple aren't going anywhere... Once the market settles down you will likely see iOS taking a significant portion of the highend, with various android handsets occupying the lower ground. I imagine RIM will get pushed into a niche with business users as they don't really have a very good consumer offering.
Also remember that android is a platform used by multiple manufacturers while iOS is used by only one, there may be many more iphone 4s out there than any given model of android phone even if android as a platform has far more market share.
But consider other countries, where the iphone is already available on every network in the country, either officially via a carrier subsidised handset or unofficially by simply using an unlocked handset.
It's only really the US where the iphone is restricted to a small subset of networks.