This is an old fallacy. It's basically the belief that there's a net loss of jobs when something more efficient than human labor replaces human labor. If you're only looking at half of the picture, it looks like there's a net loss. But the mistake is only looking at the immediate consequences and not looking at the longer term consequences. In the long term, efficiency creates more jobs. Don't believe me? Read this. Or this.
If you still believe that creating an efficiency is wrong when someone loses their job as a consequence, then you must also believe that using a computer is wrong, because you could clearly have hired someone (possibly lots of people) to deliver your communications instead of relying on automation. And for that matter, why use a car, when doing so has caused the unemployment of so many buggy drivers and horse . And for that matter, why use buggies at all. A single person can only travel so far on foot before needing rest. To get your messege to the entire world, you could employ many, many more people if you insisted that it be delivered by foot.
What strikes me about this article is how there's such an emphasis put on meeting critical dates, but that Microsoft is routinely late in delivering their software when they say they will.
How much value should we give to these "rules" if they don't actually work?
Because right now, in order for that ad revenue to be of any value, they need to get users. Their initial draw was 1GB of storage space. To go from 2MB of space to 1000MB of space, I suspect most users would be willing to change their email address. However, that tactic was effectively countered by Yahoo & Hotmail, who upped their space to 100MB and 200MB (respectively). Now the jump in space doesn't look as big, and the relative cost of having to change your email address is pretty big.
So for google to counter and get more interest, they have to do something. One suggestion is to make it so that users get to keep their gmail address forever. That's certainly not the only thing they could do, but it's my suggestion. I think it's a good suggestion because it's one that Yahoo & Hotmail can't offer. Gmail has nothing to lose by offering it - only users to gain. Yahoo & Hotmail have a lot to lose by offering it, so they can't. Now, of course, if some other (better) webmail service comes along, gmail could easily lose those users to that better service. So after this strategy, gmail needs to ensure that they are always the best.
Anyway, it's just one suggestion. I think it would work. But I don't hold google's purse strings, so take it for what it's worth.
The idea that the entire world has our standard of living is simply false.
You're right. But so what? Just because a large group of people in the world live at a standard of living well below our own does not mean we should stop envisioning, anticipating, and planning for the next advances in our standard of living.
Unfortunately, it's not up to Google to offer forwarding services from the competitors. If that were the case, we'd suddenly find Hotmail conveniently "forwarding" everyone else's email to their service.
I wasn't suggesting that Google forward hotmail accounts to gmail. I was suggesting that google allow gmail accounts to be forwarded to some other account. Meaning that once I get a gmail account, I can set it up to forward to some other account if I ever decide to leave gmail. This means that if I ever leave gmail, I don't have to go through dealing with changing my email address.
While this may sound like gmail would be shooting themselves, the idea is to add value to a gmail account that isn't in a yahoo or hotmail account, thus encouraging people to switch. Being able to permanantly keep a gmail account so that you don't ever have to worry about switching email service providers is of value to folks.
The point is to get them in the door. Initially 1GB did this, but it's been countered. Now, you have to offer something that the other guy won't offer -- free email forwarding. Hotmail and Yahoo won't offer this because it will encourage people to switch. But gmail can offer this because they're not currently worried about people switching away from gmail - hardly anyone is on it. They're worried about getting people in the door.
And if there service is as good as all of the beta testers are saying, then their service will keep them there.
Honestly, how does this tripe which makes so little sense get modded +5 insightful???
Because those people who modded it up, understood what was being said.
Well done Google! The others are just playing catch-up.
You think so? I don't. I think the others are playing "user retention". They're trying to lower the impact of 1GB of space on their existing user base. Remember the incumbants have some inertia on their side. Most people don't want to have to deal with changing their email address. So if you make the storage disparity less, then it makes the cost of changing your email address more.
I think this will have the exact intended effect. Users were tempted to put up with the pain of changing their email address to get the huge increase in space. Those same users probably won't switch now, because they've not got 100x more space than they used to have. Space isn't an issue anymore. Changing your email address is.
IMHO, it's a good move by these guys.
I think that google's response to this should be to offer free, permanant email forwarding. Essentially, what they'd be saying is this: OK, yes, you have to switch your email address today. But it's the last time you'll ever have to switch your email address... EVER. Do this, and it lowers the long term cost of switching your email address to gmail.
Right! I wonder what the implications would be on drug companies that do testing on a sample of your blood. If they turn up some amazing new reason why you're genetically more resistant to (for example) the common cold, who gets the rights to that if you've got a patent on your genes and they developed their new drug based on your blood?
Of course, you'd probably have a hard time proving that it was based exclusively on your blood. And if anyone else had that same genetic characteristic (like maybe your parents?) they could argue that prior art invalidates your patent.
Copyrights create a monopoly on a work. Copylefts create a non-monopoly on a work.
I think you may have missed my point, which is this: that as long as there are enforceable rules governing what can and can't be copied, if I expect you to abide by my application of those rules then it's entirely reasonable that you would expect me to abide by your application of those rules.
Personally, I don't think that the distinction that you make between copyright and copyleft exists today. Copyleft is a license granted under copyright. So it's also copyright. But even if copyleft were a completely seperate thing from copyright, it wouldn't diminish the point that I was trying to make: we (the slashdot crowd) have a double standard as far as what we expect should and shouldn't be enforceable. We expect our rules to be abided by with perfect compliance, but then turn around and ignore other folks rules with impunity.
And w.r.t. the technology being discussed, I think it would limit the types of litigation the author might see, if he/she put some system in place to ensure that the only material was distributed that had the permission of the copyright holder. I don't think it's too much to expect given that he's released his code under the GPL. If he expects others to comply with his license, he should enable his software to enforce compliance of other people's copyright licenses.
Wouldn't this make no sense unless you wanted to wait forever for the program to be completely downloaded?
In a previous post I talked about a similar problem when TiVo suggested a similar feature. I think this would apply here too. This doesn't change the DVR recording model, which is schedule something and watch it later. The only thing that this adds is that it makes the Internet a like a TV channel, from which you can set up something to record, and then watch it later. It's not *exactly* like a TV channel, but it still fits the DVR model.
Does it make sense to put this amount of effort into support of what might be intended to be an illegal activity for most?
The person/people who are creating this tech have got to pull off a trick. They've got to figure out how to make sure that the only content available is distributed with the permission of the copyright holder. If they can do that, then they have a much more credible case that this is not intended to be a tool which is intended for copyright violation.
I don't mean to suggest that copyright is a good thing. But it exists in today's world. It never ceases to amaze me when we (the slashdot crowd) get up in arms when someone violates the GPL (i.e. violates copyright) and then we turn around and violate copyright when it comes to music or movies or... The point is that we can't ride whatever side of the fence is most convenient. Either copyright should be enforceable and we support others rights to enforce their copyrights or copyright should not be enforceable and we allow GPL violations without restriction. Which means that if we want a solid GPL, then we should also ensure that this tech does everything to respect other's copyrights.
$.02.
Re:How YOU can help Open Source!
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By your own logic you should ask your boss to be fired. If people just can't control themselves, can we conclude that you post inflamatory comments to discussion sites during work hours?
...it will only be if there is no alternative made available
A market could be there if people actually like paying for decaying DVDs in preference to paying for something else. And the something else doesn't have to be permanent DVDs. Of course, if, as you suggest, the price of perm DVDs shot way up, then most folks would probably prefer the decaying DVDs to perm DVDs and this creates a market. But that's not the only way to create a market for these things. Another way would be to make the price of the decaying DVDs so cheap that instead of competing with perm DVDs they competed with DVD rentals, like blockbuster (et al).
Of course, this has already been tried and failed with Circuit City and their DIVX titles. But DIVX was dumb. CC didn't realize that they should have been competing with blockbuster instead of permanent DVDs. If you're going to pay money to have a temporary copy of a movie, what would you rather pay: $4 at blockbuster, or $14 at Circuit City? In other words, CC didn't set the price of DIVX titles in such a way as to get consumers to prefer it over something else.
If these new decaying DVDs can compete with DVD rentals, then there's a possibility. Because at that point the consumer is faced with a different choice. Would you rather pay $4 to blockbuster and be on the hook to return something or pay $4 to someone else, and just throw it away when you're done? Not having to return something is of value to folks, and a market could be created. Of course, it depends on being able to mass produce a lot of these things and get the margins right so that you can price compete with blockbusters. THAT could be really difficult.
My point is that it's not inconceivable that these disks could be marketed in such a way that everyone would like it. Including (maybe) even the/. crowd.
Ever since I got a TiVo, I don't rent movies from blockbuster anymore. Why? Because Pay Per View is just too convenient with a TiVo. If I want to watch a PPV movie, I simply set up a recording of it. I can watch it as it happens or watch it later... or watch it much later - as long as I want to save the recording.
Which means that I pretty much NEVER rent from the video store anymore. PPV usually costs a little bit less than a video rental, I don't have to return anything, and I can keep it as long as I want. Other than the fact that the concept is really kind of insulting, decaying DVDs are irrelevant to me.
I suspect that they're going to be irrelevant to most people, too, which means that there's going to be almost no market for them. But if there is a market for them, who am I to say how other people spend their money? These things are only going to take off if there's a demand. If there isn't demand, they'll die. If there is demand, they'll sell. If they sell, I think it's a bit presumptuous of the/. crowd to universally deride them. Isn't that like me telling you how you should spend your own money?
Because installing sendmail and some spam filter is non-trivial, and often a pain in the ass, and you have to worry about system security, patching, maintenance...
Not to be oppositional, but I think you've got this backwards. When you run your own server you don't have to worry about all of that stuff unless you want to. In which case, I would say that you get to worry about it. With someone else's server, you have to worry about it because you don't have any control as to whether or not they do anything.
To wit: yahoo's spam filtering basically sucks. If you choose their system you have to worry about whether or not you're going to get spam. If you run your own system, you're free to worry about it or not. You can spend a lot of time and effort setting up some antispam system that works exactly the way you like it, or you can not, and get the same amount of spam as you would @ yahoo.
I'm glossing over a lot of stuff here, but my point is that running your own server generally affords you a lot more choices. Some of which imply additional effort on your part. But it's effort that you choose to take on. You don't have to take on all of that extra effort if you don't want to. OTOH, if you go with a provider, no amount of effort on your part can fix any problems that you experience.
Actually it might. Right now, only beta testers can migrate to gmail. But most people can't. So they can't weigh whether the gmail service is better/worse than yahoo. As a consequence, people may discover that 100MB of mail space is all they need. If they're used to 6MB of mail space, 100MB is a huge increase. The decision isn't just between an additional 94MB and 994MB. It's between:
1000GB
100MB + keep current email address
Don't discount the cost of switching your email address. Keeping your email address is probably worth a whole lot more to most people than an additional 900MB of disk space... especially if they've been getting by with 6MB of disk space.
IMHO, this is a really good move on Yahoo's part. It will be interesting to see how well it works.
Ignoring the other comments that talk about the sample size being small, and that this "censorship" is being conducted by private companies, not the government, I still think this is off base.
He seems to have the assumption that we should attempt to create some method of governance for this kind of thing. Why is that necessary? Individuals can already self-regulate ISPs that do this stuff - they can switch to another ISP. Governmental regulation or policing of this is problematic. This implies some sort of governmental body. If you don't like the people who are running that body, you can only vote them out once every election cycle. However, in the current system, if you don't like the governance of your ISP, you can vote them out as frequently as you like - there's no law that says you can only switch ISPs once every election cycle.
I disagree with the premise that the only solution to prevent this type of silliness is to create a regulating body. That makes things much worse because it eliminates choice. Instead of rewarding the ISPs with the sensible behavior, they'll all have to behave identically. No more voting with your dollars. Additionally, this will likely lead to price increases for ISP services. Those ISPs that didn't activelly enforce this stuff today (the good ones) now will have to. A cost that will certiainly be passed to the customers.
IMHO: this is a good problem to solve, but the wrong assumption on how to fix it.
Why did you do "gnome-terminal -e date" before you did your time test? I noticed that you didn't do the same for konsole. Is it possible that this created a performance advantage for gnome-terminal?
I would think, at the very least, this would cause the disk blocks that hold gnome-terminal to be cached such that they're read from memory instead of disk. Wouldn't that improve performance?
Or did you do the same thing with konsole, but just forgot to include that in your results?
I have a disturbing mental image right now of a TV showing a text that reads "Buffering".
I know that your comment is modded as "Funny" but I doubt that's the way it will work. The TiVo model for watching TV is to record it now, and watch it later. Why wouldn't they do exactly the same thing for content over the internet? Users set up a request to get a show, the TiVo downloads it in the background - this could be over a period of days - and then the person watches whenever they want to as soon as it's done.
Basically, they're turning the internet into another TV channel. And just like every other TV channel, the instant that you decide to record something doesn't mean that you get to watch it(*). You have to wait for it to actually show up in your "Now Playing" list. Then you can watch it, rewind it, FF through commercials, etc.
(*) Yes, yes, you can record and watch Live TV while you're watching it. But when that happens you're limited in what you can do. And watching enough Live TV causes most TiVo-ers to simply wait until the entire thing is recorded, or they've got enough buffered so that they can do all of the trick play stuff. Nothing changes if instead of getting the stream from a TV channel, the stream comes from the internet. Watching it live imposes certain consequences. So don't watch it live.
The problem, if Windows came "bare-bones", is that no one would buy it.
Why? Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems. People don't buy windows because it looks pretty, performs better, has the correct API set. They buy windows because it came on the computer they bought, and that's the computer that they know will run the software they have.
I'm sure there are some consumers who buy windows based on other criteria, but the vast majority of windows purchases are as a consequence of compatibility. If the actual statistics showed only 99% of retail windows purchases were as a result of pre-installation, that's about 0.999% less than I would have expected.
I'm a vonage customer. I shed my dependance on the local telco with great pleasure, and a bit of egotisitcal pride. Still, having used it for about 8 months, I've come to this conclusion: it ain't for everyone.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not going back. But I can't imagine my neighbors buying into what RXC suggests. First of all, there's a reliability issue. Folks need to have 911 service available. They need to be able to call the power company in the event of an outage. They need the phone to be a *LOT* more reliable than current VOIP is.
For me, when the power goes out in our neighborhood, it doesn't matter that I've got my VOIP device connected to a UPS. When the neighborhood loses power, my broadband internet loses connectivity. No internet, no phone. No phone, no way to call the power company to report an outage. It gets worse if you imagine someone needing emergency services (e.g. 911) during a power outage.
It's a nice theory, but it doesn't scale. And reliability is the limitation. Right now, I (personally) can put up with the lack of reliability because I know that my neighbors have nice reliable land line based phones, and in a pinch, I can pester one of them to make a phone call. (I've got good neighbors, all of whom are willing to help each other out in a pinch.) But if the entire neighborhood were on VOIP, we'd all suffer. VOIP today just doesn't have the reliability to scale. Some of us who are willing to put up with the occasional echoes, inconsistent quality, and lower reliability (in exchange for much lower cost). But we can't all do that. We rely on some of the neighborhood to have a real and reliable phone service. VOIP isn't there yet. So it won't scale as far as a neighborhood. Much less become a "disruptive technology".
I didn't say anything about sales tax. I'm trying to make my point through the use of analogy. If the "it looks like a duck" rule is applied to cars, then all cars should be taxed identically. But that's not sensible. If we were to impose taxes on cars because of greenhouse emissions, then as soon as a ZEV came along, by the "looks like a duck" rule above, we should apply the same enviornmental taxes to that car. It looks like a car and drives like a car, well let's just apply all car taxes to it without taking into account why those taxes exist in the first place. That's just nonsense.
It's the same nonsense with VoIP. It looks like a phone and works like a phone. But it doesn't impose the same sort of problems that traditional phone companies impose. As a consequence, we shouldn't tax that VoIP as if it was the same thing as a traditional phone. It's different, despite the fact that it looks and works the same.
My point is this: when the technology changes, the taxation around that technology has to take those changes into account. Just because Vonage is a phone company doesn't mean that taxing them like traditional phone companies makes sense. The "it looks like a duck" argument is too simple.
Cellphones are not a monopoly, yet are still regulated.
Sure they are. They're granted exclusive use to a frequency, and they can't interfere with any of the other frequencies. Which is, of course, exactly why the FCC is pushing for the move to digital television, so that they can recover some of the frequencies so that they can encourage competition for frequency based servcies - including cell phones.
Today, there are a limited number of cell phone companies that can occupy a single area, because there are a limited number of frequencies available.
Maybe, but most companies deal with that privately.
No they don't! They can't. The right to lay physical lines is granted by the municipality. It's necessarily a public problem. And moreover that right to lay cable is granted to only one company in order to avoid the chaos that ensued right after phones became popular.
The point that the OP was making is that telcos (and cell providers) are regulated for reasons that do NOT apply to VoIP providers.
Your argument is roughly equivalent to saying that we should apply environmental taxes to hydrogen fuel cell cars in exactly the same as we tax gas or diesel based cars. The fact that both are cars is irrelevant. The gas cars have deleterious impact on the environment and are consequently taxed as such. Hydro cars don't, so they shouldn't be taxed. It doesn't matter that it "looks like a duck". If it's not actually imposing the same problems as a duck, it shouldn't be taxed like one.
I agree it's a telephone. And I agree that Vonage is a telephone company. But I disagree that being a telephone company qualifies them for regulation. What qualifies traditional phone companies for regulation is the fact that they've been granted exclusive rights to lay cable in a particular area. Consequently they must be regulated in order to ensure that their state sanctioned monopoly is not abused.
What monopoly has been granted to Vonage that requires regulation? Right now, the market that Vonage is in is rife with competition. If you don't like Vonage's service, switch to Packet8. Don't like them, try VoicePulse, etc, etc. There is no need for any level of government to regulate Vonage because the consumers can do it themselves.
There is, however need for the government to regulate BellSouth, Verizon, etc, because they are the only ones with the right to lay telephone lines. And as such, the consumer has no ability to self regulate that company. So government regulation serves a purpose. For VoIP providers, government regulation is redundant, and should not be done until a compelling reason can be identified. They are not a traditional phone company, and the rationale for regulating traditional phone companies does not apply.
I don't know enough about the bandwidth availability on cable networks to know if it would work, but it seems that there shoul
d be more than enough.
I know a little bit about it. With DOCSIS 2.0, the cable companies have a total of 30Mb/s on each analog channel. Multiply that about about 120 channels and the total available bandwidth is approximately 3600Mb/s. But, of course, to receive this, you'd need to have 120 DOCSIS 2.0 compliant cable modems. These could, of course, be integrated into a single device. But it'd be expensive.
That said, the problem is this. Imagine that you have a cable modem system with 1000 customers. Currenlty, if all 1000 customers want to watch Friends, it costs a single analog channel worth of bandwidth (the equivalent of 30Mb/s of digital bandwidth). If they delivered Friends over a digital channel instead of an analog channel it'd cost about 7.5Mb/s of bandwidth because they compress the stream using MPEG. So to deliver friends to 1000 customers at 7.5Mb/s requires 7500 Mb/s. Which is more than the total available bandwidth of all of the channels combined.
Now, you could do something like multicasting, but when you do that you're back to being on a broadcast schedule. Because not everyone is going to want/be able to receive the same bits at the same time. Or you could implement some sort of caching mechanism.
The final word is this: there are about 120 analog channels which can provide 30Mb/s each. Programs could be MPEG encoded so that they don't take up a full 30Mb/s. This is what digital cable does, and it achieves about 4 digital channels in the space of a single analog channel. Which means that you have a total available bandwitdh of about 480 channels at a customer acceptable quality at any given time. If you only have demand for 480 unique simultaneous programs, you can probably support your model. But if you have more demand than that, then your model won't work. I can't imagine it working for anything other than
a very small town cable company. If you're not convinced, ask yourself how many different websites are visited by a company of 5000 people at any given time. When I was managing the proxy, for such a company we were supporting approximately 30 new connections per second, to 500 (ish) of different web sites every hour.
I'm still pretty convinced that, for the time being, DVRs in the home recording content based on a broadcast schedule is a much better way to deliver on demand TV programming. As bandwidth requirements get better, then maybe. But HDTV which requires quite a bit more bandwidth (19.2 Mb/s I believe) makes the probelm even harder.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an old fallacy. It's basically the belief that there's a net loss of jobs when something more efficient than human labor replaces human labor. If you're only looking at half of the picture, it looks like there's a net loss. But the mistake is only looking at the immediate consequences and not looking at the longer term consequences. In the long term, efficiency creates more jobs. Don't believe me? Read this. Or this.
If you still believe that creating an efficiency is wrong when someone loses their job as a consequence, then you must also believe that using a computer is wrong, because you could clearly have hired someone (possibly lots of people) to deliver your communications instead of relying on automation. And for that matter, why use a car, when doing so has caused the unemployment of so many buggy drivers and horse . And for that matter, why use buggies at all. A single person can only travel so far on foot before needing rest. To get your messege to the entire world, you could employ many, many more people if you insisted that it be delivered by foot.
What strikes me about this article is how there's such an emphasis put on meeting critical dates, but that Microsoft is routinely late in delivering their software when they say they will.
How much value should we give to these "rules" if they don't actually work?
Because right now, in order for that ad revenue to be of any value, they need to get users. Their initial draw was 1GB of storage space. To go from 2MB of space to 1000MB of space, I suspect most users would be willing to change their email address. However, that tactic was effectively countered by Yahoo & Hotmail, who upped their space to 100MB and 200MB (respectively). Now the jump in space doesn't look as big, and the relative cost of having to change your email address is pretty big.
So for google to counter and get more interest, they have to do something. One suggestion is to make it so that users get to keep their gmail address forever. That's certainly not the only thing they could do, but it's my suggestion. I think it's a good suggestion because it's one that Yahoo & Hotmail can't offer. Gmail has nothing to lose by offering it - only users to gain. Yahoo & Hotmail have a lot to lose by offering it, so they can't. Now, of course, if some other (better) webmail service comes along, gmail could easily lose those users to that better service. So after this strategy, gmail needs to ensure that they are always the best.
Anyway, it's just one suggestion. I think it would work. But I don't hold google's purse strings, so take it for what it's worth.
You're right. But so what? Just because a large group of people in the world live at a standard of living well below our own does not mean we should stop envisioning, anticipating, and planning for the next advances in our standard of living.
I wasn't suggesting that Google forward hotmail accounts to gmail. I was suggesting that google allow gmail accounts to be forwarded to some other account. Meaning that once I get a gmail account, I can set it up to forward to some other account if I ever decide to leave gmail. This means that if I ever leave gmail, I don't have to go through dealing with changing my email address.
While this may sound like gmail would be shooting themselves, the idea is to add value to a gmail account that isn't in a yahoo or hotmail account, thus encouraging people to switch. Being able to permanantly keep a gmail account so that you don't ever have to worry about switching email service providers is of value to folks.
The point is to get them in the door. Initially 1GB did this, but it's been countered. Now, you have to offer something that the other guy won't offer -- free email forwarding. Hotmail and Yahoo won't offer this because it will encourage people to switch. But gmail can offer this because they're not currently worried about people switching away from gmail - hardly anyone is on it. They're worried about getting people in the door.
And if there service is as good as all of the beta testers are saying, then their service will keep them there.
Because those people who modded it up, understood what was being said.
Doesn't google run on Linux? If so, shouldn't that be /usr/local/jokes?
You think so? I don't. I think the others are playing "user retention". They're trying to lower the impact of 1GB of space on their existing user base. Remember the incumbants have some inertia on their side. Most people don't want to have to deal with changing their email address. So if you make the storage disparity less, then it makes the cost of changing your email address more.
I think this will have the exact intended effect. Users were tempted to put up with the pain of changing their email address to get the huge increase in space. Those same users probably won't switch now, because they've not got 100x more space than they used to have. Space isn't an issue anymore. Changing your email address is.
IMHO, it's a good move by these guys.
I think that google's response to this should be to offer free, permanant email forwarding. Essentially, what they'd be saying is this: OK, yes, you have to switch your email address today. But it's the last time you'll ever have to switch your email address... EVER. Do this, and it lowers the long term cost of switching your email address to gmail.
$.02
Right! I wonder what the implications would be on drug companies that do testing on a sample of your blood. If they turn up some amazing new reason why you're genetically more resistant to (for example) the common cold, who gets the rights to that if you've got a patent on your genes and they developed their new drug based on your blood?
Of course, you'd probably have a hard time proving that it was based exclusively on your blood. And if anyone else had that same genetic characteristic (like maybe your parents?) they could argue that prior art invalidates your patent.
Yeah, this gets ridiculous pretty quick.
I think you may have missed my point, which is this: that as long as there are enforceable rules governing what can and can't be copied, if I expect you to abide by my application of those rules then it's entirely reasonable that you would expect me to abide by your application of those rules.
Personally, I don't think that the distinction that you make between copyright and copyleft exists today. Copyleft is a license granted under copyright. So it's also copyright. But even if copyleft were a completely seperate thing from copyright, it wouldn't diminish the point that I was trying to make: we (the slashdot crowd) have a double standard as far as what we expect should and shouldn't be enforceable. We expect our rules to be abided by with perfect compliance, but then turn around and ignore other folks rules with impunity.
And w.r.t. the technology being discussed, I think it would limit the types of litigation the author might see, if he/she put some system in place to ensure that the only material was distributed that had the permission of the copyright holder. I don't think it's too much to expect given that he's released his code under the GPL. If he expects others to comply with his license, he should enable his software to enforce compliance of other people's copyright licenses.
In a previous post I talked about a similar problem when TiVo suggested a similar feature. I think this would apply here too. This doesn't change the DVR recording model, which is schedule something and watch it later. The only thing that this adds is that it makes the Internet a like a TV channel, from which you can set up something to record, and then watch it later. It's not *exactly* like a TV channel, but it still fits the DVR model.
The person/people who are creating this tech have got to pull off a trick. They've got to figure out how to make sure that the only content available is distributed with the permission of the copyright holder. If they can do that, then they have a much more credible case that this is not intended to be a tool which is intended for copyright violation.
I don't mean to suggest that copyright is a good thing. But it exists in today's world. It never ceases to amaze me when we (the slashdot crowd) get up in arms when someone violates the GPL (i.e. violates copyright) and then we turn around and violate copyright when it comes to music or movies or ... The point is that we can't ride whatever side of the fence is most convenient. Either copyright should be enforceable and we support others rights to enforce their copyrights or copyright should not be enforceable and we allow GPL violations without restriction. Which means that if we want a solid GPL, then we should also ensure that this tech does everything to respect other's copyrights.
$.02.
By your own logic you should ask your boss to be fired. If people just can't control themselves, can we conclude that you post inflamatory comments to discussion sites during work hours?
A market could be there if people actually like paying for decaying DVDs in preference to paying for something else. And the something else doesn't have to be permanent DVDs. Of course, if, as you suggest, the price of perm DVDs shot way up, then most folks would probably prefer the decaying DVDs to perm DVDs and this creates a market. But that's not the only way to create a market for these things. Another way would be to make the price of the decaying DVDs so cheap that instead of competing with perm DVDs they competed with DVD rentals, like blockbuster (et al).
Of course, this has already been tried and failed with Circuit City and their DIVX titles. But DIVX was dumb. CC didn't realize that they should have been competing with blockbuster instead of permanent DVDs. If you're going to pay money to have a temporary copy of a movie, what would you rather pay: $4 at blockbuster, or $14 at Circuit City? In other words, CC didn't set the price of DIVX titles in such a way as to get consumers to prefer it over something else.
If these new decaying DVDs can compete with DVD rentals, then there's a possibility. Because at that point the consumer is faced with a different choice. Would you rather pay $4 to blockbuster and be on the hook to return something or pay $4 to someone else, and just throw it away when you're done? Not having to return something is of value to folks, and a market could be created. Of course, it depends on being able to mass produce a lot of these things and get the margins right so that you can price compete with blockbusters. THAT could be really difficult.
My point is that it's not inconceivable that these disks could be marketed in such a way that everyone would like it. Including (maybe) even the /. crowd.
Ever since I got a TiVo, I don't rent movies from blockbuster anymore. Why? Because Pay Per View is just too convenient with a TiVo. If I want to watch a PPV movie, I simply set up a recording of it. I can watch it as it happens or watch it later... or watch it much later - as long as I want to save the recording.
/. crowd to universally deride them. Isn't that like me telling you how you should spend your own money?
Which means that I pretty much NEVER rent from the video store anymore. PPV usually costs a little bit less than a video rental, I don't have to return anything, and I can keep it as long as I want. Other than the fact that the concept is really kind of insulting, decaying DVDs are irrelevant to me.
I suspect that they're going to be irrelevant to most people, too, which means that there's going to be almost no market for them. But if there is a market for them, who am I to say how other people spend their money? These things are only going to take off if there's a demand. If there isn't demand, they'll die. If there is demand, they'll sell. If they sell, I think it's a bit presumptuous of the
Not to be oppositional, but I think you've got this backwards. When you run your own server you don't have to worry about all of that stuff unless you want to. In which case, I would say that you get to worry about it. With someone else's server, you have to worry about it because you don't have any control as to whether or not they do anything.
To wit: yahoo's spam filtering basically sucks. If you choose their system you have to worry about whether or not you're going to get spam. If you run your own system, you're free to worry about it or not. You can spend a lot of time and effort setting up some antispam system that works exactly the way you like it, or you can not, and get the same amount of spam as you would @ yahoo.
I'm glossing over a lot of stuff here, but my point is that running your own server generally affords you a lot more choices. Some of which imply additional effort on your part. But it's effort that you choose to take on. You don't have to take on all of that extra effort if you don't want to. OTOH, if you go with a provider, no amount of effort on your part can fix any problems that you experience.
$.02
Oh, but for the ability to edit a post after the fact!!! Yeah, I saw that after I posted it. Oops!
Actually it might. Right now, only beta testers can migrate to gmail. But most people can't. So they can't weigh whether the gmail service is better/worse than yahoo. As a consequence, people may discover that 100MB of mail space is all they need. If they're used to 6MB of mail space, 100MB is a huge increase. The decision isn't just between an additional 94MB and 994MB. It's between:
- 1000GB
- 100MB + keep current email address
Don't discount the cost of switching your email address. Keeping your email address is probably worth a whole lot more to most people than an additional 900MB of disk space... especially if they've been getting by with 6MB of disk space.IMHO, this is a really good move on Yahoo's part. It will be interesting to see how well it works.
Ignoring the other comments that talk about the sample size being small, and that this "censorship" is being conducted by private companies, not the government, I still think this is off base.
He seems to have the assumption that we should attempt to create some method of governance for this kind of thing. Why is that necessary? Individuals can already self-regulate ISPs that do this stuff - they can switch to another ISP. Governmental regulation or policing of this is problematic. This implies some sort of governmental body. If you don't like the people who are running that body, you can only vote them out once every election cycle. However, in the current system, if you don't like the governance of your ISP, you can vote them out as frequently as you like - there's no law that says you can only switch ISPs once every election cycle.
I disagree with the premise that the only solution to prevent this type of silliness is to create a regulating body. That makes things much worse because it eliminates choice. Instead of rewarding the ISPs with the sensible behavior, they'll all have to behave identically. No more voting with your dollars. Additionally, this will likely lead to price increases for ISP services. Those ISPs that didn't activelly enforce this stuff today (the good ones) now will have to. A cost that will certiainly be passed to the customers.
IMHO: this is a good problem to solve, but the wrong assumption on how to fix it.
Why did you do "gnome-terminal -e date" before you did your time test? I noticed that you didn't do the same for konsole. Is it possible that this created a performance advantage for gnome-terminal?
I would think, at the very least, this would cause the disk blocks that hold gnome-terminal to be cached such that they're read from memory instead of disk. Wouldn't that improve performance?
Or did you do the same thing with konsole, but just forgot to include that in your results?
Just curious.
I know that your comment is modded as "Funny" but I doubt that's the way it will work. The TiVo model for watching TV is to record it now, and watch it later. Why wouldn't they do exactly the same thing for content over the internet? Users set up a request to get a show, the TiVo downloads it in the background - this could be over a period of days - and then the person watches whenever they want to as soon as it's done.
Basically, they're turning the internet into another TV channel. And just like every other TV channel, the instant that you decide to record something doesn't mean that you get to watch it(*). You have to wait for it to actually show up in your "Now Playing" list. Then you can watch it, rewind it, FF through commercials, etc.
(*) Yes, yes, you can record and watch Live TV while you're watching it. But when that happens you're limited in what you can do. And watching enough Live TV causes most TiVo-ers to simply wait until the entire thing is recorded, or they've got enough buffered so that they can do all of the trick play stuff. Nothing changes if instead of getting the stream from a TV channel, the stream comes from the internet. Watching it live imposes certain consequences. So don't watch it live.
I'm sure there are some consumers who buy windows based on other criteria, but the vast majority of windows purchases are as a consequence of compatibility. If the actual statistics showed only 99% of retail windows purchases were as a result of pre-installation, that's about 0.999% less than I would have expected.
$.02
I'm a vonage customer. I shed my dependance on the local telco with great pleasure, and a bit of egotisitcal pride. Still, having used it for about 8 months, I've come to this conclusion: it ain't for everyone.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not going back. But I can't imagine my neighbors buying into what RXC suggests. First of all, there's a reliability issue. Folks need to have 911 service available. They need to be able to call the power company in the event of an outage. They need the phone to be a *LOT* more reliable than current VOIP is.
For me, when the power goes out in our neighborhood, it doesn't matter that I've got my VOIP device connected to a UPS. When the neighborhood loses power, my broadband internet loses connectivity. No internet, no phone. No phone, no way to call the power company to report an outage. It gets worse if you imagine someone needing emergency services (e.g. 911) during a power outage.
It's a nice theory, but it doesn't scale. And reliability is the limitation. Right now, I (personally) can put up with the lack of reliability because I know that my neighbors have nice reliable land line based phones, and in a pinch, I can pester one of them to make a phone call. (I've got good neighbors, all of whom are willing to help each other out in a pinch.) But if the entire neighborhood were on VOIP, we'd all suffer. VOIP today just doesn't have the reliability to scale. Some of us who are willing to put up with the occasional echoes, inconsistent quality, and lower reliability (in exchange for much lower cost). But we can't all do that. We rely on some of the neighborhood to have a real and reliable phone service. VOIP isn't there yet. So it won't scale as far as a neighborhood. Much less become a "disruptive technology".
$.02
I didn't say anything about sales tax. I'm trying to make my point through the use of analogy. If the "it looks like a duck" rule is applied to cars, then all cars should be taxed identically. But that's not sensible. If we were to impose taxes on cars because of greenhouse emissions, then as soon as a ZEV came along, by the "looks like a duck" rule above, we should apply the same enviornmental taxes to that car. It looks like a car and drives like a car, well let's just apply all car taxes to it without taking into account why those taxes exist in the first place. That's just nonsense.
It's the same nonsense with VoIP. It looks like a phone and works like a phone. But it doesn't impose the same sort of problems that traditional phone companies impose. As a consequence, we shouldn't tax that VoIP as if it was the same thing as a traditional phone. It's different, despite the fact that it looks and works the same.
My point is this: when the technology changes, the taxation around that technology has to take those changes into account. Just because Vonage is a phone company doesn't mean that taxing them like traditional phone companies makes sense. The "it looks like a duck" argument is too simple.
Today, there are a limited number of cell phone companies that can occupy a single area, because there are a limited number of frequencies available.
No they don't! They can't. The right to lay physical lines is granted by the municipality. It's necessarily a public problem. And moreover that right to lay cable is granted to only one company in order to avoid the chaos that ensued right after phones became popular.The point that the OP was making is that telcos (and cell providers) are regulated for reasons that do NOT apply to VoIP providers.
Your argument is roughly equivalent to saying that we should apply environmental taxes to hydrogen fuel cell cars in exactly the same as we tax gas or diesel based cars. The fact that both are cars is irrelevant. The gas cars have deleterious impact on the environment and are consequently taxed as such. Hydro cars don't, so they shouldn't be taxed. It doesn't matter that it "looks like a duck". If it's not actually imposing the same problems as a duck, it shouldn't be taxed like one.
I agree it's a telephone. And I agree that Vonage is a telephone company. But I disagree that being a telephone company qualifies them for regulation. What qualifies traditional phone companies for regulation is the fact that they've been granted exclusive rights to lay cable in a particular area. Consequently they must be regulated in order to ensure that their state sanctioned monopoly is not abused.
What monopoly has been granted to Vonage that requires regulation? Right now, the market that Vonage is in is rife with competition. If you don't like Vonage's service, switch to Packet8. Don't like them, try VoicePulse, etc, etc. There is no need for any level of government to regulate Vonage because the consumers can do it themselves.
There is, however need for the government to regulate BellSouth, Verizon, etc, because they are the only ones with the right to lay telephone lines. And as such, the consumer has no ability to self regulate that company. So government regulation serves a purpose. For VoIP providers, government regulation is redundant, and should not be done until a compelling reason can be identified. They are not a traditional phone company, and the rationale for regulating traditional phone companies does not apply.
I know a little bit about it. With DOCSIS 2.0, the cable companies have a total of 30Mb/s on each analog channel. Multiply that about about 120 channels and the total available bandwidth is approximately 3600Mb/s. But, of course, to receive this, you'd need to have 120 DOCSIS 2.0 compliant cable modems. These could, of course, be integrated into a single device. But it'd be expensive.
That said, the problem is this. Imagine that you have a cable modem system with 1000 customers. Currenlty, if all 1000 customers want to watch Friends, it costs a single analog channel worth of bandwidth (the equivalent of 30Mb/s of digital bandwidth). If they delivered Friends over a digital channel instead of an analog channel it'd cost about 7.5Mb/s of bandwidth because they compress the stream using MPEG. So to deliver friends to 1000 customers at 7.5Mb/s requires 7500 Mb/s. Which is more than the total available bandwidth of all of the channels combined.
Now, you could do something like multicasting, but when you do that you're back to being on a broadcast schedule. Because not everyone is going to want/be able to receive the same bits at the same time. Or you could implement some sort of caching mechanism.
The final word is this: there are about 120 analog channels which can provide 30Mb/s each. Programs could be MPEG encoded so that they don't take up a full 30Mb/s. This is what digital cable does, and it achieves about 4 digital channels in the space of a single analog channel. Which means that you have a total available bandwitdh of about 480 channels at a customer acceptable quality at any given time. If you only have demand for 480 unique simultaneous programs, you can probably support your model. But if you have more demand than that, then your model won't work. I can't imagine it working for anything other than a very small town cable company. If you're not convinced, ask yourself how many different websites are visited by a company of 5000 people at any given time. When I was managing the proxy, for such a company we were supporting approximately 30 new connections per second, to 500 (ish) of different web sites every hour.
I'm still pretty convinced that, for the time being, DVRs in the home recording content based on a broadcast schedule is a much better way to deliver on demand TV programming. As bandwidth requirements get better, then maybe. But HDTV which requires quite a bit more bandwidth (19.2 Mb/s I believe) makes the probelm even harder.