Let me know if I understand what you're saying. You're asking for television programming to change its distribution model to be closer to the way that the WWW is distributed - all content on demand. And you want to take advantage of the huge data pipe that exists between your home and the cableco to do this.
I suspect that the medium that is currently best suited to do that is the Internet. Essentially, you need something that does for TV programming what iTunes does for music distribution; iTunes allows people another choice for selecting music other than just listening to the radio. You want the same thing for TV programming.
The reason I think that the internet is the better medium for this is that iTunes doesn't preclude people who still prefer to listen to music on the radio from listening to the radio. But if your suggestion were implemented it would require most folks to change. And people don't like change, much less change that is forced upon them. This adversity to change would result in cableco's losing huge numbers of subscribers to satellite, which would provide the thing closest to what they're used to.
Personally, I'd love to see what you're talking about come into reality. But even if you get past the technical problems (bandwidth requirements) and the sociological requirements (people don't like change) you still have to get past the legal problems (copyright). If you can't get past the last one on the internet, I don't think that changing the medium (from the internet to the cableco's infrastructure) would make much of a difference.
HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, (et al) all care about which shows people watch and whether or not people like them. And in exchange for people paying extra, there are no commercials.
The type of programming that the OP was talking about exists today in the premium channel systems.
Frankly, I'd prefer if the cable company would just store all this stuff at THEIR end, dump all the broadcast channels, and use the bandwidth to feed the cable modem system so I can watch anything I want, whenever I want, without having to make copies at my end.
Not me. I prefer to have the DVR at my house. Mainly because it allows me complete control. DVRs are a distributed problem; everyone has their own set of preferences that don't necessarily align with anyone elses. Consequently, distributed preference implies distributed control. So it makes sense to me that the solution also be distributed:
I can manage my own data space without having to rely on the cable company's shared data space.
I can decide that I want to keep a program for 7 months instead of relying on the cable co. to automatically delete everything after 7 days.
I can decide which shows I want to record instead of relying on the cable co. to decide for me.
I don't have to deal with latency associated with sending the command to do something accross the internet, and then be responded to by a machine that's trying to handle a gazillion of these types of requests simultaneously.
IMHO, DVR is a distributed problem. In the long run a distributed solution works better for everyone.
The bill does more than just deal with properly labeling CDs. It also ammends the following to the definition of fair use:
`(5) It shall not be a violation of this title to manufacture, distribute, or make noninfringing use of a hardware or software product capable of enabling significant noninfringing use of a copyrighted work.'.
IMHO, THAT is the most important part of this bill. It makes it *legal* to own a device that allows you to get access to the copyrighted material that you already own/rent/etc.
Although the University offered minors, my college (the college of letters & sciences) did not. If they had, I would have taken the remaining two credits in order to get the minor in math.
IMHO, the assistance that math has provided me has been invaluable in my career. NOT because I use calculus on a day to day basis, but because it forced me to develop critical and systematic thinking skills. And THAT has been invaluable. At the time I hated it, but in retrospect it was really good.
This article contains a very large number of assumptions, which may well prove not to be the case (constant cosmological constant, no FTL communication/travel, no access to other universes etc. etc.). Still, an interesting intellectual exercise I suppose...;-)
That's an interesting perspective. I haven't RTFA, but aren't those assumptions fairly reasonable? Considering that we have Einstein with a proof that faster than light is impossible, it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume it.
Maybe the article is based on assumptions. But if they're all pretty reasonable assumptions, then it would seem to be a pretty good conclusion. Or am I missing something?
Right. I forgot about that. Yet another reason why I prefer DirecTV to cable. With DTV, it's all digital. With TWC the local stations are analog - which results in really crappy picture on a large number of channels that I really want to watch.
If I walk up to the pointy-haired boss, and I say "okay, fine, I understand that the information being protected by this system is not sensitive, but cracking this system can open attack vectors to xyz systems, and the y system DOES have sensitive information, and the moron looks at me and says "I have too many passwords to memorize, and who's going to attack THIS system anyway"... well, the problem really isn't on my head at this point.
Oh, absolutely. If you enumerate the risks, and the PHB makes a dumb decision, the responsibility is on him. All I'm saying is don't be so quick to assume that the dumb decision wasn't (instead) a calculated risk that went bad.
Think of banks: they take risks every single day. They loan money. They don't know whether or not that money's coming back. If they focused only on the fact that it's a risk that they might lose the money, they'd never make the loan. BUT they frequently make loans because they've figured out how big of a risk it is, and on the backend they get paid specifically for taking the risk. That's what loan interest is: payment for taking a risk.
That being said, it is incumbent upon the business to *LISTEN* to IT. That doesn't mean they have to do everything IT says, but they do have to listen and consider those risks. It's been my experience (having been as geeky as they come) that the business actually does a much better job of this than I thought they did when I was entirely focused on the bits. They're not perfect, but they aren't nearly as bad as I thought.
I have a securid card that I use for logging into a number of different things at work. I wish it was used for *EVERYTHING*. I'd never have to remember another password in my life (unless you count my PIN as my password). I'd never have to deal with varying password changing schemes on multiple systems. Which result in having multiplying passwords which I have to remember, which require me to enter them into STRIP.
I wish I could use SecurID (or something like it) for everything. It would dramatically simplify my life.
I can imagine my boss giving up some of his real passwords for a bribe because he thinks "big deal... that one's not protecting anything sensitive anyway".
This is not a very good example, but essentially, your boss *should* be doing exactly what he's doing. Not for chocolate, of course. But he should be making business risk assessments to determine how senstive something is before identifying how much effort (e.g. cost) is going to be expended trying to protect it.
The goal of information security MUST be to enable the business to make informed risk based decisions. Contrary to popular belief, it is NOT to remove all risk from every situation. Think of it this way, is it worth it to the business to risk $1 billion if the transaction is going to generate $2 billion? Probably. Now, maybe IT could develop some controls to protect more of the $1 billion. Maybe spend $1 million and lower the risk to $100 million. That's a reasonable response except when the $2 billion transaction is time critical?
My point is this: the business needs to understand the information security risk. That's the job of the information security department or the information technology department. But technology risk is only one component that the business should be assessing, and the Info Sec and IT departments do not know all of the other components, so they should NOT be trying to dictate to the business what to do.
And this is exactly why I won't use Debian. It's hard to know just what your codebase is. I once had a program that wouldn't work because it wanted a version number of perl beyond a certain patch release, due to a known security bug in the "version" that debian shipped.
See, I consider this to be a perfect example of providing you an additional choice. Without debian backporting the patches, you only have the first two choices below. Debian provides you the third:
Upgrade to the most recent software and possibly change features that you rely on
Live with the vulnerability
Use the old software with debian's backported patch
There are risks to each of these choices, but IMHO, 3 choices are better than 2. You choose #2, which is fine. You just take on the risks associated with that choice. I choose #3 so I take on the risks associated with that choice. We are each able to pick our own set of acceptable risks. Which makes my point: this isn't a failure of opensource. It demonstrates that it works.
The only responses from debian folks was the typical, "our stuff isn't broke, so it must be you" attitude.
That's too bad. I've had much better responsiveness from debian developers. Of course, I had to learn to the balance between providing too many details and not enough details. I don't always get it right. But generally, I've had good response from developers. Sorry you haven't.
RedHat is not alone in backporting changes to current software into a previous version. Debian does this too - albeit not with the kernel. Security patches comes out all of the time for current software. But debian may have a version of that software in it's stable tree that isn't current but still vulnerable and require that patch. The debian folks simply backport the patch and release an update.
This is one of the things that makes debian's stable tree live up to it's name. It isn't a bug in opensource, it's a feature. Now, of course, this puts additional pressure on debian to ensure that their stable branch continues to work as expected considering that the stable software is patched in a way that's unique to debian. But if they want to do that, good for them. It's up to their users to decide if this is a good practice. And historically, it's been an excellent practice.
Is SuSe saying that they don't do this? Are they saying that if you're using a piece of software that they distribute that's slightly older than current and a patch comes out for current, that they won't patch the old software? If so, that leaves SuSe customers with a horrible choice:
Upgrade to the most recent software and possibly change features that you rely on, or
Live with the vulnerability
I wouldn't think that'd be good for business.
legacy piece of software on their distro, and a patch for a current version comes out, that they won't support it? I would think that'd be bad for business.
Well, yeah, that'd get their attention, but it's never going to happen, even if it's entertaining to imagine. It won't happen because the crime doesn't fit the punishment. And you're not allowed (and should not be allowed) to craft a punishment for a crime that only applies to one person.
It seems to me that what you're suggesting is roughly equivalent to sentancing amputation to a known, non-repentant jay-walker - just because you know he's non-repentant. The law against jay-walking never described such a penalty, and it's not fair to make one up now. The anti-trust laws never described the penalty you suggest, and it would be equally unfair to impose on M$.
Well, I would think that the biggest problem you'd have is proving that they didn't do the required 50 jumping jacks. But of course, if you could prove it, then I'd have to agree with you.
I've been searching for a backup solution like this. I read about this earlier today and immediately thought, "Woah. This will solve my backup problem." Then I looked at the price and realized I could get a USB 2.0 or firewire hard drive for a LOT less money and have a LOT more storage.
If it's compatible Linux, I'll certainly reconsider when/if the price comes down.
Look I understand if you don't want to buy one of these thing, that's fine. But why is the fact that this is available on the market make this a censorship issue?
Some people don't subscribe to HBO because they don't like the things that are shown. Are they censoring HBO? Well, I guess if you twist the meaning of the word "censor". But is it unreasonable? Of course not! An individuals right to decide (for themselves) whether or not they want to view something isn't censorship, it's freedom of choice.
As far as this particular device, if you don't like it's feature set, don't buy it. But, who's being the censor if, because you don't like the feature set, you prevent someone else from buying it?
A lot of other folks have spoken to the capping of cable bandwidth, and what they're saying is true. But there's another aspect of bandwidth that I haven't seen touched yet.
Even if bandwidth were an issue (which it isn't) it would be fairly easy to give multiple ISP's access to the infrastructure without impacting each other's bandwidth. The cable that runs into a subscribers house is divided into a bunch of channels. In my home town, channel 3 is ABC, 6 is NBC, 11 is Fox, etc. To get cable modem to work over the cable plant you need two things to happen:
You need to ensure that the cable plant can transmit signals in two directions, and
You need to allocate a single channel for download and a single channel for upload.
Basically, a single ISP on the cable infrastructure needs two channels. If you want to give competitive access to the cable infrastructure, you could run the competing ISP on those same two channels, or you could allocate two completely new channels.
Where I live, there are three ISP's running on the local cable plant. They are all running on the same two channels because there's more than enough bandwidth to accomodate them. But if there weren't it would be an easy matter to allocate a couple of unused channels to one or more ISPs and effectively double the total available bandwidth on the system.
In my experience, there is a large segment of the IT community that is pathologically unable to focus on business needs enough to understand this.
I don't think I could agree more with this part of your post. Of course, part of the reason for this is that most of the IT world is generally shoved into such a small corner that they have no possible way of seeing the bigger picture.
There are some really smart folks in IT who are very underutilized. They don't see the bigger picture of why things are happening around them and as a consequence have become surley, ornery, and protective of the tiny bit of control that they do have. IMHO, it's a failure of the business to waste this kind of talent, and the only result will be lower customer satisfaction.
Against my will, I moved out of IT and am now much closer to the business than I ever wanted to be before. This has been an incredible experience for me. I now have a perspective that I did not have before on why some (seemingly non-sensical) business decisions are made. When I go back, I think I will be a much better manager of technology. I would advise anyone who's in IT to take a hiatus and spend time (a couple of years) working for the business and doing non-IT stuff. Don't worry about letting your IT skills fall. If you're at all like me, you couldn't let that happen even if you wanted to. In the end, it will make you a better technolgist, and you'll be able to speak the language of the business much better, so you'll be able to get more done than you ever had before.
At first, when I got my TiVo I watched quite a bit more TV. Everytime I went to the TV, my TiVo had something good so I watched. But over time, I started going to the TiVo and pulling up Now Playing. I'd see something, and generally, I think, "Ooh, that'll be good when I eventually have some time to watch it." Unfortunately, I never seem to have time to watch it.
My TiVo makes it so that I can rely on watching only what's good based on my schedule. What ends up happening is that I watch much less, because I can wait until later to watch it. And for a lot of shows, later never comes. So I'm watching less.
I have DirecTV and I have a multisat dish. Mainly this is so that I can get HD content, but you get a few extra channels. Most of which are useless most of the time. E.g. Rural Farm Channel. Occasionally, NASA TV has something interesting on it, but nothing that I've ever thought to TiVo.
But Mach 7-10? That's worth putting on the TiVo. Fortunately, it's an incredibly still picture, so this thing compresses well and doesn't take up much space on the disk.
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Let me know if I understand what you're saying. You're asking for television programming to change its distribution model to be closer to the way that the WWW is distributed - all content on demand. And you want to take advantage of the huge data pipe that exists between your home and the cableco to do this.
I suspect that the medium that is currently best suited to do that is the Internet. Essentially, you need something that does for TV programming what iTunes does for music distribution; iTunes allows people another choice for selecting music other than just listening to the radio. You want the same thing for TV programming.
The reason I think that the internet is the better medium for this is that iTunes doesn't preclude people who still prefer to listen to music on the radio from listening to the radio. But if your suggestion were implemented it would require most folks to change. And people don't like change, much less change that is forced upon them. This adversity to change would result in cableco's losing huge numbers of subscribers to satellite, which would provide the thing closest to what they're used to.
Personally, I'd love to see what you're talking about come into reality. But even if you get past the technical problems (bandwidth requirements) and the sociological requirements (people don't like change) you still have to get past the legal problems (copyright). If you can't get past the last one on the internet, I don't think that changing the medium (from the internet to the cableco's infrastructure) would make much of a difference.
$.02
HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, (et al) all care about which shows people watch and whether or not people like them. And in exchange for people paying extra, there are no commercials.
The type of programming that the OP was talking about exists today in the premium channel systems.
IMHO, DVR is a distributed problem. In the long run a distributed solution works better for everyone.
$.02
I vote for unusable latency. According to the boeing FAQ the service is provided over satellite internet. Which means unusable latancy for VoIP.
For my BS in Comp Sci (1992 U of Wisconsin), I had to take 18 credits of math, and achieve a B average in those courses. The 18 credits comprised:
Calculus 1: 5 credits
Calculus 2: 5 credits
Calculus 3: 5 credits
Matrix Algebra: 3 credits
Although the University offered minors, my college (the college of letters & sciences) did not. If they had, I would have taken the remaining two credits in order to get the minor in math.
IMHO, the assistance that math has provided me has been invaluable in my career. NOT because I use calculus on a day to day basis, but because it forced me to develop critical and systematic thinking skills. And THAT has been invaluable. At the time I hated it, but in retrospect it was really good.
$.02.
Maybe the article is based on assumptions. But if they're all pretty reasonable assumptions, then it would seem to be a pretty good conclusion. Or am I missing something?
Right. I forgot about that. Yet another reason why I prefer DirecTV to cable. With DTV, it's all digital. With TWC the local stations are analog - which results in really crappy picture on a large number of channels that I really want to watch.
It also makes the cost of the hardware cheaper since TiVo wouldn't need to buy an expensive hardware MPEG encoder.
Think of banks: they take risks every single day. They loan money. They don't know whether or not that money's coming back. If they focused only on the fact that it's a risk that they might lose the money, they'd never make the loan. BUT they frequently make loans because they've figured out how big of a risk it is, and on the backend they get paid specifically for taking the risk. That's what loan interest is: payment for taking a risk.
That being said, it is incumbent upon the business to *LISTEN* to IT. That doesn't mean they have to do everything IT says, but they do have to listen and consider those risks. It's been my experience (having been as geeky as they come) that the business actually does a much better job of this than I thought they did when I was entirely focused on the bits. They're not perfect, but they aren't nearly as bad as I thought.
$.02.
I wish I could use SecurID (or something like it) for everything. It would dramatically simplify my life.
This is not a very good example, but essentially, your boss *should* be doing exactly what he's doing. Not for chocolate, of course. But he should be making business risk assessments to determine how senstive something is before identifying how much effort (e.g. cost) is going to be expended trying to protect it.
The goal of information security MUST be to enable the business to make informed risk based decisions. Contrary to popular belief, it is NOT to remove all risk from every situation. Think of it this way, is it worth it to the business to risk $1 billion if the transaction is going to generate $2 billion? Probably. Now, maybe IT could develop some controls to protect more of the $1 billion. Maybe spend $1 million and lower the risk to $100 million. That's a reasonable response except when the $2 billion transaction is time critical?
My point is this: the business needs to understand the information security risk. That's the job of the information security department or the information technology department. But technology risk is only one component that the business should be assessing, and the Info Sec and IT departments do not know all of the other components, so they should NOT be trying to dictate to the business what to do.
See, I consider this to be a perfect example of providing you an additional choice. Without debian backporting the patches, you only have the first two choices below. Debian provides you the third:
- Upgrade to the most recent software and possibly change features that you rely on
- Live with the vulnerability
- Use the old software with debian's backported patch
There are risks to each of these choices, but IMHO, 3 choices are better than 2. You choose #2, which is fine. You just take on the risks associated with that choice. I choose #3 so I take on the risks associated with that choice. We are each able to pick our own set of acceptable risks. Which makes my point: this isn't a failure of opensource. It demonstrates that it works.That's too bad. I've had much better responsiveness from debian developers. Of course, I had to learn to the balance between providing too many details and not enough details. I don't always get it right. But generally, I've had good response from developers. Sorry you haven't.
This is one of the things that makes debian's stable tree live up to it's name. It isn't a bug in opensource, it's a feature. Now, of course, this puts additional pressure on debian to ensure that their stable branch continues to work as expected considering that the stable software is patched in a way that's unique to debian. But if they want to do that, good for them. It's up to their users to decide if this is a good practice. And historically, it's been an excellent practice.
Is SuSe saying that they don't do this? Are they saying that if you're using a piece of software that they distribute that's slightly older than current and a patch comes out for current, that they won't patch the old software? If so, that leaves SuSe customers with a horrible choice:
I wouldn't think that'd be good for business. legacy piece of software on their distro, and a patch for a current version comes out, that they won't support it? I would think that'd be bad for business.
Well, yeah, that'd get their attention, but it's never going to happen, even if it's entertaining to imagine. It won't happen because the crime doesn't fit the punishment. And you're not allowed (and should not be allowed) to craft a punishment for a crime that only applies to one person.
It seems to me that what you're suggesting is roughly equivalent to sentancing amputation to a known, non-repentant jay-walker - just because you know he's non-repentant. The law against jay-walking never described such a penalty, and it's not fair to make one up now. The anti-trust laws never described the penalty you suggest, and it would be equally unfair to impose on M$.
Not to be overly nitpicky, but that'd be two channels: one for upload and one for download.
Well, I would think that the biggest problem you'd have is proving that they didn't do the required 50 jumping jacks. But of course, if you could prove it, then I'd have to agree with you.
I've been searching for a backup solution like this. I read about this earlier today and immediately thought, "Woah. This will solve my backup problem." Then I looked at the price and realized I could get a USB 2.0 or firewire hard drive for a LOT less money and have a LOT more storage.
If it's compatible Linux, I'll certainly reconsider when/if the price comes down.
Look I understand if you don't want to buy one of these thing, that's fine. But why is the fact that this is available on the market make this a censorship issue?
Some people don't subscribe to HBO because they don't like the things that are shown. Are they censoring HBO? Well, I guess if you twist the meaning of the word "censor". But is it unreasonable? Of course not! An individuals right to decide (for themselves) whether or not they want to view something isn't censorship, it's freedom of choice.
As far as this particular device, if you don't like it's feature set, don't buy it. But, who's being the censor if, because you don't like the feature set, you prevent someone else from buying it?
Even if bandwidth were an issue (which it isn't) it would be fairly easy to give multiple ISP's access to the infrastructure without impacting each other's bandwidth. The cable that runs into a subscribers house is divided into a bunch of channels. In my home town, channel 3 is ABC, 6 is NBC, 11 is Fox, etc. To get cable modem to work over the cable plant you need two things to happen:
- You need to ensure that the cable plant can transmit signals in two directions, and
- You need to allocate a single channel for download and a single channel for upload.
Basically, a single ISP on the cable infrastructure needs two channels. If you want to give competitive access to the cable infrastructure, you could run the competing ISP on those same two channels, or you could allocate two completely new channels.Where I live, there are three ISP's running on the local cable plant. They are all running on the same two channels because there's more than enough bandwidth to accomodate them. But if there weren't it would be an easy matter to allocate a couple of unused channels to one or more ISPs and effectively double the total available bandwidth on the system.
I don't think I could agree more with this part of your post. Of course, part of the reason for this is that most of the IT world is generally shoved into such a small corner that they have no possible way of seeing the bigger picture.
There are some really smart folks in IT who are very underutilized. They don't see the bigger picture of why things are happening around them and as a consequence have become surley, ornery, and protective of the tiny bit of control that they do have. IMHO, it's a failure of the business to waste this kind of talent, and the only result will be lower customer satisfaction.
Against my will, I moved out of IT and am now much closer to the business than I ever wanted to be before. This has been an incredible experience for me. I now have a perspective that I did not have before on why some (seemingly non-sensical) business decisions are made. When I go back, I think I will be a much better manager of technology. I would advise anyone who's in IT to take a hiatus and spend time (a couple of years) working for the business and doing non-IT stuff. Don't worry about letting your IT skills fall. If you're at all like me, you couldn't let that happen even if you wanted to. In the end, it will make you a better technolgist, and you'll be able to speak the language of the business much better, so you'll be able to get more done than you ever had before.
$.02.
At first, when I got my TiVo I watched quite a bit more TV. Everytime I went to the TV, my TiVo had something good so I watched. But over time, I started going to the TiVo and pulling up Now Playing. I'd see something, and generally, I think, "Ooh, that'll be good when I eventually have some time to watch it." Unfortunately, I never seem to have time to watch it.
My TiVo makes it so that I can rely on watching only what's good based on my schedule. What ends up happening is that I watch much less, because I can wait until later to watch it. And for a lot of shows, later never comes. So I'm watching less.
Ummm... are you sure about that?
I have DirecTV and I have a multisat dish. Mainly this is so that I can get HD content, but you get a few extra channels. Most of which are useless most of the time. E.g. Rural Farm Channel. Occasionally, NASA TV has something interesting on it, but nothing that I've ever thought to TiVo.
But Mach 7-10? That's worth putting on the TiVo. Fortunately, it's an incredibly still picture, so this thing compresses well and doesn't take up much space on the disk.