And that's probably why they levy fines instead of just taking away Microsoft's license to do business. The point of the fines is (ostensibly) not to collect cash, but to force them to change their ways so competitors have a more level playing field. In this case, I believe it's the market for media players in question, and Microsoft was supposed to separate out Windows Media Player. It may sound like a small thing, but with the rise of pay-to-play video on the web, content delivery could easily be one of the biggest markets on the Internet within just a few years.
Similarly, I thought splitting MS Office from MS Windows seemed reasonable. The point being, not to shut anything down, just to require Microsoft to expose their roadmap and APIs enough for other companies to get in the game. Yes, I can see why Microsoft would kick and scream and drag their feet on that. Having a lock on 95% of the market is pretty awesome, just look at their financial reports for the last 15 or so years in a row. But their dominance is not good for the market; not just for competitors, but for consumers (which in this case is mainly other businesses outside the computer industry).
LOL I commented on that one. That dude is a complete idiot, I can't believe they let people like that into office.
There's not a lot fundamentally wrong with what he wrote; mainly he's just guilty of getting all the jargon wrong. I think his main point was that the Internet has limited capacity, and that users can impact each other, which is true. Anybody with filesharing roomates can attest to that. IMHO the main thing he got wrong is assuming that net neutrality would require ISPs to serve different customers' packets on a first-come, first-serve basis (even if one of them is a bandwidth hog)... but a lot of people who should be more informed make the same argument.
And to be honest, a net neutrality rule could have harmful effects like that if it's not carefully worded in what it prohibits. If we want net neutrality, we need a very crisp, concise, and comprehensive definition of it, and what the intended effect is. Otherwise, we leave the door open for a lot of scaremongering which is taking place.
I wonder if proper body and vehicle armor is cheaper than prosthetics, multiple surgeries, psychological counseling, and a lifetime of subsequent health problems.
If only it were so easy. Up-armoring the Humvees is no miracle cure, in fact it may hurt more than it helps.
Besides, with the quality of explosives the other side is using, they can kill an M1! Charges that cut through a main battle tank are not going to be slowed down by any amount of Humvee up-armoring.
Speaking of which, I've wondered why we still call them IED's, or "immprovised" explosive devices? They've grown all too sophisticated to be called "improvised."
As for not starting the war in the first place, good idea. But now it's too late, what should we do? (Besides not repeating the same mistake in the future.)
...Corel dropping their Linux distro also improved the average quality of Linux distros! Everybody wins.
Re:That was actually surprisingly good article
on
The Cost of the iPod
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· Score: 1
The determination is between Apple's CFO, Apple's auditing firm, and the SEC.
Aren't the shareholders even worth a mention? Apple is traditionally a computer company, you'd think the shareholders would want to know if the computer business is going down the tubes.
No, what you have is just 2 connectors to the laptop's internal video card... they're talking about having a desktop video card in the docking station so you can combine workstation-class graphics with laptop-class portability (just not at the same time!)
It's so rare, outside of a few widely-accepted interchange formats (txt, jpg, gif, bmp, etc.) to be able to use a single document format across a number of applications, without the format "belonging" to one particular program, that people can't separate the two anymore.
To be fair, exchanging read/write documents in a complex format is not at all easy. Even web browsers aren't fully compatible in simplay displaying documents! One thing is almost certain: word processors never quite work right with anything but the single format they read and write natively. "Filters" are always a hack, because different formats do not match the underlying features of the editor equally well.
Ah, you're right, I am blinded by my own zeal. Thank you for helping me see the light.
Not only should we select a document format that supports speech, but that should be embedded into the file format as a wav. I think that this will make it easier for applications to play it for the user
Now you're intentionally refusing to see the problem.
You can argue until you're blue in the face that document format and application features are two separate things, but this fact remains: if you dictate a format, then people have to use an application that supports the format!
The fact that an OpenDocument editor could have the necessary features is almost certainly true, and I happen to think the whole argument has a sort of "think of the children" ring to it. But when you propose an actual switchover in an important application, you have to get all your ducks in a row. You can't just tell people not to worry about a real problem just because it could be solved.
[Short-term focus] is a fundamental flaw in market economies, not in shareholders.
How do you build the argument that short term focus is even a flaw? Intuitively, I tend to believe it as well, but it's hard to measure. It will be interesting to see if privately-owned companies (which tend to face less short-term pressure) can really turn this into an advantage.
IBM's inability to produce high numbers and high yields led to the Intel switch.
There was also the small matter of the G5's being power hogs that could never work in a laptop, and the G4's being woefully slow.
It was not just production capacity, the PowerPC chips were too far behind.
Rutkowska stressed that the Blue Pill technology does not rely on any bug of the underlying operating system.
It's doesn't rely on any bug of the guest operating system, and isn't detectable from the guest operating system. But if something is mitigating access between multiple guest operating systems to hardware, then that thing is itself some sort of minimal operating system, and it is there that the problem lies. As far as the guest operating systems are concerned, this is really more like what would previously have been a hardware hack, in fact it's almost like your healthy computer is running behind a compromised firewall that's sending out the spam or whatever.
Getting to the point, people act as if virtualization simplifies things, But really it's an additional layer of abstraction and complication, another mass of code and/or hardware to go wrong. Now there will have to be software tools to manange this new underlying minimal OS, and maybe virus/rootkit software. I think the applicability will be limited.
The difference between 1.9% + 30 cents (ebay) and 2.0% + 20 cents (google) might not strike you as significant, but google now works out to be cheaper for all sales under $100.00
It doesn't strike me as very significant, and google is more expensive for all sales over $100.
Frankly I find the writeup curious; first stating that the new google service charges a higher percentage than PayPal, then claiming that some anonymous "others" are predicting the end of PayPayl. And this is google's opening salvo - to just match the entrenched competition? For an occasional user like myself it's not even worth the few minutes it would take to create an account at google. I expected for more.
Mind telling me where you can deliver multi-gigabyte files for anything close to a nickel?
That's an order of magnitude less than you would pay an Akamai or other professional content delivery company.
First, it remains to be seen whether the files will be multiple gigabytes. A one-hour show downloaded from bittorrent (actually 40 mins after removing commercials) is only 300 megs or so, and that's better quality and higher resolution than the iPod video downloads. I think 1.5 GB is a reasonable estimate, since that's about double VCD bitrate. A quick check of serverbeach (just because they happen to advertise on slashdot) shows they advertise 2000GB of transfer for $139. That's 7 cents per gigabyte. (And that's just for joe schmoe off the street). So about a dime for a movie. OK, that's twice what I claimed, but assuming $10 per movie download, it's still only 1% of the sale price! Not enough to justify any degredation in service.
Already a non issue: prioritize the first xxx chunks and don't request any of the other chunks from peers (already possible and implemented).
I guess anything is possible with enough local buffering and network overcapacity. But I would still be interested to hear from people how well this currently works in practice. Relying on a bunch of voluntary, anonymous, low-bandwidth servers to deliver high-bandwidth, time-critical data seems optimistic to me. Especially since bittorrent is built around a tit-for-tat protocol, which strictly interpreted means you can only download as fast as you can upload. If you're allowed to download faster, you can "leech" by disconnecting when the download is done. Since total downloads must equal total uploads across the network as a whole (as each packet is sent and received once), that leeching is not sustainable.
In addition to those network protocol issues, I assume Warner Bros will require a proprietary client in order to (more) securely access the content, and normally the bittorrent client is also the bittorrent server. I assume you're not claiming that a suitable (secure, streaming, bittorrent-based) viewing application already exists?
Is WB going to force seeding to 100%, charge you extra or ban you from further downloads if you don't?
If it's regular bittorrent, it would just mean your downloads would be slow. Bittorrent has pretty well eliminated the need to ban people.
Someone's gotta pay for the upgrades, and you can bet that those costs are going to make it to the consumers, and most likely fairly quickly.
I'm generally not a fan of widespread media distribution by bittorrent (see my other posts), but IMHO improved infrastructure is the best thing that could come out of it. As for who will pay, I already pay every month. Don't you? If they're going to stop investing in the network, they'd better lower the price once their initial investment from the.com era is repaid - which I certainly do NOT expect them to do. Just think of those AT&T telephones they used to force people to lease for $7/mo, back when you weren't allowed to connect privately owned devices to the POTS network. After 25 years, you've paid $2,000 for a $14 phone. That's how they like to operate if they can get away with it.
Effectively, bittorrent uses twice the bandwidth of a simple HTTP link to a server on the backbone. Partially due to protocol overhead, although that is not the real issue. The real issue is that P2P traffic traverses the "last mile" of network connectivity twice, and that last mile (to your home) is the bottleneck of the Internet. Doubling the load on your bottleneck is not a smart thing to do for the overall Internet. It does happen to pay off at the moment, simply because servers pay per byte and home connections pay per month. Eventually the bandwidth market might re-align to the technical reality, but then again maybe not.
Besides that, bittorrent is bad for media distribution because you can't stream. Let's say you have a 2 mbit/s link to your home and want to watch a two-hour movie which happens to be encoded at 2 mbit/s. If the movie were sent from a server at a steady rate, you could start watching immediately. With bittorrent, you'd have to wait two hours.
Finally, I just don't see the point. They're going to be charging several dollars for each video download, yet the server bandwidth for that download is only worth about a nickle. It just doesn't avoid that much expense. As a customer, I'd rather pay the extra 0.5% to download from a server and start watching immediately, and keep my uplink for my own purposes.
With video that will get chewed through rather quickly.
I think you are missing the point. Getting bandwidth is the easy part, bandwidth is cheap. In contrast, getting major studios to legally distribute content over bittorrent is a minor miracle. Now the door is open.
Yes, we can mock the Great Firewall implementors for incompetence, but let's remember that the technical means are really only a reminder of the underlying law. Many laws don't have any built-in means of enforcement at all. My car has no speed governor to keep it under 65 mph, does that mean the government is just stupid? Or that I can't get busted for speeding? Almost all laws are easy to break; the real problem is getting away with it, especially if the government decides to target you for whatever reason.
I don't think you can enter the payment market without upsetting some percent of the customers. Put yourself in Paypal's shoes: you've got a huge number of he-said-she-said arguments over amounts of money small enough not to warrant an investigation, but big enough to infuriate people. As the arbiter of payment, you could try to be nice and absorb the losses as a cost of doing business, but that would quickly become a free-for-all. It's sort of like the insurance industry, where there's a whole range of claims from purely legit to purely bogus, with quite a few in between ("believe me, the wind blew over my house *before* the flood washed it away!!") Problems are inevitable.
Personally, I wish google would offer micropayments with extremely low or no transaction costs (say 0.1 cent), and simply say, "here's a big long random number. It's CASH. Don't come crying to us if you lose your digital walette in a dark alley. And Uncle Sam, don't expect us to be able to trace every cash transaction for your misguided domestic spying enterprises." I wouldn't use such a service myself for large transactions, where the ability to reverse a charge is worth the fee. But I'm still a true believer in micropayments. All it would take is one company big enough to make it universal and extremely low overhead. All the headaches of micropayments come from trying to avoid a single bottleneck for all transactions. I say screw that, let google be the bottleneck, they can handle it. It would create entirely new markets.
Liking mod points is liking slashdot, that's one of the little features that make it more enticing/addictive. It's not like they have cash value. (But maybe they should.... hang on while I give my patent lawyer a call.)
Slashdot Mirror
Similarly, I thought splitting MS Office from MS Windows seemed reasonable. The point being, not to shut anything down, just to require Microsoft to expose their roadmap and APIs enough for other companies to get in the game. Yes, I can see why Microsoft would kick and scream and drag their feet on that. Having a lock on 95% of the market is pretty awesome, just look at their financial reports for the last 15 or so years in a row. But their dominance is not good for the market; not just for competitors, but for consumers (which in this case is mainly other businesses outside the computer industry).
There's not a lot fundamentally wrong with what he wrote; mainly he's just guilty of getting all the jargon wrong. I think his main point was that the Internet has limited capacity, and that users can impact each other, which is true. Anybody with filesharing roomates can attest to that. IMHO the main thing he got wrong is assuming that net neutrality would require ISPs to serve different customers' packets on a first-come, first-serve basis (even if one of them is a bandwidth hog)... but a lot of people who should be more informed make the same argument.
And to be honest, a net neutrality rule could have harmful effects like that if it's not carefully worded in what it prohibits. If we want net neutrality, we need a very crisp, concise, and comprehensive definition of it, and what the intended effect is. Otherwise, we leave the door open for a lot of scaremongering which is taking place.
Besides, with the quality of explosives the other side is using, they can kill an M1! Charges that cut through a main battle tank are not going to be slowed down by any amount of Humvee up-armoring.
Speaking of which, I've wondered why we still call them IED's, or "immprovised" explosive devices? They've grown all too sophisticated to be called "improvised."
As for not starting the war in the first place, good idea. But now it's too late, what should we do? (Besides not repeating the same mistake in the future.)
...Corel dropping their Linux distro also improved the average quality of Linux distros! Everybody wins.
No, what you have is just 2 connectors to the laptop's internal video card... they're talking about having a desktop video card in the docking station so you can combine workstation-class graphics with laptop-class portability (just not at the same time!)
You can argue until you're blue in the face that document format and application features are two separate things, but this fact remains: if you dictate a format, then people have to use an application that supports the format!
The fact that an OpenDocument editor could have the necessary features is almost certainly true, and I happen to think the whole argument has a sort of "think of the children" ring to it. But when you propose an actual switchover in an important application, you have to get all your ducks in a row. You can't just tell people not to worry about a real problem just because it could be solved.
Yeah, maybe Intel hid a hairdryer in the AMD box and AMD is still the best! I knew it!!! Whew, for a minute there my faith was shaken.
65K just isn't that big a number on computers these days. Sure at some point it was justified, but it isn't now, and it should be a pretty easy fix.
Getting to the point, people act as if virtualization simplifies things, But really it's an additional layer of abstraction and complication, another mass of code and/or hardware to go wrong. Now there will have to be software tools to manange this new underlying minimal OS, and maybe virus/rootkit software. I think the applicability will be limited.
Frankly I find the writeup curious; first stating that the new google service charges a higher percentage than PayPal, then claiming that some anonymous "others" are predicting the end of PayPayl. And this is google's opening salvo - to just match the entrenched competition? For an occasional user like myself it's not even worth the few minutes it would take to create an account at google. I expected for more.
Admittedly I've never tried them. It would be interesting to see a 10-way "shootout" review between such providers and see what they actually deliver.
In addition to those network protocol issues, I assume Warner Bros will require a proprietary client in order to (more) securely access the content, and normally the bittorrent client is also the bittorrent server. I assume you're not claiming that a suitable (secure, streaming, bittorrent-based) viewing application already exists?
Besides that, bittorrent is bad for media distribution because you can't stream. Let's say you have a 2 mbit/s link to your home and want to watch a two-hour movie which happens to be encoded at 2 mbit/s. If the movie were sent from a server at a steady rate, you could start watching immediately. With bittorrent, you'd have to wait two hours.
Finally, I just don't see the point. They're going to be charging several dollars for each video download, yet the server bandwidth for that download is only worth about a nickle. It just doesn't avoid that much expense. As a customer, I'd rather pay the extra 0.5% to download from a server and start watching immediately, and keep my uplink for my own purposes.
That's why my first word was "yes." I was agreeing with you.
Yes, we can mock the Great Firewall implementors for incompetence, but let's remember that the technical means are really only a reminder of the underlying law. Many laws don't have any built-in means of enforcement at all. My car has no speed governor to keep it under 65 mph, does that mean the government is just stupid? Or that I can't get busted for speeding? Almost all laws are easy to break; the real problem is getting away with it, especially if the government decides to target you for whatever reason.
Personally, I wish google would offer micropayments with extremely low or no transaction costs (say 0.1 cent), and simply say, "here's a big long random number. It's CASH. Don't come crying to us if you lose your digital walette in a dark alley. And Uncle Sam, don't expect us to be able to trace every cash transaction for your misguided domestic spying enterprises." I wouldn't use such a service myself for large transactions, where the ability to reverse a charge is worth the fee. But I'm still a true believer in micropayments. All it would take is one company big enough to make it universal and extremely low overhead. All the headaches of micropayments come from trying to avoid a single bottleneck for all transactions. I say screw that, let google be the bottleneck, they can handle it. It would create entirely new markets.