God gave the beings he created the gift of free will so that they would not be mere automatons. Inherent in free will is the ability to choose to do something against God's will. There is a problem with that argument: if God really is omniscient then he would have known the consequences of giving us "free will" and condemned us to them. You cannot maintain both beliefs without conflict. Besides, God's will is often vengeful, petty, violent, merciless and absolute (read the old testament); certainly not a God I wish to worship.
just curious, how does knowing what you will do limit your choice? By definition, "all-knowing" implies that all possibilities and decisions that follow have been considered and selected according to the "master plan". If the end point is known, then all but one possibility is stripped away, thereby removing choice.
The seven day week is a natural division (one fourth) of a 28 day month (the amount of time the moon takes to orbit the earth) and is therefore hardly arbitrary. The selection of the moon orbiting the earth is as arbitrary as any other measure.
Well, that is exactly what Jobs has publicly stated he would "do in a heartbeat". The primary reasons seem to be 1) The iPod was a wild success before iTMS and would probably remain so without iTMS or its associated DRM. 2) The music industry itself sells the vast majority of its digital music via CD, which has NO built in DRM capabilities. 3) By removing DRM the online digital market is on a level playing field with CDs and would prosper. This would probably increase the online digital music market by removing barriers placed on customers due to draconian DRM schemes that fail to solve the problem they were meant to solve - piracy. 6) Apple (and others) can ditch the administrative overhead in developing and maintaining said DRM and streamline their business. Perhaps Apple should just hand over Fairplay to the music industry and open it up, follow all instructions given by them and say "I told you so" when they finally realise it will never work?
The problem is even worse than that - the networks are unwilling to change. Advertisements are constant and loud (to spite investigative "reporters" proving otherwise - have they never heard of dynamic compression?), the repetition of shows is repeatative in the most repeatative of ways you can repeat, the switch to digital is slooooooow (when can we get a proper EPG that shows more than the current and next shows?).
Of course, all of these issues are a little off point. The fact is most shows are delayed by around 6 month, probably due to the seasonal structure of programming. Even so, I am quite willing to download Lost, Heroes and Dr. Who 6 months before they are aired here, then watch them at my convenience, not the networks.
While I don't know much about the intricacies of ADSL, I do believe you are correct - the last mile is essentially shared bandwidth. However, placing a cache at each local exchange would help the situation (but not solve it). A peer at the exchange could serve popular torrents at high speed and largely negate the need for your client to upload at all (except to other peers who are with an ISP not providing such a service). Furthermore, since a complete seed is available locally, it could be streamed to your client as fast as you could receive it and reducing the networks time spent saturated (mind you, then your client moves to the next torrent). If it were implemented, I expect it would die as soon as authorities found out that the ISP were serving copyrighted content of their servers.
There are illegal uses of all protocols (HTTP, FTP, Telnet, SSH, whatever), but you don't see ISP's slamming the gates down on them. The technology itself is not good nor evil, but its use makes it so. I see my ISP as a means to provide me with bandwidth and data; what I do with it is none of their business.
But that's the point - they currently *do* give it away - it costs me nothing to watch the show when it's aired. They can always leave the ads in the downloaded version to keep their current business model intact (mostly). Sure, people could edit out the ads, but guess what - this has already been happening for a long time (press fast-forward on the VCR/PVR).
At least they have stated a commitment to mac and linux.
I was interested to see a advert directly after "Supernatural" the other night here in Australia that promised "free download of the episodes" (see http://supernatural.ten.com.au/). Cool I thought - the networks here are listening and responding to the demand for true on-demand viewing.
Imagine my disappointment in discovering that I must be running Windows XP with IE6 and WMP9. Nothing else will work because other players do "not support the DRM features we use to protect our content from unauthorised use". Not only that, but the access is limited "a maximum of 1 computer for download" and I can watch it "as many times as you wish within a 48 hour period". On top of this, the episodes are only available *after* they have been aired.
WTF? This is a lesson in how to take a great idea (true on-demand, customer driven technology) and cripple it to the point of being almost completely useless. If you are going to make it freely available then do so , otherwise we will continue to record the show on our PVR's and watch it whenever we like (and where ever we like if you want to transfer the files onto your laptop).
While PVR's have dramatically altered my viewing habit (it is rare for me to watch anything live anymore), they are still imited by one important fact - I still must wait for the networks to broadcast the show. There is no true "on demand" service available and there probably won;t be for sometime; not because nobody wants it, but because the existing business models are deeply entrenched. It will take an enormous tectonic shift in the industry to allow true on demand services.
The first tentative steps have happened (first DVDs sent to your home, now available for download) but this is a long way off what people really want.
I would love to be able to sit in front of my TV, pick up a remote and select the season/episode of the show I want to watch *right now*. An internal BT client could start the download from the network and start playing (the more popular programs would naturally get more bandwidth). Such a service relies on a completely different business model.
I will happily pay a few dollars for a single program, or buy a season pass to my favorite shows, or pay a monthly fee that allows me access to a certain number of programs. A natural extension of this is tying the number of paying viewers to the production houses. Popular shows get paid more and will continue, bad/unpopular shows will die if they are not supported via other means.
For now, bittorrent will remain extremely popular as it allows people to watch the shows they want, when they want to - are you TV networks listening? There is a huge business here!
How convenient that the rights held so dear to your heart do not apply to any other person on the planet. This is the kind of attitude that results in the rest of us regarding you as self-centered and arrogant.
Funny this topic come up today - last night I was looking at Pale Blue Dot. Judging by the behavior exhibited, we're a pretty dumb species.
As President of the Safety Institute of Australia (Tasmanian Division) I am saddened to say that most safety measures are for show.
While the airline industry does an excellent job engineering their machines to stay skies (probabilistically), there are more public aspects to "safety" that have little to do with reality and more providing the illusion of safety. The movie "Fight Club" mentions this in passing: "placid as Hindu cows" when referring to the in-flight safety cards.
I believe the sentiment is correct. There is little a seatbelt, the brace position and a life jacket with a whistle will do when you slam into the ocean at 800K's/hour. Here is an example of *controlled* flight into water, and it ain't pretty!
The previous story seems to suggest the industry has not stagnated at all, just Microsoft who seems to be making them more irrelevant with every passing day.
The fix for Microsoft? Get rid of half your employees, ask the consumer what they want and give it to them. Easy isn't it? Worked for Warren Buffet.
Glad to hear from someone who was actually developing the product.
I implemented Netmail for a reasonably large non profit organisation here in Australia with terrific results. Since Netmail integrated so tightly with eDirectory (which we used to keep the membership information) it was a breeze giving everyone an email address with wemail, forwarding, spam protection, calendaring, etc. One of the best features was its recognition of eDirectory groups (even dynamic ones) which we used as the basis for email lists with great effect (up to the minute accurate based on user defined attributes).
When Novell first announced Hula I was concerned what this might mean for the existing Netmail installations (here are many who are *much* larger than us). Admittedly, I have not kept a close eye on the developments as I have moved on to other projects, but is seems my initial fears were confirmed. I hope the small development community around Hula continues and releases great stuff.
BTW - IMHO, Hula was never really meant to be an Exchange killer. As a kid it was trained to do different things and was never really suited to taking on the big boy. Novell has Groupwise against Exchange, but that is a whole other subject...
Yep - and the manufacturers have not help themselves by marketing SD displays as being "HD ready", which usually means it might accept an HD signal and down covert it to SD for display (in many cases this will only work if there is no HDCP involved). There are now a few that are selling true HD displays and they have had to invent another term for it. Add LCD/Plamsa/Rear Projection/CRT/HDMI/DVI/Component/S-Video/Composit e into the mix and there is plenty of confusion for the average consumer.
We as consumers have been told that digital will solve all our poor reception issues (it doesn't), and digital is DVD quality (maybe, but the original content isn't), and that my new plasma is HDTV ready (which is is not) and HD is really good (yawn, heard it before, why should I believe you this time?)
Absolutely!
Here is Australia we do not have Tivo, but I suspect its success is a direct response to the freedom of viewing options it offers. Although we can still record free to air programs and play them back at anytime, this *does not compare* with being able to watch the program *you* want *when* you want it.
Millions are flocking to bittorrent sites to download their favorite programs so they can watch them whenever is convenient for them, not the networks. This presents a tremendous opportunity for a media network who is willing to abandon the current business model and pursue a truly customer orientated service.
The pieces are all there: bittorrrent + broadband. I have said this before, but imagine a unit that plugs into a dedicated broadband connection, your hifi and display. It presents a simple interface to find and download shows and movies, which it does using a built in bittorrent client. The source files are seeded on large distributed libraries owned by the media networks and/or ISPs and because it's BT the more popular programs are naturally faster. Boom! No longer do you have to wait for a show to be aired, you can watch whatever you want when you want.
The entire back catalog of shows can be made available, so if you want to watch the fourth episode of the third season of "The Simpsons" - no problem.
In my work as a risk manager it is common for members of the public to misunderstand risk. What *is* safe? There is always a chance that something will happen, resulting in injury or damage - for example the ground may open up under your house and swallow you. What does vary is the probability of things will happening. We therefore define "safe" as "an acceptable level of risk". Not having looked at the studies, but if it is difficult to prove, it is probably a very low risk. There are many more risks we should worry about before attempting to fix these ones (say, driving your kids to school).
You argument is brief and yet still flawed. If the signs that are there are being ignored then why have them at all? Adding signs does not fix the problem.
When we have a road system that thinks thiskindofsignage is acceptable we have a problem. While I do not advocate the removal of all signs and rules, they are currently overused.
We need to simplify our lives not make them more complex, but don't go too far. For example, the article says "We're getting rid of the division between cars and pedestrians." Last time I checked, people and cars to not mix too well (usually the people come of worse in confrontations). Keeping pedestrians and vehicles separate is a sensible step in reducing the probability of coincidence and should remain.
Gee - Who would have thought Intel's naming scheme that uses both words "duo" and "2" would cause confusion (what a bone-headed marketing decision that was).
How many of these "new" domains are those horrible "parked domains" that advertise their own sale and link to other sites (presumably to lift their google ranking)?
Slashdot Mirror
If they are Mormons, just ask them about their special underwear - that seems to make them unconformable when their at my door :)
Well, that is exactly what Jobs has publicly stated he would "do in a heartbeat". The primary reasons seem to be 1) The iPod was a wild success before iTMS and would probably remain so without iTMS or its associated DRM. 2) The music industry itself sells the vast majority of its digital music via CD, which has NO built in DRM capabilities. 3) By removing DRM the online digital market is on a level playing field with CDs and would prosper. This would probably increase the online digital music market by removing barriers placed on customers due to draconian DRM schemes that fail to solve the problem they were meant to solve - piracy. 6) Apple (and others) can ditch the administrative overhead in developing and maintaining said DRM and streamline their business. Perhaps Apple should just hand over Fairplay to the music industry and open it up, follow all instructions given by them and say "I told you so" when they finally realise it will never work?
The problem is even worse than that - the networks are unwilling to change. Advertisements are constant and loud (to spite investigative "reporters" proving otherwise - have they never heard of dynamic compression?), the repetition of shows is repeatative in the most repeatative of ways you can repeat, the switch to digital is slooooooow (when can we get a proper EPG that shows more than the current and next shows?).
Of course, all of these issues are a little off point. The fact is most shows are delayed by around 6 month, probably due to the seasonal structure of programming. Even so, I am quite willing to download Lost, Heroes and Dr. Who 6 months before they are aired here, then watch them at my convenience, not the networks.
http://www.venganza.org/
While I don't know much about the intricacies of ADSL, I do believe you are correct - the last mile is essentially shared bandwidth. However, placing a cache at each local exchange would help the situation (but not solve it). A peer at the exchange could serve popular torrents at high speed and largely negate the need for your client to upload at all (except to other peers who are with an ISP not providing such a service). Furthermore, since a complete seed is available locally, it could be streamed to your client as fast as you could receive it and reducing the networks time spent saturated (mind you, then your client moves to the next torrent). If it were implemented, I expect it would die as soon as authorities found out that the ISP were serving copyrighted content of their servers.
There are illegal uses of all protocols (HTTP, FTP, Telnet, SSH, whatever), but you don't see ISP's slamming the gates down on them. The technology itself is not good nor evil, but its use makes it so. I see my ISP as a means to provide me with bandwidth and data; what I do with it is none of their business.
But that's the point - they currently *do* give it away - it costs me nothing to watch the show when it's aired. They can always leave the ads in the downloaded version to keep their current business model intact (mostly). Sure, people could edit out the ads, but guess what - this has already been happening for a long time (press fast-forward on the VCR/PVR).
At least they have stated a commitment to mac and linux.
I was interested to see a advert directly after "Supernatural" the other night here in Australia that promised "free download of the episodes" (see http://supernatural.ten.com.au/). Cool I thought - the networks here are listening and responding to the demand for true on-demand viewing.
Imagine my disappointment in discovering that I must be running Windows XP with IE6 and WMP9. Nothing else will work because other players do "not support the DRM features we use to protect our content from unauthorised use". Not only that, but the access is limited "a maximum of 1 computer for download" and I can watch it "as many times as you wish within a 48 hour period". On top of this, the episodes are only available *after* they have been aired.
WTF? This is a lesson in how to take a great idea (true on-demand, customer driven technology) and cripple it to the point of being almost completely useless. If you are going to make it freely available then do so , otherwise we will continue to record the show on our PVR's and watch it whenever we like (and where ever we like if you want to transfer the files onto your laptop).
Finally, someone who gets it!
While PVR's have dramatically altered my viewing habit (it is rare for me to watch anything live anymore), they are still imited by one important fact - I still must wait for the networks to broadcast the show. There is no true "on demand" service available and there probably won;t be for sometime; not because nobody wants it, but because the existing business models are deeply entrenched. It will take an enormous tectonic shift in the industry to allow true on demand services.
The first tentative steps have happened (first DVDs sent to your home, now available for download) but this is a long way off what people really want.
I would love to be able to sit in front of my TV, pick up a remote and select the season/episode of the show I want to watch *right now*. An internal BT client could start the download from the network and start playing (the more popular programs would naturally get more bandwidth). Such a service relies on a completely different business model.
I will happily pay a few dollars for a single program, or buy a season pass to my favorite shows, or pay a monthly fee that allows me access to a certain number of programs. A natural extension of this is tying the number of paying viewers to the production houses. Popular shows get paid more and will continue, bad/unpopular shows will die if they are not supported via other means.
For now, bittorrent will remain extremely popular as it allows people to watch the shows they want, when they want to - are you TV networks listening? There is a huge business here!
How convenient that the rights held so dear to your heart do not apply to any other person on the planet. This is the kind of attitude that results in the rest of us regarding you as self-centered and arrogant.
Funny this topic come up today - last night I was looking at Pale Blue Dot. Judging by the behavior exhibited, we're a pretty dumb species.
As President of the Safety Institute of Australia (Tasmanian Division) I am saddened to say that most safety measures are for show.
While the airline industry does an excellent job engineering their machines to stay skies (probabilistically), there are more public aspects to "safety" that have little to do with reality and more providing the illusion of safety. The movie "Fight Club" mentions this in passing: "placid as Hindu cows" when referring to the in-flight safety cards.
I believe the sentiment is correct. There is little a seatbelt, the brace position and a life jacket with a whistle will do when you slam into the ocean at 800K's/hour. Here is an example of *controlled* flight into water, and it ain't pretty!
Mod up. I watched this the other day and it raises some very good questions.
The previous story seems to suggest the industry has not stagnated at all, just Microsoft who seems to be making them more irrelevant with every passing day.
The fix for Microsoft? Get rid of half your employees, ask the consumer what they want and give it to them. Easy isn't it? Worked for Warren Buffet.
The simple sharing of events/etc in Hula looked great. Hopefully Apple's upcoming CalDAV implementation in Leopard will be just as good.
Glad to hear from someone who was actually developing the product.
I implemented Netmail for a reasonably large non profit organisation here in Australia with terrific results. Since Netmail integrated so tightly with eDirectory (which we used to keep the membership information) it was a breeze giving everyone an email address with wemail, forwarding, spam protection, calendaring, etc. One of the best features was its recognition of eDirectory groups (even dynamic ones) which we used as the basis for email lists with great effect (up to the minute accurate based on user defined attributes).
When Novell first announced Hula I was concerned what this might mean for the existing Netmail installations (here are many who are *much* larger than us). Admittedly, I have not kept a close eye on the developments as I have moved on to other projects, but is seems my initial fears were confirmed. I hope the small development community around Hula continues and releases great stuff.
BTW - IMHO, Hula was never really meant to be an Exchange killer. As a kid it was trained to do different things and was never really suited to taking on the big boy. Novell has Groupwise against Exchange, but that is a whole other subject...
Yep - and the manufacturers have not help themselves by marketing SD displays as being "HD ready", which usually means it might accept an HD signal and down covert it to SD for display (in many cases this will only work if there is no HDCP involved). There are now a few that are selling true HD displays and they have had to invent another term for it. Add LCD/Plamsa/Rear Projection/CRT/HDMI/DVI/Component/S-Video/Composit e into the mix and there is plenty of confusion for the average consumer.
We as consumers have been told that digital will solve all our poor reception issues (it doesn't), and digital is DVD quality (maybe, but the original content isn't), and that my new plasma is HDTV ready (which is is not) and HD is really good (yawn, heard it before, why should I believe you this time?)
Absolutely!
Here is Australia we do not have Tivo, but I suspect its success is a direct response to the freedom of viewing options it offers. Although we can still record free to air programs and play them back at anytime, this *does not compare* with being able to watch the program *you* want *when* you want it.
Millions are flocking to bittorrent sites to download their favorite programs so they can watch them whenever is convenient for them, not the networks. This presents a tremendous opportunity for a media network who is willing to abandon the current business model and pursue a truly customer orientated service.
The pieces are all there: bittorrrent + broadband. I have said this before, but imagine a unit that plugs into a dedicated broadband connection, your hifi and display. It presents a simple interface to find and download shows and movies, which it does using a built in bittorrent client. The source files are seeded on large distributed libraries owned by the media networks and/or ISPs and because it's BT the more popular programs are naturally faster. Boom! No longer do you have to wait for a show to be aired, you can watch whatever you want when you want.
The entire back catalog of shows can be made available, so if you want to watch the fourth episode of the third season of "The Simpsons" - no problem.
In my work as a risk manager it is common for members of the public to misunderstand risk. What *is* safe? There is always a chance that something will happen, resulting in injury or damage - for example the ground may open up under your house and swallow you. What does vary is the probability of things will happening. We therefore define "safe" as "an acceptable level of risk". Not having looked at the studies, but if it is difficult to prove, it is probably a very low risk. There are many more risks we should worry about before attempting to fix these ones (say, driving your kids to school).
You argument is brief and yet still flawed. If the signs that are there are being ignored then why have them at all? Adding signs does not fix the problem.
When we have a road system that thinks this kind of signage is acceptable we have a problem. While I do not advocate the removal of all signs and rules, they are currently overused.
We need to simplify our lives not make them more complex, but don't go too far. For example, the article says "We're getting rid of the division between cars and pedestrians." Last time I checked, people and cars to not mix too well (usually the people come of worse in confrontations). Keeping pedestrians and vehicles separate is a sensible step in reducing the probability of coincidence and should remain.
Thankyou. If I had mod points they would be yours.
Gee - Who would have thought Intel's naming scheme that uses both words "duo" and "2" would cause confusion (what a bone-headed marketing decision that was).
How many of these "new" domains are those horrible "parked domains" that advertise their own sale and link to other sites (presumably to lift their google ranking)?