"You can only move from Windows 7 Professional to Windows Vista Business or Windows XP Professional, and from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows Vista Ultimate or Windows XP Professional.
Organizations with Windows volume licenses, which cover 250 PCs or more, will be able to downgrade to any prior version of Windows - a standard policy.
But the downgrade window will expire before 18 months if a service pack ships. Downgrade rights to Windows Vista will not expire."
They repeated exactly the same mistakes of the first trial.
Jammie Thomas' lawyer did not challenge the technical evidence presented in court; the type of evidence that had already failed to meet the standards of trustworthiness required in other cases.
Nor did Jammie present her own technical expert to rebut their findings, only her own testimony that she didn't do it.
Nor did the judge instruct that mere 'making available' of copyrighted works is not enough to be found liable; this mistake was what caused the original retrial.
The conduct of the trial itself was flawed, again, the defence didn't challenge the collection of the evidence, again, and the instructions to the jury on what the law is were flawed, again. There are ample grounds for a retrial or an appeal.
A little background - virgin media is virtually the only choice for cable provider in the UK, having bought up most of the competition, though their network only covers the cities and largest towns. They offer up to 20Mb, though I think they've started offering 50Mb in some areas now. They're competing with ADSL2+ in city centres, with services up to 24Mb (if you're close enough to the exchange)
Virgin already offer TV packages, phone etc being cable, and already have throttling in place. When you download a certain amount in peak hours, they throttle you for the next 5 hours (for the 10Mb users, it's down to 1Mb after downloading 800MB, for example). They've also worked with the major labels to issue warning letters when accused of file sharing, and are partnering with phorm to handover browsing data for targeted advertising, so they have form for keeping a close eye on what their customers get up to, alongside official media services.
So this new DRM-free all-you-can-eat music package, as long as it's a Universal artist (i.e. they don't get deleted when you leave) will be an optional add-on to their normal packages, with all users having extra policing of their use in order to keep Universal happy. Their pricing estimate so far is 'a couple of albums a month'; so £20 or $35 a month on top.
The channel/program assignments come along with the guide data that's downloaded from Microsoft, as opposed to the info pulled off the air, like everybody else does it. So Microsoft screwed up the guide data they were distributing to DTV-using Media Centre users. I'm a DTV Media Centre user in another country, and I'd be kinda pissed if Microsoft screwed that up, breaking all DTV functions of media centre and still hadn't fixed it.
But yeah, that's just completely unrelated Microsoft bashing. Christ, what an asshole.
I would hope that she is found liable only on good evidence. Due process is important not least because some day I might find myself in that chair for some reason.
I hope that if that day comes, the evidence against me will be scrutinised for correctness, and that the conclusions the prosecution draw from it are valid, not just an unquestioned piece of paper that my accusers' expert say proves my guilt.
I would also hope that when the judge instructs the jury on the actual law, and what is needed to find me liable, he actually gives the correct instructions. Kudos to the original judge for at least realising he'd made a mistake in what the law is, and corrected it somewhat by calling for a retrial.
I would also hope my punishment if found liable would be proportional to my offence, and be focused of making good my accusers losses, rather than an incredibly excessive fine in order to discourage others.
To draw the inevitable car parallel; if I was accused of speeding, I'd hope they would have some evidence that I'd actually been speeding, that I'd be allowed to examine it, that the judge wouldn't decide that merely sitting in a car capable of doing that speed would make me guilty, and if found guilty, they wouldn't fine me $222,000 for it.
Because his instruction was that she'd have broken the law if she was found to be 'making available' copyrighted works, i.e. she was found sharing them, even if no-one had actually downloaded them from her.
He came to that instruction because the major label lawyers argued that that was the case. The judge himself had second thoughts over the correctness of that instruction to the jury, asked for additional briefing on the matter, and then changed his mind as 'making available' isn't in copyright law, and based upon precedent was an incorrect instruction to the jury over what the law was. He thus called the retrial himself.
Now we also get to examine the original evidence properly that she was 'making available', which it wasn't at the original trial.
Why on earth would thousands (potentially millions) of individuals download high-bandwidth material over separate, contending, low-bandwidth links, when much of that same material is freely broadcast through the air they breathe?
Convenience. Being able to watch what you want, when you want instead of what some channel manager has decided should be broadcast in that timeslot. It's the difference between ordinary radio and spotify, and not having to wait a year (or possibly forever) for it to hit DVD for an outrageous price is just gravy.
Video-on-demand for a low price is incredibly popular whether it's from the BBC or the piratebay, even though the technology was never designed for it, and it's a pretty creaky fit. Yet even with the limitations, people still want it really badly. And it's just a driver of what's to come. High capacity links have all sorts of uses, many of them productive - video just happens to be the vox populi one.
TV, radio and phones all got very expensive custom networks built just for them at large public subsidy. Other countries like korea and france are doing the same for broadband - it's overdue time that control and upgrades of one of our key pieces of national infrastructure shouldn't be left in the hands of a selfish operator. Yes, BT openreach is nominally a different company than BT-the-consumer-ISP, but we should have a national fibre-optic to the kerb system in place by now, instead of the half-assed ADSL2+ 21CN upgrade to the copper phone line system they're struggling with right now and the LLU operators rolled out years ago. As long as management concerned only with the bottom line are in control of it, we'll be permanently stuck in the tech stone age in this country, and have to pay through the nose for it to boot.
As the iplayer is not currently covered by the licence fee (i.e. you don't need a TV licence just to watch the iplayer if you have no TV) they should be ok to not provide iplayer service to everyone, such as BT customers - after all, many people can't get a fast enough connection, or even any connection to watch what limited selection of content is available via iplayer at the moment.
But don't cut BT users off from the BBC; redirect them to a page saying 'due to BT not wishing to let you visit us without being paid extra, we've had to stop BT customers like yourself watching TV via the iplayer service for free. You may wish to find an ISP that includes iplayer access as part of their broadband packages.'
The cherry would be including links and switching instructions, but I suspect that would be seen as commercial advertising, which is against the charter.
This shouldn't be an issue at all; the BBC's ISP should be charging them a fortune for their high bandwidth use and then the squabble is between ISPs for peering costs. Also BT should be charging by the gigabyte instead of offering unrealistic "unlimited" packages that cause problems when people actually use their bandwidth.
Both of these already take place more or less; the BBC does pay an ungodly amount for bandwidth already.
BT's packages also have a 40GB soft limit in their FUP - virtually no british home user ADSL ISPs offer a truly unlimited service any more, you need to get a business class ADSL account for £80-100 a month or so.
BT also throttle video streaming down to 750Kb/s in peak periods on the standard packages, so users already have limited access to the higher quality streams on iplayer in the evening with BT, something a number of other ISPs have been using lately in their adverts.
So not only are the BBC paying for their bandwidth, and users are paying through the nose for a pretty limited service, BT now want to double dip and charge twice for the same content, with the BBC picking up the bill instead of the customers.
Must be good business when you're an ex-public service monopoly and still the largest ISP, and can get away with bullshit like this.
how am I supposed to use my already-active internet connection to get Firefox?
The same way we did back in the days before bundling; from third party media. Remember when every magazine cover CD and ISP setup CD came with a copy of netscape and IE installers? Or if you're just reinstalling from your custom OEM media/restore partition, you'll get their setup, including browser.
Of course, it's not like they're actually *removing* IE; they're just flipping the switch in the registry that says to hide the shortcut. Go into control panel and re-enable it, and there it is again.
I have to admit, it'd be a stroke of genius by microsoft; they can tell the monpolies regulator that IE is off by default, and that it's just coincidence that all OEMs* choose to turn it back on as part of their sysprep image cos it's a lot simpler than explaining to users what opera or firefox are. So nothing changes in the end at all, but it gets Microsoft nicely off the hook of having to actually compete on a level playing field.
And since no doubt somebody in this thread is getting upmodded for muttering the words 'free market' and it's 'just anti-US bias against microsoft' and 'everyone needs a browser, like KDE or apple supply' I'll take the opportunity to explain - again - why this matters.
Yes, every user needs a browser, so isn't it convenient if nearly every computer in the world shipped with IE, then third parties don't need to support the standards, they just need to support IE. They write to some extension specific to IE - like say activeX - and that's the same as supporting everyone by an open standard, and it's easier to just write to one specific browser than test it in a bunch of them. Eventually, when so many websites are written this way, it becomes nigh impossible to use the web without using IE - and then microsoft have a new defacto monopoly with IE, because everyone writes to it because everyone uses it. That makes it extremely hard for any browser, or any OS that doesn't ship with IE to compete - because they don't work on the web without IE. So Mirosoft have leveraged a monpoly in one market, windows, into a monopoly in another market, the web, and that just reinforces their original monopoly and makes windows even harder to compete with. We've seen this in actually happen Korea for example, where virtually all banking websites use activex, making IE - and thus windows - a near mandatory requirement.
The way to break that cycle is to ensure that third party developers can't take the shortcut of assuming that because 95% of users are windows users, that 95% of people will have IE, by taking IE off the desktop by default, and giving the alternatives an equal platform. The only reason firefox has the market share it does is because IE won, and was left to rot for so very long indeed that users and developers switched to a project with a pulse.to get new features. The only reason we have IE8 at all is because of firefox forcing microsoft to have to compete again.
Without competition, there is no choice in the market, and with no choice in the market consumers lose their own weapon to force improvements of service - to switch to somebody else. When existing monopolies step into new markets, and compete purely on their existing domination rather than any merit, governments are duty bound to protect the long term interests of the public be ensuring competition is kept fair, even if letting the monopoly do what it wants is easier in the short term.
I used payola intentionally, and meant it. Record companies used to illegally bribe radio stations directly, to get their music on the playlists - and then present it as an independent choice based on quality. In 2006, major labels were sued (successfully) in NYC for using third party promoters to pay the radio stations directly to play their music, and try to get round the payola laws that way.
It's a form of astroturfing, and it's still going on.
There's another form of sleeze with top-10 chart lists. They're based on sales, right? Well, the record companies buy back their own records in an attempt to get them up the chart. I'm told that in some cases, they don't even bother shipping merchandise; they just give the retailer a lump cash sum equivalent to their cut as if they had bought and sold x number of albums to the label, and to then say that they had, in fact, sold x albums.
Since people are social animals, they have a tendency to buy what other people are buying - if it's popular, it must be good, right? See amazon recommendations for another example, though I've no reason to believe amazon are artificially changing the recommendations because of bribes. But getting on the top 10 list for music sales, by whatever method, then goes on to make much more money from people buying what other people are listening to, even though the charts are based on a total lie.
Actually, they added up all the bittorrent users on one file in the afternoon, waved some magic fairly dust to extrapolate that to everyone for a year, multiplied the figure by £25 as the 'average' price per file, and then multipled *that* figure by 10 (from £12 billion to £120 billion) in the press release by accident, then quietly changed it when challenged by a BBC reporter. Not that they issued a retraction.
It's such a useless figure for anything it's laughable. Well, apart from whipping up a moral panic in the government so they pass yet more draconian legislation forcing ISPs to act as some sort of panopticon against their own userbase at their own cost. I'm sure it's pretty good at that.
The reason CD prices and DVD prices are what they has virtually nothing to do with the cost of production. It's because they lie on what the companies believe to be the optimum point on the price/demand curve - i.e. the maximum they can get away with. This is the result of monpoly distribution - if you want a legitimate copy of a particular artist on a major label, or a particular film, you go to their media representative and pay their price, or you don't buy it at all.
If you look at the price breakdown of either media, the largest slices of the pie go to the retailer, the label, and the taxman, generally in that order. The artists get a very small percentage. Where you see price drops, thats due to competition between the retailers (i.e. supermarkets) reducing their cut, rather than the label taking a hit. Of course, the record labels have used it as justification to reduce the artist's cut, even though their own profit margins have increased due to the substantial falling cost of production. Pressing plants are a lot cheaper, and while a good studio engineer and producer still costs money, the equipment is a lot cheaper and time needed to run it through autotune has fallen.
Just take radio; payola is still in business, so labels literally pay to get their music on the air, as a promotional tool to drive album sales.
With DVDs, most of the costs of production have already been paid anyway; most films at least break even in the cinema, so DVD sales are just gravy, and they'll take as much as they can get away with. It's also why prices are so wildly different between regions; they price to what local demand will allow (prices are generally 50% higher in Europe compared to the US), and use DRM and import restrictions to prevent customers price shopping around.
So, the internet. The long tail has turned out to be somewhat of a myth - online sales have emphasised the marketshare of the top marketed artists, not flattened it. Many of the more obscure back catalogues don't sell anything at all, as generally teenagers want the latest new hit, not some crusty 20 year old album from a band they've never heard of.
What it has done though is freed the indies. OK, their share of the market might not be very big, but the market itself (if you include piracy) has grown quite a lot. indie music doesn't end up on piratebay much, and they can price themselves very low and still keep almost all the profit. Self-production is pretty cheap indeed now, and there's various indie distribution channels such as cdbaby that leave the artist with almost all the money. You might not make the megabucks of being a heavily marketed hit teen sensation, but it's still enough to make a decent living. Even major artists have twigged that once they're famous, if they can break free of the label they can really make a killing using the internet. Just look at radiohead.
So the record industry is being squeezed between two places. Internet distributed indies are showing how the internet can make you money not lose it; and piracy is utterly destroying their artificial distribution monopoly, and its monopoly prices. They had their chance to become the go-to online distributer buy buying napster and keeping it running, and blew it big time - now apple have that title. The film industry is not making the same mistake; with services like netflix, and video streaming via xbox live, or even just over cable they're trying to stay ahead of the curve by offering convenience for a price. If they can keep that price low enough, and get titles out fast enough not to drive the general public to piracy, they'll survive. Plus of course, they have the cinema chains to fall back on; anyone prepared to watch a cam rip wasn't likely a customer in the first place.
My maxim is always this - in a world where you can sell bottled water, you'll be able to sell packaged entertainment media. You might not make as money as you'd like, but give the customer a cheap, easy to use experience that 'just works', and you'll stay in business. Trea
This is certainly true. The PS2 still gets at least half the sales of the PS3 every month, and got 50% more in April due to a US price cut of the PS2 that month.
I'd be quite happy with the existing wii style, i.e. broadbrush stylized cartoony style (wii tennis, mario galaxy, boom blox, little king's story), but running at a higher res. You don't need to turn a game into Gears of War 2 or Alan Wake in order to get a nice looking high res game that doesn't go all blocky and hard to see on a 1080p panel - so some sort of wii 2, with backwards compatibility but a gruntier gpu and anti-aliasing built in would still be nice to see sometime before 2015.
On the other hand, PCs are definitely pulling ahead of the consoles again in the graphics horsepower stakes, and it will hopefully be a shot in the arm for the platform if AAA titles look a lot better on the PC (or even has some good exclusives that just aren't possible on the consoles) for a few years.
I don't want to move to linux on the desktop for the ordinary users. With the range and amount of crappy software (designed for windows 98!) that their managers insist they MUST have that is windows only and doesn't have a linux analog, I can live without the grief of desktop virtualization.
Add to that the many staff than can't handle when an option moves two places down in a menu on office, or how to fix the 'problem' that I've already shown them how to fix three times this week, I'd spend my entire day just helping them find their way round firefox (yes, we have firefox on our windows pcs. No, they don't use it because they 'know the internet', and the big e IS the internet)
Windows sucks, but supporting it sucks less than trying to deal with staff who don't gain anything from training, even if we had the money or time to pay for it. And active directory might suck, but it sucks less than trying to get the equivalent functionality with openldap, and my linux servers still tie in to it nicely.
I can think of one use-case for ethernet-hdmi that doesn't involve DRM, though I can think of a whole bunch that do involve DRM (come on, these are the guys that insisted on HDCP, how likely is it that they're *not* thinking about DRM scheme upgrades, device key blacklists, and online key verification?)
Firmware updates for your TV. At the moment, you need to tune into a particular digital TV channel at a particular time on a particular day to get the firmware update. Which is a right royal pain in the danglies if it fixes a particular bug - and yes, I have done this with a couple of samsung TVs. Being able to push an update via tftp, or even having it go and get it directly would be damn handy.
The standard composite AV-out lead (that has the optical socket on it) you get with a 360 is too fat to allow an HDMI lead to be used at the same time - the sockets are just too close together.
If you buy an elite 360, you get a special slimline audio out-only dongle that gives you both optical and HDMI, which you can also get separately in the expensive official 360 HDMI cable pack. There are also a number of slimline 3rd party VGA or SCART cables that are thinner, and also work with HDMI (bonus tip - if you use a VGA-out lead as well as HDMI, it will work with whichever one is plugged in to a live device; so I have HDMI on a switchbox going to the TV, and the VGA to my projector, and the 360 switches on boot to whichever is turned on).
If you're really desperate to get a 360 standard AV lead to fit alongside an HDMI lead, you can take a screwdriver to the plastic case, and pop it open like a clamshell. Ghetto, but it works.
Same reason that linux doesn't playback MP3, DVDs and h.264 by default. US-only software patents covering the codecs. Without paying the fee, and getting the licences to use the patents, it's illegal to ship it in your US product.
XP added limited MP3 playback, Windows Vista added built in MPEG2 playback, and 7 adds h.264 playback. Yes, XP should have had MPEG2 playback built in, it came out three years after DVD became widely available.
Linux at least has the excuse that free distros can't pay the patent fees and thus can't ship them in the default package to US users (so usually have a 'download it now' option when you first need it, where you promise you don't live in the US, and download from a mirror elsewhere in the world). This is annoying when you do live outside the US, and have to put up with software patent bullshit in everything, even non-US software projects, because they don't want to get sued.
Perhaps you should have thought about having sufficient time and space to overtake the car in front without breaking the speed limit before you started overtaking.
You're not allowed to break the speed limit when overtaking, just like the rest of the time. If the car you're overtaking is close to the speed limit, and you can't see the road ahead clear for a nice long way, you shouldn't be overtaking that car in the first place.
The problem with this vein of thought, while it is indeed true, is that proponents of it almost invariably place themselves in the 'good driver' category, as an argument as to why they're capable of driving faster safely.
However, many people over-estimate their own driving ability compared to their peers, especially younger drivers, especially in relation to hazard awareness.
As a general rule of thumb, unless you're a professional racing driver or trained police pursuit driver, you're not as good at risk assessment as you think you are.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, for up to 18 months.
"You can only move from Windows 7 Professional to Windows Vista Business or Windows XP Professional, and from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows Vista Ultimate or Windows XP Professional.
Organizations with Windows volume licenses, which cover 250 PCs or more, will be able to downgrade to any prior version of Windows - a standard policy.
But the downgrade window will expire before 18 months if a service pack ships. Downgrade rights to Windows Vista will not expire."
They repeated exactly the same mistakes of the first trial.
Jammie Thomas' lawyer did not challenge the technical evidence presented in court; the type of evidence that had already failed to meet the standards of trustworthiness required in other cases.
Nor did Jammie present her own technical expert to rebut their findings, only her own testimony that she didn't do it.
Nor did the judge instruct that mere 'making available' of copyrighted works is not enough to be found liable; this mistake was what caused the original retrial.
The conduct of the trial itself was flawed, again, the defence didn't challenge the collection of the evidence, again, and the instructions to the jury on what the law is were flawed, again. There are ample grounds for a retrial or an appeal.
He won the 2009 Orwell special prize for blogs - under the pseudonym he used on the blog, Jack Night.
Wikipedia doesn't say much about the special prizes, only the Journalism and Book prizes.
A little background - virgin media is virtually the only choice for cable provider in the UK, having bought up most of the competition, though their network only covers the cities and largest towns. They offer up to 20Mb, though I think they've started offering 50Mb in some areas now. They're competing with ADSL2+ in city centres, with services up to 24Mb (if you're close enough to the exchange)
Virgin already offer TV packages, phone etc being cable, and already have throttling in place. When you download a certain amount in peak hours, they throttle you for the next 5 hours (for the 10Mb users, it's down to 1Mb after downloading 800MB, for example). They've also worked with the major labels to issue warning letters when accused of file sharing, and are partnering with phorm to handover browsing data for targeted advertising, so they have form for keeping a close eye on what their customers get up to, alongside official media services.
So this new DRM-free all-you-can-eat music package, as long as it's a Universal artist (i.e. they don't get deleted when you leave) will be an optional add-on to their normal packages, with all users having extra policing of their use in order to keep Universal happy. Their pricing estimate so far is 'a couple of albums a month'; so £20 or $35 a month on top.
The channel/program assignments come along with the guide data that's downloaded from Microsoft, as opposed to the info pulled off the air, like everybody else does it. So Microsoft screwed up the guide data they were distributing to DTV-using Media Centre users. I'm a DTV Media Centre user in another country, and I'd be kinda pissed if Microsoft screwed that up, breaking all DTV functions of media centre and still hadn't fixed it.
But yeah, that's just completely unrelated Microsoft bashing. Christ, what an asshole.
I would hope that she is found liable only on good evidence. Due process is important not least because some day I might find myself in that chair for some reason.
I hope that if that day comes, the evidence against me will be scrutinised for correctness, and that the conclusions the prosecution draw from it are valid, not just an unquestioned piece of paper that my accusers' expert say proves my guilt.
I would also hope that when the judge instructs the jury on the actual law, and what is needed to find me liable, he actually gives the correct instructions. Kudos to the original judge for at least realising he'd made a mistake in what the law is, and corrected it somewhat by calling for a retrial.
I would also hope my punishment if found liable would be proportional to my offence, and be focused of making good my accusers losses, rather than an incredibly excessive fine in order to discourage others.
To draw the inevitable car parallel; if I was accused of speeding, I'd hope they would have some evidence that I'd actually been speeding, that I'd be allowed to examine it, that the judge wouldn't decide that merely sitting in a car capable of doing that speed would make me guilty, and if found guilty, they wouldn't fine me $222,000 for it.
Because his instruction was that she'd have broken the law if she was found to be 'making available' copyrighted works, i.e. she was found sharing them, even if no-one had actually downloaded them from her.
He came to that instruction because the major label lawyers argued that that was the case. The judge himself had second thoughts over the correctness of that instruction to the jury, asked for additional briefing on the matter, and then changed his mind as 'making available' isn't in copyright law, and based upon precedent was an incorrect instruction to the jury over what the law was. He thus called the retrial himself.
Now we also get to examine the original evidence properly that she was 'making available', which it wasn't at the original trial.
International traffic - though the iplayer isn't available outside the UK, plenty of other BBC services are.
Only applies if there's LLU equipment in your exchange; if you're in a non-sky LLU exchange (about 60% of them) there's a 40GB cap.
Why on earth would thousands (potentially millions) of individuals download high-bandwidth material over separate, contending, low-bandwidth links, when much of that same material is freely broadcast through the air they breathe?
Convenience. Being able to watch what you want, when you want instead of what some channel manager has decided should be broadcast in that timeslot. It's the difference between ordinary radio and spotify, and not having to wait a year (or possibly forever) for it to hit DVD for an outrageous price is just gravy.
Video-on-demand for a low price is incredibly popular whether it's from the BBC or the piratebay, even though the technology was never designed for it, and it's a pretty creaky fit. Yet even with the limitations, people still want it really badly. And it's just a driver of what's to come. High capacity links have all sorts of uses, many of them productive - video just happens to be the vox populi one.
TV, radio and phones all got very expensive custom networks built just for them at large public subsidy. Other countries like korea and france are doing the same for broadband - it's overdue time that control and upgrades of one of our key pieces of national infrastructure shouldn't be left in the hands of a selfish operator. Yes, BT openreach is nominally a different company than BT-the-consumer-ISP, but we should have a national fibre-optic to the kerb system in place by now, instead of the half-assed ADSL2+ 21CN upgrade to the copper phone line system they're struggling with right now and the LLU operators rolled out years ago. As long as management concerned only with the bottom line are in control of it, we'll be permanently stuck in the tech stone age in this country, and have to pay through the nose for it to boot.
As the iplayer is not currently covered by the licence fee (i.e. you don't need a TV licence just to watch the iplayer if you have no TV) they should be ok to not provide iplayer service to everyone, such as BT customers - after all, many people can't get a fast enough connection, or even any connection to watch what limited selection of content is available via iplayer at the moment.
But don't cut BT users off from the BBC; redirect them to a page saying 'due to BT not wishing to let you visit us without being paid extra, we've had to stop BT customers like yourself watching TV via the iplayer service for free. You may wish to find an ISP that includes iplayer access as part of their broadband packages.'
The cherry would be including links and switching instructions, but I suspect that would be seen as commercial advertising, which is against the charter.
This shouldn't be an issue at all; the BBC's ISP should be charging them a fortune for their high bandwidth use and then the squabble is between ISPs for peering costs. Also BT should be charging by the gigabyte instead of offering unrealistic "unlimited" packages that cause problems when people actually use their bandwidth.
Both of these already take place more or less; the BBC does pay an ungodly amount for bandwidth already.
BT's packages also have a 40GB soft limit in their FUP - virtually no british home user ADSL ISPs offer a truly unlimited service any more, you need to get a business class ADSL account for £80-100 a month or so.
BT also throttle video streaming down to 750Kb/s in peak periods on the standard packages, so users already have limited access to the higher quality streams on iplayer in the evening with BT, something a number of other ISPs have been using lately in their adverts.
So not only are the BBC paying for their bandwidth, and users are paying through the nose for a pretty limited service, BT now want to double dip and charge twice for the same content, with the BBC picking up the bill instead of the customers.
Must be good business when you're an ex-public service monopoly and still the largest ISP, and can get away with bullshit like this.
Well, a cigarette is physically smaller than a cigar, thus the dimunitive.
I think there's a decent argument that your average woman is physically smaller than your average chair-bound mountain-dew lovin' male geek.
how am I supposed to use my already-active internet connection to get Firefox?
The same way we did back in the days before bundling; from third party media. Remember when every magazine cover CD and ISP setup CD came with a copy of netscape and IE installers? Or if you're just reinstalling from your custom OEM media/restore partition, you'll get their setup, including browser.
Of course, it's not like they're actually *removing* IE; they're just flipping the switch in the registry that says to hide the shortcut. Go into control panel and re-enable it, and there it is again.
I have to admit, it'd be a stroke of genius by microsoft; they can tell the monpolies regulator that IE is off by default, and that it's just coincidence that all OEMs* choose to turn it back on as part of their sysprep image cos it's a lot simpler than explaining to users what opera or firefox are. So nothing changes in the end at all, but it gets Microsoft nicely off the hook of having to actually compete on a level playing field.
And since no doubt somebody in this thread is getting upmodded for muttering the words 'free market' and it's 'just anti-US bias against microsoft' and 'everyone needs a browser, like KDE or apple supply' I'll take the opportunity to explain - again - why this matters.
Yes, every user needs a browser, so isn't it convenient if nearly every computer in the world shipped with IE, then third parties don't need to support the standards, they just need to support IE. They write to some extension specific to IE - like say activeX - and that's the same as supporting everyone by an open standard, and it's easier to just write to one specific browser than test it in a bunch of them. Eventually, when so many websites are written this way, it becomes nigh impossible to use the web without using IE - and then microsoft have a new defacto monopoly with IE, because everyone writes to it because everyone uses it. That makes it extremely hard for any browser, or any OS that doesn't ship with IE to compete - because they don't work on the web without IE. So Mirosoft have leveraged a monpoly in one market, windows, into a monopoly in another market, the web, and that just reinforces their original monopoly and makes windows even harder to compete with. We've seen this in actually happen Korea for example, where virtually all banking websites use activex, making IE - and thus windows - a near mandatory requirement.
The way to break that cycle is to ensure that third party developers can't take the shortcut of assuming that because 95% of users are windows users, that 95% of people will have IE, by taking IE off the desktop by default, and giving the alternatives an equal platform. The only reason firefox has the market share it does is because IE won, and was left to rot for so very long indeed that users and developers switched to a project with a pulse.to get new features. The only reason we have IE8 at all is because of firefox forcing microsoft to have to compete again.
Without competition, there is no choice in the market, and with no choice in the market consumers lose their own weapon to force improvements of service - to switch to somebody else. When existing monopolies step into new markets, and compete purely on their existing domination rather than any merit, governments are duty bound to protect the long term interests of the public be ensuring competition is kept fair, even if letting the monopoly do what it wants is easier in the short term.
I used payola intentionally, and meant it. Record companies used to illegally bribe radio stations directly, to get their music on the playlists - and then present it as an independent choice based on quality. In 2006, major labels were sued (successfully) in NYC for using third party promoters to pay the radio stations directly to play their music, and try to get round the payola laws that way.
It's a form of astroturfing, and it's still going on.
There's another form of sleeze with top-10 chart lists. They're based on sales, right? Well, the record companies buy back their own records in an attempt to get them up the chart. I'm told that in some cases, they don't even bother shipping merchandise; they just give the retailer a lump cash sum equivalent to their cut as if they had bought and sold x number of albums to the label, and to then say that they had, in fact, sold x albums.
Since people are social animals, they have a tendency to buy what other people are buying - if it's popular, it must be good, right? See amazon recommendations for another example, though I've no reason to believe amazon are artificially changing the recommendations because of bribes. But getting on the top 10 list for music sales, by whatever method, then goes on to make much more money from people buying what other people are listening to, even though the charts are based on a total lie.
Actually, they added up all the bittorrent users on one file in the afternoon, waved some magic fairly dust to extrapolate that to everyone for a year, multiplied the figure by £25 as the 'average' price per file, and then multipled *that* figure by 10 (from £12 billion to £120 billion) in the press release by accident, then quietly changed it when challenged by a BBC reporter. Not that they issued a retraction.
It's such a useless figure for anything it's laughable. Well, apart from whipping up a moral panic in the government so they pass yet more draconian legislation forcing ISPs to act as some sort of panopticon against their own userbase at their own cost. I'm sure it's pretty good at that.
The reason CD prices and DVD prices are what they has virtually nothing to do with the cost of production. It's because they lie on what the companies believe to be the optimum point on the price/demand curve - i.e. the maximum they can get away with. This is the result of monpoly distribution - if you want a legitimate copy of a particular artist on a major label, or a particular film, you go to their media representative and pay their price, or you don't buy it at all.
If you look at the price breakdown of either media, the largest slices of the pie go to the retailer, the label, and the taxman, generally in that order. The artists get a very small percentage. Where you see price drops, thats due to competition between the retailers (i.e. supermarkets) reducing their cut, rather than the label taking a hit. Of course, the record labels have used it as justification to reduce the artist's cut, even though their own profit margins have increased due to the substantial falling cost of production. Pressing plants are a lot cheaper, and while a good studio engineer and producer still costs money, the equipment is a lot cheaper and time needed to run it through autotune has fallen.
Just take radio; payola is still in business, so labels literally pay to get their music on the air, as a promotional tool to drive album sales.
With DVDs, most of the costs of production have already been paid anyway; most films at least break even in the cinema, so DVD sales are just gravy, and they'll take as much as they can get away with. It's also why prices are so wildly different between regions; they price to what local demand will allow (prices are generally 50% higher in Europe compared to the US), and use DRM and import restrictions to prevent customers price shopping around.
So, the internet. The long tail has turned out to be somewhat of a myth - online sales have emphasised the marketshare of the top marketed artists, not flattened it. Many of the more obscure back catalogues don't sell anything at all, as generally teenagers want the latest new hit, not some crusty 20 year old album from a band they've never heard of.
What it has done though is freed the indies. OK, their share of the market might not be very big, but the market itself (if you include piracy) has grown quite a lot. indie music doesn't end up on piratebay much, and they can price themselves very low and still keep almost all the profit. Self-production is pretty cheap indeed now, and there's various indie distribution channels such as cdbaby that leave the artist with almost all the money. You might not make the megabucks of being a heavily marketed hit teen sensation, but it's still enough to make a decent living. Even major artists have twigged that once they're famous, if they can break free of the label they can really make a killing using the internet. Just look at radiohead.
So the record industry is being squeezed between two places. Internet distributed indies are showing how the internet can make you money not lose it; and piracy is utterly destroying their artificial distribution monopoly, and its monopoly prices. They had their chance to become the go-to online distributer buy buying napster and keeping it running, and blew it big time - now apple have that title. The film industry is not making the same mistake; with services like netflix, and video streaming via xbox live, or even just over cable they're trying to stay ahead of the curve by offering convenience for a price. If they can keep that price low enough, and get titles out fast enough not to drive the general public to piracy, they'll survive. Plus of course, they have the cinema chains to fall back on; anyone prepared to watch a cam rip wasn't likely a customer in the first place.
My maxim is always this - in a world where you can sell bottled water, you'll be able to sell packaged entertainment media. You might not make as money as you'd like, but give the customer a cheap, easy to use experience that 'just works', and you'll stay in business. Trea
This is certainly true. The PS2 still gets at least half the sales of the PS3 every month, and got 50% more in April due to a US price cut of the PS2 that month.
I'd be quite happy with the existing wii style, i.e. broadbrush stylized cartoony style (wii tennis, mario galaxy, boom blox, little king's story), but running at a higher res. You don't need to turn a game into Gears of War 2 or Alan Wake in order to get a nice looking high res game that doesn't go all blocky and hard to see on a 1080p panel - so some sort of wii 2, with backwards compatibility but a gruntier gpu and anti-aliasing built in would still be nice to see sometime before 2015.
On the other hand, PCs are definitely pulling ahead of the consoles again in the graphics horsepower stakes, and it will hopefully be a shot in the arm for the platform if AAA titles look a lot better on the PC (or even has some good exclusives that just aren't possible on the consoles) for a few years.
I don't want to move to linux on the desktop for the ordinary users. With the range and amount of crappy software (designed for windows 98!) that their managers insist they MUST have that is windows only and doesn't have a linux analog, I can live without the grief of desktop virtualization.
Add to that the many staff than can't handle when an option moves two places down in a menu on office, or how to fix the 'problem' that I've already shown them how to fix three times this week, I'd spend my entire day just helping them find their way round firefox (yes, we have firefox on our windows pcs. No, they don't use it because they 'know the internet', and the big e IS the internet)
Windows sucks, but supporting it sucks less than trying to deal with staff who don't gain anything from training, even if we had the money or time to pay for it. And active directory might suck, but it sucks less than trying to get the equivalent functionality with openldap, and my linux servers still tie in to it nicely.
I can think of one use-case for ethernet-hdmi that doesn't involve DRM, though I can think of a whole bunch that do involve DRM (come on, these are the guys that insisted on HDCP, how likely is it that they're *not* thinking about DRM scheme upgrades, device key blacklists, and online key verification?)
Firmware updates for your TV. At the moment, you need to tune into a particular digital TV channel at a particular time on a particular day to get the firmware update. Which is a right royal pain in the danglies if it fixes a particular bug - and yes, I have done this with a couple of samsung TVs. Being able to push an update via tftp, or even having it go and get it directly would be damn handy.
The standard composite AV-out lead (that has the optical socket on it) you get with a 360 is too fat to allow an HDMI lead to be used at the same time - the sockets are just too close together.
If you buy an elite 360, you get a special slimline audio out-only dongle that gives you both optical and HDMI, which you can also get separately in the expensive official 360 HDMI cable pack. There are also a number of slimline 3rd party VGA or SCART cables that are thinner, and also work with HDMI (bonus tip - if you use a VGA-out lead as well as HDMI, it will work with whichever one is plugged in to a live device; so I have HDMI on a switchbox going to the TV, and the VGA to my projector, and the 360 switches on boot to whichever is turned on).
If you're really desperate to get a 360 standard AV lead to fit alongside an HDMI lead, you can take a screwdriver to the plastic case, and pop it open like a clamshell. Ghetto, but it works.
Same reason that linux doesn't playback MP3, DVDs and h.264 by default. US-only software patents covering the codecs. Without paying the fee, and getting the licences to use the patents, it's illegal to ship it in your US product.
XP added limited MP3 playback, Windows Vista added built in MPEG2 playback, and 7 adds h.264 playback. Yes, XP should have had MPEG2 playback built in, it came out three years after DVD became widely available.
Linux at least has the excuse that free distros can't pay the patent fees and thus can't ship them in the default package to US users (so usually have a 'download it now' option when you first need it, where you promise you don't live in the US, and download from a mirror elsewhere in the world). This is annoying when you do live outside the US, and have to put up with software patent bullshit in everything, even non-US software projects, because they don't want to get sued.
Perhaps you should have thought about having sufficient time and space to overtake the car in front without breaking the speed limit before you started overtaking.
You're not allowed to break the speed limit when overtaking, just like the rest of the time. If the car you're overtaking is close to the speed limit, and you can't see the road ahead clear for a nice long way, you shouldn't be overtaking that car in the first place.
The problem with this vein of thought, while it is indeed true, is that proponents of it almost invariably place themselves in the 'good driver' category, as an argument as to why they're capable of driving faster safely.
However, many people over-estimate their own driving ability compared to their peers, especially younger drivers, especially in relation to hazard awareness.
As a general rule of thumb, unless you're a professional racing driver or trained police pursuit driver, you're not as good at risk assessment as you think you are.