I agree wrt to the terminology, and after years of pitching the benefits to a mainstream audience, I've come to use the term "openness" to try to describe the phenomenon generally: inviting community cooperation and feedback, releasing documentation, using open source software, using open standards, etc. It's really splitting hairs to a mainstream audience to get them to understand the distinctions that are so clear to the folks here. For years, we'd try to explain open source in more precise terms, only to get reactions like "so that means its recordings will play on my iPod?" so we ultimately came to focus more on "openess" as an umbrella term to describe all the related aspects. It's certainly more ambiguous, but look at the article and you'll understand what I'm talking about. That was not a casually written piece, she interviewed not only Neuros employees, but community members as well as references from the EFF and Cory Doctorow, etc.
Except that it has a DSP, programmed with tools that cost a large amount of money. It can be "Open Source", but it's gonna cost you to actually do anything with it. At least Neuros' other products had easily available development tools. Well, it has an ARM9 core (where linux and all the application software runs) and an API to the DSP functionality so there's plenty that can be done with out the proprietary tools ( in fact, the typical Neuros hacker doesn't have any proprietary tools). In addition, Neuros is also working to get free tools for those that want to develop for the DSP.
The OSD does support SMB. It's supports SMB as a client for browsing other shares (as well as NFS). In addition, within the next month, it will be able to act as an SMB server. Attach an external hard drive and it'll act like a media server so to speak (sort of a PVR +NAS). In addition, some users have enabled an FTP server on the device, so you can pull your recordings off it from outside the LAN.
Because the PC's architecture is not right for every application. There are tradeoffs, certainly there's no doubt that, given the x86's legacy, it has a more robust OSS support system, but it can't touch the DSP's price performance levels. With a DSP a silent, High def PVR (simultaneous encode and decode) for $100 is a possibility, and that's much harder, if not impossible on x86. Personally, I'm a believer that the future of multimedia appliances is making "embedded" devices more open, rather than trying to make the x86 a CE device. This process is already a long way along, while it's true it's not "as open," I think few would argue that ARM and other embedded devices are rapidly approaching the critical mass support levels for OSS, and I think most would say they are already there.
We'd certainly love to have you on the ML, etc even if you don't have time to participate otherwise, and we've been known to give discounts to people that can help out. Send me an email.
Speaking for Neuros, I think your comments are absolutely right regarding the "cohesive user experience." We know that hackers will add features and get all kinds of "proof of concept" stuff working, but at the end of the day, it's our job (as the manufacturer) to stitch it together to make it work for the average person, that "doesn't need another hobby," as someone else said here. The first stage of this product's life will be geeks and hackers, but we need to get the user experience right to broaden the appeal. If we do that, I'm not so worried about the fact that this unit is SD v. HD and analog v. digital, we'll address that with future (more expensive) models. This one will serve a need for users that want a way to stitch together their SD video, digital audio, photos and connect that content (or internet content like Youtube, etc) to their TV and Stereo at a reasonable price.
I'm from Neuros, we talked about a display but decided a small one wasn't worth much and a big one was too expensive. We've focused more on a two way wifi remote ala Sonos, or the Creative audio streamer. So we'll be addressing the "music without a TV" with a "remote" control like that.
Sure, like anything is a battle for critical mass. If there's enough demand for something it becomes a requirement. Obviously the cable companies will fight any loss of control tooth and nail (often under the guise of preventing piracy). At this point, they are getting away with the walled garden, and with the DMCA (and proposed analog hole/broadcast flag legislation) they will gain more control. That's why awareness campaigns like the FSF http://www.defectivebydesign.org/ are so important. If citizens understand what's going on, that's the first step to them influencing the market (and bad legislation)
Speaking for Neuros, we are folding back bug fixes, and feature additions into the open source software we're using. In fact, the applications we've written ourselves are GPL too.
There's a little more here than standard corporate schtick: http://wiki.neurostechnology.com/theneuros/index.p hp/Developer_Welcome
A lot of set-top tuners have serial controls as well, which is supported by the Neuros device. There's a serial cable included as well as IR Blaster...
I think there's more to it than that.
Mossberg's logic is flawed for a few reasons. The iPod's success might stem partly from its integration with iTunes, but I think it's primarily just due to the job Apple did on the device itself. Apple really beat Archos and Creative. Then Microsoft was in the position of playing catch-up (where they primarily targeted the video player space) and on the mp3 player, the device firmware is still primarily done by the Mp3 manufacturers. It's really not appropriate to say that Apple beat Microsoft, since Microsoft was never in that game.
Suggesting that openness and choice are not as important in the "Post PC Era" is not right. What choice and openness have users had? 3rd party software is not supported on an iPod and it's not supported on a windows portable media device either really. Even the stuff that runs Linux is not really open since it runs so much proprietary stuff that you can add 3rd party applications with "hacking it" and breaking the warranty. That's hardly open.
The most significant part of the "component model" as Mossberg calls it is the fact that devices you buy under the "component model," which has only been PCs to date, can evolve. They are not static, like most CE devices. I've had computers I kept for many years and I continue to upgrade them and customize them to my purposes. As a result, they have a lot more value. Not so with the "device model" devices, ie everything else. if my DVD burner is missing a feature or has some annoying bug, it's very likely it will never get fixed. In theory, it's true that a company like Apple could take on that entire evolution of products themselves, but is it realistic for one company to take on that entire investment? The benefit of 3rd party applications is clear even on Apple's systems.
Actually I think the next era will belong to linux on devices where there is no entrenched party and the playing field is more level: http://open.neurostechnology.com/node/241
Parent hits the nail right on the head, which is exactly why this is a bad idea even for those whose sole mission is to stop piracy. You only can stop ordinary folks from making copies, which are more often than not paying customers that just want to exert some simple fair use rights. This is about the average mom that wants to put finding nemo on an iPod without having to scour the internet to figure out how to do it. Everyone here knows how to decrypt a dvd, if you want to seed something on BT, that's how you'll do it, not by using the analog hole.
Again, this is not about piracy, its either about control or ignorance of technology. I'm encouraged by Conyers blog response above in my hope that it's the latter in his case. It is our job to help legislators understand this. I hate to continue to beat this dead horse, but with the current lobbying imbalance, it's up to geeks to make sure that the voice of fair use rights is heard in congress.
Well the article was a little misleading, it won't really outlaw all analog to digital conversion, it will just make it so that the hardware manufacturers have to recognize a signal in the analog stream that dictates what can and can't be done with the stream. In effect this will likely make those devices useless since no media will allow recording, just like virtually no DVDs allow copying today. Yes, you can expect the INDEPENDENT hardware manufacturers to fight this, but there aren't very many of them around anymore. Sony has studios, Apple is the 7th largest music retailer in the US with ITMS, and TiVo is already largely beholden to the content providers. Microsoft is aggressively courting Hollywood to adopt its DRM and codec standards, so it's not clear they'll fight it. It really is scary:
I don't fully agree, again take the Sony Betamax case that legalized the VCR. The content creators fought the VCR, and ultimately lost, but you can't argue that Hollywood's revenues were reduced by the creation of the VCR. In fact it created a whole new revenue stream for them in the the form of rental movies. It's not clear at all that outlawing PVRs or capture cards would hurt Hollywood's revenues. This is about control. They fear technology, innovation and change and they fight it at every turn. Remember they fought the mp3 player too, and look what a boon the iPod turned out to be for them.
It wouldn't outlaw analog to digital conversion, it would force all manufacturers to recognize signals embedded in the analog stream, so that content providers could disallow recording for example. It would basically reverse the famous Sony betamax case that legalized the VCR and other recording devices.
There is a great imbalance in the corporate interested regarding fair use rights, and citizens need to make up the difference if we're going to keep this kind of legislation at bay, see below for our take on why digital rights have been steadily eroding recently. http://www.neurosaudio.com/press/freedom.asp
I really find that highly implausible. It's analygous to saying that open source is bad because companies will surely steal the code and take it proprietary in defiance of the license. I'm sure it does happen in open source projects, but to suggest that on balance open source is strengthening the "proprietary" coders at the expense of the open source community is just not true. In patent applications, it will be even less frequent, becuase patent information inherently has to be released to the public. Besides if the site reached any kind of critical mass and was at all organized, checking it against patent applications would become a matter of course. Already examiners use the internet to do "prior art" checks, they would surely use a site essentially dedicated to helping them do so.
The simple truth is the more inventions that are in the public domain, the more paired down issued patents will be.
Regarding anticipating what companies will try to patent, its just a matter of the number of ideas up there. If even a small percentage of open source projects posted their enhancement and wishlist, it would go a lot way towards stopping a lot of the ridiculous patents that have been issued. You may have heard of the "bounties" that are sometimes setup by sponsors looking for documentation that something was invented that predates the patent application. But very often such documentation doesn't exist even though you can imagine that surely lots of developers talked about it.
I agree that it's the modern implementation that's the problem. The patent system was originally created with two goals: one to give an incentive to innovate and two to give an incentive to share your inventions with the world. It's just not doing that today. Back then, 17 years was not a lot of time to bring an invention to the world, manufacturing, distribution, communication, etc was a whole lot more rudimentary back then.
I believe if Thomas Jefferson could see what's happened to the Patent system now, he'd be the first to be advocating radical changes.
There is little doubt that the patent system needs reform desperately, particularly when it comes to software patents, but there is also another solution that should be pursued in parallel.
That other solutions is a simple, centralized place, like a wiki (maybe even a wiki), where people post publicly, and contribute "inventions" to the public domain. While there is a serious issue with the Patent office's enforcement of the obviousness standard, they are quite good about enforcing the "novelty" standard. In other words, if the exact item has already been "invented," they will typically not allow that item to be patented. This suggests that it would really behoove the open source community to create a central repository of "inventions" that the examiners could search prior to issuing patents. This could be a very potent defence against some of the shotgun patent applications that big companies are engaging in.
XviD and Ogg and others will definately be included in the final product. The admittedly embarassing fact that it started with ASF was just an artifact of how it was designed in collaboration with the factory, etc. I won't make excuses for that, but it will be corrected.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree wrt to the terminology, and after years of pitching the benefits to a mainstream audience, I've come to use the term "openness" to try to describe the phenomenon generally: inviting community cooperation and feedback, releasing documentation, using open source software, using open standards, etc. It's really splitting hairs to a mainstream audience to get them to understand the distinctions that are so clear to the folks here. For years, we'd try to explain open source in more precise terms, only to get reactions like "so that means its recordings will play on my iPod?" so we ultimately came to focus more on "openess" as an umbrella term to describe all the related aspects. It's certainly more ambiguous, but look at the article and you'll understand what I'm talking about. That was not a casually written piece, she interviewed not only Neuros employees, but community members as well as references from the EFF and Cory Doctorow, etc.
It's USB 1.1 theoretical max 11mbit, in practice it's not that fast, but it is fast enough to stream SD video, I do it all the time.
The OSD does support SMB. It's supports SMB as a client for browsing other shares (as well as NFS). In addition, within the next month, it will be able to act as an SMB server. Attach an external hard drive and it'll act like a media server so to speak (sort of a PVR +NAS). In addition, some users have enabled an FTP server on the device, so you can pull your recordings off it from outside the LAN.
Because the PC's architecture is not right for every application. There are tradeoffs, certainly there's no doubt that, given the x86's legacy, it has a more robust OSS support system, but it can't touch the DSP's price performance levels. With a DSP a silent, High def PVR (simultaneous encode and decode) for $100 is a possibility, and that's much harder, if not impossible on x86. Personally, I'm a believer that the future of multimedia appliances is making "embedded" devices more open, rather than trying to make the x86 a CE device. This process is already a long way along, while it's true it's not "as open," I think few would argue that ARM and other embedded devices are rapidly approaching the critical mass support levels for OSS, and I think most would say they are already there.
yes, it can boot from cards now.
We'd certainly love to have you on the ML, etc even if you don't have time to participate otherwise, and we've been known to give discounts to people that can help out. Send me an email.
yes package management needs to be worked on, I'm not familiar with openembedded but its certainly worth looking into.
Speaking for Neuros, I think your comments are absolutely right regarding the "cohesive user experience." We know that hackers will add features and get all kinds of "proof of concept" stuff working, but at the end of the day, it's our job (as the manufacturer) to stitch it together to make it work for the average person, that "doesn't need another hobby," as someone else said here. The first stage of this product's life will be geeks and hackers, but we need to get the user experience right to broaden the appeal. If we do that, I'm not so worried about the fact that this unit is SD v. HD and analog v. digital, we'll address that with future (more expensive) models. This one will serve a need for users that want a way to stitch together their SD video, digital audio, photos and connect that content (or internet content like Youtube, etc) to their TV and Stereo at a reasonable price.
I'm from Neuros, we talked about a display but decided a small one wasn't worth much and a big one was too expensive. We've focused more on a two way wifi remote ala Sonos, or the Creative audio streamer. So we'll be addressing the "music without a TV" with a "remote" control like that.
Sure, like anything is a battle for critical mass. If there's enough demand for something it becomes a requirement. Obviously the cable companies will fight any loss of control tooth and nail (often under the guise of preventing piracy). At this point, they are getting away with the walled garden, and with the DMCA (and proposed analog hole/broadcast flag legislation) they will gain more control. That's why awareness campaigns like the FSF http://www.defectivebydesign.org/ are so important. If citizens understand what's going on, that's the first step to them influencing the market (and bad legislation)
Speaking for Neuros, we are folding back bug fixes, and feature additions into the open source software we're using. In fact, the applications we've written ourselves are GPL too. There's a little more here than standard corporate schtick: http://wiki.neurostechnology.com/theneuros/index.p hp/Developer_Welcome
A lot of set-top tuners have serial controls as well, which is supported by the Neuros device. There's a serial cable included as well as IR Blaster...
I think there's more to it than that. Mossberg's logic is flawed for a few reasons. The iPod's success might stem partly from its integration with iTunes, but I think it's primarily just due to the job Apple did on the device itself. Apple really beat Archos and Creative. Then Microsoft was in the position of playing catch-up (where they primarily targeted the video player space) and on the mp3 player, the device firmware is still primarily done by the Mp3 manufacturers. It's really not appropriate to say that Apple beat Microsoft, since Microsoft was never in that game. Suggesting that openness and choice are not as important in the "Post PC Era" is not right. What choice and openness have users had? 3rd party software is not supported on an iPod and it's not supported on a windows portable media device either really. Even the stuff that runs Linux is not really open since it runs so much proprietary stuff that you can add 3rd party applications with "hacking it" and breaking the warranty. That's hardly open. The most significant part of the "component model" as Mossberg calls it is the fact that devices you buy under the "component model," which has only been PCs to date, can evolve. They are not static, like most CE devices. I've had computers I kept for many years and I continue to upgrade them and customize them to my purposes. As a result, they have a lot more value. Not so with the "device model" devices, ie everything else. if my DVD burner is missing a feature or has some annoying bug, it's very likely it will never get fixed. In theory, it's true that a company like Apple could take on that entire evolution of products themselves, but is it realistic for one company to take on that entire investment? The benefit of 3rd party applications is clear even on Apple's systems. Actually I think the next era will belong to linux on devices where there is no entrenched party and the playing field is more level: http://open.neurostechnology.com/node/241
Parent hits the nail right on the head, which is exactly why this is a bad idea even for those whose sole mission is to stop piracy. You only can stop ordinary folks from making copies, which are more often than not paying customers that just want to exert some simple fair use rights. This is about the average mom that wants to put finding nemo on an iPod without having to scour the internet to figure out how to do it. Everyone here knows how to decrypt a dvd, if you want to seed something on BT, that's how you'll do it, not by using the analog hole.
Again, this is not about piracy, its either about control or ignorance of technology. I'm encouraged by Conyers blog response above in my hope that it's the latter in his case. It is our job to help legislators understand this. I hate to continue to beat this dead horse, but with the current lobbying imbalance, it's up to geeks to make sure that the voice of fair use rights is heard in congress.
Well the article was a little misleading, it won't really outlaw all analog to digital conversion, it will just make it so that the hardware manufacturers have to recognize a signal in the analog stream that dictates what can and can't be done with the stream. In effect this will likely make those devices useless since no media will allow recording, just like virtually no DVDs allow copying today. Yes, you can expect the INDEPENDENT hardware manufacturers to fight this, but there aren't very many of them around anymore. Sony has studios, Apple is the 7th largest music retailer in the US with ITMS, and TiVo is already largely beholden to the content providers. Microsoft is aggressively courting Hollywood to adopt its DRM and codec standards, so it's not clear they'll fight it. It really is scary:
http://www.neurostechnology.com/press/freedom.asp
I don't fully agree, again take the Sony Betamax case that legalized the VCR. The content creators fought the VCR, and ultimately lost, but you can't argue that Hollywood's revenues were reduced by the creation of the VCR. In fact it created a whole new revenue stream for them in the the form of rental movies. It's not clear at all that outlawing PVRs or capture cards would hurt Hollywood's revenues. This is about control. They fear technology, innovation and change and they fight it at every turn. Remember they fought the mp3 player too, and look what a boon the iPod turned out to be for them.
This is about power and control.
It wouldn't outlaw analog to digital conversion, it would force all manufacturers to recognize signals embedded in the analog stream, so that content providers could disallow recording for example. It would basically reverse the famous Sony betamax case that legalized the VCR and other recording devices.
There is no bigger threat to technical innovation than this bill presents
http://www.house.gov/writerep/
There is a great imbalance in the corporate interested regarding fair use rights, and citizens need to make up the difference if we're going to keep this kind of legislation at bay, see below for our take on why digital rights have been steadily eroding recently.
http://www.neurosaudio.com/press/freedom.asp
Sorry for the shameless plug, but depending on your timing, a product we have in development would probably be a good solution for you, unfortunately, it's still several months out. See http://www.theneuros.com/index.php/Category_Roadma p:The_MPEG-4_Recorder_III
I really find that highly implausible. It's analygous to saying that open source is bad because companies will surely steal the code and take it proprietary in defiance of the license. I'm sure it does happen in open source projects, but to suggest that on balance open source is strengthening the "proprietary" coders at the expense of the open source community is just not true. In patent applications, it will be even less frequent, becuase patent information inherently has to be released to the public. Besides if the site reached any kind of critical mass and was at all organized, checking it against patent applications would become a matter of course. Already examiners use the internet to do "prior art" checks, they would surely use a site essentially dedicated to helping them do so. The simple truth is the more inventions that are in the public domain, the more paired down issued patents will be.
Regarding anticipating what companies will try to patent, its just a matter of the number of ideas up there. If even a small percentage of open source projects posted their enhancement and wishlist, it would go a lot way towards stopping a lot of the ridiculous patents that have been issued. You may have heard of the "bounties" that are sometimes setup by sponsors looking for documentation that something was invented that predates the patent application. But very often such documentation doesn't exist even though you can imagine that surely lots of developers talked about it.
I agree that it's the modern implementation that's the problem. The patent system was originally created with two goals: one to give an incentive to innovate and two to give an incentive to share your inventions with the world. It's just not doing that today. Back then, 17 years was not a lot of time to bring an invention to the world, manufacturing, distribution, communication, etc was a whole lot more rudimentary back then.
I believe if Thomas Jefferson could see what's happened to the Patent system now, he'd be the first to be advocating radical changes.
There is little doubt that the patent system needs reform desperately, particularly when it comes to software patents, but there is also another solution that should be pursued in parallel. That other solutions is a simple, centralized place, like a wiki (maybe even a wiki), where people post publicly, and contribute "inventions" to the public domain. While there is a serious issue with the Patent office's enforcement of the obviousness standard, they are quite good about enforcing the "novelty" standard. In other words, if the exact item has already been "invented," they will typically not allow that item to be patented. This suggests that it would really behoove the open source community to create a central repository of "inventions" that the examiners could search prior to issuing patents. This could be a very potent defence against some of the shotgun patent applications that big companies are engaging in.
XviD and Ogg and others will definately be included in the final product. The admittedly embarassing fact that it started with ASF was just an artifact of how it was designed in collaboration with the factory, etc. I won't make excuses for that, but it will be corrected.
Other than FLAC encoding (which is TBD), I'm confident we'll have the rest of your wishlist above.