Microsoft's main complaint is that AAC is a closed format, which is only useful with iTunes, the iPod, Apple's Music Store, and QuickTime, and throwing the stone that the Windows Media Player format is compatible with 40 devices and several download sites... but let's face it, WMA is a closed system to. The WMA system has a few more choices, but not an unlimited number.
What I really see is a future where you're about to lock yourself into the music network you pick today. If you buy your music by AAC, then you're stuck in the Apple products universe, if you buy your music by WMA you'll get stuck in the Windows Media products universe. If you want to stay with MP3s, you'll either have to buy CDs or risk the P2P cops finding you...
Yeah, there are you options. How would you like to pay today?
Re:What about those of us
on
CNet on WinFS
·
· Score: 1, Informative
I doubt they're going to drop that interface and "logical" way of locating files, but this is going to still make your files appear faster.
See, C:\Foo\Bar1.txt and C:\Foo\Bar2.txt right now do not have to live next to each other on the hard disk. In order to display the contents of C:\Foo\ the system has to search the entire File Allocation Table to look for files that reside in C:\Foo\. This is why a directory that has 1000 entries can sometimes take nearly forever to display in Windows, and even longer if a networking situation is involved.
The basic idea here to replace the simple FAT, or even NTFS, with a database that has a lot of indexes, so that any time you make a request of the file system, the answer is either already ready or very close to being so. So yes, even you should see a speed improvement.
Baseball is a bad metaphor to pick. MLB has an exemption from anti-trust law that allows collusion between the teams when it would otherwise be illegal. The RIAA enjoys no such exemption... so while it's okay for MLB to decide who to admit into their little club, the RIAA can't hold onto their monopoly by claiming they're the only game in town.
Internet2 is essentially a high-bandwidth yet limited-admission major backbone provider...
During its heyday, a good chunk of Napster's traffic flowed over I2 because at the time each school routed all traffic headed to another I2 school (by IP space) over the I2 link rather than the main Internet link. However, once university officials got wise to this they either excluded dorm room connects from accessing or did port-level routing.
I2's concept is essentially to be what ARPAnet was meant to be before it got diverted into commercial uses, a closed-admission club where abuse by authorized users overstepping their bounds wasn't such of a threat because such a troublemaker would lose access for good and most likely lose other security clearances and their job as well...
I agree... most college networks are in a star configuration where all paths eventually lead to the main datacenter where the conencts to the outside world (Internet, I2, any direct links to nearby campuses of other schools) are.
So, breaking it down.... any P2P config would only create extra hops, and any school that has a class that's big enough to cause a bandwidth clog at a single server really has other problems to deal with.
Actually, Cisco's only involvment is that they purchased Linksys who had gotten themselves into this mess. Buying a company and then realizing it didn't own its key IP asset would have to go down as one of the biggest business blunders of the decade.
Exactly. This is cracking open a bank vault with hardly anything in it. It's still a vault, and the cops are gonna come after anybody who breaks into it.
If you wanna do a Rosa Parks-like stand of civil disobedience, go ahead, but also pack your bags for the slammer. The fact is, civil disobedience means breaking the law and paying the price, the theory being that if enough people do it it'll get attention and hopefully cause the law to be changed, or at least cause the local officials a headache trying to arrest 10,000 people when the local police department only has enough cells for 3. Somehow, a small number of hackers breaking a non-used scheme isn't quite the same effect...
You're better off pointing out the DRM schemes that can be hacked with a single key. That's a much better test case than this...
Ashcroft's major malfunction is forgetting that in the American system, we'd rather make the mistake of letting the guilty go free than putting the wrong person in jail. As a result, we make it hard for law enforcement to arrest and hold people. We require that proof be presented to the public when they want to do so.
Now, this makes it difficult to have a "zero tolerance" policy on terrorism. Our justice system doesn't have anything we can do with the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, they're already dead. Our justice system doesn't quite have much it could have done much with the hijackers before they did it, it's very hard to prove somebody is going to committ a murder, and lowering the standards of proof just lets mistakes of capturing the wrong people happen.
If we didn't hold our justice system to such high standards of proof, we would risk people within the government abusing their power. That's exactly what the terrorists want in their governments, and exactly why we're happy with ours just the way it is... we can't let the government just point the finger at people without proof, that's exactly what the terrorists want us to do.
TechTV's The Screen Savers had two live conversations with Lamo when he was on the run, and they sent contributor Kevin Rose to walk with him all the way to the door of the FBI offices.
Initially, fans were concerned that they were not discussing these over-the-line subpeonas because of the threats contained within. They since declartively said on the air that the reason they haven't been talking about this story is because they have never seen such a subpeona.
If TechTV had the absolute most access to Lamo in the hours before turning himself in, how could they have been left out of the FBI's threatening spree?
They appear to have designed for XP, and just happened to not have used anything incompatible with 2000 in the process so it works there too. XP and 2000 are very close relatives, while 98 is a whole different beast.
It's Roxio MusicBlast... it's Roxio FireTune...
on
Napster Tries Again
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Let's face it... this service is Roxio's attempt to build their clone of iTunes, BuyMusic, PressPlay, etc. The main gimmick of this one is just the fact that they bought the rights to the Napster name and logo at the bankruptcy auction, so they get to slap that name on it rather than having to create a new brand from zero.
You know, that's not a bad idea. A user-configurable firewall at the ISP that in its default settings allows Web, e-mail, IM, and FTP to work, but nothing else. If you want something else to work, no human contact is required, you simply have to understand TCP/IP to the level that you know which port number you would like released, follow the instructions of an automated web interface to do so, and wait for the next batch process to put that into effect.
So, the default config creates a web user who can't unknowlingly do too much damage. If somebody wants to be more advanced and set up servers, they can, but they've got to prove they at least know what port numbers those things run on... which is a decent level of Internet skill...
Nope, John Q. Public can't use this to create his own cell phone company, no way he'd be able to afford the license to use the GSM frequencies...
And the key "battery not included" in this problem is also that this thing is going to need some link longer-range than itself to get back to the main PTSN, otherwise you can only call other users on the same micronode and that's likely pointless because they'll all be able to hear you shout too.
So really, the main use of such a device will be to fill in small black holes in the existing networks. This is a big step forward in making the devices such as the ones they'd have to put to get cell phones to work in the subways cheaper for the providers.
Your understanding of the way things works seems a bit broken...
Taxes do not need justifications linked to what they're assessed against. It's sometimes politically popular to link a tax to "because it's wrong" or "because that's what causes the problem we need to pay for" but there's no need to do so. Taxes exist simply because the government needs to raise money somehow, and the government arbitrailily picks the things it wants to tax through a process called "legislature" based on what's politically acceptable, and what actually can be effectively taxed.
What's more, the telco is actually a "natural monopoly", which is to say that if market forces were left to play with no regulation, you'd end up with exactly one national phone company. See, there's nothing in the laws that prevents you from going to your home town's cable licencing authority (that's usually the mayor or city council) and the state regulatory board and applying to build a 2nd cable system in your home town, and on that coax/fiber network you can offer your own cable TV, phone, and Internet services. What's preventing this from happening is the law of economics... assuming you're wealthy enough to have the money to build such a thing, it wouldn't be a smart use of your money. You see, once you "overbuild" the existing monopoly cable company and threaten the ILEC with a digital phone service (BTW, cable company digital phone services have to comply with telco regulations...), both companies stop being monopolies in your area, your a competitor. And as a non-monopoly, the cable company and the ILEC will straighten up and fly right, and offer better service than you do. Let's face it, even if all things were equal you could never hope to get 100% of the market, you'll be fighting to convince enough people to switch to get a 50%/50% split. Come on, there's better investment options than that out there... you're better off buying stock in the existing monopolies than trying to challenge them.
There's nothing in the laws of the land that grants the ILEC a monopoly. There's nothing in the laws of the land that grants the cable company in your area a monopoly. Try getting Congress to repeal the laws of economics sometime... oh, so THAT's what regulation is.:)
If you try to do DRM on a Compact Disc, it is never going to work.
If you ever think you succeeded, you've failed anyway because you violated the standards that define a Compact Disc... you've got a CD-like piece of plastic that just might play in some CD players, but you will not have a CD.
In both of those examples, the phone lines never leave the physical building. You can even extend this to college campuses, where the phone service is usually lumped into student housing fees.
In all those cases, the phone line stays within the orginization, and that's the key. They're not offering phone services to the public, they're offering phone services to those renting place to stay/work there.
And don't think that market is unregulated either. Yeah, they can charge a higher price for use, but they have to allow free access to toll free numbers, and allow access to the long distance provider of your choice via a 1-800 number.
We don't tax things because they're monopolies. We tax things because we need to tax things if we want our government to function. Restaurants aren't a monopolies, so why do most states tax meals?
We require phone companies to provide standardized levels of service because we consider phone service a utlity, a service we just can't live without these days.
If Vonage is going to set itself as a competitor to a monopoly, then something's not quite right with that picture. Monopolies by definition don't have competitors.
Slashdot Mirror
The death of the MP3 is upon us.
Microsoft's main complaint is that AAC is a closed format, which is only useful with iTunes, the iPod, Apple's Music Store, and QuickTime, and throwing the stone that the Windows Media Player format is compatible with 40 devices and several download sites... but let's face it, WMA is a closed system to. The WMA system has a few more choices, but not an unlimited number.
What I really see is a future where you're about to lock yourself into the music network you pick today. If you buy your music by AAC, then you're stuck in the Apple products universe, if you buy your music by WMA you'll get stuck in the Windows Media products universe. If you want to stay with MP3s, you'll either have to buy CDs or risk the P2P cops finding you...
Yeah, there are you options. How would you like to pay today?
I doubt they're going to drop that interface and "logical" way of locating files, but this is going to still make your files appear faster.
See, C:\Foo\Bar1.txt and C:\Foo\Bar2.txt right now do not have to live next to each other on the hard disk. In order to display the contents of C:\Foo\ the system has to search the entire File Allocation Table to look for files that reside in C:\Foo\. This is why a directory that has 1000 entries can sometimes take nearly forever to display in Windows, and even longer if a networking situation is involved.
The basic idea here to replace the simple FAT, or even NTFS, with a database that has a lot of indexes, so that any time you make a request of the file system, the answer is either already ready or very close to being so. So yes, even you should see a speed improvement.
That's kinda the point. If your work goes beyond personal use, you need to buy the license and they'll gladly de-watermark your files then...
Baseball is a bad metaphor to pick. MLB has an exemption from anti-trust law that allows collusion between the teams when it would otherwise be illegal. The RIAA enjoys no such exemption... so while it's okay for MLB to decide who to admit into their little club, the RIAA can't hold onto their monopoly by claiming they're the only game in town.
Internet2 is essentially a high-bandwidth yet limited-admission major backbone provider...
During its heyday, a good chunk of Napster's traffic flowed over I2 because at the time each school routed all traffic headed to another I2 school (by IP space) over the I2 link rather than the main Internet link. However, once university officials got wise to this they either excluded dorm room connects from accessing or did port-level routing.
I2's concept is essentially to be what ARPAnet was meant to be before it got diverted into commercial uses, a closed-admission club where abuse by authorized users overstepping their bounds wasn't such of a threat because such a troublemaker would lose access for good and most likely lose other security clearances and their job as well...
I agree... most college networks are in a star configuration where all paths eventually lead to the main datacenter where the conencts to the outside world (Internet, I2, any direct links to nearby campuses of other schools) are.
So, breaking it down.... any P2P config would only create extra hops, and any school that has a class that's big enough to cause a bandwidth clog at a single server really has other problems to deal with.
Sounds like a solution in search of a problem...
That's not FUD, that's a fact. The GPL isn't toothless, it has the FSF behind it.
Actually, Cisco's only involvment is that they purchased Linksys who had gotten themselves into this mess. Buying a company and then realizing it didn't own its key IP asset would have to go down as one of the biggest business blunders of the decade.
Exactly. This is cracking open a bank vault with hardly anything in it. It's still a vault, and the cops are gonna come after anybody who breaks into it.
If you wanna do a Rosa Parks-like stand of civil disobedience, go ahead, but also pack your bags for the slammer. The fact is, civil disobedience means breaking the law and paying the price, the theory being that if enough people do it it'll get attention and hopefully cause the law to be changed, or at least cause the local officials a headache trying to arrest 10,000 people when the local police department only has enough cells for 3. Somehow, a small number of hackers breaking a non-used scheme isn't quite the same effect...
You're better off pointing out the DRM schemes that can be hacked with a single key. That's a much better test case than this...
What's the point in hacking a format nobody's using anyway?
Ashcroft's major malfunction is forgetting that in the American system, we'd rather make the mistake of letting the guilty go free than putting the wrong person in jail. As a result, we make it hard for law enforcement to arrest and hold people. We require that proof be presented to the public when they want to do so.
Now, this makes it difficult to have a "zero tolerance" policy on terrorism. Our justice system doesn't have anything we can do with the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, they're already dead. Our justice system doesn't quite have much it could have done much with the hijackers before they did it, it's very hard to prove somebody is going to committ a murder, and lowering the standards of proof just lets mistakes of capturing the wrong people happen.
If we didn't hold our justice system to such high standards of proof, we would risk people within the government abusing their power. That's exactly what the terrorists want in their governments, and exactly why we're happy with ours just the way it is... we can't let the government just point the finger at people without proof, that's exactly what the terrorists want us to do.
TechTV's The Screen Savers had two live conversations with Lamo when he was on the run, and they sent contributor Kevin Rose to walk with him all the way to the door of the FBI offices.
Initially, fans were concerned that they were not discussing these over-the-line subpeonas because of the threats contained within. They since declartively said on the air that the reason they haven't been talking about this story is because they have never seen such a subpeona.
If TechTV had the absolute most access to Lamo in the hours before turning himself in, how could they have been left out of the FBI's threatening spree?
Tax VoIP systems that connect to the PTSN... :)
Here's a way to shut down overseas call centers quickly...
Place a tax on outbound international toll free calls of about 50 cents per minute. So much for the cost savings...
I do. Since the stock will crash when they lose. Fools of that degree deserve to be parted from their money.
They appear to have designed for XP, and just happened to not have used anything incompatible with 2000 in the process so it works there too. XP and 2000 are very close relatives, while 98 is a whole different beast.
Let's face it... this service is Roxio's attempt to build their clone of iTunes, BuyMusic, PressPlay, etc. The main gimmick of this one is just the fact that they bought the rights to the Napster name and logo at the bankruptcy auction, so they get to slap that name on it rather than having to create a new brand from zero.
You know, that's not a bad idea. A user-configurable firewall at the ISP that in its default settings allows Web, e-mail, IM, and FTP to work, but nothing else. If you want something else to work, no human contact is required, you simply have to understand TCP/IP to the level that you know which port number you would like released, follow the instructions of an automated web interface to do so, and wait for the next batch process to put that into effect.
So, the default config creates a web user who can't unknowlingly do too much damage. If somebody wants to be more advanced and set up servers, they can, but they've got to prove they at least know what port numbers those things run on... which is a decent level of Internet skill...
No, $50-90 million with the dollar sign already there. No, you don't get to double-inflate, that was already a revenue stat...
Nice Utopia vision, but the "big guys" still are the only ones with licenses to the GSM frequencies.
Nope, John Q. Public can't use this to create his own cell phone company, no way he'd be able to afford the license to use the GSM frequencies...
And the key "battery not included" in this problem is also that this thing is going to need some link longer-range than itself to get back to the main PTSN, otherwise you can only call other users on the same micronode and that's likely pointless because they'll all be able to hear you shout too.
So really, the main use of such a device will be to fill in small black holes in the existing networks. This is a big step forward in making the devices such as the ones they'd have to put to get cell phones to work in the subways cheaper for the providers.
Your understanding of the way things works seems a bit broken...
:)
Taxes do not need justifications linked to what they're assessed against. It's sometimes politically popular to link a tax to "because it's wrong" or "because that's what causes the problem we need to pay for" but there's no need to do so. Taxes exist simply because the government needs to raise money somehow, and the government arbitrailily picks the things it wants to tax through a process called "legislature" based on what's politically acceptable, and what actually can be effectively taxed.
What's more, the telco is actually a "natural monopoly", which is to say that if market forces were left to play with no regulation, you'd end up with exactly one national phone company. See, there's nothing in the laws that prevents you from going to your home town's cable licencing authority (that's usually the mayor or city council) and the state regulatory board and applying to build a 2nd cable system in your home town, and on that coax/fiber network you can offer your own cable TV, phone, and Internet services. What's preventing this from happening is the law of economics... assuming you're wealthy enough to have the money to build such a thing, it wouldn't be a smart use of your money. You see, once you "overbuild" the existing monopoly cable company and threaten the ILEC with a digital phone service (BTW, cable company digital phone services have to comply with telco regulations...), both companies stop being monopolies in your area, your a competitor. And as a non-monopoly, the cable company and the ILEC will straighten up and fly right, and offer better service than you do. Let's face it, even if all things were equal you could never hope to get 100% of the market, you'll be fighting to convince enough people to switch to get a 50%/50% split. Come on, there's better investment options than that out there... you're better off buying stock in the existing monopolies than trying to challenge them.
There's nothing in the laws of the land that grants the ILEC a monopoly. There's nothing in the laws of the land that grants the cable company in your area a monopoly. Try getting Congress to repeal the laws of economics sometime... oh, so THAT's what regulation is.
If you try to do DRM on a Compact Disc, it is never going to work.
If you ever think you succeeded, you've failed anyway because you violated the standards that define a Compact Disc... you've got a CD-like piece of plastic that just might play in some CD players, but you will not have a CD.
In both of those examples, the phone lines never leave the physical building. You can even extend this to college campuses, where the phone service is usually lumped into student housing fees.
In all those cases, the phone line stays within the orginization, and that's the key. They're not offering phone services to the public, they're offering phone services to those renting place to stay/work there.
And don't think that market is unregulated either. Yeah, they can charge a higher price for use, but they have to allow free access to toll free numbers, and allow access to the long distance provider of your choice via a 1-800 number.
We don't tax things because they're monopolies. We tax things because we need to tax things if we want our government to function. Restaurants aren't a monopolies, so why do most states tax meals?
We require phone companies to provide standardized levels of service because we consider phone service a utlity, a service we just can't live without these days.
If Vonage is going to set itself as a competitor to a monopoly, then something's not quite right with that picture. Monopolies by definition don't have competitors.