I don't know if Sun can be said to make money on the software, or the hardware, or whatever. It seems to be more about the whole package. They make everything work together.
I used to have a business that used Sun, and the level of support we got (mostly from our vendor, admittedly) was incredible, and we never got that "pass the buck" sort of thing where the software people blame the hardware, and the hardware people blame the software.
I have a friend who works for sun doing support. He had a solid academic background and a number of years of experience doing system administration at fermilab before he joined the company. He spent most of his time supporting clustered systems. The point is that if you have problems and a high level support contract, you talk to smart people.
I know that they used to have (and probably still do have) Oracle gurus on staff, because if you're a big customer you don't want to hear Sun say, "Call Oracle" and the Oracle people say, "Call Sun." You want it to work.
And I remember once I had a system die on me, and I didn't have a spare. My vendor, who usually dealt with much larger customers, kept an inventory of stuff preboxed at an overnight shipping facility. He could call them up and tell them to ship something out as late as 8p or so, and get it there the next morning. I called him in the evening, and he got it there in the morning. He said, "We'll talk about billing later, let's get this shipped before the deadline passes."
It's a whole different world when you have problems. That's what Sun sells. But obviously, it's a lot more expensive than taking a commodity pc that you built for $500 and putting linux on it.
The problem Sun would have with an Open Source Solaris is that people would change it, and that would make support a lot more difficult.
Sun's problem isn't that Solaris is missing features that open source developers could contribute, or reliability issues that volunteers could help them work out. Their problem is that they're caught in a pretty small niche, and other people with a lot of money are coming at them all the time.
And the fact that linux is solid, and that it can be made to work creates a new problem, because it creates the possibility that another company (like RedHat) might be in a position soon to offer the same kind of "we make it work" service that Sun offers.
I don't think there are any easy answers to these problems. Sun seems like a viable company, but they definitely have some challenges ahead.
If you don't have a support contract, if you're a guy with a couple of sparc servers and no lifeline, Sun doesn't make so much sense. You're better off with the commodity hardware and linux. I think that tends to color the way linux guys look at Sun.
I don't know if anyone would buy AOL just for Time/Warner content, but it does sweeten the pot for some people.
The people that I know who are on AOL are there for stuff that's not available on the net at large -- chatrooms, the parental controls on IMs that allow kids to chat with their friends, without worrying about predators, etc.
I know parents who buy AOL even though they have broadband and home networks, for just this reason.
This move would just make AOL that much nicer for the people who subscribe. By itself, it's not enough to swing anyone. But when you add it to the pile of AOL features that people like, it contributes to the cumulative effect.
Since online readers of Time or People don't do the company much good anyway, it seems like a good move to me.
I could see them doing something similar with online movies in the future -- bringing out stuff first for AOL customers, or whatever.
People buy PCs to do things, and the PCs that people have now can do the things they want to do. The good sales in the past were based on the jump to the net.
Windows 3.1 machines were horrible online, Win95 was better but still way too flaky, Win98 was an improvment when it first came out, and by the end a well patched 98 second editition became more or less usable. 2000 and XP are much better than 98, but if you just surf the web and send email, 98 is good enough.
The thing is, my 1.4G athalon is crummy at playing full screen hi res video compressed with a top notch codec. I use MPEG2 instead. That makes me crave a faster machine. Video is the next killer app, the one that will push people into upgrading.
A world with solid PVR apps, good file sharing apps, and lots of video files floating around would be a good thing for the tech industry. I'm not saying anything about the ethics of that, or anything else. But it would push people to buy better computers.
The good blackhats have lots of compromised machines at their disposal, and are generally way too clever to leave such an obvious clue behind.
It's possible that this guy has something to do with it, but it's more likely that his machine is owned by the same person who managed to put the trojan out there.
I was as afraid of palladium as the next guy before the details started to come out, but I think we ought to try to avoid the knee jerk reaction and think this stuff through more carefully.
A lot of people are opposed to any scheme that can be used to thwart piracy. But in my view that's an extreme and unreasonable position, even when fair use issues are taken into account.
For a long time it's seemed to me that the thing we ought to be working towards is an open system of distribution, one that can't be dominated by large media concerns, something that gives a guy who makes music at home the same sort of access to the market as the big record labels.
To me, the issue is not whether or not my computer is capable of running some sort of protected DRM system -- the issue is whether or not it's capable of running alternative systems, if the existence of a palladium aware media player will break my mp3, ogg, and divx players, or my entire open source operating system. As I read these proposals, that's not the case, they won't break things.
Microsoft has said explicitly that one of the key design goals of palladium was that it shouldn't break existing software.
In my view, these sorts of services are useful, and we ought to be talking more about "how" then "if" they are implemented.
In particular, we ought to be sure that software that will run under linux can provide the same sorts of services as a palladium enabled version of windows. I know that the applications themselves couldn't be truly open source (or at least you'd have to use a signed snapshot of an application that was developed using open source methodologies). But I don't think that's enough of a reason to pull back from this stuff.
There are useful applications for this stuff.
About a decade ago, one of the hot topics among crypto types was digicash -- cryptographic protocols invented by a guy named Chaum that try to mimic cash, especially its anonymity and security.
One of the big problems was how to make microtransactions work when you're disconnected from the net. Imagine two palm os devices doing a transaction over infrared. Chaum's answer was to use tamper proof chips.
Sure, on some level nothing is tamper proof, but it ought to be possible to make tampering difficult enough, expensive enough, and to cap the size of the transactions possible and the rate at which they can be made, in a way that would give people reasonable security. The NSA could hack the micropayment system, but they'd have to spend a million bucks, and all they could get back would be $50, or something like that.
It seems to me that this kind of hardware could be seen as a more flexible kind of tamper proof chip.
I think the goal should be that whatever hardware comes out should work with arbitrary operating systems. The trust chain should be decentralized.
In other words, if I develop an electronic music distribution system, I should be able to develop apps for whatever OSs I choose to support, and I should be able to make my system recognize whatever signatures I feel are trusthworsthy. It ought to be possible for *anyone* to develop such a system, and to use the hooks into the hardware.
The thing that worries me is that if all we say is "no, palladium is the devil" we won't have any voice in this stuff.
I can see why the guys in Namibia would be pissed off -- it sounds like they got jerked around.
It doesn't change the fact that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does an enormous amount of good in Africa and the rest of the world. Look it up if you don't believe me.
Bill Gates is the biggest philanthropist in the history of the world, and while critics can talk about soft donations of things like software licenses, in reality he does a lot of stuff like vaccinations and grants to develop basic infrastructure in the developing world.
He's done far more than anyone else, certainly more than me or anyone slamming him here.
If that's the case, the inclusion of the crypto code in the kernel is a good thing.
An awful lot of people use the kernel, and interfering with its distribution would generate lots of waves, interfere with lots of businesses, anger lots of tech journalists, etc.
Politically, I just don't see how they could muck with it.
I think that MS is going to back off on a lot of this stuff, probably even Palladium in its most extreme form.
Their strategy at the highest level seems to be two pronged. On one hand they want to gather up all of the power and control of the monopolist, and on the other hand, they try to respond to customers as if they had to compete.
I know that a lot of people are skeptical about the last part of that, but I believe it. They backed off of the passport nightmare to a large extent.
There are lots of smaller things they've backed off on as well -- their first incarnation of their anti-piracy measures would have made it impossible for corporate users to roll out systems using software like ghost, but they backed down on that, and that concession has had a real effect on the ease with which one can pirate their software.
The banks have a real problem, and MS is going to have to address it or lose the business. I think they're going to address it.
The big conceptual problem, I think, is to consider MS to be a monolith. There are people who are pushing for this stuff, and there are others who are talking to the customers who are screaming bloody murder.
In the end, they will have to listen to their customers.
Lucky Green is a well known cypherpunk, a guy who has been around for a long time. He might lose, but he won't sell out.
It's kind of strange seeing the name pop up, especially after seeing Perry Metzger's name yesterday, in connection with the OpenBSD privilage elevation. The old Cypherpunks are still out there fighting the good fight.
I like old time radio, for example, and there are newsgroups where people post the audio files. With WMA you can crunch a half hour show small enough to fit on a floppy. The fidelity isn't great, but it's good enough for this content.
I've never had a problem with DRM when I make my own files.
I don't think there's a one size fits all solution for everyone. WMA is good at some things, MP3 is very portable, is a great free system that gives you tight compression and great sound, etc.
The computer industry is in the doldrums because people don't have a solid need to upgrade. The computers that they already own are fast enough to do what they want to do.
These codecs take a lot of processing power. The ones that will follow, that will presumably be even tighter, will probably need even more power.
This is the application that will drive future upgrades. Most adults don't play video games, but everyone watches TV.
By getting in line behind palladium, MS and Intel are putting Hollywood's interests ahead of their own. Why buy a $1200 computer to watch video when an $80 DVD player will do it just as well? If you can't do more with the video -- record it, archive it, copy it, etc. -- there's no compelling reason. Why not keep your 300Mhz box for email and web surfing, and keep your DVD player for movies?
MS and Intel are undoubtedly backing palladium to get Hollywood onboard, to secure their cooperation in the grand campaign to bring computers to the living room, to home entertainment. This is what they don't understand -- that outcome is inevitable, and Hollywood will have little to say about it one way or another. It's the way the technology is evolving, just like music distribution is moving online, with or without the RIAA.
The quickest way to get to the living room is to make the technology useful for consumers. In the end, the computer companies work for the people who buy the machines, and the interests of the computer industry are served by serving the customers. Not Hollywood, not the RIAA, not anyone else.
I find the comment about how the software sucks because it only cost $50 to be a little ironic in a linux user community.
The community can produce application servers that load balance over several machines, beowulf supercomputing clusters, etc., but not PVR software? Because quality costs?
My card has a tuner, and yes, it can change channels. It doesn't control a satellite reciever or a digitalTV set top box, though.
I didn't buy the version of my aver pvr card with a remote, but it's available. I use my laptop, with a wireless net card and vnc, as a remote for all of my computer multimedia needs. A little bulky, but it does a little bit more.
I know that people can mod tivos, but I wouldn't count on that lasting forever. Maybe it will -- but I wouldn't count on it.
It's not as good now. I'm not claiming it is. What I'm claiming is that there aren't any fundamental reasons why it isn't.
PS -- can your Tivo record to Divx format files directly?
There are apps out there -- one is at www.snapstream.com.
And Microsoft fails at a lot of stuff -- they win because they have the money to keep trying, if they want to, and the leverage to create incentives for people to use and sell their products. I remember them slogging away at lotus and word perfect in the old days, for a long time word and excel were 2nd best.
I think that KDE is pretty nice, as a UI, with a lot of nice tools. And I don't know that the multimedia is the bottleneck. I mean, the best codecs give you higher quality with smaller sizes, and open source can't touch that. But if you can buy your own disks, maybe you're better off with looser compression and freedom.
It is a huge thing to have access to your video files, to be able to share and edit them, to be able to recompress them, etc. Don't underestimate it.
I do use it, but not the way I'd use a tivo. I capture video and recompress it, and I sometimes edit it in premiere.
I know it's not simple to get it right. It hasn't happened yet (although there are 3rd party solutions that claim to have done that -- like snapstream, but I haven't tried them).
Bottom line: if I can get a good OS for free, and a good SQL engine for free, I believe I can get a good PVR application for free. It's not here now, but it will be.
The point isn't that PVR will fail -- just that the long term prognistics for this company aren't good.
I bought a PVR card for a pc. It sucks, the software is no good. But the card was $50. There's no reason why the software couldn't be good -- it just isn't. There are 3rd party apps that tie into tv listings just like TiVo does.
TiVo is nice, and they make it work, but you pay an awful lot for the storage space. TiVo is vulnerable to pressure from the big media companies, too, in a way that other solutions won't be. And I have to say that it's very nice to be able to record to Divx files that can be saved or shared.
I remember when Sun was trying to sell an ISP in a box during the 90's as well.
I think that they'll be able to make system administration more efficient -- allow fewer people to manage more machines. But someone will still have to run them.
I think they did look at Microsoft, and what MS could and would do to them if they raised such a challenge.
Office would certainly die, probably IE as well.
Tight integration of hardware and software is a big part of the Mac experience. It avoids problems. MacOS x86 would have tons of problems, many more than windows, more, probably, than Linux, which is known for having driver problems.
I was about to write that most Mac people have never thought about a driver in their lives, but that's probably an exaggeration. They have to worry about them for scanners and stuff like that. But not for the core components of the system. Stuff just works. Which is, of course, the basis of their ad campaign.
Apple makes a profit on their hardware, because their model shields them from direct competition. The tight integration is a core component of their OS. And moving into x86 OS's would trigger an all out war from MS, and pull the plug on software that every Mac OS X user uses all day every day (IE).
There's a ton of music out on CD that can be copied, and countless movies out in formats that can be copied. All of these things can be pirated, and will always be pirateable.
Let's assume that these new schemes, unlike all the others that have come down the pike, will really be solid.
It just means that people can't trade this year's crappy new content. Here's a tough problem: listen to The Beatles for free or to the latest manufactured boy band or Celine Dion type singer for $20 a disc, when there's only one halfway decent song on the disc?
The entertainment industry depends, in a very fundamental sense, on controlling access to the distribution systems. If you want your record at the Virgin Megastore, you've got to give a big label a cut. An unreasonably big cut, in my opinion.
They're acting as if they've got better music than people outside of their system. Ask anyone who listens to indie or underground music -- that's just not true. All they have is distribution. Even if they can build a closed and pirate proof system, THEY CAN'T KEEP PEOPLE FROM DISTRIBUTING MUSIC AND MOVIES IN OTHER WAYS. The ability to prevent people from distributing their art has always been the foundation of their power. That's why the mob was (is?) so important to the music business. They understood that, and they enforced it.
In other words, artists will be able to do an end run around them. They're going to go from having the best distribution to having a crippled distribution system, one that delivers a less desirable product, due to the heavy restrictions they're fighting for now.
Hollywood doesn't get it. You can channel a river, but you can't stop it all together, and the changes that technology is bringing down the pike are too big for anything but channeling. But they don't try to do that. The entertainment industry reacts the same way over and over again -- they try to litigate and copy protect their way back to the way things used to be.
Well, it ain't ever going to be the way it used to be. Until they start coming out with strategies to deal with the world as it is now, they're screwed.
Valenti is a dinosaur who is leading them to disaster.
I missed this the first time through, because the Dell email is poorly written. But if you read the letter carefully, it's pretty clear to me that the poster of this post's parent has it right.
I think that you could argue that forcing companies to sell different models for non-OS systems is an overwhelming use of monopolistic force. The OEM price is much less, and not getting it prices your model out of the marketplace. And what hardware manufacturer have made models just for, say, an infant Be?
But the fact remains that the article doesn't say the things that most of the people here are arguing against.
It seems to me that the key missing element is some sort of database of listings. It seems that it ought to be doable -- we have freedb's of CD track names, for example.
A computer with a PVR card is a more complicated replacement for a VCR, and unless you want to edit or share the video, it doesn't give you many advantages. If you just want to watch the show you're going to miss because you're going out, a VCR is a better solution.
TiVo is a lot more than a VCR -- you program it, and you never miss your favorite shows again. You have a pool of programs waiting for you, a queue of shows you like that's available whenever you have the time to watch them.
Imagine coupling all of the funcationality of TiVo with a p2p system -- so you could even get shows that you forgot to record, or earlier episodes of a show you've just discovered.
Kazaa lets you do things that go a long way towards proving the potential of this technology. You can tell kazaa to get some specific episode of south park, and it will, although it might take awhile. But the selection of shows available on kazaa is pretty poor.
If a p2p system shared all the shows that people recorded for themselves, then everything would be available. We'd all end up in jail for copyright violations, but there'd be a lot of good video on the network.
Better yet, the system would be international. We could watch British shows here in the States, or Japanese shows, or whatever.
This stuff has a lot of potential to be insanely great.
Design Patterns, by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides.
Refactoring: improving the design of existing code, by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts.
Joe Celko's SQL books.
It's an introductory text, but Jerry Sussman's and Julie Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is pretty good too. It makes you think about things more deeply than many other books do.
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I don't know if Sun can be said to make money on the software, or the hardware, or whatever. It seems to be more about the whole package. They make everything work together.
I used to have a business that used Sun, and the level of support we got (mostly from our vendor, admittedly) was incredible, and we never got that "pass the buck" sort of thing where the software people blame the hardware, and the hardware people blame the software.
I have a friend who works for sun doing support. He had a solid academic background and a number of years of experience doing system administration at fermilab before he joined the company. He spent most of his time supporting clustered systems. The point is that if you have problems and a high level support contract, you talk to smart people.
I know that they used to have (and probably still do have) Oracle gurus on staff, because if you're a big customer you don't want to hear Sun say, "Call Oracle" and the Oracle people say, "Call Sun." You want it to work.
And I remember once I had a system die on me, and I didn't have a spare. My vendor, who usually dealt with much larger customers, kept an inventory of stuff preboxed at an overnight shipping facility. He could call them up and tell them to ship something out as late as 8p or so, and get it there the next morning. I called him in the evening, and he got it there in the morning. He said, "We'll talk about billing later, let's get this shipped before the deadline passes."
It's a whole different world when you have problems. That's what Sun sells. But obviously, it's a lot more expensive than taking a commodity pc that you built for $500 and putting linux on it.
The problem Sun would have with an Open Source Solaris is that people would change it, and that would make support a lot more difficult.
Sun's problem isn't that Solaris is missing features that open source developers could contribute, or reliability issues that volunteers could help them work out. Their problem is that they're caught in a pretty small niche, and other people with a lot of money are coming at them all the time.
And the fact that linux is solid, and that it can be made to work creates a new problem, because it creates the possibility that another company (like RedHat) might be in a position soon to offer the same kind of "we make it work" service that Sun offers.
I don't think there are any easy answers to these problems. Sun seems like a viable company, but they definitely have some challenges ahead.
If you don't have a support contract, if you're a guy with a couple of sparc servers and no lifeline, Sun doesn't make so much sense. You're better off with the commodity hardware and linux. I think that tends to color the way linux guys look at Sun.
I agree with you -- it was one of the few attempts at humor here that actually came off.
I don't know if anyone would buy AOL just for Time/Warner content, but it does sweeten the pot for some people.
The people that I know who are on AOL are there for stuff that's not available on the net at large -- chatrooms, the parental controls on IMs that allow kids to chat with their friends, without worrying about predators, etc.
I know parents who buy AOL even though they have broadband and home networks, for just this reason.
This move would just make AOL that much nicer for the people who subscribe. By itself, it's not enough to swing anyone. But when you add it to the pile of AOL features that people like, it contributes to the cumulative effect.
Since online readers of Time or People don't do the company much good anyway, it seems like a good move to me.
I could see them doing something similar with online movies in the future -- bringing out stuff first for AOL customers, or whatever.
People buy PCs to do things, and the PCs that people have now can do the things they want to do. The good sales in the past were based on the jump to the net.
Windows 3.1 machines were horrible online, Win95 was better but still way too flaky, Win98 was an improvment when it first came out, and by the end a well patched 98 second editition became more or less usable. 2000 and XP are much better than 98, but if you just surf the web and send email, 98 is good enough.
The thing is, my 1.4G athalon is crummy at playing full screen hi res video compressed with a top notch codec. I use MPEG2 instead. That makes me crave a faster machine. Video is the next killer app, the one that will push people into upgrading.
A world with solid PVR apps, good file sharing apps, and lots of video files floating around would be a good thing for the tech industry. I'm not saying anything about the ethics of that, or anything else. But it would push people to buy better computers.
The good blackhats have lots of compromised machines at their disposal, and are generally way too clever to leave such an obvious clue behind.
It's possible that this guy has something to do with it, but it's more likely that his machine is owned by the same person who managed to put the trojan out there.
I was as afraid of palladium as the next guy before the details started to come out, but I think we ought to try to avoid the knee jerk reaction and think this stuff through more carefully.
A lot of people are opposed to any scheme that can be used to thwart piracy. But in my view that's an extreme and unreasonable position, even when fair use issues are taken into account.
For a long time it's seemed to me that the thing we ought to be working towards is an open system of distribution, one that can't be dominated by large media concerns, something that gives a guy who makes music at home the same sort of access to the market as the big record labels.
To me, the issue is not whether or not my computer is capable of running some sort of protected DRM system -- the issue is whether or not it's capable of running alternative systems, if the existence of a palladium aware media player will break my mp3, ogg, and divx players, or my entire open source operating system. As I read these proposals, that's not the case, they won't break things.
Microsoft has said explicitly that one of the key design goals of palladium was that it shouldn't break existing software.
In my view, these sorts of services are useful, and we ought to be talking more about "how" then "if" they are implemented.
In particular, we ought to be sure that software that will run under linux can provide the same sorts of services as a palladium enabled version of windows. I know that the applications themselves couldn't be truly open source (or at least you'd have to use a signed snapshot of an application that was developed using open source methodologies). But I don't think that's enough of a reason to pull back from this stuff.
There are useful applications for this stuff.
About a decade ago, one of the hot topics among crypto types was digicash -- cryptographic protocols invented by a guy named Chaum that try to mimic cash, especially its anonymity and security.
One of the big problems was how to make microtransactions work when you're disconnected from the net. Imagine two palm os devices doing a transaction over infrared. Chaum's answer was to use tamper proof chips.
Sure, on some level nothing is tamper proof, but it ought to be possible to make tampering difficult enough, expensive enough, and to cap the size of the transactions possible and the rate at which they can be made, in a way that would give people reasonable security. The NSA could hack the micropayment system, but they'd have to spend a million bucks, and all they could get back would be $50, or something like that.
It seems to me that this kind of hardware could be seen as a more flexible kind of tamper proof chip.
I think the goal should be that whatever hardware comes out should work with arbitrary operating systems. The trust chain should be decentralized.
In other words, if I develop an electronic music distribution system, I should be able to develop apps for whatever OSs I choose to support, and I should be able to make my system recognize whatever signatures I feel are trusthworsthy. It ought to be possible for *anyone* to develop such a system, and to use the hooks into the hardware.
The thing that worries me is that if all we say is "no, palladium is the devil" we won't have any voice in this stuff.
I can see why the guys in Namibia would be pissed off -- it sounds like they got jerked around.
It doesn't change the fact that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does an enormous amount of good in Africa and the rest of the world. Look it up if you don't believe me.
Bill Gates is the biggest philanthropist in the history of the world, and while critics can talk about soft donations of things like software licenses, in reality he does a lot of stuff like vaccinations and grants to develop basic infrastructure in the developing world.
He's done far more than anyone else, certainly more than me or anyone slamming him here.
If that's the case, the inclusion of the crypto code in the kernel is a good thing.
An awful lot of people use the kernel, and interfering with its distribution would generate lots of waves, interfere with lots of businesses, anger lots of tech journalists, etc.
Politically, I just don't see how they could muck with it.
I think that MS is going to back off on a lot of this stuff, probably even Palladium in its most extreme form.
Their strategy at the highest level seems to be two pronged. On one hand they want to gather up all of the power and control of the monopolist, and on the other hand, they try to respond to customers as if they had to compete.
I know that a lot of people are skeptical about the last part of that, but I believe it. They backed off of the passport nightmare to a large extent.
There are lots of smaller things they've backed off on as well -- their first incarnation of their anti-piracy measures would have made it impossible for corporate users to roll out systems using software like ghost, but they backed down on that, and that concession has had a real effect on the ease with which one can pirate their software.
The banks have a real problem, and MS is going to have to address it or lose the business. I think they're going to address it.
The big conceptual problem, I think, is to consider MS to be a monolith. There are people who are pushing for this stuff, and there are others who are talking to the customers who are screaming bloody murder.
In the end, they will have to listen to their customers.
Lucky Green is a well known cypherpunk, a guy who has been around for a long time. He might lose, but he won't sell out.
It's kind of strange seeing the name pop up, especially after seeing Perry Metzger's name yesterday, in connection with the OpenBSD privilage elevation. The old Cypherpunks are still out there fighting the good fight.
I use WMA for very tight voice audio encoding.
I like old time radio, for example, and there are newsgroups where people post the audio files. With WMA you can crunch a half hour show small enough to fit on a floppy. The fidelity isn't great, but it's good enough for this content.
I've never had a problem with DRM when I make my own files.
I don't think there's a one size fits all solution for everyone. WMA is good at some things, MP3 is very portable, is a great free system that gives you tight compression and great sound, etc.
The computer industry is in the doldrums because people don't have a solid need to upgrade. The computers that they already own are fast enough to do what they want to do.
These codecs take a lot of processing power. The ones that will follow, that will presumably be even tighter, will probably need even more power.
This is the application that will drive future upgrades. Most adults don't play video games, but everyone watches TV.
By getting in line behind palladium, MS and Intel are putting Hollywood's interests ahead of their own. Why buy a $1200 computer to watch video when an $80 DVD player will do it just as well? If you can't do more with the video -- record it, archive it, copy it, etc. -- there's no compelling reason. Why not keep your 300Mhz box for email and web surfing, and keep your DVD player for movies?
MS and Intel are undoubtedly backing palladium to get Hollywood onboard, to secure their cooperation in the grand campaign to bring computers to the living room, to home entertainment. This is what they don't understand -- that outcome is inevitable, and Hollywood will have little to say about it one way or another. It's the way the technology is evolving, just like music distribution is moving online, with or without the RIAA.
The quickest way to get to the living room is to make the technology useful for consumers. In the end, the computer companies work for the people who buy the machines, and the interests of the computer industry are served by serving the customers. Not Hollywood, not the RIAA, not anyone else.
I find the comment about how the software sucks because it only cost $50 to be a little ironic in a linux user community.
The community can produce application servers that load balance over several machines, beowulf supercomputing clusters, etc., but not PVR software? Because quality costs?
My card has a tuner, and yes, it can change channels. It doesn't control a satellite reciever or a digitalTV set top box, though.
I didn't buy the version of my aver pvr card with a remote, but it's available. I use my laptop, with a wireless net card and vnc, as a remote for all of my computer multimedia needs. A little bulky, but it does a little bit more.
I know that people can mod tivos, but I wouldn't count on that lasting forever. Maybe it will -- but I wouldn't count on it.
It's not as good now. I'm not claiming it is. What I'm claiming is that there aren't any fundamental reasons why it isn't.
PS -- can your Tivo record to Divx format files directly?
There are apps out there -- one is at www.snapstream.com.
And Microsoft fails at a lot of stuff -- they win because they have the money to keep trying, if they want to, and the leverage to create incentives for people to use and sell their products. I remember them slogging away at lotus and word perfect in the old days, for a long time word and excel were 2nd best.
I think that KDE is pretty nice, as a UI, with a lot of nice tools. And I don't know that the multimedia is the bottleneck. I mean, the best codecs give you higher quality with smaller sizes, and open source can't touch that. But if you can buy your own disks, maybe you're better off with looser compression and freedom.
It is a huge thing to have access to your video files, to be able to share and edit them, to be able to recompress them, etc. Don't underestimate it.
I do use it, but not the way I'd use a tivo. I capture video and recompress it, and I sometimes edit it in premiere.
I know it's not simple to get it right. It hasn't happened yet (although there are 3rd party solutions that claim to have done that -- like snapstream, but I haven't tried them).
Bottom line: if I can get a good OS for free, and a good SQL engine for free, I believe I can get a good PVR application for free. It's not here now, but it will be.
The point isn't that PVR will fail -- just that the long term prognistics for this company aren't good.
I bought a PVR card for a pc. It sucks, the software is no good. But the card was $50. There's no reason why the software couldn't be good -- it just isn't. There are 3rd party apps that tie into tv listings just like TiVo does.
TiVo is nice, and they make it work, but you pay an awful lot for the storage space. TiVo is vulnerable to pressure from the big media companies, too, in a way that other solutions won't be. And I have to say that it's very nice to be able to record to Divx files that can be saved or shared.
I remember when Sun was trying to sell an ISP in a box during the 90's as well.
I think that they'll be able to make system administration more efficient -- allow fewer people to manage more machines. But someone will still have to run them.
This is good for the public at large, but I'll bet theKompany feels like suckers for buying a license.
And I'll bet that this will make it more difficult for Vorbis to sell more licenses for other products down the road.
I think they did look at Microsoft, and what MS could and would do to them if they raised such a challenge.
Office would certainly die, probably IE as well.
Tight integration of hardware and software is a big part of the Mac experience. It avoids problems. MacOS x86 would have tons of problems, many more than windows, more, probably, than Linux, which is known for having driver problems.
I was about to write that most Mac people have never thought about a driver in their lives, but that's probably an exaggeration. They have to worry about them for scanners and stuff like that. But not for the core components of the system. Stuff just works. Which is, of course, the basis of their ad campaign.
Apple makes a profit on their hardware, because their model shields them from direct competition. The tight integration is a core component of their OS. And moving into x86 OS's would trigger an all out war from MS, and pull the plug on software that every Mac OS X user uses all day every day (IE).
There's a ton of music out on CD that can be copied, and countless movies out in formats that can be copied. All of these things can be pirated, and will always be pirateable.
Let's assume that these new schemes, unlike all the others that have come down the pike, will really be solid.
It just means that people can't trade this year's crappy new content. Here's a tough problem: listen to The Beatles for free or to the latest manufactured boy band or Celine Dion type singer for $20 a disc, when there's only one halfway decent song on the disc?
The entertainment industry depends, in a very fundamental sense, on controlling access to the distribution systems. If you want your record at the Virgin Megastore, you've got to give a big label a cut. An unreasonably big cut, in my opinion.
They're acting as if they've got better music than people outside of their system. Ask anyone who listens to indie or underground music -- that's just not true. All they have is distribution. Even if they can build a closed and pirate proof system, THEY CAN'T KEEP PEOPLE FROM DISTRIBUTING MUSIC AND MOVIES IN OTHER WAYS. The ability to prevent people from distributing their art has always been the foundation of their power. That's why the mob was (is?) so important to the music business. They understood that, and they enforced it.
In other words, artists will be able to do an end run around them. They're going to go from having the best distribution to having a crippled distribution system, one that delivers a less desirable product, due to the heavy restrictions they're fighting for now.
Hollywood doesn't get it. You can channel a river, but you can't stop it all together, and the changes that technology is bringing down the pike are too big for anything but channeling. But they don't try to do that. The entertainment industry reacts the same way over and over again -- they try to litigate and copy protect their way back to the way things used to be.
Well, it ain't ever going to be the way it used to be. Until they start coming out with strategies to deal with the world as it is now, they're screwed.
Valenti is a dinosaur who is leading them to disaster.
Policing the p2p networks and hacking into every computer in America will create far more jobs than CG technology will destroy.
I missed this the first time through, because the Dell email is poorly written. But if you read the letter carefully, it's pretty clear to me that the poster of this post's parent has it right.
I think that you could argue that forcing companies to sell different models for non-OS systems is an overwhelming use of monopolistic force. The OEM price is much less, and not getting it prices your model out of the marketplace. And what hardware manufacturer have made models just for, say, an infant Be?
But the fact remains that the article doesn't say the things that most of the people here are arguing against.
It seems to me that the key missing element is some sort of database of listings. It seems that it ought to be doable -- we have freedb's of CD track names, for example.
A computer with a PVR card is a more complicated replacement for a VCR, and unless you want to edit or share the video, it doesn't give you many advantages. If you just want to watch the show you're going to miss because you're going out, a VCR is a better solution.
TiVo is a lot more than a VCR -- you program it, and you never miss your favorite shows again. You have a pool of programs waiting for you, a queue of shows you like that's available whenever you have the time to watch them.
Imagine coupling all of the funcationality of TiVo with a p2p system -- so you could even get shows that you forgot to record, or earlier episodes of a show you've just discovered.
Kazaa lets you do things that go a long way towards proving the potential of this technology. You can tell kazaa to get some specific episode of south park, and it will, although it might take awhile. But the selection of shows available on kazaa is pretty poor.
If a p2p system shared all the shows that people recorded for themselves, then everything would be available. We'd all end up in jail for copyright violations, but there'd be a lot of good video on the network.
Better yet, the system would be international. We could watch British shows here in the States, or Japanese shows, or whatever.
This stuff has a lot of potential to be insanely great.
Design Patterns, by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides.
Refactoring: improving the design of existing code, by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts.
Joe Celko's SQL books.
It's an introductory text, but Jerry Sussman's and Julie Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is pretty good too. It makes you think about things more deeply than many other books do.
Why is ogg any more strange as a word than egg?
Once people get used to it, it will be ok.
At least it's a word, and not an acronym.