I wouldn't say this is Hulu's fault, but I do think Hulu is using this as an excuse.
I find it highly suspect that 100% of the content providers are saying pull me off of Boxee. I'm sure there are a few who are failing to grasp the implications, but all of them? All of them care? It seems that Hulu is getting pressure to target Boxee (what about the other apps? or embeds?) and Hulu (for whatever reason) is going along with this request.
If Hulu can allow other apps and embeds to work, then there is no way this is just about distribution. Hulu has a vested interest in getting people to go to their site as a destination (future business model, part of their sell, etc), and apps like Boxee take that reason away (lord knows I don't visit hulu except through an un-named app, so no-one takes it away).
There has to be more than just a request from content providers going on here.
The US is not a Democracy, never has been. The US is a Federal Republic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Republic/). Speaking of elections if you read election rules you'll see that there is nothing to stop a 3rd party from running provided they can actually get the backing of the people. And there are numerous cases of independent or small parties winning elections in local or even federal government.
Some local state goverments do have Democracy particpation on specfic aspects of their government (check your state's constitution) but the US as a whole is a federal republic.
And the electoral (what you are referring to) continues to serve an extremely useful purpose as it was intended when it was first put in place. Read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_college. Without the electoral college small states would have little to no voice in any presidential ellection, so be glad it exists. And in some states it is state law that the electoral college vote with the will of the people. So if you live in one of those states then your vote does indeed count directly toward the election of the president.
The US Gov hasn't "stolen" anything. The country was founded this way. Go read US history, federal (there's that word again) law, or perhaps the constitution. Every vote is worth something, just because your candidate doesn't get anything for not being able to convince people doesn't make the system any less effective.
This is definitely a surprise for more reasons that one. In 03 I was interning at IBM in their product marketing group for the zSeries (working on a new product) and one of the technologies frequently discussed as a potential showcase for the new mainframe was an un-named search technology leveraging UIMA and natural language. An IBM researcher had developed all of the algorithms in a pretty hush-hush project (never did find out if there were any other sponsors involved). At the time there was a lot of discussion on trying to find a way to monetize the search technology.
In the trials for the new mainframe they were searching the entire net, but not for your typical search reasons (ex. Searching on an address), but to find relationships and patterns. Evidently they were getting some really interesting results searching on predictive patterns for stocks (finding tell-tale relationships that indicated when something was going to move) or in evaluating government actions. A lot of discussion I sat in on was on how they could use the tech to find patterns across thousands of sources.
Anyway the net net is they were trying hard to find a way to sell this tech, part of their new efforts to monetize technologies like this (IBM has this great weather predicative technology for micro-cells that still hasn't seen the light of day). Guess they couldn't find a good way to sell it directly, so releasing it this way to the world is pretty interesting. Though it wouldn't surprise me that when they ran the numbers they found they'd sell more hardware and services then the software would ever generate if it was adopted by other companies.
Actually it wasn't my intention to suggest an EvilEmpire move at all. In fact I think it is a very intelligent business decision on their part.
I'm an ex-techie turned suit and I proposed my last question as food for thought, not an indictment of Google. By putting out features like Google Maps, and not releasing an API, but making it hackable, Google gains valuable insight into customer needs. They learn the kinds of things that people would want to see in an API, and more importantly they get a ton of free product concepts/demos without spending a $.
All companies would like to be in a similar position, create the core platform (maps) and then enable 3rd parties to generate a large portion of the support through their efforts, thus achieving market dominance. Just look at iPods as an example (wasn't by chance that all those 3rd parties sprouted up around the iPod).
This tactic isn't anything new. About a year and a half ago I was working with a publisher and this was just one of our tactics to promote a game. We were placing information about the game in select blogs (as well as actively tracking embedded keywords) across sites to monitor our game's buzz.
What we were doing wasn't all that sophisticated (we had an evangelist program as well, which who were far better than us at promoting our messages). There were several viral advertising firms out there that were posting in fake blogs, in real blogs, on multiple forums using fake ids, etc.
While you could argue that viral marketing of this sort is unethical or at least questionable, it really is no different than paying people to walk around with your product in public. Online viral marketing, and placement in a blog, is just another form of PR placement.
Of course there is an ethical question to be answered if blogs are truly a form of news protected by the laws and practices of journalists. If that's the case than these blogs are practicing yellow journalism, which would then throw into question their role as independent journalists (then again if you can find me a 100% untainted all the time news source these days I'd be pretty impressed (especially if they have over 100 readers)).
This really points toward some interesting applications of wireless in gaming. With the DS's abilities you could add wireless to games. A hide-n-seek game which requires you to travel around a city and find "virtual" objects and DL them?
I'm surprised there haven't been any games announced yet that will leverage teh idea of downloading content as updates, or as part of the gameplay. Depending upon how well this works this could be the DS's real differnation between it and a PSP (though the PSP does have wireless, so they might be able to do something similar).
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I wouldn't say this is Hulu's fault, but I do think Hulu is using this as an excuse. I find it highly suspect that 100% of the content providers are saying pull me off of Boxee. I'm sure there are a few who are failing to grasp the implications, but all of them? All of them care? It seems that Hulu is getting pressure to target Boxee (what about the other apps? or embeds?) and Hulu (for whatever reason) is going along with this request. If Hulu can allow other apps and embeds to work, then there is no way this is just about distribution. Hulu has a vested interest in getting people to go to their site as a destination (future business model, part of their sell, etc), and apps like Boxee take that reason away (lord knows I don't visit hulu except through an un-named app, so no-one takes it away). There has to be more than just a request from content providers going on here.
Your case is based on incorrect assumptions.
The US is not a Democracy, never has been. The US is a Federal Republic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Republic/). Speaking of elections if you read election rules you'll see that there is nothing to stop a 3rd party from running provided they can actually get the backing of the people. And there are numerous cases of independent or small parties winning elections in local or even federal government.
Some local state goverments do have Democracy particpation on specfic aspects of their government (check your state's constitution) but the US as a whole is a federal republic.
And the electoral (what you are referring to) continues to serve an extremely useful purpose as it was intended when it was first put in place. Read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_college. Without the electoral college small states would have little to no voice in any presidential ellection, so be glad it exists. And in some states it is state law that the electoral college vote with the will of the people. So if you live in one of those states then your vote does indeed count directly toward the election of the president.
The US Gov hasn't "stolen" anything. The country was founded this way. Go read US history, federal (there's that word again) law, or perhaps the constitution. Every vote is worth something, just because your candidate doesn't get anything for not being able to convince people doesn't make the system any less effective.
In the trials for the new mainframe they were searching the entire net, but not for your typical search reasons (ex. Searching on an address), but to find relationships and patterns. Evidently they were getting some really interesting results searching on predictive patterns for stocks (finding tell-tale relationships that indicated when something was going to move) or in evaluating government actions. A lot of discussion I sat in on was on how they could use the tech to find patterns across thousands of sources.
Anyway the net net is they were trying hard to find a way to sell this tech, part of their new efforts to monetize technologies like this (IBM has this great weather predicative technology for micro-cells that still hasn't seen the light of day). Guess they couldn't find a good way to sell it directly, so releasing it this way to the world is pretty interesting. Though it wouldn't surprise me that when they ran the numbers they found they'd sell more hardware and services then the software would ever generate if it was adopted by other companies.
I'm an ex-techie turned suit and I proposed my last question as food for thought, not an indictment of Google. By putting out features like Google Maps, and not releasing an API, but making it hackable, Google gains valuable insight into customer needs. They learn the kinds of things that people would want to see in an API, and more importantly they get a ton of free product concepts/demos without spending a $.
All companies would like to be in a similar position, create the core platform (maps) and then enable 3rd parties to generate a large portion of the support through their efforts, thus achieving market dominance. Just look at iPods as an example (wasn't by chance that all those 3rd parties sprouted up around the iPod).
What we were doing wasn't all that sophisticated (we had an evangelist program as well, which who were far better than us at promoting our messages). There were several viral advertising firms out there that were posting in fake blogs, in real blogs, on multiple forums using fake ids, etc.
While you could argue that viral marketing of this sort is unethical or at least questionable, it really is no different than paying people to walk around with your product in public. Online viral marketing, and placement in a blog, is just another form of PR placement.
Of course there is an ethical question to be answered if blogs are truly a form of news protected by the laws and practices of journalists. If that's the case than these blogs are practicing yellow journalism, which would then throw into question their role as independent journalists (then again if you can find me a 100% untainted all the time news source these days I'd be pretty impressed (especially if they have over 100 readers)).
This really points toward some interesting applications of wireless in gaming. With the DS's abilities you could add wireless to games. A hide-n-seek game which requires you to travel around a city and find "virtual" objects and DL them? I'm surprised there haven't been any games announced yet that will leverage teh idea of downloading content as updates, or as part of the gameplay. Depending upon how well this works this could be the DS's real differnation between it and a PSP (though the PSP does have wireless, so they might be able to do something similar).