This lawsuit has nothing to do with you or your formats. It's strictly a business deal between content producers and a cable distributor; the content producers think Time Warner is welching on their deal to distribute the data according to their contract. What if a cable channel wants to stream their channel themselves for direct subscription revenues? TWCs action makes it less likely this would work, and it looks like TWC is just trying to make build a technological end run in order to stymie cable channels from selling themselves to subscribers a la carte.
It's remarkable how many people here are suddenly on the side of Time Warner Cable(!) and iPads(!!) as long as they're providing Teh Shiny New Modality.
You can't. It's a size issue. this idea of everyone living in a city is absurd.
Of course you can, but local and city zoning regulations force developers to limit the number of stories and units in their developments (tall buildings are ugly!), how much of their land they can use for building and how much must be allocated to set-backs (green space!), how much of the land can be developed for mixed-use and commercial (usually none), how much of the land must be allocated for parking, and on and on. Some of these rules have a legitimate purpose but most of the time it's NIMBYism on planning boards and city councils, trying to force a town to look like an artificial 1950s ideal of what a suburb should be, without regard for what people want to buy, where they want to live and work, what developers want to build, and what would save everyone money.
I think this policy came about because the OHA members were complaining they had to compete with the cheap tablets out there.
Exactly: Oh no, they had to COMPETE! The OHA is a cartel, they compete where they want to compete, mainly in securing the most lucrative marketing and subsidy agreements with networks, splitting the rents in the system. In the areas they don't want to compete, they use open source to crush the competition, plain and simple.
You're right, but it's worth pointing out that this is the App Store argument. If Google may withhold source from certain hardware vendors in order to "protect" end users or the platform, to protect the platform's reputation of stability and performance, mutatis mutandis Apple is justified to withhold apps and functionality from their platform for the same reasons. If Andy Rubin thinks he's entitled to prevent people from running Honeycomb because of UX, then Jobs is completely free to make such decisions about iOS.
It works and it's completely reasonable, but it's not "free." Free means people being grownups and understanding what minimum specs are, and the distinction between an application, an OS and hardware.
Yeah, the OSS platform will always be one version behind the version they give to their top-tier partners, thus Motorola and Samsung get a head start selling the best devices, and then vendors who Google doesn't license Ice Cream to are stuck selling last year's commodity, in a market that is by then saturated.
Pretty cool, huh? Almost as if Google has created a perpetual motion machine that allows them to release their platform as open software, while simultaneously maintaining the power to decide which handset vendors will thrive.
That's how Andy Rubin sees it. Of course, Motorola got to peek at the source early for the Xoom, but they did that the old-fashioned way, with a license.
I guess that's hypocrisy -- I wouldn't bitch about Google being hypocritical, it's a company after all and it has no beliefs to contradict. But when a single large corporation basically runs an OSS project you have to consider exactly why they release source. And the Xoom basically shows us the strategy: if you're a big corporation that can manufacturer millions of units and you're willing to play by Google's proprietary licensing terms, you get a sneek peak at the new platform. If you're not important enough for Google to do business with, you'll get the Android source the same time the rest of the world does. It's a two-tier system: Google's OHA partners, and everyone else.
It might be as easy as trusting a self-signed certificate, but I suspect all the bits and pieces check on each other and you'd have to tweak and re-sign a lot of different binaries for which you have no source code.
So in your view it's okay if someone just takes your code / program and sells it under his own brand as a proprietary software package, makes lots of money, without contributing back anything to the open source community? Because that's what you're suggesting.
This is the central conflict -- the code is on my hard drive, it's mine in any "information wants to be free" sense. However, there's the GPL, which is relies on a strong definition of intellectual property, that asserts that even though you have possession of the code, the copyright holder retains a proprietary interest and all of the rights with regard to how it may be distributed. It's really just the same sort of arbitrary IP line-drawing that the USPTO does every day, they just draw the line in a different place than a commercial software vendor. It's designed so that any improvements a contributor may make revert to the rights holder of the base, instead of a commercial source-code license, where improvements and the right to distribute those improvements would be retained by the licensee.
There's a lot of heat and light about freedom, but all it is is RMS using Intellectual Property law to try to keep alive his memories of going to school in the late 70s and having access to the source code to SysV Unix, source code that was licensed to his college for educational purposes and with AT&T hoping that it would make Unix "viral" with CS students.
No, it doesn't. That's a ridiculous assertion presented without any evidence or reason.
That's sortof disingenuous, GPL has always been a Hobson's choice. You can always "sell" a piece of GPL software, but unless you are the original rights holder the GPL has the practical effect of ruining any mechanism for monetizing the software. If any distribution of the software requires the source code be included, it destroys the competitive advantage of the seller in a market and makes it impossible to prevent free-riding by users. You can only "sell" a GPL'd piece of software if you are the author, and then only by withholding code yourself; anyone who contributes is obliged to hand back their work in a manner that prevents them from monetizing any direct benefits.
GPL works for many reasons, but "you can sell it" is not one of them. In a time where people donwload everything -- instead of when RMS wrote the GPL, and people sold tapes and disks -- the "salability" property of GPL software is really incidental, and Internet distribution has made it infeasible from a business point-of-view.
The summary is flat out wrong the way it is worded, but there are legitimate licensing issues.
They probably figure it is easier to maintain a single SMB/CIFS implementation rather than two, so they are ditching it on OS X as well (or they have other plans for OS X that we are not aware of yet).
Just about all of the binaries in/System on a Mac OS X site are signed by Apple to prevent tampering, either by the user or Eve trying to installing a rootkit. They probably don't want to turn over the signing keys for those, because they definitely don't want Eve patching their system, and as far as Apple engineers are concerned/System should have a big sticker on it reading "No user serviceable parts inside."
In most countries in the developed world, the cellular networks, the towers and backhauls, are built by the government or a quasi-government monopoly and access is leased to retailers who then sell the SIM cards. As a condition of the lease the retailers agree to a regulatory regime that's much more stringent than in the US-- they can't bundle services, they must provide open access to the network, their ability to set prices and services are sometimes subject to legal restrictions, etc., and the system is very retail consumer friendly. In exchange for the regulation, these resellers can be very agile and operate very cheaply, because they don't have to pay any of the downside for running the antennas, which is a large fixed cost that has to be paid wether people use their minutes or not, and the government has the money resources necessary to make the network reach all kinds of out-of-the-way places that for a private company would be unprofitable, and to run the network on a non-profit basis, or worse.
In the US the network was built by private companies, the large fixed costs of the infrastructure are borne by the providers, and the government gives the providers a much freer hand to extract the costs for running their network in whatever way they see fit.
I dunno, I disagree with where you're going with this. When you say some people don't "deserve" programming tools that meet their skills, that sounds a lot like saying people don't deserve to paint unless they go to art school, or turntablism isn't "real" music and the people that make hiphop music are beneath recognition because they don't understand the rules of "real" music.
I'm a sound designer by profession, I've never received formal education in development-- it's taken about 10 years for me to get enough C down to write an RPN calculator for timecode. I started out with filemaker scripts, and then Ruby scripts, and that's still what I use most of the time. The problem is I don't have the money to pay a developer do make my tools, and available tools, particularly open source ones, are overengineered and unusable by nonprogrammers. I have very specific ideas and tools, and devs just don't understand my work, they don't have my 10 years of experience with sound effects and filmmaking.
Ultimately, the more people that can code, the better code will be. We shouldn't be shutting people or because they don't understand arbitrary rules about wether the "to" or "from" comes first on the arg list.
Postal, was actually pretty good as far as films go, if only for the portion that he dedicates to mocking himself on camera.
Strangely enough, even if we accept arguendo that Postal was a good film, which is quite a stretch, it's done nothing to enhance his career, which would seem to prove my point.
El Mariachi was shot for $7k, but after Sony picked up the negative they spent half a million on sound work, editing, opticals, prints and advertising.
What you are saying would be true if they only plan to create one film in their entire career.
Nobody plans to make a bad movie -- the real issue is that with such a funding model nobody would ever produce a good movie, or the movies that come out that are good are only good out of dumb luck. You're assuming that skill follows the man; I'm saying it's much sticker to the money.
The fact that Uwe Boll made bad movies didn't seem to keep foreign copro money away from him, over and over and over. Instead of smart money finding the good filmmakers, the alternate equilibrium is much more likely: producers will simply find the dumbest money.
I hope the "buy a frame" and selling of merchandise make it financially viable...
The problem with "buy a frame" and merch is that the movie doesn't actually have to be good -- it just has to have a script that reads well or a concept that markets merchandise well (viz. Snakes on a Plane). Once the filmmakers have the money they aren't under very much pressure to make a film that's successful, they're already in the black. This is a lot like what happened in the middle of the decade with foreign pre-sales of low-budget ($1-$10 million) films: a foreign distributor would agree to distribute a film and pay a fee, sight unseen, as long as the film had a particular lead American actor in it and the concept was easily marketed (an action film, or a crime drama). Once the producer had all the cash from the foreign distros their upside was covered and they were in the black, and all they had to do is the bare minimum to make the film watchable. This is how Battlefield: Earth was produced, among many other lesser films of the last 10 years.
The equipment is the easy part. The prices for facilities and equipment have been very quickly approaching the marginal cost -- if you can get skilled people to donate time you're in.
Competent writing, acting, directing and producing are much trickier.
If the bytes are cheap then why would the provider care if people transfer more then 5 gigabytes of data a month?
This is right, the bandwidth is a limited commodity, but moving traffic to and from a saturated cell doesn't cost much more than a quiet cell. It will eventually hurt the provider because people will cancel their service, though, so they have to impose controls on how much service you get in a unit of time, otherwise nobody will ever be able to get on. If enough people cancel their service then the provider has to roll up their service and then nobody can get on, wether they're willing to pay or not.
The cost of maintaing availability, the price a consumer is willing to pay (or stated better, the deal a consumer is willing to accept), and the amount of traffic on the system at whatever priority level are all things that have to be balanced, the cost to get a byte from a tower in LA to a tower in San Francisco though is a very, very small part of the equation.
Run the question backwards: You might ask, why do you have to pay for a byte THIS month and a byte NEXT month, when you've already paid for the tower the first time? Why are they double-charging you for the network when it's already built?
In the end there are different kinds of bytes:
a byte on a very busy cell at 5pm
a byte on a quiet cell at 3 am
a byte that has to go 1500 miles over several ASs, crossing several gateways, peering agreements and tax boundaries.
a byte that goes 1 mile down the road to the next aerial and never leaves your phone company's property
Any price structure that assigns the same costs to all of these bytes is going to be in a lot of trouble, and any system that attempted to assign cost to these bytes on the basis of their true cost of carriage would be complicated in the extreme.
Charge them for how much data they use, not for how they use it.
Moving bytes doesn't cost the phone company money, once they have the towers built the cost of moving the data around is very very low. They sign up people to flat rates that theoretically oversubscribe the network because they want flat revenue to build new towers and maintain the hardware on a predictable schedule. Remember you're getting in fact two services: the bytes over the air, and the network's availability over large stretches of geography. The first thing is marginal, the second thing is what actually costs serious money.
Paying per byte is more practical in Europe or Asia, where a national quasi-public provider owns much of the infrastructure and leases access to resellers, and the state takes on the actual risk of undersubscription. Pay-as-you-go doesn't work for people who have to build antennas, you just can't map the revenue to the expenses without making prices so awful (and unpredictable) that consumers are scared off. They really need the extra money they get from under-users to subsidize building out network, and the problem with over-subscribers they're free-riding on the flat rate. The contract is phrased in terms of services instead of bytes, but that's what the subscribers agreed to, so they should be held to their agreement.
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This lawsuit has nothing to do with you or your formats. It's strictly a business deal between content producers and a cable distributor; the content producers think Time Warner is welching on their deal to distribute the data according to their contract. What if a cable channel wants to stream their channel themselves for direct subscription revenues? TWCs action makes it less likely this would work, and it looks like TWC is just trying to make build a technological end run in order to stymie cable channels from selling themselves to subscribers a la carte.
It's remarkable how many people here are suddenly on the side of Time Warner Cable(!) and iPads(!!) as long as they're providing Teh Shiny New Modality.
Of course you can, but local and city zoning regulations force developers to limit the number of stories and units in their developments (tall buildings are ugly!), how much of their land they can use for building and how much must be allocated to set-backs (green space!), how much of the land can be developed for mixed-use and commercial (usually none), how much of the land must be allocated for parking, and on and on. Some of these rules have a legitimate purpose but most of the time it's NIMBYism on planning boards and city councils, trying to force a town to look like an artificial 1950s ideal of what a suburb should be, without regard for what people want to buy, where they want to live and work, what developers want to build, and what would save everyone money.
Exactly: Oh no, they had to COMPETE! The OHA is a cartel, they compete where they want to compete, mainly in securing the most lucrative marketing and subsidy agreements with networks, splitting the rents in the system. In the areas they don't want to compete, they use open source to crush the competition, plain and simple.
You're right, but it's worth pointing out that this is the App Store argument. If Google may withhold source from certain hardware vendors in order to "protect" end users or the platform, to protect the platform's reputation of stability and performance, mutatis mutandis Apple is justified to withhold apps and functionality from their platform for the same reasons. If Andy Rubin thinks he's entitled to prevent people from running Honeycomb because of UX, then Jobs is completely free to make such decisions about iOS.
It works and it's completely reasonable, but it's not "free." Free means people being grownups and understanding what minimum specs are, and the distinction between an application, an OS and hardware.
Yeah, the OSS platform will always be one version behind the version they give to their top-tier partners, thus Motorola and Samsung get a head start selling the best devices, and then vendors who Google doesn't license Ice Cream to are stuck selling last year's commodity, in a market that is by then saturated.
Pretty cool, huh? Almost as if Google has created a perpetual motion machine that allows them to release their platform as open software, while simultaneously maintaining the power to decide which handset vendors will thrive.
That's how Andy Rubin sees it. Of course, Motorola got to peek at the source early for the Xoom, but they did that the old-fashioned way, with a license.
I guess that's hypocrisy -- I wouldn't bitch about Google being hypocritical, it's a company after all and it has no beliefs to contradict. But when a single large corporation basically runs an OSS project you have to consider exactly why they release source. And the Xoom basically shows us the strategy: if you're a big corporation that can manufacturer millions of units and you're willing to play by Google's proprietary licensing terms, you get a sneek peak at the new platform. If you're not important enough for Google to do business with, you'll get the Android source the same time the rest of the world does. It's a two-tier system: Google's OHA partners, and everyone else.
Tom Servo says Mac OS is clearly superior.
Those are for services, not for the code itself. It makes it impossible to sell the code itself, as a product, opposed to a service.
It's a good question. Here's what I see:
It might be as easy as trusting a self-signed certificate, but I suspect all the bits and pieces check on each other and you'd have to tweak and re-sign a lot of different binaries for which you have no source code.
Oh I can be a jerk, too.
This is the central conflict -- the code is on my hard drive, it's mine in any "information wants to be free" sense. However, there's the GPL, which is relies on a strong definition of intellectual property, that asserts that even though you have possession of the code, the copyright holder retains a proprietary interest and all of the rights with regard to how it may be distributed. It's really just the same sort of arbitrary IP line-drawing that the USPTO does every day, they just draw the line in a different place than a commercial software vendor. It's designed so that any improvements a contributor may make revert to the rights holder of the base, instead of a commercial source-code license, where improvements and the right to distribute those improvements would be retained by the licensee.
There's a lot of heat and light about freedom, but all it is is RMS using Intellectual Property law to try to keep alive his memories of going to school in the late 70s and having access to the source code to SysV Unix, source code that was licensed to his college for educational purposes and with AT&T hoping that it would make Unix "viral" with CS students.
That's sortof disingenuous, GPL has always been a Hobson's choice. You can always "sell" a piece of GPL software, but unless you are the original rights holder the GPL has the practical effect of ruining any mechanism for monetizing the software. If any distribution of the software requires the source code be included, it destroys the competitive advantage of the seller in a market and makes it impossible to prevent free-riding by users. You can only "sell" a GPL'd piece of software if you are the author, and then only by withholding code yourself; anyone who contributes is obliged to hand back their work in a manner that prevents them from monetizing any direct benefits.
GPL works for many reasons, but "you can sell it" is not one of them. In a time where people donwload everything -- instead of when RMS wrote the GPL, and people sold tapes and disks -- the "salability" property of GPL software is really incidental, and Internet distribution has made it infeasible from a business point-of-view.
Just about all of the binaries in /System on a Mac OS X site are signed by Apple to prevent tampering, either by the user or Eve trying to installing a rootkit. They probably don't want to turn over the signing keys for those, because they definitely don't want Eve patching their system, and as far as Apple engineers are concerned /System should have a big sticker on it reading "No user serviceable parts inside."
Did you ever flashy-thing me, K? Did you ever flashy-thing ME?
In most countries in the developed world, the cellular networks, the towers and backhauls, are built by the government or a quasi-government monopoly and access is leased to retailers who then sell the SIM cards. As a condition of the lease the retailers agree to a regulatory regime that's much more stringent than in the US-- they can't bundle services, they must provide open access to the network, their ability to set prices and services are sometimes subject to legal restrictions, etc., and the system is very retail consumer friendly. In exchange for the regulation, these resellers can be very agile and operate very cheaply, because they don't have to pay any of the downside for running the antennas, which is a large fixed cost that has to be paid wether people use their minutes or not, and the government has the money resources necessary to make the network reach all kinds of out-of-the-way places that for a private company would be unprofitable, and to run the network on a non-profit basis, or worse.
In the US the network was built by private companies, the large fixed costs of the infrastructure are borne by the providers, and the government gives the providers a much freer hand to extract the costs for running their network in whatever way they see fit.
I dunno, I disagree with where you're going with this. When you say some people don't "deserve" programming tools that meet their skills, that sounds a lot like saying people don't deserve to paint unless they go to art school, or turntablism isn't "real" music and the people that make hiphop music are beneath recognition because they don't understand the rules of "real" music.
I'm a sound designer by profession, I've never received formal education in development-- it's taken about 10 years for me to get enough C down to write an RPN calculator for timecode. I started out with filemaker scripts, and then Ruby scripts, and that's still what I use most of the time. The problem is I don't have the money to pay a developer do make my tools, and available tools, particularly open source ones, are overengineered and unusable by nonprogrammers. I have very specific ideas and tools, and devs just don't understand my work, they don't have my 10 years of experience with sound effects and filmmaking.
Ultimately, the more people that can code, the better code will be. We shouldn't be shutting people or because they don't understand arbitrary rules about wether the "to" or "from" comes first on the arg list.
Not the good T-Mobile handsets. You can't put an AT&T SIM in your Nexus now?
SBC service and connectivity with T-Mobile handsets.
Postal, was actually pretty good as far as films go, if only for the portion that he dedicates to mocking himself on camera.
Strangely enough, even if we accept arguendo that Postal was a good film, which is quite a stretch, it's done nothing to enhance his career, which would seem to prove my point.
El Mariachi was shot for $7k, but after Sony picked up the negative they spent half a million on sound work, editing, opticals, prints and advertising.
Nobody plans to make a bad movie -- the real issue is that with such a funding model nobody would ever produce a good movie, or the movies that come out that are good are only good out of dumb luck. You're assuming that skill follows the man; I'm saying it's much sticker to the money.
The fact that Uwe Boll made bad movies didn't seem to keep foreign copro money away from him, over and over and over. Instead of smart money finding the good filmmakers, the alternate equilibrium is much more likely: producers will simply find the dumbest money.
The problem with "buy a frame" and merch is that the movie doesn't actually have to be good -- it just has to have a script that reads well or a concept that markets merchandise well (viz. Snakes on a Plane). Once the filmmakers have the money they aren't under very much pressure to make a film that's successful, they're already in the black. This is a lot like what happened in the middle of the decade with foreign pre-sales of low-budget ($1-$10 million) films: a foreign distributor would agree to distribute a film and pay a fee, sight unseen, as long as the film had a particular lead American actor in it and the concept was easily marketed (an action film, or a crime drama). Once the producer had all the cash from the foreign distros their upside was covered and they were in the black, and all they had to do is the bare minimum to make the film watchable. This is how Battlefield: Earth was produced, among many other lesser films of the last 10 years.
The equipment is the easy part. The prices for facilities and equipment have been very quickly approaching the marginal cost -- if you can get skilled people to donate time you're in.
Competent writing, acting, directing and producing are much trickier.
This is right, the bandwidth is a limited commodity, but moving traffic to and from a saturated cell doesn't cost much more than a quiet cell. It will eventually hurt the provider because people will cancel their service, though, so they have to impose controls on how much service you get in a unit of time, otherwise nobody will ever be able to get on. If enough people cancel their service then the provider has to roll up their service and then nobody can get on, wether they're willing to pay or not.
The cost of maintaing availability, the price a consumer is willing to pay (or stated better, the deal a consumer is willing to accept), and the amount of traffic on the system at whatever priority level are all things that have to be balanced, the cost to get a byte from a tower in LA to a tower in San Francisco though is a very, very small part of the equation.
Run the question backwards: You might ask, why do you have to pay for a byte THIS month and a byte NEXT month, when you've already paid for the tower the first time? Why are they double-charging you for the network when it's already built?
In the end there are different kinds of bytes:
Any price structure that assigns the same costs to all of these bytes is going to be in a lot of trouble, and any system that attempted to assign cost to these bytes on the basis of their true cost of carriage would be complicated in the extreme.
Moving bytes doesn't cost the phone company money, once they have the towers built the cost of moving the data around is very very low. They sign up people to flat rates that theoretically oversubscribe the network because they want flat revenue to build new towers and maintain the hardware on a predictable schedule. Remember you're getting in fact two services: the bytes over the air, and the network's availability over large stretches of geography. The first thing is marginal, the second thing is what actually costs serious money.
Paying per byte is more practical in Europe or Asia, where a national quasi-public provider owns much of the infrastructure and leases access to resellers, and the state takes on the actual risk of undersubscription. Pay-as-you-go doesn't work for people who have to build antennas, you just can't map the revenue to the expenses without making prices so awful (and unpredictable) that consumers are scared off. They really need the extra money they get from under-users to subsidize building out network, and the problem with over-subscribers they're free-riding on the flat rate. The contract is phrased in terms of services instead of bytes, but that's what the subscribers agreed to, so they should be held to their agreement.