I'm guessing it's not the same for all flash, for instance this usb memory stick is rated at speeds of 900KB/s for writing and 4.3MB/s for reading, much slower than a hard-disk (at least for reading, not sure about hard-drive write speeds). Other memory sticks on that site list read speeds below what I'd expect from a hard drive.
Yes, however, an iPod user who has bought music from the iTunes media store cannot buy a competing music player and still be able to play that music on it. It helps ensure that the current iPod users stay iPod users.
6.) The first thing anyone who gets digital notices (here in the UK at least) is the new channels. The second thing they notice is how long it takes to change channels with their £40 freeview box. The third thing they notice is how annoying it is when you occasionally lose all picture and/or sound for a few seconds.
7.) It can be a bitch to set up nicely with your VCR (unless that has a DVB tuner as well)
In the UK, the BBC has done a good job of telling everyone that they can get their channels for free with digital. Because we get broadband and phone from the same cable provider, digital over cable (with a free box) was £1 more/month.
Won't happen because it's impossible to define how different a derivative work must be. E.g. if I add a triangle ting onto the end of the track, that's a derivative work, but anyone hearing it wouldn't need to download your original to hear how it originally sounded.
Not sure, I sometimes find reading on the screen annoying. For a quick search, an electronic version is faster but for prolonged reading, I'd prefer a dead tree version.
This does lead to the question of why I would read more than a page at a time of a reference book. I could see myself doing it to get a feel for what functions were available in a particular area or just out of an interest for nitty-gritty details.
Even playing team games, counter strike is pretty different to the other games mentioned. CS is very much a twitch game, you can headshot someone with any weapon and in a close range fire fight, one of you should be dead in a couple of seconds, even with the starting weapons. Add to this CSs buying weapons mechanic and round based set up and you have a completely different game.
UT2004 for example allows the player to move around faster, not take an accuracy hit for firing while moving, has a larger variety of weapons, most of which use actual projectiles rather than infinitely fast bullets, has a variety of team based games (Assault, CTF, TeamDM, Domination, Bombing Run) and modifiers.
I do realise that many more people play CS and CS Source than the games listed, but to say they're not worth playing is like saying it's not worth having a car because we have motorcycles now.
It wasn't shipping windows messenger with XP that helped push msnm but tying it with hotmail. Certainly here, hotmail was popular before msnm became widespread and if you have hotmail, you don't need to signup for a new account.
Windows messenger may have helped a little, but most people I know went and downloaded the newer msn messenger client because it was newer and "prettier".
TA didn't require more CPU power than was available to consumers.
Yes it did, unless you were content with playing the original maps at 640x480. As soon as people managed to raise the unit cap and build bigger and bigger custom maps, you needed something better. Admittedly, these performance problems came about gradually but if you didn't upgrade along with the majority of the TA community you were slowing everyone down.
When Kazaa was big, they may have scared a few people off uploading, and to a lesser extent downloading. My experience from my friends is that as we got older, we had more disposable income to buy a few CDs and since we mostly liked the same music, it was easier to borrow someone's CD than to go through a p2p program with slow and unreliable downloads, low bitrates and incorrect tagging.
Of the music on my computer some is ripped from my own CDs, some is ripped from my friends CDs, less was bought from allofmp3.com and a small amount was downloaded, most of that from torrents.
Many universities in the UK offer the chance to do a year's work placement between your second and third years of study on a CS course (don't know about any IT courses) so you can have some experience when you graduate with your academic degree.
I didn't know about any BBC plans to make their entire archive available, this gets better and better.
The key consideration is to make the archive directly available only to it's customers and no-one else. Everything good is available via bittorrent, if people are prepared to go through an illegal third-party to get tv programmes they can do so already. The BBC can restrict broadcast to the UK only using IP addresses and allow only licence fee payers in the same way that they do now. If that's not acceptable they could require you to register and send a key by post to your address.
The difficulty for most people is the effort required to export the programme. I doubt there are many people who will start sending programmes to their friends outside the UK because of this new method of distribution. If they're willing to go to that much effort anyway, they will probably go to the effort of recording the programme when it's shown on tv.
Yes indeed, you make a good point. However, I would suggest that releasing this content online won't have much of an impact on others so long as the vast majority of the BBCs distribution is only to the UK. The amount of stuff exported by end users will be minimal when there are so many people who rip shows live and upload on bittorrent.
The problem the BBC needs to worry about is people being able to archive BBC content and then not buying the DVDs. Which I guess is why they've wanted to use DRM. To be effective it doesn't have to be uncrackable, it just has to keep the majority from already having it stored on their pcs when the DVDs come out. To this end, a half-baked DRM solution which could be used on all platforms would be fine.
You do realise that it's possible to tell what country someone is in from their IP address right? The bbc already does this to prevent sports broadcasts on Radio5Live from being listened to online from abroad.
Additionally, anyone who can be bothered to set up a proxy in the UK just to be able to download programmes from the bbc is probably capable of finding them on p2p anyway.
I did work experience at a large company in the UK, part of my job was doing fresh windows installs onto computers for other staff. I was installing from a backup disk with slipstreamed patches and the serial number for the site licence scribbled down on a piece of paper.
Can't agree with you there. At the lan parties I've attended at uni, there tends to be a good amount of down time while people patch and argue about what to play and while there are some whose eyes never leave their screen, most do talk to the people around them.
We joked about using something similar in our Software Engineering project.
It was a flight booking system. People always complain that computers are hard to use so we'll link it to something they understand in the real world. Pretty much everyone knows the concept of higher or lower games so we considered a system which would tell you an available flight and you could decide to take it or ask for one earlier or later.
They could also charge for transfer used above an allowance (as most hosting companies do).
Here in the UK, most do. Several ISPs (inc. BT) now give you 8Mbps (pretty standard for ADSL here) for every package they offer but the packages differ on how much bandwidth you are allowed to use.
They could be honest about and tell customers that they throttle traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing it's not the same for all flash, for instance this usb memory stick is rated at speeds of 900KB/s for writing and 4.3MB/s for reading, much slower than a hard-disk (at least for reading, not sure about hard-drive write speeds). Other memory sticks on that site list read speeds below what I'd expect from a hard drive.
Wasn't that how AOL started?
Yes, however, an iPod user who has bought music from the iTunes media store cannot buy a competing music player and still be able to play that music on it. It helps ensure that the current iPod users stay iPod users.
Fixed that for you
6.) The first thing anyone who gets digital notices (here in the UK at least) is the new channels. The second thing they notice is how long it takes to change channels with their £40 freeview box. The third thing they notice is how annoying it is when you occasionally lose all picture and/or sound for a few seconds.
/month.
7.) It can be a bitch to set up nicely with your VCR (unless that has a DVB tuner as well)
In the UK, the BBC has done a good job of telling everyone that they can get their channels for free with digital. Because we get broadband and phone from the same cable provider, digital over cable (with a free box) was £1 more
Won't happen because it's impossible to define how different a derivative work must be. E.g. if I add a triangle ting onto the end of the track, that's a derivative work, but anyone hearing it wouldn't need to download your original to hear how it originally sounded.
Not sure, I sometimes find reading on the screen annoying. For a quick search, an electronic version is faster but for prolonged reading, I'd prefer a dead tree version.
This does lead to the question of why I would read more than a page at a time of a reference book. I could see myself doing it to get a feel for what functions were available in a particular area or just out of an interest for nitty-gritty details.
Even playing team games, counter strike is pretty different to the other games mentioned. CS is very much a twitch game, you can headshot someone with any weapon and in a close range fire fight, one of you should be dead in a couple of seconds, even with the starting weapons. Add to this CSs buying weapons mechanic and round based set up and you have a completely different game.
UT2004 for example allows the player to move around faster, not take an accuracy hit for firing while moving, has a larger variety of weapons, most of which use actual projectiles rather than infinitely fast bullets, has a variety of team based games (Assault, CTF, TeamDM, Domination, Bombing Run) and modifiers.
I do realise that many more people play CS and CS Source than the games listed, but to say they're not worth playing is like saying it's not worth having a car because we have motorcycles now.
It wasn't shipping windows messenger with XP that helped push msnm but tying it with hotmail. Certainly here, hotmail was popular before msnm became widespread and if you have hotmail, you don't need to signup for a new account.
Windows messenger may have helped a little, but most people I know went and downloaded the newer msn messenger client because it was newer and "prettier".
Aim carefully, but make sure no-one catches you
When Kazaa was big, they may have scared a few people off uploading, and to a lesser extent downloading. My experience from my friends is that as we got older, we had more disposable income to buy a few CDs and since we mostly liked the same music, it was easier to borrow someone's CD than to go through a p2p program with slow and unreliable downloads, low bitrates and incorrect tagging.
Of the music on my computer some is ripped from my own CDs, some is ripped from my friends CDs, less was bought from allofmp3.com and a small amount was downloaded, most of that from torrents.
Depends...
If I, living in the UK, fail to spend £11 on the latest album, not much of that will go into the US economy.
Many universities in the UK offer the chance to do a year's work placement between your second and third years of study on a CS course (don't know about any IT courses) so you can have some experience when you graduate with your academic degree.
The key consideration is to make the archive directly available only to it's customers and no-one else. Everything good is available via bittorrent, if people are prepared to go through an illegal third-party to get tv programmes they can do so already. The BBC can restrict broadcast to the UK only using IP addresses and allow only licence fee payers in the same way that they do now. If that's not acceptable they could require you to register and send a key by post to your address.
The difficulty for most people is the effort required to export the programme. I doubt there are many people who will start sending programmes to their friends outside the UK because of this new method of distribution. If they're willing to go to that much effort anyway, they will probably go to the effort of recording the programme when it's shown on tv.
Yes indeed, you make a good point. However, I would suggest that releasing this content online won't have much of an impact on others so long as the vast majority of the BBCs distribution is only to the UK. The amount of stuff exported by end users will be minimal when there are so many people who rip shows live and upload on bittorrent. The problem the BBC needs to worry about is people being able to archive BBC content and then not buying the DVDs. Which I guess is why they've wanted to use DRM. To be effective it doesn't have to be uncrackable, it just has to keep the majority from already having it stored on their pcs when the DVDs come out. To this end, a half-baked DRM solution which could be used on all platforms would be fine.
You do realise that it's possible to tell what country someone is in from their IP address right? The bbc already does this to prevent sports broadcasts on Radio5Live from being listened to online from abroad. Additionally, anyone who can be bothered to set up a proxy in the UK just to be able to download programmes from the bbc is probably capable of finding them on p2p anyway.
I did work experience at a large company in the UK, part of my job was doing fresh windows installs onto computers for other staff. I was installing from a backup disk with slipstreamed patches and the serial number for the site licence scribbled down on a piece of paper.
Crackdown is a great game and probably appeals to a wider audience than DDR (at least within readers of EDGE)
Umm, try 50% off
Can't agree with you there. At the lan parties I've attended at uni, there tends to be a good amount of down time while people patch and argue about what to play and while there are some whose eyes never leave their screen, most do talk to the people around them.
No, it's what the BBFC just did (ESRB rated it AO), but without their approval the game can't be sold or imported into the country.
Aww, man. Now I'll have to buy another rubber stamp...
It was a flight booking system. People always complain that computers are hard to use so we'll link it to something they understand in the real world. Pretty much everyone knows the concept of higher or lower games so we considered a system which would tell you an available flight and you could decide to take it or ask for one earlier or later.
Here in the UK, most do. Several ISPs (inc. BT) now give you 8Mbps (pretty standard for ADSL here) for every package they offer but the packages differ on how much bandwidth you are allowed to use.
Some do, I know plusNet does.