Microsoft is not "obsoleting" products. They are providing their own solutions, which are in some cases inferior to competing solutions (performance, acceleration, features, quality), and:
* Preventing WMP/MCE using competing solutions whereas all previous versions of WMP were more open * Changing the way DirectShow works so that without a custom graph builder third-party DirectShow applications will now also prefer Microsoft decoders for certain formats over any other regardless of filter merits
This in place of, for example, better designing their new media architecture (media foundation) to allow easy management of what gets used via API/UI as a solution to the problem.
It's a proprietary software vendor who is mad that Microsoft is obsoleting his company's products.
Even if that was true, there's a reason that product bundling is contentious and why Microsoft has been on the wrong end of various anti-trust cases. Maybe promoting consumer choice is less important these days? The MSDN documentation, and registry keys (yet unfilled) in the Windows 7 RC also imply that in addition to preferring filters they can also blacklist others so that intelligent connect will ignore them. Let's hope we don't see to much of that and only for good reason.
I think the most interesting thing is that he doesn't actually comprehend what he himself is saying:
Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it, and those of us in the entertainment business want to meet that kind of demand as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Okay so far...
But what has happened online is that if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want.
Yes, what you are saying there is "we realize that to compete on the Internet where there is a lot of choice available to potential customers we need to meet their expectations for service, pricing, experience, and so forth. If we don't they may end up going elsewhere, and that's a huge problem for us!".
Perhaps if all the big players had spent as much time investing in the internet as they had fighting it in past they would be in less of a predicament.
I want service on my terms at a reasonable price without abuse of our relationship through the likes of DRM. If you can't even come close to my terms then we don't do business. It works that way in the real world, why do you think it should work differently online? Too often studios are so threatened by piracy that they impose such abhorrent terms on potential customers that nobody wants to be an actual customer. It's a self fulfilling prophecy perpetuated by the studios themselves.
Why can't I download FLAC from the majority of online stores for the same price I can download an MP3, or even at all? Why can't I download a movie in high quality without DRM? We both know it's technically possible, we both already know I can get the content elsewhere, and so far as the studios refuse to cater to what I'm looking for at a reasonable price realistically they can't expect anything other than what they're seeing.
One thing I've noticed since getting an Eee PC is that browsing sites with a lot of "flashy" (heh) Flash content is that they drain the battery much faster than normal.
I would not mind on a page if a web developer could insert a special tag, like <!-- AdOption 320x240 --> to insert an image in the page, styled by Adblock, not the developer, so that I could turn on ads on that site. It would also be nice if I could differentiate ad types, like you say (e.g. flash, animated, etc.). This might eventually see balance restored to the web, where site owners are more respectful of their visitors.
Most ships in I-War had three modes of spacecraft propulsion:
* Propellant ejecting thrusters, similar to real-life rockets, were used for combat and close-in maneuvering.
* Linear Displacement drive System (LDS), which allows very fast travel up to almost the speed of light, allowing for fast interplanetary travel.
* Capsule Drive, which was used for faster-than-light interplanetary and interstellar travel. It was restricted to using Lagrangian points L4 and L5 as jump points. When jumping the ship forms its own spacetime capsule, referred as 'capsule space', around itself.
I don't use facebook either. In fact the only thing I've close to social networking would be./ or stumbleupon.
So it seems that you don't see high value in social networking in general, and that's okay. Putting twitter aside as a specific example, there are a lot of people and investors who do. And putting you personally aside, it would be nice if twitter didn't remain the sole focus of criticism for the social networking revolution by people who don't see the value in it... after all, are we really finished bashing myspace yet??;)
I can keep track of what my friends are up to (so much as they want to share that), especially people I no longer see all that often. I can look at the public timeline and see major events unfolding around the world before the media even covers them, and I also follow some non-personal accounts that keep me up-to-date with other useful information. For example, recently I've caught wind of a couple of interesting webinars from nVidia and driver update notices all without giving them my e-mail address and subscribing to a newsletter. Lots of us also followed accounts for the Mars lander. You can follow services like woot.com to get notified of new deals. You can actually converse with influential people otherwise unreachable inside big companies on topics that you're interested in without going through customer service. Most recently, some of the best information about the TWC debacle has appeared through twitter before it did anywhere else.
I tire of this constant parroting of "twitter is useless". If you don't understand what is good about twitter, if you don't find it is useful for to you, then don't use it, but stop spamming any discussion around the service with your ignorance.
There are plenty of services on the Internet that I personally see little value in but hey, millions of people wouldn't use this stuff if it's "useless".
There is no obligation to ensure that a works value is recognized within its term of copyright. Again, if you want to profit from your work financially market it while it is under copyright protection. And, again, we shouldn't hold up one or two exceptions to set a standard that applies to every creative work brought into existence. To do so literally robs society of access to works in public domain.
Some performers aren't recognized until they have died
.. and? The existing 50 year copyright term would still have protected his major works. He wasn't even 50 years old when he died.
If you want to earn income from creative works then you or those who inherit your estate should market them while they are under the protection of copyright. We shouldn't hold up one or two exceptions to set a standard that applies to every creative work brought into existence.
Copyright should at best be related to the death of the performer
Copyright should have no ties to the death of the performer. All works should share equal protection. If a performer wants income for life they should invest their money, set up a pension, etc. and/or continue performing.
Indeed. Many of us will be dead before the works our parents enjoyed before our conception enter the public domain.
It seems the media industry has much stronger political influence than the people. Something has gone very, very wrong with copyright law. The value society now takes from offering artists the protection of copyright is now extraordinarily questionable.
If these industry groups were so concerned with the future of their artists they shouldn't be calling for 70-year long copyright terms, they should be offering artists a pension.
Now we just need to wait for ICANN to allow anyone to buy any TLD, then the government can capture people trying to use.i2p sites with misconfigured clients.
As far as I can see (although I'm not an expert on the topic) the BlackBerry may already do this when contacting BIS. Hit up Options->Security Options->Certificates and you'll probably see various provider certs (trusted root CA's) that seem to be used to sign for other domains while you browse (may depend on TLS settings). I can mark my providers certs as untrusted, but I suspect if they wanted to they could force my settings to be overridden by service book (RIM seems to allow your provider to monkey with a lot of settings).
In the end it may be that your provider has more control over your security than you do.
That's all fine and dandy, but you know what an OS is generally useless without? A runtime environment (RAM, Storage, etc.). An OS that's stored in non-erasable ROM can still have vulnerabilities that can be exploited at runtime with exactly the same consequences as any other OS. If you have storage then depending on the vulnerabilities available you might even be able to persist an exploit despite the non-erasable ROM.
Either way, I dread the day that we have to run anti-virus on our phones.
Personally I look forward to the day when I can run any software I like on my phone and my carrier can't lock it down and/or override my own settings. If that implies I have to worry about viruses then so be it. TFA (PDF) states that at least 420 already exist anyway, and I know Avira already offers anti-virus for certain mobile platforms.
40GB is enough for 90 hours of iPlayer video, or about three hours a day, which is a lot more than I'd want to watch.
Is it? Not in HD, surely! And these kind of caps make a consistent 1080p experience even more remote.
iPlayer also uses P2P to serve other users. As you watch more high quality content not only will you consume more of your own bandwidth but others will consume more of your bandwidth too.
Here in San Diego, I have one of their RoadRunner packages. I get up to 8Mbps (and often the full 8Mbps), but I see it's also common to have up to 50Mbps. On a 5Mbps line you can download about 50GB in 24 hours. On an 8Mbps line just over 80GB. TW reps have announced a 100GB "super-tier" via Twitter. Even so, you can exhaust that in under 2 days at only 5Mbps.
Sounds like a lot of bandwidth? 720p H.264 will run 5-6Mbps for decent quality (my opinion). If you watch 24 hours of it you'll blow through their 40GB plan in around 19 hours of viewing (based on 5Mbps avg for the video). 1080p? Let's call it 8Mbps average for the video bitrate (favorable for the ISP in my opinion) and you'll exceed your $55 plan (according to the summary) after watching only 12 hours worth of content.
Tier based pricing such as this will kill innovative new services. If this becomes commonplace I doubt you'll see some of the video sites emerging today serving a lot of HD. We're even less likely to see online music stores adopting lossless formats. Because end users will only be able to download a limited amount per month there will be less pressure to lower bandwidth prices for backbone/CDN - "demand" (and I use that term loosely in this context) will outstrip supply.
I see it like this: Thanks to things like YouTube HD, Hulu, Netflix online, Veoh, and so forth, we're *all* downloading more, no matter what the ISPs try to tell us "the majority of their customers" use. Their margins will be getting squeezed. You aren't benefiting from this new tiered model because "you aren't subsidizing high use users" - you're going to be paying about the same, if not more, and your plan will give you less downloads and greater risk (if you exceed it).
I also cannot help but wonder for ISPs that are linked to media giants whether there is some line of thinking that says "We're bleeding due to piracy, people are dropping their cable packages, motions against BitTorrent haven't worked, let's find another way to stem the bleeding". If this were a factor it would be putting self protectionism against national infrastructure interests.
Anyway - the main thing to keep in mind is that this is not just an issue for your net access and wallet today, it will limit the kind of services and media that are developed tomorrow.
Today we can look at a real brain and even the most intelligent among us can only say "we know it works, we think we're getting a better understanding of the mechanisms, we can observe certain things, but we really don't have the fundamental understanding necessary to create true artificial intelligence". When we eventually succeed in creating a truly artificial intelligence that can genuinely learn through the "training" of a simulated brain, will we then look upon it with the same puzzlement and lack of comprehension as a real brain?
The scary part is that our new telecommunications overlords are us.
For the sake of argument: As a malicious copyright holding member of the public, what power does the RIAA have over an ISP that I do not? If I furnish some documents against someone I don't like to an ISP and tell them either to follow the same practice as they employ for the RIAA or face a suit themselves what's going to happen?
1. Who pays your ISP for service, you or the RIAA? Is the RIAA a law enforcement agency? Who is the burden of proof on? Is there a reasonable and established standard of evidence? Is there any real way to dispute a false allegation? What happens when someones life is ruined because of this (can't work from home any longer, can't order goods online, can't communicate with friends)?
2. The RIAA has stopped suing individuals because they realize that's too many people to scare. Now they're waving a big legal stick at the ISPs and the ISPs are caving in based on nothing but a threat. Fantastic. Maybe I'm wrong, but have there been many/any cases where the courts have actually ruled against an ISP for an end-user P2P'ing? Have damages been established for such a case which could threaten the business of the ISP? Have the ISPs appealed the ruling?
3. ISPs are not throttling your traffic due to their concern for copyright issues, they're throttling your traffic because they haven't invested sufficiently in infrastructure suitable to meet the usage demands of some of their customers and/or have sold misleading "unlimited" plans that in reality they can't/won't stand behind.
How can you accept this? (Apart from "because I have to")
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is not "obsoleting" products. They are providing their own solutions, which are in some cases inferior to competing solutions (performance, acceleration, features, quality), and:
* Preventing WMP/MCE using competing solutions whereas all previous versions of WMP were more open
* Changing the way DirectShow works so that without a custom graph builder third-party DirectShow applications will now also prefer Microsoft decoders for certain formats over any other regardless of filter merits
This in place of, for example, better designing their new media architecture (media foundation) to allow easy management of what gets used via API/UI as a solution to the problem.
It's a proprietary software vendor who is mad that Microsoft is obsoleting his company's products.
Even if that was true, there's a reason that product bundling is contentious and why Microsoft has been on the wrong end of various anti-trust cases. Maybe promoting consumer choice is less important these days? The MSDN documentation, and registry keys (yet unfilled) in the Windows 7 RC also imply that in addition to preferring filters they can also blacklist others so that intelligent connect will ignore them. Let's hope we don't see to much of that and only for good reason.
I think the most interesting thing is that he doesn't actually comprehend what he himself is saying:
Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it, and those of us in the entertainment business want to meet that kind of demand as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Okay so far...
But what has happened online is that if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want.
Yes, what you are saying there is "we realize that to compete on the Internet where there is a lot of choice available to potential customers we need to meet their expectations for service, pricing, experience, and so forth. If we don't they may end up going elsewhere, and that's a huge problem for us!".
Perhaps if all the big players had spent as much time investing in the internet as they had fighting it in past they would be in less of a predicament.
I want service on my terms at a reasonable price without abuse of our relationship through the likes of DRM. If you can't even come close to my terms then we don't do business. It works that way in the real world, why do you think it should work differently online? Too often studios are so threatened by piracy that they impose such abhorrent terms on potential customers that nobody wants to be an actual customer. It's a self fulfilling prophecy perpetuated by the studios themselves.
Why can't I download FLAC from the majority of online stores for the same price I can download an MP3, or even at all? Why can't I download a movie in high quality without DRM? We both know it's technically possible, we both already know I can get the content elsewhere, and so far as the studios refuse to cater to what I'm looking for at a reasonable price realistically they can't expect anything other than what they're seeing.
...they had no Flash
Amen.
One thing I've noticed since getting an Eee PC is that browsing sites with a lot of "flashy" (heh) Flash content is that they drain the battery much faster than normal.
I would not mind on a page if a web developer could insert a special tag, like <!-- AdOption 320x240 --> to insert an image in the page, styled by Adblock, not the developer, so that I could turn on ads on that site. It would also be nice if I could differentiate ad types, like you say (e.g. flash, animated, etc.). This might eventually see balance restored to the web, where site owners are more respectful of their visitors.
-- Cruise by the local donut shop just before dawn and stick it on a cop's car
Later, GPS evidence reveals you visited half a dozen crime scenes that day, including returning to the scene that sparked the original investigation!
Also check out Infogrammes' I-War:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-War_(Independence_War)
Most ships in I-War had three modes of spacecraft propulsion:
* Propellant ejecting thrusters, similar to real-life rockets, were used for combat and close-in maneuvering.
* Linear Displacement drive System (LDS), which allows very fast travel up to almost the speed of light, allowing for fast interplanetary travel.
* Capsule Drive, which was used for faster-than-light interplanetary and interstellar travel. It was restricted to using Lagrangian points L4 and L5 as jump points. When jumping the ship forms its own spacetime capsule, referred as 'capsule space', around itself.
I don't use facebook either. In fact the only thing I've close to social networking would be ./ or stumbleupon.
So it seems that you don't see high value in social networking in general, and that's okay. Putting twitter aside as a specific example, there are a lot of people and investors who do. And putting you personally aside, it would be nice if twitter didn't remain the sole focus of criticism for the social networking revolution by people who don't see the value in it. .. after all, are we really finished bashing myspace yet?? ;)
Why is twitter any less useful than Facebook?
I can keep track of what my friends are up to (so much as they want to share that), especially people I no longer see all that often. I can look at the public timeline and see major events unfolding around the world before the media even covers them, and I also follow some non-personal accounts that keep me up-to-date with other useful information. For example, recently I've caught wind of a couple of interesting webinars from nVidia and driver update notices all without giving them my e-mail address and subscribing to a newsletter. Lots of us also followed accounts for the Mars lander. You can follow services like woot.com to get notified of new deals. You can actually converse with influential people otherwise unreachable inside big companies on topics that you're interested in without going through customer service. Most recently, some of the best information about the TWC debacle has appeared through twitter before it did anywhere else.
I tire of this constant parroting of "twitter is useless". If you don't understand what is good about twitter, if you don't find it is useful for to you, then don't use it, but stop spamming any discussion around the service with your ignorance.
There are plenty of services on the Internet that I personally see little value in but hey, millions of people wouldn't use this stuff if it's "useless".
What exactly is your point?
There is no obligation to ensure that a works value is recognized within its term of copyright. Again, if you want to profit from your work financially market it while it is under copyright protection. And, again, we shouldn't hold up one or two exceptions to set a standard that applies to every creative work brought into existence. To do so literally robs society of access to works in public domain.
Some performers aren't recognized until they have died
.. and? The existing 50 year copyright term would still have protected his major works. He wasn't even 50 years old when he died.
If you want to earn income from creative works then you or those who inherit your estate should market them while they are under the protection of copyright. We shouldn't hold up one or two exceptions to set a standard that applies to every creative work brought into existence.
Copyright should at best be related to the death of the performer
Copyright should have no ties to the death of the performer. All works should share equal protection. If a performer wants income for life they should invest their money, set up a pension, etc. and/or continue performing.
Indeed. Many of us will be dead before the works our parents enjoyed before our conception enter the public domain.
It seems the media industry has much stronger political influence than the people. Something has gone very, very wrong with copyright law. The value society now takes from offering artists the protection of copyright is now extraordinarily questionable.
If these industry groups were so concerned with the future of their artists they shouldn't be calling for 70-year long copyright terms, they should be offering artists a pension.
Cool,
Now we just need to wait for ICANN to allow anyone to buy any TLD, then the government can capture people trying to use .i2p sites with misconfigured clients.
As far as I can see (although I'm not an expert on the topic) the BlackBerry may already do this when contacting BIS. Hit up Options->Security Options->Certificates and you'll probably see various provider certs (trusted root CA's) that seem to be used to sign for other domains while you browse (may depend on TLS settings). I can mark my providers certs as untrusted, but I suspect if they wanted to they could force my settings to be overridden by service book (RIM seems to allow your provider to monkey with a lot of settings).
In the end it may be that your provider has more control over your security than you do.
That's all fine and dandy, but you know what an OS is generally useless without? A runtime environment (RAM, Storage, etc.). An OS that's stored in non-erasable ROM can still have vulnerabilities that can be exploited at runtime with exactly the same consequences as any other OS. If you have storage then depending on the vulnerabilities available you might even be able to persist an exploit despite the non-erasable ROM.
Either way, I dread the day that we have to run anti-virus on our phones.
Personally I look forward to the day when I can run any software I like on my phone and my carrier can't lock it down and/or override my own settings. If that implies I have to worry about viruses then so be it. TFA (PDF) states that at least 420 already exist anyway, and I know Avira already offers anti-virus for certain mobile platforms.
TWC reps on Twitter have now stated:
Customers currently under contract will not be subject to the new tiers.
https://twitter.com/MsmarTWC/status/1440469909
https://twitter.com/jeffTWC/status/1440485481
IMO this is not an acceptable final outcome but does leave more time to fight against the situation.
40GB is enough for 90 hours of iPlayer video, or about three hours a day, which is a lot more than I'd want to watch.
Is it? Not in HD, surely! And these kind of caps make a consistent 1080p experience even more remote.
iPlayer also uses P2P to serve other users. As you watch more high quality content not only will you consume more of your own bandwidth but others will consume more of your bandwidth too.
Is there any reasonable explanation for the $1/GB plan excess? Any at all? Why does your billing not continue at the per GB rate of your plan?
Self correction:
"but I see it's also common to have up to 5Mbps."
Typo, sorry!
Here in San Diego, I have one of their RoadRunner packages. I get up to 8Mbps (and often the full 8Mbps), but I see it's also common to have up to 50Mbps. On a 5Mbps line you can download about 50GB in 24 hours. On an 8Mbps line just over 80GB. TW reps have announced a 100GB "super-tier" via Twitter. Even so, you can exhaust that in under 2 days at only 5Mbps.
Sounds like a lot of bandwidth? 720p H.264 will run 5-6Mbps for decent quality (my opinion). If you watch 24 hours of it you'll blow through their 40GB plan in around 19 hours of viewing (based on 5Mbps avg for the video). 1080p? Let's call it 8Mbps average for the video bitrate (favorable for the ISP in my opinion) and you'll exceed your $55 plan (according to the summary) after watching only 12 hours worth of content.
Tier based pricing such as this will kill innovative new services. If this becomes commonplace I doubt you'll see some of the video sites emerging today serving a lot of HD. We're even less likely to see online music stores adopting lossless formats. Because end users will only be able to download a limited amount per month there will be less pressure to lower bandwidth prices for backbone/CDN - "demand" (and I use that term loosely in this context) will outstrip supply.
I see it like this: Thanks to things like YouTube HD, Hulu, Netflix online, Veoh, and so forth, we're *all* downloading more, no matter what the ISPs try to tell us "the majority of their customers" use. Their margins will be getting squeezed. You aren't benefiting from this new tiered model because "you aren't subsidizing high use users" - you're going to be paying about the same, if not more, and your plan will give you less downloads and greater risk (if you exceed it).
I also cannot help but wonder for ISPs that are linked to media giants whether there is some line of thinking that says "We're bleeding due to piracy, people are dropping their cable packages, motions against BitTorrent haven't worked, let's find another way to stem the bleeding". If this were a factor it would be putting self protectionism against national infrastructure interests.
Anyway - the main thing to keep in mind is that this is not just an issue for your net access and wallet today, it will limit the kind of services and media that are developed tomorrow.
'Cosmonauts are above the ongoing squabble, no matter what officials decide,'
Literally.
I, for one, can't wait until they publish Programming Brains For Dummies.
There's also another problem.
Today we can look at a real brain and even the most intelligent among us can only say "we know it works, we think we're getting a better understanding of the mechanisms, we can observe certain things, but we really don't have the fundamental understanding necessary to create true artificial intelligence". When we eventually succeed in creating a truly artificial intelligence that can genuinely learn through the "training" of a simulated brain, will we then look upon it with the same puzzlement and lack of comprehension as a real brain?
The scary part is that our new telecommunications overlords are us.
For the sake of argument: As a malicious copyright holding member of the public, what power does the RIAA have over an ISP that I do not? If I furnish some documents against someone I don't like to an ISP and tell them either to follow the same practice as they employ for the RIAA or face a suit themselves what's going to happen?
1. Who pays your ISP for service, you or the RIAA? Is the RIAA a law enforcement agency? Who is the burden of proof on? Is there a reasonable and established standard of evidence? Is there any real way to dispute a false allegation? What happens when someones life is ruined because of this (can't work from home any longer, can't order goods online, can't communicate with friends)?
2. The RIAA has stopped suing individuals because they realize that's too many people to scare. Now they're waving a big legal stick at the ISPs and the ISPs are caving in based on nothing but a threat. Fantastic. Maybe I'm wrong, but have there been many/any cases where the courts have actually ruled against an ISP for an end-user P2P'ing? Have damages been established for such a case which could threaten the business of the ISP? Have the ISPs appealed the ruling?
3. ISPs are not throttling your traffic due to their concern for copyright issues, they're throttling your traffic because they haven't invested sufficiently in infrastructure suitable to meet the usage demands of some of their customers and/or have sold misleading "unlimited" plans that in reality they can't/won't stand behind.
How can you accept this? (Apart from "because I have to")