It is certainly true that any sufficiently large open source project will attract contributors of all sorts of backgrounds, including therefore paid developers. It's a big leap to conclude from this that paid developers are the lifeblood of large OSS development.
It is my personal experience that this is the case. I've seen studies for both Linux and FreeBSD that showed the majority of code (by lines of code) was contributed by paid developers. One study of open source in general showed something like 46% of all code came from someone on the clock, being paid for that task. I'd be willing to bet that percentage is higher for large, complex projects and lower for smaller, simpler projects. For large projects, it is often the case that the paid programmers work on just that project full time (40+), whereas the average unpaid contributor donates just 6 hours. Obviously the paid developers are in a better place to intimately understand the code and have more experience with that code base.
That's more ideology than fact. The biggest open source project of them all is GNU, which fails your claim.
Sigh. GNU is certainly a capitalist endeavor. Do you really think IBM contributes all that coding effort out of some sort of misplaced idealism? Nonsense. They make money and Linux+GNU allows them to do it by selling hardware and services. They are a for profit company and to them GNU is simply a way to make money. The same goes for almost any major OSS project I can think of.
It is true that medium sized OSS projects like Mozilla have a capitalist outlook and a nice revenue source. It remains to see how long that organization and its products will last.
The Mozilla foundation is a nonprofit. It is not capitalist, but that doesn't mean capitalism does not drive the project it organizes. A lot of the resources, both financial and labor are motivated by capitalism. Google pays the foundation because it makes good business sense for them. My company has contributed code to Firefox, Linux, OpenBSD, Apache, and hundreds of other OSS projects. That code was written by paid employees, because it helps us make money. That is capitalism.
My main point is that capitalism plays no role in this, it's an orthogonal issue.
And I think your point is bunk. OSS is largely created by capitalist companies in order to make money. Just because no one is selling it, does nat make it any less capitalism than working as an accountant in a major firm. They are both indirect ways the company makes money.
Actually, maybe the problem is the theory that top-notch computing work can be done for free, without paying the people who do it, because they just love the fame.
Top notch programming can be done for free, but for large products that is the exception rather than the rule, even for open source applications. Most of the people who think large open source projects are done primarily by unpaid developers as a hobby, simply don't have any real experience in OSS development.
Which means Mozilla could consider a third evil and join the nasty capitalist system by figuring out exactly what value they are providing to their customers, and charging for it.
Most open source projects that work really well are capitalist endeavors. The difference is that the users of the software are also the developers, instead of having developers sell the software to users after marking up the price. Mozilla provides a functional and useful Web browser, with better security than IE. The company I work for has done a very small amount of work on Firefox, because we use Firefox and wanted a feature for our own use. We're users and developers. Other companies that have standardized on it hire developers to program and contribute some feature to the project. We do this because it makes our business money by improving our tools. I guess my main point is that most OSS projects are driven by capitalism, just with the "programming as a service" instead of "code as a product" model of capitalism.
Maybe I should found the OpenOffice XML Standardization Committee? Anyone interested in joining? Membership requires you prefer OOXML today, but plan to have a strong belief that ODF is superior to OOXML as per the announcement we'll make tomorrow. Don't worry, it won't take a lot of your time since we plan to dissolve in a week, and announce that to the tech press.;)
There's really not much reason for these major networks to go through iTunes.
Umm, yeah, just like there's not much reason for consumers to use iPods to play music. The reason to sell via iTunes is to reach people who have bought video iPods and iPhones (and to a very small extent AppleTV). It isn't that users can't watch these shows on their Windows PC, but most people don't want to watch TV on their PCs. They want to watch it on their TVs and portables. Some people would like to watch it on their laptop while traveling. The reason selling through iTunes works is because it is easy for consumers to find and buy shows and get them onto the device they want to play them through a single, consistent interface.
The major challenge for them is protecting their revenue, seeing as how ads make up nearly all of the major network revenue.
The networks themselves are just ad middlemen with distribution channels. Their goal is not just to protect revenue, but to keep the barrier for competition as high as possible so producers of shows can't bypass them and easily reach the consumer (who now has an internet pipe and theoretically can buy direct more cheaply). All of the studios are looking for a "way out" of a future where they aren't firmly interposed between show producers and consumers because they know how little value they add.
There are three types of consumers right now:
those who want to pay little or nothing, but will watch commercials
those who are willing to pay for content, but don't want to watch commercials
those who want to pay little or nothing and won't watch traditional commercials (they might watch better targeted, or better written commercials or product placement)
All these groups are moving towards internet supplied content, regardless of what the networks do. You can think of them as broadcast/cable customers, DVD buyers and movie goers, and MythTV P2P users, respectively. This service targets only a subset of the first group. It works for those users who are willing to watch commercials and who want to watch a show currently on NBC and who want to watch on the same device they're using to download (desktop or laptop) and whose device is a Windows PC with the right version of IE and who want to download the show within the US.
The problem is this solution is competing against Tivo/MythTV type services and against P2P services both of which are more flexible and reach a greater audience. In many cases they are easier to use. Finally, it offers no solution for people in categories 2 and 3. Now make no mistake, all three of those categories are looking for solutions and can be profitable to supply a solution to. Any solution which targets more than one of the categories is at an advantage.
If NBC was smart, they'd be making real advances and putting together a system that targets as many markets as possible as easily as possible. The worst thing that can happen to them is for users to discover an alternate solution that is superior and which ties users to it. iTunes is an example. If users started getting all their content from iTunes and from there moving it to their viewing devices, what value would NBC have except the content producers they own? Why would not content producers make direct arrangements with Apple? The other danger is losing users to P2P services which are already commercial free, cost nothing, and work on more devices more easily.
NBC is counting on users who don't want to watch commercials, buying DVDs, but that is unlikely to be the future. Many people aren't willing to wait that long anymore. People will pay for commercial free shows, or they'll pirate them, or they'll download them and edit out the commercials using technology. So long as NBC ignores that market they are in great danger. People want to watch shows on Macs, and while visiting other countries, and on ipods and cell phones. So long as NBC ignores that market, they are in danger.
Or maybe 95%+ computer users who use Windows would be interested in this kind of news.
Your numbers are way off. MS has about 90% of the PC market in the US (this is a US only service) according to most estimates of PC use. The Mac accounts for about 8%. Now exclude the large number of Windows machines running in business environments and which are not used to view entertainment media. You're probably looking at something closer to 70% of potential computer users that can run this. Now consider that 2% of those users are using versions of IE that are not supported by this service. Now consider that 15% of the market is running Firefox and while those users can run IE for the most part, some of them won't switch browsers just to watch a TV show. Now consider all the people using Web appliances, iPods, cell phones, and other handhelds.
By tying their technology to one specific vendor and one specific software instead of writing to standards they've assured that their potential market is probably about half of what it otherwise could be.
Can't we just be happy that most of the population has access to free TV shows?
Capitalism works via enlightened self interest so... no. This move is just one more which contributes to keeping the PC market broken and uncompetitive and works towards consolidating the cartel run entertainment industry and the monopoly dominated desktop OS industry.
My favorite copy protection was in the game "Escape Velocity." I'm not referring to the mechanism, just the way it was implemented. Unregistered version beyond 30 days did not stop working, or do anything annoying, except occasionally a special, unkillable space ship would show up tell you they hate pirates and attack you... forcing you to jump to another star system or two and escape. Coders that go to that kind of effort inspire me to not only buy the game, but encourage others to do the same.
So obfuscate it some more. Make the initial conversation be with a different computer than the one you will connect to.
That is what I originally suggested, although using a Tor like network so that the first machine can be unique each time.
It's an arms race indeed, but the winning side is going to be the P2P side.
Right now, it is the ISPs winning, seeing as they can throttle all encrypted traffic that matches a given pattern and is not whitelisted (like their own services and customers who pay a premium). ISPs right now also monitor traffic to well known P2P search services and use that info.
Meanwhile an open source P2P client could quickly release an update.
It takes about 20 minutes to write a regular expression to detect one of the escalations you mention. It takes a day for the fingerprint to be distributed among 90% of the tier 1 and 2 ISPs in the world via already established channels.
Really, the one-two punch to beat the ISPs at this game is ubiquitous encryption built into a large portion of common networking software and network neutrality laws to stop ISPs from slowing traffic based upon the source/destination.
I understand what you're saying. The question is, what is to prevent the ISP from seeing that you established two connections and the first was an HTTPs connection that only lasted a short time and the second was random data, matching that to a traffic profile that says together they are "obfuscated encrypted tunnel type 3" in their traffic analysis/shaping tool, and throttling it just the same? All you propose is a baby step in the arms race, that can be dealt with automatically by current tools, if it becomes common.
Here's one workaround that comes to mind, for example: Establish a completely normal SSL session by HTTPS with another computer, exchange keys, close that connection, then start an encrypted connection using those keys, without any standard magic numbers of any sort.
A number of protocols already use separate control and transfer ports, including random ports within a large range. A traffic analysis method called "ephemeral port tracking" already automatically links these two connections by tracking actions between a given source and destination and linking them as one event for analysis/shaping. Maybe if a Tor style network were in place that would exchange keys via one route and data via another it would work, provided ISPs did not begin sharing all traffic data.
I would be careful for patent issues though... Apple is a big pattenter[sic]... (Espctially[sic] after Microsoft stole their interface)
I always wonder about Apple's reputation as a danger to innovation via patents. They seem to patent a medium number of technologies, usually interface elements and as near as I can tell almost never bring suit against others over patents, although they do occasionally for copyright or trademark concerns. From what is reported in the news, however, it seems that people are suing Apple, not being sued by them.
One man with a gun will cause less destruction than if there's one man with a gun and sixty people trying to shoot him.
Really, what is your source for this opinion? I imagine it is just the opposite.
That many guns going off would probably lead to more causualties, not fewer.
So you think people shooting at a target are more likely to hit some other, person than their target. I think that is bunk.
When the police arrive on the scene, they will see many people with guns. How will they tell which one is the maniac and which are the innocent people trying to protect themselves? When there's only one guy with a gun, the police can tell instantly which one is the dangerous one.
But they can't tell now. Statistically speaking, the police are over three times as likely to misidentify a violent criminal and shoot the wrong person, as an armed citizen who is on the scene. Cops usually show up late to these things and did not see what happened. There are plenty of environments where a large percentage of people are armed and it tends to have exactly the opposite affect from what you're arguing.
Actually, it says more about the fact that there aren't enough Macs to make it worthwhile for [most] MMOGs to maintain two separate versions of their software...and Boot Camp gives them further disincentive.
There are plenty of Macs to make the market profitable for game developers, if the game is a success to start with. There are really several types of games:
Games that the developers know are going to be successful and which plan for the Mac port immediately (think WoW) - these are usually released on both platforms simultaneously or with a slight delay for the Mac version.
Games where the developer is owned by MS and develops exclusively with DirectX - some of these get ported after some delay when MS gets greedy.
Games where the developer is unsure if the game will be profitable - the more successful ones are usually ported, unless the code base is too messy and tied to DirectX. This happens sometimes with a studio's first big hit and they plan better for the next one. The less successful ones are not profitable for Windows or barely profitable and are usually not worth the effort to port.
As for BootCamp, it does not really impact the market. So few people use it that it does not really figure into things. Heck most people can't even install Windows on a regular PC. The market for Mac computers is 8% of the US market these days, almost all of which is in home use instead of business, and which sells to the higher end buyers with disposable income. They also have fewer titles to choose from. A guestimate projection for a mainstream game would be you could expect to sell 1/5 as many copies on the Mac as you do for the PC version. Do you suppose the cost of porting a game to the Mac or developing it with reusable code in the first place (which you'll want to do anyway to make future games easier) is more than 1/5 the cost of developing a game from scratch?
As a final note, compatibility with the Mac is also a significant selling point for PC games. I know of more than one instance where a dozen friends all bought a Mac compatible game instead of the competition because they wanted to play together and one or more of them had a Mac (especially when that one is the cute co-ed studying graphic design).
Actually some ISP offer filtering and some do not.
Yes, but what the government is allowed to filter is subject to constitutional challenges, while what private ISPs filter is much less so.
Your view of Utah is typical but frankly unfair.
Lets see, Utah has repeatedly Elected Rep. Orin Hatch, one of the most outspoken advocates of censoring the internet. And wasn't it in Utah where the governor and other legislators were complaining that filters required on government computers by Utah law prevented them from reading the news about the Clinton scandal?
Your view of Utah is typical but frankly unfair.
Why do you say that? A full 28% of Californians, for example, immigrated from another country (mostly Mexico). I'm guessing that alone probably exceeds the number of people in Utah who have lived in other countries. (Utah's population is approximately 6% immigrants.)
Religiously they are very homogeneous but as a group they are actually pretty technically with it.
Be that as it may, they also have a history of censorship, and introducing censorship legislation to "save the children." I don't think my remark was unfair at all.
Nope. The project is paid for by federal grant money and by the charges for the higher speed packages. It costs the local taxpayer no tax increase.
Will the difference between the 300-600 a year you're paying for a DSL pipe be worth giving up for the probably 100-300 you'll be paying for a mush[sic] more restricted connection?
Umm, I already listed the prices for this service to the end user. Your assumption that the connection will be more restricted has no foundation in fact. The truth is there will be less incentive to place restrictions and legally it will be harder to place restrictions since the government project is bound by first amendment concerns, while private companies are not.
Do you really think that youll[sic] get the same service when its provided by the municipal government and shared by everyone around you that you get with your own incoming pipe?
First, it is a county-wide project, not municipal. It encompasses numerous towns and cities. Second, I expect I'll get better service from the local government than from the current options, which is to say, one of two abusive, state government enforced monopolies who have been charged with price gouging and other crimes regularly.
Where?
I'd rather not say where I am in order to preserve my anonymity. Suffice it to say, that I've researched all the options. To get a slightly slower internet connection via DSL than I am getting from Comcast I'd have to pay an additional $35 a month, plus I'd lose the bundled TV service. At one point I was so fed up that I tried DSL, but the provider (Speakeasy) eventually contacted me and said that in violation of the law the phone line operators were saying they could not install a line to my residence, despite claiming they would offer the same service via their own DSL offering. Together we decided it was not worth the effort to sue, since I am not wealthy enough to front the legal fees.
Regardless, most estimates for the US show about 30% of households are not close enough to a head end to get DSL service and a full 10% have access to neither DSL nor cable. The wireless project will reach all households in our county, including those not profitable enough for the big telcos to bother with.
Maybe but it depends on how much municipal taxes go up does it not?
They don't. The service takes advantage of collective bargaining and cutting out numerous middle men to get a much better deal on service than you can get from either the phone company or the cable company. It pays for this service by selling the higher speed packages at just barely above cost. Think of it like a local credit union. It can give better interest rates because it bargains collectively on behalf of the users and because it is run as a nonprofit by a private corporation, instead of as a for profit corporation which simply tries to extract as much money while spending as little as possible.
A number of people have pointed out some of the major deficiencies of this software in comparison to Time Machine. There are a couple of items, however, that no one seems to be mentioning and which I think will have some of the biggest, long term effects. First, Time Machine includes easy APIs so that other programs can access the stored data from within their application. Second, it is included in the standard install so developers can rely upon it being there.
Why does this matter? Think of all the applications in which versioning would be really nice, but it just isn't available. Your address book, for example can look up old contacts or numbers or addresses. Your development tools can automatically load an older, version of that code you're writing to recover that function you did not think was needed anymore, even if you did not write it to a versioning server. Your video games can take you back to older saved games or versions of characters before you sold that really cool item. Photoshop, Word, OpenOffice, etc. can use it to revert changes to a file all the way back to last month.
The difference is that while many users will never take the trouble to learn how to use a backup system and properly recover an old version of a file, they might trouble to plug in a Time Machine drive and then use the interface to backed up versions from with their applications. It seems strange that everyone is ignoring the cool new API for developers and concentrating on the integration in the finder, which will probably be the lesser used portion of Time Machine.
Makes you wonder what apple users did for backups before version 10.5 of their operating system? I just drag my important files onto an external drive.
Backup.app worked just fine for incremental backups to DVD, network drives, etc.
And you think your local government isn't going to traffic shape, block ports or filter? Your[sic] crazy.
Sure they will shape traffic, as they should, but any filters or blocks they implement have to be in the interests of the people, not absolute profits, and we can theoretically vote to reward proper behavior. If Comcast blocks VPN traffic unless I pay an additional $80 a month, well that's business. If the county does it, they have to think up some other way to justify that decision to the constituents and in a county, smaller issues have swung the course of an election. Also, all filters implemented by the county, as a government body, have to be consistent with the state and federal constitution. Private companies can get away with filtering a lot of things the government cannot due to first amendment issues.
Umm, yeah, I'll get right on that. The issue takes more than 30 seconds to explain and as such will never be a major issue in this state. People here vote based upon gun control, abortion, taxes, and union issues, and that is about it. If I ever mange to make enough money to give AT&T a run for their money in court, I'll let you know. In the mean time we have to deal with the real world.
Well the colleges and or apartment complexes can offer WiFi as part the deal. Same thing for the summer cottages.
The colleges and universities do run their own wireless. The reason I mentioned them is because they cause a huge temporary populace that tends to change housing every 9 months. This makes it a pain to sign up for internet service, wait for it to be hooked up, then cancel the access and to the same thing all over again in a year. Most housing is in rental homes, and there are mostly summer homes rather than rental cottages. Wireless is currently offered by a few rental places, but not many. Also, most of the the local coffee shops, restaurants, pubs, etc. offer wireless so people can use their laptops, but they all have to buy a wired internet connection now and install and manage their own wireless. Businesses often have their own wireless as well, placing them in the same boat. Everyone buying these connections and hardware separately and managing them separately is incredibly inefficient and not cost effective. County-wide wireless thus is an incentive to prospective residents and businesses, even more so than a wired system.
Even with Wifi you will have to have some kind of supporting network to connect all the WAPS.
Of course, but you don't have to worry bout the last-mile problem of getting it into homes and businesses via the easements, which is the main block used by the entrenched telecos to stifle competition.
The thing is if the Utah/Provo valleys can do it why not other places? I mean Utah is as republican and conservative as you can possibly get. How is it other states seem to be more willing to sell of the citizens rights than Utah is?
At a guess, maybe the Utah legislators sold it on a platform of being able to censor that intarweb thingy and protect the children?
I never said that community internet was a bad plan. Take a look at the Utopia project out in Utah. Wifi is slow and shared fiber is a lot faster and I would bet cheaper to maintain in the long run.
It will never happen here. First, the county is a mix of urban and rural, so population density in rural areas is not sufficient to justify the cost of laying new lines. Second, state law pretty much guarantees that the phone and cable companies are the only ones allowed to lay fiber to the premises and even if they were legally obligated to do so, they would simply sabotage the project by delaying and refusing to lay the lines, just as they have done with competing DSL companies here.
Realistically, wireless is the only way to bypass the power of the entrenched players. In an ideal world, fiber would be better, but realistically it just isn't an option. Besides with fiber you don't get wi-fi phone service for portables and it does not allow for the ease of connection/disconnection for temporary residents (we have two huge universities, a half dozen smaller colleges, and a lot of summer residents resulting in a population that gains real value from a network you can just connect to without filling out any forms or waiting for hookup).
If you want to provide access to the citizens then Hot Spots at community centers, libraries, and parks will get you 90% of the benefit for 5% of the cost.
I strongly disagree. The difference between access when I bring my laptop to the park or library and access in my home and every other place in the area with a laptop or desktop; is enormous. Free wi-fi can replace existing internet access packages from local duopoly. I currently pay Comcast about $45 a month for internet access and I have to deal with their constant outages, outright blocking of VPN traffic to work (I have to SSH tunnel instead), and poor customer service. They are the most affordable option currently on the market.
My county is rolling out tiered wireless for the entire county including a low-speed access for free and several higher speed packages for $15 and $30 respectively. In my mind, the availability of such access will not only benefit me directly, but also benefit all the local businesses by removing their cost to provide such access, as well as allowing them free or cheaper access for business use. It may also help with the housing market slump, by providing additional incentive for people to move to this county. I'd say the cost is significant, but the benefits are also significant, although a lot harder to easily calculate.
The way I see it, is if iTunes provided DRM free music in several formats, they could instantly improve their marketshare by about 20%.
The question is, how would this benefit Apple? According to their published numbers, they run the iTMS at near break-even prices, purely as a motivator to sell iPods, Macs, and now iPhones. More market share is just more overhead for them unless it is selling Apple hardware.
The real question is... when will all the other hardware manufacturers and stores start supporting MP4? So far for hardware there is Apple, Creative, MS, Sony, and SanDisk supporting it. I suppose that is most of them at this point. Since file sizes are smaller than MP3 for the same quality and since you don't have to pay a licensing fee for distribution or streaming (unlike MP3) it seems like a no-brainer to add support for online stores. The only real problem is that so many are locked into Windows Media formats with DRM.
Apple handed that part of the market to Amazon on a silver platter.
Umm, I'd say Amazon's market share is largely because the RIAA companies gave them a better deal (price) out of fear that Apple was gaining too much power over them, not because of which formats they support.
The Linux and Mac gaming markets aren't all that large, especially since in both cases the option always exists to boot to Windows if you really want to play games.
Booting into Windows is not a realistic option for most people. Most people can't install an OS at all. Only a tiny fraction of the 8% of the US market that uses a Mac can also run Windows games. That 8% is almost all home users (not business) and it is concentrated among people who can afford luxury items. It is actually a pretty attractive and profitable market for games, although more so for casual games than "hardcore" games for people really into it.
One of the major reasons WoW was so much more popular than any other MMORPG before it is because Blizzard heavily took the attitude that a game isn't supposed to punish you for failure.
I don't know. I've witnessed firsthand several instances of large numbers of game purchases being decided by whether or not a given game would let everyone play, including that cute college girl with the Mac.
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It is my personal experience that this is the case. I've seen studies for both Linux and FreeBSD that showed the majority of code (by lines of code) was contributed by paid developers. One study of open source in general showed something like 46% of all code came from someone on the clock, being paid for that task. I'd be willing to bet that percentage is higher for large, complex projects and lower for smaller, simpler projects. For large projects, it is often the case that the paid programmers work on just that project full time (40+), whereas the average unpaid contributor donates just 6 hours. Obviously the paid developers are in a better place to intimately understand the code and have more experience with that code base.
That's more ideology than fact. The biggest open source project of them all is GNU, which fails your claim.Sigh. GNU is certainly a capitalist endeavor. Do you really think IBM contributes all that coding effort out of some sort of misplaced idealism? Nonsense. They make money and Linux+GNU allows them to do it by selling hardware and services. They are a for profit company and to them GNU is simply a way to make money. The same goes for almost any major OSS project I can think of.
It is true that medium sized OSS projects like Mozilla have a capitalist outlook and a nice revenue source. It remains to see how long that organization and its products will last.The Mozilla foundation is a nonprofit. It is not capitalist, but that doesn't mean capitalism does not drive the project it organizes. A lot of the resources, both financial and labor are motivated by capitalism. Google pays the foundation because it makes good business sense for them. My company has contributed code to Firefox, Linux, OpenBSD, Apache, and hundreds of other OSS projects. That code was written by paid employees, because it helps us make money. That is capitalism.
My main point is that capitalism plays no role in this, it's an orthogonal issue.And I think your point is bunk. OSS is largely created by capitalist companies in order to make money. Just because no one is selling it, does nat make it any less capitalism than working as an accountant in a major firm. They are both indirect ways the company makes money.
Sure... you call the PR department at Sun and I'll call IBM.
Top notch programming can be done for free, but for large products that is the exception rather than the rule, even for open source applications. Most of the people who think large open source projects are done primarily by unpaid developers as a hobby, simply don't have any real experience in OSS development.
Which means Mozilla could consider a third evil and join the nasty capitalist system by figuring out exactly what value they are providing to their customers, and charging for it.Most open source projects that work really well are capitalist endeavors. The difference is that the users of the software are also the developers, instead of having developers sell the software to users after marking up the price. Mozilla provides a functional and useful Web browser, with better security than IE. The company I work for has done a very small amount of work on Firefox, because we use Firefox and wanted a feature for our own use. We're users and developers. Other companies that have standardized on it hire developers to program and contribute some feature to the project. We do this because it makes our business money by improving our tools. I guess my main point is that most OSS projects are driven by capitalism, just with the "programming as a service" instead of "code as a product" model of capitalism.
Maybe I should found the OpenOffice XML Standardization Committee? Anyone interested in joining? Membership requires you prefer OOXML today, but plan to have a strong belief that ODF is superior to OOXML as per the announcement we'll make tomorrow. Don't worry, it won't take a lot of your time since we plan to dissolve in a week, and announce that to the tech press. ;)
There's really not much reason for these major networks to go through iTunes.
Umm, yeah, just like there's not much reason for consumers to use iPods to play music. The reason to sell via iTunes is to reach people who have bought video iPods and iPhones (and to a very small extent AppleTV). It isn't that users can't watch these shows on their Windows PC, but most people don't want to watch TV on their PCs. They want to watch it on their TVs and portables. Some people would like to watch it on their laptop while traveling. The reason selling through iTunes works is because it is easy for consumers to find and buy shows and get them onto the device they want to play them through a single, consistent interface.
The major challenge for them is protecting their revenue, seeing as how ads make up nearly all of the major network revenue.
The networks themselves are just ad middlemen with distribution channels. Their goal is not just to protect revenue, but to keep the barrier for competition as high as possible so producers of shows can't bypass them and easily reach the consumer (who now has an internet pipe and theoretically can buy direct more cheaply). All of the studios are looking for a "way out" of a future where they aren't firmly interposed between show producers and consumers because they know how little value they add.
There are three types of consumers right now:
All these groups are moving towards internet supplied content, regardless of what the networks do. You can think of them as broadcast/cable customers, DVD buyers and movie goers, and MythTV P2P users, respectively. This service targets only a subset of the first group. It works for those users who are willing to watch commercials and who want to watch a show currently on NBC and who want to watch on the same device they're using to download (desktop or laptop) and whose device is a Windows PC with the right version of IE and who want to download the show within the US.
The problem is this solution is competing against Tivo/MythTV type services and against P2P services both of which are more flexible and reach a greater audience. In many cases they are easier to use. Finally, it offers no solution for people in categories 2 and 3. Now make no mistake, all three of those categories are looking for solutions and can be profitable to supply a solution to. Any solution which targets more than one of the categories is at an advantage.
If NBC was smart, they'd be making real advances and putting together a system that targets as many markets as possible as easily as possible. The worst thing that can happen to them is for users to discover an alternate solution that is superior and which ties users to it. iTunes is an example. If users started getting all their content from iTunes and from there moving it to their viewing devices, what value would NBC have except the content producers they own? Why would not content producers make direct arrangements with Apple? The other danger is losing users to P2P services which are already commercial free, cost nothing, and work on more devices more easily.
NBC is counting on users who don't want to watch commercials, buying DVDs, but that is unlikely to be the future. Many people aren't willing to wait that long anymore. People will pay for commercial free shows, or they'll pirate them, or they'll download them and edit out the commercials using technology. So long as NBC ignores that market they are in great danger. People want to watch shows on Macs, and while visiting other countries, and on ipods and cell phones. So long as NBC ignores that market, they are in danger.
Your numbers are way off. MS has about 90% of the PC market in the US (this is a US only service) according to most estimates of PC use. The Mac accounts for about 8%. Now exclude the large number of Windows machines running in business environments and which are not used to view entertainment media. You're probably looking at something closer to 70% of potential computer users that can run this. Now consider that 2% of those users are using versions of IE that are not supported by this service. Now consider that 15% of the market is running Firefox and while those users can run IE for the most part, some of them won't switch browsers just to watch a TV show. Now consider all the people using Web appliances, iPods, cell phones, and other handhelds.
By tying their technology to one specific vendor and one specific software instead of writing to standards they've assured that their potential market is probably about half of what it otherwise could be.
Can't we just be happy that most of the population has access to free TV shows?Capitalism works via enlightened self interest so... no. This move is just one more which contributes to keeping the PC market broken and uncompetitive and works towards consolidating the cartel run entertainment industry and the monopoly dominated desktop OS industry.
Umm, because they're based in and incorporated out of Washington state? In fact the company is a legal construct granted rights by that state.
My favorite copy protection was in the game "Escape Velocity." I'm not referring to the mechanism, just the way it was implemented. Unregistered version beyond 30 days did not stop working, or do anything annoying, except occasionally a special, unkillable space ship would show up tell you they hate pirates and attack you... forcing you to jump to another star system or two and escape. Coders that go to that kind of effort inspire me to not only buy the game, but encourage others to do the same.
That is what I originally suggested, although using a Tor like network so that the first machine can be unique each time.
It's an arms race indeed, but the winning side is going to be the P2P side.Right now, it is the ISPs winning, seeing as they can throttle all encrypted traffic that matches a given pattern and is not whitelisted (like their own services and customers who pay a premium). ISPs right now also monitor traffic to well known P2P search services and use that info.
Meanwhile an open source P2P client could quickly release an update.It takes about 20 minutes to write a regular expression to detect one of the escalations you mention. It takes a day for the fingerprint to be distributed among 90% of the tier 1 and 2 ISPs in the world via already established channels.
Really, the one-two punch to beat the ISPs at this game is ubiquitous encryption built into a large portion of common networking software and network neutrality laws to stop ISPs from slowing traffic based upon the source/destination.
I understand what you're saying. The question is, what is to prevent the ISP from seeing that you established two connections and the first was an HTTPs connection that only lasted a short time and the second was random data, matching that to a traffic profile that says together they are "obfuscated encrypted tunnel type 3" in their traffic analysis/shaping tool, and throttling it just the same? All you propose is a baby step in the arms race, that can be dealt with automatically by current tools, if it becomes common.
A number of protocols already use separate control and transfer ports, including random ports within a large range. A traffic analysis method called "ephemeral port tracking" already automatically links these two connections by tracking actions between a given source and destination and linking them as one event for analysis/shaping. Maybe if a Tor style network were in place that would exchange keys via one route and data via another it would work, provided ISPs did not begin sharing all traffic data.
I always wonder about Apple's reputation as a danger to innovation via patents. They seem to patent a medium number of technologies, usually interface elements and as near as I can tell almost never bring suit against others over patents, although they do occasionally for copyright or trademark concerns. From what is reported in the news, however, it seems that people are suing Apple, not being sued by them.
Really, what is your source for this opinion? I imagine it is just the opposite.
That many guns going off would probably lead to more causualties, not fewer.So you think people shooting at a target are more likely to hit some other, person than their target. I think that is bunk.
When the police arrive on the scene, they will see many people with guns. How will they tell which one is the maniac and which are the innocent people trying to protect themselves? When there's only one guy with a gun, the police can tell instantly which one is the dangerous one.But they can't tell now. Statistically speaking, the police are over three times as likely to misidentify a violent criminal and shoot the wrong person, as an armed citizen who is on the scene. Cops usually show up late to these things and did not see what happened. There are plenty of environments where a large percentage of people are armed and it tends to have exactly the opposite affect from what you're arguing.
There are plenty of Macs to make the market profitable for game developers, if the game is a success to start with. There are really several types of games:
As for BootCamp, it does not really impact the market. So few people use it that it does not really figure into things. Heck most people can't even install Windows on a regular PC. The market for Mac computers is 8% of the US market these days, almost all of which is in home use instead of business, and which sells to the higher end buyers with disposable income. They also have fewer titles to choose from. A guestimate projection for a mainstream game would be you could expect to sell 1/5 as many copies on the Mac as you do for the PC version. Do you suppose the cost of porting a game to the Mac or developing it with reusable code in the first place (which you'll want to do anyway to make future games easier) is more than 1/5 the cost of developing a game from scratch?
As a final note, compatibility with the Mac is also a significant selling point for PC games. I know of more than one instance where a dozen friends all bought a Mac compatible game instead of the competition because they wanted to play together and one or more of them had a Mac (especially when that one is the cute co-ed studying graphic design).
Yes, but what the government is allowed to filter is subject to constitutional challenges, while what private ISPs filter is much less so.
Your view of Utah is typical but frankly unfair.Lets see, Utah has repeatedly Elected Rep. Orin Hatch, one of the most outspoken advocates of censoring the internet. And wasn't it in Utah where the governor and other legislators were complaining that filters required on government computers by Utah law prevented them from reading the news about the Clinton scandal?
Your view of Utah is typical but frankly unfair.Why do you say that? A full 28% of Californians, for example, immigrated from another country (mostly Mexico). I'm guessing that alone probably exceeds the number of people in Utah who have lived in other countries. (Utah's population is approximately 6% immigrants.)
Religiously they are very homogeneous but as a group they are actually pretty technically with it.Be that as it may, they also have a history of censorship, and introducing censorship legislation to "save the children." I don't think my remark was unfair at all.
Nope. The project is paid for by federal grant money and by the charges for the higher speed packages. It costs the local taxpayer no tax increase.
Will the difference between the 300-600 a year you're paying for a DSL pipe be worth giving up for the probably 100-300 you'll be paying for a mush[sic] more restricted connection?Umm, I already listed the prices for this service to the end user. Your assumption that the connection will be more restricted has no foundation in fact. The truth is there will be less incentive to place restrictions and legally it will be harder to place restrictions since the government project is bound by first amendment concerns, while private companies are not.
Do you really think that youll[sic] get the same service when its provided by the municipal government and shared by everyone around you that you get with your own incoming pipe?First, it is a county-wide project, not municipal. It encompasses numerous towns and cities. Second, I expect I'll get better service from the local government than from the current options, which is to say, one of two abusive, state government enforced monopolies who have been charged with price gouging and other crimes regularly.
Where?I'd rather not say where I am in order to preserve my anonymity. Suffice it to say, that I've researched all the options. To get a slightly slower internet connection via DSL than I am getting from Comcast I'd have to pay an additional $35 a month, plus I'd lose the bundled TV service. At one point I was so fed up that I tried DSL, but the provider (Speakeasy) eventually contacted me and said that in violation of the law the phone line operators were saying they could not install a line to my residence, despite claiming they would offer the same service via their own DSL offering. Together we decided it was not worth the effort to sue, since I am not wealthy enough to front the legal fees.
Regardless, most estimates for the US show about 30% of households are not close enough to a head end to get DSL service and a full 10% have access to neither DSL nor cable. The wireless project will reach all households in our county, including those not profitable enough for the big telcos to bother with.
Maybe but it depends on how much municipal taxes go up does it not?They don't. The service takes advantage of collective bargaining and cutting out numerous middle men to get a much better deal on service than you can get from either the phone company or the cable company. It pays for this service by selling the higher speed packages at just barely above cost. Think of it like a local credit union. It can give better interest rates because it bargains collectively on behalf of the users and because it is run as a nonprofit by a private corporation, instead of as a for profit corporation which simply tries to extract as much money while spending as little as possible.
A number of people have pointed out some of the major deficiencies of this software in comparison to Time Machine. There are a couple of items, however, that no one seems to be mentioning and which I think will have some of the biggest, long term effects. First, Time Machine includes easy APIs so that other programs can access the stored data from within their application. Second, it is included in the standard install so developers can rely upon it being there.
Why does this matter? Think of all the applications in which versioning would be really nice, but it just isn't available. Your address book, for example can look up old contacts or numbers or addresses. Your development tools can automatically load an older, version of that code you're writing to recover that function you did not think was needed anymore, even if you did not write it to a versioning server. Your video games can take you back to older saved games or versions of characters before you sold that really cool item. Photoshop, Word, OpenOffice, etc. can use it to revert changes to a file all the way back to last month.
The difference is that while many users will never take the trouble to learn how to use a backup system and properly recover an old version of a file, they might trouble to plug in a Time Machine drive and then use the interface to backed up versions from with their applications. It seems strange that everyone is ignoring the cool new API for developers and concentrating on the integration in the finder, which will probably be the lesser used portion of Time Machine.
Backup.app worked just fine for incremental backups to DVD, network drives, etc.
Sure they will shape traffic, as they should, but any filters or blocks they implement have to be in the interests of the people, not absolute profits, and we can theoretically vote to reward proper behavior. If Comcast blocks VPN traffic unless I pay an additional $80 a month, well that's business. If the county does it, they have to think up some other way to justify that decision to the constituents and in a county, smaller issues have swung the course of an election. Also, all filters implemented by the county, as a government body, have to be consistent with the state and federal constitution. Private companies can get away with filtering a lot of things the government cannot due to first amendment issues.
Umm, yeah, I'll get right on that. The issue takes more than 30 seconds to explain and as such will never be a major issue in this state. People here vote based upon gun control, abortion, taxes, and union issues, and that is about it. If I ever mange to make enough money to give AT&T a run for their money in court, I'll let you know. In the mean time we have to deal with the real world.
Well the colleges and or apartment complexes can offer WiFi as part the deal. Same thing for the summer cottages.The colleges and universities do run their own wireless. The reason I mentioned them is because they cause a huge temporary populace that tends to change housing every 9 months. This makes it a pain to sign up for internet service, wait for it to be hooked up, then cancel the access and to the same thing all over again in a year. Most housing is in rental homes, and there are mostly summer homes rather than rental cottages. Wireless is currently offered by a few rental places, but not many. Also, most of the the local coffee shops, restaurants, pubs, etc. offer wireless so people can use their laptops, but they all have to buy a wired internet connection now and install and manage their own wireless. Businesses often have their own wireless as well, placing them in the same boat. Everyone buying these connections and hardware separately and managing them separately is incredibly inefficient and not cost effective. County-wide wireless thus is an incentive to prospective residents and businesses, even more so than a wired system.
Even with Wifi you will have to have some kind of supporting network to connect all the WAPS.Of course, but you don't have to worry bout the last-mile problem of getting it into homes and businesses via the easements, which is the main block used by the entrenched telecos to stifle competition.
The thing is if the Utah/Provo valleys can do it why not other places? I mean Utah is as republican and conservative as you can possibly get. How is it other states seem to be more willing to sell of the citizens rights than Utah is?At a guess, maybe the Utah legislators sold it on a platform of being able to censor that intarweb thingy and protect the children?
It will never happen here. First, the county is a mix of urban and rural, so population density in rural areas is not sufficient to justify the cost of laying new lines. Second, state law pretty much guarantees that the phone and cable companies are the only ones allowed to lay fiber to the premises and even if they were legally obligated to do so, they would simply sabotage the project by delaying and refusing to lay the lines, just as they have done with competing DSL companies here.
Realistically, wireless is the only way to bypass the power of the entrenched players. In an ideal world, fiber would be better, but realistically it just isn't an option. Besides with fiber you don't get wi-fi phone service for portables and it does not allow for the ease of connection/disconnection for temporary residents (we have two huge universities, a half dozen smaller colleges, and a lot of summer residents resulting in a population that gains real value from a network you can just connect to without filling out any forms or waiting for hookup).
I strongly disagree. The difference between access when I bring my laptop to the park or library and access in my home and every other place in the area with a laptop or desktop; is enormous. Free wi-fi can replace existing internet access packages from local duopoly. I currently pay Comcast about $45 a month for internet access and I have to deal with their constant outages, outright blocking of VPN traffic to work (I have to SSH tunnel instead), and poor customer service. They are the most affordable option currently on the market.
My county is rolling out tiered wireless for the entire county including a low-speed access for free and several higher speed packages for $15 and $30 respectively. In my mind, the availability of such access will not only benefit me directly, but also benefit all the local businesses by removing their cost to provide such access, as well as allowing them free or cheaper access for business use. It may also help with the housing market slump, by providing additional incentive for people to move to this county. I'd say the cost is significant, but the benefits are also significant, although a lot harder to easily calculate.
The question is, how would this benefit Apple? According to their published numbers, they run the iTMS at near break-even prices, purely as a motivator to sell iPods, Macs, and now iPhones. More market share is just more overhead for them unless it is selling Apple hardware.
The real question is... when will all the other hardware manufacturers and stores start supporting MP4? So far for hardware there is Apple, Creative, MS, Sony, and SanDisk supporting it. I suppose that is most of them at this point. Since file sizes are smaller than MP3 for the same quality and since you don't have to pay a licensing fee for distribution or streaming (unlike MP3) it seems like a no-brainer to add support for online stores. The only real problem is that so many are locked into Windows Media formats with DRM.
Apple handed that part of the market to Amazon on a silver platter.Umm, I'd say Amazon's market share is largely because the RIAA companies gave them a better deal (price) out of fear that Apple was gaining too much power over them, not because of which formats they support.
Booting into Windows is not a realistic option for most people. Most people can't install an OS at all. Only a tiny fraction of the 8% of the US market that uses a Mac can also run Windows games. That 8% is almost all home users (not business) and it is concentrated among people who can afford luxury items. It is actually a pretty attractive and profitable market for games, although more so for casual games than "hardcore" games for people really into it.
One of the major reasons WoW was so much more popular than any other MMORPG before it is because Blizzard heavily took the attitude that a game isn't supposed to punish you for failure.I don't know. I've witnessed firsthand several instances of large numbers of game purchases being decided by whether or not a given game would let everyone play, including that cute college girl with the Mac.
A couple more points: