Although a lot of the online chatter about DRM has focused on locked-down platforms, this is really not a key feature of DRM. The purpose of DRM is to protect contect, which it does through condition access to obtain a host-specific key, which is used in a secure decoder chip to play back encrypted content. In a nutshell.
The platform part is merely a marketing tool, if you're Tivo, or IPTV, or someone else and you sell subsidized hardware with the expectation of recouping it on service, with a liberal minimum contract requirement, then you don't want people to be able to take the cheap subsidized hardware and use it with a competing service. If this marketing tool weren't available, there would be no subsidized hardware. For the overwhelming majority of users, the subsidy is a good deal since they have no intention of using the box for anything other than it was intended for originally.
It's quite a stretch to extend this to a general-purpose desktop not marketed as an access device. Curiously, the greatest use is probably for online gaming, to keep cheaters from hacking the binary or spinning their own.
Read this before installing: http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/security/page_1.htm Note that the average survival time for a fresh, unpatched, Windows installation is under 10 minutes, which is less than it takes to patch it via Windows Update. And you can't download the patches from MacOSX before starting the install, you can only patch from the already installed (and activated) system. So you need an external firewall to protect you during the initial Windows Update. (Not a bad idea to have one, anyway.)
I'd like to see this data broken up by market segment. Obviously Linux makes no sense whatsoever in a wrist watch, thermostat, or automotive ignition (ECM) system.
But it makes lots of sense in network appliances (NATs, firewalls, routers, print servers, etc) and certain consumer electronics. The latter includes things with disk storage for DVR functionality and network connectivity for services or content/conditional access. In many cases the choice of Linux in this segment is determined by the chip vendor; they may only offer reference software and tools on Linux. This is true for at least a couple of dominant vendors today.
EET should look at Linux penetration in market segments where it makes sense. Not just numbers, but also why. E.g., "everyone already knew it here", "cheapest", "chip vendor mandated", "allows us to use a gcc tooolchain", etc. I'd also like to see the numbers as a percentage of all shipped units as well as a percentage of market share (in US$).
drop out of school, quit your job, divorce your spouse, disown your children, cancel your gym membership, upgrade your PC, and clear out your schedule for World of Starcraft
Dammit, I totally fell for this one!
Now I have to go tell my former employer, my ex-wife, and the nuns at the orphanage that it was all just a joke! Thanks a lot pinkdot.
r do you really think foreign companies shouldn't have to follow US laws in their US operations? They do. And there have been antitrust suits against foreign companies in the US. And in case you missed it, Microsoft was found guilty of antitrust violations in the USA too.
I think a couple of nice little prison sentences for Gates, Ballmer, and company, to be served in some vintage Polish penitentiary would help the problem immensely. I bet Samsung isn't going to flaunt U.S. law again anytime soon. 2M EUR to the likes of Ballmer is just the cost of doing business, not a deterrent.
t would take an absolutely colossal amount of computing power, but given sufficient resources and a complete understanding of the basic physics and chemistry involved (neither of which we have yet) you could absolutely simulate a living creature, and the simulation would be intelligent.
Note that the simulation doesn't have to 100% replicate the existing world. It just needs to be somewhat consistent and deterministic. The life forms in it will presumably adapt to the laws of their universe. But it probably needs to be somewhat close to ours if we want to copy our life machinery and hope for something to survive. Otherwise we could bootstrap life by tossing randomly composed molecules into the goo until it gets going on its own. In the latter case the laws could be altered for performance or other goals.
I should have clarified. DSL providers do not typically oversell their bandwidth like cable providers do. And whether i'm downloading movies or linux ISOs should be of no importance to you. I pay for the service, I'm just using it to its full capacity. Don't like it? Switch to dialup.
Of course DSL is oversold. The link to the DSLAM doesn't grow just because they keep plugging more customers into it. DSL access is oversold at least 10:1, or there's just no economy.
The proposal also isn't about paying for bandwidth, but for quality. The Internet as it is is completely and utterly unsuitable for any real-time activities because of the atrocious jitter and constant route updates. (Read: temporary outages measured in seconds.) The solution is SLAs. VoIP is cute, but without SLAs it won't match the quality of a plain old circuit switched network. You can't just provision your way out of this, it's not a bandwidth problem.
Somebody needs to pay for the SLAs since they require resources. Let's start by eliminating the ISP -- they don't have the margins to implement it and absorb the cost. Let's also drop the government. Left is either the end user or the service. I don't use VoIP, why should I see my bill take a jump so my ISP can add infrastructure to make your calling experience match POTS, or vice versa? So some end users will need to pay for SLA usage if they want it. Either by usage (hot billing or monthly), or unlimited. It can be included by tiering, e.g. buy "premium" service and it includes VoIP SLAs and video SLAs up to say 700kbps for say 10 hours a month. Buy high-end service and you might get unlimited video SLAs in addition.
The other billing approach is for the service to pay for SLAs. E.g. your VoIP service or any other service that requires functioning beyond proof of concept simply factors it into their business model. This is probably preferable since it leverages competition and scale (i.e. it's easier to switch media service than ISP), and for many media services this is where the traffic originates. (Proxyless VoIP would be a notable exception.)
*Of course* SLAs require FCC regulation. Apart from merely standardizing it since so many parties are involved, it also equires regulation on what must be disclosed by an SLA provider, means of redress and arbitration, standards in billing, determining what is or isn't taxable by states and cities, methods of measurement (what's paid for), etc. And yes, it's going to need to happen if you want the Internet to ever be suitable for anything other than bulk traffic. And no, Google has no interest in this, they deal strictly with a data model based around submit-response, or they have made investments in tweaking media performance over a bulk medium, or have some other vested interest in keeping SLAs off the table. Or maybe they just crassly don't want the Internet to become usable for anything that might rock their ship.
Slashdot Mirror
Although a lot of the online chatter about DRM has focused on locked-down platforms, this is really not a key feature of DRM. The purpose of DRM is to protect contect, which it does through condition access to obtain a host-specific key, which is used in a secure decoder chip to play back encrypted content. In a nutshell.
The platform part is merely a marketing tool, if you're Tivo, or IPTV, or someone else and you sell subsidized hardware with the expectation of recouping it on service, with a liberal minimum contract requirement, then you don't want people to be able to take the cheap subsidized hardware and use it with a competing service. If this marketing tool weren't available, there would be no subsidized hardware. For the overwhelming majority of users, the subsidy is a good deal since they have no intention of using the box for anything other than it was intended for originally.
It's quite a stretch to extend this to a general-purpose desktop not marketed as an access device. Curiously, the greatest use is probably for online gaming, to keep cheaters from hacking the binary or spinning their own.
Read this before installing:
http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/security/page_1.htm
Note that the average survival time for a fresh, unpatched, Windows installation is under 10 minutes, which is less than it takes to patch it via Windows Update. And you can't download the patches from MacOSX before starting the install, you can only patch from the already installed (and activated) system. So you need an external firewall to protect you during the initial Windows Update. (Not a bad idea to have one, anyway.)
But it makes lots of sense in network appliances (NATs, firewalls, routers, print servers, etc) and certain consumer electronics. The latter includes things with disk storage for DVR functionality and network connectivity for services or content/conditional access. In many cases the choice of Linux in this segment is determined by the chip vendor; they may only offer reference software and tools on Linux. This is true for at least a couple of dominant vendors today.
EET should look at Linux penetration in market segments where it makes sense. Not just numbers, but also why. E.g., "everyone already knew it here", "cheapest", "chip vendor mandated", "allows us to use a gcc tooolchain", etc. I'd also like to see the numbers as a percentage of all shipped units as well as a percentage of market share (in US$).
Dammit, I totally fell for this one!
Now I have to go tell my former employer, my ex-wife, and the nuns at the orphanage that it was all just a joke! Thanks a lot pinkdot.
Samsung execs plead guilty, receive prison terms
I think a couple of nice little prison sentences for Gates, Ballmer, and company, to be served in some vintage Polish penitentiary would help the problem immensely. I bet Samsung isn't going to flaunt U.S. law again anytime soon. 2M EUR to the likes of Ballmer is just the cost of doing business, not a deterrent.
Note that the simulation doesn't have to 100% replicate the existing world. It just needs to be somewhat consistent and deterministic. The life forms in it will presumably adapt to the laws of their universe. But it probably needs to be somewhat close to ours if we want to copy our life machinery and hope for something to survive. Otherwise we could bootstrap life by tossing randomly composed molecules into the goo until it gets going on its own. In the latter case the laws could be altered for performance or other goals.
Of course DSL is oversold. The link to the DSLAM doesn't grow just because they keep plugging more customers into it. DSL access is oversold at least 10:1, or there's just no economy.
The proposal also isn't about paying for bandwidth, but for quality. The Internet as it is is completely and utterly unsuitable for any real-time activities because of the atrocious jitter and constant route updates. (Read: temporary outages measured in seconds.) The solution is SLAs. VoIP is cute, but without SLAs it won't match the quality of a plain old circuit switched network. You can't just provision your way out of this, it's not a bandwidth problem.
Somebody needs to pay for the SLAs since they require resources. Let's start by eliminating the ISP -- they don't have the margins to implement it and absorb the cost. Let's also drop the government. Left is either the end user or the service. I don't use VoIP, why should I see my bill take a jump so my ISP can add infrastructure to make your calling experience match POTS, or vice versa? So some end users will need to pay for SLA usage if they want it. Either by usage (hot billing or monthly), or unlimited. It can be included by tiering, e.g. buy "premium" service and it includes VoIP SLAs and video SLAs up to say 700kbps for say 10 hours a month. Buy high-end service and you might get unlimited video SLAs in addition.
The other billing approach is for the service to pay for SLAs. E.g. your VoIP service or any other service that requires functioning beyond proof of concept simply factors it into their business model. This is probably preferable since it leverages competition and scale (i.e. it's easier to switch media service than ISP), and for many media services this is where the traffic originates. (Proxyless VoIP would be a notable exception.)
*Of course* SLAs require FCC regulation. Apart from merely standardizing it since so many parties are involved, it also equires regulation on what must be disclosed by an SLA provider, means of redress and arbitration, standards in billing, determining what is or isn't taxable by states and cities, methods of measurement (what's paid for), etc. And yes, it's going to need to happen if you want the Internet to ever be suitable for anything other than bulk traffic. And no, Google has no interest in this, they deal strictly with a data model based around submit-response, or they have made investments in tweaking media performance over a bulk medium, or have some other vested interest in keeping SLAs off the table. Or maybe they just crassly don't want the Internet to become usable for anything that might rock their ship.