Lessig claims that municipal networks will be able to compete with the Telcos to prevent abuse of their control over the network. I'm no expert but don't these municipal networks still plug into backbones owned by the Telcos? What is there to stop the Telcos from exercising their control at that level rather than at the end user level? I understand his point about not being too hasty with regulation, but there seem to be some holes in his logic.
At minimum proposals like this should be struck down for their extreme short-sightedness. Patent and copyright law exist to foster innovation and reward people for producing new works. Instead, laws like this merely protect the entrenched powers from having to do just that. This bill serves as an example of just how corrupt (or ignorant, pick one) its backers are. This law does nothing to protect the will of the people, nor does it advance any sort of greater good for society. Rather it promotes the interests of a specific group of businesses at the expense of everyone else. This is not democracy.
Oh boo, fucking, ho. Apple doesn't want developers creating oddball software that'll dick up the iPod (it's an MP3 player, not a PDA). I wasn't complaining about anything. I was simply making the point that Apple will eventually need to switch from a closed system to an open one with Fairplay is they want the iPod to remain the success for the next 5 years that it has been for the last 5.
There isn't one other dedicated MP3 player out there that is open like you want That's entirely my point. There needs to be one, and eventually there will be. If Apple continues to stay closed and other manufacturers move to standardized, or no, DRM then they will lose market share.
Apple has however opened up the software to developers for the iPod a bit. Otherwise there wouldn't be the games available on the iTunes store right now. If you want open, go deal with iPod Linux, and other tools. You're missing the point. It doesn't matter what Apple allows people to put on the iPod as long as they still restrict it from being put on other devices.
Now if you were bitching about the iPhone's announcement that 3rd party will at the very minimum have a hard time I could understand. Hell thats kind of a deal-breaker for me if it's as restrictive as it sounds. Again, I'm not bitching about anything. And secondly, I never even mentioned the iPhone. I don't know what the hell you're talking about.
I find it interesting how you bitch that Apple is a closed culture, yet applaud Microsoft for bringing some standardization for the PC environment. Apple does things in reverse from Microsoft, plain & simple. They start with a neatly defined standard, make sure it works, expand it, allow developers more control, so on and so forth. You can piss & moan about the different business practices, but I can get a hell of allot more done, and with less headache, when using a system thats well defined from the get go than the one that just gets thrown out there once it barely functions, then gets incremental fixes. Still with the bitching thing. I have no problem with Apple's closed culture. It works for what it's good for, making important innovations in stagnant markets. However, if Apple wants the iPod to continue to be the juggernaut that it's been, they will need to open up fairplay eventually. Furthermore, I wasn't applauding Microsoft for anything. They have some pretty shitty business practices. I was using them as an example of how Apple's closed culture fares once the market shifts to open standards. It's not a matter of what will work better for you personally, it's a matter of what will work best for the population as a whole. Apple does a great job of providing a fantastic platform for small segments of people, but their focus on closed systems can't compete with open systems in addressing the needs of the larger markets.
There's a significant difference between the incompatibility of analog and digital media versus DRM. With analog to digital conversion, the incompatibility is inherent to the formats and unavoidable. With digital media conversion is a non-issue. Why should I have to go through the process of burning a track from iTunes to CD and then re-ripping the CD to my computer to stream a song to my 360? The 360 is perfectly capable of playing the track. However Apple actively puts measures in place to keep you from doing that. The whole process in entirely unnecessary.
That may very well be so. However, none of those things are preventing companies from working together to create standards for DRM. Apple is the worst culprit here too. They refuse to allow any other companies to create DRM schemes that would work with either iTunes of the iPod. In fact, they've actively sued companies for trying to do such things in the past. Just because DRM exists, doesn't mean it has to exist in the cumbersome, unusable, anti-consumer form it does today.
Granted, that's not complete and absolute freedom of choice, but it's not bad I'm sorry but I have to disagree. It's absolutely pitiful, and we as consumers shouldn't have to accept such asinine workarounds just to use our legally purchased media the way we want to. In any other market, we would have long ago left iTunes for a different conpany that provides a better product. However, DRM keeps us from doing just that. If you use an iPod, and you want to legally buy music online, your only option is iTunes. There's almost no consumer choice. DRM restricts the market from working the way it's meant to. On top of all that, your workaround doesn't work at all if we're talking about videos sold on iTunes.
Madden topped the chart with 2.8 Million in sales for the PS2 version of Madden 07. Right behind was New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, with some 2 Million in sales of its own Where does Gears of War fit into this? The statistics I've read said it had sold 2.7 million copies as of Jan 2nd. Unless Gears sold over 700,000 copies in the first two days of the year, it would appear that these statistics are at least somewhat off.
Admittedly, Apple's DRM is almost transparent to most people using it. The main problem with Apple's DRM is that you can't stray from Apple products. People give Apple a whole lot of leeway in this area, mainly because they make good products. However, this is far from the ideal solution. The consumer electronics and digital media industries need to standardize, both for the consumers as well as themselves. The industries are missing out on massive growth opportunities because they can't make their products compelling to the average person. The whole situation is just too complicated and convoluted at the moment.
I've always imagined that Apple's reluctance to open their iPod/iTunes environment up to third parties will eventually be the iPod's undoing. At the moment, consumer electronics are a mess. Everything is proprietary and nothing works together, much the same way PC's were back in the early 80's. It's only in these kinds of situations that Apple's closed culture really thrives.
Eventually, though, someone is going to get it when it comes to consumer electronics, much the same way Microsoft did with PC's. People like to give Microsoft a lot of crap about how they run their business, but forget the they did a lot of the legwork for making the PC a standardized environment.
Once the digital media market has matured, I imagine we'll look back on the days of the iPod much the same way we look back on the early days of Apple. Meanwhile, Apple will have moved on to another market segment and continue to do what they do best, innovate within a small, closed environment.
People like to point to those original iPod comments and laugh about how wrong they were. However, the original iPod was far from perfect. When was the last time you actually saw a 1st gen iPod, if ever? It was really the iPod mini that made it such a successful product.
While the iPhone is stunning, it has plenty of flaws worth noting. It could certainly turn out to be the smash hit that the iPod was, but I expect it will take a couple of revisions before it realizes its true potential. If nothing else, there enough problems to prevent me from buying one in its 1st gen.
Hunter gathers do/did live in a society with greater political and economic freedom, but technically, that's before history, since history is the recorded word. It's easy to live in a society with greater economic freedom when you're society doesn't have an economy. For a society to have an economy there has to be some form of trade, which in turn implies some form of division of labor. In a hunter gatherer society nearly everyone performs the same function to support themselves. Once agriculture enters the picture you begin to see these things, however you also begin to see the beginnings of governments that restrict and control trade.
Actually, the middle class emerged during the middle ages as the bourgeoisie, which consisted primarily of merchants. The rise of the middle class over the last century or so has been primarily due to industrialization and mechanization, which has shifted more workers from away from production type labor and into mercantile and technical fields.
You're assertion that the whole of human history, up to recent times, has been the history of the free market is entirely false. For example, in feudal Europe and Japan you needed a lot more than a shop to be a shop keeper. You needed to be a member of a certain land-owning class, something a great deal more difficult to obtain than a business license. And where exactly would you say that slaves fit into the free market?
You also claim that Socialism and regulated economy are inventions of the past 100 years. However, Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848.
Your entire statement is nothing more than supposition and conjecture, interlaced with flat out falsehoods. The free market is far from perfect. There are plenty of areas where regulation is needed to ensure things operate smoothly (economists refer to these as externalities). However, you completely fail to understand the respective benefits and shortcomings of the free market and socialism, not to mention basic history.
That's the thing though. They can still produce great hardware. With a DVD player it's not a problem because DVD is a universal standard. The problem with their hardware comes when they try to tie it to one of their formats or DRM schemes. Think the digital camera that only uses memory stick, the PSP that was really just meant to push UMD, the early MP3 players that were really just ATRAC players, or the whole rootkit debacle. Sony has a consistent track record of creating good hardware and then crippling one feature or another before releasing it to consumers.
I love my Cybershot, but it drive me nuts that the memory stick pro duo won't fit in my flash card reader. What was so wrong with SD that they couldn't use it? Heck, the whole reason the PS3 is so damned expensive and why you can't find one anywhere is because Sony wants to use it to push yet another format.
I think that it may actually be in Sony's best interest for BluRay to lose this format war. For the last decade Sony's content divisions have been essentially destroying their hardware division from the inside. People once regarded Sony as the default brand to buy when purchasing consumer electronics. Now, anyone who is remotely informed avoids their products like the plague. Sony's insistence on making their hardware and content divisions cooperate has insured that nearly every product they release is crippled right out of the gate with DRM and proprietary formats doomed to obscurity.
If BluRay succeeds, it will be seen by Sony as a success of this miserable business plan. At that point we can all expect Sony to tread even further down this dead end road. Should BluRay fail however, then maybe, just maybe, Sony will finally realize that their biggest enemy is themselves. Obviously, the failure of BluRay wouldn't necessarily mean that things will get better. If if should succeed though, we can almost be assured that they will get worse.
I've never fallen into the groupthink that states that in order for a game to be good it must be original, or vice versa. I've played many excellent games that were not original at all, and many original games that were crap. By this reasoning no sequel has been, or ever will be, good.
This is not to say that new and innovative games can't be good or that we don't need any innovation in the industry. However, it really bothers me the way people seem to want to do away with every great series and genre that brought us to this point.
I'm sorry, you've obviously either never played Viva Pinata or never played Animal Crossing since about the only thing that the two games have in common is bright colors. Viva Pinata is more akin to a mix between The Sims and a tycoon game. Even if it was similar to Animal Crossing, does that somehow not make it a good game? Perhaps we shouldn't be playing Half-Life 2 because id already did it "or something very similar"... they called it Doom and it sold for the PC 15 years ago.
While owners of game consoles might be more tech savy than your average sampling of the general population, I don't think it's that much of an increase. Consider that movie licensed game and sports games are the biggest sellers, while true gems often languish on store shelves. While tech savy does not necessarily translate to good taste in games, I take these sales trends to indicate two things. First, people are generally uninformed about their game purchase. Second, the game market extends a lot further than the "hardcore" crowd that would be more likely associated with being tech savy.
While the high initial cost of the 360 and PS3 mean that they're being purchased by mostly early adopters right now, as prices begin to fall you will see more and more average (and less tech savy people) buying these consoles.
I'm curious how this sits in respect to Net Neutrality. Using AT&T as an example (since they currently have Net Neutrality restrictions imposed by the FCC) why would Microsoft partner with them for IPTV? If it's to ensure larger bandwidth that could not be obtained over the network normally, wouldn't this be in violation of Net Neutrality? If there's no speed benefit to partnering with AT&T why offer the service through them at all? Why not make the service open to anyone who wants to sign up? It all seems rather pointless and unnecessarily complicated to me (as does just about anything involving digital media these days).
While there are obvious technical differences, the average user isn't going to know the difference between IPTV, downloadable video, VOD, or probably even your basic DVR. In the end, they all basically do the same thing, let me watch what I want to when I want to. In the end it just boils down to which solution, or combination of them, is the most cost effective and hassle free for the type of content I want.
People seem to be taking a very pessimistic view of IPTV and downloadable video, considering how young the technologies are. True, the Xbox Live offerings are pretty sparse, but the service is less then two months old. Of course cable TV has more options, they've been around for 3 decades now. However, I also pay extortion-like rates for those offerings, 95% of which I don't want or need.
Announcements like this are encouraging to me, because I can envision a day not far off when they will provide viable alternatives to cable TV and bring some much needed competition to the cable companies monopolistic business practices.
"if i can drive a chevy, i can drive a honda, and a buick"
That's because they all function essentially the same. This is like saying, if I can use Word, I can use Open Office Writer, Writely, and Pages. The gear shift might be moved from the floor to the steering column, but it still does essentially the same thing. If I move to a completely different program though, like Photoshop, it's like trying to use those car-driving skills to fly a helicopter.
Really, it wouldn't need to be that fast. It only needs to download faster than the bit-rate of the video. For that you only need about 1-2 Mbps with good compression. The problem is that even though my cable company advertises my line a 6 Mbps, these files are only downloading at about 100 Kbps. Part of the problem is on Microsoft's end, part of the problem is with the cable company. However, it doesn't really matter to the average consumer who's fault it is. All that matters is that it doesn't work better than the alternative of driving to the nearest Blockbuster.
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Lessig claims that municipal networks will be able to compete with the Telcos to prevent abuse of their control over the network. I'm no expert but don't these municipal networks still plug into backbones owned by the Telcos? What is there to stop the Telcos from exercising their control at that level rather than at the end user level? I understand his point about not being too hasty with regulation, but there seem to be some holes in his logic.
At minimum proposals like this should be struck down for their extreme short-sightedness. Patent and copyright law exist to foster innovation and reward people for producing new works. Instead, laws like this merely protect the entrenched powers from having to do just that. This bill serves as an example of just how corrupt (or ignorant, pick one) its backers are. This law does nothing to protect the will of the people, nor does it advance any sort of greater good for society. Rather it promotes the interests of a specific group of businesses at the expense of everyone else. This is not democracy.
There's a significant difference between the incompatibility of analog and digital media versus DRM. With analog to digital conversion, the incompatibility is inherent to the formats and unavoidable. With digital media conversion is a non-issue. Why should I have to go through the process of burning a track from iTunes to CD and then re-ripping the CD to my computer to stream a song to my 360? The 360 is perfectly capable of playing the track. However Apple actively puts measures in place to keep you from doing that. The whole process in entirely unnecessary.
That may very well be so. However, none of those things are preventing companies from working together to create standards for DRM. Apple is the worst culprit here too. They refuse to allow any other companies to create DRM schemes that would work with either iTunes of the iPod. In fact, they've actively sued companies for trying to do such things in the past. Just because DRM exists, doesn't mean it has to exist in the cumbersome, unusable, anti-consumer form it does today.
Ahh, suppose I fell for the old "shipped vs sold" trick.
Admittedly, Apple's DRM is almost transparent to most people using it. The main problem with Apple's DRM is that you can't stray from Apple products. People give Apple a whole lot of leeway in this area, mainly because they make good products. However, this is far from the ideal solution. The consumer electronics and digital media industries need to standardize, both for the consumers as well as themselves. The industries are missing out on massive growth opportunities because they can't make their products compelling to the average person. The whole situation is just too complicated and convoluted at the moment.
I've always imagined that Apple's reluctance to open their iPod/iTunes environment up to third parties will eventually be the iPod's undoing. At the moment, consumer electronics are a mess. Everything is proprietary and nothing works together, much the same way PC's were back in the early 80's. It's only in these kinds of situations that Apple's closed culture really thrives.
Eventually, though, someone is going to get it when it comes to consumer electronics, much the same way Microsoft did with PC's. People like to give Microsoft a lot of crap about how they run their business, but forget the they did a lot of the legwork for making the PC a standardized environment.
Once the digital media market has matured, I imagine we'll look back on the days of the iPod much the same way we look back on the early days of Apple. Meanwhile, Apple will have moved on to another market segment and continue to do what they do best, innovate within a small, closed environment.
People like to point to those original iPod comments and laugh about how wrong they were. However, the original iPod was far from perfect. When was the last time you actually saw a 1st gen iPod, if ever? It was really the iPod mini that made it such a successful product.
While the iPhone is stunning, it has plenty of flaws worth noting. It could certainly turn out to be the smash hit that the iPod was, but I expect it will take a couple of revisions before it realizes its true potential. If nothing else, there enough problems to prevent me from buying one in its 1st gen.
Actually, the middle class emerged during the middle ages as the bourgeoisie, which consisted primarily of merchants. The rise of the middle class over the last century or so has been primarily due to industrialization and mechanization, which has shifted more workers from away from production type labor and into mercantile and technical fields.
You're assertion that the whole of human history, up to recent times, has been the history of the free market is entirely false. For example, in feudal Europe and Japan you needed a lot more than a shop to be a shop keeper. You needed to be a member of a certain land-owning class, something a great deal more difficult to obtain than a business license. And where exactly would you say that slaves fit into the free market?
You also claim that Socialism and regulated economy are inventions of the past 100 years. However, Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848.
Your entire statement is nothing more than supposition and conjecture, interlaced with flat out falsehoods. The free market is far from perfect. There are plenty of areas where regulation is needed to ensure things operate smoothly (economists refer to these as externalities). However, you completely fail to understand the respective benefits and shortcomings of the free market and socialism, not to mention basic history.
That's the thing though. They can still produce great hardware. With a DVD player it's not a problem because DVD is a universal standard. The problem with their hardware comes when they try to tie it to one of their formats or DRM schemes. Think the digital camera that only uses memory stick, the PSP that was really just meant to push UMD, the early MP3 players that were really just ATRAC players, or the whole rootkit debacle. Sony has a consistent track record of creating good hardware and then crippling one feature or another before releasing it to consumers.
I love my Cybershot, but it drive me nuts that the memory stick pro duo won't fit in my flash card reader. What was so wrong with SD that they couldn't use it? Heck, the whole reason the PS3 is so damned expensive and why you can't find one anywhere is because Sony wants to use it to push yet another format.
I think that it may actually be in Sony's best interest for BluRay to lose this format war. For the last decade Sony's content divisions have been essentially destroying their hardware division from the inside. People once regarded Sony as the default brand to buy when purchasing consumer electronics. Now, anyone who is remotely informed avoids their products like the plague. Sony's insistence on making their hardware and content divisions cooperate has insured that nearly every product they release is crippled right out of the gate with DRM and proprietary formats doomed to obscurity.
If BluRay succeeds, it will be seen by Sony as a success of this miserable business plan. At that point we can all expect Sony to tread even further down this dead end road. Should BluRay fail however, then maybe, just maybe, Sony will finally realize that their biggest enemy is themselves. Obviously, the failure of BluRay wouldn't necessarily mean that things will get better. If if should succeed though, we can almost be assured that they will get worse.
I've never fallen into the groupthink that states that in order for a game to be good it must be original, or vice versa. I've played many excellent games that were not original at all, and many original games that were crap. By this reasoning no sequel has been, or ever will be, good.
This is not to say that new and innovative games can't be good or that we don't need any innovation in the industry. However, it really bothers me the way people seem to want to do away with every great series and genre that brought us to this point.
The CNBC report has been discredited. The official NPD numbers won't be out until Thursday.
I'm sorry, you've obviously either never played Viva Pinata or never played Animal Crossing since about the only thing that the two games have in common is bright colors. Viva Pinata is more akin to a mix between The Sims and a tycoon game. Even if it was similar to Animal Crossing, does that somehow not make it a good game? Perhaps we shouldn't be playing Half-Life 2 because id already did it "or something very similar"... they called it Doom and it sold for the PC 15 years ago.
While owners of game consoles might be more tech savy than your average sampling of the general population, I don't think it's that much of an increase. Consider that movie licensed game and sports games are the biggest sellers, while true gems often languish on store shelves. While tech savy does not necessarily translate to good taste in games, I take these sales trends to indicate two things. First, people are generally uninformed about their game purchase. Second, the game market extends a lot further than the "hardcore" crowd that would be more likely associated with being tech savy.
While the high initial cost of the 360 and PS3 mean that they're being purchased by mostly early adopters right now, as prices begin to fall you will see more and more average (and less tech savy people) buying these consoles.
I'm curious how this sits in respect to Net Neutrality. Using AT&T as an example (since they currently have Net Neutrality restrictions imposed by the FCC) why would Microsoft partner with them for IPTV? If it's to ensure larger bandwidth that could not be obtained over the network normally, wouldn't this be in violation of Net Neutrality? If there's no speed benefit to partnering with AT&T why offer the service through them at all? Why not make the service open to anyone who wants to sign up? It all seems rather pointless and unnecessarily complicated to me (as does just about anything involving digital media these days).
While there are obvious technical differences, the average user isn't going to know the difference between IPTV, downloadable video, VOD, or probably even your basic DVR. In the end, they all basically do the same thing, let me watch what I want to when I want to. In the end it just boils down to which solution, or combination of them, is the most cost effective and hassle free for the type of content I want.
People seem to be taking a very pessimistic view of IPTV and downloadable video, considering how young the technologies are. True, the Xbox Live offerings are pretty sparse, but the service is less then two months old. Of course cable TV has more options, they've been around for 3 decades now. However, I also pay extortion-like rates for those offerings, 95% of which I don't want or need. Announcements like this are encouraging to me, because I can envision a day not far off when they will provide viable alternatives to cable TV and bring some much needed competition to the cable companies monopolistic business practices.
"if i can drive a chevy, i can drive a honda, and a buick" That's because they all function essentially the same. This is like saying, if I can use Word, I can use Open Office Writer, Writely, and Pages. The gear shift might be moved from the floor to the steering column, but it still does essentially the same thing. If I move to a completely different program though, like Photoshop, it's like trying to use those car-driving skills to fly a helicopter.
Really, it wouldn't need to be that fast. It only needs to download faster than the bit-rate of the video. For that you only need about 1-2 Mbps with good compression. The problem is that even though my cable company advertises my line a 6 Mbps, these files are only downloading at about 100 Kbps. Part of the problem is on Microsoft's end, part of the problem is with the cable company. However, it doesn't really matter to the average consumer who's fault it is. All that matters is that it doesn't work better than the alternative of driving to the nearest Blockbuster.