Posts by Mo

Re: Why can't they do it right?

Apple's most unprofitable unsuccessful point is when they licensed the Mac OS to third parties, prior to bringing back Jobs.

Although DRM is bad…

…this isn't why it's bad. This is why subscription services are bad (which do, of course, depend upon DRM to work, but that's an implementation detail).

The real losers here are subscribers: they've just paid for the right to listen to the music for a set period, and so when the service closes its doors they no longer pay (and by extension, no longer have the right to listen to the music).

There's nothing legally or morally wrong with it per se, except that people who had a reasonable expectation that as long as they were willing to pay for it the music would be available are going to be sorely disappointed: if people knew the service would end in a couple of years when they first signed up, they would probably have spent the money buying tracks instead—which *is* dodgy.

Effectively, retailers shouldn't be offering subscription services unless they're prepared to support it more or less forever. Anything less is ripping off the consumer.

Re: PC World

Some corrections to your anonymous comment:

1. PC World have been a joke for at least the past decade.

2. Staff admitting they don't know stuff is fine, staff making complete tosh up isn't.

3. Selling products at high prices isn't so bad (market forces take care of that one), it's the selling of identical looking but slightly differently specced (with different aftersales policies) models from mainstream brands, like the Toshiba laptops that are made solely for DSG and are a lower spec (but inexplicably the same price) as the same model from other outlets, along with a requirement that you use DSG's 0870 technical support instead of the manufacturer's own.

The biggest source of confusion…

…is probably whether a given HDTV is 720i, 720p, 1020i, 1020p, and which is better for viewing which types of content.

Simply saying “HD ready” doesn't answer either of those questions to the average consumer.

Re: Just ship the media

You're entirely on the money with that.

Although they say “we don't all the content”, we know perfectly well that there's plenty of content they DO own the rights for. Existing technologies (torrent tracker with authentication, geolocation as part of the sign-up, and so on) would work wonderfully and mean they could release the video as H.264 (which is both standard and scaleable and playable on virtually everything, including most mobile phones and portable video players) instead of some Microsoft-proprietary format.

Their podcasts didn't have any DRM, and were released as H.264, and contained big chunks of recently-broadcasted programming. Guess what? Nobody complained, except that maybe the resolution was a bit rubbish for desktop playback.

So

The tribunal has ruled that Ofcom has to hand over the information, but the operators are under no obligation to give it to Ofcom in the first place?

And this has been going on since 2005!?

I'm all for making Ofcom DTRT, but this is a bit rubbish, really.

So tell me…

After I download a track, to my phone, what happens? Can I sync it with my iPod? When I plug it into my Mac or PC, does it appear in my iTunes library? Does it sync with _anything_? Or does it just sit on my phone, where it'll be practically useless to an awful lot of people?

Simple fix

Whenever somebody logs in (which is presumably over SSL), or out, you generate them a new session ID and invalidate the old one. Anybody who sniffed the cookie previously doesn't get access to the elevated credentials.

Universal and UMG

Although they share a name (and tactics, apparently), Universal and UMG are two completely different companies.

OS X

The iPhone runs (according to crash dumps and poking around on it) runs “OS X” not “Mac OS X”: “Mac OS X” is really supposed to be only for Macs, although the Apple TV does run a variant.

RE DRM-free

They charge a 30cent premium because it's a much higher bitrate. The lack of DRM is thrown in as part of the bargain.

My word

There's some complete and total drivel been posted in these comments, demonstrating a clear misunderstanding of any of the issues involved.

I really *really* hope that you lot aren't IT decision-makers.

VMware!?

Er, of course you can't run AIX on VMware. AIX for x86 hasn't existed in about ten years.

AIX is a POWER operating system, through and through. IBM doesn't really care about being able to run its operating systems in VMware, because IBM's *the* original player in the hypervisor space.

Legitimate licenses

Under the original SCO-Novell agreement, SCO is charged with collecting licensing fees, as it did from Microsoft and Sun.

What it didn't do—and was supposed to—was to turn 75% of those revenues over to Novell. SCO's just supposed to be an agent.

Sun and Microsoft are in the clear; SCO isn't going to be a target of Sun/MS litigation unless they believe they were duped into buying licenses they didn't need and can prove as much. The only shizzle is that SCO owes Novell more money than SCO has, by some considerable margin.

Endianness!?

There's no endianness or ambiguity when the month is written as a word instead of a number.

It isn't, however, correct to write “the” or “of” in the middle of a date: it's purely a spoken construct. If you want to be picky, it'd be “7th July” with proper superscripting, but I'd be surprised if an El Reg article managed that.

You're all missing the point

In 2007, nobody gets Internet access. It's all about the Web, baby.

See, although people often think they're synonymous, they're not, and those of us who think we're supposedly paying our ISPs for Internet access tend to get disappointed quite regularly.

Unfortunately, the same scenario is often mirrored in the mobile world (especially at the cheaper end of the market), where anything non-port 80 is regularly embargoed, and the Web traffic is non-transparently proxied to the hilt, despite being billed as “Internet access”.

Dumb

This isn't a smart move by MySQL. Yes, you can get the sources yourself, but that means being au fait with BitKeeper (and having a client available), whereas tarballs are… well, *the* way of distributing sources. I'd also be surprised if the BK repository contained the pre-generated configure script (and related autotools magic), meaning you've got to have the right versions of autoconf, automake and libtool present and correct before you can think about building it.

“If you can't make your own tarball, what in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster do you think you're doing with an SQL database server?”

Developer != sysadmin != DBA. To build, install and run MySQL from source you'll need to be all three.

Still, if anything's going to push people towards PostgreSQL, this will. Shame, really; MySQL 5 is quite a good RDBMS.

Mind you, doesn't Debian post the upstream sources alongside the diff and dsc required to build a .deb? Assuming they continue to distribute MySQL, all of the debian sources mirrors will continue to carry MySQL sources, which is presumably how FreeBSD Ports, pkgsrc, MacPorts, et al, will continue to work.

Mactel client?

Will 11g mark the release of a universal binary Mac client, I wonder?

Actually, will 11g mark the release of a universal binary Mac *server*?

I know Oracle aren't famed for the speed of their release cycles, but it's starting to get slightly ridiculous now.

Re: Content caching

That would work for the LLU ISPs, although the P2P nature of the iPlayer (and 4oD, etc, etc) means that you shouldn't need to: users of the same ISP will be nearby peers and—provided the P2P layer is functioning correctly—should be leeched from as appropriate.

For non-LLU ISPs, it doesn't help much. As others have pointed out, the problem really lies with BT Wholesale's pricing for the link between the exchanges and the ISP's own networks. Well, it doesn't; it lies with the fact that the ISPs are unwilling to pay BT Wholesale the sort of costs involved in letting people download as much as the ISPs are claiming people are able to.

There's not a massive amount hugely wrong with BT Wholesale's pricing in conceptual terms: you buy a pipe. The bigger the pipe, the more it costs. If you buy a huge pipe and only send 1Mbit/sec down it, that's a waste of resources that you're paying for, but it's the same as any other transit. The ISPs can't really have it both ways; if they want the kind of flexibility they need to be able to offer “unlimited broadband” and not be paying BT month-on-month for a bigger IPstream pipe than they need, they need to stop renting BT's kit and put their own equipment in exchanges. If the barriers to doing that are significant, then there's a problem that needs to be looked at.

Re: Secure, Open, DRM choose any two

…which indeed they've done.

FairUse4WM allows you to strip the DRM from 4oD's downloads (running on the same software platform as the iPlayer), so that they can be transcoded and played back with VLC on the Mac or other non-Windows machines. Shame the quality's fairly poor—straight H.264+AAC would have saved everybody a whole load of hassle, really.

The problem is that you still need to have a Windows machine to do it, and they're bound to “upgrade” the DRM system (and require users to install the update in order to download anything new) to close the hole sooner or later… until somebody does it again.

P2P

ad47uk is correct about the iPlayer not being the only service to use P2P—indeed, almost all of the IPTV services from traditional broadcasters use Kontiki.

The point about P2P is that it scales, and it scales *in the ISP's favour*: instead of massive amounts of data being transferred to and from its network to the BBC, P2P helps keep the vast majority of traffic within an ISP's own network.

Re:TV License

“Bad luck mate, read the Law. any device CAPABLE of recieving any type of broadcast (limit is screen size) so this includes internet broadcast and as such, ANY PC needs a TV Licence!”

Bzzt, wrong. The law doesn't say precisely those words. Go forth and look it up. Indeed, the rules were recently clarified. A PC doesn't need one unless it has a TV tuner card in (and shows signs of being used—if it happens to have one in but you've never installed the tuning software, or never set up the channel lists, you're in the clear). Similarly, TVs used just for games consoles and DVD players are fine—keep them away from an aerial and de-tune them, and you'll get a thumbs up from TV Licensing.

Hmm

Universal wants to try it out and test consumer reactions and piracy responses.

…but it doesn't want to sell through iTunes store, which is the market-leader in online music sales, by a country mile.

What's it intended to achieve, other than a flawed trial that is pretty much guaranteed to fail because it deliberately avoids the mass-market?

Oh, I think I just answered my own question.

Re: Which TV?

“Also, if you're using Linux, haven't you bought into the FSF idealogy anyway? If so, stop complaining and write your own iPlayer-for-Linux emulator!”

You can't. The specifications for the platform are closed and owned by Microsoft and Kontiki.

That's the _point_.

Re: Bad programming at Google

Yes, address-translating proxies do break that security: the sort employed by a number of very large and very popular ISPs; invariably a customer's site-facing IP address changes when you go from http to https and vice versa, which rather breaks the whole model.

So, Google could avoid it by tying cookies to IP addresses, but it would prevent a great many people from using Gmail. It would also be completely ineffective in preventing the attack demonstrated here, because most public wifi networks use NAT at the Internet gateway point and so your IP and the attacker's IP will be identical.

They could use SSL for the whole session, which would neatly avoid the problem, but that would make things incredibly slow, and IE6—still (just) the most popular browser on the planet—has all manner of irritating little SSL bugs which would cause Gmail to break for lots of people at random instances, both of which amount to the reason why many web developers avoid prolonging SSL sessions for longer than they have to.

Re: Dunno about you..

Computers *can* be just as secure as paper-based voting. It just invariably isn't in these contexts because actual computer security experts are rarely consulted at any point, or if they are their input is ignored. Instead, everything gets outsourced to somebody big, who is more often than not largely clueless.

There's absolutely no reason why an open source, open-ended, transparent, secure electronic voting platform can't be developed: it just takes time, effort, and suitable levels of expert scrutiny. None of the challenges involved are ones which haven't been overcome in the past, after all.

Re: To be fair...

“via their status website”

Where, O oracle, lies this status website? It's not linked to from anywhere obvious on their site and Google is unable to locate it, nor have their mentioned it (to my knowledge) in any of their newsletters.

Contrary to your belief, a 12-hour outage of a payment system is a *major* deal. An hour? That's a bad day. Two is pushing it. Anything more than that is beyond a joke.

Hmm

I've not been accepted into the Beta yet, though I do other IP-based TV delivery systems (and blog about them, on occasion…)

Even so, I've found the most effective way to get TV onto my Mac is to make use of the picture-in-picture mode of my flatscreen monitor which now conveniently has a Freeview box plugged into it…

Hardly my ideal solution, though.

Internet distribution

"Why, exactly, wasn't the URL to the source code good enough?

Is there any scenario where someone would want the source code of a VOIP phone's software, but is unable to obtain it through the internet?"

Because the license agreement—which they must abide by in order to use the software—was written before Internet access was widespread.

It may very well be a less than ideal requirement, though it's not hugely unreasonable, but if they don't like it they're free not to use GPL'd software in their products.

O rly?

"So the Beeb (who were going to support OS-X all along, just not at the launch)"

Really? I think you'll find that they use Microsoft's proprietary DRM (which isn't tied into the OS, incidentally, it's just not licensed to anybody for porting to other platforms). If they persuaded Microsoft to port it to any platform besides Windows, it'd be a bit of a coup.

The alternative is to not use Microsoft's DRM, or only use it for Windows users. There's nothing about DRM that means it has to be integrated with the OS, although for Mac users the BBC could just take a look at the iTunes Store, which has been providing downloadable episodes of various TV series in the US for quite some time now. For Linux users, they'd have to do something else.

“The Beeb should just make sure it works with WINE, and all will be well.”

That's not going to help the people who don't use x86. And WINE isn't exactly a production solution at the best of times.

Yes, RPM is irrelevant

RPM and cache size are merely means to an end. Give me performance stats in metrics which make sense: time, and give me power statistics in a similar vein. It could spin at 1RPM for all I care if the access times make it irrelevant.

O2's i-mode

i-mode failed in the UK because O2's implementation of it was abysmal. I bought a phone at launch, and gave up after a couple of months when there weren't any worthwhile services to speak of, the handsets were horribly buggy with no firmware (or PC connectivity—despite the mini-USB ports!) on the horizon, and the whole thing locked you into a walled garden of extremely limited appeal.

It was so bad, as I recall, that O2 had to extend the whole “free trial” period by three months to persuade people to stick around.

It's unfortunate, because the platform was fairly good: automated billing for services for prepaid subscribers worked well, for example. There were certainly some hiccups in the beginning that I saw, but on the whole the server side was fairly well put together, in technical terms. It's just a shame that pretty much nothing took advantage of it in any meaningful way.

Re: Yea great news

Oh yes, because it was the *unions* that drove the coal mining, steel, shipping, shipbuilding and carbuilding industries out of business in the UK.

How foolish of the whole damned entire world to believe otherwise.

It's really *really* easy to not end up on the wrong end of the disruption caused by industrial action supported by unions: don't treat any of your employees like dirt.

Er

The biggest flaw in the argument of a levy on hardware sales is that I'VE ALREADY PAID FOR THE CDs that I'm sticking on my iPod.

Why on earth should people be forced to pay twice? Even Steve Ballmer had to back down on his “The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'” quip.

Maybe I should have to pay a levy on each separate pair of speakers that I buy?