Michael 's Techdirt Comments
Latest Comments (168)
-
On the post: Is IPv6 A Solution In Search Of A Problem?
-
On the post: Where Does The Internet Rank As A Utility?
Michael ( profile ), 26 Jan, 2008 @ 06:25amThe Internet is Phone's Successor, anyone who thin
The subject pretty much says my opinion flat out. The Internet does for our thinking machines what the phone did for our speaking abilities.
Except that our thinking machines can send anything from quick notes to whole books, videos, or even the plain old voice communications. Only now the marginal cost of everything is rushing towards zero due to the successful tracking of moore's law to this point making the thinking machines at every node ever cheaper and ever more efficient at using the tubes of glass connecting them.
It has also because of the very nature of it being an inter-network directly benefited from that same progression making processing and storage at any given leaf node very much larger and less expensive at the same time. Geometrically growing the value of the network. While those same rates of change might not so easily continue, at the very least cost should go a bit lower and there's at least a bit of very likely progress to be squeezed out of the existing manufacturing processes for all of those parts.
Thus, it already has surpassed phone service as a need. It may not be vital to basic survival in general, but it is vital to being an integrated unit within society. Just look at the trends between POTS, Data services, and Cell phones. Cell phones only win out because they're so portable and still (often) less expensive then the more powerful thinking machines for network access. -
On the post: Why AT&T's Plans To Filter The Internet Will Only Do More Harm To AT&T (And Everyone Else)
Michael ( profile ), 22 Jan, 2008 @ 12:23pmMight be repeating some stuff, but I'm short on time right now and want to make sure these points are addressed.
1) Encryption is a benefit to anyone wanting to keep private things private, or control distribution of their information. It will be central to business models, private communication, and anyone trying to break the law to any degree... and you won't be able to tell who is doing what. You can't force people to hand over their freedom by making them use a vulnerable algo, and processing for that on the fly would cause insane lag anyway.
2) When you make the types of content transfered transfer at different rates, without being fair or transparent about it, the easiest solution will be to encapsulate/tunnel the content. Any redundancy or headers already there will then be repeated or even increased in the outer wrapper.
3) Get a business model that works.
My ideal system would look something like this for billing.
* Account Fee: $5 per year
* Network Action Hotline: Free (Automated front end, you dial in the account number, it tells you what they think the status of the network is for you (up, down, area outage, etc) and if you disagree you can dial in details and checkoff a simple troubleshooting list over the phone. If at that list you don't mind being called back by a technician for additional questions you can leave them a callback number.)
* Network Support Hotline: $5 flat rate to do the above with a human. (If they can't help you isolate the problem in 30 min, they deserve to eat it.)
* Data Transfer: Billed by mega-bit (or byte, multiply cost by $ per second rate guarantee... )
* Data Pipe Class: (Depends on the hardware, flat rate lease per month...)
* Service Level: Various types of response packages, redundancy options (basically discount extra-links), and insurance against downtime.
...which means you're leasing that much of a pipe, dedicated 24/7. Rate structure something like BulkRate*(1+1/(Weight^((Speed-X)/(Y-X)))) , where Speed is the constant BPS, X is the speed where rate is 2x, Y is the speed where rate is close to 1, and Weight is how bent the slope is (If the Weight is too high relative to the difference in 2x and ~1x rates, then odd distortions in pricing occur.)
=1/POWER($C$1;(A12-$B$9)/($B$10-$B$9))+1 -
On the post: National Motorists Association Challenges Cities To Prove Red-Light Cameras Are Safer
Michael ( profile ), 09 Jan, 2008 @ 04:16amI agree, countdown is something I've wanted at a light for a long time. You don't even have to use numbers, just an extra light with them all one color, even 3 second ticks for change warning, would really help.
The other thing, besides longer yellows, that would help is actually timing the damn lights to let cars through, and posting the actual speed you should be going on the road (under the speed limit sign) that you should go to keep hitting greens. -
On the post: Is Banning Internet Usage For Sex Offenders Reasonable Or Practical?
Michael ( profile ), 29 Dec, 2007 @ 10:28amReally, there are levels of this problem. You've got one label 'Sex Offender' that can mean anything from someone who kidnaps, violently rapes, and maybe even murders. (Yeah, death penalty, unless someone can provide a recovery program with a better then 50% chance of full social re-integration.) However it can also apply to someone who didn't know someone was actually 16 or 17, instead of 18 like they might claim. It also means that acts of informed, consensual activity between individuals can be classified as 'statutory' (The law says you can't) non-consensual and therefore rape, maybe even violent depending on the area of enforcement, acts.
How should this be solved? Remove the victims from the equation. Educate all children, through school, to NEVER meet with anyone they know online, to NEVER give out any information that can let someone find them, to NEVER go meet with someone they don't know outside of a well populated, well lit, public place where it's extremely easy to 'make a scene' and get the real law enforcement involved.
A busy mall food court for example might be a good place, or a movie theater where silence is golden (maybe not with no alarm fire exits...)
Another thing that might be good is if legislation required that phones for children had an extra button (or button mapping) that required them to press the button once per period of time (an hour or two at most, but less if they set it that way), so that the 'dead man switch' would automatically go off and broadcast their GPS location to law enforcement and that they've failed to respond. Roll cars to the area, but get them on the line too, it could be a false positive.
Of course, you also make them enter an unlock code. It would be a code they set, and they'd have to set at least two, and change them every time they use them.
Only one code would be 'everything is ok, I'm safe', the other would make the phone appear to react the same way, but clearly tell law enforcement there IS a problem, and they're under duress. -
On the post: Anime Exec Responds To Fansubber Complaints
Michael ( profile ), 13 Dec, 2007 @ 06:06amDigital Distribution - Patent woes the blame?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071126/182202.shtml (Look at comment #41)
I was late then, and very long, but it boils down to the exact same things said here, and I also point out the biggest obstacle on this. Digital content naturally wants to trend towards a very low cost per unit due to the extreme ease of distribution. Barriers to that are greed from many parties. However the biggest nightmare are the Lawyers and Lobbyists.
Yes, our nemesis, out of control Patents. Communications standards, the very languages we use to exchange information content, must be developed somehow. Yes, people deserve to eat, but once that has been figured out, and the fixed research cost paid for, the cost of duplicating the idea is practically nothing with modern technology.
Patents might best be rectified by sourcing their cost of development, and applying a short (maybe 5 year?) time frame on monetary recovery, along with a cap of some multiplier or simple formula over the development cost. Within that 5 years/capped value, any additional 'licenses' would pay back to prior licensees and the innovators based on a pro-rated division of time relative to the remainder of the patent. (That is, whoever literally buys in to using the patent first would get the most back each time the increasingly standard method is used.) -
On the post: ISP Inserts Its Own Messages Into Google
Michael ( profile ), 13 Dec, 2007 @ 05:34amBreak them up just like long distance
The solution is easy for this one. You have a structure which like roads, water, sewer, and power, is at best a limited natural monopoly. The local community should actually be responsible for providing access to a more centralized data-exchange that you can purchase long-haul service from.
However the easiest way to transition out of this situation is to correctly break out the actual 'pipe' providers as private utilities. Force those to be the dumb pipes, and let whatever content providers want to buy in to ports at the dumb-pipe's peering locations for ultra-cheep inter-network access, or provide over the normal Internet do so. -
On the post: Did Anime Producers Go From Embracing Fansubbers To Blaming Them?
Michael ( profile ), 30 Nov, 2007 @ 03:21amThe problems with the obvious solution...
The obvious solution is to emulate the methods current fansubs use to achieve their success within an organized profit-making structure.
* Priced at a point which a customer feels Value.
* Timely out on a regular basis, likely not more then 1 week from air/release In Japan (further details later)
* Quality as good as current competition or better (the -good- Fansubs)
* Distributed digitally, your target audience is already technically competent enough to download episodes from the internet.
* The Catch, do it all Legally.
* Use Open standards that work for Every operating system.
First, to cut down on costs, and easy adherence to standards, open source protocols, and even software, should be used whenever possible. Hire an in house programmer/web admin or two, preferably cross trained, and have them make sure it functions well and has no security holes.
Next you have the sticky issue. While containers (EG AVI/OGM/MKV I prefer them in reverse order) are free, and audio has options that are free and still great (ogg/vorbis), video codecs, sadly, are not. Most of the efforts in producing codecs were researched early by huge groups of experts who patented their work (Excellent news in the future when the patents come off the stack.), and we've relied upon them sense. They simply got there first and won market share for it. Open source alternatives simply have not reached the level of maturity that VC1 or h.264 have. The sticky point here is something I've not carefully researched or asked.
V1.a) How much does a licence to produce/sell works made using said codecs cost? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_codecs#Codecs_list
V1.b) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Patent_licensing seems clear on Shipping products which have encoders/decoders. However it is entirely UNCLEAR about shipping content, or the use but not distribution of the GPL encoder for such content. I imagine such use would require V1.a for legal reasons...
V2) As an alternative how much does a good VC1/h.264 encoder cost?
With video encoding out of the way, a container (MKV preferably), and commodity server hardware/internet access the business model can come together.
* Contact (or be) a studio in Japan and acquire worldwide licensed fansub enhanced distribution rights.
* Build a community among the fansub translators, video editors, etc, to turn existing amateurs in to staff compensated based on work completed. Compensation can come in many forms. The obvious one is money, but offers of download credits, internet access, a place to host a server, all sorts of other non-monetary or not necessarily directly money related forms of payment could work. This would depend on a project by project, and/or staff by staff basis. Obviously a free copy of whatever they're creating should be a given. (They'll have to really love it to not be sick to death of it, and maybe they'll want to watch it again later during a marathon.)
* Provide your translators earlier access to the material they'll need to translate. Stills of notes/signs, audio recordings, even the original script if possible.
* Have high quality (Not necessarily high bandwidth, simplified versions for mobile video players or less capable playback systems should also be produced) encodings, HD/DVD quality or better as the basis.
* Sell on line, as soon as the original audio and video streams are ready. (Actually given credit card fees... more likely 'preorder by the series/season')
* The fansubs (maybe even multiple versions (like a Fast and High Quality later or even Censored/Americanized)) and if later dubbed English audio tracks would be properly priced additions.
* Recognize you are competing with free, not just no cost, but no -restrictions-.
This is the hardest part of all, you MUST sell these at an actual value for them to have a good reception. Bleach for example has 150+ episodes. You will simply not be competitive at over a dollar per episode for this series, or really, any other series. I'll look to Stargate DVDs I recently purchased, they had actual -value- for me. ~212usd for everything Stargate SG1. That's 10 seasons, 214 episodes, or about a dollar per 45 min of actual show. It even had bonus features, audio tracks, and 5 whole DVDs of extras. Plus these where on actual DVD disks, in a format I could play in a 20 dollar DVD player if I wanted. I had absolutely no need for fancy (expensive) hardware, managing my own storage space (hard drives/burning DVDs), or even providing a nice stylish case to store them in.
Those above reasons are all arguments to sell for even Less then 1 dollar. Probably something on the order of 25-50 cents when in buying whole series (or at least 'multiple seasons'). It's not all high action stuff either, every anime series of any length has filler episodes. The exceptions are those which are meticulously planned, like Hellsing (only 13 episodes though... but I don't recall -any- fillers).
My personal recommendation is to actually provide the end user a detailed breakdown, showing them the cost of each component when they're shopping so they can see the value (and provide feedback on things that look overpriced.).
The proof of purchase would probably need to be mailed, but a digital version may suffice.
Another item that could be sent through the mail (or sold to places like Netflix) would be officially licensed on demand DVD runs (Probably burned, but with actual proof it is legitimate).
Still, the primary form of distribution I haven't covered yet. Bit torrent is excellent for completely free things, and server based is fine, but realistically costs more (and should be seen as the middle ground between something peer to peer like bit torrent, and something direct like DVDs), and should be billed as more. While most of your users, the peek demand weekly ones, will instead want to use a peer to peer method.
The solution is to add security to it, making white lists for sharing to specific internet addresses based on account logins, only publishing peering data to them, and possibly even adding transport, but not content (that is tunnel unencumbered content via a secure pipe), encryption.
My highest recommendation design wise is to transfer the video, audio, and other component streams separately, so that they can be re-multiplexed in a normal container like MKV whenever an additional or updated track is available.
In this way, by planning ahead, providing a community and point of content synchronization, you can not only embrace and truly extend the fansub model, but legitimize it as well.
Most realistically this should work best when a studio themselves recognizes it as a new method of distribution. Every major studio would be best setting up their own, while independents and small studios would probably be better off with some shared service.
Most of the components that are really required already exist, and it's obvious to anyone technical that a solution (several in fact) could be built from those or similar pieces. However I don't think marketing executives, corporate directors, or anyone not technically inclined or in the fansub production/consumption community (or other extremely similar ones...) actually Gets that fact.
The Internet's two biggest advantages are Speed and far more easily scaling production (No physical production, maybe something commodity like burned DVDs or printouts snail mailed on the side.) to exact demand, in either real or extremely close to real time. It's high time every country's content producers realized it's a global market. There are no more information or distance barriers.
The upgrade path, as x86-64 must be coexistance
In order to get any traction at all, there must be an -easy- way for individual sites to serve the same content on the same hosts with the same domain names. Unfortunately other posters are correct. That means the core (DNS servers, various providers there of, and especially ISPs) must be upgraded first, then then edges can start to talk over the new addresses. Once that happens the benefits of having packets that are easier to route (read less latency for games/interactive content), larger (content again, more for videos), and that can actually directly reach consumer-end points without crippling hacks like port-mapping connections (Slashing latency, and, oh yeah, now acting like a server works too!) returning the connectivity that should have never been taken away.
Of course, that means that operating systems have to actually know how to drop malformed packets, not suffer from buffer overflows or any other lower level attacks like that.