On The Margins

Wednesday December 20, 2006

[ Technology ] Torrents to Distribute Video Content

Legal writers on the Internet have viewed it as a giant copying and distribution machine. They are not far off the mark, and from this position, they have argued that the Internet should be let loose as such a machine with only minimal limitations, and that the legislature need to reconsider and rewrite copyright laws to bring them back to their original intent. Let the machine do what it does best and figure out how to use it to benefit society at large, they have argued.

Roberto Chinnici and Michael Calore write about a major use of BitTorrent protocol for (copying and) distribution of video content from a major news media outlet, the BBC. 

This is a grand idea and a great use of the machine.

The only potential downside I could see is that BitTorrent works best when a piece is popular. For it to work for programming that does not always suit the popular taste of the masses, a major news outlet must also use enough torrent seeds to ensure these programs remain available for distribution. This way the less popular programming can still have the minimal torrent seeding necessary for efficient distribution while the more popular programming gets the benefit of additional distribution through the collaborative distribution BitTorrent makes possible as a piece becomes increasingly popular. In other words, popularity should (and can, thanks to BitTorrent) pay for itself.

One day, the designer of BitTorrent will be considered a great visionary who changed the face of the Internet. He made a great leap to make the copying and distribution machine more efficient and more fair.

2006-12-20 17:36:50.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
bittorrent content copyrights distribution internet news technology torrents video web

[ Technology ] Innovation on the Desktop

Bernard Traversat tells us about a new release of the Looking Glass Project.

Looking Glass is a 3D GUI desktop environment that provides robustness and stability for most of the 3D window effects. The 1.0 release gives the user better performance, support for JDK 1.6 and Java 3D 1.5, ease of installation with the mega bundle distributions for Solaris X86, Linux and wWindow. Bernard says that his team contributed lot of the X extensions to X.org. They also now have a Netbeans module for Looking Glass.

Innovations on the desktop do not come often and this one is worth a close, serious look. 

2006-12-20 17:17:29.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
desktop development gui software sun technology