Miscellaneous > The Lounge

A Google PC?

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cymon:
Something that would be nice is if it was done over the internet. You could get a subscription, or a card in your computer, that would descramble the content. You could watch the output on a television, or your computer monitor. Of course, the drivers would have to be ported to all os'es, and a FireWire or USB version would be available to the laptop users. Since it would be hardware, it would be immune to piracy.

worker201:
That wouldn't make it immune to piracy - a bunch of hackers working night and day could probably figure out the scrambler in a couple weeks.

The key to fighting piracy is to not let piracy bother you.  If your business model is based on selling the same product over and over to everyone, then piracy will hurt you.  Not with like chocolate bars, since those can't be used again once they've been used.  But trying to convince people to buy something they could just as easily borrow from a friend, well that's just plain stupid.

There must be some way to serve content to those who want it, and not care whether they redistribute it.  Perhaps an entertainment tax, where you pay for the service whether you use it or not, kinda like the way schools are currently funded.  Or, even better, we open up the market to independent media, whose costs can be easily funded by advertising or front-end user fees.  In such cases, piracy could still be discouraged, but if it did go on, it wouldn't be a huge deal.

cymon:
I never thought of cracking it, oops.

That seems to be what Apple's stance is. OSX is pirated, but it doesn't really bother them because they've already paid for the Mac.

piratePenguin:

--- Quote from: Calum ---
anyway, they don't say much about this google OS, do they?
--- End quote ---
Nope, probably something simple and specific to multimedia and web browsing. Like the OS on the Xbox, but instead of being based on Windows maybe it'd be based on one of the BSDs or GNU/Linux.

http://www.kottke.org/04/04/google-operating-system Interesting read about the huge computer some people believe Google are working on that everyone on earth can have an account on.

--- Quote ---
do you think the PCs will be bog standard x86 type PCs? do you reckon they will be some linux or BSD type OS? possibly gnu/hurd? it's have to be based on some free thing to keep costs down i would have thought...
--- End quote ---
Probably x86 or PPC. I doubt very much they'd be using GNU/Hurd. But if they intend on building the greatest operating system ever (which I doubt), GNU/Hurd wouldn't be a bad starting point. It's definetly something none of the Hurd developers know about, but Google could be working away behind closed doors and release huge patches when they're finished. They'd almost be as well to create, from scratch, their own microkernel servers, and just take ideas from the Hurd. The Hurd isn't in a great state right now - most people want to port it to the L4 microkernel, and they're mostly done with that, and now some of them wanna port it to other more advanced and experimental microkernels.

I'd say it'd be like the Xbox OS, and it might take stuff from GNU/Linux or the BSDs.

On advertising, if I could download episodes of Lost from someone licenced to give them to me that contained advertisements and were gratis, I'd download them before pirating them or paying for them.

I agree with worker201 on piracy. If you depend on selling something that can be reproduced at next to zero cost, then you should be greatful for any penny you recieve. But if things didn't turn out the way they did (bad), I'm not gonna pretend that I know how they would.

Calum:

--- Quote from: cymon ---Of course, the drivers would have to be ported to all os'es, and a FireWire or USB version would be available to the laptop users.
--- End quote ---


first of all there's no of course about it.

i would bet anything that if this ever comes into place, that it will be exclusively for windows and possible macosx users, and other OSs will have to rely on a poorly supported and constantly out of date (due to unneccessary changes in the protocols etc) community supported version.

secondly, the programmes change every week, by and large, so if you've paid for say episodes 1 to 6 of something, then that's what you get, then you could watch them again, because you downloaded them or screengrabbed them or whetever. i don't see a problem with this, they've paid for the programmes in the first place, so what's the deal? why should anybody make it hard for people to save programmes they have already paid for? also, they should get to download the stuff more than once if they have paid for it already once, this is my main problem with paid mp3 downloads too, if i have some hard drive failure then it suddenly represents a loss of hundreds of pounds worth of media content if i paid for a lot of downloads and hadn't backed them up to CD yet (which i think would be illegal to do anyway).

anyway. any idea what basis for google's OS? what architecture their 'PC' will have etc?
EDIT: sorry, didn't see that last post. excellent little thing about google there, i had wondered about that too, with google's 2GB plus quota for your inbox. most people wouldn't have got near the 2GB yet, but it's still a whackload of data i would have thought. they must have or be developing a virtually infinitely scalable cluster operating system.

to run gmail alone, i suppose you could have one machine (or a small cluster) doing the actual running and just have hundreds of disks, but you'd still need to make the system capable of addressing all those disks.

as you can see i know nothing about clustered systems, but it's interesting to start thinking about it based on this google related story.

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