A Google PC?

[piratePenguin]

There's speculation that Google will release a PC with their own operating system for doing multimedia stuff and web browsing. T'would be interesting.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-predict1jan01,0,3503327.story (there are other predictions concerning Google and 2006 in there).

I can't see Google doing this, but I'd like to see it. It's not cheap to enter the hardware/operating system market, but there are things they could do that noone else could (advertisements everywhere!, so it could be gratis).
A Google handheld would be nice, because they could have Google Maps (and could use it to implement GPS, although this can already be done by anyone using the API.), and then they could have easy access to Gmail and Google Talk and other Google stuff.

[hm_murdock]

It would become a new way to sell things. Why actually sell products when you could give them away? And then, you can annoy people into not using them via the same ads that you require to turn a profit! Brilliant!

Cable and satellite TV proved that people will pay to be ad-free. Unfortunately, now cable channels, which get paid by the viewer to exist, run ads. It seems to be a corporate thing these days. You can't exist unless you do something to help out some other CEO.

[piratePenguin]

Cable and satellite TV proved that people will pay to be ad-free.

I would've thought most people would be paying for the TV.
I know I wouldn't normally pay (at least not much) to be ad-free. I don't mind ads.

[Calum]

i hate them, but only now that i can see channels where they are on all the damn time. most cable channels seem to have adverts for literally half the airtime. On the BBC channels, there are no adverts, and on ITV and channel 4, there are only adverts every quarter hour, and if the show is an hour long, you'll only get two advert breaks in it. Then WHAM! hundreds of american channels filled with adverts arrived on our screens.

anyway, they don't say much about this google OS, do they? 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...

[worker201]

Moving away from topic, I think that television's largest problem is not ads.  It's the futility of the star based system.  All 80+ channels get sent to your house, whether you watch them or not.  HBO gets sent to your house, even if you don't pay for it - it gets descrambled at the cable box on the side of your house.  Just blasting the receivers with as much crap as possible is not an efficient way to run anything.  I want "The Daily Show", "The Colbert Report", and "Law&Order" at my house, and would be willing to pay $5 or $10 per month for them.  But I have absolutely no interest in any of the other shows or channels.  So cable's main problem is their distribution method, not their programming or ad-based revenue system.  

I doubt that Google is brave enough to step beyond this sort of firehose model.  The question is, who will?  DuoMaxwell and I had an idea to offer this sort of service, but we don't have the money to make it run.  And the people who do have the money have no balls or ideas.

[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]

anyway, they don't say much about this google OS, do they?

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.

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...

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]

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.

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.

[worker201]

Somebody needs to split this thread.

I just got a great idea to reduce piracy simply and efficiently.  Make optical media expensive.  Right now, you can get cds for less than a dollar.  When the only cost involved in music piracy is that low, there's almost no reason to not do it.  Make the discs $5 each.  The only thing a cd is good for is music anyway - if you need to back up files, get a portable hard drive.  Of course we all know that the reason cds are so cheap in the first place is that the costs were driven down in order to sell cd burners.  Anyway, the whole music/film industry is truly fucked up as it is, and I doubt that raising the price of optical disks would unfuck it.

Calum, you mentioned the possible loss of paid music due to hard drive failure.  I feel I should point out that iTunes has a way around this.  With a single click, you it will check your drive for a song you purchased.  If it doesn't find it, it will redownload it for you, at no cost.  This system also protects you from interrupted or corrupt downloads - simply delete the busted file and get another one.

The problem I have with iTunes is that it tends to reset itself whenever you do any kind of firmware install.  When my graphics logic board was replaced, iTunes treated it as if I had a new computer.  I had to reauthorize that computer to play my purchased songs.  You can only do this 5 times, and I have now used up 3, all with the same computer.  So there's that to deal with.

I still think that per-item licensing is not the way to go with this sort of thing.  A bulk license would be better.  Like royalty-free images.  I was thinking about a bulk license payment that would be made up front by the content distributor, and then amortized by the consumer.  So I pay 10,000 to distribute a program, and then charge people $1 to buy it, or $10 to register for free downloads.  Eventually, my licensing costs would be covered, and the people who downloaded the stuff could do whatever the hell they wanted with it.

These are the kind of questions that have to be answered.  There is a ton of independent and foreign tv, movies, games, and music that is just waiting for an audience.  Whoever gets a hold of it can answer these questions in a way that is more equitable and makes more sense than the current paradigm.

[piratePenguin]

Looks like there won't be a Google PC, ah well.

[Aloone_Jonez]

This is a good thing as it probably would've been shit anyway, it would've been shit hardware running a shit OS similar to Linspire.

[Calum]

When the only cost involved in music piracy is that low, there's almost no reason to not do it.  Make the discs $5 each.  The only thing a cd is good for is music anyway

i have to disagree. first of all, who makes the money from this? people who do not deserve it. also, in a free market, anybody upping the price of this media will simply be undercut by others and go quickly bankrupt. Also, i am a musician and i create CDs to sell using blank media. I am not breaking any law and i consider cheap blank CDs to be a helpful technological aid (a necessity?) for me to make affordable CDs of my own music. Why should i pay extra for a bunch of script kiddies downloading music illegally to burn to CDs?

- if you need to back up files, get a portable hard drive.

no. i'll continue to use my CD writer, one of the reasons i got it, actually. I think having more than one way of doing something is very helpful in a world where everybody is different. Also, what's the difference in cost between a portable drive (which could and will eventually fail at any moment) and a pack of CDs? I know which one i would rather buy. Also, my local supermarket doesn't sell hard drives.  

Of course we all know that the reason cds are so cheap in the first place is that the costs were driven down in order to sell cd burners.

not because they're cheap shitty bits of plastic then, no? if what you say is correct, then who is subsidising cheap CDs now that it's 20 years later?  

Anyway, the whole music/film industry is truly fucked up as it is, and I doubt that raising the price of optical disks would unfuck it.

me too. this i agree with.

Calum, you mentioned the possible loss of paid music due to hard drive failure.  I feel I should point out that iTunes has a way around this.  With a single click, you it will check your drive for a song you purchased.  If it doesn't find it, it will redownload it for you, at no cost.  This system also protects you from interrupted or corrupt downloads - simply delete the busted file and get another one.

cool idea. i presume the list of downloaded files resides on the server then? This is actually a very good idea. I am not aware that iTunes is available for fedora though, so that's me out of the running for the use of this scheme.

The problem I have with iTunes is that it tends to reset itself whenever you do any kind of firmware install.  When my graphics logic board was replaced, iTunes treated it as if I had a new computer.  I had to reauthorize that computer to play my purchased songs.  You can only do this 5 times, and I have now used up 3, all with the same computer.  So there's that to deal with.

this is just one of the many idiotic things that will prohibit legitimate users from getting what they deserve, while at the same time unscrupulous script kiddies will be happily cracking this sort of thing and getting away with murder.

I still think that per-item licensing is not the way to go with this sort of thing.  A bulk license would be better.  Like royalty-free images.  I was thinking about a bulk license payment that would be made up front by the content distributor, and then amortized by the consumer.  So I pay 10,000 to distribute a program, and then charge people $1 to buy it, or $10 to register for free downloads.  Eventually, my licensing costs would be covered, and the people who downloaded the stuff could do whatever the hell they wanted with it.

yep, excellent. this is what i was trying to describe above, i think.

[piratePenguin]

This is a good thing as it probably would've been shit anyway, it would've been shit hardware running a shit OS similar to Linspire.

Or Windows?
http://pack.google.com/
Google are doing a pretty good job of taking care of Windows computers (something Microsoft should be doing), I'd say they wouldn't do a bad job with their own multimedia/internet OS.

So you bought a new PC for yourself or a relative during the holidays. There was the initial excitement about its speed and the nice screen