Talk:Octoshape

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Why do you want to delete it?

This is a genuine technology, which has just as much right to be mentioned as anyother P2P streaming programs such as peercast.

You can find a technical review on http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/trev/trev_303-octoshape.pdf from the renowned organisation of public broadcasters in europe.

Best, Bernino Lind

This article is a verbatim copy of a PDF, likely the one you refer to. This infringes copyright (unless you own the copyright and agree to put the PDF into the GNU Free Documentation License). Aside from the copyright issue, it is not written in the neutral point of view and encyclopedic style that Wikipedia requires. Octoshape has relatively few Google hits, indicating it is not (yet) particularly notable. Just because something is "genuine" doesn't mean it deserves a Wikipedia article. Haakon 22:09, 14 December 2005 (UTC)


A big problem with the article is that it is not written in encyclopedia style (it may be good essay). Since it is very specific I do not expect a Wikipedia editor will pick it up and give it better form (in reasonable time frame). I still think it would be best to be deleted. Pavel Vozenilek 00:06, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

As a sidenote, I wanted only to explain that in Spain, "Radio Televisión Española" (RTVE) (the national radio and television public service broadcaster) is broadcasting both its "24 Horas" and "Docu TVE" channels using octoshape's plug-in. I was able to freely download the plug-in from a link in the RTVE site. Nevertheless I had never seen that plug-in before. I also think that the article should be either rewritten from scratch or deleted. 81.203.157.106 15:11, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Cons: Can't try it out

It's not free, and the free trial demo is not valid for home users. Only companies and organizations. --ScarletSpiderDave 04:49, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bandwidth usage analysis

I am User:Henning Makholm, an employee of Octoshape, editing from an ad-hoc account for CoI segregation purposes.

Most of the figures currently given in the Bandwidth usage analysis section are completely wrong (possibly the result of flawed measurement procedures) and make our technology look significantly worse than it actually is. As the entire section is unsourced and appears to be the original research of the anonymous editor who inserted it, could some uninvolved editor please remove it? Thanks. Octoshape 13:13, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Done: as you say, those stats are completely unverified. Tearlach 17:51, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Uninvolved review of COI edits requested

I request review of a series of edits I made to the article recently. The edits removed or corrected unsourced (and untrue!) negative claims about our product.

I know that the recommended procedure is to describe the desired edits on the talk page and then wait for somebody else to do them, but I decided that it would be clearer to do than to describe, in light of the number of small changes as well as the low level of activity on the talk page. The edits may readily be undone in case I overstepped. I will, of course, be happy to discuss each change here if my edit summaries are not found convincing.

I don't think any of the individual edits are problematic; in each particular case our outside aims appear to be well in line with the interest of the encyclopedia. However, my selection of what to correct is inherently biased: If I were (hypothetically) to come across similarly unsourced positive claims about our product, I would not act to remove them. Therefore it might be desirable for somebody uninvolved to look over the current state of the article critically. Octoshape (talk) 11:32, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I have no connection to the interested parties. I am a software developer, but in a completely different field, so I think I'm qualified to comment. I've reviewed the following edits and below are my conclusion and analysis for each:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Octoshape&diff=182712894&oldid=181876811
TOS - edit okay - I don't think it does put them at the risk of violating their terms of service. Terms of service usually preclude running "commercial software" and "servers", where I think a "server" is something that provides services to third parties who connect to the "server", whereas the p2p software that is described in the article I would classify as a "client" program. I would only support re-instating this section if a reference could be found where an opinion by a Service Provider was given that attempts to classify "client side programs that utilize upstream bandwidth" as a TOS violation.
EULA - edit is okay - comment in edit history notes that EULA has been changed and should no longer prohibit such things
edit should be reverted - I think this should be kept in the article. Could be expanded to explain why it is a valid Con. IE: with VOIP being more prevelant, and multiple computers in the typical family home sharing bandwidth - being prohibited entirely from running a bandwidth shaper to make sure one person in the house doesn't saturate your uplink, and not being able to run a QOS shaper to make sure your VOIP phone gets the low latency it needs - are clearly possible Cons. I have at least two techie friends who run such home networks with VOIP and who have their own firewalls/packet-shapers, and if the EULA was strictly enforced, it would be a Con for them. Whoops, I didn't read the edit history that explains that. CraigWyllie (talk) 02:00, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
unaware ... "all available bandwidth" - edit is okay - The implication prior to the edit is that it will use all of a person's bandwidth. That type of assertion would require a reference or source citation.
no upload bandwidth limiting capabilities - edit is okay - The edited version is still accurate and true.
Cheers, CraigWyllie (talk) 01:53, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for your review. Perhaps you could help with an additional point that is bothering us, namely the sentence "It does not get very clear when downloading this program that it will use the user's connections for broadcasting." The trouble with this is that the typical way to get the program is to download the program from a link at a broadcaster's website, because the user wants to see content provided by that broadcaster. We depend on the broadcaster's web people to explain to users what will happen, but we have no power to check that they do it forcefully enough. (In many cases we don't have the ability to check because the broadcaster's website is in a language we do not speak). All in all, it is not meaningfully a property of our streaming technology per se how well informed the users are when they start using it. The best we can do is to flash an EULA after our program is downloaded — which we do, but that does not ensure that it will be read.
I have not tried to fix this, because I do not trust my ability to construct a neutral replacement. But I would appreciate if someone else had a try. Octoshape (talk) 00:15, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Response to EdJohnston's comments at WP:COIN:

For the record (not that I think EdJohnston meant to imply otherwise): To the best of my knowledge, the creator of the article is not affiliated with our company, nor have anybody at the company ever edited the article except for the four edits logged under this username. We know that some of our end users are very enthusiastic about our technology; we have been assuming that the peacocky language in the article was inserted by one of them.

If I try to wear my Wikipedian hat for a moment, EdJohnston is quite right about the lack of reliable sources. Unfortunately I have no reliable Wikipedia-quality sources for technical facts to offer. The fact that Octoshape exists can probably be documented by newspaper mentions, as can the fact that this or that broadcaster are our customers. But that will source only the stubbiest of stubs.

A problem apart from the lack of sources is the "pro/con" layout of the article. For example, the article lists as a "con" that our technology shifts much of the bandwidth burden from broadcasters to listeners. We cite that very fact as a "pro" when we market our services to broadcasters. Any attempt to group claims into "pros" and "cons" inherently fixes a particular POV for the article. However, it is clearly not for me to try to fix that issue. (Wikipedian hat off).

In a world as big as this one, one can doubtlessly find ISPs who forbid their users to run any P2P software at all. The reason why we take issue with claiming this as a "con" is that our most relevant competition is not pure client-server streaming, but other vendors of peer-to-peer streaming solutions. Naturally, we're not happy with having this possibility listed as a particular "con" for us when it applies uniformly to our competitors as well. Octoshape (talk) 00:15, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Section break

From a look at www.octoshape.com, it seems that some big national broadcasters have used Octoshape, and such outfits are usually not shrinking violets. Wouldn't they have written or broadcast something about Octoshape? If Octoshape is sold to a large provider, do they then distribute it to their customers? Wouldn't they have written something to explain it to their customers? Due to the nature of the product, it seems inevitable that stuff must have been written about it. Another thing you might be able to tell us is who some of your competitors are. Though for some reason people are reluctant to say, knowing how large Octoshape is as a company is useful if this is to be thought of as a business article (employees, business volume, market share, or anything similar). EdJohnston (talk) 02:14, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

In this edit I tried to moderate the product claims, given that no reliable sources are available to confirm details. If the new version gets any facts wrong, or fails to be neutral, please let me know. Feel free to add new claims if they can be confirmed from any reliable sources. EdJohnston (talk) 05:53, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
Looks better, all in all. Some minor comments:
  • I would remove the "100% stable" sentence completely — it used to be a silly claim somebody wrote in Wikipedia; now it is a silly claim attributed to us! Nothing is ever 100% stable; if you disconnect the network cable and leave it out for long enough, any streaming system will eventually stop playing. Robustness in this area is about how gracefully the system can recover from trouble that is temporary enough to survive in the first place, and "100%" does not denote a meaningful metric here.
  • I'm not sure how much sense the "there should be no need to reconnect to another relay" list item makes, unless one already knows what it tries to say. Eventually, of course, one does need to establish a connection to another node to compensate for the one that went away. The point is that we do that smoothly and transparently, which might be expressed more clearly by just adding "... without interruptions or discontinuities" to the end of the previous item.
  • The Windows version is as Java based as the Linux and Macintosh ones. (But neither one is, at the current time, a pure Java program).
As for sources, there is stuff such as this link or this one; more of the same kind may be found. I would hesitate to call them independent reliable sources, since they come from customers that we have an active business relationship with, and some of it echoes our own marketing material. But perhaps I'm too cautious here?
I'm not at liberty to disclose anything about market shares or financial figures. Similarly for competitors; some of them will be found in the lists at P2PTV or Peercasting, but I'm not going to disclose which of them we take how seriously. (It should perhaps be noted that I'm neither a manager nor a marketer at Octoshape; I was chosen to liaise with Wikipedia because I'm the guy in the office who has the most prior editing experience.) Octoshape (talk) 19:45, 14 January 2008 (UTC)