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Slashback: Drivers, Bodycomputing, Farscape
Maybe customer service isn't dead. On November 28th, we posted a report that OEM cards using ATI chips had trouble with the official drivers from ATI. Terry Makedon (Senior Product Manager, Software for ATI Technologies) writes "Last week we posted a set of unified Linux drivers. These drivers were only loading up on 'Built by ATI' cards. Through our various feedback mechanisms we have determined that there is a large community of 'Powered by ATI' Linux users that did not benefit from our Linux drivers. At this point we are happy to announce an update to our Linux driver (ver. 2.5.1) which will work on both 'Powered by' and 'Built by.' ATI's driver and software strategy is firmly based on responsiveness and we greatly appreciate the feedback our Linux users have provided. Please use http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/ for a direct feedback line to ATI.
Thanks again for the feedback."
But what if we put the show into this Interdimensional Fungubulon, and then jumped through this here "wormhole"? xagon7 writes "David Kemper, the producer/writer of Farscape, mentioned that it would be theoretically and legally possible for a group to set up a non-profit organization for fans to donate money to, in order to finance an episode and make Farscape all that much tastier to Sci-Fi for the 5th season. They have done just that. They have $200,000 worth of pledges and only need $800,000 total....I hope this gets Slashdotted. Read the story here and you can pledge here."
You're getting less happy to see me? man_of_mr_e writes "Check out MIThril, the next generation research platform for context aware wearable computing. It's been about 18 months since this was last talked about here on Slashdot, and it's kind of cool to see how far the technology has come since then. For those that aren't aware of what it is, it's essentially a project to prototype human wearable computers, complete with schematics, pictures, and a cvs repository for software. Now you too can be like that guy in the IBM commercials trading stock while feeding the pigeons."
Flattening the slope to entry. Catskul writes "You don't need the libwine hack, mentioned in the previous news entry. Just follow the New QT Howto, download the codecs and start MPlayer."
Don't look at me in that tone of voice! 1010011010 writes "On Nov. 26, you ran a story on SpeechView, 'software that translates the voice on the other side of the line into a three dimensional animated face on the computer.' The North Carolina State University Department of Computer Science's 'Voice IO Group' is also working on that problem. Their software looks like it might be better. Read about it here. Includes quicktime movies of the results."
Victory, or a reprieve? A non moose cow writes "Just noticed that a couple of my favorite "Killed by the RIAA" webcast stations are back... like Soma-FM and Monkey Radio (get the streams at Shoutcast). The saving grace came via the recent passage of HR5469 [PDF] by the US Legislature. Thank you to all that sent letters and/or money to fix this problem. If you have been yearning for the resurrection of your favorite stream, go check, it might be back. If you would like to trace the chronology of this mess, check out the Soma-FM news page."
Irregardless, maybe they could take it a step further and have an entirely fan-financed Farscape where the shows are shipped commercial-free on DVD to donors. I.E., some point to donating besides making what was already a very sweet deal sweeter for SciFi.
Because:
Farscape and well-fed children are not substitutes, in an economic sense. Each satisfy a unique need on the part of the donator.
Thus, while you may be correct that donating to a feed-the-children charity will make one feel better about one's self, that does not imply that donating to a feed-the-children charity INSTEAD of donating to a save-the-Farscape charity will make one feel MORE good. The law of diminishing utility implies that donating some money to save Farscape and some to save children will make a person MOST happy overall.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
I click into this story to see what geeks are saying about the update to ATI's drivers and I see lots of comments but not a single one about ATI.
Does this mean it's too late for ATI? Has the entire Linux crowd already gone Nvidia?
Yes, good point, and their begathon comes every year! Meanwhile the number and wordiness of thank-yous to corporate sponsors has been growing. (I mostly listen to NPR -- same problem.) Yet membership accounts for only 25% of revenue, so "viewer supported" is true but misleading. One-fourth supporting.
I went to the trouble of looking this up on the CPB site, so feast your eyes. Their financing is complex to say the least. The item "CPB Appropriation" appears to represent the federal government's $300 million share -- a pittance if you compare it to the $800,000 they want here for one episode of one show.
The point is probably just to get the pledges, to make an impression on SciFi whose bottomline motivation is money.
$1.7 mil USD is likely the production budget per episode, but $800,000 USD per episode is the ammount of money Sci-Fi network gave the production company at the start, with the theory being that the remaining half of the money would come in from other sources such as the infinite future of rerun rights (which Sci-Fi is apparently still buying) and other intellectual property licensing rights. Remember, all this money would buy them just one episode to wrap things up, they'd need to multiply it all by 10-20 if they want a full season.
As for this TVC entity, it should be very interesting to see what this builds into. If it were to be able to build up enough of warchest, it could finance the production of borderline shows that it knows there are enough fans to make viable, then collect a share of the revenues and use that income to finance future show-saving efforts. Of course, the whole point of this organization would be to finance shows that are good TV but are being canceled because they lose money, so TVC should seek non-profit status and always be soliciting donations.
As for distributing the show to maximize profits, I would suggest that TVC first sell the new episodes via DVD and pay-per-view at about $10-20 per episode in order to capture the outright hardcore fans who are willing to pay big to see the show continued. Then, about six months later enter into a prime-time time exchange with a TV network where TVC provides the show for free to a cable network in exchange for TVC being allowed to sell all but 2 minutes or so of the ad time. (Of course, if there is a network willing to pay for the show, that is the safer bet...) The idea of putting the show on free TV would be to attract new fans, and hopefully enough new fans would be brought in to make the show once again viable, at which point TVC could begin to pull its financial involvement out and find another show to rescue.
I'm curious, why would open-source developers need to sign an NDA? Isn't their work the ultimate disclosure?
If I'm using a Tivo, the Tivo's recorded the commercial -- the cable company can't tell whether or not, on a subsequent viewing of the show, I fast forward through the commercial.
Actually, they (Tivo) can. Tivo has always stated they collect anonymous viewing statistics, and I've read that commercial skipping is among the statistics they collect. Assuming that's one of the statistics Tivo would be willing to sell, it would be trivial for them to say "of 58,000 tivo owners that recorded last week's farscape, 96% of them skipped or fast-forwarded through the commercials". Of course, it's probably in Tivo's best interest NOT to release those numbers.. It would only reinforce what network execs already suspect: tivo owners (generally) don't watch commercials. This is why Tivo is starting to test other methods of getting ads in front of you, such as pushing them down to your box in nightly updates and displaying them prominently on your Tivo Central menu. *For now* you still have the option of whether you want to watch or not, but how long before Tivo forces you to sit through at least one ad before watching something you've recorded? Not trying to sound conspiratorial, just food for thought.
Shayne
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I got to say it was a good day -- Icecube
mplayer.c:2899: insn does not satisfy its constraints:
(insn 16703 17382 19207 (parallel[
(set (reg:SF 8 st(0))
(if_then_else:SF (ge (reg/v:SF 9 st(1) [1501])
(reg:SF 8 st(0)))
(reg:SF 8 st(0))
(reg:SF 9 st(1))))
(clobber (reg:CC 17 flags))
] ) 624 {*minsf_nonieee} (insn_list 17382 (nil))
(expr_list:REG_UNUSED (reg:CC 17 flags)
(nil)))
mplayer.c:2899: Internal compiler error in final_scan_insn, at final.c:2556
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
After a tedious email exchange with ATI support their final position is that the serial number from CD is insufficient proof of purchase. I need to supply a number which is located on the card and unreadable without reopening the case, dismantling the AGP support bridge and pulling the card. You would think they might mention "Write this number down before installing in case you need support later" somewhere in the installion instructions.
I told them if I had to pull the card out to get replacement drivers from them, then I might as well put the card back in the box it came in and exchange it for a Matrox. Screw ATI.