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Father of DVD Gets Bitter Reward
Ant writes "MSNBC has a
Newsweek article on Warren Lieberfarb, the father of DVD, transformed the movie business. And yet his reward was he was fired."
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This guy wasn't fired because he was smart. He was fired because the company knew that they had shortchanged him and they didn't want him hanging around to hassle them about it. He was exploited and, when he demanded fair compensation, he was shown the door.
Doesn't that say it all? Yo, music industry!
But hey, if we're making assloads of money the way we do things now, why risk something new?
The church was mad at Galileo becasue he didn't follow procedure with his findings. Plus he was a 'in your face pope' kind of guy.
The church did create the first public observatory.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In the future, will there be a place for a "hard" medium that you can touch and store on your shelves? Lieberfarb believes that answer is no. "The future will see video on demand delivered over the Internet, and movies will be just one of the offerings," he says.
Can anyone else see the possibility of large hard disks (or their equivalent newer tech) becoming more difficult to buy retail? The googles and 'distributors' of the world will have bulk deals directly with the manufacturers, the majority will watch 'on demand' and the nerd/geek minority will have to pay more as hard disks are no longer a 'consumer item'. Copyright interests would no doubt see this as improvement, as 'average Joes' would lose the ability to store stuff themselves, having to 'pay per view'.
Thoughts anyone? Will there be a mainstream application that will require privately owned data storage, keeping data storage as a consumer item?
Not because he's wealthy, but because he seems like just one of the many high energy, ego-driven assholes who inhabit the business world. He seems to have treated his peers just as poorly as they've treated him.
Let's put this in our terms. Say you're making $50,000 a year and you're due a bonus of $125,000 (I dunno why, but this is what happens) but then your immediate superior says, 'Hey, you can get $1 Million in stock options instead of the bonus.' And seeing as how this is a good bit more than what your bonus would be, you say "Fuck yeah!" and do it, but then the company does something retarded, and your stock option become completely worthless. Then, on top of that, they fire you, and give you one year's pay severance. So, instead of getting $1.05 Million, or even $175,000 in bonus and severance, you're stuck with the $50,000 in severance. I think I would be pissed in this situation. Now for this guy, it's the same situation, just that there is a lot more money involved. Instead of getting $25 Million bonus, or getting the $125 million in options, he gets $10 Million in severance. There's a big difference between $125 Million and $10 Million. So, in his shoes, I would be bitching, too.
Right, putting Papal quotes into the mouth of "Simplicus" and publishing the work in vernacular Italian (meaning "Simplicus" would be pronounced as a word meaning "stupid") didn't have anything to do with it.
There's a differnce being persecuted for nobly insisting on scientific truth, and being persecuted because you flamed the local absolute ruler in an era where freedom of speech was a concept yet to be invented.
As Homer is walking through a landfill:
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
No. It makes him a tool. At best, it makes him painfully naive.
Let me tell you a little story, nigh upon 20 years old at this point. My employer at the time developed a piece of software that was leased, not sold -- elaborate support contracts and all that. To ensure that a client didn't just stop payments and continue using their copy, I was ordered to create a copy protection system that would kill the application in 90 days. The idea was that clients would receive an updated copy every 60 days, provided they kept up with the payments.
Technical problem: Most of the users would not quit the program when they were done for the day, they would shut the machine off, preventing usage metrics from being written to the disk. I would detect such a case and subtract a day's worth of usage time. Some time later, Management decided that they wanted to encourage orderly shutdown of the app, and ordered me to change it such that ten days worth of usage would be lost if the machine was simply shut off. So I did. After all, they were Management, and it was My Job.
Do the math: 90 days total usage divided by 10 days per power-off equals... An important client's installation self-destructed, per Management's specifications, after two weeks.
Guess whose ass got fired for it.
I have since sworn an oath that I will never, ever design or facilitate copy protection measures again, for one simple reason: There is no honor among thieves. Copy protection is a deliberately introduced flaw, a capacity for failure that would not otherwise exist. They are stealing reliability from you. They are stealing your rights from you. I like to think of myself as a man of good character, and I will not burden my conscience or soil my reputation by participating in such reprehensible practices. I suggest you seriously consider doing the same. It's your future, after all...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I am kicking myself now for forgetting his name too.
/. type geek here. If anybody can remember his name, I (and the /. crowd here) would totally appreciate it.
I met him at COMDEX while I was visiting the Toshiba booth back in '97. I was in the process of writing a DVD-Video authoring system, and it was refreshing at the time to talk to somebody who actually had a clue regarding the internals of the format, and I got a few pointers from him at the time. What was particularly interesting, besides having him wander around the corporate booth unescorted by salesmen, was the fact he was hiding out in a comparatively obscure corner of the 10,000 sq. foot booth hanging around a bunch of chips and data sheets. A definite
While Lieberfarb may get the credit, it was a bunch of geeks working primarily for the founders of the DVD Forum that actually got it working, and it was not an easy accomplishment. The Kareoke features of DVD, in particular, as well as oriental character encoding (which is why DVD uses sub-pictures rather than ASCII to encode text... a good idea BTW), show a strong bias toward Japanese companies and some really strange bureaucratic design compromises. I wish I knew more about the history of DVD-Video, but the format certainly whent through several design changes before it was formally released, including some major design goals that changed mid-way through the development process. I would like to see that story fully told.
I decided to investigate this matter a little.
Often new words are formed by using roots from a single language, often either Greek or Latin in the West. Mixing Greek and Latin is often viewed as bad form. When I see mixed constructions, I most often find that the person either is kidding or never learned such a fine point. It is not a significant failing not to know, but my ears certainly perk when I hear someone reveal how subtle his or her sensitivity to language is by speaking well. It is only so impressive when someone does it without calling attention to it. My rambling assumes that I know enough myself to notice, and I doubtless do not in many cases.
"Heliocentric" definitely is the common word. The "-centric" prefix, according to Merriam-Webster, is Latin, as is "sol." Kentron is a Greek word. It appears to me that the relevant suffix from either Latin or Greek is "-centric," but all the fairly common words I found with this suffix are built from Greek.
I am not a linguist. I just like words.
I can't speak to this individual, but often times there are rules about when and how stock can be sold. For instance, if a company goes public, it is often 3-6 months before employees can cash in their stock, and as much as a year before executives. I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar restrictions in effect in this case.
I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't restrictinos either either, but things like this are often 'negotiated' as part of termination settlements. 'You don't sue us, we give you $100M in stock, but you can't sell it for a year.'.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
He accepted stock, believing it to be worth more than it ended up being. A lot of people lost money in the merger. It wasn't anything personally directed to him.
Agreed.
During the tech boom, like thousands of others I was offered a decent salary and large number of stock options to leave my current job and move into a new company.
I accepted the offer. In the end, after stock splits, acquisitions/mergers, delays, blahblah the stock options weren't worth much. I was a bit surprised but then again I was naive. I'd do the same again: taking a certain degree of risks tends to increase opportunity from my experience. It wasn't a Bad Thing at all either: I gained so much from that job, including a great deal of respect from work colleagues, management and other people in IT.
Getting paid in options is a gamble and I doubt this guy has any more of a legal leg to stand on than anyone else. Some dude told him "I'm gonna make you rich". Heh, same here. Bad luck. That's life.
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"