Chinese officials are probably mortified by the possibility that some day, Chinese citizens may band together/organize over the internet, and decide to have a spontaneous uprising or two of their own against the ruling authorities, just like happened in the Arab world. Seen through this prism, unwanted spreading of rumors with any potential political implications or "viral properties" may be seen as an "early sign" of people bonding/moving together online in spontaneous ways the authorities frown upon. There is another possibility to consider as well. To this days we don't know how much of the online-component of the "Arab Spring" was genuinely Arab youths, and how much was potentially "fake social media accounts" created by forces outside the Arab world, and utilized to spur the Arab revolutions on, ensuring that they happen (who knows whether Mohammed1331 is a real person, or a fake account created somewhere in the West?). China may be worried of something similar being done in China and may see "unchecked rumor spreading" on its microblogs as a potential source of spontaneous, viral bonding, intended to cheerlead an eventual uprising...?
The probably answer is that they don't. If things falling into earth's atmosphere (e.g. small meteorites) burn up nearly completely during the trip, then the same should happen to those 1cm Ejecta falling into another planet's atmosphere, no?
It seems that companies think of social media in two ways only: 1) Can we use this to our advantage? 2) Can this be used against us? They don't seem to understand that YOUR social media account actually REPRESENTS YOU on the internet, as in your ONLINE IDENTITY. So what they are asking you to do is analogous to making you stand on the sidewalk in front of a supermarket with a bullhorn, in a yellow chicken-suit, and then making you shout "Fred Freddson's Eggs are the BEST EGGS in the market. Buy today! You'll LOOOOVE these eggs!" at anyone who passes by? Would you do this in real life if your employer asked you to? Its up to you to decide whether "Astroturfing" on social media is as bad as that. How much do you like your job? If you depend on it financially, then yes, by all means, do some Astroturfing. If the job sucks on the other hand, and you think you can find a better one, by all means, tell your employer "You know, I shouldn't be FORCED to use my social media accounts for the good of the company... There are better ways of marketing a product." Good luck with your job...
The free market is a "vehicle for freedom and self-determination" only for people who get the "top jobs" in an economy and "call the shots" from the top of the pyramid. That would be 1 - 5 percent of the population, depending on the country you live in. For almost everyone else, unfettered ("unregulated") free-market capitalism is a system of abuse and serfdom that lasts a lifetime. Do you like Software/Content DRM? It was dreamed up by supposed "free-market capitalism". As was almost everything in the modern world that kills/maims/abuses/denigrates/disadvantages the common man. The hard-left and hard-right will never enter a synthesis, because the hard-right is so morally corrupt, exploitative, predatory and irresponsible that nothing good can come from cooperating with the hard-right. Period.
If this reasearch is correct, people living under Socialism (where cooperation is high because it is mandatory and forms the very basis of the system) would wind up becoming smarter than people who live under Capitalism (where competition/versus behaviour and everyone-for-himself thinking is closer to being the norm, relatively speaking). This is an interesting result from a politics perspective, because proponents of unfettered, hard-core capitalism often charicature socialist systems/ideologies and the people who live under them as being "unfree" or "living like cattle". Quite a contradiction of views/results, eh? One could infer from this, that hard-core capitalists lack the "cooperative intelligence" that a working socialist system creates to such an extent, that hard-core capitalists cannot even comprehend how a cooperation-socialism based system works - because they never developed a comparable cooperation-based intelligence themselves. Of course it is somewhat silly to arrive at this result purely based on a clever neural-networks exercise that has been conducted by some PhD students. But the hypothesis of capitalists never developing, and thus largely lacking, the cooperative-intelligence needed to live in a socialist society is interesting nevertheless, is it not? It might explain why hard-core capitalists are so keen at swining rhetorical wrecking balls at anything that has even a small whiff of "socialist cooperative model" to it... Like Open Source Software - which is very much a product of cooperative intelligence - for example. To put it more simply, maybe prominent capitalists like Bill Gates cannot help dissing open source efforts like Linux, because they are, from a personal development standpoint, largely unfamiliar with the kind of cooperative-intelligence that a more "socialist" mode of product creation promotes.
NetSoft InternetEscaper? Netcraft MicroScapeExplorer? MicroCape NetExCavator? A strange marriage, this on... I'll just stick to using FireFox, thank you...
Everybody with half a brain has known for decades that radiation, whether it comes from an X-Ray or the current mess that is the Fukushima NPlant, is dangerous, and very much capable of causing cancer. So how on earth did it take THIS LONG for the link between dental X-Rays and brain tumours to be made? I don't want to get all conspiratorial, but it seems to take 3 - 5 decades each time, for something involving radiation actually being linked to cancer. For example, after over 2 decades of rumors and talk about it, we still don't know with any degree of certainty whether cellphones/mobilephones do or don't cause cancer. Given the overall time trend established, we'll probably know for sure, say, 2 - 3 decades from now, when its too late for any of us to stop using a mobile phone.
It seems to me that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook et al are currently so dominant in creating 2 - 3 year consumer market-trends, then collapsing them, and pushing yet another nouveau 2 - 3 year trend into the marketplace, that new computing science graduates will have a very, very difficult time "making their mark" in the computing world. I feel that the world of computing, a few years ago, was more open to individual CompSci artisans creating seriously interesting things, and these things growing wings if people liked what they created. Today, if it doesn't get pushed by AppGoogFaceMicrosoft, hardly anyone notices that it exists, or even possible. Good luck to our new CompSci graduates. The world you will be thrown into when you graduate won't be a garden of roses...
If you are someone who has a vested interest in making people's lives as "transparent" as possible, putting as many "human-detecting" devices in people's homes as possible is precisely what you'd do. If this "smart floor" is cheap enough, you'll probably find it included, at some point, in many newly built houses. The only way you could truly "opt out" of that smart flooring would be to either have the entire flooring ripped out and replaced with passive flooring, or to cut off the electricity supply of the smart flooring (What if they can transmit electricity to it "wirelessly" however? Tesla thought/proved this was possible, no?)
You missed a few inventions. Apple also invented the Wheel, the Spear, Bow&Arrow, Gunpowder, Basket Weaving, Marbles, Feng Shui, the Gramophone, the Radio, the Radar, the Telegraph and a few thousand other important things, including Nikola Tesla (they wanted to call that last invention iNikola iTesla, but his mother didn't like that name...).
http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_AMIGAmini.aspx.... The new AMIGA MINI comes with a 3.5 Ghz i-7 CPU, up to 16 GB RAM, GTX 430 GFX, 600 GB SSD, HDMI/DVI out and 8 USB ports. Sure, it isn't a real "AMIGA", but its cool that there is at least an "attempt" to put AMIGA branded computers back on the desktop.
Long live Commodore! And long live the C64 and Amiga 500! Good times...
In theory, patents are designed to protect "genuinely new and useful inventions" from being copied/manufactured instantly by just anyone. This is intended to reward the inventor for doing "the hard work of inventing". In practice, big companies will file for a patent for virtually anything, and anything at all, that they can think of. Sometimes this doesn't work, because the "device" or "method" supposedly being invented is something ludicrously obvious. But in many cases, patents are simply handed out on a "first applicant gets the patent" basis. If you are the first to file the patent, you are the party that will receive the patent. Even if it is something bloody obvious. Like a pressure-sensitive floor (I've seen this done, experimentally, over a decade ago).
Our TV broadcast signals reached them years ago... They saw Reality TV programs like "Keeping Up With The Kardashians", "Big Brother Austria" and "MTV Teenage Cribs". Horrified, they quickly hid their planets from view with giant cloaking devices, hoping that the Earthlings never find them... ever...
No, no, no. In Soviet Russia, floor stands/spies on YOU. I insist that it be this way! =) Really... I do... Um, okay, actually no... Soviet Flooring tells me it has to be this way... Otherwise Soviet Flooring drop away, and become trapdoor I fall through...
In IBM/Soviet Floor Industry, Smart Floor Stand on YOU!
But seriously, this stupid patent actually mentions "detecting your teens throwning a party while you are away, if the floor detects there are more than six people in the house".
Is this really a problem that needs a technological solution? And how much does it cost to have 400 sq meters of "smart floor" installed in your house to begin with? 50K or so?
While I agree with your first sentence, copyright infringers being dragged into court and asked to cough up xxxxx thousand dollars per infringment IS a government problem, because such high fines are, technically speaking, a "human rights violation". Believe it or not, receiving a disproportionately tough/hard/long sentence over only a "small infringement" is a human rights violation. And human rights law is, since 1974, "Internation Law". So if the government doesn't protect you from getting a f____ed up, expensive, hard-core sentence for downloading a film or two, then that government has failed to honour its responsibilities vis-a-vis International Law.
99% of piracy is caused by a failure to A) produce high quality content that "sattisfies" in the first place B) identify the correct "asking price" for the content and C) distribute it in a way that your target audience actually wants it to be distributed. You may think that your latest 200+ million dollar "John Carter Screws some Four-Armed Martians" is worth "at least" 12 - 15 Dollars per person viewing. The very people who would watch such CG- and action-heavy teenboy-fantasy-dreck in the first place, however, may value watching that film at only 10 Dollars, or 7 Dollars, or perhaps even 3 Dollars and 50 Cents. A Typical Situation Develops: A) your content quality doesn't sattisfy the viewer B) its priced at 2x or 3x what your typical viewer wants to pay for it C) the only way to watch the blody movie is a 4 hour trip to the cinema, or a 2 - 3 month wait for it to hit DVD/BluRay. The whole "product chain" is set up wrong. You can't produce something that sattisfies (= incompetence), you overcharge for it (= also incompetence), and there is no option to watch it from home for a few bucks when it come out (= also incompetence).
Remember your basic MBA training, Hollywood "moveeemaking" folks: The Right Product, released at the Right Time, aimed at the Right Audience, at the Right Price, paired with High Product Quality, and distributed/delivered to the customer in the Right Way. You fail to follow this basic "Product Success Advice" at EACH AND EVERY STEP, then wonder why people are sitting at home, downloading your movie for free from Internet Torrents instead. Then you fail to LEARN from your business model's innate problems (the worst of which, currently, is poor quality films couple with overpricing and a dated distribution model), and then try to make the NEGATIVE RESULTS you yourself have engineered, by sending lawyers and law enforcement folks to clobber downloaders flat. This is a piss poor business model, and the only reason that it doesn't roll over and die completely (people walking away to consume a substitute-product) is that A) CG-effects and B) A-list actors are, at this point in time, far too expensive for the Europeans and Asians and others to put much of either in their films. That picture will look different in a decade or so, when high quality CG effects will cost perhaps 1/5th or even 1/10th of what they cost today, and American A-list actors make a habit out of working with talented European or Asian "Auteur" filmmakers again (like used to be the case with the old French "New Wave" and Italian "CinneCitta" films).
>> Their DRM and control freakery is driving away customers by the millions, which is a shame, the hardware itself is pretty decent.
As I said in my posts above, Sony is not a company capable of learning from its mistakes.
Hardcore DRM in PS4? It may actually tank Playstation 4, regardless of the raw CPU/graphics performance it delivers.
That, in turn, could, strangely enough, be good for PC gaming, with people buying a cheap gaming PC instead of DRMstation 4.
I don't know who precisely is responsible for Sony's relationship/reputation with its users going downhill. All I know is that Samsung makes damn nice looking/feeling quality electronics for a very competitive price, and that unlike Sony, Samsung isn't engaged in any of the nastiness (proprietary components, DRM, HD format wars et cetera et cetera) that Sony has been spewing at its users for the past decade. A new CEO taking over at Sony? GOOD! I hope that he's "awake-awake" enough to fix the crazy, user-unfriendly course Sony is currently on, and has been on for the past decade or so. Removing all DRM from the Playstation 4 experience would be a good start. As would putting manual focus-rings back on Sony handycams... As would lobbying to lower the price of BluRay movies... Lots of things a new CEO could do to make Sony the good old, reliable "SONY" again...
There was a time - in the 80s, 90s - when Sony was perhaps THE company to buy quality products from. A Sony CRT TV or VCR was sturdy, reliable, and offered a high quality (visual) experience for the time. A Sony Walkman or Discman was, again, a quality product that was most usable and dependable. A Sony Betamax or VHS home-video camera, and later its much smaller (digital) handycams would, similarly, give you a quality home video experience. Then, at some point, Sony started going downhill in terms of corporate philosophy: Putting proprietary, expensive & incompatible Sony memory-sticks into Sony digital cameras? Selling 60GB HDD videocameras with no manual focus-ring, and not entirely reliable always-on autofocus? Putting DRM on music CDs, in PC Games, and all over the Playstation 3 experience? Branding handycam lenses "Zeiss Vario-Tessar" to lure buyers, even though the lenses are manufactured by Sony, not Zeiss (Sony just bought the right to call them "Zeiss" lenses)? Selling large, heavy, expensive LCD TVs while advertising that they include the fantabulous "Bravia Engine" (a collection of very, very mediocre video sharpening/upscaling/color/contrast algorithms). Sony Vaio laptops that are seriously expensive, while offering only very mediocre hardware specs? Killing HD-DVD, then failing to offer a decent (low) price on BluRay players and movies. Being a main player in demanding that all HD content be played back through HDMI cables - what was so bloody "wrong" with analogue HD cables? While Sony was slowly loosing its "focus on the user experience" and on "end-user and buyer sattisfaction" in particular, once far lesser brands like Korean Samsung zipped onto the scene with products that look, perform and, overall, please better, and without Sony's premium pricing attached. I'm sorry that Sony has fallen so low. It used to be my go-to brand for consumer electronics. But Sony isn't a company that learns from experience. I personally think that Playstation 4 will flop badly - at least initially - if Sony persists in forcing hardcore DRM and always-on-internet-to-play type shit on PS4 gamers. Wake up, Sony! Wake up before your corporate-crapfest-philosophy costs another 10,000 or 20,000 Sony employees their jobs. (Will Sony actually wake up? Not a chance, I think. PS4 will quite likely wind up being a horrid DRM fest that may actually drive some gamers back to gaming on a PC...)
Slashdot Mirror
Chinese officials are probably mortified by the possibility that some day, Chinese citizens may band together/organize over the internet, and decide to have a spontaneous uprising or two of their own against the ruling authorities, just like happened in the Arab world. Seen through this prism, unwanted spreading of rumors with any potential political implications or "viral properties" may be seen as an "early sign" of people bonding/moving together online in spontaneous ways the authorities frown upon. There is another possibility to consider as well. To this days we don't know how much of the online-component of the "Arab Spring" was genuinely Arab youths, and how much was potentially "fake social media accounts" created by forces outside the Arab world, and utilized to spur the Arab revolutions on, ensuring that they happen (who knows whether Mohammed1331 is a real person, or a fake account created somewhere in the West?). China may be worried of something similar being done in China and may see "unchecked rumor spreading" on its microblogs as a potential source of spontaneous, viral bonding, intended to cheerlead an eventual uprising...?
The probably answer is that they don't. If things falling into earth's atmosphere (e.g. small meteorites) burn up nearly completely during the trip, then the same should happen to those 1cm Ejecta falling into another planet's atmosphere, no?
It seems that companies think of social media in two ways only: 1) Can we use this to our advantage? 2) Can this be used against us? They don't seem to understand that YOUR social media account actually REPRESENTS YOU on the internet, as in your ONLINE IDENTITY. So what they are asking you to do is analogous to making you stand on the sidewalk in front of a supermarket with a bullhorn, in a yellow chicken-suit, and then making you shout "Fred Freddson's Eggs are the BEST EGGS in the market. Buy today! You'll LOOOOVE these eggs!" at anyone who passes by? Would you do this in real life if your employer asked you to? Its up to you to decide whether "Astroturfing" on social media is as bad as that. How much do you like your job? If you depend on it financially, then yes, by all means, do some Astroturfing. If the job sucks on the other hand, and you think you can find a better one, by all means, tell your employer "You know, I shouldn't be FORCED to use my social media accounts for the good of the company... There are better ways of marketing a product." Good luck with your job...
The free market is a "vehicle for freedom and self-determination" only for people who get the "top jobs" in an economy and "call the shots" from the top of the pyramid. That would be 1 - 5 percent of the population, depending on the country you live in. For almost everyone else, unfettered ("unregulated") free-market capitalism is a system of abuse and serfdom that lasts a lifetime. Do you like Software/Content DRM? It was dreamed up by supposed "free-market capitalism". As was almost everything in the modern world that kills/maims/abuses/denigrates/disadvantages the common man. The hard-left and hard-right will never enter a synthesis, because the hard-right is so morally corrupt, exploitative, predatory and irresponsible that nothing good can come from cooperating with the hard-right. Period.
If this reasearch is correct, people living under Socialism (where cooperation is high because it is mandatory and forms the very basis of the system) would wind up becoming smarter than people who live under Capitalism (where competition/versus behaviour and everyone-for-himself thinking is closer to being the norm, relatively speaking). This is an interesting result from a politics perspective, because proponents of unfettered, hard-core capitalism often charicature socialist systems/ideologies and the people who live under them as being "unfree" or "living like cattle". Quite a contradiction of views/results, eh? One could infer from this, that hard-core capitalists lack the "cooperative intelligence" that a working socialist system creates to such an extent, that hard-core capitalists cannot even comprehend how a cooperation-socialism based system works - because they never developed a comparable cooperation-based intelligence themselves. Of course it is somewhat silly to arrive at this result purely based on a clever neural-networks exercise that has been conducted by some PhD students. But the hypothesis of capitalists never developing, and thus largely lacking, the cooperative-intelligence needed to live in a socialist society is interesting nevertheless, is it not? It might explain why hard-core capitalists are so keen at swining rhetorical wrecking balls at anything that has even a small whiff of "socialist cooperative model" to it... Like Open Source Software - which is very much a product of cooperative intelligence - for example. To put it more simply, maybe prominent capitalists like Bill Gates cannot help dissing open source efforts like Linux, because they are, from a personal development standpoint, largely unfamiliar with the kind of cooperative-intelligence that a more "socialist" mode of product creation promotes.
In Soviet Russia, Brain Voxels divide YOU into 3,000 three dimensional units.
Am I the only one who read this as "U.S. Aircraft Carriers Finally Doing Something About Cellphone Theft"?
In Soviet Russia, Best Buys YOU! ...or... In Soviet Russia, YOU are Best Buy Loss! ...or... In Soviet Best Buy, Russia buys YOU!
NetSoft InternetEscaper? Netcraft MicroScapeExplorer? MicroCape NetExCavator? A strange marriage, this on... I'll just stick to using FireFox, thank you...
Everybody with half a brain has known for decades that radiation, whether it comes from an X-Ray or the current mess that is the Fukushima NPlant, is dangerous, and very much capable of causing cancer. So how on earth did it take THIS LONG for the link between dental X-Rays and brain tumours to be made? I don't want to get all conspiratorial, but it seems to take 3 - 5 decades each time, for something involving radiation actually being linked to cancer. For example, after over 2 decades of rumors and talk about it, we still don't know with any degree of certainty whether cellphones/mobilephones do or don't cause cancer. Given the overall time trend established, we'll probably know for sure, say, 2 - 3 decades from now, when its too late for any of us to stop using a mobile phone.
It seems to me that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook et al are currently so dominant in creating 2 - 3 year consumer market-trends, then collapsing them, and pushing yet another nouveau 2 - 3 year trend into the marketplace, that new computing science graduates will have a very, very difficult time "making their mark" in the computing world. I feel that the world of computing, a few years ago, was more open to individual CompSci artisans creating seriously interesting things, and these things growing wings if people liked what they created. Today, if it doesn't get pushed by AppGoogFaceMicrosoft, hardly anyone notices that it exists, or even possible. Good luck to our new CompSci graduates. The world you will be thrown into when you graduate won't be a garden of roses...
...and thousands of Chinese boys will line up to sell their kidneys to get one.
If you are someone who has a vested interest in making people's lives as "transparent" as possible, putting as many "human-detecting" devices in people's homes as possible is precisely what you'd do. If this "smart floor" is cheap enough, you'll probably find it included, at some point, in many newly built houses. The only way you could truly "opt out" of that smart flooring would be to either have the entire flooring ripped out and replaced with passive flooring, or to cut off the electricity supply of the smart flooring (What if they can transmit electricity to it "wirelessly" however? Tesla thought/proved this was possible, no?)
You missed a few inventions. Apple also invented the Wheel, the Spear, Bow&Arrow, Gunpowder, Basket Weaving, Marbles, Feng Shui, the Gramophone, the Radio, the Radar, the Telegraph and a few thousand other important things, including Nikola Tesla (they wanted to call that last invention iNikola iTesla, but his mother didn't like that name...).
http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_AMIGAmini.aspx .... The new AMIGA MINI comes with a 3.5 Ghz i-7 CPU, up to 16 GB RAM, GTX 430 GFX, 600 GB SSD, HDMI/DVI out and 8 USB ports. Sure, it isn't a real "AMIGA", but its cool that there is at least an "attempt" to put AMIGA branded computers back on the desktop.
Long live Commodore! And long live the C64 and Amiga 500! Good times...
In theory, patents are designed to protect "genuinely new and useful inventions" from being copied/manufactured instantly by just anyone. This is intended to reward the inventor for doing "the hard work of inventing". In practice, big companies will file for a patent for virtually anything, and anything at all, that they can think of. Sometimes this doesn't work, because the "device" or "method" supposedly being invented is something ludicrously obvious. But in many cases, patents are simply handed out on a "first applicant gets the patent" basis. If you are the first to file the patent, you are the party that will receive the patent. Even if it is something bloody obvious. Like a pressure-sensitive floor (I've seen this done, experimentally, over a decade ago).
Our TV broadcast signals reached them years ago... They saw Reality TV programs like "Keeping Up With The Kardashians", "Big Brother Austria" and "MTV Teenage Cribs". Horrified, they quickly hid their planets from view with giant cloaking devices, hoping that the Earthlings never find them... ever...
In Soviet Russia, your mother-in-law stand on YOU!
No, no, no. In Soviet Russia, floor stands/spies on YOU. I insist that it be this way! =) Really... I do... Um, okay, actually no... Soviet Flooring tells me it has to be this way... Otherwise Soviet Flooring drop away, and become trapdoor I fall through...
In IBM/Soviet Floor Industry, Smart Floor Stand on YOU! But seriously, this stupid patent actually mentions "detecting your teens throwning a party while you are away, if the floor detects there are more than six people in the house". Is this really a problem that needs a technological solution? And how much does it cost to have 400 sq meters of "smart floor" installed in your house to begin with? 50K or so?
While I agree with your first sentence, copyright infringers being dragged into court and asked to cough up xxxxx thousand dollars per infringment IS a government problem, because such high fines are, technically speaking, a "human rights violation". Believe it or not, receiving a disproportionately tough/hard/long sentence over only a "small infringement" is a human rights violation. And human rights law is, since 1974, "Internation Law". So if the government doesn't protect you from getting a f____ed up, expensive, hard-core sentence for downloading a film or two, then that government has failed to honour its responsibilities vis-a-vis International Law.
99% of piracy is caused by a failure to A) produce high quality content that "sattisfies" in the first place B) identify the correct "asking price" for the content and C) distribute it in a way that your target audience actually wants it to be distributed. You may think that your latest 200+ million dollar "John Carter Screws some Four-Armed Martians" is worth "at least" 12 - 15 Dollars per person viewing. The very people who would watch such CG- and action-heavy teenboy-fantasy-dreck in the first place, however, may value watching that film at only 10 Dollars, or 7 Dollars, or perhaps even 3 Dollars and 50 Cents. A Typical Situation Develops: A) your content quality doesn't sattisfy the viewer B) its priced at 2x or 3x what your typical viewer wants to pay for it C) the only way to watch the blody movie is a 4 hour trip to the cinema, or a 2 - 3 month wait for it to hit DVD/BluRay. The whole "product chain" is set up wrong. You can't produce something that sattisfies (= incompetence), you overcharge for it (= also incompetence), and there is no option to watch it from home for a few bucks when it come out (= also incompetence). Remember your basic MBA training, Hollywood "moveeemaking" folks: The Right Product, released at the Right Time, aimed at the Right Audience, at the Right Price, paired with High Product Quality, and distributed/delivered to the customer in the Right Way. You fail to follow this basic "Product Success Advice" at EACH AND EVERY STEP, then wonder why people are sitting at home, downloading your movie for free from Internet Torrents instead. Then you fail to LEARN from your business model's innate problems (the worst of which, currently, is poor quality films couple with overpricing and a dated distribution model), and then try to make the NEGATIVE RESULTS you yourself have engineered, by sending lawyers and law enforcement folks to clobber downloaders flat. This is a piss poor business model, and the only reason that it doesn't roll over and die completely (people walking away to consume a substitute-product) is that A) CG-effects and B) A-list actors are, at this point in time, far too expensive for the Europeans and Asians and others to put much of either in their films. That picture will look different in a decade or so, when high quality CG effects will cost perhaps 1/5th or even 1/10th of what they cost today, and American A-list actors make a habit out of working with talented European or Asian "Auteur" filmmakers again (like used to be the case with the old French "New Wave" and Italian "CinneCitta" films).
>> Their DRM and control freakery is driving away customers by the millions, which is a shame, the hardware itself is pretty decent. As I said in my posts above, Sony is not a company capable of learning from its mistakes. Hardcore DRM in PS4? It may actually tank Playstation 4, regardless of the raw CPU/graphics performance it delivers. That, in turn, could, strangely enough, be good for PC gaming, with people buying a cheap gaming PC instead of DRMstation 4.
I don't know who precisely is responsible for Sony's relationship/reputation with its users going downhill. All I know is that Samsung makes damn nice looking/feeling quality electronics for a very competitive price, and that unlike Sony, Samsung isn't engaged in any of the nastiness (proprietary components, DRM, HD format wars et cetera et cetera) that Sony has been spewing at its users for the past decade. A new CEO taking over at Sony? GOOD! I hope that he's "awake-awake" enough to fix the crazy, user-unfriendly course Sony is currently on, and has been on for the past decade or so. Removing all DRM from the Playstation 4 experience would be a good start. As would putting manual focus-rings back on Sony handycams... As would lobbying to lower the price of BluRay movies... Lots of things a new CEO could do to make Sony the good old, reliable "SONY" again...
There was a time - in the 80s, 90s - when Sony was perhaps THE company to buy quality products from. A Sony CRT TV or VCR was sturdy, reliable, and offered a high quality (visual) experience for the time. A Sony Walkman or Discman was, again, a quality product that was most usable and dependable. A Sony Betamax or VHS home-video camera, and later its much smaller (digital) handycams would, similarly, give you a quality home video experience. Then, at some point, Sony started going downhill in terms of corporate philosophy: Putting proprietary, expensive & incompatible Sony memory-sticks into Sony digital cameras? Selling 60GB HDD videocameras with no manual focus-ring, and not entirely reliable always-on autofocus? Putting DRM on music CDs, in PC Games, and all over the Playstation 3 experience? Branding handycam lenses "Zeiss Vario-Tessar" to lure buyers, even though the lenses are manufactured by Sony, not Zeiss (Sony just bought the right to call them "Zeiss" lenses)? Selling large, heavy, expensive LCD TVs while advertising that they include the fantabulous "Bravia Engine" (a collection of very, very mediocre video sharpening/upscaling/color/contrast algorithms). Sony Vaio laptops that are seriously expensive, while offering only very mediocre hardware specs? Killing HD-DVD, then failing to offer a decent (low) price on BluRay players and movies. Being a main player in demanding that all HD content be played back through HDMI cables - what was so bloody "wrong" with analogue HD cables? While Sony was slowly loosing its "focus on the user experience" and on "end-user and buyer sattisfaction" in particular, once far lesser brands like Korean Samsung zipped onto the scene with products that look, perform and, overall, please better, and without Sony's premium pricing attached. I'm sorry that Sony has fallen so low. It used to be my go-to brand for consumer electronics. But Sony isn't a company that learns from experience. I personally think that Playstation 4 will flop badly - at least initially - if Sony persists in forcing hardcore DRM and always-on-internet-to-play type shit on PS4 gamers. Wake up, Sony! Wake up before your corporate-crapfest-philosophy costs another 10,000 or 20,000 Sony employees their jobs. (Will Sony actually wake up? Not a chance, I think. PS4 will quite likely wind up being a horrid DRM fest that may actually drive some gamers back to gaming on a PC...)