Except that new accounts aren't free -- they cost US$10-20/month per account. So creating a bunch of accounts can get expensive, making it only of interest to real hard-core DVD watchers.
Which raises the obvious question -- if the problem is that Netflix loses money to households that get more than 5 DVDs/month, why not be up front about the throttling and offer these households the chance to buy their way out of it?
In other words, just say "our Great Low Prices won't allow us to ship you more than x DVDs a month. For most of our customers, that's not a problem. However, we recognize that some of you dedicated fans out there want more than that. So upgrade your account for $y dollars per month and we'll ship them as fast as you can watch them."
It would require taking an initial PR hit for qualifying the "Unlimited rentals" promise, but it would (a) reinforce the idea that Netflix's base pricing is reasonable (since they're not piling up margins they can dip into to serve high-usage customers), (b) give them a way to turn a problem into a new revenue stream, and (c) earn them brownie points for being transparent with customers, instead of skulking around silently throttling accounts.
It's actually a pretty significant milestone for Mozilla because Songbird (AFAIK) is the first major product released that is built on the XULRunner platform.
XULRunner is exactly what it sounds like -- a small runtime to allow deployment of XUL-based applications on machines that may not have Firefox installed. Think of it as a JRE for XUL.
Until XULRunner, there was no practical way to build full-fledged apps using Mozilla tech that didn't run inside one of their products (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Seamonkey) because that was the only way to get access to a XUL interpreter. Songbird is an interesting demo of how XULRunner gets you beyond that.
Can you tell us which news outlets have agreed to give a company's PR person final approval authority for their reporting? I'd like to know so I can make sure to avoid them at all costs. Thanks.
A lot of this ill repute comes from the low standards that are attached to "entertainment journalism". Much of what passes for entertainment journalism is just repackaged PR -- stories fed to the correspondent by a celebrity's publicist, who then reprints it without investigation. A good journalist is supposed to check facts and corroborate stories with multiple sources, but in entertainment journalism assertions by a celebrity's "camp" ("TOM SPEAKS: KATIE IS THE MOST AWESOMEST WOMAN EVER") are considered "news" in and of themselves.
TV entertainment journalism is even worse; look at networks like E!, for example, and you'll discover how much of their programming consists of just running "video press kits" -- programs produced by a company looking to push a product or star and then handed over to the network to run. A common example of this is the "Behind The Scenes of..." program about a new movie -- these are produced by the studio that made the movie, not by the network (which is why they always show up as "extras" on the DVD of the movie). They're cheap to produce and distribute, and they help 24-hour networks fill air time, so everybody "wins".
When a newspaper takes a story off the wire, it is generally credited as such. Therefore, it is not plagiarism, as the paper is not claiming the story came from their own original reporting.
Look in your local paper to see what I mean. Stories that come off the AP wire usually have "Associated Press" after the author's name on the byline. Stories that the paper's staff wrote will carry their own blurb, which can vary from paper to paper. Looking at today's Washington Post, for example, I see "Washington Post Staff Writer" and "Washington Post Foreign Service" labels on all the stories on the front page.
Many smaller papers don't have the same resources the Post does, so the quantity of wire service reporting will be higher (my hometown paper is nearly all AP copy these days). But any reputable paper will label stuff they get from a wire or syndicate as such.
The interface isnt bad, its just simple (which is good in my books).
If it allows you to purchase videos that won't work on your system without ever warning you of that prior to purchase, it is indeed bad, not "simple".
Imagine if when you bought a DVD from Amazon they would just pick-to-ship by title, mixing discs of all different region codes together. When you got your new DVD, popped it in your player, and discovered that you had bought a Region 3 DVD that was unplayable on your Region 1 player, would you thank Amazon for "simplifying" the process? Or would you be upset?
My bet is you'd be upset -- especially when Amazon could obviate the problem altogether by simply matching your address (or what local store you buy from) to the appropriate region - which they do.
"Simple" makes doing the right thing easy. "Bad" makes doing the wrong thing easy. Google Video's UI is bad.
It could have been worse... it could have been "iMacBook Pro".
Or for that matter they could have bundled it with Windows for "iMacBook Pro XP" and created The Ugliest Product Name EVER!!! Truly a missed opportunity.
Reminds me of a joke I was told by an Air Force NCO while working on a base...
"The biggest reason why the armed services don't work together well is because they all speak different languages. For example, consider the phrase 'SECURE THE BUILDING'.
If you tell a Marine officer to 'secure the building', he will hand pick a team of six men to rappel into the building from a helicopter at night. They will then work their way down the building floor by floor, slitting the throats of everyone they meet, including the janitorial staff. When the reach the ground floor, they will run out the front door and yell at the top of their lungs that SIR! THE BUILDING HAS BEEN SECURED, SIR!
If you tell an Army officer to 'secure the building', he will organize a battalion-size strike force and march it off to a half-mile or so from the building. He will then call in artillery on the building until it is a pile of rubble. Then he will run up onto the rubble, plant an American flag and announce to nobody in particular that the building has been secured.
If you tell a Navy officer to 'secure the building', he will put the request in the chain of command, which will result in a cruiser 1000 miles away firing a single Tomahawk cruise missile that will fly out and turn the building into a smoking hole in the ground. The Fleet commanding officer will then issue a press release announcing that the building has been secured.
If you tell an Air Force officer to 'secure the building', he'll get you a five-year lease with an option to buy."
the US hired nuclear, rocket, and aviation scientists.... these were skilled professions who practiced their profession for their country; they cannot be tarred with a single 'Nazi eugenics' brush...
Hmmm... given your comments you might also want to check out Silent Storm -- it's a different scenario (WW2 rather than sci-fi), and the plot starts to get silly near the end, but it reminds me a LOT of the "good old days" of the original X-COM in the way it plays, right down to the destructible environments.
Neither LSN nor Silent Storm are as good as the original X-COM, though, for all the reasons you cite. Heck, I'd probably pay $20 just to get X-COM redone to run in Windows and take advantage of my 3D card...
Yeah, but that was back in the OS 8-9 days when MacOS sucked harder than a floor vacuum. (No multitasking!)
Nowadays what with the spit and polish of OS X and the plague of viruses and spyware that infests Windows I imagine you'd find a more receptive market among the Windows-oppressed...
Slashdot Mirror
Too busy blowing.
Mac PPC, or Mac Intel? ;-)
There are other titles in the library?!?
You're in luck :-) Python bindings are coming to XUL.
Mozilla is working with ECMA on that too. See Brendan's comments about ECMAScript 4/JavaScript 2.
At last we can have Tetris with regular expressions.
Except that new accounts aren't free -- they cost US$10-20/month per account. So creating a bunch of accounts can get expensive, making it only of interest to real hard-core DVD watchers.
Which raises the obvious question -- if the problem is that Netflix loses money to households that get more than 5 DVDs/month, why not be up front about the throttling and offer these households the chance to buy their way out of it?
In other words, just say "our Great Low Prices won't allow us to ship you more than x DVDs a month. For most of our customers, that's not a problem. However, we recognize that some of you dedicated fans out there want more than that. So upgrade your account for $y dollars per month and we'll ship them as fast as you can watch them."
It would require taking an initial PR hit for qualifying the "Unlimited rentals" promise, but it would (a) reinforce the idea that Netflix's base pricing is reasonable (since they're not piling up margins they can dip into to serve high-usage customers), (b) give them a way to turn a problem into a new revenue stream, and (c) earn them brownie points for being transparent with customers, instead of skulking around silently throttling accounts.
It's actually a pretty significant milestone for Mozilla because Songbird (AFAIK) is the first major product released that is built on the XULRunner platform.
XULRunner is exactly what it sounds like -- a small runtime to allow deployment of XUL-based applications on machines that may not have Firefox installed. Think of it as a JRE for XUL.
Until XULRunner, there was no practical way to build full-fledged apps using Mozilla tech that didn't run inside one of their products (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Seamonkey) because that was the only way to get access to a XUL interpreter. Songbird is an interesting demo of how XULRunner gets you beyond that.
Nope. For another example, see Food Force, distributed by the UN's World Food Programme.
Late.
Don't forget, these are the same geniuses who decided to name a product "Viiv". So I wouldn't put anything past them, idiocy-wise.
Can you tell us which news outlets have agreed to give a company's PR person final approval authority for their reporting? I'd like to know so I can make sure to avoid them at all costs. Thanks.
A lot of this ill repute comes from the low standards that are attached to "entertainment journalism". Much of what passes for entertainment journalism is just repackaged PR -- stories fed to the correspondent by a celebrity's publicist, who then reprints it without investigation. A good journalist is supposed to check facts and corroborate stories with multiple sources, but in entertainment journalism assertions by a celebrity's "camp" ("TOM SPEAKS: KATIE IS THE MOST AWESOMEST WOMAN EVER") are considered "news" in and of themselves.
TV entertainment journalism is even worse; look at networks like E!, for example, and you'll discover how much of their programming consists of just running "video press kits" -- programs produced by a company looking to push a product or star and then handed over to the network to run. A common example of this is the "Behind The Scenes of..." program about a new movie -- these are produced by the studio that made the movie, not by the network (which is why they always show up as "extras" on the DVD of the movie). They're cheap to produce and distribute, and they help 24-hour networks fill air time, so everybody "wins".
When a newspaper takes a story off the wire, it is generally credited as such. Therefore, it is not plagiarism, as the paper is not claiming the story came from their own original reporting.
Look in your local paper to see what I mean. Stories that come off the AP wire usually have "Associated Press" after the author's name on the byline. Stories that the paper's staff wrote will carry their own blurb, which can vary from paper to paper. Looking at today's Washington Post, for example, I see "Washington Post Staff Writer" and "Washington Post Foreign Service" labels on all the stories on the front page.
Many smaller papers don't have the same resources the Post does, so the quantity of wire service reporting will be higher (my hometown paper is nearly all AP copy these days). But any reputable paper will label stuff they get from a wire or syndicate as such.
If it allows you to purchase videos that won't work on your system without ever warning you of that prior to purchase, it is indeed bad, not "simple".
Imagine if when you bought a DVD from Amazon they would just pick-to-ship by title, mixing discs of all different region codes together. When you got your new DVD, popped it in your player, and discovered that you had bought a Region 3 DVD that was unplayable on your Region 1 player, would you thank Amazon for "simplifying" the process? Or would you be upset?
My bet is you'd be upset -- especially when Amazon could obviate the problem altogether by simply matching your address (or what local store you buy from) to the appropriate region - which they do.
"Simple" makes doing the right thing easy. "Bad" makes doing the wrong thing easy. Google Video's UI is bad.
It could have been worse... it could have been "iMacBook Pro".
Or for that matter they could have bundled it with Windows for "iMacBook Pro XP" and created The Ugliest Product Name EVER!!! Truly a missed opportunity.
Hey, what's
between friends?
*cough* ActiveX *cough*
More like:
Yeah, I learned that at the Web 1.0 Summit...
I'm guessing more pastels. And rounded corners.
Reminds me of a joke I was told by an Air Force NCO while working on a base...
"The biggest reason why the armed services don't work together well is because they all speak different languages. For example, consider the phrase 'SECURE THE BUILDING'.
If you tell a Marine officer to 'secure the building', he will hand pick a team of six men to rappel into the building from a helicopter at night. They will then work their way down the building floor by floor, slitting the throats of everyone they meet, including the janitorial staff. When the reach the ground floor, they will run out the front door and yell at the top of their lungs that SIR! THE BUILDING HAS BEEN SECURED, SIR!
If you tell an Army officer to 'secure the building', he will organize a battalion-size strike force and march it off to a half-mile or so from the building. He will then call in artillery on the building until it is a pile of rubble. Then he will run up onto the rubble, plant an American flag and announce to nobody in particular that the building has been secured.
If you tell a Navy officer to 'secure the building', he will put the request in the chain of command, which will result in a cruiser 1000 miles away firing a single Tomahawk cruise missile that will fly out and turn the building into a smoking hole in the ground. The Fleet commanding officer will then issue a press release announcing that the building has been secured.
If you tell an Air Force officer to 'secure the building', he'll get you a five-year lease with an option to buy."
Yeah, because it's not like those Nazi rocket scientists got all that experience by using slave labor to build rockets to kill civilians in London or anything.
Never administrated a Windows server, eh? ;-)
Hmmm... given your comments you might also want to check out Silent Storm -- it's a different scenario (WW2 rather than sci-fi), and the plot starts to get silly near the end, but it reminds me a LOT of the "good old days" of the original X-COM in the way it plays, right down to the destructible environments.
Neither LSN nor Silent Storm are as good as the original X-COM, though, for all the reasons you cite. Heck, I'd probably pay $20 just to get X-COM redone to run in Windows and take advantage of my 3D card...
Yeah, but that was back in the OS 8-9 days when MacOS sucked harder than a floor vacuum. (No multitasking!)
Nowadays what with the spit and polish of OS X and the plague of viruses and spyware that infests Windows I imagine you'd find a more receptive market among the Windows-oppressed...