I'm so tired of people using the term "Tin Foil Hat" at any indication of concern that a giant corporation might betray the trust of its clients. The tin foil hat had a very specific application and supposed protection -- and while we would both agree that it's completely ludicrous, I believe its a mixed metaphor for this argument. Just to be clear: you're using it as a snarky pejorative. Right?
I thought I read elsewhere here (from other commenters) that Psystar was modifying the code, including the Apple Updates. Perhaps I misunderstood, or maybe those posters were misinformed.
If I write a book that doesn't give anybody the right to tweak it a bit and then sell it under a new binding -- so why should Psystar have the right to do this with Apple's OS?
The Highlander sequels did nothing to ruin the original classic for me, because I never saw them, and never will.
What kind of a geek are you?! Highlander 2: The Renegade Version, on laserdisc, is an orgiastic experience. Mulcahy, who was the director of the first Highlander, made a very interesting film out of the sequel -- with grand operatic moments, terrific action scenes -- and brought an interesting evolution to the Highlander mythology. You owe it to yourself to not be such a fundamentalist and at least investigate the sequel. It's a good time.
You list three good original movies but I counter that there is so much more to them than just needed money to make. Look at the directors/writers: Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino & Danny Boyle respectively. Now look at those three directors/writers names and notice how they rarely--if ever--attach themselves to bad projects."
...and pay for the music you want to listen to on your frickin' iPod. DRM seems to be working because the iTMS seems to be doing great business -- and I don't see normal non-slashdot folks (and I'm not talking about my mother, but about my 13 year old daughter) caring one iota if it has DRM or not. If they like it, they buy it twice, and at.99 cents it's not back breaking. I'm so sick of everyone complaining because they don't get everything for free. I posit that DRM is fine, and if you don't like it there's plenty of utilities that easily strip your DRM with minimal effort on your behalf.
DRM isn't what's holding it back, because at the end of the day the general public doesn't care (or are too ignorant) about DRM restrictions.
When will home video distributors realize that the only way to sell a high end product is by wrapping it into high end packaging. Collectors have a fetish for package design. These days, when most everything is available online (legally or illegally), the one thing you can't download is beautiful package design for the fetishistic collector who wants pride of ownership. Instead, you get the ugliest cheap-plastic blue-box nightmare. Who wants to collect that?! I'd rather have a virtual product with no packaging design than that crap cluttering up my shelves. What good is a high end player without high end product packaged in high end packaging?
I collect Atari 800/400 systems (to my wife's frustration) and amazingly I'm still able to use the systems as if they were new. The floppy media still boots on all of the disks I pop in (Miner 2049'er anyone?). The cartridges, like Star Raiders, seem like they'll last as long as the 800 is able to turn on. Frankly, I'm amazed at the engineering in those systems. They were built like console games, to be used by kids on a carpeted living room floor and hooked up to a TV. They have no fan, the power supply is external to the unit, and they boot with instant on. Compare this to modern systems, which have built in obsolescence, and I think respect should be given to the designers of those early systems. Also, the fact that they still work perfectly means that they're not only collectible, but usable.
Indeed. I am a senior 3d-artist working in the game industry, and my salary for a game is nowhere near 100k Maybe that's because you don't have a union like SAG that fights for your creative rights. Maybe you should.
C'mon. You're telling me that you went to see Spiderman because of the performances?! If you respect the work that they do, then you should respect that their job is an above-the-line item that can be easily separated from the craftsman work of the below-the-line artisans that can be compared to production designers, gaffers, etc. There is a paradigm in place for large scale creative entertainment production, and the videogame industry isn't making simple Pacman anymore. Credits where credit is due, and compensation where compensation is due. (I, for one, think that Portal's magnificence is in large part due to Ellen McLain's GlaDos performance, and I think she should be compensated with backend residual payments for that excellent work).
I don't know what you guys are talking about. Guys like Chris Crawford were working miracles with that system, cranking out elegant and slim titles like "Eastern Front" on the 800 -- still one of my favorite strategy games, it really felt like a board game by Steve Jackson Games. His code was so tight and beautiful. The Atari 6502 systems were a joy to program on -- the graphics were unparalleled (color registers in a home system?!). I only wrote music software, because of how delightful the Pokey chip was (try doing that on an Apple ][). If anything, I miss today the discipline that came from restrictions. It compelled you to be creative.
I'm an Academy member (AMPAS), and I can tell you that the only benefit of membership is that at year end they send you every movie made that year on DVD. It's quite nice. There's a mad December-January rush to cram in every possible film. I'd hate to lose my membership because the DVD I loaned to my friends were ripped and torrented all over Christendom. The Academy is now in the habit of unceremoniously kicking out members when it's found that they've contributed to the piracy of a film (many are pre-release). So I'm usually fairly cautious.
A couple of years ago, Cinea (a Technicolor company) sent out a free DVD player with a powerful DRM/encryption, and many of the movies that came out were suddenly playable only on that machine. This was a hassle, as I was on a job and traveling frequently, and consequently missed a number of smaller films before the January 12 nominating deadline (coincidentally, today). I also hated the ergonomics of that damned player -- the remote was impossible to use in darkened conditions. Anyhow, it was a hassle. And well over half of the movies sent to us were specially encoded to only play on my specific registered player. The other percentage of discs usually favored watermarking.
Cut to this year, suddenly everything is watermarking and there's not a Cinea encrypted disc to be seen. Cinea doesn't support their machine and I'm stuck with this crap player that I had my son beat it to death with a sledgehammer the other day, as I videotaped the ceremony. I'm throwing away all of the past Award seasons discs, which are useless to me now. From my perspective, I'm totally cool with watermarking. However, I frequently lend movies to my elderly mother -- and I'm always living in fear that one of her tennis friends is going to talk my mother into loaning the movie to her, thusly exposing the DVD to possibilities of piracy (who knows what goes on in the houses of my mother's tennis friends) -- risking the one benefit I have of being an Academy member.
So is this what we're reduced to? Living in fear and paranoia as if in a police state? Will Big Brother find my name/number attached to a rip online and bust my ass down to the basement? I don't, as an Academy member, believe that trading movies with your friends is piracy. As a kid we used to do it with VHS all the time. But, it's not lost on me that I lose residuals every time a movie doesn't get legitimately purchased. This is America however, I'll take the paranoia that comes with watermarking any day over the inconvenience of encryption tied to specific proprietary players.
What I was getting at was that those motorcycles just became a lot more dangerous with this heavier vehicle that everyone can afford on the road. The design mandate of this car is flawed, and strikes me as a public affairs marketing ploy to justify a cheap vehicle that they plan on selling like hot cakes. That $500 (or more) dollars could have been much better spent on a solution that would have actually been solving a problem, not contributing to one. Cars like this one, once everyone in the world has one, are going to be our undoing.
...is that all of those motorbikes are still going to be on the road, and now there's going to be a bunch of cheap cars as well. I think it likely that this will increase accidents and congestion, not to mention the increase in pollution (why wasn't that a factor in the vehicle's design?!).
Yes, but my point is that we're being slowly lulled into paying for both television and radio. What used to be free, we've all been gradually led to believe are "worth the price tag."
Why should you have to pay anything at all for television? How is it that we as a nation became convinced that we should pay for television? Something that was once totally free (except for the price of a tv), now has a charge attached to it. If you ask me, it's not the people in rural areas who watch analog tv that are the stupid ones. It's all of us who drank the kool-aid.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm so tired of people using the term "Tin Foil Hat" at any indication of concern that a giant corporation might betray the trust of its clients. The tin foil hat had a very specific application and supposed protection -- and while we would both agree that it's completely ludicrous, I believe its a mixed metaphor for this argument. Just to be clear: you're using it as a snarky pejorative. Right?
Thanks for the clarification. So then it is illegal. I guess if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is, after all, a duck.
I thought I read elsewhere here (from other commenters) that Psystar was modifying the code, including the Apple Updates. Perhaps I misunderstood, or maybe those posters were misinformed.
If I write a book that doesn't give anybody the right to tweak it a bit and then sell it under a new binding -- so why should Psystar have the right to do this with Apple's OS?
Asimov on Numbers. Such a fun and insightful read.
The Highlander sequels did nothing to ruin the original classic for me, because I never saw them, and never will.
What kind of a geek are you?! Highlander 2: The Renegade Version, on laserdisc, is an orgiastic experience. Mulcahy, who was the director of the first Highlander, made a very interesting film out of the sequel -- with grand operatic moments, terrific action scenes -- and brought an interesting evolution to the Highlander mythology. You owe it to yourself to not be such a fundamentalist and at least investigate the sequel. It's a good time.
You list three good original movies but I counter that there is so much more to them than just needed money to make. Look at the directors/writers: Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino & Danny Boyle respectively. Now look at those three directors/writers names and notice how they rarely--if ever--attach themselves to bad projects."
You mean like The Beach, or Four Rooms?
The devil tends to be in the details...
...and pay for the music you want to listen to on your frickin' iPod. DRM seems to be working because the iTMS seems to be doing great business -- and I don't see normal non-slashdot folks (and I'm not talking about my mother, but about my 13 year old daughter) caring one iota if it has DRM or not. If they like it, they buy it twice, and at .99 cents it's not back breaking. I'm so sick of everyone complaining because they don't get everything for free. I posit that DRM is fine, and if you don't like it there's plenty of utilities that easily strip your DRM with minimal effort on your behalf.
Steven Soderbergh's latest film, Ché, was shot on RED cameras. They regularly overheated on set, and the solution was to keep two cameras so that when one overheated they would pull the other one out. Issues like this will get ironed out, but for conditions of extreme heat and extreme cold these cameras simply don't cut it alongside robust 100 year old technology like celluloid. Which brings us to the second part of your question, why doesn't everyone switch to digital, and the answer is bandwidth. The pipeline for all of this deep-bit goodness simply ramps up the cost of posting a production to astronomical levels. Film is cheap, and you can run film in any cinema in the world. Digital still has a way to go. Don't get me started on the proprietary codecs involved. Film is the ultimate open source medium -- free as in free. Digital isn't. Period.
DRM isn't what's holding it back, because at the end of the day the general public doesn't care (or are too ignorant) about DRM restrictions. When will home video distributors realize that the only way to sell a high end product is by wrapping it into high end packaging. Collectors have a fetish for package design. These days, when most everything is available online (legally or illegally), the one thing you can't download is beautiful package design for the fetishistic collector who wants pride of ownership. Instead, you get the ugliest cheap-plastic blue-box nightmare. Who wants to collect that?! I'd rather have a virtual product with no packaging design than that crap cluttering up my shelves. What good is a high end player without high end product packaged in high end packaging?
H.A.A.R.P.!!!
I collect Atari 800/400 systems (to my wife's frustration) and amazingly I'm still able to use the systems as if they were new. The floppy media still boots on all of the disks I pop in (Miner 2049'er anyone?). The cartridges, like Star Raiders, seem like they'll last as long as the 800 is able to turn on. Frankly, I'm amazed at the engineering in those systems. They were built like console games, to be used by kids on a carpeted living room floor and hooked up to a TV. They have no fan, the power supply is external to the unit, and they boot with instant on. Compare this to modern systems, which have built in obsolescence, and I think respect should be given to the designers of those early systems. Also, the fact that they still work perfectly means that they're not only collectible, but usable.
I think it's time someone at /. create a graphic of Borg Steve Jobs.
C'mon. You're telling me that you went to see Spiderman because of the performances?! If you respect the work that they do, then you should respect that their job is an above-the-line item that can be easily separated from the craftsman work of the below-the-line artisans that can be compared to production designers, gaffers, etc. There is a paradigm in place for large scale creative entertainment production, and the videogame industry isn't making simple Pacman anymore. Credits where credit is due, and compensation where compensation is due. (I, for one, think that Portal's magnificence is in large part due to Ellen McLain's GlaDos performance, and I think she should be compensated with backend residual payments for that excellent work).
There are hundreds of other cell phones to buy.
True, and they're all crap compared to my wonderful iPhone.
I don't know what you guys are talking about. Guys like Chris Crawford were working miracles with that system, cranking out elegant and slim titles like "Eastern Front" on the 800 -- still one of my favorite strategy games, it really felt like a board game by Steve Jackson Games. His code was so tight and beautiful. The Atari 6502 systems were a joy to program on -- the graphics were unparalleled (color registers in a home system?!). I only wrote music software, because of how delightful the Pokey chip was (try doing that on an Apple ][). If anything, I miss today the discipline that came from restrictions. It compelled you to be creative.
I'm an Academy member (AMPAS), and I can tell you that the only benefit of membership is that at year end they send you every movie made that year on DVD. It's quite nice. There's a mad December-January rush to cram in every possible film. I'd hate to lose my membership because the DVD I loaned to my friends were ripped and torrented all over Christendom. The Academy is now in the habit of unceremoniously kicking out members when it's found that they've contributed to the piracy of a film (many are pre-release). So I'm usually fairly cautious.
A couple of years ago, Cinea (a Technicolor company) sent out a free DVD player with a powerful DRM/encryption, and many of the movies that came out were suddenly playable only on that machine. This was a hassle, as I was on a job and traveling frequently, and consequently missed a number of smaller films before the January 12 nominating deadline (coincidentally, today). I also hated the ergonomics of that damned player -- the remote was impossible to use in darkened conditions. Anyhow, it was a hassle. And well over half of the movies sent to us were specially encoded to only play on my specific registered player. The other percentage of discs usually favored watermarking.
Cut to this year, suddenly everything is watermarking and there's not a Cinea encrypted disc to be seen. Cinea doesn't support their machine and I'm stuck with this crap player that I had my son beat it to death with a sledgehammer the other day, as I videotaped the ceremony. I'm throwing away all of the past Award seasons discs, which are useless to me now. From my perspective, I'm totally cool with watermarking. However, I frequently lend movies to my elderly mother -- and I'm always living in fear that one of her tennis friends is going to talk my mother into loaning the movie to her, thusly exposing the DVD to possibilities of piracy (who knows what goes on in the houses of my mother's tennis friends) -- risking the one benefit I have of being an Academy member.
So is this what we're reduced to? Living in fear and paranoia as if in a police state? Will Big Brother find my name/number attached to a rip online and bust my ass down to the basement? I don't, as an Academy member, believe that trading movies with your friends is piracy. As a kid we used to do it with VHS all the time. But, it's not lost on me that I lose residuals every time a movie doesn't get legitimately purchased. This is America however, I'll take the paranoia that comes with watermarking any day over the inconvenience of encryption tied to specific proprietary players.
What I was getting at was that those motorcycles just became a lot more dangerous with this heavier vehicle that everyone can afford on the road. The design mandate of this car is flawed, and strikes me as a public affairs marketing ploy to justify a cheap vehicle that they plan on selling like hot cakes. That $500 (or more) dollars could have been much better spent on a solution that would have actually been solving a problem, not contributing to one. Cars like this one, once everyone in the world has one, are going to be our undoing.
...is that all of those motorbikes are still going to be on the road, and now there's going to be a bunch of cheap cars as well. I think it likely that this will increase accidents and congestion, not to mention the increase in pollution (why wasn't that a factor in the vehicle's design?!).
These people have never been to a Fry's. If you've never been to one, picture this: they sell porn and energy drinks within 20 feet of each other.
And the employees still can't tell you where either is.
--
Franklin
I like how their charts are made up of "Tubes."
Yes, but my point is that we're being slowly lulled into paying for both television and radio. What used to be free, we've all been gradually led to believe are "worth the price tag."
Why should you have to pay anything at all for television? How is it that we as a nation became convinced that we should pay for television? Something that was once totally free (except for the price of a tv), now has a charge attached to it. If you ask me, it's not the people in rural areas who watch analog tv that are the stupid ones. It's all of us who drank the kool-aid.