MS has changed a lot in the last two years. Back in the days when they toasted Netscape, they were using their monopoly position to defend themselves (at least in their own paranoid fantasies).
The difference now is that Microsoft MUST use its monopoly power, just to carry out its strategy and meet its quarterly targets. The recent licensing moves are a huge giveaway that they expect monopoly power to be a key revenue asset. Since the Appeals Court just found all that behaviour to be illegal, Microsoft suddenly has a big problem.
They can't use their market position to force Passport down everyone's throat. They can' use it to put Real out of business. They can't use it to make.Net and hailstorm the defacto information currencies of the new Microsoft Internet. They sure can't use their regular tactics to try and keep Linux out of the servers and off the desktop. No special deals and incentives, no exclusionary contracts, no threats to punsish OEMs with discriminatory pricing, no tradeoffs with Sony to make them lay off the Xbox.
For the first time in 15 or 20 years, Microsoft is going to have to compete. So, what the fuck are they going to do? Ballmer will huff and puff, but they haven't a clue.
The most significant thing about this article is that it is from the Wall Street Journal. Its the second anti MS article in a week. They called smart tags "dangerous".
The Journal is conservative, it is voice of the establishment. It is also one of the best newspapers in the world.
As the voice of the establishment, the fact that it has gone sour on MS is tremendously significant. It means that Corporate America is turning against them.
Why does this matter? Because, if the "business community" is against MS, then the Bush administration will see them as a political liability.
And what happens to companies that become political liabilities? Well, what happened to ADM? or the tobacco companies? They got hung out to dry.
Wishful thinking? Possibly, but two negative stories in the Journal in a week is one of those red flags only monomania can blind someone to.
It doesn't actually. You are thinking that fittest means most fit, most intellegent, most capable. That is not what that word meant to people in the 19th century and not what Darwin meant.
They meant fit to mean fitting in. The specied that best fit the envronmental variables at a given time was the fittest and would survive.
The point being that there is no inference of moral, intellectual or even physical superiority.
For example, you have two species on a planet. One water dwelling, one land dwelling. During the ice ages, the land dweller would do better, because there would be more land as the water collected in ice sheets. On the other hand, during warm periods, the water dweller would do better because the ice sheets would melt, raising the water level and cutting down on the amount of land available to the land dwellers.
another interesting theory about this story is that it was based on the rise of the sea after the last ice age. In some places, this would not have been gradual, but sudden. For example, places where there were natural dams of sand dunes and such.
YES! I have always wondered if our ancestors exterminated the Neandertals. If its true, then there is still a lot of relevance in understanding what happened.
Think about it, they WERE smart enough to fight back. It would have taken thousands of years to kill them all. And they would have killed a lot of humans in the process. A genocidal war that continued through a few hundred generations.
Now, imagine the society that would have to develop to carry this out. Humans were hunter gatherers, living in tribal groups with little communication. How would you mobilize such a scattered population? Not that there would be any sembalence of organized structure. At least no more than that shown in pogroms.
What do you think living in a perma-war culture would do to humans? To human society and values? This could really explain a lot about human nature and particularly blood lust and genocide.
It could also explain why the first thing you see in organized groups of humans is defensive structures. Not against the long gone Neandertals, but against other humans. People conditioned by generations of genocide, to use violence as a first step in competing for resources.
Did anyone bother to read the article? No, that would simply clog the disucssion with useless facts.
They don't say RSI is a hoax. They say that a lot of people suffer pain. They also say that the vast majority of people that COMPLAIN of pain are not really suffering from a clinical RSI. That the number of real clinical RSIs is small by comparison. What is controvertial about that?
Kind of like saying that not all car accidents are fatal. I can see the/. discussion now... "Are they saying my cousin DIDN'T die in that crash? How dare they!!!"
They're dead. But they don't realize it yet. Like the French, they always learn the wrong lesson from the last war. This time, they think that their apparent (but far from garuanteed) win in appelate court gives them a license to bully the marketplace like they have never dared to before.
It won't work. MS is about to undergo a revenue meltdown. Win2k has been far from the revenue wonder it was supposed to be. WinXP is going to be a hard sell on several fronts. Not least because many shops will install the home version to replace NT4. Why spend the extra $ on an enterprise version. OfficeXP is likewise going to have a hard time as a no-brainer upgrade. MS knows it. That's why they are doing this licensing tango lately. Watch the IT departments of the world vote with their feet on this one.
The real issue for them is that they have a dandy desktop monopoly. But as soon as they start trying to move everyone to.Net subscription services with increasingly restrictive licenses, they will find they have a competitor. Themselves; in the guise of all those Office 2000 and Win2k installs. Unless MS figures out a way to retroactively disable Office 2000 and Win2k, they are going to have problems.
And remember the wrong lessons? MS thinks they can get away with Sherman Act violations. They think that they will get away with what they are doing with Smart Tags & MSN, Windows Media Player, MSN Instant Messanger, etc. They will continue to think that until they go so far that even the Bush administration will turn against them.
During the cold war, people in the US did not take their rights for granted. There was an alternative to a free society, and it was not chaos. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Anyway, those days are gone. The biggest threat to freedom in the world is not Communism, its complacency. I am flabbergasted at the patently unconstitutional measures routinely introduced nowadays in local, state and federal legislation.
US society needs an enemy. It has always been this way. Many have served in the past. Recent candidates have included Lybia, Iran and recently, Osama Bin Laden. None but Iran have shown any staying power.
The recent dust-up with China over the spy plane is a good sign, however. A bunch of crminal thugs in charge of the most populated country in the world is compelling. The fact that they are thin skinned human rights criminals is the real payoff, though. Demonizing the Chinese government is just the thing to jolt US society from destructive complacency.
Mr. Katz has described the issues, but completely missed their significance.
The world is now in a transition from the nation state to the ??? state. Will it be the corporate state, with free trade pacts replacing phenomea like the cold war blocs? Will it be the super regional umbrella over many new micro countries (like Europe is becoming)? Will it be completely decentralized with the Internet providing the means for smaller and smaller political units?
The outcome of the present transition is far from clear. It will take another hundred years at least before the matter is settled. The last transformation as fundamental as this occured at the end of the Middle Ages with the transition from the fuedal state to the nation state.
Personally, I really think the corporate state would be a bad result. But there would be pluses and minuses to each. The corporate state would offer great rewards to many and lead to fast development in the third world. The regional state might devolve into tribal warfare.
However, like the Bolshovik state, some of the alternatives might have a downside so negative that any pluses are entirely irrelevant. It depends on how the contest plays out and how many bodies pile up on the way.
What is really interesting is that we are alive to see such an important change. This is the first change of fundamental political structure to occur on a global basis, and it the first where individuals have the means to influence the outcome.
For better or worse, we live in interesting times.
What an incredible waste of money. The idea that Canada can do anything meaningful on its own in space is, well, really stupid is the best thing I can say about it. Better to put our money into a bigger pot with other countries and actually accomplish more than make work for downsized DND scientists.
What do you want to bet the hq of this effort will be downtown Shawinigan?
I'll be writing to my MP straightaway on this one.
Re:Well they did sign an agreement
on
Launchcast Sued
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exactly. The RIAA can't sue about licenses signed with individual companies. If you were Warners, wouldn't you like the RIAA to do your suing for you? Mighty fine, reduce costs and get your competitors to pay for your lawyers. Somehow I think the other companies might object.
So, whatever the RIAA is suing for, it can't be because of the signed licenses, it has to be something above and beyond.
The reason that films are released in Australia, Asia and Europe well after North America is cost. The studios save money on print costs by re-using the same prints in different English speaking markets.
The current average opening for an average Hollywood film is about 3,000 screens in North America. After two months, the film will be down to several hundred screens and the distributor will have accumulated enough still good prints to rlease into other English speaking markets. The UK is the single biggest outside North America, so they get first dibs. The UK release, however, usualy gets syncronized with a Europe wide release, so the other language versions have to be ready as well.
After the UK run is over, the distributor recycles the prints again for tertiary markets. Sorry, but to Hollywood, OZ is a tertiary market. After you are done with them, they will have very few prints still in a watchable state. Those they probably send to smaller or less important markets. If you see an English version of a movie in someplace like Calcutta, for example.
Why do they do this? Because despite the glories of digital technology, films are barely advanced from the 19th century technology that spawned them. Prints are expensive to make. 3,000 prints of a 2 hr movie will cost between $2 million and $3 million, plus other post production costs, and shipping costs. Big, complicated or very long movies can cost a lot more.
The movie studios are also mostly the same companies that distribute the movies, so their effective monopolies allow this methodology. That was based on the days when the North American gross amounted to between 60% and 75% of the total gross. That has changed radically in the last ten years. The average in now close to 50/50. Some movies, like Stallone films, for example, do much better abroad than they do here in North America. In addition, REALLY big movies have started moving to global premiers. The Phantom Menace was the first film to be able to claim a near global premier. It had over 7,000 prints spread around the world (mind you, over 4,500 were still in North America).
The upcoming Jurassic Park III will be the first movie to open on 10,000 screens and will be a truly global release.
These two trends, along with the front-loading revenue strategies the studios/distributors are using more and more, mean that staggered regional releases will become less common in the future.
Hmmm.... We went through something like this last week with Hotlline here on/. It sounds to me like there are a lot of people here accepting one side of a complicated story with no question or critical analysis.
Greylock and General Atlantic are two of the best and most respected VCs in the business. I've pitched to both. A description of them as amoral cash robots is rubbish. These people want to get a good return on an investment, but they are not stupid. Destroying a company to plunder it is just not the way these guys do business.
Keep in mind that a VC who always screws the companies they invest in will not get a crack at the really good ideas. There is competition in VC land as well.
As for suing a founder, very, very unusual for VCs of this caliber. Bad for business. They do not make decisions like this to be vengeful, to even the score, or because they are generally pissed off. My guess is that Mr. Greenspun must have done something way over the top to provoke this. The proposition that a visionary, good hearted founder has been run over by greedy, stupid VCs is not credible.
Why do slashdotters allways assume that a company is better off under the control of founders than under the control of professional managers? Remember what happened to Wang?
The Recording Industry Association of America is pleased to announce they are suing Apple Computer for copyright infringement. RIAA head Hilary Rosen was quoted as saying "Apple's rediculous advertising campaign "Rip, Mix, Burn" is a shocking example of encouraging theft of intellectual property. The application "iTunes" is as outrageous as Napster in terms of its potential to destroy the American Way of Life."
(Apple) Rosen claims the editor enables third parties to copy its copyrighted (trademark themes) music by "improperly copying (Apple's) the music industry's copyrighted (software code and graphic files) music".
I work at Hotline Communications. You can judge my comments with that in mind. I am NOT speaking as a representative of Hotline Communications. these are my personal opinions.
I am very familiar with all of the issues in the case. I have met all the main players, except Adam Hinkley himself.
I find it hard to believe the bullshit that I have seen in these comments. Many of the "facts" cited here are entirely made up. For example, Hotline was ruined by the PC port. Most of the work on the pc port was done by Adam Hinkley himself. He did not leave because he was opposed to banner ads, or because he disagreed with the way the company was going, or because greedy investors threw him out, or even because he was homesick. The death of his sister, tragic though that may have been, was entirely irrelevant. He left, and took the source with him, because he wanted a better deal. He did not feel that anyone else should own any more of "his" product. Even if they were investing money in its development. He wanted complete control, in perpituity.
Keep this in mind. When he left, he was the President of the company and its majority shareholder. He had a seat on the board and a veto over any change in ownership structure. Nobody had the power to take anything away from Adam. He WAS the company.
Read the judgement. It confirms what I have always thought. Adam Hinkley screwed everyone he ever had a chance to screw. Including his own father.
Greed was indeed the problem here. But it was Adam Hinkley's greed, not that of his business partners' that was the real issue. Sorry, but if you want corporate bullys, you will have to look somewhere else.
C'mon. Its suprising how many people, even here, have no understanding of what this is beyond file sharing. That's not much different from saying in 1992 that the net was not much good for anything more than email.
In the 90's the net (via the web) morphed into the broadcast model. Yahoo or Cnet supplies, I receive. All about content. Imagine if all you were able to use a phone for was to listen to the news or buy something. Kind of sub-optimized.
The P2P (yuck) stuff is for giving people the ability to communicate directly. Sometimes that communication is about content, sometimes its just shooting the shit. The point is, they decide for themselves what they want to use it for, or if they use it at all.
If the technology is useful, then people will figure out how to make money with it. All the bullshit about nobody has a business model is almost totally irellevant to anyone that does not have money invested in any of these startups.
If the technology is usefull, people will use it. If not, they won't.
So a lack of good business models won't have much effect on adoption. Likewise brillaint business models won't save it if the technology is useless.
I am very disapointed that Jon Katz has bought the media's line on P2P. To many, including people that should know better like Michael Robertson of MP3.com, peer-to-peer technology means file sharing of one sort or another. Full stop. While Mr. Katz refers to different uses beyond this, he fails utterly to understand what those uses are. For example
"Like those falling trees in the forest, information needs critical mass. It has to be seen and heard by substantial numbers of people to have significance"
What what possible relevance does such an observation to a product like Groove? None. Because Groove is not about file sharing, it is a collaboration tool (the best ever IMHO).
I admit to being biased, because I work at Hotline Communications, possibly the oldest extant peer-to-peer company. We have dozens of interesting uses for P2P technology that have nothing to do with file sharing. At least, not of the kind that Mr. Katz seems to understand. (tempting, but I won't insert a commercial here) We believe that people will use different kinds of applications. Some will be to exchange information, but many will be used to manage information. Unlike Mr. Katz, we believe that people want more control over their lives and are not content to give control of their attention and time to Microsoft, or AT&T.
It is also kind of silly to assert that
Peer-to-peer is touted as a democratizing force in computing, but it's hard to imagine a time when more than a handful of people will be able to: understand, let alone use, it.
This is patently false. Some 20 million plus people apparently understand, let alone use, Napster.
And, as an aside, is it generally accepted that "middle-class Americans,... are always -- always -- the people who decide which media technologies will actually revolutionize the world and which will not?" I was under the naive impression that people in places like Japan and Germany and Egypt and India would make their own decisions about what kinds of media technologies suited them. I guess that explains why America is so far ahead in wireless communicatons.
Mr. Katz says that people's uses for the net are "clear". Is Mr. Katz seeking to become the first Luddite of the Internet age? In any case, how many of these "clear" needs existed five years ago? So possibly new technologies can create new and interesting ways for people to communicate. When those ways become general, they become a "clear need" in Mr. Katz's book.
And lastly, what's wrong with democratization? Is not more choice inherently a good thing? Mr. Katz appears to think that this technology is so worthless, that more discussion is pointless. Possibly to spare Harry and Martha in Debuque the burden of thinking about it. Qualified Intellectuals like Mr. Katz can do that for them. And anyway, they are just going to want what AT&T gives them, right? Because they don't care about doing things beyond their "clear" needs, they just want good service. I just hope that AT&T looks to Qualified Intellectuals like Mr. Katz for guidance.
The half consumated Internet revolution is on front in a much larger and more significant struggle. Right now, the biggest issue is the development of the corporate state. Five hundred years ago, the development of the nation state in Europe changed the social compact in many significant ways. As the nation state obviated what went before, so the new corporate/technical state seems poised to replace the increasingly irrelevant nation state. That this process is underway is not in doubt. What the new state will look like is still up in the air. It could look like the EU, with a strong meta government and smaller regional goverments. That is based on the assumption that at least some of the EU contsitutent states disintegrate into smaller units. This is already happening in Britain and need not lead to violence.
Another potential model is China, where a strong anti-democratic government sets up the entire country as a commerce play. Authoritarianism is, in this case, good for business as it keeps the "human resources" in line.
Another variant is the American one where the workers/government/corporations form an alliance to forward their perceived common agendas. Well, at least while the Republicans are in power.
If this supposition is correct, then the Internet revolution and the Intellectual Property war are indeed parts of a larger struggle. The outcome is far from clear. Historical scenarios do not parallell the current situation because of technology. Both its diffusion and its power leave the corporatists at a potential disadvantage. In the middle ages, peasants were not allowed to possess metal weapons, only the oligarchy could have those. But that won't work now. Regulation and access denial have not worked because new technologies are evolving too fast. Recent cases show that the corporatists are catching up. Hopefully, they won't be able to go fast enough.
The second reason denial and regulation won't work is that the corporate state needs all of us to be productive consumers. No technology, no productivity increases and no artificial demand.
It is important to realize that most corporations (entertainment companies excepted) have no idealogical axe to grind. They are happy to go along with what is good for business. If that is democracy, great, if that is authoritarianism, that's fine too. The problem that business has with China, which should be a paradise, is that there is no rule of law. Business needs to know that a deal is a deal. If that gives the populace more freedom, they don't really care.
Privacy, etc. are not inherently bad, they are just bad for business. Companies like Sun do not want to exploit us, they just want to lower their costs and maximize their ROI. MS and the entertainment companies may be different, but they are an exception.
Also remember that the entertainment companies have a long history of both influencing government and dictating the circumstances of the use of their content. They see no reason why technology changes anything. Hopefully, they are wrong.
This is truely the beginning of the new world order. What it will look like will be influenced by those individuals that understand technology. The new order may be an Orwellian nightmare, but probably not since that would be a less than optimal business climate. The new order might be a technologically empowered paradise where we don't have to work anymore and we spend our days surfing and playing Quake. But probably not.
The real New World Order is being shaped each day, and on all the different fronts that Slashdot covers. So the Internet revolution may be half over, but the bigger contest is justs started. Stay tuned, it will be an interesting century.
The story, not overclocking. Just in case any of you bad children didn't get the point that overclocking is BAD, consider this:
Physical injury is even a possibility. "You're dealing with a lot of heat," Blevins said. "I've had friends get third-degree burns working on their systems."
Remember, what's bad for Intel is bad for America.
BTW, a friend of mine bought a chip to change the maximum speed in his Volkswagen. He's overclocking his car.
Slashdot Mirror
That these guys are acting like a bunch of fucking communists!
It used to be nice, but I haven't been able to get it to work on any of the three machines I have Linux on, since somewhere around the 7.1 release.
Possibly there is a curse.
MS has changed a lot in the last two years. Back in the days when they toasted Netscape, they were using their monopoly position to defend themselves (at least in their own paranoid fantasies).
.Net and hailstorm the defacto information currencies of the new Microsoft Internet. They sure can't use their regular tactics to try and keep Linux out of the servers and off the desktop. No special deals and incentives, no exclusionary contracts, no threats to punsish OEMs with discriminatory pricing, no tradeoffs with Sony to make them lay off the Xbox.
The difference now is that Microsoft MUST use its monopoly power, just to carry out its strategy and meet its quarterly targets. The recent licensing moves are a huge giveaway that they expect monopoly power to be a key revenue asset. Since the Appeals Court just found all that behaviour to be illegal, Microsoft suddenly has a big problem.
They can't use their market position to force Passport down everyone's throat. They can' use it to put Real out of business. They can't use it to make
For the first time in 15 or 20 years, Microsoft is going to have to compete. So, what the fuck are they going to do? Ballmer will huff and puff, but they haven't a clue.
The most significant thing about this article is that it is from the Wall Street Journal. Its the second anti MS article in a week. They called smart tags "dangerous".
The Journal is conservative, it is voice of the establishment. It is also one of the best newspapers in the world.
As the voice of the establishment, the fact that it has gone sour on MS is tremendously significant. It means that Corporate America is turning against them.
Why does this matter? Because, if the "business community" is against MS, then the Bush administration will see them as a political liability.
And what happens to companies that become political liabilities? Well, what happened to ADM? or the tobacco companies? They got hung out to dry.
Wishful thinking? Possibly, but two negative stories in the Journal in a week is one of those red flags only monomania can blind someone to.
It doesn't actually. You are thinking that fittest means most fit, most intellegent, most capable. That is not what that word meant to people in the 19th century and not what Darwin meant.
They meant fit to mean fitting in. The specied that best fit the envronmental variables at a given time was the fittest and would survive.
The point being that there is no inference of moral, intellectual or even physical superiority.
For example, you have two species on a planet. One water dwelling, one land dwelling. During the ice ages, the land dweller would do better, because there would be more land as the water collected in ice sheets. On the other hand, during warm periods, the water dweller would do better because the ice sheets would melt, raising the water level and cutting down on the amount of land available to the land dwellers.
another interesting theory about this story is that it was based on the rise of the sea after the last ice age. In some places, this would not have been gradual, but sudden. For example, places where there were natural dams of sand dunes and such.
YES! I have always wondered if our ancestors exterminated the Neandertals. If its true, then there is still a lot of relevance in understanding what happened.
Think about it, they WERE smart enough to fight back. It would have taken thousands of years to kill them all. And they would have killed a lot of humans in the process. A genocidal war that continued through a few hundred generations.
Now, imagine the society that would have to develop to carry this out. Humans were hunter gatherers, living in tribal groups with little communication. How would you mobilize such a scattered population? Not that there would be any sembalence of organized structure. At least no more than that shown in pogroms.
What do you think living in a perma-war culture would do to humans? To human society and values? This could really explain a lot about human nature and particularly blood lust and genocide.
It could also explain why the first thing you see in organized groups of humans is defensive structures. Not against the long gone Neandertals, but against other humans. People conditioned by generations of genocide, to use violence as a first step in competing for resources.
no, actually, they have been outlawed in Canada. Apparently, they can be used to do bad things. So they say.
Did anyone bother to read the article? No, that would simply clog the disucssion with useless facts.
/. discussion now... "Are they saying my cousin DIDN'T die in that crash? How dare they!!!"
They don't say RSI is a hoax. They say that a lot of people suffer pain. They also say that the vast majority of people that COMPLAIN of pain are not really suffering from a clinical RSI. That the number of real clinical RSIs is small by comparison. What is controvertial about that?
Kind of like saying that not all car accidents are fatal. I can see the
They're dead. But they don't realize it yet. Like the French, they always learn the wrong lesson from the last war. This time, they think that their apparent (but far from garuanteed) win in appelate court gives them a license to bully the marketplace like they have never dared to before.
.Net subscription services with increasingly restrictive licenses, they will find they have a competitor. Themselves; in the guise of all those Office 2000 and Win2k installs. Unless MS figures out a way to retroactively disable Office 2000 and Win2k, they are going to have problems.
It won't work. MS is about to undergo a revenue meltdown. Win2k has been far from the revenue wonder it was supposed to be. WinXP is going to be a hard sell on several fronts. Not least because many shops will install the home version to replace NT4. Why spend the extra $ on an enterprise version. OfficeXP is likewise going to have a hard time as a no-brainer upgrade. MS knows it. That's why they are doing this licensing tango lately. Watch the IT departments of the world vote with their feet on this one.
The real issue for them is that they have a dandy desktop monopoly. But as soon as they start trying to move everyone to
And remember the wrong lessons? MS thinks they can get away with Sherman Act violations. They think that they will get away with what they are doing with Smart Tags & MSN, Windows Media Player, MSN Instant Messanger, etc. They will continue to think that until they go so far that even the Bush administration will turn against them.
During the cold war, people in the US did not take their rights for granted. There was an alternative to a free society, and it was not chaos. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Anyway, those days are gone. The biggest threat to freedom in the world is not Communism, its complacency. I am flabbergasted at the patently unconstitutional measures routinely introduced nowadays in local, state and federal legislation.
US society needs an enemy. It has always been this way. Many have served in the past. Recent candidates have included Lybia, Iran and recently, Osama Bin Laden. None but Iran have shown any staying power.
The recent dust-up with China over the spy plane is a good sign, however. A bunch of crminal thugs in charge of the most populated country in the world is compelling. The fact that they are thin skinned human rights criminals is the real payoff, though. Demonizing the Chinese government is just the thing to jolt US society from destructive complacency.
Mr. Katz has described the issues, but completely missed their significance.
The world is now in a transition from the nation state to the ??? state. Will it be the corporate state, with free trade pacts replacing phenomea like the cold war blocs? Will it be the super regional umbrella over many new micro countries (like Europe is becoming)? Will it be completely decentralized with the Internet providing the means for smaller and smaller political units?
The outcome of the present transition is far from clear. It will take another hundred years at least before the matter is settled. The last transformation as fundamental as this occured at the end of the Middle Ages with the transition from the fuedal state to the nation state.
Personally, I really think the corporate state would be a bad result. But there would be pluses and minuses to each. The corporate state would offer great rewards to many and lead to fast development in the third world. The regional state might devolve into tribal warfare.
However, like the Bolshovik state, some of the alternatives might have a downside so negative that any pluses are entirely irrelevant. It depends on how the contest plays out and how many bodies pile up on the way.
What is really interesting is that we are alive to see such an important change. This is the first change of fundamental political structure to occur on a global basis, and it the first where individuals have the means to influence the outcome.
For better or worse, we live in interesting times.
What an incredible waste of money. The idea that Canada can do anything meaningful on its own in space is, well, really stupid is the best thing I can say about it. Better to put our money into a bigger pot with other countries and actually accomplish more than make work for downsized DND scientists.
What do you want to bet the hq of this effort will be downtown Shawinigan?
I'll be writing to my MP straightaway on this one.
exactly. The RIAA can't sue about licenses signed with individual companies. If you were Warners, wouldn't you like the RIAA to do your suing for you? Mighty fine, reduce costs and get your competitors to pay for your lawyers. Somehow I think the other companies might object.
So, whatever the RIAA is suing for, it can't be because of the signed licenses, it has to be something above and beyond.
The reason that films are released in Australia, Asia and Europe well after North America is cost. The studios save money on print costs by re-using the same prints in different English speaking markets.
The current average opening for an average Hollywood film is about 3,000 screens in North America. After two months, the film will be down to several hundred screens and the distributor will have accumulated enough still good prints to rlease into other English speaking markets. The UK is the single biggest outside North America, so they get first dibs. The UK release, however, usualy gets syncronized with a Europe wide release, so the other language versions have to be ready as well.
After the UK run is over, the distributor recycles the prints again for tertiary markets. Sorry, but to Hollywood, OZ is a tertiary market. After you are done with them, they will have very few prints still in a watchable state. Those they probably send to smaller or less important markets. If you see an English version of a movie in someplace like Calcutta, for example.
Why do they do this? Because despite the glories of digital technology, films are barely advanced from the 19th century technology that spawned them. Prints are expensive to make. 3,000 prints of a 2 hr movie will cost between $2 million and $3 million, plus other post production costs, and shipping costs. Big, complicated or very long movies can cost a lot more.
The movie studios are also mostly the same companies that distribute the movies, so their effective monopolies allow this methodology. That was based on the days when the North American gross amounted to between 60% and 75% of the total gross. That has changed radically in the last ten years. The average in now close to 50/50. Some movies, like Stallone films, for example, do much better abroad than they do here in North America. In addition, REALLY big movies have started moving to global premiers. The Phantom Menace was the first film to be able to claim a near global premier. It had over 7,000 prints spread around the world (mind you, over 4,500 were still in North America).
The upcoming Jurassic Park III will be the first movie to open on 10,000 screens and will be a truly global release.
These two trends, along with the front-loading revenue strategies the studios/distributors are using more and more, mean that staggered regional releases will become less common in the future.
I am writing this from a dual boot WinXP/Mandrake machine. I am using both almost every day and have been for two weeks. No problems.
I've thought about this often, but the problem is hardware upgrades. Which could be a bitch.
Not to mention recalls, like the Dell laptop batteries. Ouch!
Hmmm.... We went through something like this last week with Hotlline here on /. It sounds to me like there are a lot of people here accepting one side of a complicated story with no question or critical analysis.
Greylock and General Atlantic are two of the best and most respected VCs in the business. I've pitched to both. A description of them as amoral cash robots is rubbish. These people want to get a good return on an investment, but they are not stupid. Destroying a company to plunder it is just not the way these guys do business.
Keep in mind that a VC who always screws the companies they invest in will not get a crack at the really good ideas. There is competition in VC land as well.
As for suing a founder, very, very unusual for VCs of this caliber. Bad for business. They do not make decisions like this to be vengeful, to even the score, or because they are generally pissed off. My guess is that Mr. Greenspun must have done something way over the top to provoke this. The proposition that a visionary, good hearted founder has been run over by greedy, stupid VCs is not credible.
Why do slashdotters allways assume that a company is better off under the control of founders than under the control of professional managers? Remember what happened to Wang?
The Recording Industry Association of America is pleased to announce they are suing Apple Computer for copyright infringement. RIAA head Hilary Rosen was quoted as saying "Apple's rediculous advertising campaign "Rip, Mix, Burn" is a shocking example of encouraging theft of intellectual property. The application "iTunes" is as outrageous as Napster in terms of its potential to destroy the American Way of Life."
(Apple) Rosen claims the editor enables third parties to copy its copyrighted (trademark themes) music by "improperly copying (Apple's) the music industry's copyrighted (software code and graphic files) music".
Since I am no fan of vapour, there have been no announcements of a date or feature set for Hotline 2.0. But it is progressing.
;-)
Have no doubt, it will rock. I won't be looking for a job anytime soon !
I work at Hotline Communications. You can judge my comments with that in mind. I am NOT speaking as a representative of Hotline Communications. these are my personal opinions.
I am very familiar with all of the issues in the case. I have met all the main players, except Adam Hinkley himself.
I find it hard to believe the bullshit that I have seen in these comments. Many of the "facts" cited here are entirely made up. For example, Hotline was ruined by the PC port. Most of the work on the pc port was done by Adam Hinkley himself. He did not leave because he was opposed to banner ads, or because he disagreed with the way the company was going, or because greedy investors threw him out, or even because he was homesick. The death of his sister, tragic though that may have been, was entirely irrelevant. He left, and took the source with him, because he wanted a better deal. He did not feel that anyone else should own any more of "his" product. Even if they were investing money in its development. He wanted complete control, in perpituity.
Keep this in mind. When he left, he was the President of the company and its majority shareholder. He had a seat on the board and a veto over any change in ownership structure. Nobody had the power to take anything away from Adam. He WAS the company.
Read the judgement. It confirms what I have always thought. Adam Hinkley screwed everyone he ever had a chance to screw. Including his own father.
Greed was indeed the problem here. But it was Adam Hinkley's greed, not that of his business partners' that was the real issue. Sorry, but if you want corporate bullys, you will have to look somewhere else.
C'mon. Its suprising how many people, even here, have no understanding of what this is beyond file sharing. That's not much different from saying in 1992 that the net was not much good for anything more than email.
In the 90's the net (via the web) morphed into the broadcast model. Yahoo or Cnet supplies, I receive. All about content. Imagine if all you were able to use a phone for was to listen to the news or buy something. Kind of sub-optimized.
The P2P (yuck) stuff is for giving people the ability to communicate directly. Sometimes that communication is about content, sometimes its just shooting the shit. The point is, they decide for themselves what they want to use it for, or if they use it at all.
If the technology is useful, then people will figure out how to make money with it. All the bullshit about nobody has a business model is almost totally irellevant to anyone that does not have money invested in any of these startups.
If the technology is usefull, people will use it. If not, they won't.
So a lack of good business models won't have much effect on adoption. Likewise brillaint business models won't save it if the technology is useless.
I am very disapointed that Jon Katz has bought the media's line on P2P. To many, including people that should know better like Michael Robertson of MP3.com, peer-to-peer technology means file sharing of one sort or another. Full stop. While Mr. Katz refers to different uses beyond this, he fails utterly to understand what those uses are. For example
"Like those falling trees in the forest, information needs critical mass. It has to be seen and heard by substantial numbers of people to have significance"
What what possible relevance does such an observation to a product like Groove? None. Because Groove is not about file sharing, it is a collaboration tool (the best ever IMHO).
I admit to being biased, because I work at Hotline Communications, possibly the oldest extant peer-to-peer company. We have dozens of interesting uses for P2P technology that have nothing to do with file sharing. At least, not of the kind that Mr. Katz seems to understand. (tempting, but I won't insert a commercial here) We believe that people will use different kinds of applications. Some will be to exchange information, but many will be used to manage information. Unlike Mr. Katz, we believe that people want more control over their lives and are not content to give control of their attention and time to Microsoft, or AT&T.
It is also kind of silly to assert that
Peer-to-peer is touted as a democratizing force in computing, but it's hard to imagine a time when more than a handful of people will be able to: understand, let alone use, it.
This is patently false. Some 20 million plus people apparently understand, let alone use, Napster.
And, as an aside, is it generally accepted that "middle-class Americans, ... are always -- always -- the people who decide which media technologies will actually revolutionize the world and which will not?" I was under the naive impression that people in places like Japan and Germany and Egypt and India would make their own decisions about what kinds of media technologies suited them. I guess that explains why America is so far ahead in wireless communicatons.
Mr. Katz says that people's uses for the net are "clear". Is Mr. Katz seeking to become the first Luddite of the Internet age? In any case, how many of these "clear" needs existed five years ago? So possibly new technologies can create new and interesting ways for people to communicate. When those ways become general, they become a "clear need" in Mr. Katz's book.
And lastly, what's wrong with democratization? Is not more choice inherently a good thing? Mr. Katz appears to think that this technology is so worthless, that more discussion is pointless. Possibly to spare Harry and Martha in Debuque the burden of thinking about it. Qualified Intellectuals like Mr. Katz can do that for them. And anyway, they are just going to want what AT&T gives them, right? Because they don't care about doing things beyond their "clear" needs, they just want good service. I just hope that AT&T looks to Qualified Intellectuals like Mr. Katz for guidance.
The half consumated Internet revolution is on front in a much larger and more significant struggle. Right now, the biggest issue is the development of the corporate state. Five hundred years ago, the development of the nation state in Europe changed the social compact in many significant ways. As the nation state obviated what went before, so the new corporate/technical state seems poised to replace the increasingly irrelevant nation state. That this process is underway is not in doubt. What the new state will look like is still up in the air. It could look like the EU, with a strong meta government and smaller regional goverments. That is based on the assumption that at least some of the EU contsitutent states disintegrate into smaller units. This is already happening in Britain and need not lead to violence.
Another potential model is China, where a strong anti-democratic government sets up the entire country as a commerce play. Authoritarianism is, in this case, good for business as it keeps the "human resources" in line.
Another variant is the American one where the workers/government/corporations form an alliance to forward their perceived common agendas. Well, at least while the Republicans are in power.
If this supposition is correct, then the Internet revolution and the Intellectual Property war are indeed parts of a larger struggle. The outcome is far from clear. Historical scenarios do not parallell the current situation because of technology. Both its diffusion and its power leave the corporatists at a potential disadvantage. In the middle ages, peasants were not allowed to possess metal weapons, only the oligarchy could have those. But that won't work now. Regulation and access denial have not worked because new technologies are evolving too fast. Recent cases show that the corporatists are catching up. Hopefully, they won't be able to go fast enough.
The second reason denial and regulation won't work is that the corporate state needs all of us to be productive consumers. No technology, no productivity increases and no artificial demand.
It is important to realize that most corporations (entertainment companies excepted) have no idealogical axe to grind. They are happy to go along with what is good for business. If that is democracy, great, if that is authoritarianism, that's fine too. The problem that business has with China, which should be a paradise, is that there is no rule of law. Business needs to know that a deal is a deal. If that gives the populace more freedom, they don't really care.
Privacy, etc. are not inherently bad, they are just bad for business. Companies like Sun do not want to exploit us, they just want to lower their costs and maximize their ROI. MS and the entertainment companies may be different, but they are an exception.
Also remember that the entertainment companies have a long history of both influencing government and dictating the circumstances of the use of their content. They see no reason why technology changes anything. Hopefully, they are wrong.
This is truely the beginning of the new world order. What it will look like will be influenced by those individuals that understand technology. The new order may be an Orwellian nightmare, but probably not since that would be a less than optimal business climate. The new order might be a technologically empowered paradise where we don't have to work anymore and we spend our days surfing and playing Quake. But probably not.
The real New World Order is being shaped each day, and on all the different fronts that Slashdot covers. So the Internet revolution may be half over, but the bigger contest is justs started. Stay tuned, it will be an interesting century.
The story, not overclocking. Just in case any of you bad children didn't get the point that overclocking is BAD, consider this: Physical injury is even a possibility. "You're dealing with a lot of heat," Blevins said. "I've had friends get third-degree burns working on their systems." Remember, what's bad for Intel is bad for America. BTW, a friend of mine bought a chip to change the maximum speed in his Volkswagen. He's overclocking his car.