MGM obviously hasn't learned that disruptive technologies can be big money-makers for mature industries.
MGM ought to talk to InterTrust. They figured out how media companies can make money on P2P networks in the early '90s. Revenue streams from viewing, revenue streams from sharing, protected content, etc. MGM and the rest of those ostriches are missing out on some big dinero by not dealing with InterTrust.
-- Target shooting and sport. Pure entertainment, and good hand-eye coordination practice.
-- Self- and home defense. Good to stay alive if someone breaks into your home and tries to kill you.
-- Hunting. Mmm, pheasants taste good.
i remember in his "expanded universe" that he wrote if the u.s. didn't get off its ass and develop a real space program, japan would, and we would end up having our visas stamped by japanese customs officers when we space tourists arrived at the moon.
if japan allocates nearly 4x what the us spends on nasa to build a shuttle and a moon base, and we combine the threat to our national prestige with what china is up to, we've got ourselves another space race on our hands. that can only be good for us space geeks.
i'm not arguing with you that there should be conflict/characterization/etc. i'm an amateur student of screenwriting (i'm a tech writer and am applying to usc's mfa program in cinema for 2006). i'm just saying that the worlds that sci-fi writers (including trek writers) create should be believable given all fields of human advancement including ethics.
but i am arguing with you that sci-fi writers should be predictive. jules verne predicted a 20th-century worldwide communications network in 1864 and he was right on target. arthur c. clarke predicted all kinds of technologies that are being developed today. hell, roddenberry predicted the alcubierre warp drive. so i think it is a responsibility of good sf writers to be predictive and think seriously about what kind of world 23rd/24th century denizens will live in.
given your background as a producer, i'd love to talk with you further about your thoughts regarding sci-fi screenwriting, but i can't parse your email address. if you feel like interesting conversation, you're welcome to contact me at kris@themagnussons.us.
i agree with you that a sci-fi series should take nanotech, etc., into account. but there are all sorts of technical advancements that will happen between now and the 23rd/24th century--strong ai, genetic engineering, space elevators, and so forth. what i would like to see in a sci-fi series is how humanity has advanced its ethics to benefit from these technical advancements to promote the greater good and individual liberties.
for example, i always thought it was dumb that genetic engineering was outlawed in the federation because a bunch of g.e. people tried to take over the world three/four hundred years previously. i think roddenberry would have approved of stories that emphasized that genetic engineering could eliminate disease and misery. those stories would fit right into the notion of roddenberry's utopian society--it's just that the ethical angle would have to be developed and explained in order to make the trek universe cohesive. same goes for every other technology developed between now and then.
(while i'm talking about dumb things in sci-fi series, why is it that the federation would give up its rights to develop a cloaking device? and why is it that starfleet soldiers go into battle without armor or personal shields?)
basically what i am saying is that the architect of a sci-fi series should take into account the development of ethics that helps advanced technology benefit the greater good and promote individual liberties--and create a much more satisfying sci-fi series as a result.
interestingly enough, the US government acted a little "crazy" and unstable during the cold war--it was part of US war strategy aimed at stabilizing the global political situation.
mcnamara and his think-tank guys implemented a doctrine that held that by creating the perception that the US govt was unstable, the soviet leadership would feel reticent to provoke them--the US response would simply be unpredictable. this meant the safest course of action would, of course, be not to provoke the US.
some would say that the net result of the US "acting crazy" policy was greater global stability. in fact, i think you're saying that, too.
nothing personal here, drinkypoo, and i really hate to be negative, i really do, but you should know that . ..
i summarily ignore any posts/posters that mention
-- space elevators, or -- the extraction of helium-3 on the moon for nuclear fusion
again, nothing personal, but imho any poster who mentions either of these in a post, let alone both, is so ungrounded in consensus reality that he/she confuses highly speculative science fiction with hyperexpensive, megastructural engineering feats that Won't Occur Within Our Lifetimes, If Ever. we might just as well be talking about warp drives and transporters for exploring the alpha quadrant.
sorry to take it out on you, drinkypoo, but i just hit my breaking point.
jesus, what a bunch of pompous airbags. if you can't answer a simple question with a simple, one sentence answer, you have no business being an author, an authority, or a scientist.
btw, the best response was given by bruce sterling.
it's too bad that it's a Windows-only release. i would have liked to try it on my PowerBook G4. i guess Mac support is low on their list. or else maybe ActiveX is too difficult to support on the Mac. i will not be using the new Netscape browser--i have Firefox on my Mac (version 1.0), so i guess i'm not missing out much, except for those pesky sites that require ActiveX support.
........ kris
Thinking outside of the KDE/GNOME box
on
NeXTSTEP To Mac OS X
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
i applaud anyone who would like to bring the user interface of NeXTstep back to the x86 platform on modern hardware. but i'm wondering if there's an alternate route.
i've been spending considerable time of late conceptualizing building a new distro based solely on GNUstep and its associated apps. in my opinion, there is a critical mass of GNUstep-powered apps that run on Linux to create a user experience that rivals that of NeXTstep. it's low-hanging fruit that IMHO no one is reaching out to grab. i would like to grab it.
you might not understand the sheer power NeXTstep affords its users to appreciate why I would want to build something like this--i encourage you to find an old NeXTstep box and see for yourself why I would be excited about NeXTstep years after its demise.
i'm sure some believe KDE/GNOME already provide ease-of-use for end users, but having had the power of NeXTstep under my fingers for years, and having been a Linux user since 1995, I'm not sold. I'm currently working with a small Linux distro vendor to explore the possibility of building such an environment. We're trying to figure out if it would have any commercial promise. So far, well, it looks promising, but we might do it anyway for the sheer fun of having NeXTstep back on top of Linux. (Scratching an itch, in other words.) Although I believe KDE and GNOME have come a long way, IMHO they still lack the sheer ease-of-use that NeXTstep provided back in the day. I think the time might be right for an alternative to KDE/GNOME that is based on the NeXTstep experience.
I'm interested in readers' thoughts on this matter. Email me if this sounds interesting.
I like Best Buy a lot because the sales droids tend to really take care of their customers. I speak from experience. I recently bought a projection HDTV from Best Buy. It was an open box return and I got a screaming good deal ($899 down from $1499). I was worried about whether there was something wrong with the TV, since obviously someone had returned it previously. The sales droid wrote on the receipt that if there was something wrong with the TV that they would exchange it for their display model, which worked perfectly. Sure enough, I got the TV home and the picture was distorted. I called the droid at Best Buy and within a couple of days the delivery guys brought the floor model over to the house and hauled away the bad one. Simple as that.
There's a lot of bitching and complaining here about the quality of the sales droids at Best Buy, but I'm a happy Best Buy customer (and my wife works at a Best Buy too, and it's a great place for her to work).
I was first on campus to own a NeXTstation 68040. The NeXTstep operating environment (Mach + BSD layer + AppKit + Display PostScript + included apps) wasn't a lot different then from today's MacOS X, modulo the nifty GUI extras like Expose, etc.
My point is that NeXT technology provided the boost that gave Apple such a headstart over Microsoft. The past few years have been mainly useability and performance improvements as they have iterated through releases. So thank NeXT for doing all the heavy lifting.
These inflatable modules are cool and everything, but I'm much more interested in the America Space Prize than the modules.
I was hoping that one of the criteria for the contest was that the entire spacecraft, not just the crew module, would be reusable. As far as I can tell, the winning entry will be launched on a traditional throwaway booster. Given this, it will cost you half a mil to fly to a Bigelow Inflatable Hotel for a week of fun in space, hardly an affordable price.
It seems, therefore, the America Space Prize is not about tourism but competing directly with NASA for space science money. Not necessarily bad, but not as exciting as seeing the frontier of affordable LEO space tourism open up.
The X-Prize is obviously the model for the Centennial Challenge--in fact an X-Prize administrator participated in the Challenge. Clearly the X-Prize was the right idea at the right time. If NASA and Congress actually follow through, we might see some useful things come out of this.
Personally, I liked the idea of a reusable first and second stage heavy-lift vehicle. I always wondered why they couldn't be reusable.
i went on an acid bender in my late teens, trying to understand what it was like to be psychotic. it set off my latent bipolar disorder and then i had a REAL opportunity to see what psychosis was like, one that wouldn't stop.
please don't take powerful psychedelic drugs without supervision by a psychiatrist. at least find out whether you're predisposed to mental illness before you do.
when i was arrested last summer for violent behavior when i stopped taking my meds, i got into an argument with the psych assessment officer that bipolars don't hallucinate. he said, "i've been dealing with the mentally ill for forty years, and only schizophrenics hallucinate." i didn't back down, and won't. i know better from first-hand experience.
i have severe bipolar II, and for years before I was diagnosed and treated with meds I hallucinated like a son-of-a-bitch. people, voices, psychedelic imagery, the whole nine yards. the myth that only schizophrenics hallucinate is simply that, a myth............ kris
What GNUstep needs is a refactoring to make it 100% compatible with the modern Cocoa object APIs. Then and only then will it become possible to write to Cocoa and then recompile on Linux. This will take more resources than the GNUstep team has to throw at the problem. What is needed, as another poster pointed out, is a corporate backer who will finance the work.
I'd like to be the guy who starts the ball rolling. I've written business plans that have passed muster with several VC firms, so I have connections and know what it takes to create a plan that can generate real live venture capital. I'm working on a business proposal for a startup that would focus on refactoring GNUstep and using it as the foundation of a Mac-like user experience and development environment sitting on top of the Linux kernel. With an initial investment of less than two million dollars (the magic number) to hire an initial team of engineers and decent management, GNUstep could be refactored and provide the foundation for real Mac-to-Linux crossplatform capabilities. Of course, my business proposal includes working closely with the GNUstep team, as well as honoring the GPL and releasing the refactored APIs in source code form.
The only problem with a firm investing massive amounts of capital in the GNUstep project is return on investment and decent upper management. I think I have the management problem solved, but investment would have to come with the emergence of Linux as a viable desktop platform in the minds and eyes of IT staff and upper management. That's happening, but not as quickly as some hope. But it turns out that a lean and nimble development team, combined with further stages of capitalization and moderate levels of GNUstep-powered environment sales, could generate profits in its third year at the current level of Linux desktop sales, according to my preliminary and terse calculations.
In short, I believe GNUstep could be a viable platform for a commercial company to build a business on, and the side benefit would be a lot more Mac apps ported to Linux, as well as the reverse.
I've run the proposal across several people who are clueful, and they've been enthusiastic. I'm enthusiastic. I hope something comes of this, given I'm a Linux user and a rabid MacOS X fan. It could only help GNUstep take its rightful place as a premier API and development environment.
With or without Windows, Apple would probably be in the same boat.
Porting MacOS to Intel would have only happened under a Jobs regime at Apple during the period Windows was gaining its dominance. Remember, Jobs was not CEO of Apple during this period--Sculley was. Sculley pushed for a "margin" over "volume" business strategy--this would have still limited their market penetration had Windows not been around, just as it did when Windows was making its inroads into the PC market and Apple was trying to squeeze every last penny from its installed base.
In summary, Jobs would have had to still be CEO of Apple if it were to port MacOS to Intel and adopt a business strategy based on volume and not margin. But I strongly believe, based on his move to port NeXTstep to Intel after recognizing he could make more money on software than hardware, than Apple would have become a software company that made cutting-edge x86 hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
MGM ought to talk to InterTrust. They figured out how media companies can make money on P2P networks in the early '90s. Revenue streams from viewing, revenue streams from sharing, protected content, etc. MGM and the rest of those ostriches are missing out on some big dinero by not dealing with InterTrust.
......... kris
-- Self- and home defense. Good to stay alive if someone breaks into your home and tries to kill you.
-- Hunting. Mmm, pheasants taste good.
...... kris
i remember in his "expanded universe" that he wrote if the u.s. didn't get off its ass and develop a real space program, japan would, and we would end up having our visas stamped by japanese customs officers when we space tourists arrived at the moon.
..... kris
seems to me the real space race has started.
if japan allocates nearly 4x what the us spends on nasa to build a shuttle and a moon base, and we combine the threat to our national prestige with what china is up to, we've got ourselves another space race on our hands. that can only be good for us space geeks.
........ kris
i'm not arguing with you that there should be conflict/characterization/etc. i'm an amateur student of screenwriting (i'm a tech writer and am applying to usc's mfa program in cinema for 2006). i'm just saying that the worlds that sci-fi writers (including trek writers) create should be believable given all fields of human advancement including ethics.
................ kris
but i am arguing with you that sci-fi writers should be predictive. jules verne predicted a 20th-century worldwide communications network in 1864 and he was right on target. arthur c. clarke predicted all kinds of technologies that are being developed today. hell, roddenberry predicted the alcubierre warp drive. so i think it is a responsibility of good sf writers to be predictive and think seriously about what kind of world 23rd/24th century denizens will live in.
given your background as a producer, i'd love to talk with you further about your thoughts regarding sci-fi screenwriting, but i can't parse your email address. if you feel like interesting conversation, you're welcome to contact me at kris@themagnussons.us.
cough**borg**cough
my point was that they should be. surely the state of the art should have advanced enough to supply personal shields to ground infantry.
...... kris
i agree with you that a sci-fi series should take nanotech, etc., into account. but there are all sorts of technical advancements that will happen between now and the 23rd/24th century--strong ai, genetic engineering, space elevators, and so forth. what i would like to see in a sci-fi series is how humanity has advanced its ethics to benefit from these technical advancements to promote the greater good and individual liberties.
.......... kris
for example, i always thought it was dumb that genetic engineering was outlawed in the federation because a bunch of g.e. people tried to take over the world three/four hundred years previously. i think roddenberry would have approved of stories that emphasized that genetic engineering could eliminate disease and misery. those stories would fit right into the notion of roddenberry's utopian society--it's just that the ethical angle would have to be developed and explained in order to make the trek universe cohesive. same goes for every other technology developed between now and then.
(while i'm talking about dumb things in sci-fi series, why is it that the federation would give up its rights to develop a cloaking device? and why is it that starfleet soldiers go into battle without armor or personal shields?)
basically what i am saying is that the architect of a sci-fi series should take into account the development of ethics that helps advanced technology benefit the greater good and promote individual liberties--and create a much more satisfying sci-fi series as a result.
"real artists ship."
......... kris
interestingly enough, the US government acted a little "crazy" and unstable during the cold war--it was part of US war strategy aimed at stabilizing the global political situation.
mcnamara and his think-tank guys implemented a doctrine that held that by creating the perception that the US govt was unstable, the soviet leadership would feel reticent to provoke them--the US response would simply be unpredictable. this meant the safest course of action would, of course, be not to provoke the US.
some would say that the net result of the US "acting crazy" policy was greater global stability. in fact, i think you're saying that, too.
..... kris
nothing personal here, drinkypoo, and i really hate to be negative, i really do, but you should know that . . .
....... kris
i summarily ignore any posts/posters that mention
-- space elevators, or
-- the extraction of helium-3 on the moon for nuclear fusion
again, nothing personal, but imho any poster who mentions either of these in a post, let alone both, is so ungrounded in consensus reality that he/she confuses highly speculative science fiction with hyperexpensive, megastructural engineering feats that Won't Occur Within Our Lifetimes, If Ever. we might just as well be talking about warp drives and transporters for exploring the alpha quadrant.
sorry to take it out on you, drinkypoo, but i just hit my breaking point.
Who's Erin Grey?
Kris Magnusson
b. 1990
jesus, what a bunch of pompous airbags. if you can't answer a simple question with a simple, one sentence answer, you have no business being an author, an authority, or a scientist.
........ kris
btw, the best response was given by bruce sterling.
Spectacular Optical
it's too bad that it's a Windows-only release. i would have liked to try it on my PowerBook G4. i guess Mac support is low on their list. or else maybe ActiveX is too difficult to support on the Mac. i will not be using the new Netscape browser--i have Firefox on my Mac (version 1.0), so i guess i'm not missing out much, except for those pesky sites that require ActiveX support.
........ kris
i applaud anyone who would like to bring the user interface of NeXTstep back to the x86 platform on modern hardware. but i'm wondering if there's an alternate route.
........... kris
i've been spending considerable time of late conceptualizing building a new distro based solely on GNUstep and its associated apps. in my opinion, there is a critical mass of GNUstep-powered apps that run on Linux to create a user experience that rivals that of NeXTstep. it's low-hanging fruit that IMHO no one is reaching out to grab. i would like to grab it.
you might not understand the sheer power NeXTstep affords its users to appreciate why I would want to build something like this--i encourage you to find an old NeXTstep box and see for yourself why I would be excited about NeXTstep years after its demise.
i'm sure some believe KDE/GNOME already provide ease-of-use for end users, but having had the power of NeXTstep under my fingers for years, and having been a Linux user since 1995, I'm not sold. I'm currently working with a small Linux distro vendor to explore the possibility of building such an environment. We're trying to figure out if it would have any commercial promise. So far, well, it looks promising, but we might do it anyway for the sheer fun of having NeXTstep back on top of Linux. (Scratching an itch, in other words.) Although I believe KDE and GNOME have come a long way, IMHO they still lack the sheer ease-of-use that NeXTstep provided back in the day. I think the time might be right for an alternative to KDE/GNOME that is based on the NeXTstep experience.
I'm interested in readers' thoughts on this matter. Email me if this sounds interesting.
I like Best Buy a lot because the sales droids tend to really take care of their customers. I speak from experience. I recently bought a projection HDTV from Best Buy. It was an open box return and I got a screaming good deal ($899 down from $1499). I was worried about whether there was something wrong with the TV, since obviously someone had returned it previously. The sales droid wrote on the receipt that if there was something wrong with the TV that they would exchange it for their display model, which worked perfectly. Sure enough, I got the TV home and the picture was distorted. I called the droid at Best Buy and within a couple of days the delivery guys brought the floor model over to the house and hauled away the bad one. Simple as that.
.......... kris
There's a lot of bitching and complaining here about the quality of the sales droids at Best Buy, but I'm a happy Best Buy customer (and my wife works at a Best Buy too, and it's a great place for her to work).
I was first on campus to own a NeXTstation 68040. The NeXTstep operating environment (Mach + BSD layer + AppKit + Display PostScript + included apps) wasn't a lot different then from today's MacOS X, modulo the nifty GUI extras like Expose, etc.
My point is that NeXT technology provided the boost that gave Apple such a headstart over Microsoft. The past few years have been mainly useability and performance improvements as they have iterated through releases. So thank NeXT for doing all the heavy lifting.
(posted from my 1 GHz PowerBook)
......... kris
These inflatable modules are cool and everything, but I'm much more interested in the America Space Prize than the modules.
I was hoping that one of the criteria for the contest was that the entire spacecraft, not just the crew module, would be reusable. As far as I can tell, the winning entry will be launched on a traditional throwaway booster. Given this, it will cost you half a mil to fly to a Bigelow Inflatable Hotel for a week of fun in space, hardly an affordable price.
It seems, therefore, the America Space Prize is not about tourism but competing directly with NASA for space science money. Not necessarily bad, but not as exciting as seeing the frontier of affordable LEO space tourism open up.
The X-Prize is obviously the model for the Centennial Challenge--in fact an X-Prize administrator participated in the Challenge. Clearly the X-Prize was the right idea at the right time. If NASA and Congress actually follow through, we might see some useful things come out of this.
Personally, I liked the idea of a reusable first and second stage heavy-lift vehicle. I always wondered why they couldn't be reusable.
....... kris
bad advice.
i went on an acid bender in my late teens, trying to understand what it was like to be psychotic. it set off my latent bipolar disorder and then i had a REAL opportunity to see what psychosis was like, one that wouldn't stop.
please don't take powerful psychedelic drugs without supervision by a psychiatrist. at least find out whether you're predisposed to mental illness before you do.
when i was arrested last summer for violent behavior when i stopped taking my meds, i got into an argument with the psych assessment officer that bipolars don't hallucinate. he said, "i've been dealing with the mentally ill for forty years, and only schizophrenics hallucinate." i didn't back down, and won't. i know better from first-hand experience.
........... kris
i have severe bipolar II, and for years before I was diagnosed and treated with meds I hallucinated like a son-of-a-bitch. people, voices, psychedelic imagery, the whole nine yards. the myth that only schizophrenics hallucinate is simply that, a myth.
Have you ever been on the receiving end of an analyst's call? I have several times, and no money was exchanged.
Just because one analyst dissed Linus doesn't mean they all suck.
Good reason to browse at +3 . . . I never encountered this priceless gem of JavaScript.
What GNUstep needs is a refactoring to make it 100% compatible with the modern Cocoa object APIs. Then and only then will it become possible to write to Cocoa and then recompile on Linux. This will take more resources than the GNUstep team has to throw at the problem. What is needed, as another poster pointed out, is a corporate backer who will finance the work.
I'd like to be the guy who starts the ball rolling. I've written business plans that have passed muster with several VC firms, so I have connections and know what it takes to create a plan that can generate real live venture capital. I'm working on a business proposal for a startup that would focus on refactoring GNUstep and using it as the foundation of a Mac-like user experience and development environment sitting on top of the Linux kernel. With an initial investment of less than two million dollars (the magic number) to hire an initial team of engineers and decent management, GNUstep could be refactored and provide the foundation for real Mac-to-Linux crossplatform capabilities. Of course, my business proposal includes working closely with the GNUstep team, as well as honoring the GPL and releasing the refactored APIs in source code form.
The only problem with a firm investing massive amounts of capital in the GNUstep project is return on investment and decent upper management. I think I have the management problem solved, but investment would have to come with the emergence of Linux as a viable desktop platform in the minds and eyes of IT staff and upper management. That's happening, but not as quickly as some hope. But it turns out that a lean and nimble development team, combined with further stages of capitalization and moderate levels of GNUstep-powered environment sales, could generate profits in its third year at the current level of Linux desktop sales, according to my preliminary and terse calculations.
In short, I believe GNUstep could be a viable platform for a commercial company to build a business on, and the side benefit would be a lot more Mac apps ported to Linux, as well as the reverse.
I've run the proposal across several people who are clueful, and they've been enthusiastic. I'm enthusiastic. I hope something comes of this, given I'm a Linux user and a rabid MacOS X fan. It could only help GNUstep take its rightful place as a premier API and development environment.
With or without Windows, Apple would probably be in the same boat.
.............. kris
Porting MacOS to Intel would have only happened under a Jobs regime at Apple during the period Windows was gaining its dominance. Remember, Jobs was not CEO of Apple during this period--Sculley was. Sculley pushed for a "margin" over "volume" business strategy--this would have still limited their market penetration had Windows not been around, just as it did when Windows was making its inroads into the PC market and Apple was trying to squeeze every last penny from its installed base.
In summary, Jobs would have had to still be CEO of Apple if it were to port MacOS to Intel and adopt a business strategy based on volume and not margin. But I strongly believe, based on his move to port NeXTstep to Intel after recognizing he could make more money on software than hardware, than Apple would have become a software company that made cutting-edge x86 hardware.