The paper is about adding a layer of addressing so that IP and Ethernet addresses can be moved from one machine to another as instances of virtual machines are migrated around. It's not about the problems of physically building a very large switch. The switch components are mostly stock items.
There's nothing wrong with a browser establishing a persistent connection to a server which uses a non-HTTP protocol. Java applets have been doing that for a decade. That's how most chat clients work. Many corporate client/server apps work that way. In fact, what the article is really talking about is going back to "client-server computing", with Javascript applications in the browser being the client-side application instead of Java applets (2000) or Windows applications (1995).
But accepting incoming HTTP connections in the browser is just asking for trouble. There will be exploits that don't require any user action. Not a good thing. Every time someone puts something in Windows clients that accepts outside connections, there's soon an exploit for it.
It seems sort of pointless to have another language that runs on top of the Java JVM. You still have all the Java baggage, plus a new language with its own baggage.
Scala is heavy on "cute" features. Wow, you can define your own infix operators! Mixins! Traits! Lots of overriding and overloading! Heavy "extensibility". You can beat the language into letting you write parser rules in Scala.
The trouble with overdoing language extensibility is that someone else may have to fix the "extended" code.
Something like 0.2% of the US population claims to have been abducted by a UFO. This means about 16 flights per night for a medium-sized city. Do UFOs coordinate with air traffic control, or what?
UFO 149A, you are cleared to descend to 6000, turn right heading 240, report when over LAX VOR.
Suppose Disney did this. Which they could. Then they could squelch embarrassing videos like this one of the aftermath of a monorail crash. You can see guests trying to get the driver out of the wrecked monorail as the clueless Disney employees try to stop someone from photographing the crash.
The problem is that Burning Man wants to censor videos at their absolute discretion. If they had a set of standards on what was acceptable, that would be reasonable, but, as is typical with EULA agreements, they overreached.
The future of space belongs to a country willing to use nuclear propulsion. Chemical rockets are a dead end. They haven't improved much in forty years, and the limits of that technology have been nearly reached.
It's really hard to get a Dell netbook delivered with Linux. At the moment, the Latitude 2100 is one of the very few machines to come with Linux. It's $30 cheaper than with a Microsoft OS. Dell's search page has a "FreeDOS and Linux" option, and if you check that, you get "No configurations are valid for the selected options." There's a Linux option for the Mini 10v, but the Windows versions has an "instant discount" to bring its price down to match the Linux version. (Also, the Windows version comes with a hard drive, while the Linux version only has 8GB of flash memory)
There are, as far as I know, no Linux-only netbooks left on the market.
Such a service should be bonded, by an outside bonding company. It's the surety bonding company's responsibility to run background checks on the contractor's employees, and to pay up if they steal. (They'll try to get the money back from the contractor or the employee.) Banks carry surety bonds for their employees.
This has been tried. Remember Bonded Spammer? That was a flop. Then they were sold, reduced their standards (senders no longer have to post a bond) and are now called ReturnPath.. For $82,500/year you can send 100 million spams. They pay off ISPs to whitelist their senders. There's a way to query DNS to determine if an address is a "Bonded Spammer". It's an indication that the message should be sent to the "bulk" folder.
Nobody uses this much any more. The last Bonded Spammer e-mail I received was in 2007.
I'd like to see a new/competing version of the online encyclopedia which attempts to be more inclusive of all information.
It exists. It's called Wikia. Wikia has the Star [Trek|Craft|Gate|Wars] wikis, where the fanboys can publish the details of every item ever mentioned in any spinoff comic book. Go there and post away.
Someone else criticized the typography of the C-12 textbooks. The graphs are worse. I'm reading
their "Calculus" book.
The axis scales on the graphs tend to be very tiny. You have to zoom way, way in using a PDF viewer to read the axes. At which point the graph lines show serious jaggies. Tables of numeric values are left-aligned, which makes it hard to compare values.
There's very little motivation. The text just jumps right in, throwing formulas at the kids.
The language is painful. "Recall that a particular pair of numbers is a solution if direct substitution of the X and Y values into the original equation yields a true equation statement." This is formally correct, but it uses the concept of evaluating an equation as a truth-valued Boolean statement, which is beyond the scope of this text.
On pages 15-16, the book discusses depreciation. One problem says "Assuming the rate of depreciation of the car is constant..." What they mean is that the price declines linearly (into negative territory?). A "constant rate of depreciation" is usually understood as a constant percentage rate. (The financial community uses "straight line depreciation" to refer to linear depreciation.) This also could have led to a useful discussion of exponentials, compound interest, decay, and inflation, but they don't go there. They change the subject and go on.
The text assumes that the student has some specific model of graphing calculator, but doesn't say what it is. (Incidentally, the whole course is a PDF file formatted for printing, not HTML with applets, which might be more useful.)
There's a section on fitting a curve to a set of data. It tells the student what buttons to push on the calculator, but says nothing about what's going on inside.
The terms "open interval" and "closed interval" are used, but not defined before use. The text also uses capital letters like N to indicate sets of pairs of reals on page 68. This is a confusing usage from more advanced math. I think that some of the theorems were cut and pasted from another source, and don't quite fit the text.
When the text finally gets to integrals and derivatives, it doesn't start by pointing out that they're inverse operations. Both are presented separately. The text would be better if it started off with a completely graphical presentation of what's going on, instead of starting with derivations.
This text has all the stuff on the checklist, but presents them incoherently. This is not a good textbook.
It's good that Wikipedia's growth is slowing. That's an indication that the job is approaching completion.
Most of the important articles were in the first 500,000. New articles at this point tend to be marginal or unwanted. Here are the last five articles added to Wikipedia:
Robert S Vibert "Robert S. Vibert is a 'big-picture" Applied Researcher of numerous techniques, philosophies and methods developed both in ancient and modern times to provide awaren..." (First article by new editor, a bio of some unknown self-improvement guru. Queued for speedy deletion.)
National Management Association "The roots of NMA began in southwestern Ohio in the dark years following World War I. Poor working conditions were everywhere, yet any working condi..." (Advertising. Copyright violation. Cut and paste of organization's web site. Already deleted.)
WALLIS STUDIOS"WALLIS STUDIOS are based within the DARO WORKS, 80-86 Wallis Road, Hackney Wick, London E9 5LW and were established five years ago. WALLIS STUDIOS have expanded ove..." (First article by new editor. Promotes the business he works for. Contested speedy deletion, already deleted.)
Va va bloom Va Va Bloom is a well known Florist based in the heart of Edinburgh. Va Va Bloom provide a wide cross section of customers from both..." (Blatant advertising. Speedy deletion requested.)
Eirik solheim "Eirik Solheim is a professor in orthopaedic surgery at the University of Bergen in Norway, and a specialist on..." (Created by "Eiriksolheim", which Wikipedia frowns upon. Proposed deletion flag: "Fails WP:PROF. No secondary sources")
That's what's coming in right now. Most of the articles being added to Wikipedia at this point are either junk like that, or on very obscure topics. That's why growth is slowing. This is a good thing. Throwing out the trash is a hassle for everyone involved.
VATSIM is a simulated air traffic control environment. It allows users of Microsoft Flight Simulator to connect to a set of Linux servers which simulate worldwide air traffic. There are volunteer ATC controllers, who run a simulator for an ATC position, with a simulated radar screen. The controllers issue clearances and control traffic as in the real world. To the greatest extent possible, real-world procedures are followed. Real-world weather information is used, and everything runs in real time.
So VATSIM would be a good environment in which to test an automated UAV controller which talked to ATC. VATSIM will accept text communications with ATC, so it's not necessary to do voice recognition. When a UAV can fly routinely in VATSIM, properly interacting with ATC, then the basic problems of operating in controlled airspace will have been solved.
I went to a meeting at NASA Ames in Silicon Valley about this last year. There are people who want to fly various types of drones for law enforcement purposes. One of the speakers was from the Sacramento PD, which sometimes uses a helicopter. But the helicopter is expensive to fly and can't stay up long enough. They'd like to fly a small drone with TV cameras when they just need to look around from the air.
Currently, there's a procedure for requesting airspace for such operations, but it takes months to get approval from the FAA. Unless it's a law enforcement emergency, in which case it takes only hours. Current policy is to clear all other traffic out of airspace where UAVs are being operated, which is why it's so hard to get permission.
One goal is to handle UAV operations like helicopter operations in class A and B airspace, where ATC is aware of and is separating all aircraft. News and police helicopters in LA are operated that way; they have to be, with all the air traffic over Los Angeles. UAV operations may turn out to be easier to manage in such highly congested areas, where everybody is used to tight control over flights and the ATC capability is in place to keep track of them.
That article sounds bogus. The problem seems to be that there's not much demand for more capacity, not that there's a lack of floor space.
If anybody actually needs a few thousand servers in Silicon Valley right now, I know a company that has them idle. Machines less than 18 months old, 8 CPUs per server, plenty of bandwidth. Serious inquiries only.
Multiple light sources offer some interesting options. A few years ago, someone modified a digital camera (I think a Canon PowerShot) to have four flash sources instead of the usual one. The camera would take four pictures in quick succession, one with each flash. This allowed better edge detection.
It was useful for applications like taking a picture of complex, dirty machinery (as under a car hood) and locating the edges, even where everything was roughly the same shade. It also helped when photographing very shiny objects, where the reflection from the flash was a problem. With each reflection from each flash unit in a different place, all reflections could be removed.
It was too specialized to become mainstream, though. That seems to be the fate of 3D from 2D systems. Good ones have been built, but most have been either discontinued or turned into very expensive products for specialized use.
RCA thought they had a breakthrough, when they showed Disney executives a cassette they had developed. It was designed for rental and could only be played once. A mechanical locking arrangement was engaged when the cassette had finished playing. The consumer would then have to return it to the rental store, which had the special tool needed to unlock and rewind it.
That was actually produced, with little success. The cassettes were big; I think 3/4" U-Matic type tape. The player had no rewind capability. I came across the "rewinder" in a surplus store; it was a simple device, with a key switch and a counter to record how many tapes it had rewound.
In the early days of VCRs, some movie studios were arguing that a video rental should cost about as much as four movie tickets, with popcorn. Really.
Polaroid at one point came up with a VHS cassette limited to a fixed number of plays by a mechanical ratchet device. This went nowhere.
There have been a few of these. JAUS, Microsoft Robot Studio, Player/Stage, etc.
Mostly, they're message passing systems. The Willow Robotics system starts by putting a message passing layer on top of Linux. Microsoft's Robot Studio uses a message passing system based on Windows Web Services, a rather sluggish approach. JAUS has its own message passing system. Each of these systems has its own message formats. Most of the bigger systems have a publish-subscribe model, where the receiver decides what inputs they want to listen to.
When we did a Grand Challenge vehicle, we used QNX, which has hard real time message passing as its basic primitive. If it really has to be done on a tight schedule, that's the way to go. BigDog runs on QNX, with the main balance loop at 200KHz and the individual servovalve control loops at 1KHz, all on one CPU.
In 2004 and 2005, Google sponsored the Web Spam Summmit, on how to stop web spam. In 2006 and later, Google sponsored the Search Engine Strategies conference, on how to create web spam. So 2006 is when Google turned to the dark side.
He's right. There's a great book called "The Box", which is a history of modern shipping containers. Containerization reduced the cost of ocean shipping of manufactured goods by about 90%. Breakage and theft went way down, too.
A few decades ago, if you went down to the docks in New York or San Francisco, there were thousands of big guys lifting and carrying stuff. Not only did containers end that, they ended the ports of New York and San Francisco - both were replaced with new ports in New Jersey and Oakland. If you go to a container port today, you see very few people around.
The other big development that made international trade work was fax machines. With fax machines, you could send ordinary business paperwork to people far away. Even if they didn't speak your language, they could probably figure out a purchase order. So you could do the basics of commerce at a distance. This cut out many of the expensive middlemen in international trade. It used to be that to import something, you had to deal with an importer, who dealt with an exporter at the sending end, who dealt with the manufacturer, possibly with a wholesaler and a warehouse company somewhere in the chain. With fax machines and containers, you cut the deal with the manufacturer by fax, they filled a container, and the container came to you without any intermediaries who cared what was in the box.
A movie is a story; a game is a place you go. Too much story in a game makes the game a "track ride", where you ride along the plot track, mostly doing drive-by shootings. This has been the curse of most movie-licensed games.
Fortunately, the game industry has gone beyond that. Most major games are now large-area free-play games. There are plotted things to do, but you're not locked into the plot. You can start up GTA IV and just tour Liberty City if you like. Try that with early Star Wars games and you get nowhere; you're locked on the track and you will bomb the Death Star as ordered.
The free-play model breaks the Hollywood process, which progresses from plot to script to production in a very sequential way. Game development today is more about world-building. There are subplots, but often there's no overarching plot at all. Nor is there necessarily a story arc.
MMOs go even further in that direction. Not only are they free-play, but there are tens or hundreds of users all creating input. Those users have to be kept happy (they're paying by the month) and managed. Managing an MMO is a politician's job, not a director's. Hollywood types hate that.
World of Warcraft is run from Irvine, CA. (WoW staffers, you have my sympathy.) Everquest is run from San Diego. EVE is run from Bellevue, WA. Lord of the Rings is run from Westwood, Massachusetts. The big successes in the MMO area aren't coming from Hollywood.
Marchex is a "domaining" company. They're the people behind those "What you need, when you need it" ad-heavy landing pages. They tried to buy up all the 5-digit number domains. (So did others; nobody got all of them.) This sounds like a similar idea, only less profitable.
If you thought Microsoft was bad, Apple had a closed ecosystem, and Comcast Cable was an obnoxious monopoly, visualize a world where your netbook running Google's OS is permanently tethered to Google's servers.
Note, for example, that there is no workable ad blocker for Chrome. (AdSweep was discontinued due to lack of interest.)
Slashdot Mirror
The paper is about adding a layer of addressing so that IP and Ethernet addresses can be moved from one machine to another as instances of virtual machines are migrated around. It's not about the problems of physically building a very large switch. The switch components are mostly stock items.
There's nothing wrong with a browser establishing a persistent connection to a server which uses a non-HTTP protocol. Java applets have been doing that for a decade. That's how most chat clients work. Many corporate client/server apps work that way. In fact, what the article is really talking about is going back to "client-server computing", with Javascript applications in the browser being the client-side application instead of Java applets (2000) or Windows applications (1995).
But accepting incoming HTTP connections in the browser is just asking for trouble. There will be exploits that don't require any user action. Not a good thing. Every time someone puts something in Windows clients that accepts outside connections, there's soon an exploit for it.
It seems sort of pointless to have another language that runs on top of the Java JVM. You still have all the Java baggage, plus a new language with its own baggage.
Scala is heavy on "cute" features. Wow, you can define your own infix operators! Mixins! Traits! Lots of overriding and overloading! Heavy "extensibility". You can beat the language into letting you write parser rules in Scala.
The trouble with overdoing language extensibility is that someone else may have to fix the "extended" code.
Something like 0.2% of the US population claims to have been abducted by a UFO. This means about 16 flights per night for a medium-sized city. Do UFOs coordinate with air traffic control, or what?
UFO 149A, you are cleared to descend to 6000, turn right heading 240, report when over LAX VOR.
The RIAA doesn't care if you make a copy of an audio CD for different machines in your own house. The BSA does.
The BSA's target is the company that buys one copy and runs ten copies.
The Google ad for this page is:
Earn up to $1 Million for Reporting Software Piracy - All Confidential
www.BSA.org/reportpiracy
Suppose Disney did this. Which they could. Then they could squelch embarrassing videos like this one of the aftermath of a monorail crash. You can see guests trying to get the driver out of the wrecked monorail as the clueless Disney employees try to stop someone from photographing the crash.
The problem is that Burning Man wants to censor videos at their absolute discretion. If they had a set of standards on what was acceptable, that would be reasonable, but, as is typical with EULA agreements, they overreached.
The next step is to enforce ICANN rule 4.2.5 to prohibit registrars from warehousing or speculating in domains.
The future of space belongs to a country willing to use nuclear propulsion. Chemical rockets are a dead end. They haven't improved much in forty years, and the limits of that technology have been nearly reached.
It's really hard to get a Dell netbook delivered with Linux. At the moment, the Latitude 2100 is one of the very few machines to come with Linux. It's $30 cheaper than with a Microsoft OS. Dell's search page has a "FreeDOS and Linux" option, and if you check that, you get "No configurations are valid for the selected options." There's a Linux option for the Mini 10v, but the Windows versions has an "instant discount" to bring its price down to match the Linux version. (Also, the Windows version comes with a hard drive, while the Linux version only has 8GB of flash memory)
There are, as far as I know, no Linux-only netbooks left on the market.
Such a service should be bonded, by an outside bonding company. It's the surety bonding company's responsibility to run background checks on the contractor's employees, and to pay up if they steal. (They'll try to get the money back from the contractor or the employee.) Banks carry surety bonds for their employees.
Here's a contract for network administration services with a bonding clause.
This has been tried. Remember Bonded Spammer? That was a flop. Then they were sold, reduced their standards (senders no longer have to post a bond) and are now called ReturnPath.. For $82,500/year you can send 100 million spams. They pay off ISPs to whitelist their senders. There's a way to query DNS to determine if an address is a "Bonded Spammer". It's an indication that the message should be sent to the "bulk" folder.
Nobody uses this much any more. The last Bonded Spammer e-mail I received was in 2007.
I'd like to see a new/competing version of the online encyclopedia which attempts to be more inclusive of all information.
It exists. It's called Wikia. Wikia has the Star [Trek|Craft|Gate|Wars] wikis, where the fanboys can publish the details of every item ever mentioned in any spinoff comic book. Go there and post away.
Someone else criticized the typography of the C-12 textbooks. The graphs are worse. I'm reading their "Calculus" book. The axis scales on the graphs tend to be very tiny. You have to zoom way, way in using a PDF viewer to read the axes. At which point the graph lines show serious jaggies. Tables of numeric values are left-aligned, which makes it hard to compare values.
There's very little motivation. The text just jumps right in, throwing formulas at the kids.
The language is painful. "Recall that a particular pair of numbers is a solution if direct substitution of the X and Y values into the original equation yields a true equation statement." This is formally correct, but it uses the concept of evaluating an equation as a truth-valued Boolean statement, which is beyond the scope of this text.
On pages 15-16, the book discusses depreciation. One problem says "Assuming the rate of depreciation of the car is constant..." What they mean is that the price declines linearly (into negative territory?). A "constant rate of depreciation" is usually understood as a constant percentage rate. (The financial community uses "straight line depreciation" to refer to linear depreciation.) This also could have led to a useful discussion of exponentials, compound interest, decay, and inflation, but they don't go there. They change the subject and go on.
The text assumes that the student has some specific model of graphing calculator, but doesn't say what it is. (Incidentally, the whole course is a PDF file formatted for printing, not HTML with applets, which might be more useful.)
There's a section on fitting a curve to a set of data. It tells the student what buttons to push on the calculator, but says nothing about what's going on inside.
The terms "open interval" and "closed interval" are used, but not defined before use. The text also uses capital letters like N to indicate sets of pairs of reals on page 68. This is a confusing usage from more advanced math. I think that some of the theorems were cut and pasted from another source, and don't quite fit the text.
When the text finally gets to integrals and derivatives, it doesn't start by pointing out that they're inverse operations. Both are presented separately. The text would be better if it started off with a completely graphical presentation of what's going on, instead of starting with derivations.
This text has all the stuff on the checklist, but presents them incoherently. This is not a good textbook.
It's good that Wikipedia's growth is slowing. That's an indication that the job is approaching completion.
Most of the important articles were in the first 500,000. New articles at this point tend to be marginal or unwanted. Here are the last five articles added to Wikipedia:
That's what's coming in right now. Most of the articles being added to Wikipedia at this point are either junk like that, or on very obscure topics. That's why growth is slowing. This is a good thing. Throwing out the trash is a hassle for everyone involved.
VATSIM is a simulated air traffic control environment. It allows users of Microsoft Flight Simulator to connect to a set of Linux servers which simulate worldwide air traffic. There are volunteer ATC controllers, who run a simulator for an ATC position, with a simulated radar screen. The controllers issue clearances and control traffic as in the real world. To the greatest extent possible, real-world procedures are followed. Real-world weather information is used, and everything runs in real time.
So VATSIM would be a good environment in which to test an automated UAV controller which talked to ATC. VATSIM will accept text communications with ATC, so it's not necessary to do voice recognition. When a UAV can fly routinely in VATSIM, properly interacting with ATC, then the basic problems of operating in controlled airspace will have been solved.
I went to a meeting at NASA Ames in Silicon Valley about this last year. There are people who want to fly various types of drones for law enforcement purposes. One of the speakers was from the Sacramento PD, which sometimes uses a helicopter. But the helicopter is expensive to fly and can't stay up long enough. They'd like to fly a small drone with TV cameras when they just need to look around from the air.
Currently, there's a procedure for requesting airspace for such operations, but it takes months to get approval from the FAA. Unless it's a law enforcement emergency, in which case it takes only hours. Current policy is to clear all other traffic out of airspace where UAVs are being operated, which is why it's so hard to get permission.
One goal is to handle UAV operations like helicopter operations in class A and B airspace, where ATC is aware of and is separating all aircraft. News and police helicopters in LA are operated that way; they have to be, with all the air traffic over Los Angeles. UAV operations may turn out to be easier to manage in such highly congested areas, where everybody is used to tight control over flights and the ATC capability is in place to keep track of them.
That article sounds bogus. The problem seems to be that there's not much demand for more capacity, not that there's a lack of floor space.
If anybody actually needs a few thousand servers in Silicon Valley right now, I know a company that has them idle. Machines less than 18 months old, 8 CPUs per server, plenty of bandwidth. Serious inquiries only.
Multiple light sources offer some interesting options. A few years ago, someone modified a digital camera (I think a Canon PowerShot) to have four flash sources instead of the usual one. The camera would take four pictures in quick succession, one with each flash. This allowed better edge detection.
It was useful for applications like taking a picture of complex, dirty machinery (as under a car hood) and locating the edges, even where everything was roughly the same shade. It also helped when photographing very shiny objects, where the reflection from the flash was a problem. With each reflection from each flash unit in a different place, all reflections could be removed.
It was too specialized to become mainstream, though. That seems to be the fate of 3D from 2D systems. Good ones have been built, but most have been either discontinued or turned into very expensive products for specialized use.
RCA thought they had a breakthrough, when they showed Disney executives a cassette they had developed. It was designed for rental and could only be played once. A mechanical locking arrangement was engaged when the cassette had finished playing. The consumer would then have to return it to the rental store, which had the special tool needed to unlock and rewind it.
That was actually produced, with little success. The cassettes were big; I think 3/4" U-Matic type tape. The player had no rewind capability. I came across the "rewinder" in a surplus store; it was a simple device, with a key switch and a counter to record how many tapes it had rewound.
In the early days of VCRs, some movie studios were arguing that a video rental should cost about as much as four movie tickets, with popcorn. Really.
Polaroid at one point came up with a VHS cassette limited to a fixed number of plays by a mechanical ratchet device. This went nowhere.
There have been a few of these. JAUS, Microsoft Robot Studio, Player/Stage, etc.
Mostly, they're message passing systems. The Willow Robotics system starts by putting a message passing layer on top of Linux. Microsoft's Robot Studio uses a message passing system based on Windows Web Services, a rather sluggish approach. JAUS has its own message passing system. Each of these systems has its own message formats. Most of the bigger systems have a publish-subscribe model, where the receiver decides what inputs they want to listen to.
When we did a Grand Challenge vehicle, we used QNX, which has hard real time message passing as its basic primitive. If it really has to be done on a tight schedule, that's the way to go. BigDog runs on QNX, with the main balance loop at 200KHz and the individual servovalve control loops at 1KHz, all on one CPU.
When did he leave Google?
In 2004 and 2005, Google sponsored the Web Spam Summmit, on how to stop web spam. In 2006 and later, Google sponsored the Search Engine Strategies conference, on how to create web spam. So 2006 is when Google turned to the dark side.
but the big thing was the freight container.
He's right. There's a great book called "The Box", which is a history of modern shipping containers. Containerization reduced the cost of ocean shipping of manufactured goods by about 90%. Breakage and theft went way down, too.
A few decades ago, if you went down to the docks in New York or San Francisco, there were thousands of big guys lifting and carrying stuff. Not only did containers end that, they ended the ports of New York and San Francisco - both were replaced with new ports in New Jersey and Oakland. If you go to a container port today, you see very few people around.
The other big development that made international trade work was fax machines. With fax machines, you could send ordinary business paperwork to people far away. Even if they didn't speak your language, they could probably figure out a purchase order. So you could do the basics of commerce at a distance. This cut out many of the expensive middlemen in international trade. It used to be that to import something, you had to deal with an importer, who dealt with an exporter at the sending end, who dealt with the manufacturer, possibly with a wholesaler and a warehouse company somewhere in the chain. With fax machines and containers, you cut the deal with the manufacturer by fax, they filled a container, and the container came to you without any intermediaries who cared what was in the box.
A movie is a story; a game is a place you go. Too much story in a game makes the game a "track ride", where you ride along the plot track, mostly doing drive-by shootings. This has been the curse of most movie-licensed games.
Fortunately, the game industry has gone beyond that. Most major games are now large-area free-play games. There are plotted things to do, but you're not locked into the plot. You can start up GTA IV and just tour Liberty City if you like. Try that with early Star Wars games and you get nowhere; you're locked on the track and you will bomb the Death Star as ordered.
The free-play model breaks the Hollywood process, which progresses from plot to script to production in a very sequential way. Game development today is more about world-building. There are subplots, but often there's no overarching plot at all. Nor is there necessarily a story arc.
MMOs go even further in that direction. Not only are they free-play, but there are tens or hundreds of users all creating input. Those users have to be kept happy (they're paying by the month) and managed. Managing an MMO is a politician's job, not a director's. Hollywood types hate that.
World of Warcraft is run from Irvine, CA. (WoW staffers, you have my sympathy.) Everquest is run from San Diego. EVE is run from Bellevue, WA. Lord of the Rings is run from Westwood, Massachusetts. The big successes in the MMO area aren't coming from Hollywood.
Marchex is a "domaining" company. They're the people behind those "What you need, when you need it" ad-heavy landing pages. They tried to buy up all the 5-digit number domains. (So did others; nobody got all of them.) This sounds like a similar idea, only less profitable.
If you thought Microsoft was bad, Apple had a closed ecosystem, and Comcast Cable was an obnoxious monopoly, visualize a world where your netbook running Google's OS is permanently tethered to Google's servers.
Note, for example, that there is no workable ad blocker for Chrome. (AdSweep was discontinued due to lack of interest.)