How about thinking your ideas through before stating them? For one, you've just decreased the price of CD's by over 90%, but on the other hand you've just jacked up the price of books by 100-400%!
Full length moveis should cost about the same as a DVD? Well, isn't that what they cost now???? Or does a DVD movie somehow not cost as much as a DVD Movie.
Your business has no model to it... Destroy all credit card info... So that means i can open an account, download whatever i want, then say someone stole my card. You can't come forward with any proof that it was me... in fact you can't even furnish paper work saying where and when you got my credit card number... YOU EAT THE CHARGES.
Next, you want artists to PAY you for the the priveledge of letting you selling their music, while at the same time giving away any rights and control they might have had? Or... they can get PAID by a label, and still retain ultimate control over their works... Or at least get credit for them.
How are you going to pay.25 a song? Micropayments never caught on, and none of the credit card companies are going to give you anything near a deal if they're handling a load of 25 cent transactions... Their fee is probably more than 25 cents, meaning again, the artists would lose out... There is some stuff that labels bring to the table, that people overlook... Distribution, quantities of scale, and centralization. They give artists one check rather than 500,000 checks.
Microsoft tried to create something that would make artists and labels more comfortable with that concept... Guess what? A bunch of hackers... err... crackers... broke it before it even arrived.
Digitals nice for some things, as data can be moved and copied with no fear of loss of quality. That's kind of detrimental to music, though... At least before the advent of CD-R's and MP3's, copies to cassettes would degrade more and more and more... CD-R's are perfect. MP3's lose a lot upon conversion, but from then on they don't lose anything...
Come, work for me, and if i feel like it, i'll pay you... Any takers?
In the best case scenario, an artist sells a downloads and has to go to the bank to deposit one million checks?!? It's going to take them a couple of years just to sign and bundle all those checks. They'll probably have to hire a staff of workers to do it in a reasonable time. Guess what? Those'll cost them money... They'll probably lose 75% of their cash just to the overhead of employees sitting there stamping checks all day long.
Now if an artist was okay with that idea, came forward and said, yes, distribute this on the internet. If you like it, send me a buck, that'd be cool. But let them decide how they want to do it! Many would rather just get a cash advance and then a few large sized checks from the labels rather than suffering through hundreds of thousands of one dollar checks. Remember, it's their choice as to how to distribute their music not yours.
To put it in the slashdot perspective, it's akin to me saying "hey this linux thing is pretty cool, but you know, i don't really like the GPL... So i guess i'll just make my own distro, pull out all the source and references to the GPL, because, you know, computer programs should be free... my interpretation of free being that i can do WHATEVER I LIKE with it, even if that means ignoring the copyrights"
What if you want to move your asp pages from your IIS server to a Linux/Apache server in a minimal amount of time? Once there, you could commence to reprogramming your site at a more relaxed pace.
If IBM wants only to be a hardware vendor, how can you explain that their services division now makes around 30% of their profits? How can you explain DB/2 being one of the foremost SQL databases available?
IBM just wants to be the leading edge computer company again. The one that everyone looks up to. They took the java ball and ran with it... They still do, a lot more than Sun does. They're running with Linux right now. But they're large enough that any flop won't seriously hurt them (remember when they lost over a billion dollars selling PC's? Their reaction was "Oh. We'll have to take a closer look at that division in the future."
There are enough x86 server OSes available that of course IBM won't demand that everyone use just one. Even before Linux, there was OS/2 Warp Server, the BSDs, SCO Unixware and OpenServer, Netware, Windows NT... People want and demand all of them. IBM for it's part just doesn't want to be an MSFT lackey like Dell, and sell people the best tool for the job, but more over, the tool people ask for.
They're far from being a company that's really benefiting from opensource, the way I interpretted the sentence. If anything, opensource is benefiting from having IBM on it's side.
So what about the multimillionaire executive, the hundred-thousandaire programmers who've never had to break a sweat at work? Maybe they should all do what they do for free as well, then then repave roads for a living? Sound fair?
The only people trying to give away all artists works for free around here are the people who aren't artists.
I dropped this comment on this type of discussion before, and it still seems relevant, so here it is again:
Artists need the royalty's from their CD's to survive... Only the mega popular acts actually make money on tours. Most artists go on tours to promote their CD's. It's more of an advertising expense than a revenue generator.
If you really at all care for the artists, i strongly encourage you to give this a read. You'll see that there's already plenty of people out there screwing artists over, that fans really shouldn't start as well.
We all know that the recording industry aren't angels and are in fact devils in most cases... But without formulating a plan where artists will definetly get paid for their efforts, all the speculation about what MP3's can and can not do are moot, in my eyes.
While your experiences with they might be giants sound okay, I'd hardly assume that's how the rest of the music scene goes. Remember, they're a HUGE band, in a position where they have some influence. They also know they've got a LOT of loyal fans. Bands starting out don't have either of those luxuries.
Yes, but that means that's what they were expecting to do... and in case you hadn't noticed, Redhat and VA Linux have fallen from their high horse positions of being $20 billion dollar companies with negative earnings to being mere $5 billion dollar companies with negative earnings.... When they start posting positive earnings, it will say something about the open source only business model... Because a company can last for only so long issuing more and more stock... Right now it's acceptable, slightly, that they're not making real money... But i'd rather wait for them to make the money before declaring open source a success and pointing to them as the most tangible reasons one can tell it succeeded.
IBM adopts almost any promising technology. That's a good thing. But they're big enough to be able to take gambles, knowing up they'll make up for any loses with one of their many divisions...
When IBM starts talking about Linux at their analyst meetings, i'll believe it's helped them... but right now, its so early on the curve that's it's hard to know what will become of IBM and Linux
Mac's were at 72 DPI back when there were only Mac's, Mac Pluses, Mac SE's, and SE30's... Also classics, color classics, and classic II's were locked into 72 dpi.
But ever since multisync displays arrived on the scene (what? around 1987), mac users have been free to use whatever resolution they cared to use...
I like 1600x1200 for stuff like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and maybe some 3-D apps, but when i want to read text i switch to a much saner resolution.
Their style sheets said 9 px, not 9 pt... hence the type was exactly 9 pixels tall, not points, by the way.
Ummm... They sold their units at a LOSS. They expected to make up for it by the fees for the online service. A bunch of hackers opened up the boxes, installed NetBSD, and didn't use their service. So, they stood to lose tons of money on their loss leaders with no way to make it up... It's not exactly shooting themselves in the feet when they try to stop the on coming flood of future losses.
Oh, and who has open source actually helped, I'm curious? Red Hat? VA Linux? Cobalt? Well, they were all open source companies to start with.
Corel, maybe? Netscape? No... they got bought by AOL just as they were vowing to make Linux a "tier 1 platform". How about Apple? No... Apple's opened their kernel, but make their money on hardware sales... Plus their new OS isn't even on the market yet, so it's hard to gauge the effects of their new OS. SGI? Okay, SGI might be rebounding... In the past few weeks their price range has gone from the low 9's and low 10's to around the 12 dollar mark.
Who else has open source helped? Please tell me!
Another point here is when companies execute according to their business plan, they're more likely to succeed. When their customers tear up their business plan and and starts taking their product from them, it's just not a good business strategy.
Amiga's didn't need anything to "morph" code or translate it. They had the same processors as Mac's (Motorolla 68K's) and only needed ROM's and a few chips to translate calls to the Mac's hardware to the corresponding Amiga hardware.
Why is everyone here content on lobbying to change what the creators of new things do with them? It was your choice to develop under the GPL... it wasn't mandated. You may even like the idea of it. But some people have ego's. They WANT to take credit for their creations. In terms of inventions or music or whatever else, they're also entitiled to make money from their creations. I'd hate the idea of seeing that right taken away.
Yes, IP laws are screwy. Patents need an overhaul. Fair use is both being abused and needing to grant more rights. But when people mention that artists should do what they do for free, it's just absurd./.er's code for free because they're able to, thanks to many having jobs where they code for a living and bring in a lot of money. Artists don't have that luxury.
Without admitting guilt or anything, I have to say that I did once play with Macster and was completely disappointed. It completely ignores ID3 tags, searching only on the file name. Therefore you could put an artist name in the song name field and vice versa and searches would return identical results. I always assumed that Macster and Napster shared a common code base, and hence, Napster only searched on file name, not MP3's.
As an experiment, it'd be nice if Macster would allow logging... Just make up a song that sounds like it's by back street boys or brittney spears or something, say it's by them, but have it only be an mp3 ranting about thievery... The only people that'd get it are the ones who obviously don't have it...
Rather than just jumping to defend napster by saying it's not used for piracy, people really should try to study the usage of it and be honest about their own usage.
Geez... Maybe it's because I"m on a Mac with a 21" monitor... One of those two variables... Granted the srceen is 1240x1024... but according to the pages styles, the type is all 9 pixels... which should be readable, unless you're running a 17" at 1600 x 1200 or something insane like that!
I didn't even need to use IE to look at the page. I looked great in Netscape, had no active X, and... get this, the extension was.htm, NOT.asp. The site still runs IIS, though...
I thought your original tip was for editing your hosts file?
Anyways, did you hear that DoubleClicks CEO stepped forward publicly and put his foot in his mouth by saying that he had grossly miscalculated the effects that his company's actions would have on people's fears about losing their privacy and vowed to discontinue all of their data merging/matching programs?
Yes, DoubleClicks site isn't the best place to find commentary about what they were doing wrong, but its' a great place to look to find out 1- their side of the story, and 2 - what they're doing about it.
The reason that the media moguls are in the position they're in today is because we put them there. They sold America exactly what it wanted. They still do. Therefore, they're not going to leave their thrones anytime soon.
I agree that some programmers are indeed artists, but I still stand by my point of the fact there's a much finer line of distinction between success and failure in programming than there is in any of the mass market "mediums" which I gave as examples somewhere in there.
But in the end, the free tools, protocols and storage standards make up such a small slice of the budgets or costs of putting out a theater or broadcast quality program, that they're essentially zero.
I mean, yes, you spend $15,000 on the animation software, but you've also spent $500,000 on the render farm, pay the artist $75,000+, sit him at a $10,000 machine, etc... If you start cutting those others costs down, you're going to attract lower skilled workers, using weaker desktop machines along with much less rendering power, so in the end your film is going to need an extra 12-18 months to reach distribution, all so you can save $15,000 on the software.
In the end, I think the amount of $$$ spent on proprietary software and formats is SUCH A SMALL SLICE of the actual production costs, that it really just isn't worth it. Talent and hardware cost so much more than the software.
And I just imagined newbie following your advice, then deciding to go to DoubleClicks website to find out what all the fuss is about, only to see a big welcome to apache page.
As for my logic, I know... It can get rather twisted logic sometimes.
But a LOT of websites exist only because of monies they get from DoubleClick. You may not like it, but it's the simple truth.
Even with everything you need being free, you'll find a few roadblocks in your path... Movies, music, television, newspapers, books, and magazines, as trashy as some of them are, are art. Programming is much more of a science.
You program something wrong, it doesn't work or it gives back invalid data. You can test for things like that. You can create an artistic piece which you may like, but no one else does, and you'll never know until it's released upon the world.
Yes, I'm sure some programmers would fancy themselves artists, but in this context, I don't htnkn they are.
There's a great articles in either this months or last months macworld, which explains to all the iMac DV buyers that there's a LOT more that goes into the production of a movie than just camera's and editting software. There's scripts, storyboards, gaffers, technicians, lighting, etc... Get any of those wrong and you've got an amateurish creation.
Likewise, giving anyone who wants it SoftImage, 3D studio, or lightwave, or a free subsitute if one could even be created, will not create animations like you've seen on star trek, star wars, babylon 5, etc... There's artistry involved that can't be instilled within a program or wizard.
Lastly, who will start in your movies? Who will direct them? Starving actors and directors? There is a reason that many of them starve, you know. Yes, people have to put in their time before they see their big break, but too often people don't realize that their opportunity has passed... I hope that doens't come out wrong, but to shorten, I doubt we'll ever see something like The Matrix, Forest Gump, Jurassic Park, or anything else like that come from a "free content" type scheme.
Those budgets were immense because of all the man hours involved. With no guarentee that they'ed make money. Which is why movie studio's act to protect their investments.
*.doubleclick is kinda harsh... but then i guess you'd never want to go to their website to read stuff like their press releases where maybe they'll announce something that retroactively rights their wrongs...
This might be slightly off topic, but i think too much ado is being made about the installation programs various distro's use, and not enough about the quality of the GUI's. I mean, you might need to install a distro once or twice to get it right, but after that, the installation program has served it's purpose.
Haven't played with Mandrake ever, though I've heard that they've started diffentiating their distro more from Redhat's. How, I don't know unless it's in all the extra apps they bundle. But they had to. It was funny to see people defending Mandrake and bashing LinuxOne in the same sentense.
Which brings something else up - why haven't we seen more stories about LInux One? They were always a lot of fun!
Yeah, we'll be cooking bacon, eggs, steaks, and whatever else you dare leave in the same room as your nifty 100,000 RPM hard drives.
Really, there are so few applications out there that are actually hard disk intensive. And for those, it's actually beneficial to use disk arrays for the redundancy.
Everything else can benefit from more RAM to avoid having to swap to the disk. RAM's solid state. Hard drives aren't. Don't expect them to ever have more than a very small fraction of the speed of RAM, cache, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
How about thinking your ideas through before stating them? For one, you've just decreased the price of CD's by over 90%, but on the other hand you've just jacked up the price of books by 100-400%!
Full length moveis should cost about the same as a DVD? Well, isn't that what they cost now???? Or does a DVD movie somehow not cost as much as a DVD Movie.
Your business has no model to it... Destroy all credit card info... So that means i can open an account, download whatever i want, then say someone stole my card. You can't come forward with any proof that it was me... in fact you can't even furnish paper work saying where and when you got my credit card number... YOU EAT THE CHARGES.
Next, you want artists to PAY you for the the priveledge of letting you selling their music, while at the same time giving away any rights and control they might have had? Or... they can get PAID by a label, and still retain ultimate control over their works... Or at least get credit for them.
Shall i keep poking holes or not?
How are you going to pay .25 a song? Micropayments never caught on, and none of the credit card companies are going to give you anything near a deal if they're handling a load of 25 cent transactions... Their fee is probably more than 25 cents, meaning again, the artists would lose out... There is some stuff that labels bring to the table, that people overlook... Distribution, quantities of scale, and centralization. They give artists one check rather than 500,000 checks.
Microsoft tried to create something that would make artists and labels more comfortable with that concept... Guess what? A bunch of hackers... err... crackers... broke it before it even arrived.
Digitals nice for some things, as data can be moved and copied with no fear of loss of quality. That's kind of detrimental to music, though... At least before the advent of CD-R's and MP3's, copies to cassettes would degrade more and more and more... CD-R's are perfect. MP3's lose a lot upon conversion, but from then on they don't lose anything...
That's a useless proposition...
Come, work for me, and if i feel like it, i'll pay you... Any takers?
In the best case scenario, an artist sells a downloads and has to go to the bank to deposit one million checks?!? It's going to take them a couple of years just to sign and bundle all those checks. They'll probably have to hire a staff of workers to do it in a reasonable time. Guess what? Those'll cost them money... They'll probably lose 75% of their cash just to the overhead of employees sitting there stamping checks all day long.
Now if an artist was okay with that idea, came forward and said, yes, distribute this on the internet. If you like it, send me a buck, that'd be cool. But let them decide how they want to do it! Many would rather just get a cash advance and then a few large sized checks from the labels rather than suffering through hundreds of thousands of one dollar checks. Remember, it's their choice as to how to distribute their music not yours.
To put it in the slashdot perspective, it's akin to me saying "hey this linux thing is pretty cool, but you know, i don't really like the GPL... So i guess i'll just make my own distro, pull out all the source and references to the GPL, because, you know, computer programs should be free... my interpretation of free being that i can do WHATEVER I LIKE with it, even if that means ignoring the copyrights"
What if you want to move your asp pages from your IIS server to a Linux/Apache server in a minimal amount of time? Once there, you could commence to reprogramming your site at a more relaxed pace.
If IBM wants only to be a hardware vendor, how can you explain that their services division now makes around 30% of their profits? How can you explain DB/2 being one of the foremost SQL databases available?
IBM just wants to be the leading edge computer company again. The one that everyone looks up to. They took the java ball and ran with it... They still do, a lot more than Sun does. They're running with Linux right now. But they're large enough that any flop won't seriously hurt them (remember when they lost over a billion dollars selling PC's? Their reaction was "Oh. We'll have to take a closer look at that division in the future."
There are enough x86 server OSes available that of course IBM won't demand that everyone use just one. Even before Linux, there was OS/2 Warp Server, the BSDs, SCO Unixware and OpenServer, Netware, Windows NT... People want and demand all of them. IBM for it's part just doesn't want to be an MSFT lackey like Dell, and sell people the best tool for the job, but more over, the tool people ask for.
They're far from being a company that's really benefiting from opensource, the way I interpretted the sentence. If anything, opensource is benefiting from having IBM on it's side.
So what about the multimillionaire executive, the hundred-thousandaire programmers who've never had to break a sweat at work? Maybe they should all do what they do for free as well, then then repave roads for a living? Sound fair?
The only people trying to give away all artists works for free around here are the people who aren't artists.
I dropped this comment on this type of discussion before, and it still seems relevant, so here it is again:
Artists need the royalty's from their CD's to survive... Only the mega popular acts actually make money on tours. Most artists go on tours to promote their CD's. It's more of an advertising expense than a revenue generator.
If you really at all care for the artists, i strongly encourage you to give this a read. You'll see that there's already plenty of people out there screwing artists over, that fans really shouldn't start as well.
We all know that the recording industry aren't angels and are in fact devils in most cases... But without formulating a plan where artists will definetly get paid for their efforts, all the speculation about what MP3's can and can not do are moot, in my eyes.
While your experiences with they might be giants sound okay, I'd hardly assume that's how the rest of the music scene goes. Remember, they're a HUGE band, in a position where they have some influence. They also know they've got a LOT of loyal fans. Bands starting out don't have either of those luxuries.
Yes, but that means that's what they were expecting to do... and in case you hadn't noticed, Redhat and VA Linux have fallen from their high horse positions of being $20 billion dollar companies with negative earnings to being mere $5 billion dollar companies with negative earnings.... When they start posting positive earnings, it will say something about the open source only business model... Because a company can last for only so long issuing more and more stock... Right now it's acceptable, slightly, that they're not making real money... But i'd rather wait for them to make the money before declaring open source a success and pointing to them as the most tangible reasons one can tell it succeeded.
IBM adopts almost any promising technology. That's a good thing. But they're big enough to be able to take gambles, knowing up they'll make up for any loses with one of their many divisions...
When IBM starts talking about Linux at their analyst meetings, i'll believe it's helped them... but right now, its so early on the curve that's it's hard to know what will become of IBM and Linux
what?
Mac's were at 72 DPI back when there were only Mac's, Mac Pluses, Mac SE's, and SE30's... Also classics, color classics, and classic II's were locked into 72 dpi.
But ever since multisync displays arrived on the scene (what? around 1987), mac users have been free to use whatever resolution they cared to use...
I like 1600x1200 for stuff like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and maybe some 3-D apps, but when i want to read text i switch to a much saner resolution.
Their style sheets said 9 px, not 9 pt... hence the type was exactly 9 pixels tall, not points, by the way.
Ummm... They sold their units at a LOSS. They expected to make up for it by the fees for the online service. A bunch of hackers opened up the boxes, installed NetBSD, and didn't use their service. So, they stood to lose tons of money on their loss leaders with no way to make it up... It's not exactly shooting themselves in the feet when they try to stop the on coming flood of future losses.
Oh, and who has open source actually helped, I'm curious? Red Hat? VA Linux? Cobalt? Well, they were all open source companies to start with.
Corel, maybe?
Netscape? No... they got bought by AOL just as they were vowing to make Linux a "tier 1 platform".
How about Apple? No... Apple's opened their kernel, but make their money on hardware sales... Plus their new OS isn't even on the market yet, so it's hard to gauge the effects of their new OS.
SGI? Okay, SGI might be rebounding... In the past few weeks their price range has gone from the low 9's and low 10's to around the 12 dollar mark.
Who else has open source helped? Please tell me!
Another point here is when companies execute according to their business plan, they're more likely to succeed. When their customers tear up their business plan and and starts taking their product from them, it's just not a good business strategy.
Amiga's didn't need anything to "morph" code or translate it. They had the same processors as Mac's (Motorolla 68K's) and only needed ROM's and a few chips to translate calls to the Mac's hardware to the corresponding Amiga hardware.
Why is everyone here content on lobbying to change what the creators of new things do with them? It was your choice to develop under the GPL... it wasn't mandated. You may even like the idea of it. But some people have ego's. They WANT to take credit for their creations. In terms of inventions or music or whatever else, they're also entitiled to make money from their creations. I'd hate the idea of seeing that right taken away.
/.er's code for free because they're able to, thanks to many having jobs where they code for a living and bring in a lot of money. Artists don't have that luxury.
Yes, IP laws are screwy. Patents need an overhaul. Fair use is both being abused and needing to grant more rights. But when people mention that artists should do what they do for free, it's just absurd.
Without admitting guilt or anything, I have to say that I did once play with Macster and was completely disappointed. It completely ignores ID3 tags, searching only on the file name. Therefore you could put an artist name in the song name field and vice versa and searches would return identical results. I always assumed that Macster and Napster shared a common code base, and hence, Napster only searched on file name, not MP3's.
As an experiment, it'd be nice if Macster would allow logging... Just make up a song that sounds like it's by back street boys or brittney spears or something, say it's by them, but have it only be an mp3 ranting about thievery... The only people that'd get it are the ones who obviously don't have it...
Rather than just jumping to defend napster by saying it's not used for piracy, people really should try to study the usage of it and be honest about their own usage.
Geez... Maybe it's because I"m on a Mac with a 21" monitor... One of those two variables... Granted the srceen is 1240x1024... but according to the pages styles, the type is all 9 pixels... which should be readable, unless you're running a 17" at 1600 x 1200 or something insane like that!
Not to nitpick, but your palm pilot runs Palm OS... Unless you're referring to your "Hand Held PC" as Microsoft puts it....
I didn't even need to use IE to look at the page. I looked great in Netscape, had no active X, and... get this, the extension was .htm, NOT .asp. The site still runs IIS, though...
I thought your original tip was for editing your hosts file?
Anyways, did you hear that DoubleClicks CEO stepped forward publicly and put his foot in his mouth by saying that he had grossly miscalculated the effects that his company's actions would have on people's fears about losing their privacy and vowed to discontinue all of their data merging/matching programs?
Yes, DoubleClicks site isn't the best place to find commentary about what they were doing wrong, but its' a great place to look to find out 1- their side of the story, and 2 - what they're doing about it.
The reason that the media moguls are in the position they're in today is because we put them there. They sold America exactly what it wanted. They still do. Therefore, they're not going to leave their thrones anytime soon.
I agree that some programmers are indeed artists, but I still stand by my point of the fact there's a much finer line of distinction between success and failure in programming than there is in any of the mass market "mediums" which I gave as examples somewhere in there.
But in the end, the free tools, protocols and storage standards make up such a small slice of the budgets or costs of putting out a theater or broadcast quality program, that they're essentially zero.
I mean, yes, you spend $15,000 on the animation software, but you've also spent $500,000 on the render farm, pay the artist $75,000+, sit him at a $10,000 machine, etc... If you start cutting those others costs down, you're going to attract lower skilled workers, using weaker desktop machines along with much less rendering power, so in the end your film is going to need an extra 12-18 months to reach distribution, all so you can save $15,000 on the software.
In the end, I think the amount of $$$ spent on proprietary software and formats is SUCH A SMALL SLICE of the actual production costs, that it really just isn't worth it. Talent and hardware cost so much more than the software.
And I just imagined newbie following your advice, then deciding to go to DoubleClicks website to find out what all the fuss is about, only to see a big welcome to apache page.
As for my logic, I know... It can get rather twisted logic sometimes.
But a LOT of websites exist only because of monies they get from DoubleClick. You may not like it, but it's the simple truth.
Even with everything you need being free, you'll find a few roadblocks in your path... Movies, music, television, newspapers, books, and magazines, as trashy as some of them are, are art. Programming is much more of a science.
You program something wrong, it doesn't work or it gives back invalid data. You can test for things like that. You can create an artistic piece which you may like, but no one else does, and you'll never know until it's released upon the world.
Yes, I'm sure some programmers would fancy themselves artists, but in this context, I don't htnkn they are.
There's a great articles in either this months or last months macworld, which explains to all the iMac DV buyers that there's a LOT more that goes into the production of a movie than just camera's and editting software. There's scripts, storyboards, gaffers, technicians, lighting, etc... Get any of those wrong and you've got an amateurish creation.
Likewise, giving anyone who wants it SoftImage, 3D studio, or lightwave, or a free subsitute if one could even be created, will not create animations like you've seen on star trek, star wars, babylon 5, etc... There's artistry involved that can't be instilled within a program or wizard.
Lastly, who will start in your movies? Who will direct them? Starving actors and directors? There is a reason that many of them starve, you know. Yes, people have to put in their time before they see their big break, but too often people don't realize that their opportunity has passed... I hope that doens't come out wrong, but to shorten, I doubt we'll ever see something like The Matrix, Forest Gump, Jurassic Park, or anything else like that come from a "free content" type scheme.
Those budgets were immense because of all the man hours involved. With no guarentee that they'ed make money. Which is why movie studio's act to protect their investments.
*.doubleclick is kinda harsh... but then i guess you'd never want to go to their website to read stuff like their press releases where maybe they'll announce something that retroactively rights their wrongs...
This might be slightly off topic, but i think too much ado is being made about the installation programs various distro's use, and not enough about the quality of the GUI's. I mean, you might need to install a distro once or twice to get it right, but after that, the installation program has served it's purpose.
Haven't played with Mandrake ever, though I've heard that they've started diffentiating their distro more from Redhat's. How, I don't know unless it's in all the extra apps they bundle. But they had to. It was funny to see people defending Mandrake and bashing LinuxOne in the same sentense.
Which brings something else up - why haven't we seen more stories about LInux One? They were always a lot of fun!
Yeah, we'll be cooking bacon, eggs, steaks, and whatever else you dare leave in the same room as your nifty 100,000 RPM hard drives.
Really, there are so few applications out there that are actually hard disk intensive. And for those, it's actually beneficial to use disk arrays for the redundancy.
Everything else can benefit from more RAM to avoid having to swap to the disk. RAM's solid state. Hard drives aren't. Don't expect them to ever have more than a very small fraction of the speed of RAM, cache, etc...