Apple's iTunes is going to offer assorted shows from ABC (Lost, Desperate Housewives) the day after airing at $1.99 for the new video iPod. Somebody's looked at the torrent files out there and realized there's a market.
And the real fans will end up buying the box sets the next year for the better quality and the extras anyway. This is exactly for the forgot-to-program-the-VCR crowd.
Prendergast's group appears to be an opinion-for-hire crew a la ADTI, Enderle Research, etc. That they get the majority of their funding from MSFT was *not* disclosed in the original article. Fox's correction owned up to that, and I gather the crapstorm of letters from "viewers like us" to that effect prompted them printing some (including mine).
Not quite, Lucent inherited BTL in the spinout from AT&T. But it's become little more than the product development arm of that company, and a shadow of its Ma Bell days as probably the largest private research facility in the free world.
This was probably the single biggest casualty of the Bell System breakup. First The Labs had Bellcore sheared off to support the RBOCs, then Lucent/Avaya took a lot of the hardware research. The market pressure that had been absent in the monopoly days burned off a lot of the pure research work as being too blue-sky. Having grown up in the Holmdel NJ area in the 60's & 70's, then getting to work in the central NJ campus in the late 80's just post-breakup, I could see the decline starting. Now the Holmdel facility is on the block. I don't think we'd have seen UNIX or C in the post-monopoly environment. Sic transit...
>>we all pay to watch cable TV. It doesn't mean we pay to be able to copy this content, distribute it or whatever the hell else we want to do with it.
Actually, it *does* mean we can copy it FOR PERSONAL USE. That's what the "Betamax decision" was all about. It doesn't mean we can turn around and sell copies on the corner (distribution), though. Most premium-channel shows (HBO) have the 'for personal use' disclaimer upfront.
I'll leave as an exercise to the reader the question of P2P downloads of shows I *could* have recorded off-the-air but forgot to program for. If I record off-air, the Betamax decision applies, no issue; if I forgot to set up the VCR and grab it off a torrent somewhere, somehow to the MPAA I'm the modern Satan?
These days, it's online only at BYTE Online. The hardware stuff seems to have mainly moved to Circuit Cellar. As one of the few generalist mag's out there, BYTE got clobbered in the PC-biased publishing boom a few years back; of course now *all* the technical mag's are hurting with the market contraction.
MS & Intel are supporting HD DVD, but Dell & HP, that use their code & chips, and control around 55% of the market, are supporting Blu-Ray.
Is MS saying they'll actively break Blu-Ray drives in Vista? *That'll* drive migration up next year. Is Intel threatening to break Blu-Ray in their mainboards? How fast would Dell be on the phone to AMD? How much faster would HP dump Itanium? Gimme a break.
This one will, for better or worse, be decided by the studios bludgeoning one another into a common standard. I'm standing on the sidelines until then. I recommend you do the same.
Never said they weren't, just not the unspeakably obscene amounts they were hauling in the last couple of years, so obviously it must be because of downloading that people aren't breaking down the doors at the theaters.
Hmmm, so-so economy, rising ticket prices, content that makes Sturgeon's Law sound optimistic; yup, must be those meddlesome kids and their P2P.
The studios are quietly admitting to themselves that a big part of this season's lousy box office has been the glut of LOUSY MOVIES (NYT link).
However, throwing $30M at an anti-piracy effort lets them point fingers as do all the RIAA lawsuits against 14-year-olds, vs. actually admitting their business model is desperately fscked.
The record companies have become even more the hit-centered PR factory than before. Their focus has become the quick hit vs. cultivating an act over time. They claim to be selling music while the focus is selling discs in little square boxes. Then when they see their market contract because of lousy acts and a lousy economy reducing disposable income, they point at "those meddlesome kids and their downloading" and ignore the data that tells them to update their business model.
It might if any of them ever got to trial. SOP has been to threaten the parents of the teenager accused of downloading with a six-figure fine if it *does* go to court, settle for a mere $3-4 thousand, then show them off as PR against downloading in general. Lather, rinse, repeat. The cases like the 70-ish grandma get dropped ASAP to avoid bad press.
That's why this single-mom case where she's calling their bluff and insisting on a trial is interesting. If they can't prove their case to the judge, their tactics collapse.
>>They might help you buy that application/server software. But they have never made it.
Funny, I used to work for Netscape. Sun & AOL carved us up between them, and Sun kept the server stacks. Netscape begat iPlanet begat SunONE begat the current "Java Enterprise System".
Their J2EE appserver has been completely re-written, but their web & directory servers are derivatives of the old Netscape codebase.
Their strategy, unfortunately, relies on finding people who look like they've downloaded tons of material, threaten them with a six-figure lawsuit that would take a five-figure legal bill to defend, and in the end squeeze them for a few thousand. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Not bad ROI for a few threatening letters, eh?
If a bunch of these folks combined forces and resources, they probably *could* get the cases thrown out for shaky evidence, but the studios are relying on that not happening.
Seems odd: I can timeshift a TV show on my VCR without issues, if I stole the $50 DVD season-pack from the local Big Box Store it'd be a low-grade misdemeanor, but downloading it makes me liable for a five-figure fine? Isn't there some rule about proportionality in the legal system?
Sadly it hasn't: turning over their log files was apparently part of the settlement for them and Loki not being hit with a seven-figure lawsuit for 'contributory infringement', and the studios' lawyers have just now got around to parsing them.
They probably figure this is how to get back all that money they lost on the War of the Worlds remake and The Island, by suing a bunch of customers. Brilliant...
I grew up in central NJ, got my first taste of programming at the Explorer post run by the Telephone Pioneers at Holmdel, and worked at the adjacent Middletown and Lincroft sites for five years. I was a visitor at Murray Hill frequently over that time, and always felt a little awe-struck walking around in there. This news, along with Lucent selling the Holmdel site (story at Asbury Park Press), leave me feeling all too old. Sic transit...
After the whole Kiva -> Netscape -> iPlanet -> Sun fiasco, the company that *owns* Java (like it or not) has been completely unable to market a viable J2EE server product, and had their lunch split up and eaten between IBM & BEA. Then to add insult to injury, those nassssty OSS folks come along and roll their own (JBoss, Geronimo, JOnAS), and *those* have more street cred than Sun's product.
They may as well throw the source out there, nobody really cares at this point...
The financial market had been a huge buyer of Sun and IBM midrange equipment. While I don't see some brokerage going out and buying a pallet of white box systems at the local flea market, the cost of even high-end x86 equipment is markedly lower than what they've been accustomed to.
The techs can look over the code, tweak where needed, and run it on commodity hardware at a big upfront savings. The *ix heritage means they're already well up on running the OS and can port over their apps with little effort. What's not to like?
go to LinuxMedNews, where Vista and its derivatives has been an ongoing discussion for some time.
And given that it seems to be running Slashcode for the site, should be very familiar to the crowd here...
It's from a videophile magazine who no doubt consider that anyone not watching their local news in HD on a 60-inch flat-panel is a neo-Luddite.
My 70-plus mother on the NJ shore finally broke down and went to cable only about three years back; her local reception was fine, she just wanted the extra channels.
For my part, seeing Sturgeon's Law implemented so exquisitely in the choices available to me on television, has delayed my shelling out for HD equipment.
Apple has said that Mac OS will *NOT* be available for off-the-shelf Wintel PCs; they'll be doing their own hardware as before, just with Intel CPUs. This could change downstream, but that's the party line at present.
I'll concede that having an Intel-based Mac environment available *might* detract from Linux, but your hardware options (for now) are orders of magnitude greater under Linux than with Apple, and I can't see that changing anytime in the near future.
If *I* was one of those "rubes in DC", the sight of Ballmer doing his monkey-dance would (a) have me spewing up my last five meals (b) calling back Novell to help me evict every last byte of MS code as quickly as possible. Any company with *that* for a CEO couldn't *possibly* be taken seriously.
Looking at postings elsewhere, it seems that the IBM trial is nearing the end of discovery, and the judge has publicly commented that SCO hasn't shown any evidence of infringement by IBM. In the Novell case, SCO can't show that Novell ever signed over the UNIX copyrights, and the Novell board minutes agreeing to the deal specifically mention Novell's retention of said copyrights. IBM has also filed countercharges of patent infringement, etc.
Best guess is that SCOX expected IBM to buy them out for their silence. They didn't expect to actually have to defend their allegations, and they're holding an empty hand to do so. Now they're stalling to try and unload their stock options before the hammer comes down.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's iTunes is going to offer assorted shows from ABC (Lost, Desperate Housewives) the day after airing at $1.99 for the new video iPod. Somebody's looked at the torrent files out there and realized there's a market.
And the real fans will end up buying the box sets the next year for the better quality and the extras anyway. This is exactly for the forgot-to-program-the-VCR crowd.
Prendergast's group appears to be an opinion-for-hire crew a la ADTI, Enderle Research, etc. That they get the majority of their funding from MSFT was *not* disclosed in the original article. Fox's correction owned up to that, and I gather the crapstorm of letters from "viewers like us" to that effect prompted them printing some (including mine).
Why, thank you.
I figured there'd be enough "Evil MS shill FUD FUD FUD!!" notes sent in.
Given Fox's leanings, I thought a note talking up market competition and less government spending might get their attention. Seems I was right.
Not quite, Lucent inherited BTL in the spinout from AT&T. But it's become little more than the product development arm of that company, and a shadow of its Ma Bell days as probably the largest private research facility in the free world.
This was probably the single biggest casualty of the Bell System breakup. First The Labs had Bellcore sheared off to support the RBOCs, then Lucent/Avaya took a lot of the hardware research. The market pressure that had been absent in the monopoly days burned off a lot of the pure research work as being too blue-sky. Having grown up in the Holmdel NJ area in the 60's & 70's, then getting to work in the central NJ campus in the late 80's just post-breakup, I could see the decline starting. Now the Holmdel facility is on the block. I don't think we'd have seen UNIX or C in the post-monopoly environment. Sic transit...
Actually, it *does* mean we can copy it FOR PERSONAL USE. That's what the "Betamax decision" was all about. It doesn't mean we can turn around and sell copies on the corner (distribution), though. Most premium-channel shows (HBO) have the 'for personal use' disclaimer upfront.
I'll leave as an exercise to the reader the question of P2P downloads of shows I *could* have recorded off-the-air but forgot to program for. If I record off-air, the Betamax decision applies, no issue; if I forgot to set up the VCR and grab it off a torrent somewhere, somehow to the MPAA I'm the modern Satan?
These days, it's online only at BYTE Online. The hardware stuff seems to have mainly moved to Circuit Cellar. As one of the few generalist mag's out there, BYTE got clobbered in the PC-biased publishing boom a few years back; of course now *all* the technical mag's are hurting with the market contraction.
MS & Intel are supporting HD DVD, but Dell & HP, that use their code & chips, and control around 55% of the market, are supporting Blu-Ray.
Is MS saying they'll actively break Blu-Ray drives in Vista? *That'll* drive migration up next year. Is Intel threatening to break Blu-Ray in their mainboards? How fast would Dell be on the phone to AMD? How much faster would HP dump Itanium? Gimme a break.
This one will, for better or worse, be decided by the studios bludgeoning one another into a common standard. I'm standing on the sidelines until then. I recommend you do the same.
>>yet they are still _MAKING_ _MONEY_
Never said they weren't, just not the unspeakably obscene amounts they were hauling in the last couple of years, so obviously it must be because of downloading that people aren't breaking down the doors at the theaters.
Hmmm, so-so economy, rising ticket prices, content that makes Sturgeon's Law sound optimistic; yup, must be those meddlesome kids and their P2P.
However, throwing $30M at an anti-piracy effort lets them point fingers as do all the RIAA lawsuits against 14-year-olds, vs. actually admitting their business model is desperately fscked.
The record companies have become even more the hit-centered PR factory than before. Their focus has become the quick hit vs. cultivating an act over time. They claim to be selling music while the focus is selling discs in little square boxes. Then when they see their market contract because of lousy acts and a lousy economy reducing disposable income, they point at "those meddlesome kids and their downloading" and ignore the data that tells them to update their business model.
It might if any of them ever got to trial. SOP has been to threaten the parents of the teenager accused of downloading with a six-figure fine if it *does* go to court, settle for a mere $3-4 thousand, then show them off as PR against downloading in general. Lather, rinse, repeat. The cases like the 70-ish grandma get dropped ASAP to avoid bad press.
That's why this single-mom case where she's calling their bluff and insisting on a trial is interesting. If they can't prove their case to the judge, their tactics collapse.
>>They might help you buy that application/server software. But they have never made it.
Funny, I used to work for Netscape. Sun & AOL carved us up between them, and Sun kept the server stacks. Netscape begat iPlanet begat SunONE begat the current "Java Enterprise System".
Their J2EE appserver has been completely re-written, but their web & directory servers are derivatives of the old Netscape codebase.
Their strategy, unfortunately, relies on finding people who look like they've downloaded tons of material, threaten them with a six-figure lawsuit that would take a five-figure legal bill to defend, and in the end squeeze them for a few thousand. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Not bad ROI for a few threatening letters, eh?
If a bunch of these folks combined forces and resources, they probably *could* get the cases thrown out for shaky evidence, but the studios are relying on that not happening.
Seems odd: I can timeshift a TV show on my VCR without issues, if I stole the $50 DVD season-pack from the local Big Box Store it'd be a low-grade misdemeanor, but downloading it makes me liable for a five-figure fine? Isn't there some rule about proportionality in the legal system?
Sadly it hasn't: turning over their log files was apparently part of the settlement for them and Loki not being hit with a seven-figure lawsuit for 'contributory infringement', and the studios' lawyers have just now got around to parsing them.
They probably figure this is how to get back all that money they lost on the War of the Worlds remake and The Island, by suing a bunch of customers. Brilliant...
I grew up in central NJ, got my first taste of programming at the Explorer post run by the Telephone Pioneers at Holmdel, and worked at the adjacent Middletown and Lincroft sites for five years. I was a visitor at Murray Hill frequently over that time, and always felt a little awe-struck walking around in there. This news, along with Lucent selling the Holmdel site (story at Asbury Park Press), leave me feeling all too old. Sic transit...
After the whole Kiva -> Netscape -> iPlanet -> Sun fiasco, the company that *owns* Java (like it or not) has been completely unable to market a viable J2EE server product, and had their lunch split up and eaten between IBM & BEA. Then to add insult to injury, those nassssty OSS folks come along and roll their own (JBoss, Geronimo, JOnAS), and *those* have more street cred than Sun's product.
They may as well throw the source out there, nobody really cares at this point...
The financial market had been a huge buyer of Sun and IBM midrange equipment. While I don't see some brokerage going out and buying a pallet of white box systems at the local flea market, the cost of even high-end x86 equipment is markedly lower than what they've been accustomed to.
The techs can look over the code, tweak where needed, and run it on commodity hardware at a big upfront savings. The *ix heritage means they're already well up on running the OS and can port over their apps with little effort. What's not to like?
go to LinuxMedNews, where Vista and its derivatives has been an ongoing discussion for some time. And given that it seems to be running Slashcode for the site, should be very familiar to the crowd here...
It's from a videophile magazine who no doubt consider that anyone not watching their local news in HD on a 60-inch flat-panel is a neo-Luddite.
My 70-plus mother on the NJ shore finally broke down and went to cable only about three years back; her local reception was fine, she just wanted the extra channels.
For my part, seeing Sturgeon's Law implemented so exquisitely in the choices available to me on television, has delayed my shelling out for HD equipment.
Apple has said that Mac OS will *NOT* be available for off-the-shelf Wintel PCs; they'll be doing their own hardware as before, just with Intel CPUs. This could change downstream, but that's the party line at present.
I'll concede that having an Intel-based Mac environment available *might* detract from Linux, but your hardware options (for now) are orders of magnitude greater under Linux than with Apple, and I can't see that changing anytime in the near future.
Wonder how many of the PC makers would be interested in offering a dual-boot Windows/Mac box? Wonder how many folks would be interested in buying one?
If *I* was one of those "rubes in DC", the sight of Ballmer doing his monkey-dance would (a) have me spewing up my last five meals (b) calling back Novell to help me evict every last byte of MS code as quickly as possible. Any company with *that* for a CEO couldn't *possibly* be taken seriously.
Looking at postings elsewhere, it seems that the IBM trial is nearing the end of discovery, and the judge has publicly commented that SCO hasn't shown any evidence of infringement by IBM. In the Novell case, SCO can't show that Novell ever signed over the UNIX copyrights, and the Novell board minutes agreeing to the deal specifically mention Novell's retention of said copyrights. IBM has also filed countercharges of patent infringement, etc.
Best guess is that SCOX expected IBM to buy them out for their silence. They didn't expect to actually have to defend their allegations, and they're holding an empty hand to do so. Now they're stalling to try and unload their stock options before the hammer comes down.