AMD on the stand: "You see, your honor, unless we take the side of Microsoft in this trial, they will strangle our company into bankrupcy within two years. So, my testimony is, they are not a monopoly! No way! Not them! They are innocent of all bad things anyone has ever accused them of, and furthermore, they are nice people who love children and puppies and the American way. I'm forgetting something... oh, here are my notes... Oh yes, their products won over so many users because they are superior to everything their competitors produced. Can we go now?"
Yeah, but unless you have a garnfather clause in your contract that TW can't change terms on you, I think you're in for some bad times once TW starts charging you per megabyte transferred. I'd be happy with 500Kb/s if it's unmetered, but because of AOL's cable monopoly in NY, I have a feeling we won't get a way out (unless you consider -shudder- Verizon DSL as a way out).
I was wondering whether it was possible to pipe uncompressed video through a gigabit ethernet--say 720p? I ask because I still have this dream that I will be able to buy (make?) a component for my living room entertainment system that logs into my main computer as a user and plays back media files (both audio and video) on my fancy living room equipment. I think that system would be much more elegant than what I have now (analog RCA cables for audio and S-video running into my living room--it's an ugly hack).
The much nicer interface would be to have a living room box join my ethernet LAN. The box would just receive uncompressed audio and video from the computer over gig ethernet. That way, all the decompressing would be done by the fancy CPU in my bedroom, and the box would not become obsolete when new/more CPU-intensive codecs came out. (Because the alternative is, of course, to have the box do the decompression, but I don't like that.) Somebody please make one of these (or explain why it would be a bad idea).
While Europe is quickly getting reliable and cheap broadband, US-Americans are about to be relegated to second-class internet citizens as our broadband providers roll out their "per megabyte" pricing plans. For shame!
I have to say, now that we are seeing the glimmer of what Mozilla is to become, that I think all the skeptics were wrong. They said it was taking too long, that they didn't reuse enough of a once-market-leading product, etc. Even I used to say that. Well, now I think that was stupid.
You see, Mozilla developers know how to, and not to, build a browser. Somehow, through some strange chain of circumstances plus big balls, they didn't humor the marketoids and stick to small improvements. They designed a browser for the next 10 years.
We have not yet begun to see how this work will pay off. You see, if you were in charge of "improving" IE6, what would there be for you to do? You might think "this module needs a serious rewrite" but your team would say "don't fuckin touch it--that code has been there since the Mosaic days, nobody really understands anymore what it does, but if you fuck with it, the whole ship is going down." "Well, what about this other module that needs a rewrite?" "Sure, good luck. Some temp patched that stuff together in '94. He had a deadline, and I guess he loved GOTOs..."
My point is that basically, improving IE is now a lost cause. Just about all the tweaking that's doable to that venerable mess has already been done. Sure they might paste on more modules, and they'll spice up the UI with each release. Other than that, they'll sit on their hands.
Mozilla was built from the ground up to be modular, reusable, publically documented, coded correctly. They took a long time getting the fundamentals right, and they refused to cut corners. That took a while, but as a result, Mozilla can be tuned into an ass kicking browsing machine.
To use an analogy: I'm sure that when the jet engine was conceived, the fastest planes used propellers. You might say that it's stupid to throw out piston+prop engines if you've already invested so much time on tuning and testing them. And I'm sure the best propeller planes were faster and more reliable than the first jet planes. Still, you wouldn't be stupid if you put all your eggs into the "jet" basket, because you know the potential of the technology, and you know that in the long run, they'll leave props in the dust.
It seems to me that IE is like a propeller plane that works very well, and Mozilla is a jet plane with many of the quirks that new technology brings with it. Right now, they're about equally well suited for their missions. But there's nowhere else for the prop plane to go.
Well, that was my long-winded take of what's up. In summary: sometimes it's right to throw everything away and comit to a better concept, as painful as that might be in the short term. It won't be long that people turn up their noses at IE.
I wish I could moderate on this topic, but I already posted. Thank you for helping me understand this. I guess I knew about the EM troubles for the inner Jovian moons, but I didn't really put all this together. It really pours cold water (ha ha) on the idea that some fancy free-ranging submarines could ever get any data back to scientists.
Yeah, I asked myself this too. But because the answer was "I don't know" I didn't mention it in my post. In any case, I suspect that not much Jovian radiation can penetrate under the Europa ice. Still, I don't think a Plutonium drive would be a big deal. If there is life in the Europa oceans, it is probably very close to the density and composition of saltwater (as are we). This means that the chance of a gamma ray (that penetrates the shielding) hitting a lifeform there is exactly the same as the % of volume in the Europa ocean occupied by life. I assume this is very small indeed.
I was thinking this exactly. I was picturing something more like an atomic bomb on one of these gliders guided by GPS to blow up right under the Bay Bridge. Needless to say, any evidence about who sent the thing would be vaporized in the blast. (How many nations in the world hate the US?) It could even be in the shape of a dolphin, so it would be very hard to detect en route.
As I've always said, it seems the best long-term defense against terrorism is for the US to play fair with the rest of the world. Until we do, we're all at risk.
If I had to design one of these Europa divers, I fear I would make it have a radioactive decay drive. Basically, it would have a super decay-resistant shell (that we could recover in the far future, before it decomposes) and a bunch of radioactive stuff on one end. That end would get heated and produce thrust. You maneuver with changing the shape of the craft, or with moving around the heat source inside. The heat could also power a computer and a radio to send out data.
I know it doesn't sound right to send a bunch of Plutonium to Europa (the Monolith warned us...) but we could shield it reasonably well. Once its mission is done, it could use its internal heat to melt upwards through the ice and onto the surface. There it would be isolated from the Europa ocean (the ice would re-freeze below it) and sit in a little warm puddle waiting for someone to pick it up (in, say 200 years).
This solves a problem which the other posters have already mentioned, namely that even if we send anything else which is on the drawing board, there would be no plan to get it back. It would decompose in the Europa ocean and potentially cause a lot more environmental destruction than just a couple of gamma rays.
It's all well and good to go on long missions under the Europa ice crust, but if this is expected to be of any use to science, there must be a way of getting data back to Earth. I doubt we could equip this thing with a radio powerful enough to send data through potentially miles of water and ice. The original plan for the battery+propeller vehicle was to have it tethered, IIRC. Would this work in the same way? The cooler thing to do would be to let it go free but then returh and report to a base station (or maybe interface with a cable hanging down from the base station into the water.) The base station could then relay the data back to and orbiter and then on to Earth. Anyway, I think this could be the real technological challenge. Even if you can move far on a "penlight battery" you can't send much of a signal with one.
For atmospheric stuff, I would hope they glue a couple of solar cells on the thing. Do we have solar cells that would resist the heat and acidity of the Venusian atmospere?
Also, what you say about turbulence is right, but makes me think that it would work to our advantage if there is a smart computer inside calculating and then moving into columns of updraft. This is the basic theory behind gliders.
Also, in turbulent currents that just throw a craft around, why not build in a motion reciprocation system like in those Rolex watches that don't need batteries because they run off the mechanical energy of your arm movements? I think these are all good ideas to explore, and I agree with the poster that all this makes more sense than the battery+propeller diver that was proposed.
I see. This seems like a good policy, given all the various "Spawn of Mozilla" projects around. The roadmap doesn't say much about the work planned for 1.1 and eventually 2.0. Are you free to talk about that? From the look of the tree, work on that branch has already begun.
I don't know why we all want to look over your shoulder as you code. I hope you don't find it too annoying. This reminds me a bit of the Monty Python sketch where they had a live broadcast of a famous author composing his eighth novel, complete with "expert" play-by-play commentary.
The real reason why we care so much is because we love you guys, and ofen spend hours at the mercy of your code (which has recently treated us well). And thank you for staying in touch with the community that relies on your work!
It appears from the roadmap that they plan to fork development after 1.0 into two branches, one for further stabilizing 1.0 and one for adding features, leading to 1.1.
The strange result is that 1.0.3 is scheduled to be released about a month after the final 1.1. Are they really planning something huge for the 1.1 branch that they don't trust themselves to re-merge the tree? I guess there is precedent for this, with Netscape 4.08 being released after the 4.5 releases were well on their way. Also, it seems that this is how Linux kernel releases work, with 2.2 still being maintained after the release of 2.4. Still, this is a new policy for Mozilla.
I must say that I agree entirely, both with the sentiment that this is no occasion to whine about Mozilla's current shortcomings, but also with the observation that the fonts still look bad and don't need to.
Is freetype support for *nix releases being planned by the AOL developers? If not, would it be hard for an independent OSS project to hack it together? I really do think this is important. Like the author of the parent post, I instinctively fire up Konqueror, and turn to Mozilla only when I find Konqueror can't render what I'm looking at (and this is becoming very rare). The only reason I do this is because the fonts look so much better.
I was shocked when I heard their plans to go from 0.9.9 straight to 1.0. Such a bold numerical jump! Now I see what they had up their sleeve: RC-releases! I think to keep up the humor, they should have called it.9.9.9, with RC2 being.9.9.9.1 and so on. That way, it would really convey the sense that they're close to 1.0!
Alternately, they could declare that 1.0 is an asymptotic limit for Mozilla, and no actual human coded Mozilla will ever reach it, though future versions will come closer.
Re:An explanation of why this man is a crank.
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2
I re-read my post and I guess you're right. I guess we're discussing topics that are close to a sensitive nerve of mine. I did not mean to attack you, though I think I did.:(
However, I stand by what I said about the website you linked. You have to understand that the stuff there is pathetic garbage written in order to sound semi-plausible to people who don't have the time to actually read up on the subject. It is like reading about plate techtonics from the Flat Earth Society website--i.e., not the place to satisfy a casual curiosity. Maybe I was mad, too, that others here thought your link "insightful". Slashdot can look like a big shouting match sometimes, especially when articles get as many responses as this one did, and I think I was shouting instead of discussing. I'm sorry I did that.
So please, re-read my post with all the "angry" words removed.
Your post really opened my eyes to the larger AOL plan. Of course they will announce a similar kind of a deal: all AOL-hosted content will not count towards your quota.
So, when media companies finally get around to streaming movies over the internet, Road Runner users will be charged up the butt for downloading stuff from competing movie houses, but access to the AOL service will be unmetered (though there will be usage fees, of course). There will be AOL-approved (and hosted) streaming radio stations, AOL-approved news sites with streaming content (Time, CNN, etc.) and this will be the only stuff users will be allowed to look at without the fear that their RR bills will sink them.
This is a brilliant vertical-monopolistic strategy. This way, AOL will leverage their cable monopoly to feed us exactly the media content they want us to see (i.e. theirs), and we'll be greatful, because it's "free." Any opponents ("competitors") will be ignored because downloading stuff from them will cost you heavy usage charges. AOL will say "why would you want to go anywhere else when we have so much great AOL content for free?" This way, the internet to an AOL user will basically look like an AOL sandbox.
No, see, they're not about to lower your bill if you're a light downloader. They'll raise the bills of the heavy downloaders. I think the article was right that this may well be a move to force heavy users to DSL, and get more customers without upgrading their network.
Of course, I expect to do my part to make this backfire by contesting every single "over-quota" penny I get charged, and annoying the operators daily with quota-related "customer support" questions. I have a special student deal where I pay about $35/month for RR, and if each month I can tie up an operator for a total of four hours, I'll be causing TW to lose money on me. If enough of us do this, as a part of a "active resistance" campaign, they will ditch the stupid quotas.
I'm not ditching RR quite yet. As I read this article, however, I fired up some P2P software and removed all the upload caps. I'll keep it this way until RR announces that they are ditching the caps, or until they actually kick in, at which point I start my telephone campaign. You in?
Your point about Nimda and spam really raises a interesting issue: many things we do while our computers are on cause data to flow in and out through the cable modem, and it's not always our fault.
Now, catching Code Red could potentially cost someone lots of bandwith money. Those stupid pop-under downloads might install a P2P program without your knowledge or consent. Online media files are often much larger than you expect.
This makes me think that the cost of administring these quotas (paying phone operators and tech support staff who will have to put up with hours of my constant bitching and excuses about my bill) will be higher than the cost of adding fatter pipes to the network and keeping everything uncapped.
I would honestly prefer that my download bandwith be cut (expecially during peak hours) than to have to constantly fret and worry that I'm close to my bandwidth cap, so I'd better turn off Shoutcast.
I hope they do a test run of this program in some small district, to see how users respond. I suspect that once people see their bill and the cryptic charges, many will try to dispute them. I promise I'll be on the phone the day my first metered RR bill arives. Will they "itemize" the usage fees like any other utility? Will they do it by port number? By time? By source? Will they charge the same for Usenet downloads, even if it puts no pressure on their connection to the internet? Will there be a warning when I've reached 75% of my monthly quota? Without these things, customers will bitch endlessly, and the workforce necessary to accomodate all the bitching will be more expensive than the overdue RR network improvements. Everybody who thinks this is a bad idea should put the RR customer service number in their speed dial and call them all the time to ask a bunch of really obscure questions, like "Oh God, I don't know what my daughter did on my computer just now. Can you please check how close I am to my cap? Oh, really, well, can you check how much I downloaded today? What? That's not what my meter says..." and so on.
You're probably right to some extent, but I think FOTR sold out on a lot of screens during its first two weeks out. If it had been shorter, theaters would have been able to handle a larger volume of people. I think many people just see a different movie when they are told that what they wanted to see sold out, and may never get around to seeing what they had come to see. Come to think of it, this probably does't add up to a very large number.
However, there's also the matter that theaters prefer playing shorter movies, other things being equal, because they just get to sell more tickets per day. That may have contributed to some early removals of FOTR from some theaters. Two half-full screenings of some crappy 90 minute film will make more money for a theater than one nearly packed showing of FOTR, and for this reason, I wouldn't be surprised if many theaters ended their run of FOTR while there was still a fairly high demand to see it.
I'm not saying that FOTR should have been shorter; I think just the opposite. I expect it would have been a better film if it had been 90 minutes longer. It's just that at a certain point, every 10 minutes of length will cost a film quite a bit of box office money, and even directors with integrity quicly reach their limit.
I'm just happy there are no similar constraints with the DVD release. In fact, I think that with DVDs there is a market incentive to make it longer. Great! Hooray for DVD!
(Of course, if this becomes the rule, people might start treating the screen versions as merely butchered cuts, and wait for the DVD. That would be funny! But I'm not too worried...)
It seems to me that these interactive features are there to apologize for how terrible most movies are these days. It's like the studios are saying "sure, our directors and scriptwriters suck shit, but hey, you can "re-edit" the movie yourself and make it suck less." Pretty soon, movies will be so "interactive" that we will just periodically mail $10 to the MPAA, get some cameras and friends, film some footage, and edit it to our liking.
But seriously, I am happy that LOTR-FOTR is being released in a four-hour version. I really like the idea of DVD-directors cuts. I'm pretty confident FOTR would have made a lot more money if it had only been 2 hours long, because it could be shown five times a day per screen, rather than three. There is a lot of pressure on studios to avoid long movies. They want people to pay and free their seats as fast as possible. DVD releases are not under that same pressure, so I think we will see more "unshortened" versions of movies.
I hope that enough people buy the FOTR DVD for the extra footage that movie studios actually learn to always shoot extra scences (character-development, background explanations, and cheap stuff like that) that don't appear in the theater release, but show up on the DVD to drive up sales/rentals for people who loved the movie in the theater and want to see more. FOTR is one movie that definitely needs another hour or so to make it seem less rushed.
Slashdot Mirror
AMD on the stand: "You see, your honor, unless we take the side of Microsoft in this trial, they will strangle our company into bankrupcy within two years. So, my testimony is, they are not a monopoly! No way! Not them! They are innocent of all bad things anyone has ever accused them of, and furthermore, they are nice people who love children and puppies and the American way. I'm forgetting something... oh, here are my notes... Oh yes, their products won over so many users because they are superior to everything their competitors produced. Can we go now?"
Yeah, but unless you have a garnfather clause in your contract that TW can't change terms on you, I think you're in for some bad times once TW starts charging you per megabyte transferred. I'd be happy with 500Kb/s if it's unmetered, but because of AOL's cable monopoly in NY, I have a feeling we won't get a way out (unless you consider -shudder- Verizon DSL as a way out).
The much nicer interface would be to have a living room box join my ethernet LAN. The box would just receive uncompressed audio and video from the computer over gig ethernet. That way, all the decompressing would be done by the fancy CPU in my bedroom, and the box would not become obsolete when new/more CPU-intensive codecs came out. (Because the alternative is, of course, to have the box do the decompression, but I don't like that.) Somebody please make one of these (or explain why it would be a bad idea).
While Europe is quickly getting reliable and cheap broadband, US-Americans are about to be relegated to second-class internet citizens as our broadband providers roll out their "per megabyte" pricing plans. For shame!
You see, Mozilla developers know how to, and not to, build a browser. Somehow, through some strange chain of circumstances plus big balls, they didn't humor the marketoids and stick to small improvements. They designed a browser for the next 10 years.
We have not yet begun to see how this work will pay off. You see, if you were in charge of "improving" IE6, what would there be for you to do? You might think "this module needs a serious rewrite" but your team would say "don't fuckin touch it--that code has been there since the Mosaic days, nobody really understands anymore what it does, but if you fuck with it, the whole ship is going down." "Well, what about this other module that needs a rewrite?" "Sure, good luck. Some temp patched that stuff together in '94. He had a deadline, and I guess he loved GOTOs..."
My point is that basically, improving IE is now a lost cause. Just about all the tweaking that's doable to that venerable mess has already been done. Sure they might paste on more modules, and they'll spice up the UI with each release. Other than that, they'll sit on their hands.
Mozilla was built from the ground up to be modular, reusable, publically documented, coded correctly. They took a long time getting the fundamentals right, and they refused to cut corners. That took a while, but as a result, Mozilla can be tuned into an ass kicking browsing machine.
To use an analogy: I'm sure that when the jet engine was conceived, the fastest planes used propellers. You might say that it's stupid to throw out piston+prop engines if you've already invested so much time on tuning and testing them. And I'm sure the best propeller planes were faster and more reliable than the first jet planes. Still, you wouldn't be stupid if you put all your eggs into the "jet" basket, because you know the potential of the technology, and you know that in the long run, they'll leave props in the dust.
It seems to me that IE is like a propeller plane that works very well, and Mozilla is a jet plane with many of the quirks that new technology brings with it. Right now, they're about equally well suited for their missions. But there's nowhere else for the prop plane to go.
Well, that was my long-winded take of what's up. In summary: sometimes it's right to throw everything away and comit to a better concept, as painful as that might be in the short term. It won't be long that people turn up their noses at IE.
Yeah, I asked myself this too. But because the answer was "I don't know" I didn't mention it in my post. In any case, I suspect that not much Jovian radiation can penetrate under the Europa ice. Still, I don't think a Plutonium drive would be a big deal. If there is life in the Europa oceans, it is probably very close to the density and composition of saltwater (as are we). This means that the chance of a gamma ray (that penetrates the shielding) hitting a lifeform there is exactly the same as the % of volume in the Europa ocean occupied by life. I assume this is very small indeed.
As I've always said, it seems the best long-term defense against terrorism is for the US to play fair with the rest of the world. Until we do, we're all at risk.
I know it doesn't sound right to send a bunch of Plutonium to Europa (the Monolith warned us...) but we could shield it reasonably well. Once its mission is done, it could use its internal heat to melt upwards through the ice and onto the surface. There it would be isolated from the Europa ocean (the ice would re-freeze below it) and sit in a little warm puddle waiting for someone to pick it up (in, say 200 years).
This solves a problem which the other posters have already mentioned, namely that even if we send anything else which is on the drawing board, there would be no plan to get it back. It would decompose in the Europa ocean and potentially cause a lot more environmental destruction than just a couple of gamma rays.
It's all well and good to go on long missions under the Europa ice crust, but if this is expected to be of any use to science, there must be a way of getting data back to Earth. I doubt we could equip this thing with a radio powerful enough to send data through potentially miles of water and ice. The original plan for the battery+propeller vehicle was to have it tethered, IIRC. Would this work in the same way? The cooler thing to do would be to let it go free but then returh and report to a base station (or maybe interface with a cable hanging down from the base station into the water.) The base station could then relay the data back to and orbiter and then on to Earth. Anyway, I think this could be the real technological challenge. Even if you can move far on a "penlight battery" you can't send much of a signal with one.
Also, what you say about turbulence is right, but makes me think that it would work to our advantage if there is a smart computer inside calculating and then moving into columns of updraft. This is the basic theory behind gliders.
Also, in turbulent currents that just throw a craft around, why not build in a motion reciprocation system like in those Rolex watches that don't need batteries because they run off the mechanical energy of your arm movements? I think these are all good ideas to explore, and I agree with the poster that all this makes more sense than the battery+propeller diver that was proposed.
I don't know why we all want to look over your shoulder as you code. I hope you don't find it too annoying. This reminds me a bit of the Monty Python sketch where they had a live broadcast of a famous author composing his eighth novel, complete with "expert" play-by-play commentary.
The real reason why we care so much is because we love you guys, and ofen spend hours at the mercy of your code (which has recently treated us well). And thank you for staying in touch with the community that relies on your work!
The strange result is that 1.0.3 is scheduled to be released about a month after the final 1.1. Are they really planning something huge for the 1.1 branch that they don't trust themselves to re-merge the tree? I guess there is precedent for this, with Netscape 4.08 being released after the 4.5 releases were well on their way. Also, it seems that this is how Linux kernel releases work, with 2.2 still being maintained after the release of 2.4. Still, this is a new policy for Mozilla.
Is freetype support for *nix releases being planned by the AOL developers? If not, would it be hard for an independent OSS project to hack it together? I really do think this is important. Like the author of the parent post, I instinctively fire up Konqueror, and turn to Mozilla only when I find Konqueror can't render what I'm looking at (and this is becoming very rare). The only reason I do this is because the fonts look so much better.
Which bosses impose this on you... the company formerly known as VA Linux? I'm not trolling; just puzzled.
Alternately, they could declare that 1.0 is an asymptotic limit for Mozilla, and no actual human coded Mozilla will ever reach it, though future versions will come closer.
However, I stand by what I said about the website you linked. You have to understand that the stuff there is pathetic garbage written in order to sound semi-plausible to people who don't have the time to actually read up on the subject. It is like reading about plate techtonics from the Flat Earth Society website--i.e., not the place to satisfy a casual curiosity. Maybe I was mad, too, that others here thought your link "insightful". Slashdot can look like a big shouting match sometimes, especially when articles get as many responses as this one did, and I think I was shouting instead of discussing. I'm sorry I did that.
So please, re-read my post with all the "angry" words removed.
Oh, and sorry about the typos... yuck!
So, when media companies finally get around to streaming movies over the internet, Road Runner users will be charged up the butt for downloading stuff from competing movie houses, but access to the AOL service will be unmetered (though there will be usage fees, of course). There will be AOL-approved (and hosted) streaming radio stations, AOL-approved news sites with streaming content (Time, CNN, etc.) and this will be the only stuff users will be allowed to look at without the fear that their RR bills will sink them.
This is a brilliant vertical-monopolistic strategy. This way, AOL will leverage their cable monopoly to feed us exactly the media content they want us to see (i.e. theirs), and we'll be greatful, because it's "free." Any opponents ("competitors") will be ignored because downloading stuff from them will cost you heavy usage charges. AOL will say "why would you want to go anywhere else when we have so much great AOL content for free?" This way, the internet to an AOL user will basically look like an AOL sandbox.
We are entering some scary times...
Of course, I expect to do my part to make this backfire by contesting every single "over-quota" penny I get charged, and annoying the operators daily with quota-related "customer support" questions. I have a special student deal where I pay about $35/month for RR, and if each month I can tie up an operator for a total of four hours, I'll be causing TW to lose money on me. If enough of us do this, as a part of a "active resistance" campaign, they will ditch the stupid quotas.
I'm not ditching RR quite yet. As I read this article, however, I fired up some P2P software and removed all the upload caps. I'll keep it this way until RR announces that they are ditching the caps, or until they actually kick in, at which point I start my telephone campaign. You in?
Now, catching Code Red could potentially cost someone lots of bandwith money. Those stupid pop-under downloads might install a P2P program without your knowledge or consent. Online media files are often much larger than you expect.
This makes me think that the cost of administring these quotas (paying phone operators and tech support staff who will have to put up with hours of my constant bitching and excuses about my bill) will be higher than the cost of adding fatter pipes to the network and keeping everything uncapped.
I would honestly prefer that my download bandwith be cut (expecially during peak hours) than to have to constantly fret and worry that I'm close to my bandwidth cap, so I'd better turn off Shoutcast.
I hope they do a test run of this program in some small district, to see how users respond. I suspect that once people see their bill and the cryptic charges, many will try to dispute them. I promise I'll be on the phone the day my first metered RR bill arives. Will they "itemize" the usage fees like any other utility? Will they do it by port number? By time? By source? Will they charge the same for Usenet downloads, even if it puts no pressure on their connection to the internet? Will there be a warning when I've reached 75% of my monthly quota? Without these things, customers will bitch endlessly, and the workforce necessary to accomodate all the bitching will be more expensive than the overdue RR network improvements. Everybody who thinks this is a bad idea should put the RR customer service number in their speed dial and call them all the time to ask a bunch of really obscure questions, like "Oh God, I don't know what my daughter did on my computer just now. Can you please check how close I am to my cap? Oh, really, well, can you check how much I downloaded today? What? That's not what my meter says..." and so on.
Oh, here's a much better, though more technical paper!
Actually, here's a link to a pretty crappy essay that touches on some stuff in that article. If I were you, though, I'd go look it up.
However, there's also the matter that theaters prefer playing shorter movies, other things being equal, because they just get to sell more tickets per day. That may have contributed to some early removals of FOTR from some theaters. Two half-full screenings of some crappy 90 minute film will make more money for a theater than one nearly packed showing of FOTR, and for this reason, I wouldn't be surprised if many theaters ended their run of FOTR while there was still a fairly high demand to see it.
I'm not saying that FOTR should have been shorter; I think just the opposite. I expect it would have been a better film if it had been 90 minutes longer. It's just that at a certain point, every 10 minutes of length will cost a film quite a bit of box office money, and even directors with integrity quicly reach their limit.
I'm just happy there are no similar constraints with the DVD release. In fact, I think that with DVDs there is a market incentive to make it longer. Great! Hooray for DVD! (Of course, if this becomes the rule, people might start treating the screen versions as merely butchered cuts, and wait for the DVD. That would be funny! But I'm not too worried...)
But seriously, I am happy that LOTR-FOTR is being released in a four-hour version. I really like the idea of DVD-directors cuts. I'm pretty confident FOTR would have made a lot more money if it had only been 2 hours long, because it could be shown five times a day per screen, rather than three. There is a lot of pressure on studios to avoid long movies. They want people to pay and free their seats as fast as possible. DVD releases are not under that same pressure, so I think we will see more "unshortened" versions of movies.
I hope that enough people buy the FOTR DVD for the extra footage that movie studios actually learn to always shoot extra scences (character-development, background explanations, and cheap stuff like that) that don't appear in the theater release, but show up on the DVD to drive up sales/rentals for people who loved the movie in the theater and want to see more. FOTR is one movie that definitely needs another hour or so to make it seem less rushed.