I've consumed quite a few six packs, and my abs look nothing like that.
You're probably doing it wrong, or drinking the wrong sort of six-packs.
What you need to do is:
Buy the sort of six-packs that come in the plastic ring six-pack holder - you know, the sort that traps animals and chokes turtles.
Once you've drunk the six-pack take off your shirt, lie down face-up in a sunny spot, place the six-pack holder over your abs, then pass out.
When you wake up your abs will display the perfect, or "true", 6-pack pattern. You'll also have the added benefit that, if you decide you don't like it, it'll fade to nothing in a week or so - I bet Mr. Universe can't do that!
(A further benefit of this method is that gay men are less likely to have pictures of you on their bedroom walls...)
Carlton United's Big Ad was a huge success, in that people learned about it by being told by friends
As a middle-income, single, Australian, male, technical/internet tradesman in his 30's, I should be smack-bang in the middle of the target demographic for those ads. But from the first time I saw the first one, I found them really annoying. And I don't think I was alone - I can't recall a single instance of my workmates ever mentioning those ads.
So why do Australians keep bringing these ads up as an example of fantastic advertising?
The only reason I can think of is further advertising - the advertising industry gave the advertising company that created these advertisements an advertising award for creative advertising, and to keep the advertising going they advertise that these advertisements were so good they won advertising awards...
Wait until Best Buys start hooking up the Sony SXRD to the new HD-DVD players and watch how many crowd around to see.
If it's anything like the situation here, where retailers demonstrate HDTV by hooking up a 50" HD plasma panel to a HD DTV STB via composite, the answer to your question is "0"...
Re:Media Center software is not commercially viabl
on
Viiv Falls Flat
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· Score: 1
It seems to me that the concept of a Media Center PC is totally at odds with current corporate movements towards content protection.
That's because you don't understand what a "Media Centre PC" is.
You think it's a PC that'll act as a host, collector & source for all your media needs - serving music around your house, recording multiple TV shows and channels, and downloading clips and shows from all over the world via the Internet, playing them all on your wide-screen TV & 7.1 channel sound system. Maybe with some intelligence thrown in whereby it auto-schedules things you might like based on your previous choices, and all with a nice GUI/OSD and a simple to use remote.
They think it's an opportunity to lock you in to buying their hardware and content from their "partners", while locking out anything that conflicts with that revenue model.
And, guess what? They make the machines and the software, and they'll keep trying that strategy until they either win, or give the whole thing up as a bad joke, claiming "it failed due to rampant piracy / terrorists / paedophiles".
You make the common mistake of thinking that "want" or "need" leads directly to "product". What actually happens is "want" leads to "focus group", which leads to "marketing", which leads to "strategy", which leads to "product development", which leads on a little side trip back to "marketing" again, and finally leads to "product". By which time its real and actual purpose bears only a passing similarity to what was originally wanted.
It's still funny that they can't even get review or demo units to function properly, though. Don't they test the damn things before sending them out? It's like they really believe that the hype will swamp the disappointing reality...
Shoulda bought a Topfield (thought you got away from the Topfield fanboys by avoiding dtvforum.info, didn't you;-)
- upgradeable HD (I've got a 250G in mine, others have done 400G+) - full twin tuner (record 2 timers while playing back a recording) - full 7-day EPG (not just "Now & Next") uploaded from PC - USB port for downloading recordings to your PC - make DVDs with proper menus, directly from the digital stream, with no analogue loss.
Admittedly, they cost 5x as much as your Humax. But even the Humax 9000T can't do 2 & 3, and I'm not sure about 1 either.
Just an interesting note, seeing as you talk about rewarding the content creators and mention you're in Australia.
You must have noticed how all the commercial stations here have taken to crushed/split screen credits in the last year or so. Have you also noticed that the one bit they don't interfere with is the production company and studio/network tails that appear after the credits?
So, they're quite happy to trample all over the people who were actually physically involved with the show - hell, they're quite happy to trample all over the actual show with banner advertising, station promos, and logos - but God forbid anyone interferes with the moneymen's "fame"/branding. Regardless of your point of view, that pretty much answers your "How does one award (reward, treat) the content creators?" question.
Like shit.
FWIW, I encountered my first self-service checkout while on holidays a few weeks ago. So I queued up at a staffed checkout. The second thing the checkout chick said (after the obligatory "hello, how are you today, will you be taking this with you?") was "why didn't you use the self-checkout lane?". My answer? "So you can keep getting paid"...
Hmmm - another manufacturer on my personal do-not-buy list. No more Sony, for the obvious reasons. No Belkin, because they made routers that deliberately didn't route. No Dlink or Netgear, because they abused the goodwill of NTP server providers. Various others, for GPL violations / screwing customers / abuse of the common good. And now, no more Philips.
Rule #1: Don't feed the bears!
Oh well, I'll bet there'll be more than one manufacturer emerging from Taiwan or China who will be happy to supply my future hardware needs...
1) You dismissed with the trite phrasing "Microsoft... began to leverage its substantial distribution advantage" the fact that MS cut off Netscape's only chance of competing directly with IE in the "browser installed on shipping PCs" market. Several things came together right at that time - Windows started changing from being a box sold on shelves at the local nerd-shop to being pre-installed on every computer right at the time they brought out IE pre-installed. And their vendor agreements locked NS out of that market forever - by the time the DoJ had moved, NS was dead in the water.
2) Given that MS had cut them out of the retail PC market, Netscape's only option was to try to be better than IE. Which, while not hard (remember what steaming piles of crap IE, up to and including the "Microsoft Windows * with Internet Explorer" IE3, were?), was still strongly hampered by the fact IE was pre-installed. So they threw everything into beating IE on features - they cut back the browser-only Netscape releases, concentrated hard on adding functionality to the suite / Netscape Gold versions (mail, newsgroups, calendar, browser), but in their death throes only managed to add pointless eye-candy - and broke the back of their already-fragile codebase in doing that.
Remember, it took IE at least 3 versions to break Netscape. Arguably 4 - IE 1&2 are deservedly forgotten, IE3 was shit but worked, IE4 slightly less so on both counts (but marked IE's start down the useless eye-candy road...), IE5 was the first half-decent one. And it wasn't so much that IE became a better browser than Netscape as the fact that IE was already planted firmly in front of everybody who bought a PC at the time...
(Funny, just noticed in passing that IE development somewhat parallels that of MS-DOS - 1&2 were barely useable, 3 was the first fully-working one, 4 was a dog full of fluff and bugs, 5 was better, and 6 the best. Maybe there's a lesson there...)
In those days when you signed up to an ISP it was not unusual to get a CD with browser software for you to install as they could not be certain you would already have a browser.
A CD?! Hell, I've got setup floppies from my original ISP here, with Trumpet Winsock and NCSA Mosaic. My only choice was 3 1/2" or 5 1/4";-)
Very handy it was too. There was quite a while, in the heady days of IE3, where IE would quite often fail to download Netscape even from the ISP's mirror - usually it'd stall and sit there at around 80~90%, going no further. Mosaic, of course, would download it all at a blazing 1.4kB/sec...
Some people say there is no similar market effect. I think there is. Car sound installations. While there is a high-tech market for after market sound systems for your car it is tiny compared to the pre-installed market. For most of the standard cheap radio and speakers factory installed are apperantly good enough and the cost and time involved in upgrading to a product no matter how superior is just not worth it.
Funny you should mention car radios - somebody else mentioned them upthread too, and I was going to mention this then:
In some modern cars, removing the factory head unit to fit an aftermarket one actually reduces functionality - much like completely uninstalling IE from Windows. In these cars, the LCD display for all the console functions (aircon, temp, clock, etc) is driven from the radio. Very Microsoft...
You're forgetting that people actually WANT to use these services. It's not your companies right to refuse them.
How very American...
Of course it is my company's right to refuse them! If I feel and can justify that the cost of setting up and running separate accounting, billing, and traffic systems for the (very small) x% who are both (a) heavy users and (b) prepared to pay for it is too high to be bothered with, then why would I do it?
I wouldn't - I'd leave it to those who want or are best structured to handle that particular set of problems. Since everyone else is using crap analogies, I'll say this: there's a reason the corner hardware store doesn't sell industrial plumbing supplies, and it's the same reason MegaHardwareStore doesn't sell individual screws...
I've no mod points, but you make some good points - at least, when it comes to LANs. One of the big advantages of Token Ring networks is that they have known, stable delivery timing - unnecessary for most "LAN"-style network traffic; and when it is, you start running into all the QoS/timing/delivery kludges that have been implemented on top of ethernet line & TCP/IP protocols.
Or, in other words, the advantages that Token Ring has turned out to be unnecessary for the way LANs came to be used. Until recently...
Telecommunications-grade stuff - this is one application where timing and delivery are hyper-critical. Interesting to note that "packet" handling on the ring side of SDH/SONET is not at all dissimilar to Token Ring (although based more on timeslots than tokens).
(Of course, the big ethernet hardware vendors are busy trying to prove generations of telecommunications engineers wrong on this count. But the truth still is that, to get ethernet-style networks to provide the delivery and timing quality required of telecommunications, involves lots of physical layer and protocol kludges, plus plenty of bandwidth headroom to boot.)
Let's be clear about these things. They are *laws* debated and agreed to by *represented officials* and can be changed at any time if society at large decides these rules need to be changed.
Let's be even clearer.
They are *laws* "debated" and "agreed to" by *self-interested individuals who have obtained a position of power specifically in order to take advantage of others, and who have been further corrupted through their own greed and self-interest by external non-elected and self-interested outside parties, many of which don't even have the right to vote*, and can only be changed with great difficulty and great individual and societal cost if society at large can be turned from their own self-absorbtion and cultivated fear for sufficiently long enough to decide these rules need to be changed.
Though yours is snappier and fits better into a primary-school civics textbook...
It's the new end run around having a real debate in the U.S. or Europe.
What, you think this is new? It's been going on for at least 20+ years that I can remember.
It's pretty much SOP in most governments, and, in fact, in most domains of human activity. It's walking up the rules, one step at a time. Hell, I'd bet you even tried the same thing as a kid - "well, Billy's parents let him do X; why can't I do Y?". And, of course, Billy's argument always was "Well, TubeSteak's parents let him do Y; why can't I do Z?"
The only thing that I can see has changed recently is that, in the political sphere, the US government (and they're not alone in this, BTW) is playing a more active role. The US creates a law, leans on someone else to create a slightly more draconian version of the same law, then uses that as justification to extend their own laws "to align them with our major trading partners".
For every picture there is always some doubt as to... (2) the actual age of the person(s) in the picture,...
Which is why I only whack off to midget porn...
Seriously, let's examine what the article really says. "People with a vested interest in control support a law strengthening their control". That's it; that's all it says. Despite the use of emotive words like "upswell" (which BTW only appears in the/. article!) to imply widespread public support, and hot-button topics like "child pornography" (which makes up nearly 100% of the justification in the original news article) in an attempt to actually grab real widespread support, it really just boils down to that.
Or, to phrase it in a more sinister fashion : "let's make laws with a wide scope and potential for abuse, and justify them by focussing on a narrow scope that all right-thinking people agree with". Laws so wide that, from the point of view of their application, there's no difference between a child-molester and someone who doesn't agree with the government line...
Future headline : "Protest Group Arrested Under Kiddie-Porn Laws"? Not so far-fetched; just read some of the headlines in newspapers today and compare them to the actual article text. Technically accurate, emotionally manipulative, but factually deceptive...
This is only going to work if they can first brainwash all employees into firmly believing in the goals of the company and putting their own goals aside for those.
Funny... that's the same problem that most other "normal" companies face anyway!
Quite aside from the fact that, while modern management might say "the customer comes first" (and sometimes, second and third as well), what they really practice is usually something along the lines of "the shareholders come first, the board's remuneration and resumes are a close second, and customers and employees are left jostling for a distant third and fourth".
Hey, you're right - as an OS X user, I just looked at that and laughed out loud too! It looks like the stunted, brain-damaged, 6-fingered love child from a one-night-stand between an XP crack-addict and his Apple first cousin...
If that's the case, maybe it's just as well the Kubuntu people didn't copy Apple's internationalisation support while they were at it...
if ((GeolocateSourceIP=="USA") && (ResultIncludes("crikey")) rank++
Australians don't say "crikey!" (much - unless we're toying with the Seppos;-); we don't drink Fosters (unfortunately, Australia's best-selling beer is VB, which is even worse...); and we don't all ride around in kangaroos (we have wallabies, which are smaller and easier to park...)
Truth be told, the typical Australian is less like Steve Irwin, and more like that other great Australian export - The Wiggles. Next time you meet an Australian sneak up behind them, make your hands into pistol-shapes, rotate them vertically in front of you, and scream "WAKE UP, JEFF!" in their ear. They'll appreciate it;-)
Oh - and the quote: same product any more than a cup of 50-cent vending-machine coffee is the same as a Starbucks nonfat venti latte.
Dreadful analogy - the 50-cent vending machine coffee is crap, the $3.50 starbucks latte is crap.
Actually, it's an insightful analogy - you know the 50c vending-machine coffe is crap, but you expect the $3.50 Starbucks coffee to be good.
Or, in other words, people seem to be quite prepared to blow $3 to have their expectations disappointed. Interestingly, this is the same peculiarity of human nature that the music industry, movie studios, and many software developers prey on...
Apple have shown that the smoke and mirrors, done well, really helps the sales figures
Yeah, but you have to actually have something to reveal enticingly through the smoke, or reflect dazzlingly in the mirrors. Apple has elegant hardware and OSX. Microsoft has... "uh, XP, yeah XP, but, y'know, better, and coming Real Soon Now. Don't buy anything else!".
Sorry everybody, but Vista became nothing more than "XP: The Unnecessary Update" the moment they dropped WinFS from the feature list...
Slashdot Mirror
What you need to do is:
When you wake up your abs will display the perfect, or "true", 6-pack pattern. You'll also have the added benefit that, if you decide you don't like it, it'll fade to nothing in a week or so - I bet Mr. Universe can't do that!
(A further benefit of this method is that gay men are less likely to have pictures of you on their bedroom walls...)
So why do Australians keep bringing these ads up as an example of fantastic advertising?
The only reason I can think of is further advertising - the advertising industry gave the advertising company that created these advertisements an advertising award for creative advertising, and to keep the advertising going they advertise that these advertisements were so good they won advertising awards...
Or, in two words: circle jerk...
Running an ADSL ISP ain't like dusting crops, boy...
The other month I watched this series of documentaries where a single samurai repeatedly took on dozens of ninjas at once, winning every time!
You think it's a PC that'll act as a host, collector & source for all your media needs - serving music around your house, recording multiple TV shows and channels, and downloading clips and shows from all over the world via the Internet, playing them all on your wide-screen TV & 7.1 channel sound system. Maybe with some intelligence thrown in whereby it auto-schedules things you might like based on your previous choices, and all with a nice GUI/OSD and a simple to use remote.
They think it's an opportunity to lock you in to buying their hardware and content from their "partners", while locking out anything that conflicts with that revenue model.
And, guess what? They make the machines and the software, and they'll keep trying that strategy until they either win, or give the whole thing up as a bad joke, claiming "it failed due to rampant piracy / terrorists / paedophiles".
You make the common mistake of thinking that "want" or "need" leads directly to "product". What actually happens is "want" leads to "focus group", which leads to "marketing", which leads to "strategy", which leads to "product development", which leads on a little side trip back to "marketing" again, and finally leads to "product". By which time its real and actual purpose bears only a passing similarity to what was originally wanted.
It's still funny that they can't even get review or demo units to function properly, though. Don't they test the damn things before sending them out? It's like they really believe that the hype will swamp the disappointing reality...
Shoulda bought a Topfield (thought you got away from the Topfield fanboys by avoiding dtvforum.info, didn't you ;-)
- upgradeable HD (I've got a 250G in mine, others have done 400G+)
- full twin tuner (record 2 timers while playing back a recording)
- full 7-day EPG (not just "Now & Next") uploaded from PC
- USB port for downloading recordings to your PC - make DVDs with proper menus, directly from the digital stream, with no analogue loss.
Admittedly, they cost 5x as much as your Humax. But even the Humax 9000T can't do 2 & 3, and I'm not sure about 1 either.
Just an interesting note, seeing as you talk about rewarding the content creators and mention you're in Australia.
You must have noticed how all the commercial stations here have taken to crushed/split screen credits in the last year or so. Have you also noticed that the one bit they don't interfere with is the production company and studio/network tails that appear after the credits?
So, they're quite happy to trample all over the people who were actually physically involved with the show - hell, they're quite happy to trample all over the actual show with banner advertising, station promos, and logos - but God forbid anyone interferes with the moneymen's "fame"/branding. Regardless of your point of view, that pretty much answers your "How does one award (reward, treat) the content creators?" question.
Like shit.
FWIW, I encountered my first self-service checkout while on holidays a few weeks ago. So I queued up at a staffed checkout. The second thing the checkout chick said (after the obligatory "hello, how are you today, will you be taking this with you?") was "why didn't you use the self-checkout lane?". My answer? "So you can keep getting paid"...
Hmmm - another manufacturer on my personal do-not-buy list. No more Sony, for the obvious reasons. No Belkin, because they made routers that deliberately didn't route. No Dlink or Netgear, because they abused the goodwill of NTP server providers. Various others, for GPL violations / screwing customers / abuse of the common good. And now, no more Philips.
Rule #1: Don't feed the bears!
Oh well, I'll bet there'll be more than one manufacturer emerging from Taiwan or China who will be happy to supply my future hardware needs...
Like the sig ;-)
..."
"Just on the border of your waking mind, there lies another time, where darkness and light are one
You glossed over 2 things there:
... began to leverage its substantial distribution advantage" the fact that MS cut off Netscape's only chance of competing directly with IE in the "browser installed on shipping PCs" market. Several things came together right at that time - Windows started changing from being a box sold on shelves at the local nerd-shop to being pre-installed on every computer right at the time they brought out IE pre-installed. And their vendor agreements locked NS out of that market forever - by the time the DoJ had moved, NS was dead in the water.
1) You dismissed with the trite phrasing "Microsoft
2) Given that MS had cut them out of the retail PC market, Netscape's only option was to try to be better than IE. Which, while not hard (remember what steaming piles of crap IE, up to and including the "Microsoft Windows * with Internet Explorer" IE3, were?), was still strongly hampered by the fact IE was pre-installed. So they threw everything into beating IE on features - they cut back the browser-only Netscape releases, concentrated hard on adding functionality to the suite / Netscape Gold versions (mail, newsgroups, calendar, browser), but in their death throes only managed to add pointless eye-candy - and broke the back of their already-fragile codebase in doing that.
Remember, it took IE at least 3 versions to break Netscape. Arguably 4 - IE 1&2 are deservedly forgotten, IE3 was shit but worked, IE4 slightly less so on both counts (but marked IE's start down the useless eye-candy road...), IE5 was the first half-decent one. And it wasn't so much that IE became a better browser than Netscape as the fact that IE was already planted firmly in front of everybody who bought a PC at the time...
(Funny, just noticed in passing that IE development somewhat parallels that of MS-DOS - 1&2 were barely useable, 3 was the first fully-working one, 4 was a dog full of fluff and bugs, 5 was better, and 6 the best. Maybe there's a lesson there...)
Very handy it was too. There was quite a while, in the heady days of IE3, where IE would quite often fail to download Netscape even from the ISP's mirror - usually it'd stall and sit there at around 80~90%, going no further. Mosaic, of course, would download it all at a blazing 1.4kB/sec...
Funny you should mention car radios - somebody else mentioned them upthread too, and I was going to mention this then:
In some modern cars, removing the factory head unit to fit an aftermarket one actually reduces functionality - much like completely uninstalling IE from Windows. In these cars, the LCD display for all the console functions (aircon, temp, clock, etc) is driven from the radio. Very Microsoft...
Of course it is my company's right to refuse them! If I feel and can justify that the cost of setting up and running separate accounting, billing, and traffic systems for the (very small) x% who are both (a) heavy users and (b) prepared to pay for it is too high to be bothered with, then why would I do it?
I wouldn't - I'd leave it to those who want or are best structured to handle that particular set of problems. Since everyone else is using crap analogies, I'll say this: there's a reason the corner hardware store doesn't sell industrial plumbing supplies, and it's the same reason MegaHardwareStore doesn't sell individual screws...
I've no mod points, but you make some good points - at least, when it comes to LANs. One of the big advantages of Token Ring networks is that they have known, stable delivery timing - unnecessary for most "LAN"-style network traffic; and when it is, you start running into all the QoS/timing/delivery kludges that have been implemented on top of ethernet line & TCP/IP protocols.
Or, in other words, the advantages that Token Ring has turned out to be unnecessary for the way LANs came to be used. Until recently...
Telecommunications-grade stuff - this is one application where timing and delivery are hyper-critical. Interesting to note that "packet" handling on the ring side of SDH/SONET is not at all dissimilar to Token Ring (although based more on timeslots than tokens).
(Of course, the big ethernet hardware vendors are busy trying to prove generations of telecommunications engineers wrong on this count. But the truth still is that, to get ethernet-style networks to provide the delivery and timing quality required of telecommunications, involves lots of physical layer and protocol kludges, plus plenty of bandwidth headroom to boot.)
Or, in other words, for the same reasons the US wants to engage with China...
Though yours is snappier and fits better into a primary-school civics textbook...
It's pretty much SOP in most governments, and, in fact, in most domains of human activity. It's walking up the rules, one step at a time. Hell, I'd bet you even tried the same thing as a kid - "well, Billy's parents let him do X; why can't I do Y?". And, of course, Billy's argument always was "Well, TubeSteak's parents let him do Y; why can't I do Z?"
The only thing that I can see has changed recently is that, in the political sphere, the US government (and they're not alone in this, BTW) is playing a more active role. The US creates a law, leans on someone else to create a slightly more draconian version of the same law, then uses that as justification to extend their own laws "to align them with our major trading partners".
Seriously, let's examine what the article really says. "People with a vested interest in control support a law strengthening their control". That's it; that's all it says. Despite the use of emotive words like "upswell" (which BTW only appears in the
Or, to phrase it in a more sinister fashion : "let's make laws with a wide scope and potential for abuse, and justify them by focussing on a narrow scope that all right-thinking people agree with". Laws so wide that, from the point of view of their application, there's no difference between a child-molester and someone who doesn't agree with the government line...
Future headline : "Protest Group Arrested Under Kiddie-Porn Laws"? Not so far-fetched; just read some of the headlines in newspapers today and compare them to the actual article text. Technically accurate, emotionally manipulative, but factually deceptive...
Quite aside from the fact that, while modern management might say "the customer comes first" (and sometimes, second and third as well), what they really practice is usually something along the lines of "the shareholders come first, the board's remuneration and resumes are a close second, and customers and employees are left jostling for a distant third and fourth".
Hey, you're right - as an OS X user, I just looked at that and laughed out loud too! It looks like the stunted, brain-damaged, 6-fingered love child from a one-night-stand between an XP crack-addict and his Apple first cousin...
If that's the case, maybe it's just as well the Kubuntu people didn't copy Apple's internationalisation support while they were at it...
Truth be told, the typical Australian is less like Steve Irwin, and more like that other great Australian export - The Wiggles. Next time you meet an Australian sneak up behind them, make your hands into pistol-shapes, rotate them vertically in front of you, and scream "WAKE UP, JEFF!" in their ear. They'll appreciate it
Today's Sunday. He would have written the article last week...
Or, in other words, people seem to be quite prepared to blow $3 to have their expectations disappointed. Interestingly, this is the same peculiarity of human nature that the music industry, movie studios, and many software developers prey on...
Sorry everybody, but Vista became nothing more than "XP: The Unnecessary Update" the moment they dropped WinFS from the feature list...