Trying to explain the demise of an obsolete business model..
The movie Dark knight cost about 185 million to make and took in a total revenue of over 1billion. Thats more than five times the original investment. Iron Man cost 140 million and made over 500 million. Transformers cost 151 million and made over 700 million. The list goes on.
That does not look like a demise of an industry to me. That looks like bloody good business. You can find similar statistics for music, however its somewhat harder to do. For example black eyed peas "Monkey Business" sold about 300k copies in its first week alone.
I think obsolete does not mean what you think it means.
When a game has problems and they don't publish details everyone bemoans that fact that they are so closed about it. "Just be up front and honest about it, we understand there can be problems..." everyone says. Then when some does that everyone starts crying out " Cheap bastards are just trying to get free advertising... ".
I will give you 5 million reasons. License fees. 5 million bucks per year. Just cus you probably use a h.264 codec illegally does not make it work for a target as large as firefox or opera. M$ has one or two of the patents on h264 so they would be lining up pretty fast.
But there is a much bigger problem. Say Shuttleworth came to the party and said I will pay the fees. There is the license agreement. This agreement is not compatible with GPL or open source in general and will probably contain DRM clauses. (ie DVD players need to enforce zone DRM because of the license agreement).
And to top it all off in a few years there is a fee on *content* encoded with h264.
Will you pay the 5 Million yearly license fees so firefox/mozillia etc can provide free legal support....
Thought not.
Oh and soon there will be a fee on *providing* content in h.264.
And I left out all the other parts of the license agreement that firefox would be forced to follow before they would be given a license. And this would make it incompatible with GPL or even open source in general.
Pay an actor to wear a lab coat when he delivers your message. Have him wear a hard hat and carry a clipboard. Pose him in front of a very large machine, or a pristine meadow. That's where your dollars have their biggest effect.
Reminds me of a funny story. We got a new shiny 1.3Million dollar mass spec machine. The national news paper comes in to do a story. The ask if we can take a photo with "that machine in the background, because it looks more credible as a expensive scientific instrument...".
A big problem with higher level languages is tools. They give awful error messages and often you don't even have a line number. As an example consider scheme. Its the error in the way the macro was called or the macro itself? Now consider that often standard language constructs are often implemented with macros we now need to consider a macro of a macro of a macro. Now try to understand that error message.....
Another problem with java is that every first year student writes a GUI in *bad* swing and then makes it an applet. Bad GUIs are always slow and I have never found a "great" widget toolkit.
Its a benchmark. Thats it. Was the scala writen by a scala coder or a C programmer. Is the C writen by a... etc. There are so many things to consider that it should all be taken with salt. It will taste better that way.
I have this problem as a indie game dev. If I charge too little everyone thinks its cheap and won't even try the demo. If I charge full price everyone is assuming its too expensive since its can't be a real AAA title. Lots of different people have very different ideas of a "right" price for a non big player game.
So at this stage there will be a demo, a "steam" like rental version ($5 per week) and a full version ($20). Rental becomes a full game once you hit $20 bucks.
Yea my wifi had that problem too. Power management all out the wazzo and keeps cutting the connection. Also the SD card reader doesn't work either and the "digital sound system" didn't work properly (everything sounded like chipmonks) and to top it all off suspend didn't work.
That was with the preinstall windows.
Windows doesn't just work. Window users get someone else to get it to work for them.
Incidentally only the SD card reader doesn't work under linux. I use slackware. oooo-baaan-tooo wouldn't even boot.
I'll consider supporting cameras no sooner than them being able to keep a robber from stealing my wallet. I don't really win a lot when there's footage of me being shot by some junkie who doesn't give a rat's ass whether someone sees him mugging me for the 10 bucks in my wallet.
Or that even after the fact that there is no footage cus its too labor intensive to get it out of the database for petty crimes like a mugging. Or its just turned off when your shot to death....
which is far beyond what facial recognition can do as yet
I propose that is far better than it can ever do. We think humans are very good at facial recognition and would be very happy if the software is that good. But we each only have a very small local database of the faces of people we know. We look far more similar to each other when you are talking about 2+ million people.
As an example consider the look alike competions that some pubs may run. Back when Clinton was president we had a look alike Clinton comp with $500 bar tab up for grabs. I could not tell the difference with the top 4 entries from the real deal or between each other. They weren't even twins or anything. And that was in a city/town of only 40000.
Slashdot Mirror
we've heard nothing from the authors of the Library..
They are irrelevant as its not their "technology". However the patent holders are a different matter entirely.
Theora isn't that great....
Perhaps that because the bulk of the [codec] OS community puts there time and effort into H.264 etc rather than theora.
I'm sure the licence holders like it quite a lot.... and like with mp3, when you can't resnably shift formats, they start serious enforcment..
And then add fees for content produced with it too.
I second that. I tell people I would prefer the train to a plane for shorter trips to be green and all that. Really I just cus trains are cool.
That and the crap they put you trough at the airport.
But mostly its coolness B-)
Its because you live in the UK. Seriously what is cheap over there?
Trying to explain the demise of an obsolete business model..
The movie Dark knight cost about 185 million to make and took in a total revenue of over 1billion. Thats more than five times the original investment. Iron Man cost 140 million and made over 500 million. Transformers cost 151 million and made over 700 million. The list goes on.
That does not look like a demise of an industry to me. That looks like bloody good business. You can find similar statistics for music, however its somewhat harder to do. For example black eyed peas "Monkey Business" sold about 300k copies in its first week alone.
I think obsolete does not mean what you think it means.
When a game has problems and they don't publish details everyone bemoans that fact that they are so closed about it. "Just be up front and honest about it, we understand there can be problems..." everyone says. Then when some does that everyone starts crying out " Cheap bastards are just trying to get free advertising... ".
If the copyright holder is not the person who created it then the copyright ends when they die.
Like hell. 20 years or when they die, whichever is shorter. Period. Corporations do not need "special" protection.
Godwin's law is inapplicable when we discuss the *German* government. Its right there in the subclauses.
Game Stop can innovate. You don't have to wait long for 2nd hand games...
There is work for *fair* pay and then theres lawyers fees.
I wouldn't have a problem with the fees if I got paid half as well as a lawyer.
In the end. Only the lawyers win.
This is Format shifting. In most countries this is fair use. So generally no, there is no such license.
I will give you 5 million reasons. License fees. 5 million bucks per year. Just cus you probably use a h.264 codec illegally does not make it work for a target as large as firefox or opera. M$ has one or two of the patents on h264 so they would be lining up pretty fast.
But there is a much bigger problem. Say Shuttleworth came to the party and said I will pay the fees. There is the license agreement. This agreement is not compatible with GPL or open source in general and will probably contain DRM clauses. (ie DVD players need to enforce zone DRM because of the license agreement).
And to top it all off in a few years there is a fee on *content* encoded with h264.
Will you pay the 5 Million yearly license fees so firefox/mozillia etc can provide free legal support....
Thought not.
Oh and soon there will be a fee on *providing* content in h.264.
And I left out all the other parts of the license agreement that firefox would be forced to follow before they would be given a license. And this would make it incompatible with GPL or even open source in general.
Pay an actor to wear a lab coat when he delivers your message. Have him wear a hard hat and carry a clipboard. Pose him in front of a very large machine, or a pristine meadow. That's where your dollars have their biggest effect.
Reminds me of a funny story. We got a new shiny 1.3Million dollar mass spec machine. The national news paper comes in to do a story. The ask if we can take a photo with "that machine in the background, because it looks more credible as a expensive scientific instrument...".
It was the printer.
A big problem with higher level languages is tools. They give awful error messages and often you don't even have a line number. As an example consider scheme. Its the error in the way the macro was called or the macro itself? Now consider that often standard language constructs are often implemented with macros we now need to consider a macro of a macro of a macro. Now try to understand that error message.....
Another problem with java is that every first year student writes a GUI in *bad* swing and then makes it an applet. Bad GUIs are always slow and I have never found a "great" widget toolkit.
bloatware in any language is bloatware. On low mem machines (read 1 gig) i don't use eclipse anymore. But yes it works fine with 2gig+.
Its a benchmark. Thats it. Was the scala writen by a scala coder or a C programmer. Is the C writen by a ... etc. There are so many things to consider that it should all be taken with salt. It will taste better that way.
In eclipse I would use Refactor to change a name/type. Or a regex type thing...
Add security problems even when they do "work". aka Buffer overflows. To add to that they make flow analysis very difficult.
I have this problem as a indie game dev. If I charge too little everyone thinks its cheap and won't even try the demo. If I charge full price everyone is assuming its too expensive since its can't be a real AAA title. Lots of different people have very different ideas of a "right" price for a non big player game.
So at this stage there will be a demo, a "steam" like rental version ($5 per week) and a full version ($20). Rental becomes a full game once you hit $20 bucks.
Yea my wifi had that problem too. Power management all out the wazzo and keeps cutting the connection. Also the SD card reader doesn't work either and the "digital sound system" didn't work properly (everything sounded like chipmonks) and to top it all off suspend didn't work.
That was with the preinstall windows.
Windows doesn't just work. Window users get someone else to get it to work for them.
Incidentally only the SD card reader doesn't work under linux. I use slackware. oooo-baaan-tooo wouldn't even boot.
It's far past the time citizens should be held hostage with proprietary formats.
Why should I be force to fork out for MS products to work with the government?
I'll consider supporting cameras no sooner than them being able to keep a robber from stealing my wallet. I don't really win a lot when there's footage of me being shot by some junkie who doesn't give a rat's ass whether someone sees him mugging me for the 10 bucks in my wallet.
Or that even after the fact that there is no footage cus its too labor intensive to get it out of the database for petty crimes like a mugging. Or its just turned off when your shot to death....
which is far beyond what facial recognition can do as yet
I propose that is far better than it can ever do. We think humans are very good at facial recognition and would be very happy if the software is that good. But we each only have a very small local database of the faces of people we know. We look far more similar to each other when you are talking about 2+ million people.
As an example consider the look alike competions that some pubs may run. Back when Clinton was president we had a look alike Clinton comp with $500 bar tab up for grabs. I could not tell the difference with the top 4 entries from the real deal or between each other. They weren't even twins or anything. And that was in a city/town of only 40000.