And who jumped on the bandwagon in a big way before any other industry? The music industry. When they converted everything from LP to CD. They had consumers throw out all their old equipment and music collections - and what the consumers got in return was, higher quality audio (of course, some audiophiles debate that. For the sake of argument, fuck them). What did the music industry get out of "going digital"? Remarkably lower production and manufacturing and shipping costs. Cheap digital sound processing equipment. Cheap razzle-dazzle digital effects processing. High quality mastering equipment, cheap. Easy to use production tools (cheaper studio labor). Cha Ching! this went right into the record companies' profits.
However, they squeezed out the digital toothpaste, and once they realized that this allows people to make infinite perfect digital copies, they decided they maybe didn't want digital technology after all.
RIAA-
I'll tell you what. Switch back to vinyl. 'k? Really. It'll kill off the music pirates once and for all (shhhh! don't TELL them!!). I know that you lose all those nice benefits that the computer industry gave you with the commoditization of digital technology - but it will also save you from the ugly side effects of the commoditization of digital technology! Gasp! Everyone now has tools on their desktops to make infinite perfect digital copies at no cost!!
Methinks you guys should have gone and taken a few computer classes before you bought into this whole "digital technology" thing.
If IBM wanted marketshare for AIX, instead of paying ISV's to port products to AIX, they should just pay Microsoft to bundle it with Windows. It worked for IE.
Just because it's a company's fiduciary duty, does not make it RIGHT.
It's a wolf's evolutionary duty to tear live human babies apart and devour them when they're hungry, and when live human babies are readily available. Of course we're offended by that as humans. Humans have a sense of value on human life, and morals, and ethics.
Are you saying that publicly owned companies should be exempt from that and should place "fiduciary duty" higher? Because, if that's the case, then publically owned businesses are no better than animals, and should be put in a cage.
I was driving to work today. I live near a winery, and I saw a trail of red on the pavement, apparently wine that was leaking from the back of a delivery tanker.
I thought to myself - man, that red trail must be worth thousands of dollars.
Then I thought to myself - wait, that wine isn't worth thousands of dollars. It's not yet in a store, on a shelf, in a bottle with a label on it from a trendy distributor.
That's my opinion of the value of Record Labels. And also my opinion of the BSA's estimates of how much stolen software is worth. Copied data was never in a shrink-wrapped package on a shelf, with cost-centers like manufacturing, shipping, and record-store employee salaries tied to it.
An estimate CAN be made of *design* costs (how much the musician earns in royalties per copy, plus music production costs (not CD duplication costs) plus studio time, or in the case of software, the combined salaries of the developers over the life of the project plus hardware and other support costs - but this is nowhere NEAR the retail value of the software, or lost revenue/profit. If you sell 10000 copies, and you've paid for your design expenses, it costs you NOTHING when someone copies the data for the 10,001st time.
Record companies, artists, software producers, have every right to enforce the re-couping of costs to invent, design, and produce master copies. And they have every right to charge for manufacturing costs on manufactured goods. But they should have no fucking right to charge for manufacturing costs on products that weren't manufactured. The market simply won't justify that - in a supply-demand world, digital goods have an infinite supply. In a digital world, manufacturing costs are equivalent to the cost of running an ftp server on the internet.
Car dealers do not sell cars, nor do they rake in a lot of profits from parts replacement, sales or service. Their main profit center is selling financial services. The commission they get on the car loan.
I've been thinking about this over and over in my head since I first taped an LP back in the dark ages, sometime in the early 1980's. There's a certain sense of "right and wrong" that I have - that I was raised with. It keeps me from stealing. It keeps me from wringing people's necks when they piss me off. It keeps me from cheating at cards. But for some reason, I have a really difficult time believing that it's wrong to make a copy, as long as I'm not profiting from it. And when I read the fair use provisions in the 1992 AHRA, I thought - wow, that's very level-headed and fair. Hence "fair use". I thought that sure, authors' rights needed to be protected, but on the other hand, you can't tell a book reviewer, for instance, that it's illegal to quote a passage from a book. That's wrong. You can't tell a teacher of film history that it's illegal to show a clip from a movie (or even an entire movie) to a class. In my opinion, that's just wrong, and absolutely UN-American - goes against everything this country was founded on. Sure it's wrong for me to spool out 10 tapes of the latest Pink Floyd LP and sell copies to my friends. But make a tape for a friend so they can listen to it, so we can talk about a particular lyric or guitar rif, what the fuck is wrong with that?
The trouble arises where this free exchange of music among friends, begins to replace the legitimate paid-for music collections of millions of people. I can see wanting to suppress that - but at it's heart, it's no different than sharing a tape with a friend - those 50,000 people connected to my box via Napster are all my friends. We chat on line, if we lived in the same area, I'm sure we'd probably get together and discuss how cool The Wall was, have a beer or two, and I sure as hell didn't get any money from them for the music. It just doesn't trigger that little red warning light on my "right and wrong" meter in the back of my head.
Sure, society tries to pre-empt your built-in "right and wrong" meter by making laws. It's confusing, hey, dont' drink until you're 21. But when you're 18, you just can't see why it's a problem. Doesn't seem wrong. But there's a law that says it's wrong. But that doesn't make it so.
Re:Meanwhile, in a parallel universe near you:
on
Unix Isn't Dead
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· Score: 4, Funny
Microsoft releases Windows/X, a BSD-based unix with an open-source layer called Freud and a graphical interface called Water. The OS uses twin APIs; a cleaned up Win32 called Soot and (uh) Chocolate.
Yes, but they're still cleaning up problems with Freud, because quite often, child processes will become attached to the processes that spawned them.
Digital Camcorder: shoot footage Firewire/iMovie: import footage to HD, edit clips into full video stream with titles, transitions, effects, etc. iDVD or DVD Studio Pro: Author DVD content with menus, encode video stream. Toast: Master (burn) DVD content onto disk.
IMO - it's still not as easy as it could be.
Re:But linux is killing unix..for better or for wo
on
Unix Isn't Dead
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· Score: 2
This is at least partially because Linux and it's set of applications are FINALLY starting to mature. Mozilla is *nearly* there. (IMO, it's there - I've deleted Netscape 4.72 and I'm not looking back). Gimp, a few years ago was very rough, and now it's actually a useful app. And the windows managers for Linux are far better than they used to be. I think Linux's time has not yet arrived - but it is soon, my children. Soon.
Oh yes. I feel oh so safe and secure that the ultra civilized and advanced civilizations of India and Pakistan have nukes. I get a nice safe secure feeling deep inside every time I hear about hordes of Hindus raiding Muslim towns and burning houses, or strike-teams of Muslim fighters attacking parliment with grenades and machineguns with the ultimate aim of becoming a martyr and taking as many infidels with them.
On the other hand, I feel safe that I live in a country with several thousand nukes - run by a man who panders to the same religious extremists who bomb abortion clinics (er - killing people because all life is sacred).
Ah, so you're saying that the taxpayers should fund this kind of supercomputing power so that pfizer can own my DNA? No thanks.
Re:Silly people *tsk,tsk,tsk*
on
Unix Isn't Dead
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· Score: 2
And GW Bush ran against Clinton, not Gore. I think pretty much every republican for the next 50 years is going to have the privilege of running against Clinton. And the democrats are going to have the disadvantage of running against Reagan. *sigh*
Re:Silly people *tsk,tsk,tsk*
on
Unix Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 2
Microsoft is scared? That's gotta be the "DUH!" heard-round-the-world. Microsoft has got to be the perfect textbook example of institutionalized paranoia. That's why they destroy their competition. Because they fear it. The degree to which they pursue this destruction is the magnitude of their paranoia. If there's been one obvious factor driving Microsoft's dominance and business practices, and all of their PR blather that supposedly justifies it - it's been fear.
The one thing that I never "got" about Sliders is, out of all the zillions of possible parallel Earths, (I assume that they were all orbiting and rotating in the same exact location, or there would be some serious inertial or spacial problems on arrival) - none of them were very freindly and benign. They were all near the cusp of some frighteningly huge conflict. They never found a place where nobody was fighting anybody, and where there were helpful people and plentiful resources where they could relax for a few months and try to solve the problem of how to get back home. Just unlucky, I guess.
I have opted to upgrade my old system, rather than to buy a new one. I wanted to add the capabilities of putting my home movies on DVDs. I figured that all I had to do was get a DVD burner, bigger faster hard drive, CPU upgrade, some more memory, etc. I spent a fair chunk of change on the hardware, but less than if I had bought a new iMac, and MUCH less than if I had bought a G4 desktop.
Turns out I was wrong - one crucial step in the DVD process is authoring. And on the Mac there are really two choices. DVD Studio Pro, which is $1k, or iDVD, which is free*. *Disclaimer: if you buy a new Mac with the built in DVD burner. In other words, if you want to burn DVD's you either have to take it up the ass for a new machine, or REALLY take it up the ass for the Pro software package. Granted, DVD Studio Pro is awesome, but after spending $1k on hardware, I'm not sure if I want to spend that much again on software to do something that another program will do for free (if you buy a new Mac).
And before you call me a whiner, I'm not in the market for an iMac. I want a machine that's upgradable - and I want to preserve my investment in my legacy hardware (SCSI scanner, ext. HD array, ext. CD-R burner, ADB graphics tablet, etc. etc. etc.) - and I don't believe that the current Pro machines are worth what Apple is charging, especially at the high end with the DVD burner and iDVD software.
The computer industry thrives on sales of new machines. And as sales decline, we'll see pressure like this increase to get people to upgrade. And we'll continue to see stubborn hold-outs like myself. I think it's worse in the Apple market, because Macs in general (not iMacs) are VERY upgradable. Nobody wants to just toss their legacy hardware. OS X, USB, all these new technologies are really putting the pressure on. I'm just glad I'm not one of those poor schmucks stuck with a 9600. It was an awesome platform in it's day, and can still be upgraded - I think you can put dual 500MHz G4's on it, but it's not supported by OS X.
where do they get 4%? from what I've read, every mammalian clone to date has been an unmitigated disaster. Let's see, we have cancerous chimps, aged sheep, and obese mice. I don't know about you, but if I were the clone-ee, I sure as hell would resent anybody having even tried to clone a human at this stage of the art. It's just not ready for human trials yet. It's obvious that there are many many mechanisms at work that are not fully understood.
I wanna be a digital archaeologist. I want to spend my days looking through old CD ROMs and tape backups, digging through ancient browser caches, matching history's version of what things were like back then, with what things really WERE like back then.
No matter how much I agree with you, that argument an $2 will get you a cup of coffee. While a completely lame argument, and $50k in soft money will buy you a law.
Gates and Alan started out on the university's computer system (don't sweat it though, it was a private school, right?). Not their garage. Jobs and Wozniak *did* start out in their garage. And HP.
Slashdot Mirror
And who jumped on the bandwagon in a big way before any other industry? The music industry. When they converted everything from LP to CD. They had consumers throw out all their old equipment and music collections - and what the consumers got in return was, higher quality audio (of course, some audiophiles debate that. For the sake of argument, fuck them).
What did the music industry get out of "going digital"? Remarkably lower production and manufacturing and shipping costs. Cheap digital sound processing equipment. Cheap razzle-dazzle digital effects processing. High quality mastering equipment, cheap. Easy to use production tools (cheaper studio labor). Cha Ching! this went right into the record companies' profits.
However, they squeezed out the digital toothpaste, and once they realized that this allows people to make infinite perfect digital copies, they decided they maybe didn't want digital technology after all.
RIAA-
I'll tell you what. Switch back to vinyl. 'k? Really. It'll kill off the music pirates once and for all (shhhh! don't TELL them!!). I know that you lose all those nice benefits that the computer industry gave you with the commoditization of digital technology - but it will also save you from the ugly side effects of the commoditization of digital technology! Gasp! Everyone now has tools on their desktops to make infinite perfect digital copies at no cost!!
Methinks you guys should have gone and taken a few computer classes before you bought into this whole "digital technology" thing.
*snicker*
If IBM wanted marketshare for AIX, instead of paying ISV's to port products to AIX, they should just pay Microsoft to bundle it with Windows. It worked for IE.
Just because it's a company's fiduciary duty, does not make it RIGHT.
It's a wolf's evolutionary duty to tear live human babies apart and devour them when they're hungry, and when live human babies are readily available. Of course we're offended by that as humans. Humans have a sense of value on human life, and morals, and ethics.
Are you saying that publicly owned companies should be exempt from that and should place "fiduciary duty" higher? Because, if that's the case, then publically owned businesses are no better than animals, and should be put in a cage.
I was driving to work today. I live near a winery, and I saw a trail of red on the pavement, apparently wine that was leaking from the back of a delivery tanker.
I thought to myself - man, that red trail must be worth thousands of dollars.
Then I thought to myself - wait, that wine isn't worth thousands of dollars. It's not yet in a store, on a shelf, in a bottle with a label on it from a trendy distributor.
That's my opinion of the value of Record Labels. And also my opinion of the BSA's estimates of how much stolen software is worth. Copied data was never in a shrink-wrapped package on a shelf, with cost-centers like manufacturing, shipping, and record-store employee salaries tied to it.
An estimate CAN be made of *design* costs (how much the musician earns in royalties per copy, plus music production costs (not CD duplication costs) plus studio time, or in the case of software, the combined salaries of the developers over the life of the project plus hardware and other support costs - but this is nowhere NEAR the retail value of the software, or lost revenue/profit. If you sell 10000 copies, and you've paid for your design expenses, it costs you NOTHING when someone copies the data for the 10,001st time.
Record companies, artists, software producers, have every right to enforce the re-couping of costs to invent, design, and produce master copies. And they have every right to charge for manufacturing costs on manufactured goods. But they should have no fucking right to charge for manufacturing costs on products that weren't manufactured. The market simply won't justify that - in a supply-demand world, digital goods have an infinite supply. In a digital world, manufacturing costs are equivalent to the cost of running an ftp server on the internet.
. . . (and led Congress to specifically exempt the Boy / Girl Scouts).
ooh! I'm going to set up an MP3 server for our Cub Scout Pack tonight!
funny you should mention that. I suddenly can't find the shares on our corporate MP3 server. . .
Car dealers do not sell cars, nor do they rake in a lot of profits from parts replacement, sales or service. Their main profit center is selling financial services. The commission they get on the car loan.
I've been thinking about this over and over in my head since I first taped an LP back in the dark ages, sometime in the early 1980's. There's a certain sense of "right and wrong" that I have - that I was raised with. It keeps me from stealing. It keeps me from wringing people's necks when they piss me off. It keeps me from cheating at cards. But for some reason, I have a really difficult time believing that it's wrong to make a copy, as long as I'm not profiting from it.
And when I read the fair use provisions in the 1992 AHRA, I thought - wow, that's very level-headed and fair. Hence "fair use". I thought that sure, authors' rights needed to be protected, but on the other hand, you can't tell a book reviewer, for instance, that it's illegal to quote a passage from a book. That's wrong. You can't tell a teacher of film history that it's illegal to show a clip from a movie (or even an entire movie) to a class. In my opinion, that's just wrong, and absolutely UN-American - goes against everything this country was founded on. Sure it's wrong for me to spool out 10 tapes of the latest Pink Floyd LP and sell copies to my friends. But make a tape for a friend so they can listen to it, so we can talk about a particular lyric or guitar rif, what the fuck is wrong with that?
The trouble arises where this free exchange of music among friends, begins to replace the legitimate paid-for music collections of millions of people. I can see wanting to suppress that - but at it's heart, it's no different than sharing a tape with a friend - those 50,000 people connected to my box via Napster are all my friends. We chat on line, if we lived in the same area, I'm sure we'd probably get together and discuss how cool The Wall was, have a beer or two, and I sure as hell didn't get any money from them for the music. It just doesn't trigger that little red warning light on my "right and wrong" meter in the back of my head.
Sure, society tries to pre-empt your built-in "right and wrong" meter by making laws. It's confusing, hey, dont' drink until you're 21. But when you're 18, you just can't see why it's a problem. Doesn't seem wrong. But there's a law that says it's wrong. But that doesn't make it so.
Justice Dredd?
Microsoft releases Windows/X, a BSD-based unix with an open-source layer called Freud and a graphical interface called Water. The OS uses twin APIs; a cleaned up Win32 called Soot and (uh) Chocolate.
Yes, but they're still cleaning up problems with Freud, because quite often, child processes will become attached to the processes that spawned them.
Digital Camcorder: shoot footage
Firewire/iMovie: import footage to HD, edit clips into full video stream with titles, transitions, effects, etc.
iDVD or DVD Studio Pro: Author DVD content with menus, encode video stream.
Toast: Master (burn) DVD content onto disk.
IMO - it's still not as easy as it could be.
This is at least partially because Linux and it's set of applications are FINALLY starting to mature. Mozilla is *nearly* there. (IMO, it's there - I've deleted Netscape 4.72 and I'm not looking back). Gimp, a few years ago was very rough, and now it's actually a useful app. And the windows managers for Linux are far better than they used to be. I think Linux's time has not yet arrived - but it is soon, my children. Soon.
Oh yes. I feel oh so safe and secure that the ultra civilized and advanced civilizations of India and Pakistan have nukes. I get a nice safe secure feeling deep inside every time I hear about hordes of Hindus raiding Muslim towns and burning houses, or strike-teams of Muslim fighters attacking parliment with grenades and machineguns with the ultimate aim of becoming a martyr and taking as many infidels with them.
On the other hand, I feel safe that I live in a country with several thousand nukes - run by a man who panders to the same religious extremists who bomb abortion clinics (er - killing people because all life is sacred).
Yeah, what a beautiful world we live in.
How in the hell are we supposed to justify taking over the world if we don't let them toss around a few nukes in anger first?
Ah, so you're saying that the taxpayers should fund this kind of supercomputing power so that pfizer can own my DNA? No thanks.
And GW Bush ran against Clinton, not Gore. I think pretty much every republican for the next 50 years is going to have the privilege of running against Clinton. And the democrats are going to have the disadvantage of running against Reagan. *sigh*
Microsoft is scared? That's gotta be the "DUH!" heard-round-the-world. Microsoft has got to be the perfect textbook example of institutionalized paranoia. That's why they destroy their competition. Because they fear it. The degree to which they pursue this destruction is the magnitude of their paranoia. If there's been one obvious factor driving Microsoft's dominance and business practices, and all of their PR blather that supposedly justifies it - it's been fear.
The one thing that I never "got" about Sliders is, out of all the zillions of possible parallel Earths, (I assume that they were all orbiting and rotating in the same exact location, or there would be some serious inertial or spacial problems on arrival) - none of them were very freindly and benign. They were all near the cusp of some frighteningly huge conflict. They never found a place where nobody was fighting anybody, and where there were helpful people and plentiful resources where they could relax for a few months and try to solve the problem of how to get back home. Just unlucky, I guess.
Because they are helping readers of this thread to find information that is actually relevant to the topic being discussed.
Instead of whining about other people getting karma.
Apple is also playing this game.
I have opted to upgrade my old system, rather than to buy a new one. I wanted to add the capabilities of putting my home movies on DVDs. I figured that all I had to do was get a DVD burner, bigger faster hard drive, CPU upgrade, some more memory, etc. I spent a fair chunk of change on the hardware, but less than if I had bought a new iMac, and MUCH less than if I had bought a G4 desktop.
Turns out I was wrong - one crucial step in the DVD process is authoring. And on the Mac there are really two choices. DVD Studio Pro, which is $1k, or iDVD, which is free*. *Disclaimer: if you buy a new Mac with the built in DVD burner. In other words, if you want to burn DVD's you either have to take it up the ass for a new machine, or REALLY take it up the ass for the Pro software package. Granted, DVD Studio Pro is awesome, but after spending $1k on hardware, I'm not sure if I want to spend that much again on software to do something that another program will do for free (if you buy a new Mac).
And before you call me a whiner, I'm not in the market for an iMac. I want a machine that's upgradable - and I want to preserve my investment in my legacy hardware (SCSI scanner, ext. HD array, ext. CD-R burner, ADB graphics tablet, etc. etc. etc.) - and I don't believe that the current Pro machines are worth what Apple is charging, especially at the high end with the DVD burner and iDVD software.
The computer industry thrives on sales of new machines. And as sales decline, we'll see pressure like this increase to get people to upgrade. And we'll continue to see stubborn hold-outs like myself. I think it's worse in the Apple market, because Macs in general (not iMacs) are VERY upgradable. Nobody wants to just toss their legacy hardware. OS X, USB, all these new technologies are really putting the pressure on. I'm just glad I'm not one of those poor schmucks stuck with a 9600. It was an awesome platform in it's day, and can still be upgraded - I think you can put dual 500MHz G4's on it, but it's not supported by OS X.
where do they get 4%? from what I've read, every mammalian clone to date has been an unmitigated disaster. Let's see, we have cancerous chimps, aged sheep, and obese mice. I don't know about you, but if I were the clone-ee, I sure as hell would resent anybody having even tried to clone a human at this stage of the art. It's just not ready for human trials yet. It's obvious that there are many many mechanisms at work that are not fully understood.
Next, we accept the euthanizing of clones birthed purely for liver transplant for the wealthy party animal who burned his liver out on drugs.
I wanna be a digital archaeologist.
I want to spend my days looking through old CD ROMs and tape backups, digging through ancient browser caches, matching history's version of what things were like back then, with what things really WERE like back then.
No matter how much I agree with you, that argument an $2 will get you a cup of coffee. While a completely lame argument, and $50k in soft money will buy you a law.
Gates and Alan started out on the university's computer system (don't sweat it though, it was a private school, right?). Not their garage. Jobs and Wozniak *did* start out in their garage. And HP.