When i read the article about Dan Rather's objection to CBS's use of the technology, there was a genuine flavor of: "no, we really do think that this use was over the line, and that the previous use in whimsey on the morning show was okay".
Well, that's fine and dandy. In my book, even counts as a retraction of the previous stance of "this use does not go counter to our guidelines against digital modification of images".
Hmmph.
Then they go on to mention that the CBS morning show is in trouble, ratings-wise. And that they had spent $30 Million trying to fix it up. Then things became clear. This was all a publicity stunt. Sure, they probably genuinely were playing around with covering up NBC logos with CBS logos, etc. But the hubub that resulted, the news articles, the allegations, the unethical stance, the retraction, righteous indignation. All sounds like a carefully orchestrated publicity stunt to me. Otherwise, this wouldn't have gotten nearly the media coverage it had.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Well, then there's the Bang&Olafson look for hi-fi's, and you would think people would be copying that like gangbusters, because if you've looked closely at a B&O system, it IS just cheap facade, and inside, are fairly worthy electronic components, so it wouldn't be asking too much for Realistic to capitalize on that look&feel with cheap tinted plastic and brushed aluminum veneer, the B&O look without the B&O pricetag.
But somehow, nobody's doing that. ..
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Yeah, that would be nice, a good solid, legal, binding definition of a minimal OS.
Problem is, you do that, then the applications side of MS wins. Because the OS loses it's significance, because the monopoly was never about the OS, it was about the platform, which demands a very blurry line between OS and applications, which includes MS Office, IE, the file-formats, Exchange Server and Outlook, Microsoft Visual C++, and Visual Basic, etc.
But this is the very reason why splitting Microsoft like this won't work. Because you have to define the cut-line to be at a place that doesn't make sense technically. The cut-line has to be arbitrary, and in the software business, every time either company comes out with a new product, you're going to have to get some government official involved to bless it. So the line gets constantly tested, streched, bent out of shape, and redefined.
IOW, it simply wont work. But I guess the DOJ is hell-bent on trying to prove me wrong. I hope to God I am wrong.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
hell, for that matter, forget about Notepad and Paint. What about Explorer.exe? It's an application! A file-system browser/editor. Arguably, you could StartMenu->Run. . . command.com, and do all your file-system work via the DOS shell.
If I were king of the world, I'd tell Microsoft to not only unbundle IE, notepad, and paint, but Explorer as well. That would kick ass!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
However, Microsoft will then be unable to give away IE for free. That will be major. It will rekindle the browser wars, and Mozilla just might have a chance then. ..
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Find the illegal behavior, isolate it, find out who did it (which individuals), put them behind bars!
Naughty children need to be spanked!
Then put a mechanism of trust in place, so that the behavior of the company can be more closely monitored, and illegal behavior can be stopped before it damages the computer industry further.
With such deterrence, we can regain all the benefits of a strong competitor and corporate entity like Microsoft, and we lose all the negative aspects, like the raping of the market, and strongarm tactics against smaller competitors. Others will be able to enter the market, and compete. . . anybody else see the world in color today, instead of black and white?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Apple HAS sold systems preloaded with Linux in the past. I don't think Sun would mind a bit either. (I DO think that Sun should be forced, at gunpoint to provide a Linux implementation of Java - if they're going to SAY "write once, run anywhere", then it better damn well run ANYWHERE!!)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I, being a closet Macophile, didn't even realize this. I thought Metrowerks was Apple's premier development tool for OS X. Serves me right for reading press releases.
This explains a lot.
And I'm SURE it wasn't "Apple" per se who dissed Metrowerks. I'm betting it was the dreaded NeXT Nazis within Apple. Who themselves got dissed when Objective-C was dropped as the primary language for Yellow Box in favor of (yeeuch!) Java. After that maneuver, I thought that the NeXT faction had been silenced.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Moto bought Metroworks so they could fuck with Apple:
"Gee, Steve, I'm really sorry to hear you're not happy with the latest batch of PPC chips - you wouldn't be planning on making any public statements to that effect would you? I mean, you've got a really nice development environment here, "Code Warrior". It'd be a REAL shame if anything happened to it. .."
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
(Bill Walker is the evil son of Satan at Motorola who has decreed that all desktop machines containing PowerPC processors (manufactured by Motorola), be eliminated and replaced with Dell machines, runnin NT, of course.)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
This comes out the DAY AFTER the Caldera settlement, and is followed by an official denial.
I think it's an "unintentional leak" designed to scare Microsoft into a settlement. Perhaps the DOJ thinks MS got off lucky with Caldera, and doesn't want MS to get a set of balls after that experience. A sly negotiating tactic.
In the end, my prediction is, this case will end with an out of court settlement consisting of an undisclosed, but 10-digit dollar figure. Which may throw-off MS's game for about a year or two, but will ultimately not be nearly as crippling as Linux and Apple's resurgance will be.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
"Funny, I don't see them complaining. Their founders are now wealthy, and their product will soon be integrated into AOL."
Are you kidding? THey're all but dead. They couldn't survive against Microsoft on their own, they had to be bailed out by AOL. And as for Navigator being integrated into AOL, don't hold your breath, cause it'll make you blue.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Re:Image Alteration has it's uses.
on
Live or Memorex?
·
· Score: 1
What if you're doing a story on say, a Calvin Klein bilboard with a too racy photo on it or something? How do you cover that if you have to pixelate the footage?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
3Com better sell Palm to Apple (if that's still possible), and use the handwriting recognition from the Newton instead. This is what's rumored to go into the iMate anyway. ..
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
A few weeks back, I saw a TV sitcom (Oh Grow Up), where a guy was wearing a black t-shirt with some kind of logo on it (I'm assuming Nike), which was "blurred-out" so you couldn't see what the logo was. If you weren't looking directly at it, you wouldn't notice, the few seconds the logo was visible to the camera. Granted it wasn't live, and I don't see how technically, a replacement could be done live on a moving object, but perhaps with enough hardware, and maybe a few seconds delay. ..
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I thought about this when the local cable provider switched from a full-screen preview-guide channel, to a split-screen preview-guide. Half the screen is now ads. This makes the preview-guide about 1/10th as useful as it used to be for finding out what shows are on.
Then I started thinking, man, what if the cable company would take like, an extra dollar a month from me to give me back a full-screen preview-guide. I'd pay it. What happens when our favorite shows start being superimposed with corporate logos. Split-screen ads, etc. Pay a few bucks extra for the full-screen version of this channel. The uncompressed version of this movie. The time-compression technology scares me more, because it will interfere with the timing and pacing of movies, that the director intended - it's like what they were doing on the radio back in the 80's, you'd buy a record of a song you heard, and find it sounded like an octave lower. Because they would play the song faster on-air so they could devote more time to ads. So then they started cutting off the first and last 10-15 seconds of a given song. Well, that's mostly pop radio anyway. But when you think of radio entertainment as really no more than a commercial for selling the record, it's kind of smarmy.
And this stuff will only get worse. The well off among us, may be able to pay extra to avoid some of it. The rest of humanity is just going to have to adapt. Perhaps learn skills. For instance, I'm cancelling my cable this week. I'm going to learn to live without television. Gonna live off of rentals. I give myself about two weeks tho.
As far as journalistic integrity goes, we're going to have to all assume that no news source can be trusted anymore. With the advent of the internet, we've already talked about real-time corroboration from independent sources, real witnesses, all of which are difficult to verify, but still better than the megacorp-media-sausage being forced past our lips now. I've discussed this idea before somewhat, and I'll say it again, perhaps some independent notarization or certification process needs to be applied to journalism, in other words, when a photojournalist takes a photo of a newsworthy event, an individual hired by the photojournalist, working for an independent organization, verified with no legal ties or conflict of interest, will tag-along, certify every step of the way that fresh film was put into the camera, no trickery was used in capturing the image, processing the film, or presenting the finished print, and this certified image can be used in a court of law to say "yes, this is a real, unaltered image of Miss Lewinsky swallowing the President's tube steak". If nothing else is to be trusted, some system like this has to emerge. Sort of like the "Public Advocate" concept from Stranger In A Strange Land (? or was it some other book I read as a teenager?)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Re:Here is a full explanation of how it works - co
on
Live or Memorex?
·
· Score: 1
bah! Still primative junk. Until they can correctly render a player's cast shadow (from the Sun, overcast sky, or various artificial stadium lights) onto the generated line, they won't fool me!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Yeah, but that model is oversimplified when MegaCorp has it's hands in many diverse businesses (such as chipsets and motherboards, which is the lever Intel is applying to AMD lately).
And also, this does not at all apply to software, where companies like Microsoft can give away IE free, because it costs nothing to produce another copy of IE. The fixed development cost is paid from OEM revenues from Win95. Netscape didn't have a cash-cow like Windows95. They had their internet server and their portal.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
well, let's see now. When M$ invested in Apple, it was at like $12/shr. Right? $150M/12=12.5 million shares. APPL is now @~$95/shr. So M$ has made about $83/shr profit. So that "Apple" fund at M$ is now worth about $1.0375 Billion.
I think they can spare some.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
The irony here (that M$ paid off Apple $150M plus an undisclosed sum thought to be in the $300-$500M range, and paid off Caldera, and others - etc.) is that even with all these legal problems, and defeats, Microsoft is still about the most profitable business in the history of business.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I've posted comments about the company I work for. And when I identify myself as an employee of that company, I don't blow my cover, I go "AC".
I'll be damned if I'm going to put my career at risk for your informance. I'm happy to pass on relevant stuff that the "/. community" would be interested in, even when that could be considered a firing offense, or even an SEC violation. But despite the job market being nice for us techies and all, I'm not going to jeopardize my way of life and the support of my family just so you can be safe and secure about the source of the information. Trust it from an AC, or moderate it down. Your choice.
But when I'm Jafac, I don't want anyone knowing who I work for. Many of my coworkers also read/..
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Slashdot Mirror
When i read the article about Dan Rather's objection to CBS's use of the technology, there was a genuine flavor of: "no, we really do think that this use was over the line, and that the previous use in whimsey on the morning show was okay".
Well, that's fine and dandy. In my book, even counts as a retraction of the previous stance of "this use does not go counter to our guidelines against digital modification of images".
Hmmph.
Then they go on to mention that the CBS morning show is in trouble, ratings-wise. And that they had spent $30 Million trying to fix it up. Then things became clear. This was all a publicity stunt.
Sure, they probably genuinely were playing around with covering up NBC logos with CBS logos, etc. But the hubub that resulted, the news articles, the allegations, the unethical stance, the retraction, righteous indignation. All sounds like a carefully orchestrated publicity stunt to me. Otherwise, this wouldn't have gotten nearly the media coverage it had.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
prolly because Apple felt sorry for the poor users who had been promised Copeland and the new look/feel since 1994.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Well, then there's the Bang&Olafson look for hi-fi's, and you would think people would be copying that like gangbusters, because if you've looked closely at a B&O system, it IS just cheap facade, and inside, are fairly worthy electronic components, so it wouldn't be asking too much for Realistic to capitalize on that look&feel with cheap tinted plastic and brushed aluminum veneer, the B&O look without the B&O pricetag.
.
But somehow, nobody's doing that. .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Yeah, that would be nice, a good solid, legal, binding definition of a minimal OS.
Problem is, you do that, then the applications side of MS wins. Because the OS loses it's significance, because the monopoly was never about the OS, it was about the platform, which demands a very blurry line between OS and applications, which includes MS Office, IE, the file-formats, Exchange Server and Outlook, Microsoft Visual C++, and Visual Basic, etc.
But this is the very reason why splitting Microsoft like this won't work. Because you have to define the cut-line to be at a place that doesn't make sense technically. The cut-line has to be arbitrary, and in the software business, every time either company comes out with a new product, you're going to have to get some government official involved to bless it. So the line gets constantly tested, streched, bent out of shape, and redefined.
IOW, it simply wont work. But I guess the DOJ is hell-bent on trying to prove me wrong. I hope to God I am wrong.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
hell, for that matter, forget about Notepad and Paint. What about Explorer.exe? It's an application! A file-system browser/editor. Arguably, you could StartMenu->Run. . . command.com, and do all your file-system work via the DOS shell.
If I were king of the world, I'd tell Microsoft to not only unbundle IE, notepad, and paint, but Explorer as well. That would kick ass!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
However, Microsoft will then be unable to give away IE for free. That will be major. It will rekindle the browser wars, and Mozilla just might have a chance then. . .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
My point exactly!
Leave the company alone!
Find the illegal behavior, isolate it, find out who did it (which individuals), put them behind bars!
Naughty children need to be spanked!
Then put a mechanism of trust in place, so that the behavior of the company can be more closely monitored, and illegal behavior can be stopped before it damages the computer industry further.
With such deterrence, we can regain all the benefits of a strong competitor and corporate entity like Microsoft, and we lose all the negative aspects, like the raping of the market, and strongarm tactics against smaller competitors. Others will be able to enter the market, and compete. . . anybody else see the world in color today, instead of black and white?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
The Corporate death penalty.
Revoke Microsoft's corporate charter.
Put everyone at the director level and above behind bars.
Let's see them leverage a monopoly there.
Can you bundle some free sodomy with that license plate? Come on buddy, let's see you innovate this!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I agree with everything else you say, except for;
Apple HAS sold systems preloaded with Linux in the past. I don't think Sun would mind a bit either.
(I DO think that Sun should be forced, at gunpoint to provide a Linux implementation of Java - if they're going to SAY "write once, run anywhere", then it better damn well run ANYWHERE!!)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
OIC! (x10^23)
Score: 5, Informative!
I, being a closet Macophile, didn't even realize this. I thought Metrowerks was Apple's premier development tool for OS X. Serves me right for reading press releases.
This explains a lot.
And I'm SURE it wasn't "Apple" per se who dissed Metrowerks. I'm betting it was the dreaded NeXT Nazis within Apple. Who themselves got dissed when Objective-C was dropped as the primary language for Yellow Box in favor of (yeeuch!) Java. After that maneuver, I thought that the NeXT faction had been silenced.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Moto bought Metroworks so they could fuck with Apple:
."
"Gee, Steve, I'm really sorry to hear you're not happy with the latest batch of PPC chips - you wouldn't be planning on making any public statements to that effect would you? I mean, you've got a really nice development environment here, "Code Warrior". It'd be a REAL shame if anything happened to it. .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Why do I smell Bill Walker in this?
(Bill Walker is the evil son of Satan at Motorola who has decreed that all desktop machines containing PowerPC processors (manufactured by Motorola), be eliminated and replaced with Dell machines, runnin NT, of course.)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
This comes out the DAY AFTER the Caldera settlement, and is followed by an official denial.
I think it's an "unintentional leak" designed to scare Microsoft into a settlement. Perhaps the DOJ thinks MS got off lucky with Caldera, and doesn't want MS to get a set of balls after that experience. A sly negotiating tactic.
In the end, my prediction is, this case will end with an out of court settlement consisting of an undisclosed, but 10-digit dollar figure. Which may throw-off MS's game for about a year or two, but will ultimately not be nearly as crippling as Linux and Apple's resurgance will be.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
"Funny, I don't see them complaining. Their founders are now wealthy, and their product will soon be integrated into
AOL."
Are you kidding? THey're all but dead. They couldn't survive against Microsoft on their own, they had to be bailed out by AOL. And as for Navigator being integrated into AOL, don't hold your breath, cause it'll make you blue.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
What if you're doing a story on say, a Calvin Klein bilboard with a too racy photo on it or something? How do you cover that if you have to pixelate the footage?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
3Com better sell Palm to Apple (if that's still possible), and use the handwriting recognition from the Newton instead. This is what's rumored to go into the iMate anyway. . .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
A few weeks back, I saw a TV sitcom (Oh Grow Up), where a guy was wearing a black t-shirt with some kind of logo on it (I'm assuming Nike), which was "blurred-out" so you couldn't see what the logo was. If you weren't looking directly at it, you wouldn't notice, the few seconds the logo was visible to the camera. Granted it wasn't live, and I don't see how technically, a replacement could be done live on a moving object, but perhaps with enough hardware, and maybe a few seconds delay. . .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
What's coming:
I thought about this when the local cable provider switched from a full-screen preview-guide channel, to a split-screen preview-guide. Half the screen is now ads. This makes the preview-guide about 1/10th as useful as it used to be for finding out what shows are on.
Then I started thinking, man, what if the cable company would take like, an extra dollar a month from me to give me back a full-screen preview-guide. I'd pay it.
What happens when our favorite shows start being superimposed with corporate logos. Split-screen ads, etc. Pay a few bucks extra for the full-screen version of this channel. The uncompressed version of this movie.
The time-compression technology scares me more, because it will interfere with the timing and pacing of movies, that the director intended - it's like what they were doing on the radio back in the 80's, you'd buy a record of a song you heard, and find it sounded like an octave lower. Because they would play the song faster on-air so they could devote more time to ads. So then they started cutting off the first and last 10-15 seconds of a given song. Well, that's mostly pop radio anyway. But when you think of radio entertainment as really no more than a commercial for selling the record, it's kind of smarmy.
And this stuff will only get worse. The well off among us, may be able to pay extra to avoid some of it.
The rest of humanity is just going to have to adapt. Perhaps learn skills. For instance, I'm cancelling my cable this week. I'm going to learn to live without television. Gonna live off of rentals. I give myself about two weeks tho.
As far as journalistic integrity goes, we're going to have to all assume that no news source can be trusted anymore. With the advent of the internet, we've already talked about real-time corroboration from independent sources, real witnesses, all of which are difficult to verify, but still better than the megacorp-media-sausage being forced past our lips now.
I've discussed this idea before somewhat, and I'll say it again, perhaps some independent notarization or certification process needs to be applied to journalism, in other words, when a photojournalist takes a photo of a newsworthy event, an individual hired by the photojournalist, working for an independent organization, verified with no legal ties or conflict of interest, will tag-along, certify every step of the way that fresh film was put into the camera, no trickery was used in capturing the image, processing the film, or presenting the finished print, and this certified image can be used in a court of law to say "yes, this is a real, unaltered image of Miss Lewinsky swallowing the President's tube steak". If nothing else is to be trusted, some system like this has to emerge.
Sort of like the "Public Advocate" concept from Stranger In A Strange Land (? or was it some other book I read as a teenager?)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
bah! Still primative junk. Until they can correctly render a player's cast shadow (from the Sun, overcast sky, or various artificial stadium lights) onto the generated line, they won't fool me!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Yeah, but that model is oversimplified when MegaCorp has it's hands in many diverse businesses (such as chipsets and motherboards, which is the lever Intel is applying to AMD lately).
And also, this does not at all apply to software, where companies like Microsoft can give away IE free, because it costs nothing to produce another copy of IE. The fixed development cost is paid from OEM revenues from Win95. Netscape didn't have a cash-cow like Windows95. They had their internet server and their portal.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
well, let's see now. When M$ invested in Apple, it was at like $12/shr. Right? $150M/12=12.5 million shares.
APPL is now @~$95/shr. So M$ has made about $83/shr profit.
So that "Apple" fund at M$ is now worth about $1.0375 Billion.
I think they can spare some.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
The irony here (that M$ paid off Apple $150M plus an undisclosed sum thought to be in the $300-$500M range, and paid off Caldera, and others - etc.) is that even with all these legal problems, and defeats, Microsoft is still about the most profitable business in the history of business.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I've posted comments about the company I work for. And when I identify myself as an employee of that company, I don't blow my cover, I go "AC".
/..
I'll be damned if I'm going to put my career at risk for your informance. I'm happy to pass on relevant stuff that the "/. community" would be interested in, even when that could be considered a firing offense, or even an SEC violation. But despite the job market being nice for us techies and all, I'm not going to jeopardize my way of life and the support of my family just so you can be safe and secure about the source of the information. Trust it from an AC, or moderate it down. Your choice.
But when I'm Jafac, I don't want anyone knowing who I work for. Many of my coworkers also read
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
well, this morining, CNN (AOLTimeWarner) stated that sources said that the figure was around $275M.
Now, why would CNN (AOLTimeWarner) want to make Microsoft look bad by inflating that figure?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
No, it's more like if Microsoft bought Disney and Hughes.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".