Plenty of 1080p content is available at your nearest torrent site.I know you said "buy", not "illegally download", but if it is easily doable for free, it can't be impossible to do for money. If legitimate sites are running that far behind illegitimate ones, it certainly isn't for purely technical reasons.
Incidentally, I don't generally buy video content online (or steal it, before you say), but of the many free-to-view services I use (iPlayer, 4OD, You Tube), HD video is becoming increasingly (and infuriatingly, if your laptop can't cope) common.
I don't think you can press a CD for that little, even if you're buying 10 million of them at a time. I'd bet that the setup fee for a big CD run costs more than hosting the website for 6 months or a year.
And you're not even thinking about the whole cost of physical media. Not only do you have to pay for the cost of physically manufacturing the things, but then there's the cost of shipping it to your retailers, and the cost of the retailer owning and maintaining a warehouse, and a shop. All that sort of thing gets absorbed into the final retail price too.
Digital distribution should be miles upon miles cheaper.
Are you really trying to tell me that running a data centre (and I'm going to purposefully ignore P2P here, despite it being a perfectly valid distribution model for software-linked media shops like iTunes) costs the same as: 1) Procuring materials 2) Building/maintaining/staffing a factory 3) Owning or paying for a global network of lorries, ships, planes, etc., including staff costs 4) The rental of shop space, the costs to maintain and run shops, the cost of staff again.
Please bear in mind that a fair portion of the the digital distribution is already being paid for by the customer, in terms of their ISP subscription and bandwidth costs.
It's not free, sure. It still has an associated non-trivial cost. But I struggle to believe that the cost is in any way on par with the end-to-end cost of physical production and distribution.
Then there's the matter of the ultimate format these compositions would be provided in. What are they going to use, AAC or some other crap-quality lossy format? That alone would defeat the purpose of this whole exercise. If they devised a process for disseminating this music, on CD or better yet, SACD or DVD audio, perhaps there might be something here. But it's unlikely that will ever happen.
If you donate enough, they'll post you a lossless DVD. In the post. So yeah, they've got that sorted.
There are plenty of free high-quality file formats too. I'm sure, as audiophiles, they're capable of picking one as an option. They can distribute it for free by torrent- which shouldn't be tricky considering the community backing of this project.
I was serious. I don't know quite why I got a Troll for that, but thanks for answering.
According to Wikipedia, they've already tried and failed to take on PayPal, with a service called "BidPay". Which doesn't say much, except that Western Union doesn't have a magic bullet.
It actually really worries me that you had to post this reply. Have we really reached the point where people have forgotten that you can buy things from hardware shops? Do people now really believe that hardware must always be dealt with through a carrier, who owns the device over you?
I feel like I should blame somebody for this. I want to say Apple, but that might just be habit.
Well one of the points is that, by having your computer run only a single programme (with 99% of everything else being a webservice), it should be able to run very smoothly on low-powered devices.
Not that I really agree with this. The big resource hogs these days are HD video, games and picture editing- none of which are helped much by running over a network.
Not only that, but it feels like it has missed the boat. Android is already taking care of the pocket-computing (these days- smartphone) niche, and the netbook market has already reached a sort of equilibrium with Windows and Linux versions covering all bases. If ChromeOS had launched 2 years ago it could have stood a chance of establishing itself as a market player. Now though?
My current netbook, and the vast majority of netbooks currently available, runs an Intel Atom that is only capable of operating in 32 bit mode.
Clearly 32 bit is not a major problem for low-power devices. As this is the market ARM would likely to target first, I can't see it being a major problem for them right now.
I think you misunderstand that saying. Although to be fair, so does almost everyone.
The saying "exception that proves the rule" is much misunderstood. What it means is that if someone states an exception, you know there must be a rule which it must be an exception to. The original rue does not need to be stated, it can be inferred ("proven") by the exception.
So if someone states to you "emergency vehicles are allowed to travel faster than 60 MPH on a public road", they have told you an exception. By being told this exception, you can infer that the general rule is that non-emergency vehicles cannot go faster than 60 MPH.
Or to put it another way, if you read an official leaflet that says "emergency vehicles are allowed to travel faster than 60 MPH on a public road", you can be sure that it wouldn't say this if there were no speed limit for non-emergency vehicles. The existence of this exception proves the existence of a rule, even though you haven't been told the rule itself.
What the saying DOESN'T mean, as it is often misunderstood to mean, that a rule is somehow more valid by the existence of something that breaks the rule. Because that is obviously ridiculous.
I had a design meeting for a web site a week or so ago. A good half an hour was spent debating whether the page should ask the customer to "select" one of the following, or "choose". Or "pick". Or "click on". Half an hour solid of heated debate, AND the perpetrators tried to bring it up several more times throughout the 2 hour meeting.
These things are often like jumping off a cliff. It seems like you're flying right up until you hit the ground.
Sir Fred Goodwin was hailed as a mastermind CEO at the helm of RBS, due to their rapidly expanding portfolio, growing market presence, and bumper profits. That was right up until they went bust and had to be bailed by the tax payer, all because of his ridiculously risky strategies.
The board will lap up everything O'Leary gives them. But as soon as they have a £150 million jet carrying 500 passengers crash into an expensive looking airport, and the company is bankrupted, they'll suddenly wish they had asked more questions in board meetings.
A driver/pilot CAN stop a train, car, boat in near enough any circumstances though.
"Moderating demands" has nothing to do with it. Planes are a lot more complicated than any of those other vehicles. They're complicated enough with 2 trained crew plus a sophisticated computer system.
If anything goes wrong on a train that does not immediately destroy it, there is a good chance that it can be rescued. The same cannot be said of planes. Taking away layers of safety from such a complex device is not smart, regardless of any obtuse precedent.
If they're covering costs, why would you cut them?
If they cover costs, they're essentially free. And seeing as they have safety and regulatory purposes, not to mention a good customer image, keeping them is a positive.
My netbook was only £180 (About $270 I believe), and is remarkably similarly spec'd to the iPad.
It isn't touchscreen (obviously) and the processor is an Atom, but other than that it is similar weight, similar size (when closed), same RAM, similar HDD, plus all the joys you'd expect from a standard computer (physical keyboard, multiple USBs, ethernet, SD card, choice of OSs, etc.).
I digress a bit, but basically- it was cheaper than an iPad for a similar piece of kit.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this "truce" he has in mind might involve technology companies cracking down on pirates (again), and respecting their copyrights.
Further out on a limb, I'd say that nothing will be achieved off the back of this.
Speaking for all people with mediocre eyesight and a preference for sub 30" TVs (my living room is small enough without mega-cinema-vision equipment just for watching Simpsons repeats), I don't give a flying rats ass about HD.
My parents have a 42" HD TV, and I've watched films, cricket, World Cup matches and whatnot on it. I have a 22" TV with no HD subscription or whatnot. Honestly, can't tell the difference. Maybe it's a bit crisper, but not so that I'd care. I must be desensitized by the high-quality output of computer monitors from all these years.
Videophiles are no better than audiophiles, and their £200 cables for "slightly reduced hiss".
More on topic, I dislike the current wave of 3D films. They've mostly been gimicky and jarring, and the big glasses hurt my face when worn over my prescription glasses. I opted for the 2D version of Toy Story 3, and I think I'll keep it that way for the foreseeable future.
Why don't people understand that posting things on a publicly accessible website is publishing it to the world, as sure as sending out a mass mailer.
If I wrote a book titled "Tales of a dope-smoking man-whore", I would have every expectation that it might lower me in the eyes of a certain sort of person, and might harm my employment prospects with firms who don't want to be associated with promiscuity and drugs.
If I write a detailed blog saying the same, I would expect the same.
Twitter, Facebook, etc., are all exactly the same. If you post things on there, be prepared that the public may judge you, and you may not like it.
That's not the current system, If you labeled salmon caught in Norway as Scottish, then you would be breaking the law.
Scottish salmon is from Scotland, Burgundy wine is from Burgundy. What is the fundamental difference?
You could say "we all understand that "Burgundy wine" means wine that's like wine that's from Burgundy, whereas we all know that "Scottish salmon" has to be from Scotland". But how is that a sensible system?
More to the point, Burgundy Chardonnay is different from other Chardonnay in only one respect- that it is grown in the soil of the Burgundy region of France. If you haven't grown the grapes in Burgundy, in what way is your wine a Burgundy?
What else are you going to do with the massive botnet between big decrypt or password cracking jobs?
It could well be just what they do on idle. If it gets 1 hit in a million, it would still be more profitable than letting your 100 thousand hacked machines sit there doing nothing for hours at a time.
I know I'm going to get a "Slashdot is a US site, yadda yadda yadda..." for this, but all the same.
My parents, here in the UK, got married about 3 decades ago, both of them quite young. Neither of them were in great jobs, but they bought good sized 3 bedroom house in the suburbs on mortgage, which they payed off entirely in 20 years. Their house is now worth 5x as much as when they bought it. University education at this point was also free.
Me and my girlfriend are now about the same age as that, and we are in better jobs than they had been at the time. Banks won't give us a mortgage without a deposit of a little less than twice my yearly salary, and the maximum they will lend us will afford a much smaller house than they had. The average student debt for Uni leavers is now £23,000 ($35k).
In terms of replying to your figures- in the 1950s, many (most?) houses would have had a single bread winner and a stay-at-home parent. Nowadays, a majority of households have two adults in employment. The fact that food, clothing and housing budgets accounted for 65% a single wage earner's wage in the 1950's, and accounts for 50% of two wage earner's wages in the 21st century, is a particularly interesting figure.
Seeing as the games industry is still experiencing year-on-year growth almost every single month, I'd say that it's working out pretty well for them...
Slashdot Mirror
Plenty of 1080p content is available at your nearest torrent site.I know you said "buy", not "illegally download", but if it is easily doable for free, it can't be impossible to do for money. If legitimate sites are running that far behind illegitimate ones, it certainly isn't for purely technical reasons.
Incidentally, I don't generally buy video content online (or steal it, before you say), but of the many free-to-view services I use (iPlayer, 4OD, You Tube), HD video is becoming increasingly (and infuriatingly, if your laptop can't cope) common.
I don't think you can press a CD for that little, even if you're buying 10 million of them at a time. I'd bet that the setup fee for a big CD run costs more than hosting the website for 6 months or a year.
And you're not even thinking about the whole cost of physical media. Not only do you have to pay for the cost of physically manufacturing the things, but then there's the cost of shipping it to your retailers, and the cost of the retailer owning and maintaining a warehouse, and a shop. All that sort of thing gets absorbed into the final retail price too.
Digital distribution should be miles upon miles cheaper.
Are you really trying to tell me that running a data centre (and I'm going to purposefully ignore P2P here, despite it being a perfectly valid distribution model for software-linked media shops like iTunes) costs the same as:
1) Procuring materials
2) Building/maintaining/staffing a factory
3) Owning or paying for a global network of lorries, ships, planes, etc., including staff costs
4) The rental of shop space, the costs to maintain and run shops, the cost of staff again.
Please bear in mind that a fair portion of the the digital distribution is already being paid for by the customer, in terms of their ISP subscription and bandwidth costs.
It's not free, sure. It still has an associated non-trivial cost. But I struggle to believe that the cost is in any way on par with the end-to-end cost of physical production and distribution.
Also, enforce July as a "no-sex" month so we don't have people being born in April.
Shouldn't be a problem for most of the Slashdot crowd.
Super Mario Bros. was bundled with the console originally too. Presumably we weren't disqualifying that.
Mine was a SMB/Duck Hunt twin-pak, and was awesome I might add.
Twin-pak with Duck Hunt, ftw!
Ah, childhood.
Then there's the matter of the ultimate format these compositions would be provided in. What are they going to use, AAC or some other crap-quality lossy format? That alone would defeat the purpose of this whole exercise. If they devised a process for disseminating this music, on CD or better yet, SACD or DVD audio, perhaps there might be something here. But it's unlikely that will ever happen.
If you donate enough, they'll post you a lossless DVD. In the post. So yeah, they've got that sorted.
There are plenty of free high-quality file formats too. I'm sure, as audiophiles, they're capable of picking one as an option. They can distribute it for free by torrent- which shouldn't be tricky considering the community backing of this project.
At time of writing, $42,239 donated incidentally.
I was serious. I don't know quite why I got a Troll for that, but thanks for answering.
According to Wikipedia, they've already tried and failed to take on PayPal, with a service called "BidPay". Which doesn't say much, except that Western Union doesn't have a magic bullet.
It actually really worries me that you had to post this reply. Have we really reached the point where people have forgotten that you can buy things from hardware shops? Do people now really believe that hardware must always be dealt with through a carrier, who owns the device over you?
I feel like I should blame somebody for this. I want to say Apple, but that might just be habit.
Well one of the points is that, by having your computer run only a single programme (with 99% of everything else being a webservice), it should be able to run very smoothly on low-powered devices.
Not that I really agree with this. The big resource hogs these days are HD video, games and picture editing- none of which are helped much by running over a network.
Not only that, but it feels like it has missed the boat. Android is already taking care of the pocket-computing (these days- smartphone) niche, and the netbook market has already reached a sort of equilibrium with Windows and Linux versions covering all bases. If ChromeOS had launched 2 years ago it could have stood a chance of establishing itself as a market player. Now though?
My current netbook, and the vast majority of netbooks currently available, runs an Intel Atom that is only capable of operating in 32 bit mode.
Clearly 32 bit is not a major problem for low-power devices. As this is the market ARM would likely to target first, I can't see it being a major problem for them right now.
Really? Who are Western Union? I've heard of Google, and heard of Amazon (both run PayPal-like services), but Western Union are unknown to me.
I mean I'll go Wikipedia them now, but I'm interested into what would give them such a fantastic edge over these other internet giants.
I think you misunderstand that saying. Although to be fair, so does almost everyone.
The saying "exception that proves the rule" is much misunderstood. What it means is that if someone states an exception, you know there must be a rule which it must be an exception to. The original rue does not need to be stated, it can be inferred ("proven") by the exception.
So if someone states to you "emergency vehicles are allowed to travel faster than 60 MPH on a public road", they have told you an exception. By being told this exception, you can infer that the general rule is that non-emergency vehicles cannot go faster than 60 MPH.
Or to put it another way, if you read an official leaflet that says "emergency vehicles are allowed to travel faster than 60 MPH on a public road", you can be sure that it wouldn't say this if there were no speed limit for non-emergency vehicles. The existence of this exception proves the existence of a rule, even though you haven't been told the rule itself.
What the saying DOESN'T mean, as it is often misunderstood to mean, that a rule is somehow more valid by the existence of something that breaks the rule. Because that is obviously ridiculous.
I had a design meeting for a web site a week or so ago. A good half an hour was spent debating whether the page should ask the customer to "select" one of the following, or "choose". Or "pick". Or "click on". Half an hour solid of heated debate, AND the perpetrators tried to bring it up several more times throughout the 2 hour meeting.
So yes, I agree with you- people suck.
I think that was the gist of your point, anyway.
These things are often like jumping off a cliff. It seems like you're flying right up until you hit the ground.
Sir Fred Goodwin was hailed as a mastermind CEO at the helm of RBS, due to their rapidly expanding portfolio, growing market presence, and bumper profits. That was right up until they went bust and had to be bailed by the tax payer, all because of his ridiculously risky strategies.
The board will lap up everything O'Leary gives them. But as soon as they have a £150 million jet carrying 500 passengers crash into an expensive looking airport, and the company is bankrupted, they'll suddenly wish they had asked more questions in board meetings.
A driver/pilot CAN stop a train, car, boat in near enough any circumstances though.
"Moderating demands" has nothing to do with it. Planes are a lot more complicated than any of those other vehicles. They're complicated enough with 2 trained crew plus a sophisticated computer system.
If anything goes wrong on a train that does not immediately destroy it, there is a good chance that it can be rescued. The same cannot be said of planes. Taking away layers of safety from such a complex device is not smart, regardless of any obtuse precedent.
If they're covering costs, why would you cut them?
If they cover costs, they're essentially free. And seeing as they have safety and regulatory purposes, not to mention a good customer image, keeping them is a positive.
My netbook was only £180 (About $270 I believe), and is remarkably similarly spec'd to the iPad.
It isn't touchscreen (obviously) and the processor is an Atom, but other than that it is similar weight, similar size (when closed), same RAM, similar HDD, plus all the joys you'd expect from a standard computer (physical keyboard, multiple USBs, ethernet, SD card, choice of OSs, etc.).
I digress a bit, but basically- it was cheaper than an iPad for a similar piece of kit.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this "truce" he has in mind might involve technology companies cracking down on pirates (again), and respecting their copyrights.
Further out on a limb, I'd say that nothing will be achieved off the back of this.
Speaking for all people with mediocre eyesight and a preference for sub 30" TVs (my living room is small enough without mega-cinema-vision equipment just for watching Simpsons repeats), I don't give a flying rats ass about HD.
My parents have a 42" HD TV, and I've watched films, cricket, World Cup matches and whatnot on it. I have a 22" TV with no HD subscription or whatnot. Honestly, can't tell the difference. Maybe it's a bit crisper, but not so that I'd care. I must be desensitized by the high-quality output of computer monitors from all these years.
Videophiles are no better than audiophiles, and their £200 cables for "slightly reduced hiss".
More on topic, I dislike the current wave of 3D films. They've mostly been gimicky and jarring, and the big glasses hurt my face when worn over my prescription glasses. I opted for the 2D version of Toy Story 3, and I think I'll keep it that way for the foreseeable future.
Why don't people understand that posting things on a publicly accessible website is publishing it to the world, as sure as sending out a mass mailer.
If I wrote a book titled "Tales of a dope-smoking man-whore", I would have every expectation that it might lower me in the eyes of a certain sort of person, and might harm my employment prospects with firms who don't want to be associated with promiscuity and drugs.
If I write a detailed blog saying the same, I would expect the same.
Twitter, Facebook, etc., are all exactly the same. If you post things on there, be prepared that the public may judge you, and you may not like it.
That's not the current system, If you labeled salmon caught in Norway as Scottish, then you would be breaking the law.
Scottish salmon is from Scotland, Burgundy wine is from Burgundy. What is the fundamental difference?
You could say "we all understand that "Burgundy wine" means wine that's like wine that's from Burgundy, whereas we all know that "Scottish salmon" has to be from Scotland". But how is that a sensible system?
More to the point, Burgundy Chardonnay is different from other Chardonnay in only one respect- that it is grown in the soil of the Burgundy region of France. If you haven't grown the grapes in Burgundy, in what way is your wine a Burgundy?
What else are you going to do with the massive botnet between big decrypt or password cracking jobs?
It could well be just what they do on idle. If it gets 1 hit in a million, it would still be more profitable than letting your 100 thousand hacked machines sit there doing nothing for hours at a time.
I know I'm going to get a "Slashdot is a US site, yadda yadda yadda..." for this, but all the same.
My parents, here in the UK, got married about 3 decades ago, both of them quite young. Neither of them were in great jobs, but they bought good sized 3 bedroom house in the suburbs on mortgage, which they payed off entirely in 20 years. Their house is now worth 5x as much as when they bought it. University education at this point was also free.
Me and my girlfriend are now about the same age as that, and we are in better jobs than they had been at the time. Banks won't give us a mortgage without a deposit of a little less than twice my yearly salary, and the maximum they will lend us will afford a much smaller house than they had. The average student debt for Uni leavers is now £23,000 ($35k).
In terms of replying to your figures- in the 1950s, many (most?) houses would have had a single bread winner and a stay-at-home parent. Nowadays, a majority of households have two adults in employment. The fact that food, clothing and housing budgets accounted for 65% a single wage earner's wage in the 1950's, and accounts for 50% of two wage earner's wages in the 21st century, is a particularly interesting figure.
Seeing as the games industry is still experiencing year-on-year growth almost every single month, I'd say that it's working out pretty well for them...