Unfortunately what happens now is that some geek buys an ebook, strips the DRM, and uploads it so that people he doesn't know can get a copy as well without paying anyone for it. Publishing digitally is a bad move for authors who are better off staying physical. That way if someone wants to copy your book, they have to put a bit more effort into it. There's a reason that JK Rowling doesn't allow ebook versions of Harry Potter - she knows that people who would otherwise pay for her work won't if they can pick up a DRM stripped ebook version.
Re:As much as I wanted Nokia to adopt Android...
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
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· Score: 1
Non-technical users can't differentiate one Android phone from another. Going with Android just means that for the non-technical buyer (which is 99% of smartphone buyers) there isn't really anything that differentiates a HTC from a Samsung from a Motorola from some cheap arse Taiwanese import that you've never heard of. And it is the cheap arse Taiwanese imports that are doing damage to the "Android" brand - shipping phones that simply are incapable of running the OS in a way that is a credit to the platform.
Going WP7 allows Nokia to differentiate itself. If MeeGo had been anywhere near ready, they would have jumped on it. If Symbian were salvageable, they would have gone that way.
It is perhaps good that Stallman ended up as a programmer as his ability to write fiction leaves much to be desired.
In the long run most authors are better off *not* publishing electronically. If people want your work, they can pay for it in hard copy, borrow it in hard copy from a friend, or borrow it in hard copy from the library. When a book is a physical object, like a car, people will be reluctant to steal it. When a book is a digital object and is easily replicated, people will not be reluctant to replicate it and distribute it to people they know and people that they do not know.
Re:As much as I wanted Nokia to adopt Android...
on
Why Nokia Is Toast
·
· Score: 1
Android is a race to the bottom against manufacturers in countries that have negligible labor costs. Nokia can't leverage this strategy because they aren't in one of those countries.
By your own reasoning the cheaters would climb out of the bucket and go back to griefing ordinary users. Anti-social behavior is about causing the most grief to and ruining the experience of the most people. You don't accomplish that by playing in a "cheater league" - you do that by ruining the experience of everyday gamers.
Of course with the four that are seemingly in charge, the mob that's been left out can say "fark it" and go their own way saying that they don't need to kowtow to Google, Apple, Mozilla and Opera, (the last of which has such a small audience that they are within the margin of error).
Retailers make a fair thwack of money out of all the crap they pre-load onto PCs to the point where the craplets cover the cost of the Windows license and subsidize the cost of the PC. Stuff like Norton and Nero doesn't end up on these machines for free - those companies pay to get it on there. Because of this, it can end up to be more expensive to by a naked machine than it is to buy one with all the crap installed because you lose the subsidies.
Correlation doesn't equal causation - but if you look at the list of most torrented shows for 2009 http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-tv-shows-of-2009-091231/ you'll find that 3 of them have since been axed because of low ratings (Sarah Conner, Heroes, Prison Break)
Heroes had more downloads than viewers! Now say what you want about the quality of Heroes, but if people are saying "FK IT, I'll download it rather than watch it" the ratings suffer and the show gets canned.
In the parent post I pointed to George Lucas' model with the The Clone Wars cartoon - which is primarily an advertisement for toys. There are limits to how well this works though and you have to design your movie around selling toys. Also, the toys don't necessarily bring in heaps of $. Look at the rise in Hasbro's profits after the release of the first Transformers movie.
Putting it on a website for free won't remove it from the torrent sites. Hell, people still torrent the Daily Show even though they post it on the Daily Show website!
Geeks have found a distribution method that suits them - the only way they'll shift from that method is if they find one that *suits them more*. Beating *FREE* and *CONVENIENT* may be possible, but it seems highly improbable.
TV producers are coming to the conclusion of "we can jump through all these hoops to try to make a buck off science fiction, or, stuff it, lets just make more reality TV and back up the dump truck full of cash"
Which, when it comes to producing entertainment content, sorta edges you towards the "too hard basket".
It isn't that they don't want customers, it is just that it is easier to get more customers than less effort than it is to chase fussy nerds;-)
Primer may have "officially" cost 7K - but the guy had a lot of people work for free (he did over 2 years post production on it). So as long as you are happy with movies that aren't made as professional pieces, that's fine.
Probably not, given that talent always outshines tools. Give everyone a piano and lessons and your hit rate might be better, but most pianists are pretty good by the time they get their own Steinway;-)
The biggest difference in the short term will be the death of "Big TV Sci Fi" of the Galactica/Stargate/Trek variety. SGU was canceled recently due to poor ratings, yet several torrent tracker sites reported it consistently ranked in the top 5 shows downloaded. Say what you want about the quality of the show, but if it was consistently downloaded by that many people, it had an audience. The problem was, it had an audience that couldn't be monetized.
The reason why Big TV Sci-Fi is in trouble more than other genres is that the audience of Big TV Sci-Fi is the most likely to seek a method of viewing the product that can't be monetized. The SyFy channel isn't moving towards showing wrestling because they think that wrestling is cooler than space ships and time machines, it is just that the audience for wrestling will watch wrestling on the TV rather than downloading it and watching it in an alternate manner.
Perhaps, maybe, somehow there is a business model where you can make money out of hi-budget Sci-Fi that people download rather than watch, but other than George Lucas' "sell lots of toys" method of recouping expenses, no one seems to have found it yet.
Of course if Oz government IT peoples had been following Slashdot they'd also know that there is a big fork of Open Office to Libre Office where there seems to be no real guarantee that either will be around in 3 years time (some of the code might be, but can you imagine trying to explain byzantine Open Source politics to a PHB?)
"You should standardize on Libre Office"
"How long has that been around?"
"Well that's a question with a complicated answer...."
You'll probably find that they'll chose the risk long term unreadability over allowing wikileaks style information leakage (because whatever solution they choose will be sold as being able to recover from encrypted archives)
Security isn't a complete barrier, but there is no way you are going to be able to cellphone camera more than a couple of documents (and remember you have access to that document anyway because you've been able to open it)
What this stops is mega document dumps like Wikileaks as you can't cell phone camera 10,000 documents or even 100 easily.
All forms of security are an inconvenience rather than a total barrier.
You might be able to copy one document manually by typing it out - but that is extremely time consuming. AD RMS would stop the mega document dumps that wikileaks is performing unless you have a million monkeys manually retyping every document.
Built into Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is a role called "Active Directory Rights Management Services". It allows authors to control what can be done with documents. You can stop cutting, pasting, forwarding, editing, the whole shebang. Office 2007 and 2010 follow the rules set down in the rights templates. So does the operating system.
After Wikileaks, governments are going to be all about rights management protection for documents. RMS stops people opening sensitive documents that they've copied to a USB stick.
Open / Libre Office doesn't have this functionality (and because of the Open Source movement's philosophical objection to rights management technologies probably will never have this functionality).
The recent wikileaks saga has been a big wake up call to business and government - because they want to do their best to make sure that their information isn't plastered all over the Internet. Office 2007 / 2010 support this out of the box (just that few people use it). Open / Libre Office won't support it in a million years because "DRMs is Teh Evil"
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately what happens now is that some geek buys an ebook, strips the DRM, and uploads it so that people he doesn't know can get a copy as well without paying anyone for it. Publishing digitally is a bad move for authors who are better off staying physical. That way if someone wants to copy your book, they have to put a bit more effort into it. There's a reason that JK Rowling doesn't allow ebook versions of Harry Potter - she knows that people who would otherwise pay for her work won't if they can pick up a DRM stripped ebook version.
Non-technical users can't differentiate one Android phone from another. Going with Android just means that for the non-technical buyer (which is 99% of smartphone buyers) there isn't really anything that differentiates a HTC from a Samsung from a Motorola from some cheap arse Taiwanese import that you've never heard of. And it is the cheap arse Taiwanese imports that are doing damage to the "Android" brand - shipping phones that simply are incapable of running the OS in a way that is a credit to the platform. Going WP7 allows Nokia to differentiate itself. If MeeGo had been anywhere near ready, they would have jumped on it. If Symbian were salvageable, they would have gone that way.
It is perhaps good that Stallman ended up as a programmer as his ability to write fiction leaves much to be desired.
In the long run most authors are better off *not* publishing electronically. If people want your work, they can pay for it in hard copy, borrow it in hard copy from a friend, or borrow it in hard copy from the library. When a book is a physical object, like a car, people will be reluctant to steal it. When a book is a digital object and is easily replicated, people will not be reluctant to replicate it and distribute it to people they know and people that they do not know.
Android is a race to the bottom against manufacturers in countries that have negligible labor costs. Nokia can't leverage this strategy because they aren't in one of those countries.
Piracy will never be fixed by availability or even a reduction in cost because most pirates pirate due to a sense of entitlement.
Where did you pull that figure from? It is complete rubbish.
By your own reasoning the cheaters would climb out of the bucket and go back to griefing ordinary users. Anti-social behavior is about causing the most grief to and ruining the experience of the most people. You don't accomplish that by playing in a "cheater league" - you do that by ruining the experience of everyday gamers.
You and your wife should move to Australia - to say that Oz is desperate for teachers is understating the case.
Of course with the four that are seemingly in charge, the mob that's been left out can say "fark it" and go their own way saying that they don't need to kowtow to Google, Apple, Mozilla and Opera, (the last of which has such a small audience that they are within the margin of error).
Retailers make a fair thwack of money out of all the crap they pre-load onto PCs to the point where the craplets cover the cost of the Windows license and subsidize the cost of the PC. Stuff like Norton and Nero doesn't end up on these machines for free - those companies pay to get it on there. Because of this, it can end up to be more expensive to by a naked machine than it is to buy one with all the crap installed because you lose the subsidies.
Correlation doesn't equal causation - but if you look at the list of most torrented shows for 2009 http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-tv-shows-of-2009-091231/ you'll find that 3 of them have since been axed because of low ratings (Sarah Conner, Heroes, Prison Break) Heroes had more downloads than viewers! Now say what you want about the quality of Heroes, but if people are saying "FK IT, I'll download it rather than watch it" the ratings suffer and the show gets canned.
In the parent post I pointed to George Lucas' model with the The Clone Wars cartoon - which is primarily an advertisement for toys. There are limits to how well this works though and you have to design your movie around selling toys. Also, the toys don't necessarily bring in heaps of $. Look at the rise in Hasbro's profits after the release of the first Transformers movie.
Putting it on a website for free won't remove it from the torrent sites. Hell, people still torrent the Daily Show even though they post it on the Daily Show website! Geeks have found a distribution method that suits them - the only way they'll shift from that method is if they find one that *suits them more*. Beating *FREE* and *CONVENIENT* may be possible, but it seems highly improbable. TV producers are coming to the conclusion of "we can jump through all these hoops to try to make a buck off science fiction, or, stuff it, lets just make more reality TV and back up the dump truck full of cash"
That's the problem - the audience isn't willing to pay to watch no matter how good something is when they have the option of getting it for free.
It might have, if it was true.
It was an economic hypothesis that works well for edge case scenarios for Cory Doctorow, but doesn't translate across to general cases very well.
Which, when it comes to producing entertainment content, sorta edges you towards the "too hard basket". It isn't that they don't want customers, it is just that it is easier to get more customers than less effort than it is to chase fussy nerds ;-)
Primer may have "officially" cost 7K - but the guy had a lot of people work for free (he did over 2 years post production on it). So as long as you are happy with movies that aren't made as professional pieces, that's fine.
Probably not, given that talent always outshines tools. Give everyone a piano and lessons and your hit rate might be better, but most pianists are pretty good by the time they get their own Steinway ;-)
The biggest difference in the short term will be the death of "Big TV Sci Fi" of the Galactica/Stargate/Trek variety. SGU was canceled recently due to poor ratings, yet several torrent tracker sites reported it consistently ranked in the top 5 shows downloaded. Say what you want about the quality of the show, but if it was consistently downloaded by that many people, it had an audience. The problem was, it had an audience that couldn't be monetized.
The reason why Big TV Sci-Fi is in trouble more than other genres is that the audience of Big TV Sci-Fi is the most likely to seek a method of viewing the product that can't be monetized. The SyFy channel isn't moving towards showing wrestling because they think that wrestling is cooler than space ships and time machines, it is just that the audience for wrestling will watch wrestling on the TV rather than downloading it and watching it in an alternate manner.
Perhaps, maybe, somehow there is a business model where you can make money out of hi-budget Sci-Fi that people download rather than watch, but other than George Lucas' "sell lots of toys" method of recouping expenses, no one seems to have found it yet.
"You should standardize on Libre Office" ...."
"How long has that been around?"
"Well that's a question with a complicated answer
Pharmboy's understanding of economics explains why in 30 years time the US will be more like Liberia than Lichtenstein.
You'll probably find that they'll chose the risk long term unreadability over allowing wikileaks style information leakage (because whatever solution they choose will be sold as being able to recover from encrypted archives)
Security isn't a complete barrier, but there is no way you are going to be able to cellphone camera more than a couple of documents (and remember you have access to that document anyway because you've been able to open it) What this stops is mega document dumps like Wikileaks as you can't cell phone camera 10,000 documents or even 100 easily.
All forms of security are an inconvenience rather than a total barrier. You might be able to copy one document manually by typing it out - but that is extremely time consuming. AD RMS would stop the mega document dumps that wikileaks is performing unless you have a million monkeys manually retyping every document.
After Wikileaks, governments are going to be all about rights management protection for documents. RMS stops people opening sensitive documents that they've copied to a USB stick.
Open / Libre Office doesn't have this functionality (and because of the Open Source movement's philosophical objection to rights management technologies probably will never have this functionality).
The recent wikileaks saga has been a big wake up call to business and government - because they want to do their best to make sure that their information isn't plastered all over the Internet. Office 2007 / 2010 support this out of the box (just that few people use it). Open / Libre Office won't support it in a million years because "DRMs is Teh Evil"