In the first two drafts of the screenplay, it ends with Deckard killing Rachel.
In the third and final draft from 1981, it ends with Deckard and Rachel fleeing the city in Deckard's car. The only difference is that they are fleeing with Gaff in persuit. It was NEVER meant to end with them getting in to the elevator. It's just that Scott wanted to cut the actual ending from the theatrical release, and had nothing in the can to replace it with.
As for the Unicorn dream, I stand corrected. While researching an answer to your question, I discovered that apocryphal stories abound about that sequence. Some insist that it was culled from leftover "Legend" footage. Others (including Scott himself) say it was part of principal photography in 1982, but omitted from the final cut. So much mythology surrounds the making of it and the intentions of the director (who has made contradicting statements about many aspects of it) that the truth is somewhat hard to pin down, but I see no reason not to buy the idea that the Unicorn Dream is something he always intended to have in there. I still say it's redundant and drags the film down at that particular moment.
I have to wonder why this was given a 7 if the book was so badly edited, written and completely boring 5/6 of the time.
Read the review again. Then read some of his other reviews. From his writing style, I think you might conclude that "badly edited, written and completely boring 5/6 of the time" is actually high praise.
Cyberpunk was still a relatively new genre when the film was being made. If no date was attached, viewers in 1982 might be inclined to assume it was set in the distant future, when the whole point of cyberpunk was to write about things that seemed to be just around the corner.
It makes the film seem kind of dated now, but even without that date, some elements seem a bit dated anyway, and my 2019 those elements might seem downright silly. It's the nature of the beast when you do sci-fi.
I don't think so. Sure, there were hippies and Rock n Roll, but the cities were still there, people still drove cars, went to church on Sunday, etc.
Dude, there were more two-car families in 1968 than there were single-car families in 1938. By '68, most middle-class families were living in suburbs. In '38, suburbs mostly didn't even exist. In '38 it was commonplace to have your elderly parents live with you. In '68 it was common for them to move to Florida. In '38, a woman in the workplace was a novelty, and a married woman in the workplace almost unheard of. In '68, it was commonplace. I could go on. In '38, only radical kooks owned TV sets. In '68, only radical kooks didn't. I could go on, but why?
The three Star Wars films were done by three different directors, so it's hard to make the case that they should be counted as a single, continuous movie. Ask any serious fan of the trilogy, and they will invariably have a single favorite out of the three (usually the middle one.)
Cars gave young people a place to have sex outside of the home. The also allowed people to move out of the urban centers where their jobs were.
Communication technology has made it possible to transform our lives in many ways, but we haven't reached a point where the culture has re-organized around it just yet. It's still only a small fraction of people who use broad-band Internet in America, and even fewer that use it for anything more than recreation and shopping. (And what is Internet shopping really, other than mail-order without a printed catalog?)
I love telecommuting a couple times a week, but the vast majority of people in our society are still driving in to office buildings every weekday. I'd say the invention of the cubicle wall impacted work-day culture at least as much as the invention of the computer.
The ubiquity of cell phones have made a huge impact on the culture in Japan, where people use them almost perpetually to check train schedules and the weather, etc., as well as to constantly chat with one another via text messaging.
In America, most people seem to just have their phones with them as a "safety net" device. It makes it easier to hear from their babysitter if there's a problem at home, or hear from the office if there's a crisis at work, or call for a tow truck if their car breaks down. All stuff which could be done before, but not as conveniently.
I agree that it was a somewhat weak ending, but the Director's Cut has no ending.
Deckard and Rachel get in an elevator, as the door closes Deckard looks around in case they are being followed, brandishing his gun, and then... nothing. Credits roll.
It feels like a movie that stops five minutes before the story ends. That's because it is. If Scott had any real intention of ending the movie differently than the mountan ride, he never filmed what he needed in order to do so.
Also, the addition of the "unicorn dream" was stupid. It was not needed, at all, to establish that Deckard may very well have been a replicant. It also changed the meaning of the final scene. The unicorn which Gaff left was his way of saying, "I was here. I could have killed you both. Now would be a good time to disappear." Instead, Scott tacked on a "dream" (which, speaking of stealing footage from other movies... that was a leftover clip from another film) which was never part of the movie in any of its 6 different iterations prior to the '92 remaster, that was meant to make it seem like Gaff somehow knew what Deckard dreamed about.
(Which is silly, when you think about it. Even if Deckard was a Replicant, how would Gaff know about his dreams? Gaff was a low-level detective, not a hot-shit bladerunner. The cops didn't know shit about who was and wasn't a replicant, let alone what they dream about. If they did, they wouldn't need VK tests.)
Cell phones are new, but are they really such a major change to our lives?
I make calls on my cell phone maybe 20 times a week, at most. Several of those calls could probably be made from a land line with only slightly more hassle. It might be slightly easier for people to call me, but in many situations (work, movie theaters, concerts, commuting, etc.) I'm more likely to just let voice mail pick it up, so they are still leaving me a message just like people left messages on Jim Rockford's tape machine back in the 70s.
The biggest way in which it has changed my life is that, between the cell phone, iPod, etc., I can no longer carry all my shit in my jeans pockets very easilly, and if it were not for my laptop bag I would have to consider strapping on the infamous "man purse" around my belt.
From '38 to '68 we went from "most people don't own cars" to "just about everybody owns cars."
From '68 to '98 it went from "just about everybody owns cars" to "just about everybody owns cars which are slightly less boxy than the ones from the '60s."
Hardly are radical of a transformation.
Also, the cop car in Blade Runner could fly. Are you seriously saying we are 13 years from flying cars???
The biggest change in our culture from back then is that we now take for granted what was then new.
When Frank Sinatra sang "Come Fly With Me", hopping on a plane and going to a distant state or country for recreation was still a fairly new concept. The idea that a middle-class family in Ohio could jet to California on a Friday and be back in time for the parents to go to work on Monday was something that was a dramatic departure from the early 20th Century.
Today we're still flying with pretty the same jet technology that Frank used. It's just that it's not something which inspires pop songs anymore.
I guess thinking that 30+ years into the future it was possible that such a drastic change to occur.
Contrast America of 1938 with America of 1968, and it's easy to see why Sci-Fi writers made the mistake of thinking that radical transformaiton of both technology and culture is to be expected in the span of a few decades.
I'm usually a huge fan of "director's cut" editions of movies. Often times, the stuff cut out of the original is really awesome stuff, such as John Lee Hooker's outstanding performance of "Boom Boom Boom" in "The Blues Brothers" (most of which was purged from the final theatrical release as being "too ethnic" for audiences of the time.) The restoration of that scene is a delight, and I no longer want to view the movie without it.
That said, there are five films where I strongly believe that the original is worth owning (if you plan on owning any version at all, that is):
Blade Runner. Yes, I know Ridley Scott hated having to add the film-noir style overdubs. But we're talking about the asshole who made "Legend" here. He's far from perfect. The pacing in the "Director's Cut" makes it quite obvious that it was filmed to make room for those dubs, and rather than actually re-edit those scenes, he simply removed the offending dub track. Probably because he didn't have enough other footage to keep a worthwhile run-time, especially after chopping off the ending he didn't like. The so-called Director's Cut feels like an unfinished movie, because that's kind of what it is. It's almost the film he would have made, had he not lost a few arguments with his producers.
Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi While the DVD re-edits of these are slightly better than the theatrical re-edits from a couple years before, they are still deeply flawed. Han still "dodges" a laser. The Jabba scene is still redunandant, still repeats dialog from the Greedo scene, and still has that stupid slapstick moment of Han stepping on Jabba's tail. Empire's re-edit fares slightly better, but syncing the Emperor with the one from Jedi and the prequels was, I feel, a bad choice, necessitated only by a need to keep things consistant with the prequels. The new ending sequence in Jedi was a mess... The Death Star effect was changed for the worse, and the tribal festivities of the corny "Yub Nub" song was replaced with something considerably less inspiring.
Blood Simple Nothing wrong with the Director's Cut of this one. You could argue that the pace was slightly better, but most of the changes the Coen Brothers made were actually cuts from the original. The first release is totally worth seeing, if you get the chance.
Oh, by the way, your video iPod's battery is probably not that hard to replace. I've done iPod battery replacements before, and it's relatively straightforward:
1. Pop the case open with a plastic pry-bar (usually included with the replacement battery)
2. Carefully unplug the hard drive (it's attached with a ribbon cable), and set it aside.
3. Unplug the old battery and remove it.
4. Put in the new battery and plug it in.
5. Put the HD back, and plug it in.
6. Snap the case closed.
Not really such a bad operation to have to perform every two years or so. For most people, a $30 battery every couple years is a lot cheaper than a pair of $5 AAA disposables each day that you want to use it.
Listen to yourself. You've been brainwashed. "It works for me and for most people so if it's not right for you, well tough"???
Actually, what I said was more like, "it works for me and a lot of other people, but if it's not for you then buy something else. No skin off my nose."
Are you so eager to argue with zealotry that you see it everywhere, even when it's not present?
The rise of network gaming has made the Mac more important though. I'm convinced that one of the reasons World of Warcraft took off so far ahead of its contemporaries is the fact that it's a cross-platform game.
Sure, out of 20 of your friends, only one might be a Mac user, but if you want to do any MMO gaming with that one friend, it can't be on EverQuest, EverQuest 2, Star Wars Galaxies, or City of Heroes. It has to be World of Warcraft.
When deciding on an MMORPG for you and your circle of friends to each pay $15 a month for, the logical choice is the one which everybody can play. Any game which excludes part of the group is less likely to be seriously considered. Blizzard seems to understand that. Sony... not so much.
I'm surprised it was marked as insightful. He didn't share any "insights" that have not been brought up on every single Slashdot discussion of the iPod ever. If anything, it should probably be marked "Redundant."
But yeah, it shouldn't have been marked as a "Troll" either. The population of slashdot has changed to the point that there are a lot of people with mod points who don't actually seem to know what a troll is anymore. C'est La Vie.
That's not a reason to dislike iPods. It's just a reason why they are probably not right for you.
The iPod is designed for urbanites. The battery is perfectly adequate for people who don't go more than a few hours away from an outlet most of the time. I have my iPod running in my car (off the car charger) when I drive in to work in the morning, listen to it on headphones in the office, take it jogging with me over lunch, and back in the car in the evening. If I go for a bike ride or a walk that evening, I can take it along then. It's even nice for domestic air travel, and awesome to have with you for a day of downhill skiing.
Even when traveling by hitch-hiking or on a bicycle, you plug in your charger in the restaurant where you eat lunch (every restaurant has a few outlets in the dining area so they can run vacuum cleaners and stuff), and you're good to go until dinner. No problem.
That said, unless you attach an external battery pack, it's unsuitable for camping out in the wilderness.
Then again, when *I* go out into the wilderness, I'm trying to get away from all that shit, and the only piece of electronics I want with me is *maybe* a GPS. Kind of hard to hear the call of the eagle, or the wind rushing through the pines, if it's drowned out by your "slow jams."
Still, it sounds like the iPod is the wrong player for your lifestyle. You do, however, realize that the way you live is rather atypical, right?
The iPod was already taking over the market before iTMS came along. It certainly helped them ramp up sales over the last few years, but the real reason the iPod became so popular was because of the one thing that Apple is known for getting right most of the time: Interface simplicity.
Remember what most MP3 players looked like before the iPod? I'm not just talking about the general ugliness of some of them, but the way the interface was designed specifically to appeal to people who LOVE high-tech gagetry, and think the Windows file manager is downright spiffy.
No non-geek had any clue at all how to operate them, or even what they were for. They just barely knew that "EM PEE THREE" had something to do with music, because their nephew set them up with Napster back around 1999 so they could steal music online and listen to it at the office.
Then the iPod comes out. It's not an "MP3 Player", it's a music player. It has simple and obvious controls. It's easy to figure out how to get songs into it, and easy to figure out how to play them when they are there.
What iTMS is doing is ensuring that the iPod *keeps* it's lead in the market. It's also creating a new revenue source for Apple. (They started it off as a possible loss-leader to sell iPods, but it's turning a profit these days, and with the addition of video downloads, I'm betting it will become an even bigger revenue generator for them. There's no way in hell I'm going to pay two bucks for a low-res TV show episode, but it appears that some people are happy to do so. Go figure.)
Basically, as soon as you have a gather critical mass of people willing to take big risks for the sake of a get-rich-quick scheme, the fleecing can begin, both legally and illegally.
Then there are the people who don't know what they are doing, but want to "get in" on the fleecing. They show up with shears and leave without their wool, wondering just what the hell happened.
As soon as Second Life becomes mainly populated by people hoping to make a living off it, it will become pretty much impossible for anybody to make a living off of it, because it will become a world with lots of producers and no consumers.
During the California Gold Rush, the people who made money were the outfitters. If you want to make money off Second Life, write a book on how to make money off Second Life. Or sell programming tools. Or training seminars. Then use your vast wealth to soothe your guilt for having ripped off a bunch of saps until you die and go to Hell where you will burn forever with everybody who ever established a pyramid scheme or other means of exploiting the ambitions of fools.
Windows users are spoiled by the preceived "convenience" of always-on admin rights. Taking that away will create bitching from some of them, and I would agree with you that it's unfair, had Microsoft not lovingly made the bed in which they must now lie.
Slashdot Mirror
In the first two drafts of the screenplay, it ends with Deckard killing Rachel.
In the third and final draft from 1981, it ends with Deckard and Rachel fleeing the city in Deckard's car. The only difference is that they are fleeing with Gaff in persuit. It was NEVER meant to end with them getting in to the elevator. It's just that Scott wanted to cut the actual ending from the theatrical release, and had nothing in the can to replace it with.
As for the Unicorn dream, I stand corrected. While researching an answer to your question, I discovered that apocryphal stories abound about that sequence. Some insist that it was culled from leftover "Legend" footage. Others (including Scott himself) say it was part of principal photography in 1982, but omitted from the final cut. So much mythology surrounds the making of it and the intentions of the director (who has made contradicting statements about many aspects of it) that the truth is somewhat hard to pin down, but I see no reason not to buy the idea that the Unicorn Dream is something he always intended to have in there. I still say it's redundant and drags the film down at that particular moment.
I have to wonder why this was given a 7 if the book was so badly edited, written and completely boring 5/6 of the time.
Read the review again. Then read some of his other reviews. From his writing style, I think you might conclude that "badly edited, written and completely boring 5/6 of the time" is actually high praise.
Best nitpick of the week! Thank you, AC, for reminding me why I still keep my reading threshold at 0. :)
Cyberpunk was still a relatively new genre when the film was being made. If no date was attached, viewers in 1982 might be inclined to assume it was set in the distant future, when the whole point of cyberpunk was to write about things that seemed to be just around the corner.
It makes the film seem kind of dated now, but even without that date, some elements seem a bit dated anyway, and my 2019 those elements might seem downright silly. It's the nature of the beast when you do sci-fi.
I don't think so. Sure, there were hippies and Rock n Roll, but the cities were still there, people still drove cars, went to church on Sunday, etc.
Dude, there were more two-car families in 1968 than there were single-car families in 1938. By '68, most middle-class families were living in suburbs. In '38, suburbs mostly didn't even exist. In '38 it was commonplace to have your elderly parents live with you. In '68 it was common for them to move to Florida. In '38, a woman in the workplace was a novelty, and a married woman in the workplace almost unheard of. In '68, it was commonplace. I could go on. In '38, only radical kooks owned TV sets. In '68, only radical kooks didn't. I could go on, but why?
The three Star Wars films were done by three different directors, so it's hard to make the case that they should be counted as a single, continuous movie. Ask any serious fan of the trilogy, and they will invariably have a single favorite out of the three (usually the middle one.)
Cars gave young people a place to have sex outside of the home.
The also allowed people to move out of the urban centers where their jobs were.
Communication technology has made it possible to transform our lives in many ways, but we haven't reached a point where the culture has re-organized around it just yet. It's still only a small fraction of people who use broad-band Internet in America, and even fewer that use it for anything more than recreation and shopping. (And what is Internet shopping really, other than mail-order without a printed catalog?)
I love telecommuting a couple times a week, but the vast majority of people in our society are still driving in to office buildings every weekday. I'd say the invention of the cubicle wall impacted work-day culture at least as much as the invention of the computer.
The ubiquity of cell phones have made a huge impact on the culture in Japan, where people use them almost perpetually to check train schedules and the weather, etc., as well as to constantly chat with one another via text messaging.
In America, most people seem to just have their phones with them as a "safety net" device. It makes it easier to hear from their babysitter if there's a problem at home, or hear from the office if there's a crisis at work, or call for a tow truck if their car breaks down. All stuff which could be done before, but not as conveniently.
I agree that it was a somewhat weak ending, but the Director's Cut has no ending.
Deckard and Rachel get in an elevator, as the door closes Deckard looks around in case they are being followed, brandishing his gun, and then... nothing. Credits roll.
It feels like a movie that stops five minutes before the story ends. That's because it is. If Scott had any real intention of ending the movie differently than the mountan ride, he never filmed what he needed in order to do so.
Also, the addition of the "unicorn dream" was stupid. It was not needed, at all, to establish that Deckard may very well have been a replicant. It also changed the meaning of the final scene. The unicorn which Gaff left was his way of saying, "I was here. I could have killed you both. Now would be a good time to disappear." Instead, Scott tacked on a "dream" (which, speaking of stealing footage from other movies... that was a leftover clip from another film) which was never part of the movie in any of its 6 different iterations prior to the '92 remaster, that was meant to make it seem like Gaff somehow knew what Deckard dreamed about.
(Which is silly, when you think about it. Even if Deckard was a Replicant, how would Gaff know about his dreams? Gaff was a low-level detective, not a hot-shit bladerunner. The cops didn't know shit about who was and wasn't a replicant, let alone what they dream about. If they did, they wouldn't need VK tests.)
Cell phones are new, but are they really such a major change to our lives?
I make calls on my cell phone maybe 20 times a week, at most. Several of those calls could probably be made from a land line with only slightly more hassle. It might be slightly easier for people to call me, but in many situations (work, movie theaters, concerts, commuting, etc.) I'm more likely to just let voice mail pick it up, so they are still leaving me a message just like people left messages on Jim Rockford's tape machine back in the 70s.
The biggest way in which it has changed my life is that, between the cell phone, iPod, etc., I can no longer carry all my shit in my jeans pockets very easilly, and if it were not for my laptop bag I would have to consider strapping on the infamous "man purse" around my belt.
Cars are shaped a little different. Big deal.
From '38 to '68 we went from "most people don't own cars" to "just about everybody owns cars."
From '68 to '98 it went from "just about everybody owns cars" to "just about everybody owns cars which are slightly less boxy than the ones from the '60s."
Hardly are radical of a transformation.
Also, the cop car in Blade Runner could fly. Are you seriously saying we are 13 years from flying cars???
The biggest change in our culture from back then is that we now take for granted what was then new.
When Frank Sinatra sang "Come Fly With Me", hopping on a plane and going to a distant state or country for recreation was still a fairly new concept. The idea that a middle-class family in Ohio could jet to California on a Friday and be back in time for the parents to go to work on Monday was something that was a dramatic departure from the early 20th Century.
Today we're still flying with pretty the same jet technology that Frank used. It's just that it's not something which inspires pop songs anymore.
I guess thinking that 30+ years into the future it was possible that such a drastic change to occur.
Contrast America of 1938 with America of 1968, and it's easy to see why Sci-Fi writers made the mistake of thinking that radical transformaiton of both technology and culture is to be expected in the span of a few decades.
I'm usually a huge fan of "director's cut" editions of movies. Often times, the stuff cut out of the original is really awesome stuff, such as John Lee Hooker's outstanding performance of "Boom Boom Boom" in "The Blues Brothers" (most of which was purged from the final theatrical release as being "too ethnic" for audiences of the time.) The restoration of that scene is a delight, and I no longer want to view the movie without it.
That said, there are five films where I strongly believe that the original is worth owning (if you plan on owning any version at all, that is):
Blade Runner. Yes, I know Ridley Scott hated having to add the film-noir style overdubs. But we're talking about the asshole who made "Legend" here. He's far from perfect. The pacing in the "Director's Cut" makes it quite obvious that it was filmed to make room for those dubs, and rather than actually re-edit those scenes, he simply removed the offending dub track. Probably because he didn't have enough other footage to keep a worthwhile run-time, especially after chopping off the ending he didn't like. The so-called Director's Cut feels like an unfinished movie, because that's kind of what it is. It's almost the film he would have made, had he not lost a few arguments with his producers.
Star Wars, Empire, and Jedi While the DVD re-edits of these are slightly better than the theatrical re-edits from a couple years before, they are still deeply flawed. Han still "dodges" a laser. The Jabba scene is still redunandant, still repeats dialog from the Greedo scene, and still has that stupid slapstick moment of Han stepping on Jabba's tail. Empire's re-edit fares slightly better, but syncing the Emperor with the one from Jedi and the prequels was, I feel, a bad choice, necessitated only by a need to keep things consistant with the prequels. The new ending sequence in Jedi was a mess... The Death Star effect was changed for the worse, and the tribal festivities of the corny "Yub Nub" song was replaced with something considerably less inspiring.
Blood Simple Nothing wrong with the Director's Cut of this one. You could argue that the pace was slightly better, but most of the changes the Coen Brothers made were actually cuts from the original. The first release is totally worth seeing, if you get the chance.
Oh, by the way, your video iPod's battery is probably not that hard to replace. I've done iPod battery replacements before, and it's relatively straightforward:
1. Pop the case open with a plastic pry-bar (usually included with the replacement battery)
2. Carefully unplug the hard drive (it's attached with a ribbon cable), and set it aside.
3. Unplug the old battery and remove it.
4. Put in the new battery and plug it in.
5. Put the HD back, and plug it in.
6. Snap the case closed.
Not really such a bad operation to have to perform every two years or so. For most people, a $30 battery every couple years is a lot cheaper than a pair of $5 AAA disposables each day that you want to use it.
Listen to yourself. You've been brainwashed. "It works for me and for most people so if it's not right for you, well tough"???
Actually, what I said was more like, "it works for me and a lot of other people, but if it's not for you then buy something else. No skin off my nose."
Are you so eager to argue with zealotry that you see it everywhere, even when it's not present?
The rise of network gaming has made the Mac more important though. I'm convinced that one of the reasons World of Warcraft took off so far ahead of its contemporaries is the fact that it's a cross-platform game.
Sure, out of 20 of your friends, only one might be a Mac user, but if you want to do any MMO gaming with that one friend, it can't be on EverQuest, EverQuest 2, Star Wars Galaxies, or City of Heroes. It has to be World of Warcraft.
When deciding on an MMORPG for you and your circle of friends to each pay $15 a month for, the logical choice is the one which everybody can play. Any game which excludes part of the group is less likely to be seriously considered. Blizzard seems to understand that. Sony... not so much.
I must have missed the part in my post where I "attacked" anybody.
I'm surprised it was marked as insightful. He didn't share any "insights" that have not been brought up on every single Slashdot discussion of the iPod ever. If anything, it should probably be marked "Redundant."
But yeah, it shouldn't have been marked as a "Troll" either. The population of slashdot has changed to the point that there are a lot of people with mod points who don't actually seem to know what a troll is anymore. C'est La Vie.
That's not a reason to dislike iPods. It's just a reason why they are probably not right for you.
The iPod is designed for urbanites. The battery is perfectly adequate for people who don't go more than a few hours away from an outlet most of the time. I have my iPod running in my car (off the car charger) when I drive in to work in the morning, listen to it on headphones in the office, take it jogging with me over lunch, and back in the car in the evening. If I go for a bike ride or a walk that evening, I can take it along then. It's even nice for domestic air travel, and awesome to have with you for a day of downhill skiing.
Even when traveling by hitch-hiking or on a bicycle, you plug in your charger in the restaurant where you eat lunch (every restaurant has a few outlets in the dining area so they can run vacuum cleaners and stuff), and you're good to go until dinner. No problem.
That said, unless you attach an external battery pack, it's unsuitable for camping out in the wilderness.
Then again, when *I* go out into the wilderness, I'm trying to get away from all that shit, and the only piece of electronics I want with me is *maybe* a GPS. Kind of hard to hear the call of the eagle, or the wind rushing through the pines, if it's drowned out by your "slow jams."
Still, it sounds like the iPod is the wrong player for your lifestyle. You do, however, realize that the way you live is rather atypical, right?
The iPod was already taking over the market before iTMS came along. It certainly helped them ramp up sales over the last few years, but the real reason the iPod became so popular was because of the one thing that Apple is known for getting right most of the time: Interface simplicity.
Remember what most MP3 players looked like before the iPod? I'm not just talking about the general ugliness of some of them, but the way the interface was designed specifically to appeal to people who LOVE high-tech gagetry, and think the Windows file manager is downright spiffy.
No non-geek had any clue at all how to operate them, or even what they were for. They just barely knew that "EM PEE THREE" had something to do with music, because their nephew set them up with Napster back around 1999 so they could steal music online and listen to it at the office.
Then the iPod comes out. It's not an "MP3 Player", it's a music player. It has simple and obvious controls. It's easy to figure out how to get songs into it, and easy to figure out how to play them when they are there.
What iTMS is doing is ensuring that the iPod *keeps* it's lead in the market. It's also creating a new revenue source for Apple. (They started it off as a possible loss-leader to sell iPods, but it's turning a profit these days, and with the addition of video downloads, I'm betting it will become an even bigger revenue generator for them. There's no way in hell I'm going to pay two bucks for a low-res TV show episode, but it appears that some people are happy to do so. Go figure.)
Ooo... Good call.
Basically, as soon as you have a gather critical mass of people willing to take big risks for the sake of a get-rich-quick scheme, the fleecing can begin, both legally and illegally.
Then there are the people who don't know what they are doing, but want to "get in" on the fleecing. They show up with shears and leave without their wool, wondering just what the hell happened.
As soon as Second Life becomes mainly populated by people hoping to make a living off it, it will become pretty much impossible for anybody to make a living off of it, because it will become a world with lots of producers and no consumers.
During the California Gold Rush, the people who made money were the outfitters. If you want to make money off Second Life, write a book on how to make money off Second Life. Or sell programming tools. Or training seminars. Then use your vast wealth to soothe your guilt for having ripped off a bunch of saps until you die and go to Hell where you will burn forever with everybody who ever established a pyramid scheme or other means of exploiting the ambitions of fools.
Just sayin' is all.
So, would you say this represents a lossy day for Fogent, since such a harsh judgment has now been rendered?
Thanks folks. I'm here all week. Try the veal.
Windows users are spoiled by the preceived "convenience" of always-on admin rights. Taking that away will create bitching from some of them, and I would agree with you that it's unfair, had Microsoft not lovingly made the bed in which they must now lie.
I knew what you intended to say. I just thought it was funny how it came out, so I rolled with it.
I needed a laugh... It's been that kind of week for me.