Luckily for me, it's only 10:15PM local. There's more to making and selling media than the original production crew.
While producers and skilled crew get paid irrespective of volume, people who package, transport, and sell the media get paid based on individual sales. Every theft of media means that there is less need of people in this chain, and accumulated theft has a cost measured in warehouse workers' jobs and wages.
Everything has a cost. You can waste time lamenting that fact, or get on with the business of being productive. The economy works because people buy and sell. People who steal bypass the economy, and that hurts real people. It even hurts normal people who work normal jobs and make normal wages.
By the way, your definition of a "good" film maker is a little egalitarian. Even the "good" film makers, who make so-called art-house and other small films, need to pay the bills. I believe that a film maker can desire to entertain and desire to make a livlihood, or even get stinking rich if the opportunity presents itself. Those are real concerns that real people have. I prefer these motivations to people (like you and me) guessing what the proper motivations should be.
In any case, if you propose to steal media from any producer, big or small, it's still theft. If a film maker chooses to license his work for free, that's his choice. Not yours nor mine, however. Pay for what you use. If you don't want to pay, don't use.
Why is IP an abomination? Your argument doesn't hold for physical things. Why is IP different?
When you justify theft of IP with "that's life", consider that others would justify their theft of all your worldly possessions with the same argumet. Is their argument valid? In an a society without ethics, yes. But in an ethical society, both arguments are invalid.
Please re-read my post. I said that Shatner did a poor job with the middle-aged version of Kirk. I did not say that a middle-aged character or actor is a bad thing. Shatner's middle-aged Kirk is boring. Stewart's older Picard is not. The movie didn't need Shatner to carry it, but some itchy movie execs decided that it had to play the Kirk card while it had a chance to.
A large portion of the theater did in fact cheer. Half is a reasonable estimate - I did not count. The cheering was loud and not directional. You can call this nihilism.
I'm a huge Trek fan, though pehaps not a "Trekker" by your definition. I've been a huge fan since I was a kid, after the original series but before the "Next Generation". When I was young, I read Trek novels by the dozen looking for a Star Trek fix. I still look forward to a future as bright as Trek. I think most science fiction fans like the way that future looks. The problem is that too many Trek fans treat any story handed down by Paramount as a great thing, without looking at it on it's own merits. Likewise, blind devotion to Shatner's performances seems to be a trait shared by your class of Trekker as well.
My objective opinion, and the opinion of most people who watched T.J. Hooker and the rest of Shatner's post-original series work is that the man is a poor actor. He was a perfect fit for the original scripts - brash and arrogant. But the time had passed for the Kirk character, played by Shatner, to retire. He doesn't portray brash and arrogant very well now that he doesn't move around so well. Many of the hand-to-hand combat scenes he's been involved in have been comical. His acting is comical, irrespective of his age. Patrick Stewart can portray an older Captain with style. Connery could do it. Any number of older actors could carry off the role. Shatner, however, can't.
I mourned the passing of Spock. I've mourned the passing of DeForest Kelley. But asking me to mourn a character, who died in a poorly constructed scene in a less than compelling movie is a little much. One of the few things that I agree with the original article's author on is that the Kirk character deserved a better death. The way he went was just fine - but he died in a movie that was set up for him to die, not with the original cast memmbers on hand to mourn him, but with Jean-Luc Picard to survive him. He had no place in a movie that should have been about the new crew. No torch needed to be passed, and certainly not in that way.
In summary, I cheered, and I don't consider myself a nihilist. I made up nothing. I'm a Trek fan, but not blindly devoted to all things Trek.
So what's the incentive for a film maker to produce a movie that's entertaining to you? Your good will? What's the incentive for big business to develop DVD technology if nobody chooses to pay for the media?
If you kid yourself into believing otherwise, you're just a thief rationalizing away your crime because your not likely to be punished. Sure, some rich man is making big money off of a movie, but a horde of average Joes out there are being paid to work on the production, all the way down to the people who package and distribute the discs. You're stealing from those people too. Try rationalizing that away.
As long as Paramount can suck money out of the franchise in its current form, it's doomed to blandness. If after 20 years, Paramount decides to take another shot at the show, they just might get it right. More likely, however, they'll try to go right back to the current formula, hoping that it seems new and fresh to an audience that looks back at any Trek with nostalgia.
With any luck, however, they'll sell the franchise rights to some small production house and let them rebuild the franchise from the ground up. Star Trek really needs the freedom to exist without the pressure to gather the massive audience that can fill Paramount's coffers. That seems like the only way anyone will be able to afford to take risks with content of the show.
Hopefully, they'll sell it to the producers of Red Dwarf. I'm watching it for the first time now on my local PBS - what a blast!;)
You're not the only one who wanted to cheer when Kirk passed on. Half of the theater did when I went to see the film. As much as I enjoy the original series and Shatner's portrayal of a young headstrong Kirk, Shatner has done a lousy job with the middle-aged and geriatric versions of Kirk.
The only thing that would have been better than killing the Kirk character would have been to avoid basing a film around the character in the first place.
Feh. Coke is a useful carrier of caffeine. When I want something to cool me down, I go for plain water or Gatorade. As long as water and Gatorade companies don't follow suit, I'm fine!;)
I'd like to add to your rant. I've been doing embedded development for 4 years now. The first two were in a Solaris and HP/UX cross-development environment, using commercial tools (logic analyzers, emulators, debuggers) that were very UNIX-centric. The last two have been spent using Windows-based debuggers, apparently because the market demands this. I've seen new test equipment (namely, a Tektronix logic analyzer than runs Win95 with 16MB of RAM). Can you imagine dropping tens of thousands of dollars for a high-speed instrument that's going to crash twice a day? The windows debugger crashes left and right.
What B.S.! If our revision control and compiler tools weren't on solaris, and if our host environment weren't POSIX-based, I'd go nuts! The tools vendors out there seem to have got half of the problem solved - Solaris and HP/UX hardware have traditionally been too expensive. I like tools that run on PCs. I just wish that the PCs were running Linux! It's not that I have anything against m$ft (right), it's just that I want the tools to work without crashing!
Luckily, Sun seems to be responding with hardware that's nearly as cheap as PC hardware. If the vendors don't stop supporting Solaris, there might be hope for sane development envrionments!
Still, I'd love to see more Linux support out there in the embedded cross-development world.
Bad moderation here - the parent post isn't really offtopic. This RTOS is being marketed for "portable gadgets with high-speed internet access".
When you consider that the new PCS wireless phones in the U.S. top out at 14.4Kbit/s, and that the digital phones in use in the rest of the world are at the same speed, the question has it's merits.
What good is handheld if you have to plug it into a wall to get high-speed access? To me, not very good at all.
The thing is, there are a whole bunch of new standards out there for other ways of connecting handhelds to networks at high speeds.
There's a standard called "Bluetooth" that uses cheap low-power radio transceivers much smaller than cell phones to connect devices to > 1Mbit/s local networks. At that point, you're only one router away from the internet.
The 3rd generation cellular standards are defining data rates over 100Kbit/s as well for use by normal users. The telcos all see this as a great way of getting people to keep the wireless networks at capacity (i.e., making them money).
The moral of the story is: Internet connected handhelds are coming, and they even be useful. It's just going to take a few years as all of the infrastructure comes together.
I flat out agree with the point on wasting space with useless code. I think most of the "Linux Rules" posts come from folks who don't really have a grip on the memory constraints of PDA. To be plainfully explicit, here's my take on it:
The sum of the RAM and ROM that you need to run some of the tiny Linux projects I've heard about is on the order of 8-16MByte, with no applications to speak of. If a PDA vendor can cram everything he needs into half of that, including applications, and jack up his profit by $10 (a rabbit from my hat) on each of the million units he plans to sell...
You get the idea.
That said, I'm looking down the road a few years, when handhelds get beefier hardware because the 8MByte systems only cost $0.50 less than the 32MByte systems...
The thing is, sooner or later someone's going to figure how to cram enough MIPS and memory into your PDA to let it do more than it does today, and to do it well.
I agree, "high-speed Internet Access" is pretty useless on today's PDA's, but sooner or later, you'll be wondering why anyone would ever want to carry around a brick of a laptop when a PDA does everything that it can do.
That said, I definitely wouldn't buy a PDA for the purpose of internet access for a while. (Now, when the 3rd generation cellular systems with 155Mbit links begin shipping, I'll start thinking about it;)
I don't know if I understand this comment. A lot of ASIC vendors put ROM and/or RAM on the ASIC along with the microcontroller. Unless you're talking about some of the interesting new "threaded processor architectures", people have been storing RTOS's in on-chip memory for a long time now.
The real question is, why do you want the OS on the microcontroller itself? If it costs you more to make a big ASIC with embedded memory to get the job done than it does to make a small ASIC with external memory, your company will go with the cheap external memory. Otherwise, your company will go with the on-chip memory.
However you choose, there's nothing magical about putting the RTOS on the chip. If you've enough RAM/ROM, it works, otherwise it doesn't.
My guess is that there's some manager in microsoft who "doesn't quite trust this key thing" and thinks that having two keys is a good idea, in case the first one "breaks.";)
Public review of an algorithm (even if it's only within Microsoft) probably would have cleaned that up. My guess is that the addition of the second key came AFTER the review (if there was a review in the first place).
The article did mention something about msft's "Active Directory". Maybe they've got a protocol for dealing with it tied into the DDNS thing that effectively "embraces and extends" DDNS?
The whole DM access & host your own server thing is the clincher for me. My old gaming friends are spread thin across the entire country. Logging onto a lagging public server for a non-DMable game like Diablo pales before sitting around in a room with friends, playing with pencil, paper, and dice, and having a blast.
Hopefully this model will come closer to capturing the pen & paper games than the other so-called "RPG" computer games out there.
The article is pretty sketchy regarding the "research" that shows that the "geek image" is passing. Most likely, the research is someone noticing that "jet" rhymes with "net".
Slashdot Mirror
Luckily for me, it's only 10:15PM local. There's more to making and selling media than the original production crew.
While producers and skilled crew get paid irrespective of volume, people who package, transport, and sell the media get paid based on individual sales. Every theft of media means that there is less need of people in this chain, and accumulated theft has a cost measured in warehouse workers' jobs and wages.
Everything has a cost. You can waste time lamenting that fact, or get on with the business of being productive. The economy works because people buy and sell. People who steal bypass the economy, and that hurts real people. It even hurts normal people who work normal jobs and make normal wages.
By the way, your definition of a "good" film maker is a little egalitarian. Even the "good" film makers, who make so-called art-house and other small films, need to pay the bills. I believe that a film maker can desire to entertain and desire to make a livlihood, or even get stinking rich if the opportunity presents itself. Those are real concerns that real people have. I prefer these motivations to people (like you and me) guessing what the proper motivations should be.
In any case, if you propose to steal media from any producer, big or small, it's still theft. If a film maker chooses to license his work for free, that's his choice. Not yours nor mine, however. Pay for what you use. If you don't want to pay, don't use.
Lobbying is not the same as law. You've got time :)
Why is IP an abomination? Your argument doesn't hold for physical things. Why is IP different?
When you justify theft of IP with "that's life", consider that others would justify their theft of all your worldly possessions with the same argumet. Is their argument valid? In an a society without ethics, yes. But in an ethical society, both arguments are invalid.
The solution is simple, then. Only view/take 40 year old media!
I was wondering when you'd get around to saying that you are only playing Devil's Advocate!
Please re-read my post. I said that Shatner did a poor job with the middle-aged version of Kirk. I did not say that a middle-aged character or actor is a bad thing. Shatner's middle-aged Kirk is boring. Stewart's older Picard is not. The movie didn't need Shatner to carry it, but some itchy movie execs decided that it had to play the Kirk card while it had a chance to.
A large portion of the theater did in fact cheer. Half is a reasonable estimate - I did not count. The cheering was loud and not directional. You can call this nihilism.
I'm a huge Trek fan, though pehaps not a "Trekker" by your definition. I've been a huge fan since I was a kid, after the original series but before the "Next Generation". When I was young, I read Trek novels by the dozen looking for a Star Trek fix. I still look forward to a future as bright as Trek. I think most science fiction fans like the way that future looks. The problem is that too many Trek fans treat any story handed down by Paramount as a great thing, without looking at it on it's own merits. Likewise, blind devotion to Shatner's performances seems to be a trait shared by your class of Trekker as well.
My objective opinion, and the opinion of most people who watched T.J. Hooker and the rest of Shatner's post-original series work is that the man is a poor actor. He was a perfect fit for the original scripts - brash and arrogant. But the time had passed for the Kirk character, played by Shatner, to retire. He doesn't portray brash and arrogant very well now that he doesn't move around so well. Many of the hand-to-hand combat scenes he's been involved in have been comical. His acting is comical, irrespective of his age. Patrick Stewart can portray an older Captain with style. Connery could do it. Any number of older actors could carry off the role. Shatner, however, can't.
I mourned the passing of Spock. I've mourned the passing of DeForest Kelley. But asking me to mourn a character, who died in a poorly constructed scene in a less than compelling movie is a little much. One of the few things that I agree with the original article's author on is that the Kirk character deserved a better death. The way he went was just fine - but he died in a movie that was set up for him to die, not with the original cast memmbers on hand to mourn him, but with Jean-Luc Picard to survive him. He had no place in a movie that should have been about the new crew. No torch needed to be passed, and certainly not in that way.
In summary, I cheered, and I don't consider myself a nihilist. I made up nothing. I'm a Trek fan, but not blindly devoted to all things Trek.
Cool. I guess it's time to read up on 3DNow! and see if I can hack on this code a little. My K6-2 266 badly wants to play DVD!
So what's the incentive for a film maker to produce a movie that's entertaining to you? Your good will? What's the incentive for big business to develop DVD technology if nobody chooses to pay for the media?
If you kid yourself into believing otherwise, you're just a thief rationalizing away your crime because your not likely to be punished. Sure, some rich man is making big money off of a movie, but a horde of average Joes out there are being paid to work on the production, all the way down to the people who package and distribute the discs. You're stealing from those people too. Try rationalizing that away.
I guess I should follow this up with another question: Can anyone elaborate on the licensing required for DVD?
I noticed that the author mentioned that some of the DVD formats had to be cracked. Does this mean that the software is infringing on someone's IP?
As long as Paramount can suck money out of the franchise in its current form, it's doomed to blandness. If after 20 years, Paramount decides to take another shot at the show, they just might get it right. More likely, however, they'll try to go right back to the current formula, hoping that it seems new and fresh to an audience that looks back at any Trek with nostalgia.
;)
With any luck, however, they'll sell the franchise rights to some small production house and let them rebuild the franchise from the ground up. Star Trek really needs the freedom to exist without the pressure to gather the massive audience that can fill Paramount's coffers. That seems like the only way anyone will be able to afford to take risks with content of the show.
Hopefully, they'll sell it to the producers of Red Dwarf. I'm watching it for the first time now on my local PBS - what a blast!
You're not the only one who wanted to cheer when Kirk passed on. Half of the theater did when I went to see the film. As much as I enjoy the original series and Shatner's portrayal of a young headstrong Kirk, Shatner has done a lousy job with the middle-aged and geriatric versions of Kirk.
The only thing that would have been better than killing the Kirk character would have been to avoid basing a film around the character in the first place.
Feh. Coke is a useful carrier of caffeine. When I want something to cool me down, I go for plain water or Gatorade. As long as water and Gatorade companies don't follow suit, I'm fine! ;)
I'd like to add to your rant. I've been doing embedded development for 4 years now. The first two were in a Solaris and HP/UX cross-development environment, using commercial tools (logic analyzers, emulators, debuggers) that were very UNIX-centric. The last two have been spent using Windows-based debuggers, apparently because the market demands this. I've seen new test equipment (namely, a Tektronix logic analyzer than runs Win95 with 16MB of RAM). Can you imagine dropping tens of thousands of dollars for a high-speed instrument that's going to crash twice a day? The windows debugger crashes left and right.
What B.S.! If our revision control and compiler tools weren't on solaris, and if our host environment weren't POSIX-based, I'd go nuts! The tools vendors out there seem to have got half of the problem solved - Solaris and HP/UX hardware have traditionally been too expensive. I like tools that run on PCs. I just wish that the PCs were running Linux! It's not that I have anything against m$ft (right), it's just that I want the tools to work without crashing!
Luckily, Sun seems to be responding with hardware that's nearly as cheap as PC hardware. If the vendors don't stop supporting Solaris, there might be hope for sane development envrionments!
Still, I'd love to see more Linux support out there in the embedded cross-development world.
Bad moderation here - the parent post isn't really offtopic. This RTOS is being marketed for "portable gadgets with high-speed internet access".
When you consider that the new PCS wireless phones in the U.S. top out at 14.4Kbit/s, and that the digital phones in use in the rest of the world are at the same speed, the question has it's merits.
What good is handheld if you have to plug it into a wall to get high-speed access? To me, not very good at all.
The thing is, there are a whole bunch of new standards out there for other ways of connecting handhelds to networks at high speeds.
There's a standard called "Bluetooth" that uses cheap low-power radio transceivers much smaller than cell phones to connect devices to > 1Mbit/s local networks. At that point, you're only one router away from the internet.
The 3rd generation cellular standards are defining data rates over 100Kbit/s as well for use by normal users. The telcos all see this as a great way of getting people to keep the wireless networks at capacity (i.e., making them money).
The moral of the story is: Internet connected handhelds are coming, and they even be useful. It's just going to take a few years as all of the infrastructure comes together.
I flat out agree with the point on wasting space with useless code. I think most of the "Linux Rules" posts come from folks who don't really have a grip on the memory constraints of PDA. To be plainfully explicit, here's my take on it:
The sum of the RAM and ROM that you need to run some of the tiny Linux projects I've heard about is on the order of 8-16MByte, with no applications to speak of. If a PDA vendor can cram everything he needs into half of that, including applications, and jack up his profit by $10 (a rabbit from my hat) on each of the million units he plans to sell...
You get the idea.
That said, I'm looking down the road a few years, when handhelds get beefier hardware because the 8MByte systems only cost $0.50 less than the 32MByte systems...
The thing is, sooner or later someone's going to figure how to cram enough MIPS and memory into your PDA to let it do more than it does today, and to do it well.
;)
I agree, "high-speed Internet Access" is pretty useless on today's PDA's, but sooner or later, you'll be wondering why anyone would ever want to carry around a brick of a laptop when a PDA does everything that it can do.
That said, I definitely wouldn't buy a PDA for the purpose of internet access for a while. (Now, when the 3rd generation cellular systems with 155Mbit links begin shipping, I'll start thinking about it
I don't know if I understand this comment. A lot of ASIC vendors put ROM and/or RAM on the ASIC along with the microcontroller. Unless you're talking about some of the interesting new "threaded processor architectures", people have been storing RTOS's in on-chip memory for a long time now.
The real question is, why do you want the OS on the microcontroller itself? If it costs you more to make a big ASIC with embedded memory to get the job done than it does to make a small ASIC with external memory, your company will go with the cheap external memory. Otherwise, your company will go with the on-chip memory.
However you choose, there's nothing magical about putting the RTOS on the chip. If you've enough RAM/ROM, it works, otherwise it doesn't.
My guess is that there's some manager in microsoft who "doesn't quite trust this key thing" and thinks that having two keys is a good idea, in case the first one "breaks." ;)
Public review of an algorithm (even if it's only within Microsoft) probably would have cleaned that up. My guess is that the addition of the second key came AFTER the review (if there was a review in the first place).
The article did mention something about msft's "Active Directory". Maybe they've got a protocol for dealing with it tied into the DDNS thing that effectively "embraces and extends" DDNS?
The whole DM access & host your own server thing is the clincher for me. My old gaming friends are spread thin across the entire country. Logging onto a lagging public server for a non-DMable game like Diablo pales before sitting around in a room with friends, playing with pencil, paper, and dice, and having a blast.
Hopefully this model will come closer to capturing the pen & paper games than the other so-called "RPG" computer games out there.
The article is pretty sketchy regarding the "research" that shows that the "geek image" is passing. Most likely, the research is someone noticing that "jet" rhymes with "net".