Last week (I can't find the article yet), Slashdot had a link to a column by someone who was (in his opinion) unjustly blacklisted for hosting an easily-accessible mail server. The moment his name hit that blacklist, he became a target for what may as well be every spammer on the planet. Even though he didn't actually have an open relay (just an easily-guessed password), the incoming traffic from so many e-mail spammers effectively brought his server to its knees. Changing his domain name and IP address was the only cure.
Building a "honeypot" mail server for spammers is appealing, but could be more trouble than its worth, especially since it's more or less irreversible. I'd advice against it.
While I love everything there is to love about open source (code and ideas), I kind of worry when I read how successful all these new Bayesian/Grahamian filtering techniques work.
Not being a coder or statistician myself, I'm left wondering if the spammers can exploit it for a workaround. Is there something "built in" to these filtering techniques that can be used by spammers to effectively circumvent them?
As you point out, rape is a horrible crime. So how can it be just that someone who commits rape will spend less time in prison than someone who copied (not stole) some digital bits?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't 117 months (avg. rape sentence sassigned) larger than 33 months (this person's warez sentence assigned)?
It always boils down to two things for them, money and re-election. The whole thing makes me sick.
I really don't see why. The system is designed that way on purpose; the politicians' desire to get campaign money and re-elections motivates them to follow their constituents' wishes.
Granted it's not an ideal moral situation, but so what? That's what democracy is for: to ensure politicians follow the desires of the people they represent. If we could count on them making the right and moral decisions all the time, we'd have a monarchy instead.
"The Whitney has put online an exhibit where viewers are encouraged to examine the source code of the program that generates the art, despite the fact that the majority of viewers have no idea what the code means. Projects use Java, C, Perl, Lingo, and VB."
Note that in the above quote, "the program" should be replaced with "the artists using the program" and the headline "open source art" should be replaced with "open source software tools for creating art".
The writer seems to be implying that the program is generating digital modern art without any human intervention whatsoever, which is both silly and wrong.
...that there are only five basic plots worth writing about in existence. They boil down to Romance (good person meets true love), Redemption (bad man turns good), Justice (good person is elevated), Tragedy (good person is fallen), and Quest (good person saves everything). Whether the person in question is in conflict with one other, many others, nature, or himself, they all come down to that.
So "Star Trek" tends to be formulaic. So what? So's everything else that's ever been written; it's a matter of how well it's written that draws or repels us, which is why "The Wrath of Khan" is so popular and "Generations" is less so.
It just became apparent that anything the 'franchise' does is just drying [sic] to squeeze a little more milk out of the cash cow. It's hardly good science fiction anymore.
"Space opera," not "science fiction." The latter is something Star Trek never was, nor ever seriously intended on being.
Ok, aside from it not using the PCs CPU horsepower, how is this altogether different from a really long set of A/V cables? (or a 900mhz broadcaster?)
Two things: you don't need to worry about installing a TV-output card on your computer, and you don't need to figure out how to run the cables from your second-floor office to your first-floor living room.
Not everybody's a geek with a studio apartment, you know. Some of us actually like to pay a few bucks have things neat, tidy and simplified.
I'm sure you'll be able to use your *own* music and media as you see fit. That's not what DRM will be about, though. It'll be about downloading video and music over the Internet and not being able to record or redistribute it.
Now think about that for a second, and you'll see what Intel clearly has in mind for this thing. Sure, it'd be cool to play your MP3 collection on your home stereo using this device. (I think Intel would be idiots to not include in this box some sort of MP3 jukebox browser controllable from your television.) But that's not what this will be intended for -- it's for downloading video over the Internet and playing it on your television.
Right now, that's a bit of a pipe dream. Televisions aren't connected to the Internet without a lot of customization, and computer screen are either too small or too poorly placed to be useful for viewing. Plus you have to set everything up with a mouse instead of a remote control. This box could (emphasis on "could") solve all that, by letting you download video on your computer and have this remote-controlled box pick it up for your television, all automatically and wirelessly, so your computer doesn't even need to be in the same room of your house.
Don't worry about DRM affecting your ability to play your own media; in this case, at least, it'll only affect your ability to play somebody else's media which you downloaded, with the understanding that it's not yours to keep.
Well, just today, Slashdot posted an article about a forthcoming 320GB hard drive using, gosh darnit, aforementioned technologies. Is that good enough for you?
Read the article, man. They expect it to take five years for this technology to produce something you can buy at the store. By then you'll have forgotten about this story completely, and your illusion of ideas never producing products will be preserved.
I'd pick the DVD. They'll have to drop the price a LOT to compete with brick-and-mortar rental store.
Why? You're also paying for the convenience of downloading the movie over broadband without ever leaving your home, remember. I frequently pay NetFlix more money than I would at Blockbuster, just so I can get anime DVDs the stores don't carry and have them delivered right to my home.
Over at Everything2, in the two and a half years it's existed, we've had a few permanent departures or deaths of well-known members of the community. Now, E2 isn't anything like an MMPORG, unless you consider the subjective assembly of a encyclopedia of culture a "game".
But the community is solid there, and an essential part of E2. A special subset of the "nodespace" is carved out just for that community to recognize itself. Gatherings take place in cities large and small so that regulars and irregulars can meet face-to-face. People who stop contributing to the database entirely sometimes stick around for the friendships.
So when a regular needs to leave the site for good, or we learn one has died recently, even those who didn't know him or her closely are affected. Homenodes and daylogs suddenly fill with memories of the person, or at the very least an acknowledgement of his or her contributions, both of knowledge and friendship. A "virtual funeral" wouldn't work there, or at least it wouldn't work the same way. It's more like an unofficial wake. I think that if the Slashdot editorial pool suffered a similar loss, we'd all gather in one forum to do the same thing.
Things like this are good to record, and to pass around. It lets people know that online community is still community, that friends exist in places where we may never meet them. Many will look at things like this and find it disturbing or unnatural; I'd argue that the opposite is true.
I'm forced to agree. When I moved into my first apartment, Ikea was a good way to get new and moderately stylish furniture for not a lot of money.
Once I got their stuff unpacked and ready to assemble, I was truly impressed by the instructions inside -- no words, no writing that wasn't legally necessary at all. They used perspective illustrations and nothing else, and managed to successfully convey exactly how to assemble the product, including what tools to use, with only that. Solved the international language problem completely, as well as the lesser-known possibility that your customer is actually illiterate.
All their products are this way, in my experience. Bottom line: if you take the time and thought to make the instructions clear, and minimize the amount of assembly actually needed, you won't need "smart chips" to beep at when you're doing it backwards.
"Many years ago Adobe anticipated the shift to electronic documents. At that time, we obtained the embedding rights from our font partners necessary to permit the creation of electronic documents," said Jim Heeger, senior vice president, cross media products....
Adobe believes these claims are being made to gain ITC and Agfa leverage in the contractual disputes. Adobe strongly disputes this claim and is asking the court to rule that there is no violation of the DMCA.
What this says to me is that Adobe licensed the fonts, intending to distribute them in electronic documents, and ITC/Afga didn't foresee that, and now they want more money for it, threatening to use the DMCA where it doesn't apply.
The Slashdot headline was sensationalist and misleading. I can't see how ITC/Afga could argue that the DMCA should even apply here.
Not only does Prince feel like he has 2 write every sentence in primitive 133t-speak, he does it using Microsoft Word as well. Oy.
It's not exactly great journalism to begin with, but here's a courtesy translation for people who know how to spell:
======================
Something happened on the way to the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started "converging" and "shareholder value" became far more important than customer service and respect for company employees ever managed to be. Compensation packages for company executives hit the stratosphere--while holding them accountable for their company's results became nearly impossible.
These executives are indeed very naïve if they think that people haven't noticed.
People are noticing that something isn't quite right--that something is indeed very wrong. After a decade during which the stock market gained apparent respectability as a legitimate, sensible form of investing, the recent slew of huge corporate scandals reveals that it is still what it has always been: a sick place where neurotic, puerile gamblers get their kicks off the backs of millions of "anonymous" workers and individuals, who have no control over what happens to their hard-earned retirement savings.
Yet this is the place that most company executives feel is much more important to watch than the actual people for whom they produce their goods and services. This is the place where the fate of thousands of employees is decided every day by people staring at computer monitors showing ever-changing, meaningless lists of numbers and charts. And if you happen to personally hold shares in a company that has just announced that it is "restructuring" in order to improve its bottom-line and thus increase its "shareholder value", don't kid yourself: When the company is talking about "shareholders", it's not talking about you and your measly couple of thousands of shares. It's only talking about big shareholders--i.e. other companies that own a more significant share of its market value.
This is a world where "hostile takeovers" and government-approved "mergers" are feeding a never-ending cycle of fewer and fewer executives wielding more and more power on a multinational scale. Soon enough, the "World Company" and George Orwell's 1984 will no longer be the stuff of satire or fiction--but prophetic descriptions of a very real "New World Order" gradually unfolding before are eyes.
A Little History
Let's start with a simple list: America Online, Time, Life, Warner Bros., Fortune, Elektra, Sports Illustrated, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Cinemax, Entertainment Weekly, New Line Cinema, In Style, Warner/Chappell Music, Time Warner Cable, WBN, ICQ, Warner Music Group, Netscape, People, Reprise, Rhino, Atlantic, WEA, TNT, MapQuest, WinAmp, In Demand, Erato, Moviefone, Road Runner, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (AOL Time Warner).
And another one: Universal Music Group, Verve, Nathan, Canal+, Impulse!, Cegetel, USA Networks, Decca, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Barclay, Armand Colin, L'Express, Universal Studios, Larousse, Sierra, MP3.com, MCA Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cineplex, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Vivendi Universal).
And yet another one: Disney, ABC, ESPN, Hyperion, Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, A&E, The History Channel, E! Entertainment, RTL-to, Buena Vista, Mr. Showbiz, Wall of Sound, Mammoth Records, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Walt Disney).
Need we say more? See for yourself... There's already only 7 of these corporate giants in total--and how long will it be before there are even fewer?
It all began innocently enough. Young entrepreneurs in the early 20th century started up new companies with a mix of creative ambition and business acumen. Then these companies grew bigger and bigger, and whatever entrepreneurial vision was present at their birth became more and more diluted and less and less relevant. Then corporate accountants suggested merging with or taking over other companies--and it all became an all-too-real game of Monopoly.
Then the Internet and "new technologies" came about, and the accountants' next big idea was convergence--i.e. the merging of "content" providers and "access" providers in order to control everything from the inception of a "cultural product" to its ultimate consumption by the unsuspecting masses.
The Art of Manipulation
It is easy to guess what got lost along the way... Creativity. Artistry. Independence. Critical objectivity. Uncontrolled access. The ability to "break through" cultural barriers. Cultural diversity. Innovation. Freedom. Real music. Real art.
Juggling between art and commerce is a delicate balance at the best of times... and these are definitely NOT the best of times.
So now we have a so-called magazine "reporting" on the latest new blockbuster movie with a 10-page, full-color spread--as if the reporters weren't aware that the same company that produced the movie also owns their magazine... Yes, this is still called a "magazine". These are still called "reporters". And this is still called "journalism"... And yet millions of people are gleefully letting themselves be had.
Maybe we should stop calling this "art", or even "entertainment" for that matter--for what is so entertaining about being involved in a collective hallucination? Maybe we should start calling it what it really is, i.e. unfettered MANIPULATION.
In 1995, Clear Channel Communications owned 43 radio stations. Now it owns more than 1,200--and its army of so-called "independent promoters" are letting legalized payola dictate what you get (or rather don't get) to hear on the radio.
Everywhere you look, the story is the same: more and more money, less and less choice, less and less freedom of access, fewer and fewer companies. How far will this have to go before a big shift in people's attitude causes this commercial hubris to collapse onto itself and implode?
Power Struggles
The first major cracks in this highly concentrated corporate world have, of course, already begun to appear, in what has been making the headlines in the past few months, i.e. shady accounting practices involving enormous amounts of money--enough to shake the economy of the most powerful nation of the world. And the hysterical stock markets have of course been swayed by this news, at the expense of tens of thousands of workers worldwide and millions of small investors who thought that their holdings had nowhere to go but up.
The value of AOL Time Warner's stock is now a quarter of what it was at the time of the merger between AOL and Time Warner, and this decline forced the company to take a $54 billion writedown earlier this year. And now it to is being investigated about its accounting practices. The story at Vivendi Universal is similar. Disney shares are near an 8-year low. And there is little doubt in people's mind that the problems are similar everywhere, in every big conglomerate that has become utterly out of touch with the reality of everyday work and the essence of human creativity.
In addition, people also realize all to well that governments have little--if any--power left when it comes to regulating these multinational monsters. Governments have much more power when it comes to regulating the lives of ordinary, law-abiding citizens--and they use and abuse this power as a way to distract people's attention from how much control the conglomerates have over what we get to hear, watch, read, eat, drink, buy, and generally experience as "free" citizens of the world.
One of the areas where this struggle is most acutely felt is, of course, the online world--a sprawling, anarchic community that is still in its infancy and whose exponential development in the last decade took everyone by surprise. And nothing exemplifies the struggle between government, big business, and individual rights better than the highly controversial issue of "peer-to-peer" file sharing and its many digital variations.
A Nation of Thieves?
Will the media/technology giants recover from the latest stock market slump? They probably will--but at what cost? In all likelihood, the cost will be more "restructuring", more layoffs, more executive shuffles and golden parachutes, causing even further alienation from their own employees and customers. And this, in turn, will further encourage the very behaviors that they claim are illegal and want punished by criminal law--all the while preserving their own impunity as they continue to carelessly flounder a capital that they do not own.
Napster may have gone bankrupt and become a closed chapter in the Internet's short history, but its death is by no means a reflection of a decline in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, quite the contrary. If anything, P2P has grown even further--but since it's becoming totally decentralized, there is no easy way to measure its significance.
What is for sure, however, is that, in spite of its many claims to the contrary, the recording industry has yet to provide evidence that P2P is actually detrimental to music making as an artistic endeavor, and even as a commercial venture. It is worth remembering, for example, that sales of music CDs actually increased when Napster was at its peak, and declined after Napster was abruptly shut down. Even economists who thought that file sharing "should be" hurting the recording industry are now expressing their doubts, based on what they say is simply not happening.
More importantly, many well-respected artists have sided with Internet users against corporate greed and actually use the Internet to promote alternative ways to distribute their music and reach out to a non-captive, legitimate audience of authentic music lovers.
This does not mean, of course, that all forms of file sharing are equally innocuous. There is little doubt that, when people use the Internet as a substitute for radio, i.e. as a way to discover new music, it can help promote the work of artists. But when a young junior high school student downloads tracks off the Internet and makes CD-R copies of them that he then sells for $5 in the schoolyard, it hurts sales of the original CD and it's disrespectful of the artist--regardless of how small a cut of the actual CD price the artist actually gets after all the executives and the middlemen in the recording industry have taken their piece of the pie.
Still, can we really go as far as to say that digital technology is creating a "nation of thieves" who no longer recognize the just value of art?
Protecting the Product
It is worth noting, to begin with, that the recording industry itself is far from having distinguished itself by recognizing the true value of art. Instead, it has consistently fought to be allowed to deprive many artists of their most fundamental rights. It has allowed popular artists to go bankrupt even though their albums were selling by the millions. It has reduced the artists' cut of the album sales pie to a ridiculously small portion of the actual income generated by these sales. It has consistently pushed commercial musical products at the expense of real musical artistry.
This hardly entitles the recording industry to lecture anyone about recognizing the just value of art.
It is also interesting to note that the cultural products that seem to be the primary concern of the industry giants are those that are already the most popular ones, and that things such as CD copy protection are being experimentally used mostly with items that will sell millions regardless of whether they are copy-protected or not.
So are most citizens really being completely disrespectful of the value of art and the need to provide appropriate compensation to the artists for their works? We've said it before and we'll say it again: the rise of digital technology and peer-to-peer file sharing has little to do with people's intrinsic respect for art and artists, and everything to do with the cynical attitude of big industry conglomerates, which have consistently pushed for more and more commercial, highly profitable products at the expense of authentic art and respect for artists.
If people do not feel enough guilt to prevent them from making digital copies of the latest episode of a popular TV show or hit pop song, it is precisely because the industry giants have succeeded in making these works purely commercial products, with little or no consideration for their actual artistic value. It is precisely because these companies have been consistently promoting commercial products at the expense of artistic works.
The fact that actual works of art still manage to seep thru the cracks of this huge profit-driven industry does not change anything about the fundamental equations that have been driving and still drive the industry, today more than ever--i.e. that art = money, artists = money-makers, and art lovers = consumers.
As a simple example of how little music is valued as an art form by the industry, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of music ever recorded is currently available--and, of this 20 percent, what proportion is actually readily available to music lovers? What proportion is not the current 100 top albums on the SoundScan charts?
It simply appears that the instinctive reaction of the lover of art (be it music, TV shows, movies, or other forms of art) is such that, if the industry has no respect for his or her identity as an appreciator of art, then he or she has no reason to have any respect for the industry as a purveyor of art. By making digital copies of so-called cultural products, many people are not demonstrating their lack of respect for art and for artists, but are expressing--consciously or not--their frustration with the way the entertainment industry profits from art at the expense of both art makers and art lovers.
The consumers of the commercial products of the entertainment industry are only as cynical as the industry has deliberately made them, by dumbing down their products, by exploiting artists, by making profit-driven choices and decisions, and by providing their own kind with obscene compensations and legal impunity that are completely out of touch with the real world of ordinary people.
Don't Get It Twisted
That being said, the whole debate about file sharing and digital piracy is, most of all, a convenient way for industry conglomerates to deflect attention from their own shady business practices and dubious alliances.
for example, it is worth noting that the Warner Music Group is heavily involved in the recording industry's fight against piracy, but that its own parent company, AOL Time Warner, is directly benefiting from file sharing, as a provider of Internet access to millions of Internet users worldwide. When AOL Time Warner repeatedly flaunts its ever-increasing number of members (34 million and counting) and the billions of hours that they spend online, is there any doubt that a good part of this growth involves the "unlawful" exchange of computer files at the detriment of recording artists?
In other words, the real "thieves" are not necessarily those that are currently getting the blame... Rather than a "nation of thieves", the current situation looks, to us, much more like an "elite of thieves".
And the real victims of this thievery are very much, as usual, the recording artists themselves, who will never get their share of AOL's profits as an Internet access provider, even though these profits are partly based on the content that they originally provided. And the real victims also include authentic music lovers, who already suffer from restricted access to the full range of music that they would like to explore, and who are also likely to suffer from technological restrictions that will soon prevent them from making legitimate copies of the works that they have lawfully purchased for their own enjoyment.
Make no mistake: the entertainment industry (including TV, movies and music) might be big, but the technology industry is even bigger. Remember that it is AOL that bought Time Warner, and not the other way around. Remember that Sony makes much more money in electronics and computer equipment than it does in record sales...
If the technology industry ends up implementing technological limitations that prevent users from lawfully enjoying their purchases--as it is threatening to do--the beneficiaries will not be the artists whose works are thus being allegedly "protected". And it will certainly not be the art lovers whose enjoyment of art will thus be restricted. No, it will simply be, once again... the industry conglomerates, who will have yet another generation of incompatible media and devices to sell to us under the guise of "technological improvement".
Conclusion
The technology and entertainment industries are simply to big for us to expect any overnight changes. The industry giants will continue to do their best to deflect people's attention away from their own wrongdoings and to blame falling profits and commercial failures on piracy at the same time that they are encouraging their customers to adopt the very technologies that make piracy possible. Artists will continue to be lured by unrealistic promises and contracts with big numbers and lots of small print.
How long, however, before a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, to leave the system for good? How long before a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and are careful not to get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long before a critical mass of art lovers get together to provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the existing system artistically irrelevant?
We know that the movie industry doesn't have the "problems" music does -- Macrovision can be easily circumvented, and copying from cable and satellite TV picks up where that leaves off. And yet people continue to buy and rent and watch movies at the box office, and the industry continues to do well despite piracy. Software isn't all that different: good programs and games continue to sell well despite the availability of "warez" and casual copying.
What then, in your opinion, are the significant differences between video and music or software? Why is digital piracy such a "problem" for them when the others have successfully made money despite it?
Apple is currently a hardware company. There's no reason they should have to stay one forever.
Think of what a fully-compatible x86 release of OS X could mean for Apple: massive consumer adoption. A new copy of WinXP costs $200, but a new copy of Jaguar costs $70 less. Apple gets to benefit from the "Megahertz Myth" instantly as non-techy computer buyers run their OS on 2.4GHz Pentiums. Consumers who honestly don't care about getting the latest games for their PC can be convinced that all the commercial software they really want is OS X compatible, and get a good package bundle to prove it.
And of course, this only means Apple gets out of the hardware business if they refuse to make Apple computers with x86 processors. They can do that, you know, and people who have come to trust in Apple's reliable hardware and slick design (think the hinged door which you can open while the computer is still running, not to mention the G4's unique external style) will continue to buy Apple's computers, knowing that any Apple software will be designed to work first and best on Apple machines and Apple drives.
At least half the reason Apple hasn't switched to PC hardware is the gazillions of configurations they'd have to support, something even Microsoft has trouble keeping up with. But if OS X gets widespread, or at least wider spread, Apple can start to count on third-party vendors developing the drivers themselves, just as Microsoft does.
Apple will lose money from the hardware, of course. But it's possible that the widespread adoption of a new, more usable Mac OS will be worth it to them.
The poster, of course, is at fault. "Animatrix" is from "animated Matrix", not "anime Matrix". But clearly the fact that all the animators, except for Square USA, are Japanese should count for something.
"The Matrix" is a huge hit with non-geeks as well as geeks, of course, and the Warchowski brothers put this video together because they're anime fans as well. Anything, IMO, that brings "animation to the masses" in the USA is a Good Thing. Hopefully there'll be some previews of each studio's other projects on the DVD to direct buyers to other anime offerings by the same folks.
Anything that brings down the cost of "Cowboy Bebop" DVDs for me is worth doing.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
That begs the question: what has been the most long-lived virus/worm/trojan so far?
That's easy -- MAKE MONEY FAST!
This need not even impact your own bandwidth.
Last week (I can't find the article yet), Slashdot had a link to a column by someone who was (in his opinion) unjustly blacklisted for hosting an easily-accessible mail server. The moment his name hit that blacklist, he became a target for what may as well be every spammer on the planet. Even though he didn't actually have an open relay (just an easily-guessed password), the incoming traffic from so many e-mail spammers effectively brought his server to its knees. Changing his domain name and IP address was the only cure.
Building a "honeypot" mail server for spammers is appealing, but could be more trouble than its worth, especially since it's more or less irreversible. I'd advice against it.
While I love everything there is to love about open source (code and ideas), I kind of worry when I read how successful all these new Bayesian/Grahamian filtering techniques work.
Not being a coder or statistician myself, I'm left wondering if the spammers can exploit it for a workaround. Is there something "built in" to these filtering techniques that can be used by spammers to effectively circumvent them?
As you point out, rape is a horrible crime. So how can it be just that someone who commits rape will spend less time in prison than someone who copied (not stole) some digital bits?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't 117 months (avg. rape sentence sassigned) larger than 33 months (this person's warez sentence assigned)?
It always boils down to two things for them, money and re-election. The whole thing makes me sick.
I really don't see why. The system is designed that way on purpose; the politicians' desire to get campaign money and re-elections motivates them to follow their constituents' wishes.
Granted it's not an ideal moral situation, but so what? That's what democracy is for: to ensure politicians follow the desires of the people they represent. If we could count on them making the right and moral decisions all the time, we'd have a monarchy instead.
"The Whitney has put online an exhibit where viewers are encouraged to examine the source code of the program that generates the art, despite the fact that the majority of viewers have no idea what the code means. Projects use Java, C, Perl, Lingo, and VB."
Note that in the above quote, "the program" should be replaced with "the artists using the program" and the headline "open source art" should be replaced with "open source software tools for creating art".
The writer seems to be implying that the program is generating digital modern art without any human intervention whatsoever, which is both silly and wrong.
Of course, this depends on your book. Ronald Tobias argues that there are only 20 Master Plots instead of 36:
...that there are only five basic plots worth writing about in existence. They boil down to Romance (good person meets true love), Redemption (bad man turns good), Justice (good person is elevated), Tragedy (good person is fallen), and Quest (good person saves everything). Whether the person in question is in conflict with one other, many others, nature, or himself, they all come down to that.
So "Star Trek" tends to be formulaic. So what? So's everything else that's ever been written; it's a matter of how well it's written that draws or repels us, which is why "The Wrath of Khan" is so popular and "Generations" is less so.
It just became apparent that anything the 'franchise' does is just drying [sic] to squeeze a little more milk out of the cash cow. It's hardly good science fiction anymore.
"Space opera," not "science fiction." The latter is something Star Trek never was, nor ever seriously intended on being.
Ok, aside from it not using the PCs CPU horsepower, how is this altogether different from a really long set of A/V cables? (or a 900mhz broadcaster?)
Two things: you don't need to worry about installing a TV-output card on your computer, and you don't need to figure out how to run the cables from your second-floor office to your first-floor living room.
Not everybody's a geek with a studio apartment, you know. Some of us actually like to pay a few bucks have things neat, tidy and simplified.
I'm sure you'll be able to use your *own* music and media as you see fit. That's not what DRM will be about, though. It'll be about downloading video and music over the Internet and not being able to record or redistribute it.
Now think about that for a second, and you'll see what Intel clearly has in mind for this thing. Sure, it'd be cool to play your MP3 collection on your home stereo using this device. (I think Intel would be idiots to not include in this box some sort of MP3 jukebox browser controllable from your television.) But that's not what this will be intended for -- it's for downloading video over the Internet and playing it on your television.
Right now, that's a bit of a pipe dream. Televisions aren't connected to the Internet without a lot of customization, and computer screen are either too small or too poorly placed to be useful for viewing. Plus you have to set everything up with a mouse instead of a remote control. This box could (emphasis on "could") solve all that, by letting you download video on your computer and have this remote-controlled box pick it up for your television, all automatically and wirelessly, so your computer doesn't even need to be in the same room of your house.
Don't worry about DRM affecting your ability to play your own media; in this case, at least, it'll only affect your ability to play somebody else's media which you downloaded, with the understanding that it's not yours to keep.
- a bookmark organizer that dynamically sorts bookmarks based on what I've visited recently, and what order I typically visit them in
- sidebars that automatically update themselves with my favorite XML newsfeeds
- an MP3 (local or streaming) player in the sidebar or toolbar
- a two-pane FTP tool that's at least as good as the ones I use for work
Probably some of these are already under development, of course....
Yes, you can need disk space for something other than MP3, DivX, and Porn.
The next version of Microsoft Office, for instance, will probably chew up at least half this much storage space.
Well, just today, Slashdot posted an article about a forthcoming 320GB hard drive using, gosh darnit, aforementioned technologies. Is that good enough for you?
Read the article, man. They expect it to take five years for this technology to produce something you can buy at the store. By then you'll have forgotten about this story completely, and your illusion of ideas never producing products will be preserved.
I'd pick the DVD. They'll have to drop the price a LOT to compete with brick-and-mortar rental store.
Why? You're also paying for the convenience of downloading the movie over broadband without ever leaving your home, remember. I frequently pay NetFlix more money than I would at Blockbuster, just so I can get anime DVDs the stores don't carry and have them delivered right to my home.
If more people thought this way, the world would really be more freer.
;-)
As would basic grammar.
...when I first saw the subject "133MB", I was trying to figure out what "leemb" could possibly mean. Then I realized those actually were numbers.
Over at Everything2, in the two and a half years it's existed, we've had a few permanent departures or deaths of well-known members of the community. Now, E2 isn't anything like an MMPORG, unless you consider the subjective assembly of a encyclopedia of culture a "game".
But the community is solid there, and an essential part of E2. A special subset of the "nodespace" is carved out just for that community to recognize itself. Gatherings take place in cities large and small so that regulars and irregulars can meet face-to-face. People who stop contributing to the database entirely sometimes stick around for the friendships.
So when a regular needs to leave the site for good, or we learn one has died recently, even those who didn't know him or her closely are affected. Homenodes and daylogs suddenly fill with memories of the person, or at the very least an acknowledgement of his or her contributions, both of knowledge and friendship. A "virtual funeral" wouldn't work there, or at least it wouldn't work the same way. It's more like an unofficial wake. I think that if the Slashdot editorial pool suffered a similar loss, we'd all gather in one forum to do the same thing.
Things like this are good to record, and to pass around. It lets people know that online community is still community, that friends exist in places where we may never meet them. Many will look at things like this and find it disturbing or unnatural; I'd argue that the opposite is true.
I'm forced to agree. When I moved into my first apartment, Ikea was a good way to get new and moderately stylish furniture for not a lot of money.
Once I got their stuff unpacked and ready to assemble, I was truly impressed by the instructions inside -- no words, no writing that wasn't legally necessary at all. They used perspective illustrations and nothing else, and managed to successfully convey exactly how to assemble the product, including what tools to use, with only that. Solved the international language problem completely, as well as the lesser-known possibility that your customer is actually illiterate.
All their products are this way, in my experience. Bottom line: if you take the time and thought to make the instructions clear, and minimize the amount of assembly actually needed, you won't need "smart chips" to beep at when you're doing it backwards.
"Many years ago Adobe anticipated the shift to electronic documents. At that time, we obtained the embedding rights from our font partners necessary to permit the creation of electronic documents," said Jim Heeger, senior vice president, cross media products....
Adobe believes these claims are being made to gain ITC and Agfa leverage in the contractual disputes. Adobe strongly disputes this claim and is asking the court to rule that there is no violation of the DMCA.
What this says to me is that Adobe licensed the fonts, intending to distribute them in electronic documents, and ITC/Afga didn't foresee that, and now they want more money for it, threatening to use the DMCA where it doesn't apply.
The Slashdot headline was sensationalist and misleading. I can't see how ITC/Afga could argue that the DMCA should even apply here.
Not only does Prince feel like he has 2 write every sentence in primitive 133t-speak, he does it using Microsoft Word as well. Oy.
It's not exactly great journalism to begin with, but here's a courtesy translation for people who know how to spell:
======================
Something happened on the way to the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started "converging" and "shareholder value" became far more important than customer service and respect for company employees ever managed to be. Compensation packages for company executives hit the stratosphere--while holding them accountable for their company's results became nearly impossible.
These executives are indeed very naïve if they think that people haven't noticed.
People are noticing that something isn't quite right--that something is indeed very wrong. After a decade during which the stock market gained apparent respectability as a legitimate, sensible form of investing, the recent slew of huge corporate scandals reveals that it is still what it has always been: a sick place where neurotic, puerile gamblers get their kicks off the backs of millions of "anonymous" workers and individuals, who have no control over what happens to their hard-earned retirement savings.
Yet this is the place that most company executives feel is much more important to watch than the actual people for whom they produce their goods and services. This is the place where the fate of thousands of employees is decided every day by people staring at computer monitors showing ever-changing, meaningless lists of numbers and charts. And if you happen to personally hold shares in a company that has just announced that it is "restructuring" in order to improve its bottom-line and thus increase its "shareholder value", don't kid yourself: When the company is talking about "shareholders", it's not talking about you and your measly couple of thousands of shares. It's only talking about big shareholders--i.e. other companies that own a more significant share of its market value.
This is a world where "hostile takeovers" and government-approved "mergers" are feeding a never-ending cycle of fewer and fewer executives wielding more and more power on a multinational scale. Soon enough, the "World Company" and George Orwell's 1984 will no longer be the stuff of satire or fiction--but prophetic descriptions of a very real "New World Order" gradually unfolding before are eyes.
A Little History
Let's start with a simple list: America Online, Time, Life, Warner Bros., Fortune, Elektra, Sports Illustrated, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Cinemax, Entertainment Weekly, New Line Cinema, In Style, Warner/Chappell Music, Time Warner Cable, WBN, ICQ, Warner Music Group, Netscape, People, Reprise, Rhino, Atlantic, WEA, TNT, MapQuest, WinAmp, In Demand, Erato, Moviefone, Road Runner, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (AOL Time Warner).
And another one: Universal Music Group, Verve, Nathan, Canal+, Impulse!, Cegetel, USA Networks, Decca, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Barclay, Armand Colin, L'Express, Universal Studios, Larousse, Sierra, MP3.com, MCA Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cineplex, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Vivendi Universal).
And yet another one: Disney, ABC, ESPN, Hyperion, Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, A&E, The History Channel, E! Entertainment, RTL-to, Buena Vista, Mr. Showbiz, Wall of Sound, Mammoth Records, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Walt Disney).
Need we say more? See for yourself... There's already only 7 of these corporate giants in total--and how long will it be before there are even fewer?
It all began innocently enough. Young entrepreneurs in the early 20th century started up new companies with a mix of creative ambition and business acumen. Then these companies grew bigger and bigger, and whatever entrepreneurial vision was present at their birth became more and more diluted and less and less relevant. Then corporate accountants suggested merging with or taking over other companies--and it all became an all-too-real game of Monopoly.
Then the Internet and "new technologies" came about, and the accountants' next big idea was convergence--i.e. the merging of "content" providers and "access" providers in order to control everything from the inception of a "cultural product" to its ultimate consumption by the unsuspecting masses.
The Art of Manipulation
It is easy to guess what got lost along the way... Creativity. Artistry. Independence. Critical objectivity. Uncontrolled access. The ability to "break through" cultural barriers. Cultural diversity. Innovation. Freedom. Real music. Real art.
Juggling between art and commerce is a delicate balance at the best of times... and these are definitely NOT the best of times.
So now we have a so-called magazine "reporting" on the latest new blockbuster movie with a 10-page, full-color spread--as if the reporters weren't aware that the same company that produced the movie also owns their magazine... Yes, this is still called a "magazine". These are still called "reporters". And this is still called "journalism"... And yet millions of people are gleefully letting themselves be had.
Maybe we should stop calling this "art", or even "entertainment" for that matter--for what is so entertaining about being involved in a collective hallucination? Maybe we should start calling it what it really is, i.e. unfettered MANIPULATION.
In 1995, Clear Channel Communications owned 43 radio stations. Now it owns more than 1,200--and its army of so-called "independent promoters" are letting legalized payola dictate what you get (or rather don't get) to hear on the radio.
Everywhere you look, the story is the same: more and more money, less and less choice, less and less freedom of access, fewer and fewer companies. How far will this have to go before a big shift in people's attitude causes this commercial hubris to collapse onto itself and implode?
Power Struggles
The first major cracks in this highly concentrated corporate world have, of course, already begun to appear, in what has been making the headlines in the past few months, i.e. shady accounting practices involving enormous amounts of money--enough to shake the economy of the most powerful nation of the world. And the hysterical stock markets have of course been swayed by this news, at the expense of tens of thousands of workers worldwide and millions of small investors who thought that their holdings had nowhere to go but up.
The value of AOL Time Warner's stock is now a quarter of what it was at the time of the merger between AOL and Time Warner, and this decline forced the company to take a $54 billion writedown earlier this year. And now it to is being investigated about its accounting practices. The story at Vivendi Universal is similar. Disney shares are near an 8-year low. And there is little doubt in people's mind that the problems are similar everywhere, in every big conglomerate that has become utterly out of touch with the reality of everyday work and the essence of human creativity.
In addition, people also realize all to well that governments have little--if any--power left when it comes to regulating these multinational monsters. Governments have much more power when it comes to regulating the lives of ordinary, law-abiding citizens--and they use and abuse this power as a way to distract people's attention from how much control the conglomerates have over what we get to hear, watch, read, eat, drink, buy, and generally experience as "free" citizens of the world.
One of the areas where this struggle is most acutely felt is, of course, the online world--a sprawling, anarchic community that is still in its infancy and whose exponential development in the last decade took everyone by surprise. And nothing exemplifies the struggle between government, big business, and individual rights better than the highly controversial issue of "peer-to-peer" file sharing and its many digital variations.
A Nation of Thieves?
Will the media/technology giants recover from the latest stock market slump? They probably will--but at what cost? In all likelihood, the cost will be more "restructuring", more layoffs, more executive shuffles and golden parachutes, causing even further alienation from their own employees and customers. And this, in turn, will further encourage the very behaviors that they claim are illegal and want punished by criminal law--all the while preserving their own impunity as they continue to carelessly flounder a capital that they do not own.
Napster may have gone bankrupt and become a closed chapter in the Internet's short history, but its death is by no means a reflection of a decline in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, quite the contrary. If anything, P2P has grown even further--but since it's becoming totally decentralized, there is no easy way to measure its significance.
What is for sure, however, is that, in spite of its many claims to the contrary, the recording industry has yet to provide evidence that P2P is actually detrimental to music making as an artistic endeavor, and even as a commercial venture. It is worth remembering, for example, that sales of music CDs actually increased when Napster was at its peak, and declined after Napster was abruptly shut down. Even economists who thought that file sharing "should be" hurting the recording industry are now expressing their doubts, based on what they say is simply not happening.
More importantly, many well-respected artists have sided with Internet users against corporate greed and actually use the Internet to promote alternative ways to distribute their music and reach out to a non-captive, legitimate audience of authentic music lovers.
This does not mean, of course, that all forms of file sharing are equally innocuous. There is little doubt that, when people use the Internet as a substitute for radio, i.e. as a way to discover new music, it can help promote the work of artists. But when a young junior high school student downloads tracks off the Internet and makes CD-R copies of them that he then sells for $5 in the schoolyard, it hurts sales of the original CD and it's disrespectful of the artist--regardless of how small a cut of the actual CD price the artist actually gets after all the executives and the middlemen in the recording industry have taken their piece of the pie.
Still, can we really go as far as to say that digital technology is creating a "nation of thieves" who no longer recognize the just value of art?
Protecting the Product
It is worth noting, to begin with, that the recording industry itself is far from having distinguished itself by recognizing the true value of art. Instead, it has consistently fought to be allowed to deprive many artists of their most fundamental rights. It has allowed popular artists to go bankrupt even though their albums were selling by the millions. It has reduced the artists' cut of the album sales pie to a ridiculously small portion of the actual income generated by these sales. It has consistently pushed commercial musical products at the expense of real musical artistry.
This hardly entitles the recording industry to lecture anyone about recognizing the just value of art.
It is also interesting to note that the cultural products that seem to be the primary concern of the industry giants are those that are already the most popular ones, and that things such as CD copy protection are being experimentally used mostly with items that will sell millions regardless of whether they are copy-protected or not.
So are most citizens really being completely disrespectful of the value of art and the need to provide appropriate compensation to the artists for their works? We've said it before and we'll say it again: the rise of digital technology and peer-to-peer file sharing has little to do with people's intrinsic respect for art and artists, and everything to do with the cynical attitude of big industry conglomerates, which have consistently pushed for more and more commercial, highly profitable products at the expense of authentic art and respect for artists.
If people do not feel enough guilt to prevent them from making digital copies of the latest episode of a popular TV show or hit pop song, it is precisely because the industry giants have succeeded in making these works purely commercial products, with little or no consideration for their actual artistic value. It is precisely because these companies have been consistently promoting commercial products at the expense of artistic works.
The fact that actual works of art still manage to seep thru the cracks of this huge profit-driven industry does not change anything about the fundamental equations that have been driving and still drive the industry, today more than ever--i.e. that art = money, artists = money-makers, and art lovers = consumers.
As a simple example of how little music is valued as an art form by the industry, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of music ever recorded is currently available--and, of this 20 percent, what proportion is actually readily available to music lovers? What proportion is not the current 100 top albums on the SoundScan charts?
It simply appears that the instinctive reaction of the lover of art (be it music, TV shows, movies, or other forms of art) is such that, if the industry has no respect for his or her identity as an appreciator of art, then he or she has no reason to have any respect for the industry as a purveyor of art. By making digital copies of so-called cultural products, many people are not demonstrating their lack of respect for art and for artists, but are expressing--consciously or not--their frustration with the way the entertainment industry profits from art at the expense of both art makers and art lovers.
The consumers of the commercial products of the entertainment industry are only as cynical as the industry has deliberately made them, by dumbing down their products, by exploiting artists, by making profit-driven choices and decisions, and by providing their own kind with obscene compensations and legal impunity that are completely out of touch with the real world of ordinary people.
Don't Get It Twisted
That being said, the whole debate about file sharing and digital piracy is, most of all, a convenient way for industry conglomerates to deflect attention from their own shady business practices and dubious alliances.
for example, it is worth noting that the Warner Music Group is heavily involved in the recording industry's fight against piracy, but that its own parent company, AOL Time Warner, is directly benefiting from file sharing, as a provider of Internet access to millions of Internet users worldwide. When AOL Time Warner repeatedly flaunts its ever-increasing number of members (34 million and counting) and the billions of hours that they spend online, is there any doubt that a good part of this growth involves the "unlawful" exchange of computer files at the detriment of recording artists?
In other words, the real "thieves" are not necessarily those that are currently getting the blame... Rather than a "nation of thieves", the current situation looks, to us, much more like an "elite of thieves".
And the real victims of this thievery are very much, as usual, the recording artists themselves, who will never get their share of AOL's profits as an Internet access provider, even though these profits are partly based on the content that they originally provided. And the real victims also include authentic music lovers, who already suffer from restricted access to the full range of music that they would like to explore, and who are also likely to suffer from technological restrictions that will soon prevent them from making legitimate copies of the works that they have lawfully purchased for their own enjoyment.
Make no mistake: the entertainment industry (including TV, movies and music) might be big, but the technology industry is even bigger. Remember that it is AOL that bought Time Warner, and not the other way around. Remember that Sony makes much more money in electronics and computer equipment than it does in record sales...
If the technology industry ends up implementing technological limitations that prevent users from lawfully enjoying their purchases--as it is threatening to do--the beneficiaries will not be the artists whose works are thus being allegedly "protected". And it will certainly not be the art lovers whose enjoyment of art will thus be restricted. No, it will simply be, once again... the industry conglomerates, who will have yet another generation of incompatible media and devices to sell to us under the guise of "technological improvement".
Conclusion
The technology and entertainment industries are simply to big for us to expect any overnight changes. The industry giants will continue to do their best to deflect people's attention away from their own wrongdoings and to blame falling profits and commercial failures on piracy at the same time that they are encouraging their customers to adopt the very technologies that make piracy possible. Artists will continue to be lured by unrealistic promises and contracts with big numbers and lots of small print.
How long, however, before a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, to leave the system for good? How long before a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and are careful not to get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long before a critical mass of art lovers get together to provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the existing system artistically irrelevant?
It all depends on us--and it all depends on you.
We know that the movie industry doesn't have the "problems" music does -- Macrovision can be easily circumvented, and copying from cable and satellite TV picks up where that leaves off. And yet people continue to buy and rent and watch movies at the box office, and the industry continues to do well despite piracy. Software isn't all that different: good programs and games continue to sell well despite the availability of "warez" and casual copying.
What then, in your opinion, are the significant differences between video and music or software? Why is digital piracy such a "problem" for them when the others have successfully made money despite it?
Apple is currently a hardware company. There's no reason they should have to stay one forever.
Think of what a fully-compatible x86 release of OS X could mean for Apple: massive consumer adoption. A new copy of WinXP costs $200, but a new copy of Jaguar costs $70 less. Apple gets to benefit from the "Megahertz Myth" instantly as non-techy computer buyers run their OS on 2.4GHz Pentiums. Consumers who honestly don't care about getting the latest games for their PC can be convinced that all the commercial software they really want is OS X compatible, and get a good package bundle to prove it.
And of course, this only means Apple gets out of the hardware business if they refuse to make Apple computers with x86 processors. They can do that, you know, and people who have come to trust in Apple's reliable hardware and slick design (think the hinged door which you can open while the computer is still running, not to mention the G4's unique external style) will continue to buy Apple's computers, knowing that any Apple software will be designed to work first and best on Apple machines and Apple drives.
At least half the reason Apple hasn't switched to PC hardware is the gazillions of configurations they'd have to support, something even Microsoft has trouble keeping up with. But if OS X gets widespread, or at least wider spread, Apple can start to count on third-party vendors developing the drivers themselves, just as Microsoft does.
Apple will lose money from the hardware, of course. But it's possible that the widespread adoption of a new, more usable Mac OS will be worth it to them.
I can't remember what I had for dinner last night but I could remember seeing this on the main page.
Been there, done that. You know you've gone uber-geek when Slashdot stories take precedence over food in your long-term memory.
The poster, of course, is at fault. "Animatrix" is from "animated Matrix", not "anime Matrix". But clearly the fact that all the animators, except for Square USA, are Japanese should count for something.
:-)
"The Matrix" is a huge hit with non-geeks as well as geeks, of course, and the Warchowski brothers put this video together because they're anime fans as well. Anything, IMO, that brings "animation to the masses" in the USA is a Good Thing. Hopefully there'll be some previews of each studio's other projects on the DVD to direct buyers to other anime offerings by the same folks.
Anything that brings down the cost of "Cowboy Bebop" DVDs for me is worth doing.