put 1 Gigabyte of JPG files of pretty California girls engaged in sexual activity.
They can erase it if they like with a simple:
Format c:\
Or, they can copy them to CDs and sell them. That way they can get enough money to buy several good PCs to go with the end-of-its-life donated PC that is being sent to them.
Label the files: 0001xyz.jpg; 0002xyz.jpg, ect...
This is a great post and refers to a great book. I've OCR scanned Preston's 'The Demon in the Freezer' and try to keep it available on Kazaa.
Since smallpox is so dangerous, so contagious, and has been erraticated from the earth, anyone who generates stockpiles of the virus outside of a stongly supervised international research study is committing a crime against humanity. They should be standing trial in The Hague, regardless of their national or religious justification.
The difference between atomic weapons and genetically engineered super diseases is that that the atomics are limited in the damage that they can do and can be precisely focused on a certain place. They have literally solved the problem that mankind has faced since the beginning of the agrucultural age of how to provide for an effective defence against marauding neighbors.
Genetically-engineered super-disease is an 'omnicide' technology. This is a word that I made up from 'omni' (every) and '-cide' (death) to refer to a technology that will kill every human on earth if engaged. People who do omnicide research and development are committing crimes against humanity. They have declared war on every person in every country and every religion. They have no legal, national, or religious justification for their activity and must be stopped. To use national defence as a justification for developing omnicide technology is a form of madness that is left over from the Cold War and is the worst legacy of the 20th century, which left a string of really bad legacies.
Of course, all this gets secondary consideration to the seriously important news of the day, like Janet Jackson's titties. But its an issue now that will never go away.
The first time that someone unfamiliar with DRM Hell finds that they can't play one of their music recordings because the manufacturer specifically designed the unit not to play a recording for corporate reasons alone (which is is DRM is), then there will be an intense anger towards the product and the company that sold it.
For this reason alone, Apple should welcome the low-cost competitions that don't play MP3. [They should, however, not be as blatently and embarrassingly arrogant as they were when the welcomed the IBM PC.]
MP3 is the world standard for digital music files. Every other digital music format is rightly seen as just a corporate scam to suck money out of customers. OGG is an exception, but OGG will never amount to anything until its files are transparently interchangable with MP3 files and work on players that only play MP3. When I say 'only' play MP3, I mean it plays MP3 along with whatever proprietary worthless corporate format that the unit was bundled with (such as whatever Apple has on the iPod along with MP3).
A corporate digital music player that only plays the corporate recordings that customers purchased from the corporation in a propropietary format is nothing more that an overpaid marketing executive's 'wet dream' (or, a sexual fantasy sleep dream that results in nocturnal orgasm, for those who are not familiar with this American expression when used as metaphor. We are an international audience here on Slashdot.) Such a product will flop in the real world regardless of its price or tech specs, as Sony is about to find out.
Sometimes I almost feel sorry for these guys that are so caught up in a corporate groupfuck that they have to blow away hundreds of millions of dollars in obviously stupid products before they finally release something successful. Especially when they could have had it right the first time if they had just asked us what we wanted to buy in the first place and taken our answers seriously.
I can believe it. The articles are the only thing in Playboy that has changed in the past fifty years. The cartoons, the reviews, the music, and pictures are all exactly the same: year after year.
Re:You changed formats and didn't bother to test i
on
eFax Hell?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I understand your position and agree with it. But underlying the position is the assumption that the basic technology can't be trusted because it sometimes just doesn't work.
This is limitation resulting from first generation 20th century software. 21st century software will note that a person is sending an unusually large document and check (using OCR and a spell checker in the local language on the random portions of the file) to see if it is a rogue transmission (like the common occurance cited above of a PDF document misformatted as a PS). The eFax will communicate (why not with a voice synthesized cell phone message?) with the sender that a rogue document is queued.
It is the responsibility of the users of 20th century office equipment to guard against runaway applications like this. But it is the responsibility of the sellers of 21st century business solutions like eFax to incorporate advanced error checking like this into their product. As we enter the age of 4GHz CPU speeds, 128 bit processors, terabyte hard drives, and GigaByte RAM banks, our PCs demand truly advanced software too.
So I'm going to go against your decision that this was the customer's fault for not closely monitoring a format change. I believe that it's partially eFax's fault for not coding their service against a common and catostophic client error.
Programmers need to get out of the 20th century mindset that if a program works in the software lab then it is finished. Actually by 21st century standards, its development has simply completed the first and easest phase. It now needs to be developed so that it works flawlessly in the bizarre and common error situations found in the field.
In Louisana we have this thing called 'car sailing' on I-10 between Lafayette and Baton Rouge. On some nights the wind is really strong and blows in straight west to east direction with solid 30 MPH gusts.
Late at night when there's no one on the road, get one of these little light cars like a Hyundai Accent or Ford Fiesta. Go down the highway in the center lane with the wind pushing the car (a stong tail wind). Get the car up to about 70 MPH so that there just a slight aerodynamic effect on the body. Then a gust of wind will literally lift the car and blow it into either the left or right lane . Lift off the gas to allow gravity to reduce the speed by bringing the weight of the car back onto to road.
It really is a form of sailing. Probably stupid and dangerous too. But a great feeling. Really 'organic' and not easily done in a heavier 'muscle car' like the TransAm.
With a little creativity these small cars can have their amusements too.
All these SUVs are beginning to embarrass me. Everybody knows that reason that people buy them is because:
1) They get '$4000 cash back'. Or something like that and they need the money.
2) 'No interest and no payments until 2006!' Or some other absurd offer like that.
3) 'Just show your paycheck stub to trade in your current rust bucket and drive away in a giant houseboat on wheels for $100 down'.
4) You can write off the entire cost of the vehicle as a tax deduction. This got slipped in the middle of one of those 1000 page Defense budget appropriations bills years ago.
What is really getting to me about these people who drive around (alone) in these HUGE vehicles is that they have no sense of public shame. Everybody knows that American solders are getting killed in the Gulf daily to protect the oil supplies, so these assholes blatently drive around in a car that gets 10 miles per gallon (roughly 4 km per liter) and then they put some flag decal on their back window to show how much they support 'our boys'. If they really cared about whether or not the solders were getting killed then they would be driving a car that gets 30 MPG and there wouldn't be any need to send 130000 solders to the Gulf to ensure the oil supplies.
Everybody knows this. But all SUV drivers just don't give a fuck. And they seem so overjoyed to stick their HUGE vehicle in everybody's face to remind people that they either don't care or they're just too stupid to make the connection.
Everybody knows by now that the giant SUVs are just given away as tax write-offs. Myself, I would be ashamed to drive around in one of those because everybody would know that I cheated the taxpayers through a bogus tax-write off to get one. But they, the SUV drivers, just don't have any sense of public shame. They must think that the rest of us are happy to see them coming down the street in giant houseboat on wheels.
We're not. We're embarrassed by you. You make us look bad to the rest of the world. Everybody in the world looks at Americans now and says 'How can these people be so vulgar and stupid and have so much money?'. It's not a situation that has any real long term growth potential or stability. Then they start to analyse the situation and realize that the whole US economy is held up by the willingness of foreign parties to buy US government Treasury Securities to support the giant US government deficits and by the willingness of foreign parties to use the US dollar as a defacto global currency. So when the Chinese (who finance most of the US federal government deficits by buying Treasury bills) start buying the oil that they need directly from OPEC through private deals (not on the open market) and paying for it in Euros, the Americans are going to be in a bad situation. Because no one will need them or their bullshit anymore.
A lot of these SUV owners don't seem to realise that this giant piece of shit that they're aiming down the road is in all likelyhood the last new car that they are going to own. And, if things get real bad, they may find themselves living in it. That's their retirement housing: a Ford Expedition sitting on cinder blocks with the seats torn out and Winnie-the-Poo curtains on the windows. Renting a 5x5 meter plot in a trailer park built on a depleted Uranium dump site for $3000 a month.
I use Yahoo! e=mail and have for seven years. No real problems and nearly all spam gets blocked by their spam filters.
I wonder if the US military network has problems with spam. Generally nothing in America gets taken seriously until it starts messing with the military. Then the problems are given serious thought by serious people with unlimited resources. The successful approachs are then brought into the corporate environment and then the media. Then they filter into general American society.
A broad example would be the systematic racism and segration against the African-American people that didn't really start to change in American society until it started to drasticily undermine the military's ability to function in the late 1960's. The approaches that worked to reduce institutional racism in the military were adopted by big corporations (slowly, but surely) and are working their way throughout the society. Things are really different now in this area than they were fifty years ago.
But if you seriously want to get rid of spam, start feeding into the military networks. Let them deal with it in their own simple direct and time-tested manner.
Getting a patent on the idea of providing a little play area for children while the parents are occupied with a transaction? My feminist friends have been suggesting this very thing for over thirty years now.
Getting a patent for the idea of serving popcorn? Are the movie theatres going to have to make payments to these people?
C'mon...a patent is supposed to be for inventing something serious and useful. This is not patent material by any stretch.
But since we're in the mood, let me be the first girl to patent the blow job. Yes, I invented it and it is now my intellectual property! So pay up. Credit card payments are billed to:
Christian Missionary Support Services, Inc.
This is no more absurd than putting a play pen in the corner of the store. Now, putting a play pen for senior executives who came up with this idea (or the Patent Office bozos who approved it), that would be a patentable idea.
Thanks for the message. It's good to know. There is a 'power good' signal on the motherboard power connection that goes back to the power supply. But your experiment says that it only applies to the power supply connector that goes to the motherboard.
I have used a +12/+5 power supply with an old junk CD burner and it worked with RedBook CDs. I have lots of old disfuctional CD burners since they used to last only about a year.
While reading your comment I suspected that it was done with Speech-to-Text software and a microphone. With a really fast CPU and a well-trained set of individual voice parameters you can get text like this: long rambling and folksy but with almost no misspelled words.
You gotta remember to say "New Paragraph" every once in a while! It's not natural but it vastly improves the readability of the generated text.
This technique is great for commenting source code. Just get the person who wrote it (usually the only person who understands how it works and usually the person the least interested in actually writing comments) to describe what it does by talking about it. Put a picture of a beautiful movie star next to the screen so he can pretend that he is describing it to her (this technique works best with geeky guys) and she is really interested.
After an hour you have an astonishing amount of text that describes in great detail how the code works. Get a software assistant or intern to either edit the comments into the source or provide an HTML link to the correct part of the source from the text description file.
Personally I think source code should look like a thriller novel. The comments should be descriptive paragraphs and the actual code to be compiled would be like dialog with quotation marks around each line. It would be much easier to read after it was finished for its upkeep. It would also be a big advance in software engineering. However, no one else on Slashdot seems to think so.
What Microsoft does is give a hundred PCs to the school district and two copies of Office. They wait until the teachers, kids, and administrators have loaded Office on all the PCs. Then they hit the school district with a huge lawsuit threatening to demand a hundred thousand dollars for every 'pirated' installation of the software. They 'settle' for a single payment of a million dollars or so. The original PCs are all taken as a tax write-off donation.
They've done this to Philadelphia and Portland Oregon that I know of and probably many other places as well.
A truly sleazy and degenerate company.
I still have to say, ?way to go RIAA, you are corrupting our children with crappy music in stores, radio, and now even in the classroom! Thanks!?
I still don't understand why the RIAA has so much political power when so much of the product that they sell is so clearly anti-social. Much rap and death-metal is clearly the results of disturbed individuals and a massively disfunctional culture.
I'm amazed that people who chose the appearance in public of gangster rappers and death-rockers complain that stangers are not inclined to assume that they are civilized human beings. They assume that this is prejudice and racism.
No, it's not. It's the result of a focused and unrelenting advertising campaign to sell rap music by portraying young males in hooded sweatshirts and other gangster fashions as the most violent and unpredictably disfunctional people on the planet.
And it has worked. Be a young male African-American with a backward baseball cap and go anywhere on earth. People will treat you like shit and just assume that you're a monster. It will take decades to reverse this new stereotype of hip-hop culture.
And what did young people of color get from all this negative stereotype casting? Nothing. A few individuals got big enough record contract advances to piss away on weird jewelery and pathetic SUVs. But nearly all the profits went to middle-aged white corporate executives, who would never let hip-hop individuals into their personal lives or social class environment.
I download sixties songs that I vaguely remember hearing as a child. For a while I bought a lot of records (45 RPM singles with the big hole for $0.79 US each new in the mid 1960's).
When I bought the record, I bought a lifetime right to the music.
An absurd concept back when it was impossible to seperate the content from the medium, but as relevant as all hell today.
The digitization process seperates the content from the medium in ways that are unimaginable when the content was first integrated onto its medium. This concept applies to all media and is the central component of post-McLuhan media theory. Generally wealth is created when old content is combined with new media in ways that were not possible before the digitization process seperates the two. For example seperating the pressing of a piano key and the sound of a piano note. After digitization, pressing a piano key on a synthesizer makes a flute or violin sound from a sample.
Anyway...
I demand the right to download any and all of the songs that I bought as a kid in the mid 1960's. I demand that the RIAA prove that I didn't buy the recording before sueing me for downloading it. "... pretty, pretty, Peggy Sue...". We are innocent until proven guilty.
I demand the right to be able to download any song that has been played on the radio long enough to have had the copyright period expire. In this case I mean the copyright period in legal effect when the recording was originally released and purchased by me.
I demand the right to publish on third world websites the names, addresses, and social security numbers of the members of the legal team that is using vague and legally unsubstantiated copyright to extort money from me.
Fuck these people! Let's cut their heads off instead of those of ordinary technicians who just happen to be working in Allah-land and got kidnapped by religious psychopaths.
Allow me to nominate a new entry into the Unknown Geek Cheezee Hall of Fame:
"The Fury" 1979 by Brian de Palma
staring Kirk Douglas, John Cassevetes, gorgeous Amy Irving, wonderful Carrie Snodgress, and Andrew Stevens. (If you don't understand why every female cast member is adorned with a complementary adjective, you're not a real Geek).
If you haven't seen this and you can find it in the $2.98 bin of the discount video store, snatch it up. A true cheezeball masterpiece.
All laws like this (overly broad and specifically targetting minorities for extortion, the minority in this case being young people who download and don't vote) are enforced in the real world as balance between how much money can be extorted from the target and how much this extortion depresses the economic activity that generates the wealth from which the extortion comes. They are basically designed to function as an open-ended and arbitrary tax.
They backfire when all the people who have been extorted using these laws are prevented from creating more wealth (when they can't get jobs according to their abilities because of their 'criminal' records) and this starts to reduce the flow of wealth to the extorters.
Lots of laws in this category are proposed. The ones that pass usually place more emphasis on pulling money from the target minority than providing a legal means for imprisoning the minority.
The drug laws are in this category in that they provide a way of extorting large amounts of money from the (usually white) middle class in fines and legal fees for ma*ri*jua*na (they do watch the net for that word) offences. They also provide an easy way to imprison economically marginal minorities (usually young blacks, who also don't vote) for unrealistically long terms for minor drug offences. The fact that in the USA the money spent on prisons goes to private corporations who give money to legislators to pass 'get tough' laws against minorities (anyone who doesn't vote) is just icing on the cake.
The Chinese have a saying that the easiest way to get out of a really bad political situation is to just leave.
...media companies are working steadily to assault their own audiences and remove their own products from circulation....They steadily try to introduce restrictive DRM measures that prevent people who DO want to buy their products from feeling comfortable about it.
I'm amazed at the extent that the media companies degrade their product and insult their customers these days with regards to implementing new technology.
I suspect that it's mostly due to the unbelievable success that they have been having for the past ten years. For movies, every year is getting bigger and better than the previous year. DVDs are part of the positive feedback loop (I hope using an engineering metaphor is OK here on Slashdot) that it making this possible.
This phenomenon is not likely to stop soon because movies are a young people's medium and also an inexpensive entertainment. The world's population is exploding and currently about 2/3rds of the people are less than 25 years old without much money to spend. And many, many more young people being born and raised behind them.
They have a guaranteed market and an perfect formula production system. So what are the media companies getting so upset about?
The notion that it is cheaper to dump garbage than recycle it is only partly true. It assumes that there is a place nearby to dump it: a place near by that is cheap to transport the garbage to, a place that nobody wants for any other purpose. These places are becoming rare and will be more rare in future years. Especially when just dumping garbage and sewerage into the ocean becomes impossible due to the destruction of sea life.
Dumping garbage is cheaper because it is only one small part of the recycling process: collecting and 'warehousing' of raw materials. Recycling is expensive because so much energy is required to seperate the various components of the garbage from the pile. By seperating the components before shipping it all to the central dump, recycling is cheaper than inital processing from natural raw materials.
Please no more remarks about 'gaddam hippies'. Hippies are smarter than you. This is website that respects intelligence and creativity: Hippies are respected around here.
One effect of this idiotic law is the wholesale destruction of nearly all of the popular books from the first half of the 20th century. The very best stuff and well-known titles are still being published and read (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Raymond Chandler) but past a hundred or so titles, the books are just disappearing.
When the paper wears out or the book stops being checked out, libraries take the title off the shelf. Large cites will sometimes save a copy in the stacks, but usually the books get pulped or burned. In a technologically advanced civilized society, each title that is worth being published in the first place would be scanned and OCR'ed before being completely wiped out. But this is illegal under the Mickey-Mouse-protection-to-infinity US copyright law. So they just get pulped and burned.
I read a book by Florence King about how white people got to be so weird (a sort of laid-back but sharp quasi-anthropological study of Caucasians in North America) "WASP, where is thy sting?". In this book, she cites many of the books that were influencial on her and her parents thoughts and attitudes when she was growing up in the 1940's. It is impossible to find any of them now even though they were read and enjoyed by tens of millions of people and had a great deal of influence on how the depression generation came to view the world.
Now the rock'n'roll generation (the baby boomers) and the MTV generation and Kazaa generations would just say 'Fuck this stupid law' and then OCR and circulate their favorite books and videos anyway. But the WWII generation won't, they'll trust that the proper authorities are taking care of the preservation of their culture. But that is not happening and their entire culture except for about 100 titles is just evaporating.
Hundreds of years from now, people will marvel at the American empire and technological accomplishments from the end of World War II. They will wonder at what these people were like; what they believed; how they interacted with each other; what drove them. But they will never know because all the popular literature from this period is being destroyed and not copied as its media wears out.
It's all happening because of this insane US copyright law. And nobody seems to be aware that it's happening.
Sure, there's a copy of every book published in the US in the Library of Congress. Maybe. One copy. Somewhere in the vast warehouse stacks. But with the current ability to fit tens of thousands of titles on a single 89 cent DVD-R there's no excuse for allowing all of the popular books from the early and mid-20th century to disappear. Future generations will not think well of us for allowing this to just happen. Just because nitwit assholes like Michael Eisner have hundreds of millions of dollars doesn't give them the right to destroy the entire culture of generations.
Yes, I'm completely for technology. But, whenever big business says that there is a giant shift about to happen it means that they are about to change the way that they do things in order to take MORE money from their customers for the same service.
Plus they are assuming that all this 'convergence' stuff actually works. Well, yes, the demo for senior management worked. And with a lot of work, the new system of 'digital convergence' will be functional about 98% of the time. The other two percent will eventually crash the whole new system. Which means higher rates for consumers to 'fix' it; which means getting things to work almost as well as they do now.
Face it, the only thing that has made the computer revolution of the past twenty years happen has been Moore's Law. And the willingness of individuals to learn how to work with new machines for their novelity and coolness value while tolerating the stupidities of bad interfaces and shoddy programming. People accept this because computers make many things much easier than they used to be (ever hear of a sticky white paint called 'WhiteOut' to fix mistyped characters when using typewriters? remember typewriters? What a fucking nightmare they were!).
When computer systems stop making life easier and the novelity factor wears thin, the acceptance and tolerance level of new computerized systems will be much less than it has been in the past twenty years. If 'digital convergence' is just another buzzword for DRM, then it won't be as welcome as the latest new PC that runs 100 times faster than the one of ten years ago.
Basically I don't trust anything that Business Week says is going to good for business in the future. Not until it has proven to be good for me and all the other customers who have to pay for and deal with all this new stuff. Look at the new Yahoo! mail interface: three times slower and half as reliable when not using MS Internet Explorer. Who needs this?
I don't know what you men consider to be mammary menace, but the goons in DC are laying their heavy hand on our local radio station. An Afro-American DJ who had a Saturday evening slot for about 20 years was fired because the management couldn't trust him not to play the hip-hop records that he had been playing for years without harassment.
The station KNOWS that the goons in DC are just looking for any excuse to shut them down through means of insane fines for 'indecent' music. So they fired the DJ rather than take the chance that he would play a song with references to 'mo-fo's, ho's, blo's'.
Granted, years ago, his show was the only place in town where you could hear "Don't Fuck With The Nigga With The Finga On The Trigga!", but recently it's been all Earth, Wind, & Fire and Beyonce. So I feel that the firing actually is just racist cowardness on the part of KBOO's oversight committee.
Besides, if the fascist fuckheads in DC are going to shut you down, they'll do it whether you're playing Sistah Soldja or Olivia Newton-John. It's like when Hoover begged Otter not to do anything wild and crazy because they were on double-secret probation, and Otter said 'It doesn't matter, they're going to do what they want to do anyway. So let's Toga!'.
A large ultra-low-power memory bank is another large step into the development of a new class of computers that record and store data for background monitoring applications.
The next big step is to get the price down significantly. The CPU component of a super-cheap data logger is now available with ATMEL's recent decision to lower the price of their low-end microcontroller, the Tiny 11, to $0.42 in quantity 25 (at www.Digikey.com). Now we need to get the sensors and the power supply to be less than a dollar each, and get the Flash RAM/EEPROM to a dollar a megabyte and we will have real high quality data logging tools.
An example of a application for this device would be when you are looking for a new apartment and you want someplace quiet with no surprises (like neighbors that work all day and come home at 3AM and turn on the stereo and the television). You would leave a data monitor in the apartment for 48 hrs that monitors sound decibel levels. Every jump in the noise level is recorded along with its time, level, and duration. That way you could be reasonably assured that there would be no nasty surprises before signing a long-term lease.
Another application (currently available from Dallas Semiconductor) is a temperature logger that records when a temperature level goes outside of a programmable range. Say you're shipping perishable food or medical products and the temp can not go below 5 degrees C (40 F) or above 35 C (@100 F). Set the monitor to these levels and when the shipment arrives check if the limits were triggered. The internal real-time clock logs the time the levels were surpassed and the period of time out of range. That way you know who to sue when the illiterate teamsters left the shipment out in the hot sun for five hours in the middle of the shipment.
MultiGig Flash storage is a good thing, but it needs to be cheap to be of any real value.
This happens to me a lot whenever I see a really great movie. I tend to go again to another film within a week. This continues until I hit a bunch of duds and then the cinema bug dies for many months.
Actually rereading the comment shows that this is a desire to reemerge into cinema 'trance' after seeing a good film. There used to be double and triple features to draw people into the theatres for this effect, specifically to market this experience. Now double features are gone and the individual title product is being marketed. Movie execs want customers to re-up for another admission fee to keep the cinema trance going, but it is usually too expensive. So people leave the cinema zone vaguely unsatisfied and maybe a little inclined to rent some videos on the way home.
Maybe a video store in or adjacent to the theatre would have much more business than one with the same selection and prices not next to the theatre. Perhaps an upscale Starbucks, a video rental outlet, and a multiplex side-by-side would do better that each store seperated.
But I've never seen that arrangement.
Possibly the holes in the corner of the screen that you refer to are the reel-change markers. Many years ago theatres would have two projectors pointed and focused at the screen. The film reels would last about twenty minutes and each projector would hold a reel.
The marks on the film would be set about 15 seconds apart. The second projector would be set 15 seconds before the start of the film. The projectionist would watch the corner of the film near the end of the reel. When the first mark appeared in the corner, the second projector would start but with the light off. At the second cue mark, the first projector's light would be switched off and the second's light switched on. This results in a continuous film.
Now the film is spliced together into a long single strip. This allows one projectionist to run many screens as long as they don't start at the same time.
The cue marks are never only one frame, they are always about 20 frames in order to avoid being missed by the projectionist. People can detect one frame as a glitch but can't absorb symbolic information like letters, numbers, or logos from one frame.
Warner sees the investment as negligible compared with the threat to the whole industry.
The biggest threats to the whole industry is (1) their inability to control costs on marginal product and (2) over-saturation of the market with expensive product.
The second point is rejected by the industry because the weekly blockbuster releases have all been are consumed and mostly paid off with two or three weeks of their release. Although the core audience is not growing, they are fanatically dedicated to going to the newest and biggest release every week. For five years there has been no break in audiences absorbing the box office ticket price increases necessary to blockbuster films. The film industry is in a positive feedback loop,which is not a good thing. If there were any film executives with engineering training , they would see that this will burn out your resources too quickly. In this case the resource is the attention span of the audience for cookie-cutter blockbusters.
Movie execs are known for their 'MORE, MORE, MORE!' mentality, so the concept that they may be creating and releasing too much product too quickly would be difficult for them to grasp. The movie business operates on a pay-per-view basis and having too much product available in the theatres and video stores can only work to drive down the price that the audience is willing to pay for the product. You see this a little with the number of special offers that the video rental outlets are using to get six-month-old product off the shelves, stuff like $1 US 24-hr rentals of new releases on weekdays or much shorter periods between theatrical and DVD/video release. Often a DVD is now released even as a film is still playing in second-run theatres. Distributors want to cash in before the film is forgotten.
I think that the emphasis on preventing 'piracy' (in this case pay-per-view without the distibutor or studio getting the pay) is somewhat missplaced because it implies that the first viewing of any product is most important 'money point' and that is getting to be less true every year. Film is now becoming like television; a product that is often a background medium that sets the mood rather than commands complete attention. Why go through the hassle of illegally copying this weeks blockbuster when next week there will be another one just the same? And next month it will be in DVD and available at the supermarket for a dollar rental?
Slashdot Mirror
In all seriousness,
put 1 Gigabyte of JPG files of pretty California girls engaged in sexual activity.
They can erase it if they like with a simple:
Format c:\
Or, they can copy them to CDs and sell them. That way they can get enough money to buy several good PCs to go with the end-of-its-life donated PC that is being sent to them.
Label the files: 0001xyz.jpg; 0002xyz.jpg, ect...
This is a great post and refers to a great book. I've OCR scanned Preston's 'The Demon in the Freezer' and try to keep it available on Kazaa.
Since smallpox is so dangerous, so contagious, and has been erraticated from the earth, anyone who generates stockpiles of the virus outside of a stongly supervised international research study is committing a crime against humanity. They should be standing trial in The Hague, regardless of their national or religious justification.
The difference between atomic weapons and genetically engineered super diseases is that that the atomics are limited in the damage that they can do and can be precisely focused on a certain place. They have literally solved the problem that mankind has faced since the beginning of the agrucultural age of how to provide for an effective defence against marauding neighbors.
Genetically-engineered super-disease is an 'omnicide' technology. This is a word that I made up from 'omni' (every) and '-cide' (death) to refer to a technology that will kill every human on earth if engaged. People who do omnicide research and development are committing crimes against humanity. They have declared war on every person in every country and every religion. They have no legal, national, or religious justification for their activity and must be stopped. To use national defence as a justification for developing omnicide technology is a form of madness that is left over from the Cold War and is the worst legacy of the 20th century, which left a string of really bad legacies.
Of course, all this gets secondary consideration to the seriously important news of the day, like Janet Jackson's titties. But its an issue now that will never go away.
The first time that someone unfamiliar with DRM Hell finds that they can't play one of their music recordings because the manufacturer specifically designed the unit not to play a recording for corporate reasons alone (which is is DRM is), then there will be an intense anger towards the product and the company that sold it.
For this reason alone, Apple should welcome the low-cost competitions that don't play MP3. [They should, however, not be as blatently and embarrassingly arrogant as they were when the welcomed the IBM PC.]
MP3 is the world standard for digital music files. Every other digital music format is rightly seen as just a corporate scam to suck money out of customers. OGG is an exception, but OGG will never amount to anything until its files are transparently interchangable with MP3 files and work on players that only play MP3. When I say 'only' play MP3, I mean it plays MP3 along with whatever proprietary worthless corporate format that the unit was bundled with (such as whatever Apple has on the iPod along with MP3).
A corporate digital music player that only plays the corporate recordings that customers purchased from the corporation in a propropietary format is nothing more that an overpaid marketing executive's 'wet dream' (or, a sexual fantasy sleep dream that results in nocturnal orgasm, for those who are not familiar with this American expression when used as metaphor. We are an international audience here on Slashdot.) Such a product will flop in the real world regardless of its price or tech specs, as Sony is about to find out.
Sometimes I almost feel sorry for these guys that are so caught up in a corporate groupfuck that they have to blow away hundreds of millions of dollars in obviously stupid products before they finally release something successful. Especially when they could have had it right the first time if they had just asked us what we wanted to buy in the first place and taken our answers seriously.
I can believe it. The articles are the only thing in Playboy that has changed in the past fifty years. The cartoons, the reviews, the music, and pictures are all exactly the same: year after year.
I understand your position and agree with it. But underlying the position is the assumption that the basic technology can't be trusted because it sometimes just doesn't work.
This is limitation resulting from first generation 20th century software. 21st century software will note that a person is sending an unusually large document and check (using OCR and a spell checker in the local language on the random portions of the file) to see if it is a rogue transmission (like the common occurance cited above of a PDF document misformatted as a PS). The eFax will communicate (why not with a voice synthesized cell phone message?) with the sender that a rogue document is queued.
It is the responsibility of the users of 20th century office equipment to guard against runaway applications like this. But it is the responsibility of the sellers of 21st century business solutions like eFax to incorporate advanced error checking like this into their product. As we enter the age of 4GHz CPU speeds, 128 bit processors, terabyte hard drives, and GigaByte RAM banks, our PCs demand truly advanced software too.
So I'm going to go against your decision that this was the customer's fault for not closely monitoring a format change. I believe that it's partially eFax's fault for not coding their service against a common and catostophic client error.
Programmers need to get out of the 20th century mindset that if a program works in the software lab then it is finished. Actually by 21st century standards, its development has simply completed the first and easest phase. It now needs to be developed so that it works flawlessly in the bizarre and common error situations found in the field.
Light little cars can be fun too...
In Louisana we have this thing called 'car sailing' on I-10 between Lafayette and Baton Rouge. On some nights the wind is really strong and blows in straight west to east direction with solid 30 MPH gusts.
Late at night when there's no one on the road, get one of these little light cars like a Hyundai Accent or Ford Fiesta. Go down the highway in the center lane with the wind pushing the car (a stong tail wind). Get the car up to about 70 MPH so that there just a slight aerodynamic effect on the body. Then a gust of wind will literally lift the car and blow it into either the left or right lane
. Lift off the gas to allow gravity to reduce the speed by bringing the weight of the car back onto to road.
It really is a form of sailing. Probably stupid and dangerous too. But a great feeling. Really 'organic' and not easily done in a heavier 'muscle car' like the TransAm.
With a little creativity these small cars can have their amusements too.
All these SUVs are beginning to embarrass me. Everybody knows that reason that people buy them is because:
1) They get '$4000 cash back'. Or something like that and they need the money.
2) 'No interest and no payments until 2006!' Or some other absurd offer like that.
3) 'Just show your paycheck stub to trade in your current rust bucket and drive away in a giant houseboat on wheels for $100 down'.
4) You can write off the entire cost of the vehicle as a tax deduction. This got slipped in the middle of one of those 1000 page Defense budget appropriations bills years ago.
What is really getting to me about these people who drive around (alone) in these HUGE vehicles is that they have no sense of public shame. Everybody knows that American solders are getting killed in the Gulf daily to protect the oil supplies, so these assholes blatently drive around in a car that gets 10 miles per gallon (roughly 4 km per liter) and then they put some flag decal on their back window to show how much they support 'our boys'. If they really cared about whether or not the solders were getting killed then they would be driving a car that gets 30 MPG and there wouldn't be any need to send 130000 solders to the Gulf to ensure the oil supplies.
Everybody knows this. But all SUV drivers just don't give a fuck. And they seem so overjoyed to stick their HUGE vehicle in everybody's face to remind people that they either don't care or they're just too stupid to make the connection.
Everybody knows by now that the giant SUVs are just given away as tax write-offs. Myself, I would be ashamed to drive around in one of those because everybody would know that I cheated the taxpayers through a bogus tax-write off to get one. But they, the SUV drivers, just don't have any sense of public shame. They must think that the rest of us are happy to see them coming down the street in giant houseboat on wheels.
We're not. We're embarrassed by you. You make us look bad to the rest of the world. Everybody in the world looks at Americans now and says 'How can these people be so vulgar and stupid and have so much money?'. It's not a situation that has any real long term growth potential or stability. Then they start to analyse the situation and realize that the whole US economy is held up by the willingness of foreign parties to buy US government Treasury Securities to support the giant US government deficits and by the willingness of foreign parties to use the US dollar as a defacto global currency. So when the Chinese (who finance most of the US federal government deficits by buying Treasury bills) start buying the oil that they need directly from OPEC through private deals (not on the open market) and paying for it in Euros, the Americans are going to be in a bad situation. Because no one will need them or their bullshit anymore.
A lot of these SUV owners don't seem to realise that this giant piece of shit that they're aiming down the road is in all likelyhood the last new car that they are going to own. And, if things get real bad, they may find themselves living in it. That's their retirement housing: a Ford Expedition sitting on cinder blocks with the seats torn out and Winnie-the-Poo curtains on the windows. Renting a 5x5 meter plot in a trailer park built on a depleted Uranium dump site for $3000 a month.
I use Yahoo! e=mail and have for seven years. No real problems and nearly all spam gets blocked by their spam filters.
I wonder if the US military network has problems with spam. Generally nothing in America gets taken seriously until it starts messing with the military. Then the problems are given serious thought by serious people with unlimited resources. The successful approachs are then brought into the corporate environment and then the media. Then they filter into general American society.
A broad example would be the systematic racism and segration against the African-American people that didn't really start to change in American society until it started to drasticily undermine the military's ability to function in the late 1960's. The approaches that worked to reduce institutional racism in the military were adopted by big corporations (slowly, but surely) and are working their way throughout the society. Things are really different now in this area than they were fifty years ago.
But if you seriously want to get rid of spam, start feeding into the military networks. Let them deal with it in their own simple direct and time-tested manner.
Getting a patent for the idea of serving popcorn?
Are the movie theatres going to have to make payments to these people?
C'mon...a patent is supposed to be for inventing something serious and useful. This is not patent material by any stretch.
But since we're in the mood, let me be the first girl to patent the blow job. Yes, I invented it and it is now my intellectual property! So pay up. Credit card payments are billed to:
Christian Missionary Support Services, Inc.
This is no more absurd than putting a play pen in the corner of the store. Now, putting a play pen for senior executives who came up with this idea (or the Patent Office bozos who approved it), that would be a patentable idea.
Thanks for the message. It's good to know. There is a 'power good' signal on the motherboard power connection that goes back to the power supply. But your experiment says that it only applies to the power supply connector that goes to the motherboard.
I have used a +12/+5 power supply with an old junk CD burner and it worked with RedBook CDs. I have lots of old disfuctional CD burners since they used to last only about a year.
While reading your comment I suspected that it was done with Speech-to-Text software and a microphone. With a really fast CPU and a well-trained set of individual voice parameters you can get text like this: long rambling and folksy but with almost no misspelled words.
You gotta remember to say "New Paragraph" every once in a while! It's not natural but it vastly improves the readability of the generated text.
This technique is great for commenting source code. Just get the person who wrote it (usually the only person who understands how it works and usually the person the least interested in actually writing comments) to describe what it does by talking about it. Put a picture of a beautiful movie star next to the screen so he can pretend that he is describing it to her (this technique works best with geeky guys) and she is really interested.
After an hour you have an astonishing amount of text that describes in great detail how the code works. Get a software assistant or intern to either edit the comments into the source or provide an HTML link to the correct part of the source from the text description file.
Personally I think source code should look like a thriller novel. The comments should be descriptive paragraphs and the actual code to be compiled would be like dialog with quotation marks around each line. It would be much easier to read after it was finished for its upkeep. It would also be a big advance in software engineering. However, no one else on Slashdot seems to think so.
What Microsoft does is give a hundred PCs to the school district and two copies of Office. They wait until the teachers, kids, and administrators have loaded Office on all the PCs. Then they hit the school district with a huge lawsuit threatening to demand a hundred thousand dollars for every 'pirated' installation of the software. They 'settle' for a single payment of a million dollars or so. The original PCs are all taken as a tax write-off donation.
They've done this to Philadelphia and Portland Oregon that I know of and probably many other places as well.
A truly sleazy and degenerate company.
I still have to say, ?way to go RIAA, you are corrupting our children with crappy music in stores, radio, and now even in the classroom! Thanks!?
I still don't understand why the RIAA has so much political power when so much of the product that they sell is so clearly anti-social. Much rap and death-metal is clearly the results of disturbed individuals and a massively disfunctional culture.
I'm amazed that people who chose the appearance in public of gangster rappers and death-rockers complain that stangers are not inclined to assume that they are civilized human beings. They assume that this is prejudice and racism.
No, it's not. It's the result of a focused and unrelenting advertising campaign to sell rap music by portraying young males in hooded sweatshirts and other gangster fashions as the most violent and unpredictably disfunctional people on the planet.
And it has worked. Be a young male African-American with a backward baseball cap and go anywhere on earth. People will treat you like shit and just assume that you're a monster. It will take decades to reverse this new stereotype of hip-hop culture.
And what did young people of color get from all this negative stereotype casting? Nothing. A few individuals got big enough record contract advances to piss away on weird jewelery and pathetic SUVs. But nearly all the profits went to middle-aged white corporate executives, who would never let hip-hop individuals into their personal lives or social class environment.
Step'n Fetch'it is rolling in his grave.
I download sixties songs that I vaguely remember hearing as a child. For a while I bought a lot of records (45 RPM singles with the big hole for $0.79 US each new in the mid 1960's).
When I bought the record, I bought a lifetime right to the music.
An absurd concept back when it was impossible to seperate the content from the medium, but as relevant as all hell today.
The digitization process seperates the content from the medium in ways that are unimaginable when the content was first integrated onto its medium. This concept applies to all media and is the central component of post-McLuhan media theory. Generally wealth is created when old content is combined with new media in ways that were not possible before the digitization process seperates the two. For example seperating the pressing of a piano key and the sound of a piano note. After digitization, pressing a piano key on a synthesizer makes a flute or violin sound from a sample.
Anyway...
I demand the right to download any and all of the songs that I bought as a kid in the mid 1960's. I demand that the RIAA prove that I didn't buy the recording before sueing me for downloading it. "... pretty, pretty, Peggy Sue...". We are innocent until proven guilty.
I demand the right to be able to download any song that has been played on the radio long enough to have had the copyright period expire. In this case I mean the copyright period in legal effect when the recording was originally released and purchased by me.
I demand the right to publish on third world websites the names, addresses, and social security numbers of the members of the legal team that is using vague and legally unsubstantiated copyright to extort money from me.
Fuck these people! Let's cut their heads off instead of those of ordinary technicians who just happen to be working in Allah-land and got kidnapped by religious psychopaths.
Allow me to nominate a new entry into the Unknown Geek Cheezee Hall of Fame:
"The Fury" 1979 by Brian de Palma
staring Kirk Douglas, John Cassevetes, gorgeous Amy Irving, wonderful Carrie Snodgress, and Andrew Stevens. (If you don't understand why every female cast member is adorned with a complementary adjective, you're not a real Geek).
If you haven't seen this and you can find it in the $2.98 bin of the discount video store, snatch it up. A true cheezeball masterpiece.
All laws like this (overly broad and specifically targetting minorities for extortion, the minority in this case being young people who download and don't vote) are enforced in the real world as balance between how much money can be extorted from the target and how much this extortion depresses the economic activity that generates the wealth from which the extortion comes. They are basically designed to function as an open-ended and arbitrary tax.
They backfire when all the people who have been extorted using these laws are prevented from creating more wealth (when they can't get jobs according to their abilities because of their 'criminal' records) and this starts to reduce the flow of wealth to the extorters.
Lots of laws in this category are proposed. The ones that pass usually place more emphasis on pulling money from the target minority than providing a legal means for imprisoning the minority.
The drug laws are in this category in that they provide a way of extorting large amounts of money from the (usually white) middle class in fines and legal fees for ma*ri*jua*na (they do watch the net for that word) offences. They also provide an easy way to imprison economically marginal minorities (usually young blacks, who also don't vote) for unrealistically long terms for minor drug offences. The fact that in the USA the money spent on prisons goes to private corporations who give money to legislators to pass 'get tough' laws against minorities (anyone who doesn't vote) is just icing on the cake.
The Chinese have a saying that the easiest way to get out of a really bad political situation is to just leave.
...media companies are working steadily to assault their own audiences and remove their own products from circulation. ...They steadily try to introduce restrictive DRM measures that prevent people who DO want to buy their products from feeling comfortable about it.
I'm amazed at the extent that the media companies degrade their product and insult their customers these days with regards to implementing new technology.
I suspect that it's mostly due to the unbelievable success that they have been having for the past ten years. For movies, every year is getting bigger and better than the previous year. DVDs are part of the positive feedback loop (I hope using an engineering metaphor is OK here on Slashdot) that it making this possible.
This phenomenon is not likely to stop soon because movies are a young people's medium and also an inexpensive entertainment. The world's population is exploding and currently about 2/3rds of the people are less than 25 years old without much money to spend. And many, many more young people being born and raised behind them.
They have a guaranteed market and an perfect formula production system. So what are the media companies getting so upset about?
The notion that it is cheaper to dump garbage than recycle it is only partly true. It assumes that there is a place nearby to dump it: a place near by that is cheap to transport the garbage to, a place that nobody wants for any other purpose. These places are becoming rare and will be more rare in future years. Especially when just dumping garbage and sewerage into the ocean becomes impossible due to the destruction of sea life.
Dumping garbage is cheaper because it is only one small part of the recycling process: collecting and 'warehousing' of raw materials. Recycling is expensive because so much energy is required to seperate the various components of the garbage from the pile. By seperating the components before shipping it all to the central dump, recycling is cheaper than inital processing from natural raw materials.
Please no more remarks about 'gaddam hippies'. Hippies are smarter than you. This is website that respects intelligence and creativity: Hippies are respected around here.
Please n
One effect of this idiotic law is the wholesale destruction of nearly all of the popular books from the first half of the 20th century. The very best stuff and well-known titles are still being published and read (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Raymond Chandler) but past a hundred or so titles, the books are just disappearing.
When the paper wears out or the book stops being checked out, libraries take the title off the shelf. Large cites will sometimes save a copy in the stacks, but usually the books get pulped or burned. In a technologically advanced civilized society, each title that is worth being published in the first place would be scanned and OCR'ed before being completely wiped out. But this is illegal under the Mickey-Mouse-protection-to-infinity US copyright law. So they just get pulped and burned.
I read a book by Florence King about how white people got to be so weird (a sort of laid-back but sharp quasi-anthropological study of Caucasians in North America) "WASP, where is thy sting?". In this book, she cites many of the books that were influencial on her and her parents thoughts and attitudes when she was growing up in the 1940's. It is impossible to find any of them now even though they were read and enjoyed by tens of millions of people and had a great deal of influence on how the depression generation came to view the world.
Now the rock'n'roll generation (the baby boomers) and the MTV generation and Kazaa generations would just say 'Fuck this stupid law' and then OCR and circulate their favorite books and videos anyway. But the WWII generation won't, they'll trust that the proper authorities are taking care of the preservation of their culture. But that is not happening and their entire culture except for about 100 titles is just evaporating.
Hundreds of years from now, people will marvel at the American empire and technological accomplishments from the end of World War II. They will wonder at what these people were like; what they believed; how they interacted with each other; what drove them. But they will never know because all the popular literature from this period is being destroyed and not copied as its media wears out.
It's all happening because of this insane US copyright law. And nobody seems to be aware that it's happening.
Sure, there's a copy of every book published in the US in the Library of Congress. Maybe. One copy. Somewhere in the vast warehouse stacks. But with the current ability to fit tens of thousands of titles on a single 89 cent DVD-R there's no excuse for allowing all of the popular books from the early and mid-20th century to disappear. Future generations will not think well of us for allowing this to just happen. Just because nitwit assholes like Michael Eisner have hundreds of millions of dollars doesn't give them the right to destroy the entire culture of generations.
Yes, I'm completely for technology. But, whenever big business says that there is a giant shift about to happen it means that they are about to change the way that they do things in order to take MORE money from their customers for the same service.
Plus they are assuming that all this 'convergence' stuff actually works. Well, yes, the demo for senior management worked. And with a lot of work, the new system of 'digital convergence' will be functional about 98% of the time. The other two percent will eventually crash the whole new system. Which means higher rates for consumers to 'fix' it; which means getting things to work almost as well as they do now.
Face it, the only thing that has made the computer revolution of the past twenty years happen has been Moore's Law. And the willingness of individuals to learn how to work with new machines for their novelity and coolness value while tolerating the stupidities of bad interfaces and shoddy programming. People accept this because computers make many things much easier than they used to be (ever hear of a sticky white paint called 'WhiteOut' to fix mistyped characters when using typewriters? remember typewriters? What a fucking nightmare they were!).
When computer systems stop making life easier and the novelity factor wears thin, the acceptance and tolerance level of new computerized systems will be much less than it has been in the past twenty years. If 'digital convergence' is just another buzzword for DRM, then it won't be as welcome as the latest new PC that runs 100 times faster than the one of ten years ago.
Basically I don't trust anything that Business Week says is going to good for business in the future. Not until it has proven to be good for me and all the other customers who have to pay for and deal with all this new stuff. Look at the new Yahoo! mail interface: three times slower and half as reliable when not using MS Internet Explorer. Who needs this?
I don't know what you men consider to be mammary menace, but the goons in DC are laying their heavy hand on our local radio station. An Afro-American DJ who had a Saturday evening slot for about 20 years was fired because the management couldn't trust him not to play the hip-hop records that he had been playing for years without harassment.
The station KNOWS that the goons in DC are just looking for any excuse to shut them down through means of insane fines for 'indecent' music. So they fired the DJ rather than take the chance that he would play a song with references to 'mo-fo's, ho's, blo's'.
Granted, years ago, his show was the only place in town where you could hear "Don't Fuck With The Nigga With The Finga On The Trigga!", but recently it's been all Earth, Wind, & Fire and Beyonce. So I feel that the firing actually is just racist cowardness on the part of KBOO's oversight committee.
Besides, if the fascist fuckheads in DC are going to shut you down, they'll do it whether you're playing Sistah Soldja or Olivia Newton-John. It's like when Hoover begged Otter not to do anything wild and crazy because they were on double-secret probation, and Otter said 'It doesn't matter, they're going to do what they want to do anyway. So let's Toga!'.
A large ultra-low-power memory bank is another large step into the development of a new class of computers that record and store data for background monitoring applications.
The next big step is to get the price down significantly. The CPU component of a super-cheap data logger is now available with ATMEL's recent decision to lower the price of their low-end microcontroller, the Tiny 11, to $0.42 in quantity 25 (at www.Digikey.com). Now we need to get the sensors and the power supply to be less than a dollar each, and get the Flash RAM/EEPROM to a dollar a megabyte and we will have real high quality data logging tools.
An example of a application for this device would be when you are looking for a new apartment and you want someplace quiet with no surprises (like neighbors that work all day and come home at 3AM and turn on the stereo and the television).
You would leave a data monitor in the apartment for 48 hrs that monitors sound decibel levels. Every jump in the noise level is recorded along with its time, level, and duration. That way you could be reasonably assured that there would be no nasty surprises before signing a long-term lease.
Another application (currently available from Dallas Semiconductor) is a temperature logger that records when a temperature level goes outside of a programmable range. Say you're shipping perishable food or medical products and the temp can not go below 5 degrees C (40 F) or above 35 C (@100 F). Set the monitor to these levels and when the shipment arrives check if the limits were triggered. The internal real-time clock logs the time the levels were surpassed and the period of time out of range. That way you know who to sue when the illiterate teamsters left the shipment out in the hot sun for five hours in the middle of the shipment.
MultiGig Flash storage is a good thing, but it needs to be cheap to be of any real value.
This happens to me a lot whenever I see a really great movie. I tend to go again to another film within a week. This continues until I hit a bunch of duds and then the cinema bug dies for many months.
Actually rereading the comment shows that this is a desire to reemerge into cinema 'trance' after seeing a good film. There used to be double and triple features to draw people into the theatres for this effect, specifically to market this experience. Now double features are gone and the individual title product is being marketed. Movie execs want customers to re-up for another admission fee to keep the cinema trance going, but it is usually too expensive. So people leave the cinema zone vaguely unsatisfied and maybe a little inclined to rent some videos on the way home.
Maybe a video store in or adjacent to the theatre would have much more business than one with the same selection and prices not next to the theatre. Perhaps an upscale Starbucks, a video rental outlet, and a multiplex side-by-side would do better that each store seperated.
But I've never seen that arrangement.
Possibly the holes in the corner of the screen that you refer to are the reel-change markers. Many years ago theatres would have two projectors pointed and focused at the screen. The film reels would last about twenty minutes and each projector would hold a reel.
The marks on the film would be set about 15 seconds apart. The second projector would be set 15 seconds before the start of the film. The projectionist would watch the corner of the film near the end of the reel. When the first mark appeared in the corner, the second projector would start but with the light off. At the second cue mark, the first projector's light would be switched off and the second's light switched on. This results in a continuous film.
Now the film is spliced together into a long single strip. This allows one projectionist to run many screens as long as they don't start at the same time.
The cue marks are never only one frame, they are always about 20 frames in order to avoid being missed by the projectionist. People can detect one frame as a glitch but can't absorb symbolic information like letters, numbers, or logos from one frame.
Warner sees the investment as negligible compared with the threat to the whole industry.
The biggest threats to the whole industry is (1) their inability to control costs on marginal product and (2) over-saturation of the market with expensive product.
The second point is rejected by the industry because the weekly blockbuster releases have all been are consumed and mostly paid off with two or three weeks of their release. Although the core audience is not growing, they are fanatically dedicated to going to the newest and biggest release every week. For five years there has been no break in audiences absorbing the box office ticket price increases necessary to blockbuster films. The film industry is in a positive feedback loop,which is not a good thing. If there were any film executives with engineering training , they would see that this will burn out your resources too quickly. In this case the resource is the attention span of the audience for cookie-cutter blockbusters.
Movie execs are known for their 'MORE, MORE, MORE!' mentality, so the concept that they may be creating and releasing too much product too quickly would be difficult for them to grasp. The movie business operates on a pay-per-view basis and having too much product available in the theatres and video stores can only work to drive down the price that the audience is willing to pay for the product. You see this a little with the number of special offers that the video rental outlets are using to get six-month-old product off the shelves, stuff like $1 US 24-hr rentals of new releases on weekdays or much shorter periods between theatrical and DVD/video release. Often a DVD is now released even as a film is still playing in second-run theatres. Distributors want to cash in before the film is forgotten.
I think that the emphasis on preventing 'piracy' (in this case pay-per-view without the distibutor or studio getting the pay) is somewhat missplaced because it implies that the first viewing of any product is most important 'money point' and that is getting to be less true every year. Film is now becoming like television; a product that is often a background medium that sets the mood rather than commands complete attention. Why go through the hassle of illegally copying this weeks blockbuster when next week there will be another one just the same? And next month it will be in DVD and available at the supermarket for a dollar rental?