Yes, Transmeta has been very secretive. There is nothing wrong with that. The extreme level of secrecy actually ended up being a brilliant PR move. The difference between "closed door CPU design" and "dirty closed source software" is that anyone with a compiler and source code can roll thier own software. If everyone on Slashdot got copies of the Crusoe design, then every one of us with access to a.18 micron fab facility could make our own processors and maybe contribute to the design process.
Sarcasm aside, CPU development and software development are completely different. The "open source" model of distributed collaboration just does not work with CPUs.
We also have to remember that people (like them or not) spent upwards of $100M over 4 years, with zero return on investments, to make this new CPU happen. They are entitled to make some money off of a very risky undertaking. They were envisioning 700 MHz mobile CPUs when Intel was selling top of the line 120 MHz chips for workstations.
You shouldn't be paranoid about "another Intel". You should hope they become another Intel. How nice would it be to have Intel, AMD, and Transmeta become the "Big Three" of CPU design and have them push each other to produce better, faster, and cheaper CPUs.
I would doubt that your rank and file FBI G-man has access to that kind of code breaking power.
Even if they could, there's no way they would tip their hand over this little case. Privacy advocates would throw a shit fit.
Seven wasn't my favorite movie, but I liked how the cops used illegal privacy invading technology (the library system watch) to catch the bad guy. Then they chalk it up to "Old fashion detective work" or "Police intuition". I would be willing to bet this stuff happens all the time. Ahh...fruit of a poison tree.
I was really amused to see the same "Anonymous Coward" that gets quoted in all sorts of mainstream media outlets, get quoted in a major court document.
The first post they list is attributed to "root@megami.com". If it had been written by someone named in the case, it would be quite damning, but it wasn't. First off, www.megami.com is a page devoted to Japanese Animation. Besides that, anyone who posts to/. as root probably isn't the brightest bulb around. At least 50% of all slashdotters have root access somewhere, and it doesn't impress anyone.
I don't mean to flame root@megami.com, but presenting his/her sloshdot post as representative of the entire "hacker community" state of mind is insane.
The obvious extension of our current postal system would be a sender paid, by-the-piece price model. This would open up a new world of spamming, the crack spam. If you could crack a businesses email delivery system, send a million USPS.gov emails advertising your get rich quick scheme, and charge it to the business you cracked into, who is going to pay the $100,000+ charge you just racked up. Investigators would obviously know where to start looking, but if you were good enough at covering your tracks and kept your mouth shut, they wouldn't have any evidence and they couldn't do anything.
Wouldn't they have to provide tech support for people trying to read their USPS emails? That's a LOT of stupid people asking a LOT of stupid questions.
Basically, the system will cost in insane ammount of money to build, cause a ton of new headaches, and nobody with 4 brain cells is going to use it for anything important. That's not what I would classify as cost effective.
-B
Re:Pshaw! This one's easy!
on
Author Unknown
·
· Score: 1
How reversible would that be? Given the source code to Fish, could you take an output and reconstruct the original text? Would you have to know what different translations were done to it or could you guess? I just replied to post #15 about creating a program that cleans your "fingerprints" off of a work. Using the Fish is very cool, but I think there needs to be some random element that can not be reconstructed.
Rather than making manifesto A appear to be written by author B, a first step would be a program that just wipes your "fingerprints" off of text. Many sentances can have different structures while keeping the same meaning. A program that randomly shuffles words around would disguise your preference for a certain style. The problem with anything like this is that you would have to proofread the text after the program finished with it to make sure your meaning is still there.
When you are named in a lawsuit with this list at the top: The plaintiffs filing the complaint are the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.; Disney Enterprises, Inc.; Columbia TriStar Television, Inc.; Columbia Pictures Television Inc.; Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.; Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer Studios Inc.; Orion Pictures Corp.; Paramount Pictures Corp.; Universal City Studios, Inc.; Time Warner Entertainment Co. L.P. (Warner Bros.); ABC Inc.; CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Fox Broadcasting Co. it's about time to get some plastic surgery and move to Venezuela.
As much as this is a crappy solution, I think I would buy these things. Two weeks ago I rented American History X on DVD, which I hadn't seen before. About a dozen times during the movie it would skip ahead a few seconds or generally screw up due to scratches on the DVD. This stuff was happening during important, dramatic parts of an otherwise excellent movie. Rental VHS tapes may have lower resolution, but at least I'm going to see the whole movie. Having a virgin, although self-destructing, DVD would solve that problem.
They touched on it in the article, but I think this technology is going to get killed by corporate greed before consumers even have a chance to kill it. The big rental chains aren't going to go for this because they make something like 30% of their profits from late charges. Also, they have no objection to renting me a DVD that has been demolished by the 100 people before me who rubbed sandpaper on it. The article mentions that places like Wal-Mart or Pizza Hut could sell these coated discs. When people want to rent a movie, they go to Blockbuster or some other video store, not to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is big enough that maybe they could pull it off, but Pizza Hut is not set up to warehouse and distribute hundreds of different movies. What they could do is offer two or three very popular movies that they could buy in volume and sell at cost (like a buck). People that wanted pizza and a movie would buy Pizza Hut pizza over other non-movie-delivering pizza places.
This post started as a solution to scratched rental DVDs and ended up a suggestion for Pizza Hut's marketing department. Oh well.
They could package it in the old McDLT containers.
Does anyone else remember that sandwich? It came in this giant foot long ozone destroying syrofoam container with the only job of keeping the "hot side hot and cold side cold" for the 60 seconds before you got to magically combine them. Who says we were wasteful in the 80s?
Hey, that's about enough common sense capitalism out of you. Here on Slashdot, any company that doesn't spend millions of dollars on Linux development with remote prospects of return is evil and should be burned to the ground.
On a less sarcastic note: When a company like Diamond is making its money off of hardware, there's something to be said about customer support. It's not like they need a 100 person staff working around the clock. If they would just cooperate more, people wouldn't hate them.
I've seen many people on/. and most of the major media outlets describing the two chips as a "400 MHz Linux version" and a "700 MHz Windows version". I could only get an audio feed of the press conference, but that's not what I understood at all.
My understanding was that the 400 MHz chip (I forget the number they gave it), was designed for very small handheld devices. Maybe something the size of a PDA, but running x86 code and very integrated with your desktop. I didn't see the device they were using for the demo, but it was running Linux. I'm fairly sure that it COULD have run Windows. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
The TM5400 is aimed at a more traditional "notebook" computer. It consumes a little more power and costs quite a bit more (.18 micron is pricey). They mentioned Windows a lot in connection with it, but didn't Linus play Quake on a TM5400 machine running Linux?
Sidenote: Was anyone else VERY impressed by the credentials of the people they brought out?
Then mentioned that a notebook computer running the 700 MHz version (TM5400) is looking at $1200 - $1500.
He also just mentioned that Linus was not only involved in the Linux end of things, but was also very involved in writing the code morphing software at the heart of the Transmeta system.
I can only get audio so I might be missing something, but from what I understand, the 400 MHz CPU is designed for very small mobile devices (I'm envisioning a Palm V). They mentioned that this CPU sucks 1 Watt. WOW. The device they are showing off is running Linux.
The 700 MHz version is designed for more traditional "computers" that would have larger batteries. The one they are showing happens to be running Windows.
The chips are not designed for a specific OS, just a type of device.
The biggest suprise I've heard so far is that Transmeta is working closely with IBM. Was this known before and I just missed it?
BTW: ZDnet sucks. Didn't they expect every nerd on Earth to try and view this webcast? Audio just isn't cutting it for me.
Second, will Linus' attempt to defend his trademark ultimately prove futile as more and more sites/companies/people start using the word Linux - I'm assuming that there is a strong possibility that the illegitimate use of the trademark Linux will outstrip Linus' ability to control it.
Universal Press Syndicate had to pay those lawyers by the hour to send out threatening letters. Linus basically has an army of people willing to enforce his "linux" trademark.
I agree that he is milking his minute in the spotlight for all it's worth. But he is raising a few bucks for charity and that's always a good thing. Hopefully, the winner won't try to argue that the Church of Satan is a charity.
I'm no market guru, but I was watching CNBC the other day and I saw a great graph. They plotted the advance vs. decline line for the last two years. For almost all of 2000, the line was going down. More stocks were going down than going up. Since about November 2000, the line is up sharply. A majority of stocks are going quite well. A whole lot of people are under the impression that "The Dow" (which is actually the Dow Industrials among a bunch of other Dow indexes) is representative of all stocks. Not by a long shot. There are even days when almost all of the Dow Industrial stocks do fairly well, but one of them (mostly INTC these days) craps itself and sends the whole index down. People see the news with it's three second "Dow did this, NASDAQ did this" segment and think the whole economy is tanking.
There are a ton of undervalued stocks that have been unfairly punished and will be coming right back up. Maybe not to where they were in April 2000, but a whole lot higher than they are now.
I remember the Corel incident as mostly being about the definition of "beta". People freaked out and imagined a company charging people for GPLed software and hiding behind, "It's only a beta, we don't have to release the code". When it was pointed out to the suits at Corel, they were quick to open up the beta, not wanting to piss off a community they were trying to become a part of.
This "hole" is based on factually wrong legal foundation and is a publicity ploy.
The only thing the corporations will do is send you coupons based on what your microwave says you've been cooking. This happens already in a variety of ways. And if Tyson chicken sees that my house cooks 6 boxes of chicken nuggets a week and wants to send us coupons for nuggets and other assorted Tyson chicken products, that's fine with me.
You are making a bad assumption here. If I could say to myself, "My garage band, Colonel Hacker and the Script Kiddies, rocks so hard. We're going to release a CD of our music and a DVD of our killer performace at my cousin's bar mitzvah. Since we believe in the GPL and free information, we're going to allow free distribution of our CD and not encrypt our DVD.", then go ahead and get a copy of that CD and that DVD into a million people's hands, I would agree with you.
It is a great idea. But in reality and any time in the near future, it's not going to happen. Anyone with a little bit of money can record music or film a movie, but there are only about a dozen corporations on this planet that can take that album or movie and make it available to the mass market. Those corporations may fight with each other for market share, but when it's in their common interest, they are more than willing to work together. The one thing they all agree on is that no new players are going to get into the distribution game.
It would be wonderful if consumers could really vote with their feet and with their wallets. But as long as a vast majority of CDs and movies are purchased at stores like WalMart and Best Buy, no large number of people are going to get ahold of anything those dozen companies don't want them to. Bottom line: Until the internet replaces brick and mortar stores as the primary means of content distribution, the system we have now will stay in place. I have no doubt that one day it will happen, but I don't see it happened any time soon.
It made me wonder why other beer makers hadn't done something similar...
I did some research recently into putting a bar style pressurized beer tap into my basement. Only Guiness and a handfull of other very dark beers needed a nitrogen/CO2 mix in the tap system. Everything else used a pure CO2 system. It's not a "good beer needs the extra expense of nitrogen" thing because plenty of good imported beers used CO2 only. My only guess is that it has to do with the thickness of dark beers. I don't think it is a patent issue that keeps beers like Honey Brown or Heineken from using nitrogen gadgets in thier cans. They just don't need one.
-Barry
Re:Image Alteration has it's uses.
on
Live or Memorex?
·
· Score: 1
As for advertisers not getting their 'paid' room, I disagree. They have their spots on buildings and billboards, and paid for the people there to see them - not for the chance that they/might/ appear on tv, sometime. Billboards in Times Square are on TV/ in movies all the time. Sure, they are expensive because 10 million New Yorkers might see them, but they're REALLY expensive because 200+ million people will probably see them on New Years Eve. The number of sign-type advertisements that will be seen on TV is low, but the cost of those ads are huge. -Barry
They mention in the story that you can only put a digital sign over a solid field if you want motion in front of it. In order for a venue to sell market specific advertising for places like behind home plate or in front of a basketball scorer's table, the actual sign would have to be plain (probably blue). For billboards or scoreboards you can get away with covering up regular signs, because little action is going to take place in front of them.
I'm sure venues would put blue signs up in a second because the number of people who see the sign in person will almost always be a fraction of the number that see it on television.
Be prepared to see a lot more of this stuff because there is a LOT of money involved.
My 2 cents: The yellow first down line they use in football broadcasts is great.
I agree that Jon messed that comparison up. Journalists love comparing the likelyhood of something to the likelyhood of things coming from the sky and killing you (airplanes, lightning, MIR, meteors). The point is supposed to be that we don't worry about things falling from the sky and we shouldn't worry about this other thing. The comparison that Katz should be playing up is the number of kids molested by people that contacted them online vs. the number of kids molested by parents or step-parents.
-Barry
Re:Information *IS* Darwinian
on
The Regulon
·
· Score: 1
The part that makes my brain hurt is that an idea's "popularity" is unrelated to nearly everything else. You could say "Marketing", but that's only partly true. There are lots of things that had massive marketing efforts that have been completely forgotten (Crystal Pepsi). Then things like Napster and the band Phish get wildly popular with nearly no marketing at all. It makes no sense and it probably will never make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Transmeta has been very secretive. There is nothing wrong with that. The extreme level of secrecy actually ended up being a brilliant PR move. The difference between "closed door CPU design" and "dirty closed source software" is that anyone with a compiler and source code can roll thier own software. If everyone on Slashdot got copies of the Crusoe design, then every one of us with access to a .18 micron fab facility could make our own processors and maybe contribute to the design process.
Sarcasm aside, CPU development and software development are completely different. The "open source" model of distributed collaboration just does not work with CPUs.
We also have to remember that people (like them or not) spent upwards of $100M over 4 years, with zero return on investments, to make this new CPU happen. They are entitled to make some money off of a very risky undertaking. They were envisioning 700 MHz mobile CPUs when Intel was selling top of the line 120 MHz chips for workstations.
You shouldn't be paranoid about "another Intel". You should hope they become another Intel. How nice would it be to have Intel, AMD, and Transmeta become the "Big Three" of CPU design and have them push each other to produce better, faster, and cheaper CPUs.
-B
I would doubt that your rank and file FBI G-man has access to that kind of code breaking power.
Even if they could, there's no way they would tip their hand over this little case. Privacy advocates would throw a shit fit.
Seven wasn't my favorite movie, but I liked how the cops used illegal privacy invading technology (the library system watch) to catch the bad guy. Then they chalk it up to "Old fashion detective work" or "Police intuition". I would be willing to bet this stuff happens all the time. Ahh...fruit of a poison tree.
-B
I was really amused to see the same "Anonymous Coward" that gets quoted in all sorts of mainstream media outlets, get quoted in a major court document.
/. as root probably isn't the brightest bulb around. At least 50% of all slashdotters have root access somewhere, and it doesn't impress anyone.
The first post they list is attributed to "root@megami.com". If it had been written by someone named in the case, it would be quite damning, but it wasn't. First off, www.megami.com is a page devoted to Japanese Animation. Besides that, anyone who posts to
I don't mean to flame root@megami.com, but presenting his/her sloshdot post as representative of the entire "hacker community" state of mind is insane.
-B
The obvious extension of our current postal system would be a sender paid, by-the-piece price model. This would open up a new world of spamming, the crack spam. If you could crack a businesses email delivery system, send a million USPS.gov emails advertising your get rich quick scheme, and charge it to the business you cracked into, who is going to pay the $100,000+ charge you just racked up. Investigators would obviously know where to start looking, but if you were good enough at covering your tracks and kept your mouth shut, they wouldn't have any evidence and they couldn't do anything.
Wouldn't they have to provide tech support for people trying to read their USPS emails? That's a LOT of stupid people asking a LOT of stupid questions.
Basically, the system will cost in insane ammount of money to build, cause a ton of new headaches, and nobody with 4 brain cells is going to use it for anything important. That's not what I would classify as cost effective.
-B
How reversible would that be? Given the source code to Fish, could you take an output and reconstruct the original text? Would you have to know what different translations were done to it or could you guess? I just replied to post #15 about creating a program that cleans your "fingerprints" off of a work. Using the Fish is very cool, but I think there needs to be some random element that can not be reconstructed.
-B
Rather than making manifesto A appear to be written by author B, a first step would be a program that just wipes your "fingerprints" off of text. Many sentances can have different structures while keeping the same meaning. A program that randomly shuffles words around would disguise your preference for a certain style. The problem with anything like this is that you would have to proofread the text after the program finished with it to make sure your meaning is still there.
-B
When you are named in a lawsuit with this list at the top:
The plaintiffs filing the complaint are the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.; Disney Enterprises, Inc.; Columbia TriStar Television, Inc.; Columbia Pictures Television Inc.; Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.; Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer Studios Inc.; Orion Pictures Corp.; Paramount Pictures Corp.; Universal City Studios, Inc.; Time Warner Entertainment Co. L.P. (Warner Bros.); ABC Inc.; CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Fox Broadcasting Co.
it's about time to get some plastic surgery and move to Venezuela.
-B
What short straw do you have to pick at archaeology school to get stuck with the landfill assignment? Wow...I thought my job sucked.
-B
As much as this is a crappy solution, I think I would buy these things. Two weeks ago I rented American History X on DVD, which I hadn't seen before. About a dozen times during the movie it would skip ahead a few seconds or generally screw up due to scratches on the DVD. This stuff was happening during important, dramatic parts of an otherwise excellent movie. Rental VHS tapes may have lower resolution, but at least I'm going to see the whole movie. Having a virgin, although self-destructing, DVD would solve that problem.
They touched on it in the article, but I think this technology is going to get killed by corporate greed before consumers even have a chance to kill it. The big rental chains aren't going to go for this because they make something like 30% of their profits from late charges. Also, they have no objection to renting me a DVD that has been demolished by the 100 people before me who rubbed sandpaper on it. The article mentions that places like Wal-Mart or Pizza Hut could sell these coated discs. When people want to rent a movie, they go to Blockbuster or some other video store, not to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is big enough that maybe they could pull it off, but Pizza Hut is not set up to warehouse and distribute hundreds of different movies. What they could do is offer two or three very popular movies that they could buy in volume and sell at cost (like a buck). People that wanted pizza and a movie would buy Pizza Hut pizza over other non-movie-delivering pizza places.
This post started as a solution to scratched rental DVDs and ended up a suggestion for Pizza Hut's marketing department. Oh well.
-B
They could package it in the old McDLT containers.
Does anyone else remember that sandwich? It came in this giant foot long ozone destroying syrofoam container with the only job of keeping the "hot side hot and cold side cold" for the 60 seconds before you got to magically combine them. Who says we were wasteful in the 80s?
-B
Yeah....it's offtopic...do your worst.
Hey, that's about enough common sense capitalism out of you. Here on Slashdot, any company that doesn't spend millions of dollars on Linux development with remote prospects of return is evil and should be burned to the ground.
On a less sarcastic note: When a company like Diamond is making its money off of hardware, there's something to be said about customer support. It's not like they need a 100 person staff working around the clock. If they would just cooperate more, people wouldn't hate them.
-B
I've seen many people on /. and most of the major media outlets describing the two chips as a "400 MHz Linux version" and a "700 MHz Windows version". I could only get an audio feed of the press conference, but that's not what I understood at all.
My understanding was that the 400 MHz chip (I forget the number they gave it), was designed for very small handheld devices. Maybe something the size of a PDA, but running x86 code and very integrated with your desktop. I didn't see the device they were using for the demo, but it was running Linux. I'm fairly sure that it COULD have run Windows. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
The TM5400 is aimed at a more traditional "notebook" computer. It consumes a little more power and costs quite a bit more (.18 micron is pricey). They mentioned Windows a lot in connection with it, but didn't Linus play Quake on a TM5400 machine running Linux?
Sidenote: Was anyone else VERY impressed by the credentials of the people they brought out?
-B
Someone just asked that:
700 MHz: ~$150 - ~$350
400 MHz: ~$68 - ~$89
Then mentioned that a notebook computer running the 700 MHz version (TM5400) is looking at $1200 - $1500.
He also just mentioned that Linus was not only involved in the Linux end of things, but was also very involved in writing the code morphing software at the heart of the Transmeta system.
-B
I can only get audio so I might be missing something, but from what I understand, the 400 MHz CPU is designed for very small mobile devices (I'm envisioning a Palm V). They mentioned that this CPU sucks 1 Watt. WOW. The device they are showing off is running Linux.
The 700 MHz version is designed for more traditional "computers" that would have larger batteries. The one they are showing happens to be running Windows.
The chips are not designed for a specific OS, just a type of device.
The biggest suprise I've heard so far is that Transmeta is working closely with IBM. Was this known before and I just missed it?
BTW: ZDnet sucks. Didn't they expect every nerd on Earth to try and view this webcast? Audio just isn't cutting it for me.
-B
Second, will Linus' attempt to defend his trademark ultimately prove futile as more and more sites/companies/people start using the word Linux - I'm assuming that there is a strong possibility that the illegitimate use of the trademark Linux will outstrip Linus' ability to control it.
Universal Press Syndicate had to pay those lawyers by the hour to send out threatening letters. Linus basically has an army of people willing to enforce his "linux" trademark.
-B
I agree that he is milking his minute in the spotlight for all it's worth. But he is raising a few bucks for charity and that's always a good thing. Hopefully, the winner won't try to argue that the Church of Satan is a charity.
-B
I'm no market guru, but I was watching CNBC the other day and I saw a great graph. They plotted the advance vs. decline line for the last two years. For almost all of 2000, the line was going down. More stocks were going down than going up. Since about November 2000, the line is up sharply. A majority of stocks are going quite well. A whole lot of people are under the impression that "The Dow" (which is actually the Dow Industrials among a bunch of other Dow indexes) is representative of all stocks. Not by a long shot. There are even days when almost all of the Dow Industrial stocks do fairly well, but one of them (mostly INTC these days) craps itself and sends the whole index down. People see the news with it's three second "Dow did this, NASDAQ did this" segment and think the whole economy is tanking.
There are a ton of undervalued stocks that have been unfairly punished and will be coming right back up. Maybe not to where they were in April 2000, but a whole lot higher than they are now.
-B
Subliminal PS: Buy Lucent
I remember the Corel incident as mostly being about the definition of "beta". People freaked out and imagined a company charging people for GPLed software and hiding behind, "It's only a beta, we don't have to release the code". When it was pointed out to the suits at Corel, they were quick to open up the beta, not wanting to piss off a community they were trying to become a part of.
This "hole" is based on factually wrong legal foundation and is a publicity ploy.
-B
The only thing the corporations will do is send you coupons based on what your microwave says you've been cooking. This happens already in a variety of ways. And if Tyson chicken sees that my house cooks 6 boxes of chicken nuggets a week and wants to send us coupons for nuggets and other assorted Tyson chicken products, that's fine with me.
-B
You are making a bad assumption here. If I could say to myself, "My garage band, Colonel Hacker and the Script Kiddies, rocks so hard. We're going to release a CD of our music and a DVD of our killer performace at my cousin's bar mitzvah. Since we believe in the GPL and free information, we're going to allow free distribution of our CD and not encrypt our DVD.", then go ahead and get a copy of that CD and that DVD into a million people's hands, I would agree with you.
It is a great idea. But in reality and any time in the near future, it's not going to happen. Anyone with a little bit of money can record music or film a movie, but there are only about a dozen corporations on this planet that can take that album or movie and make it available to the mass market. Those corporations may fight with each other for market share, but when it's in their common interest, they are more than willing to work together. The one thing they all agree on is that no new players are going to get into the distribution game.
It would be wonderful if consumers could really vote with their feet and with their wallets. But as long as a vast majority of CDs and movies are purchased at stores like WalMart and Best Buy, no large number of people are going to get ahold of anything those dozen companies don't want them to.
Bottom line: Until the internet replaces brick and mortar stores as the primary means of content distribution, the system we have now will stay in place. I have no doubt that one day it will happen, but I don't see it happened any time soon.
-Barry
It made me wonder why other beer makers hadn't done something similar...
I did some research recently into putting a bar style pressurized beer tap into my basement. Only Guiness and a handfull of other very dark beers needed a nitrogen/CO2 mix in the tap system. Everything else used a pure CO2 system.
It's not a "good beer needs the extra expense of nitrogen" thing because plenty of good imported beers used CO2 only. My only guess is that it has to do with the thickness of dark beers.
I don't think it is a patent issue that keeps beers like Honey Brown or Heineken from using nitrogen gadgets in thier cans. They just don't need one.
-Barry
As for advertisers not getting their 'paid' room, I disagree. They have their spots on buildings and billboards, and paid for the people there to see them - not for the chance that they /might/ appear on tv, sometime.
Billboards in Times Square are on TV/ in movies all the time. Sure, they are expensive because 10 million New Yorkers might see them, but they're REALLY expensive because 200+ million people will probably see them on New Years Eve.
The number of sign-type advertisements that will be seen on TV is low, but the cost of those ads are huge.
-Barry
They mention in the story that you can only put a digital sign over a solid field if you want motion in front of it. In order for a venue to sell market specific advertising for places like behind home plate or in front of a basketball scorer's table, the actual sign would have to be plain (probably blue). For billboards or scoreboards you can get away with covering up regular signs, because little action is going to take place in front of them.
I'm sure venues would put blue signs up in a second because the number of people who see the sign in person will almost always be a fraction of the number that see it on television.
Be prepared to see a lot more of this stuff because there is a LOT of money involved.
My 2 cents: The yellow first down line they use in football broadcasts is great.
-Barry
I agree that Jon messed that comparison up. Journalists love comparing the likelyhood of something to the likelyhood of things coming from the sky and killing you (airplanes, lightning, MIR, meteors). The point is supposed to be that we don't worry about things falling from the sky and we shouldn't worry about this other thing. The comparison that Katz should be playing up is the number of kids molested by people that contacted them online vs. the number of kids molested by parents or step-parents.
-Barry
The part that makes my brain hurt is that an idea's "popularity" is unrelated to nearly everything else. You could say "Marketing", but that's only partly true. There are lots of things that had massive marketing efforts that have been completely forgotten (Crystal Pepsi). Then things like Napster and the band Phish get wildly popular with nearly no marketing at all. It makes no sense and it probably will never make sense.
-B