In the local newspaper they used to run a column written by Bill Gates. He mentioned that people at Microsoft suggest ideas for software products everyday that he reject because the market it too small. He suggested that anyone wanting to start their own software company start in small, specialized markets., because MS doesn't care about the small stuff.
Of course once you become big enough he will swoop down and crush you like a bug.
There are a number of ways to see this. I think that is part of why it was picked. To say, "obviously they meant Turing and that is the only thing they meant" is silly. The most direct symbolism that can be gleaned from the article is the reference to Newton, which made up the original logo.
There was a show about it on PBS last night. People have resorted to joining bartering groups.
Brazil has had its own strangeness. I was living there when they switched from the Cruzeiro Real to the Real. They didn't correctly anticipate the number of coins that would have to be minted. For six months you couldn't get the 5 cents change from your 45 cent bus fare. You got a "5 cent coupon" instead. So basically the bus fare was 50 cents with your tenth ride free!
ps For being a privacy nut you just told us all where you live. Smith's and Albertson's aren't exactly nationwide chains.:)
It is possible to design a system that will allow secure and anonymous electronic cash transactions. It is certainly easier to not make the transactions anonymous, but it can be done. Generally the people who are paying for systems to be implemented do not have privacy within the system as a goal. They want this information. They also don't want it to get out. Of course a search warrant solves that little moral quandry...
While in college a group of us went up to stay in San Francisco for a weekend. We got rooms that the Hilton Towers. While stepping out of the elevator I said, "Hey, anyone see The Simpsons last week were Bart does this?" and ran my fingers along the buttons. Now I didn't actually press the buttons as Bart did, but to my horror, all the buttons lit up as my fingers ran along them. We were able to hear quite a few angry comments out of the elevator before the doors closed. Later we went back and tested the buttons. The slightest touch would activate them and even if you tried to press them in they wouldn't move.
What isn't clear is if they only want to go back and remaster past films that have been hits or if they want to do this to first run films. I would love to see LoTR: TTT on an IMAX screen. At least I think I would. I am assuming that they aren't lying when they say they can bump up the quality.
For action films lots of people might want to see them first run on the IMAX screen. I don't know about dramas. Who wants to see Road to Perdition on a giant screen? Or worse yet, When Harry Met Sally?
Of course this trend might annoy George Lucas. I am not aware of any digital project capability for IMAX theaters. They would need a really impressive high resolution digital projector to go to IMAX size. Which reminds me, most IMAX movies run for a long time. I mean they are at the theater for about a year. I would guess that the film is expensive to produce and transport. Would it make economic sense to convert The Matrix? How many people would pay $10 to see it again on a really big screen? Maybe first run movies would be a better bet.
I am a member of the religion being discussed, so perhaps I can shed some light on this.
There are some things withing Mormonism (not the proper name btw) that are hard and fast commandments. Other things are left up to the individual. For example, coffee is forbidden, but Coca-Cola is not. Now many there are many Mormons who will never drink Coke. But there are plenty who do. The R-rated movie thing falls into the same sort of category as Coca-Cola. More or less. Anyhow, I watch some R movies. A friend and I actually considered writing a xine pluggin and selling the scene skipper files. He actually made some progress on writing it until we saw that some company in Provo was already selling a hardware player that did something similar. Anyhow neither of us would mind watching The Matrix for example and figuring out what parts to edit. Not that I can even think of what would be edited out. Why is that movie rated R? Anyhow there would probably be certain movies that we wouldn't be willing to watch in order to edit them. 8mm comes to mind. I went in to the movie not knowing what to expect and ended up walking out. At one time I saw a list of movies that one of these companies would not edit.
Thank you Sloppy! You are a reasonable person. I don't understand how most/.ers want the right to change their software to suit them but would deny a bunch of Mormons the right to watch a video in a way that suits them. These edits are akin to an automated fast forward button. But don't tell anyone or Hollywood will make the fast forward button illegal!
For a fair comparison, you'd have to edit the movie yourself, which is not what we're talking about here.
Allowing this would allow others to become the director, thereby negating the director's role in the production of the film. Why not just let the cameras roll and let the actors do their thing, with no direction whatsoever?
As long as we are talking about fair comparisions why don't we admit that airline and TV edits exist and the directors have agreed to them. They may not like them, but they agree to them. Of course the "shmoe" that does those edits is probably from LA instead of Utah (heaven forbid!) so these are probably more acceptable to you. Of course what is acceptable to you doesn't matter since nobody is forcing you to purchase these.
Even if you are opposed to splicing a video tape imagine the following: A xine pluggin that lets the player read a file that describes what order to play the scenes in a movie. You might be able to watch Godfather 1 & 2 in chronological order. Or do the same with Pulp Fiction. Or have a file that describes The Phantom Edit. There are an endless variety of variations. I have a friend that said he would make the nude scene in Titanic play twice in a row, the second time in slow motion. You wouldn't have done anything to the DVDs themselves, but you culd watch them in different ways.
Would you be opposed to the creation of such a program? Should such a program be illegal? Should the files that describe a particular edit for a movie be illegal? If I create a nonsense edit of Star Wars that I find particularly funny, should I be able to share the edit file with you? Not that you would want it since I have lived in Utah in the past and am therefore a shmoe.
Ripping selected pages out of a book is neither creation nor is it distribution of a derivative work. How about this situation: Pages 72 and 73 of a book offend me for whatever reason. I staple them together so that while reading I skip from page 71 to 74. Is that creation of a derivative work? That would be analogous to the situation in which someone watches a DVD with software that knows how to skip particular scenes. I agree that copyright law need revision. I think that it would be pushing it to say that I have created a derivative work by ripping out pages.
Thanks for your reply. You position is entirely reasonable to me. I agree that the quote about "it shouldn't be in the movie at all" was very poorly worded.
I lived in Utah for about 20 years. There is a long tradition of editing films. There was a theater in Provo that would show edited films. There is currently some guy that runs around (with the movie studios' blessing) showing a PG version of The Matrix in high school auditoriums on weekends. Nobody is asking the directors to change the content of the original films. People have given up on Hollywood.
Why should the studios stuff differently-rated versions onto one disc when they know they can sell multiple versions on different discs and sucker a decent number of people into buying both?
Fine then. Sell a PG version and an R version. Some people might even purchase both.
The Louvre (or whoever owns the image rights to the Mona Lisa) would have a cease and desist in your face ASAP.
The copyright (if there ever was one) on the Mona Lisa ran out centuries ago. You are free to do whatever you want with a copy of the image. You are free to sell modified copies of it. Just don't do the same thing with Mickey Mouse, ok?
What do you think of "The Phantom Edit"? I would really like to know. Do you think that a consumer has a right to edit a video that they have purchased?
Who the hell is this guy to determine what should and should not be in a particular movie?
He is someone that a large group of consumers have decided they trust. Large enough for him to make money by physically clipping and splicing back toghether their video tape. If this is censorship then it is self-censorship. A person has decided that they don't care to see certain things and has paid him to remove them.
I'm sure this guy would love it if Walmart decided to start selling only his censored versions of movies in their stores, to avoid the inevitable objections of several random parents.
Where do you get that idea? This isn't someone trying to determine what YOU can buy. This is a group of people who know what they want to buy. They have no interest in forcing you to buy anything. They are not trying to censor anyone. They want more fine grained control over what they watch in their own homes. Why is that objectionable?
The last time this came up on/. I looked at the sites of some companies such as CleanFlicks. At least one of them had a list of movies that they would NEVER edit. So you wouldn't ever be able to see A Clockwork Orange from them.
it's that any idiot would try to take the swear words out of a film in the first place
Ever watched Robocop on network TV? How about Ferris Bueller's Day Off? Both have dubbed in lines that are so funny that it is worth watching the edited version.
Beyond that, how are these people harming you? What is it about them that has you all hot and bothered?
If you think about it, they have given up asking Hollywood to tone down the content of movies. Instead they have taken matters into their own hands. Since they have given up on Hollywood you no longer have to worry about them pressuring the studios to remove your precious swear words. So you get movies with extra filth due to these people! You should thank them!
Weren't DVDs supposed to give us the capability to watch a PG-version of an R-rated movie? Why are studios afraid of this? The obviously already do these edits. That is where the version of the movie that you see on an airplane and on network TV come from. If the work has already been done why don't you sell it to the public?
There is a large enough market here to justify the additional cost. There are a variety of companies in Utah that have sprung up to fill this need. The company in question has found people all over the country that want to see cleaned up movies. If Hollywood would simply provide the toned down versions that they have already made of these movies on DVD they could realize additional revenue.
This is not censorship. Censorship is when someone else decides what you get to watch. This is consumers deciding for themselves that they don't want to view particular content. I doubt that many/.ers can respect that, but they should be able to see the difference.
Certainly if I buy a book I am free to rip out any pages that I want. The magic of DVDs allows you to "rip out pages" without doing so permanently. Why hasn't this technology been supported by Hollywood?
They're letting the hardware line grow gradually, so customers get a decent depreciation time on their investment.
I really doubt that they are keeping hardware slow on purpose. What evidence is there of that? If you think that they are not releasing the fastest hardware they can while maintaining their pricepoints. I agree that Macs depreciate more slowly than PCs, but that is due to a number of factors other than the fact the they aren't coming out with new hardware as quickly as might be expected.
Every company is looking for performance breakthroughs, even if their current customers are happy with current performance. Obviously if you only have 5% market share there are some people out there that would buy your product if it had better performance.
As a rule I usually don't reply to ACs. I'll make an exception in your case.
So you've never heard of "equal protection under the law"? What constitution are you reading, Alabama's?
Did you read my original post or just decide to get offened? What part of the US constitution does not protect homosexuals? You are citing a section that DOES. That only furthers my argument that the constitution does not need additional changes to protect homosexuals. Other additional laws might be needed, but not an ammendment to the constitution.
If you reply again as AC the you will have the last word.
Apple gave 10.1 away for free to any customer who could or would walk into an Apple store and pick up a CD. That was an amazing show of good will. It may have also cost Apple a fortune. I don't know, but I'm guessing it wasn't cheap.
Though there was a widely known hack, weren't the 10.1 CDs meant to only function as upgrades? So you had to have purchased OS X for those "free" CDs to be useful.
I agree that everybody is starved for cash right now. That is one reason why I don't see Sun buying Apple. Can you imagine Steve giving up control again? I actually hear a lot of rumours about IBM buying Sun, but never from official sources.
Anyhow what percentage of Mac owners run Mac OS X. I recently saw that it was 20% and that the number was lower than Apple had hoped it would be. They need to keep that 20% happy for now so that they can evangelize the remaining 80%. If the 20% love OS X but are annoyed by the $129 price that will come through. If they were given a $40 discount as a show of appreciation for being forerunners they might be even more enthusiastic about the product.
I do agree that everybody wants to keep their numbers up. I also remember that Apple has billions in the bank. They can take a bad quarter or two.
What they really need to drive revenue is to come out with systems that are faster. They have really been stalled chip-wise. The "MHz Myth" campaign won't do much in a few months when Intel has a 3GHz P4 out. If Motorola isn't doing the job then maybe it is time for them to go with IBM.
The iMac is a great product for the home user, but all the companies buying Macs would love to see some more horsepower. As soon as all the apps people need are running on OS X companies are going to look at upgrading their workstations and wonder why Apple has stalled so badly speed wise. This is going to be a real opportunity for revenue that might be missed.
I think not! Telemarketers are a unique class in that since they have violated common courtesy by calling you, you are free to treat them badly. Not that I would encourage such a thing...
But they do provide a release that isn't available unless you are a shameless AC.
Companies don't have a right to free speech (and this includes everything from mom-and-pop businesses to multi-national corporations).
Ha! What country do you live in because I want to move there! In the USA we have the strange concept of corporate personhood which grants companies all the rights of a citizen! Luckily a corporate citizen can't hold elected office, but in the USA they have greater political influence than your average human citizen. And yes, they do have freedom of speech.
As an aside, I consider the founding father's original intentions to be largely irrelevant. When they framed the Constitution, women and blacks were excluded from its protection. We are now going through a similar fight and readjustment with homosexuality.
Also as an aside, how long have homosexuals been unable to vote? In what way does the constitution exclude them? Are you proposing a constitutional ammendment to correct this oversight? Yes I realize that there are issues to resolve but I don't think they rise to a constitutional level.
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Of course once you become big enough he will swoop down and crush you like a bug.
or the forbidden fruit.
There are a number of ways to see this. I think that is part of why it was picked. To say, "obviously they meant Turing and that is the only thing they meant" is silly. The most direct symbolism that can be gleaned from the article is the reference to Newton, which made up the original logo.
Brazil has had its own strangeness. I was living there when they switched from the Cruzeiro Real to the Real. They didn't correctly anticipate the number of coins that would have to be minted. For six months you couldn't get the 5 cents change from your 45 cent bus fare. You got a "5 cent coupon" instead. So basically the bus fare was 50 cents with your tenth ride free!
ps For being a privacy nut you just told us all where you live. Smith's and Albertson's aren't exactly nationwide chains. :)
It is possible to design a system that will allow secure and anonymous electronic cash transactions. It is certainly easier to not make the transactions anonymous, but it can be done. Generally the people who are paying for systems to be implemented do not have privacy within the system as a goal. They want this information. They also don't want it to get out. Of course a search warrant solves that little moral quandry...
Try it out. If you sing it like Freddie did you can record your own voice and play it backwards and get the same result.
While in college a group of us went up to stay in San Francisco for a weekend. We got rooms that the Hilton Towers. While stepping out of the elevator I said, "Hey, anyone see The Simpsons last week were Bart does this?" and ran my fingers along the buttons. Now I didn't actually press the buttons as Bart did, but to my horror, all the buttons lit up as my fingers ran along them. We were able to hear quite a few angry comments out of the elevator before the doors closed. Later we went back and tested the buttons. The slightest touch would activate them and even if you tried to press them in they wouldn't move.
For action films lots of people might want to see them first run on the IMAX screen. I don't know about dramas. Who wants to see Road to Perdition on a giant screen? Or worse yet, When Harry Met Sally?
Of course this trend might annoy George Lucas. I am not aware of any digital project capability for IMAX theaters. They would need a really impressive high resolution digital projector to go to IMAX size. Which reminds me, most IMAX movies run for a long time. I mean they are at the theater for about a year. I would guess that the film is expensive to produce and transport. Would it make economic sense to convert The Matrix? How many people would pay $10 to see it again on a really big screen? Maybe first run movies would be a better bet.
There are some things withing Mormonism (not the proper name btw) that are hard and fast commandments. Other things are left up to the individual. For example, coffee is forbidden, but Coca-Cola is not. Now many there are many Mormons who will never drink Coke. But there are plenty who do. The R-rated movie thing falls into the same sort of category as Coca-Cola. More or less. Anyhow, I watch some R movies. A friend and I actually considered writing a xine pluggin and selling the scene skipper files. He actually made some progress on writing it until we saw that some company in Provo was already selling a hardware player that did something similar. Anyhow neither of us would mind watching The Matrix for example and figuring out what parts to edit. Not that I can even think of what would be edited out. Why is that movie rated R? Anyhow there would probably be certain movies that we wouldn't be willing to watch in order to edit them. 8mm comes to mind. I went in to the movie not knowing what to expect and ended up walking out. At one time I saw a list of movies that one of these companies would not edit.
Thank you Sloppy! You are a reasonable person. I don't understand how most /.ers want the right to change their software to suit them but would deny a bunch of Mormons the right to watch a video in a way that suits them. These edits are akin to an automated fast forward button. But don't tell anyone or Hollywood will make the fast forward button illegal!
Allowing this would allow others to become the director, thereby negating the director's role in the production of the film. Why not just let the cameras roll and let the actors do their thing, with no direction whatsoever?
As long as we are talking about fair comparisions why don't we admit that airline and TV edits exist and the directors have agreed to them. They may not like them, but they agree to them. Of course the "shmoe" that does those edits is probably from LA instead of Utah (heaven forbid!) so these are probably more acceptable to you. Of course what is acceptable to you doesn't matter since nobody is forcing you to purchase these.
Even if you are opposed to splicing a video tape imagine the following: A xine pluggin that lets the player read a file that describes what order to play the scenes in a movie. You might be able to watch Godfather 1 & 2 in chronological order. Or do the same with Pulp Fiction. Or have a file that describes The Phantom Edit. There are an endless variety of variations. I have a friend that said he would make the nude scene in Titanic play twice in a row, the second time in slow motion. You wouldn't have done anything to the DVDs themselves, but you culd watch them in different ways.
Would you be opposed to the creation of such a program? Should such a program be illegal? Should the files that describe a particular edit for a movie be illegal? If I create a nonsense edit of Star Wars that I find particularly funny, should I be able to share the edit file with you? Not that you would want it since I have lived in Utah in the past and am therefore a shmoe.
Ripping selected pages out of a book is neither creation nor is it distribution of a derivative work. How about this situation: Pages 72 and 73 of a book offend me for whatever reason. I staple them together so that while reading I skip from page 71 to 74. Is that creation of a derivative work? That would be analogous to the situation in which someone watches a DVD with software that knows how to skip particular scenes. I agree that copyright law need revision. I think that it would be pushing it to say that I have created a derivative work by ripping out pages.
I lived in Utah for about 20 years. There is a long tradition of editing films. There was a theater in Provo that would show edited films. There is currently some guy that runs around (with the movie studios' blessing) showing a PG version of The Matrix in high school auditoriums on weekends. Nobody is asking the directors to change the content of the original films. People have given up on Hollywood.
Fine then. Sell a PG version and an R version. Some people might even purchase both.
The copyright (if there ever was one) on the Mona Lisa ran out centuries ago. You are free to do whatever you want with a copy of the image. You are free to sell modified copies of it. Just don't do the same thing with Mickey Mouse, ok?
Who the hell is this guy to determine what should and should not be in a particular movie?
He is someone that a large group of consumers have decided they trust. Large enough for him to make money by physically clipping and splicing back toghether their video tape. If this is censorship then it is self-censorship. A person has decided that they don't care to see certain things and has paid him to remove them.
I'm sure this guy would love it if Walmart decided to start selling only his censored versions of movies in their stores, to avoid the inevitable objections of several random parents.
Where do you get that idea? This isn't someone trying to determine what YOU can buy. This is a group of people who know what they want to buy. They have no interest in forcing you to buy anything. They are not trying to censor anyone. They want more fine grained control over what they watch in their own homes. Why is that objectionable?
The last time this came up on /. I looked at the sites of some companies such as CleanFlicks. At least one of them had a list of movies that they would NEVER edit. So you wouldn't ever be able to see A Clockwork Orange from them.
Ever watched Robocop on network TV? How about Ferris Bueller's Day Off? Both have dubbed in lines that are so funny that it is worth watching the edited version.
Beyond that, how are these people harming you? What is it about them that has you all hot and bothered?
If you think about it, they have given up asking Hollywood to tone down the content of movies. Instead they have taken matters into their own hands. Since they have given up on Hollywood you no longer have to worry about them pressuring the studios to remove your precious swear words. So you get movies with extra filth due to these people! You should thank them!
There is a large enough market here to justify the additional cost. There are a variety of companies in Utah that have sprung up to fill this need. The company in question has found people all over the country that want to see cleaned up movies. If Hollywood would simply provide the toned down versions that they have already made of these movies on DVD they could realize additional revenue.
This is not censorship. Censorship is when someone else decides what you get to watch. This is consumers deciding for themselves that they don't want to view particular content. I doubt that many /.ers can respect that, but they should be able to see the difference.
Certainly if I buy a book I am free to rip out any pages that I want. The magic of DVDs allows you to "rip out pages" without doing so permanently. Why hasn't this technology been supported by Hollywood?
Maelstom is classic Mac game, now ported using SDL to many platforms and released under the GPL.
I really doubt that they are keeping hardware slow on purpose. What evidence is there of that? If you think that they are not releasing the fastest hardware they can while maintaining their pricepoints. I agree that Macs depreciate more slowly than PCs, but that is due to a number of factors other than the fact the they aren't coming out with new hardware as quickly as might be expected.
Every company is looking for performance breakthroughs, even if their current customers are happy with current performance. Obviously if you only have 5% market share there are some people out there that would buy your product if it had better performance.
I would rather not let them know that they have a live address, but I appreciate your point.
So you've never heard of "equal protection under the law"? What constitution are you reading, Alabama's?
Did you read my original post or just decide to get offened? What part of the US constitution does not protect homosexuals? You are citing a section that DOES. That only furthers my argument that the constitution does not need additional changes to protect homosexuals. Other additional laws might be needed, but not an ammendment to the constitution.
If you reply again as AC the you will have the last word.
Though there was a widely known hack, weren't the 10.1 CDs meant to only function as upgrades? So you had to have purchased OS X for those "free" CDs to be useful.
I agree that everybody is starved for cash right now. That is one reason why I don't see Sun buying Apple. Can you imagine Steve giving up control again? I actually hear a lot of rumours about IBM buying Sun, but never from official sources.
Anyhow what percentage of Mac owners run Mac OS X. I recently saw that it was 20% and that the number was lower than Apple had hoped it would be. They need to keep that 20% happy for now so that they can evangelize the remaining 80%. If the 20% love OS X but are annoyed by the $129 price that will come through. If they were given a $40 discount as a show of appreciation for being forerunners they might be even more enthusiastic about the product.
I do agree that everybody wants to keep their numbers up. I also remember that Apple has billions in the bank. They can take a bad quarter or two.
What they really need to drive revenue is to come out with systems that are faster. They have really been stalled chip-wise. The "MHz Myth" campaign won't do much in a few months when Intel has a 3GHz P4 out. If Motorola isn't doing the job then maybe it is time for them to go with IBM.
The iMac is a great product for the home user, but all the companies buying Macs would love to see some more horsepower. As soon as all the apps people need are running on OS X companies are going to look at upgrading their workstations and wonder why Apple has stalled so badly speed wise. This is going to be a real opportunity for revenue that might be missed.
But they do provide a release that isn't available unless you are a shameless AC.
Ha! What country do you live in because I want to move there! In the USA we have the strange concept of corporate personhood which grants companies all the rights of a citizen! Luckily a corporate citizen can't hold elected office, but in the USA they have greater political influence than your average human citizen. And yes, they do have freedom of speech.
As an aside, I consider the founding father's original intentions to be largely irrelevant. When they framed the Constitution, women and blacks were excluded from its protection. We are now going through a similar fight and readjustment with homosexuality.
Also as an aside, how long have homosexuals been unable to vote? In what way does the constitution exclude them? Are you proposing a constitutional ammendment to correct this oversight? Yes I realize that there are issues to resolve but I don't think they rise to a constitutional level.