I wanted to add one possibility. Your discussion assumed that all artists are immediately mass=pirated... which seems unlikely to me. It seems fore likely that an artist is likely to be pirated in proportion to their popularity. A mass pirate may not even notice a starting artist that's able to produce and sell 1000-2000 CDs, and even if they do, it may not be worth it to them to try and compete with the legitimate product offering. As a musician ramps up to 10000 CDs, notice is still something of a problem, but economically, piracy may begin to be worthwhile. However, it's still possible that a real economy of scale would have yet to kick in here, and it's probable at this point that said artist is still driving sales largely through personal performances and distribution outlets with which they have personal contacts and might not be friendly to piracy. When you move up to 20000, 50000, 100000 CDs and up, piracy is certainly going to be worthwhile.
What my theory would predict would be that the point where marginal costs and marginal returns would balance out (on recording sales only, mind you) would be somewhere in between 5000 and 20000 fans. The mass media market would probably be hurt significantly... but maybe in waves, because at it hurts, so would parasitic/pirates, unless they find exactly the right level at which to drain the mass-market host without killing it. Regional artists, or artists with marginal national fame, would find it tough to break profits on recording sales through a certain ceiling, but would find themselves with a reasonably sustainable small to mid sized business -- much the way things are now. And breaking into national fame might become a much more emergent/chaotic phenomenon, rather than the carefully controlled steeplechase it is now.
Last I checked, it's significantly illegal to be less than honest with the courts.
A fact which has to be legally verified, unfortunately, a game which, if you've got the resources, you can play until people get sick of chasing you, or until you misdirect them sufficiently.
Look at Clinton. Almost certainly committed perjury. Did he even get a wrist slap (other than losing a lot of respect)?
And here I was thinking that the whole point of the @#!$%ing BSD license was that you could do whatever the hell you wanted with the code... build a baby mulcher, weapons of mass distraction, TCP/IP stack for an OS, or BSD distro that fits in a ramdisk. Or floppy. Or whatever.
Yeah, I know, it's all about the copyright notice, because that is/was the sacrosanct part of the license -- you give a notice in your code. But seriously, if the above permissive attitude is the spirit of the law, couldn't someone at least have contacted the MicroBSD project privately and gotten this resolved without building up a big brouhaha? It sure looks like they'd've been willing to comply.
I'm with ya! How about first getting people to actually VOTE in our elections, huh? Then we can focus on getting the decent politicians back where they belong -- in power.
Only if they vote in a studied, deliberate manner, rather than simply taking in traditional campaign rhetoric. If you vote just to vote, you're adding noise to the signal of people who did study carefully. And if you choose a candidate on some litmus-test issue -- like abortion or gun rights, as many do now -- then you get... well, a system much like we do now, where it's all partisan perception and no real policy and statecraft.
There are a lot of things that are eight years old, or older. The Balkan Crisis, the first US-Iraq gulf war, U2's the Joshua Tree, HTTP.9, HTML 1.0, NeXTStep, the Simpsons, Unisyn 1.x, etc. A few of these things are of current interest because they're still useful/cool/relevant. However, even for the things that aren't currently relevant, they're still useful as historical perspective, especially if you start to look for cause/effect relationships.
Windows NT 4/5, based on the Chicago/Cairo projects, were being worked on clear back in 1994. The corporate culture, shaped by the attitudes of the execs, in turn shaped the software being developed -- software in broad use today. It's history, man, cause and effect, and sometimes it takes a few years (or decades) for everything to propogate -- despite American pop culture's mass ADD.
It's understandable, of course, to accuse slashdot editors/readers of knee-jerk pummeling of MS -- and most days I'm certainly ready to pick up my pitchfork and torch at a moments notice. But this seems to be genuine perspective. Gates is actually correct that moaning about computer woes has a partially social component, but one also wonders if a basically evasive response to the issue of bugs says something about the company that's given the market some really big security problems.
It's interesting that it continues, too. After one of the recent big IIS/worm problems (think it was Nimda) I remember seeing an MS spokesman say that the problem was essentially due to their being a market leader, that any market leader would suffer similarly. This argument seemed rather disingenuous when the actual leader in the space IIS occupied (Apache) had no comparable difficulties, and again seemed to come down to evasion of responsibility for bugs.
I think that's a thread throughout their history: mitigate importance of bugs, evade responsibility, promise more in next release. I don't think it's unique to them, and I'm not entirely sure it's bad business practices, seeing as how it seems to have won them an awful lot. But I like seeing the perspective. It's funny how the Jello makes more sense once you've seen the mold.
the built-in presumption is that the user cannot be trusted.
Quasi-true. (1) Many users do not trust themselves and (2) often (without well-thought out security), you do not know who is "using" the machine (ie, who wrote the code).
Both these problems have solutions which don't have to include draconian "Trusted Computing," of course, but don't underestimate the power of those two arguments as a support for TC. I know people who use them ("But I _don't_ know much about my computer... it's be nice if there was automated security to let me know what I could trust...")
I was thinking about this the other day. I think you could almost model it with a chain of matrices. If you start thinking of "improvement" as an iterative process, a function where you put in resources x1... xn, and random factors r1...rn, and you get out some delta of improvement/loss for each resource.
It's not really a deep insight, it's just a (probably obvious) way of modeling a process. Starting resources and resources available at each iteration can make a huge difference to what kind of return you're able to get from each effort -- but so does fortune. And then there are the catastrophes, the "black swans" if you will: You may be an competent student with good work ethic, solid middle-class resources, and a promising future, and a track athlete to boot, and suddenly collapse one day from an inexplicable heart attack and that's it -- happened to a friend of mine in high school. I've known some financial equivalents of this, too. I've missed making $20,000 from not reading my email for a day. I've also known people who parlayed a small stake, a bright mind, and small bit of luck into a decent fortune. It's all possible, but it's a function of both starting resources and fortune.
Look up the story of the dentist in San Antonio who noticed that SBC was getting rid of their pay phones all over town because "they weren't profitable" and started buying them up . . . he runs hundreds of pay phones with 1/10th the number of employees (and they cost on 25 cents instead of 50).
Just google'd for this story using the terms "San Antonio pay|public phones dentist" and I'm not coming up with anything that looks promising. Any hints? (Newspaper, date range, other key words)?
but now I've become part of a ridiculed and oppressed minority, with none of the benefits of other minority groups (weither based on gender, race, etc) such as legal representation, there is no "smokers rights" groups, and, of course, I'm very much discriminated against.
I don't know if you can really claim the status of oppressed minority based on a behavioral trait. Race and gender are a lot different than preference and habit.
Don't get me wrong: I don't think that you ought to be harassed, beaten, denied a job, etc. It just seems a little disingenuous to call it discrimination....
If no one buys one, why would you design a city around them?
City planners/designers in many places are already trending towards realizing that the city designed around the automobile caries with it a lot of the sprawl/urban decay problems that have been the bane of metro areas for 2-3 decades. Ped-friendly downtowns are becoming much more common. So maybe cities won't be designed around segway -- but what if segways drop nicely into ped-friendly cities?
Mind you, there's still places like Utah where they think that the solution to traffic problems is to simply build more/bigger roads. The west in general, with the exception of the coast, doesn't tend to think in terms of urban design. So it may be a few decades yet. But it's possible.
eventually they are going to go public. When that happens, profits take precedence above everything else. Then you can't be so sure they'll stay on the straight and narrow path.
Is this really inevitable? Corporations have a charter, with articles of incorporation. They have bylaws. Wouldn't it be possible to legally build binding values into a company using these tools?
Sure, there's still shareholder lawsuits ("You could have increased revenues by selling alcohol ads!"), but it seems all you'd really have to do to greatly reduce the risk would be to include a note about the articles/bylaws into an investment prospectus....
Anyone know if this would actually work? If there are any publically held companies who do something like this?
How much do you think it would be worth to Acme Rubber (i.e. how much would they be willing to pay Google) to find out that FizBaz Rubber employees are searching for "Norwegian greenhouses"? Perhaps FizBaz is moving production from the Amazon to a bunch of greenhouses in Norway.
I started thinking about this a while ago -- Google (well, and other search engines, but Google is the most popular) is a tremendously large information leak to most companies.
If a company starts to care about stuff like this and/or Google were to demonstrate it were anything but trustworthy, then a technical solution really wouldn't be all that difficult. Use a proxy. Use a service like OrangaTango. Spoof your IP address. Whatever.
I suppose there still might be some way to get your info from the people running the proxy (or by hacking it) and if you spoof your IP there's still MAC addresses (which can also be manipulated), but the point is, at that point, it becomes much more expensive to get this information about you, and probably becomes not worth it.
To say that your application can "understand" XML because it can use the DOM API doesn't mean that it can interpret XACML, or any other XML "ontology". You might just as well argue that you can understand Danish because you can parse the "å" character. XML is a data storage format, well-suited to data that has heirarchy and structure. The DOM API could well be said to "understand" XML in the sense that it knows what it needs to know in order to directly translate an XML document into a data structure.
Of course it doesn't necessarily know what to do from there -- because that's domain specific knowledge. But no general API treats that, and that's why the analogy presented seems a little bit off to me.... talking about "understanding" in any case when it comes to modern computing technology isn't right.
Well, as he said, they spread a false 'oil shortage' story, on the Internet, in 1972. If that isn't believeable enough to you, don't self-ignite in a big swirly mass of contradiction.
It looked to me like he said you couldn't have managed to spread such a story via the Internet, and in fact, that the presence of the Web as we know it now would make the feat difficult. This makes some sense.
And that he said that the 1970s media and oil companies falsified the oil shortage. This is completely new to me, and I figure somebody on slashdot has got to know something about it....
I beleive her father is a rather famous physicist (Freeman Dyson, worked with Feynman on QED theory), and her mother is a mathematician. Last name came from the usual traditional way, and really, Esther's not that bad a name, and with parents like she has, she was very simply likely to be different from other kids, made fun of sometimes, and eventually, widely respected and succesful. I bet she took to the whole package just fine.:)
The article made sense, in fact, common sense, but there were a few interesting tidbits that made be do double takes:
In a similar vein, at present it would probably be impossible to spread a false "oil shortage" story through the Internet, as the American oil companies and mainstream media did in 1972. In fact the Internet would probably demolish such propaganda in days. In 1972, it was not until months later that a merchant marine officer told me how his oil supertanker had been held off the New Jersey coast for six weeks at the height of the "oil shortage."
Whaaat? Anybody know anything else about this? Crackpot conspiracy theory, or little known fact? Why in the world would this have been done?
The ethnic slaughters in the wake of Yugoslavia's disintegration were largely blamed on inflammatory talk radio - and the absence of contrary opinion.
On slashdot, no matter how insightful, interesting, or funny your posts are, you can't decrease your userid number (unless you buy it [ebay.com]). But what you can do, is accumulate a lot of fans. Yes, the number of fans you have on slashdot seems way more important than the number of your userid.
And best of all, you can do it without having to be insightful, interesting, informative, or funny -- just post pr0n!
Do you want the popularity of Tracy Lords or Esther Dyson?
Hollywood had decided they liked the Divx pay-to-play model and it, not DVD (it was a DVD extension) would be the next big thing. Most studios were doing Divx-first releases and some were doing no DVD releases at all.
With Divx, there were still competing products that didn't involve the pay per view model -- many titles did come on DVD, and finally, good ol' VHS was still in action.
If VHS had been a thing of the past, and DVDs the only competition, and then they switched to the pay per view model, the story could have been differenet.
If Dell, Compaq, HP, etc begin offering Palladium computers and only Palladium computers, that's where the market will go.
Might work in some polynesian languages. You can go entire sentences in Samoan w/o using a single consonant (well... unless you count the glottal stop). O a'u ia (I am a fish). OK, that one may not come up often, but I seem to recall that the word for "learning" also has no consonants, so "I am learning" wouldn't have any.
And I've met Samoans whose names were entire sentences. Fa'alelalolagi (like that which is below the heavens, I think).
The portion of the 95% that is thinking of going heretic.
(Also, MS realizes that as long as you have competitors out there with a revenue stream, they can become a threat, especially if they have access to OEMs. That's why their favorite business tactic is to cut would-be competitors off from OEMs, but since they can't do that in this case...)
Seriously, everything that's been said about Gollum aside (because I Gollum was very impressive), I walked out of TTT wondering how they managed to do FOTR so well and get TTT so wrong. It wasn't that they changed the plot here and there. It's that they completely changed who some of the characters were. Not to mention they transmuted actual drama into telegraphed-punch melodrama. Having Merry and Pippin play less of a role in their own escape, but play a greater role in persuading the doped-down Ents. Fine. Playing up Aragorn's reliance on Arwen, and the conflict there, fine. Warg riders? Way cool (don't remember that from the book). Making Wormtongue look like Marilyn Manson without the freaky contact lenses? All right, fine. But having Faramir take Frodo back to Gondor? That completely changed who Faramir was, and the only justification I can think of is that they're compositing Denethor with Faramir and leaving Denethor out, and it's still a damn weak way to change the story. Having a character like Faramir is essential to the experience of the story. And even that is secondary to the fact that Frodo's character development in the film seems entirely limited to sympathy for Gollum. That's important, but there's more to it, and his character seems rather one dimensional.
Gollum is the high point of the film. The effects are second. The rest, well....
Slashdot Mirror
Really good analysis. I enjoyed it.
I wanted to add one possibility. Your discussion assumed that all artists are immediately mass=pirated... which seems unlikely to me. It seems fore likely that an artist is likely to be pirated in proportion to their popularity. A mass pirate may not even notice a starting artist that's able to produce and sell 1000-2000 CDs, and even if they do, it may not be worth it to them to try and compete with the legitimate product offering. As a musician ramps up to 10000 CDs, notice is still something of a problem, but economically, piracy may begin to be worthwhile. However, it's still possible that a real economy of scale would have yet to kick in here, and it's probable at this point that said artist is still driving sales largely through personal performances and distribution outlets with which they have personal contacts and might not be friendly to piracy. When you move up to 20000, 50000, 100000 CDs and up, piracy is certainly going to be worthwhile.
What my theory would predict would be that the point where marginal costs and marginal returns would balance out (on recording sales only, mind you) would be somewhere in between 5000 and 20000 fans. The mass media market would probably be hurt significantly... but maybe in waves, because at it hurts, so would parasitic/pirates, unless they find exactly the right level at which to drain the mass-market host without killing it. Regional artists, or artists with marginal national fame, would find it tough to break profits on recording sales through a certain ceiling, but would find themselves with a reasonably sustainable small to mid sized business -- much the way things are now.
And breaking into national fame might become a much more emergent/chaotic phenomenon, rather than the carefully controlled steeplechase it is now.
Just a theory.
What the fuck are there video cameras embedded in ATMs for? When do they turn on? Have my efforts to moon the bank people been completely in vain?
I just had a thought, too: reality television! A show made up from ATM video cameras!
Last I checked, it's significantly illegal to be less than honest with the courts.
A fact which has to be legally verified, unfortunately, a game which, if you've got the resources, you can play until people get sick of chasing you, or until you misdirect them sufficiently.
Look at Clinton. Almost certainly committed perjury. Did he even get a wrist slap (other than losing a lot of respect)?
And here I was thinking that the whole point of the @#!$%ing BSD license was that you could do whatever the hell you wanted with the code... build a baby mulcher, weapons of mass distraction, TCP/IP stack for an OS, or BSD distro that fits in a ramdisk. Or floppy. Or whatever.
Yeah, I know, it's all about the copyright notice, because that is/was the sacrosanct part of the license -- you give a notice in your code. But seriously, if the above permissive attitude is the spirit of the law, couldn't someone at least have contacted the MicroBSD project privately and gotten this resolved without building up a big brouhaha? It sure looks like they'd've been willing to comply.
I'm with ya! How about first getting people to actually VOTE in our elections, huh? Then we can focus on getting the decent politicians back where they belong -- in power.
Only if they vote in a studied, deliberate manner, rather than simply taking in traditional campaign rhetoric. If you vote just to vote, you're adding noise to the signal of people who did study carefully. And if you choose a candidate on some litmus-test issue -- like abortion or gun rights, as many do now -- then you get... well, a system much like we do now, where it's all partisan perception and no real policy and statecraft.
We don't need more voters, we need better voters. That's what Thomas Sowell thinks, and I think I'd have to agree.
There are a lot of things that are eight years old, or older. The Balkan Crisis, the first US-Iraq gulf war, U2's the Joshua Tree, HTTP .9, HTML 1.0, NeXTStep, the Simpsons, Unisyn 1.x, etc. A few of these things are of current interest because they're still useful/cool/relevant. However, even for the things that aren't currently relevant, they're still useful as historical perspective, especially if you start to look for cause/effect relationships.
Windows NT 4/5, based on the Chicago/Cairo projects, were being worked on clear back in 1994. The corporate culture, shaped by the attitudes of the execs, in turn shaped the software being developed -- software in broad use today. It's history, man, cause and effect, and sometimes it takes a few years (or decades) for everything to propogate -- despite American pop culture's mass ADD.
It's understandable, of course, to accuse slashdot editors/readers of knee-jerk pummeling of MS -- and most days I'm certainly ready to pick up my pitchfork and torch at a moments notice. But this seems to be genuine perspective. Gates is actually correct that moaning about computer woes has a partially social component, but one also wonders if a basically evasive response to the issue of bugs says something about the company that's given the market some really big security problems.
It's interesting that it continues, too. After one of the recent big IIS/worm problems (think it was Nimda) I remember seeing an MS spokesman say that the problem was essentially due to their being a market leader, that any market leader would suffer similarly. This argument seemed rather disingenuous when the actual leader in the space IIS occupied (Apache) had no comparable difficulties, and again seemed to come down to evasion of responsibility for bugs.
I think that's a thread throughout their history: mitigate importance of bugs, evade responsibility, promise more in next release. I don't think it's unique to them, and I'm not entirely sure it's bad business practices, seeing as how it seems to have won them an awful lot. But I like seeing the perspective. It's funny how the Jello makes more sense once you've seen the mold.
the built-in presumption is that the user cannot be trusted.
Quasi-true. (1) Many users do not trust themselves and (2) often (without well-thought out security), you do not know who is "using" the machine (ie, who wrote the code).
Both these problems have solutions which don't have to include draconian "Trusted Computing," of course, but don't underestimate the power of those two arguments as a support for TC. I know people who use them ("But I _don't_ know much about my computer... it's be nice if there was automated security to let me know what I could trust...")
I was thinking about this the other day. I think you could almost model it with a chain of matrices. If you start thinking of "improvement" as an iterative process, a function where you put in resources x1... xn, and random factors r1...rn, and you get out some delta of improvement/loss for each resource.
It's not really a deep insight, it's just a (probably obvious) way of modeling a process. Starting resources and resources available at each iteration can make a huge difference to what kind of return you're able to get from each effort -- but so does fortune. And then there are the catastrophes, the "black swans" if you will: You may be an competent student with good work ethic, solid middle-class resources, and a promising future, and a track athlete to boot, and suddenly collapse one day from an inexplicable heart attack and that's it -- happened to a friend of mine in high school. I've known some financial equivalents of this, too. I've missed making $20,000 from not reading my email for a day. I've also known people who parlayed a small stake, a bright mind, and small bit of luck into a decent fortune. It's all possible, but it's a function of both starting resources and fortune.
Look up the story of the dentist in San Antonio who noticed that SBC was getting rid of their pay phones all over town because "they weren't profitable" and started buying them up . . . he runs hundreds of pay phones with 1/10th the number of employees (and they cost on 25 cents instead of 50).
Just google'd for this story using the terms "San Antonio pay|public phones dentist" and I'm not coming up with anything that looks promising. Any hints? (Newspaper, date range, other key words)?
but now I've become part of a ridiculed and oppressed minority, with none of the benefits of other minority groups (weither based on gender, race, etc) such as legal representation, there is no "smokers rights" groups, and, of course, I'm very much discriminated against.
I don't know if you can really claim the status of oppressed minority based on a behavioral trait. Race and gender are a lot different than preference and habit.
Don't get me wrong: I don't think that you ought to be harassed, beaten, denied a job, etc. It just seems a little disingenuous to call it discrimination....
If no one buys one, why would you design a city around them?
City planners/designers in many places are already trending towards realizing that the city designed around the automobile caries with it a lot of the sprawl/urban decay problems that have been the bane of metro areas for 2-3 decades. Ped-friendly downtowns are becoming much more common. So maybe cities won't be designed around segway -- but what if segways drop nicely into ped-friendly cities?
Mind you, there's still places like Utah where they think that the solution to traffic problems is to simply build more/bigger roads. The west in general, with the exception of the coast, doesn't tend to think in terms of urban design. So it may be a few decades yet. But it's possible.
Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card. One of the main characters, Step, is a game developer in the 80s, and I thought the character was pretty believable.
eventually they are going to go public. When that happens, profits take precedence above everything else. Then you can't be so sure they'll stay on the straight and narrow path.
Is this really inevitable? Corporations have a charter, with articles of incorporation. They have bylaws. Wouldn't it be possible to legally build binding values into a company using these tools?
Sure, there's still shareholder lawsuits ("You could have increased revenues by selling alcohol ads!"), but it seems all you'd really have to do to greatly reduce the risk would be to include a note about the articles/bylaws into an investment prospectus....
Anyone know if this would actually work? If there are any publically held companies who do something like this?
How much do you think it would be worth to Acme Rubber (i.e. how much would they be willing to pay Google) to find out that FizBaz Rubber employees are searching for "Norwegian greenhouses"? Perhaps FizBaz is moving production from the Amazon to a bunch of greenhouses in Norway.
I started thinking about this a while ago -- Google (well, and other search engines, but Google is the most popular) is a tremendously large information leak to most companies.
If a company starts to care about stuff like this and/or Google were to demonstrate it were anything but trustworthy, then a technical solution really wouldn't be all that difficult. Use a proxy. Use a service like OrangaTango. Spoof your IP address. Whatever.
I suppose there still might be some way to get your info from the people running the proxy (or by hacking it) and if you spoof your IP there's still MAC addresses (which can also be manipulated), but the point is, at that point, it becomes much more expensive to get this information about you, and probably becomes not worth it.
To say that your application can "understand" XML because it can use the DOM API doesn't mean that it can interpret XACML, or any other XML "ontology". You might just as well argue that you can understand Danish because you can parse the "å" character.
XML is a data storage format, well-suited to data that has heirarchy and structure. The DOM API could well be said to "understand" XML in the sense that it knows what it needs to know in order to directly translate an XML document into a data structure.
Of course it doesn't necessarily know what to do from there -- because that's domain specific knowledge. But no general API treats that, and that's why the analogy presented seems a little bit off to me.... talking about "understanding" in any case when it comes to modern computing technology isn't right.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum theory?
:)
Explains their fame, doesn't it?
While there are people working on proof-related theories, Feynman and Dyson worked up Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED).
Well, as he said, they spread a false 'oil shortage' story, on the Internet, in 1972. If that isn't believeable enough to you, don't self-ignite in a big swirly mass of contradiction.
It looked to me like he said you couldn't have managed to spread such a story via the Internet, and in fact, that the presence of the Web as we know it now would make the feat difficult. This makes some sense.
And that he said that the 1970s media and oil companies falsified the oil shortage. This is completely new to me, and I figure somebody on slashdot has got to know something about it....
I beleive her father is a rather famous physicist (Freeman Dyson, worked with Feynman on QED theory), and her mother is a mathematician. Last name came from the usual traditional way, and really, Esther's not that bad a name, and with parents like she has, she was very simply likely to be different from other kids, made fun of sometimes, and eventually, widely respected and succesful. I bet she took to the whole package just fine. :)
The article made sense, in fact, common sense, but there were a few interesting tidbits that made be do double takes:
In a similar vein, at present it would probably be impossible to spread a false "oil shortage" story through the Internet, as the American oil companies and mainstream media did in 1972. In fact the Internet would probably demolish such propaganda in days. In 1972, it was not until months later that a merchant marine officer told me how his oil supertanker had been held off the New Jersey coast for six weeks at the height of the "oil shortage."
Whaaat? Anybody know anything else about this? Crackpot conspiracy theory, or little known fact? Why in the world would this have been done?
The ethnic slaughters in the wake of Yugoslavia's disintegration were largely blamed on inflammatory talk radio - and the absence of contrary opinion.
Whaaat? Anybody know anything else about this?
On slashdot, no matter how insightful, interesting, or funny your posts are, you can't decrease your userid number (unless you buy it [ebay.com]). But what you can do, is accumulate a lot of fans. Yes, the number of fans you have on slashdot seems way more important than the number of your userid.
And best of all, you can do it without having to be insightful, interesting, informative, or funny -- just post pr0n!
Do you want the popularity of Tracy Lords or Esther Dyson?
Hollywood had decided they liked the Divx pay-to-play model and it, not DVD (it was a DVD extension) would be the next big thing. Most studios were doing Divx-first releases and some were doing no DVD releases at all.
With Divx, there were still competing products that didn't involve the pay per view model -- many titles did come on DVD, and finally, good ol' VHS was still in action.
If VHS had been a thing of the past, and DVDs the only competition, and then they switched to the pay per view model, the story could have been differenet.
If Dell, Compaq, HP, etc begin offering Palladium computers and only Palladium computers, that's where the market will go.
Might work in some polynesian languages. You can go entire sentences in Samoan w/o using a single consonant (well... unless you count the glottal stop). O a'u ia (I am a fish). OK, that one may not come up often, but I seem to recall that the word for "learning" also has no consonants, so "I am learning" wouldn't have any.
And I've met Samoans whose names were entire sentences. Fa'alelalolagi (like that which is below the heavens, I think).
Hmmmm. I wonder if the names "Neo", "Morpheous", or "Switch" showed up anywhere.
(Although naming your kid Anderson would be kind of cool).
The portion of the 95% that is thinking of going heretic.
(Also, MS realizes that as long as you have competitors out there with a revenue stream, they can become a threat, especially if they have access to OEMs. That's why their favorite business tactic is to cut would-be competitors off from OEMs, but since they can't do that in this case...)
A-men.
Seriously, everything that's been said about Gollum aside (because I Gollum was very impressive), I walked out of TTT wondering how they managed to do FOTR so well and get TTT so wrong. It wasn't that they changed the plot here and there. It's that they completely changed who some of the characters were. Not to mention they transmuted actual drama into telegraphed-punch melodrama. Having Merry and Pippin play less of a role in their own escape, but play a greater role in persuading the doped-down Ents. Fine. Playing up Aragorn's reliance on Arwen, and the conflict there, fine. Warg riders? Way cool (don't remember that from the book). Making Wormtongue look like Marilyn Manson without the freaky contact lenses? All right, fine. But having Faramir take Frodo back to Gondor? That completely changed who Faramir was, and the only justification I can think of is that they're compositing Denethor with Faramir and leaving Denethor out, and it's still a damn weak way to change the story. Having a character like Faramir is essential to the experience of the story. And even that is secondary to the fact that Frodo's character development in the film seems entirely limited to sympathy for Gollum. That's important, but there's more to it, and his character seems rather one dimensional.
Gollum is the high point of the film. The effects are second. The rest, well....