many people have commented on various methods to make the disc last longer. Spraying chemicals in a vaccum, or other methods.
They may be outside the capability of the average consumer, but if anyone figures out a way of doing it cost-effectively in volume, then there's a business opportunity there;
Step 1: buy a self-destructing rental for $5,
Step 2: run it through your process which you've got down to $4/disc
Step 3: sell it for $15.
Step 4: Profit!
Sure, it may be of dubious legality, and will be made definitively illegal in the U.S.. But that will not stop some shady organizations from trying to espablish a huge grey market in the U.S. or elsewhere!
You think that's unrealistic? Well, disposable camera producers are fighting a similar problem. Disposable cameras typically get returned to the manufacturer for recycling. But several "businesses" started buying used camera bodies for $.10 each directly from photo developing places and re-loading them with film and re-selling them on the grey market. The big disposable camera producers are pissed off about this and fire off lawsuits left and right when they find someone doing this, but there's not much more they can do. Everyone involved is just trying to make a profit: the manufacturer can try to buy back the camera at $.15, but someone will offer $.20, and how much profit do you thing those camera manufacturers really make per unit?
I agree with all your points, but I think that cartoons today exist solely for the purpose of selling toys, while the cartoons of 30 or 40 years ago sold toys almost as an afterthought. Sure, the cartoon characters were used as tools to advertise other products, but the cartoon itself was still the main product. Over the last 20 years or so, the toy became the main product, and the only thing the cartoon became good for was advertising.
Remember also that not too long ago, you only had the choice of about six or seven channels, even if you were living in a big city. My parent's neighborhood in Queens didn't get cable until the mid-to-late 80's, so I remember growing up with only a handful of channels. You watched cartoons when they were shown, which meant after school or saturday morning. You had no other choices.
Now, you have multiple channels broadcasting multiple kids shows all the time, for multiple age groups. With so many other choices, why should Saturday Morning be special?
Kids aren't near as stupid as some adults think. Write a good clean cartoon with complex humour that an adult can appreciate, and it'll keep the kids' interest better too.
You're forgetting something important. A show that "keeps the kids' interest better" will be cancelled, unless it's also driving toy sales. Obviously, "keeping the kids' interest" is not the primary goal of the people who produce cartoons. Cartoons nowadays are basically just infomercials.
Re:Cable company competition
on
TiVo Basic
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· Score: 2, Informative
Have you looked at a TiVo and a Time Warner PVR side by side?
I have, and the Time Warner PVR simply sucks by comparison. Then again, I never was a fan of whatever crappy interface Time Warner uses for their regular program guide, and the PVR uses the same interface.
However, I have been steering people toward the TWPVR if they ask about my TiVo but bet turned off by the subscription fee. I am well aware of the fact that a TiVo subscription is a luxury that most can't afford. Maybe this basic service would encourage people to try it out! After all, the new basic service is more or less what you get in the TWPVR, with a better interface and (now) no monthly fee!
Re:Apple's (& RIAA's) long-term plan
on
The Law and P2P
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· Score: 1
Steve's said on more than one occasion that subscriptions suck, which is why iTunes is structured the way it is. Why would anyone buy music that goes away if you don't re-up every month?
What he's really saying is that creators' control over their media is more important than my own control over my property -- like, my computer, or eventually, my ears. Maybe we should all get implants so that we don't accidentally hear songs that we're not licensed to listen to...
since its part of the MPEG-4 standard, that should only be a matter of time and a firmware upgrade later.
Is it really? I thought Apple had some sort of DRM protection going on for their AAC files. At least, I bought a song and haven't been able to get it to play with faad on Linux (but I haven't been able to get a non-protected AAC file from iTunes to play either. I must just be lame.)
WTF? They don't have a functioning government right now, how can anything be illegal?
The only reason I'm looking forward to ep III
on
The Return of Chewbacca
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· Score: 2, Insightful
is that we'll get another great soundtrack from John Williams. I can ignore the dialogue and still enjoy the movie, and I'll probably get just as much of the "plot", too!
I wish I could adjust the Karma modifier on specific comments so I wouldn't have to see them, or their replies.
It's not that I think the parent doesn't raise valid points, but I can tell right away that I don't want to wade through all the Insightful and Interesting post defending the Mac as a platform choice while I try to find articles about the actual submission topic, namely Apple possibly buying Universal.
OK, that's my $.02 . Time to scroll through all the replies...
Lately, how is making any profit at all bad? For a "dying company", they seem to be one of the few that aren't posting losses. As long as they're at least breaking even, I'd be happy to (and have) buy a piece of Apple.
It's not so much how much profit they're making, it's where that profit is coming from that's a concern.
Everyone makes a big deal out of Apple's cash horde ($4b? $5b?), and about how the "market" isn't valuing Apple at much more than its cash value per share. I haven't looked at the numbers in a long time, but we can safley assume that Apple isn't keeping its $4b in cash under the mattress. That means that they put it somewhere where they expect it to make some return, even if they only put it into the equivalent of your savings account.
How much money do you think Apple is making on their cash horde in interest alone? Again, I don't have those numbers, but I suspect that they made more in interest than the $14m they reported in profit. That means that they are actually losing money from operations, and using their interest income to make up the difference.
Apple IMHO has been using that cash wisely, without that interest income they would be posting losses every quarter and really in danger of dying. That cash is keeping the company afloat. Now they're thinking of spending it all (and then some). All I have to say is that, as a shareholder, the return they get on that investment needs to be better than their current interest income, or else I'm bailing out.
It is true that the Universal music label is a profitable concern (bringing in >$200m per year IIRC), but everyone predicts that the entire music industry is going down the toilet. If Jobs can figure out a way to keep the music label profitable in the long term, then this purchase makes sense.
We'll have to see what Apple's much-hyped music service is all about. If it convinces me to buy music again, than I will assume it will convince others too, and then maybe the unit will be profitable long-term and this deal will make sense...
we've been thinking of ditching our pathetic Sprint phones (which never have a consistent digital signal) for Verizon. The only thing holding us back is the fact that we want to keep our phone numbers.
Maybe I should call Verizon and tell them that they gain two customers the day this goes into effect?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are lots of problems with this:
Every digital camera sold, even the ones that attach to your gameboy, have to have some post-processing of the image to get the true RGB picture that you want. It's not as simple as "stuff the CCD output through a MD5 block." You'd have to stuff the final digital output through that block, in the process of writing it to flash.
These cameras can also generally take pictures in a multitude of different formats. Will we only generate hashes on uncompressed formats? On JPEGs? Will we develop a way to translate the hashes along with the image formats? I wouldn't want to write that algorithm.
I won't even address the camera registery/OTP idea because of how absurd it is, expecially since even the process of generating a simple hash is fraught with problems...
Ok, the inspectors can't find weapons of mass destruction. The US accuses Saddam of hiding them. Now in early phases of the war special ops have been going on to find and disable weapons of mass destruction. If we truly knew where they were, why the hell did we not share the intelligence with the inspectors?
Quite simply, because the WMD's are probably mobile. If we tell the inspectors where they are, then all the Iraqis have to do is move them. Then, when the inspectors don't find anything, they accuse the US of lying, and we have to re-find the weapons that were just moved.
OK, it's a little far-fetched, but so is everything else these days...
After world war II, there was a big grassroots movement to buy only American made cars and such. I'd like to see it taken one step further and only buy software, hardware, or services from tech companies that replace thousands of american workers with cheap exploitable foreign labor.
I agree. We should start by replacing the software written by that Finnish kid (Aren't they all a bunch of Socialists in Finland anyway?) with the software from the company founded by that All-American Harvard dropout!
This is why Logicon (a defense contractor subsidiary of Northrop-Grumman) had a fairly major in-house fiasco a couple years back. A particular portion of some secure messaging software linked to a GPL library, thereby causing the entire software package to become "open source." Logicon's legal team reviewed the terms of the GPL and realized that there was no way to maintain the level of classification needed for the package as long as it inherited GPL properties. The developers then had to go back and rewrite some hefty chunks of the application, since they were denied the use of a pre-built library to do the things they needed to do.
This "fiasco" says more about Logicon than about the GPL. If they had used a library that they had obtained from another company without their permission, They would have had to go back and rewrite everything anyway, probably paid some hefty fines to boot, and would get exactly zero sympathy from the advocates of proprietary software licenses.
But when their engineers essentially do the same thing to GPL'd software, now all of a sudden it's the "viral nature of the GPL" that's at fault, not the lack of diligence on the part of their engineers or their legal staff.
If Logicon had contracted to use another company's software, you can bet that there would be miles of NDA's, license agreements, and all sorts of other stuff that their lawyers would look at before a single line of code is sent. But when GPL'd code is used, their lawyers don't bother reading the license until after the fact. Does anyone else see the double-standard here?
I'm not necessarily advocating the GPL over any other license. Every licensing scheme has its place, and a writer of original software should be able to license it however he or she sees fit. But I think that many advocates of Proprietary Software are confusing "free" software with "free for the taking" software, then get soured on the whole open source movement when they find out that the initial GPL'd code they're using, despite being "free", really belongs to someone else, and that person expects conditions to be met to permit their software to be used. In spite of the fact that proprietary software models work the same way, they're just more restrictive.
Did they really expect to get something for nothing?
Slashdot Mirror
Question from an ignorant American:
Why is it I2IT and not I3T?
Just curious....
Hmm... You worked for VA Linux? :D
They may be outside the capability of the average consumer, but if anyone figures out a way of doing it cost-effectively in volume, then there's a business opportunity there;
Step 1: buy a self-destructing rental for $5,
Step 2: run it through your process which you've got down to $4/disc
Step 3: sell it for $15.
Step 4: Profit!
Sure, it may be of dubious legality, and will be made definitively illegal in the U.S.. But that will not stop some shady organizations from trying to espablish a huge grey market in the U.S. or elsewhere!
You think that's unrealistic? Well, disposable camera producers are fighting a similar problem. Disposable cameras typically get returned to the manufacturer for recycling. But several "businesses" started buying used camera bodies for $.10 each directly from photo developing places and re-loading them with film and re-selling them on the grey market. The big disposable camera producers are pissed off about this and fire off lawsuits left and right when they find someone doing this, but there's not much more they can do. Everyone involved is just trying to make a profit: the manufacturer can try to buy back the camera at $.15, but someone will offer $.20, and how much profit do you thing those camera manufacturers really make per unit?
I agree with all your points, but I think that cartoons today exist solely for the purpose of selling toys, while the cartoons of 30 or 40 years ago sold toys almost as an afterthought. Sure, the cartoon characters were used as tools to advertise other products, but the cartoon itself was still the main product. Over the last 20 years or so, the toy became the main product, and the only thing the cartoon became good for was advertising.
Now, you have multiple channels broadcasting multiple kids shows all the time, for multiple age groups. With so many other choices, why should Saturday Morning be special?
You're forgetting something important. A show that "keeps the kids' interest better" will be cancelled, unless it's also driving toy sales. Obviously, "keeping the kids' interest" is not the primary goal of the people who produce cartoons. Cartoons nowadays are basically just infomercials.
I have, and the Time Warner PVR simply sucks by comparison. Then again, I never was a fan of whatever crappy interface Time Warner uses for their regular program guide, and the PVR uses the same interface.
However, I have been steering people toward the TWPVR if they ask about my TiVo but bet turned off by the subscription fee. I am well aware of the fact that a TiVo subscription is a luxury that most can't afford. Maybe this basic service would encourage people to try it out! After all, the new basic service is more or less what you get in the TWPVR, with a better interface and (now) no monthly fee!
Steve's said on more than one occasion that subscriptions suck, which is why iTunes is structured the way it is. Why would anyone buy music that goes away if you don't re-up every month?
We should have a (+1, Troll) mod option for posts like this....
What he's really saying is that creators' control over their media is more important than my own control over my property -- like, my computer, or eventually, my ears. Maybe we should all get implants so that we don't accidentally hear songs that we're not licensed to listen to...
Yeah, but this 5-day chart that counts the Music Store (and all the iPods they sold because of it) looks a little better, no?
since its part of the MPEG-4 standard, that should only be a matter of time and a firmware upgrade later. Is it really? I thought Apple had some sort of DRM protection going on for their AAC files. At least, I bought a song and haven't been able to get it to play with faad on Linux (but I haven't been able to get a non-protected AAC file from iTunes to play either. I must just be lame.)
WTF? They don't have a functioning government right now, how can anything be illegal?
is that we'll get another great soundtrack from John Williams. I can ignore the dialogue and still enjoy the movie, and I'll probably get just as much of the "plot", too!
It's not that I think the parent doesn't raise valid points, but I can tell right away that I don't want to wade through all the Insightful and Interesting post defending the Mac as a platform choice while I try to find articles about the actual submission topic, namely Apple possibly buying Universal.
OK, that's my $.02 . Time to scroll through all the replies...
It's not so much how much profit they're making, it's where that profit is coming from that's a concern.
Everyone makes a big deal out of Apple's cash horde ($4b? $5b?), and about how the "market" isn't valuing Apple at much more than its cash value per share. I haven't looked at the numbers in a long time, but we can safley assume that Apple isn't keeping its $4b in cash under the mattress. That means that they put it somewhere where they expect it to make some return, even if they only put it into the equivalent of your savings account.
How much money do you think Apple is making on their cash horde in interest alone? Again, I don't have those numbers, but I suspect that they made more in interest than the $14m they reported in profit. That means that they are actually losing money from operations, and using their interest income to make up the difference.
Apple IMHO has been using that cash wisely, without that interest income they would be posting losses every quarter and really in danger of dying. That cash is keeping the company afloat. Now they're thinking of spending it all (and then some). All I have to say is that, as a shareholder, the return they get on that investment needs to be better than their current interest income, or else I'm bailing out.
It is true that the Universal music label is a profitable concern (bringing in >$200m per year IIRC), but everyone predicts that the entire music industry is going down the toilet. If Jobs can figure out a way to keep the music label profitable in the long term, then this purchase makes sense.
We'll have to see what Apple's much-hyped music service is all about. If it convinces me to buy music again, than I will assume it will convince others too, and then maybe the unit will be profitable long-term and this deal will make sense...
would be to develop a program that re-writes Lucas's inane dialogue in real time...
GW is probably more like Sun, come to think of it...
I think this is the very first time that I've read an article about Apple where the word "beleaguered" appeared, and it didn't refer to Apple...
we've been thinking of ditching our pathetic Sprint phones (which never have a consistent digital signal) for Verizon. The only thing holding us back is the fact that we want to keep our phone numbers. Maybe I should call Verizon and tell them that they gain two customers the day this goes into effect?
No problem, sir. Keep that idea generator going!
Every digital camera sold, even the ones that attach to your gameboy, have to have some post-processing of the image to get the true RGB picture that you want. It's not as simple as "stuff the CCD output through a MD5 block." You'd have to stuff the final digital output through that block, in the process of writing it to flash.
These cameras can also generally take pictures in a multitude of different formats. Will we only generate hashes on uncompressed formats? On JPEGs? Will we develop a way to translate the hashes along with the image formats? I wouldn't want to write that algorithm.
I won't even address the camera registery/OTP idea because of how absurd it is, expecially since even the process of generating a simple hash is fraught with problems...
Quite simply, because the WMD's are probably mobile. If we tell the inspectors where they are, then all the Iraqis have to do is move them. Then, when the inspectors don't find anything, they accuse the US of lying, and we have to re-find the weapons that were just moved.
OK, it's a little far-fetched, but so is everything else these days...
I agree. We should start by replacing the software written by that Finnish kid (Aren't they all a bunch of Socialists in Finland anyway?) with the software from the company founded by that All-American Harvard dropout!
This "fiasco" says more about Logicon than about the GPL. If they had used a library that they had obtained from another company without their permission, They would have had to go back and rewrite everything anyway, probably paid some hefty fines to boot, and would get exactly zero sympathy from the advocates of proprietary software licenses.
But when their engineers essentially do the same thing to GPL'd software, now all of a sudden it's the "viral nature of the GPL" that's at fault, not the lack of diligence on the part of their engineers or their legal staff.
If Logicon had contracted to use another company's software, you can bet that there would be miles of NDA's, license agreements, and all sorts of other stuff that their lawyers would look at before a single line of code is sent. But when GPL'd code is used, their lawyers don't bother reading the license until after the fact. Does anyone else see the double-standard here?
I'm not necessarily advocating the GPL over any other license. Every licensing scheme has its place, and a writer of original software should be able to license it however he or she sees fit. But I think that many advocates of Proprietary Software are confusing "free" software with "free for the taking" software, then get soured on the whole open source movement when they find out that the initial GPL'd code they're using, despite being "free", really belongs to someone else, and that person expects conditions to be met to permit their software to be used. In spite of the fact that proprietary software models work the same way, they're just more restrictive.
Did they really expect to get something for nothing?