More accurate radio ratings...? Maybe...
on
"Not a Mini-Spy"
·
· Score: 4
Yah. Read the article before commmenting. It's a ratings gathering tool, loaned to the user if they choose to help ACNeilson. My question is, "will this actually improvethe accuracy of music ratings and perhaps allow artists to recieve the residuals they actually deserve?". There is a Vary good article about the music ratings system, used to determine royalties paid to artists based on the frequency of broadcast of their work on the radio. Will ASCAP and/or BMI adopt this sort of a strategy to do their information gathering? It would be vary promising for such an application. A quick summary of the article I mentioned:
ASCAP tapes over 60,000 hours of radio airplay in order to identify the music played and on that basis, distributes a percentage of the license fees collected from radio stations and other performance venues, to the artists who's music appears most frequently in the sampled material, in the percentages associated with that performance frequency.
It seems that the neilson system could be applied here to much more cost effectively and accurately measure music performance frequency, and doll out royalty fees more fairly.
What you should take from this is that the XBox is far too complex a device to be considered merely a game console. The whole point of game consoles is that they are simplified specialized computers. The OS should be simple, and reliable. To provide an unreliable OS in such a device is completely inconsistant with the target market
OK, you say, providing an unreliable product is ALWAYS undesirable; well I maintain that it is more of a problem here because the target market is less technically inclided that that for a computer. Computer owners have the will and ability to pursue problems and correct them. Game Console customers are generally less inclined tward this way of thinking. For this reason, Microsoft will have to adopt the Apple MAC OS support strategy 'If it doesn't work, re-install it'.
Over the past 20 years we have been conditioned to accept bugs in software. In fact the software industry in the only industry where companies are not pushed out of the marketplace for providing defective products. As the adverage level of technical expertise of computer owners declines, this becomes more prevelent, because new users again, just accept this situation as the status quo.
On occasions too numerous to count I've had to tell new computer owners something along the lines of:
"Occasionaly computers will crash. This mains that some unexpected condition has occurred within the system. IN the event of this happening, here are some basic steps you can take..." bla bla bla.
I should Never EVER have to tell someone that. Game Console users should certainly not have to deal with that. TO be perfectly fair, Over 15 years of using Nintendo Game Consoles, I have seen them crash. Perhaps 25 times in 15 years. As compared to any (windows based) computer, that record is pretty good.
In the spirit of complete fairness, lets close by looking t it from Microsoft's perspective:
See, Microsoft has contributed to computer science by making otherwise deterministic systems completely non-deterministic. Wait, Isn't that a requirement for true artificial inteligence. See It's a feature. People have been trying to create non-deterministic computing systems for 30 years... And Microsoft has succeeded.
That's all I've got folks. I can accept computers crashing occasionally, buy Game consoles? Give me break!
People complain about the monsterously huge companies that manage the DNS infastructure. Well, let's face it, what small company could manage this? There is a minimum efficient scale associated with management of a system like DNS TLDs. The propogation delays introduced by distribution of registrars was bad enough. I'm not a proponant of allowing a single company to manage the system, nor am I a proponant of big government in general, but there are certain things that lend themselves to centralized management. TLDs are examples of such things. Greater overall value to the public is derived from efficient centralized management.
There certainly does need to be oversight and this solution seems to adress that issue.
--CTH
--
Microsoft vs Palm OS Licensing Model
on
Palm In Trouble?
·
· Score: 2
There was an announcement 6 months ago that Palm was looking to exit the hardware business. It they had acted to make it a reality, and handles teir OS licensing better, they'd be fine now.
Microsoft, as I recall took $5 for each copy of MS-DOS sold, back in the old days They took a flat rate. Much better than taking a percentage, especially in light of the much lower pricepoint of handheld devices.
I certainly wondn't go out and buy an ISA card now. I've had this card for over 10 years. The more modern Hauppauge cards are certainly better (and use modern bus architectures). They also make USB devices, although I have no information on the quality of their USB products. Intel also makes a pretty good TV card.
I was composing almost an identical post. Hauppauge has been providing excelant TV cards for over 10 years. I have an old ISA card from them that still works like a champ. I'm now a bit more motivated to test it out under Linux though, given the comments of the previous poster.
I doubt that targeting would be the problem, unless the collection site was in a geologically unstable site. Suppose for a moment, that equipment was setup in California, to recieve microwaves and convert them to usable electricity. Suppose now that there was seismic activity which cause the reception equipment to go out of alignment with the space based delivery mechanism. Not only would the area have been ravaged by an earthquake, but also the power generation capability of the region would be disabled. Not only would I not be able to get power to my house because the lines were severed, but there would simply be no power to be had. This will make for difficult selection of reception sites for this system. It must be in a geologically stable region, with consistant weather conditions (for predictable gain) and there are probably a number ofother similar considerations.
There were a number of lerge migrant populations in western china at the time. Over the next 2000 years, they migrated west across the countries of Russia, and eventually sacked Rome. At that time they were collectively called the Hunns. According to most accounts, they had a vary materialistic culture, but also a vary open one, accepting of anyone willing to travel with them. This was the primary reason their population grew so large and their armies were vast enough when approaching Rome.
Come on, there are always people with enough time to do these sorts of things.
I wish I had enough time to do these sorts of things. That wouild mean (hopefully) that I had enough money to free up my time. The.com shakeout effects everyone, and is constantly adding to the ranks of people who have time to pursue projects like this. The latest group of geeks who will have time to pursue this are those from cyberRebate.com Best of luck to them.
committed to offering only streamed music -- which has to be downloaded each time -- and "tethered downloads," which have a special license attached to them.
Unfortunately, there isn't a watermarking strategy in existance that hasn't been cracked. In fact, I suggest that there will never be a viable technical solution to this problem. There are simply far too many technically astute consumers and hackers who will be able to crack virtually any SDMI technical solution. The only workable solution to this problem will be achieved through social means. There must be good will between the music industry and the music consuming public. the RIAA has seen to it that this won't happend in the forseeable future.
Second, the systems being proposed in this article aren't flexible enough. Their current model is to alter the consumer music licensing model, moving from a perpetual personal use license, to the rental model mentioned in the aticle:
The demonstration before the intellectual property subcommittee showed that if a person stops their subscription to either service, they may not be able to keep listening to the songs they downloaded. In essence, consumers wouldn't buy music, just rent it.
No consumer would go for this. It ranks up there with Microsoft's software subscription model, but even more restrictive. Microsoft Backed off their plan, and so will these music services.
The Iron Chef is really an adictive show. If this works out it'll be great but It'd be better with Morimoto. Perhaps they can bring in all the hosts of all the other TV Imports, to be judges.
I bet Anne Robinson can really pack it away.
and Regis seems to be quite the food coneseur
Jeff Probst seems like he could really benefit from eating something other that all that Vegimite he's been living on...
It's great to hear that these two gaming pioneers are back in the business. This is great news for the industry as well as gaming consumers. A while back, perhaps a year ago the announcement that Origin Systems would produce only multiplayer subscription based online games, after the success of Ultima Online.
Is there any word on weather Destination Games will be operating exclusively in that market as well, or pursue other areas of the market as well?
It looks like I had a typo in there. The math goes like this: $1,499 x 150 customers = $224,850 in added revenue, where in the example, those new customers would not have bought at the higher price of $1,500.
This is antitrust legislation, intended to prevent monopolistic practices. The critical clause here is:
where the effect of such discrimination may be substantially to lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in any line of commerce, or to injure, destroy, or prevent competition with any person who either grants or knowingly receives the benefit of such discrimination
This area of law is of great interest to me but doesn't adress the case of price descrimination (in the economic rather than social sense).
How could the company not have foreseen this as a PR disaster? No one is likely to boycot the product because of this but come on, it clearly took some programmer some time and concerted effort to develop this 'feature'. Why was it even developed? It's rediculous. People who want to cheat will cheat. part of the fun for them is finding new and creative ways to do it. Let them have their kind of fun. Let the rest of us play our games in peace, and save dome R&D dollars by not wasting programmers' time with things like this.
--
Microsoft Advances the field of Computer Science
on
Shared Source?
·
· Score: 2
Microsoft is now allowing universities to get access to Windows source code. This will allow us to learn how they were able to write an OS that causes programs to run differently each time thay are run; in a completely non-deterministic fashion.
See, Microsoft has contributed to computer science by making otherwise deterministic systems completely non-deterministic. Wait, Isn't that a requirement for true artificial inteligence. See It's a feature. People have been trying to create non-deterministic computing systems for 30 years... And Microsoft has succeeded.
--
Re:MS Tactic to end reverse-engineering?
on
Shared Source?
·
· Score: 2
This probably is their strategy with regard to the the promotion of 'shared source' amd as much as it pains me to say this, it's almost a halway valid business strategy...
I've tried to find fault with it but it doesn't seem blatently wrong; although perhaps anti-competitive, but not ilegal.
You are correct with regard to the need for elasticity of demand, however I'm not certain of the need for 'groups' to be identifiable. I guess my issue is with the word 'groups' in this case more than them being identifiable. The goal here is one-to-one marketing, so there will be no groups of consumers to identify. With that in mind, you're right, IBM would need to be able to gather the required information to make an appropriate pricing offer. Amazon, of course, didn't have this problem. They had a wealth of customer information to base their pricing decisions on. You're right. This is certainly a major if not the defining factor in making effective use of dynamic pricing.
That'd probably only work for HTTP/1.1 where you have a HOST: header.
You have to wonder though, is ford looking for a solution or just trying to set legal prescident? there are plenty of technical solution to this problem, that would have kept it miles away from the courts.
Maybe they thought the PR benefit of a highly publicized court battle would be greater than the PR benefit of added trafic to their website, and you'd have to admit, on that count they'd probably be right.
A company? A private company is offering this service? How many customers do they expect to have? Surely thare aren't that many people who have a spare $20 mil AND are willing to throw it into a single vacation... How do they epect to keep in business? I'd love to see the financial projections for this company... Amazing...
Slashdot Mirror
My question is, "will this actually improvethe accuracy of music ratings and perhaps allow artists to recieve the residuals they actually deserve?". There is a Vary good article about the music ratings system, used to determine royalties paid to artists based on the frequency of broadcast of their work on the radio. Will ASCAP and/or BMI adopt this sort of a strategy to do their information gathering? It would be vary promising for such an application. A quick summary of the article I mentioned:It seems that the neilson system could be applied here to much more cost effectively and accurately measure music performance frequency, and doll out royalty fees more fairly.
--CTH
--
OK, you say, providing an unreliable product is ALWAYS undesirable; well I maintain that it is more of a problem here because the target market is less technically inclided that that for a computer. Computer owners have the will and ability to pursue problems and correct them. Game Console customers are generally less inclined tward this way of thinking. For this reason, Microsoft will have to adopt the Apple MAC OS support strategy 'If it doesn't work, re-install it'.
Over the past 20 years we have been conditioned to accept bugs in software. In fact the software industry in the only industry where companies are not pushed out of the marketplace for providing defective products. As the adverage level of technical expertise of computer owners declines, this becomes more prevelent, because new users again, just accept this situation as the status quo.
On occasions too numerous to count I've had to tell new computer owners something along the lines of:I should Never EVER have to tell someone that. Game Console users should certainly not have to deal with that.
TO be perfectly fair, Over 15 years of using Nintendo Game Consoles, I have seen them crash. Perhaps 25 times in 15 years. As compared to any (windows based) computer, that record is pretty good.
In the spirit of complete fairness, lets close by looking t it from Microsoft's perspective:That's all I've got folks. I can accept computers crashing occasionally, buy Game consoles? Give me break!
--CTH
--
People complain about the monsterously huge companies that manage the DNS infastructure. Well, let's face it, what small company could manage this? There is a minimum efficient scale associated with management of a system like DNS TLDs. The propogation delays introduced by distribution of registrars was bad enough. I'm not a proponant of allowing a single company to manage the system, nor am I a proponant of big government in general, but there are certain things that lend themselves to centralized management. TLDs are examples of such things. Greater overall value to the public is derived from efficient centralized management.
There certainly does need to be oversight and this solution seems to adress that issue.
--CTH
--
There was an announcement 6 months ago that Palm was looking to exit the hardware business. It they had acted to make it a reality, and handles teir OS licensing better, they'd be fine now.
Microsoft, as I recall took $5 for each copy of MS-DOS sold, back in the old days They took a flat rate. Much better than taking a percentage, especially in light of the much lower pricepoint of handheld devices.
--CTH
--
As the previous poster stated, it's required, but what's outragous is that a decision like this could even have been arbitrated to begin with.
--
I certainly wondn't go out and buy an ISA card now. I've had this card for over 10 years. The more modern Hauppauge cards are certainly better (and use modern bus architectures). They also make USB devices, although I have no information on the quality of their USB products. Intel also makes a pretty good TV card.
--
That was a vary good and detailed review. Definately worth a read.
It's Great to see this game series back on track.
Keep up the good work Sid!
--
I was composing almost an identical post. Hauppauge has been providing excelant TV cards for over 10 years. I have an old ISA card from them that still works like a champ. I'm now a bit more motivated to test it out under Linux though, given the comments of the previous poster.
--
I doubt that targeting would be the problem, unless the collection site was in a geologically unstable site. Suppose for a moment, that equipment was setup in California, to recieve microwaves and convert them to usable electricity. Suppose now that there was seismic activity which cause the reception equipment to go out of alignment with the space based delivery mechanism. Not only would the area have been ravaged by an earthquake, but also the power generation capability of the region would be disabled. Not only would I not be able to get power to my house because the lines were severed, but there would simply be no power to be had. This will make for difficult selection of reception sites for this system. It must be in a geologically stable region, with consistant weather conditions (for predictable gain) and there are probably a number ofother similar considerations.
--CTH
--
There were a number of lerge migrant populations in western china at the time. Over the next 2000 years, they migrated west across the countries of Russia, and eventually sacked Rome. At that time they were collectively called the Hunns. According to most accounts, they had a vary materialistic culture, but also a vary open one, accepting of anyone willing to travel with them. This was the primary reason their population grew so large and their armies were vast enough when approaching Rome.
--
I remember seeing it on that other tech show 'The Next Step' I think. I really could have used these things last winter. It would have been a blast.
--
Well, this this thing has 5 years in development, and has recieved tremendous amounts of prainse. Has all of this raised our expectations too high?
I guess I'll find out soon...
--
Come on, there are always people with enough time to do these sorts of things.
.com shakeout effects everyone, and is constantly adding to the ranks of people who have time to pursue projects like this. The latest group of geeks who will have time to pursue this are those from cyberRebate.com
I wish I had enough time to do these sorts of things. That wouild mean (hopefully) that I had enough money to free up my time. The
Best of luck to them.
--CTH
--
Second, the systems being proposed in this article aren't flexible enough. Their current model is to alter the consumer music licensing model, moving from a perpetual personal use license, to the rental model mentioned in the aticle:No consumer would go for this. It ranks up there with Microsoft's software subscription model, but even more restrictive. Microsoft Backed off their plan, and so will these music services.
--CTH
--
So, are we allowed to Transcribe the source code for DeCSS on the chalkboard?
For those who want other places to put DeCSS, check out the popular 42 ways to distribute DeCSS.
--
The Iron Chef is really an adictive show. If this works out it'll be great but It'd be better with Morimoto. Perhaps they can bring in all the hosts of all the other TV Imports, to be judges.
I bet Anne Robinson can really pack it away.
and Regis seems to be quite the food coneseur
Jeff Probst seems like he could really benefit from eating something other that all that Vegimite he's been living on...
--
It's great to hear that these two gaming pioneers are back in the business. This is great news for the industry as well as gaming consumers. A while back, perhaps a year ago the announcement that Origin Systems would produce only multiplayer subscription based online games, after the success of Ultima Online.
Is there any word on weather Destination Games will be operating exclusively in that market as well, or pursue other areas of the market as well?
--CTH
--
It looks like I had a typo in there. The math goes like this:
$1,499 x 150 customers = $224,850 in added revenue, where in the example, those new customers would not have bought at the higher price of $1,500.
--CTH
--
--
How could the company not have foreseen this as a PR disaster? No one is likely to boycot the product because of this but come on, it clearly took some programmer some time and concerted effort to develop this 'feature'. Why was it even developed? It's rediculous. People who want to cheat will cheat. part of the fun for them is finding new and creative ways to do it. Let them have their kind of fun. Let the rest of us play our games in peace, and save dome R&D dollars by not wasting programmers' time with things like this.
--
Microsoft is now allowing universities to get access to Windows source code. This will allow us to learn how they were able to write an OS that causes programs to run differently each time thay are run; in a completely non-deterministic fashion.
See, Microsoft has contributed to computer science by making otherwise deterministic systems completely non-deterministic. Wait, Isn't that a requirement for true artificial inteligence. See It's a feature. People have been trying to create non-deterministic computing systems for 30 years... And Microsoft has succeeded.
--
This probably is their strategy with regard to the the promotion of 'shared source' amd as much as it pains me to say this, it's almost a halway valid business strategy...
I've tried to find fault with it but it doesn't seem blatently wrong; although perhaps anti-competitive, but not ilegal.
--CTH
--
You are correct with regard to the need for elasticity of demand, however I'm not certain of the need for 'groups' to be identifiable. I guess my issue is with the word 'groups' in this case more than them being identifiable. The goal here is one-to-one marketing, so there will be no groups of consumers to identify. With that in mind, you're right, IBM would need to be able to gather the required information to make an appropriate pricing offer. Amazon, of course, didn't have this problem. They had a wealth of customer information to base their pricing decisions on. You're right. This is certainly a major if not the defining factor in making effective use of dynamic pricing.
--
That'd probably only work for HTTP/1.1 where you have a HOST: header.
You have to wonder though, is ford looking for a solution or just trying to set legal prescident? there are plenty of technical solution to this problem, that would have kept it miles away from the courts.
Maybe they thought the PR benefit of a highly publicized court battle would be greater than the PR benefit of added trafic to their website, and you'd have to admit, on that count they'd probably be right.
--CTH
--
A company? A private company is offering this service? How many customers do they expect to have? Surely thare aren't that many people who have a spare $20 mil AND are willing to throw it into a single vacation... How do they epect to keep in business? I'd love to see the financial projections for this company... Amazing...
--CTH
--