What AOL did was bring IM to the masses. Way way back in the day (I was only 12) I convinced my parents to get AOL so I could talk to some of my friends. I had never heard of ICQ or IRC. ICQ may have been around before AOL IM but it didn't get out there nearly as well. I know plenty of people who use ICQ, but most of them also have AIM installed to talk to the rest of us.
The problem is that AOL made instant messaging as we know it today. They feel they are the "inventors" and hence shouldn't have to let anyone else in on their network. If they had opened things up from the get go, they would now be the absolute standard for instant messaging instead of the de facto one for 90%+ of the people I know. Their stubbornness is what caused it.
Any phone, mobile or not is required to let you make a 911 call for free. Even cell phones without a service package have to let you make a 911 call. No dice on your argument.
I think rather than having impromptu animation, why not write a rendering engine that would take advantage of the awesome GPUs out there instead of using all processor to get the job done.
Right now the render times for movies is months, even if your Geforce4 chokes horribly on each and every frame because they're so big and you only get maybe 1 frame per second. Thats 2 seconds of video per box per minute.
Spread that across a render farm of 30 boxes and you get "realtime" rendering which would make life for the animators much nicer I would think.
Thats not the point. When it really comes down to it, who is someone going to look out for first? I know I'm going to look out for my before I look out for some guy on the other side of the world who I've never met.
Granted detecting these things is still a good idea, but I would definetly be more worried about dying on the side of the highway in a car crash, because that car crash is something I have some control over, and it will assuredly directly affect me, the asteroid impact may or may not.
There is an open source project like what you are describing. It is called the enzyme project, and it is hosted at sourceforge. I've taken a look at it, and I like what I see. http://enzyme.sourceforge.net/ and take a peek.
OK here is where things get fun however. There are two different production costs.
First there is the cost of recording everything, mixing, mastering etc. Lets say its $500k to do that. Lets also say that for advertising and whatnot I spend another $500k. These are both FIXED costs, no matter how many CDs I sell these costs stay the same.
Then there is the marginal cost of pressing one more CD, which I've seen numbers around $1 for a really well done case, art, etc. Lets also add in the mass packaging and shipping to get them to the store. Thats another 50 cents.
So our prices are $1M to produce and advertise the CD, and $1.50 marginal cost for each CD.
Now its time to analyze the costs: $(14.00-1.50)*1,000,000 - $1,000,000 = $11,500,000 of profit.
we now drop the price, and check the math again: $(8.00-1.50)*2,000,000 - $1,000,000 = $12,000,000
So now I can sell either 1 million CDs at $14 or 2 million at $8. I'll make a little bit more at $8. Now I understand that this isn't overwhelming evidence that making CDs cheaper will increase profits. What I didn't take in to account was that when I made 2 million CDs the guys pressing them would give me a discount for pressing more, that the printer would give me a discount for printing more, and other ECONOMIES OF SCALE! That is why selling more of them, to a point, will help immensly.
Exec: "So Bob, if I throw double the amount of business you way, and make sure that you have work for 4 months instead of 2, think you could cut me a bit of a deal?" Bob: "Sure, how does 30% off strike you?" Exec: "Thanks Bob, say can you do our other CD too?" Bob: "Lemme check my calendar..SURE!"
And if you think companies don't give discounts look at all the OEMs who NEED the M$ discounts to STAY IN BUSINESS!
Thats what a lot of it is. In high school a bunch of my friends and I pirated tons of software. I hade photoshop 5.5 before it was released. What did I do with it? I tried to make some buttons for a completely crappy and useless website that I trashed 2 days later cuz it sucked.
I downloaded and installed the full version of Office 2000 and went to town. What did I do with it? Learned how to use Access by setting up an addressbook, and I used Word to write a few papers. Would I have bought it? No way, if I needed to write the paper that badly I could have done it on the Performa 6300 that I built this machine to replace. It had a legit copy of clarisworks that was fine.
I was the first one of us to get DSL so I was the super-leech to everyones ftp servers. I burned CDs of everying, win2k advanced server, datacenter server, 3d studio max, bunches of movies, who knows how many gigs of mp3s, etc etc etc. I figure I probably burned somewhere around a thousand CDs in high school. What of all that software do I still use? None of it, I run gentoo, open office, the gimp, etc. I never could/would have bought any of the software I pirated.
We were just a bunch of computer geeks who didn't have much in the way of social lives trying to prove that we had a bigger dick than the other guy cuz "I had win2k 2 days b4 j00." Everyone who says "pirating BILLIONS!!!!" is off their rocker, every pirate I've ever known has binders and binders of CDs, and they rarely even INSTALL any of it. Besides, the stuff we realy wanted you couldnt pirate well (starcraft, CS, etc)
I was sitting around thinking earlier today about the way the media companies operate. They want you to buy every CD you listen to. They don't have a problem if you loan a CD to a friend and he listens to it, because when he is listening to it, you are not.
So what if we took this idea a bit further. What if I took every CD I have and burned each individual song onto its own CD. Then if one of my friends wanted to listen to one song, he could. This should be OK becuase while he is listening to that one song, I am not.
Now, lets take that idea one step further, and introduce an application that runs on a server. It holds mp3s/oggs of every song I have ever bought, and of every song all my friends that I let into this deal have bought. It also has a database so that if multile copies of any song exist, that is noted. When you want to listen to a song, you can browse/search for songs that aren't currently being used, and you can listen to them. The server only lets x streams of any given song go out, where x is the number of times the song has been purchased by those who join this co-op. We could even do this for DVDs.
The one big problem with all this is making sure that the CD that someone enters as having been bought can't be used as a CD anymore. So if you buy a CD and want to get it into this co-op you have to stick it in the co-op vault or something, to be sure it isn't being accessed by you at your house while someone else streams it.
Some would probably think this system is stealing, but it is not as far as I can tell. It is merely making VERY efficient use of resources. Instead of having to go over to your friend house to borrow the CD all you have to do is type in your username and password, and stream it.
I know bandwidth limitations make this hard to do. What about incorporating a P2P client to assist in content delivery, like the spyware in kazaa or freenet does.
Does anyone see any legal flaws with this system? I'd like to know what the slashdot community thinks of this idea.
I've done something like that myself, I wrote a MySQL, PHP, and Apache webapp called ReciPHP. It was a multi-user, searchable, categorized database for recipes. Even had a rating system and favorites lists. When I moved from school to home the HD was destroyed and like a champ I didn't back any of it up. It only took me about 3 months of sporadic work (when I didn't have class and I was motivated). If you sat down and did it "full time" you could probably knock it out in a week or two. If you need any help mail me vader82[at]vader82[dot]net
The scenario you have just described is where the beauty of open standards is wonderful. The UI might look a bit different from mozilla to opera, or office and staroffice. But if they can both read and write and display the same files, who cares? Yes I know its not fun to switch from one app to another, but it would also allow companies to use software packages that they felt would result in the least tech support required, which might be OSS instead on MS. This would be a good thing.
I agree with you on the leasing the server in Russia. Then I played devils advocate and said "well eventually I have to download the software to my own machine to use it, and they would get me then."
The cool part is that they probably wouldn't. You could run the software on the machine in Russia with a nicely compressed X session. And if you want to listen to music, you could stream mp3s.
And if you were worried about mp3 streaming, you could do some simply encryption on them so that if the RIAA tried to figure out what you were sending you could hit THEM with the DMCA too.
I'm sure there are tons of other ways to get around this. Possibly a good solution is to show them that there are too many ways to circumvent the technology and laws that they are proposing, and that it would be hopeless to try and stop it.
I know everyone says "tough luck" to the RIAA, but the RIAA has lobbyists and we don't have many. Right now they have congress convinced that some laws would make the world right again. If the critters can be shown how any law they make can be circumvented, maybe they will realize the hopelessness of passing the CP-WHATEVER-A or anything like it.
What is so amazing about taking multiple AP classes? High schools in America still cater to the lowest common denominator so that nobody feels bad because they aren't in the advanced classes. The only way to really get challenged and learn something is to take AP classes. The added bonus is that you don't have to spend as much time in college, and you can get an even higher GPA (most places).
I took pretty much every AP class that my HS offered and I'm very grateful they had them. If it weren't for AP classes I wouldn't have gone to school save the occasional test I needed to take. AP classes keep bright kids from getting bored and dropping out. Even when I was taking 4 AP classes a year I still spent way too much time learning PHP, SQL, Linux admin skills, and a bunch of other things. It's not amazing that kids take AP classes, its amazing that there aren't more of them.
You're missing how a lot of stuff gets developed. IBM puts a billion dollars into Linux not so that they can sell the software, but because if they improve Linux enough (make it run on their big iron) then they can make all the software available for Linux availiable for their high end, high profit margin hardware. That makes sense.
Most of the reason software gets developed is not to make money, but because some company needs some software to perform some duty. Well as it turns out that software gives them a slight advantage in the industry(teensy bit more productivity) but they release it open source.
Right now the money is in support services. You said that the company that offers support without having programmers is the one that makes more money. What about the fact that they have to hire programmers to take the program apart and figure out how they work so that they can fix errors?
Also, the company that hires programmers to begin with can charge companies who want new features to add the new features and make them available or keep them closed. There is money to be made in open source, it just requires a bit more creative thinking.
It doesn't matter what HS he went to, it happens everywhere. I was the Valedictorian of my HS and for the first 2 years I was derided and all that other good stuff. Once I got into the advanced programs (AP classes) most of that went away, but I still had to deal with people being bastards to me for no particular reason. Fucking sucked but when I was the one giving the speech at graduation and none of them even graduated with honors that felt pretty good. Thoughts of suicide in middle/high school is pretty common among nerd/geeks due to semi to complete social outcast status. Invariably there aren't enough nerds at the school to develop a good group of friends, so thats where the internet and games help out. If I hadn't been keeping my brain busy with computers it would have been very busy plotting them doom of either myself or all the people who made my life a living hell
I was wondering if anybody had thought of using QNX to do this, and if perhaps QNX might have some sort of feature built in to do this seeing as it is a realtime OS designed for use in embedded devices. I dont know much about it but I thought I would throw the idea out for discussionwww.qnx.com
Slashdot Mirror
The market leader as an ISP, not instant messaging client. I agree with you, just wanted to make the distinction.
What AOL did was bring IM to the masses. Way way back in the day (I was only 12) I convinced my parents to get AOL so I could talk to some of my friends. I had never heard of ICQ or IRC. ICQ may have been around before AOL IM but it didn't get out there nearly as well. I know plenty of people who use ICQ, but most of them also have AIM installed to talk to the rest of us.
The problem is that AOL made instant messaging as we know it today. They feel they are the "inventors" and hence shouldn't have to let anyone else in on their network. If they had opened things up from the get go, they would now be the absolute standard for instant messaging instead of the de facto one for 90%+ of the people I know. Their stubbornness is what caused it.
Any phone, mobile or not is required to let you make a 911 call for free. Even cell phones without a service package have to let you make a 911 call. No dice on your argument.
I think rather than having impromptu animation, why not write a rendering engine that would take advantage of the awesome GPUs out there instead of using all processor to get the job done.
Right now the render times for movies is months, even if your Geforce4 chokes horribly on each and every frame because they're so big and you only get maybe 1 frame per second. Thats 2 seconds of video per box per minute.
Spread that across a render farm of 30 boxes and you get "realtime" rendering which would make life for the animators much nicer I would think.
Thats not the point. When it really comes down to it, who is someone going to look out for first? I know I'm going to look out for my before I look out for some guy on the other side of the world who I've never met.
Granted detecting these things is still a good idea, but I would definetly be more worried about dying on the side of the highway in a car crash, because that car crash is something I have some control over, and it will assuredly directly affect me, the asteroid impact may or may not.
There is an open source project like what you are describing. It is called the enzyme project, and it is hosted at sourceforge. I've taken a look at it, and I like what I see. http://enzyme.sourceforge.net/ and take a peek.
OK here is where things get fun however. There are two different production costs.
First there is the cost of recording everything, mixing, mastering etc. Lets say its $500k to do that. Lets also say that for advertising and whatnot I spend another $500k. These are both FIXED costs, no matter how many CDs I sell these costs stay the same.
Then there is the marginal cost of pressing one more CD, which I've seen numbers around $1 for a really well done case, art, etc. Lets also add in the mass packaging and shipping to get them to the store. Thats another 50 cents.
So our prices are $1M to produce and advertise the CD, and $1.50 marginal cost for each CD.
Now its time to analyze the costs:
$(14.00-1.50)*1,000,000 - $1,000,000 = $11,500,000 of profit.
we now drop the price, and check the math again:
$(8.00-1.50)*2,000,000 - $1,000,000 = $12,000,000
So now I can sell either 1 million CDs at $14 or 2 million at $8. I'll make a little bit more at $8. Now I understand that this isn't overwhelming evidence that making CDs cheaper will increase profits. What I didn't take in to account was that when I made 2 million CDs the guys pressing them would give me a discount for pressing more, that the printer would give me a discount for printing more, and other ECONOMIES OF SCALE! That is why selling more of them, to a point, will help immensly.
Exec: "So Bob, if I throw double the amount of business you way, and make sure that you have work for 4 months instead of 2, think you could cut me a bit of a deal?"
Bob: "Sure, how does 30% off strike you?"
Exec: "Thanks Bob, say can you do our other CD too?"
Bob: "Lemme check my calendar..SURE!"
And if you think companies don't give discounts look at all the OEMs who NEED the M$ discounts to STAY IN BUSINESS!
Thats what a lot of it is. In high school a bunch of my friends and I pirated tons of software. I hade photoshop 5.5 before it was released. What did I do with it? I tried to make some buttons for a completely crappy and useless website that I trashed 2 days later cuz it sucked.
I downloaded and installed the full version of Office 2000 and went to town. What did I do with it? Learned how to use Access by setting up an addressbook, and I used Word to write a few papers. Would I have bought it? No way, if I needed to write the paper that badly I could have done it on the Performa 6300 that I built this machine to replace. It had a legit copy of clarisworks that was fine.
I was the first one of us to get DSL so I was the super-leech to everyones ftp servers. I burned CDs of everying, win2k advanced server, datacenter server, 3d studio max, bunches of movies, who knows how many gigs of mp3s, etc etc etc. I figure I probably burned somewhere around a thousand CDs in high school. What of all that software do I still use? None of it, I run gentoo, open office, the gimp, etc. I never could/would have bought any of the software I pirated.
We were just a bunch of computer geeks who didn't have much in the way of social lives trying to prove that we had a bigger dick than the other guy cuz "I had win2k 2 days b4 j00." Everyone who says "pirating BILLIONS!!!!" is off their rocker, every pirate I've ever known has binders and binders of CDs, and they rarely even INSTALL any of it. Besides, the stuff we realy wanted you couldnt pirate well (starcraft, CS, etc)
I was sitting around thinking earlier today about the way the media companies operate. They want you to buy every CD you listen to. They don't have a problem if you loan a CD to a friend and he listens to it, because when he is listening to it, you are not.
So what if we took this idea a bit further. What if I took every CD I have and burned each individual song onto its own CD. Then if one of my friends wanted to listen to one song, he could. This should be OK becuase while he is listening to that one song, I am not.
Now, lets take that idea one step further, and introduce an application that runs on a server. It holds mp3s/oggs of every song I have ever bought, and of every song all my friends that I let into this deal have bought. It also has a database so that if multile copies of any song exist, that is noted. When you want to listen to a song, you can browse/search for songs that aren't currently being used, and you can listen to them. The server only lets x streams of any given song go out, where x is the number of times the song has been purchased by those who join this co-op. We could even do this for DVDs.
The one big problem with all this is making sure that the CD that someone enters as having been bought can't be used as a CD anymore. So if you buy a CD and want to get it into this co-op you have to stick it in the co-op vault or something, to be sure it isn't being accessed by you at your house while someone else streams it.
Some would probably think this system is stealing, but it is not as far as I can tell. It is merely making VERY efficient use of resources. Instead of having to go over to your friend house to borrow the CD all you have to do is type in your username and password, and stream it.
I know bandwidth limitations make this hard to do. What about incorporating a P2P client to assist in content delivery, like the spyware in kazaa or freenet does.
Does anyone see any legal flaws with this system? I'd like to know what the slashdot community thinks of this idea.
I've done something like that myself, I wrote a MySQL, PHP, and Apache webapp called ReciPHP. It was a multi-user, searchable, categorized database for recipes. Even had a rating system and favorites lists.
When I moved from school to home the HD was destroyed and like a champ I didn't back any of it up. It only took me about 3 months of sporadic work (when I didn't have class and I was motivated). If you sat down and did it "full time" you could probably knock it out in a week or two. If you need any help mail me vader82[at]vader82[dot]net
The scenario you have just described is where the beauty of open standards is wonderful. The UI might look a bit different from mozilla to opera, or office and staroffice. But if they can both read and write and display the same files, who cares? Yes I know its not fun to switch from one app to another, but it would also allow companies to use software packages that they felt would result in the least tech support required, which might be OSS instead on MS. This would be a good thing.
I agree with you on the leasing the server in Russia. Then I played devils advocate and said "well eventually I have to download the software to my own machine to use it, and they would get me then."
The cool part is that they probably wouldn't. You could run the software on the machine in Russia with a nicely compressed X session. And if you want to listen to music, you could stream mp3s.
And if you were worried about mp3 streaming, you could do some simply encryption on them so that if the RIAA tried to figure out what you were sending you could hit THEM with the DMCA too.
I'm sure there are tons of other ways to get around this. Possibly a good solution is to show them that there are too many ways to circumvent the technology and laws that they are proposing, and that it would be hopeless to try and stop it.
I know everyone says "tough luck" to the RIAA, but the RIAA has lobbyists and we don't have many. Right now they have congress convinced that some laws would make the world right again. If the critters can be shown how any law they make can be circumvented, maybe they will realize the hopelessness of passing the CP-WHATEVER-A or anything like it.
What is so amazing about taking multiple AP classes? High schools in America still cater to the lowest common denominator so that nobody feels bad because they aren't in the advanced classes. The only way to really get challenged and learn something is to take AP classes. The added bonus is that you don't have to spend as much time in college, and you can get an even higher GPA (most places).
I took pretty much every AP class that my HS offered and I'm very grateful they had them. If it weren't for AP classes I wouldn't have gone to school save the occasional test I needed to take. AP classes keep bright kids from getting bored and dropping out. Even when I was taking 4 AP classes a year I still spent way too much time learning PHP, SQL, Linux admin skills, and a bunch of other things. It's not amazing that kids take AP classes, its amazing that there aren't more of them.
You're missing how a lot of stuff gets developed. IBM puts a billion dollars into Linux not so that they can sell the software, but because if they improve Linux enough (make it run on their big iron) then they can make all the software available for Linux availiable for their high end, high profit margin hardware. That makes sense.
Most of the reason software gets developed is not to make money, but because some company needs some software to perform some duty. Well as it turns out that software gives them a slight advantage in the industry(teensy bit more productivity) but they release it open source.
Right now the money is in support services. You said that the company that offers support without having programmers is the one that makes more money. What about the fact that they have to hire programmers to take the program apart and figure out how they work so that they can fix errors?
Also, the company that hires programmers to begin with can charge companies who want new features to add the new features and make them available or keep them closed. There is money to be made in open source, it just requires a bit more creative thinking.
It doesn't matter what HS he went to, it happens everywhere. I was the Valedictorian of my HS and for the first 2 years I was derided and all that other good stuff.
Once I got into the advanced programs (AP classes) most of that went away, but I still had to deal with people being bastards to me for no particular reason. Fucking sucked but when I was the one giving the speech at graduation and none of them even graduated with honors that felt pretty good.
Thoughts of suicide in middle/high school is pretty common among nerd/geeks due to semi to complete social outcast status. Invariably there aren't enough nerds at the school to develop a good group of friends, so thats where the internet and games help out.
If I hadn't been keeping my brain busy with computers it would have been very busy plotting them doom of either myself or all the people who made my life a living hell
I was wondering if anybody had thought of using QNX to do this, and if perhaps QNX might have some sort of feature built in to do this seeing as it is a realtime OS designed for use in embedded devices. I dont know much about it but I thought I would throw the idea out for discussionwww.qnx.com