I think it's funny that these big media companies would rather pay lots of money to the legal staff to fight innovation (time-shifting) when they could just as easily be paying R&D types for their own innovation. Technology changes, and life changes. IIRC, candle-makers made a big fuss over electric lights and feared their business would be over. Now, candles are a sign of elegance or luxury. Same story with inventions like audio recordings, radio, television, and VCR's. A new business model had to be invented after the legal teams settled down.
Someday soon, a company is going to make a real innovation in TV that will benefit the "content providers" without fighting consumers. That company will thrive, and the other media companies will either rush their imitations to market, or fight that too until their deaths. It seems big media companies think it's easier to fight to keep the old system in place rather than try to lead the pack to the new system. If one of these companies were to produce a new system that respected the rights of consumers, rather than force-feed advertisements to us, I'd invest, and I'm sure a lot of ther people in the/. demographic would invest too.
Actually, there was a 5.1 last month in New York. It woke me up, and I looked out the window to see if the cars fell off the road, and then I went back to sleep. I'm really surprised that a 5.2 in CA made slashdot though, since the 5.1 I felt was not that bad, and I'm in NY where they're much less common, what with the whole lack-of-a-pacific-ring thing...
Actually, they weren't at 90 degree angles - one entered at Antarctica and left from the Indian Ocean, and one entered the Pacific and left through Antarctica. Odd that they both involved the South Pole, though - is it possible that the magnetism of the earth had an effect on them? It is considerably larger...
I also have to wonder how they can calculate its speed to be 900,000 mph. Sure, if they measure the distance from its entry to its exit, and divide by the difference in time they could come up with a number. But that would imply that the Earth is sitting still in space. Instead, we're spinning and revolving, and the focus of our revolution (actually just one focus, since the path is elliptical) is in turn rotating and revolving, and moving away from the center of the universe too. What is that 900,000 mph in relation to? What if the particle was actually sitting still, and the total velocity of the Earth is actually 900,000 mph?
Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert in physics, astronomy, geometry, grammar, or magnetism.
I don't know if there's an official term for it, but I often write a function in one language that writes code for another language - for example, using PHP or Perl to write javascript. I've even gone so far as to use PHP to write a SQL statement which in turn is used to determine what will go in a Javascript function that writes HTML code. The example below is rather pointless, but I have come across real situations where it is beneficial to use that many languages together.
That's three "real" languages and one markup language. And if you think that was crazy, think about this - I just had to write that in HTML in a slashdot posting textbox!
My next goal is to make the javascript write out HTML for parameters in a Java applet. And, the whole PHP page is going to be written by a C program exectuted by a cron job that was set up via a perl script (webmin!) That's eight different languages - perl -> bash (I think) -> C -> PHP -> SQL and Javascript -> HTML -> Java. Sadly, I don't think that's nearly as crazy as the quadrilingual program. I need to learn Brainf*ck.
Last night, Saturday, April 13th, 2002 I changed the root password to reflect administrative changes that happen in real-life IT scenarios. The root password was changed to the incredibly weak password of '12345'.
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't read all the details first time around, obviously.
It's not a bad idea, actually. Let's say you are a company and you get the right to manage a brand new TLD. Let's also say you want to get rich doing it, with minimal work.
I say, if you want to make money, appeal to the ego of a demographic with plenty of expendable income and generally limited computer know-how. If a semi-competent "professional" gets an email message suggesting that he/she may qualify for an elite, brand-new.pro domain, this professional might be duped into thinking that others in the profession will stare at his/her new website domain with awe. This professional will use the.pro domain to brag to the whole world that he/she is competent - much like getting a vanity license plate with "doctor" or "lawyer" on it.
IT professionals were probably left out of this club because we're much less likely to actually want a.pro domain (and probably already own a few.com's anyway). Why waste advertising money on a demographic that isn't going to buy the product? Also, we don't tend to fit in with the other professionals socially - if you saw a lineup comprised of lawyers, doctors, accountants, and one IT professional, you'd probably be able to pick the IT pro out quickly enough (if by no other means, by saying "all your base are" and wait for one to say "belong to us!"). We don't need/want to be in their club. We already know we're superior:)
I understand that you can accidentally delete every file on your hard drive, but it's not as easy to accidentally do as so many people claim. You have to want to recursively delete all the files at a certain point in your directory tree - I personally never use rm -r and most people who don't understand the trouble with root wouldn't even know how to use the command. They're much less likely to type it in, and then even less likely to type it in when their pwd is '/'.
I think that the classic example also downplays the dangers of typing in 'rm -rf ~/' - back when I did helpdesk work I had many more reports of people erasing their personal files than system files. It's much worse in my opinion to lose all your personal files than to lose important operating system files because they can't be replaced as easily (and these people almost never make backups). These were Windows 3.1 and 95 machines usually, so there was not much stopping them from deleting crucial files except their lack of knowledge. And all they would have had to type is "deltree c:\windows" or "del/y c:\windows\*.*" from any command prompt.
So my point is that home users logging in as root is bad practice, but not likely to cause any problems that couldn't easily happen on most Windows systems (since XP creates passwordless administrator accounts by default I am including it in this category). If an OS X user (or desktop linux user for that matter) logs in as root all the time, and then one day royally screws up his/her system, he/she will probably be able to reinstall, or find somebody to reinstall, the system files that only root can destroy. The personal files, those which the user could have destroyed without root, will be deleted either way:
Geek Friend: You really hosed your system this time! This wouldn't have happened if you logged in with your unprivileged account. User: So if I was logged in with my user account I wouldn't have been able to run 'rm -rf/*'? Odd that I typed in a command like that, which I don't even slightly understand... GF: Yep, that would have prevented it. Lucky for you I can reinstall your operating system and applications. U: How about all my important personal documents? Can you reinstall them? GF: Nope, they're hosed. Too bad you logged in as root. U: So if I logged in as myself those documents would still be safe?? GF: Well, no. You'd be just as hosed, minus me spending two hours reinstalling everything else.
So the lesson is: don't log in as root unless you know how to reinstall the OS.
I was thinking the same thing. The article needs some sort of data (or even an illustration of the model he used) to give us some sort of idea what scenario he built. I'm imagining the model is just a bunch of free-floating cell phones in a geometrically perfect (i.e., no dents on the walls) carriage. If he created a model that placed a human head on one side of each cell phone, and accounted for other things (movement of the carriage would create a doppler effect for the phone signals, right?) his results might carry some weight. As it stands now, we have no idea how he arrived at this conclusion. Or what, in actual numbers, that conclusion is.
I'd say it's worthy of doing a real study though with real people, multiple tests with certain percentages using cell phones and even an empty "control" carriage. But if there really was a huge amount of radiation in there, we would have noticed two effects: a.) It's too tough to get a signal with all that radiation, and b.) There would be a lot more birth defects in the past few years.
I have another take on this-- appealing to the whims of the slashdot mob who want everything for free is not a good business strategy.
I'm not getting it for free, first of all - I have a subscription and was promised a service in return. What I want is the freedom to view or not view any part of that content I subscribed for (with certain limitations, such as not being able to view what is on multiple channels at the same time). My problem with his complaint is that he is doing the same thing that the record companies were doing several years ago -- proclaiming the evils of a new technology just because they can't keep doing the same thing and keep growing profits*. There is no law stating that just because a company made a profit in the past, it has to keep making profits in the future. If profits go down because the product/service is no longer worth as much (i.e., consumers are not willing to pay as much) then the company must adapt, and this could mean some of its employees will go and get other jobs. If they're smart employees and they look ahead at their careers, they'll start moving before they have to.
I can't agree with the logic that because the CEO of Turner doesn't want to change with the times, I have to watch commercials.
I still stand behind the two solutions I proposed before: Either provide a better service or out-maneuver your competition. If profits go down, try something new. Don't complain to the government because you're not paying attention to technological progress. If 15% of Turner's stations can't survive the changing times, then we'll only have 85% of the stations we used to have, and they'll be the strongest of the stations (not necessarily the best, but that's how the system works).
Yes, the "content providers" stand to lose money if they mess with their advertising scheme. That's where the business skills of the corporate leaders come in. They have to figure out how to work with the system as it stands, not how to complain to congress to fix the system.
Capitalism is Darwinism with money, folks. If the government steps in and regulates our TV-viewing so that the consumers better fit the business model of the companies with the most congress(wo)men hanging out of their pockets, then the "fittest" company is not most likely to survive anymore.
* Or so they think. As we all know, record sales kept increasing for several years after mp3 hit quazi-mainstream. And with the birth of recorded music in the early 1900s, musicians feared they would no longer get gigs - live performance revenues actually grew as a result of the availability of recordings and radio broadcasts. PVR's may boost cable/satellite subscriptions and in turn boost ratings and advertising dollars, even if a lower percentage is watching commercials. But since it's somewhat counter-intuitive, the corporate types would rather outlaw this new technology than think about how to profit from it.
When we subscribe to channels, we agree to pay them a set amount of money per month, and in return they allow us to watch their programming any time during that month.
What Turner is forgetting is that we don't just subscribe to one channel and leave it on all day - so there is never a guarantee that I will watch the advertisements that companies paid to put on the stations I subscribe to. If I choose to "time-shift" the programming I subscribed to, then I can do that. If I choose to empty my bowels instead of watch the latest overproduced Pepsi spot, then I can do that. If I choose to talk to my friend during the commercial, or see what else is on TV, then I can do that.
Kellner (the CEO) does say it's OK to go to the bathroom during commercial breaks. His problem is that the 30-second skip neatly coincides with the standard advertisement length. Well, there are two options that he can pursue without whining to the government (is it just me or does it seem like "content providers" are just fighting technology with government now?)
Make your programming so compelling that viewers would rather tune in and watch your shows "live," thereby rendering the 30-second-skip feature useless. The benefits to this are the stations don't have to give soft money contributions to government, and their rating go up because their shows are that much better. The downside is that the stations need intelligent, semi-talented people to crank out this programming, and they can't rely on the government to provide guaranteed income (like what Communism was supposed to be like).
The second solution is to change the length of commercials. What would happen if Turner sent out a memo to all of its advertisers on all of its stations that it is now accepting 40 second commercials? First, we'd get a lot of commercials with ten seconds of junk thrown in (not like the first thirty seconds weren't junk anyway). Then stations could start charging more money for ads. The upside is that this solves Kellner's problem from the 2600 article -- the "Skip ahead" feature is only there to skip the 30-second commercial. It may slightly de-value that feature for the time being.
The downside is that it would be completely ineffective. I have a DishPlayer 501 which includes this 30-second-skip feature, and since sometimes 10- or 15-second spots are thrown in, it doesn't skip exactly. I end up hitting skip-skip-skip-skip-skip, back-back and watching up to ten seconds of the last commercial usually because after each skip, if I see a commercial I hit "skip" again. If I see programming I hit "back" until I see a commercial.
But I was just looking for a solution that would solve what he claims is the problem - the "skip" button lasts as long as a typical advertisement.
I've spent too much time being outraged about Fritz, Hillary, Eisner, and the whole gang. They are proclaiming the end of the world if they can't increase their revenues in light of technologocial advances that makes delievery of their products cheaper. And they seem to think it is their constitutional right to make a profit in an industry just because they could make a profit in the past.
Take the whole digital television aspect of things. The industry doesn't want us to be able to record those broadcasts for later viewing or distribution. Why? So they can trade syndications with each other (ala Full House, Saved By The Bell, Friends) and rebroadcast them to us when they feel we want to watch them. If the typical TV-loving American already has the past two years of his favorite sitcom PVR'd in its original broadcast quality (or a slightly lower quality), he won't be sure to tune in at 5:35 Monday through Friday to watch it on the Superstation, will he? So the Superstation won't be able to haul in as much advertising for that show.
There's nothing wrong with the above scenario. The TV station will either have to do something with that syndicate to make it really compelling (like not showing the same ~40 episodes over and over), or they'll get some new show to put in its place (Like "The Whoopi Goldberg Not-Quite-Famous Hollywood Crap-a-Thon").
Of course, the syndicates won't just go away, because home recording (or file swapping) still requires effort on behalf of the consumer, while tuning in for an episode hand-picked by the station is much easier. But the stations won't be able to get by as easily on cheap syndications. This new development might result in higher quality programming.
Another alternative (which is already starting) is for the stations to provide a nicely packaged alternative to the do-it-yourself approach: Sell the series on DVD. Throw in a nice menu, some scripts, outtakes, interviews, etc. and charge $60/season. The industry is doing the stuff that would be a hassle for consumers to do (be sure to record each episode, edit out / fast forward through commercials, transfer it to the desired medium) and throwing in some other stuff that the consumer didn't have before (i.e., new content).
The industries will fare much better if they find ways to compete with or benefit from the new technologies, rather than whine to the government until enough laws are passed. At this rate, they won't be satisfied until there is a royalty tax on computers just because we have the ability to copy their content with it (such as the royalty tax on blank CD-R's).
Has the GPL changed since the article came out? Even though it's the internet, relevant articles may be more than three hours old. It's nice to see an article as soon as it comes out, but I'm willing to guess that most people on this site hadn't seen the article back when it was released.
So you have two choices: Read it or don't read it. If you think that the eight months of sitting on a server virtually untouched has made it stale, then by all means don't read it. I, on the other hand, read the whole article before noticing the date, and I didn't see one word of the article that isn't as true today as it was way back when it was written.
This article has survived through the ages, indeed.
I try not to give Yahoo any more hits after they messed up their privacy poolicy, so here's the same exact story on CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-882252.html.
After what they did with their privacy policy, I think we should direct our hits to Reuters. You're getting the same story; Reuters wrote it and Yahoo got it from them. And they've got less advertising! If we don't like what Yahoo did, why are going to their site (and effectively giving them more advertising money) when an alternate site has the same story?
I made a few games for my TI-82 in high school. Nothing too complex: Pole Position and a side-scroller spaceship-shooting-the-other-spaceships kind of game. But Pole Position got harder as you advanced (the road got narrower) and I made the display pretty smooth (~4 fps)with just a short delay while it built the course in an array. It also kept score, until you reset the variable that it used.
I'd post the games online, but the floppy disk I copied the games to turned out top be corrupted. NEVER clear out the memory until you've tested the backups.
There was a very popular game for the 85's called "Boink" at my school, it was a whack-a-mole type game. A new version for the 83 is available at calc.org. In fact, the site appears to have a lot of games including a doom-like game for the Ti-92.
From my understanding of the situation, this law is due to advertising. My family used to have the broadcast network stations (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX) on their Dish Network system, because they lived outside the range of any of the local affiliates. As long as Dish wasn't taking away viewers from the local affiliates, they could give us those stations. Plus we got West Coast feeds.
Then in 1998 they lost their local channels because Dish changed its policies. They've been planning on giving everybody local stations ever since then, but that is a lot of satellites. This is why they've got their eyes on Hughes (DirecTV). With all those extra satellites and the increased revenue, they can afford to broadcast every local affiliate in the US.
But the DirecTV merger still hasn't gone through yet, and AOL-Time-Warner-Roadrunner-Netscape-HBO-Nullsoft is really bashing satellite as much as possible. So EchoStar is using this as good PR (we're fighting for your rights) and a way to stop Time Warner from using its primary attack (you can't get the major networks with satellite).
So why do I think this won't happen? Because the local affiliates have a monopoly on local viewers. If I want to watch the latest crap-tacular reality series on CBS, I'm going to have to tune in to WRGB-6 because it's my local affiliate. Why do the local affiliates have monopolies on their respective networks? Because of advertising. Local companies can't or won't advertise on national networks, because it's too expensive and pointless in a lot of cases. Why would somebody who doesn't live in Albany, NY go there to buy a mattress?
If you follow that progression, you'll see that if Dish Network offers me crystal-clear CBS out of North Carolina and crystal-clear CBS-West out of Seattle, why would I watch over-the-air fuzzy CBS in Albany? I wouldn't. And the local affiliate would lose a lot of viewers, and they wouldn't be able to charge as much for advertising, and then they wouldn't be able to pay their slightly competent news staff, and the local companies wouldn't be able to annoy us with their commercials featuring their almost-attractive-but-still-too-ugly-for-tv relatives who can't act.
In reality, this wouldn't mean the end of the world. Local businesses would advertise on Clear Channel's local station or the local newspaper. They'd still advertise on local TV because Dish would still charge for their service and not everybody can have/would want a dish. But there would be less viewerson the local stations, and we'd have to watch WXXA (local FOX) suck even more than they already do.
But the threat of the end of local businesses might be enough to stop this from happening. That's why the law was put in place to begin with, and they'll no doubt try to use it as an argument now. I hope Echostar wins this (so I can use my DishPlayer to record the Simpsons) but I'm not holding my breath - especially when you know AOL-Time-Warner-etc. stands to lose a lot of cable subscribers if we can get those channels on satellite.
But think about it - if that extra bandwidth and storage cost works out to $0.05 per user, and they can sell the usernames for $0.10 each, aren't they now making an additional $0.05 per user? The numbers above are made-up without any research, to provide an example. They don't care if users read the spam, they care if spammers pay them money for lists, particularly if the costs still work out well for Yahoo.
Do you know an accurate cross-section of the British population?
Almost everybody I know has web access (I'd say 19/20), yet that's far above my country's ratio, which I am too lazy to look up. That's because most people I know live near me and are somewhat gainfully employed. I'm limiting my scope to people near New York with a steady income.
Your scope is probably limited to family members in many if not most cases, and beyond that, people you knew at least a little bit.
The ratio given is probably based on a sampling from many funeral homes in various areas in the UK. So, while I don't doubt your personal experience, it's probably not a representative sample.
Where I work we give them names based on simpsons characters:
The linux/apache/postgresql/sendmail server is named Milhouse, because he's a bit of a nerd and is well-suited to boring mail delivery.
Nelson is the intranet server (apache/PHP/RH)
Wendell is the new intranet server - I figure he's smarter than Nelson, and the server is considerably better.
Martin is the IIS web server because I don't really like Martin, and neither do Milhouse, Nelson, or Wendell.
The Mission-critical app server is named Goldserv because it's only NT4 and doesn't deserve a good name.
The terminal server is termserv1 because somebody else installed it for us.
The Novell server is just boring old CSALB1 because it was set up before I started, and it just died! Hooray! sorta, if you ignore the data loss thing.
Of course, this doesn't work for a large number of servers. I just wanted to brag before some drunken jackass claimed ownership on Simpson-named servers.
I just happened to notice somebody at work was watching Looney Tunes during lunch on Friday, so I stopped in to watch one - it was from the "Sam and Ralph" Wile E. Coyote/Sheep Dog series. I mentioned that I thought Chuck Jones was a great animator. She looked at me like I was a freak for knowing the name of the guy who created the cartoon.
What are the odds - I'm a big fan of Looney Tunes (expecially Jones, Tex Avery, and to a lesser extent Schlessinger) but I never have watched them at work. But I'm glad to know that I said good things about him on his last day. I just wonder what the time of death was - I think I saw the cartoon around 10:30 AM in California time.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's link to the same story found on Reuters. That's where Yahoo got the story from: The Reuters article
Someday soon, a company is going to make a real innovation in TV that will benefit the "content providers" without fighting consumers. That company will thrive, and the other media companies will either rush their imitations to market, or fight that too until their deaths. It seems big media companies think it's easier to fight to keep the old system in place rather than try to lead the pack to the new system. If one of these companies were to produce a new system that respected the rights of consumers, rather than force-feed advertisements to us, I'd invest, and I'm sure a lot of ther people in the /. demographic would invest too.
Actually, there was a 5.1 last month in New York. It woke me up, and I looked out the window to see if the cars fell off the road, and then I went back to sleep. I'm really surprised that a 5.2 in CA made slashdot though, since the 5.1 I felt was not that bad, and I'm in NY where they're much less common, what with the whole lack-of-a-pacific-ring thing...
Actually, they weren't at 90 degree angles - one entered at Antarctica and left from the Indian Ocean, and one entered the Pacific and left through Antarctica. Odd that they both involved the South Pole, though - is it possible that the magnetism of the earth had an effect on them? It is considerably larger...
I also have to wonder how they can calculate its speed to be 900,000 mph. Sure, if they measure the distance from its entry to its exit, and divide by the difference in time they could come up with a number. But that would imply that the Earth is sitting still in space. Instead, we're spinning and revolving, and the focus of our revolution (actually just one focus, since the path is elliptical) is in turn rotating and revolving, and moving away from the center of the universe too. What is that 900,000 mph in relation to? What if the particle was actually sitting still, and the total velocity of the Earth is actually 900,000 mph?
Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert in physics, astronomy, geometry, grammar, or magnetism.
I don't know if there's an official term for it, but I often write a function in one language that writes code for another language - for example, using PHP or Perl to write javascript. I've even gone so far as to use PHP to write a SQL statement which in turn is used to determine what will go in a Javascript function that writes HTML code. The example below is rather pointless, but I have come across real situations where it is beneficial to use that many languages together.
That's three "real" languages and one markup language. And if you think that was crazy, think about this - I just had to write that in HTML in a slashdot posting textbox!
My next goal is to make the javascript write out HTML for parameters in a Java applet. And, the whole PHP page is going to be written by a C program exectuted by a cron job that was set up via a perl script (webmin!) That's eight different languages - perl -> bash (I think) -> C -> PHP -> SQL and Javascript -> HTML -> Java. Sadly, I don't think that's nearly as crazy as the quadrilingual program. I need to learn Brainf*ck.
-Joe
Also, the link given to the Simple Simon site in the parent post is incorrect. The proper location is http://www.sec33.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=
It's not a bad idea, actually. Let's say you are a company and you get the right to manage a brand new TLD. Let's also say you want to get rich doing it, with minimal work.
I say, if you want to make money, appeal to the ego of a demographic with plenty of expendable income and generally limited computer know-how. If a semi-competent "professional" gets an email message suggesting that he/she may qualify for an elite, brand-new .pro domain, this professional might be duped into thinking that others in the profession will stare at his/her new website domain with awe. This professional will use the .pro domain to brag to the whole world that he/she is competent - much like getting a vanity license plate with "doctor" or "lawyer" on it.
IT professionals were probably left out of this club because we're much less likely to actually want a .pro domain (and probably already own a few .com's anyway). Why waste advertising money on a demographic that isn't going to buy the product? Also, we don't tend to fit in with the other professionals socially - if you saw a lineup comprised of lawyers, doctors, accountants, and one IT professional, you'd probably be able to pick the IT pro out quickly enough (if by no other means, by saying "all your base are" and wait for one to say "belong to us!"). We don't need/want to be in their club. We already know we're superior :)
I understand that you can accidentally delete every file on your hard drive, but it's not as easy to accidentally do as so many people claim. You have to want to recursively delete all the files at a certain point in your directory tree - I personally never use rm -r and most people who don't understand the trouble with root wouldn't even know how to use the command. They're much less likely to type it in, and then even less likely to type it in when their pwd is '/'.
I think that the classic example also downplays the dangers of typing in 'rm -rf ~/' - back when I did helpdesk work I had many more reports of people erasing their personal files than system files. It's much worse in my opinion to lose all your personal files than to lose important operating system files because they can't be replaced as easily (and these people almost never make backups). These were Windows 3.1 and 95 machines usually, so there was not much stopping them from deleting crucial files except their lack of knowledge. And all they would have had to type is "deltree c:\windows" or "del /y c:\windows\*.*" from any command prompt.
So my point is that home users logging in as root is bad practice, but not likely to cause any problems that couldn't easily happen on most Windows systems (since XP creates passwordless administrator accounts by default I am including it in this category). If an OS X user (or desktop linux user for that matter) logs in as root all the time, and then one day royally screws up his/her system, he/she will probably be able to reinstall, or find somebody to reinstall, the system files that only root can destroy. The personal files, those which the user could have destroyed without root, will be deleted either way:
So the lesson is: don't log in as root unless you know how to reinstall the OS.I'd say it's worthy of doing a real study though with real people, multiple tests with certain percentages using cell phones and even an empty "control" carriage. But if there really was a huge amount of radiation in there, we would have noticed two effects: a.) It's too tough to get a signal with all that radiation, and b.) There would be a lot more birth defects in the past few years.
I have another take on this-- appealing to the whims of the slashdot mob who want everything for free is not a good business strategy.
I'm not getting it for free, first of all - I have a subscription and was promised a service in return. What I want is the freedom to view or not view any part of that content I subscribed for (with certain limitations, such as not being able to view what is on multiple channels at the same time). My problem with his complaint is that he is doing the same thing that the record companies were doing several years ago -- proclaiming the evils of a new technology just because they can't keep doing the same thing and keep growing profits*. There is no law stating that just because a company made a profit in the past, it has to keep making profits in the future. If profits go down because the product/service is no longer worth as much (i.e., consumers are not willing to pay as much) then the company must adapt, and this could mean some of its employees will go and get other jobs. If they're smart employees and they look ahead at their careers, they'll start moving before they have to.
I can't agree with the logic that because the CEO of Turner doesn't want to change with the times, I have to watch commercials.
I still stand behind the two solutions I proposed before: Either provide a better service or out-maneuver your competition. If profits go down, try something new. Don't complain to the government because you're not paying attention to technological progress. If 15% of Turner's stations can't survive the changing times, then we'll only have 85% of the stations we used to have, and they'll be the strongest of the stations (not necessarily the best, but that's how the system works).
Yes, the "content providers" stand to lose money if they mess with their advertising scheme. That's where the business skills of the corporate leaders come in. They have to figure out how to work with the system as it stands, not how to complain to congress to fix the system.
Capitalism is Darwinism with money, folks. If the government steps in and regulates our TV-viewing so that the consumers better fit the business model of the companies with the most congress(wo)men hanging out of their pockets, then the "fittest" company is not most likely to survive anymore.
* Or so they think. As we all know, record sales kept increasing for several years after mp3 hit quazi-mainstream. And with the birth of recorded music in the early 1900s, musicians feared they would no longer get gigs - live performance revenues actually grew as a result of the availability of recordings and radio broadcasts. PVR's may boost cable/satellite subscriptions and in turn boost ratings and advertising dollars, even if a lower percentage is watching commercials. But since it's somewhat counter-intuitive, the corporate types would rather outlaw this new technology than think about how to profit from it.
When we subscribe to channels, we agree to pay them a set amount of money per month, and in return they allow us to watch their programming any time during that month.
What Turner is forgetting is that we don't just subscribe to one channel and leave it on all day - so there is never a guarantee that I will watch the advertisements that companies paid to put on the stations I subscribe to. If I choose to "time-shift" the programming I subscribed to, then I can do that. If I choose to empty my bowels instead of watch the latest overproduced Pepsi spot, then I can do that. If I choose to talk to my friend during the commercial, or see what else is on TV, then I can do that.
Kellner (the CEO) does say it's OK to go to the bathroom during commercial breaks. His problem is that the 30-second skip neatly coincides with the standard advertisement length. Well, there are two options that he can pursue without whining to the government (is it just me or does it seem like "content providers" are just fighting technology with government now?)
- Make your programming so compelling that viewers would rather tune in and watch your shows "live," thereby rendering the 30-second-skip feature useless. The benefits to this are the stations don't have to give soft money contributions to government, and their rating go up because their shows are that much better. The downside is that the stations need intelligent, semi-talented people to crank out this programming, and they can't rely on the government to provide guaranteed income (like what Communism was supposed to be like).
- The second solution is to change the length of commercials. What would happen if Turner sent out a memo to all of its advertisers on all of its stations that it is now accepting 40 second commercials? First, we'd get a lot of commercials with ten seconds of junk thrown in (not like the first thirty seconds weren't junk anyway). Then stations could start charging more money for ads. The upside is that this solves Kellner's problem from the 2600 article -- the "Skip ahead" feature is only there to skip the 30-second commercial. It may slightly de-value that feature for the time being.
But I was just looking for a solution that would solve what he claims is the problem - the "skip" button lasts as long as a typical advertisement.The downside is that it would be completely ineffective. I have a DishPlayer 501 which includes this 30-second-skip feature, and since sometimes 10- or 15-second spots are thrown in, it doesn't skip exactly. I end up hitting skip-skip-skip-skip-skip, back-back and watching up to ten seconds of the last commercial usually because after each skip, if I see a commercial I hit "skip" again. If I see programming I hit "back" until I see a commercial.
I've spent too much time being outraged about Fritz, Hillary, Eisner, and the whole gang. They are proclaiming the end of the world if they can't increase their revenues in light of technologocial advances that makes delievery of their products cheaper. And they seem to think it is their constitutional right to make a profit in an industry just because they could make a profit in the past.
Take the whole digital television aspect of things. The industry doesn't want us to be able to record those broadcasts for later viewing or distribution. Why? So they can trade syndications with each other (ala Full House, Saved By The Bell, Friends) and rebroadcast them to us when they feel we want to watch them. If the typical TV-loving American already has the past two years of his favorite sitcom PVR'd in its original broadcast quality (or a slightly lower quality), he won't be sure to tune in at 5:35 Monday through Friday to watch it on the Superstation, will he? So the Superstation won't be able to haul in as much advertising for that show.
There's nothing wrong with the above scenario. The TV station will either have to do something with that syndicate to make it really compelling (like not showing the same ~40 episodes over and over), or they'll get some new show to put in its place (Like "The Whoopi Goldberg Not-Quite-Famous Hollywood Crap-a-Thon").
Of course, the syndicates won't just go away, because home recording (or file swapping) still requires effort on behalf of the consumer, while tuning in for an episode hand-picked by the station is much easier. But the stations won't be able to get by as easily on cheap syndications. This new development might result in higher quality programming.
Another alternative (which is already starting) is for the stations to provide a nicely packaged alternative to the do-it-yourself approach: Sell the series on DVD. Throw in a nice menu, some scripts, outtakes, interviews, etc. and charge $60/season. The industry is doing the stuff that would be a hassle for consumers to do (be sure to record each episode, edit out / fast forward through commercials, transfer it to the desired medium) and throwing in some other stuff that the consumer didn't have before (i.e., new content).
The industries will fare much better if they find ways to compete with or benefit from the new technologies, rather than whine to the government until enough laws are passed. At this rate, they won't be satisfied until there is a royalty tax on computers just because we have the ability to copy their content with it (such as the royalty tax on blank CD-R's).
The subject says Half-Billionth and the body says 500 millionth. Makes sense to me.
Has the GPL changed since the article came out? Even though it's the internet, relevant articles may be more than three hours old. It's nice to see an article as soon as it comes out, but I'm willing to guess that most people on this site hadn't seen the article back when it was released.
So you have two choices: Read it or don't read it. If you think that the eight months of sitting on a server virtually untouched has made it stale, then by all means don't read it. I, on the other hand, read the whole article before noticing the date, and I didn't see one word of the article that isn't as true today as it was way back when it was written.
This article has survived through the ages, indeed.
I want to patent kicking this guy's ass for doing something this stupid. Prior art, anybody?
I try not to give Yahoo any more hits after they messed up their privacy poolicy, so here's the same exact story on CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-882252.html.
After what they did with their privacy policy, I think we should direct our hits to Reuters. You're getting the same story; Reuters wrote it and Yahoo got it from them. And they've got less advertising! If we don't like what Yahoo did, why are going to their site (and effectively giving them more advertising money) when an alternate site has the same story?
I made a few games for my TI-82 in high school. Nothing too complex: Pole Position and a side-scroller spaceship-shooting-the-other-spaceships kind of game. But Pole Position got harder as you advanced (the road got narrower) and I made the display pretty smooth (~4 fps)with just a short delay while it built the course in an array. It also kept score, until you reset the variable that it used.
I'd post the games online, but the floppy disk I copied the games to turned out top be corrupted. NEVER clear out the memory until you've tested the backups.
There was a very popular game for the 85's called "Boink" at my school, it was a whack-a-mole type game. A new version for the 83 is available at calc.org. In fact, the site appears to have a lot of games including a doom-like game for the Ti-92.
From my understanding of the situation, this law is due to advertising. My family used to have the broadcast network stations (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX) on their Dish Network system, because they lived outside the range of any of the local affiliates. As long as Dish wasn't taking away viewers from the local affiliates, they could give us those stations. Plus we got West Coast feeds.
Then in 1998 they lost their local channels because Dish changed its policies. They've been planning on giving everybody local stations ever since then, but that is a lot of satellites. This is why they've got their eyes on Hughes (DirecTV). With all those extra satellites and the increased revenue, they can afford to broadcast every local affiliate in the US.
But the DirecTV merger still hasn't gone through yet, and AOL-Time-Warner-Roadrunner-Netscape-HBO-Nullsoft is really bashing satellite as much as possible. So EchoStar is using this as good PR (we're fighting for your rights) and a way to stop Time Warner from using its primary attack (you can't get the major networks with satellite).
So why do I think this won't happen? Because the local affiliates have a monopoly on local viewers. If I want to watch the latest crap-tacular reality series on CBS, I'm going to have to tune in to WRGB-6 because it's my local affiliate. Why do the local affiliates have monopolies on their respective networks? Because of advertising. Local companies can't or won't advertise on national networks, because it's too expensive and pointless in a lot of cases. Why would somebody who doesn't live in Albany, NY go there to buy a mattress?
If you follow that progression, you'll see that if Dish Network offers me crystal-clear CBS out of North Carolina and crystal-clear CBS-West out of Seattle, why would I watch over-the-air fuzzy CBS in Albany? I wouldn't. And the local affiliate would lose a lot of viewers, and they wouldn't be able to charge as much for advertising, and then they wouldn't be able to pay their slightly competent news staff, and the local companies wouldn't be able to annoy us with their commercials featuring their almost-attractive-but-still-too-ugly-for-tv relatives who can't act.
In reality, this wouldn't mean the end of the world. Local businesses would advertise on Clear Channel's local station or the local newspaper. They'd still advertise on local TV because Dish would still charge for their service and not everybody can have/would want a dish. But there would be less viewerson the local stations, and we'd have to watch WXXA (local FOX) suck even more than they already do.
But the threat of the end of local businesses might be enough to stop this from happening. That's why the law was put in place to begin with, and they'll no doubt try to use it as an argument now. I hope Echostar wins this (so I can use my DishPlayer to record the Simpsons) but I'm not holding my breath - especially when you know AOL-Time-Warner-etc. stands to lose a lot of cable subscribers if we can get those channels on satellite.
But think about it - if that extra bandwidth and storage cost works out to $0.05 per user, and they can sell the usernames for $0.10 each, aren't they now making an additional $0.05 per user? The numbers above are made-up without any research, to provide an example. They don't care if users read the spam, they care if spammers pay them money for lists, particularly if the costs still work out well for Yahoo.
Linux, on the other hand, isn't unix.
no, GNU's Not Unix.
Do you know an accurate cross-section of the British population?
Almost everybody I know has web access (I'd say 19/20), yet that's far above my country's ratio, which I am too lazy to look up. That's because most people I know live near me and are somewhat gainfully employed. I'm limiting my scope to people near New York with a steady income.
Your scope is probably limited to family members in many if not most cases, and beyond that, people you knew at least a little bit.
The ratio given is probably based on a sampling from many funeral homes in various areas in the UK. So, while I don't doubt your personal experience, it's probably not a representative sample.
Where I work we give them names based on simpsons characters:
The linux/apache/postgresql/sendmail server is named Milhouse, because he's a bit of a nerd and is well-suited to boring mail delivery.
Nelson is the intranet server (apache/PHP/RH)
Wendell is the new intranet server - I figure he's smarter than Nelson, and the server is considerably better.
Martin is the IIS web server because I don't really like Martin, and neither do Milhouse, Nelson, or Wendell.
The Mission-critical app server is named Goldserv because it's only NT4 and doesn't deserve a good name.
The terminal server is termserv1 because somebody else installed it for us.
The Novell server is just boring old CSALB1 because it was set up before I started, and it just died! Hooray! sorta, if you ignore the data loss thing.
Of course, this doesn't work for a large number of servers. I just wanted to brag before some drunken jackass claimed ownership on Simpson-named servers.
I just happened to notice somebody at work was watching Looney Tunes during lunch on Friday, so I stopped in to watch one - it was from the "Sam and Ralph" Wile E. Coyote/Sheep Dog series. I mentioned that I thought Chuck Jones was a great animator. She looked at me like I was a freak for knowing the name of the guy who created the cartoon.
What are the odds - I'm a big fan of Looney Tunes (expecially Jones, Tex Avery, and to a lesser extent Schlessinger) but I never have watched them at work. But I'm glad to know that I said good things about him on his last day. I just wonder what the time of death was - I think I saw the cartoon around 10:30 AM in California time.
-- slightly freaked out in NY