Go here. Look at the top five releases. As of today, 3 May, apparently only one of them, by consensus of all the reporting critics, is worth seeing. Look at the top ten. Look at the top twenty. It's similarly bleak.
I realize this hardly counts as definitive evidence, but it's enough that I really don't believe the MPAA when they moan about piracy.
...but I've decided to cut my nose off to spite my face by boycotting Sony because of Sony BMG's recent DRM-o-rama.
Seriously, this is the Sony I once knew and loved, when it did things like this all the time. Maybe those of us boycotting the entire company because of last month's debacle should adjust things a bit?
...that advertising people, particularly those who infest the sphere of personal computing, live in a universe that's parallel to the one in which the rest of us live.
There's a lot of talk about revenues. There's a lot of talk about private lawsuit settlements. There's a lot of talk about how effectively these guys can invade your user experience on a personal computer. At one point in the article, I read a line about Gator (Claria) suing another company for "(interfering) with its right to deliver pop-ups."
As P.J. O'Rourke would say, "What the fuck, huh?! I mean, what the fucking fuck?!" Where on Earth did these scumbags ever get the idea that they have the right to do these things? I don't see anything at all mentioned about about ethics or otherwise doing the right thing. When a few weeks ago Stewart Baker admonished Sony BMG (not directly, but everyone knew who he was talking to), "It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer," I was astonished that someone in such a position as his would step up to the plate for people like us.
Thing is, whether they're Claria, or Gator, or whatever name they want to call themselves, I still think they're still bad news. I'm just glad they're myopic enough that they haven't targeted Macintoshes yet.
As an aside, Annalee Newitz first came to my attention in the entertainment paper Metro distributed here in the South Bay area. I'm not sure if she's syndicated, but I like to think of her as a local. She's pretty sharp.
I hope no one waits to see what Google does. I know they're the golden boy du jour right now, but I'd love to see another source of this kind of innovation pop up here in Mountain View (or anyplace, for that matter).
"Let Google do it." I wonder how many have abdicated their innovative instincts to them?
In Chapter 4 of So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish," Douglas Adams described Ford Prefect's predicament in a bar in the lower side of Han Dold City when the barman wouldn't accept his American Express card:
"He glanced around at the motley collection of thugs, pimps, and record company executives that skulked on the edges of the dim pools of light with which the dark shadows of the bar's inner recesses were pitted. They were all very deliberately looiing in any direction but his, carefully picking up the threads of their former conversations about murders, drug rings, and music publishing deals. They knew what would happen now and didn't want to watch in case it put them off their drinks."
And later...
"He had, after all, been in the bar all day, he had been drinking a lot of stuff with bubbles in it, and he had bought an awful lot of rounds for all the pimps, thugs, and record executives who suddenly couldn't remember who he was."
Okay, the "music publishing deals" part wasn't exactly accurate, but this stuff was published in 1985. One would be tempted to say it was awfully prescient of Adams, but then again, maybe not.
You do raise a valid point that not everyone can do what I described. But my provider Cingular didn't disable my phone's Bluetooth capabilities (at least, not so I'd notice), and it's great being able to transfer small files so easily.
"People who use ringtones deserve to pay too much."
Unless they make them themselves.
I have a Motorola RAZR V3 and a Mac. The Mac has QuickTime Pro on it, so I was able to isolate what I wanted from a track ripped off a CD using QT Player. Used iTunes to convert that to mp3. Used Bluetooth to transfer that to the phone. The result turned out great.
I know people will accuse me of being cheap, but I had a bit of fun making it myself, and it irrigates my heart with satisfaction to know that I bypassed my cellular provider. It's one thing to pay US$0.99 for an entire song (through iTMS, for example), but to be charged US$2.50 for a mere snippet of a song is criminal.
...and where BMG were the ones who brought DRM into the picture."
Is that so?
Sony pulled the same crap with Celine Dion's album A New Day Has Come in 2002 using their key2audio DRM--the scheme that could be defeated with a felt-tip marker.
As far as I'm concerned, there should have been the same degree of outrage then as there is now.
Mr. Thomas Hesse President, Global Digital Business Sony BMG Music Entertainment Company 550 Madison Ave. New York, NY 10022-3211
I wrote this guy last summer after reading a piece in the New York Times featuring him discussing Sony's oh-so-wunnerful SunnComm copy protection. I can't locate the original NYT article, but this one says almost exactly the same thing.
I didn't receive a reply. I thought I stood a good chance of receiving one since I couched my language in civil terms and didn't call him a pig fucker. So, see what works for you.
that the story includes a photo of Bill Gates that's from Getty Images, and not from Corbis, which Gates owns.
I didn't find the story to be entirely the lovefest that some prior posters were implying. Perhaps the BBC is updating its sampling of comments as they come in?
In the days before Mac OS X, Apple used to ship a Map control panel. If you have Classic installed you still have access to it. In it, look for a blinking dot located in the southern Atlantic. Click it, and you'll find it's labeled "Middle Of Nowhere."
...has been taking lessons from someone else who produces badly-conceived products.
Lest you think I'm trolling, I have a legitimate question: Why must there be so much stratification?
Guy Kawasaki was fond of using the analogy of sailors and passengers aboard a ship: "A passenger gets on a ship, plays shuffleboard, and eats at the captain's table. A sailor weighs the anchor, goes into the engine room, and gets grease under his fingernails." He said that a product that was deep, indulgent, complete, and elegant could appeal to both kinds of users.
What we have here isn't any of these things. Instead, it's what a marketer sees as a way to "add value" and provide "choice" and ultimately increase revenues, but what it will really produce is confusion, because no one is going to be really sure which of Microsoft's offerings will suit them best.
""The digital revolution is about the democratization of technology and the experiences it makes possible."
What in the book of econo-techno bable does that MEAN?"
Looking up the word 'democratization,' I found that it means to "make (something) accessible to everyone," to quote my Dictionary widget. That something was technology.
Unfortunately, Ms. Fiorina did this by outsourcing as many jobs as possible abroad. It's possible she really believed in what she was doing (though I think she only cared about cheaper labor), but I believe she will be remembered as one of the most destructive forces through which Silicon Valley has ever suffered.
"...but I've never seen an electronics company (without a major stake in the film/music production business) so willing to shoot themselves in the foot."
Toshiba is connected. In Japan, they distribute EMI's product. We should remember (though I can't find the relevant link) that EMI's in bed with Macrovision, so it's safe to say that EMI may be wielding some influence.
Doesn't mean they're any less shooting themselves in the foot, however.
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect th
Slashdot Mirror
Go here. Look at the top five releases. As of today, 3 May, apparently only one of them, by consensus of all the reporting critics, is worth seeing. Look at the top ten. Look at the top twenty. It's similarly bleak.
I realize this hardly counts as definitive evidence, but it's enough that I really don't believe the MPAA when they moan about piracy.
"The Z5, shaped like a stick of gum..."
And in the device's promotional materials, there's an asterisk that points to: "Do not chew Z5," right?
...but I've decided to cut my nose off to spite my face by boycotting Sony because of Sony BMG's recent DRM-o-rama.
Seriously, this is the Sony I once knew and loved, when it did things like this all the time. Maybe those of us boycotting the entire company because of last month's debacle should adjust things a bit?
...that advertising people, particularly those who infest the sphere of personal computing, live in a universe that's parallel to the one in which the rest of us live.
There's a lot of talk about revenues. There's a lot of talk about private lawsuit settlements. There's a lot of talk about how effectively these guys can invade your user experience on a personal computer. At one point in the article, I read a line about Gator (Claria) suing another company for "(interfering) with its right to deliver pop-ups."
As P.J. O'Rourke would say, "What the fuck, huh?! I mean, what the fucking fuck?!" Where on Earth did these scumbags ever get the idea that they have the right to do these things? I don't see anything at all mentioned about about ethics or otherwise doing the right thing. When a few weeks ago Stewart Baker admonished Sony BMG (not directly, but everyone knew who he was talking to), "It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer," I was astonished that someone in such a position as his would step up to the plate for people like us.
Thing is, whether they're Claria, or Gator, or whatever name they want to call themselves, I still think they're still bad news. I'm just glad they're myopic enough that they haven't targeted Macintoshes yet.
As an aside, Annalee Newitz first came to my attention in the entertainment paper Metro distributed here in the South Bay area. I'm not sure if she's syndicated, but I like to think of her as a local. She's pretty sharp.
I hope no one waits to see what Google does. I know they're the golden boy du jour right now, but I'd love to see another source of this kind of innovation pop up here in Mountain View (or anyplace, for that matter).
"Let Google do it." I wonder how many have abdicated their innovative instincts to them?
I'd always been told that use of Goto led to a case of the BLAS in my code!
In Chapter 4 of So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish," Douglas Adams described Ford Prefect's predicament in a bar in the lower side of Han Dold City when the barman wouldn't accept his American Express card:
"He glanced around at the motley collection of thugs, pimps, and record company executives that skulked on the edges of the dim pools of light with which the dark shadows of the bar's inner recesses were pitted. They were all very deliberately looiing in any direction but his, carefully picking up the threads of their former conversations about murders, drug rings, and music publishing deals. They knew what would happen now and didn't want to watch in case it put them off their drinks."
And later...
"He had, after all, been in the bar all day, he had been drinking a lot of stuff with bubbles in it, and he had bought an awful lot of rounds for all the pimps, thugs, and record executives who suddenly couldn't remember who he was."
Okay, the "music publishing deals" part wasn't exactly accurate, but this stuff was published in 1985. One would be tempted to say it was awfully prescient of Adams, but then again, maybe not.
You do raise a valid point that not everyone can do what I described. But my provider Cingular didn't disable my phone's Bluetooth capabilities (at least, not so I'd notice), and it's great being able to transfer small files so easily.
"People who use ringtones deserve to pay too much."
Unless they make them themselves.
I have a Motorola RAZR V3 and a Mac. The Mac has QuickTime Pro on it, so I was able to isolate what I wanted from a track ripped off a CD using QT Player. Used iTunes to convert that to mp3. Used Bluetooth to transfer that to the phone. The result turned out great.
I know people will accuse me of being cheap, but I had a bit of fun making it myself, and it irrigates my heart with satisfaction to know that I bypassed my cellular provider. It's one thing to pay US$0.99 for an entire song (through iTMS, for example), but to be charged US$2.50 for a mere snippet of a song is criminal.
...and where BMG were the ones who brought DRM into the picture."
Is that so?
Sony pulled the same crap with Celine Dion's album A New Day Has Come in 2002 using their key2audio DRM--the scheme that could be defeated with a felt-tip marker.
As far as I'm concerned, there should have been the same degree of outrage then as there is now.
...had it been titled "Unix: Dummy to Diletante in 24 Hours."
Mr. Thomas Hesse
President, Global Digital Business
Sony BMG Music Entertainment Company
550 Madison Ave.
New York, NY 10022-3211
I wrote this guy last summer after reading a piece in the New York Times featuring him discussing Sony's oh-so-wunnerful SunnComm copy protection. I can't locate the original NYT article, but this one says almost exactly the same thing.
I didn't receive a reply. I thought I stood a good chance of receiving one since I couched my language in civil terms and didn't call him a pig fucker. So, see what works for you.
that the story includes a photo of Bill Gates that's from Getty Images, and not from Corbis, which Gates owns.
I didn't find the story to be entirely the lovefest that some prior posters were implying. Perhaps the BBC is updating its sampling of comments as they come in?
Must...have...primary...colors!
In the days before Mac OS X, Apple used to ship a Map control panel. If you have Classic installed you still have access to it. In it, look for a blinking dot located in the southern Atlantic. Click it, and you'll find it's labeled "Middle Of Nowhere."
"Should PalmOS be hosted on a PalmOS server?"
Why am I suddenly thinking about the Monty Python joke about cutting down the forest with a herring?
...has been taking lessons from someone else who produces badly-conceived products.
Lest you think I'm trolling, I have a legitimate question: Why must there be so much stratification?
Guy Kawasaki was fond of using the analogy of sailors and passengers aboard a ship: "A passenger gets on a ship, plays shuffleboard, and eats at the captain's table. A sailor weighs the anchor, goes into the engine room, and gets grease under his fingernails." He said that a product that was deep, indulgent, complete, and elegant could appeal to both kinds of users.
What we have here isn't any of these things. Instead, it's what a marketer sees as a way to "add value" and provide "choice" and ultimately increase revenues, but what it will really produce is confusion, because no one is going to be really sure which of Microsoft's offerings will suit them best.
This isn't insight. It's the schadenfreud of pimply 15-year-old Slashdotters of all ages tee-heeing behind their daddy's PC.
I was able to read it from the supplied link this morning, so maybe it's goldy or bronzy involved after all.
-tc
"OS X is still too idiot proof for me."
So you're saying you're still too much of an idiot to use it?
""The digital revolution is about the democratization of technology and the experiences it makes possible."
What in the book of econo-techno bable does that MEAN?"
Looking up the word 'democratization,' I found that it means to "make (something) accessible to everyone," to quote my Dictionary widget. That something was technology.
Unfortunately, Ms. Fiorina did this by outsourcing as many jobs as possible abroad. It's possible she really believed in what she was doing (though I think she only cared about cheaper labor), but I believe she will be remembered as one of the most destructive forces through which Silicon Valley has ever suffered.
"...but I've never seen an electronics company (without a major stake in the film/music production business) so willing to shoot themselves in the foot."
Toshiba is connected. In Japan, they distribute EMI's product. We should remember (though I can't find the relevant link) that EMI's in bed with Macrovision, so it's safe to say that EMI may be wielding some influence.
Doesn't mean they're any less shooting themselves in the foot, however.
"In fact, I'm suprised Mac OSX doesn't ship with a sheet of the stuff."
I have a secret to share with you.
You know those sheets of labels that have been included with every Mac shipped? They're not really labels!
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect th
This reminds me of the x86 vs. PowerPC debate.