Have you heard of this thing called cabletv? You pay a subscription and you get your entertainment in weekly installments
That's how it's distributed. Believe it or not, cabletv subscriptions don't pay for shows to be produced except in the case of the premium channels like Showtime, HBO. That's why they have advertising. It still requires movie & tv companies to stump up the money to create the content first. They get their money back through the advertising revenue; the cable company actually charges channels to be distributed.
As for your "known quantities" comments... no, they're basing it on the reputation of the producers. Your system will make it nearly impossible for an unknown to break in. You can't rely on your reputation when you don't have one yet.
Prepay only works if you can guarantee that the work will be completed, and also it puts a huge barrier to entry to anyone but the already established superstars.
Subscriptions don't work in general - it's the same problem. Most people prefer completed works so they don't have to wait for the next installment - and there's no guarantee that the next installment will ever be created. Unless you enjoy buying your novel by the chapter, and are willing to wait several months for each one to come out. You also lose the benefits of rewrites that way; you're just injecting scarcity over again. For the completed work to be of any merit, it'll probably need rewrites, which means planning it out, and pretty much writing the whole damn thing before selling the first subscription.
Subscriptions are also still subject to the "famous people sell the most" problem.
You're just pushing the issue of scarcity around. It's still the same system - except instead of selling finished works, you're front loading it, or doing it in pieces. Why not just enforce copyright, and then you get all the same benefits, but it actually works out to be better for the consumer - you know what you're buying, when you're buying it. The whole term of the deal is a known quantity and you're getting exactly what you pay for.
Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of anarchists and malcontents deciding that they deserve to get for free the benefit of others' hard work.
You know, tribes would actually ostracize or kill people who did that in the past.
You know what sucks? People don't keep paying me since I'm a great engineer. I have to actually work to get people to keep paying me. How is this different from being an artist?
People are willing to pay you a living wage to be an engineer. People won't pay more than about $20 for entertainment, which is what they get from an artist. If an author sells one book every 4 years for 4x your yearly salary, it all evens out.
Entertainment is the economy of wide distribution. It means that 1,000,000 people buying something for a very small price can afford to have something that otherwise, one person would have to spend $10,000,000 to do. And that normally doesn't happen.
Or you could actually, you know, man up and use your engineering skills in an artistic fashion.
The next time someone whines "How can we make money if we give away XYZ for free?" ask them how we can give away recipes for free without starving.
Pity that analogy doesn't work for - say - novelists. Or movie makers.
Take it further. How can you give away recipes for free without starving? Simple:
The recipe creator has another job. They're not relying on the recipe for income. Recipes are algorithms for the creation of food from ingredients. There is value in using them again and again. Fiction, for example, loses its value over time - you remember it.
So, what you're saying is - without the pap analogy:
Writers, filmmakers, musicians should all have a different source of income than selling their creations.
Which is another way of saying "I don't want to pay for it. It should be free for me to consume".
Sorry, but society doesn't work like that - and none has. If you want something to do something for you, you pay for it. You're advocating a return to slavery, or a rule-of-muscle society. But hey, good luck. I'm sure you won't mind when someone comes to you and demands that you give them the chair you made, or the poem you wrote at gunpoint. Because heck, taking that won't make you starve will it? You can always make another chair.
For supply and demand to work, the suppliers (the creators) still need to be compensated. Otherwise you're talking slavery/mooching/indentured servitude. If there were an infinite number of creators, you may have a point. There aren't.
With regards to literature, this is something of a myth. The presence of thousands of literate slaves in Rome allowed the mass-copying and sale of literary productions
In that case, let's change that statement: For most of the history copyright wasn't an issue since easy copying and wide distribution were not possible (or practical) without resorting to slavery.
Douglas Adams (DA) is paid by the BBC to write a radio series. This is given away, for free, by the BBC, over the airwaves (I don't think that there was a radio license by the time Hitch-hiker's was broadcast).
Don't "think" - research. There was a radio license as early as 1904; it was rolled into the TV license in 1971.
Maybe the state of Washington should take a page out of Microsoft's book: If you are working for Microsoft they give you a certain time period to pay up (activation) and if not will disable access to the bridge. Once they pay up the will allow them through, but sometimes get it wrong and prevent them from crossing until they have waded through the support process.
Alas, I came across the yearning to re-watch some of these demos lately. They're nice, but then you realize nowadays, when one could benefit from learning all these tips and tricks for optimization, the source code's lost to the ether forever.
Try registering a domain name that isn't opaque. It's nearly impossible these days - people bought all the obvious ones, and most of the non-obvious ones. Most of them are just domain squatters hoping to get rich, or spamvertising sites.
His 'donations' and 'charities', little more than investments in pharmaceutical companies to produce drug profits, rather than actually providing reasonably cost medicines for the poor, are an excellent example of how Bill ONLY thinks of profiting.
Bullshit. Their foundation promotes the use of generic drugs wherever possible, and provides donation so that those drugs can be bought and used where they're needed.
Guess that explains why you're posting anonymously though. Because you're full of shit.
Oh, and less you forget, it IS illegally obtained cash, as evidenced by the CRIMINAL conviction of Microsoft, master-in-chief at the helm, his Wonderful Giving Self, Lord William Gates.
What criminal conviction? Reference please, because there haven't been any criminal convictions against Microsoft. The only one Gates has that I know of was for speeding.
Obviously you don't live in Seattle were we have to see signs plastered on the streets proclaiming the greatness of "Bill and Melinda Gates" for anything they do. How insecure do you have to be to demand that people put up signs with your name on it any time you help? Seriously, haven't you noticed that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is all about self-promotion?! If you lived in Seattle you would. Rarely do they give money without also doing a bunch of PR work to promote the "brand".
I live in Seattle, and have for the past 10 years. What the hell are you blithering on about? Are you sure people didn't just put up signs near you to annoy you? Because I've not seen any of these signs.
Then again, it is Bill Gates and he is notorious for being a businessman first, so any "charity" from him should be taken with a grain of sand.
And if you'd care to delve into more of my ideas on the topic, they are buried throughout a novel that I've written which is available here. Granted, the novel is mostly about a group of citizens who aren't happy with things in a post-Capitalist world, but there is a lot of description about how such a world might be structured (and free feel to grep "Gates" in the text to see what I think about *that*).
Why would I read your novel when you can't even get basic metaphors right?
You are paying for his talent and resources. You are paying because he was right for the part.
You are paying for the marquee value of his name.
In the animated film, the voices are recorded first. The vocal performance, the personality of the actor, shapes the design and animation of the character.
Not the case in games, trust me. Not only that, but I seriously disagree with the practice of using A-list actors in games. I'd much rather use agency voice actors; the big names - as far as I can tell - don't bring anything to the game.
It seems to me that laborers in "infinite" production industries have a very good argument for residuals, from the perspective of fairness.
Although frankly, if they want residuals in the games industry, they can get the fuck in line. Behind the programmers, artists, animators, fx guys, et al. (Same goes for the actors - fuck you! You want royalties on a performance that took you at most a week? We slaved over that game for over three years, working evenings, weekends, you name it).
To see what position the eye is in, or exactly how the lips tighten, the face must hold the "micro" position long enough to be seen clearly. Visual clarity can not occur faster than the eye's biochemistry can operate. "Persistence of vision" is caused by the finite amount of time required to replenish the rodopsin in the rods/cones of the eye. It is not a cognitive process, and therefore, no amount of training can overcome it.
The thing is, that system is much faster than you're giving it credit for.
Some parts of the visual system can respond at up to 250Hz. That'd be an equivalent of 250 frames per second.
Movie projectors use a shutter system that blanks the image and redisplays it twice or 3 times to reduce flicker, giving an image which is shown 72 times per second.
Most television sets remove visible flicker by displaying the image at 100Hz or 120Hz; less than that gives visible flicker.
It's a bit like the debate about 192khz audio. Sure, your ear can probably only hear tones up to 22khz... but that's not all the information your ear processes. Phase correlation between your two ears means that for spatial positioning, your ear processes sound all the way up to about 96khz - giving a spatial separation of (if you do the math) about.5cm (that is, if you put a ring around your head, you can locate a sound to within.5cm of any spot on the ring). Above a certain rate, the audio information is processed as something other than tone; when that tone actually arrives becomes important.
Best example I can give of this is going home to the UK for christmas one year; the US updates its TV sets at 60hz; I went home and they're at 50hz. I literally could see the TV set strobing on and off as it refreshed, because I'd become so used to the US speed. It was freaky, and took several hours to get used to before I could integrate the picture again. Even then, it was noticeably flickering.
That of course, has nothing to do with the autism/tourettes issues you mentioned, which are of course a concern. I'm agree with you there that it is a potential problem.
Oh, that prior art is easy.
Windows for Workgroups 3.1 (originally codenamed Kato), released in October 1992... would have inside it an excellent networked solitaire game called Hearts.
If human eyes could catch 10 millisecond movements, TV and movies would be too jerky to watch, and movies would flash
Don't confuse persistence of vision with the ability to detect motion. Ever played quake with someone running at 120fps? Or heck, watch a DVD and then compare to a football game. You can easily see stuff down to the 1ms range; flicker fusion just exploits the eye and brain's blink reflexes to fill in the image.
Re:well, not effortlessly
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
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· Score: 1
Sure... here's my research:
http://www.ross.net/compression/introduction.html "Unfortunately, during this happy rollout, some patents popped out of the US patent system that cast a shadow over the LZRW series algorithms, and they became effectively unuseable in any practical application. If you want to use them in any product (whether free or commercial), you will have to do some in-depth patent homework and algorithm development/modification so as to avoid infringement. If you think that's easy, then you should be aware that Microsoft tried to use an LZ77/LZRW1/etc variant, specifically designed not to infringe existing patents, in its MS-DOS V6 operating system, and ended up having to pay Stac about $80m in the resulting patent lawsuit. For this reason, I would like to take this opportunity to state that the code provided in this web (and FTP site) is provided with the intention that it be used for educational and recreational use only. "
Waterworth patented a LZ77 variant (US Patent 4701745). This algorithm is generally referred to as as LZRW1, because Ross Williams reinvented it later and posted it on comp.compression on April 22, 1991. The same algorithm has later been patented by Gibson & Graybill (US Patent 5049881). The patent office failed to recognize that the same algorithm was patented twice, even though the wording used in the two patents is very similar.
The Waterworth patent is now owned by Stac, which won a lawsuit against Microsoft, concerning the compression feature of MS-DOS 6.0. Damages awarded were $120 million. (Microsoft and Stac later settled out of court.) "
Slashdot Mirror
Have you heard of this thing called cabletv? You pay a subscription and you get your entertainment in weekly installments
That's how it's distributed. Believe it or not, cabletv subscriptions don't pay for shows to be produced except in the case of the premium channels like Showtime, HBO. That's why they have advertising. It still requires movie & tv companies to stump up the money to create the content first. They get their money back through the advertising revenue; the cable company actually charges channels to be distributed.
As for your "known quantities" comments... no, they're basing it on the reputation of the producers. Your system will make it nearly impossible for an unknown to break in. You can't rely on your reputation when you don't have one yet.
Prepay only works if you can guarantee that the work will be completed, and also it puts a huge barrier to entry to anyone but the already established superstars.
Subscriptions don't work in general - it's the same problem. Most people prefer completed works so they don't have to wait for the next installment - and there's no guarantee that the next installment will ever be created. Unless you enjoy buying your novel by the chapter, and are willing to wait several months for each one to come out. You also lose the benefits of rewrites that way; you're just injecting scarcity over again. For the completed work to be of any merit, it'll probably need rewrites, which means planning it out, and pretty much writing the whole damn thing before selling the first subscription.
Subscriptions are also still subject to the "famous people sell the most" problem.
You're just pushing the issue of scarcity around. It's still the same system - except instead of selling finished works, you're front loading it, or doing it in pieces. Why not just enforce copyright, and then you get all the same benefits, but it actually works out to be better for the consumer - you know what you're buying, when you're buying it. The whole term of the deal is a known quantity and you're getting exactly what you pay for.
Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of anarchists and malcontents deciding that they deserve to get for free the benefit of others' hard work.
You know, tribes would actually ostracize or kill people who did that in the past.
You know what sucks? People don't keep paying me since I'm a great engineer. I have to actually work to get people to keep paying me. How is this different from being an artist?
People are willing to pay you a living wage to be an engineer. People won't pay more than about $20 for entertainment, which is what they get from an artist. If an author sells one book every 4 years for 4x your yearly salary, it all evens out.
Entertainment is the economy of wide distribution. It means that 1,000,000 people buying something for a very small price can afford to have something that otherwise, one person would have to spend $10,000,000 to do. And that normally doesn't happen.
Or you could actually, you know, man up and use your engineering skills in an artistic fashion.
The next time someone whines "How can we make money if we give away XYZ for free?" ask them how we can give away recipes for free without starving.
Pity that analogy doesn't work for - say - novelists. Or movie makers.
Take it further. How can you give away recipes for free without starving? Simple:
The recipe creator has another job.
They're not relying on the recipe for income.
Recipes are algorithms for the creation of food from ingredients. There is value in using them again and again. Fiction, for example, loses its value over time - you remember it.
So, what you're saying is - without the pap analogy:
Writers, filmmakers, musicians should all have a different source of income than selling their creations.
Which is another way of saying "I don't want to pay for it. It should be free for me to consume".
Sorry, but society doesn't work like that - and none has. If you want something to do something for you, you pay for it. You're advocating a return to slavery, or a rule-of-muscle society. But hey, good luck. I'm sure you won't mind when someone comes to you and demands that you give them the chair you made, or the poem you wrote at gunpoint. Because heck, taking that won't make you starve will it? You can always make another chair.
Whatever dude. You seem to have failed econ 101.
No, you're applying it poorly.
For supply and demand to work, the suppliers (the creators) still need to be compensated. Otherwise you're talking slavery/mooching/indentured servitude. If there were an infinite number of creators, you may have a point. There aren't.
With regards to literature, this is something of a myth. The presence of thousands of literate slaves in Rome allowed the mass-copying and sale of literary productions
In that case, let's change that statement:
For most of the history copyright wasn't an issue since easy copying and wide distribution were not possible (or practical) without resorting to slavery.
Yet it's funny how the software that everyone wants to pirate is not this custom work. Must be a reason for that...
Douglas Adams (DA) is paid by the BBC to write a radio series. This is given away, for free, by the BBC, over the airwaves (I don't think that there was a radio license by the time Hitch-hiker's was broadcast).
Don't "think" - research. There was a radio license as early as 1904; it was rolled into the TV license in 1971.
Maybe the state of Washington should take a page out of Microsoft's book: If you are working for Microsoft they give you a certain time period to pay up (activation) and if not will disable access to the bridge. Once they pay up the will allow them through, but sometimes get it wrong and prevent them from crossing until they have waded through the support process.
Nah, they're doing it another way.
$6-$7 toll on 520 bridge, possibly I-90 bridge, next year.
Isn't this simple "projection"? You use a screwdriver, you feel the surface of the screwdriver using the tip of the screwdriver. It should be obvious.
Alas, I came across the yearning to re-watch some of these demos lately. They're nice, but then you realize nowadays, when one could benefit from learning all these tips and tricks for optimization, the source code's lost to the ether forever.
Not always lost forever... SAM Coupe demo source
That's a civil matter, not a criminal act.
Those aren't criminal infractions. They're civil. Learn the difference.
Badge of honor to have an opaque domain name?
Not so.
Try registering a domain name that isn't opaque. It's nearly impossible these days - people bought all the obvious ones, and most of the non-obvious ones. Most of them are just domain squatters hoping to get rich, or spamvertising sites.
His 'donations' and 'charities', little more than investments in pharmaceutical companies to produce drug profits, rather than actually providing reasonably cost medicines for the poor, are an excellent example of how Bill ONLY thinks of profiting.
Bullshit. Their foundation promotes the use of generic drugs wherever possible, and provides donation so that those drugs can be bought and used where they're needed.
Guess that explains why you're posting anonymously though. Because you're full of shit.
Oh, and less you forget, it IS illegally obtained cash, as evidenced by the CRIMINAL conviction of Microsoft, master-in-chief at the helm, his Wonderful Giving Self, Lord William Gates.
What criminal conviction? Reference please, because there haven't been any criminal convictions against Microsoft. The only one Gates has that I know of was for speeding.
Obviously you don't live in Seattle were we have to see signs plastered on the streets proclaiming the greatness of "Bill and Melinda Gates" for anything they do. How insecure do you have to be to demand that people put up signs with your name on it any time you help? Seriously, haven't you noticed that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is all about self-promotion?! If you lived in Seattle you would. Rarely do they give money without also doing a bunch of PR work to promote the "brand".
I live in Seattle, and have for the past 10 years. What the hell are you blithering on about? Are you sure people didn't just put up signs near you to annoy you? Because I've not seen any of these signs.
Then again, it is Bill Gates and he is notorious for being a businessman first, so any "charity" from him should be taken with a grain of sand.
And if you'd care to delve into more of my ideas on the topic, they are buried throughout a novel that I've written which is available here. Granted, the novel is mostly about a group of citizens who aren't happy with things in a post-Capitalist world, but there is a lot of description about how such a world might be structured (and free feel to grep "Gates" in the text to see what I think about *that*).
Why would I read your novel when you can't even get basic metaphors right?
Clue: It's salt, not sand.
As a percentage he gives away much much less than others do. The guy who founded Dominoes Pizza gave away his entire fortune.
Hard to give away everything, when selling all his stock in MS would probably destroy the stock price in the process.
His plan - if you did your research - is to give it all away by the time he dies.
You aren't paying for the actor's time.
You are paying for his talent and resources. You are paying because he was right for the part.
You are paying for the marquee value of his name.
In the animated film, the voices are recorded first. The vocal performance, the personality of the actor, shapes the design and animation of the character.
Not the case in games, trust me. Not only that, but I seriously disagree with the practice of using A-list actors in games. I'd much rather use agency voice actors; the big names - as far as I can tell - don't bring anything to the game.
It seems to me that laborers in "infinite" production industries have a very good argument for residuals, from the perspective of fairness.
Although frankly, if they want residuals in the games industry, they can get the fuck in line. Behind the programmers, artists, animators, fx guys, et al. (Same goes for the actors - fuck you! You want royalties on a performance that took you at most a week? We slaved over that game for over three years, working evenings, weekends, you name it).
To see what position the eye is in, or exactly how the lips tighten, the face must hold the "micro" position long enough to be seen clearly. Visual clarity can not occur faster than the eye's biochemistry can operate.
.5cm (that is, if you put a ring around your head, you can locate a sound to within .5cm of any spot on the ring). Above a certain rate, the audio information is processed as something other than tone; when that tone actually arrives becomes important.
"Persistence of vision" is caused by the finite amount of time required to replenish the rodopsin in the rods/cones of the eye. It is not a cognitive process, and therefore, no amount of training can overcome it.
The thing is, that system is much faster than you're giving it credit for.
Wikipedia article on Flicker Fusion
Some parts of the visual system can respond at up to 250Hz. That'd be an equivalent of 250 frames per second.
Movie projectors use a shutter system that blanks the image and redisplays it twice or 3 times to reduce flicker, giving an image which is shown 72 times per second.
Most television sets remove visible flicker by displaying the image at 100Hz or 120Hz; less than that gives visible flicker.
It's a bit like the debate about 192khz audio. Sure, your ear can probably only hear tones up to 22khz... but that's not all the information your ear processes. Phase correlation between your two ears means that for spatial positioning, your ear processes sound all the way up to about 96khz - giving a spatial separation of (if you do the math) about
Best example I can give of this is going home to the UK for christmas one year; the US updates its TV sets at 60hz; I went home and they're at 50hz. I literally could see the TV set strobing on and off as it refreshed, because I'd become so used to the US speed. It was freaky, and took several hours to get used to before I could integrate the picture again. Even then, it was noticeably flickering.
That of course, has nothing to do with the autism/tourettes issues you mentioned, which are of course a concern. I'm agree with you there that it is a potential problem.
Oh, that prior art is easy. Windows for Workgroups 3.1 (originally codenamed Kato), released in October 1992 ... would have inside it an excellent networked solitaire game called Hearts.
If human eyes could catch 10 millisecond movements, TV and movies would be too jerky to watch, and movies would flash
Don't confuse persistence of vision with the ability to detect motion. Ever played quake with someone running at 120fps? Or heck, watch a DVD and then compare to a football game. You can easily see stuff down to the 1ms range; flicker fusion just exploits the eye and brain's blink reflexes to fill in the image.
Sure... here's my research:
http://www.ross.net/compression/introduction.html
"Unfortunately, during this happy rollout, some patents popped out of
the US patent system that cast a shadow over the LZRW series algorithms,
and they became effectively unuseable in any practical application. If
you want to use them in any product (whether free or commercial), you
will have to do some in-depth patent homework and algorithm
development/modification so as to avoid infringement. If you think
that's easy, then you should be aware that Microsoft tried to use an
LZ77/LZRW1/etc variant, specifically designed not to infringe existing
patents, in its MS-DOS V6 operating system, and ended up having to pay
Stac about $80m in the resulting patent lawsuit. For this reason, I
would like to take this opportunity to state that the code provided in
this web (and FTP site) is provided with the intention that it be used
for educational and recreational use only. "
http://www.ross.net/compression/patents_notes_from_ccfaq.html
"LZ77 Patents
Waterworth patented a LZ77 variant (US Patent 4701745). This algorithm
is generally referred to as as LZRW1, because Ross Williams reinvented
it later and posted it on comp.compression on April 22, 1991. The same
algorithm has later been patented by Gibson & Graybill (US Patent
5049881). The patent office failed to recognize that the same algorithm
was patented twice, even though the wording used in the two patents is
very similar.
The Waterworth patent is now owned by Stac, which won a lawsuit against
Microsoft, concerning the compression feature of MS-DOS 6.0. Damages
awarded were $120 million. (Microsoft and Stac later settled out of
court.) "