I'd really love to have Turtle Beach's Audiotron supporting Rendevous/ZeroConf. Of course, I'd like to be able to control the Audiotron from iTunes.
I suppose we can all wait until Windows 2003 implements Rendezvous. Then all hardware will support it, and Mac owners will have one more thing they can kvetch about Microsoft stealing, while the anti-Mac crowd will respond with taunts about market share and CPU speed. The natural balance of the universe will thus be restored.
Actually, I think he does get it. We just tend to resist the message.
For years I used to be one of the folks who lamented "bloat" in programs, pointing back at the fairly capable word processor I used on my TRS-80--AllWrite!, far more powerful than many of the "lite" GUI challengers out there now--that did so much with 48K of RAM and 150K or so of disk space.
But the thing is, if you actually work out the numbers, AllWrite was taking up more of that Trash-80's resources than Word does on even a relatively modern PC. (This is presuming the TRS-80 even had a hard drive, of course, to let the disk space comparison be meaningful.) If you compare early PC word processors like WordPerfect, taking up 1M of your 20M hard drive (5%) versus all of Microsoft Office taking up 230M of your 20G hard drive (1.2%), the difference is even more dramatic. Proportional to actual available resources, software size is decreasing.
This isn't a comfortable observation for most Unix guys, and it's true that it's not an excuse to write sloppy, wasteful code. But fear of bloat just isn't a good reason not to use high-level programming resources. When a programmer cries, "That'll add an extra ten megs of libraries! Can we afford that space?", if this program is going to be run on a typical workstation or server environment (rather than an embedded system), the sensible reply is, "Of course we can."
There hasn't even hit version 1 yet. Some of the questions you're asking are answered in the article despite your implication (things like virtual storefronts, for instance, and the potential for users to make radical environment changes down the road). The other questions--depreciation and taxes, and indeed the whole question of what free enterprise entails in such a market--are worthwhile to ask, but unrealistic to expect answers to yet. The data simply isn't available.
A lot of people seem to think that There's ambitions are only to be a better Sims Online, or a graphic AIM, or some such. These people don't have the imagination the company has. And honestly, those people haven't been reading the publicly available articles on the system. When I say that the Metaverse is being prototyped in There, I'm not being entirely facetious.
I'm curious about TIFFany. The company that made it (Caffeine Software) seems to have ceased operations on March 3, and while their website now consists solely of a link to their products in one big archive, that archive still contains demos of their commercial products, which suggests they're still hanging onto their assets.
While I've argued that Apple taking on Photoshop strikes me as highly unlikely--and it still does--TIFFany might be a really good base to start from. The synchronicity between them going under and this public questioning of the seriousness of Adobe's commitment to the Mac is probably a coincidence, but it's an interesting one.
Yes, it could very well be that. Specifically, it could be that most Adobe programs don't know what to do with a second processor. Check out this article, Apples to Apples, which compares a single-processor 933 MHz G4 to a dual-processor 1GHz G4. Most of the benchmarks don't show any more improvement than you'd expect comparing the 933 MHz machine to a single-processor 1GHz machine.
With this in mind, it's no wonder that a 3 GHz P4 is going to run rings around a dual processor 1.25 GHz G4--in most of those real world tests, the G4 is behaving like a single processor machine. No matter how much one fervently believes the "megahertz myth" (which gets vastly overstated these days anyway), that much of a speed difference is going to win. If anything, it's a testament to the good processor design in the G4 that it's only get trounced by that much.
It'd be nice if OS X did more to automatically take advantage of multiple processors the way BeOS did, but it clearly doesn't--and in any case coders need to think about how multithreading across processors could be used to dramatically increase performance. They're not. That isn't Apple's fault, although unfortunately, it is their problem.
However, if they are selling off their major product lines, I wonder how they plan to achieve profitability.
My bet is that they don't plan to--they plan to take the money from the asset sales and "wind down operations," as the euphemism goes. While the usual IANAL disclaimer applies, I think the reason for Chapter 11 in this case may simply be that the Chapter 7 liquidation proceedings give less control over what's left of your company's assets, and the sale thereof, than Chapter 11 proceedings do.
From what I've heard from a person or two who used to work there, they were very poorly managed--rampant internal problems from massive employee theft to bungled (if not outright fraudulent) accounting.
After the reorganization that led to the creation of Sonicblue (the video card operations were sold off, I think to ATI), they never really got back on their feet. Cool MP3 players are a nice "in addition to" business but not a core business, and once they bought ReplayTV it all but vanished from the marketplace--I don't know what happened with that, but I'm guessing they zigged when the market zagged.
Okay. I don't know what your experience is--you don't actually say if you're an author. But what you're describing doesn't match up with the publishing world I'm familiar with.
Very few novelists write under the kind of contract you imagine in your your third scenario, unless they are writing novelizations (a very different animal) or in "name brand" series. And in your second scenario, looking at what's selling and saying "I can write stuff exactly like this" and then doing it... according to every author, agent and screenwriter I'm aware of, that's a non-starter. Those books you see on the shelf were written two or three years ago. By the time you get your clone manuscript done (another 3-6 months in the best case), even the small publishing houses will be sick of reading slush piles filled with people who are trying to do just what you are. By that point either they've already published their bid at that fad, or they were never interested in publishing such a bid in the first place.
I think your central premise here is flawed: fiction writing is not like game publishing. It is in fact the inverse of other entertainment industries: Eidos buys the rights to the Tomb Raider "franchise," but Del Rey doesn't buy the rights to the Xanth "franchise." They just buy the right to publish those books, usually a right for a limited time. Del Rey does not get the right to tell Piers Anthony he "had" to work on more Xanth books, nor can they say "We think Lawrence Watt-Evans can do light fantasy better, Piers, so we're giving him the Xanth contract." They can say "we're only interested in Xanth books," but he can say, "Stuff you all, then, I'm going to Tor."
Ultimately, your first scenario is the only scenario that works for fiction authors: you write what you love and you hope an editor loves it enough to buy it. And that's how every author I know--and probably every author you know, when it comes down to it--made the transition to supporting themselves through their writing, assuming they ever managed to do that. (Most, in fact, do not.)
The 'market forces' are already at work on this. There's been sufficient advancement in wind power over the last 20 years that the most recent generation wind farms are, in terms of cost per kw/hr of generation, directly competitive with fossil fuels. (To stave off obvious retorts, yes, that's only true in areas with sufficient prevailing winds--but there are some pretty big areas of the US that qualify and could power areas significant distances away.)
Generally I agree with your observations. I'm not of a particularly 'neoliberal' economic bent, but it's difficult to argue with basic economic common sense--for better and worse, mass market items are going to be made with and powered by the most cost-effective resources. Oil prices will rise over time and alternative sources to petroleum will become cheaper as technologies improve--and cheaper still when they can achieve sufficient volume. For most uses, eventually the recurring costs of petroleum will be higher than the costs of retooling to use a cheaper alternative.
The big difference is that with MDI, you're able to view multiple documents at once, like the traditional "one document per window" view, yet still keep them constrained within an overall application window--which for all the complaints about the evilness of MDI is an advantage I think people don't give enough credit to. (Having, say, Excel arrange two spreadsheets side by side in the space I've defined is a nice, nice thing.)
I like tabs in theory, and there are things I don't like about using MDI for browsers (at least in the last version of Opera I used, popup windows popped up as child windows of the main document window, which is slightly boneheaded). But I do wonder if there isn't a better interface paradigm out there for restraining multiple document windows within one application window.
For one, you hear a lot of complaints which run "Why should I pay [$12-20] for a CD when I only like two or three songs on it?" If that's true, that means you're only paying $2 or $3 with this pricing scheme, so it suddenly becomes less goofy.
For another, $12 is the exception, not the rule, for pricing--if you can find everything you want on CD at Target, more power to you. I can't. Best Buy charges $13-16 for CDs, generally, and they have about the best price to selection ratio of any place that I've found. The actual list price for CDs seems to be $18.99--and you may think people never pay that, but if they find the CD they've been looking for at the Virgin Megastore and nowhere else, you can bet they grit their teeth and pony up the cash.
Sure, there are going to be people for whom $0.99 a song is too much, and I think it'd be a good idea to have something like a "10% off when you buy the whole CD" promotion (and maybe to let you buy the physical CD for another $3-5 or some such). But I don't think it's going to be that big a deal.
Newsflash yourself, guy. The full quote, which I'm guessing you haven't heard, is from Stewart Brand, stated in print for the first time as follows:
Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.
The quote was never meant to be used as a bludgeon to claim that all information should be free; it was part of an illustration of exactly the kind of tension going on here.
You're essentially claiming she should have been more careful in some fashion that would have prevented the email fro being leaked in the first place. Careful in what? Her use of email for delivery only to the intended recipients? Her choice of friends?
I'd like anyone with that attitude to look back over all the emails they've written since they've been online and to consider ones they've written that they only wanted a selected group of individuals to see. Don't think of claiming you've never written an email like that. Can you honestly tell me that if that email showed up suddenly on a web discussion board, you wouldn't be incensed? (And can you honestly tell me that if people responded to you with "information wants to be free!" you wouldn't want to break their kneecaps?)
Having said that, I agree Ms. Garrett should have been more careful in her responses to this trust violation. She displayed a snitty disdain for all internet discourse that, as a fan of her writing, I find considerably disappointing.
Actually, someone else suggested something I've thought about--essentially, giving the last mile to a single regulated utility per municipality in the manner of electricity and water. Consumers and providers would both be charged flat connection fees (it doesn't matter what the fee is, only that pricing is consistent across the board). I'm aware that on the surface this is anathema to libertarian ideals, but it would make competition substantially easier once it was implemented.
The problem is that federal deregulation alone won't necessarily allow new companies to lay their own copper. Not only can state, city and county regulations can still override those, for many people that would only mean that instead of the government choosing their service provider, their landlord, subdivision builder, or homeowner's association would choose it. Making the last mile a regulated utility with required open access would provide a more competitive scenario.
The big Catch-22, of course, is that since the last mile loops have already been given to private companies that are also service providers, there's no way to implement this that isn't mega-intrusive.
As a final note, it's worth remembering that your ability to run a server with a static IP from speakeasy.net comes from intrusive government regulation: if the government hadn't forced your local telco to open their lines to speakeasy.net, they'd have no incentive to do it. (And if Speakeasy would have had to lay lines to get to you, the chances are pretty good the installation cost would be prohibitive for non-business customers.)
The only place where things are probably similar is WORD, which boiled down could be replaced by just about anything, really...
Were that only the case.
Take a real-life case: doing a manuscript for a novel in one file. This requires a few basic things:
A title page with its own formatting.
Every chapter starts with its own page that has no header and a footer consisting of just one centered page number.
Every other page in the chapter has no footer but does have a simple header.
Ideally all the spacing should be done in styles for consistency, particularly vertical layout (i.e., the cover page is vertically centered, the chapter titles start 4" from the page's top edge, etc.).
Sounds simple, right?
You'd be amazed at how few modern word processors are able to do this. I say "modern" because, ironically, this was pretty trivial with most non-GUI word processors like WordStar. (Incidentally, to those who'd suggest using a text editor and LaTeX, it's a good idea in theory, but in practice you want a manuscript to be set in Courier, to use underlines instead of italics, to use "--" and straight quotes instead of em dashes and typographer's quotes, etc. Ironically, LaTeX and other good print formatters have a lot of trouble dumbing their output down sufficiently.)
At any rate, once you get into Word's collaboration features, forms, mail merge, multilevel indexing, and so on (all things I've actually had to use!), competitors get even fewer and farther between--for the most part, in fact, you may pretty much be limited to OpenOffice and WordPerfect. There are a few single-platform competitors which come close in the feature department and even surpass Word for certain functions (Nota Bene on Windows, Nisus Writer on the Mac), but the uncomfortable truth is that Word really doesn't have a lot of competition out there in terms of its feature set.
You're under an (understandable) misconception. Virtual PC for the Mac is an i386 emulator; Virtual PC for OS/2 and Windows run software directly on the host CPU, a la VMWare.
At risk of being pedantic: He said that Microsoft, their employees, and new Linux users are most likely to be aware of "switch-friendly" open source software. You said that those doing innovative work are more likely to be using Linux for doing that work. Unless the set of people "doing innovative work" with Linux and the set of OSS-aware Microsoft employees and new Linux users are essentially identical, you aren't pointing out a flaw in what he said, you're just imagining a contradiction where there is none.
The higher up people in companies that make all Flash sites don't seem to realize that Flash is annoying to a lot of people.
People who disable Flash and refuse to patronize sites that require it don't seem to realize how small a minority they actually are. The Flash client is installed on 98% of the browsers in use (according to Macromedia's estimate last year), and most people don't disable it because they're not so bothered by it. I skip over Flash intros and most of the time don't even notice Flash interfaces, except to the degree that they're fluidly animated in ways that would be far more bandwidth-consuming. Flash also provides greater degree of cross-platform compliance than HTML and CSS do, as sad as that is to say--a Flash designer doesn't have to worry about how IE 6 on Windows and IE 5 on the Mac don't quite sync up, how Mozilla does things slightly differently, and how Netscape 4 is horribly, horribly broken with respect to standards. Flash just works.
As far as I know, Word can't embed fonts. Programs like WordStar 6, XyWrite 3 (and its still in-production descendant, Nota Bene 6) embed all those things in documents and they're not 20K for two words, even two words that specified being centered 24-point Times Roman, in blue. On A4 paper.
Formatting can't come for 0 bytes, but that doesn't mean it has to come for 19,000+ bytes.
If we take "Andromeda" as an example, because the powers that be don't trust producers who want to tell intelligent stories. The first season of "Andromeda" was spotty but definitely promising--signs that writers actually read science journals occasionally (for instance, using nanotube cables for tow lines rather than ephemeral "tractor beams"), and episodes which (at least in the better ones) traded happy endings for tough moral choices and intriguing development of the universe. Then they shoved Robert Hewitt Wolfe out and retooled the series to be heavy on the action, low on the brains, effectively deciding that the worst episodes of the first season were the ones they wanted to emulate. Except they needed more explosions. And, oh yes, to throw out the entire show's concept of rebuilding a lost empire while they were at it.
As other people have noted, the original "Trek" had good science fiction writers involved with it, including D.C. Fontana as the story editor (who returned for a few seasons of TNG, but not subsequent shows). By and large, most people in Hollywood aren't science fiction fans and are more interested in reproducing what they think they see in "Star Wars" than anything else. Most of what they see is dollar signs and explosions.
Please. The original Star Trek concept in both the shows Roddenberry had direct involvement in were presentations of socialist utopias, and that's precisely the way he wanted it. The only capitalists we saw in the first two series were buffoons and pirates. If there was any overriding theme in "Trek," it's the theme of being "post-epic," where humans have moved past things like global warfare and, from most appearances, monetary-based economics. If you check any history of the "Trek" franchise you'll see that there were only weapons on the first Enterprise because the network insisted it have more of a military feel.
While there may be a lot of blame to lay at the feet of Berman and Piller as executive producers, being "out of sync with American culture" is not one of them. The original "Trek" was in sync, all right--in sync with the late '60s. It was far more stereotypically Californian than Deep Space Nine, which dared to do things Roddenberry would never have allowed--volatile, conflicted main characters, ongoing story arcs involving interstellar war without clearcut villains, and characters who changed over time. (As Harlan Ellison noted with respect to his "City on the Edge of Forever" script, Roddenberry was deadset against the idea of stories that would have affected characters permanently.)
Lastly, your whole equating of "Trek" to California tells us a whole lot more about your attitudes than it does about Trek, or for that matter, about California. News flash: not all of California is Hollywood. Not all of Hollywood is Hollywood, for that matter. As shocking as it might be, Ronald Reagan was not governor of Oklahoma before becoming president.
Wild idea: maybe "Voyager" sucked teabags because the writers had no talent, not because of their political affiliation.
(Goingware? Hey, I remember you from BeOS days.)
I'm guessing this is the Mike Roberts of TADS? I bought that program when it was shareware--and never really got around to finishing the text adventure I wanted to write with it, although that wasn't the language's fault. It was really well-designed.
It's a great conspiracy theory, except that it's bullshit.
Disney is the company that bought the rights to distribute Miyazaki's films in America. Not Mirimax acting independently. The theatrical releases have been under the Mirimax label because Miyizaki's contract with the Disney studio requires that his movies not be marketed as Disney films.
I'm all for knocking big companies, but the fact is that big companies like to make money, and spending money on the rights to American distribution for a movie with the intent of killing it is not good business practice. Anime fans may not like the mainstream Hollywood perception that anime releases aren't "big-budget" enough, and they may not like it that Disney obviously buys into this and released both Mononoke and Spirited Away as art-house films. I don't like it, either, even though I'm not much of an anime fan. But that doesn't require a conspiracy.
Reality check: these films got the same kind of promotional budget and release that other art-house films do. This is the normal pattern. Start small with very little advertising, and when a film starts to take off, pump more money pumped into them. Look at Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon--there was no more advertising for it in the first several months of its release than there was for Mononoke. (In my area, in fact, there was more advertising for Mononoke; Dragon didn't get TV ads, at least in that region, until its Oscar nomination.)
And you know what? The fact that Mononoke made much less money wasn't a great argument for putting it into wide release. "It'd have made lots of money if only you'd opened it on three thousand screens simultaneously and spent ten million advedrtising it" is an argument that warms the heart of fans but not studio accountants.
The level of commitment that Disney is showing by even considering a major theatre rollout for Spirited Away is much higher than I'd have expected. It's also inconsistent with the idea that they're interested in burying it--if they hadn't released it in the first place, nobody in America would be talking about it except anime fans. If you hope something "will still go away quietly," you don't start screaming about it louder.
None of the Intel releases of BeOS required the install floppy. I can say this pretty conclusively, since I was in the developer program and installed all of them from CD.
At risk of being a little curt, when you start off by announcing to the world Hi! I've never used this product!, there are volumes being spoken, all right--none of them are about BeOS, though.
As for what Be can do that other systems aren't doing better, I still miss the "live query" aspect of the system that let you make virtual folders. You could have a folder on your desktop that contained all C source code files you'd modified in the last 24 hours, or all unread email messages from your boss, and they'd always be current (leave the folder open and its contents would change as appropriate). That's a small thing, but most of what I miss about BeOS, ultimately, are small things that few other people seem to have picked up on. OS X is inching there, with things like the systemwide address book and the new search functionality, but it has a ways to go.
"Battlestar Galactica" came out in 1978 and "Buck Rogers" in 1977--both were capitalizing on Star Wars to some degree. ("Rogers" was probably in the planning stages before Star Wars' release but they clearly knew of the movie, and "Galactica" never made much effort to hide its influences. And, while I'm honestly not much of a "Star Trek" fan, when the original series was good it was good on a level that George Lucas never came close to. The Empire Strikes Back made an effort, but mostly thanks to screenwriter Leigh Brackett (who's almost certainly responsible for the clever plot twists and delightful character development).
I really didn't expect too much from the new trilogy because I lost a lot of respect for Lucas the more I watched his career and the more I learned about the development of Star Wars itself. (The Phantom Menace is much closer to his original draft for Star Wars, before people convinced him that he needed to have a mythic story and turned him on to Joseph Campbell.) I had, however, expected that Lucas might have been wise enough now to recognize his limitations and to bring other screenwriters on from the start. Instead. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case.
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I'd really love to have Turtle Beach's Audiotron supporting Rendevous/ZeroConf. Of course, I'd like to be able to control the Audiotron from iTunes.
I suppose we can all wait until Windows 2003 implements Rendezvous. Then all hardware will support it, and Mac owners will have one more thing they can kvetch about Microsoft stealing, while the anti-Mac crowd will respond with taunts about market share and CPU speed. The natural balance of the universe will thus be restored.
Actually, I think he does get it. We just tend to resist the message.
For years I used to be one of the folks who lamented "bloat" in programs, pointing back at the fairly capable word processor I used on my TRS-80--AllWrite!, far more powerful than many of the "lite" GUI challengers out there now--that did so much with 48K of RAM and 150K or so of disk space.
But the thing is, if you actually work out the numbers, AllWrite was taking up more of that Trash-80's resources than Word does on even a relatively modern PC. (This is presuming the TRS-80 even had a hard drive, of course, to let the disk space comparison be meaningful.) If you compare early PC word processors like WordPerfect, taking up 1M of your 20M hard drive (5%) versus all of Microsoft Office taking up 230M of your 20G hard drive (1.2%), the difference is even more dramatic. Proportional to actual available resources, software size is decreasing.
This isn't a comfortable observation for most Unix guys, and it's true that it's not an excuse to write sloppy, wasteful code. But fear of bloat just isn't a good reason not to use high-level programming resources. When a programmer cries, "That'll add an extra ten megs of libraries! Can we afford that space?", if this program is going to be run on a typical workstation or server environment (rather than an embedded system), the sensible reply is, "Of course we can."
There hasn't even hit version 1 yet. Some of the questions you're asking are answered in the article despite your implication (things like virtual storefronts, for instance, and the potential for users to make radical environment changes down the road). The other questions--depreciation and taxes, and indeed the whole question of what free enterprise entails in such a market--are worthwhile to ask, but unrealistic to expect answers to yet. The data simply isn't available.
A lot of people seem to think that There's ambitions are only to be a better Sims Online, or a graphic AIM, or some such. These people don't have the imagination the company has. And honestly, those people haven't been reading the publicly available articles on the system. When I say that the Metaverse is being prototyped in There, I'm not being entirely facetious.
I'm curious about TIFFany. The company that made it (Caffeine Software) seems to have ceased operations on March 3, and while their website now consists solely of a link to their products in one big archive, that archive still contains demos of their commercial products, which suggests they're still hanging onto their assets.
While I've argued that Apple taking on Photoshop strikes me as highly unlikely--and it still does--TIFFany might be a really good base to start from. The synchronicity between them going under and this public questioning of the seriousness of Adobe's commitment to the Mac is probably a coincidence, but it's an interesting one.
Yes, it could very well be that. Specifically, it could be that most Adobe programs don't know what to do with a second processor. Check out this article, Apples to Apples, which compares a single-processor 933 MHz G4 to a dual-processor 1GHz G4. Most of the benchmarks don't show any more improvement than you'd expect comparing the 933 MHz machine to a single-processor 1GHz machine.
With this in mind, it's no wonder that a 3 GHz P4 is going to run rings around a dual processor 1.25 GHz G4--in most of those real world tests, the G4 is behaving like a single processor machine. No matter how much one fervently believes the "megahertz myth" (which gets vastly overstated these days anyway), that much of a speed difference is going to win. If anything, it's a testament to the good processor design in the G4 that it's only get trounced by that much.
It'd be nice if OS X did more to automatically take advantage of multiple processors the way BeOS did, but it clearly doesn't--and in any case coders need to think about how multithreading across processors could be used to dramatically increase performance. They're not. That isn't Apple's fault, although unfortunately, it is their problem.
However, if they are selling off their major product lines, I wonder how they plan to achieve profitability.
My bet is that they don't plan to--they plan to take the money from the asset sales and "wind down operations," as the euphemism goes. While the usual IANAL disclaimer applies, I think the reason for Chapter 11 in this case may simply be that the Chapter 7 liquidation proceedings give less control over what's left of your company's assets, and the sale thereof, than Chapter 11 proceedings do.
From what I've heard from a person or two who used to work there, they were very poorly managed--rampant internal problems from massive employee theft to bungled (if not outright fraudulent) accounting.
After the reorganization that led to the creation of Sonicblue (the video card operations were sold off, I think to ATI), they never really got back on their feet. Cool MP3 players are a nice "in addition to" business but not a core business, and once they bought ReplayTV it all but vanished from the marketplace--I don't know what happened with that, but I'm guessing they zigged when the market zagged.
Steve Forbes takes a position I agree with.
Okay. I don't know what your experience is--you don't actually say if you're an author. But what you're describing doesn't match up with the publishing world I'm familiar with.
Very few novelists write under the kind of contract you imagine in your your third scenario, unless they are writing novelizations (a very different animal) or in "name brand" series. And in your second scenario, looking at what's selling and saying "I can write stuff exactly like this" and then doing it... according to every author, agent and screenwriter I'm aware of, that's a non-starter. Those books you see on the shelf were written two or three years ago. By the time you get your clone manuscript done (another 3-6 months in the best case), even the small publishing houses will be sick of reading slush piles filled with people who are trying to do just what you are. By that point either they've already published their bid at that fad, or they were never interested in publishing such a bid in the first place.
I think your central premise here is flawed: fiction writing is not like game publishing. It is in fact the inverse of other entertainment industries: Eidos buys the rights to the Tomb Raider "franchise," but Del Rey doesn't buy the rights to the Xanth "franchise." They just buy the right to publish those books, usually a right for a limited time. Del Rey does not get the right to tell Piers Anthony he "had" to work on more Xanth books, nor can they say "We think Lawrence Watt-Evans can do light fantasy better, Piers, so we're giving him the Xanth contract." They can say "we're only interested in Xanth books," but he can say, "Stuff you all, then, I'm going to Tor."
Ultimately, your first scenario is the only scenario that works for fiction authors: you write what you love and you hope an editor loves it enough to buy it. And that's how every author I know--and probably every author you know, when it comes down to it--made the transition to supporting themselves through their writing, assuming they ever managed to do that. (Most, in fact, do not.)
The 'market forces' are already at work on this. There's been sufficient advancement in wind power over the last 20 years that the most recent generation wind farms are, in terms of cost per kw/hr of generation, directly competitive with fossil fuels. (To stave off obvious retorts, yes, that's only true in areas with sufficient prevailing winds--but there are some pretty big areas of the US that qualify and could power areas significant distances away.)
Generally I agree with your observations. I'm not of a particularly 'neoliberal' economic bent, but it's difficult to argue with basic economic common sense--for better and worse, mass market items are going to be made with and powered by the most cost-effective resources. Oil prices will rise over time and alternative sources to petroleum will become cheaper as technologies improve--and cheaper still when they can achieve sufficient volume. For most uses, eventually the recurring costs of petroleum will be higher than the costs of retooling to use a cheaper alternative.
The big difference is that with MDI, you're able to view multiple documents at once, like the traditional "one document per window" view, yet still keep them constrained within an overall application window--which for all the complaints about the evilness of MDI is an advantage I think people don't give enough credit to. (Having, say, Excel arrange two spreadsheets side by side in the space I've defined is a nice, nice thing.)
I like tabs in theory, and there are things I don't like about using MDI for browsers (at least in the last version of Opera I used, popup windows popped up as child windows of the main document window, which is slightly boneheaded). But I do wonder if there isn't a better interface paradigm out there for restraining multiple document windows within one application window.
Well, yes and no.
For one, you hear a lot of complaints which run "Why should I pay [$12-20] for a CD when I only like two or three songs on it?" If that's true, that means you're only paying $2 or $3 with this pricing scheme, so it suddenly becomes less goofy.
For another, $12 is the exception, not the rule, for pricing--if you can find everything you want on CD at Target, more power to you. I can't. Best Buy charges $13-16 for CDs, generally, and they have about the best price to selection ratio of any place that I've found. The actual list price for CDs seems to be $18.99--and you may think people never pay that, but if they find the CD they've been looking for at the Virgin Megastore and nowhere else, you can bet they grit their teeth and pony up the cash.
Sure, there are going to be people for whom $0.99 a song is too much, and I think it'd be a good idea to have something like a "10% off when you buy the whole CD" promotion (and maybe to let you buy the physical CD for another $3-5 or some such). But I don't think it's going to be that big a deal.
Newsflash yourself, guy. The full quote, which I'm guessing you haven't heard, is from Stewart Brand, stated in print for the first time as follows:
The quote was never meant to be used as a bludgeon to claim that all information should be free; it was part of an illustration of exactly the kind of tension going on here.
You're essentially claiming she should have been more careful in some fashion that would have prevented the email fro being leaked in the first place. Careful in what? Her use of email for delivery only to the intended recipients? Her choice of friends?
I'd like anyone with that attitude to look back over all the emails they've written since they've been online and to consider ones they've written that they only wanted a selected group of individuals to see. Don't think of claiming you've never written an email like that. Can you honestly tell me that if that email showed up suddenly on a web discussion board, you wouldn't be incensed? (And can you honestly tell me that if people responded to you with "information wants to be free!" you wouldn't want to break their kneecaps?)
Having said that, I agree Ms. Garrett should have been more careful in her responses to this trust violation. She displayed a snitty disdain for all internet discourse that, as a fan of her writing, I find considerably disappointing.
Actually, someone else suggested something I've thought about--essentially, giving the last mile to a single regulated utility per municipality in the manner of electricity and water. Consumers and providers would both be charged flat connection fees (it doesn't matter what the fee is, only that pricing is consistent across the board). I'm aware that on the surface this is anathema to libertarian ideals, but it would make competition substantially easier once it was implemented.
The problem is that federal deregulation alone won't necessarily allow new companies to lay their own copper. Not only can state, city and county regulations can still override those, for many people that would only mean that instead of the government choosing their service provider, their landlord, subdivision builder, or homeowner's association would choose it. Making the last mile a regulated utility with required open access would provide a more competitive scenario.
The big Catch-22, of course, is that since the last mile loops have already been given to private companies that are also service providers, there's no way to implement this that isn't mega-intrusive.
As a final note, it's worth remembering that your ability to run a server with a static IP from speakeasy.net comes from intrusive government regulation: if the government hadn't forced your local telco to open their lines to speakeasy.net, they'd have no incentive to do it. (And if Speakeasy would have had to lay lines to get to you, the chances are pretty good the installation cost would be prohibitive for non-business customers.)
The only place where things are probably similar is WORD, which boiled down could be replaced by just about anything, really...
Were that only the case.
Take a real-life case: doing a manuscript for a novel in one file. This requires a few basic things:
Sounds simple, right?
You'd be amazed at how few modern word processors are able to do this. I say "modern" because, ironically, this was pretty trivial with most non-GUI word processors like WordStar. (Incidentally, to those who'd suggest using a text editor and LaTeX, it's a good idea in theory, but in practice you want a manuscript to be set in Courier, to use underlines instead of italics, to use "--" and straight quotes instead of em dashes and typographer's quotes, etc. Ironically, LaTeX and other good print formatters have a lot of trouble dumbing their output down sufficiently.)
At any rate, once you get into Word's collaboration features, forms, mail merge, multilevel indexing, and so on (all things I've actually had to use!), competitors get even fewer and farther between--for the most part, in fact, you may pretty much be limited to OpenOffice and WordPerfect. There are a few single-platform competitors which come close in the feature department and even surpass Word for certain functions (Nota Bene on Windows, Nisus Writer on the Mac), but the uncomfortable truth is that Word really doesn't have a lot of competition out there in terms of its feature set.
You're under an (understandable) misconception. Virtual PC for the Mac is an i386 emulator; Virtual PC for OS/2 and Windows run software directly on the host CPU, a la VMWare.
At risk of being pedantic: He said that Microsoft, their employees, and new Linux users are most likely to be aware of "switch-friendly" open source software. You said that those doing innovative work are more likely to be using Linux for doing that work. Unless the set of people "doing innovative work" with Linux and the set of OSS-aware Microsoft employees and new Linux users are essentially identical, you aren't pointing out a flaw in what he said, you're just imagining a contradiction where there is none.
The higher up people in companies that make all Flash sites don't seem to realize that Flash is annoying to a lot of people.
People who disable Flash and refuse to patronize sites that require it don't seem to realize how small a minority they actually are. The Flash client is installed on 98% of the browsers in use (according to Macromedia's estimate last year), and most people don't disable it because they're not so bothered by it. I skip over Flash intros and most of the time don't even notice Flash interfaces, except to the degree that they're fluidly animated in ways that would be far more bandwidth-consuming. Flash also provides greater degree of cross-platform compliance than HTML and CSS do, as sad as that is to say--a Flash designer doesn't have to worry about how IE 6 on Windows and IE 5 on the Mac don't quite sync up, how Mozilla does things slightly differently, and how Netscape 4 is horribly, horribly broken with respect to standards. Flash just works.
As far as I know, Word can't embed fonts. Programs like WordStar 6, XyWrite 3 (and its still in-production descendant, Nota Bene 6) embed all those things in documents and they're not 20K for two words, even two words that specified being centered 24-point Times Roman, in blue. On A4 paper.
Formatting can't come for 0 bytes, but that doesn't mean it has to come for 19,000+ bytes.
If we take "Andromeda" as an example, because the powers that be don't trust producers who want to tell intelligent stories. The first season of "Andromeda" was spotty but definitely promising--signs that writers actually read science journals occasionally (for instance, using nanotube cables for tow lines rather than ephemeral "tractor beams"), and episodes which (at least in the better ones) traded happy endings for tough moral choices and intriguing development of the universe. Then they shoved Robert Hewitt Wolfe out and retooled the series to be heavy on the action, low on the brains, effectively deciding that the worst episodes of the first season were the ones they wanted to emulate. Except they needed more explosions. And, oh yes, to throw out the entire show's concept of rebuilding a lost empire while they were at it.
As other people have noted, the original "Trek" had good science fiction writers involved with it, including D.C. Fontana as the story editor (who returned for a few seasons of TNG, but not subsequent shows). By and large, most people in Hollywood aren't science fiction fans and are more interested in reproducing what they think they see in "Star Wars" than anything else. Most of what they see is dollar signs and explosions.
Please. The original Star Trek concept in both the shows Roddenberry had direct involvement in were presentations of socialist utopias, and that's precisely the way he wanted it. The only capitalists we saw in the first two series were buffoons and pirates. If there was any overriding theme in "Trek," it's the theme of being "post-epic," where humans have moved past things like global warfare and, from most appearances, monetary-based economics. If you check any history of the "Trek" franchise you'll see that there were only weapons on the first Enterprise because the network insisted it have more of a military feel.
While there may be a lot of blame to lay at the feet of Berman and Piller as executive producers, being "out of sync with American culture" is not one of them. The original "Trek" was in sync, all right--in sync with the late '60s. It was far more stereotypically Californian than Deep Space Nine, which dared to do things Roddenberry would never have allowed--volatile, conflicted main characters, ongoing story arcs involving interstellar war without clearcut villains, and characters who changed over time. (As Harlan Ellison noted with respect to his "City on the Edge of Forever" script, Roddenberry was deadset against the idea of stories that would have affected characters permanently.)
Lastly, your whole equating of "Trek" to California tells us a whole lot more about your attitudes than it does about Trek, or for that matter, about California. News flash: not all of California is Hollywood. Not all of Hollywood is Hollywood, for that matter. As shocking as it might be, Ronald Reagan was not governor of Oklahoma before becoming president.
Wild idea: maybe "Voyager" sucked teabags because the writers had no talent, not because of their political affiliation.
(Goingware? Hey, I remember you from BeOS days.) I'm guessing this is the Mike Roberts of TADS? I bought that program when it was shareware--and never really got around to finishing the text adventure I wanted to write with it, although that wasn't the language's fault. It was really well-designed.
It's a great conspiracy theory, except that it's bullshit.
Disney is the company that bought the rights to distribute Miyazaki's films in America. Not Mirimax acting independently. The theatrical releases have been under the Mirimax label because Miyizaki's contract with the Disney studio requires that his movies not be marketed as Disney films.
I'm all for knocking big companies, but the fact is that big companies like to make money, and spending money on the rights to American distribution for a movie with the intent of killing it is not good business practice. Anime fans may not like the mainstream Hollywood perception that anime releases aren't "big-budget" enough, and they may not like it that Disney obviously buys into this and released both Mononoke and Spirited Away as art-house films. I don't like it, either, even though I'm not much of an anime fan. But that doesn't require a conspiracy.
Reality check: these films got the same kind of promotional budget and release that other art-house films do. This is the normal pattern. Start small with very little advertising, and when a film starts to take off, pump more money pumped into them. Look at Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon--there was no more advertising for it in the first several months of its release than there was for Mononoke. (In my area, in fact, there was more advertising for Mononoke; Dragon didn't get TV ads, at least in that region, until its Oscar nomination.)
And you know what? The fact that Mononoke made much less money wasn't a great argument for putting it into wide release. "It'd have made lots of money if only you'd opened it on three thousand screens simultaneously and spent ten million advedrtising it" is an argument that warms the heart of fans but not studio accountants.
The level of commitment that Disney is showing by even considering a major theatre rollout for Spirited Away is much higher than I'd have expected. It's also inconsistent with the idea that they're interested in burying it--if they hadn't released it in the first place, nobody in America would be talking about it except anime fans. If you hope something "will still go away quietly," you don't start screaming about it louder.
None of the Intel releases of BeOS required the install floppy. I can say this pretty conclusively, since I was in the developer program and installed all of them from CD.
At risk of being a little curt, when you start off by announcing to the world Hi! I've never used this product!, there are volumes being spoken, all right--none of them are about BeOS, though.
As for what Be can do that other systems aren't doing better, I still miss the "live query" aspect of the system that let you make virtual folders. You could have a folder on your desktop that contained all C source code files you'd modified in the last 24 hours, or all unread email messages from your boss, and they'd always be current (leave the folder open and its contents would change as appropriate). That's a small thing, but most of what I miss about BeOS, ultimately, are small things that few other people seem to have picked up on. OS X is inching there, with things like the systemwide address book and the new search functionality, but it has a ways to go.
"Battlestar Galactica" came out in 1978 and "Buck Rogers" in 1977--both were capitalizing on Star Wars to some degree. ("Rogers" was probably in the planning stages before Star Wars' release but they clearly knew of the movie, and "Galactica" never made much effort to hide its influences. And, while I'm honestly not much of a "Star Trek" fan, when the original series was good it was good on a level that George Lucas never came close to. The Empire Strikes Back made an effort, but mostly thanks to screenwriter Leigh Brackett (who's almost certainly responsible for the clever plot twists and delightful character development).
I really didn't expect too much from the new trilogy because I lost a lot of respect for Lucas the more I watched his career and the more I learned about the development of Star Wars itself. (The Phantom Menace is much closer to his original draft for Star Wars, before people convinced him that he needed to have a mythic story and turned him on to Joseph Campbell.) I had, however, expected that Lucas might have been wise enough now to recognize his limitations and to bring other screenwriters on from the start. Instead. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case.