Does this mean my wife can share her 13,000 MP3s to utter impunity? (Note: irony). After all, she is a grandmother (she had her son when she was 16, and became a grandmother 6 years ago). I realize we live in a youth-obsessed culture, but there are few people who are as obsessed with music as my wife. Yeah, and some amount of new stuff as well.
Open sharing of music files doesn't actually hurt the creators of music. It helps them. When friends can say, "Have you heard Eva Cassidy's music? Here, I'll send you a couple of songs, you won't believe how good she is," that's called "word of mouth," and what you'll get is more and more people who attend her live performances and buy her CDs.
A good editor might have suggested a different singer...Eva Cassidy is dead. The tragedy of her death was the best "marketing angle" the record company had.
The person who's potentially getting hurt the worst is Anthony Hamilton. This guy and his career are being used as a guinea pig (read: sacrificial lamb) by the RIAA for their "technical exercises", as you put it.
Exactly. I remember the first movie the MPAA released in theaters and to Pay-Per-View at the same time - "Pirates of Penzance". The theater owners reacted by refusing to advertise the film and showed it in the fewest theaters they could for the least amount of time.
You'd need a motherboard with 8 sockets. But I'm sure someone will hack it. Or at least a WinAmp plug-in that will use the RAM LEDs as a spectrum analyzer.
Someone at Argonne Lab once hacked up a Pong for the LEDs on the front of the Connection Machine.
The copying of the Forrester report is much more harmful to Forrester than thousands of downloads of the latest Top Ten single could ever be to the record company in question. Forrester sells a small number of copies of the reports from their various analysts like Josh (who get a bonus for every time they get quoted in a mainstream magazine). The average reader of a Forrester report is a vice-president of a Fortune 500 company - an obviously limited market. The executive at the record company could and should have bought his own copy of the report.
This is triple-layer, double-fudge death-by-chocolate irony!
Disclaimer: I used to work for Forrester. Unofficial Company Motto: We only have to be right more than half the time!
Thanks for the link! I had no idea. The condom one looks comfortable enough (though I've never considered wearing a rubber for 11 or so hours before). But the ones with the adhesive strip doesn't look like a lot of fun to take off. If you weren't already circumcised...
I just have to say...New Line is doing a brilliant job with these movies. The whole thing with not having any extras on the standard issue DVD repeated on the extended edition was wonderful, and a major departure from the usual "grease 'em up and bend 'em over" Hollywood mentality.
But this tops it. They're not going to make a ton of money by releasing these films to the theaters. This is for the fans. And, this is going to be a gift to the theaters as well. Instead of the theater staff having to cope with a lobby filled with crazed fans (like myself) waiting to get the best seats all day long, they can have them safely in the theater, eating popcorn. No geeks in hobbit gear, or long-haired men weilding swords frightening the mundanes.
Utterly brilliant. Whoever came up with the marketing plan for these films should be promoted to CEO of Time-Warner ASAP.
Damn, I guess I'm lucky that my girlfriend is every bit as big a geek as me. She was right there with me waiting in the front of the line for "The Two Towers". When she sent me this, before I saw it on Slashdot, she said "it's going to be a long 4 months".
I was watching at the time it happened. HBO likes to spin that the signal was never clear, and that the handled the interference quickly. My experience was that the signal he sent was every bit as clear as HBO's own signal. It's funny that it happened during "The Falcon & The Snowman", a film about a couple of Americans who become spys for the Soviets - and screw up royally.
Funny, but true. This application makes so much more sense than the actual CueCat business model - people reading magazines while seated at a computer. If they had thought this one up first, they might still exist. But then, the people in charge thought up their original business model, so probably not.
"Copyright only exists to protect and encourage the arts and sciences. There is no intrisic moral value in copyright."
There is the intrinsic moral precept that a person can reap a reward from their own labours. This is why communism was a failure. Copyright does for the "world of ideas" what is considered an inaliable right in the "brick and steel world" that we exist in.
The difference, which is plainly obvious, is that to make additional bricks you need additional clay...to make more steel you need more iron ore. But to make a second digital copy of a work of art doesn't require more art.
Sorry, but there is a good solid reason why it's called "intellectual property" - that's because it is not, and never can be, physical property. The whole IP industry is based on scarcity - on the now defunct concept that in order to get access to a song, you have to by a physical carrier for that song.
A Mr. A. Coward continues:
"
"Given the nature of modern technology, and the low cost of modern distribution (electronically), we can safely abolish the concept of copyright."
Actually we can not. While todays discussion may be over MPAA/RIAA, copyright isn't confined to just that. A great deal falls under copyright, even your posts on slashdot. Technology isn't a substitute for a sound social policy.
Frankly, we don't have a sound social policy. What we have is a system that has been abused and stretched to the point of absurdity by our members of congress.
Your argument seems to...what...that we should retain copyright because we should retain copyright? My modest proposal is that if the scarcity no longer exists, the reason for copyright no longer exists.
Humans have created ever since they aquired the intelligence to do so, and they will continute to do so even if the whole "intellectual property" business were to disappear tomorrow.
Record executives have the same relationship to artists as pimps have to prostitutes. And pretty much the same effect.
Why don't we just consider the possibility that retailing music is dead?
It was a situation made possible with the fairly recent (in historical terms) invention of printed sheet music, followed by piano rolls, wax cylinders, 78s, 45s, LPs, cassettes, CDs and now DVD-Audio and SuperAudio-CD. That's all happened within a span of 100 years or so. It's no longer needed.
Seriously. Things are invented, manufactured, sold and used. But eventually every thing has a lifespan. At one point in the US, everyone got their heat by burning coal or oil. But the cities built natural gas distribution systems, and everyone converted over to gas. Almost every company that was involved in distributing coal and heating oil went out of business, along with all those companies that made related products. The ones that survived adapted.
What possible harm could come of a return to the historical nature of music as something that belongs to the public?
As for the argument that musicians would starve...the truth is, most are starving now because of the corruption of the record business.
The commercial distribution of music has actually caused there to be fewer musicians alive today than at any prior time in history. Before the advent of recorded music, every family had several musicians. People played their own music for pleasure (ask your grandparents about this). But the record industry has redefined the meaning of music. Now, unless you can sell more than 100,000 copies of a recording, you are a failure.
So, what if we said "Hey, let 'em die!"? What if all of the big 4 giants were allowed to implode? Would people stop making music? Of course not! In fact, in the absence of a gigantic "Industry of Cool" (Lester Bangs' immortal pharse), we'll hear more music.
We could return to the heyday of Napster, when you could message people downloading music from you and suggest other artists in your collection. And then people could download that, and if they like it, buy it from the artist.
Because that's the main thing ignored in all of this - people like artists. But they don't like giant industries. I enjoy sending money directly to an artist. I enjoy buying the CD from the artist at a concert even more - especially as I know the majority of the money will go directly to the artist - (Did you know that if you have a major label contract, if you want to buy copies to sell at your concert from the label, they charge you $11 each? More than they charge stores?)
Sorry, but anyone who has watched more than two episodes of "Behind The Music" will have no sympathy for the giant labels. Screw 'em!
I agree. The USPS is a favorite whipping boy of a lot of people, but the service I've received from them is has been a lot better than UPS, and one hell of a lot cheaper than FedEx. At the main Chicago Post Office, where I have a P.O. Box (because my apartment building used to have someone who stole packages), every employee I've delt with has been courteous and professional.
However, nobody has actually done this. It's far simpler to just install Linux.
By what definition? There is a huge world of audio tools on OSX that do not yet exist on Linux. It might be "simplier" once, but not if you count all the thousands of times OSX users would have to needlessly reboot. OSX users are as proud of their system uptime as any Linux user.
This looks like a great system, and I can imagine that it would be very popular with OSX users.
Tell me again, if you will, what the base of the defense will be for the illegal file trader who "stands up" to the RIAA? That they made SURE that all the people who downloaded music from them owned copies of the music?
I'm half tempted to resume file-sharing just to become a test case. None of the 13,0000+ files in my collection are currently available for purchase. Yes, they were originally distributed by major labels, but in every case the artist was dropped and the album was sent to the cut-out bins. So they CANNOT be purchased.
Perhaps you are too young to remember when everyone was "forced" to aquire new TV sets to get those new-fangled UHF channels. I'm not. We had a seperate UHF tuner box on our old B&W television. We were "forced" to get it in the same way you will be "forced" to get an HD tuner. Of course, this is all moot for most viewers, as they are already "forced" to use a seperate box supplied their cable company to get all the channels they want to watch, or they are "forced" to buy a satellite receiver from DirecTV or Dish. So, the vast majority who get their signals from cable or sat will just get a different box which will continue outputting a crappy, state-of-the-art-of-1948 television signal - the rough equivilant of remaining with an IBM EGA card because you resent that software makers are trying to "force" you to higher resolutions.
most people saw it in the cinema, which is better than hdtv. So really, all you want to do is brag about how good your TV is?
No, I was bragging about being able to look at still frames. And most 35mm film presentations are actually lower resolution than HD video, due to projector weave and being several chemical stages from the original camera negative.
In the basic PRMan setup you send one frame to each CPU...
...or split one large frame into a number of "buckets" and send each to as many processers as needed. At least that's the way we used to do it on a 16 node transputer setup.
This isn't true for any movie I'm familiar with. In fact, I'd be highly surprised if LOTR was rendered at anything much higher than 2k resolution.
Final file size may be 2k x 4k, but each one of those pixels is sub-sampled - usually 8 x 8. It's brute-force, but that's the way you get such nice anti-aliasing.
(Disclaimer: It's been several years since my last RenderMan render, so the techniques may have changed.)
The set directors were told to treat everything historically, so you get everything from accurate Dwarvish runes everywhere that you'll never see to miniature dishes in Bilbo's kitchen to specially made "Elvish" boots with leaf designs that nobody will ever see.
Some of us have seen them. "Fellowship of the Ring" played in high-definition on Dish Pay-Per-View, and I can assure you that the details are there, and can be seen on an HD monitor. In the scenes where Frodo has the ring in the palm of his hand, you can see the whorls of his fingerprints. You can see the Christmas Tree lights reflected in Gladrial's eyes. You can read the text in Bilbo's book. The intricate woodwork in Rivendell.
(Note: For some incomprehensible reason, there is an anti-HDTV contingent on Slashdot - bizzarely, it's the same people who have no problem with spending hundreds of dollars every six months to get an additional few FPS out of their games.)
They wouldn't have to re-render the whole scene. RenderMan allows one to specify a crop, so they would only have to re-render the propeller and whatever parts of the scene affected.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean my wife can share her 13,000 MP3s to utter impunity? (Note: irony). After all, she is a grandmother (she had her son when she was 16, and became a grandmother 6 years ago). I realize we live in a youth-obsessed culture, but there are few people who are as obsessed with music as my wife. Yeah, and some amount of new stuff as well.
Following up on your own posts is lame, agreed, but this link to an article by Janis Ian is too good and relevant to not post:
Dead Artists - The Ultimate Success.A good editor might have suggested a different singer...Eva Cassidy is dead. The tragedy of her death was the best "marketing angle" the record company had.
Exactly. I remember the first movie the MPAA released in theaters and to Pay-Per-View at the same time - "Pirates of Penzance". The theater owners reacted by refusing to advertise the film and showed it in the fewest theaters they could for the least amount of time.
You'd need a motherboard with 8 sockets. But I'm sure someone will hack it. Or at least a WinAmp plug-in that will use the RAM LEDs as a spectrum analyzer.
Someone at Argonne Lab once hacked up a Pong for the LEDs on the front of the Connection Machine.
The copying of the Forrester report is much more harmful to Forrester than thousands of downloads of the latest Top Ten single could ever be to the record company in question. Forrester sells a small number of copies of the reports from their various analysts like Josh (who get a bonus for every time they get quoted in a mainstream magazine). The average reader of a Forrester report is a vice-president of a Fortune 500 company - an obviously limited market. The executive at the record company could and should have bought his own copy of the report.
This is triple-layer, double-fudge death-by-chocolate irony!
Disclaimer: I used to work for Forrester. Unofficial Company Motto: We only have to be right more than half the time!
Thanks for the link! I had no idea. The condom one looks comfortable enough (though I've never considered wearing a rubber for 11 or so hours before). But the ones with the adhesive strip doesn't look like a lot of fun to take off. If you weren't already circumcised...
I just have to say...New Line is doing a brilliant job with these movies. The whole thing with not having any extras on the standard issue DVD repeated on the extended edition was wonderful, and a major departure from the usual "grease 'em up and bend 'em over" Hollywood mentality.
But this tops it. They're not going to make a ton of money by releasing these films to the theaters. This is for the fans. And, this is going to be a gift to the theaters as well. Instead of the theater staff having to cope with a lobby filled with crazed fans (like myself) waiting to get the best seats all day long, they can have them safely in the theater, eating popcorn. No geeks in hobbit gear, or long-haired men weilding swords frightening the mundanes.
Utterly brilliant. Whoever came up with the marketing plan for these films should be promoted to CEO of Time-Warner ASAP.
Damn, I guess I'm lucky that my girlfriend is every bit as big a geek as me. She was right there with me waiting in the front of the line for "The Two Towers". When she sent me this, before I saw it on Slashdot, she said "it's going to be a long 4 months".
Sounds like some theater chains should seriously consider getting a T1 and a Wi-Fi system.
Dunno, but a catheter might be a good idea. But I don't look forward to putting one in.
It's not a physical law, an observation or or eve a wild guess. This was Intel's Gorden Moore. It was a marketing plan.
I was watching at the time it happened. HBO likes to spin that the signal was never clear, and that the handled the interference quickly. My experience was that the signal he sent was every bit as clear as HBO's own signal. It's funny that it happened during "The Falcon & The Snowman", a film about a couple of Americans who become spys for the Soviets - and screw up royally.
Funny, but true. This application makes so much more sense than the actual CueCat business model - people reading magazines while seated at a computer. If they had thought this one up first, they might still exist. But then, the people in charge thought up their original business model, so probably not.
Why don't we just consider the possibility that retailing music is dead?
It was a situation made possible with the fairly recent (in historical terms) invention of printed sheet music, followed by piano rolls, wax cylinders, 78s, 45s, LPs, cassettes, CDs and now DVD-Audio and SuperAudio-CD. That's all happened within a span of 100 years or so. It's no longer needed.
Seriously. Things are invented, manufactured, sold and used. But eventually every thing has a lifespan. At one point in the US, everyone got their heat by burning coal or oil. But the cities built natural gas distribution systems, and everyone converted over to gas. Almost every company that was involved in distributing coal and heating oil went out of business, along with all those companies that made related products. The ones that survived adapted.
What possible harm could come of a return to the historical nature of music as something that belongs to the public?
As for the argument that musicians would starve...the truth is, most are starving now because of the corruption of the record business.
The commercial distribution of music has actually caused there to be fewer musicians alive today than at any prior time in history. Before the advent of recorded music, every family had several musicians. People played their own music for pleasure (ask your grandparents about this). But the record industry has redefined the meaning of music. Now, unless you can sell more than 100,000 copies of a recording, you are a failure.
So, what if we said "Hey, let 'em die!"? What if all of the big 4 giants were allowed to implode? Would people stop making music? Of course not! In fact, in the absence of a gigantic "Industry of Cool" (Lester Bangs' immortal pharse), we'll hear more music.
We could return to the heyday of Napster, when you could message people downloading music from you and suggest other artists in your collection. And then people could download that, and if they like it, buy it from the artist.
Because that's the main thing ignored in all of this - people like artists. But they don't like giant industries. I enjoy sending money directly to an artist. I enjoy buying the CD from the artist at a concert even more - especially as I know the majority of the money will go directly to the artist - (Did you know that if you have a major label contract, if you want to buy copies to sell at your concert from the label, they charge you $11 each? More than they charge stores?)
Sorry, but anyone who has watched more than two episodes of "Behind The Music" will have no sympathy for the giant labels. Screw 'em!
I agree. The USPS is a favorite whipping boy of a lot of people, but the service I've received from them is has been a lot better than UPS, and one hell of a lot cheaper than FedEx. At the main Chicago Post Office, where I have a P.O. Box (because my apartment building used to have someone who stole packages), every employee I've delt with has been courteous and professional.
By what definition? There is a huge world of audio tools on OSX that do not yet exist on Linux. It might be "simplier" once, but not if you count all the thousands of times OSX users would have to needlessly reboot. OSX users are as proud of their system uptime as any Linux user.
This looks like a great system, and I can imagine that it would be very popular with OSX users.
I'm half tempted to resume file-sharing just to become a test case. None of the 13,0000+ files in my collection are currently available for purchase. Yes, they were originally distributed by major labels, but in every case the artist was dropped and the album was sent to the cut-out bins. So they CANNOT be purchased.
Perhaps you are too young to remember when everyone was "forced" to aquire new TV sets to get those new-fangled UHF channels. I'm not. We had a seperate UHF tuner box on our old B&W television. We were "forced" to get it in the same way you will be "forced" to get an HD tuner. Of course, this is all moot for most viewers, as they are already "forced" to use a seperate box supplied their cable company to get all the channels they want to watch, or they are "forced" to buy a satellite receiver from DirecTV or Dish. So, the vast majority who get their signals from cable or sat will just get a different box which will continue outputting a crappy, state-of-the-art-of-1948 television signal - the rough equivilant of remaining with an IBM EGA card because you resent that software makers are trying to "force" you to higher resolutions.
No, I was bragging about being able to look at still frames. And most 35mm film presentations are actually lower resolution than HD video, due to projector weave and being several chemical stages from the original camera negative.
...or split one large frame into a number of "buckets" and send each to as many processers as needed. At least that's the way we used to do it on a 16 node transputer setup.
Final file size may be 2k x 4k, but each one of those pixels is sub-sampled - usually 8 x 8. It's brute-force, but that's the way you get such nice anti-aliasing.
(Disclaimer: It's been several years since my last RenderMan render, so the techniques may have changed.)
Some of us have seen them. "Fellowship of the Ring" played in high-definition on Dish Pay-Per-View, and I can assure you that the details are there, and can be seen on an HD monitor. In the scenes where Frodo has the ring in the palm of his hand, you can see the whorls of his fingerprints. You can see the Christmas Tree lights reflected in Gladrial's eyes. You can read the text in Bilbo's book. The intricate woodwork in Rivendell.
(Note: For some incomprehensible reason, there is an anti-HDTV contingent on Slashdot - bizzarely, it's the same people who have no problem with spending hundreds of dollars every six months to get an additional few FPS out of their games.)
They wouldn't have to re-render the whole scene. RenderMan allows one to specify a crop, so they would only have to re-render the propeller and whatever parts of the scene affected.