I hate to reply to my own post, but someone modded it as Flamebait, and I have to respond to that accusation.
There is a load of technical, financial, and industry-related information available about a wide number of topics. One of the very important steps to be taken in beginning any business project is to DO YOUR RESEARCH! And it's one of the talents of businesspeople to be able to take an abstract idea and fill in all the details.
The fact that this story was posted on Slashdot does a grave disservice to a lot of people involved:
* The Slashdot community sees an Ask Slashdot where a relatively vague and unnecessary question is asked... never mind a question posed arrogantly enough to assume we should tell him how to start an ISP. I'm not saying that the author of the question meant to be flamebait himself, but perhaps they are inadvertently being lazy and helpless. Some Ask Slashdot questions are actually quite interesting, yet get posted on the back page and recieve 4 or 5 comments. Why this happens, yet this one gets posted on the main page, I don't know.
* The person asking the question himself is doing himself a grave disservice by asking such a broad question on here without actually going through the steps that it would take to make a successful business plan. He's enlisting us as his consultants... while some of us don't mind being armchair consultants, it's like asking the people who call into sports radio shows to do the Super Bowl coverage. We don't know shit because we don't do research, and even if we did research on the business plan he needs, we'd never be able to tell him everything in one posting. He should go out and do his own market and business research so that he is BEST able to make a decision on his ISP idea.
* The future customers of this ISP are potentially going to be buying a service from a person who asked how to run his business on Slashdot. I already feel sorry for them.
I admit, I'm being a bit drastic, overdramatic, and exaggerating here... but the moral of the story is the same. The best helpful advice we can give this guy is to do his own research. Ask Slashdot is helpful when the guy has a very specific technical question, and even then it's a bit questionable that this is the proper forum to ask those kind of questions (it's alright, I guess, but not perfect). But for such a general and broad question, this guy has got to find the answer for himself.
My sarcasm doesn't quite help the situation, but I thought I'd use it to point out how thoroughly ludicrous it was for this question to make it to the front page. Then again, Slashdot isn't my site, so they can run it however they want...
And tomorrow's Ask Slashdot: How to start a successful chain of gourmet coffee restaurants!
Gee, I should be submitting my homework questions to/. as well; after all, the TA isn't around 24/7 like you people are. Besides, compared to some of the stuff posted on here, my homework is very important.
Quote:
Obtaining an official UNIX title is merely achieved when key functionality is added, thus allowing the OS to meet the requirements of the UNIX brand. In this context, Windows NT could obtain UNIX status. Believe it or not.
Gee, you'd think stability would be a requirement of UNIX status, eh? *wink wink, nudge nudge*
(Disclaimer: This is a joke. If you have a serious response to this post, please seek professional help. And don't drink so much coffee.)
1. Politely inform them of the infraction, wait for a response; if they continue to violate, take it up legally.
2. Show up at their front door with torches and shotguns
3. Spam their PR department and the company president to death.
4. Curse them out to all hell on Slashdot, ineffectively
5. Sue the bastards!
6. Cowboy Neal
... seriously, if all you people are serious about the GPL (I'll take a neutral stance on the GPL itself), for God's sakes, get a real organization together to handle these things, so that there's always someone to turn to when there is a GPL violation. You know, some professional and legal experts to help the cause out.
And posting the "news" on Slashdot is a bad way of handling it, since now Sony is going to be defamed and disparaged about 50 million times for something that may be non-existent, innocent, or an issue dealt with expediently. What if one manager made the decision to evilly include a GPL'ed program in the product, and when the company found out, they fired the manager and changed the product to be GPL compliant? Then will the Slashdot community remove or apologize for all the flaming that will follow this? I doubt it.
Lemme just say that it's not as bad as you say it is... unless I let assignments accumulate for a while... but that I've been through your whole scenario.
Right now I'm in the middle of school hell. I'm working on a time-consuming internship with a project team, where the company fucked us over and delayed our project three weeks in the past 5 weeks... and now me and one other girl on our project team are the only ones who can code at all and the weight of creating all the software for the project is on both of us. In the meantime, for the SAME PROJECT, I have to complete our benchmarking report, which means taking one of the top ten insurance companies in the nation and looking at a year's worth of claims data to find anomalies in trends. We have less than two weeks to do this. That's just one class. I only have one CIS class, but it's a pain in the ass... the professor is disorganized and swamps us with logic work and projects late in the semester due to his ineptitude to stay on schedule with anything. Now I have too much on my plate the next two weeks. Furthermore, my remaining courses are burying me with work, I have no job when I graduate in 24 days, I have to spend extra time at my part time job to make current ends meet (which means usually 5pm-3am shifts), I have to take a large "advance" from my parents just to pay rent for my first month of living out of college (there's no signing bonus and no job to pay for it), I have no money in the bank worth speaking of, I've been sick for a week, and I'm developing an asthmatic condition from my ridiculous allergies due to the shitty quality of the air around here.
I have taken that ambulance ride before. Granted, that ambulance ride got me free passes to delay major projects for a few weeks, and I wound up getting on Dean's List as a result. That's the only semester I made Dean's List. Some of the rest of them are absolutely shameful. My GPA is shit, at least from where I want it to be. I'm just not a great consistent student, and I was unfortunate enough to get stuck in a major (CIS) where everyone works against you and your personal well being.
I'm not enjoying my final weeks here, to say the least. But, the satisfaction of being done, once and for all, after 4 torturous years, is the payoff I've been waiting for ever since freshman year, when I was as shitty a student as one person can ever be. I've improved drastically now, and I'm extremely consistent. My reward, of course, is going to have to look for a manual labor or all-nite diner job just to pay rent once I graduate. However, I cherish that thought... the last thing I want to do is work for a high tech company that says "You'll work an average of 50 hours a week" at this point. My heart just isn't in it.
I'll change the world on my own terms, thank you very much...
Sergeant Cho: What happen?
Wang Wei : Someone set up us the router!
Sergeant Cho: We get signal
Captain Zhao: What!
Sergeant Cho: IRC turn on.
>Welcome to Shanghai Red's EFNet
>No bots please
Captain Zhao: It's you!!
Vinton Cerf: How are you gentlemen!!
Vinton Cerf: All your communist regime are belong to us
Vinton Cerf: You are on the way to democracy
Captain Zhao: What you say?
Vinton Cerf: You have no chance to survive, me love you long time
Vinton Cerf: Ha ha ha....
>Vinton Cerf has logged out (Network Split)
Sergeant Cho: Captain!!
Captain Zhao: Take off every filtering software!!
Captain Zhao: Move communist propaganda.
Captain Zhao: For great nationalism
Win-TV products seem nice, but they don't entirely meet my expectations in terms of quality, interface, and functionality. I myself have an ATI All-in-Wonder 128; the thing is amazing when you consider the number and quality of the functions it provides. Of course, it does nothing quite spectacularly (it does a lot of things well, some things mediocre considering the time it was released) but overall, it's still impressive. And I only got it for $100 over a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, the drivers and included programs SUCK A LOT, and it's starting to show its age. I could go with the AIW Radeon, but I have a feeling that won't show enough improvement for the cost. Plus, my processor is a bit old too, so a better video card won't speed up games THAT much...
The moral of the story is: generally these consumer TV tuner products can be amazing, but underwhelming as well. And I mean the quality of video capture, the options for capture, the coding functions built into the card, the software included, etc.
Plus, TiVO is a lot more than just VCR functions; it does a lot for you automatically. You don't even have to tell it when something's on; if you just tell it to record "The Simpsons", it'll find out when it's on and record it EVERY SINGLE TIME. Some cable systems have it set up such that shows like "Friends", "Seinfeld", "The Simpsons", etc. are on like 3-4 times a day; just telling it to record THOSE shows only will fill it up quickly. There are no computer programs that do that, period. And that is the exact capability that makes the TiVO amazing.
The Homeseer stuff looks pretty good, but I don't have a need for it at the time. Nice to know it's there, though.
Simply put, 256 character filenames are not fully descriptive of an underlying file and I could use more in terms of storage. Unfortunately, without building a custom app, the only thing I use now to browse MP3s, video files, images, etc. is Windows Explorer. Browsing media content on a filename basis is dumb (like dumb terminal dumb). I heard BeOS uses ID3 tags in the filesystem for MP3 catalogs - good but not quite there yet. I want the interface to ALL the media clips on my computer by any way I choose - in terms of sorting, grouping, ordering, hierarchies, etc. It isn't that hard to do for something like MP3 but it gets harder as you include multiple media formats. Everything physically should sit in one directory, and filenames should be irrelevant (perhaps GUIDs would be nice). Oh, and I want the media player to be like Winamp.
* TiVO functionality
WinVCR is NOT like TiVO. TiVO is a lot smarter about recording things than WinVCR is. WinVCR is more like... a VCR. And note, no one (including me) asked for VCR functionality built into this system. Gee, I wonder why... (hint: big bulky mediocre-quality tapes)
* (anything answered with a Win-TV product)
Do you work for Hauppauge?;) No, seriously, I should look into that product again... but it seems to me that you'd need to pick from HDTV and a radio tuner at the moment from the Win-TV line. Not to mention that they're so friggen expensive, and that I can't find any product reviews on the Net (I need some kind of product comparison before I buy ANYTHING). There's a WinTV DVR now that does TiVO stuff, but again I couldn't find a product review. So I take these recommendations with a grain of salt for now. As for most other products... well, shitty drivers and viewers are to blame for my reluctance to jump further into this arena. I noticed most programs that try to mess with video overlays fail very badly... and this is the fault of the OS and the video card drivers. And this is under Windows, too... there probably is non-existent support for some of the better stuff under Linux.
* Clock
Yea every computer has a built in clock... but no alarm program in the OS. And I haven't found a truly useful alarm application that doesn't get in your way too much. It's got to be easy to use, not some monstrosity that wants lots of system tray room and has too many options but not enough features (snooze, decent event triggering with enough options for popular programs, maybe remote-control compatibility, etc.)...
* Streaming video via Realplayer
Hahahaha! Sorry to call you out on this one, but this is pretty funny to me. Real Player is an application that I've been trying to avoid for the past three years. And it never works right for me anymore, either. I think I need to reinstall it... but anyway, it's one of the worse media formats out there, and one of the worst media players by far just for being a big nuisance...
* Phone functionality
There aren't any popular phone products for computers cause there aren't any good ones. Again, we get into the problem of too many features and not enough functionality... and most voicemail programs are also a nuisance as well. Don't forget shitty drivers. It's about time someone wrote a better phone program. Don't look at me, I hate programming.:)
* Home Automation software
Beyond X10, haven't seen anything worth considering. Besides, I don't want a computer to be another light switch... I want it to be a BETTER light switch. X10 isn't better, it's just another one as far as I'm concerned. And I already have light switches. Also, I want SOFTWARE events to be triggered as well as household appliances. Again, it's time someone wrote a better event-trigger software system that works well with popular applications.
* Crossfading or partitioning windows
Taco mentioned the crossfading, kind of like overlaying or having two displays on the same screen space... like double transparency. Window partitioning... well, I'm tired of what Windows and XWindows look like now... window management should be smarter and should have more formats/choices. Sonique is a good example of a program that does interesting things with its own screen space... but it needs to go further than that. I say, chop about 1/8th of the screen off the right side and make it a universal status/functional area of the screen so that we can put things into dim focus (word doc taking up most of the screen but TV playing upper right hand small window, winamp sliding in just below that, a remote control panel onscreen below that... but with options for where things go. This is a UI thing.
* Remote control the PC
The opposite of above - I need a program to remote control the PC, not a program to have the PC act as a remote control. Again, nothing useable and non-pesky enough out there that I know of. Same thing for voice commands...
I think it's good that all these products are out there in some form, but I'm saying none of them are quite ready for prime time yet. The states of media catalogs, TV tuners, real life event-triggering and event-triggered software, user interfaces, display technology, bandwidth, and media applications are all not what they could be, and where they should be. I'm hardly one to talk because I contribute nothing to that area, but I just see it as a tremendous opportunity. Then again, it's the irony of putting a lot of work into being entertained... you have to wonder if it's worth the effort.
As far as I know, with any operating system or application, there is NO software that:
* Automatically catalogues media clips (BeOS does this to an extent, I've heard)
* Replicates TiVO functionality to an acceptable degree
* Does a decent job at being a convenient radio tuner
* Does a decent job at being an alarm clock
* Streams decent-quality (visual and production) video from the Net on a channel-lookup system
* Plays HDTV signals
* Does a decent job of being a voicemail/phone answering/notification system for incoming calls - or for that matter, does any decent voice functionality over voice lines at all
* Triggers events via anything other than timers, keyboard taps, and mouse clicks
* Displays information services in an acceptable format on a TV screen
* Crossfades or partitions anything via automatic windowing (yea I know you can drag titlebars and window boundaries to your heart's content, but your good old "tile windows" command is usually not good enough for practical usage)
* Decently controls events on a PC via a remote control
... and so on.
There is a great need for this stuff, no doubt... I'm sure many of us spend countless hours performing manual tasks related to entertainment that represent work more than entertainment... an irony if I've ever seen one. And I believe much of it exists... albeit in primitive, obscure, or component form. There are a lot of the things on Taco's list that are here today - the CD/DVD player, the remote controls and IR ports, the X10 systems, good file compression, TiVO and its consumer electronics counterparts, and so on.
The task is wrapping it all up. And it's much harder to construct a consumer electronic system that works on TV technology, that has a simple user interface, and that meets the processing/hardware requirements of all this functionality. This is why the PS2 doesn't do all of this... it's too much to build in at once without driving the price through the roof. PCs can do it much easier, though - they're expandable, they're versatile, and they're not as expensive as consumer electronics.
Now, you must think I'm on crack for saying "not as expensive as consumer electronics". But honestly, PCs are component systems that don't have to be bought all at once. The initial shell-out is high, and the overall cost can be staggering on a small budget... but over time, it's not a bad thing at all. I've never had $3000 to spend on a computer at once, yet that's easily what my computer cost altogether (the SCSI subsystem alone breaks $1000). Stereo systems are like this as well - but you can easily spend $1500 the first time out on one of those as well. Most consumer electronics are either too dumb to cooperate in the manner suggested here, or can be a royal pain in the ass when they're integrated - TV/VCR combos come to mind.
Before this gets way too long, I think the correct approach is to:
1. Use existing PC hardware and write flexible, well-interfaced software packages for separate media functions. Not just your typical poorly-written driver software to watch TV, use a remote, or capture video - but software that does these things good and with greater power. The ideas are out there, typically the functionality is not.
2. Encourage new PC hardware to fill in the functionality gaps (HDTV tuners, USB plug-n-play IR receivers, radio tuners, big ass hard drives) and write quality software packages for those as well. Not to forget, the hardware needs OPEN STANDARD INTERFACES... not a separate programming interface or application for each brand of tuner, media player, etc., but something like the way all sound cards are SoundBlaster compatible or 3D cards have DirectX/OpenGL functionality.
3. Finally, someone builds a system with existing, well established hardware and software, that accomplishes the task of integrating all these components seamlessly, with an easy to use interface, that just plugs into the TV and the phone/cable line, and does all this stuff for you in your living room.
So... improve what we have, create what we need, and bring it all together when it's ready. But as it is now, it's not ready yet.
While I agree with the scientist's anger, I find the comparison of peer-reviewed articles to contracted copyrighted music entirely ludicrious.
Even technically, music can be copyrighted a number of ways. One person (or more than one) can write the song and the lyrics, and be registered for it under ASCAP. Then, someone can PERFORM it, and the record labels can have a copyright on THAT. Then there's derivative works, etc...
Let's not go to the lengths to say that science research - meant to further the human race - is in any way comparable to Britney Spears - meant to move us in the other direction while mesmerizing us with jiggly boobies moving across the stage.
Oh, by the way, there IS a reason researchers LICENSE FOR FREE their articles to journal publishers... so they can get them peer-reviewed, not just printed somewhere. And although the journal does not pay them for the rights to the article, certainly the journal doesn't have the rights to the artcle when all is said and done... and neither does anyone else in the world, as plagarism would be a copyright violation.
But I understand. It's morning, and you need more coffee. So do I.
Say that you play an uncopyrighted or copyright expired work in a music player and use a vis engine to display visuals on the screen. You will avoid the legal muck mentioned above about unauthorized usage of copyrighted music.
Quickly, though, I understand where the author of the parent message is coming from. Let's say that MTV plays a video for a certain artist's single on a certain rotation... but then all of a sudden, some independent producer has the cohoneys to film a music video, unauthorized, for that single on his/her own and then submits it to MTV... and MTV likes it and puts it in the rotation. In nearly any event, the record industry would hit the mattresses on that one. I regard visualizations the same way... if anyone ever recorded a really good visualization for a song, bought a license to play the song on TV, and then played the visualization plus the song, there would be hell to pay. I think it's fair use as long as you have a sampling license, but you know that won't ever be permitted anyway. Just like they have posters in every university saying MP3s are illegal. But anyway, that's not the point of this...
The point is, there's yet another muck to get through... the license of the visualization itself! That's right, just cause you have it and downloaded it for free does NOT mean you are authorized to use it outside of your bedroom. I realized this when I came up with a concept for a TV show on my college's TV station. Basically, I had become pretty good at using Geiss (plugin for Winamp), and I could output to TV, so I recorded a few tapes of the video + sound and showed it to some friends... they liked it a lot (especially when they were rolling) and I figured it might make a good TV show. It was not to be (the station never gave the concept a chance, and disregarded the demo tape) but it would have been a gamble anyway - the Geiss license says that Ryan Geiss, the author, owns all the images produced by the plugin, and requires royalties for public display (cut and pasted from the license file):
TERMS OF USE / COPYRIGHT INFORMATION / PUBLIC DISPLAY
Geiss is 100 percent free for personal use. No registration is required.
Any commercial use of this program, however, requires the consent of the
author. For large ventures this will involve a licensing fee. Be wary
that every image or video sequence generated with this program is the sole
copyright of Ryan M. Geiss and can not be reproduced or displayed in public
without permission.
... After reading this, I did e-mail Geiss asking about the whole college TV station thing, because it would have been a non-profit private showing for the university... something that may fall under fair use (as it does in some cases with some things). Dishearteningly, he never replied. I didn't pursue it further after I knew the idea for the TV show tanked. Since then, Geiss got a job with WildTangent and doesn't develop Geiss anymore AFAIK... which is a shame because, as good as it was, there was some potential for enhanced functionality specifically dealing with scripted effects for displays. And, IMO, Punkie is better...
I'm not sure if the other visualization plugins have such restrictive licenses, but I know this one is unbearably harsh for anyone who wants to use it for public viewing or distribution. I'm not saying the idea of the license is unfair, but... I mean, come on, the damn thing only runs decent at 640x400x8, and you can't tell it what to do without having your hands on a keyboard (highly inconvenient for a DJ), I'm not paying a huge license fee for THAT. Or at least I'm pretty sure that the price I'd be willing to pay for an hour's worth of that (about $30) for 1000 people is a lot less than he's thinking he should get for it. The license should be spelled out in more certain terms, just so I can get an idea of what I would have to pay before I go out on any ventures.
So, check the fine print on the licenses for your plugins before you start playing them at DJ parties and raves. Just because you downloaded it for free doesn't mean it is free. And there are some very unsure concepts here about what the legality is of a copyrighted visualization + a copyrighted recording. It's a shame that the art may get lost in the process...
Open one IE window on a PII-233 with 64mb of RAM, and you're okay. Now try that with 20 windows. One of the great advantages of having >200mb RAM is that you can open every application on your computer 5 times and not thrash your hard drive into oblivion. Same thing with Word, Excel, Winamp, or any other program where you might have more than 3 windows open for no good reason. Speaking of hard drives...
2. CD burning + broadband
MP3 files aren't enough to demand special investments in hard drive technology. But once you get a CD burner, you now need a faster harddrive so you don't burn as many coasters. (I mean, you don't want one turtle C: drive for everything - moving the mouse will screw up the burn) Then you run out of things to throw on CD... but then you get a cable modem, and you're downloading VCDs and giant MP3 collections. And that's when you need BIGGER as well as faster. At that point, if you're serious, you're looking at IDE RAID or big honkin SCSI drives. (I went somewhere in the middle and got a medium sized, blazing fast SCSI and a large, fast IDE drive... but I still have space problems, hehehe)
3. Video capture
This is where things start to get out of hand. Everyone has looked at an ATI All-in-Wonder at some point and thought, "*Sigh* if only it were GREAT at 3D and didn't have crap drivers." Well, I went that route anyway (I didn't have a decent video card at the time), and I haven't played too many games in a year and a half as a result... but it was worth it. Now I can watch TV on the computer and watch the computer on the TV, record TV programs onto the hard drive, get some decent performance in 3D games, etc. Only problem is, it's not good enough... it does a lot of things well, but overall it's not that impressive as it is convenient. The newer Radeon AIW does make me salivate, though... but it's not a GeForce2 in 3D, it's not like TiVO for recording programs, and it's not like a professional video capture/compression setup for making movies and stuff. It's just decent, that's all. But once you lose sanity and go for the gold, you can REALLY rack up some big price tags. Once you have the taste in your mouth, it's hard not to be hungry. To have a GeForce3, a TiVO, a professional TV tuner/video capture card, a PentiumIII for the processing requirements (cause I like 720x540 realtime MPEG2 encoding), and a nice set of hard drives to hold all the movies (yet another reason to pick up an IDE RAID or SCSI hard drive habit)... well, that's a LOT of money. A lot more than the $100 I paid for the AIW on eBay. Granted, you may have no need for most of this... but the TiVO and the GeForce3 are expensive enough.
Maybe the next boundaries to push aren't in software functionality, but in software/hardware convenience. Running bloated code is one thing, running many bloated code programs at once and getting them to cooperate is another story. And I hate to say it, but right now we WASTE so many computer resources on absolutely nothing. I don't run SETI or RC5 cause I have no interest in it, so my processor sits idle and unentertaining. My DSL line also remains underused, even when Napster is going full throttle - there's plenty of low bandwidth applications that can work alongside a file download, yet I have no compelling reason to run any of them. Other than games and video compression, there is nothing that makes my computer work hard at all... but there's not much that I'm doing instead, either. Which is why it's about time that we started making lots of little flashy doo-dads and convenient background applications to use all that wasted processor time. For example, I've never seen a single good alarm-clock application for a PC. Also, why can't I have a simple yet powerful personal organizer program that looks like a Palm Pilot and that I can bring up by clicking on an icon in the taskbar? (in otherwords, a program that acts like a Palm Pilot but on the screen... maybe even an emulator, perhaps) What about a personal Internet radio station tracker? Or a TV program listings retriver and alert system? (instead of the TiVO recording it for you, you click on an icon in the taskbar and it tells you when your favorite programs are on that day - and alerts you, ICQ style, 5 minutes before any of them start) How about some SERIOUSLY snazzy looking Winamp plugins? Or flashy GUI stuff like active icons and mouse-over gradient animation highlighting? (or how about that Aqua stuff in the new OS X?) A lot of this stuff would really run well on Windows AND Linux... except you won't want to close everything just to run a game that needs your entire computer... so you just buy a faster computer to run the game AND all that stuff at the same time! Old idea, new implementation - how many of us bought a new computer because games didn't run fast unless you used a boot disk or something...
Judging by votes and sheer coolness, the 5k Chess is the big winner. Hell, it beat me. If something under 5k can beat me at chess... well, my TI-85 has 32kb, maybe I should let it think for me on a more frequent basis.
The big loser? Skadden Arps Recruiting site. Arriving at the entry itself is sort of like buying a car in the classified ads and then finding out that it's a tiny plastic model of a car. The joke is barely funny until you realize someone submitted that entry for real, and that the entry was posted on the list anyway.
Timepiece is pretty funky, I have to say.
By the way, I have made websites under 5k before, and I've found them highly entertaining. They consist mostly of ranting text about my high school from about 5 years ago. Oh well, maybe my tastes are unique to the world...
I'm very sorry that the state of the world has come to this, but I can't trust anyone enough to base an opinion on any facts presented so far in this incident. This is exactly what the Internet was supposed to SOLVE, but instead has made worse.
I'm American, and I sympathize with American interests. I think China is very dangerous because of their immense population, their hardline political stances, and their history of human rights violations/suppression. I'm not saying we should get into a war with China, and I'm not saying China should change to adopt our culture. Rather, I'm saying that the current situation demands a VERY delicate manner when dealing with China on foreign relations, because we strongly disagree with them on many things. Now, we've basically handed them 24 American armed forces to use as leverage so that the Chinese government can gain political power. It's as simple as that.
On the other hand, the U.S. is pretty arrogant, and that clouds the issue entirely. Specifically, we don't know what the government really knows, and we don't know what the media really knows. Since they would have the most reliable sources for the happenings of this incident, we should be able to find out exactly what happened and what needs to be done from them. But we can't trust them, not only to have a realistic opinion on the issue, but also to present the facts in an unbiased and truthful manner. We may very well be entitled to say MORE than sorry.
My gut instinct says that China is more likely at fault in this particular situation than the US, but the fact that I can't trust the facts means that I can't say that I have an informed opinion. All I know for sure is that the planes actually crashed and that the Americans are being held captive for the time being.
Now, of course, the Internet was supposed to be able to help us in these cases by being an improved provider of information in a timely, honest manner. But what happened? China filters all of their Internet access, which leads me to believe that there's nothing but propaganda on their side of the network. Over here, the media, rather than wait for news to be accurate and well-developed, chooses instead to report ANYTHING the second it comes in off the news wire. The whole Dale Earndhart tragedy/autopsy situation, the presidential elections, and even the news coverage of the Oscars are perfect examples of that... we're told things in stages as they come in. But almost none of it is verified as much as it is rushed out the door, making basically every media outlet another Matt Drudge. Plus, it's like having a scrap of the newspaper delivered every five minutes as it's progressively typed. But more importantly, it's starting to have a reputation for being unreliable... not to mention biased (read some news stories about Napster and ecstacy on Yahoo! to see what kind of one-sided treatments some of these news stories get sometimes).
Of course, people have always went for cheap, flashy, and fast in this country. It baffles me that more people eat at McDonalds still than Boston Market, especially considering the price of the meals at both places is somewhat similar. The Internet is no exception... people prefer big dumb web-portals to well-organized useful information sites, even though portals go out of business because they basically don't have much of a business to start with.
Perhaps if we just bombed all of China to get those pilots back on the first day of this "incident", everyone in the US would be happy and we would have avoided this whole mess. I'm not saying it would have been the proper thing to do (far from it); it just would have kept everyone fat and happy as usual. Bush's popularity would have been way up, just like his father's was after the Gulf War. Lots of cool TV footage of bombs going off, pictures of jet planes taking off, soldiers marching in, blah blah blah. Americans love that shit. They turn out in droves for the war victory parades. They like to see fireworks. It's fucking disgraceful.
My only hope is that the youth get sick of seeing fireworks at an early age and get bored with it all... and start pursuing more sensible priorities just because they're sick of "TRL" for the millionth time. That would be great.
Didn't know that. Now I won't look like an idiot if I ever meet the guy in person and have to say his name. That already makes 2002 a possibly better year for me than 2001 would have been so far, due to one less embarrassing mispronouciation...
Yea, I noticed those Red Bull ads in Wipeout XL... mostly cuz I played it for 10 hours straight once. Awesome game. I wish I had that for the computer... (yea I know it was released on the PC, but it JUST wasn't the same)
Yea, I also don't appreciate that "Oh god, not more ads" attitude. I've always LIKED advertisements... the less grating ones, anyway. Commercials can be entertaining, billboards can be eye-grabbing, etc. As long as they're not abrasive, they're fine. I think video game ads would be a good example of ads that would be less intrusive than most. And anything that reduces the cost of video games is OK by me:)
They will go to trial, and pay for their crimes...
Great! It's about time! I haven't bought a new computer in 2 years now, and the sooner we squeeze these bastards out of the market, the quicker I can buy a cheaper motherboard and cheaper RAM than what's out today!
(Oh, wait, I forgot about AMD.)
Now, all I need is those prices to come down on plasma displays a bit more, and I'm set...
Yea, great points. I figured I didn't wanna touch advertising, cause that does complicate things and brings a commercial feel into it (advertisers do have a lot of sway once they become the source of money... more so than you would think), and advertising is crashing on the net right now, so I dunno if anyone would get into a venture like that after these dot-coms crashed... but still, factor in advertising, and if it works, then it works even better. Maybe advertising could just make the whole thing FREE:)
Also, I like your ideas about links, CD-ROMs, progressive reviews, and how journals work today... the nice thing about my proposed system, though, is assuming that it's not a horrible idea in the first place, people may not have to write articles pro-bono anymore, which means more people would get involved in doing research and publishing articles. Money is always good motivation:) but on top of that, pro-bono work is basically money LOST not doing something that pays. You also gain the advantage of people not having to worry that they're not spending enough time actually making money anymore, which gets more people involved in the process...
Electronic publication costs next to nothing?!?! I'll go with ya on the peer review costs... which is absolutely NOTHING, all you have to do is store responses and reviews, which isn't any more difficult to do than to store the actual articles... but electronic publication is VERY expensive. How about: buying the hardware, leasing the bandwidth, developing the software, and maintaining the network/servers? All that maintenance comes at a cost, not to mention the idea of a clearinghouse, advertising and marketing, etc. (I admit those costs would be minimal, but they're still costs) Basically, a computerized research network costs money... just like paper and printing costs money too. I was just throwing generous figures out, I have no idea what any of these costs are... and I said that first priority is to improve the current journal distribution methods anyway, since that would be easier and cheaper.
Second, page hits are meaningless. Basically, authors and research groups are paid every time someone BUYS an article to read or peer review. It's akin to buying a page out of a journal - one you buy it, it's yours forever. I don't think you can model this around page hits, since people have to pay before they look (other than an overview)... and the purpose of the system is for research and peer review, I don't see how counting simple page hits has anything to do with that. Basically, the first time someone accesses the article, they've bought it. They can look at it once, or a million times, but at that point the author and the research group (the people maintaining that server) are paid. Subscribers don't actually pay, but they've already paid a subscription fee and that money is pooled and used to pay the authors and research groups. One time buyers (per-article) DO pay on the spot, and have access to both the article and the peer review system, as do subscribers... but just for that article.
Yea, there are only cosmetic differences to what we have today... if you don't count the powerful search engine capabilities, the availability, the convenience, and the ease of use for peer reviewing. Basically, no books, full searching, available anywhere, and it's easy to review an article and have the review posted RIGHT AWAY for the whole world. It's a very powerful information system, compared to today's paper journals...
Oh, did you know, corporate resarch groups and universities ARE private businesses... the last time I checked, anyway. Research needs funding, period. The more funding, the better. But experiments cost money, and researchers need to eat.
Finally, I didn't intend to suggest a for-profit system... rather, I just wanted everything to pay for itself through a solid (yet kinda complicated, I admit) business model, and I thought researchers who write articles should be compensated modestly. One dollar from every subscriber who ever read/reviewed that particular article at least once does NOT add up quickly... and if it does, then maybe it's a powerful incentive to write GOOD articles, or maybe it's a target for cutting costs and reducing subscriber fees. I think it should all cost as little as possible, both to the subscriber and to the research groups... but there's a lot of money flying around in universities and in research groups which would be WELL SPENT on a powerful and effective online peer review and article publishing system. Once again, I advised fixing the printed journal distribution system first.
P.S. - I said information should not be free in this case, and that people shouldn't be posting articles for free on the Net. I stand behind that, and because of this: you can't walk in a library and grab a copy of everything you want and walk out with it. If libraries did that, they'd be really popular, but they'd go out of business quickly. But libraries do have books and publications (among other things), and in most cases any member of the public can go there to read them if he or she likes. It's the same thing with the Internet. Furthermore, a precedent of "everything is totally free" encourages business models that emphasize being cheap, fast, and prolific. In other words, crappy. Quantity over quality. I believe that authors do themselves a great disservice by setting such a precedent. I think a little patience in this case will prevent the peer-review process from being "Napsterized". But I think ultimately, the whole process should be public and available to all. Okay, so with my system, not everyone can log in from home and read whatever they want... but I specifically wanted something where universities and public libraries could subscribe (via site licenses) to the system so that it would be another freely available resource to anyone on-premises. Just like books and journals are today. And it's more powerful beyond that, too, but if you are just some guy off the street, you can get to it if you need to. So it would be free for everyone. That's why I like that idea. For now, though, it just takes planning and patience.
I get the idea that there's a couple of serious issues to deal with here:
* Journals are inconvenient due to distribution, format, and pricing.
* There isn't a consensus opinion on how to instatiate the peer review process online.
* Funding for research and the viability of the distribution systems are money issues that can't be ignored: people need to make money on research as well as have it peer reviewed, and information distributors MUST put food on the table somehow.
Basically, it boils down to political and fiscal issues. And this is not a case of greed; rather, people have needs, there are livelihoods at stake, and we're talking about a very important process for research that basically includes ALL human scientific advancement.
So, there are no easy answers.
Here's what I think:
Printed journals are good. They just need more availability, more participation, and a reduced cost. While Internet distribution sounds great, we have a current system that needs improvement. It's more beneficial... not to mention easier and cheaper... to improve the printed journals. Plus, we need the journals. Everyone currently reads journals, it's easier for most of the scientific community at this point to deal with printed journals, and I think the scientific community would suffer if we let journals degrade further or disappear entirely. So let's think of that first.
Next, we need a prototype/pilot peer review process online. It needs to make money (not all information can be free), it needs to be more effective and convenient than published journals, it needs to be robust, scalable, practical, and easy to use. (most people shouldn't have to type %man "Mayan anthropology" or something like that) And in the meantime, articles should NOT be published freely on the net AT ALL, as it hurts our progress in both printed journals (robs them of needed revenue) and online distribution (makes it scattered and sets a bad precedent for pricing).
Here's a sample model for an online peer review process, if I were to whip it up this weekend - a Slashcode-powered subscription website frontend, with a separate domain for each journal field. Professional groups, like the ones that put out journals, are responsible for setting up and maintaining their own domains... as in, they follow a cookie-cutter method for setting it up, and it's standarized for all domains, but each group moderates and maintains their own domain so that you don't have something like one website with ALL scientific articles being maintained by the same 6 computer guys. All actual articles are stored in a networked database. The front-ends access the database for the actual articles, you can do a very broad search on that one database easily, it's nearly infintely scalable to handle any scientific field, and it keeps the subscription model centralized. Individual users are charged one of the following ways: per article, retrieve article and have commenting/review priviledges for that article for a nominal one-time fee (like $3 per article, or prepay for 20 articles for $50, something like that); per domain, access to whole domain for a modest subscription fee (like $10 a month); all-domains access for individual user, large personal subscription fee ($100 a month); and all-domains for organziation, site and user licensing fees for libraries, universities, corporations, research groups, etc. where users belonging to an organization can access the articles at a licensed computing site or they can register with the database through the organization for universal access. Organizations probably should have per-domain licensing, too. Searching would be free to all, but obviously the results would be limited to subscribers (as in, they can find what they're looking for, but they can't get to it without paying... kind of if you used Google but the links it returned asked for your username when clicked).
You could do some nifty things with personalization, information linking, relevant searches, multiple domain cross-posting, etc.
Oh, and profits would be distributed like this: authors get commissions based on article views/participation (like, $1 per user participating in an article, one time), domains get 50% of per-domain subscriptions plus 50 cents for each non-per-domain subscriber article participation (all-domain and per-article users), the main database publishing organization gets 10-15% of all fees - that leaves about $1 leftover fees from each per-article view, per-domain subscribers have their subscription fees distributed after 5 article participations in a given domain (which means money is lost after the 5th article participation), and all-domain individual users fees are distributed after 60 (!) article participations (if you made it $50/month, it would be 30 participations).
This leaves organization fees: an organization could pay for all-domains, per year: $300 per licensed site (individual computer), and for universal access user members, something like $200 for up to 20 users, $400 for up to 50 users, $1000 for up to 200 users, etc. That means, every year, each site computer could access/participate in 180 articles, and each universal access user could participate in 3 - 6 articles and you're still making money. Now, per-domain organization access, that would be an agreement between the domain holder and the organization, but the main database publishing organization should still get $20 a year for each licensed site and 50 cents per universal access user. The main database publishing organization would be a clearinghouse for user fees and author/domain payments.
The logic behind all of this would need to be refined much further and some of it just doesn't scale well... it could get very complicated, because the overall system makes 30% undistributed profit on each per-article purchase, but a university like mine (20,000 enrolled plus faculty) would pay something like $125,000 per year to the organization for full access on all library computers (not counting other computing sites) and universal user access for all students and faculty, and that pays for 75,000 participations, or about 3 per person overall... yet if all faculty members plus 10% of heavy research students viewed/participated in an average of 20 articles in a year (not a lot of views if you have a lot of research) and the remaining students averaged 2 article views/participations, the clearinghouse (which uses %10 of the original payment to stay in business) pays out to domains and authors over $30,000 more than it recieved from the group. Reduce both author and domain fees by 50%, and you scale far better, but I don't even know if $1 for authors and 50 cents for domains per view is even enough payment to maintain the system... plus, the fees from users may be entirely too high to begin with, since $3 per article, $100 per all-access user, and $125,000 per large university are all rather high... more than journals cost (to a point) and redundant since the journals are out there already...
Overall, it's a decent sized project, but it's viability can be tested on a small scale... and from there, it's all math, statistics, and consumer interest studies. Maybe the top researchers could make enough money off of such a system to rival A-Rod, and maybe a lot of researchers would find the payments affordable and worthwhile... then again, maybe everyone will starve trying to publish these articles, and maybe everyone will balk at even $1 a month for articles. And the system becomes more valuable as it gets bigger, but it might lose money faster that way, and it's always a big risk to build something that would be successful only if it gets really big. But it's worth thinking about.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to reply to my own post, but someone modded it as Flamebait, and I have to respond to that accusation.
There is a load of technical, financial, and industry-related information available about a wide number of topics. One of the very important steps to be taken in beginning any business project is to DO YOUR RESEARCH! And it's one of the talents of businesspeople to be able to take an abstract idea and fill in all the details.
The fact that this story was posted on Slashdot does a grave disservice to a lot of people involved:
* The Slashdot community sees an Ask Slashdot where a relatively vague and unnecessary question is asked... never mind a question posed arrogantly enough to assume we should tell him how to start an ISP. I'm not saying that the author of the question meant to be flamebait himself, but perhaps they are inadvertently being lazy and helpless. Some Ask Slashdot questions are actually quite interesting, yet get posted on the back page and recieve 4 or 5 comments. Why this happens, yet this one gets posted on the main page, I don't know.
* The person asking the question himself is doing himself a grave disservice by asking such a broad question on here without actually going through the steps that it would take to make a successful business plan. He's enlisting us as his consultants... while some of us don't mind being armchair consultants, it's like asking the people who call into sports radio shows to do the Super Bowl coverage. We don't know shit because we don't do research, and even if we did research on the business plan he needs, we'd never be able to tell him everything in one posting. He should go out and do his own market and business research so that he is BEST able to make a decision on his ISP idea.
* The future customers of this ISP are potentially going to be buying a service from a person who asked how to run his business on Slashdot. I already feel sorry for them.
I admit, I'm being a bit drastic, overdramatic, and exaggerating here... but the moral of the story is the same. The best helpful advice we can give this guy is to do his own research. Ask Slashdot is helpful when the guy has a very specific technical question, and even then it's a bit questionable that this is the proper forum to ask those kind of questions (it's alright, I guess, but not perfect). But for such a general and broad question, this guy has got to find the answer for himself.
My sarcasm doesn't quite help the situation, but I thought I'd use it to point out how thoroughly ludicrous it was for this question to make it to the front page. Then again, Slashdot isn't my site, so they can run it however they want...
And tomorrow's Ask Slashdot: How to start a successful chain of gourmet coffee restaurants!
/. as well; after all, the TA isn't around 24/7 like you people are. Besides, compared to some of the stuff posted on here, my homework is very important.
Gee, I should be submitting my homework questions to
Quote:
Obtaining an official UNIX title is merely achieved when key functionality is added, thus allowing the OS to meet the requirements of the UNIX brand. In this context, Windows NT could obtain UNIX status. Believe it or not.
Gee, you'd think stability would be a requirement of UNIX status, eh? *wink wink, nudge nudge*
(Disclaimer: This is a joke. If you have a serious response to this post, please seek professional help. And don't drink so much coffee.)
When a company violates the GPL, do we:
1. Politely inform them of the infraction, wait for a response; if they continue to violate, take it up legally.
2. Show up at their front door with torches and shotguns
3. Spam their PR department and the company president to death.
4. Curse them out to all hell on Slashdot, ineffectively
5. Sue the bastards!
6. Cowboy Neal
... seriously, if all you people are serious about the GPL (I'll take a neutral stance on the GPL itself), for God's sakes, get a real organization together to handle these things, so that there's always someone to turn to when there is a GPL violation. You know, some professional and legal experts to help the cause out.
And posting the "news" on Slashdot is a bad way of handling it, since now Sony is going to be defamed and disparaged about 50 million times for something that may be non-existent, innocent, or an issue dealt with expediently. What if one manager made the decision to evilly include a GPL'ed program in the product, and when the company found out, they fired the manager and changed the product to be GPL compliant? Then will the Slashdot community remove or apologize for all the flaming that will follow this? I doubt it.
Lemme just say that it's not as bad as you say it is... unless I let assignments accumulate for a while... but that I've been through your whole scenario.
Right now I'm in the middle of school hell. I'm working on a time-consuming internship with a project team, where the company fucked us over and delayed our project three weeks in the past 5 weeks... and now me and one other girl on our project team are the only ones who can code at all and the weight of creating all the software for the project is on both of us. In the meantime, for the SAME PROJECT, I have to complete our benchmarking report, which means taking one of the top ten insurance companies in the nation and looking at a year's worth of claims data to find anomalies in trends. We have less than two weeks to do this. That's just one class. I only have one CIS class, but it's a pain in the ass... the professor is disorganized and swamps us with logic work and projects late in the semester due to his ineptitude to stay on schedule with anything. Now I have too much on my plate the next two weeks. Furthermore, my remaining courses are burying me with work, I have no job when I graduate in 24 days, I have to spend extra time at my part time job to make current ends meet (which means usually 5pm-3am shifts), I have to take a large "advance" from my parents just to pay rent for my first month of living out of college (there's no signing bonus and no job to pay for it), I have no money in the bank worth speaking of, I've been sick for a week, and I'm developing an asthmatic condition from my ridiculous allergies due to the shitty quality of the air around here.
I have taken that ambulance ride before. Granted, that ambulance ride got me free passes to delay major projects for a few weeks, and I wound up getting on Dean's List as a result. That's the only semester I made Dean's List. Some of the rest of them are absolutely shameful. My GPA is shit, at least from where I want it to be. I'm just not a great consistent student, and I was unfortunate enough to get stuck in a major (CIS) where everyone works against you and your personal well being.
I'm not enjoying my final weeks here, to say the least. But, the satisfaction of being done, once and for all, after 4 torturous years, is the payoff I've been waiting for ever since freshman year, when I was as shitty a student as one person can ever be. I've improved drastically now, and I'm extremely consistent. My reward, of course, is going to have to look for a manual labor or all-nite diner job just to pay rent once I graduate. However, I cherish that thought... the last thing I want to do is work for a high tech company that says "You'll work an average of 50 hours a week" at this point. My heart just isn't in it.
I'll change the world on my own terms, thank you very much...
Sergeant Cho: What happen? ....
Wang Wei : Someone set up us the router!
Sergeant Cho: We get signal
Captain Zhao: What!
Sergeant Cho: IRC turn on.
>Welcome to Shanghai Red's EFNet
>No bots please
Captain Zhao: It's you!!
Vinton Cerf: How are you gentlemen!!
Vinton Cerf: All your communist regime are belong to us
Vinton Cerf: You are on the way to democracy
Captain Zhao: What you say?
Vinton Cerf: You have no chance to survive, me love you long time
Vinton Cerf: Ha ha ha
>Vinton Cerf has logged out (Network Split)
Sergeant Cho: Captain!!
Captain Zhao: Take off every filtering software!!
Captain Zhao: Move communist propaganda.
Captain Zhao: For great nationalism
Win-TV products seem nice, but they don't entirely meet my expectations in terms of quality, interface, and functionality. I myself have an ATI All-in-Wonder 128; the thing is amazing when you consider the number and quality of the functions it provides. Of course, it does nothing quite spectacularly (it does a lot of things well, some things mediocre considering the time it was released) but overall, it's still impressive. And I only got it for $100 over a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, the drivers and included programs SUCK A LOT, and it's starting to show its age. I could go with the AIW Radeon, but I have a feeling that won't show enough improvement for the cost. Plus, my processor is a bit old too, so a better video card won't speed up games THAT much...
The moral of the story is: generally these consumer TV tuner products can be amazing, but underwhelming as well. And I mean the quality of video capture, the options for capture, the coding functions built into the card, the software included, etc.
Plus, TiVO is a lot more than just VCR functions; it does a lot for you automatically. You don't even have to tell it when something's on; if you just tell it to record "The Simpsons", it'll find out when it's on and record it EVERY SINGLE TIME. Some cable systems have it set up such that shows like "Friends", "Seinfeld", "The Simpsons", etc. are on like 3-4 times a day; just telling it to record THOSE shows only will fill it up quickly. There are no computer programs that do that, period. And that is the exact capability that makes the TiVO amazing.
The Homeseer stuff looks pretty good, but I don't have a need for it at the time. Nice to know it's there, though.
Riiiiight... and you took the time to point that out, which makes you the expert on gay.
Throw in a bottle of Stoli, a mail-order bride, and a MiG fighter jet... and I'll take it for 90% of the original MSRP.
Oh yea... and LCD screens in the headrests, and a Playstation hooked up... and make sure the games include "Space Invaders". Heh heh.
* Media Clip cataloging
;) No, seriously, I should look into that product again... but it seems to me that you'd need to pick from HDTV and a radio tuner at the moment from the Win-TV line. Not to mention that they're so friggen expensive, and that I can't find any product reviews on the Net (I need some kind of product comparison before I buy ANYTHING). There's a WinTV DVR now that does TiVO stuff, but again I couldn't find a product review. So I take these recommendations with a grain of salt for now. As for most other products... well, shitty drivers and viewers are to blame for my reluctance to jump further into this arena. I noticed most programs that try to mess with video overlays fail very badly... and this is the fault of the OS and the video card drivers. And this is under Windows, too... there probably is non-existent support for some of the better stuff under Linux.
:)
Simply put, 256 character filenames are not fully descriptive of an underlying file and I could use more in terms of storage. Unfortunately, without building a custom app, the only thing I use now to browse MP3s, video files, images, etc. is Windows Explorer. Browsing media content on a filename basis is dumb (like dumb terminal dumb). I heard BeOS uses ID3 tags in the filesystem for MP3 catalogs - good but not quite there yet. I want the interface to ALL the media clips on my computer by any way I choose - in terms of sorting, grouping, ordering, hierarchies, etc. It isn't that hard to do for something like MP3 but it gets harder as you include multiple media formats. Everything physically should sit in one directory, and filenames should be irrelevant (perhaps GUIDs would be nice). Oh, and I want the media player to be like Winamp.
* TiVO functionality
WinVCR is NOT like TiVO. TiVO is a lot smarter about recording things than WinVCR is. WinVCR is more like... a VCR. And note, no one (including me) asked for VCR functionality built into this system. Gee, I wonder why... (hint: big bulky mediocre-quality tapes)
* (anything answered with a Win-TV product)
Do you work for Hauppauge?
* Clock
Yea every computer has a built in clock... but no alarm program in the OS. And I haven't found a truly useful alarm application that doesn't get in your way too much. It's got to be easy to use, not some monstrosity that wants lots of system tray room and has too many options but not enough features (snooze, decent event triggering with enough options for popular programs, maybe remote-control compatibility, etc.)...
* Streaming video via Realplayer
Hahahaha! Sorry to call you out on this one, but this is pretty funny to me. Real Player is an application that I've been trying to avoid for the past three years. And it never works right for me anymore, either. I think I need to reinstall it... but anyway, it's one of the worse media formats out there, and one of the worst media players by far just for being a big nuisance...
* Phone functionality
There aren't any popular phone products for computers cause there aren't any good ones. Again, we get into the problem of too many features and not enough functionality... and most voicemail programs are also a nuisance as well. Don't forget shitty drivers. It's about time someone wrote a better phone program. Don't look at me, I hate programming.
* Home Automation software
Beyond X10, haven't seen anything worth considering. Besides, I don't want a computer to be another light switch... I want it to be a BETTER light switch. X10 isn't better, it's just another one as far as I'm concerned. And I already have light switches. Also, I want SOFTWARE events to be triggered as well as household appliances. Again, it's time someone wrote a better event-trigger software system that works well with popular applications.
* Crossfading or partitioning windows
Taco mentioned the crossfading, kind of like overlaying or having two displays on the same screen space... like double transparency. Window partitioning... well, I'm tired of what Windows and XWindows look like now... window management should be smarter and should have more formats/choices. Sonique is a good example of a program that does interesting things with its own screen space... but it needs to go further than that. I say, chop about 1/8th of the screen off the right side and make it a universal status/functional area of the screen so that we can put things into dim focus (word doc taking up most of the screen but TV playing upper right hand small window, winamp sliding in just below that, a remote control panel onscreen below that... but with options for where things go. This is a UI thing.
* Remote control the PC
The opposite of above - I need a program to remote control the PC, not a program to have the PC act as a remote control. Again, nothing useable and non-pesky enough out there that I know of. Same thing for voice commands...
I think it's good that all these products are out there in some form, but I'm saying none of them are quite ready for prime time yet. The states of media catalogs, TV tuners, real life event-triggering and event-triggered software, user interfaces, display technology, bandwidth, and media applications are all not what they could be, and where they should be. I'm hardly one to talk because I contribute nothing to that area, but I just see it as a tremendous opportunity. Then again, it's the irony of putting a lot of work into being entertained... you have to wonder if it's worth the effort.
As far as I know, with any operating system or application, there is NO software that:
* Automatically catalogues media clips (BeOS does this to an extent, I've heard)
* Replicates TiVO functionality to an acceptable degree
* Does a decent job at being a convenient radio tuner
* Does a decent job at being an alarm clock
* Streams decent-quality (visual and production) video from the Net on a channel-lookup system
* Plays HDTV signals
* Does a decent job of being a voicemail/phone answering/notification system for incoming calls - or for that matter, does any decent voice functionality over voice lines at all
* Triggers events via anything other than timers, keyboard taps, and mouse clicks
* Displays information services in an acceptable format on a TV screen
* Crossfades or partitions anything via automatic windowing (yea I know you can drag titlebars and window boundaries to your heart's content, but your good old "tile windows" command is usually not good enough for practical usage)
* Decently controls events on a PC via a remote control
... and so on.
There is a great need for this stuff, no doubt... I'm sure many of us spend countless hours performing manual tasks related to entertainment that represent work more than entertainment... an irony if I've ever seen one. And I believe much of it exists... albeit in primitive, obscure, or component form. There are a lot of the things on Taco's list that are here today - the CD/DVD player, the remote controls and IR ports, the X10 systems, good file compression, TiVO and its consumer electronics counterparts, and so on.
The task is wrapping it all up. And it's much harder to construct a consumer electronic system that works on TV technology, that has a simple user interface, and that meets the processing/hardware requirements of all this functionality. This is why the PS2 doesn't do all of this... it's too much to build in at once without driving the price through the roof. PCs can do it much easier, though - they're expandable, they're versatile, and they're not as expensive as consumer electronics.
Now, you must think I'm on crack for saying "not as expensive as consumer electronics". But honestly, PCs are component systems that don't have to be bought all at once. The initial shell-out is high, and the overall cost can be staggering on a small budget... but over time, it's not a bad thing at all. I've never had $3000 to spend on a computer at once, yet that's easily what my computer cost altogether (the SCSI subsystem alone breaks $1000). Stereo systems are like this as well - but you can easily spend $1500 the first time out on one of those as well. Most consumer electronics are either too dumb to cooperate in the manner suggested here, or can be a royal pain in the ass when they're integrated - TV/VCR combos come to mind.
Before this gets way too long, I think the correct approach is to:
1. Use existing PC hardware and write flexible, well-interfaced software packages for separate media functions. Not just your typical poorly-written driver software to watch TV, use a remote, or capture video - but software that does these things good and with greater power. The ideas are out there, typically the functionality is not.
2. Encourage new PC hardware to fill in the functionality gaps (HDTV tuners, USB plug-n-play IR receivers, radio tuners, big ass hard drives) and write quality software packages for those as well. Not to forget, the hardware needs OPEN STANDARD INTERFACES... not a separate programming interface or application for each brand of tuner, media player, etc., but something like the way all sound cards are SoundBlaster compatible or 3D cards have DirectX/OpenGL functionality.
3. Finally, someone builds a system with existing, well established hardware and software, that accomplishes the task of integrating all these components seamlessly, with an easy to use interface, that just plugs into the TV and the phone/cable line, and does all this stuff for you in your living room.
So... improve what we have, create what we need, and bring it all together when it's ready. But as it is now, it's not ready yet.
While I agree with the scientist's anger, I find the comparison of peer-reviewed articles to contracted copyrighted music entirely ludicrious.
Even technically, music can be copyrighted a number of ways. One person (or more than one) can write the song and the lyrics, and be registered for it under ASCAP. Then, someone can PERFORM it, and the record labels can have a copyright on THAT. Then there's derivative works, etc...
Let's not go to the lengths to say that science research - meant to further the human race - is in any way comparable to Britney Spears - meant to move us in the other direction while mesmerizing us with jiggly boobies moving across the stage.
Oh, by the way, there IS a reason researchers LICENSE FOR FREE their articles to journal publishers... so they can get them peer-reviewed, not just printed somewhere. And although the journal does not pay them for the rights to the article, certainly the journal doesn't have the rights to the artcle when all is said and done... and neither does anyone else in the world, as plagarism would be a copyright violation.
But I understand. It's morning, and you need more coffee. So do I.
Well, aside from that alone...
Say that you play an uncopyrighted or copyright expired work in a music player and use a vis engine to display visuals on the screen. You will avoid the legal muck mentioned above about unauthorized usage of copyrighted music.
Quickly, though, I understand where the author of the parent message is coming from. Let's say that MTV plays a video for a certain artist's single on a certain rotation... but then all of a sudden, some independent producer has the cohoneys to film a music video, unauthorized, for that single on his/her own and then submits it to MTV... and MTV likes it and puts it in the rotation. In nearly any event, the record industry would hit the mattresses on that one. I regard visualizations the same way... if anyone ever recorded a really good visualization for a song, bought a license to play the song on TV, and then played the visualization plus the song, there would be hell to pay. I think it's fair use as long as you have a sampling license, but you know that won't ever be permitted anyway. Just like they have posters in every university saying MP3s are illegal. But anyway, that's not the point of this...
The point is, there's yet another muck to get through... the license of the visualization itself! That's right, just cause you have it and downloaded it for free does NOT mean you are authorized to use it outside of your bedroom. I realized this when I came up with a concept for a TV show on my college's TV station. Basically, I had become pretty good at using Geiss (plugin for Winamp), and I could output to TV, so I recorded a few tapes of the video + sound and showed it to some friends... they liked it a lot (especially when they were rolling) and I figured it might make a good TV show. It was not to be (the station never gave the concept a chance, and disregarded the demo tape) but it would have been a gamble anyway - the Geiss license says that Ryan Geiss, the author, owns all the images produced by the plugin, and requires royalties for public display (cut and pasted from the license file):
TERMS OF USE / COPYRIGHT INFORMATION / PUBLIC DISPLAY
Geiss is 100 percent free for personal use. No registration is required.
Any commercial use of this program, however, requires the consent of the
author. For large ventures this will involve a licensing fee. Be wary
that every image or video sequence generated with this program is the sole
copyright of Ryan M. Geiss and can not be reproduced or displayed in public
without permission.
... After reading this, I did e-mail Geiss asking about the whole college TV station thing, because it would have been a non-profit private showing for the university... something that may fall under fair use (as it does in some cases with some things). Dishearteningly, he never replied. I didn't pursue it further after I knew the idea for the TV show tanked. Since then, Geiss got a job with WildTangent and doesn't develop Geiss anymore AFAIK... which is a shame because, as good as it was, there was some potential for enhanced functionality specifically dealing with scripted effects for displays. And, IMO, Punkie is better...
I'm not sure if the other visualization plugins have such restrictive licenses, but I know this one is unbearably harsh for anyone who wants to use it for public viewing or distribution. I'm not saying the idea of the license is unfair, but... I mean, come on, the damn thing only runs decent at 640x400x8, and you can't tell it what to do without having your hands on a keyboard (highly inconvenient for a DJ), I'm not paying a huge license fee for THAT. Or at least I'm pretty sure that the price I'd be willing to pay for an hour's worth of that (about $30) for 1000 people is a lot less than he's thinking he should get for it. The license should be spelled out in more certain terms, just so I can get an idea of what I would have to pay before I go out on any ventures.
So, check the fine print on the licenses for your plugins before you start playing them at DJ parties and raves. Just because you downloaded it for free doesn't mean it is free. And there are some very unsure concepts here about what the legality is of a copyrighted visualization + a copyrighted recording. It's a shame that the art may get lost in the process...
Now our space stations will look like Puff Daddy with all those crusted diamonds...
No, wait, it's P. Diddy now. Imagine that - the P. Diddy International Space Station.
We're asking for an alien invasion.
1. Internet Explorer
Open one IE window on a PII-233 with 64mb of RAM, and you're okay. Now try that with 20 windows. One of the great advantages of having >200mb RAM is that you can open every application on your computer 5 times and not thrash your hard drive into oblivion. Same thing with Word, Excel, Winamp, or any other program where you might have more than 3 windows open for no good reason. Speaking of hard drives...
2. CD burning + broadband
MP3 files aren't enough to demand special investments in hard drive technology. But once you get a CD burner, you now need a faster harddrive so you don't burn as many coasters. (I mean, you don't want one turtle C: drive for everything - moving the mouse will screw up the burn) Then you run out of things to throw on CD... but then you get a cable modem, and you're downloading VCDs and giant MP3 collections. And that's when you need BIGGER as well as faster. At that point, if you're serious, you're looking at IDE RAID or big honkin SCSI drives. (I went somewhere in the middle and got a medium sized, blazing fast SCSI and a large, fast IDE drive... but I still have space problems, hehehe)
3. Video capture
This is where things start to get out of hand. Everyone has looked at an ATI All-in-Wonder at some point and thought, "*Sigh* if only it were GREAT at 3D and didn't have crap drivers." Well, I went that route anyway (I didn't have a decent video card at the time), and I haven't played too many games in a year and a half as a result... but it was worth it. Now I can watch TV on the computer and watch the computer on the TV, record TV programs onto the hard drive, get some decent performance in 3D games, etc. Only problem is, it's not good enough... it does a lot of things well, but overall it's not that impressive as it is convenient. The newer Radeon AIW does make me salivate, though... but it's not a GeForce2 in 3D, it's not like TiVO for recording programs, and it's not like a professional video capture/compression setup for making movies and stuff. It's just decent, that's all. But once you lose sanity and go for the gold, you can REALLY rack up some big price tags. Once you have the taste in your mouth, it's hard not to be hungry. To have a GeForce3, a TiVO, a professional TV tuner/video capture card, a PentiumIII for the processing requirements (cause I like 720x540 realtime MPEG2 encoding), and a nice set of hard drives to hold all the movies (yet another reason to pick up an IDE RAID or SCSI hard drive habit)... well, that's a LOT of money. A lot more than the $100 I paid for the AIW on eBay. Granted, you may have no need for most of this... but the TiVO and the GeForce3 are expensive enough.
Maybe the next boundaries to push aren't in software functionality, but in software/hardware convenience. Running bloated code is one thing, running many bloated code programs at once and getting them to cooperate is another story. And I hate to say it, but right now we WASTE so many computer resources on absolutely nothing. I don't run SETI or RC5 cause I have no interest in it, so my processor sits idle and unentertaining. My DSL line also remains underused, even when Napster is going full throttle - there's plenty of low bandwidth applications that can work alongside a file download, yet I have no compelling reason to run any of them. Other than games and video compression, there is nothing that makes my computer work hard at all... but there's not much that I'm doing instead, either. Which is why it's about time that we started making lots of little flashy doo-dads and convenient background applications to use all that wasted processor time. For example, I've never seen a single good alarm-clock application for a PC. Also, why can't I have a simple yet powerful personal organizer program that looks like a Palm Pilot and that I can bring up by clicking on an icon in the taskbar? (in otherwords, a program that acts like a Palm Pilot but on the screen... maybe even an emulator, perhaps) What about a personal Internet radio station tracker? Or a TV program listings retriver and alert system? (instead of the TiVO recording it for you, you click on an icon in the taskbar and it tells you when your favorite programs are on that day - and alerts you, ICQ style, 5 minutes before any of them start) How about some SERIOUSLY snazzy looking Winamp plugins? Or flashy GUI stuff like active icons and mouse-over gradient animation highlighting? (or how about that Aqua stuff in the new OS X?) A lot of this stuff would really run well on Windows AND Linux... except you won't want to close everything just to run a game that needs your entire computer... so you just buy a faster computer to run the game AND all that stuff at the same time! Old idea, new implementation - how many of us bought a new computer because games didn't run fast unless you used a boot disk or something...
Judging by votes and sheer coolness, the 5k Chess is the big winner. Hell, it beat me. If something under 5k can beat me at chess... well, my TI-85 has 32kb, maybe I should let it think for me on a more frequent basis.
The big loser? Skadden Arps Recruiting site. Arriving at the entry itself is sort of like buying a car in the classified ads and then finding out that it's a tiny plastic model of a car. The joke is barely funny until you realize someone submitted that entry for real, and that the entry was posted on the list anyway.
Timepiece is pretty funky, I have to say.
By the way, I have made websites under 5k before, and I've found them highly entertaining. They consist mostly of ranting text about my high school from about 5 years ago. Oh well, maybe my tastes are unique to the world...
No, you won't see how the new help system works, because you use Linux and StarOffice.
Unless, that is, you switch over to the DARK SIDE.
:(
I'm very sorry that the state of the world has come to this, but I can't trust anyone enough to base an opinion on any facts presented so far in this incident. This is exactly what the Internet was supposed to SOLVE, but instead has made worse.
I'm American, and I sympathize with American interests. I think China is very dangerous because of their immense population, their hardline political stances, and their history of human rights violations/suppression. I'm not saying we should get into a war with China, and I'm not saying China should change to adopt our culture. Rather, I'm saying that the current situation demands a VERY delicate manner when dealing with China on foreign relations, because we strongly disagree with them on many things. Now, we've basically handed them 24 American armed forces to use as leverage so that the Chinese government can gain political power. It's as simple as that.
On the other hand, the U.S. is pretty arrogant, and that clouds the issue entirely. Specifically, we don't know what the government really knows, and we don't know what the media really knows. Since they would have the most reliable sources for the happenings of this incident, we should be able to find out exactly what happened and what needs to be done from them. But we can't trust them, not only to have a realistic opinion on the issue, but also to present the facts in an unbiased and truthful manner. We may very well be entitled to say MORE than sorry.
My gut instinct says that China is more likely at fault in this particular situation than the US, but the fact that I can't trust the facts means that I can't say that I have an informed opinion. All I know for sure is that the planes actually crashed and that the Americans are being held captive for the time being.
Now, of course, the Internet was supposed to be able to help us in these cases by being an improved provider of information in a timely, honest manner. But what happened? China filters all of their Internet access, which leads me to believe that there's nothing but propaganda on their side of the network. Over here, the media, rather than wait for news to be accurate and well-developed, chooses instead to report ANYTHING the second it comes in off the news wire. The whole Dale Earndhart tragedy/autopsy situation, the presidential elections, and even the news coverage of the Oscars are perfect examples of that... we're told things in stages as they come in. But almost none of it is verified as much as it is rushed out the door, making basically every media outlet another Matt Drudge. Plus, it's like having a scrap of the newspaper delivered every five minutes as it's progressively typed. But more importantly, it's starting to have a reputation for being unreliable... not to mention biased (read some news stories about Napster and ecstacy on Yahoo! to see what kind of one-sided treatments some of these news stories get sometimes).
Of course, people have always went for cheap, flashy, and fast in this country. It baffles me that more people eat at McDonalds still than Boston Market, especially considering the price of the meals at both places is somewhat similar. The Internet is no exception... people prefer big dumb web-portals to well-organized useful information sites, even though portals go out of business because they basically don't have much of a business to start with.
Perhaps if we just bombed all of China to get those pilots back on the first day of this "incident", everyone in the US would be happy and we would have avoided this whole mess. I'm not saying it would have been the proper thing to do (far from it); it just would have kept everyone fat and happy as usual. Bush's popularity would have been way up, just like his father's was after the Gulf War. Lots of cool TV footage of bombs going off, pictures of jet planes taking off, soldiers marching in, blah blah blah. Americans love that shit. They turn out in droves for the war victory parades. They like to see fireworks. It's fucking disgraceful.
My only hope is that the youth get sick of seeing fireworks at an early age and get bored with it all... and start pursuing more sensible priorities just because they're sick of "TRL" for the millionth time. That would be great.
So it's pronounced:
Rob-LIHM-oh
instead of
Rob-LEEM-oh
Didn't know that. Now I won't look like an idiot if I ever meet the guy in person and have to say his name. That already makes 2002 a possibly better year for me than 2001 would have been so far, due to one less embarrassing mispronouciation...
Yea, I noticed those Red Bull ads in Wipeout XL... mostly cuz I played it for 10 hours straight once. Awesome game. I wish I had that for the computer... (yea I know it was released on the PC, but it JUST wasn't the same)
:)
Yea, I also don't appreciate that "Oh god, not more ads" attitude. I've always LIKED advertisements... the less grating ones, anyway. Commercials can be entertaining, billboards can be eye-grabbing, etc. As long as they're not abrasive, they're fine. I think video game ads would be a good example of ads that would be less intrusive than most. And anything that reduces the cost of video games is OK by me
They will go to trial, and pay for their crimes...
Great! It's about time! I haven't bought a new computer in 2 years now, and the sooner we squeeze these bastards out of the market, the quicker I can buy a cheaper motherboard and cheaper RAM than what's out today!
(Oh, wait, I forgot about AMD.)
Now, all I need is those prices to come down on plasma displays a bit more, and I'm set...
Yea, great points. I figured I didn't wanna touch advertising, cause that does complicate things and brings a commercial feel into it (advertisers do have a lot of sway once they become the source of money... more so than you would think), and advertising is crashing on the net right now, so I dunno if anyone would get into a venture like that after these dot-coms crashed... but still, factor in advertising, and if it works, then it works even better. Maybe advertising could just make the whole thing FREE :)
:) but on top of that, pro-bono work is basically money LOST not doing something that pays. You also gain the advantage of people not having to worry that they're not spending enough time actually making money anymore, which gets more people involved in the process...
Also, I like your ideas about links, CD-ROMs, progressive reviews, and how journals work today... the nice thing about my proposed system, though, is assuming that it's not a horrible idea in the first place, people may not have to write articles pro-bono anymore, which means more people would get involved in doing research and publishing articles. Money is always good motivation
Electronic publication costs next to nothing?!?! I'll go with ya on the peer review costs... which is absolutely NOTHING, all you have to do is store responses and reviews, which isn't any more difficult to do than to store the actual articles... but electronic publication is VERY expensive. How about: buying the hardware, leasing the bandwidth, developing the software, and maintaining the network/servers? All that maintenance comes at a cost, not to mention the idea of a clearinghouse, advertising and marketing, etc. (I admit those costs would be minimal, but they're still costs) Basically, a computerized research network costs money... just like paper and printing costs money too. I was just throwing generous figures out, I have no idea what any of these costs are... and I said that first priority is to improve the current journal distribution methods anyway, since that would be easier and cheaper.
Second, page hits are meaningless. Basically, authors and research groups are paid every time someone BUYS an article to read or peer review. It's akin to buying a page out of a journal - one you buy it, it's yours forever. I don't think you can model this around page hits, since people have to pay before they look (other than an overview)... and the purpose of the system is for research and peer review, I don't see how counting simple page hits has anything to do with that. Basically, the first time someone accesses the article, they've bought it. They can look at it once, or a million times, but at that point the author and the research group (the people maintaining that server) are paid. Subscribers don't actually pay, but they've already paid a subscription fee and that money is pooled and used to pay the authors and research groups. One time buyers (per-article) DO pay on the spot, and have access to both the article and the peer review system, as do subscribers... but just for that article.
Yea, there are only cosmetic differences to what we have today... if you don't count the powerful search engine capabilities, the availability, the convenience, and the ease of use for peer reviewing. Basically, no books, full searching, available anywhere, and it's easy to review an article and have the review posted RIGHT AWAY for the whole world. It's a very powerful information system, compared to today's paper journals...
Oh, did you know, corporate resarch groups and universities ARE private businesses... the last time I checked, anyway. Research needs funding, period. The more funding, the better. But experiments cost money, and researchers need to eat.
Finally, I didn't intend to suggest a for-profit system... rather, I just wanted everything to pay for itself through a solid (yet kinda complicated, I admit) business model, and I thought researchers who write articles should be compensated modestly. One dollar from every subscriber who ever read/reviewed that particular article at least once does NOT add up quickly... and if it does, then maybe it's a powerful incentive to write GOOD articles, or maybe it's a target for cutting costs and reducing subscriber fees. I think it should all cost as little as possible, both to the subscriber and to the research groups... but there's a lot of money flying around in universities and in research groups which would be WELL SPENT on a powerful and effective online peer review and article publishing system. Once again, I advised fixing the printed journal distribution system first.
P.S. - I said information should not be free in this case, and that people shouldn't be posting articles for free on the Net. I stand behind that, and because of this: you can't walk in a library and grab a copy of everything you want and walk out with it. If libraries did that, they'd be really popular, but they'd go out of business quickly. But libraries do have books and publications (among other things), and in most cases any member of the public can go there to read them if he or she likes. It's the same thing with the Internet. Furthermore, a precedent of "everything is totally free" encourages business models that emphasize being cheap, fast, and prolific. In other words, crappy. Quantity over quality. I believe that authors do themselves a great disservice by setting such a precedent. I think a little patience in this case will prevent the peer-review process from being "Napsterized". But I think ultimately, the whole process should be public and available to all. Okay, so with my system, not everyone can log in from home and read whatever they want... but I specifically wanted something where universities and public libraries could subscribe (via site licenses) to the system so that it would be another freely available resource to anyone on-premises. Just like books and journals are today. And it's more powerful beyond that, too, but if you are just some guy off the street, you can get to it if you need to. So it would be free for everyone. That's why I like that idea. For now, though, it just takes planning and patience.
I get the idea that there's a couple of serious issues to deal with here:
* Journals are inconvenient due to distribution, format, and pricing.
* There isn't a consensus opinion on how to instatiate the peer review process online.
* Funding for research and the viability of the distribution systems are money issues that can't be ignored: people need to make money on research as well as have it peer reviewed, and information distributors MUST put food on the table somehow.
Basically, it boils down to political and fiscal issues. And this is not a case of greed; rather, people have needs, there are livelihoods at stake, and we're talking about a very important process for research that basically includes ALL human scientific advancement.
So, there are no easy answers.
Here's what I think:
Printed journals are good. They just need more availability, more participation, and a reduced cost. While Internet distribution sounds great, we have a current system that needs improvement. It's more beneficial... not to mention easier and cheaper... to improve the printed journals. Plus, we need the journals. Everyone currently reads journals, it's easier for most of the scientific community at this point to deal with printed journals, and I think the scientific community would suffer if we let journals degrade further or disappear entirely. So let's think of that first.
Next, we need a prototype/pilot peer review process online. It needs to make money (not all information can be free), it needs to be more effective and convenient than published journals, it needs to be robust, scalable, practical, and easy to use. (most people shouldn't have to type %man "Mayan anthropology" or something like that) And in the meantime, articles should NOT be published freely on the net AT ALL, as it hurts our progress in both printed journals (robs them of needed revenue) and online distribution (makes it scattered and sets a bad precedent for pricing).
Here's a sample model for an online peer review process, if I were to whip it up this weekend - a Slashcode-powered subscription website frontend, with a separate domain for each journal field. Professional groups, like the ones that put out journals, are responsible for setting up and maintaining their own domains... as in, they follow a cookie-cutter method for setting it up, and it's standarized for all domains, but each group moderates and maintains their own domain so that you don't have something like one website with ALL scientific articles being maintained by the same 6 computer guys. All actual articles are stored in a networked database. The front-ends access the database for the actual articles, you can do a very broad search on that one database easily, it's nearly infintely scalable to handle any scientific field, and it keeps the subscription model centralized. Individual users are charged one of the following ways: per article, retrieve article and have commenting/review priviledges for that article for a nominal one-time fee (like $3 per article, or prepay for 20 articles for $50, something like that); per domain, access to whole domain for a modest subscription fee (like $10 a month); all-domains access for individual user, large personal subscription fee ($100 a month); and all-domains for organziation, site and user licensing fees for libraries, universities, corporations, research groups, etc. where users belonging to an organization can access the articles at a licensed computing site or they can register with the database through the organization for universal access. Organizations probably should have per-domain licensing, too. Searching would be free to all, but obviously the results would be limited to subscribers (as in, they can find what they're looking for, but they can't get to it without paying... kind of if you used Google but the links it returned asked for your username when clicked).
You could do some nifty things with personalization, information linking, relevant searches, multiple domain cross-posting, etc.
Oh, and profits would be distributed like this: authors get commissions based on article views/participation (like, $1 per user participating in an article, one time), domains get 50% of per-domain subscriptions plus 50 cents for each non-per-domain subscriber article participation (all-domain and per-article users), the main database publishing organization gets 10-15% of all fees - that leaves about $1 leftover fees from each per-article view, per-domain subscribers have their subscription fees distributed after 5 article participations in a given domain (which means money is lost after the 5th article participation), and all-domain individual users fees are distributed after 60 (!) article participations (if you made it $50/month, it would be 30 participations).
This leaves organization fees: an organization could pay for all-domains, per year: $300 per licensed site (individual computer), and for universal access user members, something like $200 for up to 20 users, $400 for up to 50 users, $1000 for up to 200 users, etc. That means, every year, each site computer could access/participate in 180 articles, and each universal access user could participate in 3 - 6 articles and you're still making money. Now, per-domain organization access, that would be an agreement between the domain holder and the organization, but the main database publishing organization should still get $20 a year for each licensed site and 50 cents per universal access user. The main database publishing organization would be a clearinghouse for user fees and author/domain payments.
The logic behind all of this would need to be refined much further and some of it just doesn't scale well... it could get very complicated, because the overall system makes 30% undistributed profit on each per-article purchase, but a university like mine (20,000 enrolled plus faculty) would pay something like $125,000 per year to the organization for full access on all library computers (not counting other computing sites) and universal user access for all students and faculty, and that pays for 75,000 participations, or about 3 per person overall... yet if all faculty members plus 10% of heavy research students viewed/participated in an average of 20 articles in a year (not a lot of views if you have a lot of research) and the remaining students averaged 2 article views/participations, the clearinghouse (which uses %10 of the original payment to stay in business) pays out to domains and authors over $30,000 more than it recieved from the group. Reduce both author and domain fees by 50%, and you scale far better, but I don't even know if $1 for authors and 50 cents for domains per view is even enough payment to maintain the system... plus, the fees from users may be entirely too high to begin with, since $3 per article, $100 per all-access user, and $125,000 per large university are all rather high... more than journals cost (to a point) and redundant since the journals are out there already...
Overall, it's a decent sized project, but it's viability can be tested on a small scale... and from there, it's all math, statistics, and consumer interest studies. Maybe the top researchers could make enough money off of such a system to rival A-Rod, and maybe a lot of researchers would find the payments affordable and worthwhile... then again, maybe everyone will starve trying to publish these articles, and maybe everyone will balk at even $1 a month for articles. And the system becomes more valuable as it gets bigger, but it might lose money faster that way, and it's always a big risk to build something that would be successful only if it gets really big. But it's worth thinking about.
Yes I did. Now where's my space ride?
:-P