Netflix had a big spread in Wired several months back... the business model of the company is such that they are only profitable on accounts which rent 5 or less movies a month.
Logical from a purely bean-counting perspective. But I'd imagine the people who are renting >5 movies per month are probably, at the same time, the most zealous advocates of Netflix. They're probably the ones going around telling all their friends about it, bringing in new business.
Actually, Netflix does now have some sort of deal with the studios that allows them to manufacture their own discs. Sort of like how the BMG Music Club does it for audio CDs, I suspect.
Check it out: Look carefully at the Netflix discs you get in the mail from now on. Every now and again, you'll get one that has just the title of the film printed in a weird font (kind of Art Deco) and no graphics. Actually, the text isn't printed... the entire surface of the disc is printed a sort of purplish grey color, and the "printed" part is actually the parts that are missing, so you can see the silver of the disc itself through the letters. On these discs, there's just the movie title, the studio logo... and the Netflix logo.
So, they ARE trying to do something about the cost of maintaining inventory...
Spiderman was a cool comic book because Marvel, not sony, not you, and not some amorphous, non corporate comic machine in the sky, paid cool artists, and cool writers, to produce a cool comic, which had to be printed on a cool press, and distributed nationwide.
Ah, but one could argue that this all happened in a different age, before Marvel became a publicly traded corporation, before corporate raider Ron Perelman decided to ream the company out for quick profits, dragging it into bankruptcy. Only after all this happened did Marvel become the intellectual property factory we know and love today. Before that, they made cool comics.
Today's Marvel is so scandalous they'll even screw Stan Lee himself, the very same "cool writer" who invented half of the characters Marvel shareholders stand to profit from today. So, please -- before you start getting on your soapbox about people being too sanctimonious, make sure you know which company you're talking about first.
Back in my poor college days, we'd subscribe to magazines just to get them for free. 15 or 20 magazines addressed to IP Freely, Poopoo Stayne, and Rev. Fuckyouintheass to name a few names we used.
Ah, you smutty-mouthed youth of today. In my day, stating your name as "Freema Gazine" was sufficient.
But if the band abuses the agreement, in the end they hurt themselves. If you're in the indie punk world, and Ian Mckay is not on your good side, your band is pretty much dead. He's pretty influential (he's in Fugazi, after all).
Jesus, man... so when you sleep over at Dischord House, do you get the left side of the bed or the right?
I've never really gotten QT to work correctly in Windows. Multiple machines, multiple versions of the OS, etc. Something is always wrong.
Rumor always had it that porting QuickTime to Windows required that Apple port something like 50% of the core Mac OS 9 APIs. I wouldn't go so far as to say QuickTime for Windows is running under an emulator, but it's pretty darn close.
I'm not sure if I'd make that assumption. A company may hire a consultant because they want an outside opinion. Everyone at the company gets so used to thinking the same way they lose sight of the forest for the trees.
Bingo. Absolutely. I've seen this even in things like Web development jobs. A company will hire an outside agency to create a Web page for them. All the while they do nothing but bitch and complain. Outside agency busts its collective asses, working weekends and nights, to produce what the company seems to be asking for. When all's said and done, the company issues a sniffy acknowledgement, then two months later they tear the whole thing down and re-design the site in-house.
As it turns out, the problem wasn't so much that the company needed outside expertise to get the job done -- in fact, there were plenty of people on staff who took offense at the very suggestion. The problem was that the corporate culture was such that they were completely incapable of coming to a decision until they got someone from the outside to make some for them. Once that was done, they were able to conclude that none of the decisions made were right for them and they really wanted to proceed in another direction entirely.
Should they have been able to communicate their needs from the very start? Of course. But again, that would have required their internal meetings to actually have been productive, and as we all know, they all too frequently are not.
Should the consultant [outside Web agency] feel bad for not having been able to convince the client that its ideas/decisions were the right ones? I'd say hell no -- in fact, the chances of that happening were minimal from the very beginning. Take the money and move on.
Re:I'm glad I was too young to use that
on
Implementing VisiCalc
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· Score: 3, Insightful
But the worst part was probably having to program these machines. 8 bit assembly code, tweaks all around, memory and speed concerns... It's much better to write a Java program in a 2.0 Ghz machine with 512 MB memory.
TROLL! I call troll!
Or if you're not, you're totally off base. Those were the days when programming was really fun, man! I remember being really excited when the PalmPilot came out, cuz it sounded like a good opportunity to get back to programming the way folks were meant to do it.
This is getting confusing. When I talked to a guy at MS who does.Net development he told me that.Net is basicaly a fancy standardized way of doing XML markup.
I think this is some lingering confusion from the early days of the.Net thrust, when Microsoft was calling just about everything.Net.
I've heard Steve Ballmer, too, referring to.Net as basically a way to facilitate inter-application compatibility using XML. But what I think he's talking about is the.Net applications effort -- using an XML format for Office.Net, etc. What we're talking about here could be more properly called the.Net Development Environment/Platform, and that's considerably more complicated.
I think it's safe to chalk a lot of this confusion up to "baffle 'em with bullshit" marketing designed to scare customers into tightening their grip around the arm of their buddy, the almighty Vendor. If you want a straight answer, next time you ask a Microsoft guy, try asking him not "What is.Net" but "What's the benefit of the.Net Development Environment?" and see what answer you get.
Social control - yes
Right-wing politics - hell no! Socialist influences more like.
While I agree with you to a certain extent, I got a new look at Norwegian society when I was bumbling around Oslo around 2:30am one day, after missing my bus back to Stockholm. YES, it's true that Scandinavian countries have a heavy Socialist bent, YES, the government will provide just about anything for anybody... but I think a certain amount of that is only on the surface. Case in point, the security guy I saw kicking -- literally, kicking -- the homeless couple awake for sleeping in front of the train station... I suspect that type of thing is much closer to the heart of the society than most Norwegians are willing to admit.
Accept the sprawling bureaucracy of social programs and the accepted social order: OK, fine.
Reject it, or fall through the cracks of it: Who needs you? Get lost.
What's more, here's a country that threw Christian "Varg" Vikernes in jail for just 21 years (a so-called "life sentence") for stabbing another guy to death -- first-degree murder, in U.S. parlance. On the other hand, this Jon guy goes to trial twice for -- what? Writing software? Go figure those priorities! "Right-wing politics -- hell no" indeed!
If the MPAA can keep on pursuing Jon, regardless of his acquittal, on the grounds that his product enables "movie piracy", then surely there's a lot of other folks that should be seriously worried right now.
1) Smith&Wesson, Colt, Heckler&Koch all have products that enable, for example, car-jacking, armed robbery and murder.
News Flash: That one's already been tried. It ain't like computer hackers are the only people to ever have to defend themselves from aggressive lawsuits.
(Then again, on the earlier example -- while it's true that guns don't kill people, trigger fingers don't fire bullets...)
Whew! For a minute there, I thought I'd see a Slashdot post where some chucklehead didn't use the condescending, tired old "nothing to see here, move along" line.
On a related (but off-topic) note, does anyone know the "best" version of Army of Darkness to buy? Seems like there must have been about eight of them released...
There's your official reason right there, and it's reasonable. If Warner released an expensive special edition now, it would push the standard Matrix DVD farther back on the shelves.
Though your argument sounds reasonable, I doubt this is what's really behind the studio's decision. After all, it's not like they're still trying to clear out their old back stock of the original Matrix DVD.
As my professor described it, is a system similar to a power grid. You can plug in anywhere, and use the resources (Disk, Memory, CPU) of the grid for computation. Your resources would be added to the "grid collective" as well.
It seems as though this system would inherently be P2P.
Actually, if you take a moment to at least skim the article, you'll see that the Slashdot headline isn't exactly correct. This article doesn't actually spend a whole lot of time predicting a "convergence" of Grid computing and P2P.
What it says, as far as I see it, in a nutshell:
Grid computing and P2P have similar goals, and are each an attempt to address many of the same problems.
The Grid and P2P approaches tackle these problems from different directions.
Before either is completely successful, a system will probably emerge that incorporates elements of both.
So in that sense, yes, he's predicting some convergence. But on the other hand, what most of the paper seems to do is both compare and contrast the P2P and Grid approaches, so that people like you who say, "Wait a minute! This Grid stuff and this P2P stuff, it all sounds like the same thing!" can finally figure out what the differences are.
In that sense, it seems like a really great paper, the kind of thing I've sought after for a while now. Nice one, Ian!
I buy CDs from artists that I trust to deliver a full album of good songs.
I call that "not getting out much." Or at minimum, being predictable.
Thus, paying $0.99 per song to download a shitty mp3 is pointless to me.
Apple is apparently going to deliver music in AAC format, not MP3. I haven't heard audio in this format, so I personally can't tell you whether it's going to be shitty or not.
But the way it currently is, for the music I like, it's the same price, without getting the original, full quality version, and without physical media. And frankly, that sucks.
Really? When I buy music, half the time I end up ripping the album to MP3, so I can burn them to a CD, so I can walk around with about 12 albums in my MP3 CD Player and not have to worry about carrying around all that physical media. In fact, the physical media ends up taking up far too much space in my apartment.
This, BTW, was the point of the "threatens you" comment. You seem to get pretty touchy when confronted with the fact that not everybody's music-listening habits are like yours.
Ummm... yeah. I guess you get the point. At 99 cents per track instead of $17 per disc, nobody has to buy the shitty music they don't like. They just buy the songs they do like.
2. The employer never has your resume on his desk, in physical form, printed on quality paper stock.
Actually, as someone who has both applied for jobs and hired people to work, I always submit my resume pasted as plain text at the end of my cover email -- no MS Word, no attachments, no fancy graphics, no stupid monogrammed paper.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Netflix does now have some sort of deal with the studios that allows them to manufacture their own discs. Sort of like how the BMG Music Club does it for audio CDs, I suspect.
... the entire surface of the disc is printed a sort of purplish grey color, and the "printed" part is actually the parts that are missing, so you can see the silver of the disc itself through the letters. On these discs, there's just the movie title, the studio logo ... and the Netflix logo.
Check it out: Look carefully at the Netflix discs you get in the mail from now on. Every now and again, you'll get one that has just the title of the film printed in a weird font (kind of Art Deco) and no graphics. Actually, the text isn't printed
So, they ARE trying to do something about the cost of maintaining inventory...
Today's Marvel is so scandalous they'll even screw Stan Lee himself, the very same "cool writer" who invented half of the characters Marvel shareholders stand to profit from today. So, please -- before you start getting on your soapbox about people being too sanctimonious, make sure you know which company you're talking about first.
Jesus, man
Rumor always had it that porting QuickTime to Windows required that Apple port something like 50% of the core Mac OS 9 APIs. I wouldn't go so far as to say QuickTime for Windows is running under an emulator, but it's pretty darn close.
LOL! Me too, man!
:-)
P.S. Take that, ya cowards!
As it turns out, the problem wasn't so much that the company needed outside expertise to get the job done -- in fact, there were plenty of people on staff who took offense at the very suggestion. The problem was that the corporate culture was such that they were completely incapable of coming to a decision until they got someone from the outside to make some for them. Once that was done, they were able to conclude that none of the decisions made were right for them and they really wanted to proceed in another direction entirely.
Should they have been able to communicate their needs from the very start? Of course. But again, that would have required their internal meetings to actually have been productive, and as we all know, they all too frequently are not.
Should the consultant [outside Web agency] feel bad for not having been able to convince the client that its ideas/decisions were the right ones? I'd say hell no -- in fact, the chances of that happening were minimal from the very beginning. Take the money and move on.
Or if you're not, you're totally off base. Those were the days when programming was really fun, man! I remember being really excited when the PalmPilot came out, cuz it sounded like a good opportunity to get back to programming the way folks were meant to do it.
Who's with me??
I've heard Steve Ballmer, too, referring to .Net as basically a way to facilitate inter-application compatibility using XML. But what I think he's talking about is the .Net applications effort -- using an XML format for Office.Net, etc. What we're talking about here could be more properly called the .Net Development Environment/Platform, and that's considerably more complicated.
I think it's safe to chalk a lot of this confusion up to "baffle 'em with bullshit" marketing designed to scare customers into tightening their grip around the arm of their buddy, the almighty Vendor. If you want a straight answer, next time you ask a Microsoft guy, try asking him not "What is .Net" but "What's the benefit of the .Net Development Environment?" and see what answer you get.
Accept the sprawling bureaucracy of social programs and the accepted social order: OK, fine.
Reject it, or fall through the cracks of it: Who needs you? Get lost.
What's more, here's a country that threw Christian "Varg" Vikernes in jail for just 21 years (a so-called "life sentence") for stabbing another guy to death -- first-degree murder, in U.S. parlance. On the other hand, this Jon guy goes to trial twice for -- what? Writing software? Go figure those priorities! "Right-wing politics -- hell no" indeed!
(Then again, on the earlier example -- while it's true that guns don't kill people, trigger fingers don't fire bullets...)
Whew! For a minute there, I thought I'd see a Slashdot post where some chucklehead didn't use the condescending, tired old "nothing to see here, move along" line.
Am I missing something?
The dates on the letters posted on that Web site, including the one about GM "pulling the plug," are from February 2002.
Yep -- some of us are, anyway.
What it says, as far as I see it, in a nutshell:
- Grid computing and P2P have similar goals, and are each an attempt to address many of the same problems.
- The Grid and P2P approaches tackle these problems from different directions.
- Before either is completely successful, a system will probably emerge that incorporates elements of both.
So in that sense, yes, he's predicting some convergence. But on the other hand, what most of the paper seems to do is both compare and contrast the P2P and Grid approaches, so that people like you who say, "Wait a minute! This Grid stuff and this P2P stuff, it all sounds like the same thing!" can finally figure out what the differences are.In that sense, it seems like a really great paper, the kind of thing I've sought after for a while now. Nice one, Ian!
This, BTW, was the point of the "threatens you" comment. You seem to get pretty touchy when confronted with the fact that not everybody's music-listening habits are like yours.
Sorry if that threatens you somehow.
And this is bad how, exactly?
Let me guess: When it's called PGP it's good, when they call it Microsoft Something Something it's bad?