On a Spectrum. Character (sorry - Commander) was called Boss Hogg, as I recall. Spent days and days on it, got to Deadly, and then something in the computer started to go badly wrong (capacitor?) resulting in the dread dot-crawl...
Now your argument says if I illegally download a song, this harms the supply. This has nothing to do with the supply. Even if 100,000 people downloaded the same song, this still would have no effect on the supply. The supply is the same. Even applying this to demand, since I never had the intent to ever buy the song, and if most of the other 100k people never had any intent to buy the song, then this does not affect the demand.
True, but if those 100,000 people offered that same song for global distribution at near-zero opportunity cost, I reckon you'd find that the market is affected on the supply side and demand for the song at the price level set by the recording industry is obviously lower. Clearly not every consumer has the access to the P2P 'market' and the purchase of computer + bandwidth obviously represents an substantial opportunity cost, but for those which already have the equipment...
Can we talk about something else, please?
on
Cheap Audio Production
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Because there is only so many times a week that I can stomach listening to Slashdot's collective indignance about the recording industry and its antics.
Surprise, surprise: advances in technology drive down the costs of production; I'm sure that every aspect of the music business has benefitted from this in some way or another.
Equally unsurprising: We're not seeing any of this money, as the industry is effectively an oligopoly, with high barriers to entry on a national/international level.
And between a) apathy-induced boycotts of major label artists on the grounds of not being very good, and b) illegal distribution of the very little we can be bothered to buy via P2P networks, we'll either remedy the situation through the collapse of recording industry as we know it or make it worse through yet further consolidation of record labels, putting even more power in the hands of the people we despise the most.
Ian McLeod is Scottish, for a start. I know it seems like a subtle difference, but at least try and get it right.
Ian Mcleod is a socialist and has written some pretty intersting stuff about how the future might work if you do not accept the inevitability of near-future societies that are nation-state economies driven by Capitalism. He nails the US, because of its arch-Capitalist nature, and ironically tags the UN as behoven to the US.
I guess he got pretty fed up with seeing the future solely portrayed as a Captialist utopia, something which he disagrees with. It's nothing personal, just another point of view.
Most newspapers go through several editions, from the first edition, which you can get late the previous day if you live in the city where it's published, to the last which goes out about during the morning. Early editions (being few, as a percentage of the total) tend to disappear (which ones get archived, for instance?)
The most striking example of this I can remember was the Sunday Express (I think) published on the day that Princess Diana died. The first edition was extremely critical of her, her management of her life and her dalliance with Dodi al-Fayed. But suddenly, in the space of an hour, she became a saint, and you'd believe that the paper had always been her strongest supporter.
The real cash-cow for Microsoft is Office, and it is certainly inconceivable that Office could go Open Source.
However, there are certain MS products (IIS, even the core OS) which could be at least partially opened up in order to capture some of the coding-for-free Open Source culture. But if you thought that Linus was picky with patch acceptance, imagine what Bill would be like.
However, it won't happen, since:
Gates is just philosophically opposed to it
The enormous law suit which would follow from shareholders claiming wilful destruction of shareholder value
I guess there's a few reasons why Hollywood would want to do this a Wallace and Gromit film:
Cheap. The fixed cost is pretty low, and the keeping the animators supplied with clay and film is a lot less expensive than top-earning actors/actresses, huge sfx sequences, expensive sound sets and location shooting.
No egos. Nick Park is is one of the most self-effacing multi-Oscar winners you can find. Peter Sallis is not going to throw a fit because his trailer only has one jacuzzi.
Infinite Merchandising. The BBC has been (for a state-run organisation) extremely effective at the merchandising thing. And the merchandising opportunities are directly proportional to the imagination of the creators
I was worried about Chicken Run, as I thought the combination of Mel Gibson and Disney was going to overwhelm the charm and subtlety (and, let's face it, Englishness) of Aardvark's films. As it turned out, Gibson seemed to understand and was completely cool with the Aardvark style; Disney knew when to butt out. Brownie points all round.
You're right - but how much money will EA make on Xbox Live, subscription for for subscription, vs an equivalent PS2 version? The problem seems to be that Microsoft wants to use some sort of trickle-down effect to keep publishers happy. EA isn't used to playing that game.
EA's sports titles are highly visible and successful; I think Microsoft was counting on leveraging those brands to make Xbox Live a success and recoup some cash. Losing the multi-player angle is a big loss to Microsoft.
Eidos isn't such a big loss, but it all adds to the FUD surrounding Xbox Live.
Hmm; seems to be a fair sprinkling of ESA projects in there, not to mention national agency projects. Not wanting to picky, or anything, mind. NASA certainly contributes elements to many of these projects but to imply that they are NASA projects is a little disingenuous.
NVIDIA not does yet have driver optimised for the paths which 3DMark 2003 uses. World+dog has gone benchmark crazy, particularly the mad-for-it overclocking vanguard which forms a large part of the early-adopter community, and who drive sales through sites like, err, slashdot.
Without them and good, king-of-the-hill benchmarks, NV30 is dead in the water.
No - they want to produce one before one gets mandated on them by the government. If they can point to actions _they_ are taking to prevent what they (Microsoft/RIAA) consider piracy or theft (never mind arguments over the definitions of these terms) they may persuade the governemnt that no action is necessary.
This probably explains the statements they were making earlier vis a vis mandated DRM.
I think there's a certain amount of Not Invented Here around (and it goes both ways) but that probably comes from:
Every project manager believing that they can do a better job than the last by bringing their vision (read: buzz-words) to the project,
a need to develop the European space industry to get a competitive mix of companies
And last but not least
redistributing money from the European tax-payer to the space/defense industry.
Galileo certainly is a major case of this.
It cuts both ways; I believe it is very nearly impossible for a European firm to win any work for NASA and NASA would not buy in anything European.
Things are slowly changing though. Both the NASA and ESA budgets are being squeezed so I think we will see a lot more of organisations such as CCSDS being used a way of reducing needless duplication of effort and encouraging more open systems.
There is already joint venture between the Russians and Europeans to provide Soyuz launch services (Starsem), but this seems to be just a method for hiking prices for Russian launches so they are not undercutting Arianespace prices enormously. Guess where the extra money goes? Yep - Arianespace.
There seems to be a plan to shift Soyuz launches from Baikonur to Kourou as the Kazakhstan government is getting edgy about exploding Protons wiping out land downrange. Plus it is closer to the equator, so you get a greater delta-V from the Earth's rotation.
In any case, Arianespace decided early on in the Ariane 5 program that man-rating it was going to be prohibitively expensive with no real Return on Investment. So it's going to be up the the US and Russia to keep manned space flight going. I'm sure the Chinese will be only too happy (propaganda-wise) to shuttle westerners up to LEO but we'll all be juggling snowballs through hell before we see that happening.
It is certainly not ESA's stated aim to be develop technology incompatible with NASA, that is just wrong. ESA and NASA are partners in varying proportions on a substantial number of projects, past, present and future, such as IUE, SOHO, Ulysses, Hubble and JWST. EURECA was flown on a Space Shuttle, which you cannot do if you don't interoperate with the Shuttle's systems. Huygens is the ESA Titan Lander piggy-backing on Cassini on its way to Saturn. ESA uses the NASA DSN for up/downlink if their stations cannot provide coverage. ESA certainly competes with NASA (albeit on unequal budget terms) but that's good as it keeps things focussed.
And as for the UK, ESA and geographic return; the UK does get big contracts, usually through Astrium UK, but this is but part of a multinational company based elsewhere. The space segment market in Europe is as much of a oligopoly as it is in the US. In the ground segment market, the UK competes very effectively through companies such as Vega, Serco, Logica and Science Systems.
The fact is that the UK does not contribute the money that other contries do because of its typical anti-European attitude, so it doesn't get the work. The UK was a founder member of ESA but gave up this leadership position because it thought it could do better by itself.
Well, it's common practice in the compilation of Dictionaries - the compiler will throw in a few non-existent words in order to identify any non-authorised editions that occur.
Well, ESA is comparatively unbureaucratic compared to NASA, especially the manned-spaceflight part.
The Ariane 4 series (another product of that 'shoddy nationalized industry') had one of the best launch records around and was incredibly successful, along with Boeing and Lockheed designs, in opening up space for commercialization.
And if you think that it'll take just 10 years to move from a government organized, but market driven space industry to 'space settled by commerce, not governments', you must be stark raving mad.
Your general tone and lack of actual knowledge (as opposed to half-baked opinions) just say' The lights are on, the door is open, but Mr Brain has long since departed.'
Slashdot Mirror
On a Spectrum. Character (sorry - Commander) was called Boss Hogg, as I recall. Spent days and days on it, got to Deadly, and then something in the computer started to go badly wrong (capacitor?) resulting in the dread dot-crawl...
Now your argument says if I illegally download a song, this harms the supply. This has nothing to do with the supply. Even if 100,000 people downloaded the same song, this still would have no effect on the supply. The supply is the same. Even applying this to demand, since I never had the intent to ever buy the song, and if most of the other 100k people never had any intent to buy the song, then this does not affect the demand.
True, but if those 100,000 people offered that same song for global distribution at near-zero opportunity cost, I reckon you'd find that the market is affected on the supply side and demand for the song at the price level set by the recording industry is obviously lower. Clearly not every consumer has the access to the P2P 'market' and the purchase of computer + bandwidth obviously represents an substantial opportunity cost, but for those which already have the equipment...
Because there is only so many times a week that I can stomach listening to Slashdot's collective indignance about the recording industry and its antics.
Surprise, surprise: advances in technology drive down the costs of production; I'm sure that every aspect of the music business has benefitted from this in some way or another.
Equally unsurprising: We're not seeing any of this money, as the industry is effectively an oligopoly, with high barriers to entry on a national/international level.
And between a) apathy-induced boycotts of major label artists on the grounds of not being very good, and b) illegal distribution of the very little we can be bothered to buy via P2P networks, we'll either remedy the situation through the collapse of recording industry as we know it or make it worse through yet further consolidation of record labels, putting even more power in the hands of the people we despise the most.
God I'm feeling cynical today.
Ian McLeod is Scottish, for a start. I know it seems like a subtle difference, but at least try and get it right.
Ian Mcleod is a socialist and has written some pretty intersting stuff about how the future might work if you do not accept the inevitability of near-future societies that are nation-state economies driven by Capitalism. He nails the US, because of its arch-Capitalist nature, and ironically tags the UN as behoven to the US.
I guess he got pretty fed up with seeing the future solely portrayed as a Captialist utopia, something which he disagrees with. It's nothing personal, just another point of view.
Here I can only speak for the UK but:
Most newspapers go through several editions, from the first edition, which you can get late the previous day if you live in the city where it's published, to the last which goes out about during the morning. Early editions (being few, as a percentage of the total) tend to disappear (which ones get archived, for instance?)
The most striking example of this I can remember was the Sunday Express (I think) published on the day that Princess Diana died. The first edition was extremely critical of her, her management of her life and her dalliance with Dodi al-Fayed. But suddenly, in the space of an hour, she became a saint, and you'd believe that the paper had always been her strongest supporter.
The real cash-cow for Microsoft is Office, and it is certainly inconceivable that Office could go Open Source.
However, there are certain MS products (IIS, even the core OS) which could be at least partially opened up in order to capture some of the coding-for-free Open Source culture. But if you thought that Linus was picky with patch acceptance, imagine what Bill would be like.
However, it won't happen, since:
I guess there's a few reasons why Hollywood would want to do this a Wallace and Gromit film:
I was worried about Chicken Run, as I thought the combination of Mel Gibson and Disney was going to overwhelm the charm and subtlety (and, let's face it, Englishness) of Aardvark's films. As it turned out, Gibson seemed to understand and was completely cool with the Aardvark style; Disney knew when to butt out. Brownie points all round.
You're right - but how much money will EA make on Xbox Live, subscription for for subscription, vs an equivalent PS2 version? The problem seems to be that Microsoft wants to use some sort of trickle-down effect to keep publishers happy. EA isn't used to playing that game.
EA's sports titles are highly visible and successful; I think Microsoft was counting on leveraging those brands to make Xbox Live a success and recoup some cash. Losing the multi-player angle is a big loss to Microsoft.
Eidos isn't such a big loss, but it all adds to the FUD surrounding Xbox Live.
Which is ironic, really, considering the FUDee.
It's more Xbox Living Dead than Xbox Live
It would be the ESA symbol, certainly not the EU one, since there are members of ESA who are not EU members and vice versa.
Hmm; seems to be a fair sprinkling of ESA projects in there, not to mention national agency projects.
Not wanting to picky, or anything, mind. NASA certainly contributes elements to many of these projects but to imply that they are NASA projects is a little disingenuous.
NVIDIA not does yet have driver optimised for the paths which 3DMark 2003 uses. World+dog has gone benchmark crazy, particularly the mad-for-it overclocking vanguard which forms a large part of the early-adopter community, and who drive sales through sites like, err, slashdot.
Without them and good, king-of-the-hill benchmarks, NV30 is dead in the water.
No - they want to produce one before one gets mandated on them by the government. If they can point to actions _they_ are taking to prevent what they (Microsoft/RIAA) consider piracy or theft (never mind arguments over the definitions of these terms) they may persuade the governemnt that no action is necessary.
This probably explains the statements they were making earlier vis a vis mandated DRM.
Every project manager believing that they can do a better job than the last by bringing their vision (read: buzz-words) to the project,
a need to develop the European space industry to get a competitive mix of companies
And last but not least
redistributing money from the European tax-payer to the space/defense industry.
Galileo certainly is a major case of this.
It cuts both ways; I believe it is very nearly impossible for a European firm to win any work for NASA and NASA would not buy in anything European.
Things are slowly changing though. Both the NASA and ESA budgets are being squeezed so I think we will see a lot more of organisations such as CCSDS being used a way of reducing needless duplication of effort and encouraging more open systems.
There is already joint venture between the Russians and Europeans to provide Soyuz launch services (Starsem), but this seems to be just a method for hiking prices for Russian launches so they are not undercutting Arianespace prices enormously. Guess where the extra money goes? Yep - Arianespace.
There seems to be a plan to shift Soyuz launches from Baikonur to Kourou as the Kazakhstan government is getting edgy about exploding Protons wiping out land downrange. Plus it is closer to the equator, so you get a greater delta-V from the Earth's rotation.
In any case, Arianespace decided early on in the Ariane 5 program that man-rating it was going to be prohibitively expensive with no real Return on Investment. So it's going to be up the the US and Russia to keep manned space flight going. I'm sure the Chinese will be only too happy (propaganda-wise) to shuttle westerners up to LEO but we'll all be juggling snowballs through hell before we see that happening.
It is certainly not ESA's stated aim to be develop technology incompatible with NASA, that is just wrong. ESA and NASA are partners in varying proportions on a substantial number of projects, past, present and future, such as IUE, SOHO, Ulysses, Hubble and JWST. EURECA was flown on a Space Shuttle, which you cannot do if you don't interoperate with the Shuttle's systems. Huygens is the ESA Titan Lander piggy-backing on Cassini on its way to Saturn. ESA uses the NASA DSN for up/downlink if their stations cannot provide coverage. ESA certainly competes with NASA (albeit on unequal budget terms) but that's good as it keeps things focussed.
And as for the UK, ESA and geographic return; the UK does get big contracts, usually through Astrium UK, but this is but part of a multinational company based elsewhere. The space segment market in Europe is as much of a oligopoly as it is in the US. In the ground segment market, the UK competes very effectively through companies such as Vega, Serco, Logica and Science Systems.
The fact is that the UK does not contribute the money that other contries do because of its typical anti-European attitude, so it doesn't get the work. The UK was a founder member of ESA but gave up this leadership position because it thought it could do better by itself.
a quid is to a pound (currency) as a buck is to a dollar.
1 pound (weight) = 0.4536 kilograms
Well, it's common practice in the compilation of Dictionaries - the compiler will throw in a few non-existent words in order to identify any non-authorised editions that occur.
Well, ESA is comparatively unbureaucratic compared to NASA, especially the manned-spaceflight part.
The Ariane 4 series (another product of that 'shoddy nationalized industry') had one of the best launch records around and was incredibly successful, along with Boeing and Lockheed designs, in opening up space for commercialization.
And if you think that it'll take just 10 years to move from a government organized, but market driven space industry to 'space settled by commerce, not governments', you must be stark raving mad.
Your general tone and lack of actual knowledge (as opposed to half-baked opinions) just say' The lights are on, the door is open, but Mr Brain has long since departed.'
Or is it part of the ongoing campaign to get a Lifetime Achievement Award from FuckedCompany?
The network providers in the U.K. had a habit of badly underestimating the number GSM phones sold as Christmas presents.
10am, Christmas Day: 5 to 10 thousand new users per cell log onto a network for the first time. *FOOM* the whole network just seizes up.
--
With the additional benefit of the U.S. not meddling in the affairs of other countries. Everyone's a winner, I think.
Without the support of the U.S. in return for oil, profoundly undemocratic countries like Saudi Arabia might see some real change.