The only other major player that is left to offer content at a lower price would be Microsoft, or a major music company.... I can see the price dropping even further as these services ramp up. I also think that the monthly fees will go away with future reincarnations of this business model. Maybe these music companies are starting to get a clue that people want to download music, and not pay 16 bucks for a CD with 13 tracks that is only 38 minutes long...
How do you think the different ports of Bittorrent (i.e. Windows/MAC version) has affected the available content? Do you think the availability of pirated material has increased since releasing these ports? If you had it to do over, would you have released these ports?
Maybe this will convince them not to attempt a remake of Space Ace. I don't know if I could handle it!
It is interesting though, that you can order the DVD version of the original Dragon's Lair Laser Disc version of the game to be played on any standard home DVD player, Playstation 2, or an XBOX with a DVD dongle.
It is much more fun to play the original than this new remake.
It's interesting that out of the top 25 episodes picked in this article, only 2 episodes are from seasons after 1997. The vast majority of episodes listed in this article are from 1993-1994.
Have all of the creative juices stopped flowing into the Simpsons? Or have they just had a bad run of writers?
We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know.
Nowhere in this article did I find any mention of turning "Bringing down a movie on the Internet" into a viable business model.
People download movies becasue it is easy, convenient, and fast.
Attach a cost.
Keep it easy.
Keep it convenient
Make it fast.
and it could become a viable business model for the future... The music industry still hasn't gotten the clue, maybe the movie industry still has a chance before it eaten alive by Kazaa, IRC(for the moment), and other file sharing applications.
Carson Daly rose to fame as the host of "Total Request Live" on Viacom's MTV. Less well known is his side gig as a superhuman D. J. With a little help from digital editing, Mr. Daly can do a top-10 countdown show tailored to the phoned-in requests of radio listeners in 11 different cities without actually knowing which songs he is counting down.
Mr. Daly's syndicated radio show, "Carson Daly Most Requested," is produced by Premiere Radio Networks, a unit of the broadcasting giant Clear Channel Communications. The program runs each weekday on 140 stations -- most of them owned by Clear Channel -- although only 11 receive the digitally customized version that seeks to simulate a local program.
"Most Requested" has been on the air for nearly two years, but only recently have people not directly involved in the program become aware of the extent to which technology is allowing Mr. Daly to cozy up to local listeners. Radio experts say the program involves perhaps the most extensive use yet of digital audio processing to offer localized shows from a central location. And members of a major broadcasting union are investigating to determine whether the techniques violate local labor agreements.
Clear Channel executives and Mr. Daly declined to discuss the program and the technology. But according to former Clear Channel employees, Mr. Daly spends several hours a week in a studio in his Manhattan apartment, reading scripts with short song introductions and longer segments of D. J. patter. His audio feed is transmitted to Los Angeles, where the show's engineers turn the segments into digital files and drop them into a database.
With a lot of cutting and pasting, the engineers create 11 customized hourlong countdown shows for cities like New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, and two national pop and rhythm-and-blues countdowns for other markets. The customization means Mr. Daly can seem to be telling listeners in a particular city their most-requested songs for that day -- without ever seeing the city's top-10 list.
Clear Channel has been widely criticized for its use of so-called voice-tracking technology, which enables prerecorded D. J.'s to sound to listeners in a distant city as if they were both local and live.
Opponents of media consolidation say the technology allows Clear Channel to ignore its regulatory mandate requiring the company to have local stations serve local audiences.
In a case that will go to trial this week, the National Labor Relations Board is charging that Clear Channel violated the contracts of the staff at WWPR-FM in New York, a hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues station known as Power 105.1. The suit argues that the station began using a voice-tracked Los Angeles D. J. without union authorization.
The company has said that the show, "Power After Hours," was a syndicated program, which the contract allows.
Mr. Daly's show uses technology that is similar to voice tracking, but industry experts said that the digital manipulation of the host's words and phrases is so extensive as to put the show in a league of its own.
"This tells you that Carson Daly, as a brand and a personality, is worth the extra studio effort," said Tom Taylor, the editor of Inside Radio, an industry newsletter. "The technology has been advancing to the point where you can do that and make it sound really good."
Steven Dunston, a sound designer and editor in Los Angeles who worked at Clear Channel's Premiere Radio unit when the Daly show began in early 2001, said he helped build its innovative database, which had tens of thousands of audio samples in it.
He said that because Mr. Daly had only a few hours a week to devote to the program, phrases like "coming in at No. 4" were recorded once and stored in the database for reuse. The call letters and phone numbers of the 11 stations, in Mr. Daly's voice, were inserted throughout.
"It really was fascinating from a technological angle," Mr. Dunston said. "Nothing had been done to that extent before."
People close to the current show said its operations had changed little since it began. A spokeswoman for Premiere declined to answer questions about the production of Mr. Daly's show, saying that was proprietary information. She said Mr. Daly was unavailable for comment.
Not all of Mr. Daly's sentences are digitally constructed. The show's writers give him longer segments, like gossip roundups and customized introductions for New York and Los Angeles. But much of the material is written with recycling in mind, so a joke about Christina Aguilera that is used to introduce the No. 3 song in Boston can be used on another day when the song is, say, No. 6 in Atlanta.
Mr. Daly's unconventional countdown only recently caught the attention of the New York chapter of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which represents broadcast personnel and opposes voice tracking. Peter Fuster, the chapter's assistant executive director, said the union had previously thought that the show was just a national countdown with local branding.
Mr. Fuster said, "We're looking into whether the customized package that they are preparing for New York violates our collective bargaining agreement" at Z-100 (WHTZ-FM), the station that carries the show in New York. If the station is giving Mr. Daly's show a list of songs to play, that would essentially be voice tracking, which is not allowed under the contract, Mr. Fuster said.
Mr. Daly is likely to be even more pressed for time now that he has his own late-night television talk show on NBC, "Last Call With Carson Daly." But when he needs some time off from his radio work, the database lets the countdown roll on. Before he goes on vacation, the show's producers try to make sure they have enough sound clips so his voice can introduce top-10 lists that have yet to be compiled.
That has not always gone smoothly. Mr. Dunston, the sound designer, said that at one point a new Michael Jackson song, "You Rock My World," unexpectedly showed up on the charts. Mr. Daly was unavailable that day, and because he had never introduced a song by Mr. Jackson, the engineers had to dig through old recordings to find a segment in which he made an offhand reference to the singer. Then they hunted down bits of the song title and assembled all the pieces.
"We had to cobble things together," Mr. Dunston said.
Wonder what this means for all the current Xbox Mod Chips?
The version 1.1 XBOX that started shipping in September of 2002 was hacked in about 1-2 weeks. This means that unless MSFT has really upped the ante with security, it will be more of a fun challenge to the MOD community, rather than a deterrent.
It's been 6 months since they've changed anything significant on the XBOX, so I'm sure the MOD community is waiting for a new challenge.
"the recording companies did bring us Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Eminem, etc.."
To bundle Led Zeppelin and the Beatles with Eminem is SO wrong. The difference in the level of musical talent between these groups is staggering.
XVID is compatible with the xbox media player divx software for the xbox game console. In one word "unbelievable". The quality of a new movie in xvid format on a 46" projection television was breathtaking. It was like watching a SuperBit DVD.
It is interesting that the richest company in the world (Microsoft) released a game console to take on the clear leader in the console market (Sony), and has lost TONS of money attempting to gain market share in this market. Now, an unknown company with who knows how much cash on hand is going to attempt to squeeze out these 2 leaders... Someone get the company e-mail address and send them Chapter 11 paperwork now.
One less player, broadband in general is feeling a bit more monopolistic... With Comcast and AT&T and a few other "big guys" holding the majority of customers, I hope other "smaller" providers can stay afloat.
I'd pay $3-4 for new releases via web, but not PPV fodder.
Crichton & Timeline
on
Electronic Life
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's not supprising that Crichton did his homework before writing the novel "Timeline". Timeline is a great novel that involves the mechanics of quantum computing. He does a great job of breaking down how a quantum computer (of more than 5 atoms) could work. It's also worth a read.
Do they think everyone will own a DVD player in the next 3 years? let alone, have a "HOME THEATRE" system? Movie piracy may slow DVD sales and may slightly hurt movie attendance, but the movie industry dying in 3 years is a crock.
This may be a last ditch effort to get the AOL side of the business profitable, before splitting back into two seperate companies again. I don't think anyone thinks that this merger was a good idea in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I use 192.168.0.1 on quite a few of my machines... So I'm not wasting IP addresses, I'm reusing them.
Poor attempt at humor.
The only other major player that is left to offer content at a lower price would be Microsoft, or a major music company.... I can see the price dropping even further as these services ramp up. I also think that the monthly fees will go away with future reincarnations of this business model. Maybe these music companies are starting to get a clue that people want to download music, and not pay 16 bucks for a CD with 13 tracks that is only 38 minutes long...
How do you think the different ports of Bittorrent (i.e. Windows/MAC version) has affected the available content?
Do you think the availability of pirated material has increased since releasing these ports?
If you had it to do over, would you have released these ports?
I think I'll patent annoying stupid people and make a million bucks. I don't know which is more intrusive. Pop-ups, or annoying stupid people.
See This article from PDA Street from March... they denied it then... same exact picture it seems... I wonder how valid this article actually is.
Maybe this will convince them not to attempt a remake of Space Ace. I don't know if I could handle it!
It is interesting though, that you can order the DVD version of the original Dragon's Lair Laser Disc version of the game to be played on any standard home DVD player, Playstation 2, or an XBOX with a DVD dongle.
It is much more fun to play the original than this new remake.
It's interesting that out of the top 25 episodes picked in this article, only 2 episodes are from seasons after 1997. The vast majority of episodes listed in this article are from 1993-1994.
Have all of the creative juices stopped flowing into the Simpsons? Or have they just had a bad run of writers?
Back in Blacker than Black
AC/DC should really rename their Back in Black album now.
We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know.
Nowhere in this article did I find any mention of turning "Bringing down a movie on the Internet" into a viable business model.
People download movies becasue it is easy, convenient, and fast.
Attach a cost.
Keep it easy.
Keep it convenient
Make it fast.
and it could become a viable business model for the future...
The music industry still hasn't gotten the clue, maybe the movie industry still has a chance before it eaten alive by Kazaa, IRC(for the moment), and other file sharing applications.
Carson Daly rose to fame as the host of "Total Request Live" on Viacom's MTV. Less well known is his side gig as a superhuman D. J. With a little help from digital editing, Mr. Daly can do a top-10 countdown show tailored to the phoned-in requests of radio listeners in 11 different cities without actually knowing which songs he is counting down.
Mr. Daly's syndicated radio show, "Carson Daly Most Requested," is produced by Premiere Radio Networks, a unit of the broadcasting giant Clear Channel Communications. The program runs each weekday on 140 stations -- most of them owned by Clear Channel -- although only 11 receive the digitally customized version that seeks to simulate a local program.
"Most Requested" has been on the air for nearly two years, but only recently have people not directly involved in the program become aware of the extent to which technology is allowing Mr. Daly to cozy up to local listeners. Radio experts say the program involves perhaps the most extensive use yet of digital audio processing to offer localized shows from a central location. And members of a major broadcasting union are investigating to determine whether the techniques violate local labor agreements.
Clear Channel executives and Mr. Daly declined to discuss the program and the technology. But according to former Clear Channel employees, Mr. Daly spends several hours a week in a studio in his Manhattan apartment, reading scripts with short song introductions and longer segments of D. J. patter. His audio feed is transmitted to Los Angeles, where the show's engineers turn the segments into digital files and drop them into a database.
With a lot of cutting and pasting, the engineers create 11 customized hourlong countdown shows for cities like New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, and two national pop and rhythm-and-blues countdowns for other markets. The customization means Mr. Daly can seem to be telling listeners in a particular city their most-requested songs for that day -- without ever seeing the city's top-10 list.
Clear Channel has been widely criticized for its use of so-called voice-tracking technology, which enables prerecorded D. J.'s to sound to listeners in a distant city as if they were both local and live.
Opponents of media consolidation say the technology allows Clear Channel to ignore its regulatory mandate requiring the company to have local stations serve local audiences.
In a case that will go to trial this week, the National Labor Relations Board is charging that Clear Channel violated the contracts of the staff at WWPR-FM in New York, a hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues station known as Power 105.1. The suit argues that the station began using a voice-tracked Los Angeles D. J. without union authorization.
The company has said that the show, "Power After Hours," was a syndicated program, which the contract allows.
Mr. Daly's show uses technology that is similar to voice tracking, but industry experts said that the digital manipulation of the host's words and phrases is so extensive as to put the show in a league of its own.
"This tells you that Carson Daly, as a brand and a personality, is worth the extra studio effort," said Tom Taylor, the editor of Inside Radio, an industry newsletter. "The technology has been advancing to the point where you can do that and make it sound really good."
Steven Dunston, a sound designer and editor in Los Angeles who worked at Clear Channel's Premiere Radio unit when the Daly show began in early 2001, said he helped build its innovative database, which had tens of thousands of audio samples in it.
He said that because Mr. Daly had only a few hours a week to devote to the program, phrases like "coming in at No. 4" were recorded once and stored in the database for reuse. The call letters and phone numbers of the 11 stations, in Mr. Daly's voice, were inserted throughout.
"It really was fascinating from a technological angle," Mr. Dunston said. "Nothing had been done to that extent before."
People close to the current show said its operations had changed little since it began. A spokeswoman for Premiere declined to answer questions about the production of Mr. Daly's show, saying that was proprietary information. She said Mr. Daly was unavailable for comment.
Not all of Mr. Daly's sentences are digitally constructed. The show's writers give him longer segments, like gossip roundups and customized introductions for New York and Los Angeles. But much of the material is written with recycling in mind, so a joke about Christina Aguilera that is used to introduce the No. 3 song in Boston can be used on another day when the song is, say, No. 6 in Atlanta.
Mr. Daly's unconventional countdown only recently caught the attention of the New York chapter of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which represents broadcast personnel and opposes voice tracking. Peter Fuster, the chapter's assistant executive director, said the union had previously thought that the show was just a national countdown with local branding.
Mr. Fuster said, "We're looking into whether the customized package that they are preparing for New York violates our collective bargaining agreement" at Z-100 (WHTZ-FM), the station that carries the show in New York. If the station is giving Mr. Daly's show a list of songs to play, that would essentially be voice tracking, which is not allowed under the contract, Mr. Fuster said.
Mr. Daly is likely to be even more pressed for time now that he has his own late-night television talk show on NBC, "Last Call With Carson Daly." But when he needs some time off from his radio work, the database lets the countdown roll on. Before he goes on vacation, the show's producers try to make sure they have enough sound clips so his voice can introduce top-10 lists that have yet to be compiled.
That has not always gone smoothly. Mr. Dunston, the sound designer, said that at one point a new Michael Jackson song, "You Rock My World," unexpectedly showed up on the charts. Mr. Daly was unavailable that day, and because he had never introduced a song by Mr. Jackson, the engineers had to dig through old recordings to find a segment in which he made an offhand reference to the singer. Then they hunted down bits of the song title and assembled all the pieces.
"We had to cobble things together," Mr. Dunston said.
1 part - Destroy an Enterprise NCC1701-?.
1 part - Old rehashed plot lines.
2 parts - Kill a main character.
1 part - Miserable love story.
3 parts - Dry "DADA" humor.
Mix thouroughly
Bake on 350 for 1 1/2 hours
Remove and chill.
Serves Rick Bermans ego for 3 months.
Doom has been ported to everythinge else, I can't wait to see the 4Kb version on the Atari 2600.
The version 1.1 XBOX that started shipping in September of 2002 was hacked in about 1-2 weeks. This means that unless MSFT has really upped the ante with security, it will be more of a fun challenge to the MOD community, rather than a deterrent.
It's been 6 months since they've changed anything significant on the XBOX, so I'm sure the MOD community is waiting for a new challenge.
Return a Time/Space anomoly to normal.
Seal an atmoshpere about to get ripped away from a planet.
Stun some nasty aliens.
Adjust the harmonics of a warp drive.
But, how can this be? It's not possible they say.
Get over it and just have fun.
"the recording companies did bring us Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Eminem, etc.." To bundle Led Zeppelin and the Beatles with Eminem is SO wrong. The difference in the level of musical talent between these groups is staggering.
XVID is compatible with the xbox media player divx software for the xbox game console. In one word "unbelievable". The quality of a new movie in xvid format on a 46" projection television was breathtaking. It was like watching a SuperBit DVD.
It is interesting that the richest company in the world (Microsoft) released a game console to take on the clear leader in the console market (Sony), and has lost TONS of money attempting to gain market share in this market. Now, an unknown company with who knows how much cash on hand is going to attempt to squeeze out these 2 leaders... Someone get the company e-mail address and send them Chapter 11 paperwork now.
Why would someone go to www.hotbot.com to do a google search??? they both are 6 letter urls, so it's not quicker to type.... and it's slower....
One less player, broadband in general is feeling a bit more monopolistic... With Comcast and AT&T and a few other "big guys" holding the majority of customers, I hope other "smaller" providers can stay afloat.
Reminded me of an earlier story concerning Netfilx bandwith.
9 23 4&mode=thread&tid=95
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/23/171
I'd pay $3-4 for new releases via web, but not PPV fodder.
It's not supprising that Crichton did his homework before writing the novel "Timeline". Timeline is a great novel that involves the mechanics of quantum computing. He does a great job of breaking down how a quantum computer (of more than 5 atoms) could work. It's also worth a read.
I thought the Google headline was a little deceiving...
"Fossil unveils wrist-worn Palm OS PDA"
It made me think of Back to the Future and all of the time travel Star Trek episodes!
Do they think everyone will own a DVD player in the next 3 years? let alone, have a "HOME THEATRE" system? Movie piracy may slow DVD sales and may slightly hurt movie attendance, but the movie industry dying in 3 years is a crock.
It's like watching a VHS tape on your high-definition television.
Why buy new SACD's that were converted from the original stereo source?
Until the recording industry starts releasing SACD's that meant to be SACD's in the first place, it is pointless...
This may be a last ditch effort to get the AOL side of the business profitable, before splitting back into two seperate companies again. I don't think anyone thinks that this merger was a good idea in the first place.