Once again, they were not giving out copies of iDVD!
They were giving out a patch to iDVD which let the 3rd party DVD drive work with it. That is why Apple is WRONG here.
If Apple was smart, they would back off of this madness and maybe even offer OWC the ability to SELL iDVD, prepatched, with the system (kicking the price up $20) and Apple would get the whole $20 for iDVD and thus satisfy the fears about piracy as well as keep the MPEG licensing people happy and at the same time make a little money off of it while also regaining user goodwill.
I never claimed that I did. Though I notice that some people have modded me down simply because they didn't agree with me or think I'm a troll. I don't worry as I have plenty of good karma and I know my position is correct.
The fact is, I am a Mac user and have been with Apple since the days of the IIe. The reason this DMCA thing upsets me so much is that Steve Jobs should know better than to order this kind of thing. Not only that, but as a Mac user, I am always glad to see 3rd party options and competition between vendors on my platform because it *drives prices down*. When Apple uses the DMCA against its own 3rd party providers, it sends a message of "don't bother porting your hardware to the Mac" and that is why I am upset. I may love Apple and the Mac, but I'm not afraid to criticize them when they deserve it.
Just when he is getting on the good sides of the geek community, he pulls a stunt like this.
Now he might as well burn DMCA into his forehead because he is going to have the stink of that law around him for all time for this stunt.
You know, instead of attacking OWC with a bad law which will definately get them REALLY bad publicity, even among their own ranks, why didn't Jobs cut a deal with OWC instead?
Make iDVD part of the OWC DVD burner bundle? No piracy concerns there now are there?
If he thinks this will boost Mac sales, he's fooling himself. If they are going for a cheaper 3 rd party DVD burner, then maybe it is because they *CAN'T AFFORD A NEW MAC RIGHT NOW* or simply bought one which had no DVD burner at the time or wish to hook one up to a Powerbook or iBook and burn DVD's on the go.
Companies like Dell have to live with the fact that any schmuck can go build their own PC for 2/3 the cost of a premade PC but they are still in buisiness.
So Steve, please learn to fucking compete instead of using unconstitutional laws to hurt your own 3rd party developers.
These will not play in a car stereo or a portable MP3 player, only in a computer and likely only in a Windows box. Not Mac or Linux since they have the SOFTWARE player located on the disc.
That completely eliminates most people's desire to buy a CD. Who wants to pay $21 for a CD which you can't take in your car or on vacation without lugging along a Windows laptop?
Given that I also use a Macintosh at home, yet another reason I won't buy this shit.
Of course the most overriding reason is I am simply sick of the RIAA and they havee lost my buisiness forever, even if they fell on their knees before me and wept and tried to get the DMCA revoked.
The current logo looks to me like the shadow of a gigantic Mickey Mouse head starting to slowly loom over the planet and would fit better as a Disney logo given they are bent on control of the world, or at least control over what the world is allowed to do with the movies they buy anyway...
No NDA at all, but I won't tell you the plot simply because I don't want to spoil it;)
They were open with it and showed it to anyone willing to come see a rough cut of a movie at the con and comment on it. The director is one of the coolest people I've met and he was more than willing to discuss the movie's good and bad parts and take that into consideration for how to make it a BETTER movie when they do the final cut of it.
The first movie came out in 1997 and while it looks a bit rough, its funny and it was the best technology a small group like them had available at the time. Now, just 4 years later they are producing something which looks like it could have been shot in a real movie studio. It just shows how far we've come in getting movie making technology to the masses and independant film makers.
If you happen to see them at a sci-fi convention, I highly suggest you go to one of their panels on movie making!
After they finish #2 this year, they are planning to do a DVD re-release of the first with some re-editing and some updated effects and "special edition" features such as bloopers and other extra material.
If you can't wait, you can buy their movie on VHS from their website or at any con they are attending.
Just FYI, Macworld ownd Maccentral and thus anything coming out of Maccentral will be a parrot of what's coming out of Macworld.
Not to say that's wrong, just saying that you might have well only mentioned one of the other and picked a different 3rd example.
Re:They're Destroying It
on
CD Copy Stopper
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
More like they are doing all they can to stop the inevitable. Their business model fails with today's technology and they know it and are doing whatever they can to squeeze what little they still can from it. Instead of embracing the technology and working the problem of making a new buisiness model around it, they are thrashing to and fro as they slowly die, doing anything to extend their life a little longer.
Case in point... last weekend I was at Conglomeration (nice mid sized sci-fi con held near Lousiville) and attended a panel by the directors of the home made movie "Rock and Roll Starship". I brought up computer technology and he told me that since the advent of things like iMovie and companies like Adobe and Apple making what was once high end movie software cheap enough for the masses, that the number of people who are interested in starting their own independant movie making groups has skyrocketed. He said that anymore, movie making is going more and more independant and it is only a matter of time before Hollywood loses control to groups of kids who are able to make their own films and put them up on the internet or burn them to DVD and sell them at cons.
True, the flashiest looking stuff will always come from big budget Hollywood, but independant film makers are going to catch up enough to make some stuff which looks pretty nice on their own. That and some of the independant stuff is pretty damn good story wise, better so than a lot of Hollywood fluff.
In fact, I was able to see a rough cut of their second movie and comment on it, to influence the final version, which was very cool! Their first movie came out in 1997, had shaky camera work, Dr. Who like special effects and the sound was a bit buzzy.
This next one, though a rough cut, already looked a lot better. The sound hadn't been cleaned up yet and there were only a few "test" effects, but from what there was in there the new movie will look as professional as something that Hollywood might put out.
Times are changing and you will see more and more of this as time goes on. Hollywood had better prepare itself, because the computer is going to bring on the age of the independant film, and nothing they do is going to stop it.
They will just use it as an excuse to raise CD prices yet again.
But cracking this will be easy enough, all you need is a patch cable and a sound card and a PC. Most MP3's are flawed with digital artifacts anyway, so people won't complain too much about the slight loss in quality from this kind of copy. All they will care is, "Does it work in my MP3 player?".
Fully updated with ion or solar sail propulsion to get it out there quicker with a nice AOLesque "VERSION 3.0" stamped on the side so they know its the latest.
On board we also include a copy of Lord of the Rings in DivX format and Mp3's of Britney Spears. That way if the aliens invade, we can tell the RIAA and MPAA they have pirated movies and music and watch the aliens recoil and flee under the unsuing crush of lawyers and DMCA threat letters.
If that doesn't work, we trick them into installing the cracked copy of WinXP convieniently on stowed board and watch their ships fail in horrible and astonishing ways.
Now if that fails, then we trick them into installing AOL and logging onto it. After all nothing can withstand humankinds most powerful weapon... Pure stupidity.
If you are indeed a computer consultant who sets up firewalls for people, I would HOPE you would know how to get this on your own... It is not so hard to write a program or even a shell scipt which will take a web addy and spit back the IP.
But it sends a powerful message to the RIAA by saying that you will basically shut down their corporate mouthpiece to the masses if they continue in this.
It also shows congress the kind of war and chaos that will result on the internet if the RIAA passes these kinds of laws and that even those who run the internet are against it. Hopefully they will take the clue or we will see the type of wild west shootout on the web that will have them scrambing to repeal the law.
Seriously, read the damn article! It says that it cuts the travel time from London to Sydney from 20 hours to 2! Obviously you are not getting there the moment you take off. The Earth is a huge huge place and even at Mach 7.6, it will take you a while to get somewhere.
The problem is, lawyers should be doing what is right within the law, not firing off dubious threat letters for pay. The lawyers should have told the company that this was a waste of their time and would likely result in bad publicity. Instead they took their money and threatened this guy who has NOT DONE ANYTHING WRONG!
I did say that one should only do this to lawyers like this, and I stand by that. After all, they *didn't* do their jobs properly and if Dave had the resources to take them this to court, I imagine a judge would have agreed.
Yet, it has been shown over and over that even though we are capable of our worst in the name of competition, it is also when we are at our best. Without the space race, we would never had gotten to the moon in the first place, or built the Space Shuttle either, expensive dinosaur that it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Insert "Pusher robot" above "Basement Stairs".
Or should that be the "Shover robot?"
Is a huge board with a nail in it!
We just have to be careful that we don't build a board with a nail that is so big, we destroy ourselves!
Once again, they were not giving out copies of iDVD!
They were giving out a patch to iDVD which let the 3rd party DVD drive work with it. That is why Apple is WRONG here.
If Apple was smart, they would back off of this madness and maybe even offer OWC the ability to SELL iDVD, prepatched, with the system (kicking the price up $20) and Apple would get the whole $20 for iDVD and thus satisfy the fears about piracy as well as keep the MPEG licensing people happy and at the same time make a little money off of it while also regaining user goodwill.
Its quite simple really.
I never claimed that I did. Though I notice that some people have modded me down simply because they didn't agree with me or think I'm a troll. I don't worry as I have plenty of good karma and I know my position is correct.
The fact is, I am a Mac user and have been with Apple since the days of the IIe. The reason this DMCA thing upsets me so much is that Steve Jobs should know better than to order this kind of thing. Not only that, but as a Mac user, I am always glad to see 3rd party options and competition between vendors on my platform because it *drives prices down*. When Apple uses the DMCA against its own 3rd party providers, it sends a message of "don't bother porting your hardware to the Mac" and that is why I am upset. I may love Apple and the Mac, but I'm not afraid to criticize them when they deserve it.
Just when he is getting on the good sides of the geek community, he pulls a stunt like this.
Now he might as well burn DMCA into his forehead because he is going to have the stink of that law around him for all time for this stunt.
You know, instead of attacking OWC with a bad law which will definately get them REALLY bad publicity, even among their own ranks, why didn't Jobs cut a deal with OWC instead?
Make iDVD part of the OWC DVD burner bundle? No piracy concerns there now are there?
If he thinks this will boost Mac sales, he's fooling himself. If they are going for a cheaper 3 rd party DVD burner, then maybe it is because they *CAN'T AFFORD A NEW MAC RIGHT NOW* or simply bought one which had no DVD burner at the time or wish to hook one up to a Powerbook or iBook and burn DVD's on the go.
Companies like Dell have to live with the fact that any schmuck can go build their own PC for 2/3 the cost of a premade PC but they are still in buisiness.
So Steve, please learn to fucking compete instead of using unconstitutional laws to hurt your own 3rd party developers.
The headlines aren't always clear. I was also unable to get to the story because it was slashdotted at the time.
Still, someone will crack the encryption scheme before long and this will be as useless as CSS ever was.
These will not play in a car stereo or a portable MP3 player, only in a computer and likely only in a Windows box. Not Mac or Linux since they have the SOFTWARE player located on the disc.
That completely eliminates most people's desire to buy a CD. Who wants to pay $21 for a CD which you can't take in your car or on vacation without lugging along a Windows laptop?
Given that I also use a Macintosh at home, yet another reason I won't buy this shit.
Of course the most overriding reason is I am simply sick of the RIAA and they havee lost my buisiness forever, even if they fell on their knees before me and wept and tried to get the DMCA revoked.
Someone beat you to it.
/. has ever posted.
Not only that, science textbooks beat Slashdot to this years ago. I read this in my college biology textbook as a sophmore, back in 1996.
This has to be the oldest "news" story
I mean, seriously, Scientology is no more or less fiction than Star Wars is.
The current logo looks to me like the shadow of a gigantic Mickey Mouse head starting to slowly loom over the planet and would fit better as a Disney logo given they are bent on control of the world, or at least control over what the world is allowed to do with the movies they buy anyway...
http://www.netusa1.net/~starship/
;)
No NDA at all, but I won't tell you the plot simply because I don't want to spoil it
They were open with it and showed it to anyone willing to come see a rough cut of a movie at the con and comment on it. The director is one of the coolest people I've met and he was more than willing to discuss the movie's good and bad parts and take that into consideration for how to make it a BETTER movie when they do the final cut of it.
The first movie came out in 1997 and while it looks a bit rough, its funny and it was the best technology a small group like them had available at the time. Now, just 4 years later they are producing something which looks like it could have been shot in a real movie studio. It just shows how far we've come in getting movie making technology to the masses and independant film makers.
If you happen to see them at a sci-fi convention, I highly suggest you go to one of their panels on movie making!
After they finish #2 this year, they are planning to do a DVD re-release of the first with some re-editing and some updated effects and "special edition" features such as bloopers and other extra material.
If you can't wait, you can buy their movie on VHS from their website or at any con they are attending.
Amazon was offering a discount on it, but I think that's over with now.
Just FYI, Macworld ownd Maccentral and thus anything coming out of Maccentral will be a parrot of what's coming out of Macworld.
Not to say that's wrong, just saying that you might have well only mentioned one of the other and picked a different 3rd example.
More like they are doing all they can to stop the inevitable. Their business model fails with today's technology and they know it and are doing whatever they can to squeeze what little they still can from it. Instead of embracing the technology and working the problem of making a new buisiness model around it, they are thrashing to and fro as they slowly die, doing anything to extend their life a little longer.
Case in point... last weekend I was at Conglomeration (nice mid sized sci-fi con held near Lousiville) and attended a panel by the directors of the home made movie "Rock and Roll Starship". I brought up computer technology and he told me that since the advent of things like iMovie and companies like Adobe and Apple making what was once high end movie software cheap enough for the masses, that the number of people who are interested in starting their own independant movie making groups has skyrocketed. He said that anymore, movie making is going more and more independant and it is only a matter of time before Hollywood loses control to groups of kids who are able to make their own films and put them up on the internet or burn them to DVD and sell them at cons.
True, the flashiest looking stuff will always come from big budget Hollywood, but independant film makers are going to catch up enough to make some stuff which looks pretty nice on their own. That and some of the independant stuff is pretty damn good story wise, better so than a lot of Hollywood fluff.
In fact, I was able to see a rough cut of their second movie and comment on it, to influence the final version, which was very cool! Their first movie came out in 1997, had shaky camera work, Dr. Who like special effects and the sound was a bit buzzy.
This next one, though a rough cut, already looked a lot better. The sound hadn't been cleaned up yet and there were only a few "test" effects, but from what there was in there the new movie will look as professional as something that Hollywood might put out.
Times are changing and you will see more and more of this as time goes on. Hollywood had better prepare itself, because the computer is going to bring on the age of the independant film, and nothing they do is going to stop it.
They will just use it as an excuse to raise CD prices yet again.
But cracking this will be easy enough, all you need is a patch cable and a sound card and a PC. Most MP3's are flawed with digital artifacts anyway, so people won't complain too much about the slight loss in quality from this kind of copy. All they will care is, "Does it work in my MP3 player?".
Yes I noticed that after I posted, oops.
But hey, that does bring up the idea of also including a couple of grammar nazi's on board as well as another line of defence against hostile aliens.
Fully updated with ion or solar sail propulsion to get it out there quicker with a nice AOLesque "VERSION 3.0" stamped on the side so they know its the latest.
On board we also include a copy of Lord of the Rings in DivX format and Mp3's of Britney Spears. That way if the aliens invade, we can tell the RIAA and MPAA they have pirated movies and music and watch the aliens recoil and flee under the unsuing crush of lawyers and DMCA threat letters.
If that doesn't work, we trick them into installing the cracked copy of WinXP convieniently on stowed board and watch their ships fail in horrible and astonishing ways.
Now if that fails, then we trick them into installing AOL and logging onto it. After all nothing can withstand humankinds most powerful weapon... Pure stupidity.
If you are indeed a computer consultant who sets up firewalls for people, I would HOPE you would know how to get this on your own... It is not so hard to write a program or even a shell scipt which will take a web addy and spit back the IP.
But it sends a powerful message to the RIAA by saying that you will basically shut down their corporate mouthpiece to the masses if they continue in this.
It also shows congress the kind of war and chaos that will result on the internet if the RIAA passes these kinds of laws and that even those who run the internet are against it. Hopefully they will take the clue or we will see the type of wild west shootout on the web that will have them scrambing to repeal the law.
Good, let that happen! The law will be repealed when the government realizes just how crackbrained this is in the first place.
If anything, they better take the clue now, because more and more ISP's are going to jump on this when they see how popular it is.
So they will still sell to build e-mailers? In otherwords... spammers?
Seriously, read the damn article! It says that it cuts the travel time from London to Sydney from 20 hours to 2! Obviously you are not getting there the moment you take off. The Earth is a huge huge place and even at Mach 7.6, it will take you a while to get somewhere.
There can be bugs in a license agreement as well. And we all know M$ is known for bugs :)
The problem is, lawyers should be doing what is right within the law, not firing off dubious threat letters for pay. The lawyers should have told the company that this was a waste of their time and would likely result in bad publicity. Instead they took their money and threatened this guy who has NOT DONE ANYTHING WRONG!
I did say that one should only do this to lawyers like this, and I stand by that. After all, they *didn't* do their jobs properly and if Dave had the resources to take them this to court, I imagine a judge would have agreed.
Yet, it has been shown over and over that even though we are capable of our worst in the name of competition, it is also when we are at our best. Without the space race, we would never had gotten to the moon in the first place, or built the Space Shuttle either, expensive dinosaur that it is.