I really enjoyed your post. I met an engineer who worked under Von Braun at Kennedy Space center several years ago and have great awe for the tradition of immense labor and the old science that got us into space the first time around. I can remember a statistic being batted around at the time that one Saturn V launch was estimated to have the work of 400,000 people involved in it.
Its a shame about the old designs not being preserved. Nasa should kick up the budget in that area and do what they can to photograph the rest of this stuff before its too late.
I thought "enter the desktop market" meant sell hardware like Apple. That would've been a good idea.
otherwise, having only a year of updates is ridiculously stupid. Microsofts well established method works. You sell the OS product and then support it for its lifespan. If you don't, the client will stop using it and you will lose their desktop to someone who does.
The multiplayer seems very Quake 3, which disappointed me a bit. I always loathed Quake 3 and thought it was a major blip in id's record.
I agree with your post on the whole except for the above statement that Quake 3 is a blip in id's record. That's absurd! Perhaps it is a little disapointing for you because it is multi-player only, but the engine IMO (and probably in lots of other people's as well) still stands up as probably being one of the, if not the best 3D game engines of all time. I know, there are so many, namely Valve's and all of the newer offerings, but Quake 3 was definitely a genre-defining engine. Not to mention that there have been hundred's of namebrand titles forged from the Quake 3 engine that you have probably played and enjoyed. hey, and its open source now!
Man, you said it. Leave it to a slashdot thread to mod up all the funny or cleverly off-topic comments that dont really address the issue in a safe and comfortable way and miss one that does.
The Above Post is 100% RIGHT ON. rtb61, you pretty much nailed the problem on the head. Somebody should mod this up immediately for Insightful, or how about, Truthful.
- dingbats from the RIAA *check* - no matter how bad the game is, with the right marketing it will sell *check* - The developer suffers far more than the publisher *check* - do not hire marketdroids unless you are a monopoly selling a crap operating system hmmmm
I guess in order to get a good insight across you have to package it in such a way that is pleasing for the intended audience of slashdotians, whatever that is...
exactly, they can't do it anymore. Bill Gates is so off in Lalaland. He doesn't even understand what is going on in the internet anymore. "Opensource software is communist". He said it. The influx of opensource into the infrastructure of technology has become commonplace. Microsoft can't do RSS. Microsoft can't do Bittorrent. and Microsoft wont do Skype either. These are all things born of the new way of thinking.
MSN Search = 75% marketing, 25% technology. well, I cant corroborate the technology part.
What if all the studios agreed to a salary cap for stars?
Better yet, Dont hire stars that cost over $5 million at all. High-cost stars tend to ruin a movie's ability to simply tell a story. Part of the packaging methodology is to put one or more household name actor into a movie to insure that the movie has the bare minimum draw to provide return on investment.
Almost every movie with Jamie Fox or Tom Cruise or Tim Robbins or whoever.. __(big name here)__ just sucks though by definition. Really good movies are able to stand on their own. Napolean Dynamite for instance has a medium size cast of people that no one has ever heard of, but they are all wonderful and the movie becomes universally successful. not an insult to the audience. Big budget blockbusters treat the audience as consumers, not as people.
If I hear one more person tell me how vastly superior a GUI is, or scoff that I would use the command line for... anything, and sense that it is their fear of the unknown rather than substantive argument of any kind, I'm going to..., but still, I end up getting hung out to dry by these damn GUI zealots. Like all the Mac people who are addicted to the eye candy.
I think the implication in the 20 year timespan is that it would require a large booster rocket, not a spaceshuttle to get there. such that the (US) space program would have to go back to the drawing boards with how they do things. although, I would tend to agree with you. 20 years in this day and age is a long time. The will the do get there or having something looming over our heads similar to the cold war would be enough.
The fallacy is that we are becoming more technologically adept at spaceflight. We are actually becoming less. We may have fantastic microcomputers now whereas in the 60's there weren't any yet except for the univac or whatever, but that meant that these sliderule toting engineers had to work all these things out in their head. and by doing it in their head they actually had superior computers compared to what we depend on now.
I've heard estimates that we couldn't land on the moon in 20 years now if we set our minds to it. (Sorry I cant drum up the reference. It was an ex-astronaut on science-friday.)
I met one of the original Saturn V engineers in the giftshop at Kennedy Space center when I was there. He was aparently haggling with the poor woman who ran the giftshop about the display for the poster he designed. I overheard their conversation as I was perusing the poster right next to them and she (gladly) turned him over to me. His name was Bud Abbot. He was just happy to have a fan, someone who appreciated what they did way back then. I even bought his poster and got it autographed.
It took 400,000 people to get one Saturn V rocket into the air. A monumentous achievement, and there was significant outcry from all sorts of people that thought that they knew better how government should spend their money. This continued and grew in pitch throughout the 60's until the Moonlanding was broadcast on TV. History has forgotten that side of the story.
I think that there are dual points I'm trying to squeeze out:
1 - that "To Survive" means that space exploration is imminent. What if something happens here? Our ozone depletes all the way, some sort of viral pollution tears everything up. When I was a kid, it was just a matter of time until we had space stations like the one in 2001. There was a spirit of cooperation and wonder. 2 - We have to get our world in order here first. I can barely afford to drive anywhere with gas prices the way we are. We have to throw all these oil crooks in prison, start getting along with other countries, and just generally promote goodwill...
are you associated with the cool indy band of the same name that I have seen play before,..., just wondering. I'm guessing that if you were raised catholic (as I) that you are the guitar player...
you can mess with your ISP to avoid being blocked or throttled-down. see how long you can get away with this: change the default ports that your bittorrent client uses. They probably blocked ports 6881-6999. those are the default bittorrent ports. on windows or linux you can supply command line args to change the port range. set it for up in the 50000 - 65535 range. I dont know how to change ports on other clients but suspect its probably pretty easy.
The point is, the rules just changed. Its not interesting what you or I could do with BT or DC++ or whatever. what I'm saying is that the technology allows EVERYONE to do it. and when BT is gone, something will replace it, ad infinitum, forever so that there is going to be a sizeable percentage of people that for the rest of time are going to "steal" your music. either you can reconcile yourself with that and make a living the old fashioned way by gigging, self-promotion (which is gruelling hard work) and actually being talented or you can whine about it. the rest of us will be working to do something about it.
Think of the last 50 years of the record industry as the dotcom boom stretched out over several decades.
No, you've completely missed my point. Are you even responding to the post above you? Its not "wheww, 128kbps is great, OMG" at all... I've never use iTMS, and I never buy hype. Heck, you've bought the hype that you need a RAID. For what? your music?
My point really coalesces at the bottom. DRM and controlling "content" is just a last scramble for table scraps using an old business model. A business model that was built around analog media that travelled household to household packaged in cardboard and plastic.
all that's irrelevant now. This is the business model used by untalented people to make money off of the talented. That's why I'm againt intellectual property. Instead we could switch to a whuffie based economy. where the talented would again prosper.
" I'd happily shell out 2-3 un-DRMed dollars for about 2-3 hours worth of DRMed digital entertainment. "
Think about how this feels when you read it... Its not true. Its the path of least resistance. Say I become interested in a band, a video game or a movie. Now I know that I must listen, play or see said piece of digital media. if it is available online, for free, what is my impetus for paying the inflated price for the official piece of plastic at a store, besides evading the guilt that some of us more moral types might experience? or just the convenience of having the fully actualized content, rather than a ripped/slightly neutered version.
Even then, you can justify downloading to yourself any number of ways: i.e. "90% goes to companies who stifle artists and are involved in Guerilla marketing. and I'm mad at them because they keep shoving Christina Aguilara in my face."
The other piece of conventional wisdom is that for every type of encryption or copy-protection, someone, somewhere can break it. As long as the digital technology itself allows this 'sort' of transfer of information to be physically possible, then we would just be pretending not to see it, not to use it. why pretend?
I dont believe at this stage in the game that it is possible for the internet to be so dramatically altered that it can be amply controlled or legislated into a micro-payment, DRM style world. It seemed a good idea to the content owners at first, but its becoming apparent to many people now that it is a losing battle, that these companies can only prolong their hereditary business models for a little while longer.
"Information wants to be free"
I'm not saying that its gonna happen overnight or even in a couple of years, but as long as the fundamental rule-sets that the computers on our desks are built from and the network that connects them remains the way it is, then the internet _will_ persist in its democratic nature.
yes, I have several sticks of PC133, but why the hell would anybody want them?
This is the most classic display of public 'Disobeyance of Authority'. DVD-jon is like an evangelist or something. iTunes, I dont believe is the target, nor were the MPAA when he cracked DeCSS. Its more of classic CIVIL DISOBEDIANCE. I mean, something has to be done here. I'm not talking in the near future, but the slightly more distant. People have to stand up against the copyright enforcers. I mean, that's what we're here for right? We love linux, We love not getting told what to do constantly because we are smart enough to think for ourselves.
DRM and iTunes or Microsofts or anybody's is becoming a ****ing nuisance. Digital technology just enables people to do this stuff. Its the way things are, and there will come a time when we are really going to have to confront intellectual property and its owners instead of just pissing around and wondering if Apple Legal are going to send him a letter tommorrow or not.
He can get away with it, so he's doing it. To force their hand. To force all of our hands eventually. I mean, checkout what Lessig is doing. Checkout the Creative Commons and what it really means. We have to be free to do this stuff eventually. Or else the world is going to fall into contradiction.
which I spose it is,.. or isn't in any given period of time....
The best thing about Google isn't even its search capability. They dont shove advertising in your face. Its beyond Microsucks pathos to even attempt something like that. watch, Gates is gonna croak soon from all the bad Karma that gets tossed at him.
Slashdot Mirror
I really enjoyed your post. I met an engineer who worked under Von Braun at Kennedy Space center several years ago and have great awe for the tradition of immense labor and the old science that got us into space the first time around. I can remember a statistic being batted around at the time that one Saturn V launch was estimated to have the work of 400,000 people involved in it.
Its a shame about the old designs not being preserved. Nasa should kick up the budget in that area and do what they can to photograph the rest of this stuff before its too late.
bittorrent Inc. aquired utorrent some time ago. http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-inc-buys-%C2%B5 torrent/
I thought "enter the desktop market" meant sell hardware like Apple. That would've been a good idea.
otherwise, having only a year of updates is ridiculously stupid. Microsofts well established method works. You sell the OS product and then support it for its lifespan. If you don't, the client will stop using it and you will lose their desktop to someone who does.
Firebug is awesome. that's how I learned the DOM.
The multiplayer seems very Quake 3, which disappointed me a bit. I always loathed Quake 3 and thought it was a major blip in id's record.
I agree with your post on the whole except for the above statement that Quake 3 is a blip in id's record. That's absurd! Perhaps it is a little disapointing for you because it is multi-player only, but the engine IMO (and probably in lots of other people's as well) still stands up as probably being one of the, if not the best 3D game engines of all time. I know, there are so many, namely Valve's and all of the newer offerings, but Quake 3 was definitely a genre-defining engine. Not to mention that there have been hundred's of namebrand titles forged from the Quake 3 engine that you have probably played and enjoyed. hey, and its open source now!
gotta love it.
Man, you said it. Leave it to a slashdot thread to mod up all the funny or cleverly off-topic comments that dont really address the issue in a safe and comfortable way and miss one that does.
The Above Post is 100% RIGHT ON. rtb61, you pretty much nailed the problem on the head.
Somebody should mod this up immediately for Insightful, or how about, Truthful.
- dingbats from the RIAA *check*
- no matter how bad the game is, with the right marketing it will sell *check*
- The developer suffers far more than the publisher *check*
- do not hire marketdroids unless you are a monopoly selling a crap operating system hmmmm
I guess in order to get a good insight across you have to package it in such a way that is pleasing for the intended audience of slashdotians, whatever that is...
Mod to me zero and back, I dont care.
exactly, they can't do it anymore. Bill Gates is so off in Lalaland. He doesn't even understand what is going on in the internet anymore. "Opensource software is communist". He said it. The influx of opensource into the infrastructure of technology has become commonplace. Microsoft can't do RSS. Microsoft can't do Bittorrent. and Microsoft wont do Skype either. These are all things born of the new way of thinking.
MSN Search = 75% marketing, 25% technology. well, I cant corroborate the technology part.
What if all the studios agreed to a salary cap for stars?
Better yet, Dont hire stars that cost over $5 million at all. High-cost stars tend to ruin a movie's ability to simply tell a story. Part of the packaging methodology is to put one or more household name actor into a movie to insure that the movie has the bare minimum draw to provide return on investment.
Almost every movie with Jamie Fox or Tom Cruise or Tim Robbins or whoever.. __(big name here)__ just sucks though by definition. Really good movies are able to stand on their own. Napolean Dynamite for instance has a medium size cast of people that no one has ever heard of, but they are all wonderful and the movie becomes universally successful. not an insult to the audience. Big budget blockbusters treat the audience as consumers, not as people.
yeah, like we now have one million days left ... times infinity!
If I hear one more person tell me how vastly superior a GUI is, or scoff that I would use the command line for ... anything, and sense that it is their fear of the unknown rather than substantive argument of any kind, I'm going to ..., but still, I end up getting hung out to dry by these damn GUI zealots. Like all the Mac people who are addicted to the eye candy.
-- In the end, all formats must go open source --
I'd choose J2EE and Solaris over Linux for nonuser-facing server applications in shops that have expert administrators.
If he thinks that his Java + Solaris can best my custom Debian Sarge for performance he's got another thing coming.
I think the implication in the 20 year timespan is that it would require a large booster rocket, not a spaceshuttle to get there. such that the (US) space program would have to go back to the drawing boards with how they do things. although, I would tend to agree with you. 20 years in this day and age is a long time. The will the do get there or having something looming over our heads similar to the cold war would be enough.
The fallacy is that we are becoming more technologically adept at spaceflight. We are actually becoming less. We may have fantastic microcomputers now whereas in the 60's there weren't any yet except for the univac or whatever, but that meant that these sliderule toting engineers had to work all these things out in their head. and by doing it in their head they actually had superior computers compared to what we depend on now.
I've heard estimates that we couldn't land on the moon in 20 years now if we set our minds to it. (Sorry I cant drum up the reference. It was an ex-astronaut on science-friday.)
actually didn't the ST and SW backstories both involve clone wars? Where Kahn came from.
Kerrrrk Kerrrrk
400,000 people.
I met one of the original Saturn V engineers in the giftshop at Kennedy Space center when I was there. He was aparently haggling with the poor woman who ran the giftshop about the display for the poster he designed. I overheard their conversation as I was perusing the poster right next to them and she (gladly) turned him over to me. His name was Bud Abbot. He was just happy to have a fan, someone who appreciated what they did way back then. I even bought his poster and got it autographed.
It took 400,000 people to get one Saturn V rocket into the air. A monumentous achievement, and there was significant outcry from all sorts of people that thought that they knew better how government should spend their money. This continued and grew in pitch throughout the 60's until the Moonlanding was broadcast on TV. History has forgotten that side of the story.
I think that there are dual points I'm trying to squeeze out:
1 - that "To Survive" means that space exploration is imminent. What if something happens here? Our ozone depletes all the way, some sort of viral pollution tears everything up. When I was a kid, it was just a matter of time until we had space stations like the one in 2001. There was a spirit of cooperation and wonder.
2 - We have to get our world in order here first. I can barely afford to drive anywhere with gas prices the way we are. We have to throw all these oil crooks in prison, start getting along with other countries, and just generally promote goodwill...
Group: "HI, TRIPMASTER!"
..., just wondering. I'm guessing that if you were raised catholic (as I) that you are the guitar player...
Tripmaster,
are you associated with the cool indy band of the same name that I have seen play before,
you can mess with your ISP to avoid being blocked or throttled-down. see how long you can get away with this:
change the default ports that your bittorrent client uses. They probably blocked ports 6881-6999. those are the default bittorrent ports.
on windows or linux you can supply command line args to change the port range. set it for up in the 50000 - 65535 range.
I dont know how to change ports on other clients but suspect its probably pretty easy.
btw, I'm a musician too, and I support filesharing. and don't call me moron.
The point is, the rules just changed. Its not interesting what you or I could do with BT or DC++ or whatever. what I'm saying is that the technology allows EVERYONE to do it. and when BT is gone, something will replace it, ad infinitum, forever so that there is going to be a sizeable percentage of people that for the rest of time are going to "steal" your music. either you can reconcile yourself with that and make a living the old fashioned way by gigging, self-promotion (which is gruelling hard work) and actually being talented or you can whine about it. the rest of us will be working to do something about it.
Think of the last 50 years of the record industry as the dotcom boom stretched out over several decades.
oh wait, you're not responding to me, my bad ;)
cheers
No, you've completely missed my point. Are you even responding to the post above you? Its not "wheww, 128kbps is great, OMG" at all... I've
never use iTMS, and I never buy hype. Heck, you've bought the hype that you need a RAID. For what? your music?
My point really coalesces at the bottom. DRM and controlling "content" is just a last scramble for table scraps using an old business model. A business model that was built around analog media that travelled household to household packaged in cardboard and plastic.
all that's irrelevant now. This is the business model used by untalented people to make money off of the talented. That's why I'm againt intellectual property. Instead we could switch to a whuffie based economy. where the talented would again prosper.
" I'd happily shell out 2-3 un-DRMed dollars for about 2-3 hours worth of DRMed digital entertainment. "
Think about how this feels when you read it... Its not true. Its the path of least resistance. Say I become interested in a band, a video game or a movie. Now I know that I must listen, play or see said piece of digital media. if it is available online, for free, what is my impetus for paying the inflated price for the official piece of plastic at a store, besides evading the guilt that some of us more moral types might experience? or just the convenience of having the fully actualized content, rather than a ripped/slightly neutered version.
Even then, you can justify downloading to yourself any number of ways: i.e. "90% goes to companies who stifle artists and are involved in Guerilla marketing. and I'm mad at them because they keep shoving Christina Aguilara in my face."
The other piece of conventional wisdom is that for every type of encryption or copy-protection, someone, somewhere can break it. As long as the digital technology itself allows this 'sort' of transfer of information to be physically possible, then we would just be pretending not to see it, not to use it. why pretend?
I dont believe at this stage in the game that it is possible for the internet to be so dramatically altered that it can be amply controlled or legislated into a micro-payment, DRM style world. It seemed a good idea to the content owners at first, but its becoming apparent to many people now that it is a losing battle, that these companies can only prolong their hereditary business models for a little while longer.
"Information wants to be free"
I'm not saying that its gonna happen overnight or even in a couple of years, but as long as the fundamental rule-sets that the computers on our desks are built from and the network that connects them remains the way it is, then the internet _will_ persist in its democratic nature.
yes, I have several sticks of PC133, but why the hell would anybody want them?
.. or isn't in any given period of time....
This is the most classic display of public 'Disobeyance of Authority'. DVD-jon is like an evangelist or something. iTunes, I dont believe is the target, nor were the MPAA when he cracked DeCSS. Its more of classic CIVIL DISOBEDIANCE. I mean, something has to be done here. I'm not talking in the near future, but the slightly more distant. People have to stand up against the copyright enforcers. I mean, that's what we're here for right? We love linux, We love not getting told what to do constantly because we are smart enough to think for ourselves.
DRM and iTunes or Microsofts or anybody's is becoming a ****ing nuisance. Digital technology just enables people to do this stuff. Its the way things are, and there will come a time when we are really going to have to confront intellectual property and its owners instead of just pissing around and wondering if Apple Legal are going to send him a letter tommorrow or not.
He can get away with it, so he's doing it. To force their hand. To force all of our hands eventually. I mean, checkout what Lessig is doing. Checkout the Creative Commons and what it really means. We have to be free to do this stuff eventually.
Or else the world is going to fall into contradiction.
which I spose it is,
read this site:
http://www.downhillbattle.org/itunes
Yes, I have several pc133, but why the hell would you want them?
The best thing about Google isn't even its search capability. They dont shove advertising in your face. Its beyond Microsucks pathos to even attempt something like that. watch, Gates is gonna croak soon from all the bad Karma that gets tossed at him.