Is there a description of what flamebait is somewhere? This is really starting to get on my nerves. Seems like I get modded down as flamebait quite a bit. Either there's something to the way I post, or some people's definition of what flambebait is a little off from mine. I'm asking for clarification.
I am dead serious this is what they said. I used to work for a game retailer. I used to sell those stupid things and the first run of them had a very high (1 in 4) defect rate! Couple that with a shortage, and you have a PR problem. Sony's response was 'The customers are mistreating the systems.'
I kid you not. I'm not exaggerating, that is what REALLY HAPPENED.
I think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles altered the general perception of the word mutation a bit. All kidding aside, I can imagine a 20 year old today having a different idea about it than the 40 year old who wrote this article.
Anybody remember 'Enos Lives'? If you rearrange the letters just a little, you get 'Sones Evil' or 'Sony's Evil'. Part of a marketing gag that people spent months trying to decode when the PS1 was launched.
Don't ever expect Sony to support the idea of people making games for Linux without paying royalties to them. Remember them shutting down the Aibo hacking site?
In any case, I wouldn't expect a whole lot from Sony releasing a product to run Linux on their machines. I think they're worried that people will use it to exploit their machines to do things that Sony doesn't think is appropriate. I'd be much more comfortable with a 3rd party doing it.
I vaguely remember some marketing blurb when the PS2 was released saying that 4000 PS2's were shipped to Iraq to be netted together as a 'super-computer', and that China was being blocked from recieving these also.
Personally, I believe these to have been simply marketing rumors intentionally set to make the PS2 seem more powerful than it is. I am curious, though, does anybody have better insight into that than I do? My memory is very fuzzy about it.
"The reason that Playstations are going bad is because people are misusing them." -- that's what Sony said when they had LOTS of returned, defective Playstations.
"Coming to your home in 1995, only on the Nintendo ULTRA 64!" -- the game Killer Instinct, if you can find that in arcades, very loudly says that hehe.
For the uninitiated, the Nintendo 64 (ultra was dropped...) came out in 1996 with a whopping 2 games at launch.
Okay, just to be clear, if you are reading this as "I'm trying to piss off anti-MS people..." then I ask you to read it again. I'm talking about actual experience here with what I believe to be a good OS. The only reason this would draw 'flames' is because people are hard set in their opinions about MS. I can't do anything about that. I'm hoping maybe that if they see that there are people in the world doing just fine with MS, then maybe they'll open their minds a bit to alternatives like MS out there.
Trust me, if I were going for flame bait the post would have been rather different. I've been given 2 points for being insightful so far, take that as an indication that at least 2 people thought I wasn't trying to start a flame war.
It is partially true, on a mhz per mhz comparison. I found a Lightwave benchmark site at http://www.blanos.com/benchmark/index.html , it shows that in nearly all cases the Mac was significantly more efficient, mhz wise, to the PC. But what it doesn't show is the price per performance ratio. 1gig Macs just recently showed up at a time when PC's were at 2 gigz. They perform roughly the same.
Figure Athlon into this, and the benchmarks get more interseting. An Athlon 4 1.2 gig rendered a scene in 130 seconds, a Macintosh 867 took 271 seconds. I think both those processors came out about the same time, but that's a big difference, dontcha think?
In any case, I agree with you. Marketing has a way of twisting the numbers to their favor. It's funny how if you narrow a perspective a bit, you seem a lot more favorable.
I got news for ya. You actually can do stuff with Windows. The vast majority of problems with the WinNT line (Win9X is horrid and i won't defend it at all) has nothing to do with Windows itself.
I realize I'm going to draw criticism for this, seeing as how apparently some people have issues with Win2k. My perspective on this is from being the assistant-administrator for my office of around 17 or so. Almost everybody is on Win2k, I think one person is on 98. Other than a minor issue with an old laptop having difficulty going into standby mode (a bios flash fixed this), I've had no Windows or even Microsoft related problems to report. The problems that do come up are nearly always the fault of the company making the software. Netscape, for example, doesn't like to stay running for an entire day without crashing at least once. That's not a Windows problem. Netscape has never been known for its stability on any platform.
In any case, MS certainly kept their promise of greater stability with Windows 2k, and I am very glad that we upgraded the whole office to it.
Let me give you a piece of advice, though. Do some research before you make a switch like that. Go to www.deja.com, for example, to see what people have to say about a product. If they say it sucks, then keep that in mind. Find out why. We didn't go to 2K until we had tested it on a few machines. We didn't buy it based on a vendor promise. We certainly aren't running MS servers, we're running Linux there. We know better because we looked into it. It is a lot harder to be succeptable to vendor lies when you do reasearch like this.
I agree, the fair use definition is a bit misunderstood here. But we have to stay focused in that they are trying to take it all away forcefully. For example, today I have the right to rip a DVD to my PC and re-edit the movie. I want to do this in order to pick up valuable editing skills. Imagine if I could make Lost in Space into a good movie! I can show it to my friends here at my place, but I can't distribute it. But that's okay! I get my education that way.
They want to forcefully prevent me from pursuing this education. This seems a bit unconstitutional to me. First off, taking my rights away is similar to putting me in jail. Therefore, I'm being punished criminal before commiting any crime. This is not what 'innocent until proven guilty' means.
Secondly, it intrudes on my ability to make a parody. I can't take a scene from a movie, or a sound bite, and use it in a parody of any sorts.
Third, it totally destroy's fair use. It's not fair use anymore. It's their rules. Scary, isn't it?
My friend had a problem with his neighbor cats having a competition to see who could leave their scent on the door. To stop this, he rigged up an eletric fence charger to the door. I never actually saw it, but his description was along the lines of placing two leads up on the door. The cat pee would complete the circuit, and he'd get a 1 second long shock. It's not a continual shock, just enough to make your weiner shout "ACK! WTF??".
He noticed a difference within a day, but it took about 2 weeks for the message to get across.
The fence charger is gone now, but his door is bone dry heh. (Well not really, he's in Portland, rains alot here...)
I have a feeling that if cats couldn't get through the door carrying rodents, they'd learn they can't go inside with them. I've personally witnessed cat behaviour modification hehe. My stepmom had a cat that wasn't allowed in the bedroom. So the cat wouldn't go in the bedroom, she'd avoid it. We're pretty sure, though, that she only followed that rule when everybody was home, though heh.
I think he brings up an interesting point. One could productize this and teach your cats it is inacceptable to bring their dead dinner inside.
I have a friend of mine that put a bird feeder in his hard. Well, it turned out to be a cat feeder. After it was up a couple of days, he noticed feathers and bird meat bits around the vicinity of the bird feeder. Part of the problem was that the cat was bringing his kills inside the house as a gift. This didn't settle too well with his 5 year old daughter.
I bet you anything my friend'd be willing to buy a productized version of this. Heck, he'd probably build one himself heh. He's a very smart guy.
"Everyone seems to think that the only money studios spend on discs is the actual manufacturing costs."
Um, no, I was including that. Check out this site: http://www.moviefxmag.com/ I bought one of their 'mags', it's really a DVD. They charge $10 per disc and it includes 60-90 mins (lost track of time) of behind the scenes footage of a few movies. I find it hard to believe these guys could be in business if it cost more than $1 per DVD to make.
The simple fact of the matter is that the cost of making one DVD disperses across millions of copies being out there. It's a case of the DVD's costing pennies to make is a bigger issue than the cost of producing the content for the DVD.
The MPAA would have little problem selling DVD's for $10 each. If that would prove inprofitable (yeah right), then they'd need to tighten their belts a bit. It is not that hard to make quality content. The reason that a DVD costs say $25 on average over the $17 VHS format (I'm pulling numbers out of my head, I bet I'm not that far off) is that the DVD has higher resolution than the VHS counterpart. Therefore, it's worth more money. They make no mention of the discs being far cheaper to make. Yet VHS stuff has gone down in price as of late.
Trust me, the MPAA seriously inflated the price of their content.
BTW, if you are interested in movie making at all, go to Barnes and Noble or Borders and get this mag, it's called MovieFX I think. Here is the URL, you can find out more there:
http://www.moviefxmag.com/
I was totally shocked when i got one of these guys, gonna subscribe to them.
*sigh* I hope you're being sarcastic. The MPAA has no intention of doing anything but screwing us on this. First, they won't allow you to 'purchase' a copy of content unless it is on their media, meaning the price will be in the $20 range. Second, they want to maintain selling their crap on DVD because they can justify a ridiculous price on them. Third, with that legislation, they have 0 incentive to use new formats down the road. Their same old crap will always sell, they have no reason to improve it, and nobody else will be able to come along and do it better.
"Even if some sort of standard allowed better compression rates [ciol.com] than even DivX or MP3 could allow, the size of a DVD could still be more than half a GB"
People think that is acceptable today. Go to Morpheus and do a search for 'DVD Rip', and you'll find lots of 700 meg files up on a 128k connection. As for the quality, the quality is pretty damn good. A little more artifact-y than a DVD.
If the MPAA would put up a site where I could download it at 150k/s instead of 15, then it'd be worth $5 to me. I'd rather get the DivX version than the DVD version in most cases. Heck, if the DVD version was noticably better, then I'd have a reason to have both.
They could do it. They just have this mindset that one person will buy a copy and then transfer it around. They are totally blind to the idea that if they price it low enough (yeah right) then buying it from them will be day/night better than getting it free. Imagine having instant access to a bunch of movies that can be downloaded really fast for like $5 a pop. I would certainly be better than getting in line and waiting roughly a day to get a movie on Kazaa.
.. that if they are busting guys with only 15 DVD burners, then they really aren't reclaiming much money. They must be making ridiculous amounts of money on DVD's to want to shut down somebody so small. Maybe they need to lower their prices some?
As for the 'wholly inferior' comment, is it possible that the DVD's he was talking about had no special features? Granted, I know he's trying to make it sound like pirated DVD's are ripping people off (they arent if they're getting movies out faster...) but it's difficult to imagine that they were able to also get the extra footage that often accompanies DVD's.
"Well, I don't know. There aren't any simple answers!"
I find it interesting they can claim losses to internet piracy when they don't even have an internet media. Because of that, they are saying that every single internet copy is a pirate copy and that they ose money to it.
What they need to do, to stop piracy, is first lower prices. It's a little hard to pay $35 (in an extreme case, RoboCop Director's cut was about that much...) for a DVD when you know they cost pennies to make. $15 is far more reasonable, but they insist on gouging. No Duh are people going to pirate. The problem is, you just don't know what you are getting when you spend money on a DVD.
Second, they need to provide an internet format. It is ridiculous that they look at how many people are trading movies on the web and then they say "we better stop them!". How come nobody in the industry saw this as a new market and leapt on it? That's a bit ignorant if you ask me, I'm not paying for their mistake. Seems like if 'billions of movies are flying around the web a year...' then somebody would be say 'we think we can make money from that new market.'
The funny thing is, the people using DeCSS aren't typically making money from it. It makes you wonder if fair-use at least partially protects them. Oh well, they got their poorly written DMCA. Seems like it wouldn't be that hard to trap the MPAA or RIAA using the DMCA.
I never thought I'd finally be able to use my ass as a password.
Any respectable moderators out there?
on
Chase the Rabbits
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
I asked a question about whether or not this patent could stop the CBDTPA. That was modded down as 'offtopic'. I asked why it was modded down as offtopic (as opposed to being overrated if it was a stupid question), and that was was modded redundant.
I'm not looking to get those points back, but some hypothetical insight as to what i did wrong would be nice. Perhaps my definition of what is off topic needs some modification? I mean, I am asking about this patent and how it it could be used to stop idiotic legislation from being psased, but for some reason this is off topic.
Why was this modded as offtopic? I was asking if this patent holds can it prevent the SSSCA or whatever it's called now. Overrated I would understand, but offtopic? What was I supposed to do? Post "man, they suck for trying to enforce that."
Gah. I doubt anybody'll give me a reasonable response.
Could this prevent the CBDTPA?
on
Chase the Rabbits
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I am by no means an expert on this stuff, but wouldn't this mean that the CBDTPA would require companies to pay this dumb license... but what if the companies paid the company NOT to license the technology. Could that mean that the CBDTPA wouldn't legally be possible?
Maybe I totally misread that doc, I dunno. I'm not sure that stopping the CBDTPA would be worth the other damage this would do. But just for curiosity's sake...
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Is there a description of what flamebait is somewhere? This is really starting to get on my nerves. Seems like I get modded down as flamebait quite a bit. Either there's something to the way I post, or some people's definition of what flambebait is a little off from mine. I'm asking for clarification.
I am dead serious this is what they said. I used to work for a game retailer. I used to sell those stupid things and the first run of them had a very high (1 in 4) defect rate! Couple that with a shortage, and you have a PR problem. Sony's response was 'The customers are mistreating the systems.'
I kid you not. I'm not exaggerating, that is what REALLY HAPPENED.
I think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles altered the general perception of the word mutation a bit. All kidding aside, I can imagine a 20 year old today having a different idea about it than the 40 year old who wrote this article.
Anybody remember 'Enos Lives'? If you rearrange the letters just a little, you get 'Sones Evil' or 'Sony's Evil'. Part of a marketing gag that people spent months trying to decode when the PS1 was launched.
Don't ever expect Sony to support the idea of people making games for Linux without paying royalties to them. Remember them shutting down the Aibo hacking site?
In any case, I wouldn't expect a whole lot from Sony releasing a product to run Linux on their machines. I think they're worried that people will use it to exploit their machines to do things that Sony doesn't think is appropriate. I'd be much more comfortable with a 3rd party doing it.
I vaguely remember some marketing blurb when the PS2 was released saying that 4000 PS2's were shipped to Iraq to be netted together as a 'super-computer', and that China was being blocked from recieving these also.
Personally, I believe these to have been simply marketing rumors intentionally set to make the PS2 seem more powerful than it is. I am curious, though, does anybody have better insight into that than I do? My memory is very fuzzy about it.
My dad ran across an advertisement for a sewing machine in the newspaper once. It had a special feature: "an automatic buttholer".
My dad never did by the machine, but I have a feeling they were lying when they said it had a feature to automatically butthole something.
"The reason that Playstations are going bad is because people are misusing them." -- that's what Sony said when they had LOTS of returned, defective Playstations.
"Coming to your home in 1995, only on the Nintendo ULTRA 64!" -- the game Killer Instinct, if you can find that in arcades, very loudly says that hehe.
For the uninitiated, the Nintendo 64 (ultra was dropped...) came out in 1996 with a whopping 2 games at launch.
Okay, just to be clear, if you are reading this as "I'm trying to piss off anti-MS people..." then I ask you to read it again. I'm talking about actual experience here with what I believe to be a good OS. The only reason this would draw 'flames' is because people are hard set in their opinions about MS. I can't do anything about that. I'm hoping maybe that if they see that there are people in the world doing just fine with MS, then maybe they'll open their minds a bit to alternatives like MS out there.
Trust me, if I were going for flame bait the post would have been rather different. I've been given 2 points for being insightful so far, take that as an indication that at least 2 people thought I wasn't trying to start a flame war.
It is partially true, on a mhz per mhz comparison. I found a Lightwave benchmark site at http://www.blanos.com/benchmark/index.html , it shows that in nearly all cases the Mac was significantly more efficient, mhz wise, to the PC. But what it doesn't show is the price per performance ratio. 1gig Macs just recently showed up at a time when PC's were at 2 gigz. They perform roughly the same.
Figure Athlon into this, and the benchmarks get more interseting. An Athlon 4 1.2 gig rendered a scene in 130 seconds, a Macintosh 867 took 271 seconds. I think both those processors came out about the same time, but that's a big difference, dontcha think?
In any case, I agree with you. Marketing has a way of twisting the numbers to their favor. It's funny how if you narrow a perspective a bit, you seem a lot more favorable.
I got news for ya. You actually can do stuff with Windows. The vast majority of problems with the WinNT line (Win9X is horrid and i won't defend it at all) has nothing to do with Windows itself.
I realize I'm going to draw criticism for this, seeing as how apparently some people have issues with Win2k. My perspective on this is from being the assistant-administrator for my office of around 17 or so. Almost everybody is on Win2k, I think one person is on 98. Other than a minor issue with an old laptop having difficulty going into standby mode (a bios flash fixed this), I've had no Windows or even Microsoft related problems to report. The problems that do come up are nearly always the fault of the company making the software. Netscape, for example, doesn't like to stay running for an entire day without crashing at least once. That's not a Windows problem. Netscape has never been known for its stability on any platform.
In any case, MS certainly kept their promise of greater stability with Windows 2k, and I am very glad that we upgraded the whole office to it.
Let me give you a piece of advice, though. Do some research before you make a switch like that. Go to www.deja.com, for example, to see what people have to say about a product. If they say it sucks, then keep that in mind. Find out why. We didn't go to 2K until we had tested it on a few machines. We didn't buy it based on a vendor promise. We certainly aren't running MS servers, we're running Linux there. We know better because we looked into it. It is a lot harder to be succeptable to vendor lies when you do reasearch like this.
We have it deployed at our office. It's stable, easy to maintain, and nobody ever manages to break it.
I agree, the fair use definition is a bit misunderstood here. But we have to stay focused in that they are trying to take it all away forcefully. For example, today I have the right to rip a DVD to my PC and re-edit the movie. I want to do this in order to pick up valuable editing skills. Imagine if I could make Lost in Space into a good movie! I can show it to my friends here at my place, but I can't distribute it. But that's okay! I get my education that way.
They want to forcefully prevent me from pursuing this education. This seems a bit unconstitutional to me. First off, taking my rights away is similar to putting me in jail. Therefore, I'm being punished criminal before commiting any crime. This is not what 'innocent until proven guilty' means.
Secondly, it intrudes on my ability to make a parody. I can't take a scene from a movie, or a sound bite, and use it in a parody of any sorts.
Third, it totally destroy's fair use. It's not fair use anymore. It's their rules. Scary, isn't it?
*WheW* had me worried for a second there that the MPAA had some convincing propoganda out there.
My friend had a problem with his neighbor cats having a competition to see who could leave their scent on the door. To stop this, he rigged up an eletric fence charger to the door. I never actually saw it, but his description was along the lines of placing two leads up on the door. The cat pee would complete the circuit, and he'd get a 1 second long shock. It's not a continual shock, just enough to make your weiner shout "ACK! WTF??".
He noticed a difference within a day, but it took about 2 weeks for the message to get across.
The fence charger is gone now, but his door is bone dry heh. (Well not really, he's in Portland, rains alot here...)
I have a feeling that if cats couldn't get through the door carrying rodents, they'd learn they can't go inside with them. I've personally witnessed cat behaviour modification hehe. My stepmom had a cat that wasn't allowed in the bedroom. So the cat wouldn't go in the bedroom, she'd avoid it. We're pretty sure, though, that she only followed that rule when everybody was home, though heh.
I think he brings up an interesting point. One could productize this and teach your cats it is inacceptable to bring their dead dinner inside.
I have a friend of mine that put a bird feeder in his hard. Well, it turned out to be a cat feeder. After it was up a couple of days, he noticed feathers and bird meat bits around the vicinity of the bird feeder. Part of the problem was that the cat was bringing his kills inside the house as a gift. This didn't settle too well with his 5 year old daughter.
I bet you anything my friend'd be willing to buy a productized version of this. Heck, he'd probably build one himself heh. He's a very smart guy.
"Everyone seems to think that the only money studios spend on discs is the actual manufacturing costs."
Um, no, I was including that. Check out this site: http://www.moviefxmag.com/ I bought one of their 'mags', it's really a DVD. They charge $10 per disc and it includes 60-90 mins (lost track of time) of behind the scenes footage of a few movies. I find it hard to believe these guys could be in business if it cost more than $1 per DVD to make.
The simple fact of the matter is that the cost of making one DVD disperses across millions of copies being out there. It's a case of the DVD's costing pennies to make is a bigger issue than the cost of producing the content for the DVD.
The MPAA would have little problem selling DVD's for $10 each. If that would prove inprofitable (yeah right), then they'd need to tighten their belts a bit. It is not that hard to make quality content. The reason that a DVD costs say $25 on average over the $17 VHS format (I'm pulling numbers out of my head, I bet I'm not that far off) is that the DVD has higher resolution than the VHS counterpart. Therefore, it's worth more money. They make no mention of the discs being far cheaper to make. Yet VHS stuff has gone down in price as of late.
Trust me, the MPAA seriously inflated the price of their content.
BTW, if you are interested in movie making at all, go to Barnes and Noble or Borders and get this mag, it's called MovieFX I think. Here is the URL, you can find out more there:
http://www.moviefxmag.com/
I was totally shocked when i got one of these guys, gonna subscribe to them.
*sigh* I hope you're being sarcastic. The MPAA has no intention of doing anything but screwing us on this. First, they won't allow you to 'purchase' a copy of content unless it is on their media, meaning the price will be in the $20 range. Second, they want to maintain selling their crap on DVD because they can justify a ridiculous price on them. Third, with that legislation, they have 0 incentive to use new formats down the road. Their same old crap will always sell, they have no reason to improve it, and nobody else will be able to come along and do it better.
"Even if some sort of standard allowed better compression rates [ciol.com] than even DivX or MP3 could allow, the size of a DVD could still be more than half a GB"
People think that is acceptable today. Go to Morpheus and do a search for 'DVD Rip', and you'll find lots of 700 meg files up on a 128k connection. As for the quality, the quality is pretty damn good. A little more artifact-y than a DVD.
If the MPAA would put up a site where I could download it at 150k/s instead of 15, then it'd be worth $5 to me. I'd rather get the DivX version than the DVD version in most cases. Heck, if the DVD version was noticably better, then I'd have a reason to have both.
They could do it. They just have this mindset that one person will buy a copy and then transfer it around. They are totally blind to the idea that if they price it low enough (yeah right) then buying it from them will be day/night better than getting it free. Imagine having instant access to a bunch of movies that can be downloaded really fast for like $5 a pop. I would certainly be better than getting in line and waiting roughly a day to get a movie on Kazaa.
.. that if they are busting guys with only 15 DVD burners, then they really aren't reclaiming much money. They must be making ridiculous amounts of money on DVD's to want to shut down somebody so small. Maybe they need to lower their prices some?
As for the 'wholly inferior' comment, is it possible that the DVD's he was talking about had no special features? Granted, I know he's trying to make it sound like pirated DVD's are ripping people off (they arent if they're getting movies out faster...) but it's difficult to imagine that they were able to also get the extra footage that often accompanies DVD's.
"Well, I don't know. There aren't any simple answers!"
I find it interesting they can claim losses to internet piracy when they don't even have an internet media. Because of that, they are saying that every single internet copy is a pirate copy and that they ose money to it.
What they need to do, to stop piracy, is first lower prices. It's a little hard to pay $35 (in an extreme case, RoboCop Director's cut was about that much...) for a DVD when you know they cost pennies to make. $15 is far more reasonable, but they insist on gouging. No Duh are people going to pirate. The problem is, you just don't know what you are getting when you spend money on a DVD.
Second, they need to provide an internet format. It is ridiculous that they look at how many people are trading movies on the web and then they say "we better stop them!". How come nobody in the industry saw this as a new market and leapt on it? That's a bit ignorant if you ask me, I'm not paying for their mistake. Seems like if 'billions of movies are flying around the web a year...' then somebody would be say 'we think we can make money from that new market.'
The funny thing is, the people using DeCSS aren't typically making money from it. It makes you wonder if fair-use at least partially protects them. Oh well, they got their poorly written DMCA. Seems like it wouldn't be that hard to trap the MPAA or RIAA using the DMCA.
People post here all the time and never get noticed... *G*
I never thought I'd finally be able to use my ass as a password.
I asked a question about whether or not this patent could stop the CBDTPA. That was modded down as 'offtopic'. I asked why it was modded down as offtopic (as opposed to being overrated if it was a stupid question), and that was was modded redundant.
I'm not looking to get those points back, but some hypothetical insight as to what i did wrong would be nice. Perhaps my definition of what is off topic needs some modification? I mean, I am asking about this patent and how it it could be used to stop idiotic legislation from being psased, but for some reason this is off topic.
Please, somebody seriously answer me?
Why was this modded as offtopic? I was asking if this patent holds can it prevent the SSSCA or whatever it's called now. Overrated I would understand, but offtopic? What was I supposed to do? Post "man, they suck for trying to enforce that."
Gah. I doubt anybody'll give me a reasonable response.
I am by no means an expert on this stuff, but wouldn't this mean that the CBDTPA would require companies to pay this dumb license... but what if the companies paid the company NOT to license the technology. Could that mean that the CBDTPA wouldn't legally be possible?
Maybe I totally misread that doc, I dunno. I'm not sure that stopping the CBDTPA would be worth the other damage this would do. But just for curiosity's sake...