Why do their work for them? I say, if they don't want to release in a format I can use, then they proceed without my dollars and with my negative word-of-mouth.
Quicker release of DVDs is not about piracy, it's about distributors thinking that DVDs are a bigger and more lucrative market and somewhat about producers that finally see "profits" if the DVDs sell.
Simultaneous release also offers lower or more efficient marketing costs as the marketing for weeks one and two of a film's release would generate ticket receipts and DVD sales (rather then another crank up of the publicity machine and a second media buy x months later for the DVD release). This is also meant to get more money in some till before word of mouth kills the demand on the mediocre and bad movies that come out. And I ask you to think about how many comedies seem to pull some scenes in order to be able to get bookings as PG-13 in the theaters and then release unrated DVDs because the "forbidden fruit" makes the title sell better? Do we really know how much real overlap of the DVD sales market and ticket buyers there really is?
My suggestion? The distributors, in return for simultaneous release, collect a smaller percentage of receipts in the first 2 and 13 weeks of release. (Maybe the theatres keep 80% of ticket receipts in the first two weeks.) Incidentally, I think it's the fact that theatres cannot survive on their take of ticket receipts during the effective shelf-life of a typical first release that has led to the high cost of going to a movie.
Another suggestion: theatres are given a two week window of exclusivity for DVD sales, so theater goers who want a keepsake (or maybe an unrated version or director cut) can get it only in the lobby on the way out. Maybe on the same web page where one can buy a movie ticket, one can choose the cd and the theatre owners who are currently booking the film get a cut of the DVD sale. Think what that would mean to small independent films that get bookings in large markets at art houses and get discussed in the national media, but may never make it to a smaller market.
I would guess that DVD success is correlated to box-office success. Killing the theatres is not in anyone's best interest.
First of all, Microsoft goes after OSDL, as an hypothetical, for something in samba and suddenly a lot of fecal matter hits fans. Meanwhile, Microsoft has to toss the goodwill it receives when it argues that its patent portfolio is for defensive purposes. Do we seriously expect that investors will even care (in a positive sense) that cease and desist letters have been sent to infringers without deep pockets. And aren't there cross-licensing arrangements with the people with big pockets, precluding suits? And won't the record of anti-trust violations and anti-competitive activities, for the immediate future, play a role in any patent litigation so as to decrease the probability of collections which exceed the litigation costs?
But, secondly, wouldn't the shareholders be much more interested in hearing about what management is doing about shipping key products late and down-scoped? Because it is products and results which move stock prices for Fortune 500 corporations and its higher stock prices which make shareholders happy, not pig-in-a-poke intellectual property portfolios.
I want to experiment with stuff and Microsoft licensing terms are not amenable to hobbyists and explorers. (I saw recently that they require a new license for an upgraded motherboard. Sheesh. Sometimes I think they forget whose machine it is.) Well it's their right, but I've chosen to not use Windows unless someone is paying for my time, and I'm unable to figure a way to use my Mac instead. Now when I build or re-purpose computers, in other words, have fun, I put FreeBSD or Linux on them because these are the platforms that allow you to check out new technologies more easily, while the basic stuff, like e-mail and web, is essentially the same. BTW, even though it's the quintessence of the nerd's approach, is there any excuse for Microsoft to not have included vi, emacs, grep, awk, and perl in their default installations a long time ago?
Oh yes, there's this predeliction of Microsoft to draft its customers into its corporate pissing wars, and I don't want to be used again to kill off some company that built a technology that Microsoft now wants to own.
Interestingly, I bought one of those Fry's cheapies with Linspire about a month ago and took it to work to use as a coding machine. (Incidentally, no one at Fry's asked me what I was going to do with it.) Wiped Linspire and put a fresh install of SuSE 10 on the machine. About a week later, I find out that one of the bosses who has avoided any and all contact with computers finally could no longer duck having to use a workstation, so I started her on the only machine I had available, that cheapo from Fry's with a GNOME desktop + OpenOffice.org2.0 + Thunderbird + Firefox. You know what? It wasn't any more difficult getting her going than it was helping my Mom a couple of years ago with Windows XP. Now, if it hadn't worked out, I would have been the first one to ignore my little obsessions and request an XP license for her. But Linux worked out. I'm not saying that this little story proves that the day of the Linux Desktop is here, but using a Linux desktop isn't that ridiculous either as far as I'm concerned.
Well, the funny part is that, if I read the Register report correctly, those folks will still get something in October.
I know the take has been "ole Microsoft, shipping late again." But... I'm starting to wonder if Microsoft is making the Christmas '06 season safe for XBox 360 sales, by reducing the number of new shiny things the retail consumers will see. I would think that Microsoft expects revenues from the cash cows will be unaffected by the delay.
The government gives scientists research grants. I'd guess that there are grants for academics in the computer sciences, so it's probably already happening.
A developer writes a proposal and demonstrates the benefits from the development, the government reviews and grants funds, and at then end of the grant period the developed software goes into the common pool for re-use (BSD-style license I would think.) (Of course, how many software projects fail to meet goals in the estimated time. And wouldn't the news media have an inexhaustible supply of "goofy ways the government spends your taxes" stories.)
But, as for tax breaks? Let's say you are Company A and you hire a developer for some r&d. The salary costs of that person's salary and benefits are fully expensible already. For the government to add some additional reductions in taxes just doesn't make sense. In fact, it sounds like a giveaway.
And let's say you're Company A's PHB, and the government says in return for the tax reduction, you have to share your r&d results. Don't the advantages of being a swell guy get quickly overwhelmed by the lessons from those take-aways you got at the "Get a patent and retire to Bermuda" seminar you attended last week? (Or do you game the system by putting the crap code into the pool, overvaluing the code/overestimating the costs for the tax benefits, and then withhold the good stuff for future products and patent submarines?)
Now I managed to get through college without the burden of economics classes, but it seems to me that economic efficiency doesn't need any help. (And wouldn't my libertarian friends suggest that government interference would in fact disrupt the efficiencies as politics intrude to be sure that the code is "good" code and doesn't interfere with the war against drugs, pornography, indecency, culture self-distribution, terrorists real, imagined and to-be, and the unharassed teaching of evolution?)
I didn't see it in a theatre when it first came out. But, I've stumbled across it on tv, and, though I've tried to stay with it, can't watch it for more than five minutes. The plot and the story arc are well-tested. Star Trek used that plot a few times -- think of Tron's computer-space as another planet and the bad guy as this week's alien life form who is forcing the humans into a life or death competition. (The business about Tron's main character being a game designer, etc., is motivation/back story and not plot. That the two co-workers learn something and die [after telling the hero important information] is a device as old as the hills (or Homer) in order to suggest that the peril to the hero is real and the outcome is in doubt.) The film's graphical style was unique and imaginative (which is why I think any one remembers that film at all.) But, this film was one of the first victims of the synergy curse. The film was designed for easy portability to a video game (which was released and IIRC did better as a video game title than the film as a movie) and so I can see the Disney execs rubbing their hands in glee at the story boards saying "This looks great! Gentlemen, we've got ourselves Level 3," and choosing to make plot and storyline serviceable and obvious so as to not get in the way of the graphics and competitions and chases.
So two minutes, get it, and tune out. About right for an infomercial, yes?
Plus SBC (AT&T) is putting its ducks in a row to be the content gatekeeper (and skim off a take of each transaction). Give everyone broadband now and the taxpayers just bought AT&T their monopoly. Perhaps this is about a perception in Hollywood that the ubiquitous broadband channel is needed now to offset declining interest and rentals/sales?
A bad idea. Just like the all-go-digital-television legislation, which ignored that people just didn't want digital television, was bad (and I will not be coverting and taking that subsidy from our exhausted treasury).
Still not there, because a page in a comic book has some relationship to the page before and page after, which is not true of 99% of the cd's.
Maybe it's like buying a $20 Picasso poster instead of the $120 monograph
HEY, it makes sense to do that
Course, I've been saying that we're back to the days of the 45 and hit songs, as we were in the 50s and 60s. You want to sell cd's, write a Sergeant Pepper's. Or put a lot of hits in the album. Or, release a single and flip side not in an album, release a single and flip from an album. Release an album every year and a single every 13 weeks. Find people with something to say and let them say it without spending a gazillion dollars per utterance. Decrease the advances and increase the royalties. Get more concerned with development of performers, because the musician who starts out now and is playing in 20 years will be the one to move catalog. Be more agile. Dinosaur time is so over.
Oddly, the comparison was brought in to counterpoint the survey finding of reduced cosumer demand. And, last I looked, the movie companies were freaking about reduced demand for DVDs and a continued downturn in tickets sold which last year resulted in reduced total receipts. So is 30 hours per game (which I take is a mean amount of accumulated play per person per title) trending up or down? I'm not a gamer and have no base-line for comparisons but I find the 30 hours figure surprisingly low, I'm guessing it means there must be a lot of dog games, which people abandon after the first play, out there. That can't be good.
So. Everything's fine. Hey Sony here's how you can sweep the board. Hey Mircrosoft here's how you can sweep the board. By the way consumer interest in games is fading, so you may be spending millions to sweep a smaller board. Let's have lunch.
The mastering engineers always did something like this. 16 years ago, I self-produced a vinyl record. Some of the studio material was recorded on a Fostex B-16 (1/2 inch 16 track) and some were recorded in 2 inch 24 track. All were mixed to DAT. The DAT was then taken to a Hollywood mastering studio and there the master was cut. Cutting the master meant putting a blank disk on the cutting machine, and playing (without stopping) the tape for the side being cut.
In preparation, the engineer listened to our songs and set up equalization and compression and looked for s's in the music. We didn't have a lot of music, so the issue of rolling off the bottom to allow for a narrower gap between the grooves on the disk was not an issue. And while working with adapting our tape for the technical restrictions of vinyl disk, he also was working on trying to make the songs sound as good as possible on vinyl.
He also had this really cool AB mixer, which allowed him to tailor the settings so the inconsistently recorded songs would sound as consistent as possible on the disk. While one song was playing to the cutter, he would use his notes to dial in the settings for the next song. During the gap between songs, he cross-fades from the A mixer to the B mixer and sets up the offline one for the next song.
My opinion was that his efforts made the songs sound better (warmer, more present, more musical) on the disk than on the DAT masters. Now I can't tell you what mastering engineers do today, but I suspect the best ones are trying to do what the vinyl engineers were doing then, taking "perfect" studio mixes and optimizing them for the characteristics of the compact disc. (I would expect that the masters for release to the download services are also re-equalized with a version for every authorized format, in order to maximize the sound for the format.) So I guess my point of view, from my limited experience, is that a good mastering engineer makes the studio mixes sound better.
Just curious. When you or your musician friends needed to teach their bands a song a few years ago, did everyone go out and buy a copy of the cd/lp or was a little casual infringement via cassette accepted? And when you were starting out and a friend told you about a rad band, did you schedule a trip to the record store to buy the disk, so you could legally listen at home and decide, strictly on their say-so, every single time you got a tip?
I understand the rules and I think I understand the business. Record companies and, maybe to a larger degree, musicians are looking for that shot to be part of a sub-culture's soundtrack. It doesn't happen unless a lot of folks hear the music without explicitly paying. So, it seems to me that if the rules are ever 100% enforceable, via legislation, litigation and/or code/technology, and no one can ever make mix tapes or copies for friends, relatives or band mates, then this has gone too far. (I think it'd be a good thing if collectors were allowed to offer out-of-print obscurities on-line at no cost for download, which is well outside of the realm of any one's definition of personal use.)
Back to my original questions, music is not this thing that springs fully formed from the brow of Zeus. It exists as a chain of ideas and techniques developed by musicians hearing stuff and performing stuff which other people and musicians hear, and I know you understand that. Records, radio, cds, mp3s, the internet have all brought us to a point where it is really really easy for someone to hear our music without the former bounds of geography. So, how much lockdown is too much lockdown? I think we passed the point of too much a few years ago. If it goes further, and going further has the momentum, then a golden age of pop culture is irrevocably past and right at the time when the finders in the farthest corners of the globe could share with any seekers. Perhaps it's nearing time to talk about music like it was a can of beans and devalue the artists to the status of the pickers and packers fighting for the chance to owe their soul to the company store.
When these laws are debated or when discussing incidents like these, where the powers granted to law enforcement are zealously interpreted, the cliches "slippery slope" and "power corrupts" are brought out. Give an office of state power and there will be someone who comes along and abuses it. Our system, at its roots, holds faith that the fallibility of people can be mitigated by distributing limited powers among independent organs of the state, by freedom of speech and press, by regular elections by secret ballot, and by making the government do its work before it seizes property or interferes with a person's daily affairs.
Now some of the abuse of the government will be willful and conscious wrongdoing by bad persons, such as embezzling tax funds. But some of the abuse will be justified by the abusers and their supporters along the lines of making sure it's easier for good people to do good things or ensuring that the "right" people stay in charge of an institution. (And I've seen instances of where embezzlement was tolerated by a person's political allies because of all the "good things" he had done while in his position!) Keeping the good people in power and eliminating the "bad" people are the common threads of justification which run through the disappearings, unlimited incarcerations, pogroms, purges, and genocides committed by those on the left and those on the right.
Overreaching people will occasionally be found in the corridors of power, so, yes, these officers and their supervisors who took upon the charge of values-policing are at fault. But, I expect there will be no punishment, because these people will argue that pornography is bad, it shouldn't be near children, and if you want to punish these officers, you must be for pornography near children. And next thing you know someone else will jump up and say there should be a law which expands library surveillance by the police to allow for identification and monitoring of pornography-viewers in addition to the people being monitored for viewing sites with words the government has deemed to threaten homeland security. That existing law seems to suggest that police should be going into libraries and keeping track of what some people are reading seems to me to open the door to this kind of mischief. But, your point is taken, this incident could have happened with or without the Patriot Act or Department of Homeland Security or this state/county/muncipal safety department. Still, laws which expand law enforcement privileges and powers written in a time of fear by the self-sanctified are deeply disturbing to me and I think this incident reflects poorly on the PATRIOT act and Homeland Security enforcement and suggests that this would be a good time to revisit the debate.
Wasn't that the song that led Chuck Berry, er, Morris Levy (its publisher) to sue John Lennon for copyright infringement? As settlement, Lennon recorded the "Rock 'n' Roll" album, which had material published by Levy.
That last sentence leads to an intriguing thought: if the RIAA hadn't required DRM lockdown, people would be able to move their purchased music from their Sonys to their iPods or vice versa. Okay it would be easier to share, but on the other hand, most people are busy enough with work and family and don't have much time for joining the plot to destroy the music industry as we know it. And the RIAA may be unhappy with the consequences of Apple "winning" (at least for now) but... it was the bed they made, no?
Ajax and web standards are orthogonal. Web standards relate to what amounts to a gentlemen's agreement between parties: one writes their html and css a certain way and a contemporary browser will render it in a consistent and generally understood way. It's all about how the web page presents and is structured.
Now I've not used Ajax, but I've written a few small jsp/tomcat web applications, and I think I understand what issue it addresses.
When designing an application with user interaction, user input frequently changes the range for future questions and responses. Some examples: pick a city, enter a zip code; do you have dependents, what is their names. The approaches are to
Ask both questions and check for inconsistencies prior to processing of (causing a potential return of the form with some sort of message "02220 is not a Los Angeles zip code.")
The wizard approach: the user provides a city and state, clicks a button, and a new form appears which asks for the zip code from a list of valid zip codes for the city, and
Have a controller listen to input fields and respond to events by changing the view dynamically so only valid choices are available.
For a basic garden variety <form action="postInfo.do"> web page, the third choice is problematic primarily because http is stateless. But also, good web application design means the controller is on the server and it knows two things: how to build a model from the data received and where to pass that model for something else to parse, validate, apply business rules, process and persist. The only traditional way to get the controller going is to send a http POST or GET to a url.
Ajax is meant to give developers that third option for their web applications, by providing a listener mechanism with which the controller on the server monitors and revises the downstream input fields when the user makes a choice in an upstream input field. And notice that if the range of the user's input may be dynamically restricted, the server can avoid checking for inconsistencies such as Los Angeles, Colorado. It also reduces the number of times a form gets returned to a user (I'm guessing that there is a significant number of people who just bail at the point the same page comes back with error messages.) It avoids irritating the user, when they have to consider what to put in a field when an earlier choice made the response irrelevant, obvious, or the exact same answer the user gave yesterday. (It also makes the web application look better when, upon entering Elaine Package-Receiver's name, it shows the address in the correct field, without the click, wait, and redraw cycle.)
So: one good reason? As I said I haven't used it but I can seen where something like it would be good for increasing a web application's efficiency and user friendliness.
Plus, wasn't Mitnick's main trick social engineering access to restricted areas? Maybe next news cycle a famous cracker will explain how he/she prefers to tackle well documented source code.
I think Toy Story 3 was Eisner's attempt to use Pixar's characters as a leverage point in the distribution negotiations. Before Pixar walked, it was the stick, in that Disney kept character rights and said we could do sequels without you. After Pixar did walk it was revenge for defying the mighty Michael (who had pissed Jobs off by saying to Congress that Apple owners were stealing music). Once it became clear that Michael was on his way out (partly for pushing out Roy Disney, partly for Pixar, and partly for poor results from the animation, parks, and ABC units), I would guess that there wasn't a whole lot of serious work done on Toy Story 3. I'd be surprised if development even went as far as animatics from story boards.
Customary? In the 16th century, you could print a play if you had a press and could find an actor who'd recite the lines to you. Oh there were the authorized publications, which came from the author's manuscript, which were more likely to be correct and complete.
Or how about the 19th century? The United States did not enforce foreign copyrights. And foreign or domestic copyright notwithstanding, if a traveler bought a book in the United States, they could read it abroad. Customarily, there were no region codes.
And while we're returning to the practices of an by gone period, may I have from the RIAA firmware updates to my early 90s Sony DATman. Being an under-capitalized artist I had to acquire the version that would not allow digital copies of my performances of my song. I think allowing the author full rights to copy their works would fall under customary. And it was interference and threats by the RIAA which caused lower cost "non-professional" U.S. DAT recorders to include serial copy management in the first place.
I certainly do not think that I am immune in any sort of percentage. I have a limited understanding of how security is implemented and some, but minimal, knowldege of how to make my machines locked down.
I understand that by connecting to the internet and by using darwinports and fink in order to add applications to my machine I have opened up significant vectors for mischief, though independent checksums mitigate that risk to a degree. I understand rationally that there is only so much the operating system and applications writers can do for security and the rest is up to me.
But, I don't accept that operating system security should be a required after-market accessory. And, when you look at systems by Microsoft, Apple, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, RedHat, Novell, Debian, etc., who seems to be uniquely arguing that it should be.
So, am I immune using my Macs. Nope. Based on my understanding of how security should work and my observation as to what is actually getting infected, I still feel safer using Macs. I'm prepared to reassess that position as soon as new information arrives.
Where I come from, that's called a desirable demographic. So why, why, why oh why are Sony and others trying to make it harder for me to buy a cd and put it on my iPod. I want to buy cds. I do not want to cede control of my computers to somebody else. And the latter is the deal breaker.
I remember how WKRP in Cincinnati was a favorite tv sit-com in the late 70s and early 80s among those of us working in radio because it had good characters and funny situations. We could overlook that none of the djs ever used headphones, their casual approach to cueing up the next record, the unrealistic l'aissez faire style of the program director, the occasional lack of music director, an AM station looking to rock music as a viable format change (pop music's move to FM was well established at that point), the station's too much wattage for its position on the dial, there never being any powering down and up at sunset and sunrise, that the news announcer and dj shared the same microphone and studio, that full-time operation of the station was possible with an air staff of two, that Les Nessman wasn't jettisoned along with the elevator music recordings, and other compromises of authenticity or verisimilitude.
Take 2: So this makes (RIAA (Mashboxx (grokster.com))) a customer of the largest suc... (scratch that) licensee of SCOSource, and the brand found in the convenient RedHat box.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do their work for them? I say, if they don't want to release in a format I can use, then they proceed without my dollars and with my negative word-of-mouth.
Quicker release of DVDs is not about piracy, it's about distributors thinking that DVDs are a bigger and more lucrative market and somewhat about producers that finally see "profits" if the DVDs sell.
Simultaneous release also offers lower or more efficient marketing costs as the marketing for weeks one and two of a film's release would generate ticket receipts and DVD sales (rather then another crank up of the publicity machine and a second media buy x months later for the DVD release). This is also meant to get more money in some till before word of mouth kills the demand on the mediocre and bad movies that come out. And I ask you to think about how many comedies seem to pull some scenes in order to be able to get bookings as PG-13 in the theaters and then release unrated DVDs because the "forbidden fruit" makes the title sell better? Do we really know how much real overlap of the DVD sales market and ticket buyers there really is?
My suggestion? The distributors, in return for simultaneous release, collect a smaller percentage of receipts in the first 2 and 13 weeks of release. (Maybe the theatres keep 80% of ticket receipts in the first two weeks.) Incidentally, I think it's the fact that theatres cannot survive on their take of ticket receipts during the effective shelf-life of a typical first release that has led to the high cost of going to a movie.
Another suggestion: theatres are given a two week window of exclusivity for DVD sales, so theater goers who want a keepsake (or maybe an unrated version or director cut) can get it only in the lobby on the way out. Maybe on the same web page where one can buy a movie ticket, one can choose the cd and the theatre owners who are currently booking the film get a cut of the DVD sale. Think what that would mean to small independent films that get bookings in large markets at art houses and get discussed in the national media, but may never make it to a smaller market.
I would guess that DVD success is correlated to box-office success. Killing the theatres is not in anyone's best interest.
First of all, Microsoft goes after OSDL, as an hypothetical, for something in samba and suddenly a lot of fecal matter hits fans. Meanwhile, Microsoft has to toss the goodwill it receives when it argues that its patent portfolio is for defensive purposes. Do we seriously expect that investors will even care (in a positive sense) that cease and desist letters have been sent to infringers without deep pockets. And aren't there cross-licensing arrangements with the people with big pockets, precluding suits? And won't the record of anti-trust violations and anti-competitive activities, for the immediate future, play a role in any patent litigation so as to decrease the probability of collections which exceed the litigation costs?
But, secondly, wouldn't the shareholders be much more interested in hearing about what management is doing about shipping key products late and down-scoped? Because it is products and results which move stock prices for Fortune 500 corporations and its higher stock prices which make shareholders happy, not pig-in-a-poke intellectual property portfolios.
I want to experiment with stuff and Microsoft licensing terms are not amenable to hobbyists and explorers. (I saw recently that they require a new license for an upgraded motherboard. Sheesh. Sometimes I think they forget whose machine it is.) Well it's their right, but I've chosen to not use Windows unless someone is paying for my time, and I'm unable to figure a way to use my Mac instead. Now when I build or re-purpose computers, in other words, have fun, I put FreeBSD or Linux on them because these are the platforms that allow you to check out new technologies more easily, while the basic stuff, like e-mail and web, is essentially the same. BTW, even though it's the quintessence of the nerd's approach, is there any excuse for Microsoft to not have included vi, emacs, grep, awk, and perl in their default installations a long time ago?
Oh yes, there's this predeliction of Microsoft to draft its customers into its corporate pissing wars, and I don't want to be used again to kill off some company that built a technology that Microsoft now wants to own.
Interestingly, I bought one of those Fry's cheapies with Linspire about a month ago and took it to work to use as a coding machine. (Incidentally, no one at Fry's asked me what I was going to do with it.) Wiped Linspire and put a fresh install of SuSE 10 on the machine. About a week later, I find out that one of the bosses who has avoided any and all contact with computers finally could no longer duck having to use a workstation, so I started her on the only machine I had available, that cheapo from Fry's with a GNOME desktop + OpenOffice.org2.0 + Thunderbird + Firefox. You know what? It wasn't any more difficult getting her going than it was helping my Mom a couple of years ago with Windows XP. Now, if it hadn't worked out, I would have been the first one to ignore my little obsessions and request an XP license for her. But Linux worked out. I'm not saying that this little story proves that the day of the Linux Desktop is here, but using a Linux desktop isn't that ridiculous either as far as I'm concerned.
Well, the funny part is that, if I read the Register report correctly, those folks will still get something in October.
I know the take has been "ole Microsoft, shipping late again." But... I'm starting to wonder if Microsoft is making the Christmas '06 season safe for XBox 360 sales, by reducing the number of new shiny things the retail consumers will see. I would think that Microsoft expects revenues from the cash cows will be unaffected by the delay.
The government gives scientists research grants. I'd guess that there are grants for academics in the computer sciences, so it's probably already happening.
A developer writes a proposal and demonstrates the benefits from the development, the government reviews and grants funds, and at then end of the grant period the developed software goes into the common pool for re-use (BSD-style license I would think.) (Of course, how many software projects fail to meet goals in the estimated time. And wouldn't the news media have an inexhaustible supply of "goofy ways the government spends your taxes" stories.)
But, as for tax breaks? Let's say you are Company A and you hire a developer for some r&d. The salary costs of that person's salary and benefits are fully expensible already. For the government to add some additional reductions in taxes just doesn't make sense. In fact, it sounds like a giveaway.
And let's say you're Company A's PHB, and the government says in return for the tax reduction, you have to share your r&d results. Don't the advantages of being a swell guy get quickly overwhelmed by the lessons from those take-aways you got at the "Get a patent and retire to Bermuda" seminar you attended last week? (Or do you game the system by putting the crap code into the pool, overvaluing the code/overestimating the costs for the tax benefits, and then withhold the good stuff for future products and patent submarines?)
Now I managed to get through college without the burden of economics classes, but it seems to me that economic efficiency doesn't need any help. (And wouldn't my libertarian friends suggest that government interference would in fact disrupt the efficiencies as politics intrude to be sure that the code is "good" code and doesn't interfere with the war against drugs, pornography, indecency, culture self-distribution, terrorists real, imagined and to-be, and the unharassed teaching of evolution?)
I didn't see it in a theatre when it first came out. But, I've stumbled across it on tv, and, though I've tried to stay with it, can't watch it for more than five minutes. The plot and the story arc are well-tested. Star Trek used that plot a few times -- think of Tron's computer-space as another planet and the bad guy as this week's alien life form who is forcing the humans into a life or death competition. (The business about Tron's main character being a game designer, etc., is motivation/back story and not plot. That the two co-workers learn something and die [after telling the hero important information] is a device as old as the hills (or Homer) in order to suggest that the peril to the hero is real and the outcome is in doubt.) The film's graphical style was unique and imaginative (which is why I think any one remembers that film at all.) But, this film was one of the first victims of the synergy curse. The film was designed for easy portability to a video game (which was released and IIRC did better as a video game title than the film as a movie) and so I can see the Disney execs rubbing their hands in glee at the story boards saying "This looks great! Gentlemen, we've got ourselves Level 3," and choosing to make plot and storyline serviceable and obvious so as to not get in the way of the graphics and competitions and chases.
So two minutes, get it, and tune out. About right for an infomercial, yes?
Plus SBC (AT&T) is putting its ducks in a row to be the content gatekeeper (and skim off a take of each transaction). Give everyone broadband now and the taxpayers just bought AT&T their monopoly. Perhaps this is about a perception in Hollywood that the ubiquitous broadband channel is needed now to offset declining interest and rentals/sales?
A bad idea. Just like the all-go-digital-television legislation, which ignored that people just didn't want digital television, was bad (and I will not be coverting and taking that subsidy from our exhausted treasury).
Still not there, because a page in a comic book has some relationship to the page before and page after, which is not true of 99% of the cd's.
Maybe it's like buying a $20 Picasso poster instead of the $120 monograph
HEY, it makes sense to do that
Course, I've been saying that we're back to the days of the 45 and hit songs, as we were in the 50s and 60s. You want to sell cd's, write a Sergeant Pepper's. Or put a lot of hits in the album. Or, release a single and flip side not in an album, release a single and flip from an album. Release an album every year and a single every 13 weeks. Find people with something to say and let them say it without spending a gazillion dollars per utterance. Decrease the advances and increase the royalties. Get more concerned with development of performers, because the musician who starts out now and is playing in 20 years will be the one to move catalog. Be more agile. Dinosaur time is so over.
Oddly, the comparison was brought in to counterpoint the survey finding of reduced cosumer demand. And, last I looked, the movie companies were freaking about reduced demand for DVDs and a continued downturn in tickets sold which last year resulted in reduced total receipts. So is 30 hours per game (which I take is a mean amount of accumulated play per person per title) trending up or down? I'm not a gamer and have no base-line for comparisons but I find the 30 hours figure surprisingly low, I'm guessing it means there must be a lot of dog games, which people abandon after the first play, out there. That can't be good.
So. Everything's fine. Hey Sony here's how you can sweep the board. Hey Mircrosoft here's how you can sweep the board. By the way consumer interest in games is fading, so you may be spending millions to sweep a smaller board. Let's have lunch.
Do I have the picture?
The mastering engineers always did something like this. 16 years ago, I self-produced a vinyl record. Some of the studio material was recorded on a Fostex B-16 (1/2 inch 16 track) and some were recorded in 2 inch 24 track. All were mixed to DAT. The DAT was then taken to a Hollywood mastering studio and there the master was cut. Cutting the master meant putting a blank disk on the cutting machine, and playing (without stopping) the tape for the side being cut.
In preparation, the engineer listened to our songs and set up equalization and compression and looked for s's in the music. We didn't have a lot of music, so the issue of rolling off the bottom to allow for a narrower gap between the grooves on the disk was not an issue. And while working with adapting our tape for the technical restrictions of vinyl disk, he also was working on trying to make the songs sound as good as possible on vinyl.
He also had this really cool AB mixer, which allowed him to tailor the settings so the inconsistently recorded songs would sound as consistent as possible on the disk. While one song was playing to the cutter, he would use his notes to dial in the settings for the next song. During the gap between songs, he cross-fades from the A mixer to the B mixer and sets up the offline one for the next song.
My opinion was that his efforts made the songs sound better (warmer, more present, more musical) on the disk than on the DAT masters. Now I can't tell you what mastering engineers do today, but I suspect the best ones are trying to do what the vinyl engineers were doing then, taking "perfect" studio mixes and optimizing them for the characteristics of the compact disc. (I would expect that the masters for release to the download services are also re-equalized with a version for every authorized format, in order to maximize the sound for the format.) So I guess my point of view, from my limited experience, is that a good mastering engineer makes the studio mixes sound better.
Just curious. When you or your musician friends needed to teach their bands a song a few years ago, did everyone go out and buy a copy of the cd/lp or was a little casual infringement via cassette accepted? And when you were starting out and a friend told you about a rad band, did you schedule a trip to the record store to buy the disk, so you could legally listen at home and decide, strictly on their say-so, every single time you got a tip?
I understand the rules and I think I understand the business. Record companies and, maybe to a larger degree, musicians are looking for that shot to be part of a sub-culture's soundtrack. It doesn't happen unless a lot of folks hear the music without explicitly paying. So, it seems to me that if the rules are ever 100% enforceable, via legislation, litigation and/or code/technology, and no one can ever make mix tapes or copies for friends, relatives or band mates, then this has gone too far. (I think it'd be a good thing if collectors were allowed to offer out-of-print obscurities on-line at no cost for download, which is well outside of the realm of any one's definition of personal use.)
Back to my original questions, music is not this thing that springs fully formed from the brow of Zeus. It exists as a chain of ideas and techniques developed by musicians hearing stuff and performing stuff which other people and musicians hear, and I know you understand that. Records, radio, cds, mp3s, the internet have all brought us to a point where it is really really easy for someone to hear our music without the former bounds of geography. So, how much lockdown is too much lockdown? I think we passed the point of too much a few years ago. If it goes further, and going further has the momentum, then a golden age of pop culture is irrevocably past and right at the time when the finders in the farthest corners of the globe could share with any seekers. Perhaps it's nearing time to talk about music like it was a can of beans and devalue the artists to the status of the pickers and packers fighting for the chance to owe their soul to the company store.
When these laws are debated or when discussing incidents like these, where the powers granted to law enforcement are zealously interpreted, the cliches "slippery slope" and "power corrupts" are brought out. Give an office of state power and there will be someone who comes along and abuses it. Our system, at its roots, holds faith that the fallibility of people can be mitigated by distributing limited powers among independent organs of the state, by freedom of speech and press, by regular elections by secret ballot, and by making the government do its work before it seizes property or interferes with a person's daily affairs.
Now some of the abuse of the government will be willful and conscious wrongdoing by bad persons, such as embezzling tax funds. But some of the abuse will be justified by the abusers and their supporters along the lines of making sure it's easier for good people to do good things or ensuring that the "right" people stay in charge of an institution. (And I've seen instances of where embezzlement was tolerated by a person's political allies because of all the "good things" he had done while in his position!) Keeping the good people in power and eliminating the "bad" people are the common threads of justification which run through the disappearings, unlimited incarcerations, pogroms, purges, and genocides committed by those on the left and those on the right.
Overreaching people will occasionally be found in the corridors of power, so, yes, these officers and their supervisors who took upon the charge of values-policing are at fault. But, I expect there will be no punishment, because these people will argue that pornography is bad, it shouldn't be near children, and if you want to punish these officers, you must be for pornography near children. And next thing you know someone else will jump up and say there should be a law which expands library surveillance by the police to allow for identification and monitoring of pornography-viewers in addition to the people being monitored for viewing sites with words the government has deemed to threaten homeland security. That existing law seems to suggest that police should be going into libraries and keeping track of what some people are reading seems to me to open the door to this kind of mischief. But, your point is taken, this incident could have happened with or without the Patriot Act or Department of Homeland Security or this state/county/muncipal safety department. Still, laws which expand law enforcement privileges and powers written in a time of fear by the self-sanctified are deeply disturbing to me and I think this incident reflects poorly on the PATRIOT act and Homeland Security enforcement and suggests that this would be a good time to revisit the debate.
Wasn't that the song that led Chuck Berry, er, Morris Levy (its publisher) to sue John Lennon for copyright infringement? As settlement, Lennon recorded the "Rock 'n' Roll" album, which had material published by Levy.
That last sentence leads to an intriguing thought: if the RIAA hadn't required DRM lockdown, people would be able to move their purchased music from their Sonys to their iPods or vice versa. Okay it would be easier to share, but on the other hand, most people are busy enough with work and family and don't have much time for joining the plot to destroy the music industry as we know it. And the RIAA may be unhappy with the consequences of Apple "winning" (at least for now) but... it was the bed they made, no?
Ajax and web standards are orthogonal. Web standards relate to what amounts to a gentlemen's agreement between parties: one writes their html and css a certain way and a contemporary browser will render it in a consistent and generally understood way. It's all about how the web page presents and is structured.
Now I've not used Ajax, but I've written a few small jsp/tomcat web applications, and I think I understand what issue it addresses.
When designing an application with user interaction, user input frequently changes the range for future questions and responses. Some examples: pick a city, enter a zip code; do you have dependents, what is their names. The approaches are to
For a basic garden variety <form action="postInfo.do"> web page, the third choice is problematic primarily because http is stateless. But also, good web application design means the controller is on the server and it knows two things: how to build a model from the data received and where to pass that model for something else to parse, validate, apply business rules, process and persist. The only traditional way to get the controller going is to send a http POST or GET to a url.
Ajax is meant to give developers that third option for their web applications, by providing a listener mechanism with which the controller on the server monitors and revises the downstream input fields when the user makes a choice in an upstream input field. And notice that if the range of the user's input may be dynamically restricted, the server can avoid checking for inconsistencies such as Los Angeles, Colorado. It also reduces the number of times a form gets returned to a user (I'm guessing that there is a significant number of people who just bail at the point the same page comes back with error messages.) It avoids irritating the user, when they have to consider what to put in a field when an earlier choice made the response irrelevant, obvious, or the exact same answer the user gave yesterday. (It also makes the web application look better when, upon entering Elaine Package-Receiver's name, it shows the address in the correct field, without the click, wait, and redraw cycle.)
So: one good reason? As I said I haven't used it but I can seen where something like it would be good for increasing a web application's efficiency and user friendliness.
Plus, wasn't Mitnick's main trick social engineering access to restricted areas? Maybe next news cycle a famous cracker will explain how he/she prefers to tackle well documented source code.
I think Toy Story 3 was Eisner's attempt to use Pixar's characters as a leverage point in the distribution negotiations. Before Pixar walked, it was the stick, in that Disney kept character rights and said we could do sequels without you. After Pixar did walk it was revenge for defying the mighty Michael (who had pissed Jobs off by saying to Congress that Apple owners were stealing music). Once it became clear that Michael was on his way out (partly for pushing out Roy Disney, partly for Pixar, and partly for poor results from the animation, parks, and ABC units), I would guess that there wasn't a whole lot of serious work done on Toy Story 3. I'd be surprised if development even went as far as animatics from story boards.
Customary? In the 16th century, you could print a play if you had a press and could find an actor who'd recite the lines to you. Oh there were the authorized publications, which came from the author's manuscript, which were more likely to be correct and complete.
Or how about the 19th century? The United States did not enforce foreign copyrights. And foreign or domestic copyright notwithstanding, if a traveler bought a book in the United States, they could read it abroad. Customarily, there were no region codes.
And while we're returning to the practices of an by gone period, may I have from the RIAA firmware updates to my early 90s Sony DATman. Being an under-capitalized artist I had to acquire the version that would not allow digital copies of my performances of my song. I think allowing the author full rights to copy their works would fall under customary. And it was interference and threats by the RIAA which caused lower cost "non-professional" U.S. DAT recorders to include serial copy management in the first place.
I certainly do not think that I am immune in any sort of percentage. I have a limited understanding of how security is implemented and some, but minimal, knowldege of how to make my machines locked down.
I understand that by connecting to the internet and by using darwinports and fink in order to add applications to my machine I have opened up significant vectors for mischief, though independent checksums mitigate that risk to a degree. I understand rationally that there is only so much the operating system and applications writers can do for security and the rest is up to me.
But, I don't accept that operating system security should be a required after-market accessory. And, when you look at systems by Microsoft, Apple, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, RedHat, Novell, Debian, etc., who seems to be uniquely arguing that it should be.
So, am I immune using my Macs. Nope. Based on my understanding of how security should work and my observation as to what is actually getting infected, I still feel safer using Macs. I'm prepared to reassess that position as soon as new information arrives.
Where I come from, that's called a desirable demographic. So why, why, why oh why are Sony and others trying to make it harder for me to buy a cd and put it on my iPod. I want to buy cds. I do not want to cede control of my computers to somebody else. And the latter is the deal breaker.
I remember how WKRP in Cincinnati was a favorite tv sit-com in the late 70s and early 80s among those of us working in radio because it had good characters and funny situations. We could overlook that none of the djs ever used headphones, their casual approach to cueing up the next record, the unrealistic l'aissez faire style of the program director, the occasional lack of music director, an AM station looking to rock music as a viable format change (pop music's move to FM was well established at that point), the station's too much wattage for its position on the dial, there never being any powering down and up at sunset and sunrise, that the news announcer and dj shared the same microphone and studio, that full-time operation of the station was possible with an air staff of two, that Les Nessman wasn't jettisoned along with the elevator music recordings, and other compromises of authenticity or verisimilitude.
Take 2: So this makes (RIAA (Mashboxx (grokster.com))) a customer of the largest suc... (scratch that) licensee of SCOSource, and the brand found in the convenient RedHat box.
So, this makes RIAASCOSource, found in the convenient RedHat box.
The Gates "Trustworthy Security" memo was Jan-2002; it's coming up on four years old.
Time flies when you're reviewing log files!