Well my comment risked being too long and waffly, so I did sort of reduce it a bit. As for the Friends comment, well I know that the only reason the actors were worth that is because of the massive international syndication that Friends enjoys, such that the network is guaranteed sales of the last episodes before they are shot, and without so much as a draft script to show that they will be any good.
What I'm also getting at is that money is being even more unfairly distributed in the global market, when stars really can attract money like magnets because of the worldwide audience they have, and most of the rest of it stays in the hands of Fox. Yet much other entertainment does not get aired (or never sees primetime) because of the massive hyping of these shows, which seem to be able to survive beyond their initial great episodes, on and on and on.
In an ultimate capitalist model, those who sell most get most, the actors are fairly paid, etc... but somewhere along the line viewers will watch the best of a bad bunch of primetime viewing, and of course as soon as success happens, these shows will be pushed to their limits, to the detriment of other more innovative stuff.
Still, it is the law of the market, so you're right. Just personally I think somehow that wealth should be better redistributed maybe. I can't come up with a good suggestion as to what I might really be getting at though. Perhaps that the plethora of content out there only serves to obscure rare treasures, and pinpoint those shows that networks push hardest, where they must but meet a minimum of success in order to become the (sub)standard primetime fare for years.
The mere fact that the actors all privately stated that they didn't really want to go on, but had "one last go at it" and had to get paid big to do it, tends to make me reflect that even they were jaded with the format.
Victor Hugo said, back in 1831/1832, that the printing press killed architecture, by taking away part of what architectural edifices were about (telling a story, imposing a theme, etc). Books lasted longer, could be more widely diffused, and were not subject to being rebuilt and demolished in the same ways (amongst other things, for more read "Ceci tuera cela" in "Notre Dame de Paris").
The Internet is now killing all other media, because it is at once all media, and is the same thing to all people, rather like the book was more accessible than the edifice as Victor Hugo observed had happened from the 15th century onwards*.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, ITV Digital went down due to piracy. Canal Horizons, the Moroccan digital TV unit, also went down due to piracy. Not that people were pirating their signal, they were pirating French digital TV instead;-)
All this leads us to the logicial conclusion that paying for recorded content is going to be a harder and harder thing to enforce, whatever the medium. Which is great, in my opinion. It might bring back live entertainment, something which was originally killed by the recorded work. People moan about how piracy is killing CDs, DVDs and so on - but the real artists who could really perform live lost a livelihood to recorded works. Maybe they will see a renaissance, which would be much more democratic than some big-ass company making all the $$$ for a recording.
I can't help feeling that content is priced too high. Why should "Friends" actors make a million bucks an episode? Why should Arnold Schwarzenegger make so much? Careful editing and effects respectively make these two vehicles much more successful than the actual TALENT (or lack of) of the actors.
The re-democratisation of content is perhaps happening today. And live shows might perhaps make a comeback. I'd much rather hear a live show in a bar (sometimes for like $5 and maybe I'll leave a tip for the band or buy their self-marketed CD) than pay $15 for recorded works of some pimped singer who actually can't play an instrument or write anything, just has a nice voice _once it is processed_...
DirecTV, indeed TV in general, had it coming to them. Even their good content is becoming diluted by the sheer volume of crap out there, and indeed the success of mediocre vehicles like recent Friends, Simpsons and others just goes to show that the public is less and less able to find something good to watch (or listen to). People probably have a strong urge to pirate because it is quite frankly not worth the subscription fee most of the time. And, Internet is already giving us content on demand, including movies, on the wrong side of the law, while conventional media is actually playing catchup. Time to start seeing this for what it is, a paradigm shift for the 21st century.
* indeed Hugo was talking about an era before his time, the 15th century, when Gutenberg's press was invented. The novel "Notre Dame de Paris" was written in 1831-2 but the story takes place in 1482.
Mission statements are wanky, I'll agree with that.
However, in creating 'just a fucking operating system' you do need to have some guiding principles, which become a philosophy. Nothing to do with wanky paragraphs of a few words which cost millions to 'brainstorm'.
I'm not defending child porn, but it's entirely possible that it represents for many would-be child molesters, an alternative way of satisfying their unhealthy sexual tendencies.
If nobody looked at the pictures, there would be no market for it.
If you create a market just of people who want to 'look at the pictures' then you're only one level of abstraction away from the actual abuse.
And let's not forget, these pictures aren't just naked children. They are much, much more intimate and degrading than that.
Re:what's next, DOS 5.0 on a single floppy?
on
Windows 95 in 4.47MB
·
· Score: 1
Yes well what if you were running on a machine with only 128Kb RAM, and a text only screen, and the version of WordStar (3, I think) was previous to the version (4) which did enable bright and underlining provided you had the right graphics.
In any case, brighter or underlined text onscreen is a far cry from WYSIWYG.
Note that the WYSIWYGness of an application is relative. Originally, WYSIWYG referred to any word processor that could accurately show line breaks on the display screen. Later WYSIWYGs had to be able to show different font sizes, even if the screen display was limited to one typeface. Now, a word processor must be able to display graphics and many different typefaces to be considered WYSIWYG.
Well I don't remember "being able to accurately display linebreaks" as WYSIWYG, but then even my old WordStar 3 (I think) defaulted to showing control codes only, and I don't think you could get it to do otherwise.
Re:what's next, DOS 5.0 on a single floppy?
on
Windows 95 in 4.47MB
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, the layout on the Wordstar screen I had, 80 columns, was NOT what you saw on the printer output. Emboldened text looked like this:
^K^B This text in bold ^K^K
I wasn't sure about LaTeX but if it's marked up, that's kinda what I was getting at. Text underlined or emboldened would mean that the line would wrap beyond 80 on the screen, but on the printout it would be at 80, because the control codes would go away. The font was always the standard display character set, although I did program my Epson EX-800 control codes so I could switch between NLQ Roman, NLQ Sans-Serif, and Draft modes, plus Proportional, but on the screen it all looked the same. Hence, it was not WYSIWYG. This was all in DOS.
Linux can "see" those buttons. Getting Mozilla to do something with them might be a bit harder though.
I use keys mostly when browsing, anyway...
Re:what's next, DOS 5.0 on a single floppy?
on
Windows 95 in 4.47MB
·
· Score: 1
Wordstar versions I used (including WordStar2000) were not WYSIWYG. AbiWord is of course.
A closer equivalent to WordStar these days would be LaTeX or something, maybe.
I think that WordStar actually got bought up by M$ and may have been part of the old Microsoft Word for DOS, actually. Not sure.
Re:what's next, DOS 5.0 on a single floppy?
on
Windows 95 in 4.47MB
·
· Score: 1
Well WordStar wasn't wysiwyg for a start. A handy little word processing tool though, it was fine for my needs. Indeed, it wasn't much bigger by the version I used, and a newer version supporting EGA text modes and colours still fit in less than 200Kb, maybe even less than 150Kb... Open Office does, in it's defence, have a load of crap that has nothing to do with Word Processing. AbiWord would be a fairer comparison. Installer for Win32 =~ 4Mb
Re:what's next, DOS 5.0 on a single floppy?
on
Windows 95 in 4.47MB
·
· Score: 1
Screw that. I still have a copy of DOS on a 5.25" single sided floppy (320Kb formatted) with Wordstar on it too. There's even space for a few documents.
Extra file utilities, of course, are on a separate disk.
Yeah, it's all coming back to me now... I've wasted most of my afternoon reminiscing about ZX-Spectrum tape loaders ! Multicolour loaders, they tended to crash more often though. The most reliable were Multiface saves. They'd just save a copy of whatever was in memory directly to tape (so you'd have a first generation copy) and you'd just load back directly to where you were when you saved, handy for stuff like Knight Lore by Ultimate.
Yeah, and black and white first, with the colours coming in at the end! I think they did the order like that to make it look like the picture was gradually building, and you could try to work out what the finished picture would look like.
You did get black and white squiggles on the TV when stuff was loading though. Not as nice as the Blue/Yellow loading lines of the speccy though. There was some red too in there, or something. Don't quite remember.
Ahh yeah... you could get a whole 16Kb with the RAM expansion. They cost about 40 quid if I remember right. Maybe that was the second hand price I paid. Yeah, that was even worse, if you finally got a 4K program typed in or something.
I had hours of fun reliving all that on a ZX81 emulator on the Atari ST... I could just hit F5 to reset and imagine the DODGY power lead had been in effect...
There was a tape interface on it though. Nicking Grannie's little cassette recorder from her bedside, and then plugging in the grey and black wires from EAR and LINE respectively (or was it EAR and MIC?) whatever, and you could save to tape and reload later.
This was standard equipment on our ZX81... although there was always that dreaded DODGY POWER LEAD which if someone so much as breathed on it, the computer would reset... those were the days.
The perfect lightweight distro. Total ISO size less than 200Mb, I installed it without problems on an old PI 233MHz with 32M RAM, could have got away with 16M.
What is worse, perhaps, is that the inside of the face hugger was knowingly designed around the female vulva/vagina, and it is plainly clear that that is the case in the photos of the auction. So not only do you have the prop, but the slightly perverted looking replica of labia in the middle of this plastic thing. Maybe it makes some of you want to have it near your face, but remember, it IS a model.
Someone could just patent the OS, or enough principles within, and be done with it. But that has not happened.
Why do companies get away with patenting stuff which is reasonably obvious? The whole thing reeks of ridiculousness to the extreme. It's like the nightmares of post dot-com boom stress disorder in flashback.
The scariest thing is this: if Yahoo! are not big enough to stand up to stupid patents about web application technology, then who is? Take the Internet away, and this patent suit would surely never have stood up. Real time POS stock checking, is it only NCR that do this? I think not...
You're confusing bandwidth with the added value put in the network by servers, configurations, and admin time. A cheap admin might be had in Iraq, India, North Africa, South America...
It's a shame you finished your post with "Too touch to u'stand", that was a condescension on your part.
Something tells me that we're not looking at market forces properly here. What infrastructure would Iraq use in order to sell their bandwidth to the US? This post just doesn't make sense. Bandwidth cost is a function of infrastructure costs, competition in the marketplace, and the market demand. It's not a commodity like oil.
Windows... existed in Xerox PARC and on Macs before Microsoft borrowed the concepts. Office... was taken from WordStar, Lotus 123, and Harvard Graphics' lead. Web browsers - Microsoft were the LAST big boys in that market, and they gave theirs away for FREE in a market where everyone else was selling.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'm also getting at is that money is being even more unfairly distributed in the global market, when stars really can attract money like magnets because of the worldwide audience they have, and most of the rest of it stays in the hands of Fox. Yet much other entertainment does not get aired (or never sees primetime) because of the massive hyping of these shows, which seem to be able to survive beyond their initial great episodes, on and on and on.
In an ultimate capitalist model, those who sell most get most, the actors are fairly paid, etc... but somewhere along the line viewers will watch the best of a bad bunch of primetime viewing, and of course as soon as success happens, these shows will be pushed to their limits, to the detriment of other more innovative stuff.
Still, it is the law of the market, so you're right. Just personally I think somehow that wealth should be better redistributed maybe. I can't come up with a good suggestion as to what I might really be getting at though. Perhaps that the plethora of content out there only serves to obscure rare treasures, and pinpoint those shows that networks push hardest, where they must but meet a minimum of success in order to become the (sub)standard primetime fare for years.
The mere fact that the actors all privately stated that they didn't really want to go on, but had "one last go at it" and had to get paid big to do it, tends to make me reflect that even they were jaded with the format.
Cheers for your comment, and fair point.
And don't try bringing your Parents into it, my Dad is bigger than your Dad, because Debian could be your Dad anyway !
Err... they are illegal, aren't they? Or are you saying owning a VCR + one blank tape should be made illegal?
$30 for a card update? That's high too. Wasn't like that in Morocco ($2 an update). Did the update last over a month?
Victor Hugo said, back in 1831/1832, that the printing press killed architecture, by taking away part of what architectural edifices were about (telling a story, imposing a theme, etc). Books lasted longer, could be more widely diffused, and were not subject to being rebuilt and demolished in the same ways (amongst other things, for more read "Ceci tuera cela" in "Notre Dame de Paris").
The Internet is now killing all other media, because it is at once all media, and is the same thing to all people, rather like the book was more accessible than the edifice as Victor Hugo observed had happened from the 15th century onwards*.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, ITV Digital went down due to piracy. Canal Horizons, the Moroccan digital TV unit, also went down due to piracy. Not that people were pirating their signal, they were pirating French digital TV instead ;-)
All this leads us to the logicial conclusion that paying for recorded content is going to be a harder and harder thing to enforce, whatever the medium. Which is great, in my opinion. It might bring back live entertainment, something which was originally killed by the recorded work. People moan about how piracy is killing CDs, DVDs and so on - but the real artists who could really perform live lost a livelihood to recorded works. Maybe they will see a renaissance, which would be much more democratic than some big-ass company making all the $$$ for a recording.
I can't help feeling that content is priced too high. Why should "Friends" actors make a million bucks an episode? Why should Arnold Schwarzenegger make so much? Careful editing and effects respectively make these two vehicles much more successful than the actual TALENT (or lack of) of the actors.
The re-democratisation of content is perhaps happening today. And live shows might perhaps make a comeback. I'd much rather hear a live show in a bar (sometimes for like $5 and maybe I'll leave a tip for the band or buy their self-marketed CD) than pay $15 for recorded works of some pimped singer who actually can't play an instrument or write anything, just has a nice voice _once it is processed_ ...
DirecTV, indeed TV in general, had it coming to them. Even their good content is becoming diluted by the sheer volume of crap out there, and indeed the success of mediocre vehicles like recent Friends, Simpsons and others just goes to show that the public is less and less able to find something good to watch (or listen to). People probably have a strong urge to pirate because it is quite frankly not worth the subscription fee most of the time. And, Internet is already giving us content on demand, including movies, on the wrong side of the law, while conventional media is actually playing catchup. Time to start seeing this for what it is, a paradigm shift for the 21st century.
However, in creating 'just a fucking operating system' you do need to have some guiding principles, which become a philosophy. Nothing to do with wanky paragraphs of a few words which cost millions to 'brainstorm'.
If nobody looked at the pictures, there would be no market for it.
If you create a market just of people who want to 'look at the pictures' then you're only one level of abstraction away from the actual abuse.
And let's not forget, these pictures aren't just naked children. They are much, much more intimate and degrading than that.
In any case, brighter or underlined text onscreen is a far cry from WYSIWYG.
From here:
Well I don't remember "being able to accurately display linebreaks" as WYSIWYG, but then even my old WordStar 3 (I think) defaulted to showing control codes only, and I don't think you could get it to do otherwise.
^K^B This text in bold ^K^K
I wasn't sure about LaTeX but if it's marked up, that's kinda what I was getting at. Text underlined or emboldened would mean that the line would wrap beyond 80 on the screen, but on the printout it would be at 80, because the control codes would go away. The font was always the standard display character set, although I did program my Epson EX-800 control codes so I could switch between NLQ Roman, NLQ Sans-Serif, and Draft modes, plus Proportional, but on the screen it all looked the same. Hence, it was not WYSIWYG. This was all in DOS.
I use keys mostly when browsing, anyway...
A closer equivalent to WordStar these days would be LaTeX or something, maybe.
I think that WordStar actually got bought up by M$ and may have been part of the old Microsoft Word for DOS, actually. Not sure.
Well WordStar wasn't wysiwyg for a start. A handy little word processing tool though, it was fine for my needs. Indeed, it wasn't much bigger by the version I used, and a newer version supporting EGA text modes and colours still fit in less than 200Kb, maybe even less than 150Kb... Open Office does, in it's defence, have a load of crap that has nothing to do with Word Processing. AbiWord would be a fairer comparison. Installer for Win32 =~ 4Mb
Extra file utilities, of course, are on a separate disk.
Yeah, it's all coming back to me now... I've wasted most of my afternoon reminiscing about ZX-Spectrum tape loaders ! Multicolour loaders, they tended to crash more often though. The most reliable were Multiface saves. They'd just save a copy of whatever was in memory directly to tape (so you'd have a first generation copy) and you'd just load back directly to where you were when you saved, handy for stuff like Knight Lore by Ultimate.
Yeah, and black and white first, with the colours coming in at the end! I think they did the order like that to make it look like the picture was gradually building, and you could try to work out what the finished picture would look like.
Doooooo.... dit!
Doooooo.... didddlydlydidddlydidddlychorrrorrrchorrrdit!
And a loading screen would appear! Seemed like magic to me at the time.
I had hours of fun reliving all that on a ZX81 emulator on the Atari ST... I could just hit F5 to reset and imagine the DODGY power lead had been in effect...
This was standard equipment on our ZX81... although there was always that dreaded DODGY POWER LEAD which if someone so much as breathed on it, the computer would reset... those were the days.
The perfect lightweight distro. Total ISO size less than 200Mb, I installed it without problems on an old PI 233MHz with 32M RAM, could have got away with 16M.
What is worse, perhaps, is that the inside of the face hugger was knowingly designed around the female vulva/vagina, and it is plainly clear that that is the case in the photos of the auction. So not only do you have the prop, but the slightly perverted looking replica of labia in the middle of this plastic thing. Maybe it makes some of you want to have it near your face, but remember, it IS a model.
Why do companies get away with patenting stuff which is reasonably obvious? The whole thing reeks of ridiculousness to the extreme. It's like the nightmares of post dot-com boom stress disorder in flashback.
The scariest thing is this: if Yahoo! are not big enough to stand up to stupid patents about web application technology, then who is? Take the Internet away, and this patent suit would surely never have stood up. Real time POS stock checking, is it only NCR that do this? I think not...
then write a regexp search and run it against from, to, subject, body, etc
But maybe you're just laughing at the geek factor of that phrase?
It's a shame you finished your post with "Too touch to u'stand", that was a condescension on your part.
Something tells me that we're not looking at market forces properly here. What infrastructure would Iraq use in order to sell their bandwidth to the US? This post just doesn't make sense. Bandwidth cost is a function of infrastructure costs, competition in the marketplace, and the market demand. It's not a commodity like oil.
Windows... existed in Xerox PARC and on Macs before Microsoft borrowed the concepts. Office... was taken from WordStar, Lotus 123, and Harvard Graphics' lead. Web browsers - Microsoft were the LAST big boys in that market, and they gave theirs away for FREE in a market where everyone else was selling.