The rights to tell the story have to get purchased from somewhere, and you better believe New Line isn't going to give those up (though Disney was foolish enough to pass) for chump change.
Re:Already tried & failed
on
P2P and TV
·
· Score: 1
Your example forgets the mere fact that the Steven King story sucked. "The Plant?" I mean come on. The "first hit free" model doesn't work if the first hit didn't do anything for anyone.
Every single feature on the Carbon had to have a purpose. Some companies have reacted to the iPod by loading up with features, but that can backfire. It'll become kitschy and tasteless. The control and discipline in the details had to convey Rio's commitment to quality in the design.
Sounds like this idea isn't quite lost on everyone (looking at you Creative and iRiver). It's just a shame Rio isn't doing even better than they are.
In that whole document H.264 is mentioned once, and only to say that PureVideo is "adaptable," which presumably means that it may support it in the future.
From Anandtech:
NVIDIA has also said that the 7800 GTX should support H.264, but have said that the driver will not have support until near year's end. As we have already seen an H.264 demo from ATI, and the lack of anything tangible from NVIDIA at this point is disappointing. We are hesitant to even mention NVIDIA's claimed "support" before we see it running on actual hardware (especially after the lacking and late Purevideo support for initial NV40 parts). This time around, we can expect more support for alternate video players from NVIDIA as they are working with InterVideo and Cyberlink.
It might also be important to note that CNN has switched from Real SuperPass (and hence the RV9 they used to use) to Windows Media 9. To me, this means that they lined up another big sponsor in Microsoft.
This is a disappointment to me, as it means that I'm not entirely sure I'm always going to be able to watch these videos on a Linux or Mac system; WM10 isn't out on Mac, and obviously never will be for Linux. Real has generally been fairly consistent with clients being available for all 3 big platforms. Mplayer is nice but official clients are even better.
Build hardware using custom northbridge and/or custom BIOS/OF/EFI, as well as custom motherboards.
In OS X, create drivers only for the devices that Apple knows are in its hardware (eg. the only drivers included are those for the custom chipset, bootloader, what have you). Include no other drivers, period.
When you control both the hardware and software, it's easy to make simple restrictions that make it difficult to install on your average x86. Who's going to want to install OS X if it doesn't include drivers for your nv/intel/ati chipset, and thus probably barely works? Got an exotic soundcard? Too bad OS X doesn't include drivers for it. Using an unsupported ethernet adapter? Too bad that's not working either.
Sure someone may be able to hack it, but so long as it's annoying that 95% of the computing population won't bother with it, that's probably suitable enough for Apple's needs.
Not only would this not be likely to be approved due to antitrust rules and such, what would be the point of such a purchase? Paying a large chunk of change for a competitor to do...what exactly? Microsoft isn't going to suddenly say "WinServer 2003 blows, here's RHEL 4" to all its customers, undermining the last 5 years of FUD. A purchase like this would contribute nothing to the MSFT bottom line. Not to mention that this completely ignores the efforts of Novell and SuSE. If RH went out, someone else would line up to take its place in a heartbeat.
It was actually originally reported to the Mozilla Foundation as a critical security bug (bug 292691, still closed access since May 2), and was actively being worked on with the original bug reporter under wraps before someone managed to leak it without anyone's permission, at which point FrSirt (or whatever their name is) and Secunia repackaged it as their own security advisory.
True credit belongs to Paul from Greyhats Security Group and Michael Krax (and in the spirit of this post, I'm going to give credit to mozillazine for originally posting the summary I'm writing this off of).
I am still trying to gather all the details as to how my research was leaked, but recent conversations are leading me to believe that it was a misplacement of trust, not a server compromise. However, I do not want to jump to conclusions too quickly, as this will only lead to more problems. That's all I will say about that subject, as I don't want to offend anybody.
This isn't really so much a review as a description of features currently in the nightly. Firefox 1.1 isn't expected until June at the earliest. The roadmap (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.h tml) gives a rough overview of the timeframes involved right now, though it is not always accurate as it isn't updated frequently.
Honestly, Firefox 1.1 isn't even in alpha-release yet. To take some highly unstable code and to "preview" it is a bit premature right now. I would call 1.1beta a better time to 'preview' things, as hopefully by then there will be a feature freeze and things will have stabilized a bit. I'm not kidding about the unstable bit either: up until a couple days ago themes and extensions wouldn't install in the nightly builds.
In fact, an article like this does a disservice because it's misleading the/. crew. Yes, an incredibly fast back/forward feature has been checked in to the latest nightly builds, but what they won't tell you is at present this feature is DISABLED. While that doesn't mean it won't be enabled in the future and might be enabled for 1.1, as it stands this feature is off by default and only accessible through a custom pref, so in its current state it changes nothing for the average end-user.
Some of us enjoy playing games at screen sizes more than 640x480 and extremely low details. I find it difficult to believe that a GF4MX would have been able to play either of those two games at any settings higher than that, at least at an acceptable rate.
Though it may have done well, that lies more in that Valve spent an extraordinary amount of time optimizing the engine to scale from DX7 to DX9. Take a look at the various screenshot comparisons from HL2 and you'll notice a huge quality jump from DX7 to DX9. The difference from DX8 to 9 is more subtle but it's also there. The fact that you *can* play HL2 on such low graphics cards doesn't mean that it's the best way to experience such a game.
This is probably the most flamebait posting I've seen in a long long time. Nevermind the fact that RealPlayer 10 does not suck and in no way resembles the "glory" days of RealPlayer 7/G2/8 (Would you like to subscribe to the following newsletters? Don't forget the 5 or so at the bottom of this list), it's still cool on slashdot to make inflammatory comments with zero justification (Yes yes I know this *is* slashdot).
Anyway, this service is nowhere near the hype that Real made it out to be. It's basically a slightly better version of the free trial that most of the legal music services out there. The files are streamed to you (this is the standard method on Rhapsody, but it does a really good job of hiding the process so that you don't even realize it's streaming all this) so you cannot keep them. Instead of getting a whole month free after which they charge your credit card, for this system I don't think they even ask for your credit card as they plan on keeping the basic 25-song plan perpetually free (so long as enough users sign up for pay-plans and the advertisers keep staying along obviously).
Yes, this is advertiser supported, and yes, this gimmick will probably end if all of them decide it's not effective enough. But for now, you might as well try it out since it won't cost you anything.
It's an interesting way of trying to get new users hooked on the new service, though, and considering that I prefer Rhapsody's subscription plan and my Napster university account expires soon, I might just pick this up for the summer. I can't speak for the original poster though, something tells me there isn't an attractive pay-music service model in the world that'll convince him otherwise.
You'll notice that Rhapsody (a very very nice subscription music service, albeit somewhat ugly) and RealPlayer music store are two completely separate programs, and that a subscription in one does not indicate a purchase in the other. I bet this is what their announcement is going to indicate.
Back in 2004 there was this little noticed press release on their website: REALNETWORKS MERGES REALPLAYER AND MUSIC SERVICES TEAMS INTO SINGLE BUSINESS UNIT. I bet what they're announcing tomorrow is the fruits of their labor, a single program that combines the single-track buy idea with the subscription music idea, into one program and hopefully does it well. Napster does it now, but their subscription program has so many different restrictions on it it's really annoying (eg "buy track only" or "buy album only" and such).
Obviously the "digital music revolution" thing is a lot of hype, but a combined program would be far more effective than what they've got now, so long as it works well and isn't bloated to hell. Also, it'd be nice if they took this opportunity to upgrade the audio quality on the Rhapsody stream files to something like 160 or 192 AAC/RA10 instead of the 128WMA they use right now (the actual pay per track music store uses 192 AAC)
Then you haven't used a modern version of RealPlayer recently. RealPlayer 10 does exactly just what you describe: precache the file if your connection can handle it while it's playing. I've even noticed WMP10 doing this not too long ago, so this feature is not unique to QT.
At least on Windows, here's how you enable it:
Tools>Preferences
General|Playback Settings
Cache on-demand streams for faster seeking and smoother playback
Next time you're playing a file, you should notice a little green bar scrolling across the progress bar, indicating how far ahead you've cached the file. I don't know if this requires the special Helix server to do this, but I don't think so since it does it on basically every file I've played. The windows media-equivalent might require the server use the WM Server though, since this isn't something I've seen happen too often.
If you want to eliminate the "buffering" syndrome, you might want to turn on TurboPlay too, which is in the same panel as the cache setting. I have no idea if either of these are turned on by default (but they probably should be).
I believe they have a contractual obligation with Vivendi that prevents them from seriously undercutting the retail box shelf price. I'm sure they don't mind anyway, as they keep a bigger chunk of the profits to themselves with steam as it is.
The discussion becomes there is a sizable (if not major) userbase that still prefers Mozilla Suite over Firefox at the moment. For whatever reason, these people would rather just not change over to the new suite of browser apps. The discussion was a sign of Mozilla looking at the users clamoring for more releases and deciding whether or not a) MoFo has the resources to dedicate towards an official 1.8 release, and b) whether it is worth continuing Mozilla releases in the long term. In the end, Mozilla came to the same conclusion they decided a while ago: it isn't.
And actually, this isn't too different from Microsoft openly pondering dropping the piracy blocking from Windows Update/Service Pack 2.
As for accomodating the needs and concerns of the community, I feel they did. MoFo simply doesn't have the ability to do it on themselves, so now they're allowing for the community to step up and take charge. Now, the community gets to take the new project in whatever direction it feels is best for the project. Who knows, maybe they'll be able to innovate enough that the classic Suite'll prove just as compelling as Firefox is today.
This version implemented something new called "Site Controls," or at least a better version of them. It also implements that master list of trusted sites you guys might've heard about a while back.
Well, it turns out that ANY site that is on the 'trusted site list' is set to display like IE. I don't know what's on this list, but I can tell you that's a LOT of sites this browser is using the IE engine for. It only defaults to Gecko when it's an "I'm not sure of this site" or "I dont trust this site" setting.
While these tests are nice for having empirical data, it's also important to not focus too much on this data. In many cases, the differences in results was not much more than a second. IE sucks for many reasons that are not its speed. Firefox and Opera have far more benefits other than what speed it displays pages at.
The point is, for most of these browsers, they all run 'fast enough.' A second or two here and there isn't going to significantly impact your browsing experience. Tabs, intelligent UI design, intelligent security decisions, and perhaps themes/extensions will add up to the overall experience.
So I noticed the program flagged a bunch of VOB files, which didn't surprise me at first. I thought I had deleted a bunch of VOB files for a movie I ripped the other week, but I guess I hadn't.
Until I looked at it again. The program had flagged all the VOB files from the DVD movie that was in my DVDROM drive.
This looks quite interesting... It makes the whole "here's my public key, now you give me mine" process much more simplified and transparent, which is really the big problem with PGP. Although pgp keyservers make this a little simplified (especially the new PGP beta server, it looks slick https://keyserver-beta.pgp.com/), the end user still has to actively search out public keys for their contacts.
However, as with all things, corporate acceptance is probably going to be pivotal for this, especially as corporations are probably much more concerned about security than the average user. I haven't downloaded a build yet, but make it possible for corporations to set up their own internal key servers, and allow the software to specify which keyservers it should upload/negotiate with first. Although I'm sure setting up a keyserver is possible, I still don't know how I would be able to set one up for, say my school, if I wanted to. You might even be able to sell a license for the keyserver and keep the basic software free, though you would probably get bonus points if the whole thing was OSS.
Make it compelling! You have to give the customers a REASON to want the legit wares over the illegal ones. Right now, the reason they're providing is a stick, when I think a carrot would be far more useful.
Take for example, Movielink. They're aggressively pursuing college students, probably the worst offenders of them all. I'd be surprised if they're profitable at all, mostly for the following reasons in no particular order:
1. IE-only site. While this isn't a huge deal in and of itself, when you navigate the site it doesn't make any sense. Not only are they cutting out about 5-10% of the total market (depending on who you ask), it's one of those pointlessly IE-only sites. The site itself doesn't make use of any super fancy scripts, DHTML, or much ActiveX. The only use of ActiveX is essentially for the client installer, which could easily be replaced with an EXE installer instead.
2. Timely Releases. Movielink's releases are typically 2 months after the DVD release. Who wants to pay $5 for a lower quality release of a movie that has already been on DVD for 2 months, and has already been on the Internet as a Divx rip for 2.5 months?
3. Quality and price. As I just mentioned, most of Movielink's prices are $5 per movie. Your "rental period" is 24 hours. This is really ridiculous, considering that Blockbuster usually has 48 hour/5 day rental periods for the same price, AND they just got rid of late fees. Quality is acceptable (your choice of RealPlayer 10 or Windows Media), but not high quality by any means.
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The rights to tell the story have to get purchased from somewhere, and you better believe New Line isn't going to give those up (though Disney was foolish enough to pass) for chump change.
Your example forgets the mere fact that the Steven King story sucked. "The Plant?" I mean come on. The "first hit free" model doesn't work if the first hit didn't do anything for anyone.
It might also be important to note that CNN has switched from Real SuperPass (and hence the RV9 they used to use) to Windows Media 9. To me, this means that they lined up another big sponsor in Microsoft.
This is a disappointment to me, as it means that I'm not entirely sure I'm always going to be able to watch these videos on a Linux or Mac system; WM10 isn't out on Mac, and obviously never will be for Linux. Real has generally been fairly consistent with clients being available for all 3 big platforms. Mplayer is nice but official clients are even better.
Build hardware using custom northbridge and/or custom BIOS/OF/EFI, as well as custom motherboards.
In OS X, create drivers only for the devices that Apple knows are in its hardware (eg. the only drivers included are those for the custom chipset, bootloader, what have you). Include no other drivers, period.
When you control both the hardware and software, it's easy to make simple restrictions that make it difficult to install on your average x86. Who's going to want to install OS X if it doesn't include drivers for your nv/intel/ati chipset, and thus probably barely works? Got an exotic soundcard? Too bad OS X doesn't include drivers for it. Using an unsupported ethernet adapter? Too bad that's not working either.
Sure someone may be able to hack it, but so long as it's annoying that 95% of the computing population won't bother with it, that's probably suitable enough for Apple's needs.
That's not really all that impressive, seeing as how iCab uses WebCore (==Safari)
Not only would this not be likely to be approved due to antitrust rules and such, what would be the point of such a purchase? Paying a large chunk of change for a competitor to do...what exactly? Microsoft isn't going to suddenly say "WinServer 2003 blows, here's RHEL 4" to all its customers, undermining the last 5 years of FUD. A purchase like this would contribute nothing to the MSFT bottom line. Not to mention that this completely ignores the efforts of Novell and SuSE. If RH went out, someone else would line up to take its place in a heartbeat.
True credit belongs to Paul from Greyhats Security Group and Michael Krax (and in the spirit of this post, I'm going to give credit to mozillazine for originally posting the summary I'm writing this off of).
Dropping $100M sounds like it might crush RedHat. All those dollar bills piled up on top of the roof...
Imagine if they were Sacagaweas. Those poor Linux geeks wouldn't stand a chance with dollar coins raining down on their heads.
This isn't really so much a review as a description of features currently in the nightly. Firefox 1.1 isn't expected until June at the earliest. The roadmap (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.h tml) gives a rough overview of the timeframes involved right now, though it is not always accurate as it isn't updated frequently.
/. crew. Yes, an incredibly fast back/forward feature has been checked in to the latest nightly builds, but what they won't tell you is at present this feature is DISABLED. While that doesn't mean it won't be enabled in the future and might be enabled for 1.1, as it stands this feature is off by default and only accessible through a custom pref, so in its current state it changes nothing for the average end-user.
7 66
Honestly, Firefox 1.1 isn't even in alpha-release yet. To take some highly unstable code and to "preview" it is a bit premature right now. I would call 1.1beta a better time to 'preview' things, as hopefully by then there will be a feature freeze and things will have stabilized a bit. I'm not kidding about the unstable bit either: up until a couple days ago themes and extensions wouldn't install in the nightly builds.
In fact, an article like this does a disservice because it's misleading the
This forums post gives a better idea of the new features to be expected in 1.1 with one line sentences: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=257
Some of us enjoy playing games at screen sizes more than 640x480 and extremely low details. I find it difficult to believe that a GF4MX would have been able to play either of those two games at any settings higher than that, at least at an acceptable rate.
Though it may have done well, that lies more in that Valve spent an extraordinary amount of time optimizing the engine to scale from DX7 to DX9. Take a look at the various screenshot comparisons from HL2 and you'll notice a huge quality jump from DX7 to DX9. The difference from DX8 to 9 is more subtle but it's also there. The fact that you *can* play HL2 on such low graphics cards doesn't mean that it's the best way to experience such a game.
Anyway, this service is nowhere near the hype that Real made it out to be. It's basically a slightly better version of the free trial that most of the legal music services out there. The files are streamed to you (this is the standard method on Rhapsody, but it does a really good job of hiding the process so that you don't even realize it's streaming all this) so you cannot keep them. Instead of getting a whole month free after which they charge your credit card, for this system I don't think they even ask for your credit card as they plan on keeping the basic 25-song plan perpetually free (so long as enough users sign up for pay-plans and the advertisers keep staying along obviously).
Yes, this is advertiser supported, and yes, this gimmick will probably end if all of them decide it's not effective enough. But for now, you might as well try it out since it won't cost you anything.
It's an interesting way of trying to get new users hooked on the new service, though, and considering that I prefer Rhapsody's subscription plan and my Napster university account expires soon, I might just pick this up for the summer. I can't speak for the original poster though, something tells me there isn't an attractive pay-music service model in the world that'll convince him otherwise.
Back in 2004 there was this little noticed press release on their website: REALNETWORKS MERGES REALPLAYER AND MUSIC SERVICES TEAMS INTO SINGLE BUSINESS UNIT. I bet what they're announcing tomorrow is the fruits of their labor, a single program that combines the single-track buy idea with the subscription music idea, into one program and hopefully does it well. Napster does it now, but their subscription program has so many different restrictions on it it's really annoying (eg "buy track only" or "buy album only" and such).
Obviously the "digital music revolution" thing is a lot of hype, but a combined program would be far more effective than what they've got now, so long as it works well and isn't bloated to hell. Also, it'd be nice if they took this opportunity to upgrade the audio quality on the Rhapsody stream files to something like 160 or 192 AAC/RA10 instead of the 128WMA they use right now (the actual pay per track music store uses 192 AAC)
At least on Windows, here's how you enable it:
- Tools>Preferences
- General|Playback Settings
- Cache on-demand streams for faster seeking and smoother playback
Next time you're playing a file, you should notice a little green bar scrolling across the progress bar, indicating how far ahead you've cached the file. I don't know if this requires the special Helix server to do this, but I don't think so since it does it on basically every file I've played. The windows media-equivalent might require the server use the WM Server though, since this isn't something I've seen happen too often. If you want to eliminate the "buffering" syndrome, you might want to turn on TurboPlay too, which is in the same panel as the cache setting. I have no idea if either of these are turned on by default (but they probably should be).I believe they have a contractual obligation with Vivendi that prevents them from seriously undercutting the retail box shelf price. I'm sure they don't mind anyway, as they keep a bigger chunk of the profits to themselves with steam as it is.
The discussion becomes there is a sizable (if not major) userbase that still prefers Mozilla Suite over Firefox at the moment. For whatever reason, these people would rather just not change over to the new suite of browser apps. The discussion was a sign of Mozilla looking at the users clamoring for more releases and deciding whether or not a) MoFo has the resources to dedicate towards an official 1.8 release, and b) whether it is worth continuing Mozilla releases in the long term. In the end, Mozilla came to the same conclusion they decided a while ago: it isn't.
And actually, this isn't too different from Microsoft openly pondering dropping the piracy blocking from Windows Update/Service Pack 2.
As for accomodating the needs and concerns of the community, I feel they did. MoFo simply doesn't have the ability to do it on themselves, so now they're allowing for the community to step up and take charge. Now, the community gets to take the new project in whatever direction it feels is best for the project. Who knows, maybe they'll be able to innovate enough that the classic Suite'll prove just as compelling as Firefox is today.
This version implemented something new called "Site Controls," or at least a better version of them. It also implements that master list of trusted sites you guys might've heard about a while back.
Well, it turns out that ANY site that is on the 'trusted site list' is set to display like IE. I don't know what's on this list, but I can tell you that's a LOT of sites this browser is using the IE engine for. It only defaults to Gecko when it's an "I'm not sure of this site" or "I dont trust this site" setting.
Now if you're worried about putting too much strain on the Mozilla download servers, use the BT links!
Alternatively, this page lists translations and direct download links
Not that there wasn't value in those suggestions, but any company would be completely foolish if they were to follow the comments on Slashdot blindly.
While these tests are nice for having empirical data, it's also important to not focus too much on this data. In many cases, the differences in results was not much more than a second. IE sucks for many reasons that are not its speed. Firefox and Opera have far more benefits other than what speed it displays pages at.
The point is, for most of these browsers, they all run 'fast enough.' A second or two here and there isn't going to significantly impact your browsing experience. Tabs, intelligent UI design, intelligent security decisions, and perhaps themes/extensions will add up to the overall experience.
Until I looked at it again. The program had flagged all the VOB files from the DVD movie that was in my DVDROM drive.
This looks quite interesting... It makes the whole "here's my public key, now you give me mine" process much more simplified and transparent, which is really the big problem with PGP. Although pgp keyservers make this a little simplified (especially the new PGP beta server, it looks slick https://keyserver-beta.pgp.com/), the end user still has to actively search out public keys for their contacts.
However, as with all things, corporate acceptance is probably going to be pivotal for this, especially as corporations are probably much more concerned about security than the average user. I haven't downloaded a build yet, but make it possible for corporations to set up their own internal key servers, and allow the software to specify which keyservers it should upload/negotiate with first. Although I'm sure setting up a keyserver is possible, I still don't know how I would be able to set one up for, say my school, if I wanted to. You might even be able to sell a license for the keyserver and keep the basic software free, though you would probably get bonus points if the whole thing was OSS.
Make it compelling! You have to give the customers a REASON to want the legit wares over the illegal ones. Right now, the reason they're providing is a stick, when I think a carrot would be far more useful.
Take for example, Movielink. They're aggressively pursuing college students, probably the worst offenders of them all. I'd be surprised if they're profitable at all, mostly for the following reasons in no particular order:
1. IE-only site. While this isn't a huge deal in and of itself, when you navigate the site it doesn't make any sense. Not only are they cutting out about 5-10% of the total market (depending on who you ask), it's one of those pointlessly IE-only sites. The site itself doesn't make use of any super fancy scripts, DHTML, or much ActiveX. The only use of ActiveX is essentially for the client installer, which could easily be replaced with an EXE installer instead.
2. Timely Releases. Movielink's releases are typically 2 months after the DVD release. Who wants to pay $5 for a lower quality release of a movie that has already been on DVD for 2 months, and has already been on the Internet as a Divx rip for 2.5 months?
3. Quality and price. As I just mentioned, most of Movielink's prices are $5 per movie. Your "rental period" is 24 hours. This is really ridiculous, considering that Blockbuster usually has 48 hour/5 day rental periods for the same price, AND they just got rid of late fees. Quality is acceptable (your choice of RealPlayer 10 or Windows Media), but not high quality by any means.