Why didn't the customer base get upset at the studios for not allowing their titles can stream to a larger audience? Slashdot tends to get upset quickly at the music studios, but do we collectively give the movie studios a free pass?
Customers who cancelled their Netflix subscriptions did show their upset to the movie studios, in the only way that matters - by placing a limit on what they are willing to pay. Conversely, those who did nothing are simply asking for more of the same down the road. And if Netflix is unwilling or unable to negotiate lower prices to its customers than any other distribution channel, then it really has nothing to offer.
Honestly, I don't want them to lower the price back down. I want them to use that increased revenue to license more streaming content.
The revolt would have been much smaller if they had phased in higher prices while also phasing in greater selection. Instead they simply said, drop your drawers. Even now there is no promise of increased selection. They got Dreamworks but lost Starz, which is at best a wash.
Except everybody would consider that excuse even more contemptible and irresponsible than intentional remote killings in the first place. Nothing would hurt the drone program more than "proof" that they're not trustworthy.
my time has value, and if I'm not interested in reading a book, I'm simply not going to read it
That's a good argument that the $1 book is a bad idea in the first place. If a book is worth spending time reading, it's worth paying more than $1. The problem is you don't know until after you pay. A solution would be to make the first chapter free and the full book $5.
Nothing you said addresses the point, which is that the pie as a whole is shrinking for authors, including reporters, and what that might mean for governance and culture.
Since the parent mentioned VMs, guest OS instances are a good example of where a memory-hogging OS is a bad thing. It would be better to let the guest OS's memory usage rise and fall with their load, instead, aggressive caching basically implies static memory allocation to VMs because whatever you set as maximum, they'll use. This is a problem with Java too - you just guess how much heap the program might use, but don't guess too high, because the JVM tends to use whatever you let it, because garbage collection overhead is less that way.
Nice try, but you can't simply give apps carte blanche to use gobs of memory by assuming it's being put to good use and speeding things up. True, there's a good case for the OS to use lots of RAM for caching, since it's the 'overseer' making all the programs get along and has the best picture of when one app needs to sacrifice for the others. But when a single application is a memory hog, it can no longer play nicely with others.
Bottom line, most memory-hogging software fails to run well at all on machines with less memory, or even on a decent computer when several memory hogs are sharing space. In that case it's not just opportunistic system optimization, it's a problem.
You could just crack the window, and skip all material, production, shipping, installation, and environmental costs.
Whew, do you have similar objections to air conditioning as well? Any luxury has costs. Objecting that they don't offset their own costs is meaningless. The point is to make your car more comfortable when you get in.
My car already has a sunroof that I can tilt up to let hot air rise out. It helps. But active circulation would be more effective.
Would it be less depressing to you if all ended in a Big Crunch?
The collapsing universe idea seemed sensible because it implied the universe was in an endless regenerative cycle. If it's just a one-shot deal, why is it happening now, of all times?
The Russian drought last year, which triggered them to ban grain exports, lead to higher food prices, especially in importer nations such as the middle east. High food prices in large part triggered the Arab Spring, in which a handful of governments were overturned. So, it is arguable whether this premise is even a prediction, or simply a predicted continuation of recent events.
5. "Better than console game graphics." No, really. Seriously! They said that!
That is becoming increasingly close to feasible. The XBox 360 was released in 2005, the PS3 in 2006. Let's think about that for a minute. This is the top-selling cellphone in 2005, in all its glory. (cite) Even the 960x640 resolution of the iPhone is dangerously close to current-gen consoles (considering they can't support 1080p very well).
Consoles aren't behind yet, but the trajectories of the two cross in the surprisingly near future.
Imagine: You're to be paid after a month of work, and you work hard, but at the end of the month you're told you won't be paid after all. Now you are free to go work somewhere else if you don't like it. Is that okay in your opinion?
One is particularly relevant: "The Assault on Integrity," which condemns any regulation or investor or consumer protection because, Greenspan argues, the government cannot do as effective a job in policing business as the free market can.
"It is precisely the 'greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit seeking which is the unexpected protector of the consumer," he wrote. "It is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for integrity and a quality product."
"A company cannot afford to risk its years of investment by letting down its standards of quality for one moment or one inferior product; nor would it be tempted by any potential 'quick killing,'" he asserted.
So, yes, some of them are that crazy. Yes, Greenspan has since recanted, but as they say, a sucker is born every minute... Rand's books still sell like hotcakes to naive college freshmen.
Actually, taking everything does not necessarily mean somebody is enormously better. It can also mean somebody is just a tiny bit better, consistently, in a winner-takes-all situation.
Imagine you hire 20 guys to dig ditches and pay them by the foot. It will be rare for anybody to out-earn anybody else by more than a factor of about two. Now imagine you have a contest to see which of the 20 guys can dig the fastest, and give him all the earnings. That doesn't mean he's suddenly infinitely better than the others, just that he's at least a little better. (You'll also notice the guys now spend a lot of effort trying to slow each other down, and give up if they fall behind, so less digging gets done overall).
I am confused about whether running Android means a device is open. I am thinking the Kindle Fire could make a really neat remote control for my PVR, maybe as simple as remoting Nautilus from the PVR onto the tablet (on tablet, run ssh -X mypvr nautilus). Are those sorts of things possible?
I appreciate your cynicism, but are you claiming London will have plenty of wireless bandwidth ready for the Olympics next year? Cowboys Stadium alone has 1000 cells.
HTTPS can be proxied without being decrypted by the proxy, are you sure they aren't doing that? Or are you just joking? *Nobody* would want amazon snooping on their online banking etc.
You could just as well argue it increases privacy, since Amazon becomes a proxy service. So instead of your 1-page request hitting 10 companies' servers, each of which collects information on you, now they see a bunch of hits from Amazon.
Of course, google probably aggregates information from those ten servers anyway, and Amazon probably sells the information they collect on you anyway, and the government is probably monitoring everybody involved in any case...
The real reason to put a new card in an old computer is because manufacturers stop releasing drivers for old cards, and old drivers don't work with recent OSes (this is particularly bad under Linux).
I just ditched a pretty good laptop (Thinkpad T60p) because ATI doesn't support the video card any more, and the generic drivers don't support the features that make it useful to me (DVI output through a docking station in this case).
How do they handle the free-rider problem? Live in a low-tax state when you're young and making money, move to a high-tax high-service state when you're old and sick.
Slashdot Mirror
Customers who cancelled their Netflix subscriptions did show their upset to the movie studios, in the only way that matters - by placing a limit on what they are willing to pay. Conversely, those who did nothing are simply asking for more of the same down the road. And if Netflix is unwilling or unable to negotiate lower prices to its customers than any other distribution channel, then it really has nothing to offer.
The revolt would have been much smaller if they had phased in higher prices while also phasing in greater selection. Instead they simply said, drop your drawers. Even now there is no promise of increased selection. They got Dreamworks but lost Starz, which is at best a wash.
Hey Netflix, while you're eating crow, how about rewinding another couple months and rescinding the price hike as well?
Except everybody would consider that excuse even more contemptible and irresponsible than intentional remote killings in the first place. Nothing would hurt the drone program more than "proof" that they're not trustworthy.
That's a good argument that the $1 book is a bad idea in the first place. If a book is worth spending time reading, it's worth paying more than $1. The problem is you don't know until after you pay. A solution would be to make the first chapter free and the full book $5.
Nothing you said addresses the point, which is that the pie as a whole is shrinking for authors, including reporters, and what that might mean for governance and culture.
Since the parent mentioned VMs, guest OS instances are a good example of where a memory-hogging OS is a bad thing. It would be better to let the guest OS's memory usage rise and fall with their load, instead, aggressive caching basically implies static memory allocation to VMs because whatever you set as maximum, they'll use. This is a problem with Java too - you just guess how much heap the program might use, but don't guess too high, because the JVM tends to use whatever you let it, because garbage collection overhead is less that way.
Bottom line, most memory-hogging software fails to run well at all on machines with less memory, or even on a decent computer when several memory hogs are sharing space. In that case it's not just opportunistic system optimization, it's a problem.
Whew, do you have similar objections to air conditioning as well? Any luxury has costs. Objecting that they don't offset their own costs is meaningless. The point is to make your car more comfortable when you get in.
My car already has a sunroof that I can tilt up to let hot air rise out. It helps. But active circulation would be more effective.
How long before some know-it-all slashdotter posts some ridiculous idea on how this might be subverted to allow the enemy to gain the upper hand?
I would like this on the windshield of my car to power a little fan to stop it from getting so hot when I park in the sun.
The Russian drought last year, which triggered them to ban grain exports, lead to higher food prices, especially in importer nations such as the middle east. High food prices in large part triggered the Arab Spring, in which a handful of governments were overturned. So, it is arguable whether this premise is even a prediction, or simply a predicted continuation of recent events.
According to Wikipedia, it was released Nov 2006 in Japan. The US version, although released later, was not upgraded.
That is becoming increasingly close to feasible. The XBox 360 was released in 2005, the PS3 in 2006. Let's think about that for a minute. This is the top-selling cellphone in 2005, in all its glory. (cite) Even the 960x640 resolution of the iPhone is dangerously close to current-gen consoles (considering they can't support 1080p very well).
Consoles aren't behind yet, but the trajectories of the two cross in the surprisingly near future.
The reason ebay can offer their buyer protection program is because ebay can, in turn, resort to the law when necessary. They can and they do.
Be careful calling libertarians' bluff. Until relatively recently, none other than Alan Greenspan (an Ayn Rand acolyte) maintained that government should have little or no role in policing fraud:
So, yes, some of them are that crazy. Yes, Greenspan has since recanted, but as they say, a sucker is born every minute... Rand's books still sell like hotcakes to naive college freshmen.
It all depends on the hardware - I just got an old P4 for my kids to use, and the web suddenly seems surprisingly bloated and slow.
Imagine you hire 20 guys to dig ditches and pay them by the foot. It will be rare for anybody to out-earn anybody else by more than a factor of about two. Now imagine you have a contest to see which of the 20 guys can dig the fastest, and give him all the earnings. That doesn't mean he's suddenly infinitely better than the others, just that he's at least a little better. (You'll also notice the guys now spend a lot of effort trying to slow each other down, and give up if they fall behind, so less digging gets done overall).
I am confused about whether running Android means a device is open. I am thinking the Kindle Fire could make a really neat remote control for my PVR, maybe as simple as remoting Nautilus from the PVR onto the tablet (on tablet, run ssh -X mypvr nautilus). Are those sorts of things possible?
I appreciate your cynicism, but are you claiming London will have plenty of wireless bandwidth ready for the Olympics next year? Cowboys Stadium alone has 1000 cells.
HTTPS can be proxied without being decrypted by the proxy, are you sure they aren't doing that? Or are you just joking? *Nobody* would want amazon snooping on their online banking etc.
Of course, google probably aggregates information from those ten servers anyway, and Amazon probably sells the information they collect on you anyway, and the government is probably monitoring everybody involved in any case...
I just ditched a pretty good laptop (Thinkpad T60p) because ATI doesn't support the video card any more, and the generic drivers don't support the features that make it useful to me (DVI output through a docking station in this case).
How do they handle the free-rider problem? Live in a low-tax state when you're young and making money, move to a high-tax high-service state when you're old and sick.