Oh, and "This is the world's smallest violin playing just for Rambus."
By this logic, Nintendo could sue Sony for luring gamers and developers away from the N64 to the PS1 because they didn't want to pay the costs of cartridges over CDs!
It's funny how companies turn against the supposed benefits of the free market when it stops working in their favour, isn't it?
If you design a widget that you think guarantees you a fortune, and then somebody comes up with a better and cheaper widget that everyone uses instead, then that's really tough shit on you. Innovate, not litigate.
Have any of you ever paid a bill slightly (or even very) late? Ever take out a loan, with which you intended to enrich yourself, and then take longer to pay it back than you originally contracted?
No, and no.
So I can criticise the RIAA as much as I like, and be morally right. BWAH HAH HAH!
People don't realise that it does indeed cost money to produce creative works, and those people who invested in them have a right to protect them. If it costs you $100 million to create a feature film, what incentive is there for you as an investor, a studio, whoever, to put that money in if within a week of the final edit being finished it is distributed to your entire audience for free?
I've never bought a pirated DVD in my life. Nor have I ever downloaded a movie from the internet, P2P or whatever.
And you know what? Nor have 99.5% of the other people who go to see movies.
Most people, if they want to see a film, are happy to cough up the UKP5/$8 it costs to see it in a cinema. Hell, they'll make a social event of it and go with a bunch of their friends, then go out for drinks afterwards. How many people out of the entire population go "Woah, party at my place tonight! I downloaded a 400x300 WMP file of [insert blockbuster here] that we can all sit around my computer monitor for two hours and watch!"? It's a tiny, tiny percentage.
If piracy is such a problem, if it's literally stealing the bread from the mouths of the stars and directors and producers and executives, then how come last year was the most successful year financially in Hollywood history?
The studios and the *AAs are not being devastated by piracy. No studio has *ever* been driven to bankruptcy by piracy - they've been driven to bankruptcy by making shit films that nobody wants to see. Piracy denies them just a teeny, tiny percentage of their overall profits. The problem is that, like organised crime, the loss of 0.5% of their profits is considered the same as losing 100% of their profits. Unlike organised crime, they have the law on their side (which they've bought), and as a result they get to treat the 99.5% of people who *don't* buy pirated goods as potential criminals.
And under the current western political system, lobbying groups and corporations with money get what they want at the expense of the pre-existing rights of citizens without it. I'm no revolutionary, but to me that seems wrong, and something really should be done about it. Any suggestions?
Wow, I hadn't seen those shots before. Quite interesting to see a proto-OSX, and running on x86, at that. Would the world be different if Apple had put their OS on x86 hardware, or would MS simply have tried to destroy them?
Also interesting to see a proto-Dock, one which looks even more intrusive and unwieldy than what we have now. (I didn't like the Dock when I saw it in the OSX beta, and I still don't like it even in 10.3...)
Broaden your retro horizons and get a C64 emulator! Minter wrote games (mainly) in the 8-bit computer era (C64 for the most part). He also wrote Tempest 2000, one of the best 'twitch' games of all time, far better than the original Tempest coin-op and not far behind Robotron, IMO.
He also wrote Defender 2000, which sucked because Defender is one of the very few games that needs no improvement, but everyone makes mistakes sometimes.
Minter might never have been cutting edge in terms of eye candy, but he's always been focused on what actually counts - gameplay. He's also been a lot more willing to experiment with control concepts. Nobody else would have come up with Ancipital's four-way gravity or Iridis Alpha's simultaneous twin playfields. Some of his experiments may not have worked out (like Mama Llama's confusing llama family/droid combo), but when they did they made the games unique - as if the bizarre enemies and trippy FX didn't already!
BTW, if you get down to the bottom of the article and wonder who Andy Braybrook is, he was another British developer who wrote classic C64 titles like Paradroid and Uridium. And yes, it's a tragedy that he stopped making games to write accounting software instead - but you go where the money is (literally, in his case).
Could YOU afford to defend yourself?
Which sums up in a single sentence exactly what's wrong with the legal system in the US and many other countries. In civil cases, procedings can just be dragged on until the smaller party runs out of money, even if that party has a 100% solid case.
The western legal system needs a *major* overhaul, but it's not going to happen any time soon, because the people who stand to lose the most from change are very same people who run it!
So how is MS now including WMP any different than apple always including Itunes+ITMS? It seems like its just the/. bias at work again.
Mm, no, MS was found guilty by the US courts of illegally abusing its monopoly position to destroy its competition. It's also just been found guilty by the EU of exactly the same anti-competitive practices, and had its offices raided in Japan as part of an investigation into, yup, you guessed it, monopolistic practices.
Apple can bundle whatever software it likes with a Mac - at 3% market share, it's not going to have a monopoly on the desktop any time soon. Hell, you can even delete iTunes if you want, and it's gone forever. But if MS puts its own music portal in as part of WMP and it can't be removed, just like they claim IE is a vital part of the system (*coughhorseshitcough* - why make a frickin' internet browser a key part of your OS unless it was a sneaky way to lock in users and destroy the competition?), then they're abusing their monopoly position yet again, breaking the law and the terms of the DoJ settlement - and apparently not caring in the least, since the current administration couldn't give a rat's ass about monopolies as long as they get their cut.
Be nice if Nader won, if only to see the look on Bill's face!
Some executives, for example, believe they should be charging a premium for the online versions of older tracks because consumers may be willing to pay more for harder-to-find material.
Uh, no. No, no, no. In online music, 'hard to find' = 'obscure old crap', not 'hard to find' = 'rare and valuable'! It might be hard to find a copy of Baltimora's 'Tarzan Boy' in the shops. It doesn't mean I'm willing to spend 2.5 times more to get hold of it than a brand-new track just because I have a vague hankering to hear the song again as it reminds me of a fun night I had during the 80s!
I can think of a few albums where there are less favorite tracks or even a few that I tend to dislike and skip most of the time, but unless you're buying a pop album on the basis of the single you heard on the radio I can't imagine this being an issue.
I don't own a single album where I like *all* of the tracks enough to have ripped them to iTunes for my usual 'random play' personal radio station. There are a few where I've ripped *most* of them, but not even the best album by my favourite band has got me to go 'Yup, I like each song on there so much that I could listen to it any time'. And I certainly don't have a CD collection full of top 40 crap!
This is what pisses me off about the so-called 'global economy'. It's fine for corporations to shop around for the lowest possible costs of production (and if that involves sacking thousands of workers in that corporation's home country, then so be it), but god forbid the *consumer* be allowed to do the same thing! How dare they! The drones are supposed to buy what we tell them, when we tell them, at the price we tell them! Just shut up and consume like we tell you!
Sooner or later, the whole system is going to implode. And it'll be nasty. I doubt restricting people's ability to record their favourite TV shows will be the catalyst... but it's not going to help. (Maybe Ashcroft's anti-Pr0n crusade will be a contributing factor!)
It's just a matter of doing a 40,000 page run of each of the "customized" sets of pages with the image database available
Yeah, it's 'just' a matter of doing that. The magazine I edit has roughly a 40,000 print run, and if I proposed doing a different cover for every single copy, the production director would have a heart attack, the finance director would explode and the printers would be yelling "Ka-ching!"
Hell, it's hard enough trying to wring the money out of them for a split-run cover with just *two* alternate images, never mind 40,000!
1: *Renting* music? Even though every monthly 'stop paying and lose all your tunes' subscription model to date has been a miserable failure? Fuck that.
2: Tied in to proprietary MS DRM? Fuck that.
3: If it can be heard, it can be copied. So all the protection... fuck that.
4: Janus was the codename of the villain in Goldeneye. So fuck that too! Why not just call it 'Blofeld' and be done with it?
B5: 'Severed Dreams' - physics about as realistic as we're likely to see on TV, yet still tremendously tense and exciting. The shot where a Thunderbolt gets clipped by B5's AA fire and goes tumbling right into the station, the camera following it all the way, is amazing. (Too bad Warners spoiled the effect on the DVDs by losing the masters of the CG and having to letterbox the 4:3 versions to match the 16:9 live action. The loss of quality is very noticeable.)
Star Wars - the final minutes of the Death Star attack *still* get my adrenaline going, even after all these years!
DS9: 'Sacrifice Of Angels' - fighters! Wings of Galaxies kicking ass! Mirandas spinning and exploding right into the camera! Klingons to the rescue! The Defiant flying three feet above the hull of an exploding battleship! Geek porn!
The Last Starfighter - the CG looks cheap now, but the Gun Star was/is a fantastic design. Death blossom!
Starship Troopers - one of the few times big ships have been given a real feeling of mass, especially when they start crashing into each other.
It's actually a very interesting piece, don't get me wrong. But the idea that access to information will somehow inspire millions to rise up and overthrow their oppressors has one flaw.
99% of people in the world aren't interested in rising up and overthrowing their oppressors.
Think about it. You may be being oppressed, and life may be shit, but it's *life*. You're still alive. Now, given the choice at your local newly-opened cybercafe, are you going to head for a pro-democracy website full of anti-government rhetoric, or are you going to check out mtv.com for a look at what Madonna's up to? Remember, one of these choices could lead to you being arrested. Pick wisely now.
It's much easier to get on with your life without worrying about such things. Unless somebody's actually coming to kill you *right now* for your ethnic group/religious beliefs/sexuality/whatever, in most countries you can at least have a life - friends, family, marriage, kids and so on - without the concern that you might be dragged off at any moment and thrown into a cell or shot in the back of the head. So why stir things up?
(NB: I'm not suggesting for a moment that I think people *should* just knuckle under and accept whatever tyranny happens to be exploting them. The sad fact is, people *do* accept them, because it's much easier than the alternative - running around in the countryside trying not to get shot dead.)
Governments - of any nation - are more powerful now than at any time in history. And the people who enforce the actions of those governments have guns. And tanks. And helicopter gunships. And a whole bunch of other weapons ostensibly for the 'protection' of the nation that can just as easily be turned against people within its borders.
Hell, if there's one thing the internet's done, it's shown that democracy ain't a magic wand, at least not the way it's done in the US and the UK. Here are two candidates. They're both rich white guys, and apart from trivial differences over specifics, their policies are practically identical. They also both want government to have greater control over the daily lives of the citizens. Don't even bother thinking about a third alternative, because the media has already turned them into a laughing stock. Now choose!
I've come to the sad realisation that not one single political party in the UK even vaguely represents my beliefs. So how do I get my voice heard? (Don't suggest 'start your own party' - I'm on Slashdot, I have zero charisma!;) And if it's like that even in a stable western democracy, what chance do the 'internet dissidents' have?
Can you imagine if the first broadcast the aliens got from Earth was monkey-boy dancing around yelling "Aliens, aliens, aliens!"? They'd be launching a fleet to blow up the Earth within a day!
'I, Robot' was the first *adult* (ie, no pictures in it) book I ever read as a kid, at the age of maybe 4 or 5. I still have the exact copy of the book even now. I remember being very disappointed when I found out that robots didn't really exist.
And now it looks as though Asimov is going to be fucked over by Hollywood. For Christ's sake, they had Akiva fucking Goldsman writing the script! The man who wrote 'Batman & Robin', 'Lost In Space' and a whole pile of other shit. Asimov can still write better than Goldsman, and he's *dead*. This fucktard shouldn't be writing v1agra spam, never mind major motion pictures.
In Asimov's stories, the whole point of the Three Laws was that they were never actually broken! Human error led to situations where robots were caught in conflict between their explicit orders and the Laws, or they *seemed* to be breaking one Law - but only to obey another. However, in the trailer we see crazed robots chasing and attacking humans left, right and centre. Somehow I don't think we're going to get Powell and Donovan puzzling out what's gone wrong, step by step.
Even the trailer is selling it as Bad Boys 3: Cybercops, what with Smith doing all his Fresh Prince schtick. I actually *like* Will Smith, but I don't want him doing wacky bullshit in an Isaac Asimov adaptation!
And we even get an emotional robot right there in the trailer. Again, Asimov's robots may have *seemed* to have emotional responses in the stories, but it was invariably due to orders-vs-Laws conflicts that made them act oddly, or projection on the part of the humans interacting with them. Some of the robots in his stories (especially Daneel Olivaw) may have had personalities, but they were still *machines*, and behaved as such.
Shit, and I had some hopes for this film - before I saw the trailer - too. It might even make money - "Will Smith vs killer robots? Keeeewl!" - but it's probably going to be even more insulting to Asimov than 'Paycheck' was to PKD.
Does anyone else think that DARPA *maybe* was pushing a bit too hard on this? Asking people to come up with a robot vehicle that can negotiate extremely tough terrain only marginally slower than a skilled human rally driver could? Maybe they should have first had a 'Minor Challenge' where a robot vehicle has to get from point A to point B on a paved road at moderate speeds without crashing.
Month-old babies don't run marathons, so why are we expecting their robot equivalents to do the same?
I had somebody rip off my Futurama fansite and pass it off as their own - in the Czech Republic, of all places. Not much I could do about that beyond send them an irate email and ask them to pack it in.
More insidiously, I've had fanart (from the same site) of mine be copied and printed up on t-shirts sold on eBay - passing them off as official Futurama merchandise. Again, what can you do? Complaining to eBay is all very well, but the people doing it will just open new accounts under different names even if eBay closes them down...
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I've got one of those in my home too! Although mine's called a 'laser printer'.
So RIAA stands for 'Rape In Anal Access'?
Oh, and "This is the world's smallest violin playing just for Rambus."
By this logic, Nintendo could sue Sony for luring gamers and developers away from the N64 to the PS1 because they didn't want to pay the costs of cartridges over CDs!
It's funny how companies turn against the supposed benefits of the free market when it stops working in their favour, isn't it?
If you design a widget that you think guarantees you a fortune, and then somebody comes up with a better and cheaper widget that everyone uses instead, then that's really tough shit on you. Innovate, not litigate.
No, and no.
So I can criticise the RIAA as much as I like, and be morally right. BWAH HAH HAH!
Another UK/US cultural difference there, then. I'm 5'8" as well, but I weigh 140 pounds, and would also consider myself 'average to small' build.
I've never bought a pirated DVD in my life. Nor have I ever downloaded a movie from the internet, P2P or whatever.
And you know what? Nor have 99.5% of the other people who go to see movies.
Most people, if they want to see a film, are happy to cough up the UKP5/$8 it costs to see it in a cinema. Hell, they'll make a social event of it and go with a bunch of their friends, then go out for drinks afterwards. How many people out of the entire population go "Woah, party at my place tonight! I downloaded a 400x300 WMP file of [insert blockbuster here] that we can all sit around my computer monitor for two hours and watch!"? It's a tiny, tiny percentage.
If piracy is such a problem, if it's literally stealing the bread from the mouths of the stars and directors and producers and executives, then how come last year was the most successful year financially in Hollywood history?
The studios and the *AAs are not being devastated by piracy. No studio has *ever* been driven to bankruptcy by piracy - they've been driven to bankruptcy by making shit films that nobody wants to see. Piracy denies them just a teeny, tiny percentage of their overall profits. The problem is that, like organised crime, the loss of 0.5% of their profits is considered the same as losing 100% of their profits. Unlike organised crime, they have the law on their side (which they've bought), and as a result they get to treat the 99.5% of people who *don't* buy pirated goods as potential criminals.
And under the current western political system, lobbying groups and corporations with money get what they want at the expense of the pre-existing rights of citizens without it. I'm no revolutionary, but to me that seems wrong, and something really should be done about it. Any suggestions?
Also interesting to see a proto-Dock, one which looks even more intrusive and unwieldy than what we have now. (I didn't like the Dock when I saw it in the OSX beta, and I still don't like it even in 10.3...)
He also wrote Defender 2000, which sucked because Defender is one of the very few games that needs no improvement, but everyone makes mistakes sometimes.
Minter might never have been cutting edge in terms of eye candy, but he's always been focused on what actually counts - gameplay. He's also been a lot more willing to experiment with control concepts. Nobody else would have come up with Ancipital's four-way gravity or Iridis Alpha's simultaneous twin playfields. Some of his experiments may not have worked out (like Mama Llama's confusing llama family/droid combo), but when they did they made the games unique - as if the bizarre enemies and trippy FX didn't already!
BTW, if you get down to the bottom of the article and wonder who Andy Braybrook is, he was another British developer who wrote classic C64 titles like Paradroid and Uridium. And yes, it's a tragedy that he stopped making games to write accounting software instead - but you go where the money is (literally, in his case).
The western legal system needs a *major* overhaul, but it's not going to happen any time soon, because the people who stand to lose the most from change are very same people who run it!
Mm, no, MS was found guilty by the US courts of illegally abusing its monopoly position to destroy its competition. It's also just been found guilty by the EU of exactly the same anti-competitive practices, and had its offices raided in Japan as part of an investigation into, yup, you guessed it, monopolistic practices.
Apple can bundle whatever software it likes with a Mac - at 3% market share, it's not going to have a monopoly on the desktop any time soon. Hell, you can even delete iTunes if you want, and it's gone forever. But if MS puts its own music portal in as part of WMP and it can't be removed, just like they claim IE is a vital part of the system (*coughhorseshitcough* - why make a frickin' internet browser a key part of your OS unless it was a sneaky way to lock in users and destroy the competition?), then they're abusing their monopoly position yet again, breaking the law and the terms of the DoJ settlement - and apparently not caring in the least, since the current administration couldn't give a rat's ass about monopolies as long as they get their cut.
Be nice if Nader won, if only to see the look on Bill's face!
Uh, no. No, no, no. In online music, 'hard to find' = 'obscure old crap', not 'hard to find' = 'rare and valuable'! It might be hard to find a copy of Baltimora's 'Tarzan Boy' in the shops. It doesn't mean I'm willing to spend 2.5 times more to get hold of it than a brand-new track just because I have a vague hankering to hear the song again as it reminds me of a fun night I had during the 80s!
I can think of a few albums where there are less favorite tracks or even a few that I tend to dislike and skip most of the time, but unless you're buying a pop album on the basis of the single you heard on the radio I can't imagine this being an issue. I don't own a single album where I like *all* of the tracks enough to have ripped them to iTunes for my usual 'random play' personal radio station. There are a few where I've ripped *most* of them, but not even the best album by my favourite band has got me to go 'Yup, I like each song on there so much that I could listen to it any time'. And I certainly don't have a CD collection full of top 40 crap!
Sooner or later, the whole system is going to implode. And it'll be nasty. I doubt restricting people's ability to record their favourite TV shows will be the catalyst... but it's not going to help. (Maybe Ashcroft's anti-Pr0n crusade will be a contributing factor!)
Yeah, it's 'just' a matter of doing that. The magazine I edit has roughly a 40,000 print run, and if I proposed doing a different cover for every single copy, the production director would have a heart attack, the finance director would explode and the printers would be yelling "Ka-ching!"
Hell, it's hard enough trying to wring the money out of them for a split-run cover with just *two* alternate images, never mind 40,000!
Psht, no attraction for me, then. I buy all my games second-hand to stick it to The Man!
1: *Renting* music? Even though every monthly 'stop paying and lose all your tunes' subscription model to date has been a miserable failure? Fuck that.
2: Tied in to proprietary MS DRM? Fuck that.
3: If it can be heard, it can be copied. So all the protection... fuck that.
4: Janus was the codename of the villain in Goldeneye. So fuck that too! Why not just call it 'Blofeld' and be done with it?
Star Wars - the final minutes of the Death Star attack *still* get my adrenaline going, even after all these years!
DS9: 'Sacrifice Of Angels' - fighters! Wings of Galaxies kicking ass! Mirandas spinning and exploding right into the camera! Klingons to the rescue! The Defiant flying three feet above the hull of an exploding battleship! Geek porn!
The Last Starfighter - the CG looks cheap now, but the Gun Star was/is a fantastic design. Death blossom!
Starship Troopers - one of the few times big ships have been given a real feeling of mass, especially when they start crashing into each other.
99% of people in the world aren't interested in rising up and overthrowing their oppressors.
Think about it. You may be being oppressed, and life may be shit, but it's *life*. You're still alive. Now, given the choice at your local newly-opened cybercafe, are you going to head for a pro-democracy website full of anti-government rhetoric, or are you going to check out mtv.com for a look at what Madonna's up to? Remember, one of these choices could lead to you being arrested. Pick wisely now.
It's much easier to get on with your life without worrying about such things. Unless somebody's actually coming to kill you *right now* for your ethnic group/religious beliefs/sexuality/whatever, in most countries you can at least have a life - friends, family, marriage, kids and so on - without the concern that you might be dragged off at any moment and thrown into a cell or shot in the back of the head. So why stir things up?
(NB: I'm not suggesting for a moment that I think people *should* just knuckle under and accept whatever tyranny happens to be exploting them. The sad fact is, people *do* accept them, because it's much easier than the alternative - running around in the countryside trying not to get shot dead.)
Governments - of any nation - are more powerful now than at any time in history. And the people who enforce the actions of those governments have guns. And tanks. And helicopter gunships. And a whole bunch of other weapons ostensibly for the 'protection' of the nation that can just as easily be turned against people within its borders.
Hell, if there's one thing the internet's done, it's shown that democracy ain't a magic wand, at least not the way it's done in the US and the UK. Here are two candidates. They're both rich white guys, and apart from trivial differences over specifics, their policies are practically identical. They also both want government to have greater control over the daily lives of the citizens. Don't even bother thinking about a third alternative, because the media has already turned them into a laughing stock. Now choose!
I've come to the sad realisation that not one single political party in the UK even vaguely represents my beliefs. So how do I get my voice heard? (Don't suggest 'start your own party' - I'm on Slashdot, I have zero charisma! ;) And if it's like that even in a stable western democracy, what chance do the 'internet dissidents' have?
Would those be the final front-ears?
Can you imagine if the first broadcast the aliens got from Earth was monkey-boy dancing around yelling "Aliens, aliens, aliens!"? They'd be launching a fleet to blow up the Earth within a day!
(Hmm. Wonder if any of the designers at Toshiba ever owned a Nintendo Power Glove?)
And this is an 'iPod killer' how, again?
'I, Robot' was the first *adult* (ie, no pictures in it) book I ever read as a kid, at the age of maybe 4 or 5. I still have the exact copy of the book even now. I remember being very disappointed when I found out that robots didn't really exist.
And now it looks as though Asimov is going to be fucked over by Hollywood. For Christ's sake, they had Akiva fucking Goldsman writing the script! The man who wrote 'Batman & Robin', 'Lost In Space' and a whole pile of other shit. Asimov can still write better than Goldsman, and he's *dead*. This fucktard shouldn't be writing v1agra spam, never mind major motion pictures.
In Asimov's stories, the whole point of the Three Laws was that they were never actually broken! Human error led to situations where robots were caught in conflict between their explicit orders and the Laws, or they *seemed* to be breaking one Law - but only to obey another. However, in the trailer we see crazed robots chasing and attacking humans left, right and centre. Somehow I don't think we're going to get Powell and Donovan puzzling out what's gone wrong, step by step.
Even the trailer is selling it as Bad Boys 3: Cybercops, what with Smith doing all his Fresh Prince schtick. I actually *like* Will Smith, but I don't want him doing wacky bullshit in an Isaac Asimov adaptation!
And we even get an emotional robot right there in the trailer. Again, Asimov's robots may have *seemed* to have emotional responses in the stories, but it was invariably due to orders-vs-Laws conflicts that made them act oddly, or projection on the part of the humans interacting with them. Some of the robots in his stories (especially Daneel Olivaw) may have had personalities, but they were still *machines*, and behaved as such.
Shit, and I had some hopes for this film - before I saw the trailer - too. It might even make money - "Will Smith vs killer robots? Keeeewl!" - but it's probably going to be even more insulting to Asimov than 'Paycheck' was to PKD.
Month-old babies don't run marathons, so why are we expecting their robot equivalents to do the same?
More insidiously, I've had fanart (from the same site) of mine be copied and printed up on t-shirts sold on eBay - passing them off as official Futurama merchandise. Again, what can you do? Complaining to eBay is all very well, but the people doing it will just open new accounts under different names even if eBay closes them down...