The basic problem with your premise is that now an author (let's say) need only convince a small, select number of people that they should finance his work for a year. Further, once that work is completed there are many mechanisms the market can be use to judge that work (reviews, word-of-mouth, ratings, picking it up in a store and flipping through it) and find out if it has value to them, and is worth the twenty bucks.
Now, let's compare that with an assurance contract, where I have to convince a LOT of people that I can produce something of value, doesn't generate an advance so I can actually get on with creating it, and really provides no guarantee to the end user that it will be a quality product, or one suitable to you (you were expecting killer hard-code SciFi, not a time-travel romance novel). Once I produce it according to the contract, you have to pay for it, with no recourse.
I don't see paying in advance as the answer either, as it limits the available selection to "known" authors who've already made a name for themselves. Stephen King might be able to get a 100,000 people to pay in advance for the next chapter of his new book. A new and unknown author certainly can not.
Further, I tend to see it generating "more-of-the-same" content. Weber may be getting ready to branch out, but what happens when his fans only want to pay up front for more HH? How much of the storyline of The Matrix do I have to reveal before I can convince several million people to kick in $20 up front?
Finally, the up-front "salary" kills the dream as far as I'm concerned. Every author, singer, actor, and director dreams of the "great american novel" or hit song or blockbuster movie. Those dreams convince them to take risks and experiment with new ideas. I don't want those dreams dampened with a "just a job" mentality, working for minimum wage...
"If you can't stop people from breaking it and putting it on the net..."
There's a difference between one person putting something on the net... and millions of people downloading it. One is lost is a sea of many, but the many make a rather significant pattern that can be found, and punished. The flip side of DRM is going to be network traffic analysis...
"...because at the end of the day, I am still the lord and master of all of the bits in my little reality."
Hah. Maybe, once, on your Altair 8080 or Apple II that once was true. Today, even if you're running Linux, you're on a box containing literally hundreds of millions of lines of code written entirely by other people, and that's not counting the BIOS, things like Flash and JVMs, keyboard, mouse, network, and graphic card firmware, proprietary drivers, and so on. And let's not even START getting into the applications themselves.
Any "control" you think you might have is basically just an illusion...
"I'm focusing on movies because they're the only things that fit your specifications."
I beg to differ. Movies, books, albums, software, games; all often have significant amounts of investment in them, not to mention lead and production times usually measured in years. Moreover, even somethng as simple as a song doesn't take just three minutes to produce, as that ignores the years of effort it often takes to hone a craft to the point where it's WORTH spending money on it.
Dead on. Troopers is ENTIRELY about responsibility. Unfortunately, when that Robo-Turkey director picked up the script for the film, those issues and that moral background were the first things he tossed out the window. In that vein, I'm SO disappointed with the framers of the US constitution, who nattered on and on about the "rights" of an individual, with nearly nary a word said regarding the responsibilities those rights entail...
While I agree with your comments regarding "Beast", I thought Time Enough For Love was one of RAH's best works, even better that "Stranger", hsi best know work. Yes, LL was a self-centered randy old coot... but the book did extremely well illustrating the pathos and the ultimate price one pays for immortality, especially when that life is spent among the "short-timers".
The only other story to capture that feeling for me was the first Highlander film...
I agree. Spider wrote one of my all-time-favorite short stories, "God is an Iron", and Stardance is still one of my top ten SF books, mostly because he has a knack for bringing his characters to life and making them real people. But like Heinlein in Number of the Beast, Job, and others, SR is definitely following in RAH's footsteps with each successive Callahan book being more and more implausible and "out there".
For a while I followed his work religously, and I rejoiced whenever I knew a new book was coming... up until I found out that each new book was yet another set of stories from "Callahan's Bar". I thought we'd gotten rid of 'em when he burned the place down, but no such luck. Enough is enough: SR needs to stretch his legs and explore some new worlds.
As I mentioned elsewhere, there are quite a few indie artists and labels on iTMS. According to the latest numbers, label gets 70 cents and Apple 30 cents off a $1 tune. Now, if you're an artist with Virgin Records, you're probably getting 3 cents of the 70. If, however, you're with Nettwerk -- which includes Avril Lavigne, Dido, Sarah McLachlan, and Stereophonics -- you're probably getting something closer to 50/50.
"No idea is absolutely new, so it seems unfair to give someone a absolute monopoly on an idea just because they put last pieces together."
Unfair, yeah. Tell you what. You have access to all of the same sources, so why don't you make your own books, music, games, and movies if it's so easy?
Answwer: It's not easy, and you probably don't have the talent, skill, education, or time to do so.
"Another business model could be to give away earlier works to try to build a name for yourself, then move to more traditional means of production."
That's called "promotion". Since they're giving away their work in exchange for publicity, it's not piracy. They weighed the pros and cons, then made the choice to do so. However, it is piracy once they attempt to "move to more traditional means of production" and people continue to steal their work.
Too many open source projects think the project is done when the code is 99% feature complete. We were evaluating content management systems the other day and started looking at FOSS projects. So we're looking at Joomla, features, etc., and it looks good. Then we get to the documentation and it seems like practically every other entry in the User manual's TOC is "todo". Not good.
With a commercial product they can at least afford to document the silly thing.
"I consider it a flaw that the only place to set a browser as default is inside the browser. It makes about as much sense to me..."
Well, at least we've moved from "This means you cannot uninstall Safari if you want to be able to choose a default browser."
As to making sense to you, well... does it make sense to be asked once when needed, or to have to find the right system-level control panel, or, as more likely in the case of Linux, trying to find the right configuration file in the right folder containing the right command line setting, and changing it?
BTW, I can just image the "scare-the-consumer" infomercials for those. "Anyone just walking by can steal your entire life! Stop them now with our high-tech disposable Super-TF-Wallet! Just 3 easy payments of $19.95 and you...."
"Apple is just as guilty. It just seems like a very, very odd oversight to have no one place to set the default browser... This means you cannot uninstall Safari if you want to be able to choose a default browser."
Oh, please. Delete Safari. Install FireFox. Run FireFox. See dialog: "Firefox is not set as your default browser. Would you like Firefox to be your default browser?" Click "Okay".
If you're going to criticize something it helps to have some idea as to what you're talking about... or at least have the guts to say, "I like Linux, and don't need no stinkin' rationalizations!"
"And it's not done that way on other platforms..."
Face it. MS simply didn't want to divide Windows into multiple products, those "with" IE and those without. And it's true that IE components are used by Explorer, the Help system, Express, and so on to render HTML... but in my mind that's the smart way to do it. If you're talking about bloat, why build completely different HTML rendering systems into each and every program that needs it when a single system-level component is there to do the job?
"...without divisions even where users would really appreciate them."
You mean, things like IE, Windows Media, DirectX, Mesenger, Express,.NET, and so on? Those divisions seem rather clear and useful, and most I've seen tend to have betas available so you can get them prior to release. And service packs do appear more often, with fixes and feature additions, and hot fixes and driver updates even more often than that.
And hasn't MS been delivering Vista betas to interested parties?
It's true you can't grab the source code for an unfinished product and compile it into your machine and screw it up, but most: a) wouldn't know how, and b) don't want to.
I'm not a Redmond apologist, and I'm typing this on a Mac at the moment, but all of the "monolithic" comments seem to miss the point that in a great deal of cases... it's not.
"But before trying to complain, it'd be good to look around."
I think that having to "look around" is a good portion of his point.
Linux-folk are a fascinating bunch to watch. They fanatically point out the superiority of their OS, but turn defensive when anyone points out a shortcoming, or that you shouldn't need to be a MCS to use the thing. They go orgasmic every time some study indicates that they may have gained an additional 0.02% of market share, but don't want to consolidate distros, installers, or drivers so that penetration can go deeper.
If you want my opinion, Linux isn't an OS, it's the ultimate "insiders club", where only the fully ordained may enter...
Agreed. The second a company kills off it's R&D program and/or manufacturing and becomes a "marketing" company is the second you should dump the stock. They're now on a slow, painful, declining road to oblivion...
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The basic problem with your premise is that now an author (let's say) need only convince a small, select number of people that they should finance his work for a year. Further, once that work is completed there are many mechanisms the market can be use to judge that work (reviews, word-of-mouth, ratings, picking it up in a store and flipping through it) and find out if it has value to them, and is worth the twenty bucks.
Now, let's compare that with an assurance contract, where I have to convince a LOT of people that I can produce something of value, doesn't generate an advance so I can actually get on with creating it, and really provides no guarantee to the end user that it will be a quality product, or one suitable to you (you were expecting killer hard-code SciFi, not a time-travel romance novel). Once I produce it according to the contract, you have to pay for it, with no recourse.
I don't see paying in advance as the answer either, as it limits the available selection to "known" authors who've already made a name for themselves. Stephen King might be able to get a 100,000 people to pay in advance for the next chapter of his new book. A new and unknown author certainly can not.
Further, I tend to see it generating "more-of-the-same" content. Weber may be getting ready to branch out, but what happens when his fans only want to pay up front for more HH? How much of the storyline of The Matrix do I have to reveal before I can convince several million people to kick in $20 up front?
Finally, the up-front "salary" kills the dream as far as I'm concerned. Every author, singer, actor, and director dreams of the "great american novel" or hit song or blockbuster movie. Those dreams convince them to take risks and experiment with new ideas. I don't want those dreams dampened with a "just a job" mentality, working for minimum wage...
"If you can't stop people from breaking it and putting it on the net..."
There's a difference between one person putting something on the net... and millions of people downloading it. One is lost is a sea of many, but the many make a rather significant pattern that can be found, and punished. The flip side of DRM is going to be network traffic analysis...
"...because at the end of the day, I am still the lord and master of all of the bits in my little reality."
Hah. Maybe, once, on your Altair 8080 or Apple II that once was true. Today, even if you're running Linux, you're on a box containing literally hundreds of millions of lines of code written entirely by other people, and that's not counting the BIOS, things like Flash and JVMs, keyboard, mouse, network, and graphic card firmware, proprietary drivers, and so on. And let's not even START getting into the applications themselves.
Any "control" you think you might have is basically just an illusion...
"I'm focusing on movies because they're the only things that fit your specifications."
I beg to differ. Movies, books, albums, software, games; all often have significant amounts of investment in them, not to mention lead and production times usually measured in years. Moreover, even somethng as simple as a song doesn't take just three minutes to produce, as that ignores the years of effort it often takes to hone a craft to the point where it's WORTH spending money on it.
Dead on. Troopers is ENTIRELY about responsibility. Unfortunately, when that Robo-Turkey director picked up the script for the film, those issues and that moral background were the first things he tossed out the window. In that vein, I'm SO disappointed with the framers of the US constitution, who nattered on and on about the "rights" of an individual, with nearly nary a word said regarding the responsibilities those rights entail...
While I agree with your comments regarding "Beast", I thought Time Enough For Love was one of RAH's best works, even better that "Stranger", hsi best know work. Yes, LL was a self-centered randy old coot... but the book did extremely well illustrating the pathos and the ultimate price one pays for immortality, especially when that life is spent among the "short-timers".
The only other story to capture that feeling for me was the first Highlander film...
I agree. Spider wrote one of my all-time-favorite short stories, "God is an Iron", and Stardance is still one of my top ten SF books, mostly because he has a knack for bringing his characters to life and making them real people. But like Heinlein in Number of the Beast, Job, and others, SR is definitely following in RAH's footsteps with each successive Callahan book being more and more implausible and "out there".
For a while I followed his work religously, and I rejoiced whenever I knew a new book was coming... up until I found out that each new book was yet another set of stories from "Callahan's Bar". I thought we'd gotten rid of 'em when he burned the place down, but no such luck. Enough is enough: SR needs to stretch his legs and explore some new worlds.
Since mine's always on a desk, lapdesk, or table, I think I'll not bother carrying three extra pounds of insulation. But hey, it's your back.
As I mentioned elsewhere, there are quite a few indie artists and labels on iTMS. According to the latest numbers, label gets 70 cents and Apple 30 cents off a $1 tune. Now, if you're an artist with Virgin Records, you're probably getting 3 cents of the 70. If, however, you're with Nettwerk -- which includes Avril Lavigne, Dido, Sarah McLachlan, and Stereophonics -- you're probably getting something closer to 50/50.
"Have you looked at the bullying tactics Apple has used to make music available on their system?"
You mean, standing up to the RIAA when they attempt to unilaterally raise prices?
"If I buy some iTunes music, or a DVD, or whatever, I should have the right to listen, or watch, or whatever, that media."
Certainly, but I don't buy an XBox 360 game when all I own is a Playstation, or a CD when all I have is a cassette deck.
"No idea is absolutely new, so it seems unfair to give someone a absolute monopoly on an idea just because they put last pieces together."
Unfair, yeah. Tell you what. You have access to all of the same sources, so why don't you make your own books, music, games, and movies if it's so easy?
Answwer: It's not easy, and you probably don't have the talent, skill, education, or time to do so.
So in such a country the majority could strip the rights of, say, gays or Jews or Muslims without a second thought?
Apple MacBook Pro, 17" screen, 6.8lbs, 1" thick, 5.5 hours. ;)
"Because when I go to the site, they are asking for donations..."
I thought this WAS the new model everyone is expousing: do the work for free and then beg for donations...
"Another business model could be to give away earlier works to try to build a name for yourself, then move to more traditional means of production."
That's called "promotion". Since they're giving away their work in exchange for publicity, it's not piracy. They weighed the pros and cons, then made the choice to do so. However, it is piracy once they attempt to "move to more traditional means of production" and people continue to steal their work.
Too many open source projects think the project is done when the code is 99% feature complete. We were evaluating content management systems the other day and started looking at FOSS projects. So we're looking at Joomla, features, etc., and it looks good. Then we get to the documentation and it seems like practically every other entry in the User manual's TOC is "todo". Not good.
With a commercial product they can at least afford to document the silly thing.
"I consider it a flaw that the only place to set a browser as default is inside the browser. It makes about as much sense to me..."
Well, at least we've moved from "This means you cannot uninstall Safari if you want to be able to choose a default browser."
As to making sense to you, well... does it make sense to be asked once when needed, or to have to find the right system-level control panel, or, as more likely in the case of Linux, trying to find the right configuration file in the right folder containing the right command line setting, and changing it?
Yeah, that's a "flaw" all right.
I want the tinfoil wallet.
BTW, I can just image the "scare-the-consumer" infomercials for those. "Anyone just walking by can steal your entire life! Stop them now with our high-tech disposable Super-TF-Wallet! Just 3 easy payments of $19.95 and you...."
"Apple is just as guilty. It just seems like a very, very odd oversight to have no one place to set the default browser... This means you cannot uninstall Safari if you want to be able to choose a default browser."
Oh, please. Delete Safari. Install FireFox. Run FireFox. See dialog: "Firefox is not set as your default browser. Would you like Firefox to be your default browser?" Click "Okay".
If you're going to criticize something it helps to have some idea as to what you're talking about... or at least have the guts to say, "I like Linux, and don't need no stinkin' rationalizations!"
"You have to install IE, WMP, the firewall, etc."
Do a custom install.
"And it's not done that way on other platforms..."
Face it. MS simply didn't want to divide Windows into multiple products, those "with" IE and those without. And it's true that IE components are used by Explorer, the Help system, Express, and so on to render HTML... but in my mind that's the smart way to do it. If you're talking about bloat, why build completely different HTML rendering systems into each and every program that needs it when a single system-level component is there to do the job?
"...without divisions even where users would really appreciate them."
.NET, and so on? Those divisions seem rather clear and useful, and most I've seen tend to have betas available so you can get them prior to release. And service packs do appear more often, with fixes and feature additions, and hot fixes and driver updates even more often than that.
You mean, things like IE, Windows Media, DirectX, Mesenger, Express,
And hasn't MS been delivering Vista betas to interested parties?
It's true you can't grab the source code for an unfinished product and compile it into your machine and screw it up, but most: a) wouldn't know how, and b) don't want to.
I'm not a Redmond apologist, and I'm typing this on a Mac at the moment, but all of the "monolithic" comments seem to miss the point that in a great deal of cases... it's not.
"But before trying to complain, it'd be good to look around."
I think that having to "look around" is a good portion of his point.
Linux-folk are a fascinating bunch to watch. They fanatically point out the superiority of their OS, but turn defensive when anyone points out a shortcoming, or that you shouldn't need to be a MCS to use the thing. They go orgasmic every time some study indicates that they may have gained an additional 0.02% of market share, but don't want to consolidate distros, installers, or drivers so that penetration can go deeper.
If you want my opinion, Linux isn't an OS, it's the ultimate "insiders club", where only the fully ordained may enter...
Agreed. The second a company kills off it's R&D program and/or manufacturing and becomes a "marketing" company is the second you should dump the stock. They're now on a slow, painful, declining road to oblivion...
Or simply didn't steal the music in the first place. Odd how few people mention that particular option.
But hey, feel free to enter the RIAA lottery. You too have a chance to win!