1) Create specification for DRM encumbered HD video 2) Distribute movies that contain the DRM encumbered HD video AND the non-DRM encumbered LD video. Make sure the non-DRM encumbered LD video works on existing hardware and is no worse than what ppl are used to getting now. 3) Continue this for a year 4) Hit the market with new hardware that plays DRM encumbered HD video, so if you buy one, all your existing media looks twice as sharp as it did before. 5) Sell your DRM hardware like hotcakes 6) Continue this for a year 7) Break the functionality that allows slow-adopters to view the films in low resolution on non-supporting hardware 8) Boardwalk with Hotel
Look at it this way. You're considering opening up some source code to the community and giving them some resources to work with, but you'd like to have some involvement in the new project and you'd like to be able to have it compliment what your other code bases. You see Sun and IBM and SAP doing these things, and it seems to be working well for them. So you try to draw on their example in setting things up.
Then after you've opened your source and set all these structures up, the developers unite, negotiate in bad faith, publicly sully your company image and endeavour to steal your user base, which is the sort of thing that puts you out of business. Even when you give in to their demands upon you, they do not reverse their position.
To summarize, company gives code to community and community responds by actively trying to put company out of business.
Is this the whole truth? No, likely not. But I don't see anything that contradicts it. Miro could very well go under because of this. If you were responsible for deciding if your company should give code to the community or not, wouldn't this make you reconsider the wisdom of doing so?
A better question might be, what will the CEOs of other companies considering releasing their sources make of this very high-profile example? With all the crazy spin being put on everything from both sides, it's hard to tell what the hell went on, but it sure doesn't look good to me.
If you're going to go public with a list of "community demands", they sure as hell ought to be visibly reasonable and they ought to be something you honour. If Miro is, however begrudgingly, giving in to these demands, there should be some sort of positive reaction from the community, not posting comments about how they didn't really leave over these demands but that it was a whole bunch of little things.
Perception matters, and regardless of the facts, this isn't looking good on the developers.
Oh, spare me... "generate profit" should be read as "provide goods or services in which people see value and for which they are willing to pay". The corporations are not stealing money from your wallet or raiding your bank account. They are not "taking" money... they are "earning" it.
Can you spot the difference?
A) Hi, we're here to offer you a license for that community developed product you're using. It's only $1000.00 per user per year. This license will keep our lawyers from coming and taking everything you have. That's great value.
B) Hi, we're here to offer you a membership in our protection service. It's only $1000.00 per employee per year. This membership will keep our enforcers from coming and burning everything you have.
The difference is that the protection racket will most likely spend the money in their local community, while the IP racket most likely will not.
That's such a load of bullshit. With a few high-profile exceptions, hardware manufacturers have been the ones stepping out and saying no. They are the reason the broadcast flag legislation has been delayed. They don't want to pay more money to make things that less people will want, why would they?
This comes from the software industry and the media distribution industry. Think about it, if the hardware manufacturers were so gung ho to make this stuff, why would it be necessary to compel them to make it with legislation?
Get a brain and stop directing your angst at your allies and enemies alike.
The problem is simple, once the baby boomers retire, half the population will either be retired or under 18. It doesn't matter how much money you've got, it isn't going to manufacture a spare pair of hands to wipe your ass if everyone is busy, and we are all going to be very busy if we don't wish to watch our society collapse.
The only thing that can overcome this is immigration, so expect to see lots of it... baby boomers have the money to make the rules, and they're not going to just die quietly and leave their wealth to their children when they can bring people in from elsewhere to coddle them and help them eke out every possible minute of retirement home life they can get.
When this actually happens, skilled young people are going to very suddenly become very wealthy, powerful, influential and necessary, because there will be no one else to hold things together when all the experts go wear diapers, play golf and spend their money. And there still won't be enough human resources to look after all the elderly. Expect them to die poor and unable to understand how this injustice fell upon them.
Dunno... I think the whole idea is kind of creepy. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter worth a shit what the dead guy wants, cause hey, he's dead. Going to a graveyard should be a sombre experience, and having brightly lit videos of the person who's in the ground in front of you running around and talking is kind of, well, crass. It sounds like something Ricky and Julian would think of.
Any man who wants to be called the Walt Disney of the graveyard seriously needs to go get some medical attention.
I know you were trying to be sarcastic, but aren't most of your examples are not of ideologies creating psychopaths, they're of "psychopaths" emerging from cultures very like our own and then moulding the culture to their own ideology? The thing that makes these people so historically significant is that they changed their culture so dramatically.
As a matter of fact, none of those individuals you described match the "psychopath" profile described in the article as far as I can see. They are more reminicent of the "Productive Narcissist" described in the later portions of the article, in that, regardless of the actual effect, their motivation was to improve the lot of the people in their society by creating a new system of living. They didn't just go in and selfishly plunder what was there for their own ends and skip out without paying the cheque, they invested their whole lives in the systems they created and derived their self-worth from them. Ruthless but selfless.
None of which is to say that they weren't evil or sadistic. But it sure seems to me that they were a bit too attached to something outside of themselves to meet the definition of psychopath as I understand it.
If people can't handle living in an area where wild animals live, either people should learn to deal with the results of their choice in living arrangements...or they should move.
They do. They kill the wild animals and make it safe. That's dealing with it. The only reason you don't grasp this is because you live in a place where it was done for you long ago. Your argument sounds a lot like "Move to the suburbs and graze at the supermarket, God put these ecosystems here for us to live in, stop being a terrorist." Why don't you try stepping back to the real world for a minute.
The answer is simple. Convince a decision maker that they would like to use Firefox. Sell it to them on the shiny skin and the gee-whiz functionality. Don't mention web development at all.
Then, once they use it for themselves, they'll care about the fact that they need to go back to IE and throw their weight behind vendor-neutral apps.
In a fit of outrage at the way the corporate monsters had usurped the worlds longest running and most significant cultural event from the people, they destroyed it and pretended it had never existed.
Um, the idea is to give the people back their culture, not to punish corporations out of spite.
My 4 year old daughter and niece wants to go hunting deer and have no problem with trapping rabbits to eat. Not EVERYONE gives kool-aid to their kids, you know. Some of us actually teach our kids about reality.
I so wish I lived in London so I could flagrantly violate these laws and send the authorities a big fuck you.
Will you all stop dealing with those big corporations? Become self-employed, cheat on your taxes, steal your media, buy your goods locally and stop helping those motherfuckers! Goddammit, please, please stop! It's not that hard!
You said a mouthful there. I don't pay a bunch of money to go waste my time being brainwashed.
Last movie I went to see, based on my earnings, the advertising was more expensive than admission. As in, if I worked at home during the ads and showed up late, I would have made enough to pay for the show.
So, um, yeah. I don't go to movies anymore. I don't even watch them on DVD, because they try to make me watch commercials there too. Therefore, I have no wish to own the media. Until and unless they come out with something I'd actually take pleasure in owning, I'll stick to renting and ripping, thanks. It's a pain in the ass, and I'd rather not go to the trouble, but as long as it's the only way to remain in control, I'll continue to do it.
No, as a matter of fact, I NEVER said that people could instantly understand it. I said that non-programmers can and do use it, that it's not hard to learn, and that it's widely used by people in the business world.
Just because it's a programming language doesn't make it hard. You'd apparently like to think that that's the case, but it isn't. Writing bad programs in a high level language like VBA is pretty damned easy for anyone who has the vaguest interest and a few bits of example code off the web. A child could do it.
It's easy to learn a programming language, and hard to make good programs. Full stop. If you honestly believe otherwise, you're probably one of those stupid hacks whose code I'm always being hired to fix, and likely have no business being in IT.
Hollywood: We've been chugging out sequel after sequel and they're just not making very much money. We notice that you guys in the game industry are doing well. How would you like to partner with us, and we'll fund you and give you licenses for the right to make your game a sequel of one of our movies?
Game Maker: What, am I stupid?
Hollywood: We were thinking of a budget of 100 million dollars.
Game Maker: Ok, I was thinking of changing careers in the next few years or so anyways.
Fine then... believe what you wish, moderate however you wish. If you think it's beyond most people to read the help files that are included with their office app and muddle about to make some macros in VBA that automate their work, nothing I say is going to convince you. But I've seen it time and again, and you're dead wrong.
The RIAA and the MPAA collectively make a lot of money, but that's just a drop in the bucket. The amount of money they make amounts to something like 2% of the GDP. Think about that. 2% of all the money out there comes from RIAA/MPAA earnings.
Now add in the theft that comes from p2p file sharing. Even the most conservative estimates place the value of the media being stolen by these pirates at something in the order of 800% of that being sold. That's 16% of our GDP being stolen by these pirates each year.
Now we need to add in all the theft that goes on with copying cds. We've just recently discovered that it's an order of magnitude worse than the p2p file sharing... I'm talking 8000% of the value of that actually sold. That's 160% of our GDP being stolen and never making it into the economy!
Now lets do the math. 2% that's actually being sold, plus the 16% being stolen on p2p networks, plus the 160% being stolen by cd pirates, plus the other 98% (drugs and cars and oil and stuff. That works out to 276%!!!
This means that if we can put a stop to all this piracy, our GDP will damn near triple! That will trickle down and we'll all be rich!
It's all on account of those bastard pirates that we're all always broke! Dob them in!
Netscape can use the IE renderer... This is why they say they can support it. New Netscape is just IE in sheeps clothing. Therefor, as a result, the content in question would still be IE only.
From the article:
At this point in the process of developing the Copyright Office's system for online preregistration, it is not entirely clear whether the system will be compatible with web browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 5.1 and higher. Filers of preregistration applications will be able to employ these Internet Explorer browsers successfully. Support for Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0.3, and Mozilla 1.7.7 is planned but will not be available when preregistration goes into effect. Present users of these browsers may experience problems when filing claims.
Translation:
Yeah, we know that we're supposed to provide uniform access and all that, but those stupid hack developers went and built an IE only site. Now we're staring down a government mandated deadline and there's no way we can fix it fast enough. We're kind of fucked at this point, so we'd better bite the bullet and come clean. Lets see if we can marginalize the issue as we do it, then we kill two birds with one stone and maybe even keep our jobs.
So, um, yeah... this has nothing to do with Netscapes IE renderer. Nice try though.
Wow, with all the outright offensive stuff I write on here, I'm a little suprised to see that moderated down so quickly... guess some of the moderators who told their mom they're "VB Programmers" got their feelings hurt:P
Oh no. You don't get to pass it off as laziness. You didn't need to read the article or the summary, the title clearly states that it's referring to the copyright office. This was clearly a bad case of dumb.
That's it, give me your mouse and glasses, you're suspended.
I know that a hell of a lot of secretaries, HR personel, purchasers, marketers, and managers have demanded that I provide them downloadable excel spreadsheets via websites I design so that they can automate it with their little macros written in VBA. Don't they teach a little of it in most business schools? Aside from which, how many people do you know that went and got an IT education for the money who have no business being professional developers?
Programming isn't really that hard. Just like writing isn't really that hard. Neither makes it any easier to write masterpieces.
If the system is corrupt, then everyone who successfully operates in it is corrupt. They call it "compromise" and "being realistic" and "being practical" and "getting things done in the real world" but it doesn't change the fact that if you participate in a corrupt system, you are a corrupt person.
I don't know if the scientific community that he's talking about operates in a corrupt system or not. Not my area of expertise. But if he can establish that it does, there is nothing at all unreasonable about pointing the finger at every single member who participates in it and stating that they are all corrupt. All that "few bad apples" rubbish is a very common position among those who are attempting to deflect your attention from the system and focus it on a few scapegoats who are particularly visible examples of that corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
Profit is for wusses. They're going for Monopoly.
1) Create specification for DRM encumbered HD video
2) Distribute movies that contain the DRM encumbered HD video AND the non-DRM encumbered LD video. Make sure the non-DRM encumbered LD video works on existing hardware and is no worse than what ppl are used to getting now.
3) Continue this for a year
4) Hit the market with new hardware that plays DRM encumbered HD video, so if you buy one, all your existing media looks twice as sharp as it did before.
5) Sell your DRM hardware like hotcakes
6) Continue this for a year
7) Break the functionality that allows slow-adopters to view the films in low resolution on non-supporting hardware
8) Boardwalk with Hotel
Look at it this way. You're considering opening up some source code to the community and giving them some resources to work with, but you'd like to have some involvement in the new project and you'd like to be able to have it compliment what your other code bases. You see Sun and IBM and SAP doing these things, and it seems to be working well for them. So you try to draw on their example in setting things up.
Then after you've opened your source and set all these structures up, the developers unite, negotiate in bad faith, publicly sully your company image and endeavour to steal your user base, which is the sort of thing that puts you out of business. Even when you give in to their demands upon you, they do not reverse their position.
To summarize, company gives code to community and community responds by actively trying to put company out of business.
Is this the whole truth? No, likely not. But I don't see anything that contradicts it. Miro could very well go under because of this. If you were responsible for deciding if your company should give code to the community or not, wouldn't this make you reconsider the wisdom of doing so?
A better question might be, what will the CEOs of other companies considering releasing their sources make of this very high-profile example? With all the crazy spin being put on everything from both sides, it's hard to tell what the hell went on, but it sure doesn't look good to me.
If you're going to go public with a list of "community demands", they sure as hell ought to be visibly reasonable and they ought to be something you honour. If Miro is, however begrudgingly, giving in to these demands, there should be some sort of positive reaction from the community, not posting comments about how they didn't really leave over these demands but that it was a whole bunch of little things.
Perception matters, and regardless of the facts, this isn't looking good on the developers.
Oh, spare me... "generate profit" should be read as "provide goods or services in which people see value and for which they are willing to pay". The corporations are not stealing money from your wallet or raiding your bank account. They are not "taking" money... they are "earning" it.
Can you spot the difference?
A) Hi, we're here to offer you a license for that community developed product you're using. It's only $1000.00 per user per year. This license will keep our lawyers from coming and taking everything you have. That's great value.
B) Hi, we're here to offer you a membership in our protection service. It's only $1000.00 per employee per year. This membership will keep our enforcers from coming and burning everything you have.
The difference is that the protection racket will most likely spend the money in their local community, while the IP racket most likely will not.
That's such a load of bullshit. With a few high-profile exceptions, hardware manufacturers have been the ones stepping out and saying no. They are the reason the broadcast flag legislation has been delayed. They don't want to pay more money to make things that less people will want, why would they?
This comes from the software industry and the media distribution industry. Think about it, if the hardware manufacturers were so gung ho to make this stuff, why would it be necessary to compel them to make it with legislation?
Get a brain and stop directing your angst at your allies and enemies alike.
The problem is simple, once the baby boomers retire, half the population will either be retired or under 18. It doesn't matter how much money you've got, it isn't going to manufacture a spare pair of hands to wipe your ass if everyone is busy, and we are all going to be very busy if we don't wish to watch our society collapse.
The only thing that can overcome this is immigration, so expect to see lots of it... baby boomers have the money to make the rules, and they're not going to just die quietly and leave their wealth to their children when they can bring people in from elsewhere to coddle them and help them eke out every possible minute of retirement home life they can get.
When this actually happens, skilled young people are going to very suddenly become very wealthy, powerful, influential and necessary, because there will be no one else to hold things together when all the experts go wear diapers, play golf and spend their money. And there still won't be enough human resources to look after all the elderly. Expect them to die poor and unable to understand how this injustice fell upon them.
Dunno... I think the whole idea is kind of creepy. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter worth a shit what the dead guy wants, cause hey, he's dead. Going to a graveyard should be a sombre experience, and having brightly lit videos of the person who's in the ground in front of you running around and talking is kind of, well, crass. It sounds like something Ricky and Julian would think of.
Any man who wants to be called the Walt Disney of the graveyard seriously needs to go get some medical attention.
I know you were trying to be sarcastic, but aren't most of your examples are not of ideologies creating psychopaths, they're of "psychopaths" emerging from cultures very like our own and then moulding the culture to their own ideology? The thing that makes these people so historically significant is that they changed their culture so dramatically.
As a matter of fact, none of those individuals you described match the "psychopath" profile described in the article as far as I can see. They are more reminicent of the "Productive Narcissist" described in the later portions of the article, in that, regardless of the actual effect, their motivation was to improve the lot of the people in their society by creating a new system of living. They didn't just go in and selfishly plunder what was there for their own ends and skip out without paying the cheque, they invested their whole lives in the systems they created and derived their self-worth from them. Ruthless but selfless.
None of which is to say that they weren't evil or sadistic. But it sure seems to me that they were a bit too attached to something outside of themselves to meet the definition of psychopath as I understand it.
Man... 40oz? I guess it's fast... that wouldn't last past the first time friends came to visit! Do they sell Texas Mickies?
If people can't handle living in an area where wild animals live, either people should learn to deal with the results of their choice in living arrangements...or they should move.
They do. They kill the wild animals and make it safe. That's dealing with it. The only reason you don't grasp this is because you live in a place where it was done for you long ago. Your argument sounds a lot like "Move to the suburbs and graze at the supermarket, God put these ecosystems here for us to live in, stop being a terrorist." Why don't you try stepping back to the real world for a minute.
The answer is simple. Convince a decision maker that they would like to use Firefox. Sell it to them on the shiny skin and the gee-whiz functionality. Don't mention web development at all.
Then, once they use it for themselves, they'll care about the fact that they need to go back to IE and throw their weight behind vendor-neutral apps.
Self-centered people need selfish motivations.
In a fit of outrage at the way the corporate monsters had usurped the worlds longest running and most significant cultural event from the people, they destroyed it and pretended it had never existed.
Um, the idea is to give the people back their culture, not to punish corporations out of spite.
My 4 year old daughter and niece wants to go hunting deer and have no problem with trapping rabbits to eat. Not EVERYONE gives kool-aid to their kids, you know. Some of us actually teach our kids about reality.
I so wish I lived in London so I could flagrantly violate these laws and send the authorities a big fuck you.
Will you all stop dealing with those big corporations? Become self-employed, cheat on your taxes, steal your media, buy your goods locally and stop helping those motherfuckers! Goddammit, please, please stop! It's not that hard!
I'm going to go hit something now...
You said a mouthful there. I don't pay a bunch of money to go waste my time being brainwashed.
Last movie I went to see, based on my earnings, the advertising was more expensive than admission. As in, if I worked at home during the ads and showed up late, I would have made enough to pay for the show.
So, um, yeah. I don't go to movies anymore. I don't even watch them on DVD, because they try to make me watch commercials there too. Therefore, I have no wish to own the media. Until and unless they come out with something I'd actually take pleasure in owning, I'll stick to renting and ripping, thanks. It's a pain in the ass, and I'd rather not go to the trouble, but as long as it's the only way to remain in control, I'll continue to do it.
No, as a matter of fact, I NEVER said that people could instantly understand it. I said that non-programmers can and do use it, that it's not hard to learn, and that it's widely used by people in the business world.
Just because it's a programming language doesn't make it hard. You'd apparently like to think that that's the case, but it isn't. Writing bad programs in a high level language like VBA is pretty damned easy for anyone who has the vaguest interest and a few bits of example code off the web. A child could do it.
It's easy to learn a programming language, and hard to make good programs. Full stop. If you honestly believe otherwise, you're probably one of those stupid hacks whose code I'm always being hired to fix, and likely have no business being in IT.
Hollywood: We've been chugging out sequel after sequel and they're just not making very much money. We notice that you guys in the game industry are doing well. How would you like to partner with us, and we'll fund you and give you licenses for the right to make your game a sequel of one of our movies?
Game Maker: What, am I stupid?
Hollywood: We were thinking of a budget of 100 million dollars.
Game Maker: Ok, I was thinking of changing careers in the next few years or so anyways.
Game Player: Scrabble anyone?
Fine then... believe what you wish, moderate however you wish. If you think it's beyond most people to read the help files that are included with their office app and muddle about to make some macros in VBA that automate their work, nothing I say is going to convince you. But I've seen it time and again, and you're dead wrong.
The RIAA and the MPAA collectively make a lot of money, but that's just a drop in the bucket. The amount of money they make amounts to something like 2% of the GDP. Think about that. 2% of all the money out there comes from RIAA/MPAA earnings.
Now add in the theft that comes from p2p file sharing. Even the most conservative estimates place the value of the media being stolen by these pirates at something in the order of 800% of that being sold. That's 16% of our GDP being stolen by these pirates each year.
Now we need to add in all the theft that goes on with copying cds. We've just recently discovered that it's an order of magnitude worse than the p2p file sharing... I'm talking 8000% of the value of that actually sold. That's 160% of our GDP being stolen and never making it into the economy!
Now lets do the math. 2% that's actually being sold, plus the 16% being stolen on p2p networks, plus the 160% being stolen by cd pirates, plus the other 98% (drugs and cars and oil and stuff. That works out to 276%!!!
This means that if we can put a stop to all this piracy, our GDP will damn near triple! That will trickle down and we'll all be rich!
It's all on account of those bastard pirates that we're all always broke! Dob them in!
Netscape can use the IE renderer... This is why they say they can support it. New Netscape is just IE in sheeps clothing. Therefor, as a result, the content in question would still be IE only.
From the article:
At this point in the process of developing the Copyright Office's system for online preregistration, it is not entirely clear whether the system will be compatible with web browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 5.1 and higher. Filers of preregistration applications will be able to employ these Internet Explorer browsers successfully. Support for Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0.3, and Mozilla 1.7.7 is planned but will not be available when preregistration goes into effect. Present users of these browsers may experience problems when filing claims.
Translation:
Yeah, we know that we're supposed to provide uniform access and all that, but those stupid hack developers went and built an IE only site. Now we're staring down a government mandated deadline and there's no way we can fix it fast enough. We're kind of fucked at this point, so we'd better bite the bullet and come clean. Lets see if we can marginalize the issue as we do it, then we kill two birds with one stone and maybe even keep our jobs.
So, um, yeah... this has nothing to do with Netscapes IE renderer. Nice try though.
Wow, with all the outright offensive stuff I write on here, I'm a little suprised to see that moderated down so quickly... guess some of the moderators who told their mom they're "VB Programmers" got their feelings hurt :P
Oh no. You don't get to pass it off as laziness. You didn't need to read the article or the summary, the title clearly states that it's referring to the copyright office. This was clearly a bad case of dumb.
That's it, give me your mouse and glasses, you're suspended.
I know that a hell of a lot of secretaries, HR personel, purchasers, marketers, and managers have demanded that I provide them downloadable excel spreadsheets via websites I design so that they can automate it with their little macros written in VBA. Don't they teach a little of it in most business schools? Aside from which, how many people do you know that went and got an IT education for the money who have no business being professional developers?
Programming isn't really that hard. Just like writing isn't really that hard. Neither makes it any easier to write masterpieces.
If the system is corrupt, then everyone who successfully operates in it is corrupt. They call it "compromise" and "being realistic" and "being practical" and "getting things done in the real world" but it doesn't change the fact that if you participate in a corrupt system, you are a corrupt person.
I don't know if the scientific community that he's talking about operates in a corrupt system or not. Not my area of expertise. But if he can establish that it does, there is nothing at all unreasonable about pointing the finger at every single member who participates in it and stating that they are all corrupt. All that "few bad apples" rubbish is a very common position among those who are attempting to deflect your attention from the system and focus it on a few scapegoats who are particularly visible examples of that corruption.