I think the reason most people are resistant to pay for online content is very simple: most online content isn't very good. There are a few sites and "webzines" (what a stupid word) that provide good, high-quality content. But most are crap, or at least shading to the crappish end of the scale.
It's like the recent article about "Premium [sic] Slashdot" - what is there here that's honestly worth paying for? Links to other people's content?
Commentary and opinions by people no more qualified than myself? That's not even worth $0.076 to me...
Now, I'm not claiming to be perfect, but I do like to think I would have noticed a clause saying I owe them $500 for anything! I tend to read contracts pretty carefully.
So, you read contracts carefully, but you don't do anything like keep a copy for future reference or anything silly like that? Sorry, but I'm not going to get all up in arms over an evil corporation making requests of you that you "don't really remember" in your contract with them. Send the box back and shut the fuck up.
No radio to the vehicle for computer or human. Shumacher will have to do this one without Brawn's
help
I think this would be a severe handicap for the AI, but pretty much negligible for the human driver. It's not as if Schumacher gets much help from the team on a per-lap basis. It's only in overall race strategy that Brawn's genius comes into play.
I agree that if the robot has to use the same controls and data sources that are available to the human, the human will win for the foreseeable future. This is an incredibly complex control systems problem. I've seen footage of other robotic driving systems, and I'm thinking driving an F1 car requires much more smoothness and finesse than a digital system is capable of.
Besides, they're talking a three-year timeline for this project, which means the current World Champion in 2003 will be the one challenging the robot. I think Jenson Button will kick its ass...<grin>
If you're talking about replacing Windows PCs, then the cost of Windows is effectively free, since you've already got the license you were using on the PC itself before it became a Linux desktop... If you're talking about legacy apps, it's a sure bet you've got at least a few already-paid-for copies of Windows lying about...
Re:nope, not gonna happen
on
Movies Online?
·
· Score: 1
Imagine how much more disappointing the phantom menace would have been if you'd seen it for the first time on a 25' tv.
I can't imagine it being any more disappointing than it already was... A big screen doesn't make crappy actors and a stupid plot any better...
(Yeah, this is flame-bait, but boy, did I hate that movie...)
One other thing to note here is that the statistic about how much Metallica music was traded is probably inflated, as well. I don't mean by the band; I mean that all this controversy and coverage and legal wrangling has brought a ton of publicity to Napster and Metallica, so it seems likely to me that during the 48-hour period they observed, the number of Metallica tracks changing hands is somewhat higher than it would have been had no fuss been made.
Granted, we're talking about a huge number of downloads either way, but I suspect that a graph of Metallica downloads via Napster over the last few months would show a pretty significant spike right around the times of all the major press coverage of the issue...
I'm pretty sure using the Realtime Black Hole List would have no effect whatsoever on viruses of this nature - they're not coming from a single source, they're coming from people you know, who have you listed in their address book. And the plug for Communigate is nice, but the mail server you use has no bearing at all, either.
Just because you're a Linux user doesn't make you immune to receiving the virus, it just means you don't pass it along when you get it; you're a dead-end. If you didn't receive it, it's just because nobody who has you in their address book got it. I know plenty of Windows users who didn't get it, either...
Yeah, I'm terrified, too. The mere thought of yet another product out there that I don't want and don't have to buy scares the shit out of me... Why doesn't the government prevent companies from producing products that I don't like??
By which, of course, I mean: run a wire from the shelving unit to the screw that holds the faceplate on the electrical outlet. That screw should be grounded, and will dissipate the static buildup that you're experiencing.
Three feet of insulated wire and some electrical tape is all you need. Actually, that's my motto and solution to nearly every problem...
In a related note, is there a consensus on the license for Apple's Darwin Streaming Server? Is it open enough?
In a related note, does anyone think for themselves anymore? Read the license. If you think you can live with the terms, and it suits your purpose, it's open enough. Who cares what Bruce Perens or RMS or ESR or anyone else thinks? In the end, you are the one responsible for living up to the terms of the license, so make sure it meets your needs, not anyone else's.
Here, here! Well said. I've noticed the same thing, especially with the larger number of "editors" now running the site. Seems like every story now has a running commentary to go along with it, and invariably ends in "what do you guys think?"
I've also noticed that most submissions now include the plea by the submitter to be told what to think. The trend seems to be that someone comes across a news story and submits it to Slashdot so he can be told what his opinion should be on the subject by the teeming crowd of rabid/.ers...
It's actually a rebadged Cobalt box, as others have pointed out. Gateway doesn't make 'em, they just sell 'em.
I haven't seen a Gateway box yet that didn't turn into trouble at expansion time. Want to add a new printer, scanner, video camera?, add more RAM?, more drive space?... God forbid you want to add a NIC!
While that may be true, the Qube is not designed with expansion in mind, anyway. It's a small, cheap server appliance designed for a specific purpose. You're not likely to be putting a Voodoo3 or a scanner on a dedicated web server...
That's how England populated Australia. My point was that, historically, the first wave of settlers to a new land have always been the cast-offs, the criminals, the malcontents; the lower class.
And the Europeans didn't have to bring every gram of their own oxygen, fuel, food, and water with them to America or Australia...
Of course, space is a little different from being deported to America, and the people will have to be trained, but the concept is still valid.
I still totally disagree with this idea. What's easier, train an Air Force captain to survive on Mars, or train a street peddler from Bangladesh? Poor people will never leave Earth - once space travel is cheap and easy enough for them to do it, our space colonies will already have their own poor people to worry about without importing more.
Now, how long would it take to fully evacuate our solar system?
Irrelevant, because that's not how it would be done. If all we're worried about is ensuring that the human race survives, we only need to evacuate a few thousand people. Enough for a viable gene pool and stable society. You can't evacuate the solar system - unless you invent some kind of Star Trek "warp drive", every one of those people would die of old age en route to the next system, anyway - so what's the point?
We need to establish a working (and profitable) lunar base first, then use it as a stepping stone to get to Mars. Then Europa, Titan....
Agreed. If you want real, sustainable space travel, you need an orbital station first (which can't be properly built without cheaper launch vehicles than we currently have), then a lunar base. Then, maybe by 2050 or so, we'll be ready to go to Mars. I understand the desire to see it done in our lifetimes, but if it's not done in a logical progression, it's doomed to failure in the long term.
Space travel *is* a good thing for the lower classes of people. Again, look at history. Who do you think the people who settled America/Australia were? Upper class snobs? Hell no! You ship the lower class! If they die en route, or while building the infrastructure, you ship more! Space colonization will happen the same way.
I guess this is why NASA is scouring prisons and ghettos for astronaut candidates...
The cost of sending humans to another planet is so exorbitantly high (and will be for a long time), that anyone who goes will either be a) incredibly wealthy or b) extremely vital to the success of the extraplanetary "colony". Mars will not be settled by convicts and refugees. It will be settled by affluent scientist-types from rich industrial nations. And if even the most tentative steps in that direction take place in my lifetime, I'll be shocked.
And before you say, "We'll be off-planet *long before* the sun goes nova", remember: people said the same thing about Y2K ("the computers with be updated *long before* the year 2000 is reached").
Uhhh, yeah. Those two events are about exactly the same. The Y2K problem took thirty years to manifest itself, and the sun will go nova in several million years. I don't think it's a real pressing concern. Further, stars don't die instantly. We'll have several hundred years of warning that we're being evicted...
And people who think a space colony will solve Earth's population problems are facing the same problem: expense. Which is cheaper, feeding starving people, or launching them to another (hostile) planet and feeding them there? The Earth's population is growing by 80 million people per year. So to stabilize Earth, we have to send 200,000 people to Mars every single day. Good solution, and certainly more cost-effective than, say, birth control.
I'm not against space travel and colonization. I'm just trying to be realistic, and the truth is there's no real reason to go to Mars right now, and it's not really possible to do it right with current technology.
Have patience, people. Would you rather see mankind settling Mars permanently, or another Apollo-style one-off stunt?
I won't even point out that a petition of this sort is completely useless. A petition only works when it's a direct threat ("These people won't vote for you if you don't change your ways"), not just a list of signatures from a nebulous group of unaligned people.
I didn't buy this memory and these cpu-cyles to throw them at a replication of all the mistakes M$ have made, with a few extra ones for free.
I use Star Office...
So, you don't like Microsoft-inspired interfaces and messy desktops, but you like StarOffice? Huh?
Don't get me wrong, I like SO, too. But I think deriding window managers that copy some of Windows' features while praising an office suite that does it seems a little odd.
p3nfsd does provide Linux S5 connectivity, for backups and transfers and what-not, but there currently isn't anything to convert the Psion file formats to desktop (StarOffice, Applix, whatever) formats and vice-versa under Linux. There's a project I occasionally see on Freshmeat that aims to do this, but it's slow going, and currently I think it only does Psion Word to HTML conversions. Not terribly useful.
Note to Psion: Release some Linux conversion tools, PLEASE! Ever since I quit my last job and thus stopped using Windows at all, my Psion has gone nearly unused for this reason. It's just not worth the effort to export as text and re-do all the formatting.
My thinking is that, while information technology has advanced greatly, so has printer technology. Almost everyone has access to a laser printer or high-quality inkjet, and even low-end printers output at 6 ppm now. Remember when a 2 ppm laser printer cost $5000? Not too long ago. So now people have more information to deal with, and an easy, quick, high-quality way to "transform" that information into a medium they are comfortable with.
It doesn't matter how quickly electronic paper and PDAs advance - until such technology is in the schools, and kindergarten students are learning to write the alphabet on it, people will still choose paper. It's the earliest "information technology" we are exposed to, so it's the one we're most comfortable with. Couple that with the general unreliability most folks think is inherent in computers (thanks to the abundance of crappy PC software), and they're far more likely to trust a pen and a daytimer than a Palm XVXIII.
Anyhow, that's my hypothesis, and I'm sticking with it.
Telnetting to port 80 and doing a GET will show that their server is running:
Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux)
Which is essentially a stock Red Hat 6.0 install. Also,/etc/issue on the standard telnet port shows that it's a stock Red Hat box.
More amusing, though is that browsing http://www.linuxone.net/images contains a WS_FTP.LOG file that says:
1999.09.08 14:41 B C:\LinuxOne\New Version\images\nav_order_dn.gif --> 140.174.127.97/home/guest/LinuxOne WebPage/images nav_order_dn.gif 1999.09.08 14:41 B C:\LinuxOne\New Version\images\nav_order_up.gif --> 140.174.127.97/home/guest/LinuxOne WebPage/images nav_order_up.gif 1999.09.08 14:41 B C:\LinuxOne\New Version\images\tab_order.gif --> 140.174.127.97/home/guest/LinuxOne WebPage/images tab_order.gif
Which tends to support the conclusion that a Windows machine was used to generate this web page...
Clearly a blatant attempt to capitalize on Linux's popularity, and Red Hat's recent IPO. I hope it crashes and burns badly, to discourage other shysters from doing this. I fear that if these dorks were able to take a lot of people's money, it would make the IPO market a lot more hostile to genuine Linux companies.
I think it's good to be skeptical of Sun's motives here, but let's not start labeling them the Next Great Satan just yet.
Sun's goals with the Sun Ray and the move back to network computing are targeted squarely at corporate users. Big installations. Sun may be blustering about ISPs and home users right now, but that's just to get the big business customers to buy in. They know the model won't work for home users.
And from a business standpoint, the server-centric model makes good sense. How much money has the client-server model cost in terms of man-hours lost due to crashy PCs, or employees installing Quake 2 and LAN gaming all day? Is it really cost-effective to have an army of techs constantly re-installing Win98 and NT Workstation when DLLs get munged by an employee installing the latest screen-saver his aunt e-mailed him, or file systems getting corrupted by users just flipping the computer off at night? I'm not even going to mention viruses...
And assuming Sun is successful here and starts migrating the business world back to this model? It's a severe blow to Microsoft, and one that could topple them from the monopoly position they currently enjoy, but it's not going to put Sun in their place. The industry is finally waking up to the problems of having one super-dominant company running the show, and you can bet IBM and HP at least would show up with "Sun Ray"-like offerings of their own.
In short, Sun's goals, driven as they are by McNealy's obsession could break MS's stranglehold on business, but it certainly won't give Sun the same 400-pound gorilla status.
What I think we'll see is a transition of business systems to a more server-central environment, with a sprinkling of PCs for odd tasks (notebooks especially) - all provided by a variety of vendors (system solution providers like IBM will thrive in this environment, while "us-or-them" hardware/software providers like Microsoft, Sun, and Apple will suffer unless they change their business models). Home users will continue to use PC's, and if the server model works right, they'll be able to exchange work with their business systems using standard, open interfaces and file formats. The game market alone will keep the PC alive in the home for many, many years...
Solatube sells a tubular skylight that basically acts as a "light pipe" from the roof into the ceiling of any room in your house. I have no idea how well they work, I've never seen one in real life, I just remember seeing an ad in the back of Discover magazine and thinking it was probably not a bad idea.
I walked into TPM with only the expectation that I would be entertained, and I was. I didn't look for any deep meaning.
That was my point - that even as entertainment, it failed, because it was essentially a two-hour toy commercial. The blatant product marketing in TPM was, to me, distracting in the extreme. I'm fully aware that the Star Wars movies are supposed to be for a younger audience, but TPM even failed at that level. The bottom line is, if Lucas could have sold all that merchandise without even making the movie, he would have. The movie wasn't the central thing - the Jar Jar inflatable chairs and "Making Of..." videos and Taco Bell posters were the sole reason for this movie's existence, and neither Lucas nor the studio made any effort to hide that fact.
I, personally, find all the product placement and marketing tie-ins in movies distasteful, but it's the price you pay by watching mainstream Hollywood fluff.
Lucas, however, takes it beyond the extreme into the realm of absurdity. Why was the pod race scene in TPM? To sell video games. Period. It had no relevance to the overall plot (such as it was) of the movie. Same thing for the underwater scene on the way to the Gungan city - let's make a cool submarine, it'll sell more toys! So much of the movie was put in for the sole purpose of selling toys and merchandise that I felt awkward watching it. Forget that it was a horrible movie - I've enjoyed myself watching really bad movies before - it wasn't even a fun movie.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like the recent article about "Premium [sic] Slashdot" - what is there here that's honestly worth paying for? Links to other people's content? Commentary and opinions by people no more qualified than myself? That's not even worth $0.076 to me...
So, you read contracts carefully, but you don't do anything like keep a copy for future reference or anything silly like that? Sorry, but I'm not going to get all up in arms over an evil corporation making requests of you that you "don't really remember" in your contract with them. Send the box back and shut the fuck up.
I think this would be a severe handicap for the AI, but pretty much negligible for the human driver. It's not as if Schumacher gets much help from the team on a per-lap basis. It's only in overall race strategy that Brawn's genius comes into play.
I agree that if the robot has to use the same controls and data sources that are available to the human, the human will win for the foreseeable future. This is an incredibly complex control systems problem. I've seen footage of other robotic driving systems, and I'm thinking driving an F1 car requires much more smoothness and finesse than a digital system is capable of.
Besides, they're talking a three-year timeline for this project, which means the current World Champion in 2003 will be the one challenging the robot. I think Jenson Button will kick its ass...<grin>
If you're talking about replacing Windows PCs, then the cost of Windows is effectively free, since you've already got the license you were using on the PC itself before it became a Linux desktop... If you're talking about legacy apps, it's a sure bet you've got at least a few already-paid-for copies of Windows lying about...
I can't imagine it being any more disappointing than it already was... A big screen doesn't make crappy actors and a stupid plot any better...
(Yeah, this is flame-bait, but boy, did I hate that movie...)
Granted, we're talking about a huge number of downloads either way, but I suspect that a graph of Metallica downloads via Napster over the last few months would show a pretty significant spike right around the times of all the major press coverage of the issue...
I haven't read the Allaire license, but my guess if that somewhere in there it says you can't take their code and GPL it...
Just because you're a Linux user doesn't make you immune to receiving the virus, it just means you don't pass it along when you get it; you're a dead-end. If you didn't receive it, it's just because nobody who has you in their address book got it. I know plenty of Windows users who didn't get it, either...
Yeah, I'm terrified, too. The mere thought of yet another product out there that I don't want and don't have to buy scares the shit out of me... Why doesn't the government prevent companies from producing products that I don't like??
By which, of course, I mean: run a wire from the shelving unit to the screw that holds the faceplate on the electrical outlet. That screw should be grounded, and will dissipate the static buildup that you're experiencing.
Three feet of insulated wire and some electrical tape is all you need. Actually, that's my motto and solution to nearly every problem...
In a related note, does anyone think for themselves anymore? Read the license. If you think you can live with the terms, and it suits your purpose, it's open enough. Who cares what Bruce Perens or RMS or ESR or anyone else thinks? In the end, you are the one responsible for living up to the terms of the license, so make sure it meets your needs, not anyone else's.
I've also noticed that most submissions now include the plea by the submitter to be told what to think. The trend seems to be that someone comes across a news story and submits it to Slashdot so he can be told what his opinion should be on the subject by the teeming crowd of rabid /.ers...
Moderate away, I just had to get that off my chest.
Anyone who doesn't keep their own backup of any data hosted on someone else's computer deserves to lose it... Common sense, people...
It's actually a rebadged Cobalt box, as others have pointed out. Gateway doesn't make 'em, they just sell 'em.
I haven't seen a Gateway box yet that didn't turn into trouble at expansion time. Want to add a new printer, scanner, video camera?, add more RAM?, more drive space?... God forbid you want to add a NIC!
While that may be true, the Qube is not designed with expansion in mind, anyway. It's a small, cheap server appliance designed for a specific purpose. You're not likely to be putting a Voodoo3 or a scanner on a dedicated web server...
That's how England populated Australia. My point was that, historically, the first wave of settlers to a new land have always been the cast-offs, the criminals, the malcontents; the lower class.
And the Europeans didn't have to bring every gram of their own oxygen, fuel, food, and water with them to America or Australia...
Of course, space is a little different from being deported to America, and the people will have to be trained, but the concept is still valid.
I still totally disagree with this idea. What's easier, train an Air Force captain to survive on Mars, or train a street peddler from Bangladesh? Poor people will never leave Earth - once space travel is cheap and easy enough for them to do it, our space colonies will already have their own poor people to worry about without importing more.
Now, how long would it take to fully evacuate our solar system?
Irrelevant, because that's not how it would be done. If all we're worried about is ensuring that the human race survives, we only need to evacuate a few thousand people. Enough for a viable gene pool and stable society. You can't evacuate the solar system - unless you invent some kind of Star Trek "warp drive", every one of those people would die of old age en route to the next system, anyway - so what's the point?
We need to establish a working (and profitable) lunar base first, then use it as a stepping stone to get to Mars. Then Europa, Titan....
Agreed. If you want real, sustainable space travel, you need an orbital station first (which can't be properly built without cheaper launch vehicles than we currently have), then a lunar base. Then, maybe by 2050 or so, we'll be ready to go to Mars. I understand the desire to see it done in our lifetimes, but if it's not done in a logical progression, it's doomed to failure in the long term.
I guess this is why NASA is scouring prisons and ghettos for astronaut candidates...
The cost of sending humans to another planet is so exorbitantly high (and will be for a long time), that anyone who goes will either be a) incredibly wealthy or b) extremely vital to the success of the extraplanetary "colony". Mars will not be settled by convicts and refugees. It will be settled by affluent scientist-types from rich industrial nations. And if even the most tentative steps in that direction take place in my lifetime, I'll be shocked.
And before you say, "We'll be off-planet *long before* the sun goes nova", remember: people said the same thing about Y2K ("the computers with be updated *long before* the year 2000 is reached").
Uhhh, yeah. Those two events are about exactly the same. The Y2K problem took thirty years to manifest itself, and the sun will go nova in several million years. I don't think it's a real pressing concern. Further, stars don't die instantly. We'll have several hundred years of warning that we're being evicted...
And people who think a space colony will solve Earth's population problems are facing the same problem: expense. Which is cheaper, feeding starving people, or launching them to another (hostile) planet and feeding them there? The Earth's population is growing by 80 million people per year. So to stabilize Earth, we have to send 200,000 people to Mars every single day. Good solution, and certainly more cost-effective than, say, birth control.
I'm not against space travel and colonization. I'm just trying to be realistic, and the truth is there's no real reason to go to Mars right now, and it's not really possible to do it right with current technology.
Have patience, people. Would you rather see mankind settling Mars permanently, or another Apollo-style one-off stunt?
I won't even point out that a petition of this sort is completely useless. A petition only works when it's a direct threat ("These people won't vote for you if you don't change your ways"), not just a list of signatures from a nebulous group of unaligned people.
Whoops. I guess I pointed it out.
I use Star Office...
So, you don't like Microsoft-inspired interfaces and messy desktops, but you like StarOffice? Huh?
Don't get me wrong, I like SO, too. But I think deriding window managers that copy some of Windows' features while praising an office suite that does it seems a little odd.
Note to Psion: Release some Linux conversion tools, PLEASE! Ever since I quit my last job and thus stopped using Windows at all, my Psion has gone nearly unused for this reason. It's just not worth the effort to export as text and re-do all the formatting.
It doesn't matter how quickly electronic paper and PDAs advance - until such technology is in the schools, and kindergarten students are learning to write the alphabet on it, people will still choose paper. It's the earliest "information technology" we are exposed to, so it's the one we're most comfortable with. Couple that with the general unreliability most folks think is inherent in computers (thanks to the abundance of crappy PC software), and they're far more likely to trust a pen and a daytimer than a Palm XVXIII.
Anyhow, that's my hypothesis, and I'm sticking with it.
Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux)
Which is essentially a stock Red Hat 6.0 install. Also, /etc/issue on the standard telnet port shows that it's a stock Red Hat box.
More amusing, though is that browsing http://www.linuxone.net/images contains a WS_FTP.LOG file that says:
1999.09.08 14:41 B C:\LinuxOne\New Version\images\nav_order_dn.gif --> 140.174.127.97 /home/guest/LinuxOne WebPage/images nav_order_dn.gif /home/guest/LinuxOne WebPage/images nav_order_up.gif /home/guest/LinuxOne WebPage/images tab_order.gif
1999.09.08 14:41 B C:\LinuxOne\New Version\images\nav_order_up.gif --> 140.174.127.97
1999.09.08 14:41 B C:\LinuxOne\New Version\images\tab_order.gif --> 140.174.127.97
Which tends to support the conclusion that a Windows machine was used to generate this web page...
Clearly a blatant attempt to capitalize on Linux's popularity, and Red Hat's recent IPO. I hope it crashes and burns badly, to discourage other shysters from doing this. I fear that if these dorks were able to take a lot of people's money, it would make the IPO market a lot more hostile to genuine Linux companies.
Sun's goals with the Sun Ray and the move back to network computing are targeted squarely at corporate users. Big installations. Sun may be blustering about ISPs and home users right now, but that's just to get the big business customers to buy in. They know the model won't work for home users.
And from a business standpoint, the server-centric model makes good sense. How much money has the client-server model cost in terms of man-hours lost due to crashy PCs, or employees installing Quake 2 and LAN gaming all day? Is it really cost-effective to have an army of techs constantly re-installing Win98 and NT Workstation when DLLs get munged by an employee installing the latest screen-saver his aunt e-mailed him, or file systems getting corrupted by users just flipping the computer off at night? I'm not even going to mention viruses...
And assuming Sun is successful here and starts migrating the business world back to this model? It's a severe blow to Microsoft, and one that could topple them from the monopoly position they currently enjoy, but it's not going to put Sun in their place. The industry is finally waking up to the problems of having one super-dominant company running the show, and you can bet IBM and HP at least would show up with "Sun Ray"-like offerings of their own.
In short, Sun's goals, driven as they are by McNealy's obsession could break MS's stranglehold on business, but it certainly won't give Sun the same 400-pound gorilla status.
What I think we'll see is a transition of business systems to a more server-central environment, with a sprinkling of PCs for odd tasks (notebooks especially) - all provided by a variety of vendors (system solution providers like IBM will thrive in this environment, while "us-or-them" hardware/software providers like Microsoft, Sun, and Apple will suffer unless they change their business models). Home users will continue to use PC's, and if the server model works right, they'll be able to exchange work with their business systems using standard, open interfaces and file formats. The game market alone will keep the PC alive in the home for many, many years...
Solatube sells a tubular skylight that basically acts as a "light pipe" from the roof into the ceiling of any room in your house. I have no idea how well they work, I've never seen one in real life, I just remember seeing an ad in the back of Discover magazine and thinking it was probably not a bad idea.
That was my point - that even as entertainment, it failed, because it was essentially a two-hour toy commercial. The blatant product marketing in TPM was, to me, distracting in the extreme. I'm fully aware that the Star Wars movies are supposed to be for a younger audience, but TPM even failed at that level. The bottom line is, if Lucas could have sold all that merchandise without even making the movie, he would have. The movie wasn't the central thing - the Jar Jar inflatable chairs and "Making Of..." videos and Taco Bell posters were the sole reason for this movie's existence, and neither Lucas nor the studio made any effort to hide that fact.
Lucas, however, takes it beyond the extreme into the realm of absurdity. Why was the pod race scene in TPM? To sell video games. Period. It had no relevance to the overall plot (such as it was) of the movie. Same thing for the underwater scene on the way to the Gungan city - let's make a cool submarine, it'll sell more toys! So much of the movie was put in for the sole purpose of selling toys and merchandise that I felt awkward watching it. Forget that it was a horrible movie - I've enjoyed myself watching really bad movies before - it wasn't even a fun movie.