> "Using the new technology, music labels and bands will be able to send updates to the music files - with tour dates, interviews or updates to social networking pages - while illegally-downloaded files remain static...."
So, if I'm reading this correctly, if I buy a legitimate copy of the file I get spammed mercilessly, but if I download the file illegally I don't?
Ok, call me paranoid, but could this be an attempt to defuse the situation? $2M damages for 2 CDs worth of songs is outrageous enough to get the attention of even the most complacent. $54K, although a heavy burden, is significantly less so and (seems to me) much less likely to cause a general backlash.
Wristwatch computers... Geeze... Unless they've developed the telepathic interface, I don't see this going any further than the last hundred or so times someone's tried it. Even at high resolution, the screen on a wristwatch is too small for much more than alerts and headlines.
This illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the netbook niche. It's not the computing power. You can build more resources into a phone if you want to pay enough. It's having a large enough screen to get work done in a small enough package to always have with you, with cellphone-grade battery life. It's the ability to research the net without having to squint at a 3" diagonal cell phone screen. It is *not* the ability to play Halo 3 at high res for a half hour until the battery is exhausted. There are other platforms for that. It is *not* having the smallest computer on the block. Smart phones already have that niche. And first and foremost, netbooks are not a high end device.
Making the netbook larger defeats the portability requirement. Making it more powerful usually defeats the battery life requirement. Making it smaller defeats the readability requirement. But there's no margin in small cheap computers, so the vendors are always looking for some new way to print money. They don't get it, on a fundamental level. Netbooks are a commodity item, and because of the requirements, the niche can not be taken over by a high margin item.
As far as I understand it, the real issue is that the newspapers think they're losing money because consumers are getting the product for free, and consumers are saying that the newspapers are losing money because there is no longer an overriding need for the product, in some cases going so far as to say that questionable journalism makes the product no more than a cheering section for a particular set of issues or for a particular political party.
If the former is true, then a subscription model could work if done properly. If the latter is true, web subscriptions will not help and barring government intervention, the paper will sink. It'll be entertaining either way.
If the NYT really wanted to enter the internet age, they'd dump their presses and distribution network and go internet only. In the rare cases when the user still wanted a physical paper, they could most probably be generated locally by dedicated E size printers at lower cost than being trucked in from a remote press. Or they'd pioneer electronic paper and make it work. Or e-book readers. Or all of the above.
I think there's several reasons why newspapers can not do this. One (the primary I think) is that there is a huge inertia in print media that hasn't played out yet. It's difficult for management of traditional newspapers to get their heads around a print-free business model, and many would (apparently) go under rather than go there. They typically see this internet thing as an irritation that unfairly competes with their core business, and that news websites will only ever be, at best, a companion to the print version. This clearly doesn't match reality and said papers deserve to go out of business.
Another reason is unions. You don't just dump unionized printers and truck drivers en-masse and stay in business. I see this as an insurmountable obstacle and the main reason why the newspapers will either fold or get nationalized. There doesn't seem to be a third choice.
The problem I had with the last Superman film was that it was a remake of the first Superman film. I don't particularly want to see another Superman film because it will be a remake of the second, or if enough time has passed, yet another remake of the first. If you can't come up with a Superman story that hasn't already been done, let the franchise die.
I want 12 hour battery life in a low end laptop. Free phones will last 8 days on a single charge. I want my laptop to run for days, and I don't care if it doesn't have enough grunt to play Halo 3.
> Nope, sorry. The Greeks used up all the possible stories. We just keep making remakes, whether we label them as such or not.
Absolutely not true for film. It may be true that in literature all stories have already been explored, although I think there are people who would argue with that, but only a very very tiny subset of existing stories have been aired on screens of any size. There's a huge amount of literature out there that "front row sam" has never seen because it has never been filmed. Some reasonable subset of that is filmable, but the studios insist on remaking 30-year-old sitcoms instead.
> Did you see Moon? First real Sci-Fi movie I've seen in years.
Agreed! Moon was original (for a sci-fi movie) and (more importantly) told a fascinating story on a shoestring without the cardboard and scotch tape showing too much. Highly recommended. We need more films like this.
Can anyone else recommend some reasonably novel, recent Sci-Fi movies?
No. And that's the problem. (Don't DARE say "Avatar". Just don't. Novel movie-making technology does not equal novel story.)
> Firefly was already a reboot of Blakes 7 - although perhaps unintentionally, but it was almost as similar to Blakes 7 as RDM's Battlestar was the the original Battlestar.
For God's Sake, can't we have something original? Reboots are for tired old franchises that have a diminishing following and need a kick in the pants to get going again. Otherwise, it's a remake, not a reboot, and I'm frakking (reference intended) sick and tired of seeing stories from 30 years ago rehashed yet again. So just stop it, ok? We all act like there's only 10 or 12 properties in all of science fiction.
That said, I would have to vote for Firefly returning. A reboot is absolutely not necessary -- I do not need to see the same stories with different actors -- just continue the story, perhaps as a limited series of 6 to 13 episodes once a year, like they do in England.
I think the problem with Heroes was that they just plain ran out of story. The first two seasons worked because they had a preplanned story arc. The last seasons are floundering because they don't. Rebooting will not help -- it'll just move the problem to a different set of actors. Let Heroes die and allow us to remember the first seasons -- when it was still good -- with fondness.
In the case of Star Trek and James Bond, a reboot was necessary if we were going to have more of these franchises. Not having more of these franchises was -- in my opinion -- an acceptable alternative, but the idea of a reboot was interesting, and proved fruitful. Continuing with increasingly elderly actors and every film trying to be exactly like the previous film was clearly not working.
Here, I'll give you an idea for free that combines a story that hasn't been done yet with a current franchise, making it simultaneously new and marketable. Make a series from Andre Norton's "Star Rangers", but make it part of Trek canon. It's thousands of years in the future, and a old limping spaceship from the broken fragments of a federation crash lands on a planet that used to have a high level of technology. The survivors of the crash attempt to survive from the remnants of old technology found in the dead cities. At the end of the story, (first season) they stumble upon Star Fleet Headquarters and realize they've found Earth.
> So, basically, you're saying that Windows is so good that it easily competes with OS X / Linux / Unix / Sun. I don't want to go into that war now, but we all know that Windows sucks and the world is full of it.
I'm saying no such thing, and I'm having a hard time understanding how this relates to the thread. Perhaps you should have used a car analogy?
That's kind of a different issue. Disney has always ridgedly controlled access to their content, purposely making it difficult to get. They will release a title for a limited time, and then cease production no matter what the demand, usually to release it again years later. I don't completely understand why -- it seems to me that a sale is a sale -- but that's what they've chosen as a business model. I used to think that this came into being during the long dry period where Disney wasn't producing much that was worth watching, and they realized that they had to carefully milk 50 -- 70 year old content if they were going to survive long-term. But does that really apply since they bought Pixar?
It's true that Toy Story 2 is available on Amazon, but is listed as discontinued and is only available from resellers who happen to have stock.
I own a copy -- I bought the silver Toy Story 1/2 set a few years ago -- but I understand your point. There's no doubt that torrenting breaks the business model described above.
Ok, I read TFE, and it seems to me that for consumers (which is what I personally am concerned about) there's a clear choice -- buy content (if reasonably priced) from Warner Brothers, Paramount, NBC Universal, Sony and Fox, and torrent content from Disney. What standards war?
Of course, if both solutions are confining and/or expensive, neither will be adopted en-masse. For the first time, consumers have a third choice -- free -- and to compete with that, content providers will have to provide something that benefits consumers instead of annoying them. I wonder if the content providers get this yet.
I'm conflicted by this statistic. IT executives will tend to say that their data center is understaffed whether it is or not, (or more importantly whether they know it or not) because it serves to increase their empire.
That said, I've been in some frightfully understaffed datacenters. It doesn't appear to bear much relationship to the work that actually needs to be done, more so with how good a salesperson the data center manager is. We have two power companies in my area, both do about the same job with about the same amount of yearly sales. Yet one has four times the data center budget than the other. I believe it's more a mark of the drive and character of the IT executives than it is the actual workload.
If someone is applying for an IT job, an AOL address tells me something about their background and their degree of technical savvy. If it's not an IT job, it doesn't really matter. We can't all be geeks.
Slashdot Mirror
> "Using the new technology, music labels and bands will be able to send updates to the music files - with tour dates, interviews or updates to social networking pages - while illegally-downloaded files remain static. ..."
So, if I'm reading this correctly, if I buy a legitimate copy of the file I get spammed mercilessly, but if I download the file illegally I don't?
Cool!
I wonder if it works on helicopters also?
Always knew Fred Physarum would turn up again somewhere.
Ok, call me paranoid, but could this be an attempt to defuse the situation? $2M damages for 2 CDs worth of songs is outrageous enough to get the attention of even the most complacent. $54K, although a heavy burden, is significantly less so and (seems to me) much less likely to cause a general backlash.
Insightful and darned funny.
Wristwatch computers... Geeze... Unless they've developed the telepathic interface, I don't see this going any further than the last hundred or so times someone's tried it. Even at high resolution, the screen on a wristwatch is too small for much more than alerts and headlines.
This illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the netbook niche. It's not the computing power. You can build more resources into a phone if you want to pay enough. It's having a large enough screen to get work done in a small enough package to always have with you, with cellphone-grade battery life. It's the ability to research the net without having to squint at a 3" diagonal cell phone screen. It is *not* the ability to play Halo 3 at high res for a half hour until the battery is exhausted. There are other platforms for that. It is *not* having the smallest computer on the block. Smart phones already have that niche. And first and foremost, netbooks are not a high end device.
Making the netbook larger defeats the portability requirement. Making it more powerful usually defeats the battery life requirement. Making it smaller defeats the readability requirement. But there's no margin in small cheap computers, so the vendors are always looking for some new way to print money. They don't get it, on a fundamental level. Netbooks are a commodity item, and because of the requirements, the niche can not be taken over by a high margin item.
> One way to stop this would be to turn Mickey into an pop culture symbol for a pedophile or terrorist...
's been tried -- LSD. Didn't take.
As far as I understand it, the real issue is that the newspapers think they're losing money because consumers are getting the product for free, and consumers are saying that the newspapers are losing money because there is no longer an overriding need for the product, in some cases going so far as to say that questionable journalism makes the product no more than a cheering section for a particular set of issues or for a particular political party.
If the former is true, then a subscription model could work if done properly. If the latter is true, web subscriptions will not help and barring government intervention, the paper will sink. It'll be entertaining either way.
If the NYT really wanted to enter the internet age, they'd dump their presses and distribution network and go internet only. In the rare cases when the user still wanted a physical paper, they could most probably be generated locally by dedicated E size printers at lower cost than being trucked in from a remote press. Or they'd pioneer electronic paper and make it work. Or e-book readers. Or all of the above.
I think there's several reasons why newspapers can not do this. One (the primary I think) is that there is a huge inertia in print media that hasn't played out yet. It's difficult for management of traditional newspapers to get their heads around a print-free business model, and many would (apparently) go under rather than go there. They typically see this internet thing as an irritation that unfairly competes with their core business, and that news websites will only ever be, at best, a companion to the print version. This clearly doesn't match reality and said papers deserve to go out of business.
Another reason is unions. You don't just dump unionized printers and truck drivers en-masse and stay in business. I see this as an insurmountable obstacle and the main reason why the newspapers will either fold or get nationalized. There doesn't seem to be a third choice.
Why not buy used Cisco routers? In the current economy, you should be able to make some pretty sweet deals.
Haven't seen Battle for Terra, but from your description, it had a much deeper plot than Avatar.
Oh God, not high school again. Sorry, Sony, I've lost interest. I wonder if they'll call it Spider Man IV: The Quest for Peace?
The problem I had with the last Superman film was that it was a remake of the first Superman film. I don't particularly want to see another Superman film because it will be a remake of the second, or if enough time has passed, yet another remake of the first. If you can't come up with a Superman story that hasn't already been done, let the franchise die.
So, have you sued your neighbors yet for having trees?
I want 12 hour battery life in a low end laptop. Free phones will last 8 days on a single charge. I want my laptop to run for days, and I don't care if it doesn't have enough grunt to play Halo 3.
> Nope, sorry. The Greeks used up all the possible stories. We just keep making remakes, whether we label them as such or not.
Absolutely not true for film. It may be true that in literature all stories have already been explored, although I think there are people who would argue with that, but only a very very tiny subset of existing stories have been aired on screens of any size. There's a huge amount of literature out there that "front row sam" has never seen because it has never been filmed. Some reasonable subset of that is filmable, but the studios insist on remaking 30-year-old sitcoms instead.
> Did you see Moon? First real Sci-Fi movie I've seen in years.
Agreed! Moon was original (for a sci-fi movie) and (more importantly) told a fascinating story on a shoestring without the cardboard and scotch tape showing too much. Highly recommended. We need more films like this.
Can anyone else recommend some reasonably novel, recent Sci-Fi movies?
No. And that's the problem. (Don't DARE say "Avatar". Just don't. Novel movie-making technology does not equal novel story.)
> Firefly was already a reboot of Blakes 7 - although perhaps unintentionally, but it was almost as similar to Blakes 7 as RDM's Battlestar was the the original Battlestar.
Except, you know, good.
For God's Sake, can't we have something original? Reboots are for tired old franchises that have a diminishing following and need a kick in the pants to get going again. Otherwise, it's a remake, not a reboot, and I'm frakking (reference intended) sick and tired of seeing stories from 30 years ago rehashed yet again. So just stop it, ok? We all act like there's only 10 or 12 properties in all of science fiction.
That said, I would have to vote for Firefly returning. A reboot is absolutely not necessary -- I do not need to see the same stories with different actors -- just continue the story, perhaps as a limited series of 6 to 13 episodes once a year, like they do in England.
I think the problem with Heroes was that they just plain ran out of story. The first two seasons worked because they had a preplanned story arc. The last seasons are floundering because they don't. Rebooting will not help -- it'll just move the problem to a different set of actors. Let Heroes die and allow us to remember the first seasons -- when it was still good -- with fondness.
In the case of Star Trek and James Bond, a reboot was necessary if we were going to have more of these franchises. Not having more of these franchises was -- in my opinion -- an acceptable alternative, but the idea of a reboot was interesting, and proved fruitful. Continuing with increasingly elderly actors and every film trying to be exactly like the previous film was clearly not working.
Here, I'll give you an idea for free that combines a story that hasn't been done yet with a current franchise, making it simultaneously new and marketable. Make a series from Andre Norton's "Star Rangers", but make it part of Trek canon. It's thousands of years in the future, and a old limping spaceship from the broken fragments of a federation crash lands on a planet that used to have a high level of technology. The survivors of the crash attempt to survive from the remnants of old technology found in the dead cities. At the end of the story, (first season) they stumble upon Star Fleet Headquarters and realize they've found Earth.
> So, basically, you're saying that Windows is so good that it easily competes with OS X / Linux / Unix / Sun. I don't want to go into that war now, but we all know that Windows sucks and the world is full of it.
I'm saying no such thing, and I'm having a hard time understanding how this relates to the thread. Perhaps you should have used a car analogy?
That's kind of a different issue. Disney has always ridgedly controlled access to their content, purposely making it difficult to get. They will release a title for a limited time, and then cease production no matter what the demand, usually to release it again years later. I don't completely understand why -- it seems to me that a sale is a sale -- but that's what they've chosen as a business model. I used to think that this came into being during the long dry period where Disney wasn't producing much that was worth watching, and they realized that they had to carefully milk 50 -- 70 year old content if they were going to survive long-term. But does that really apply since they bought Pixar?
It's true that Toy Story 2 is available on Amazon, but is listed as discontinued and is only available from resellers who happen to have stock.
I own a copy -- I bought the silver Toy Story 1/2 set a few years ago -- but I understand your point. There's no doubt that torrenting breaks the business model described above.
I think this is probably off-topic.
Ok, I read TFE, and it seems to me that for consumers (which is what I personally am concerned about) there's a clear choice -- buy content (if reasonably priced) from Warner Brothers, Paramount, NBC Universal, Sony and Fox, and torrent content from Disney. What standards war?
Of course, if both solutions are confining and/or expensive, neither will be adopted en-masse. For the first time, consumers have a third choice -- free -- and to compete with that, content providers will have to provide something that benefits consumers instead of annoying them. I wonder if the content providers get this yet.
I'm conflicted by this statistic. IT executives will tend to say that their data center is understaffed whether it is or not, (or more importantly whether they know it or not) because it serves to increase their empire.
That said, I've been in some frightfully understaffed datacenters. It doesn't appear to bear much relationship to the work that actually needs to be done, more so with how good a salesperson the data center manager is. We have two power companies in my area, both do about the same job with about the same amount of yearly sales. Yet one has four times the data center budget than the other. I believe it's more a mark of the drive and character of the IT executives than it is the actual workload.
If someone is applying for an IT job, an AOL address tells me something about their background and their degree of technical savvy. If it's not an IT job, it doesn't really matter. We can't all be geeks.
Referring to the Kardashians, maybe, but as far as I can tell the average Celebutante is a 98 pound size zero, which doesn't really work in 3D.