The travesty here isn't that someone is writing sequels to the original series. The travesty is that his heirs still have a monopoly on the series, 57 years later.
The first of the "I, Robot" stories was published in 1941.
They are intellectual puzzles. "Science Problem" stories typical of their era. "I, Robot" ends on the same note that the "Foundation" stories begin - that disinterested back-stage manipulators using purely mathematical models could build - or rebuild - the perfect society.
The Three Laws have been yours to play with for the better part of seventy years. They were first referenced in film no later than 1956's Forbidden Planet.
I'm sure Shakespeare has inspired and helped many a person in learning the trade of creating stories. The tragedy here is that companies like Disney reap all of the benefits of the public domain, while ensuring very little will ever be added back to it.
The key word here is "learning."
If you want to study Disney animation almost the whole of the studio's production in every genre is easily accessible. That can't be said for MGM or Warner.
Short films and features. Industrial and government films. Television.
The "extras" on any Disney or Pixar disk will take you farther and deeper into the art of animation than anything from Dreamworks.
The only thing Disney demands - the only thing it has the right to demand - is that you plow your own row.
Design your own characters, sets and props. Tell your own stories.
Memo to Apple: build a machine that has a price point between the Mac mini and Mac Pro, that isn't an all-in-one machine, and is internally expandable, and people will buy that machine from YOU rather than buy a PC and make a Hackintosh
Memo to the geek:
The Hackintosh desktop is a hack - an expensive - crappy - DIY project for the technically inclined hobbyist.
There aren't as many of those on the ground these days as there used to be - and not as much interest in the desktop either.
Apple doesn't need you need you. Apple doesn't want you.
It's sole interest in Pystar is in keeping the clone product off retail shelves.
Ken Burns wold barely have been able to produce his PBS series as all the letters he quoted would have just been coming off copyright at the time he was working on the series.
Entry into the public domain doesn't guarantee survival. Paper crumbles. Nitrate stock burns. Tapes are erased.
The nerd scans last month's comic books. Not the dusty old books, magazines and ledgers to be found in his grandfather's attic.
Private papers - private libraries - can remain private. The expiration of copyright doesn't give you physical access to anything.
Piracy is awesome and great because copyright no longer serves to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Or do you really think the Berne Convention's life + 50 minimum accomplishes that goal?
Yes I do.
Because to obtain a copyright you have to produce a work that has some originality.
Wall-E had robots.
But it wasn't Star Wars or The Iron Giant. It wasn't The Transformers. It wasn't a showcase for Will Smith or Robin Williams.
It had its own story to tell and did so superbly - taking home every award the Sci-Fi community had to offer.
with the completely unknowns actually benefiting because then they get exposure--if you haven't yet proved yourself, who is gonna buy your CD?
How do you get exposure when your music is buried under a snowdrift - smothered by the hundreds - perhaps thousands of files - from other no-name bands competing for attention?
Making music--good music--takes time and resources.
That it does.
Which raises the interesting question of whether piracy hurts some musical genres - and some musicians - more than others.
The obvious example would be the "big band" sound of a classical or jazz ensemble. Is there a place in this brave new world for a young Duke Ellington or a Louis Armstrong?
But the regional operating companies continue to sell the "Standard" product that people have come to trust.
Stable formulations. Honest weights and measures.
Rockefeller rakes in more money than before.
The small independents are absorbed. Big Oil becomes Big Oil.
AT&T is broken.
The pieces are reassembled by the "baby" Bells.
What gets lost along the way is Bell Labs and Western Electric. Basic research and the phone that always works.
Microsoft brought the PC within reach of almost everyone.
The Windows PC isn't tied to any single hardware manufacturer. Programs can be distributed under any license and through any distribution channel you chose.
That is an enormously liberating experience for both the user and the developer.
How far back has the software industry been set back by Microsoft?
Not one inch.
The "software industry" by definition produces for a market.
It doesn't exist to advance technology for its own sake, but to meet the needs of its customers.
Microsoft dominates in the office space because it understands the office worker and the office as a working environment.
The tech is secondary. This is something the geek can find really hard to understand.
How much further along would so many areas be if Microsoft had not bought up so many experts and stuffed them in an R&D group with almost no real world output, instead of having them work on practical technologies that made it to market?
Microsoft is one of the few companies its size spending serious money on basic research. We need more of them, and we need them badly.
In the past, I have asserted that social popularity trumps technical superiority. Beta was superior to VHS and yet VHS won. Why? It was more popular... some would argue that it was more popular because porn was not allowed on Beta.
The pornographer looks to the installed base, the same as anyone else.
From the start, you could record a movie or a football game on a single VHS cassette.
The players - and blank cassettes - were cheaper and available under many familiar brand names.
Betamax entered the market at a time when a lot of folks still looked to the Sears Roebuck Christmas Catalog for the big-budget holiday gift.
If you wanted to pick the winner in the mass consumer market you needed to know where Disney was placing its bets.
Betamax was entered the market at a time when almost no TV had so much as a composite video input. No comb filtering either.
Large screen displays were rare.
To see any benefit from Betamax meant spending a lot of money.
Most piracy happens because the person is too poor to afford the materials, but they can afford a computer and Internet connection and then get a free P2P file sharing program and get as many materials as they want for free.
The computer and Internet connection still generally implies a middle class income.
For the geek posting here that can be a very substantial - upper middle class - income.
The inner cynic in me wonders just what truths a three strikes law would reveal about the demographics of the P2P "community." Age. Sex. Income. Investment in PC and A/V tech.
In the states, when a jury gets to have its say about the file-sharing geek, the language isn't very pretty.
Consider: The US, in its infancy, models itself after the biggest guy on the block, the UK, and builds an empire.
The U.S. didn't so much build an empire as buy one - gathering up pieces here and there as they became available.
Louisiana 1803 $11 million Mexican Cession 1848 $15 million Gasden Purchase 1853 $10 million Alaska 1867 $7 milllion US Virgin Islands 1917 $25 million
The US was a debtor nation through most of its history - but the money went directly into infrastructure and economic development.
The building of the railroads, for example.
Take oil out of the equation and the American economy looks very strong and very well balanced.
No, but we certainly have the right to download torrents, which are legal in themselves! They aren't copyrighted material; they are pointers to copyrighted material!
Watching a geek self-destruct in the courtroom is one of life's most innocent pleasures.
You have a BT client installed.
You click on a link - and the infringing file arrives piece by piece to be assembled within your computer.
No other action on your part is anticipated or required.
That is all anyone needs to know. The interior mechanics of the system are irrelevant.
I can understand physical DVD sales or broadcasting it via television because that costs money, however the internet allows you to distribute content for -free- without the overhead of needing to translate, ship or alter any media. Even better have the fans do the work -for you- if bandwidth is a problem make it be P2P, if translating it into people's language is a problem allow fansubs. As for the "cultural barrier" many of your fans are educated enough to know that there is a difference in culture and will look up, or accept the cultural difference without being offended.
The pro from Google will move on the moment you begin peddling the nonsense that video distribution over the Internet won't cost him a dime.
Fansubs are poorly written and badly acted.
You do not make or keep your reputation in this business by handing foreign markets over to amateurs.
It isn't the fan the pro is worried about when he looks at cultural differences. the complexities of translation.
It is the larger audience he is trying to reach. It is access to markets the fan can't give him.
Real Netbooks are devices like the SmartQ5 and the SmartQ7 Basically Microsoft took the Netbook, added a disk and forced it onto the market through big-name h/w vendors.
The driving force was sales - and profit.
It was a rout - and the geek ought to be honest enough to admit it.
Instead he will - once again - redefine the netbook as a product - the mobile internet device, the MID - that sells at a price point he knows Intel and Microsoft cannot match.
The cheapest 10" Win 7 SE netbook at Walmart.com is $300 with 1 GB RAM and a 160 GB HDD.
This version uses the ribbon UI, adds brushes and anti-aliased shapes, which can be resized freely until they are rasterised, supports alpha channel transparency for PNG and ICO file formats and saves in the PNG file format by default. Paint (software)
A lesson for Windows Engineers. Aim for 256MB, not 2GB. The era of Netbooks is upon us, and it looks like Microsoft will miss the bus
WalMart.com lists 12 Win 7 netbooks for sale on line, 3 in-store. Netbooks
Atom CPU. 10 inch screen. 1 GB RAM and a 160 or 250 GB HDD. Prices start at $300 US.
The life of the geek is hard:
This is a nice little netbook. I got it home and installed Mandriva 2009.1 on it. I ran into a couple problem I want to share. The Ethernet is not recognized by 2009.1 and the wireless requires additional packages, so your left without any Internet connection. I went and bought a usb to Ethernet adapter "linksys usb300M plugged it in and had Internet in seconds. Another flavour of Linux may work fine without issues, I just like Mandriva.Acer Purple 10.1" Aspire One [Comment Posted Oct 23]
WalMart doesn't sell a netbook with less than 1 GB RAM.
The geek's obsession with "saving" RAM puzzles me.
RAM is generally the simplest and cheapest way to improve the performance and reliability of any system:
ReadyBoost works with most flash storage devices. In Windows 7, it can handle more flash memory and even multiple devices--up to eight, for a maximum 256 gigabytes (GB) of additional memory. This feature comes with all versions of Windows 7.ReadyBoost
If your computer has a hard disk that uses solid-state drive (SSD) technology, you might not see an option to speed up your computer with ReadyBoost when you plug in a USB flash drive or flash memory card. You may instead receive the message, "Readyboost is not enabled on this computer because the system disk is fast enough that ReadyBoost is unlikely to provide any additional benefit. This is because some SSD drives are so fast they're unlikely to benefit from ReadyBoost.Using memory in your storage device to speed up your computer
We don't hear them whining about economic collapse, do we? In fact this past year was one of their best years with a huge bumper crop and plenty of excess food to feed their families.
The Amish are commercial farmers.
They are as focused on markets and costs as any other - and have been for generations.
The Amish are not excmpt from property taxes, suburban development and rising land prices.
Family members often do have to take on jobs in town to make ends meet.
It's the way the world works. When the telephone came around did telegraph operators keep their business methods - or did they evolve to use the new technology?
In 1876-77 the newly incorporated Bell Telephone Company offered its patents to Western Union for $100,000 - and found no takers.
With commercial telephone projects taking off very quickly, Western Union put everything it had into bare-knuckled patent litigation - and lost.
By 1879 it left the telephone business behind forever,
Psystar quietly launched Rebel EFI, a software product that should worry Apple a lot more than Microsoft's latest operating system. Rebel EFI allows users to run Apple's flagship operating system, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, on non-Apple hardware.
The Hackintosh is a system-builder project for the geek.
The only thing that can hurt Apple is competition from the OEM and retail giants.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like Microsoft and Apple are trying to compete and see who can belittle and harass their customers the most.
The Hackintosh is a technical hobbyist's DIY project.
But the system builder is insignificant in the consumer market space where Apple and Microsoft compete.
Microsoft can live with painfully thin margins in the netbook sector because it is so strong everywhere else.
The chances are really quite good that the XP or Win 7 netbook will be the buyer's second or third Windows PC.
Apple has only five to ten percent of the PC market as a whole. Joining the march to the bottom makes no sense.
Not when it is so strongly positioned to sell smart phones and other more profitable mobile Internet devices.
The travesty here isn't that someone is writing sequels to the original series. The travesty is that his heirs still have a monopoly on the series, 57 years later.
The first of the "I, Robot" stories was published in 1941.
They are intellectual puzzles. "Science Problem" stories typical of their era.
"I, Robot" ends on the same note that the "Foundation" stories begin - that disinterested back-stage manipulators using purely mathematical models could build - or rebuild - the perfect society.
The Three Laws have been yours to play with for the better part of seventy years. They were first referenced in film no later than 1956's Forbidden Planet.
I'm sure Shakespeare has inspired and helped many a person in learning the trade of creating stories. The tragedy here is that companies like Disney reap all of the benefits of the public domain, while ensuring very little will ever be added back to it.
The key word here is "learning."
If you want to study Disney animation almost the whole of the studio's production in every genre is easily accessible. That can't be said for MGM or Warner.
Short films and features. Industrial and government films. Television.
The "extras" on any Disney or Pixar disk will take you farther and deeper into the art of animation than anything from Dreamworks.
The only thing Disney demands - the only thing it has the right to demand - is that you plow your own row.
Design your own characters, sets and props. Tell your own stories.
The RIAA and MPAA are going to want to weigh in on this if it goes anywhere.
The rights agencies don't give a damn about copies until they begin circulating outside your own household.
Memo to Apple: build a machine that has a price point between the Mac mini and Mac Pro, that isn't an all-in-one machine, and is internally expandable, and people will buy that machine from YOU rather than buy a PC and make a Hackintosh
Memo to the geek:
The Hackintosh desktop is a hack - an expensive - crappy - DIY project for the technically inclined hobbyist.
There aren't as many of those on the ground these days as there used to be - and not as much interest in the desktop either.
Apple doesn't need you need you. Apple doesn't want you.
It's sole interest in Pystar is in keeping the clone product off retail shelves.
People have been writing good music for fun (and for free) throughout history, just so that people can enjoy it.
It's just as likely that were doing it to for a coin or two, a bite to eat, and a good night's sleep.
Particularly as they grew older.
Why do you think The Iliad and The Odyssey are traditionally attributed to the blind poet, Homer?
Ken Burns wold barely have been able to produce his PBS series as all the letters he quoted would have just been coming off copyright at the time he was working on the series.
Entry into the public domain doesn't guarantee survival. Paper crumbles. Nitrate stock burns. Tapes are erased.
The nerd scans last month's comic books. Not the dusty old books, magazines and ledgers to be found in his grandfather's attic.
Private papers - private libraries - can remain private. The expiration of copyright doesn't give you physical access to anything.
Piracy is awesome and great because copyright no longer serves to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
Or do you really think the Berne Convention's life + 50 minimum accomplishes that goal?
Yes I do.
Because to obtain a copyright you have to produce a work that has some originality.
Wall-E had robots.
But it wasn't Star Wars or The Iron Giant. It wasn't The Transformers. It wasn't a showcase for Will Smith or Robin Williams.
It had its own story to tell and did so superbly - taking home every award the Sci-Fi community had to offer.
with the completely unknowns actually benefiting because then they get exposure--if you haven't yet proved yourself, who is gonna buy your CD?
How do you get exposure when your music is buried under a snowdrift - smothered by the hundreds - perhaps thousands of files - from other no-name bands competing for attention?
Making music--good music--takes time and resources.
That it does.
Which raises the interesting question of whether piracy hurts some musical genres - and some musicians - more than others.
The obvious example would be the "big band" sound of a classical or jazz ensemble. Is there a place in this brave new world for a young Duke Ellington or a Louis Armstrong?
By your logic, it's time we start outlawing Usenet.
You requested a file. You received a file.
The mechanics of the process expose you to the rights holder. It will make his burden of proof easier or harder.
But that is its only legal significance.
It was your choice to use a legal means of communication for an illegal purpose. You are on trial. Not Usenet. Not IRC. Not AIM.
The problem is that Microsoft wasn't broken up.
Standard Oil is broken.
But the regional operating companies continue to sell the "Standard" product that people have come to trust.
Stable formulations. Honest weights and measures.
Rockefeller rakes in more money than before.
The small independents are absorbed. Big Oil becomes Big Oil.
AT&T is broken.
The pieces are reassembled by the "baby" Bells.
What gets lost along the way is Bell Labs and Western Electric. Basic research and the phone that always works.
Microsoft brought the PC within reach of almost everyone.
The Windows PC isn't tied to any single hardware manufacturer. Programs can be distributed under any license and through any distribution channel you chose.
That is an enormously liberating experience for both the user and the developer.
How far back has the software industry been set back by Microsoft?
Not one inch.
The "software industry" by definition produces for a market.
It doesn't exist to advance technology for its own sake, but to meet the needs of its customers.
Microsoft dominates in the office space because it understands the office worker and the office as a working environment.
The tech is secondary. This is something the geek can find really hard to understand.
How much further along would so many areas be if Microsoft had not bought up so many experts and stuffed them in an R&D group with almost no real world output, instead of having them work on practical technologies that made it to market?
Microsoft is one of the few companies its size spending serious money on basic research. We need more of them, and we need them badly.
In the past, I have asserted that social popularity trumps technical superiority. Beta was superior to VHS and yet VHS won. Why? It was more popular... some would argue that it was more popular because porn was not allowed on Beta.
The pornographer looks to the installed base, the same as anyone else.
From the start, you could record a movie or a football game on a single VHS cassette.
The players - and blank cassettes - were cheaper and available under many familiar brand names.
Betamax entered the market at a time when a lot of folks still looked to the Sears Roebuck Christmas Catalog for the big-budget holiday gift.
If you wanted to pick the winner in the mass consumer market you needed to know where Disney was placing its bets.
Betamax was entered the market at a time when almost no TV had so much as a composite video input. No comb filtering either.
Large screen displays were rare.
To see any benefit from Betamax meant spending a lot of money.
Most piracy happens because the person is too poor to afford the materials, but they can afford a computer and Internet connection and then get a free P2P file sharing program and get as many materials as they want for free.
The computer and Internet connection still generally implies a middle class income.
For the geek posting here that can be a very substantial - upper middle class - income.
The inner cynic in me wonders just what truths a three strikes law would reveal about the demographics of the P2P "community." Age. Sex. Income. Investment in PC and A/V tech.
In the states, when a jury gets to have its say about the file-sharing geek, the language isn't very pretty.
Consider: The US, in its infancy, models itself after the biggest guy on the block, the UK, and builds an empire.
The U.S. didn't so much build an empire as buy one - gathering up pieces here and there as they became available.
Louisiana 1803 $11 million
Mexican Cession 1848 $15 million
Gasden Purchase 1853 $10 million
Alaska 1867 $7 milllion
US Virgin Islands 1917 $25 million
The US was a debtor nation through most of its history - but the money went directly into infrastructure and economic development.
The building of the railroads, for example.
Take oil out of the equation and the American economy looks very strong and very well balanced.
No, but we certainly have the right to download torrents, which are legal in themselves! They aren't copyrighted material; they are pointers to copyrighted material!
Watching a geek self-destruct in the courtroom is one of life's most innocent pleasures.
You have a BT client installed.
You click on a link - and the infringing file arrives piece by piece to be assembled within your computer.
No other action on your part is anticipated or required.
That is all anyone needs to know. The interior mechanics of the system are irrelevant.
I can understand physical DVD sales or broadcasting it via television because that costs money, however the internet allows you to distribute content for -free- without the overhead of needing to translate, ship or alter any media. Even better have the fans do the work -for you- if bandwidth is a problem make it be P2P, if translating it into people's language is a problem allow fansubs. As for the "cultural barrier" many of your fans are educated enough to know that there is a difference in culture and will look up, or accept the cultural difference without being offended.
The pro from Google will move on the moment you begin peddling the nonsense that video distribution over the Internet won't cost him a dime.
Fansubs are poorly written and badly acted.
You do not make or keep your reputation in this business by handing foreign markets over to amateurs.
It isn't the fan the pro is worried about when he looks at cultural differences. the complexities of translation.
It is the larger audience he is trying to reach. It is access to markets the fan can't give him.
If MS included this in Windows, you'd never get to see the login screen because the CPU would be so busy fixing bugs.
This sort of thing plays well to the geek's hive mind. But is it really worth a mod-up to +5, Insightful?
Vulnerability Report: Microsoft Windows 7 - 2009 There are no unpatched Secunia advisories affecting this product, when all vendor patches are applied..
Real Netbooks are devices like the SmartQ5 and the SmartQ7
Basically Microsoft took the Netbook, added a disk and forced it onto the market through big-name h/w vendors.
The driving force was sales - and profit.
It was a rout - and the geek ought to be honest enough to admit it.
Instead he will - once again - redefine the netbook as a product - the mobile internet device, the MID - that sells at a price point he knows Intel and Microsoft cannot match.
The cheapest 10" Win 7 SE netbook at Walmart.com is $300 with 1 GB RAM and a 160 GB HDD.
For the SmartQ7:
smartdevices smartq 7 7.0 inch touchscreen linux mid internet tablet 667mhz cpu $300 US
The big box retail price in the states should be cheaper, I suppose. But by how much?
microsoft *pain*.... fix that for ya.
There have been significant changes in Win 7.
This version uses the ribbon UI, adds brushes and anti-aliased shapes, which can be resized freely until they are rasterised, supports alpha channel transparency for PNG and ICO file formats and saves in the PNG file format by default. Paint (software)
A lesson for Windows Engineers. Aim for 256MB, not 2GB. The era of Netbooks is upon us, and it looks like Microsoft will miss the bus
WalMart.com lists 12 Win 7 netbooks for sale on line, 3 in-store.
Netbooks
Atom CPU. 10 inch screen.
1 GB RAM and a 160 or 250 GB HDD. Prices start at $300 US.
The life of the geek is hard:
This is a nice little netbook.
I got it home and installed Mandriva 2009.1 on it. I ran into a couple problem I want to share. The Ethernet is not recognized by 2009.1 and the wireless requires additional packages, so your left without any Internet connection. I went and bought a usb to Ethernet adapter "linksys usb300M plugged it in and had Internet in seconds. Another flavour of Linux may work fine without issues, I just like Mandriva. Acer Purple 10.1" Aspire One [Comment Posted Oct 23]
WalMart doesn't sell a netbook with less than 1 GB RAM.
The geek's obsession with "saving" RAM puzzles me.
RAM is generally the simplest and cheapest way to improve the performance and reliability of any system:
ReadyBoost works with most flash storage devices. In Windows 7, it can handle more flash memory and even multiple devices--up to eight, for a maximum 256 gigabytes (GB) of additional memory. This feature comes with all versions of Windows 7. ReadyBoost
If your computer has a hard disk that uses solid-state drive (SSD) technology, you might not see an option to speed up your computer with ReadyBoost when you plug in a USB flash drive or flash memory card. You may instead receive the message, "Readyboost is not enabled on this computer because the system disk is fast enough that ReadyBoost is unlikely to provide any additional benefit. This is because some SSD drives are so fast they're unlikely to benefit from ReadyBoost. Using memory in your storage device to speed up your computer
But why, exactly, does a consumer want Windows? For Excel? Word?
For any one of the gazillion or so home and office apps released for the MSDOS and Windows platform since 1980?
GOG.com
And only a few people even know what to do with Excel.
The reality is that training in MS Office is a marketable skill anywhere south of the Arctic Circle.
I'd take the odds that MS Office lies at or near the core of any adult education program within your reach.
That training will be free or generously subsidized for seniors, those on welfare or with disabilities.
Seems like Linux will fill the bill with a browser, maybe a PostScript app and a media player
The geek re-invents the net appliance every other year or so --- and gets his butt kicked the moment a more capable product enters the market.
The iPhone on the Internet has a 0.35% share of the market. Operating System Market Share
But it is an expensive commitment.
This idea has been around forever - and it works.
The plagerist - the infringer - is almost by defintion a lazy son of a bitch. Reviewing text line-by-line. The movie frame-by-frame. That's hard.
We don't hear them whining about economic collapse, do we? In fact this past year was one of their best years with a huge bumper crop and plenty of excess food to feed their families.
The Amish are commercial farmers.
They are as focused on markets and costs as any other - and have been for generations.
The Amish are not excmpt from property taxes, suburban development and rising land prices.
Family members often do have to take on jobs in town to make ends meet.
It's the way the world works. When the telephone came around did telegraph operators keep their business methods - or did they evolve to use the new technology?
In 1876-77 the newly incorporated Bell Telephone Company offered its patents to Western Union for $100,000 - and found no takers.
With commercial telephone projects taking off very quickly, Western Union put everything it had into bare-knuckled patent litigation - and lost.
By 1879 it left the telephone business behind forever,
Psystar quietly launched Rebel EFI, a software product that should worry Apple a lot more than Microsoft's latest operating system. Rebel EFI allows users to run Apple's flagship operating system, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, on non-Apple hardware.
The Hackintosh is a system-builder project for the geek.
The only thing that can hurt Apple is competition from the OEM and retail giants.