Yes, I did RTFA. Here is what it says about Netflix's desire to cut out their DVD service:
In an interview with Bloomberg.com, Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, is siding firmly with the latter camp and it would even appear that Netflix is gearing up to move all of its eggs from the mail-distribution basket to the online streaming basket. Hastings indicated that perhaps as soon as later this year or sometime in 2010, Netflix might start offering online-streaming-only subscription plans (beyond just its current Starz plan--see below). The Bloomberg report states:
"The company's success hinges on its ability to transition to online video from DVDs, Hastings said yesterday in an interview in San Francisco. Netflix faces a challenge similar to the one AOL had as it lost subscribers who shifted from Internet service via a telephone connection to high-speed access, he said." (emphasis mine)
It sure sounds to me like they will eventually phase out DVD mailing entirely. I wonder if any other service (besides Blockbuster) will be able to fill in the gap.
If Netflix went to a streaming-only service it would kill it for me. I subscribe to Netflix precisely because I don't have broadband internet suitable for streaming. I live in a rural area where dialup, and Verizon wireless internet with a 5 GB/month cap, are the only options. The closest chain video store is also about 15 miles away from my home. They need to realize that their DVD by mail service opens up a world to entertainment to millions of rural customers who have a mailbox but no broadband, and moving to streaming only would definitely affect their bottom line. Of course, if the Rural Broadband Initiative brings a T1 or FiOS line to my doorstep, I'll be all for it.
I would have loved to contribute to those numbers, but as a Linux user on dialup, I have to wait until an ISO distributor puts out a copy for sale. Given how those things usually run, though, by the time I actually get a copy of 3.0, people will already be downloading 4.0...
That's all fine and good for nouns, but what happens when it tries to find a Google Image for an abstract concept, like truth, beauty, or goodness, or things like adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, articles, prefixes, suffixes, or grammatical particles, or any other sort of thing that doesn't match one to one with any concrete object in the real world? Even if you narrowed the list to a subset of nouns, it would probably unnecessarily frustrate a lot of non-native English speakers, non-English speakers, undereducated people who couldn't tell an aardvark from an anteater if it bit them on the leg, owners of copyrighted visual material reproduced without permission on your website... at least current CAPTCHAs frustrate everyone equally...
Unblock gawker.com. It was the domain name that sounded most like "picture" to me (gawking -> looking -> picture), so I picked it and it worked. But you're right, why should you have to allow scripts from multiple sites just to see stupid pictures of people's cubicles? (Which, by the way, look like paradises compared to most of the places I've worked at in my life.)
IIRC, there were a number of IDEs that mimicked or emulated HyperCard's model of programming, most notably Revolution and SuperCard, but the sticker price and the extra complexity built into them for writing "modern" software kept them out of Joe Average's reach. I would definitely support any project that wanted to put programming back into the hands of the "masses." I believe that programming is an essential skill to learn and a great way to teach people that computers are not mystery boxes that break if you push the wrong button, but tools you can use to design tools to get jobs done. And something like HyperCard or Visual Basic, designed for the "average user" in mind, might be just the thing.
Oy, tell me about it! I'm on dialup and it takes forever just to download eBay's massive Javascripts, stylesheets, applets, etc. especially if you are using their seller posting pages. I want broadband so badly but unfortunately I live in a very rural area, and the only option for me is to buy expensive satellite equipment and pay $100 a month via Direcway or something like that. As soon as DSL comes to my neighborhood (or if internet-via-electric-lines becomes feasible) I'll be the first to sign up.
Thanks to the magic of saved states, you don't even need to find a purple fairy or green crystal or floating disk or glowing pentagram or beat the current boss/level or any sort of annoying "save point". Just press the save state key, and go have dinner.
Or for that matter, you don't have to write down those terrible 80-character-long passwords that always seem to end up wrong because all the letters look alike in blurry TV resolution... yes, I'm looking at you, River City Ransom!
Why not have financial service providers, banks, and places like eBay encrypt their email using PGP or S/MIME? When you sign up for these providers, you would give them your public key, and they would generate a public/private key pair just for transactions with you, and give you the public key to add to your keychain. From then on, all communications to your email address would be signed/encrypted by them, and that could be checked to the key on your computer. Furthermore, if you wanted to do a secure transaction, they could verify your identity by requesting a signed/encrypted email from you.
A system like that would be easy enough to implement without having to deal with biometrics/daily codes/dongles/etc. However, the main problem would be getting people to install PGP or GnuPG on their computers and learning how to use it. I have enough problems getting my friends to encrypt! Maybe if you gave it a slick name, people would install it... something like PhishFarm... or Gator...
What a total waste of taxpayer dollars! But then again, I suppose that's what people thought when they started adding videos and popular fiction books to library shelves. Indeed, a game such as Final Fantasy VII has just as much plot and "literary value" as your average romance novel or Adam Sandler film. Video games are products of our culture, and as such would tell us and future generations a lot about ourselves and our times, so there's no reason why they shouldn't be archived as books are in libraries. And it would bring the teenagers in, and maybe while they're at the library they might actually pick up a good book or something...
Perhaps the wide-spread adoption among libraries of a specific video game format (such as the PS2) would also spur on a whole new set of edutainment titles, multimedia encyclopedias and technical manuals and such that would be available for libraries to check out to their patrons. If Sony maintains backwards compatibility with the PS2 format for at least the next few generations, these would still remain useful for some time, unlike the multimedia CD-ROMs of the early '90s that require Windows 3.1 or an old version of the Mac OS and Quicktime to run. With the graphics capabilities of the PS2, you could make, for instance, car and appliance repair manuals, that allow you to rotate the engine on the screen and take things apart and put them back together again before working on the actual equipment. Or you could put the entire Project Gutenberg library on a PS2 DVD, which could print to a USB printer or save to a USB keyfob. This would actually be a boon to poorer families, who might be able to afford a $149 PS2 but not a computer with a DVD drive that could handle the graphics required for similar full-screen video and 3D object manipulation.
Communicate with your friends by using 'Words' (tm) that you issue from your 'Mouth' (TM)!!!!
Hush! Don't even joke about that! You wouldn't want Microsoft to actually patent voice communication, would you? Would you like to pay royalties to Microsoft every time you open your mouth?
(light bulb goes off in head) Hey... that actually might be useful. It would shut up an awful lot of annoying people...;)
on as many VHS tapes as I can get. The government/RIAA/MPAA/etc can't control what I tape on my trusty old Panasonic Omnivision VCR from 1986. Sure, it's not HD ready and can't backup to a hard drive, but that's nothing a good AV card can't handle.
Now if I could only learn how to get the clock to stop flashing 12:00...
Wow, you can still access the old-style Google Groups in l33t mode! That should make all the people bitching about the new-fangled interface feel like k3wl d00dz:)
IMHO, if you're still using Mac OS 9, you really should be using the Wamcom build of Mozilla. A little slow, but a must if you want to browse pages that are too much for Internet Explorer 5.1 (i.e. anything written after, say, 1998...)
Not that I'm suggesting a new business model (ooh, how about voluntary micropayments to the temporaily formed company that made the film instead of "If you don't pay you can't see it" payments to the distributor?)
What, you mean, like shareware movies, that flash you with advertising and nag screens every five minutes unless you pay for a 'registered' version on DVD? What a novel concept. Too bad it's never been done before...
Yeah, maybe someone should come up with a webmail client that seamlessly incorporates SSL and PGP crypto--oh, wait, it's been done.
The true barrier to calendar reform would be...
on
New Calendar Proposal
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· Score: 1
The calendar industry, which has a vested interest in having each year start on different days of the week, so consumers have to buy different calendars every year. I mean, nobody is going to buy 12 pictures of kittens or landscapes or 10-year-old Far Side comics or swimsuit models for $12.95 to hang on their wall if they can just buy one calendar that will last them forever! I bet if a calendar-reform measure were to come up in Congress, Hallmark and American Greetings lobbyists would start buying up senators right and left...;)
It's a French proverb... it means "evil unto him who evil thinks." It has something to do with England's King Edward III and a knightly group called the Order of the Garter. I speak French, and I don't know what it means, or why it has anything to do with an Iranian-born writer or this topic.
If a bzzz agent brought over "Lenner's Sausages" and starts to extol the virtues of said meat links... i WOULD THROW HER ASS out of my party.
I invited my guests over to relax and forget about the world NOT TO BE SOLD TO.
Of course, this pitch might even work to those who are fully aware of BzzAgent techniques: "Hmmm... my friend is shilling sausages for a corporation for no monetary compensation. She's doing this for free, for no other reason than it gives her a sense of 'belonging'. So either she's a complete idiot (if she is a complete idiot, why is she my friend in the first place? I'd have to be an idiot to--) or... maybe she's on to something and these sausages are a superior product after all!" My god, it's so insidious... through the magic of cognitive dissonance, it works even when the agents are obviously shilling you, and all the advertising agency has to fork out is free samples and pats on the back now and then! Beats paying ABC millions of dollars for a 30-second Superbowl spot, that's for sure. Enjoyed being used, citizens!
Yes, and in the article they use specially-made sandbags in the shape of a huge tube. Those you can't get from your local army supply warehouse. However, I believe they used barbed wire mainly for a symbolic purpose--to quote from the page, they wanted to "use the materials of war (sandbags, barbed wire) to create a safe shelter in most regions of the globe". I suppose you could use any wire-reinforced earth-filled bags arranged in the shape of an arch and then plaster over them to create the desired effect. For example, in my home town in the rural Mojave Desert of California, the local cement plant uses (and throws out) huge twine-reinforced plastic bags of sandbag strength. They are about four foot high and three feet around when fully filled. There are also long-abandoned lots with acres and acres of things like chicken wire, chain-link fence, and barbed wire in rolls just sitting around rusting. With those materials and a few piles of dirt you could probably whip up a very decent shelter. Even if you had to buy the wire and bags from their company yourself you could still build a durable structure with fewer costs and labor-hours than with traditional construction methods. However, I will admit that getting a permit for the shelter, at least in the USA, might make the savings not worth the trouble...
As environmentally friendly and frankly quite cool as this seems, the current price of $35,000 AUS (~$27,000 USD) seems a little steep for the uses (temporary housing, travel home) they're marketing it for. For that price in the US, you can get a decent trailer or RV that doesn't need to be disassembled to transport and is less likely to get water seepage and mildew when it rains...
If you want true affordable environmentally-sound housing for the poor, the best bet is to go with something like architect Nader Khalili's Superadobe shelter designs. The shelters are made with sandbags reinforced with wire and filled with earth from the site. Not only do these not require costly deliveries of wood and cement products, they can be assembled in a matter of hours and can withstand wind, rain, hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters. They also have a cool "hobbit-hole" type of feel...
Well, Guinan said it herself in "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II"... their relationship goes beyond friendship, beyond family... so basically she'll dispense pithy pseudo-philosophical diatribes for him, but she won't sleep with him.
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It sure sounds to me like they will eventually phase out DVD mailing entirely. I wonder if any other service (besides Blockbuster) will be able to fill in the gap.
If Netflix went to a streaming-only service it would kill it for me. I subscribe to Netflix precisely because I don't have broadband internet suitable for streaming. I live in a rural area where dialup, and Verizon wireless internet with a 5 GB/month cap, are the only options. The closest chain video store is also about 15 miles away from my home. They need to realize that their DVD by mail service opens up a world to entertainment to millions of rural customers who have a mailbox but no broadband, and moving to streaming only would definitely affect their bottom line. Of course, if the Rural Broadband Initiative brings a T1 or FiOS line to my doorstep, I'll be all for it.
I would have loved to contribute to those numbers, but as a Linux user on dialup, I have to wait until an ISO distributor puts out a copy for sale. Given how those things usually run, though, by the time I actually get a copy of 3.0, people will already be downloading 4.0...
That's all fine and good for nouns, but what happens when it tries to find a Google Image for an abstract concept, like truth, beauty, or goodness, or things like adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, articles, prefixes, suffixes, or grammatical particles, or any other sort of thing that doesn't match one to one with any concrete object in the real world? Even if you narrowed the list to a subset of nouns, it would probably unnecessarily frustrate a lot of non-native English speakers, non-English speakers, undereducated people who couldn't tell an aardvark from an anteater if it bit them on the leg, owners of copyrighted visual material reproduced without permission on your website... at least current CAPTCHAs frustrate everyone equally...
Unblock gawker.com. It was the domain name that sounded most like "picture" to me (gawking -> looking -> picture), so I picked it and it worked. But you're right, why should you have to allow scripts from multiple sites just to see stupid pictures of people's cubicles? (Which, by the way, look like paradises compared to most of the places I've worked at in my life.)
IIRC, there were a number of IDEs that mimicked or emulated HyperCard's model of programming, most notably Revolution and SuperCard, but the sticker price and the extra complexity built into them for writing "modern" software kept them out of Joe Average's reach. I would definitely support any project that wanted to put programming back into the hands of the "masses." I believe that programming is an essential skill to learn and a great way to teach people that computers are not mystery boxes that break if you push the wrong button, but tools you can use to design tools to get jobs done. And something like HyperCard or Visual Basic, designed for the "average user" in mind, might be just the thing.
Oy, tell me about it! I'm on dialup and it takes forever just to download eBay's massive Javascripts, stylesheets, applets, etc. especially if you are using their seller posting pages. I want broadband so badly but unfortunately I live in a very rural area, and the only option for me is to buy expensive satellite equipment and pay $100 a month via Direcway or something like that. As soon as DSL comes to my neighborhood (or if internet-via-electric-lines becomes feasible) I'll be the first to sign up.
Or for that matter, you don't have to write down those terrible 80-character-long passwords that always seem to end up wrong because all the letters look alike in blurry TV resolution... yes, I'm looking at you, River City Ransom!
In Soviet Russia, computer gives virus to *you!*
Why not have financial service providers, banks, and places like eBay encrypt their email using PGP or S/MIME? When you sign up for these providers, you would give them your public key, and they would generate a public/private key pair just for transactions with you, and give you the public key to add to your keychain. From then on, all communications to your email address would be signed/encrypted by them, and that could be checked to the key on your computer. Furthermore, if you wanted to do a secure transaction, they could verify your identity by requesting a signed/encrypted email from you.
A system like that would be easy enough to implement without having to deal with biometrics/daily codes/dongles/etc. However, the main problem would be getting people to install PGP or GnuPG on their computers and learning how to use it. I have enough problems getting my friends to encrypt! Maybe if you gave it a slick name, people would install it... something like PhishFarm... or Gator...
What a total waste of taxpayer dollars! But then again, I suppose that's what people thought when they started adding videos and popular fiction books to library shelves. Indeed, a game such as Final Fantasy VII has just as much plot and "literary value" as your average romance novel or Adam Sandler film. Video games are products of our culture, and as such would tell us and future generations a lot about ourselves and our times, so there's no reason why they shouldn't be archived as books are in libraries. And it would bring the teenagers in, and maybe while they're at the library they might actually pick up a good book or something...
Perhaps the wide-spread adoption among libraries of a specific video game format (such as the PS2) would also spur on a whole new set of edutainment titles, multimedia encyclopedias and technical manuals and such that would be available for libraries to check out to their patrons. If Sony maintains backwards compatibility with the PS2 format for at least the next few generations, these would still remain useful for some time, unlike the multimedia CD-ROMs of the early '90s that require Windows 3.1 or an old version of the Mac OS and Quicktime to run. With the graphics capabilities of the PS2, you could make, for instance, car and appliance repair manuals, that allow you to rotate the engine on the screen and take things apart and put them back together again before working on the actual equipment. Or you could put the entire Project Gutenberg library on a PS2 DVD, which could print to a USB printer or save to a USB keyfob. This would actually be a boon to poorer families, who might be able to afford a $149 PS2 but not a computer with a DVD drive that could handle the graphics required for similar full-screen video and 3D object manipulation.
That said, a PS2-updated version of A Brief History of Time CD-ROM would be super-cool...
Coming soon: VoiceMail (pat.pending)!!!!
;)
Communicate with your friends by using 'Words' (tm) that you issue from your 'Mouth' (TM)!!!!
Hush! Don't even joke about that! You wouldn't want Microsoft to actually patent voice communication, would you? Would you like to pay royalties to Microsoft every time you open your mouth?
(light bulb goes off in head) Hey... that actually might be useful. It would shut up an awful lot of annoying people...
on as many VHS tapes as I can get. The government/RIAA/MPAA/etc can't control what I tape on my trusty old Panasonic Omnivision VCR from 1986. Sure, it's not HD ready and can't backup to a hard drive, but that's nothing a good AV card can't handle.
Now if I could only learn how to get the clock to stop flashing 12:00...
Wow, you can still access the old-style Google Groups in l33t mode! That should make all the people bitching about the new-fangled interface feel like k3wl d00dz :)
In Mansfield, Ohio, only old robots go to college with sex kittens!
IMHO, if you're still using Mac OS 9, you really should be using the Wamcom build of Mozilla. A little slow, but a must if you want to browse pages that are too much for Internet Explorer 5.1 (i.e. anything written after, say, 1998...)
What, you mean, like shareware movies, that flash you with advertising and nag screens every five minutes unless you pay for a 'registered' version on DVD? What a novel concept. Too bad it's never been done before...
Yeah, maybe someone should come up with a webmail client that seamlessly incorporates SSL and PGP crypto--oh, wait, it's been done.
The calendar industry, which has a vested interest in having each year start on different days of the week, so consumers have to buy different calendars every year. I mean, nobody is going to buy 12 pictures of kittens or landscapes or 10-year-old Far Side comics or swimsuit models for $12.95 to hang on their wall if they can just buy one calendar that will last them forever! I bet if a calendar-reform measure were to come up in Congress, Hallmark and American Greetings lobbyists would start buying up senators right and left... ;)
It's a French proverb... it means "evil unto him who evil thinks." It has something to do with England's King Edward III and a knightly group called the Order of the Garter. I speak French, and I don't know what it means, or why it has anything to do with an Iranian-born writer or this topic.
If a bzzz agent brought over "Lenner's Sausages" and starts to extol the virtues of said meat links... i WOULD THROW HER ASS out of my party.
I invited my guests over to relax and forget about the world NOT TO BE SOLD TO.
Of course, this pitch might even work to those who are fully aware of BzzAgent techniques: "Hmmm... my friend is shilling sausages for a corporation for no monetary compensation. She's doing this for free, for no other reason than it gives her a sense of 'belonging'. So either she's a complete idiot (if she is a complete idiot, why is she my friend in the first place? I'd have to be an idiot to--) or... maybe she's on to something and these sausages are a superior product after all!" My god, it's so insidious... through the magic of cognitive dissonance, it works even when the agents are obviously shilling you, and all the advertising agency has to fork out is free samples and pats on the back now and then! Beats paying ABC millions of dollars for a 30-second Superbowl spot, that's for sure. Enjoyed being used, citizens!
Yes, and in the article they use specially-made sandbags in the shape of a huge tube. Those you can't get from your local army supply warehouse. However, I believe they used barbed wire mainly for a symbolic purpose--to quote from the page, they wanted to "use the materials of war (sandbags, barbed wire) to create a safe shelter in most regions of the globe". I suppose you could use any wire-reinforced earth-filled bags arranged in the shape of an arch and then plaster over them to create the desired effect. For example, in my home town in the rural Mojave Desert of California, the local cement plant uses (and throws out) huge twine-reinforced plastic bags of sandbag strength. They are about four foot high and three feet around when fully filled. There are also long-abandoned lots with acres and acres of things like chicken wire, chain-link fence, and barbed wire in rolls just sitting around rusting. With those materials and a few piles of dirt you could probably whip up a very decent shelter. Even if you had to buy the wire and bags from their company yourself you could still build a durable structure with fewer costs and labor-hours than with traditional construction methods. However, I will admit that getting a permit for the shelter, at least in the USA, might make the savings not worth the trouble...
As environmentally friendly and frankly quite cool as this seems, the current price of $35,000 AUS (~$27,000 USD) seems a little steep for the uses (temporary housing, travel home) they're marketing it for. For that price in the US, you can get a decent trailer or RV that doesn't need to be disassembled to transport and is less likely to get water seepage and mildew when it rains...
If you want true affordable environmentally-sound housing for the poor, the best bet is to go with something like architect Nader Khalili's Superadobe shelter designs. The shelters are made with sandbags reinforced with wire and filled with earth from the site. Not only do these not require costly deliveries of wood and cement products, they can be assembled in a matter of hours and can withstand wind, rain, hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters. They also have a cool "hobbit-hole" type of feel...
I'm personally waiting for the arcade port of Tux Racer myself... Come on, someone had to mention Tux Racer in a post about Linux gaming :)
Well, Guinan said it herself in "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II"... their relationship goes beyond friendship, beyond family... so basically she'll dispense pithy pseudo-philosophical diatribes for him, but she won't sleep with him.