I think that adventure games died because everyone attempted to copy the success of Myst, and, ultimately, the consumer didn't want another Myst. Certainly not the consumers who were providing the base for adventure games. So, to corporate thought, it went "Hey! Myst is the adventure game everyone loves! We should make all our adventure games like Myst!" Followed by "No one likes adventure games anymore, because none of ours sell. Let's stop making them."
Though the adventure game is arguably alive and well as a niche market now, and it seems to be doing well enough to keep existing as a niche.
I think that taxing media is a perfectly reasonable way of handling things. I'd be perfectly happy to pay a CD, DVD, or even HD tax per gig in exchange for the right to use P2P networks, burn, swap, and pirate at will.
The problem is that this law doesn't actually do that. It just adds another penalty, rather than switching penalties from prosecution to a small tax.
But I still think this is probably the best way for the music industry to make up its lost profit.
How is this different from any of the existing services like Pressplay and their ilk? I mean, yeah, all tracks burnable... but it doesn't seem like that big a leap.
Frankly, I suspect that this is not what music fans want. And that the population at large has, with the rise of mp3, taken to thinking of music as free. Totally free. And once they've thought of this, there's probably no stopping them.
The record labels will eventually have to find a business model that allows for the fact that recordings of music are now treated as items with negligible value (Rather like airings of TV shows), and finds a way to get value other ways. Advertising, maybe.
But, ultimately, I think that any system that claims that a song has a monetary value is doomed. The general public got too big a taste of the alternative.
In general, when someone says something like "Given innovation X, Y will catch on", it is safe to assume that one is also assuming that the product is marketed sufficiently, that it is available in places where people shop, that all other aspects of it beyond innovation X work well, ect.
I do not know which of thse is a problem with Psion, though, having never seen one in Circuit City, and never heard of one until you posted that, I'm guessing at least the first two conditions are not met.
I don't know exactly when I became a fast typist... but by the first time I was actually tested (6th grade) I'd hit 60 WPM with no trouble, and have since doubled that.
Regardless, for me, at least, typing and computer interfaces, much like console video game controllers, were something that were just a developmental part of my life. I learned them as I was learning language, and other really fundamental things.
At 21, I no longer really have the patience, nor the basic mental wiring, such that endeavors like that are remotely... pleasant.
Largely, I don't use the Grafiti system because of an existing fine motor disability that renders my handwriting illegible to many people, little yet a handwriting recognition machine. This is an extreme case, but the people I know who have used the Grafiti system and things like it tend to have enough problems with their handwriting to not really make that a viable option. I just tend to have an even worse problem. =)
I am not going to engage in a piece of technology that has a month-long period without proficiency. This may be because I'm enough of a gadget geek that I'm used to one or two day proficiency, but if it would take me a month to become proficient, I'd stop trying around a week.
The tiny keys issue really gets at the problem I have with PDAs in general. Interfaces at that size are a real bother. My handwriting is far too bad to use the handwriting recognition, and any other input method is just painful. I can get a fold-out keyboard attachment, but at that point the device becomes sufficiently big that I can't carry it around in the pocket of anything short of my trenchcoat.
PDAs are a wonderful idea, and once someone solves the interfacing problem I'm sure they'll be as common as full-size or notebook computers. But in their current form, I just can't use them, and I doubt that I'm the only one with this problem.
Just because there are some good applications of the DMCA does not mean that the DMCA is a good law. There are things that you can do with a gun that are not bad. But that doesn't make guns good. Microsoft makes some good products. That does not make Microsoft good.
Nothing in that quote suggests that they're not aiming at adults buying toys for kids. Considering that all purchases at Amazon and Toys R Us require a credit card, I'd be inclined to say that they really aren't aiming at kids, except in the sense of getting children to desire a product, and then to go to their parents saying "Buy me that, buy me that".
Which seems substantively different from targetting one's site to children. The product is targetted to children. The mechanism for purchase (Which is where the privacy concerns ultimatley come in) is not.
I suspect that, at this point, the market for 80s cartoon characters is largely college-age people. Who are really the people most likely to be pissed off about this. So, yeah, I'd say it can do some damage to their perception by potential customers.
I wonder what this does to their retention figures. Even if people don't know the bait and switch is going on, are people going to get frustrated about how the movies they want aren't available anymore, and quit?
I also wonder how good the market really is for this. I mean, when I rent movies it tends to be a spur of the moment thing. Some friends and I want to get together, and we rent a movie. Netflix pretty obviously doesn't accomodate that.
Also, I imagine Netflix suffers from the same problem I had with Red Octane when I was renting games from them. I'd make a list of ten things I wanted, and the first two or three would be things I was dying to have. 4-10 would be stuff that, eh, I was sorta interested in. Inevitably, I'd get things off of 4-10, and never touch my top games, until eventually I decided to just go to Blockbuster and rent one of those top games. Then I'd either love it, and buy it, or hate it. Either way, it would get removed from my Red Octane list, leaving me witha list of games that I was pretty much only sorta interested in playing.
Likewise, I imagine if I really want to see a movie, and it doesn't get sent out to me soon, I'll shrug my shoulders, and go to Blockbuster. Which would take Netflix to the point of just sending me mediocre stuff over and over again until I cancelled. Especially if that were aggravated by the fact that my rental priority was lower.
In the screenshot above Netscape was used to display account "A" while Internet Explorer was used to simultaneously show account "B".
And, of course, the account B was the new one that was having an easier rental time. So it must be that Netflix gives better rental times to people who use Internet Explorer! Microsoft owns everything!
The only thing I use the tuner for is to grab episodes of Buffy, because my college's crappy cable service apparently doesn't agree with the ReplayTV, and it picture distorts. (Note: This is a TOTALLY non-standard problem with the ReplayTV. No one else in the world has this problem, so far as I can tell) The TV tuner happens to handle that one channel better.
Past that, I would never use my TV tuner when I could use my Replay, and for one simple reason: The Replay has a GUI and a built-in channel guide (Which is what you pay $9.95 a month for), and the tuner doesn't. The Replay can thus be told "Get me every episode of Iron Chef that appears on any channel", whereas the TV tuner has to be manually programmed based on show time and station, show by show, with you holding a TV Guide and knowing when things come on.
This doesn't sound big, but it's huge. The ReplayTV/TiVo is simply a more convenient piece of technology.
Note, however, that I haven't experimented beyond Pinnacle's native program. Maybe some of the TiVo-like programs have accurate channel guides. But make damn sure they do before you invest in this box, or else you'll find that it's entirely not what you wanted.
I just downloaded the WinAmp Plugin, and played with it for quite a while, meticulously feeding in long playlists.
It does NOT try to find you new music based on what you like. It attempts to give you semi-random playlists, based on the playlists you have used in the past. The elements of that playlist are culled from your mp3 collection, and, more specifically, from the parts of your mp3 collection that you have played since starting up Brain.
Also, if you want to give it data faster, note that the way it tells how much of the song played is where in the song the track ended. In other words, if you want to fast-add 400 tracks to it, just play them all and click to the last second of every track. It'll still think you played all of the track, and add it to its records as though you did.
Someone really ought to take all the times businseses explicitly say "We are not doing X", and gather data on how often they are in fact doing X. Classify by type of X - corporate mergers, new products, swindling customers, etc.
I mean, I'm really curious exactly how much stock to put in Apple's denial here...
Before the huge storm of criticism starts, let's ask ourselves:
How would this be different from hiring Kevin Mitnick to handle security issues?
The we like Kevin Mitnick more than we like ad agencies is not sufficient grounds for an objection. What I want to know is, why shouldn't we hire knowledgable people away from doing what we don't want, and into doing what we do want?
I would assume that, following bankrupcy, a TiVo employee or two would be the ones to do this. Since bankrupcy is unlikely to result in their immediate death, this does not seem as unlikely as your offer of one million dollars.
Hope you never flatline in a hospital and get recussitated, though. =)
For what it's worth, TIVO has repeatedly promised that, should they go out of business, they will release ways to continue getting the channel information for free.
ReplayTV hasn't made a promise like that, but I'm honestly not terribly worried about them if they're owned by D&M, who I doubt are going anywhere.
That's not the point. The point is that it doesn't cost them any more to seat you in a good seat than in a bad one.
And, as someone else pointed out, would you prefer there were only one version of the software put at the price point in between the two existing ones?
I wouldn't. Honestly, I'm never going to use XML. I'm perfectly happy to pay less to scrap a few unused features.
That's ridiculous. Go ahead and extend your argument. If you're going to see a musical, then should all seats be priced equally, from fourth balcony to second row?
Of course not. Better quality goods are higher prices. Any other system is idiotic.
Regardless, other companies (Adobe springs most quickly to mind) have been packaging Light and Full versions of software for ages. Depending on how much functionality you want/need, you can pay more or less.
Hell, Microsoft basically did this with Windows XP Home and Professional, with Home having a cap on its network size. Though I think that particular move was fucking absurd (My home is not a small office or business, but has too many computers to network on XP Home).
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I think that adventure games died because everyone attempted to copy the success of Myst, and, ultimately, the consumer didn't want another Myst. Certainly not the consumers who were providing the base for adventure games. So, to corporate thought, it went "Hey! Myst is the adventure game everyone loves! We should make all our adventure games like Myst!" Followed by "No one likes adventure games anymore, because none of ours sell. Let's stop making them."
Though the adventure game is arguably alive and well as a niche market now, and it seems to be doing well enough to keep existing as a niche.
The government passing reasonable digital rights legislation?
Come on, April Fool's was almost a month ago now.
I think that taxing media is a perfectly reasonable way of handling things. I'd be perfectly happy to pay a CD, DVD, or even HD tax per gig in exchange for the right to use P2P networks, burn, swap, and pirate at will.
The problem is that this law doesn't actually do that. It just adds another penalty, rather than switching penalties from prosecution to a small tax.
But I still think this is probably the best way for the music industry to make up its lost profit.
Is it just me, or are the special effects and CGI on that more realistic than Episodes I and II?
How is this different from any of the existing services like Pressplay and their ilk? I mean, yeah, all tracks burnable... but it doesn't seem like that big a leap.
Frankly, I suspect that this is not what music fans want. And that the population at large has, with the rise of mp3, taken to thinking of music as free. Totally free. And once they've thought of this, there's probably no stopping them.
The record labels will eventually have to find a business model that allows for the fact that recordings of music are now treated as items with negligible value (Rather like airings of TV shows), and finds a way to get value other ways. Advertising, maybe.
But, ultimately, I think that any system that claims that a song has a monetary value is doomed. The general public got too big a taste of the alternative.
In general, when someone says something like "Given innovation X, Y will catch on", it is safe to assume that one is also assuming that the product is marketed sufficiently, that it is available in places where people shop, that all other aspects of it beyond innovation X work well, ect.
I do not know which of thse is a problem with Psion, though, having never seen one in Circuit City, and never heard of one until you posted that, I'm guessing at least the first two conditions are not met.
I got my first computer at age 3.
I don't know exactly when I became a fast typist... but by the first time I was actually tested (6th grade) I'd hit 60 WPM with no trouble, and have since doubled that.
Regardless, for me, at least, typing and computer interfaces, much like console video game controllers, were something that were just a developmental part of my life. I learned them as I was learning language, and other really fundamental things.
At 21, I no longer really have the patience, nor the basic mental wiring, such that endeavors like that are remotely... pleasant.
Largely, I don't use the Grafiti system because of an existing fine motor disability that renders my handwriting illegible to many people, little yet a handwriting recognition machine. This is an extreme case, but the people I know who have used the Grafiti system and things like it tend to have enough problems with their handwriting to not really make that a viable option. I just tend to have an even worse problem. =)
I am not going to engage in a piece of technology that has a month-long period without proficiency. This may be because I'm enough of a gadget geek that I'm used to one or two day proficiency, but if it would take me a month to become proficient, I'd stop trying around a week.
The tiny keys issue really gets at the problem I have with PDAs in general. Interfaces at that size are a real bother. My handwriting is far too bad to use the handwriting recognition, and any other input method is just painful. I can get a fold-out keyboard attachment, but at that point the device becomes sufficiently big that I can't carry it around in the pocket of anything short of my trenchcoat.
PDAs are a wonderful idea, and once someone solves the interfacing problem I'm sure they'll be as common as full-size or notebook computers. But in their current form, I just can't use them, and I doubt that I'm the only one with this problem.
Just because there are some good applications of the DMCA does not mean that the DMCA is a good law. There are things that you can do with a gun that are not bad. But that doesn't make guns good. Microsoft makes some good products. That does not make Microsoft good.
Ummm...
Nothing in that quote suggests that they're not aiming at adults buying toys for kids. Considering that all purchases at Amazon and Toys R Us require a credit card, I'd be inclined to say that they really aren't aiming at kids, except in the sense of getting children to desire a product, and then to go to their parents saying "Buy me that, buy me that".
Which seems substantively different from targetting one's site to children. The product is targetted to children. The mechanism for purchase (Which is where the privacy concerns ultimatley come in) is not.
I suspect that, at this point, the market for 80s cartoon characters is largely college-age people. Who are really the people most likely to be pissed off about this. So, yeah, I'd say it can do some damage to their perception by potential customers.
I wonder what this does to their retention figures. Even if people don't know the bait and switch is going on, are people going to get frustrated about how the movies they want aren't available anymore, and quit? I also wonder how good the market really is for this. I mean, when I rent movies it tends to be a spur of the moment thing. Some friends and I want to get together, and we rent a movie. Netflix pretty obviously doesn't accomodate that. Also, I imagine Netflix suffers from the same problem I had with Red Octane when I was renting games from them. I'd make a list of ten things I wanted, and the first two or three would be things I was dying to have. 4-10 would be stuff that, eh, I was sorta interested in. Inevitably, I'd get things off of 4-10, and never touch my top games, until eventually I decided to just go to Blockbuster and rent one of those top games. Then I'd either love it, and buy it, or hate it. Either way, it would get removed from my Red Octane list, leaving me witha list of games that I was pretty much only sorta interested in playing. Likewise, I imagine if I really want to see a movie, and it doesn't get sent out to me soon, I'll shrug my shoulders, and go to Blockbuster. Which would take Netflix to the point of just sending me mediocre stuff over and over again until I cancelled. Especially if that were aggravated by the fact that my rental priority was lower.
And, of course, the account B was the new one that was having an easier rental time. So it must be that Netflix gives better rental times to people who use Internet Explorer! Microsoft owns everything!
I have both a ReplayTV and a Pinnacle TV Tuner.
The only thing I use the tuner for is to grab episodes of Buffy, because my college's crappy cable service apparently doesn't agree with the ReplayTV, and it picture distorts. (Note: This is a TOTALLY non-standard problem with the ReplayTV. No one else in the world has this problem, so far as I can tell) The TV tuner happens to handle that one channel better.
Past that, I would never use my TV tuner when I could use my Replay, and for one simple reason: The Replay has a GUI and a built-in channel guide (Which is what you pay $9.95 a month for), and the tuner doesn't. The Replay can thus be told "Get me every episode of Iron Chef that appears on any channel", whereas the TV tuner has to be manually programmed based on show time and station, show by show, with you holding a TV Guide and knowing when things come on.
This doesn't sound big, but it's huge. The ReplayTV/TiVo is simply a more convenient piece of technology.
Note, however, that I haven't experimented beyond Pinnacle's native program. Maybe some of the TiVo-like programs have accurate channel guides. But make damn sure they do before you invest in this box, or else you'll find that it's entirely not what you wanted.
I just downloaded the WinAmp Plugin, and played with it for quite a while, meticulously feeding in long playlists. It does NOT try to find you new music based on what you like. It attempts to give you semi-random playlists, based on the playlists you have used in the past. The elements of that playlist are culled from your mp3 collection, and, more specifically, from the parts of your mp3 collection that you have played since starting up Brain. Also, if you want to give it data faster, note that the way it tells how much of the song played is where in the song the track ended. In other words, if you want to fast-add 400 tracks to it, just play them all and click to the last second of every track. It'll still think you played all of the track, and add it to its records as though you did.
Someone really ought to take all the times businseses explicitly say "We are not doing X", and gather data on how often they are in fact doing X. Classify by type of X - corporate mergers, new products, swindling customers, etc.
I mean, I'm really curious exactly how much stock to put in Apple's denial here...
Anyone have any ideas?
Before the huge storm of criticism starts, let's ask ourselves:
How would this be different from hiring Kevin Mitnick to handle security issues?
The we like Kevin Mitnick more than we like ad agencies is not sufficient grounds for an objection. What I want to know is, why shouldn't we hire knowledgable people away from doing what we don't want, and into doing what we do want?
I would assume that, following bankrupcy, a TiVo employee or two would be the ones to do this. Since bankrupcy is unlikely to result in their immediate death, this does not seem as unlikely as your offer of one million dollars.
Hope you never flatline in a hospital and get recussitated, though. =)
For what it's worth, TIVO has repeatedly promised that, should they go out of business, they will release ways to continue getting the channel information for free. ReplayTV hasn't made a promise like that, but I'm honestly not terribly worried about them if they're owned by D&M, who I doubt are going anywhere.
Hating AOL is like hating training wheels. They're not innately bad. They're a really good ISP for someone who has no real computer experience.
Most people are casual users. Just because we're all nerds doesn't mean we have to insult them. We can make money off of them instead.
That's not the point. The point is that it doesn't cost them any more to seat you in a good seat than in a bad one. And, as someone else pointed out, would you prefer there were only one version of the software put at the price point in between the two existing ones? I wouldn't. Honestly, I'm never going to use XML. I'm perfectly happy to pay less to scrap a few unused features.
That's ridiculous. Go ahead and extend your argument. If you're going to see a musical, then should all seats be priced equally, from fourth balcony to second row?
Of course not. Better quality goods are higher prices. Any other system is idiotic.
Regardless, other companies (Adobe springs most quickly to mind) have been packaging Light and Full versions of software for ages. Depending on how much functionality you want/need, you can pay more or less.
Hell, Microsoft basically did this with Windows XP Home and Professional, with Home having a cap on its network size. Though I think that particular move was fucking absurd (My home is not a small office or business, but has too many computers to network on XP Home).