Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me I've seen a bunch of gaming devices with this sort of form factor come and go over the years, and for whatever reason, they just don't catch. I call it the curse of the wide, center-screen game systems. Well, I don't, but I'm sure there's some curse that could be ascribed to this phenomenon.
It just doesn't seem very comfortable or thought out. In a time when systems are getting smaller, more portable and comfortable to hold, this looks like something designed in the 80s. It may have great games, but how is it going to sell if it doesn't look cool? Maybe I'm suffering from too much iPod exposure, but there is definitely something to good packaging, and my $0.02 says that the PSP just doesn't have it.
I think that they had the right idea. The only way to stop these b@$t@rds is to hit them in the wallet. If they were physically nearby, there's somewhere else I'd like to hit them, but if you make spamming unprofitable through bandwidth usage, that'll change the whole dynamic.
I know two wrongs don't make a right, but--grrrrrrr--I HAT how these spammers work.
Microsoft isn't a software company. They're a marketing company. They do what it takes to sell whatever they've got. I used to say that MS could pipe all their employee toilets into a packaging facility and sell Microsoft Excrement at a profit. With their marketing muscle, they could find an audience for just about any product.
Unfortunately, part of marketing, especially when your product is getting negative publicity, is pointing out perceived flaws in competing products. I believe the term often used is FUD, and it's nothing new or unique to MS. Heck, it's pretty much how GWB won a second term.
When it comes to this sort of thing, they have a wide lattitude of opinions they can express, especially when there is no Linux, Inc. to sue them for slander. The Linux community, however, has been quite good at spreading the word about MS badness; they're just trying to do the reverse because their feelings are hurt.
And if you've got any questions about iLife '05, let me know. GarageBand's vocal effects are pretty cool, though I don't sound all that hot as a woman...
...for a month. Unfortunately, at the time, I was working on a lot of different systems, not all of which permitted me to change keyboard settings. Switching back and forth drove me crazy and removed all the gains of using D.
Now I'm working on fewer systems on a given day; perhaps it might be worth trying something new again. Oh, whoops... one of my main computers is a laptop. Unless I'm thinking of carting this thing around, there go those gains again!
Open Source Sewers
on
Linux, Inc.
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've heard the open source model compared to public sewere systems. The spec is open to everyone, and while there's typically a fee for use paid to the municipality that owns the system, anyone can read the specification, make hardware that works with the system, connect up a home or business, and have functional water works.
To draw the parallel, it seems like this would make Microsoft comparable to, say, Acme Cesspit Corp., a fictional company that might have invented and patented cesspits and the means and tools for keeping them safe and usable in a city environment.
The public is crying out for a better system, which has been developed and is proving itself in municipality after municipality. But Acme is freaking out and suing or hiring thugs in towns where they dominate in order to maintain control of your bodily waste.
A company like Acme could do well to embrace the open standard and move on to the next step, since even with an open standard, people are going to continue needing help disposing of their wastes.
Likewise, Microsoft would do well to embrace open source software and operating systems. People will still need great apps and services, and they'll be willing to pay for them. But if they weren't so dependent on the volume of money coming in from their operating system monop^H^H^H^H^H division, they might realize that letting go and moving on to other types of products and services might be a hundred times more profitable.
Or, better yet, 100 times more beneficial to humanity. Minesweeper is a great game and I'm glad they include it, but nobody ever cured cancer by playing it.
While it's not 5-7-5, it's got more of a feel of a haiku than most I've seen and many I've written. If you go to the link and click on the "user" reviews, you're published! Tell your friends!
I use OS X on a 600 MHz G3 iBook, and it runs fine. The only time it feels sluggish is if my wife leaves MS Office applications running on her login and returns to the login screen instead of actually logging out. For some reason, those apps don't really seem to swap out nicely.
But while it's not the most serious game machine, I have used it to play some pretty good games, and more impressively, I've done multi-track recording using GarageBand on it.
When CDs came out, they were really expensive to the consumer, and they stayed that way for a long time, although the cost to the record companies dropped quickly. Many execs took that extra money home, but many invested it wisely.
The rapid drop in production cost made it possible for major labels to take chances on minor bands. Because of the costs of manufacturing, packaging and shipping vinyl, they used to have to do a run of at least 50,000 records to make a new band worthwhile. With the diminuitive CD, that dropped to 10,000. Because of that, record companies were able to roll the dice on lots of bands who were just enough outside the mainstream that they'd never have otherwise gotten on a major label.
From Laaz Rockit to Greenday, the late 80's saw an explosion of diversity. Not all of it weas quality, but people were able to find more stuff to their liking than ever before, and it was reflected in sales. The inflation-adjusted price of the CD was still WAY above that of the record, but people were buying more music per capita than ever before. And it was the little bands that were doing it. Michael Jackson used to be the big winner for his label, but do you know ANYONE who bought HIStory?
Then I'm not sure what happened. I guess bands like NKOTB started tapping the HUGE kid-pop market with formulaic music performed by no-talent lip-syncing meat-mannequins. I know that the sort of music was available before (i.e. Menudo), but I worked security at one of the NKOTB shows, and the love and dedication I saw in the eyes of the 4- to 14-year olds in that crowd of 60,000 at the Oakland Coliseum was amazing. This music was being rammed down their eardrums, and they were loving it.
Follow it up with similarly targeted bands composed of ex-mouseketeers like N-Sync, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, and suddenly you've found a formula that makes the mega-stars mega-important again. Queue up Jessica and Ashlee and all the other teen queens with super-managed images and dubious levels of talent.
I think it's like the story of the goose and the golden egg. The record companies are on a meeeee toooooo run with the trash and with diversity killers like this AI system. But it's just a golden egg. The goose they're killing is the diversity they had for one brief glimmering moment.
The good news is that, with the advent of the Internet, no one record company owns music distribution. They want to put severely limited DRM on their music? Fine! They want to only push stuff that is guaranteed to sell on the mass market? Fine! What'll happen eventually will be a rise of the niche label again, and the fall of the dinosaurs. It might not be quite as dramatic as all that, but the music-sales-bot is not the end of good music. It's just the end of good corporate music.
But me, I'd rather give my money directly to the bands, anyway.
Just what do you think Lucas was thinking
as he imagined the script he was inking?
I hope the rumors are true
that in Star Wars part two
That there's no more God damn Jar-Jar Binking
Apparently, I found number two so appalling that I didn't even write a limerick. I'll take any suggestions...
Peer to Peer is not in any way analogous to a VCR, and I wish idiots would quit using the comparison.
VCRs and P2P are absolutely analogous. They are not identical, but they don't need to be in order for people to draw parallels.
Let me spell it out for you: P2P networks are a means of distributing media. Video tapes are a means of distributing media.
The MPAA fought the video tape many years ago. They lost the fight, decided to embrace it instead, and thereby increased revenues by billions rather than protecting millions.
The MPAA and RIAA are fighting P2P tooth and claw, and the point I was trying to make was that P2P could be embraced--with content controls, payment systems, usage tracking, etc...--in order to provide cheap, fast distribution while ensuring that content creators get their fair due.
I don't believe that people should get their movies and music for free, unless that is what the artist wants. What I believe is that the consumers have demonstrated that they are ready to receive their content in a new way, and that content providers should embrace every technological means to make consumers happy.
At the end of the day, as a musician, I want everyone who wants to hear my music to be able to hear it, and I want to be paid a fair bounty for providing it. If I could use a subscription model version of BT, where users pay into a pool for content distributed over the network, and content providers got paid based on how many people had downloaded said content, that would be awesome. It's not the only solution, but it's a possibility, and it could be done completely legitimately.
The advantage of a BT-type system is not the fact that you can steal stuff--you shouldn't--but that, done right, infrastructure costs can be reduced to near zero for the content providers.
For example, if I sell one song for $0.25, and it costs me $0.05 in bandwidth for every copy I have to send out from my servers, then if I sell five of them, I've made a dollar.
On the other hand, if I just have to feed that song out once ($0.05) and have it distributed on a tracked, royalty-based BT network, after selling five, I've made $1.20, a 20% increase in revenues. Maybe I'd keep it, maybe I'd pass it along to downloaders, so eventually people could buy my song for $0.10 each or less. Since the cost to me for distributing the content quickly goes to zero. Now hundreds of people are downloading my song and I'm more popular than ever, and better compensated, too.
Before you resort to calling anyone names, please remember that I'm rubber, you're glue; anything you say bounces off me and sticks to you. Did that sound childish? Great. Now we're even.
There's some real truth there. But many of those reasons are addressed by the open source model. It's just a pity that there aren't more OSMMOGs out there. Tried out PlaneShift the other day, but while it's really neat in a lot of ways, it's got a ways to go in development.
Re:Legal uses
on
Today in P2P
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Totally agree. However, even the non-legit uses will probably eventually become legit. Like VCRs did after Sony was vindicated by the court decision against the MPAA which found that there were more legal uses for video tapes than illegal uses, or at least enough to justify their existence in the consumer market. Once the MPAA had to embrace it, they stopped fighting the VCR, and--miracle of miracles--the rental market padded their wallets quite nicely.
I think we'll eventually see something similar here. A distributed distribution network which (i.e. Blockbuster) subscribers can use to download movies to their set-top boxes. And the network would be made up of those set-top boxes, so BB (or whoever) could cheaply distribute the movies that subscribers are requesting.
The success of services like Netflix show that people want delivery. Storefront rental operations have stopped growing except in niche markets. The sooner that the industry in general, and companies like Blockbuster in particular give up their attachment to the physical disk/tape, the better they'll do.
Of course, I like to root for the little guy. Maybe the moment that there's too much competition in the DVD mailer business, Netflix will unveil some secret deal they've worked out with the MPAA and a box they've developed and ship it out to all their customers for free, and it'll contain an embedded BT client for downloading and distributing all the latest cool films...
...after the travesty that was Daredevil, I'm not sure I can bring myself to go see Elektra. Pity, I had high hopes for both movies, being a fan of the original comic book stories...
I swear, they're just doing something right with Spiderman. Even X-Men was just OK, I thought. Even the off-beat comics-to-movies (Ghost World, American Splendor) really only have appeal to total afficianados.
I'm certainly looking forward to Sin City, tho. Maybe there'll be an adaptation of some of the more oddball comics, like Mr. Natural or the Freak Brothers.
...that these folks just don't learn. People who do this get caught because they keep going and going and going. Once you have a few million, you don't need to scam anyone any more! Just invest and retire! You will eventually mess up, and you WILL get caught!!
Of course, this sort of idiotic greed is what got them to start doing these bad things in the first place. I can't imagine trying to steal identities no matter how much the profit, myself.
Correct! Correlation = Conspiracy! I don't know how, but somehow Bush or Al Qaeda or the French or Israel are causing us to get fat and lose sleep! Hey, maybe they're all in it together!
Slashdot Mirror
And don't even get me started on universal health care...
It just doesn't seem very comfortable or thought out. In a time when systems are getting smaller, more portable and comfortable to hold, this looks like something designed in the 80s. It may have great games, but how is it going to sell if it doesn't look cool? Maybe I'm suffering from too much iPod exposure, but there is definitely something to good packaging, and my $0.02 says that the PSP just doesn't have it.
we start seeing VH1-esque celebrity profiles of Page and Brin.
I know two wrongs don't make a right, but--grrrrrrr--I HAT how these spammers work.
Unfortunately, part of marketing, especially when your product is getting negative publicity, is pointing out perceived flaws in competing products. I believe the term often used is FUD, and it's nothing new or unique to MS. Heck, it's pretty much how GWB won a second term.
When it comes to this sort of thing, they have a wide lattitude of opinions they can express, especially when there is no Linux, Inc. to sue them for slander. The Linux community, however, has been quite good at spreading the word about MS badness; they're just trying to do the reverse because their feelings are hurt.
And if you've got any questions about iLife '05, let me know. GarageBand's vocal effects are pretty cool, though I don't sound all that hot as a woman...
Now I'm working on fewer systems on a given day; perhaps it might be worth trying something new again. Oh, whoops... one of my main computers is a laptop. Unless I'm thinking of carting this thing around, there go those gains again!
To draw the parallel, it seems like this would make Microsoft comparable to, say, Acme Cesspit Corp., a fictional company that might have invented and patented cesspits and the means and tools for keeping them safe and usable in a city environment.
The public is crying out for a better system, which has been developed and is proving itself in municipality after municipality. But Acme is freaking out and suing or hiring thugs in towns where they dominate in order to maintain control of your bodily waste.
A company like Acme could do well to embrace the open standard and move on to the next step, since even with an open standard, people are going to continue needing help disposing of their wastes.
Likewise, Microsoft would do well to embrace open source software and operating systems. People will still need great apps and services, and they'll be willing to pay for them. But if they weren't so dependent on the volume of money coming in from their operating system monop^H^H^H^H^H division, they might realize that letting go and moving on to other types of products and services might be a hundred times more profitable.
Or, better yet, 100 times more beneficial to humanity. Minesweeper is a great game and I'm glad they include it, but nobody ever cured cancer by playing it.
1- Stay upwind
2- ???
3- Profit!
While it's not 5-7-5, it's got more of a feel of a haiku than most I've seen and many I've written. If you go to the link and click on the "user" reviews, you're published! Tell your friends!
Tell all your friends you've been published at Dimspace!
I think that statement is defamatory to California. I'll see you in court!
I use OS X on a 600 MHz G3 iBook, and it runs fine. The only time it feels sluggish is if my wife leaves MS Office applications running on her login and returns to the login screen instead of actually logging out. For some reason, those apps don't really seem to swap out nicely. But while it's not the most serious game machine, I have used it to play some pretty good games, and more impressively, I've done multi-track recording using GarageBand on it.
When CDs came out, they were really expensive to the consumer, and they stayed that way for a long time, although the cost to the record companies dropped quickly. Many execs took that extra money home, but many invested it wisely.
The rapid drop in production cost made it possible for major labels to take chances on minor bands. Because of the costs of manufacturing, packaging and shipping vinyl, they used to have to do a run of at least 50,000 records to make a new band worthwhile. With the diminuitive CD, that dropped to 10,000. Because of that, record companies were able to roll the dice on lots of bands who were just enough outside the mainstream that they'd never have otherwise gotten on a major label.
From Laaz Rockit to Greenday, the late 80's saw an explosion of diversity. Not all of it weas quality, but people were able to find more stuff to their liking than ever before, and it was reflected in sales. The inflation-adjusted price of the CD was still WAY above that of the record, but people were buying more music per capita than ever before. And it was the little bands that were doing it. Michael Jackson used to be the big winner for his label, but do you know ANYONE who bought HIStory?
Then I'm not sure what happened. I guess bands like NKOTB started tapping the HUGE kid-pop market with formulaic music performed by no-talent lip-syncing meat-mannequins. I know that the sort of music was available before (i.e. Menudo), but I worked security at one of the NKOTB shows, and the love and dedication I saw in the eyes of the 4- to 14-year olds in that crowd of 60,000 at the Oakland Coliseum was amazing. This music was being rammed down their eardrums, and they were loving it.
Follow it up with similarly targeted bands composed of ex-mouseketeers like N-Sync, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, and suddenly you've found a formula that makes the mega-stars mega-important again. Queue up Jessica and Ashlee and all the other teen queens with super-managed images and dubious levels of talent.
I think it's like the story of the goose and the golden egg. The record companies are on a meeeee toooooo run with the trash and with diversity killers like this AI system. But it's just a golden egg. The goose they're killing is the diversity they had for one brief glimmering moment.
The good news is that, with the advent of the Internet, no one record company owns music distribution. They want to put severely limited DRM on their music? Fine! They want to only push stuff that is guaranteed to sell on the mass market? Fine! What'll happen eventually will be a rise of the niche label again, and the fall of the dinosaurs. It might not be quite as dramatic as all that, but the music-sales-bot is not the end of good music. It's just the end of good corporate music.
But me, I'd rather give my money directly to the bands, anyway.
NOTE: If you don't know about goatse, don't look it up. It was never funny and it'll turn your stomache.
Just what do you think Lucas was thinking
as he imagined the script he was inking?
I hope the rumors are true
that in Star Wars part two
That there's no more God damn Jar-Jar Binking
Apparently, I found number two so appalling that I didn't even write a limerick. I'll take any suggestions...
My hopes aren't high for this new one.
As in beer?
...This is!
VCRs and P2P are absolutely analogous. They are not identical, but they don't need to be in order for people to draw parallels.
Let me spell it out for you: P2P networks are a means of distributing media. Video tapes are a means of distributing media.
The MPAA fought the video tape many years ago. They lost the fight, decided to embrace it instead, and thereby increased revenues by billions rather than protecting millions.
The MPAA and RIAA are fighting P2P tooth and claw, and the point I was trying to make was that P2P could be embraced--with content controls, payment systems, usage tracking, etc...--in order to provide cheap, fast distribution while ensuring that content creators get their fair due.
I don't believe that people should get their movies and music for free, unless that is what the artist wants. What I believe is that the consumers have demonstrated that they are ready to receive their content in a new way, and that content providers should embrace every technological means to make consumers happy.
At the end of the day, as a musician, I want everyone who wants to hear my music to be able to hear it, and I want to be paid a fair bounty for providing it. If I could use a subscription model version of BT, where users pay into a pool for content distributed over the network, and content providers got paid based on how many people had downloaded said content, that would be awesome. It's not the only solution, but it's a possibility, and it could be done completely legitimately.
The advantage of a BT-type system is not the fact that you can steal stuff--you shouldn't--but that, done right, infrastructure costs can be reduced to near zero for the content providers.
For example, if I sell one song for $0.25, and it costs me $0.05 in bandwidth for every copy I have to send out from my servers, then if I sell five of them, I've made a dollar.
On the other hand, if I just have to feed that song out once ($0.05) and have it distributed on a tracked, royalty-based BT network, after selling five, I've made $1.20, a 20% increase in revenues. Maybe I'd keep it, maybe I'd pass it along to downloaders, so eventually people could buy my song for $0.10 each or less. Since the cost to me for distributing the content quickly goes to zero. Now hundreds of people are downloading my song and I'm more popular than ever, and better compensated, too.
Before you resort to calling anyone names, please remember that I'm rubber, you're glue; anything you say bounces off me and sticks to you. Did that sound childish? Great. Now we're even.
There's some real truth there. But many of those reasons are addressed by the open source model. It's just a pity that there aren't more OSMMOGs out there. Tried out PlaneShift the other day, but while it's really neat in a lot of ways, it's got a ways to go in development.
I think we'll eventually see something similar here. A distributed distribution network which (i.e. Blockbuster) subscribers can use to download movies to their set-top boxes. And the network would be made up of those set-top boxes, so BB (or whoever) could cheaply distribute the movies that subscribers are requesting.
The success of services like Netflix show that people want delivery. Storefront rental operations have stopped growing except in niche markets. The sooner that the industry in general, and companies like Blockbuster in particular give up their attachment to the physical disk/tape, the better they'll do.
Of course, I like to root for the little guy. Maybe the moment that there's too much competition in the DVD mailer business, Netflix will unveil some secret deal they've worked out with the MPAA and a box they've developed and ship it out to all their customers for free, and it'll contain an embedded BT client for downloading and distributing all the latest cool films...
I swear, they're just doing something right with Spiderman. Even X-Men was just OK, I thought. Even the off-beat comics-to-movies (Ghost World, American Splendor) really only have appeal to total afficianados.
I'm certainly looking forward to Sin City, tho. Maybe there'll be an adaptation of some of the more oddball comics, like Mr. Natural or the Freak Brothers.
Ah, memories of my misspent youth...
Of course, this sort of idiotic greed is what got them to start doing these bad things in the first place. I can't imagine trying to steal identities no matter how much the profit, myself.
I'm not!
Correct! Correlation = Conspiracy! I don't know how, but somehow Bush or Al Qaeda or the French or Israel are causing us to get fat and lose sleep! Hey, maybe they're all in it together!