Both of you are correct. Natural yellow diamonds are more valuable, but manufactured yellow diamonds are cheaper (because of nitrogen). Anyway, this is all very exciting and I am looking forward to reading "The Collapse of the Diamond Monopoly" somewhere around 2010.
Google is NOT your friend.:) If you read the linked article, you would find that it refers to the same survey in Nature (1997).:) 7% of the scientists believe in "personal god" (compared with 40% in 1916), which is what we usually call "god". The 40% figure relates to belief in any sort of god, which is usually called "god of the gaps".
I may be wrong about it, though, since the articles are not very clear and the original paper can't be freely accessed at nature.com.
Anyway, what most scientists believe is irrelevant. Scientists are not infallible and not even particularly smart (they are smarter than the general populace, but still not what I would call "smart"). Most scientists operate within their own narrow field of studies and are extremely often completely clueless about the rest of the areas.
From the same article: "60% responded, a figure considered high for any surveys." Unless you want to claim that surveys don't work at all, this doesn't invalidate these particular findings.
It's you, my dear AC, who has a mental illness. It's called stupidity. Do you really think there has been a shortage of candidates for the space mission? Do you really think that anybody with less than perfect health, both physical and mental, would be sent up there? If yes, then you are seriously delusional.
I don't know what kind of disaster her flight was, but at least she landed back safely. So, please stop repeating sensationalist lies that you read about in some worthless books.
Guys, let me warn you, this is nothing to laugh about! DON'T TOUCH THAT STUFF! Two of my friends work in Motorola research laboratory. Yesterday one of the downloaded the code at home and then they both looked at it. One of them was lucky - his retina burned the second he saw the code. The second did not escape that easily. His eyes glued to the screen, his hands typing madly... the paramedics found him 20 minutes later clutching the mouse and writhing in agony. After 2 hours in intensive care he (or, rather what left of him) was sent home. Today, after they were not let into the office building, both of them got pink slips by courier mail.
A cousin of a girlfriend of my former classmate yesterday went to the university computer lab to print his essay. He catched a glimpse of some code on the screen and didn't even thought about it for a second. When he returned home, he logged on to sourceforge.net and before anyone could stop him, he tainted a dozen software projects there. Shit, two perfectly good Xeon servers had to be scrapped and replaced with clean machines in a hurry.
That's just crazy, this code is the strongest shit I ever saw... oh, fuck, forget what I just said - "the strongest shit I ever heard about and never saw". It's worse than the GPL, it taints your code so quickly you can't even notice that. PLEASE, FOR THE SAKE OF EVERYTHING GOOD IN THIS WORLD, DON'T DOWNLOAD THE CODE.
Copy this message and send it to all your friends! You need to warn them not to look at the code! POST IT ON FORUMS AND MESSAGE BOARDS! THIS IS AN EVIL PLOT TO TAINT ALL CODE IN THIS WORLD! DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN!
Why? Why are you so much afraid? Imagine you are a programmer at WINE. You work hard to recreate necessary functionality, but then you stumple upon a roadblock. You simple can't make something work as it works in Win2k. So you fire up eMule, get the sourcecode, find the relevant fragments, read them a bit and then it dawns on you how it works and how your problem should be solved. Voila! You delete the code, wait a few days and then recreate the much needed functionality from scratch. To be completely sure you didn't "taint" WINE, you can undelete:) the code and compare it with what you have written.
If you are careful and don't just copy-and-paste the code, how can MS know that this particular function was written by you after looking at their code?
An argument for this technology strictly from the perspective that it "could save lives" is a weak argument. The human research conducted by Nazi Germany could "save lives". Shoving hot spikes in people's toenails would no doubt teach us alot about pain and perhaps lead to better pain relievers.
First of all, according to what I have read, the quality of Nazi medical research (the concentration camp variety) was generally bad. There have been a few results, which are valuable to modern science (even though there is an ethical problem of quoting Mengele in your work).
Second, I believe we are too slow and stupid and cowardly today. 7-10 years for a drug approval? R-r-right. Modern "civilised" societies of the US and Europe are too risk averse when it comes to potential loss of human lives. It's hard for me to remain calm when talking about this, but "insane lunatics" is the politest term I can come up with to describe people who abandon Hubble and stop stem-cell research when there is any risk (howether small) to humans.
One of the explanations might be in Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science". May be the colour pattern of the fur is determined by something like cellular automaton, selecting an image from the space of possibilities, not recreating a preprogrammed image encoded in DNA.
You're probably trolling but anyways. That's what I meant when I blamed/. for the lack of objectivity.:)
eDonkey2000 network is designed to do what BT does and then some more. The dominating ed2k network client is eMule, which is GPLed. Many (most?) other clients and servers are GPLed too, not sure about Overnet, but I think it too has open-source clients.
Rather than being a proof of inevitable P2P vs. OSS conflict, eDonkey2000 network is actually a proof that OSS P2P can work efficiently. There are a plethora of competing clients (which could sometimes have a tendency to favour their copies on the network), there have been (are?) a few leaching mods, but the network has survived and managed to resolve all these conflicts. So today the original eDonkey is irrelevant, the whole ed2k project has become a giant project based open-standards and both closed and open source products.
As for the speed, I hope you do realise that no P2P program (unless backed by a corporation, e.g. Steam) can provide QOS for every file. There are relatively rare files and they are difficult to get. But on BitTorrent you won't be able to get these files as all, because the.torrents would long ago be dead. If we are talking about hot recent files, like, say, soundtrack to ROTK a few weeks ago, they will be downloaded rather quickly.
Of course, not as quickly as your connection nominally allows you, but this is because eMule solution is better. There is eDonkeyHybrid, which has no queue and uploads files immediately to those asking for them. When I just start eMule, a large fraction of downloads would come from Hybrid, but after some time eMule clients will start contributing. But the majority of users selected eMule, not Hybrid, because they perceive it as a better experience overall. So the uploading model is based on queues and favours longer (permanent) connection times as well as rare files.
Yes, it is slightly different than BT, and BT might have certain small advantages, but there is simply no way to bend the fundamental P2P principle: Total Upload == Total Download. eMule sacrifices ultra-fast downloads of recent files to some extent, but in return we get a huge library of available files and finer control over sharing/downloading.
BTW, eMule works on any port and even when firewalled. Try it out.
P.S. It also surprises me when people here make the distinction between "legit BitTorrent" and all those "piracy P2P apps", as well as when all discussions of file-sharing are limited to KaZaA. Heck, eMule is as legit as BT is, it's only a tool for downloading and sharing files, and BT has just as much piracy going on.
As usually, the slashdot crowd forgets about existence of a superior alternative. Mozilla vs. Opera, BitTorrent vs. ED2K, people here are so entrenched in their sympathies as to abandon the last shreds of objectivity.
eDonkey network, together with Overnet are technically every bit as good as BT is. Add to that some things done and thought out significantly better, add to that a thriving open-source development community with several different clients, with many people activily working on the code, and you will see a solution which is hands down better than BT.
If it could have had severe repercussions for the project, MS would have done it eons ago. But this is bullshit, although pretty well-spread around here.
1) Everyone, feel free to download this from your favourite P2P network, Usenet newsgroup or IRC channel. Nobody will be able to prove you did it. 2) Feel free to look at it. If you don't copy the code, there is no harm in just looking. Just don't tell MS you did it. 3) Unless you steal really huge amounts of code, nobody will notice, so feel free to learn from what good examples MS has. 4) Feel free to modify/fix the code. Making binary patches to go around copyright restrictions is a bit bothersome (different builds + dll hell), but certainly doable. The world can surely use a better Windows OS.
I haven't tried Firefox yet (I used Mozilla a few times a year or so ago), since I am a Opera user, but I don't like the overall attitude to browsers here. If you consider Mozilla and its offspring to be just a browsing solution for Linux, I have no problems with this. But when people start touting Firewhatever as the solution to all ills, a broswer for every PC and stop short of claiming it will cure cancer as well, I have no choice but to respectfully disagree. From the screenshots (and from my experience) it looks just like another IE, with many useful improvements and custom features, but overall it's not really different. Yes, it has better quality and usability, but it's still just a browser.
We need more innovation in how content is represented, browsed, managed, saved, converted, processed, updated, etc. For that we need to dump the dominating "copy_the_Mosaic" paradigm and start implementing really new features. I am pretty happy with features Opera provides, but even it is far from the ultimate limits of Internet browsing.
The truth is, many people (early adopters) already use digital text readers almost exclusively. I am reading most books/newspapers/magazines either on my PC or on my Palm IIIxe. If I was living in a developed country (where the average salary allows one to buy more useless overpriced gadgets) I would probably have bought a specialised eBook reader/portable video player as well.
I don't believe digital media has any inherent deficiencies. So ultimately everybody would be content with AVIs/MP3s and TXTs, except about 2% of totally backwards people. But the first adopters for these technologies would obviously come from a select few groups, like it always is. Who would they be exactly, I can't tell for sure, but we may speculate that they will include the digital generation who are comfortable with "computer thingies" not working 100% all the time and, on the other hand, can enjoy new possibilities opened by the digitalisation of media.
Other groups, whose specific needs are served better by the files, will also join. And, of course, rich consumers (not from the Generation D) buying home entertainment centres, smart cars, expensive mobile phones, etc., would also gain access to the ocean of new features, and some of them will use them.
My father was adopting Internet very slowly, but in the past year he started using it regularly (although not much yet). Even though in 1997 he could claim that Internet will never be useful to him, he should have known better. Eventually every invention will be used by almost every potential customer, it just takes some time. And today this time measures in years, not in decades.
When I hear "maybe in the future they'll be accepted as the default means of media distribution", I am happy.:) As for the numerous advantages of phisical media that you name, they are all only temporarily:
tangibility - people connect with physical embodiments of art because for the long time that's how art was acquired. But this is not a fundamental quality of art. Remember, before the first phonograph was built, people were connecting with the Ninth Symphony just fine.:) I can connect with famous paintings, sculptures and architecture even though I can never own the physical items. Same with movies/music/books. Give us a decade or so and people will start connecting with the files. After all, isn't it stupid to feel proud of owning a copy of Titanic. The ships sunk a century ago, the movie copyright belongs to Cameron and you are proud of having a DVD-box? Nonsense, which we are just accustomed to.
being able to transfer ownership - if this is important for people, it will be implemented in a friendly way. But in any case it will not be an obstacle.
backups - digital files can be backed up much more easily. And when we finish the transition to the digital distribution/consumption, this will no longer be an issue. You will be able to redownload everything from the seller if you lose your copies, you will also be able to get a copy of the film you own for another device (e.g. you own Amelie and come to Paris. You decide you want to check out the film locations, so you download the film to your mobile phone from the French server), you will be able to get a copy from a library.
What's the point of cover art if you don't have anything to cover? It's like sniveling about losing beautiful harnesses by moving to cars. Yeah, cover art was cool, but you like it simply because you became accustomed to it accompanying CDs, not because cover art has any separate value to you.
DRM is a problem, but eventually it will be solved to everyone's satisfaction, even if we would need to crash a few skulls for that. If "they" manage to create a fully DRMed system (PC hardware, OS, applications), "we" will create a fully secure, safe, encrypted, distributed and backed up solution.
You also claim that physical media will remain useful for many purposes, but this is simply not true. This isn't another radio vs. TV struggle, it is much bigger. With modern and upcoming technologies everything will change so drastically that a large part of our human culture will likely be abandoned. You will not use paper books, once you can get an e-book, made with 5-10 pages of e-paper that you can fold in any way you want, bind and separate at will, electronically annotate by speaking or writing, sharing online, updating in real-time using for collaboration with others. And such e-books are at most 10-15 years away from us (simplier models will come much sooner). Why would you need DVDs if you can have any movie, TV program, episode of video recording or a live feed from anywhere on the globe downloaded/streamed from the global archive and projected to your retina in glorious completly realistic 3D?
Please, could you stop clutching at the remnants of our past and boldly go into the future.:)
Well, I can't leave this unanswered.:) You predict that physical media will always rule... But that goes against everything we know about technological progress today.
Just 20 years ago PCs were few and far between, mobile phones were non-existant, handheld devices were limited to programmable calculators. Today everyone has a PC, everyone has a mobile phone, many people own various digital gadgets, including PDA, portable video players, digital cameras, flash-drives, etc. PCs are slowly expanding into new areas, such as DVRs, home automation centres, etc. It is inevitable that (unless the civilisation is destroyed) eventually (in a decade or two) the progress will reach the stage when it is easier to move content digitally. Progress can't go backwards, you know. Once something is feasible it can only become easier. Once you lay down the backbone and the last mile, you can use it forever and ever without additional investments/expenses. Traffic is destined to become dirt cheap and it is already cheap enough to make Internet content delivery cost-effective. The devices will continue to evolve and fall down in price. A wireless networked player that plays media from the home server can be produced for $100-200, a price of a DVD player a few years ago. Portable video players that can hold 10 movies cost $500-1000 today, expect prices to drop to $100-200 by 2007-2010. Mobile phones, PDAs and cameras will continue to integrate, despite some people's discomfort with poor usability and low battery life. Home networks will be perfected and made easy to use and secure. When you have the digital devices replace analogue like VCRs and semi-digital ones like DVD-players (as a result you can port digital content between all of them), you will also have fast, cheap and reliable Internet.
There is simply no reason why the media will not be sold digitally then. In your final prediction you don't make any arguments whatsoever, you just claim that downloads will never work. Why? Answer! But please don't say because of box art.:) And other than that I don't see any permanent reasons. Porn is sold digitally very successfully, music and movies are distributed for free very successfully (because business realised the potential only, like, less than a year ago). Why movies will not be sold online, I don't know...
P.S. A good approach in predicting the future is to look at what is ultimately physically possible and desirable, not what is feasible or wanted today.
OK. Now I have two technologies for you to evaluate. One involves using your phone to send text messages from your phone, where the length is limited to about 30 words, where you need to press 2-3 times to type one letter, even though you can just use the phone to call the person. Add to that there there is no roaming, no ability to send the message to another operator's customer and that each message (even if it just one word) costs more than a minute or two of talking.
Another technology involves haveing access to specially designed online services from your mobile phone, which provide all kinds of useful information and services, from weather, sports news and stock quotes to erotic stories, online shops and personal banking.
Which technology do you thing is promising and which is not? You can't always correctly predict customer demands, even when you are the biggest company in the world with billions spent on marketing each year, much less when you are just a slashdotter.:)
Personally I am relatively happy to use my 256K broadabnd to download movies. I am happy watching them on the desktop, I am content with waiting. Though I use unencumbered AVIs/MPEGs and would never accept DRMed media - I need to movie the films around the home network sometimes and in a few years I hope to get a handheld with movie playing capabilities. BTW, I agree with TV/Internet integration. Hopefully BBC would do that under their new strategy.
There are already ways to sell movies online just fine. But whether Disney will succeed this time or not is still unclear.
If it becomes... To me the entry barriers in this industry look very low. First let's look at Amazon. Everyone can open an online book store, it's that simple. If Amazon was an online book store, it would not last for a month, tumbling down under attacks from new entrants. The only thing that saves it is that Amazon is not an online book store, it's a warehousing company.
Now let's look at porn sites. Without a physical product to move around there is little in terms of entry barriers. Today even a 5-year old can open a porn web-site. Selling digital music is little different.
One difference is that you need the technical side done, including DRM, billing, etc. This is very easy, expect lots of ready solutions on the market, when the time for legit digital music distribution comes.
Second issue is hosting, which can be solved solved easily and relatively cheaply.
Finally, you need to fill a catalogue with a wide selection of music. Unless Apple manages to get exclusive deals on all modern music, I don't think "independent" online stores will have much of a problem (and it's not like the vultures from the RIAA would give up control by selling away the exclusive rights). Once everything is ironed out (by iTunes, Napster 2 and the likes), buying rights to the music wholesale would probably be very simple.
Yeah, and brand loyalty is almost non-existant, as we can see with Napster. Obviously, it's harder to build it on the Net, when a competitor is just a click away.
So, in conclusion, I don't see how a monopoly could form in the distribution business. Even an oligopoly is unlikely, since the labels don't seem to have the skills to keep the online distribution to themselves and new players will probably be interested in breaking the status quo, not maintaining it.
Slashdot Mirror
Both of you are correct. Natural yellow diamonds are more valuable, but manufactured yellow diamonds are cheaper (because of nitrogen). Anyway, this is all very exciting and I am looking forward to reading "The Collapse of the Diamond Monopoly" somewhere around 2010.
Google is NOT your friend. :) If you read the linked article, you would find that it refers to the same survey in Nature (1997). :) 7% of the scientists believe in "personal god" (compared with 40% in 1916), which is what we usually call "god". The 40% figure relates to belief in any sort of god, which is usually called "god of the gaps".
I may be wrong about it, though, since the articles are not very clear and the original paper can't be freely accessed at nature.com.
Anyway, what most scientists believe is irrelevant. Scientists are not infallible and not even particularly smart (they are smarter than the general populace, but still not what I would call "smart"). Most scientists operate within their own narrow field of studies and are extremely often completely clueless about the rest of the areas.
From the same article: "60% responded, a figure considered high for any surveys." Unless you want to claim that surveys don't work at all, this doesn't invalidate these particular findings.
Yeah, let's just exchange personal anekdotes, gonna prove something... BTW, I once knew a man from Nantucket...
Here are two more pics. jpg
0 3.asf (4.6Mb ASF).
http://www.africana.ru/obschestva/RAMS/1.jpg
http://www.africana.ru/obschestva/RAMS/tereshkova
And here is a video, a news feature on Russian "1st Channel" on the 40th anniversary of her flight:
http://www-download.1tv.ru/video/2003_06/16060312
It's you, my dear AC, who has a mental illness. It's called stupidity. Do you really think there has been a shortage of candidates for the space mission? Do you really think that anybody with less than perfect health, both physical and mental, would be sent up there? If yes, then you are seriously delusional.
I don't know what kind of disaster her flight was, but at least she landed back safely. So, please stop repeating sensationalist lies that you read about in some worthless books.
Guys, let me warn you, this is nothing to laugh about! DON'T TOUCH THAT STUFF! Two of my friends work in Motorola research laboratory. Yesterday one of the downloaded the code at home and then they both looked at it. One of them was lucky - his retina burned the second he saw the code. The second did not escape that easily. His eyes glued to the screen, his hands typing madly... the paramedics found him 20 minutes later clutching the mouse and writhing in agony. After 2 hours in intensive care he (or, rather what left of him) was sent home. Today, after they were not let into the office building, both of them got pink slips by courier mail.
A cousin of a girlfriend of my former classmate yesterday went to the university computer lab to print his essay. He catched a glimpse of some code on the screen and didn't even thought about it for a second. When he returned home, he logged on to sourceforge.net and before anyone could stop him, he tainted a dozen software projects there. Shit, two perfectly good Xeon servers had to be scrapped and replaced with clean machines in a hurry.
That's just crazy, this code is the strongest shit I ever saw... oh, fuck, forget what I just said - "the strongest shit I ever heard about and never saw". It's worse than the GPL, it taints your code so quickly you can't even notice that. PLEASE, FOR THE SAKE OF EVERYTHING GOOD IN THIS WORLD, DON'T DOWNLOAD THE CODE.
Copy this message and send it to all your friends! You need to warn them not to look at the code! POST IT ON FORUMS AND MESSAGE BOARDS! THIS IS AN EVIL PLOT TO TAINT ALL CODE IN THIS WORLD! DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN!
No, inside Microsoft is a lot more like "Office Space" and anybody with motivation could get the entire source with little trouble.
I first read it as "No, inside Microsoft is a lot more like Open Source and anybody with motivation could get the entire source with little trouble."
Why? Why are you so much afraid? Imagine you are a programmer at WINE. You work hard to recreate necessary functionality, but then you stumple upon a roadblock. You simple can't make something work as it works in Win2k. So you fire up eMule, get the sourcecode, find the relevant fragments, read them a bit and then it dawns on you how it works and how your problem should be solved. Voila! You delete the code, wait a few days and then recreate the much needed functionality from scratch. To be completely sure you didn't "taint" WINE, you can undelete :) the code and compare it with what you have written.
If you are careful and don't just copy-and-paste the code, how can MS know that this particular function was written by you after looking at their code?
But can you prove it was a deliberate leak, not an unfortunate incident?
An argument for this technology strictly from the perspective that it "could save lives" is a weak argument. The human research conducted by Nazi Germany could "save lives". Shoving hot spikes in people's toenails would no doubt teach us alot about pain and perhaps lead to better pain relievers.
First of all, according to what I have read, the quality of Nazi medical research (the concentration camp variety) was generally bad. There have been a few results, which are valuable to modern science (even though there is an ethical problem of quoting Mengele in your work).
Second, I believe we are too slow and stupid and cowardly today. 7-10 years for a drug approval? R-r-right. Modern "civilised" societies of the US and Europe are too risk averse when it comes to potential loss of human lives. It's hard for me to remain calm when talking about this, but "insane lunatics" is the politest term I can come up with to describe people who abandon Hubble and stop stem-cell research when there is any risk (howether small) to humans.
One of the explanations might be in Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science". May be the colour pattern of the fur is determined by something like cellular automaton, selecting an image from the space of possibilities, not recreating a preprogrammed image encoded in DNA.
You're probably trolling but anyways. /. for the lack of objectivity. :)
.torrents would long ago be dead. If we are talking about hot recent files, like, say, soundtrack to ROTK a few weeks ago, they will be downloaded rather quickly.
That's what I meant when I blamed
eDonkey2000 network is designed to do what BT does and then some more. The dominating ed2k network client is eMule, which is GPLed. Many (most?) other clients and servers are GPLed too, not sure about Overnet, but I think it too has open-source clients.
Rather than being a proof of inevitable P2P vs. OSS conflict, eDonkey2000 network is actually a proof that OSS P2P can work efficiently. There are a plethora of competing clients (which could sometimes have a tendency to favour their copies on the network), there have been (are?) a few leaching mods, but the network has survived and managed to resolve all these conflicts. So today the original eDonkey is irrelevant, the whole ed2k project has become a giant project based open-standards and both closed and open source products.
As for the speed, I hope you do realise that no P2P program (unless backed by a corporation, e.g. Steam) can provide QOS for every file. There are relatively rare files and they are difficult to get. But on BitTorrent you won't be able to get these files as all, because the
Of course, not as quickly as your connection nominally allows you, but this is because eMule solution is better. There is eDonkeyHybrid, which has no queue and uploads files immediately to those asking for them. When I just start eMule, a large fraction of downloads would come from Hybrid, but after some time eMule clients will start contributing. But the majority of users selected eMule, not Hybrid, because they perceive it as a better experience overall. So the uploading model is based on queues and favours longer (permanent) connection times as well as rare files.
Yes, it is slightly different than BT, and BT might have certain small advantages, but there is simply no way to bend the fundamental P2P principle: Total Upload == Total Download. eMule sacrifices ultra-fast downloads of recent files to some extent, but in return we get a huge library of available files and finer control over sharing/downloading.
BTW, eMule works on any port and even when firewalled. Try it out.
P.S. It also surprises me when people here make the distinction between "legit BitTorrent" and all those "piracy P2P apps", as well as when all discussions of file-sharing are limited to KaZaA. Heck, eMule is as legit as BT is, it's only a tool for downloading and sharing files, and BT has just as much piracy going on.
As usually, the slashdot crowd forgets about existence of a superior alternative. Mozilla vs. Opera, BitTorrent vs. ED2K, people here are so entrenched in their sympathies as to abandon the last shreds of objectivity.
eDonkey network, together with Overnet are technically every bit as good as BT is. Add to that some things done and thought out significantly better, add to that a thriving open-source development community with several different clients, with many people activily working on the code, and you will see a solution which is hands down better than BT.
If it could have had severe repercussions for the project, MS would have done it eons ago. But this is bullshit, although pretty well-spread around here.
1) Everyone, feel free to download this from your favourite P2P network, Usenet newsgroup or IRC channel. Nobody will be able to prove you did it.
2) Feel free to look at it. If you don't copy the code, there is no harm in just looking. Just don't tell MS you did it.
3) Unless you steal really huge amounts of code, nobody will notice, so feel free to learn from what good examples MS has.
4) Feel free to modify/fix the code. Making binary patches to go around copyright restrictions is a bit bothersome (different builds + dll hell), but certainly doable. The world can surely use a better Windows OS.
And don't listen to scaremongers around here.
I haven't tried Firefox yet (I used Mozilla a few times a year or so ago), since I am a Opera user, but I don't like the overall attitude to browsers here. If you consider Mozilla and its offspring to be just a browsing solution for Linux, I have no problems with this. But when people start touting Firewhatever as the solution to all ills, a broswer for every PC and stop short of claiming it will cure cancer as well, I have no choice but to respectfully disagree. From the screenshots (and from my experience) it looks just like another IE, with many useful improvements and custom features, but overall it's not really different. Yes, it has better quality and usability, but it's still just a browser.
We need more innovation in how content is represented, browsed, managed, saved, converted, processed, updated, etc. For that we need to dump the dominating "copy_the_Mosaic" paradigm and start implementing really new features. I am pretty happy with features Opera provides, but even it is far from the ultimate limits of Internet browsing.
What's that with "!"s? I've never heard about anything like it...
No DRM.
Yeah, make a Matrix (Reloaded)-like setup with all displays showing different expressions of a guy dressed like Neo in a greenish hint. :)
The truth is, many people (early adopters) already use digital text readers almost exclusively. I am reading most books/newspapers/magazines either on my PC or on my Palm IIIxe. If I was living in a developed country (where the average salary allows one to buy more useless overpriced gadgets) I would probably have bought a specialised eBook reader/portable video player as well.
I don't believe digital media has any inherent deficiencies. So ultimately everybody would be content with AVIs/MP3s and TXTs, except about 2% of totally backwards people. But the first adopters for these technologies would obviously come from a select few groups, like it always is. Who would they be exactly, I can't tell for sure, but we may speculate that they will include the digital generation who are comfortable with "computer thingies" not working 100% all the time and, on the other hand, can enjoy new possibilities opened by the digitalisation of media.
Other groups, whose specific needs are served better by the files, will also join. And, of course, rich consumers (not from the Generation D) buying home entertainment centres, smart cars, expensive mobile phones, etc., would also gain access to the ocean of new features, and some of them will use them.
My father was adopting Internet very slowly, but in the past year he started using it regularly (although not much yet). Even though in 1997 he could claim that Internet will never be useful to him, he should have known better. Eventually every invention will be used by almost every potential customer, it just takes some time. And today this time measures in years, not in decades.
You also claim that physical media will remain useful for many purposes, but this is simply not true. This isn't another radio vs. TV struggle, it is much bigger. With modern and upcoming technologies everything will change so drastically that a large part of our human culture will likely be abandoned. You will not use paper books, once you can get an e-book, made with 5-10 pages of e-paper that you can fold in any way you want, bind and separate at will, electronically annotate by speaking or writing, sharing online, updating in real-time using for collaboration with others. And such e-books are at most 10-15 years away from us (simplier models will come much sooner). Why would you need DVDs if you can have any movie, TV program, episode of video recording or a live feed from anywhere on the globe downloaded/streamed from the global archive and projected to your retina in glorious completly realistic 3D?
Please, could you stop clutching at the remnants of our past and boldly go into the future.
Well, I can't leave this unanswered. :) You predict that physical media will always rule... But that goes against everything we know about technological progress today.
:) And other than that I don't see any permanent reasons. Porn is sold digitally very successfully, music and movies are distributed for free very successfully (because business realised the potential only, like, less than a year ago). Why movies will not be sold online, I don't know...
Just 20 years ago PCs were few and far between, mobile phones were non-existant, handheld devices were limited to programmable calculators. Today everyone has a PC, everyone has a mobile phone, many people own various digital gadgets, including PDA, portable video players, digital cameras, flash-drives, etc. PCs are slowly expanding into new areas, such as DVRs, home automation centres, etc. It is inevitable that (unless the civilisation is destroyed) eventually (in a decade or two) the progress will reach the stage when it is easier to move content digitally. Progress can't go backwards, you know. Once something is feasible it can only become easier. Once you lay down the backbone and the last mile, you can use it forever and ever without additional investments/expenses. Traffic is destined to become dirt cheap and it is already cheap enough to make Internet content delivery cost-effective. The devices will continue to evolve and fall down in price. A wireless networked player that plays media from the home server can be produced for $100-200, a price of a DVD player a few years ago. Portable video players that can hold 10 movies cost $500-1000 today, expect prices to drop to $100-200 by 2007-2010. Mobile phones, PDAs and cameras will continue to integrate, despite some people's discomfort with poor usability and low battery life. Home networks will be perfected and made easy to use and secure. When you have the digital devices replace analogue like VCRs and semi-digital ones like DVD-players (as a result you can port digital content between all of them), you will also have fast, cheap and reliable Internet.
There is simply no reason why the media will not be sold digitally then. In your final prediction you don't make any arguments whatsoever, you just claim that downloads will never work. Why? Answer! But please don't say because of box art.
P.S. A good approach in predicting the future is to look at what is ultimately physically possible and desirable, not what is feasible or wanted today.
OK. Now I have two technologies for you to evaluate. One involves using your phone to send text messages from your phone, where the length is limited to about 30 words, where you need to press 2-3 times to type one letter, even though you can just use the phone to call the person. Add to that there there is no roaming, no ability to send the message to another operator's customer and that each message (even if it just one word) costs more than a minute or two of talking.
:)
Another technology involves haveing access to specially designed online services from your mobile phone, which provide all kinds of useful information and services, from weather, sports news and stock quotes to erotic stories, online shops and personal banking.
Which technology do you thing is promising and which is not? You can't always correctly predict customer demands, even when you are the biggest company in the world with billions spent on marketing each year, much less when you are just a slashdotter.
Personally I am relatively happy to use my 256K broadabnd to download movies. I am happy watching them on the desktop, I am content with waiting. Though I use unencumbered AVIs/MPEGs and would never accept DRMed media - I need to movie the films around the home network sometimes and in a few years I hope to get a handheld with movie playing capabilities. BTW, I agree with TV/Internet integration. Hopefully BBC would do that under their new strategy.
There are already ways to sell movies online just fine. But whether Disney will succeed this time or not is still unclear.
If it becomes... To me the entry barriers in this industry look very low. First let's look at Amazon. Everyone can open an online book store, it's that simple. If Amazon was an online book store, it would not last for a month, tumbling down under attacks from new entrants. The only thing that saves it is that Amazon is not an online book store, it's a warehousing company.
Now let's look at porn sites. Without a physical product to move around there is little in terms of entry barriers. Today even a 5-year old can open a porn web-site. Selling digital music is little different.
One difference is that you need the technical side done, including DRM, billing, etc. This is very easy, expect lots of ready solutions on the market, when the time for legit digital music distribution comes.
Second issue is hosting, which can be solved solved easily and relatively cheaply.
Finally, you need to fill a catalogue with a wide selection of music. Unless Apple manages to get exclusive deals on all modern music, I don't think "independent" online stores will have much of a problem (and it's not like the vultures from the RIAA would give up control by selling away the exclusive rights). Once everything is ironed out (by iTunes, Napster 2 and the likes), buying rights to the music wholesale would probably be very simple.
Yeah, and brand loyalty is almost non-existant, as we can see with Napster. Obviously, it's harder to build it on the Net, when a competitor is just a click away.
So, in conclusion, I don't see how a monopoly could form in the distribution business. Even an oligopoly is unlikely, since the labels don't seem to have the skills to keep the online distribution to themselves and new players will probably be interested in breaking the status quo, not maintaining it.