No-one's mentioned it yet, but most of the successes here, can be used by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project as well. When free textbooks are written by students, they can be shared, and OLPC will have the infrastructure to do the sharing.
What's needed is a slashdot or google style moderation system so that the best percolates to the top and replaces the not so good. Meta-wiki anyone?
Well, that would be Bob 37:527 "Fear the rocket, and keep your ports closed, lest your ass gets burnt."
Bob 37:528 goes on to say. "Close down all your ports, and only open the ones truely needed, or the you will learn why you should fear the rocket."
Creative output has always been problematic to sell.
Commodities are easier. If you grow a pound of wheat, your potential customer knows what you have. You just have to advertise that you have it and then haggle for price with the customer. With creative stuff, you can't just put up a sign and say, 1 pound mental output from unknown thinker for sale to the highest bidder. No-one would ever pay for the output from an unknown.
That means that creative people have to give away their first creations (or sell very cheaply) Some even pay money in order to give them away. People pay for school where they create for free. Internships are often unpaid, and the intern has to pay their own room and board in order to take the unpaid job. A side effect of this can be that people from the lower socio-economic classes are effectively barred from these entry level positions, keeping them from attaining the next levels. (but that's another thesis)
Since creative people *must* give away their initial work, that means that there is a ton of free crap out there. Enter the music/ movie executives. Their contribution to society is to filter the crap and find the good stuff. It's easy to argue that they leave a lot of good stuff behind and let a lot of the crap through, but in theory, they're suppose to be filtering for the good stuff. The record/movie business makes a lot of money, and after any period of explosive growth, it starts to look inward and says "Hey, we're not growing as much anymore; let's apply more control to what we have." Never mind that the very business that they are in, creative output, started without control and can be killed by too much control, once there is enough money, the natural inclination of an executive is to control. Even though the execs swear up and down they are necessary to "promote' new acts, the very control they apply can stop the career of a relatively unknown artist, by not giving away enough of the artist's stuff to achieve critical mass in the marketplace.
Once an artist has hit critical mass and beyond and everyone wants their stuff, that's when the execs really want the control, and they start saying to themselves, "Why didn't we control the artist's stuff from the very beginning?" and thus they start trying extreme controls on even the unknown artists that they are promoting, even though that same control might drive sales down.
To sum up:
Creative People must give away uncontrolled free samples to get to the point where they can make money.
Executives will naturally turn up the controls once there is money.
Controls hurt new artists more than established ones.
Artists need their work to be displayed. That's how they go from being starving unknown artists, to well known famous artists that can print 4 colored soup cans and make money.
Any system that assumes that you must keep an artist's work under wraps unless you have specific permission to show it, is broken. The system *must* be that you have to have a specific license with the artist forbidding display to make displaying it in your semi-public lobby a problem. (of course any artist that forces you to sign such a license is either already wealthy, or crazy, or both)
If I've seen something once, doesn't my brain own it? Shouldn't I be able to summon back memories of scenes at will?
Ack!!! Don't let the walnut brained dinosaurs at the RIAA and MPAA know this. They may not be able to remember such things, but we can't let them know that there are people who can. Damnit man, you've let the secret out of the bag, now the goon squad's going to be on your doorstep tommorrow morning. Ah, well, you'll be happier after the surgery. Try not to slip on you own drool.
That was sort of my point. The owner of the building who hung the painting should know that he does or does not have copyright permission to film the painting, but if Joe Filmer walks in and without permission from the building owner happens to capture a few frames of the painting has the building owner contributed to the potential infringment? If the film is ruled fair use, is the building owner off the hook?
So if i build a building and someone photographs it, have I "made it available". If I display an artist's copywritten work in a lobby and the same thing happens, am I liable?
On a related note, does anyone know if all the older analog Tivo boxes will be rendered obsolete w.r.t. over the air once all the broadcasters go digital? Will Tivo support using an external converter box, or will I have to upgrade to a HD Tivo? I don't really want to pay another $800 + $200 to transfer the lifetime subscription.
Well, since I'm not willing to pay more than $.05 per track for DRM music, I'll pay about a dime ($0.10) per track for non-DRM music. Before anyone complains that that's not a realistic price, that *is* the price I've legally paid for lots of music. I buy most of mine in the form of used CDs at yard sales. Mine is lossless and comes with the liner notes most of the time.
There's sound economic theory to this. The airlines do it. Two people can be sitting right next to each other, one might have paid over $600, the other less than $200. The difference is that the $600 person had a refundable ticket, while the other person was flying on standby. The $400 difference is the cost of convenience.
Non-airlines have had a devil of a time tranlating this to thier businesses. The airlines have absolutely no danger that the $200 person will try to sell his seat to someone else once the airplane is in the air, but companies that sell more permanent things like software do have to worry that the educational versions will wind up on the grey market competing with the full priced versions. Some try to differentiate with branding, where a high end Toyota might be the same car as a low end Lexus, but cost less.
In an ideal world, you'd sell a business service for a percentage of someone's income. A millionaire would pay you $100,000, a regular person would pay like $4,000 and a poor person would pay you $400. (That assumes that your costs to provide the service were negigible.) Jesus thought this was fair, and it's the way Government charges income taxes. Unless you can threaten people with enternal damnation or send in the goon squad it's really hard to implement a system like this, unless like the airlines, your product vanishes as the person uses it.
The author gives the an example of a good meeting, the opening of the old TV show, "LA Law", where the lead attorney came in, laid his pocket watch on the table, then asked everyone to bring him up to speed with what they were doing. The pocketwatch was a device to let the audience know that he valued his time. Always, the meeting was over by the first commercial break. If real life corporate meetings could be more like this, I think we'd get a lot more done.
If you look at the numbers for the failure of the system RAM and assume that most machines have much, much more disk space than RAM, SSD's don't make sense. They are faster, but you won't get better MTTB's. On the HPC1 and COM1 groups of machines, the memory was replaced almost as often as the hard drives. If you had to replace all that HD space with RAM, your failure rate would go though the roof.
When my 2nd daughter was just over a year old, when she was just at the stage of babbling a few words or so, I came home from work one day, and she looked up at me and said clear as day, "Hello Daddy". She hasn't repeated that phrase since. (she's almost 2 now)
Both my daughters will do incredibly neat things until I get a camera, then they become lumps. It's very normal for children to make developmental leaps and then backpedal for awhile.
This had bothered me since 8th grade English class when I was told that we were going to do research, and I envisioned white lab coats and studying things that had never been done/seen before. What a letdown it was when the teacher told us we were going to spend our time in the library studying what other people had done. Let's put the "re" back into research. What you are doing is true research, what scientists do is original search. (ok, they have to do a lot of research first to see what's already been done before they start to do the original stuff)
So... no running water, no electric lights. I'm not one to dis the Amish, because it works for them, but that's not the way the rest of us live.
When our first daughter was about 1.5, she always wanted to play with the television remote control, so my wife and I thought, "Let's just buy her one of those universal remote controls that she can play with so that she won't break the real/expensive remote. Nope. Both daughters saw mommy and daddy using the TV's remote and that's the one they wanted to play with. My point is that your children want to emulate you. If you don't use technology at all, fine, put your kids in a tech free learning environment, but if you use computers, telephones, refrigerator to do your daily tasks, your children will want to learn to use these things.
The good food supply lasts about a month. In a war or emergency situation, nuclear submarines like the Trident carry a six month supply of preserved "food". Since the nuclear reactors can distill as much fresh water as they need and they can scrub the air and add O2, it is possible to stay under for that long, it's just not very comfortable. I'm sure the maximum time that any particular submarine has been under water is classified.
This will stop when home computers are powerful enough that a writer can just create a script and Poof, a movie is rendered, complete with sound and effects. It's going to happen, and I expect it in my lifetime.
There's already script processing software that will read your play outloud using different voices so you can get a feel for how it's going to sound. Soon, someone will do something similar with crude animation. Then the animation will get better and better, until it's good enough to release as a movie. There will be a time when a writer can write anything, publish it on youtube, get paid, write some more, publish, repeat. People will hear about good authors through word of mouth, get their old stuff for free, and then pay for the latest. No DRM will be needed, because what people are paying for is the newness.
The software guys will be able to get into the act as well. Suppose I write a module that adds a particularly ominous feel to a horror story. Even though I've based it on GPL software, I can charge what I want to for Media & Distribution Fees as well as the service the software needs. So, my first customer is Steven King, who uses it to make a particularly grusome series of short films distributed directly to fans. Steven, under GPL, could give away my software to anyone for free, but he doesn't right now, which allows me to sell my services to Michael Crickton for $N-epsilon for his next series. After that, Mr. King does give a copy to Clive Barker after losing to him at poker. I immediately drop the price of my services and put the software up for general distribution on my website. I become the go-to person for every amateur "filmmaker" who needs ominous in his script.
It'll be a brave new world of Filmmaking, one that doesn't have much of a role for traditional movie studios. That has them scared and buying any DRM snakeoil that promises to keep them in power a little longer.
Fong said that the company is banking on this attachment to keep users shelling out the monthly subscription fee for the service because failing to do so will result in the pet dying.
That's right, dying. If the parents don't keep shelling out the bucks, the company will kill the cute little Moji character. I wonder if they plan to send ransom notes first...
Fong said that the company is banking on this attachment to keep users shelling out the monthly subscription fee for the service because failing to do so will result in the pet dying.
So, not only do the parents pay to use it, but once the kids are hooked, the company will use the AL bots to sell bad-for-you (tm) brand food and stuff to the kid. Wow, what a business model, why didn't I think of that?
Now all they have to do is apply a little psychology to figure out which kids are truly hooked, and when they turn 18 (or 21) start cranking up the rates. Come on, you don't want little Moji to die now, do you? Wow, now there's a business idea. Design software for the Evercrack type games that figures out which players can't quit, and start adding useage surcharges to their bills. Portray it as anti-addiction, but make the amount of the charge just under what would cause the person to quit...
I've heard this before, but I don't have an iPod, and I've bought a few tunes on iTunes I couldn't find anywhere else. I didn't even use an Apple computer. After purchasing the tunes, I burned them to a CD was able to play it in all my CD players. (That accept CDRs) Apples iTunes DRM goes away when you burn to CD. It's biggest problem that limits my purchases is that it is still lossy compression. If it was lossless, like it was ripped from a CD, I'd buy a lot more from them.
Can you put solar panels on the back side of your roof. (viewed from the street) We have similar restraints, but as long as things aren't visable, they're allowed. Also, several of my neighbors have built structures and fences without getting permission. They are technically in violation, but no one has complained yet.
Big time artists, like the writer, Harlan Ellison, have a "Use it or Lose it" clause in their contracts. He put that in their because the bigest problem small, out of print works had in the 60's was inertia. Suppose the copyright for a Science Fiction paperback, long out of print, was worth $100, and you want to buy the copyright and publish a few copies. There's nobody at the big publishing house who can authorize a release that small. You aren't going to spend $1000 for the copyright to a book that's only worth $100, but for the publishing house to just do the legal review, it'll cost them more than $100.
So, when Harlan became the biggest name in Science Fiction short stories he started making deals to get the copyright back on his old stories, and introduced use it or lose it clauses. For awhile, he was also the president of the Hollywood screenwriters guild, so he helped other writers put similar clauses into their contracts.
And the thing is, if the record label that you've sold your soul to decides to just sit on your music and not promote it, it goes nowhere. Most new artists don't know enough to put a "use it or lose it" clause in there contracts.
So when the young artist tries things like this to self promote his stuff, the record company can come down on him and his friends, even though the company will make more money in the end. It's not about the money, it's about the control.
Slashdot Mirror
No-one's mentioned it yet, but most of the successes here, can be used by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project as well. When free textbooks are written by students, they can be shared, and OLPC will have the infrastructure to do the sharing.
What's needed is a slashdot or google style moderation system so that the best percolates to the top and replaces the not so good. Meta-wiki anyone?
Well, that would be Bob 37:527 "Fear the rocket, and keep your ports closed, lest your ass gets burnt."
Bob 37:528 goes on to say. "Close down all your ports, and only open the ones truely needed, or the you will learn why you should fear the rocket."
Commodities are easier. If you grow a pound of wheat, your potential customer knows what you have. You just have to advertise that you have it and then haggle for price with the customer. With creative stuff, you can't just put up a sign and say, 1 pound mental output from unknown thinker for sale to the highest bidder. No-one would ever pay for the output from an unknown.
That means that creative people have to give away their first creations (or sell very cheaply) Some even pay money in order to give them away. People pay for school where they create for free. Internships are often unpaid, and the intern has to pay their own room and board in order to take the unpaid job. A side effect of this can be that people from the lower socio-economic classes are effectively barred from these entry level positions, keeping them from attaining the next levels. (but that's another thesis)
Since creative people *must* give away their initial work, that means that there is a ton of free crap out there. Enter the music/ movie executives. Their contribution to society is to filter the crap and find the good stuff. It's easy to argue that they leave a lot of good stuff behind and let a lot of the crap through, but in theory, they're suppose to be filtering for the good stuff. The record/movie business makes a lot of money, and after any period of explosive growth, it starts to look inward and says "Hey, we're not growing as much anymore; let's apply more control to what we have." Never mind that the very business that they are in, creative output, started without control and can be killed by too much control, once there is enough money, the natural inclination of an executive is to control. Even though the execs swear up and down they are necessary to "promote' new acts, the very control they apply can stop the career of a relatively unknown artist, by not giving away enough of the artist's stuff to achieve critical mass in the marketplace. Once an artist has hit critical mass and beyond and everyone wants their stuff, that's when the execs really want the control, and they start saying to themselves, "Why didn't we control the artist's stuff from the very beginning?" and thus they start trying extreme controls on even the unknown artists that they are promoting, even though that same control might drive sales down.
To sum up:
Artists need their work to be displayed. That's how they go from being starving unknown artists, to well known famous artists that can print 4 colored soup cans and make money.
Any system that assumes that you must keep an artist's work under wraps unless you have specific permission to show it, is broken. The system *must* be that you have to have a specific license with the artist forbidding display to make displaying it in your semi-public lobby a problem. (of course any artist that forces you to sign such a license is either already wealthy, or crazy, or both)
That was sort of my point. The owner of the building who hung the painting should know that he does or does not have copyright permission to film the painting, but if Joe Filmer walks in and without permission from the building owner happens to capture a few frames of the painting has the building owner contributed to the potential infringment? If the film is ruled fair use, is the building owner off the hook?
So if i build a building and someone photographs it, have I "made it available". If I display an artist's copywritten work in a lobby and the same thing happens, am I liable?
On a related note, does anyone know if all the older analog Tivo boxes will be rendered obsolete w.r.t. over the air once all the broadcasters go digital? Will Tivo support using an external converter box, or will I have to upgrade to a HD Tivo? I don't really want to pay another $800 + $200 to transfer the lifetime subscription.
Well, since I'm not willing to pay more than $.05 per track for DRM music, I'll pay about a dime ($0.10) per track for non-DRM music. Before anyone complains that that's not a realistic price, that *is* the price I've legally paid for lots of music. I buy most of mine in the form of used CDs at yard sales. Mine is lossless and comes with the liner notes most of the time.
There's sound economic theory to this. The airlines do it. Two people can be sitting right next to each other, one might have paid over $600, the other less than $200. The difference is that the $600 person had a refundable ticket, while the other person was flying on standby. The $400 difference is the cost of convenience.
Non-airlines have had a devil of a time tranlating this to thier businesses. The airlines have absolutely no danger that the $200 person will try to sell his seat to someone else once the airplane is in the air, but companies that sell more permanent things like software do have to worry that the educational versions will wind up on the grey market competing with the full priced versions. Some try to differentiate with branding, where a high end Toyota might be the same car as a low end Lexus, but cost less.
In an ideal world, you'd sell a business service for a percentage of someone's income. A millionaire would pay you $100,000, a regular person would pay like $4,000 and a poor person would pay you $400. (That assumes that your costs to provide the service were negigible.) Jesus thought this was fair, and it's the way Government charges income taxes. Unless you can threaten people with enternal damnation or send in the goon squad it's really hard to implement a system like this, unless like the airlines, your product vanishes as the person uses it.
Let me recommed the book, "How to Run a Successful Meeting in Half the Time" http://www.amazon.com/How-Successful-Meeting-Half- Time/dp/0671726013/sr=8-7/qid=1172256632/ref=sr_1_ 7/102-8911026-2154546?ie=UTF8&s=books, It's a quick read, and does have good advice.
The author gives the an example of a good meeting, the opening of the old TV show, "LA Law", where the lead attorney came in, laid his pocket watch on the table, then asked everyone to bring him up to speed with what they were doing. The pocketwatch was a device to let the audience know that he valued his time. Always, the meeting was over by the first commercial break. If real life corporate meetings could be more like this, I think we'd get a lot more done.
The easiest way to become a leader is to find out which way the crowd is going and jump in front.
If you look at the numbers for the failure of the system RAM and assume that most machines have much, much more disk space than RAM, SSD's don't make sense. They are faster, but you won't get better MTTB's. On the HPC1 and COM1 groups of machines, the memory was replaced almost as often as the hard drives. If you had to replace all that HD space with RAM, your failure rate would go though the roof.
Is he your 1st?.
When my 2nd daughter was just over a year old, when she was just at the stage of babbling a few words or so, I came home from work one day, and she looked up at me and said clear as day, "Hello Daddy". She hasn't repeated that phrase since. (she's almost 2 now)
Both my daughters will do incredibly neat things until I get a camera, then they become lumps. It's very normal for children to make developmental leaps and then backpedal for awhile.
This had bothered me since 8th grade English class when I was told that we were going to do research, and I envisioned white lab coats and studying things that had never been done/seen before. What a letdown it was when the teacher told us we were going to spend our time in the library studying what other people had done. Let's put the "re" back into research. What you are doing is true research, what scientists do is original search. (ok, they have to do a lot of research first to see what's already been done before they start to do the original stuff)
So... no running water, no electric lights. I'm not one to dis the Amish, because it works for them, but that's not the way the rest of us live.
When our first daughter was about 1.5, she always wanted to play with the television remote control, so my wife and I thought, "Let's just buy her one of those universal remote controls that she can play with so that she won't break the real/expensive remote. Nope. Both daughters saw mommy and daddy using the TV's remote and that's the one they wanted to play with. My point is that your children want to emulate you. If you don't use technology at all, fine, put your kids in a tech free learning environment, but if you use computers, telephones, refrigerator to do your daily tasks, your children will want to learn to use these things.
The good food supply lasts about a month. In a war or emergency situation, nuclear submarines like the Trident carry a six month supply of preserved "food". Since the nuclear reactors can distill as much fresh water as they need and they can scrub the air and add O2, it is possible to stay under for that long, it's just not very comfortable. I'm sure the maximum time that any particular submarine has been under water is classified.
This will stop when home computers are powerful enough that a writer can just create a script and Poof, a movie is rendered, complete with sound and effects. It's going to happen, and I expect it in my lifetime.
There's already script processing software that will read your play outloud using different voices so you can get a feel for how it's going to sound. Soon, someone will do something similar with crude animation. Then the animation will get better and better, until it's good enough to release as a movie. There will be a time when a writer can write anything, publish it on youtube, get paid, write some more, publish, repeat. People will hear about good authors through word of mouth, get their old stuff for free, and then pay for the latest. No DRM will be needed, because what people are paying for is the newness.
The software guys will be able to get into the act as well. Suppose I write a module that adds a particularly ominous feel to a horror story. Even though I've based it on GPL software, I can charge what I want to for Media & Distribution Fees as well as the service the software needs. So, my first customer is Steven King, who uses it to make a particularly grusome series of short films distributed directly to fans. Steven, under GPL, could give away my software to anyone for free, but he doesn't right now, which allows me to sell my services to Michael Crickton for $N-epsilon for his next series. After that, Mr. King does give a copy to Clive Barker after losing to him at poker. I immediately drop the price of my services and put the software up for general distribution on my website. I become the go-to person for every amateur "filmmaker" who needs ominous in his script.
It'll be a brave new world of Filmmaking, one that doesn't have much of a role for traditional movie studios. That has them scared and buying any DRM snakeoil that promises to keep them in power a little longer.
Now all they have to do is apply a little psychology to figure out which kids are truly hooked, and when they turn 18 (or 21) start cranking up the rates. Come on, you don't want little Moji to die now, do you? Wow, now there's a business idea. Design software for the Evercrack type games that figures out which players can't quit, and start adding useage surcharges to their bills. Portray it as anti-addiction, but make the amount of the charge just under what would cause the person to quit...
I've heard this before, but I don't have an iPod, and I've bought a few tunes on iTunes I couldn't find anywhere else. I didn't even use an Apple computer. After purchasing the tunes, I burned them to a CD was able to play it in all my CD players. (That accept CDRs) Apples iTunes DRM goes away when you burn to CD. It's biggest problem that limits my purchases is that it is still lossy compression. If it was lossless, like it was ripped from a CD, I'd buy a lot more from them.
Can you put solar panels on the back side of your roof. (viewed from the street) We have similar restraints, but as long as things aren't visable, they're allowed. Also, several of my neighbors have built structures and fences without getting permission. They are technically in violation, but no one has complained yet.
Big time artists, like the writer, Harlan Ellison, have a "Use it or Lose it" clause in their contracts. He put that in their because the bigest problem small, out of print works had in the 60's was inertia. Suppose the copyright for a Science Fiction paperback, long out of print, was worth $100, and you want to buy the copyright and publish a few copies. There's nobody at the big publishing house who can authorize a release that small. You aren't going to spend $1000 for the copyright to a book that's only worth $100, but for the publishing house to just do the legal review, it'll cost them more than $100.
So, when Harlan became the biggest name in Science Fiction short stories he started making deals to get the copyright back on his old stories, and introduced use it or lose it clauses. For awhile, he was also the president of the Hollywood screenwriters guild, so he helped other writers put similar clauses into their contracts.
When you cross the RIAA, they try to ruin your life, and in this case, throw you in jail.
When you cross the FSF or RMS, you get a letter or phone call asking "How can we make this right?"
Big difference. Stallman might call you names and has hurt people's feelings. The RIAA goons leave the legal equivalent of a horse's head in your bed.
And the thing is, if the record label that you've sold your soul to decides to just sit on your music and not promote it, it goes nowhere. Most new artists don't know enough to put a "use it or lose it" clause in there contracts.
So when the young artist tries things like this to self promote his stuff, the record company can come down on him and his friends, even though the company will make more money in the end. It's not about the money, it's about the control.