Why is it released for "non commercial use", why does it matter to Pixar if it gets used in "perrsonal projects that do not generate commercial profits"?
Erm... maybe because Pixar make good money by selling RenderMan to the makers of films like Titanic, Star Wars I-III and the Lord of the Rings. RenderMan is the single most important rendering package in Hollywood at the moment, it would be a loss of millions.
It keeps working for you if someone makes money off it, guys. It still solves your necessary problem. If RenderMan didn't exist, you wouldn't have a job, and Pixar would not exist. So even if everyone else is "leeching" form your work, you still get to have Pixar do what it does and make money.
If RenderMan existed only to produce the kind of visuals you see in Pixar productions, it would be a much smaller and simpler package. Pixar doesn't do photo-realistic giant space-monsters stomping on green-screen live actors... but RenderMan does.
Pixar is not just a "cartoon studio" -- Pixar has been pioneering software rendering techniques for decades, and has always employed many of the very top people in the 3D field. Its original aim was always special effects -- feature film production was something that came along later.
If the law was changed to force them to choose between producing their own films or acting as a special effects supplier to other studios, they'd drop the in-house animation in a second. Notice how Disney are doing more and more 3D work under the Disney banner rather than Pixar (Tangled, Wreck it Ralph, Frozen). Now I don't know for sure, but I suspect the software they used was... RenderMan.
Depends. Is it easier/quicker/more powerful than Blender? If so, then it is useful to hobbyists. Is it easier/quidker/more powerful than commercial rivals? If so, then it is useful to professionals.
If you personally have no use for it, you are not obliged to download it.
This has been a live issue since the turn of the century. People keep saying "I don't make money from it, so it's non-commercial" and "it's my video, not YouTube's", but that's not been tested in court. You can argue both ways. It's not a simple issue by any stretch of the imagination.
there's been more music (and books, and photos and movies) genereated in the last 10 years then in all of history before it
supply went waaaaaay up, which means that prices have to drop (and yeah I know most of it is crap, but 90% of everything is crap)
In theory, that's a sound argument -- but your argument is predicated on the total spend remaining static, and therefore being spread further, and I don't believe that's what's happening at the moment. I believe people's overall music spend is dropping. Mine certainly has, but maybe I'm extrapolating too much from myself.
I'm sure Cream are still selling well -- Sunshine of Your Love is something of a psychedelic anthem.
On a more serious note, I am sick fed up to the back teeth of this constant mantra of "buggy whips". The controversy over Spotify's business model is *not* *about* *technology* -- it's about price. Spotify wants to convince their customers that it's about luddites dinging the technology, but it's not: 1: Spotify does not pay sustainable royalties to their suppliers. 2: Spotify cannot afford to pay more to its suppliers. => Spotify's business model is unsustainable.
Only the big "stadium acts" profit from tours. For the average musician, a gig is little more than a promotional exercise to try to increase album sales.
Might I suggest that part of what has you torn is that you're on some level expecting the world to provide you with a comfortable living (possibly supported by past decades where some artists could make a lot of money doing what they did) whilst simultaneously aware of the fact that forcing resrictions on how people you don't even know can use technology is wrong.
Nope. First up, he's not trying to force any restrictions on anyone -- he's just saying he's not really getting any meaningful profit off it, and he wishes he was.
Secondly, even if he took his material off Spotify, that wouldn't be "restrictions on [using] technology", but restrictions on using his intellectual property, which is his prerogative.
"Recouping" was basically another term for "being scammed by your label". Wasn't the digital revolution supposed to free small artists from the tyranny of the labels and allow them to keep their own profits? It's a bit of a Pyhrric victory -- "hooray we can keep our profits... and if we're lucky buy a bag of peanuts with them!"
Actually, current research shows that our tastes are narrowing. We have absolute free choice, so we go and buy exactly what we want, rather than picking something up because it's there. The money is getting more and more concentrated in a minority of hands, and as it does, it's easier for prices to drop (as the guys at the top still get lots of cash). Lower prices and lower sales would be very bad for the little guys at the bottom end of the market.
True fans, I think, would find other ways of supporting the artists they love, and I'd guess the ones who do nothing but stream wouldn't have spent more money on it in the first place.
"I think" -- words to build a business model on.
People in general are self-centred and riddled with feelings of entitlement. We all tend to feel "I've done my bit, now I deserve a reward" -- whether that's slacking off on your turn on the cleaning rota "because I always have to take the bins out, so I deserve a break", giving yourself a pay rise as the director of a charity "because I deserve it after all the lives I've saved", or claiming excessive expenses as a public servant "because really, after all I've done for the poor, I deserve a meal that's more expensive that the average family's weekly meal budget, washed down with wine that would feed an average family for a month".
"True fans" would mostly say "I've supported them since the beginning -- now I deserve my reward." There would be a minority that keep paying and paying, but if you want to see what proportion they would be in, look at home many Kickstarter backers pay more than a basic rate...
I've never understood how companies that make entertainment products can manage to continuously piss off their customers with such regularity.
It's easy -- and here's the secret: you aren't buying the brand. When was the last time you went to see a film because it was by Paramount? When did you last buy a CD because it was by Universal? Probably never. We do not associate the product with the publisher, so hatred of the publisher doesn't have a big effect on sales.
Or, you know, perhaps it is hurting sales because it's competing. Which is perfectly legitimate, free market and all that.
And by the same token, it's perfectly legitimate for Universal to threaten to remove their catalogue, free market and all that.
Spotify's competitivity derives in no small part from its low cost base. When the first reports of Spotify's royalty payments came out, I looked at my CD collection and tried to estimate how much in royalties I had paid to artists. I think I figured that in a lifetime of listening to Spotify, I would generate something like five to ten CDs worth of royalties, or something crazy like that.
Vim. Sed. Yeah, like most office types have them to hand. I knocked together a.bat to hunt for specific groups in AD extracts once. I'm sure there were more efficient ways to do it, but my way was more efficient than my assigned task of opening the properties window for every user in the system and checking their memberships visually. The difficulty wasn't writing the script (trivial copy-and-paste of various bits and bobs on the internet) but on knowing what I was looking for. I knew what I was doing because I'd been taught to program. And I also knew the principle of false positives being acceptable, and false negatives unnacceptable.
Reading and writing are very useful skills you use on a daily basis, even if you're not writing novels. The ability to write computer programs is mostly useless, outside actually writing computer programs.
The ability to read and write is mostly useless, outside actually reading and writing.
All of us are computer operators. All our tasks can be made more efficient through automation. A batch script that extracts all lines from a CSV file containing the string "w00t" could save a single operator hours or days trying to do the same thing with search... copy... paste... search... copy... paste... search... copy... paste... search... copy... paste... search... [ad nauseam].
Writing novels is more analogous to commercial software development. Software development isn't the only use of writing programs.
You don't have to have it, but once you've bought a card with it, you'll buy a monitor with it. Once you have a monitor with it, that means your next PC will have it, then when your monitor dies, your next monitor will have it. That's what he means when he says "lock-in".
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it released for "non commercial use", why does it matter to Pixar if it gets used in "perrsonal projects that do not generate commercial profits"?
Erm... maybe because Pixar make good money by selling RenderMan to the makers of films like Titanic, Star Wars I-III and the Lord of the Rings. RenderMan is the single most important rendering package in Hollywood at the moment, it would be a loss of millions.
It keeps working for you if someone makes money off it, guys. It still solves your necessary problem. If RenderMan didn't exist, you wouldn't have a job, and Pixar would not exist. So even if everyone else is "leeching" form your work, you still get to have Pixar do what it does and make money.
If RenderMan existed only to produce the kind of visuals you see in Pixar productions, it would be a much smaller and simpler package. Pixar doesn't do photo-realistic giant space-monsters stomping on green-screen live actors... but RenderMan does.
Pixar is not just a "cartoon studio" -- Pixar has been pioneering software rendering techniques for decades, and has always employed many of the very top people in the 3D field. Its original aim was always special effects -- feature film production was something that came along later.
If the law was changed to force them to choose between producing their own films or acting as a special effects supplier to other studios, they'd drop the in-house animation in a second. Notice how Disney are doing more and more 3D work under the Disney banner rather than Pixar (Tangled, Wreck it Ralph, Frozen). Now I don't know for sure, but I suspect the software they used was... RenderMan.
Depends. Is it easier/quicker/more powerful than Blender? If so, then it is useful to hobbyists. Is it easier/quidker/more powerful than commercial rivals? If so, then it is useful to professionals.
If you personally have no use for it, you are not obliged to download it.
This has been a live issue since the turn of the century. People keep saying "I don't make money from it, so it's non-commercial" and "it's my video, not YouTube's", but that's not been tested in court. You can argue both ways. It's not a simple issue by any stretch of the imagination.
5. Pumping out garbage!=$Profit$
It's apparently Universals model that is unsustainable.
It may be garbage, but it sells in volume. It's not Universal's profit levels that I'm worried about, but artists'.
there's been more music (and books, and photos and movies) genereated in the last 10 years then in all of history before it
supply went waaaaaay up, which means that prices have to drop (and yeah I know most of it is crap, but 90% of everything is crap)
In theory, that's a sound argument -- but your argument is predicated on the total spend remaining static, and therefore being spread further, and I don't believe that's what's happening at the moment. I believe people's overall music spend is dropping. Mine certainly has, but maybe I'm extrapolating too much from myself.
Tech evangelists. Bloody utopia-mongers.
I'm sure Cream are still selling well -- Sunshine of Your Love is something of a psychedelic anthem.
On a more serious note, I am sick fed up to the back teeth of this constant mantra of "buggy whips". The controversy over Spotify's business model is *not* *about* *technology* -- it's about price. Spotify wants to convince their customers that it's about luddites dinging the technology, but it's not:
1: Spotify does not pay sustainable royalties to their suppliers.
2: Spotify cannot afford to pay more to its suppliers.
=> Spotify's business model is unsustainable.
But that recording's free -- it was prepaid on Kickstarter.
Only the big "stadium acts" profit from tours. For the average musician, a gig is little more than a promotional exercise to try to increase album sales.
Might I suggest that part of what has you torn is that you're on some level expecting the world to provide you with a comfortable living (possibly supported by past decades where some artists could make a lot of money doing what they did) whilst simultaneously aware of the fact that forcing resrictions on how people you don't even know can use technology is wrong.
Nope. First up, he's not trying to force any restrictions on anyone -- he's just saying he's not really getting any meaningful profit off it, and he wishes he was.
Secondly, even if he took his material off Spotify, that wouldn't be "restrictions on [using] technology", but restrictions on using his intellectual property, which is his prerogative.
"Recouping" was basically another term for "being scammed by your label". Wasn't the digital revolution supposed to free small artists from the tyranny of the labels and allow them to keep their own profits? It's a bit of a Pyhrric victory -- "hooray we can keep our profits... and if we're lucky buy a bag of peanuts with them!"
Actually, current research shows that our tastes are narrowing. We have absolute free choice, so we go and buy exactly what we want, rather than picking something up because it's there. The money is getting more and more concentrated in a minority of hands, and as it does, it's easier for prices to drop (as the guys at the top still get lots of cash). Lower prices and lower sales would be very bad for the little guys at the bottom end of the market.
True fans, I think, would find other ways of supporting the artists they love, and I'd guess the ones who do nothing but stream wouldn't have spent more money on it in the first place.
"I think" -- words to build a business model on.
People in general are self-centred and riddled with feelings of entitlement. We all tend to feel "I've done my bit, now I deserve a reward" -- whether that's slacking off on your turn on the cleaning rota "because I always have to take the bins out, so I deserve a break", giving yourself a pay rise as the director of a charity "because I deserve it after all the lives I've saved", or claiming excessive expenses as a public servant "because really, after all I've done for the poor, I deserve a meal that's more expensive that the average family's weekly meal budget, washed down with wine that would feed an average family for a month".
"True fans" would mostly say "I've supported them since the beginning -- now I deserve my reward." There would be a minority that keep paying and paying, but if you want to see what proportion they would be in, look at home many Kickstarter backers pay more than a basic rate...
I've never understood how companies that make entertainment products can manage to continuously piss off their customers with such regularity.
It's easy -- and here's the secret: you aren't buying the brand. When was the last time you went to see a film because it was by Paramount? When did you last buy a CD because it was by Universal? Probably never. We do not associate the product with the publisher, so hatred of the publisher doesn't have a big effect on sales.
Or, you know, perhaps it is hurting sales because it's competing. Which is perfectly legitimate, free market and all that.
And by the same token, it's perfectly legitimate for Universal to threaten to remove their catalogue, free market and all that.
Spotify's competitivity derives in no small part from its low cost base. When the first reports of Spotify's royalty payments came out, I looked at my CD collection and tried to estimate how much in royalties I had paid to artists. I think I figured that in a lifetime of listening to Spotify, I would generate something like five to ten CDs worth of royalties, or something crazy like that.
Vim. Sed. Yeah, like most office types have them to hand. I knocked together a .bat to hunt for specific groups in AD extracts once. I'm sure there were more efficient ways to do it, but my way was more efficient than my assigned task of opening the properties window for every user in the system and checking their memberships visually. The difficulty wasn't writing the script (trivial copy-and-paste of various bits and bobs on the internet) but on knowing what I was looking for. I knew what I was doing because I'd been taught to program. And I also knew the principle of false positives being acceptable, and false negatives unnacceptable.
Yeah, because people who speak funny foreign languages don't deserve to use our linguistically pure English-speaking servers, right?
Reading and writing are very useful skills you use on a daily basis, even if you're not writing novels. The ability to write computer programs is mostly useless, outside actually writing computer programs.
The ability to read and write is mostly useless, outside actually reading and writing.
All of us are computer operators. All our tasks can be made more efficient through automation. A batch script that extracts all lines from a CSV file containing the string "w00t" could save a single operator hours or days trying to do the same thing with search... copy... paste... search... copy... paste... search... copy... paste... search... copy... paste... search... [ad nauseam].
Writing novels is more analogous to commercial software development. Software development isn't the only use of writing programs.
An outsource so complete and effective that most people forget that mechanic once meant so much more that just car mechanics.
Civil engineering is analogue. /. readers don't understand analogue.
This article is about the maximum possible stable lava tube dimensions, given the moon's environmental parameters.
So less "alumni", more "drop-outs...?"
If you're running 32-bit software on a 64-bit processor, you're actually running an emulator -- WOW64.
Is this an oblique reference to the sync'ing of the Bismark?
You don't have to have it, but once you've bought a card with it, you'll buy a monitor with it. Once you have a monitor with it, that means your next PC will have it, then when your monitor dies, your next monitor will have it. That's what he means when he says "lock-in".