Oh spare me your bombastic pomposity, you knob-knuckled, change jingling, bulbous lipped, shulgus wearing, furled guinous. Just stop speaking. Nothing escapes your drooling, gaping maw but gibberish, you are unintelligible, your sense went swirling away with the rinse cycle.
You have no business interacting with the conscious, your very presence gives monkeys headaches. I can't believe that diminuitive, dried up peach pit that rattles around in the space where a normal human's brain should be is able to direct your palsied and wasted limbs to achieve locomotion.
Your very personage is abhorrent to see in daylight. You ears are blue-veined and freakish horrors of aerodynamics, your forehead has creases so deep they are a haven for unclassified flora and fauna of mysterious origin.
Each wheezing breath you take uses oxygen that by rights would be better utilized by an autistic chimpanzee, and each exhalation fouls the air with so vile a stench as to bring birds crashing down dead from defoliated trees.
You wompler, you fraldersnash, you eater of curried laundry lint. You have the audacity to daily inflict your existence on the innocent people of this planet. HOW can you stand to be you?
What I hate the most is people with those hands free mobile ear/microphone sets. One of my colleagues whom I unfortunately have to work with alot has this annoying tendency to transition into a phonecall in the middle of a conversation. It annoys the hell out of everybody who has to deal with him since he has his phone switched to silent mode so there is no hint when somebody calls him, (which happens alot) causing him to drift off into a converstion whoever is on the phone and completely loose any interest in whoever he was talking to before.
I don't think I have ever finsihed a conversation with that dude
Ok. My assembly is a little rusty, so bear with me. Let's say we have equivalent Java and C programs. They both have to run on a 386 or higher. (Bear with me. I haven't kept up with the MMX/SSE/SSE2 instructions, so I'll have to fake this a little.) Now, your C compiler will see that you want to store a 32 bit value, but has to generate code for a 386. So, it generates the code:
pop AX STOSW 0x0005 pop AX STOSW 0x0005
Even though the code may be running on a Pentium Pro (which is optmized for 32 bit code), it's still going to execute those 4 statements.
Now, the Java Hotspot compiler will start and notice the fact that you're running on a Pentium Pro. So when it converts the bytecode to machine code, it creates the following instructions:
pop EAX STOD 0x0005
That's twice as fast as the C code!
Real code would tend to be running on modern processors, so this example is a little contrived. However, the JVM can (and will) use SSE instructions to do multiple calculations in one instruction, while the C code will be forced to generate non-SSE instructions to support the old Pentium Is out there.
Hotspot is also capable of analyzing the running code and regenerating even better assembly that would perform poorly in other circumstances. For example, let's say Hotspot notices that the bounds can't be exceeded on an array. Well, Hotspot will then recompile to remove the bounds checking.
...a "cluster" of more or less randomly distributed and connected computers isn't such a bad idea.
On universities, 99% of computers run with nearly zero CPU load for most of the time. People read emails, surf the web, but for most of the time the computers idle. And then someone has some work reaoznajeszdy, waits in queue for a month, throws data on the university campus dedicated cluster, waits for results for a week and receives results that are invalid due to some mistake in input data, so whole procedure must be repeated all over.
Now imagine, we install a "cluster server" on all networked computers. Assign certain resources to the project and let our PC participate in that cluster. It loads a custom computational module for given task, loads data from some anonymous dude on the other end of the world and computes his project. Heaviest "daily" stuff gets finished within few hours. It doesn't really disturb you - works as "idle task", just like SETI@home or such. But, say, you're a raytracer. You prepare a nice animation in LightWave and would leave it overnight to render. Just upload it to the net and have it rendered in 5 minutes on the worldwide cluster. Cool, eh?
Of course the system could be abused. I think some "credit system" would be in order, so people who provide more, get better priority. Plus some way of authoring the "modules" so it couldn't be used to take over the computer. And of course this would be the first step to creating a self-conscious AI, good or evil:) But I think it would be worth a try.
There are three real issues with software patents that could be fixed.
First, the interaction between patent law and antitrust law needs to be adjusted. If you have a dominant market position, you should't be able to use a patent to prevent interoperability with your de-facto standards. This is an antitrust issue because it's only a big problem when someone has market dominance. Interoperability with Microsoft Word is important. Interoperability with AbiWord is not.
This is not totally out of reach politically. Current antitrust law in the US and the EU arguably support this position, but enforcement is hard. A bright-line standard would help here.
Second, it needs to be clearly established that Government-mandated standards (ANSI, ISO, DIN, EU) preempt patents unless patent holders object prior to the issuance of the standard. The government standards organizations should be directed to adopt policies preventing the use of patented technology in standards unless the patent holder waives their rights under patent for all users of the standard.
Finally, "business method" patents seem to have been a mistake. However, the first one (4,346,442, the Merrill Lynch Cash Management Account, attaching a credit card to a brokerage account) has already expired.
These things do time out, and soon enough that it matters. The GIF patent has expired. The RSA patent has expired. The SyncSort patent has expired. All those technologies are still in use.
Patents do nothing but slow down an industry and promote laziness....
1) Ford, which is considered the model on how to build cars and do processes HAD to get around patents so that he could build a car that EVERYONE can afford.
2) Windsurfer which invented the windsurfing board had a patent, which they only enforced two years before the end of the patent. Until five years before the end of the patent there was no Wind surfing industry. Windsurfer then cashed in and forced bankruptcy of major windsurfers. Where is Windsurfer today? Sitting on money doing nothing.
3) Laser had a patent which caused nobody to do anything with lasers. Once the patent expired we ended up with laser pointers, last light shows, etc, etc..
4) Patents CANNOT be bought and defended by "small" people. Patents cost about 40,000 EUROS a pop and this is not money for the "small" company. This is money for the large company.
Now about your reference to MS and Internet Explorer. Say what you will, but Netscape was no better than Microsoft. I was around in the Netscape days and they were bastards. Once I represented a company who wanted to purchase five thousand licenses to Netscape. Netscape ignored the company because it was too small and companies like Deutsche Telekom were more important.
Microsoft might clone ideas, just like all of the other companies do as well in the industry. The software industry is like writing, we all clone!
The problem in software are the contracts. For example why do I have to buy Windows 5 times for a single computer?
Sir, I would have wished that you would have used your lawyer abilities to reign in the contracts instead of going for the easy cash in Patents. Remember you are going to be responsible for a mess that *I* have to live in.
I've got a Zaurus 5500, and love it for what I use it for, but a Palm seems to make a better PDA. So, I've come to the conclusion that a Linux handheld device isn't a PDA, but a small-sized computer. So, a Linux pda makes for a good platform if you are a unix developer who needs to write custom hand-held software. Also, while there are a bunch of Palm apps out there, not many are free. It's not that I have to have everything for free, but often times an app doesn't quite work the way I want, and I like to be able to tweek them a bit. An example, I found a good TI-85 calculator emulator, but the buttons looked awful. A bit of messing around with the xpm definitions, and now the button colors are defined in the config file. This is the kind of stuff that you just can't do with non-free apps that you find on Palm or PocketPC.
As for what I use mine for: * Web lookups (i.e., looking up items in Internet phone books, TV listings, dictionary definitions) * Other web browsing when it wouldn't due to to carry a laptop (meetings, nature's call, etc) * Custom PIM app -- I wrote a web-based app which allows me to organize data and meeting notes in a unique way that suites me. On my Zaurus, I've got a version of the app served up by a local web server. Whenever I'm within wireless range, a background task automatically keeps the local database synced with the one on my server. (Once I perfect it, I'll put it up on sourceforge). * Entertainment -- with a wireless card in the Zaurus, and one in my laptop, I can stream movies and music to the kids in the car served up by my laptop which I use for navigation. It also runs Mame.
Re: Everything, including tools, in moderation!
on
UML Fever
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Design patterns and UML were designed as practical tools, not dogma. If they help you do what you were doing anyway (and they often do), then great: use 'em. But if they don't, then don't. They're there to serve you, not the other way around.
This is true, but note that the UML/patterns/OO newbie is in no position to determine that. One common mistake is to read the book, discard the parts you don't think is necessary, and then proceed with your design work. The rules that you chose to ignore were put there by pretty smart people, and there's a good chance they were put there for a good reason. When the design finally fails because you were missing something, the egotistical designer then blames the method.
The point is, I think the parent post was suggesting that the programmers in question may simply have broken the rules, and not actually found some instance where the methods really apply poorly. It's ego-boosting to think that what you do is unique and beyond the reach of old stuffy rules, but the truth is that most of us are doing things that have been done before.
This isn't to say that those cases don't exist, but that they're probably rarer than you think, especially if your team of programmers is trying it out for the first time, especially if you don't have a senior engineer already experienced in the method guiding your team. For the first time, at least, the instructions should be followed to the letter and strictly enforced. They should be dogma until you've at least went through a complete product life cycle with them.
What you suggest we've already tried for decades. The result is prevasively poor documentation and fragile designs.
...who absolutely positively -HATES- the idea of 'paired programming'? While I wholeheartedly agree with having lots of meetings and discussions during the design phase (requirements, functional spec, detailed design) and during the review phase (post mortem, code reviews) I feel that having two coders on one computer is extremely wasteful and unbelievably stressful.
When I'm in the 'zone' I can't talk with somebody else, I can't verbalize why I'm writing a code fragment the way I am writing it without getting yanked out of it. If the design is done well, and programmers are fairly equally competent, pairing two of them is going to probably be LESS productive than having only ONE, let alone two.
The only time I can see paired programming being useful would be in a tutoring way, where coder A that has lots of experience with the codebase is paired with coder B that has never seen it, but this is more for getting coder B up to speed rather than to improve productivity and code quality
Colour me stupid, but I don't pay any license fees to run my mp3 players. So who does pay?
Yet.
every content provider is looking to incorporate more and more DRM as the quality, cost, and ease of creation of copies improves.
the music industry doesn't care about people copying songs off the radio. it didn't even really get its panties in a bunch when CD-Rs first hit the market. or when mp3s hit the ftp servers. It went ballistic when anyone could download a single application and instantly find a never ending stream of perceptibility loss-less perfect digital copies.
likewise with the MPAA and DVD encryption, likewise with the new Cable Set-top standard.
They want to cut out MythTV, Tivo, splitters, H-cards, and cable descramblers. It's becoming too easy to get at the current data, so they want a change.
with the analog system working (fairly) well as is, why else would they create a new 'standard' for the digital system? It certainly isn't in the interest of the consumer.
Why doesn't Sony support the Blu-Ray with its stock rewritable feature? Why did Disney/Circuit City/et al try to push (the bad) Divx onto the market in the first place?
It isn't because consumers are clamoring for less control or cheaper movies.
The time is coming when content producers are going to have to realize that their profits will no longer come from format-updates (repurchasing 8-tracks as CDs, VHS classics as DVDs, etc), and will -not- come from service-style access to data. Classic TV advertising may even have to give way to pure product-placement campaigns.
Cable will realize that a move to pay-per-channel is the way to support content without advertising in our new time-shifted digital reality. Some people -will- pay $1/mo for TLC. Home Depot will still pay for product placements in Trading Spaces. Maybe the Super-station will go away - but the cable companies, and popular channels, need not.
the film industry has already shown that the theatre experience is not losing out to cheap cam copies. they've learned that feature-rich dvds or dirt-cheap dvds are preferred to the customer over hacked-together recompressed copies on filesharing networks.
The record companies will need to realize that to win with digital music requires providing the best quality, with the least hassle. They will need to realize that they must beat file-sharing on features. People will give up hunting around for a good (not mislabeled)256kbps rip of Britney's newest song - if they know they can just hit iTunes or its ilk and cough up $1.
Fair Use needs to win out. These purported 'losses' from file-sharing need to be revealed to be grossly overestimated fabrications. (A PSA from a supposed union set painter claiming that file sharing is killing the movie industry, and threatening his job - airing during it's highest grossing year of all time is particularly tactless)
DRM is the tool of the content dinosaur. If they concentrated on actual content piracy rings - where big money is being made off black-market copies, and abandoned their fruitless DRM research - their profits could be higher than ever.
But such is not the reaction of anti-competitive cabals. Being forced to -compete- is not what they do. Suing, threatening, bullying, bribing - these are the blunt instruments they wield instead of the precise tools of innovation, imagination and competition.
So in the meantime - expect every advance to carry DRM in the fine print.
Books With a Voice
Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.net) is well known for offering free electronic versions of famous public-domain texts. Now Telltale Weekly (telltaleweekly.com) wants to be its audio-book equivalent.
Telltale Weekly sells audio versions of mostly public-domain texts for as little as 25 cents to $1.50. After five years or 100,000 downloads, these works will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, meaning anyone can copy, distribute or even make commercial use of the audio files as long as they are properly attributed.
The files are in the MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.
This "cheap now, free later" philosophy will allow Telltale Weekly to cover costs while underwriting the creation of a free audio library, according to Alexander Wilson, 27, the site's founder and an actor and writer in Chapel Hill, N.C. The site plans to offer 50 public-domain works this year, many of them shorter texts that can be performed in less than 45 minutes. Mr. Wilson also plans to release at least 20 copyrighted works.
So far the site offers audio versions of 16 works, including the first section of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and Swift's "Modest Proposal." Audio versions of texts by Poe, Thoreau and Chekhov, among others, are planned.
Project Gutenberg itself is now dabbling in computer-generated audio versions of its books. But Mr. Wilson hopes to attract experienced voice actors to perform the works on his site. "Text-to-voice programs are practical for some purposes," he said. "But few people would choose to listen to them for pleasure." He acknowledged one advantage of computer-generated readings: "They do ensure a completely neutral interpretation of the text."
what the f&*^#$ is ogg? Some stupid linux invention?
From their site: "Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source." In other words, it has better compression than mp3, and since it's open source, you don't have to pay licensing fees on players that decode Ogg like you would with mp3.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh spare me your bombastic pomposity, you knob-knuckled, change
jingling, bulbous lipped, shulgus wearing, furled guinous. Just stop
speaking. Nothing escapes your drooling, gaping maw but gibberish, you
are unintelligible, your sense went swirling away with the rinse
cycle.
You have no business interacting with the conscious, your very
presence gives monkeys headaches. I can't believe that diminuitive,
dried up peach pit that rattles around in the space where a normal
human's brain should be is able to direct your palsied and wasted
limbs to achieve locomotion.
Your very personage is abhorrent to see in daylight. You ears are
blue-veined and freakish horrors of aerodynamics, your forehead has
creases so deep they are a haven for unclassified flora and fauna of
mysterious origin.
Each wheezing breath you take uses oxygen that by rights would be
better utilized by an autistic chimpanzee, and each exhalation fouls
the air with so vile a stench as to bring birds crashing down dead
from defoliated trees.
You wompler, you fraldersnash, you eater of curried laundry lint. You
have the audacity to daily inflict your existence on the innocent
people of this planet. HOW can you stand to be you?
What I hate the most is people with those hands free mobile ear/microphone sets. One of my colleagues whom I unfortunately have to work with alot has this annoying tendency to transition into a phonecall in the middle of a conversation. It annoys the hell out of everybody who has to deal with him since he has his phone switched to silent mode so there is no hint when somebody calls him, (which happens alot) causing him to drift off into a converstion whoever is on the phone and completely loose any interest in whoever he was talking to before. I don't think I have ever finsihed a conversation with that dude
You are correct. I saw it several months ago and thought it was so good I saved it. Sorry, I should have given credit.
It was first written by 'AKAImBatman'; I should have given credit.
Ok. My assembly is a little rusty, so bear with me. Let's say we have equivalent Java and C programs. They both have to run on a 386 or higher. (Bear with me. I haven't kept up with the MMX/SSE/SSE2 instructions, so I'll have to fake this a little.) Now, your C compiler will see that you want to store a 32 bit value, but has to generate code for a 386. So, it generates the code:
pop AX
STOSW 0x0005
pop AX
STOSW 0x0005
Even though the code may be running on a Pentium Pro (which is optmized for 32 bit code), it's still going to execute those 4 statements.
Now, the Java Hotspot compiler will start and notice the fact that you're running on a Pentium Pro. So when it converts the bytecode to machine code, it creates the following instructions:
pop EAX
STOD 0x0005
That's twice as fast as the C code!
Real code would tend to be running on modern processors, so this example is a little contrived. However, the JVM can (and will) use SSE instructions to do multiple calculations in one instruction, while the C code will be forced to generate non-SSE instructions to support the old Pentium Is out there.
Hotspot is also capable of analyzing the running code and regenerating even better assembly that would perform poorly in other circumstances. For example, let's say Hotspot notices that the bounds can't be exceeded on an array. Well, Hotspot will then recompile to remove the bounds checking.
Does that explain it better?
...a "cluster" of more or less randomly distributed and connected computers isn't such a bad idea.
:) But I think it would be worth a try.
On universities, 99% of computers run with nearly zero CPU load for most of the time. People read emails, surf the web, but for most of the time the computers idle. And then someone has some work reaoznajeszdy, waits in queue for a month, throws data on the university campus dedicated cluster, waits for results for a week and receives results that are invalid due to some mistake in input data, so whole procedure must be repeated all over.
Now imagine, we install a "cluster server" on all networked computers. Assign certain resources to the project and let our PC participate in that cluster. It loads a custom computational module for given task, loads data from some anonymous dude on the other end of the world and computes his project. Heaviest "daily" stuff gets finished within few hours. It doesn't really disturb you - works as "idle task", just like SETI@home or such. But, say, you're a raytracer. You prepare a nice animation in LightWave and would leave it overnight to render. Just upload it to the net and have it rendered in 5 minutes on the worldwide cluster. Cool, eh?
Of course the system could be abused. I think some "credit system" would be in order, so people who provide more, get better priority. Plus some way of authoring the "modules" so it couldn't be used to take over the computer. And of course this would be the first step to creating a self-conscious AI, good or evil
Why am I replying to trolls?
There are three real issues with software patents that could be fixed.
First, the interaction between patent law and antitrust law needs to be adjusted. If you have a dominant market position, you should't be able to use a patent to prevent interoperability with your de-facto standards. This is an antitrust issue because it's only a big problem when someone has market dominance. Interoperability with Microsoft Word is important. Interoperability with AbiWord is not.
This is not totally out of reach politically. Current antitrust law in the US and the EU arguably support this position, but enforcement is hard. A bright-line standard would help here.
Second, it needs to be clearly established that Government-mandated standards (ANSI, ISO, DIN, EU) preempt patents unless patent holders object prior to the issuance of the standard. The government standards organizations should be directed to adopt policies preventing the use of patented technology in standards unless the patent holder waives their rights under patent for all users of the standard.
Finally, "business method" patents seem to have been a mistake. However, the first one (4,346,442, the Merrill Lynch Cash Management Account, attaching a credit card to a brokerage account) has already expired.
These things do time out, and soon enough that it matters. The GIF patent has expired. The RSA patent has expired. The SyncSort patent has expired. All those technologies are still in use.
Patents do nothing but slow down an industry and promote laziness....
1) Ford, which is considered the model on how to build cars and do processes HAD to get around patents so that he could build a car that EVERYONE can afford.
2) Windsurfer which invented the windsurfing board had a patent, which they only enforced two years before the end of the patent. Until five years before the end of the patent there was no Wind surfing industry. Windsurfer then cashed in and forced bankruptcy of major windsurfers. Where is Windsurfer today? Sitting on money doing nothing.
3) Laser had a patent which caused nobody to do anything with lasers. Once the patent expired we ended up with laser pointers, last light shows, etc, etc..
4) Patents CANNOT be bought and defended by "small" people. Patents cost about 40,000 EUROS a pop and this is not money for the "small" company. This is money for the large company.
Now about your reference to MS and Internet Explorer. Say what you will, but Netscape was no better than Microsoft. I was around in the Netscape days and they were bastards. Once I represented a company who wanted to purchase five thousand licenses to Netscape. Netscape ignored the company because it was too small and companies like Deutsche Telekom were more important.
Microsoft might clone ideas, just like all of the other companies do as well in the industry. The software industry is like writing, we all clone!
The problem in software are the contracts. For example why do I have to buy Windows 5 times for a single computer?
Sir, I would have wished that you would have used your lawyer abilities to reign in the contracts instead of going for the easy cash in Patents. Remember you are going to be responsible for a mess that *I* have to live in.
I've got a Zaurus 5500, and love it for what I use it for, but a Palm seems to make a better PDA. So, I've come to the conclusion that a Linux handheld device isn't a PDA, but a small-sized computer. So, a Linux pda makes for a good platform if you are a unix developer who needs to write custom hand-held software. Also, while there are a bunch of Palm apps out there, not many are free. It's not that I have to have everything for free, but often times an app doesn't quite work the way I want, and I like to be able to tweek them a bit. An example, I found a good TI-85 calculator emulator, but the buttons looked awful. A bit of messing around with the xpm definitions, and now the button colors are defined in the config file. This is the kind of stuff that you just can't do with non-free apps that you find on Palm or PocketPC.
As for what I use mine for:
* Web lookups (i.e., looking up items in Internet phone books, TV listings, dictionary definitions)
* Other web browsing when it wouldn't due to to carry a laptop (meetings, nature's call, etc)
* Custom PIM app -- I wrote a web-based app which allows me to organize data and meeting notes in a unique way that suites me. On my Zaurus, I've got a version of the app served up by a local web server. Whenever I'm within wireless range, a background task automatically keeps the local database synced with the one on my server. (Once I perfect it, I'll put it up on sourceforge).
* Entertainment -- with a wireless card in the Zaurus, and one in my laptop, I can stream movies and music to the kids in the car served up by my laptop which I use for navigation. It also runs Mame.
This is true, but note that the UML/patterns/OO newbie is in no position to determine that. One common mistake is to read the book, discard the parts you don't think is necessary, and then proceed with your design work. The rules that you chose to ignore were put there by pretty smart people, and there's a good chance they were put there for a good reason. When the design finally fails because you were missing something, the egotistical designer then blames the method.
The point is, I think the parent post was suggesting that the programmers in question may simply have broken the rules, and not actually found some instance where the methods really apply poorly. It's ego-boosting to think that what you do is unique and beyond the reach of old stuffy rules, but the truth is that most of us are doing things that have been done before.
This isn't to say that those cases don't exist, but that they're probably rarer than you think, especially if your team of programmers is trying it out for the first time, especially if you don't have a senior engineer already experienced in the method guiding your team. For the first time, at least, the instructions should be followed to the letter and strictly enforced. They should be dogma until you've at least went through a complete product life cycle with them.
What you suggest we've already tried for decades. The result is prevasively poor documentation and fragile designs.
...who absolutely positively -HATES- the idea of 'paired programming'? While I wholeheartedly agree with having lots of meetings and discussions during the design phase (requirements, functional spec, detailed design) and during the review phase (post mortem, code reviews) I feel that having two coders on one computer is extremely wasteful and unbelievably stressful.
When I'm in the 'zone' I can't talk with somebody else, I can't verbalize why I'm writing a code fragment the way I am writing it without getting yanked out of it. If the design is done well, and programmers are fairly equally competent, pairing two of them is going to probably be LESS productive than having only ONE, let alone two.
The only time I can see paired programming being useful would be in a tutoring way, where coder A that has lots of experience with the codebase is paired with coder B that has never seen it, but this is more for getting coder B up to speed rather than to improve productivity and code quality
Colour me stupid, but I don't pay any license fees to run my mp3 players. So who does pay?
Yet.
every content provider is looking to incorporate more and more DRM as the quality, cost, and ease of creation of copies improves.
the music industry doesn't care about people copying songs off the radio. it didn't even really get its panties in a bunch when CD-Rs first hit the market. or when mp3s hit the ftp servers. It went ballistic when anyone could download a single application and instantly find a never ending stream of perceptibility loss-less perfect digital copies.
likewise with the MPAA and DVD encryption, likewise with the new Cable Set-top standard.
They want to cut out MythTV, Tivo, splitters, H-cards, and cable descramblers. It's becoming too easy to get at the current data, so they want a change.
with the analog system working (fairly) well as is, why else would they create a new 'standard' for the digital system? It certainly isn't in the interest of the consumer.
Why doesn't Sony support the Blu-Ray with its stock rewritable feature?
Why did Disney/Circuit City/et al try to push (the bad) Divx onto the market in the first place?
It isn't because consumers are clamoring for less control or cheaper movies.
The time is coming when content producers are going to have to realize that their profits will no longer come from format-updates (repurchasing 8-tracks as CDs, VHS classics as DVDs, etc), and will -not- come from service-style access to data. Classic TV advertising may even have to give way to pure product-placement campaigns.
Cable will realize that a move to pay-per-channel is the way to support content without advertising in our new time-shifted digital reality. Some people -will- pay $1/mo for TLC. Home Depot will still pay for product placements in Trading Spaces. Maybe the Super-station will go away - but the cable companies, and popular channels, need not.
the film industry has already shown that the theatre experience is not losing out to cheap cam copies. they've learned that feature-rich dvds or dirt-cheap dvds are preferred to the customer over hacked-together recompressed copies on filesharing networks.
The record companies will need to realize that to win with digital music requires providing the best quality, with the least hassle. They will need to realize that they must beat file-sharing on features. People will give up hunting around for a good (not mislabeled)256kbps rip of Britney's newest song - if they know they can just hit iTunes or its ilk and cough up $1.
Fair Use needs to win out. These purported 'losses' from file-sharing need to be revealed to be grossly overestimated fabrications. (A PSA from a supposed union set painter claiming that file sharing is killing the movie industry, and threatening his job - airing during it's highest grossing year of all time is particularly tactless)
DRM is the tool of the content dinosaur. If they concentrated on actual content piracy rings - where big money is being made off black-market copies, and abandoned their fruitless DRM research - their profits could be higher than ever.
But such is not the reaction of anti-competitive cabals. Being forced to -compete- is not what they do. Suing, threatening, bullying, bribing - these are the blunt instruments they wield instead of the precise tools of innovation, imagination and competition.
So in the meantime - expect every advance to carry DRM in the fine print.
Books With a Voice Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.net) is well known for offering free electronic versions of famous public-domain texts. Now Telltale Weekly (telltaleweekly.com) wants to be its audio-book equivalent. Telltale Weekly sells audio versions of mostly public-domain texts for as little as 25 cents to $1.50. After five years or 100,000 downloads, these works will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, meaning anyone can copy, distribute or even make commercial use of the audio files as long as they are properly attributed. The files are in the MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats. This "cheap now, free later" philosophy will allow Telltale Weekly to cover costs while underwriting the creation of a free audio library, according to Alexander Wilson, 27, the site's founder and an actor and writer in Chapel Hill, N.C. The site plans to offer 50 public-domain works this year, many of them shorter texts that can be performed in less than 45 minutes. Mr. Wilson also plans to release at least 20 copyrighted works. So far the site offers audio versions of 16 works, including the first section of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and Swift's "Modest Proposal." Audio versions of texts by Poe, Thoreau and Chekhov, among others, are planned. Project Gutenberg itself is now dabbling in computer-generated audio versions of its books. But Mr. Wilson hopes to attract experienced voice actors to perform the works on his site. "Text-to-voice programs are practical for some purposes," he said. "But few people would choose to listen to them for pleasure." He acknowledged one advantage of computer-generated readings: "They do ensure a completely neutral interpretation of the text."
what the f&*^#$ is ogg? Some stupid linux invention?
From their site: "Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source." In other words, it has better compression than mp3, and since it's open source, you don't have to pay licensing fees on players that decode Ogg like you would with mp3.