Although what you say is true, and I generally agree with your closing comment, you missed the bigger point of my post: TV as a display medium for digital pictures is not enough to make the technology useful for mass adoption. People do much more than just view photographs: they are truly an extension of their own memory. They store them, treasure them, carry them around with them, share them, and yes, view them.
There is much more infrastructure currently that allows that digital camera to be viewed on a television set. Digital photographs replace, necessarily so, paper photos; and so all needs that are addressed by the latter need to be fulfilled by the former. This includes appropriate dependable long-term storage, mechanisms for easily sharing and displaying them on demand, portability and constant availability, etc., and all of this cheaply and readily. The television set provides for just fraction of this.
But even if it did provide an acceptable replacement, the new technology needs to do offer a clear advantage over the previous one, including crossing such boundaries as affordability, cultural inertia, and apathy against change.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that it is stupid or useless to view photographs on a TV, just that if that is the only thing the technology can offer at an affordable price, it is not nearly enough to supplant the tried and true paper photograph. Thus, digital photography was not only a technological problem, but an infrastructure and cultural one.
NO! It is not that. It is like Xerox realizing that the future of office systems involves some sort of electronic mechanism of communication, and possibly the recently emerging computers, that most likely will obsolete paper; and then planning their future business towards this unknown environment before the rug is inevitably pulled from under them. So they failed to recognized individual applications of this paradigm, but they certainly did not confined themselves to a paper-full future; they reacted strategically, if not with perfect insight.
Kodak, on the other hand, was given insight into a potential future of photography: a future that may eventually dispense with paper and developing emulsions, which was at the time their core business. Whether it would be digital cameras or magical pixies in a bubble didn't matter--there was a clear potential for their core business to someday in the future become obsolete, and they ignored it. They decided to put their research and development resources into the then current technology du jour: instant photography, because that's what the masses were buying at the time.
That was shortsighted and stupid, and they eventually paid for it.
That is kind of my point. I extend this further by positing that it is not only the state of the technological arts of the device, but the preexistence of an ecosystem to facilitate or support such device and its application--and ultimately create a need or desire for it--that drives its adoption by society. This ecosystem is not only technological in nature, but cultural, environmental, and philosophical.
If paper is such a successful, cheap, stable, and versatile medium, why would anybody want to replace it with a purely intangible format? This is not a shortsighted question, but a very real and relevant one today; and perhaps it may not be answerable without such intangible format proving itself useful and superior in other applications, enabling its use in- and promoting its demand for the photography field.
I still say that the adoption of the personal computer, among other things, immensely influenced the subsequent adoption of the digital camera. But the former was not invented for or because of the latter. Perhaps serendipity is the one known factor (in the sense that chance is known to exist) that drives the adoption of technology.
In other words, it is seldom obvious how a truly novel idea can ever be applied to current real-world problems, and it is never certain how it will function in a future and unknown environment.
Wait! How can an internal--and unknown to the outside--project at Kodak threaten the company's current business? I would imagine it would provide unique insight into how to direct their business in the future.
Declining to consider an interesting--and at the time, secret--invention that my change the nature of your business in the future, is not a strategic move; it's just plain shortsighted and stupid.
Not quite. If you read the original blog entry from Mr. Sasson, you'll realize that they themselves had no idea of any real world application of the device. They built it because they thought it was a nifty technological problem to solve, without any clear direction as to how it would apply in the real world.
Those questions asked by the audience after the demo are as relevant today as they were back then:
Why would anyone ever want to view his or her pictures on a TV? Indeed. If you consider how digital photography has captured the mass consumer market you'll see that there are many factors that contributed to this adoption: the ability to share photos, to keep and view them on very personalized portable devices, e-mail, web blogs, JPEG, the Internet, personal computers, etc. Many of these could not have even been conceived back in 1975, but none of them include just merely passively watching a photograph on a TV screen.
How would you store these images? It must be an efficient, stable and non-volatile mechanism; one that at least outlasts photo paper and costs at most as much, otherwise there is absolutely no advantage to the consumer. Did any such affordable mechanisms exist during 1975? Perhaps, but we can know for sure that personal computers as we know them now, did not; so there wasn't a readily available storage medium of which consumers could take advantage.
What does an electronic photo album look like? We know now, of course, but it wasn't even obvious during the advent of the first set of consumer digital cameras how to best store, display, and enjoy and share a digital photo collection; apart from the then typical hierarchical file/folder storage system.
When would this type of approach be available to the consumer? As Mr. Sasson suggested to his audience in 1975, ignoring all practical and philosophical questions above, and considering this purely as a technological problem; Moore's law predicts it would have been 15 to 20 years. That would have put the device on consumers' hands in the early- to mid-1990s. As it turned out, that was overly optimistic--but not by much! Now, take into consideration that personal computers--the primary storage and central point of digital photography collections--did not become massively popular until sometime in the 1990s and it should be obvious why it may have taken a few years more for the idea to truly catch on.
The real lesson of this story is that novel ideas and interesting inventions cannot amount to much without an actual real-world application that solves a real problem, addresses a real need, or enhances a real existing application. Additionally, we can learn that sometimes these interesting but otherwise useless (in practical terms) inventions can indeed achieve popularity and become useful--or even necessary--by previously unforeseen factors aligning serendipitously to provide the perfect mix of technology, application, and demand for them to evolve and flourish to fill that need.
Mr. Sasson says that, back in 1975, they had no idea what a portable, all-digital, film-less photo camera could amount to, nor how or why it would be used. Yet they were intuitively impressed that it would necessarily change things. And in that they were presciently correct.
>> Many cheapskates will pay if they can't get it for free, especially if they really want that game. (emphasis mine)
And herein lies the argument: all things being equal, and all games being as desirable, yes, a cheapskate would purchase them. But what if not all things are equal? What if not all games provide the same sort of attraction? What if the game is good enough to play but not worth the retail price?
These two are not mutually exclusive, yet this single point seems to be missed by virtually everyone involved in this discussion.
It is certainly conceivable that a cheapskate will not purchase a DRM-laden game for, say, $50.00 USD just because he cannot play it for free, while at the same time he may jump at the chance if the same game was offered for just $30.00 USD, sans DRM.
So what you are saying is that the actual price that the market will bear is not enough to cover your expenses, and yet this is somehow the consumer's problem?
I agree with the OP that the piracy issue suggests a problem with the price and perceived value of the product. DRM is not going to fix a broken business model.
Has anybody considered the possibility that perhaps the game is not really that good? Perhaps only a very few thought it was worth paying for, while many more discovered the game, and pirated it to check it out. It is conceivable that the latter group may have thought the game good enough to check out but not worth the price.
This scenario implies that imposing DRM would not have helped at all. I would even posit that it would have hurt sales, by limiting the exposure that the game had.
In any case, percentage of users means absolutely nothing. There is no reliable or realistic way to identify which of those pirated copies would have turned into a sale had piracy not being available.
Unless the connection is through HTTP and--in an inspired moment of sanity--you decided to allow your web browser to use that port freely.
Seriously, I thought the same thing, and then I realized that I already gave Firefox access to port 80 and 443, specifically because it was insanely annoying to be prompted for permissions per host. Damn!
I just won't upgrade. I personally mitigate my risks with additional factors, such as not surfing into strange sites and using a combination of additional security layers. I also seem to be using Safari more often recently, ever since I was able to set up AdBlock in it.
The "PSOne" came out later as a smaller version of the PlayStation, once the PS2 was introduced. You obviously did not have the original one. My mom made me keep the cabinet in the garage.
If by "concept" you mean something that already existed in other applications, but just cobbled together as a browser application.
Lets be clear here, most of those "computer science" innovations introduced in Google Wave were things that have existed in many different forms before, but usually as dedicated protocols and applications; Wave attempted to do it in JavaScript, tunneled through the stateless HTTP.
Because computer scientists have always been baffled by the purely theoretical challenge of implementing "real time typing", that staple of old AIM clients from the 1990s, in JavaScript.
I read this a lot, in Slashdot and in other sites. It seems that, in spite of all the press and praise Wave received initially, when pressed most people admit that, well it was buggy, it crashed a lot, and it was sort of confusing--then turn around completely and say something to the effect that it was still great.
Why? I don't get it. Kind of like the Matrix sequels, you know, they were awesome and brilliant--except for the fact that they sucked and bored me to tears.
Because "phones running Android" is not the same as, say, "phones from Motorola", or "phones from HTC". Those two would make a more valid comparison: i.e. a single device from a manufacturer to a device from another manufacturer.
I thought we were talking about preservation. His point was that, emulators claiming that their existence is for the sake of preservation should emulate* MAME in that regard.
Hey, I had one of those! I bought it at a game store for about 20 bucks (I later had the feeling that had I haggled a bit, the guy would have pay me to take it, but I didn't know what it was at the time).
I thought it was awesome... for about 15 minutes. That's when the headache kicked in. Me and my girlfriend played it a few times, and thought it was rather fun, but couldn't get pass the eye strain and headaches it induced.
>> I'm sort of nitpicking here, but neither of these are quite true. You can have active styluses that don't require any contact at all, and for fingers you can have non-capacitive touch screens that work by pressure. Indeed, such touch screens have a significant benefit: you can use them with gloves. (You can't do this with, say, the iPhone, unless you buy special gloves.) You can use them with simpler styluses.
Yes, nitpicking. The technology and its implementation has changed over the years, that is really not relevant. My point was that touch screens--as implemented successfully in the market today--is a different technology than the stylus-pads from before.
>> To play devil's advocate, I would say it's not so much because the technology has improved enough to make it a good solution for image editing, but rather because the technology has improved enough to make it a good solution for most tasks you'd expect to do on a phone.
Agreed. I was not implying that it is a good solution for image editing. My point there was that a newly popular technology not being used before for a specific application does not a priori preclude it from being useful for that application.
>> But it's not really any more silly than saying that, because touch-sensitive screens on phones are now commonplace, that technology would be good for image editing.
I did not claim that touch-sensitive screens would be good for image editing because they are popular in phones; I claimed that its inclusion in previous implementations of a specific application is not a prerequisite for its utility. New applications for old inventions are defined all the time.
Who's to say whether it is good for image editing or not? Those who use it, of course, would decide. You seem to agree with this. However, it not being used before for image editing does not instantly disqualify it.
Slashdot Mirror
Although what you say is true, and I generally agree with your closing comment, you missed the bigger point of my post: TV as a display medium for digital pictures is not enough to make the technology useful for mass adoption. People do much more than just view photographs: they are truly an extension of their own memory. They store them, treasure them, carry them around with them, share them, and yes, view them.
There is much more infrastructure currently that allows that digital camera to be viewed on a television set. Digital photographs replace, necessarily so, paper photos; and so all needs that are addressed by the latter need to be fulfilled by the former. This includes appropriate dependable long-term storage, mechanisms for easily sharing and displaying them on demand, portability and constant availability, etc., and all of this cheaply and readily. The television set provides for just fraction of this.
But even if it did provide an acceptable replacement, the new technology needs to do offer a clear advantage over the previous one, including crossing such boundaries as affordability, cultural inertia, and apathy against change.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that it is stupid or useless to view photographs on a TV, just that if that is the only thing the technology can offer at an affordable price, it is not nearly enough to supplant the tried and true paper photograph. Thus, digital photography was not only a technological problem, but an infrastructure and cultural one.
-dZ.
NO! It is not that. It is like Xerox realizing that the future of office systems involves some sort of electronic mechanism of communication, and possibly the recently emerging computers, that most likely will obsolete paper; and then planning their future business towards this unknown environment before the rug is inevitably pulled from under them. So they failed to recognized individual applications of this paradigm, but they certainly did not confined themselves to a paper-full future; they reacted strategically, if not with perfect insight.
Kodak, on the other hand, was given insight into a potential future of photography: a future that may eventually dispense with paper and developing emulsions, which was at the time their core business. Whether it would be digital cameras or magical pixies in a bubble didn't matter--there was a clear potential for their core business to someday in the future become obsolete, and they ignored it. They decided to put their research and development resources into the then current technology du jour: instant photography, because that's what the masses were buying at the time.
That was shortsighted and stupid, and they eventually paid for it.
-dZ.
That is kind of my point. I extend this further by positing that it is not only the state of the technological arts of the device, but the preexistence of an ecosystem to facilitate or support such device and its application--and ultimately create a need or desire for it--that drives its adoption by society. This ecosystem is not only technological in nature, but cultural, environmental, and philosophical.
If paper is such a successful, cheap, stable, and versatile medium, why would anybody want to replace it with a purely intangible format? This is not a shortsighted question, but a very real and relevant one today; and perhaps it may not be answerable without such intangible format proving itself useful and superior in other applications, enabling its use in- and promoting its demand for the photography field.
I still say that the adoption of the personal computer, among other things, immensely influenced the subsequent adoption of the digital camera. But the former was not invented for or because of the latter. Perhaps serendipity is the one known factor (in the sense that chance is known to exist) that drives the adoption of technology.
In other words, it is seldom obvious how a truly novel idea can ever be applied to current real-world problems, and it is never certain how it will function in a future and unknown environment.
-dZ.
Wait! How can an internal--and unknown to the outside--project at Kodak threaten the company's current business? I would imagine it would provide unique insight into how to direct their business in the future.
Declining to consider an interesting--and at the time, secret--invention that my change the nature of your business in the future, is not a strategic move; it's just plain shortsighted and stupid.
-dZ.
Not quite. If you read the original blog entry from Mr. Sasson, you'll realize that they themselves had no idea of any real world application of the device. They built it because they thought it was a nifty technological problem to solve, without any clear direction as to how it would apply in the real world.
Those questions asked by the audience after the demo are as relevant today as they were back then:
The real lesson of this story is that novel ideas and interesting inventions cannot amount to much without an actual real-world application that solves a real problem, addresses a real need, or enhances a real existing application. Additionally, we can learn that sometimes these interesting but otherwise useless (in practical terms) inventions can indeed achieve popularity and become useful--or even necessary--by previously unforeseen factors aligning serendipitously to provide the perfect mix of technology, application, and demand for them to evolve and flourish to fill that need.
Mr. Sasson says that, back in 1975, they had no idea what a portable, all-digital, film-less photo camera could amount to, nor how or why it would be used. Yet they were intuitively impressed that it would necessarily change things. And in that they were presciently correct.
-dZ.
How is this news? Can't you cut a laser beam by just, hum, putting something on its path?
-dZ?
Hum... I thought that was Malthus, not Darwin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
But what do I know, we're all going to die anyway.
-dZ.
>> Many cheapskates will pay if they can't get it for free, especially if they really want that game.
(emphasis mine)
And herein lies the argument: all things being equal, and all games being as desirable, yes, a cheapskate would purchase them. But what if not all things are equal? What if not all games provide the same sort of attraction? What if the game is good enough to play but not worth the retail price?
These two are not mutually exclusive, yet this single point seems to be missed by virtually everyone involved in this discussion.
It is certainly conceivable that a cheapskate will not purchase a DRM-laden game for, say, $50.00 USD just because he cannot play it for free, while at the same time he may jump at the chance if the same game was offered for just $30.00 USD, sans DRM.
-dZ.
So what you are saying is that the actual price that the market will bear is not enough to cover your expenses, and yet this is somehow the consumer's problem?
I agree with the OP that the piracy issue suggests a problem with the price and perceived value of the product. DRM is not going to fix a broken business model.
-dZ.
Has anybody considered the possibility that perhaps the game is not really that good? Perhaps only a very few thought it was worth paying for, while many more discovered the game, and pirated it to check it out. It is conceivable that the latter group may have thought the game good enough to check out but not worth the price.
This scenario implies that imposing DRM would not have helped at all. I would even posit that it would have hurt sales, by limiting the exposure that the game had.
In any case, percentage of users means absolutely nothing. There is no reliable or realistic way to identify which of those pirated copies would have turned into a sale had piracy not being available.
-dZ.
They don't use Firefox in the Enterprise, silly. The Computer has a direct connection to the Federation Network through a specialized protocol.
-dZ.
Unless the connection is through HTTP and--in an inspired moment of sanity--you decided to allow your web browser to use that port freely.
Seriously, I thought the same thing, and then I realized that I already gave Firefox access to port 80 and 443, specifically because it was insanely annoying to be prompted for permissions per host. Damn!
I just won't upgrade. I personally mitigate my risks with additional factors, such as not surfing into strange sites and using a combination of additional security layers. I also seem to be using Safari more often recently, ever since I was able to set up AdBlock in it.
-dZ.
Double *whoosh*!
I thought the part about "My mom made me keep the cabinet in the garage" would have given it away. Silly me.
-dZ.
The "PSOne" came out later as a smaller version of the PlayStation, once the PS2 was introduced. You obviously did not have the original one. My mom made me keep the cabinet in the garage.
-dZ.
You mixed your imperial and metric units again.
-dZ.
If by "concept" you mean something that already existed in other applications, but just cobbled together as a browser application.
Lets be clear here, most of those "computer science" innovations introduced in Google Wave were things that have existed in many different forms before, but usually as dedicated protocols and applications; Wave attempted to do it in JavaScript, tunneled through the stateless HTTP.
That in itself is questionable.
-dZ.
Because computer scientists have always been baffled by the purely theoretical challenge of implementing "real time typing", that staple of old AIM clients from the 1990s, in JavaScript.
-dZ.
Another one of these?
"It was great, except that it sucked when I used it. But still great."
I really don't get it.
-dZ.
I read this a lot, in Slashdot and in other sites. It seems that, in spite of all the press and praise Wave received initially, when pressed most people admit that, well it was buggy, it crashed a lot, and it was sort of confusing--then turn around completely and say something to the effect that it was still great.
Why? I don't get it. Kind of like the Matrix sequels, you know, they were awesome and brilliant--except for the fact that they sucked and bored me to tears.
-dZ.
Because "phones running Android" is not the same as, say, "phones from Motorola", or "phones from HTC". Those two would make a more valid comparison: i.e. a single device from a manufacturer to a device from another manufacturer.
-dZ.
I was very excited when I heard about it, but then it just sucked. I'm now not expecting anything better from the upcoming contemporary Tron movie.
dZ.
I thought we were talking about preservation. His point was that, emulators claiming that their existence is for the sake of preservation should emulate* MAME in that regard.
-dZ.
* Sorry, no pun intended.
I don't know about Q*Bert in the ColecoVision, but the arcade version was very popular. It is still one of my favorites, along with Pac-Man and Joust.
I think I'll fire up MAME when I get home tonight.
Damn! there goes the week. Thanks for that.
-dZ.
Hey, I had one of those! I bought it at a game store for about 20 bucks (I later had the feeling that had I haggled a bit, the guy would have pay me to take it, but I didn't know what it was at the time).
I thought it was awesome... for about 15 minutes. That's when the headache kicked in. Me and my girlfriend played it a few times, and thought it was rather fun, but couldn't get pass the eye strain and headaches it induced.
Ah, memories.
-dZ.
>> I'm sort of nitpicking here, but neither of these are quite true. You can have active styluses that don't require any contact at all, and for fingers you can have non-capacitive touch screens that work by pressure. Indeed, such touch screens have a significant benefit: you can use them with gloves. (You can't do this with, say, the iPhone, unless you buy special gloves.) You can use them with simpler styluses.
Yes, nitpicking. The technology and its implementation has changed over the years, that is really not relevant. My point was that touch screens--as implemented successfully in the market today--is a different technology than the stylus-pads from before.
>> To play devil's advocate, I would say it's not so much because the technology has improved enough to make it a good solution for image editing, but rather because the technology has improved enough to make it a good solution for most tasks you'd expect to do on a phone.
Agreed. I was not implying that it is a good solution for image editing. My point there was that a newly popular technology not being used before for a specific application does not a priori preclude it from being useful for that application.
>> But it's not really any more silly than saying that, because touch-sensitive screens on phones are now commonplace, that technology would be good for image editing.
I did not claim that touch-sensitive screens would be good for image editing because they are popular in phones; I claimed that its inclusion in previous implementations of a specific application is not a prerequisite for its utility. New applications for old inventions are defined all the time.
Who's to say whether it is good for image editing or not? Those who use it, of course, would decide. You seem to agree with this. However, it not being used before for image editing does not instantly disqualify it.
-dZ.