If you put a free as in beer website as more evil than a dongle-encryped piece of crap that you pay thousands of dollars for.
FTFY. Nobody gets points for distributing freeware, particularly if the freeware is just a portal to ads, pay services, and personal data mining.
People pay thousands of dollars for Linux support contracts and Linux is not a piece of crap. Well, it's a little bit of a piece of crap here and there, if it wasn't a little bit crappy they wouldn't be able to sell the support contracts, would they?:)
Something cool about the Behringer BCF is that it has motorized faders, and the fader moves can be controlled through non-proprietary messages, which is pretty unusual and awesome. The fader legends on the BCF are null in the middle, because they're meant to be used for organ drawbars and parameter automation, so that makes them a bit more generalist than regular flying faders, which usually null toward the top.
Also, the BCF gives you an EXPRESSION PEDAL input! Don't knock it till you try it, gives you two hands free for controlling a continuous parameter. I've used an expression pedal to control shuttle speed on a video playback.
Note well before going down this route: MIDI controllers are optimized for very good time resolution and fast response, but a MIDI continuous controller like a knob will generally only have 7 bits of resolution. Some controllers offer better but the message format isn't always standard. I use the 2-octave keyboard version of a Novation ZERO SL Mk 2, this has plenty of buttons, long faders, and detentless soft-knobs: set up a MIDI router and you're off.
If you have an iPad you can also design your own knob/fader/button/X-Y pad interfaces with an OSC client, OSC controls aren't limited to 7 bits and there are plenty of libraries and utilities for handling OSC messages.
I've seen several network pilots, they still cost mid six-figures, read a below-the-line budget before you start speculating on this. A pilot for a big show, like Lost, can cost anywhere from $10-$20 million (I believe Terra Nova was about $22 million). Individual episodes of something like The Sopranos were $2 million; a season might run $40 million including amortized costs, assuming you can bet on amortization, which is a tall order considering you basically put every season up to a vote.
I mean what you're proposing could work, but it would be a fundamental shift in how shows are made, who gets paid, and what sort of quality they have to offer. The people who make this stuff now, not just producers but the directors and actors and artists, would be dragged kicking and screaming, because they'd know, probably rightly, that the shows were going to look like crap and their paycheck was going down the tubes in the process.
The worst part would be having to submit to some sort of democratic process -- at least when a director whores himself out to a studio he only has to do it once to a couple guys, and not have to engage in it constantly on some 24-7 marketing campaign to get his show funded and then seen (see Delgo for an early example of this phenomenon). Your scheme spells democracy, and artists hate democracy; they'd rather just pitch their idea to 10 people who understand what the hell they're talking about, instead of having to convince a million bored and distracted people to please give him that $10 instead of putting it into Trasformers part 34, and then constantly convince them to NOT withdraw their money after every unfavorable Aint it Cool News story.
Actually you could self-finance if you shot a "pilot" that looked like this, I did this in January and I think it set them back about $5k. The problem is that if you wanted to produce something like this without calling in a ton of favors it would have cost about $60-$80k, and to produce an entire movie that looked like this would cost you at least $50 million -- and now that the guy playing Owen in the short is now in the new Resident Evil movie shooting now, we're fucked and he'd want several million to appear, probably.
Someone produces a pilot, releases it to the public.
Where do you get for the money for the pilot? And are you going to offer your backers a mere equity stake, with the proviso that viewers are under no obligation to pay, and if the sum doesn't meet your expenses (let alone profitably) you have to give everyone's money back? And then, just to pour salt in the wound, you're going to tell your backers that you're going to intentionally ignore the entire existing copyright infrastructure, which could be making you thousands of non-refundable dollars, just to prove the viability of the medium? People have been trying this, with The Tunnel for example, and it just doesn't work, not as a business model.
Prepaying for entertainment, really the patronage model in general, has always been very flaky as a business proposition. Mozart was barely able to subsist on subscriptions, and he was the greatest composer alive, well-respected in his day in the cultural capitol of Europe, surrounded by very wealthy, patronage-oriented people, and even HE took the simple step of only allowing subscribers into his concerts; if he were able to sell recordings he'd be a millionaire. Nowadays being a prepaid artist essentially means you work for the government, or live off a private endowment's largesse, or make commercial films -- crowdsourcing just can't make the ends meet. The biggest kickstarter projects ever gain about maybe $100,000, and I've worked on absolutely tiny films, non-union and no stars, shot as far away from Hollywood as we could get, and it still cost $250k to make something that a distributor would take a look at.
Luckily Sam Raimi picked it up and graciously put his name on it. And that's the nature of pre-selling entertainment, it's all about name recognition and stars. Pre-selling pilots and concepts would make celebrity and stardom even more intense -- Adam Sandler could easily get 1,000,000 to give him $10 each for films for a film sight unseen, but the next great talent? Good luck finding him without slogging through hours upon hours of slush pile on Youtube.
The first is that you are being paid directly by the people who want to watch it, you don't have to convince advertisers that it's sufficiently popular first.
This is the biggest challenge, nobody's ever proposed a system where you're on one side of the cash register and Peter Jackson, or J. J. Abrams or whoever, is on the other. Apple has a great infrastructure to sell individual programs or a "channel app," and 30% might not be onerous today, but it doesn't really give content producers enough leverage to switch to a different system if it doesn't work out, and producers specifically want to avoid the situation record labels found themselves in, where Apple could dictate what price a song was sold at. Amazon generally reserves the right to decide what price to sell your show at from the outset.
Netflix won't let producers charge premiums or make any sort of price differentiation on the Instant Queue.
As Starz discovered, Google is happy to carry your channel for free, but they don't take support seriously and they're clearly most focused on pushing free ad-supported content.
It's pretty clear you need some sort of intermediary to help people find programming, market it, and perhaps package it into retail-able chunks, because a la carte everything would probably kill a lot of good television. But the sort of deals aggregators, search engines and the mega-app-stores are offering now just aren't very favorable. I work with a lot of independent filmmakers, and I just finished a web series for Fox interactive a few months ago, unless you have a major outlet like Netflix committed to promoting your show and sticking it under people's noses, online distribution doesn't really pay the bills as is -- all the money seems to disappear with the people in the middle, and filmmakers talk about iTunes or Amazon in the same terms I used to hear musicians talk about labels.
I've used the Google TVs, I work for Sony but even my employee discount couldn't get me to buy one of the things. It's just a Roku, granted with the world's worst interface, but even if its UI was better, and even if it had the content, it didn't really justify itself by being any different or better in terms of function.
The complication here is that 'a new kind of TV' isn't fundamentally a technology problem, it's primarily a business problem. The new TV will come when somebody invents a better way for viewers and producers to come to a bargain, and convinces viewers and producers to go with the new system. It's a huge negotiation and political fight -- most of the technology already exists. The only major tech hurdle I could see is that I don't think the US or many less-developed countries actually have the level of internet service necessary to provide everyone with their four to six hours of TV per day,
Sony is at least competent and well-positioned to bargain with rightsholders and package technology that already exists, and to partner with a major internet provider (Sony and Comcast have been doing business together for years) to pull the cables.
Kagi charges about 30%, so does eSellerate, and neither of them support remotely as good copy protection. If you were selling brick and mortar, you might be able to get your costs under 30% of the sticker price if you get volumes in the millions. Manufacturing for a B&M requires minimum runs of thousands, tooling, printing, so even if you can snag a better-than-30% ratio, you've still gotta come up with tens of $k just to start a run, put stuff in a channel, manage that channel, market it...
Apple profiting means there will be iPads next year. If everybody making Android tablets is losing money, that means step 2 for tablet manufacturers and tablet developers is officially ???.
They run it as an at-cost loss leader. Amazon has great streaming selection but a crappy tablet, so they subsidize the tablet. Apple has a great tablet but doesn't offer streaming as a complementing option, so the subsidize the things they do offer.
What's weird is that that breakdown separates iPhone and iPod touch into separate columns, even though they run the same browser. (Also for whatever reason, the bar graph and line graph views of the same data give values that differ by several percent.)
I mean you want a link for actual stats... here. The discrepancy with StatCounter is that they don't call an iPad "mobile," which wouldn't seem to matter except that it literally gives one browser a 20% advantage. They probably should at least account for that, iPads are 25 million ad-viewing, website-browsing machines.
Why exactly is IOS the benchmark? It's a minority platform regardless of how devote its followers are.
It is not a minority of mobile browsing. A majority of people run Android but they seem to use their phones more like featurephones.
It's also a good benchmark because it's a relatively old, known and predictable quantity. Everybody knows what mobile Safari is and does, its competitive and it's been out for a long time, it doesn't do anything remarkably novel or unusual that would make it difficult to compare to other browsers, and the experience of using it is basically the same regardless of hardware.
Reasonable conclusion: you cannot predict the reliability of a phone based on what OS it runs. Continue using build quality, manufacturer and components to evaluate the reliability of phones.
If you see a phone with an apple on a back it's liable to be more reliable than a phone with a green robot on the back, on average, but now we're talking about branding, not OS. The more people try to turn Android into a consumer brand, the more it muddies the water on these issues, but Android people feel a need to conflate Android into a consumer brand, because they want to characterize Android mobile products and Apple mobile products as being in some sort of zero-sum conflict among peers, when they aren't peers and aren't for the most part in a zero-sum competition.
But seriously, for the folks with Siri, is it that useful? Do you use that often?
Three times today, it's just a lot faster for making reminders and alarms, and having good to-do action items that are ridiculously easy to make, and trigger by location, make the phone much more valuable. I've used other GTD solutions and to do lists, and while it's easy to take out your phone and type a to-do in, you did generally have to stop doing what it was you were doing, and it always gave you a good excuse to not try; when you converse with the phone you can keep doing what you're doing and not miss a beat, and so if something pings in your head suddenly that you have to remember, you don't have an excuse to put off typing it in. It sounds stupid but it's just much more ergonomic.
I guess you could say I have zero attention span, but, well, it's really the opposite... being able to use your voice lets you not take your mind off the thing you're doing, instead of switching contexts to your phone, to your job, to your emails and back.
Siri and the dictation are also good in the car, where you can respond to people's text messages in kind without ever looking down.
Slashdot Mirror
FTFY. Nobody gets points for distributing freeware, particularly if the freeware is just a portal to ads, pay services, and personal data mining.
People pay thousands of dollars for Linux support contracts and Linux is not a piece of crap. Well, it's a little bit of a piece of crap here and there, if it wasn't a little bit crappy they wouldn't be able to sell the support contracts, would they? :)
But they weren't obligated to promise it in the first place.
If there's some sort of hierarchy it works like:
1) Release nothing, offer service (Google search, Salesforce.com)
2) Distribute dongle-encrypted binaries (Pro Tools, AutoCad)
3) Distribute binaries (Mango, Google Android apps, iOS)
4) Distribute binaries, distribute open source to the open components (Mac OS X)
5) Distribute binaries, distribute source on binary delivery (Android)
6) Maintain public source tree, no one gets the bleeding-edge source before anyone else (Linux kernel)
7) Distribute source with a permissive license (Apache)
And thene there's the various support levels:
1) Fuck you (a lot of software)
2) Check out the forum (Apple level 1)
3) Give us a call and we'll charge you by the hour (Microsoft, enterprise Linux)
4) Submit a ticket but we won't tell you anything after that (Android)
5) Bring the software into the shop and we'll see what we can do with it in 10 minutes, if you live in a city (Apple Genius Bar)
6) Submit a ticket, recruit people to vote on it, post bounties for it, and follow it to resolution (Firefox)
The battery would die in 45 minutes?
Something cool about the Behringer BCF is that it has motorized faders, and the fader moves can be controlled through non-proprietary messages, which is pretty unusual and awesome. The fader legends on the BCF are null in the middle, because they're meant to be used for organ drawbars and parameter automation, so that makes them a bit more generalist than regular flying faders, which usually null toward the top.
Also, the BCF gives you an EXPRESSION PEDAL input! Don't knock it till you try it, gives you two hands free for controlling a continuous parameter. I've used an expression pedal to control shuttle speed on a video playback.
Note well before going down this route: MIDI controllers are optimized for very good time resolution and fast response, but a MIDI continuous controller like a knob will generally only have 7 bits of resolution. Some controllers offer better but the message format isn't always standard. I use the 2-octave keyboard version of a Novation ZERO SL Mk 2, this has plenty of buttons, long faders, and detentless soft-knobs: set up a MIDI router and you're off.
If you have an iPad you can also design your own knob/fader/button/X-Y pad interfaces with an OSC client, OSC controls aren't limited to 7 bits and there are plenty of libraries and utilities for handling OSC messages.
I've seen several network pilots, they still cost mid six-figures, read a below-the-line budget before you start speculating on this. A pilot for a big show, like Lost, can cost anywhere from $10-$20 million (I believe Terra Nova was about $22 million). Individual episodes of something like The Sopranos were $2 million; a season might run $40 million including amortized costs, assuming you can bet on amortization, which is a tall order considering you basically put every season up to a vote.
I mean what you're proposing could work, but it would be a fundamental shift in how shows are made, who gets paid, and what sort of quality they have to offer. The people who make this stuff now, not just producers but the directors and actors and artists, would be dragged kicking and screaming, because they'd know, probably rightly, that the shows were going to look like crap and their paycheck was going down the tubes in the process.
The worst part would be having to submit to some sort of democratic process -- at least when a director whores himself out to a studio he only has to do it once to a couple guys, and not have to engage in it constantly on some 24-7 marketing campaign to get his show funded and then seen (see Delgo for an early example of this phenomenon). Your scheme spells democracy, and artists hate democracy; they'd rather just pitch their idea to 10 people who understand what the hell they're talking about, instead of having to convince a million bored and distracted people to please give him that $10 instead of putting it into Trasformers part 34, and then constantly convince them to NOT withdraw their money after every unfavorable Aint it Cool News story.
Actually you could self-finance if you shot a "pilot" that looked like this, I did this in January and I think it set them back about $5k. The problem is that if you wanted to produce something like this without calling in a ton of favors it would have cost about $60-$80k, and to produce an entire movie that looked like this would cost you at least $50 million -- and now that the guy playing Owen in the short is now in the new Resident Evil movie shooting now, we're fucked and he'd want several million to appear, probably.
Someone produces a pilot, releases it to the public.
Where do you get for the money for the pilot? And are you going to offer your backers a mere equity stake, with the proviso that viewers are under no obligation to pay, and if the sum doesn't meet your expenses (let alone profitably) you have to give everyone's money back? And then, just to pour salt in the wound, you're going to tell your backers that you're going to intentionally ignore the entire existing copyright infrastructure, which could be making you thousands of non-refundable dollars, just to prove the viability of the medium? People have been trying this, with The Tunnel for example, and it just doesn't work, not as a business model.
Prepaying for entertainment, really the patronage model in general, has always been very flaky as a business proposition. Mozart was barely able to subsist on subscriptions, and he was the greatest composer alive, well-respected in his day in the cultural capitol of Europe, surrounded by very wealthy, patronage-oriented people, and even HE took the simple step of only allowing subscribers into his concerts; if he were able to sell recordings he'd be a millionaire. Nowadays being a prepaid artist essentially means you work for the government, or live off a private endowment's largesse, or make commercial films -- crowdsourcing just can't make the ends meet. The biggest kickstarter projects ever gain about maybe $100,000, and I've worked on absolutely tiny films, non-union and no stars, shot as far away from Hollywood as we could get, and it still cost $250k to make something that a distributor would take a look at.
Luckily Sam Raimi picked it up and graciously put his name on it. And that's the nature of pre-selling entertainment, it's all about name recognition and stars. Pre-selling pilots and concepts would make celebrity and stardom even more intense -- Adam Sandler could easily get 1,000,000 to give him $10 each for films for a film sight unseen, but the next great talent? Good luck finding him without slogging through hours upon hours of slush pile on Youtube.
This is the biggest challenge, nobody's ever proposed a system where you're on one side of the cash register and Peter Jackson, or J. J. Abrams or whoever, is on the other. Apple has a great infrastructure to sell individual programs or a "channel app," and 30% might not be onerous today, but it doesn't really give content producers enough leverage to switch to a different system if it doesn't work out, and producers specifically want to avoid the situation record labels found themselves in, where Apple could dictate what price a song was sold at. Amazon generally reserves the right to decide what price to sell your show at from the outset.
Netflix won't let producers charge premiums or make any sort of price differentiation on the Instant Queue.
As Starz discovered, Google is happy to carry your channel for free, but they don't take support seriously and they're clearly most focused on pushing free ad-supported content.
It's pretty clear you need some sort of intermediary to help people find programming, market it, and perhaps package it into retail-able chunks, because a la carte everything would probably kill a lot of good television. But the sort of deals aggregators, search engines and the mega-app-stores are offering now just aren't very favorable. I work with a lot of independent filmmakers, and I just finished a web series for Fox interactive a few months ago, unless you have a major outlet like Netflix committed to promoting your show and sticking it under people's noses, online distribution doesn't really pay the bills as is -- all the money seems to disappear with the people in the middle, and filmmakers talk about iTunes or Amazon in the same terms I used to hear musicians talk about labels.
I've used the Google TVs, I work for Sony but even my employee discount couldn't get me to buy one of the things. It's just a Roku, granted with the world's worst interface, but even if its UI was better, and even if it had the content, it didn't really justify itself by being any different or better in terms of function.
The complication here is that 'a new kind of TV' isn't fundamentally a technology problem, it's primarily a business problem. The new TV will come when somebody invents a better way for viewers and producers to come to a bargain, and convinces viewers and producers to go with the new system. It's a huge negotiation and political fight -- most of the technology already exists. The only major tech hurdle I could see is that I don't think the US or many less-developed countries actually have the level of internet service necessary to provide everyone with their four to six hours of TV per day,
Sony is at least competent and well-positioned to bargain with rightsholders and package technology that already exists, and to partner with a major internet provider (Sony and Comcast have been doing business together for years) to pull the cables.
Kagi charges about 30%, so does eSellerate, and neither of them support remotely as good copy protection. If you were selling brick and mortar, you might be able to get your costs under 30% of the sticker price if you get volumes in the millions. Manufacturing for a B&M requires minimum runs of thousands, tooling, printing, so even if you can snag a better-than-30% ratio, you've still gotta come up with tens of $k just to start a run, put stuff in a channel, manage that channel, market it...
You know iPads and iPhones had VLC until the VLC rightsholder took his toys and went home.
Apple profiting means there will be iPads next year. If everybody making Android tablets is losing money, that means step 2 for tablet manufacturers and tablet developers is officially ???.
They run it as an at-cost loss leader. Amazon has great streaming selection but a crappy tablet, so they subsidize the tablet. Apple has a great tablet but doesn't offer streaming as a complementing option, so the subsidize the things they do offer.
Terms like "always" and "never" impose very heavy burdens of proof.
What's weird is that that breakdown separates iPhone and iPod touch into separate columns, even though they run the same browser. (Also for whatever reason, the bar graph and line graph views of the same data give values that differ by several percent.)
I mean you want a link for actual stats... here. The discrepancy with StatCounter is that they don't call an iPad "mobile," which wouldn't seem to matter except that it literally gives one browser a 20% advantage. They probably should at least account for that, iPads are 25 million ad-viewing, website-browsing machines.
It is not a minority of mobile browsing. A majority of people run Android but they seem to use their phones more like featurephones.
It's also a good benchmark because it's a relatively old, known and predictable quantity. Everybody knows what mobile Safari is and does, its competitive and it's been out for a long time, it doesn't do anything remarkably novel or unusual that would make it difficult to compare to other browsers, and the experience of using it is basically the same regardless of hardware.
Everyone but Adobe.
I'm German with a mix of Swedish and Norewgian but damn if anybody is bulldozing my house because of something my brother did.
I'll bet Netanyahu very much appreciated that little exchange being published. Cui bono? I'll give you a hint, it isn't us.
IT'S A TR.... oh forget it.
Reasonable conclusion: you cannot predict the reliability of a phone based on what OS it runs. Continue using build quality, manufacturer and components to evaluate the reliability of phones.
If you see a phone with an apple on a back it's liable to be more reliable than a phone with a green robot on the back, on average, but now we're talking about branding, not OS. The more people try to turn Android into a consumer brand, the more it muddies the water on these issues, but Android people feel a need to conflate Android into a consumer brand, because they want to characterize Android mobile products and Apple mobile products as being in some sort of zero-sum conflict among peers, when they aren't peers and aren't for the most part in a zero-sum competition.
But seriously, for the folks with Siri, is it that useful? Do you use that often?
Three times today, it's just a lot faster for making reminders and alarms, and having good to-do action items that are ridiculously easy to make, and trigger by location, make the phone much more valuable. I've used other GTD solutions and to do lists, and while it's easy to take out your phone and type a to-do in, you did generally have to stop doing what it was you were doing, and it always gave you a good excuse to not try; when you converse with the phone you can keep doing what you're doing and not miss a beat, and so if something pings in your head suddenly that you have to remember, you don't have an excuse to put off typing it in. It sounds stupid but it's just much more ergonomic.
I guess you could say I have zero attention span, but, well, it's really the opposite ... being able to use your voice lets you not take your mind off the thing you're doing, instead of switching contexts to your phone, to your job, to your emails and back.
Siri and the dictation are also good in the car, where you can respond to people's text messages in kind without ever looking down.
It just remembers this stuff. It's a lot less detail than the average Facebook profile, if you think about it.