What turned my stomach the most was what happened when my photography mentor died: His widow threw out all of his storage boxes of negatives (50 years worth). Hundreds of his former customers lost the ability to ever get a reprint of their photos (without a copystand and before digital scanning). The right thing should have been to return the negatives to the customers, but that was too much work.
Lucky for my mom, when her wedding photographer died a couple years ago, his wife went through all of the negatives and gave them to all of the customers she could find. So, 30 years later, she got her negatives.
I didn't want to wait 30 years for my negatives, so last year when I was shopping around for a wedding photograher, a top priority was having high res digital copies that I could mess with and print myself. So I found a recent graduate from the local photography school, and she was more than happy to accomodate me. She shot on film, but took the film to a place that has a drum scanner and I paid a few dollars extra for the CDs. I can have the negatives themselves for $50, which I haven't done yet. But I plan on moving to a different city next year, so I'll probably buy them before I go. And I have paid her to do a few reprints, because she uses old school film special effects that look fantastic, and I feel like I'm paying her for that skill, not the images.
The way I see it, if some photographers want to retain the copyrights and charge a markup for reprints, fine. It wasn't that hard to find a photographer who would do what I wanted. And once I had the images, it was easy (and fun) for me to edit them in photoshop and make a bunch of those coffeetable books that are all the rage now. But there are a lot of people out there who have neither the ability nor desire to do that, and if they want to pay their photograher to handle that end of it, let them.
One thing I learned from wedding planning: yeah, things can be overpriced, but you only overpay if you choose to do so. There is always a reasonable alternative out there... you just have to put forth the effort to find it, and not buy into all of the propaganda in the wedding magazines.
(I am the wife of the target of the investigation, aka "HurricaneMB" in the attached comments.)
The story was posted on slashdot a while back too, but I don't have the link at the moment. The slashdot comments critized our story for being vague. Well, duh, there's an ongoing criminal investigation. What were we supposed to do, hand the feds their case on a silver platter? Tons of reporters called asking for more details, but our laywer, who was kinda pissed that we posted anything at all on the internet, said not to talk to them. When this is all over (hopefully sometime next year), we will tell our story in much more detail.
What's being made use of here is a streaming technology built into iTunes. That means that when you "share" your playlist in this way, the receiver can only listen to the music you provide, while you're online. This isn't about grabbing an MP3, saving it on your hard disk, and then redistributing it even further.
So the feature is still limited, and while I'm not going to guarantee the record labels will demand a stop be put to it - they've done some bloody stupid things in the past - I suspect it'll end up being a net gain as it'll let people properly try music out before they buy, but in a way that nobody in their right mind would prefer to use instead of buying.
The same thing could be said for internet radio, and that didn't go over too well with the RIAA either.
This technology is like a cross between internet radio and P2P file sharing, both of which the RIAA hates. And now that they've sucessfully lobbied for CARP royalties on webcasts, they're not going to like this P2P streaming system, which in effect lets people webcast music while bypassing the royalty payments.
The RIAA did all they could to kill independent internet radio. I don't see how they'd react any differently to this, especially when iTunes for Windows is released and the number of potential users dramatically increases.
I guess I just *have* to get a 17" powerbook then. Man, it sucks to be a chick...
Anyway, I wonder if they matched the male and female study subjects for 3D gaming experience. Yes, I get lost in 3D games like quake, but I've probably only played these games for a total of an hour in my entire life. I wonder if my virtual spatial abilties are any worse than a male with a simliar lack of 3D gaming experience...
I've had the unfortunate opportunity to learn a little about how federal penalties work. It's all based on a point system. A certain number points for the crime, points if you have a prior record of anything in the past 10 years (state or federal), subtracted points for taking a plea, etc. Then they add them all up and use a chart to determine the range of sentences they can give you.
And for copyright cases, they automatically tack on 4 points if a computer was involved.
We just have to hope that universities don't give in to this kind of blackmailing. The question of threatening a student's freedom is much larger than that of stopping some of them from taking part in illegal acts.
They are going after people at my university as well. What really bugged me about this was that the university IT guy said that while they have the ability to track students' online activity, they don't because "we don't have the right." Then he turns around and says that if the movie industry asks them to, they'll go ahead and "check" on you. What hypocrisy!
I wonder how they choose the students to go after. I mean, for every one student they go after, there are probably 50 more doing the exact same thing. It would really suck to get singled for something being done by everyone around you.
Anyway, so far their attention seems to be focused on undergraduates in the dorms. Are they going to start spying on us gradaute students in the research labs next?
I had some very bizarre and frustrating printing problems that appeared sometime after I installed either safari or the 10.2.3 update. But right after I installed the new safari, they magically disappeared! Cool!
From this story: "Under the agreement, technology lobbyists will argue that record companies should be permitted to use hacker-style tactics to disrupt Internet downloads of pirated music and movies."
Wasn't there an Asimov story with a radiation-detecting watch? I think it was in one of the foundation series novels. The main guy's college dorm room was blown up by a radioactive bomb, but later he figured out that it was staged because his watch didn't register any radiation. The watchband was the indicator, I think. It turned from blue to white or vice versa. Asimov was so great at predicting future technologies. What was that book? It's bugging me now and googling didn't help...
The educational rigor at Harvard and other ivy league schools is much tougher than pretty much every other school in the nation
The ivy league label is overrated. My alma mater (Johns Hopkins) has repeatedly refused to join the ivy league, mostly for finacial reasons. When I was an undergradute, there was a growing annoyance with the assumption that "ivy league" always means the best education. Most of this resentment stemmed from the grade inflation that was going on at the ivies. I remember one student publication had a nice set of graphs showing the declining SAT scores of incoming freshmen at Harvard contrasted with the increasing GPAs of the same students after admittance to Harvard. Hopkins proudly shunned grade inflation, but it was frustrating nonetheless, especially if you were applying to professional schools.
Then again, Hopkins students love to complain about how bad they have it;-)
I'm a grad student at the University of Cincinnati, and we have the exact same deal, as mentioned on the Ohio State link. In addition to the low prices, the software does not employ the same anti piracy methods as the consumer software. No product activation codes on the xp software, and my copy of office x doesn't even require a serial number. (I would link to the UC page with the details, but you can't view it from outside the local network.)
Also, Microsoft is not the only company doing this sort of thing. Our university recently signed a similar deal with Adobe. Unfortunately, the students are the only group who are NOT eligible to participate. thppppppppt!
If you are a developer at Apple, high profile anti-employee actions like this send a message: secrecy first, collaboration second.
This has nothing to do with collaboration. The guy was leaking info to a rumors site about an upcoming product. He wasn't seeking input from the community about how to make it better. It probably just made him feel cool.
"Last week, Secret Service agents in New York arrested three men and seized 35,000 illegally copied music discs, 10,000 movies on DVD and 421 compact disc burners that are used to make the counterfeit products."
Companies are currently working on getting all the DVD functions like different audio streams and camera angles as well as special features into the VOD package, and the eventual goal is to make Blockbuster obsolete.
Widescreen would be nice. That's one of the major reasons I am still willing to drive to the blockbuster, even though VOD is more convenient.
That, and Time Warner's deteriorating video quality. It seems like the more digital channels they add, the crappier the encoding is for all of the channels. It's turned into block-o-vision. Especially scenes with fog. And more often than before, the frame will freeze for a few seconds at a time. If my apartment didn't face north, I'd have DirecTV.
We've used it many times with no problems. The theater we go to is a really nice state-of-the art theater (it was one of the few with the digital version of Episode II), yet they don't have the bar code reader. We just hand the printout to the guy taking tickets and he lets us in. Maybe they do have the reader stashed in the back somewhere and they scan the tickets in all at once. I dunno.
I don't like the $1.00 fee, but it's useful when you want to see a new movie that is selling out.
They showed a movielink video file on The Screen Savers last week. The quality was AWFUL. I'd much rather rent a DVD. Even with broadband, it takes longer to download the 600 meg crappy video file than to drive 5 minutes and go to blockbuster. An even quicker and easier option - rent a movie over cable (although those are hardly ever in widescreen). And when I fly, I'd rather rent a DVD from those InMotion counters at the airport and watch them on my ibook.
These other options all cost the same and are more practical than movielink. I think I prefer my DRM-less Mac for now.
I used to get great reception with cingular in Cincinnati. Then, all of a sudden, my phone (and my boyfreind's phone) stopped working inside my apartment. So I call customer service to tell them I can't get a signal, and the representative starts to discuss my bill. I tried explaining that the problem is their network, not that I haven't paid my bill (which was NOT past due). Then I get their stock answer - go to a cingular store and have my phone "reprogrammed." Unbelievable. Their customer service is usually really good for billing issues and changing calling plans, But apparently not for technical problems. Now it's too damn cold to go outside to use the phone, so I'm just waiting for my contract to run out in January. Any suggestions?
My boyfriend has one of those powermate knobs, but he got the special limited edition black knob. For some reason, this is better than the shiny silver knob. I really don't understand...
Slashdot Mirror
What turned my stomach the most was what happened when my photography mentor died: His widow threw out all of his storage boxes of negatives (50 years worth). Hundreds of his former customers lost the ability to ever get a reprint of their photos (without a copystand and before digital scanning). The right thing should have been to return the negatives to the customers, but that was too much work.
Lucky for my mom, when her wedding photographer died a couple years ago, his wife went through all of the negatives and gave them to all of the customers she could find. So, 30 years later, she got her negatives.
I didn't want to wait 30 years for my negatives, so last year when I was shopping around for a wedding photograher, a top priority was having high res digital copies that I could mess with and print myself. So I found a recent graduate from the local photography school, and she was more than happy to accomodate me. She shot on film, but took the film to a place that has a drum scanner and I paid a few dollars extra for the CDs. I can have the negatives themselves for $50, which I haven't done yet. But I plan on moving to a different city next year, so I'll probably buy them before I go. And I have paid her to do a few reprints, because she uses old school film special effects that look fantastic, and I feel like I'm paying her for that skill, not the images.
The way I see it, if some photographers want to retain the copyrights and charge a markup for reprints, fine. It wasn't that hard to find a photographer who would do what I wanted. And once I had the images, it was easy (and fun) for me to edit them in photoshop and make a bunch of those coffeetable books that are all the rage now. But there are a lot of people out there who have neither the ability nor desire to do that, and if they want to pay their photograher to handle that end of it, let them.
One thing I learned from wedding planning: yeah, things can be overpriced, but you only overpay if you choose to do so. There is always a reasonable alternative out there... you just have to put forth the effort to find it, and not buy into all of the propaganda in the wedding magazines.
http://sg1archive.com/nightmare.shtml
(I am the wife of the target of the investigation, aka "HurricaneMB" in the attached comments.)
The story was posted on slashdot a while back too, but I don't have the link at the moment. The slashdot comments critized our story for being vague. Well, duh, there's an ongoing criminal investigation. What were we supposed to do, hand the feds their case on a silver platter? Tons of reporters called asking for more details, but our laywer, who was kinda pissed that we posted anything at all on the internet, said not to talk to them. When this is all over (hopefully sometime next year), we will tell our story in much more detail.
And yes, it did influence our vote for President.
What's being made use of here is a streaming technology built into iTunes. That means that when you "share" your playlist in this way, the receiver can only listen to the music you provide, while you're online. This isn't about grabbing an MP3, saving it on your hard disk, and then redistributing it even further.
So the feature is still limited, and while I'm not going to guarantee the record labels will demand a stop be put to it - they've done some bloody stupid things in the past - I suspect it'll end up being a net gain as it'll let people properly try music out before they buy, but in a way that nobody in their right mind would prefer to use instead of buying.
The same thing could be said for internet radio, and that didn't go over too well with the RIAA either.
This technology is like a cross between internet radio and P2P file sharing, both of which the RIAA hates. And now that they've sucessfully lobbied for CARP royalties on webcasts, they're not going to like this P2P streaming system, which in effect lets people webcast music while bypassing the royalty payments.
The RIAA did all they could to kill independent internet radio. I don't see how they'd react any differently to this, especially when iTunes for Windows is released and the number of potential users dramatically increases.
I guess I just *have* to get a 17" powerbook then. Man, it sucks to be a chick...
Anyway, I wonder if they matched the male and female study subjects for 3D gaming experience. Yes, I get lost in 3D games like quake, but I've probably only played these games for a total of an hour in my entire life. I wonder if my virtual spatial abilties are any worse than a male with a simliar lack of 3D gaming experience...
I've had the unfortunate opportunity to learn a little about how federal penalties work. It's all based on a point system. A certain number points for the crime, points if you have a prior record of anything in the past 10 years (state or federal), subtracted points for taking a plea, etc. Then they add them all up and use a chart to determine the range of sentences they can give you.
And for copyright cases, they automatically tack on 4 points if a computer was involved.
We just have to hope that universities don't give in to this kind of blackmailing. The question of threatening a student's freedom is much larger than that of stopping some of them from taking part in illegal acts.
They are going after people at my university as well. What really bugged me about this was that the university IT guy said that while they have the ability to track students' online activity, they don't because "we don't have the right." Then he turns around and says that if the movie industry asks them to, they'll go ahead and "check" on you. What hypocrisy!
I wonder how they choose the students to go after. I mean, for every one student they go after, there are probably 50 more doing the exact same thing. It would really suck to get singled for something being done by everyone around you.
Anyway, so far their attention seems to be focused on undergraduates in the dorms. Are they going to start spying on us gradaute students in the research labs next?
oops forgot
Also in that issue of discover is an article entitled "don't be a spineless lover" about the circuitry that controls sex. Cool stuff...
I had some very bizarre and frustrating printing problems that appeared sometime after I installed either safari or the 10.2.3 update. But right after I installed the new safari, they magically disappeared! Cool!
starfleet.mil (for the trekkies)
The NYT articles leaves out some important facts.
From this story: "Under the agreement, technology lobbyists will argue that record companies should be permitted to use hacker-style tactics to disrupt Internet downloads of pirated music and movies."
Great.
Wasn't there an Asimov story with a radiation-detecting watch? I think it was in one of the foundation series novels. The main guy's college dorm room was blown up by a radioactive bomb, but later he figured out that it was staged because his watch didn't register any radiation. The watchband was the indicator, I think. It turned from blue to white or vice versa. Asimov was so great at predicting future technologies. What was that book? It's bugging me now and googling didn't help...
The educational rigor at Harvard and other ivy league schools is much tougher than pretty much every other school in the nation
;-)
The ivy league label is overrated. My alma mater (Johns Hopkins) has repeatedly refused to join the ivy league, mostly for finacial reasons. When I was an undergradute, there was a growing annoyance with the assumption that "ivy league" always means the best education. Most of this resentment stemmed from the grade inflation that was going on at the ivies. I remember one student publication had a nice set of graphs showing the declining SAT scores of incoming freshmen at Harvard contrasted with the increasing GPAs of the same students after admittance to Harvard. Hopkins proudly shunned grade inflation, but it was frustrating nonetheless, especially if you were applying to professional schools.
Then again, Hopkins students love to complain about how bad they have it
I'm a grad student at the University of Cincinnati, and we have the exact same deal, as mentioned on the Ohio State link. In addition to the low prices, the software does not employ the same anti piracy methods as the consumer software. No product activation codes on the xp software, and my copy of office x doesn't even require a serial number. (I would link to the UC page with the details, but you can't view it from outside the local network.)
Also, Microsoft is not the only company doing this sort of thing. Our university recently signed a similar deal with Adobe. Unfortunately, the students are the only group who are NOT eligible to participate. thppppppppt!
Merry xmas!
If you are a developer at Apple, high profile anti-employee actions like this send a message: secrecy first, collaboration second.
This has nothing to do with collaboration. The guy was leaking info to a rumors site about an upcoming product. He wasn't seeking input from the community about how to make it better. It probably just made him feel cool.
Why aren't the text message preferences deleted when the cancellation notices comes thru?
Because that would require one of two things:
1) competence
2) the responsible parties giving a damn
Customer service seems to be in a downward spiral across the board. I think much of it stems from a lack of accountability.
"Last week, Secret Service agents in New York arrested three men and seized 35,000 illegally copied music discs, 10,000 movies on DVD and 421 compact disc burners that are used to make the counterfeit products."
I guess nobody clued them in on the RIAA's unique methods of calculation.
Damn, I just used my last mod point on another story!
Fox news? I wouldn't trust anything coming from Rupert Murdoch and his overly biased organization.
Companies are currently working on getting all the DVD functions like different audio streams and camera angles as well as special features into the VOD package, and the eventual goal is to make Blockbuster obsolete.
Widescreen would be nice. That's one of the major reasons I am still willing to drive to the blockbuster, even though VOD is more convenient.
That, and Time Warner's deteriorating video quality. It seems like the more digital channels they add, the crappier the encoding is for all of the channels. It's turned into block-o-vision. Especially scenes with fog. And more often than before, the frame will freeze for a few seconds at a time. If my apartment didn't face north, I'd have DirecTV.
Don't forget the slug!
We've used it many times with no problems. The theater we go to is a really nice state-of-the art theater (it was one of the few with the digital version of Episode II), yet they don't have the bar code reader. We just hand the printout to the guy taking tickets and he lets us in. Maybe they do have the reader stashed in the back somewhere and they scan the tickets in all at once. I dunno.
I don't like the $1.00 fee, but it's useful when you want to see a new movie that is selling out.
They showed a movielink video file on The Screen Savers last week. The quality was AWFUL. I'd much rather rent a DVD. Even with broadband, it takes longer to download the 600 meg crappy video file than to drive 5 minutes and go to blockbuster. An even quicker and easier option - rent a movie over cable (although those are hardly ever in widescreen). And when I fly, I'd rather rent a DVD from those InMotion counters at the airport and watch them on my ibook.
These other options all cost the same and are more practical than movielink. I think I prefer my DRM-less Mac for now.
I used to get great reception with cingular in Cincinnati. Then, all of a sudden, my phone (and my boyfreind's phone) stopped working inside my apartment. So I call customer service to tell them I can't get a signal, and the representative starts to discuss my bill. I tried explaining that the problem is their network, not that I haven't paid my bill (which was NOT past due). Then I get their stock answer - go to a cingular store and have my phone "reprogrammed." Unbelievable. Their customer service is usually really good for billing issues and changing calling plans, But apparently not for technical problems. Now it's too damn cold to go outside to use the phone, so I'm just waiting for my contract to run out in January. Any suggestions?
My boyfriend has one of those powermate knobs, but he got the special limited edition black knob. For some reason, this is better than the shiny silver knob. I really don't understand...