The SD card market is chock full of dodgy cards, even from reputable manufacturers, in this case it seems Microsft is not actually pulling our chain: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918
Agreed, the UK's IMR is more reflective of their society as a whole because the UK is full of middle class wealthy people walking around in bowler hats.
What's more, they only have a tiny immigrant population, of which 98% are billionaire refugees.
They'd still get made because there's still money to be made by doing so. We already, to all intents and purposes, live in a DRM free world, where movies and music can be had for free, in all-but-an-instant. Yet, people still go to the movies, the still buy the dvd, the dvd special edition, the directors cut dvd, the special edition directors cut, the blu-ray... and so on.
e.g. X-Men origins, famously leaked before hitting the cinema, had a budget of $150,000,000 and grossed $373,000,000
Heck, I don't know why the media companies don't just give up and allow you to pay an indemnity which protects you from prosecution, but allows you to download as much as you please. The people would operate their distribution platform free of charge, with 99.9% reliability! If it was reasonably priced, I'd actually support them prosecuting those that don't pay as hard as they currently try to.
That's pretty much the opposite of my experience. I would say that it's quite often those that go away and examine the implications of any new information they receive, before making a snap judgement on whether they think they've 'got it' or not are often far better informed than those that assume they understand it straight away.
You must have seen it where people go away, read a book, think they've understood it all and start putting it in to practice and screwing a bunch of other systems up because they've not weighed this new information with their existing body of knowledge. They may have fully understood the primary information given in the book in an isolated sense, but running that information though future scenarios and weighing it up against what you already believe to be true and subsequently adjusting your beliefs/plans accordingly takes time. If you think you get something straight away, you probably haven't - in that case you've just understood things superficially.
That's not to say that group are completely dumb though, as long as they learn as they go along they'll eventually arrive at the same point as the deeper thinkers.
Wait 'til the teachers get told to start teaching this gibi crap at school. Suddenly all the recent graduates are talking exbi this and zebi that and you're still talking exa and zetta, and all of a sudden you're looking like a dibinosaur.
Echoing Tassachs point above, What I think everyone seems to miss in a conversation like this is that such beings would probably do not think like us at all. They may or may not have mathematics, or they may have some completely unfathomable method for describing natural phenomena. At one point amongst our species maths did not exist, then it did - a huge progression, perhaps such an advanced civilisation has discovered that there's something else which is better than maths for the purpose of describing things...? I mean even amongst ourselves, maths has gone through numerous revisions. Think Babylonian, Roman Numerals Heck the number Zero wasn't really in use until the 9th century AD... that's like a blink of an eye on a cosmological timescale... are we really so arrogant to think that we've now thought of every possible mathematical concept? Maths seems to have some shortcomings in itself... Infinity?? Pi?? These are a couple which say to me that even our best mathematics lacks a construct in which to describe apparently absurd outcomes such as these.
Electromagnetic waves as a method of communication weren't harnessed until 1886! (Thank you wikipedia!) That's only 124 years ago! Now go and draw a 'to-scale' timeline of the universe and put a mark where 124 years ago would be. Not very far from the end is it! That's our current cutting edge and so recent as to be an infantile technology. Imagine looking for aliens in 1850 or something, electromagnetic modulation would never even cross your mind, you'd be looking for lanterns in the sky or something. It's reasonable to ponder that, dependant upon their evolutionary environment, they could be using neutrinos or gravitons for the same purpose - good luck with detecting and then responding to that signal! It's my contention that there's loads more tech breakthroughs for mankind which will render electromagnetic comms obsolete, don't ask me what they are because if I'd been alive in 1850, I wouldn't have seen electromagnetism coming either. But once these breakthroughs come, we'll ditch our radio telescopes and just start assuming the aliens are using whatever comes next. Of course, it works both ways, and they may not have even noticed our electromagnetic bubble. In which case I hope we don't startle them when they stumble upon us;)
At my place we've got a bunch of MS stuff but the management and my colleagues all seem to be open source wannabe's. When I got here, the place was in a terrible state, the Terminal Servers were bluscreening multiple times a week, the file servers were thrashing constantly, basically our major incident board was lit up like a Christmas tree. Every time something went wrong, everyone would be "Bloody Microsoft, never works!!!!, viruses, malware, blue screen of death LOLLLZZZ!!!!"
So anyway I've set to work straightening everything out (nothing magical, mainly patches, firmware etc) and we've not had a terminal server bluescreen since July '09, and the helpdesk has received exactly 2 calls this afternoon, one was for a LOB app error, and the other was a user training issue. It's been this way for months. I can't actually remember the last time I've seen a helpdesk call directly attributable to the Microsoft platform. Now we're only a small org of 80 servers worldwide, so I know this run of good fortune probably wouldn't scale to some of the badass networks you lot are running, but it works for us, and works really well.
You would think this would have earned at least a little credibility on my part? Nah. I'm still the office whipping boy because I happen to think MS prods are a strategically good idea for the business. Every time something isn't working, they still straight away blame patches, Microsoft, a virus - when demonstrably the cowboy coding of our integration engineer, or a network issue or one of our LOB apps has got a bug. Pisses me off no end. We've actually had more issues with HP drivers/firmware than we've had with the MS stack, which surprised even me!
We're looking at some border gateway stuff right now, and the boss is rejecting anything without iPhone and Mac compatibility, even though it accounts for under 4% of our userbase! I'm also trying to virtualise some of the estate, but am hitting a brick wall because he wants to use anything but Microsoft, which we don't have the skills in house to properly administer. Insanity, IMO! Then again, he does insist on referring to our server cupboard as a 'datacenter' in front of vendors, I really cringe when he does that!
So anyway, don't always count on the fact that even if you come in and make all the right moves that you'll get any credit whatsoever. People's ingrained beliefs are hard to change, even when they have been proven wrong smack bang in front of their faces.
Trouble is, once free energy is out there in the wild, the entire world economy shuts down and becomes obsolete. The price of everything you pay for is governed by the amount of energy it took to create it. Whether that energy be the amount of food an engineer eats, or the cost of the energy required to extract metal from the earth, or the petrol it takes to distribute the product around. Once the cost of the energy required to create something is reduced to (or close to) zero, why would we still have money? Everything can be produce for free (as in beer), so who would pay for stuff?
We're in the middle of an interesting demonstration of this with the 'net, and the near zero per unit cost of replication and distribution. This means we get stuff like G-Mail, Linux, heck, even the Windows Live Suite, each of which has taken many thousands of man-hours to produce, and all this comes for free!
So, a free energy machine would not 'sell'. Or it might sell buckets, but that all money would be meaningless in no time at all.
NB this is why we should be investing a whole bunch of money in to things like ITER, cos if we can crack that, we aint gonna care about the cash it cost to get us there!
Umm, yeah but I think he means that we actually receive the energy as solar. i.e. that's the most direct method of input in to our system regardless of the transformations gone before. Then when we generate nuclear energy that's the most direct source of that energy stream.
Wrong! A BSOD is caused by any unhandled exception which might cause corruption if the system is allowed to continue executing, such as some buggy software attempting to write in to kernel memory space.
I'll tell you why most people are not up in arms about these things, it's because during the recent economic boom years, the vast majority of people have been wealthy enough to put a roof over their heads and food on the plates of their family. Once those basic needs have been met, most of the 'proles' cease to have concerns outside their immediate social sphere, meaning they have less interest in what the government is up to.
The Government has cunningly used this time to introduce measures such as DNA Databases, extended periods of detention and anti 'terrorism' laws, all this following the media inspired frenzy after 9/11 & 7/7. The media is also far more widely reporting the rare occurrences of violence that are perpetrated on the streets as keeping us all in a state of fear obviously persuades us that, although we'd rather not be CCTV'd 24x7, we will put up with it 'for the greater good'.
The thing is, all this stuff is not making people feel safer, in fact they all feel far more afraid on the streets now than at any time in history, when the statistics show that crime and violent crimes in particular have been falling steadily for the last 20 years. The system is then abused by the relevant agencies and is used for trivial means, such as that pensioner being chucked out of some political party conference for heckling whoever was speaking at the time. The kicker was that the Police used their newly prescribed Anti-Terror laws to detain him. There was also a story recently about a mother whose young daughter dropped half a sausage roll in the street so she was fined £75 ($150 US) That's a sausage roll! Not even real litter like a chip packet, but a piece of food that would have been cleared away overnight by some animal or other! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-561762/I-dropped-morsel-girls-sausage-roll-litter-police-fined-75.html
There's example after example of this lunacy in the country and yet no-one says anything. It's outrageous, and every significant political party is in on the act, the situation will not change until there's a serious public backlash. I think we could be in for some interesting times if this so-called credit crunch bites as hard as some are predicting. People will let a litter fine slide when times are good, but when it is the difference between paying money to the government via their stealth taxes, and putting food on your kids plate, the public may not be so understanding.
Me neither - I think Microsoft is being bloody crooked by telling anyone in the first place that they're even developing a console. I think they should just set up a booth in each city where they want to sell it then leave people to come and look if they want. If they like it, they'll buy it - simple, no need for this evil advertising malarky.
But why would Americans need such shops or street vendors? Most Americans have high-speed internet access, or can obtain their illegal software from the computers at work. In many other countries, they don't have the network access, or jobs, so they have to buy off the street.
OK, so what you are saying is that access to a high speed net link somehow supplants the need for the shops? Why did America not have a widespread network of these shops before distribution of movies via the internet became commonplace (Probably less than 5 years ago)? Why is it that despite the fact that my entire Marketing Department, Sales Department, Directors and Administration all have access to a high speed net link, both domestically and at work, why do they all bug the IT Department guys for downloaded copies of the latest movies?
The distribution channel is only superficially related to the scale of the piracy problem. It is more the case that by allowing these places to exist that they are implicitly condoned by the authorities, which makes people more inclined to take advantage of the impossibly cheap prices they offer, which the studios have absolutely no chance of competing with. Heck, why would anyone bother downloading a movie if they are available on every street corner for less than the cost of the bandwidth, and without the hassle of tying up your broadband line for however long it takes?
I don't see what makes street vendors any more evil than other "pirates." I also don't see how the existence of street vending makes piracy a more serious problem than other methods, like Bittorrent.
I didn't say pirates are 'evil'. I was making the point that whilst the governments turn a blind eye to piracy by (for example) allowing the existence of the shops then the piracy problem in these countries makes it uneconomical for companies to compete on a large scale.
"but I would imagine that the piracy situation in countries where you can openly buy pirated material on the high street is going to be significantly bigger than in those aforementioned countries where the piracy market is somewhat underground."
Why? What is the logic behind this reasoning?
As I said before, I have no figures to back it up, so it was just a hunch based on the fact that when I walk in to Joe Schmo's house where I live, he will have maybe 20 DVD's on the shelf, and of those maybe 1 or 2 are pirate copies. Now when I have visited Joe Schmoski in Russia he has 20 DVDs on the shelf, of which maybe, and it's a BIG maybe, 1 is an original. So before I had no evidence, but now you have got me interested let's have a look for some quick quotes:
"Overall DVD unit shipments in China are forecast to rise to more than 300 million in 2009, up from about 100 million DVD units in 2005. Also, stronger government support should work to curb the country's present 90% piracy rate, where virtually all films are consumed illegally, to 70% to 80% by in 2009."
Recent reports on global intellectual property rights (IPR) protections paint a "stark and unattractive" picture of the situation in China, where piracy levels in some sectors exceed 90 percent, Utah Republican Orrin Hatch said during a May 25 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
This doesn't make sense. China is issuing this format for its own citizens. Chinese companies will be pressing the discs. China doesn't need anyone's permission o
Take a fucking pill before posting you prick! We are having a discussion about DVD standards here, and y'know, I was talking in that context. (Although I may be unaware of any link that exists between DVD standards and the importance "on the world stage" of the nation in question)
To clarify, I was talking in terms of importance by the slice of revenue the studios get from each market, as this will undoubtably drive a lot of their strategic decisions. ffs.
As for piracy, most urban centres in the USA etc will not have shops on the high street that deal in exclusively pirated material, as does China, Russia and many other places. These shops are downright common, and certainly in the cities I have visited have outnumbered bona fide outlets by maybe 10:1. If outlets like this sprung up in the US they would in all likelyhood be shut down rather promptly. The other problematic fact is that I could have bought any number of current Cinema and DVD releases for the equivalent of about $1 each, and the authorities couldn't care less about the situation. I guess they have other priorities. Now I don't have any figures to back this up, so please correct me if I am wrong, but I would imagine that the piracy situation in countries where you can openly buy pirated material on the high street is going to be significantly bigger than in those aforementioned countries where the piracy market is somewhat underground.
So in order to provide the right kind of incentive for the studios to press these new Chinese discs, China would have to clean up the piracy situation as it currently stands, and get a high penetration of their new players. Neither of these are unsurmountable problems, particularly the latter, but they will both need to be addressed. That's also not to say that they will ignore the market completely if things don't change, but they are unlikely to 'fully embrace' it either (whatever that may mean.)
Whoever the content people pay to stamp them. The only place you are gonna get "'PRC'HD-DVDs" is in those societies that are relatively tolerant of piracy, because there's no way the content producers are going to license that format anywhere that counts i.e North America, Japan or Europe and some other places. The market for unlicensed content is practically non existant That being so, the players will never sell (in qunatity) in those markets.
As a side observation I think it could be interesting to see how resiliant the new HD formats are to duplication if there is what amounts to a government sponsored initiative to get content from one format to another.
ummm - China might put the players on the shelves, but who is gonna buy the players if theres no blockbuster movies to play on 'em because nearly all the content megaliths have already cosied up with Blu-Ray or HD-DVD? obviously many countries who have a rampant piracy problem may do well, but what about the civilised world?
--
If Medicine were ever perfected, we would all be the same
That would be great! can you imagine? Send Ma Sony millions if not billions of player ID's reporting them as Pirates. They disable the lot, Joe Consumer gets up in arms, contacts TV station, TV people accurately report that Sony disabled their shiny new Blu-Ray, the other Joe Consumers think, 'duh, well if Sony do that I'm not getting one' Blu-Ray flops spectacularly. Thusly: DRM abandoned by all major manufacturers for generations to come.
I have to agree with this. Who else here thinks that the pace of progress in optical storage devices has been laughable?
I remember reading on here about a holographic disc (?) which was in development to store 1TB. Here I was thinking "That's more like it chaps, well done!" and almost all the comments were "Uh 1TB is like, uh too much dude. Who needs that?"
Well, standard DVD backup won't store my MP3 collection on one disc, let alone anything else. Once you add in all your photos and media files, you're looking at quite a few of these so called 'HD' DVD's
These are rubbish, they are outdated before they've even gone in to production. By the time a writable version comes out, we'll be seeing (at a guess) 500gb hard disks in off the shelf PCs, and I think that you are looking at digital media taking up a lot of that (what with legal movie downloads probably taking off etc)
Seriously, Sony, Toshiba et al. really have to open their eyes and start putting together a viable storage medium for the future.
Slashdot Mirror
The SD card market is chock full of dodgy cards, even from reputable manufacturers, in this case it seems Microsft is not actually pulling our chain:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918
Also, they've done a KB explaining what happens when you change cards:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2450831
Agreed, the UK's IMR is more reflective of their society as a whole because the UK is full of middle class wealthy people walking around in bowler hats. What's more, they only have a tiny immigrant population, of which 98% are billionaire refugees.
They'd still get made because there's still money to be made by doing so. We already, to all intents and purposes, live in a DRM free world, where movies and music can be had for free, in all-but-an-instant. Yet, people still go to the movies, the still buy the dvd, the dvd special edition, the directors cut dvd, the special edition directors cut, the blu-ray... and so on.
e.g. X-Men origins, famously leaked before hitting the cinema, had a budget of $150,000,000 and grossed $373,000,000
Heck, I don't know why the media companies don't just give up and allow you to pay an indemnity which protects you from prosecution, but allows you to download as much as you please. The people would operate their distribution platform free of charge, with 99.9% reliability! If it was reasonably priced, I'd actually support them prosecuting those that don't pay as hard as they currently try to.
That's pretty much the opposite of my experience. I would say that it's quite often those that go away and examine the implications of any new information they receive, before making a snap judgement on whether they think they've 'got it' or not are often far better informed than those that assume they understand it straight away.
You must have seen it where people go away, read a book, think they've understood it all and start putting it in to practice and screwing a bunch of other systems up because they've not weighed this new information with their existing body of knowledge. They may have fully understood the primary information given in the book in an isolated sense, but running that information though future scenarios and weighing it up against what you already believe to be true and subsequently adjusting your beliefs/plans accordingly takes time. If you think you get something straight away, you probably haven't - in that case you've just understood things superficially.
That's not to say that group are completely dumb though, as long as they learn as they go along they'll eventually arrive at the same point as the deeper thinkers.
Wait 'til the teachers get told to start teaching this gibi crap at school. Suddenly all the recent graduates are talking exbi this and zebi that and you're still talking exa and zetta, and all of a sudden you're looking like a dibinosaur.
Unless you're South African, where the rigid cased 3.5's are referred to as, 'Stiffies'.
Echoing Tassachs point above, What I think everyone seems to miss in a conversation like this is that such beings would probably do not think like us at all. They may or may not have mathematics, or they may have some completely unfathomable method for describing natural phenomena. At one point amongst our species maths did not exist, then it did - a huge progression, perhaps such an advanced civilisation has discovered that there's something else which is better than maths for the purpose of describing things...? I mean even amongst ourselves, maths has gone through numerous revisions. Think Babylonian, Roman Numerals Heck the number Zero wasn't really in use until the 9th century AD... that's like a blink of an eye on a cosmological timescale... are we really so arrogant to think that we've now thought of every possible mathematical concept? Maths seems to have some shortcomings in itself... Infinity?? Pi?? These are a couple which say to me that even our best mathematics lacks a construct in which to describe apparently absurd outcomes such as these.
;)
Electromagnetic waves as a method of communication weren't harnessed until 1886! (Thank you wikipedia!) That's only 124 years ago! Now go and draw a 'to-scale' timeline of the universe and put a mark where 124 years ago would be. Not very far from the end is it! That's our current cutting edge and so recent as to be an infantile technology. Imagine looking for aliens in 1850 or something, electromagnetic modulation would never even cross your mind, you'd be looking for lanterns in the sky or something. It's reasonable to ponder that, dependant upon their evolutionary environment, they could be using neutrinos or gravitons for the same purpose - good luck with detecting and then responding to that signal! It's my contention that there's loads more tech breakthroughs for mankind which will render electromagnetic comms obsolete, don't ask me what they are because if I'd been alive in 1850, I wouldn't have seen electromagnetism coming either. But once these breakthroughs come, we'll ditch our radio telescopes and just start assuming the aliens are using whatever comes next. Of course, it works both ways, and they may not have even noticed our electromagnetic bubble. In which case I hope we don't startle them when they stumble upon us
Oblig XKCD
At my place we've got a bunch of MS stuff but the management and my colleagues all seem to be open source wannabe's. When I got here, the place was in a terrible state, the Terminal Servers were bluscreening multiple times a week, the file servers were thrashing constantly, basically our major incident board was lit up like a Christmas tree. Every time something went wrong, everyone would be "Bloody Microsoft, never works!!!!, viruses, malware, blue screen of death LOLLLZZZ!!!!"
So anyway I've set to work straightening everything out (nothing magical, mainly patches, firmware etc) and we've not had a terminal server bluescreen since July '09, and the helpdesk has received exactly 2 calls this afternoon, one was for a LOB app error, and the other was a user training issue. It's been this way for months. I can't actually remember the last time I've seen a helpdesk call directly attributable to the Microsoft platform. Now we're only a small org of 80 servers worldwide, so I know this run of good fortune probably wouldn't scale to some of the badass networks you lot are running, but it works for us, and works really well.
You would think this would have earned at least a little credibility on my part? Nah. I'm still the office whipping boy because I happen to think MS prods are a strategically good idea for the business. Every time something isn't working, they still straight away blame patches, Microsoft, a virus - when demonstrably the cowboy coding of our integration engineer, or a network issue or one of our LOB apps has got a bug. Pisses me off no end. We've actually had more issues with HP drivers/firmware than we've had with the MS stack, which surprised even me!
We're looking at some border gateway stuff right now, and the boss is rejecting anything without iPhone and Mac compatibility, even though it accounts for under 4% of our userbase! I'm also trying to virtualise some of the estate, but am hitting a brick wall because he wants to use anything but Microsoft, which we don't have the skills in house to properly administer. Insanity, IMO! Then again, he does insist on referring to our server cupboard as a 'datacenter' in front of vendors, I really cringe when he does that!
So anyway, don't always count on the fact that even if you come in and make all the right moves that you'll get any credit whatsoever. People's ingrained beliefs are hard to change, even when they have been proven wrong smack bang in front of their faces.
^ Wikipedia Admin
...cheap enough for everyone yet? Or am I missing something?
Trouble is, once free energy is out there in the wild, the entire world economy shuts down and becomes obsolete. The price of everything you pay for is governed by the amount of energy it took to create it. Whether that energy be the amount of food an engineer eats, or the cost of the energy required to extract metal from the earth, or the petrol it takes to distribute the product around. Once the cost of the energy required to create something is reduced to (or close to) zero, why would we still have money? Everything can be produce for free (as in beer), so who would pay for stuff?
We're in the middle of an interesting demonstration of this with the 'net, and the near zero per unit cost of replication and distribution. This means we get stuff like G-Mail, Linux, heck, even the Windows Live Suite, each of which has taken many thousands of man-hours to produce, and all this comes for free!
So, a free energy machine would not 'sell'. Or it might sell buckets, but that all money would be meaningless in no time at all.
NB this is why we should be investing a whole bunch of money in to things like ITER, cos if we can crack that, we aint gonna care about the cash it cost to get us there!
Umm, yeah but I think he means that we actually receive the energy as solar. i.e. that's the most direct method of input in to our system regardless of the transformations gone before. Then when we generate nuclear energy that's the most direct source of that energy stream.
Dude! How many times have you read it?
Wrong! A BSOD is caused by any unhandled exception which might cause corruption if the system is allowed to continue executing, such as some buggy software attempting to write in to kernel memory space.
I'll tell you why most people are not up in arms about these things, it's because during the recent economic boom years, the vast majority of people have been wealthy enough to put a roof over their heads and food on the plates of their family. Once those basic needs have been met, most of the 'proles' cease to have concerns outside their immediate social sphere, meaning they have less interest in what the government is up to.
The Government has cunningly used this time to introduce measures such as DNA Databases, extended periods of detention and anti 'terrorism' laws, all this following the media inspired frenzy after 9/11 & 7/7. The media is also far more widely reporting the rare occurrences of violence that are perpetrated on the streets as keeping us all in a state of fear obviously persuades us that, although we'd rather not be CCTV'd 24x7, we will put up with it 'for the greater good'.
The thing is, all this stuff is not making people feel safer, in fact they all feel far more afraid on the streets now than at any time in history, when the statistics show that crime and violent crimes in particular have been falling steadily for the last 20 years. The system is then abused by the relevant agencies and is used for trivial means, such as that pensioner being chucked out of some political party conference for heckling whoever was speaking at the time. The kicker was that the Police used their newly prescribed Anti-Terror laws to detain him. There was also a story recently about a mother whose young daughter dropped half a sausage roll in the street so she was fined £75 ($150 US) That's a sausage roll! Not even real litter like a chip packet, but a piece of food that would have been cleared away overnight by some animal or other! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-561762/I-dropped-morsel-girls-sausage-roll-litter-police-fined-75.html
There's example after example of this lunacy in the country and yet no-one says anything. It's outrageous, and every significant political party is in on the act, the situation will not change until there's a serious public backlash. I think we could be in for some interesting times if this so-called credit crunch bites as hard as some are predicting. People will let a litter fine slide when times are good, but when it is the difference between paying money to the government via their stealth taxes, and putting food on your kids plate, the public may not be so understanding.
If you want to start that game, it is being powered by the sun.
anybody else up for a no-holds-barred olympics where people can do whatever they like to themselves in order to win?
fine! Get a MS Certified Driver one time, I'll trust it up to a few point releases later... don't have to do it every time if you can't afford it...
Me neither - I think Microsoft is being bloody crooked by telling anyone in the first place that they're even developing a console. I think they should just set up a booth in each city where they want to sell it then leave people to come and look if they want. If they like it, they'll buy it - simple, no need for this evil advertising malarky.
But why would Americans need such shops or street vendors? Most Americans have high-speed internet access, or can obtain their illegal software from the computers at work. In many other countries, they don't have the network access, or jobs, so they have to buy off the street.
OK, so what you are saying is that access to a high speed net link somehow supplants the need for the shops? Why did America not have a widespread network of these shops before distribution of movies via the internet became commonplace (Probably less than 5 years ago)? Why is it that despite the fact that my entire Marketing Department, Sales Department, Directors and Administration all have access to a high speed net link, both domestically and at work, why do they all bug the IT Department guys for downloaded copies of the latest movies?
The distribution channel is only superficially related to the scale of the piracy problem. It is more the case that by allowing these places to exist that they are implicitly condoned by the authorities, which makes people more inclined to take advantage of the impossibly cheap prices they offer, which the studios have absolutely no chance of competing with. Heck, why would anyone bother downloading a movie if they are available on every street corner for less than the cost of the bandwidth, and without the hassle of tying up your broadband line for however long it takes?
I don't see what makes street vendors any more evil than other "pirates." I also don't see how the existence of street vending makes piracy a more serious problem than other methods, like Bittorrent.
I didn't say pirates are 'evil'. I was making the point that whilst the governments turn a blind eye to piracy by (for example) allowing the existence of the shops then the piracy problem in these countries makes it uneconomical for companies to compete on a large scale.
"but I would imagine that the piracy situation in countries where you can openly buy pirated material on the high street is going to be significantly bigger than in those aforementioned countries where the piracy market is somewhat underground."
Why? What is the logic behind this reasoning?
As I said before, I have no figures to back it up, so it was just a hunch based on the fact that when I walk in to Joe Schmo's house where I live, he will have maybe 20 DVD's on the shelf, and of those maybe 1 or 2 are pirate copies. Now when I have visited Joe Schmoski in Russia he has 20 DVDs on the shelf, of which maybe, and it's a BIG maybe, 1 is an original. So before I had no evidence, but now you have got me interested let's have a look for some quick quotes:
http://www.dvdexclusive.com/article.asp?articleID= 2431/
"Overall DVD unit shipments in China are forecast to rise to more than 300 million in 2009, up from about 100 million DVD units in 2005. Also, stronger government support should work to curb the country's present 90% piracy rate, where virtually all films are consumed illegally, to 70% to 80% by in 2009."
http://usinfo.state.gov/eap/Archive/2005/May/26-92 5739.html
Recent reports on global intellectual property rights (IPR) protections paint a "stark and unattractive" picture of the situation in China, where piracy levels in some sectors exceed 90 percent, Utah Republican Orrin Hatch said during a May 25 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
In fact: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=china+russi a+piracy&meta= there's hundreds of sources. Looks like I was right.
This doesn't make sense. China is issuing this format for its own citizens. Chinese companies will be pressing the discs. China doesn't need anyone's permission o
Take a fucking pill before posting you prick! We are having a discussion about DVD standards here, and y'know, I was talking in that context. (Although I may be unaware of any link that exists between DVD standards and the importance "on the world stage" of the nation in question)
To clarify, I was talking in terms of importance by the slice of revenue the studios get from each market, as this will undoubtably drive a lot of their strategic decisions. ffs.
As for piracy, most urban centres in the USA etc will not have shops on the high street that deal in exclusively pirated material, as does China, Russia and many other places. These shops are downright common, and certainly in the cities I have visited have outnumbered bona fide outlets by maybe 10:1. If outlets like this sprung up in the US they would in all likelyhood be shut down rather promptly. The other problematic fact is that I could have bought any number of current Cinema and DVD releases for the equivalent of about $1 each, and the authorities couldn't care less about the situation. I guess they have other priorities. Now I don't have any figures to back this up, so please correct me if I am wrong, but I would imagine that the piracy situation in countries where you can openly buy pirated material on the high street is going to be significantly bigger than in those aforementioned countries where the piracy market is somewhat underground.
So in order to provide the right kind of incentive for the studios to press these new Chinese discs, China would have to clean up the piracy situation as it currently stands, and get a high penetration of their new players. Neither of these are unsurmountable problems, particularly the latter, but they will both need to be addressed. That's also not to say that they will ignore the market completely if things don't change, but they are unlikely to 'fully embrace' it either (whatever that may mean.)
Whoever the content people pay to stamp them. The only place you are gonna get "'PRC'HD-DVDs" is in those societies that are relatively tolerant of piracy, because there's no way the content producers are going to license that format anywhere that counts i.e North America, Japan or Europe and some other places. The market for unlicensed content is practically non existant That being so, the players will never sell (in qunatity) in those markets.
As a side observation I think it could be interesting to see how resiliant the new HD formats are to duplication if there is what amounts to a government sponsored initiative to get content from one format to another.
ummm - China might put the players on the shelves, but who is gonna buy the players if theres no blockbuster movies to play on 'em because nearly all the content megaliths have already cosied up with Blu-Ray or HD-DVD? obviously many countries who have a rampant piracy problem may do well, but what about the civilised world?
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If Medicine were ever perfected, we would all be the same
That would be great! can you imagine? Send Ma Sony millions if not billions of player ID's reporting them as Pirates. They disable the lot, Joe Consumer gets up in arms, contacts TV station, TV people accurately report that Sony disabled their shiny new Blu-Ray, the other Joe Consumers think, 'duh, well if Sony do that I'm not getting one' Blu-Ray flops spectacularly. Thusly: DRM abandoned by all major manufacturers for generations to come.
:)
Hmmm.... If Only
I have to agree with this. Who else here thinks that the pace of progress in optical storage devices has been laughable?
I remember reading on here about a holographic disc (?) which was in development to store 1TB. Here I was thinking "That's more like it chaps, well done!" and almost all the comments were "Uh 1TB is like, uh too much dude. Who needs that?"
Well, standard DVD backup won't store my MP3 collection on one disc, let alone anything else. Once you add in all your photos and media files, you're looking at quite a few of these so called 'HD' DVD's
These are rubbish, they are outdated before they've even gone in to production. By the time a writable version comes out, we'll be seeing (at a guess) 500gb hard disks in off the shelf PCs, and I think that you are looking at digital media taking up a lot of that (what with legal movie downloads probably taking off etc)
Seriously, Sony, Toshiba et al. really have to open their eyes and start putting together a viable storage medium for the future.