Because the biggest security hold is at the keyboard. In the same way a user would run your program off the internet without really knowing what it is, they'll run the next one too, even if you install a different browser.
About the only thing you could do for them is reconfigure their machine so they don't run as administrator all the time. But honestly, they'd likely get angry about that when their machine tells them they don't have permissions to do something they try (like install more BS from the internet).
Most people do just main, web surfing and perhaps some Excel. 32-bit and average floating point does quite well for those things.
It's a good mainstream processor. The market needs to realize which machines do need to be the fastest processors out there and which don't. Intel should be helping them understand this, but they're doing a crappy job.
Intel is honestly doing a horrible job getting the word out about their new chips.
But yeah, it's their mainstream chip.
That means mobile and also mainstream desktops. They understand most people don't need the fastest CPU around, so they have one that is faster than most, but not as fast as the fastest out there. And that's their new mainstream.
There should be dozens of 3rd tier Core motherboards out there by now for people to use to make their own PCs. Instead there is one, and it costs $300. Intel is not doing a great job indicating to the market which way they are headed.
Looks the same to me. Within a dollar. High performance DDR (above PC3200) costs more than DDR2, actually.
That's great AMD is making slightly more efficient systems soon. This is likely because DDR2 uses less power (1.8V instead 2.4V). But AMD is so far behind, they won't come near catching up until they get to 65nm.
It bugs me to see so many people in denial about Intel vs. AMD right now. When people moved to AMD, I thought it was because they were doing the smart thing, and paying attention to relative performance and excellence. But if that was the case, I those same people wouldn't be making excuses for AMD right now.
Intel is beating them at the moment in all but the highest performance systems. And when Core 2 Duo (awful name) comes out, Intel will have that too.
I currently own an Athlon X2 4200+ and I love it. But I'm not a fanboy, I know AMD is in 2nd place right now.
Please AMD, keep the pressure on, pass up Intel again.
When these two companies compete, we all win.
Here's another bonus link of a Core Duo beating out an Opteron 175 (AMD dual) clock for clock.
Core Duo beats Opteron 175 clock-for-clock in nearly every test (including all that measure primarily CPU performance and bandwidth). Yes, the Core Duo was massively overclocked, it wins clock-for-clock, but if you want the highest performance right now with no overclocking, it's still AMD. But you'll pay a big power/heat price for it.
NetBurst is dead. Core is their mainstream solution. Not just their mobile solution.
Bottom line: it outperforms AMD clock for clock (of course, it cannot be clocked as high as the fastest AMDs) and uses much less power, partly due to great design, partly due to 65nm process (which AMD won't have until December).
The present invention relates to systems and/or methods that generate playlist(s) for a library or collection of media items via selecting a plurality of seed items, at least one of which is an undesirable seed item. Some of the seed items are desirable indicating that a user prefers additional media items similar to the desirable seed items and others are undesirable indicating that the user prefers additional media items dissimilar to the undesirable seed items. Additionally, the seed items can be weighted to establish a relative importance of the seed items. The invention compares media items in the collection with the seed items and determines which media items are added into the playlist by computation of similarity metrics or values. The playlist can be regenerated by adding desirable seed items to the playlist and removing media items from the playlist (e.g., undesirable seed items)."
Why would Apple be worried about that? This patent applies to giving weights to stuff you like and don't like and having the device autogenerate playlists. It's basically a knockoff of TiVo's thumbs up and down.
iPod doesn't auto select stuff you might like for you. Even iTunes doesn't.
So basically the very fact that today you can have the whole spectrum of sounds including voice overs, realistic-sounding orchestra music (e.g., in SW KOTOR), ambient sounds (e.g., dogs barking or wolves howling), etc, are all made possible by the fact that someone gave PC a DAC.
The internal speaker on the PC already has a DAC. And it can play at sample rates similar to the original Soundblaster. And both were mono.
Creative improved it a bit (included a DMA engine for the DAC) and made it possible to hook better speakers up than what is in your PC.
A DVD+R (the one shown isn't DL) is 4.5G of course. What's wrong with me thinking of CDs?
You're right. With H.264, at 4.5G for a 2 hour movie you could get very good results. With 9G (dual layer), I figure you could get nearly perfect results perfect results.
Boy do I feel stupid. I apologize. I musta had a brain lock.
And as to the vast amounts of content you see on the net that are HD and reencoded, many of them aren't true HD and many of them don't look particularly good.
I know MPEG-4 is a lot better than MPEG-2 for video. But even with only good quality (ATSC), TV shows take 8G an hour. Now you want to squeeze that to 0.360G? 24X? And BluRay is supposed to provide superior quality picture, not good quality picture.
Top Gear takes about 0.300G for an hour of content. And it still doesn't look perfect and it has 1/5th the pixels as a movie.
Just because you can strip enough bits to get it to fit a CD doesn't mean the quality is there.
Some of these patent troll companies used to be companies that innovated at one time.
So, you cannot say that Creative isn't a patent troll because they innovated at one time (even recently). You have to keep watching and see if they continue to innovate.
I said that Creative may have just switched from a real company to a shell company. We'll know as time goes by, by their future actions.
And I never said Creative's patent should be anulled based upon their potential future behavior. I never even said known patent troll companies' patents should be anulled based upon their behavior.
However, I do feel Creative's patent is BS, just on its face. It's entirely obvious and menu systems were in wide use before they applied for it.
You make this argument that Creative isn't patent trolling based upon past Creative actions (actually making innovative products). But this appear to be changing. Look at Creative's mp3 player sales trends. They are not doing well in the marketplace. And furthermore they made a huge flash memory buy to lock in prices when they were rising a bit back, and they are hugely underwater on it.
In short, many of these patent trolls are shells of companies that used to do actual innovative work. If you looked at them at one time you would have said they are in no way just patent trolls. And it is very possible Creative is following this path. Things may look different soon.
If it's all a big conspiracy or incompetence, then it seems like the market is right for the picking. You should offer this service in Manhattan. If you're correct, you'll make money hand over fist.
It's pointless. It didn't drive Castro out. He'll die of old age first. It didn't change Cuba. And the major reason for it in the beginning was that Castro nationalized the assets of US compaines. This drove Cuba to the Soviets. He wasn't really a Communist, but after we turned our back on him, he had no choice, he had to survive, and the Soviets would drop money on him merely because he would be the only Communist country in the Western Hemisphere and only 60 miles from the US no less!
Now the major reason is that the anti-Castro Cuban exiles are a major swing party in a state that is important in the electoral college (and thus Presidential election process). So the parties in power subjagate the actual interests of the country to the votes of a small contingent in one area of one state.
Furthermore, and most importantly, if we don't reconcile with Castro before he dies, it will be difficult for Castro's replacement to make up with the US without being branded as going against "the revolution". So, if we wait out Castro, then try to reconcile, it doesn't go well. If we reconciled now, it'd be much smoother going.
Not that I love Castro. He executed people for the same things that Bautista had jailed Castro for (and released him early after treating him well). He ran his country into the ground trying to prove political points and partly out of spite. I do understand what drove him to do what he did, the same as the American Fruit Company (Chiquita) owning 80% of the land in Honduras.
But I do believe this, we are not solving the Castro problem with the current system, and we might be able to solve it if we changed. But we're too pigheaded to do so. We should apply the principles of engagement to Cuba as we do with China.
On the Libya front, Ghadafi, the asshole, showed himself the bigger man by capitulating. And no credit to Bush, Ghadafi had been kissing the US ass for years trying to get back on our good side. Bush was wise to accept and make maximum political hay from it, but he didn't have anything to do with it.
Too many poor decisions are made for the sake of "consistency". Sometimes you just have to say "the situation has change, the correct course is different now".
(me) Production companies aren't in the business to lose money, they wouldn't keep making movies if they didn't make money on them.
(you) Which explains why there have been a number of spectacular implosions due to very expensive productions bombing out. For example - Heaven's Gate took out UA, Cutthroat Island took out Carolco and Raise the Titanic took out ITC. On the other hand, there have been plenty of underestimations - UA and Universal both took a pass on Star Wars, even Spielberg expected Jaws to be a career-ending bomb after he had finished shooting, and of course the titanic of underestimations - Titanic, expected to bomb so badly that Cameron had to forfeit his enitre salary of $8M plus his share of the gross just to keep the production afloat.
I am aware of companies going under. I think Cutthroat Island is a little less direct than those others, but either way, Carolco did go the way of the dodo. Well, sort of. I mean, Cinergi is here, right? If movies lose money, why did Vajna start a new company doing the same thing? As Einstein said, foolishness is doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Cameron giving up his money was because of the total cost of the production compared to even an average or above average take, not becuase it was expected to bomb. It cost so much it would take a super-huge blockbuster take to cover costs. And it did that (and more) in the end.
But either way, a few cases don't prove the rule. You said 90% of movies lose money. Then you list a couple that did. Your two statements don't agree. And you completely disregard the current business climate when attempting to refute my statements that indicate the impact the current DVD sales market have on balance sheets. It's very possible these bombs actually made money given the current DVD market. It's just it came too late for these production companies.
Anyway, often the problems that cause these production companies to go away are structural or legal technicalities (like wanting to escape liabilities). SKG made plenty of money in their time to stick around, it seems they just spent too much doing it.
(me) I don't believe TV productions in general work on this "90% lose money" principle either. (You deleted my comment about most productions being done to a cost with an idea of the revenues ahead of time.)
(you) Got any hard numbers to support your beliefs? If it weren't 6am in the morning I'd dig up a ton of links to support mine, for now you will just have to be satisifed with Mark Cuban's statement that "more often than not... license fees are less than what it costs to produce the show" and that it is based on the hope that if the show does well that they can earn more on future deals, including syndication and dvd. http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000617063228 /
I think you are forgetting the largest part of the market. Again, TV is mostly cable now. Cable is mostly crap. These small productions ("World's biggest ships!" and other cheap content) are what I was referring to them. You seem to overlook them, instead looking at other end of the market, the wildly speculative productions done by Mark Cuban. You can't use a person who took the biggest chance in movies (releasing simultaneously on DVD, cable and in theaters) as an example of the entire market situation.
Anyway, I know these productions are crap, but they do account for the majority of the productions. They're the least interesting ones, but the largest part of the market, at least by volume.
Yes, I do agree the high-line (network, etc.) market is more speculative. Much of this is done by the networks themselves now (NBC, HBO), but there are still things like "Book of Daniel" out there that underscore your read of this market very well.
Again, on the DVD front, note that even cancelled TV shows hit DVD now. I have the "Keen Eddie" DVDs for example. Plenty of peopl
It surprises me how often "Fair Use" is trotted out when it really only applies to the same circumstances here as it does there (educational, including criticism since it is informative).
The US presumed right to copy recordings you've bought to use them elsewhere stems from the home taping act and presumably from the Betamax case.
If I pull my 3 month old phone out of my pocket here and go to the web, it makes the speakers 3 feet from me buzz (and yes, I know why, don't need to explain it to me).
TDMA (GSM) phones put out a lost of electromagnetic hash. If the tower tells the phone to use a high power setting and the phone obliges, it could easily mess up equipment that measures small currents (like an EKG).
And that's with a modern phone. This won't go away or even get better until GSM (and other TDMA techs) go by the wayside. Which doesn't appear like it will be soon.
About 4 years ago now Libya renounced their backing of terrorism in the 80s (and 90s) and said they'd like to return to the world community. And since it was Ghadafi in charge then and now, he had no weaseling to do. He just said he was wrong.
It does happen. It takes a lot of humility to do it, which is why we're unlikely to see the US admit wrongdoing soon. On anything like, say, the Cuba embargo.
"Now that the cost of distribution is effectively zero, it does not make sense to try to mark-up the distribution costs so as to pay for the production costs. After all 2000% of $0 is still $0."
You are working from a cost model. Speaking of what "doesn't make sense" (quotes not there to be patronizing, just the sentence reads wrong without it). That's where you work from the idea of fairness. This market isn't working that way, it is working from a "whatever the market will bear" model. They'll cut prices when they think they'll make more by charging lower prices, not when their production costs drop.
Hollywood does not universally work on the principle that only 10% of productions make money. Right now, with DVD profits and such, virtually all movie producions make money, even after advertising costs. Production companies aren't in the business to lose money, they wouldn't keep making movies if they didn't make money on them. The fiction that movies lose money is just Hollywood doing what they do best, telling stories. Look up Buchwald v. Paramount for an example.
I don't believe TV productions in general work on this "90% lose money" principle either. There are many small productions made cheaply, and they are all made to a cost with a general idea of the amount of revenue they can realize and a knowledge that they will almost certainly cover their costs.
Perhaps your description does fit TV productions, as historically if a TV show didn't make it into syndication, it was very likely to lose money. This is temporarily not as true as usual, with DVD profits even from cancelled shows helping out a lot. But likely it will return to normal as the hot market for old TV shows on DVDs dies down somewhat. Also note that with the breadth of cable channels in the US hungry for content to air, many series go to syndication with fewer than 100 shows.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the biggest security hold is at the keyboard. In the same way a user would run your program off the internet without really knowing what it is, they'll run the next one too, even if you install a different browser.
About the only thing you could do for them is reconfigure their machine so they don't run as administrator all the time. But honestly, they'd likely get angry about that when their machine tells them they don't have permissions to do something they try (like install more BS from the internet).
"a license that not only doesn't even try to screw the people who accept it over"
Do licenses try to screw those who accept it over? Licenses mostly screw people who violate it over.
If I accept the GPL, I can do anything I want except what isn't allowed by the license. If I do try that stuff, I get screwed.
How is the GPL any different in this way?
How does the GPL ensure a competitive marketplace?
I'm not saying the judge made the wrong decision, but I don't understand how the GPL helps encourage competition.
They were the devices in racks between the monitors.
They're not PCs in there. They're not "representative hardware". They're PS3s, devkits.
No, they weren't in final plastics yet either.
But the weakness don't amount to much.
Most people do just main, web surfing and perhaps some Excel. 32-bit and average floating point does quite well for those things.
It's a good mainstream processor. The market needs to realize which machines do need to be the fastest processors out there and which don't. Intel should be helping them understand this, but they're doing a crappy job.
Intel is honestly doing a horrible job getting the word out about their new chips.
But yeah, it's their mainstream chip.
That means mobile and also mainstream desktops. They understand most people don't need the fastest CPU around, so they have one that is faster than most, but not as fast as the fastest out there. And that's their new mainstream.
There should be dozens of 3rd tier Core motherboards out there by now for people to use to make their own PCs. Instead there is one, and it costs $300. Intel is not doing a great job indicating to the market which way they are headed.
http://memory4less.com/memory/m4l_ddr.asp
Looks the same to me. Within a dollar. High performance DDR (above PC3200) costs more than DDR2, actually.
That's great AMD is making slightly more efficient systems soon. This is likely because DDR2 uses less power (1.8V instead 2.4V). But AMD is so far behind, they won't come near catching up until they get to 65nm.
It bugs me to see so many people in denial about Intel vs. AMD right now. When people moved to AMD, I thought it was because they were doing the smart thing, and paying attention to relative performance and excellence. But if that was the case, I those same people wouldn't be making excuses for AMD right now.
Intel is beating them at the moment in all but the highest performance systems. And when Core 2 Duo (awful name) comes out, Intel will have that too.
I currently own an Athlon X2 4200+ and I love it. But I'm not a fanboy, I know AMD is in 2nd place right now.
Please AMD, keep the pressure on, pass up Intel again.
When these two companies compete, we all win.
Here's another bonus link of a Core Duo beating out an Opteron 175 (AMD dual) clock for clock.
http://anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2750
http://anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2750&p=1
This review is weeks old.
Core Duo beats Opteron 175 clock-for-clock in nearly every test (including all that measure primarily CPU performance and bandwidth). Yes, the Core Duo was massively overclocked, it wins clock-for-clock, but if you want the highest performance right now with no overclocking, it's still AMD. But you'll pay a big power/heat price for it.
NetBurst is dead. Core is their mainstream solution. Not just their mobile solution.
Bottom line: it outperforms AMD clock for clock (of course, it cannot be clocked as high as the fastest AMDs) and uses much less power, partly due to great design, partly due to 65nm process (which AMD won't have until December).
Abstract:
The present invention relates to systems and/or methods that generate playlist(s) for a library or collection of media items via selecting a plurality of seed items, at least one of which is an undesirable seed item. Some of the seed items are desirable indicating that a user prefers additional media items similar to the desirable seed items and others are undesirable indicating that the user prefers additional media items dissimilar to the undesirable seed items. Additionally, the seed items can be weighted to establish a relative importance of the seed items. The invention compares media items in the collection with the seed items and determines which media items are added into the playlist by computation of similarity metrics or values. The playlist can be regenerated by adding desirable seed items to the playlist and removing media items from the playlist (e.g., undesirable seed items)."
Why would Apple be worried about that? This patent applies to giving weights to stuff you like and don't like and having the device autogenerate playlists. It's basically a knockoff of TiVo's thumbs up and down.
iPod doesn't auto select stuff you might like for you. Even iTunes doesn't.
So why would Apple worry about that patent?
So basically the very fact that today you can have the whole spectrum of sounds including voice overs, realistic-sounding orchestra music (e.g., in SW KOTOR), ambient sounds (e.g., dogs barking or wolves howling), etc, are all made possible by the fact that someone gave PC a DAC.
The internal speaker on the PC already has a DAC. And it can play at sample rates similar to the original Soundblaster. And both were mono.
Creative improved it a bit (included a DMA engine for the DAC) and made it possible to hook better speakers up than what is in your PC.
I think what amazon forced on it's competitor is better than what they use.
You can use regular (checkout) type shopping with Amazon too. I don't have one-click turned on, for the same reasons you mention.
Boy do I wish I hadn't just pressed reply.
A DVD+R (the one shown isn't DL) is 4.5G of course. What's wrong with me thinking of CDs?
You're right. With H.264, at 4.5G for a 2 hour movie you could get very good results. With 9G (dual layer), I figure you could get nearly perfect results perfect results.
Boy do I feel stupid. I apologize. I musta had a brain lock.
He knows that and you don't seem to.
s ony-pictures-to-use-mpeg-2-on-blu-ray/
http://homeentertainment.engadget.com/2005/11/29/
And as to the vast amounts of content you see on the net that are HD and reencoded, many of them aren't true HD and many of them don't look particularly good.
I know MPEG-4 is a lot better than MPEG-2 for video. But even with only good quality (ATSC), TV shows take 8G an hour. Now you want to squeeze that to 0.360G? 24X? And BluRay is supposed to provide superior quality picture, not good quality picture.
Top Gear takes about 0.300G for an hour of content. And it still doesn't look perfect and it has 1/5th the pixels as a movie.
Just because you can strip enough bits to get it to fit a CD doesn't mean the quality is there.
There was a time before video cameras, before movies, before photographs. And people still believed things then.
Just because you didn't see it on TV doesn't mean it didn't happen.
These conspiracy theorists state that unless you see it happen, it can't be believed. This tape just plays right into their foolishness.
I say let the crackpots be crackpots. Let them disbelieve everything. That's what they're going to do anyway.
It isn't the government's fault some people are unable to believe overwhelming evidence just because they haven't seen a video yet.
Some of these patent troll companies used to be companies that innovated at one time.
So, you cannot say that Creative isn't a patent troll because they innovated at one time (even recently). You have to keep watching and see if they continue to innovate.
I said that Creative may have just switched from a real company to a shell company. We'll know as time goes by, by their future actions.
And I never said Creative's patent should be anulled based upon their potential future behavior. I never even said known patent troll companies' patents should be anulled based upon their behavior.
However, I do feel Creative's patent is BS, just on its face. It's entirely obvious and menu systems were in wide use before they applied for it.
It hooked to your TV. It took cartridges.
It was and is a console.
You might be able to argue a Super Gun (JAMMA to TV adapter) wasn't a console.
But Neo-Geo? It was.
And it was a ripoff. It had a 16MHz 68000, and an 8 MHz Z80 in it. That's the same hardware as a Genesis, which cost $150.
Was Dreamcast not a console because it used the Naomi hardware, which was the same as some of Segas arcade machines?
You make this argument that Creative isn't patent trolling based upon past Creative actions (actually making innovative products). But this appear to be changing. Look at Creative's mp3 player sales trends. They are not doing well in the marketplace. And furthermore they made a huge flash memory buy to lock in prices when they were rising a bit back, and they are hugely underwater on it.
In short, many of these patent trolls are shells of companies that used to do actual innovative work. If you looked at them at one time you would have said they are in no way just patent trolls. And it is very possible Creative is following this path. Things may look different soon.
If it's all a big conspiracy or incompetence, then it seems like the market is right for the picking. You should offer this service in Manhattan. If you're correct, you'll make money hand over fist.
So have at it!
It's pointless. It didn't drive Castro out. He'll die of old age first. It didn't change Cuba. And the major reason for it in the beginning was that Castro nationalized the assets of US compaines. This drove Cuba to the Soviets. He wasn't really a Communist, but after we turned our back on him, he had no choice, he had to survive, and the Soviets would drop money on him merely because he would be the only Communist country in the Western Hemisphere and only 60 miles from the US no less!
Now the major reason is that the anti-Castro Cuban exiles are a major swing party in a state that is important in the electoral college (and thus Presidential election process). So the parties in power subjagate the actual interests of the country to the votes of a small contingent in one area of one state.
Furthermore, and most importantly, if we don't reconcile with Castro before he dies, it will be difficult for Castro's replacement to make up with the US without being branded as going against "the revolution". So, if we wait out Castro, then try to reconcile, it doesn't go well. If we reconciled now, it'd be much smoother going.
Not that I love Castro. He executed people for the same things that Bautista had jailed Castro for (and released him early after treating him well). He ran his country into the ground trying to prove political points and partly out of spite. I do understand what drove him to do what he did, the same as the American Fruit Company (Chiquita) owning 80% of the land in Honduras.
But I do believe this, we are not solving the Castro problem with the current system, and we might be able to solve it if we changed. But we're too pigheaded to do so. We should apply the principles of engagement to Cuba as we do with China.
On the Libya front, Ghadafi, the asshole, showed himself the bigger man by capitulating. And no credit to Bush, Ghadafi had been kissing the US ass for years trying to get back on our good side. Bush was wise to accept and make maximum political hay from it, but he didn't have anything to do with it.
Too many poor decisions are made for the sake of "consistency". Sometimes you just have to say "the situation has change, the correct course is different now".
(me) Production companies aren't in the business to lose money, they wouldn't keep making movies if they didn't make money on them.
... license fees are less than what it costs to produce the show" and that it is based on the hope that if the show does well that they can earn more on future deals, including syndication and dvd. http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000617063228 /
(you) Which explains why there have been a number of spectacular implosions due to very expensive productions bombing out. For example - Heaven's Gate took out UA, Cutthroat Island took out Carolco and Raise the Titanic took out ITC. On the other hand, there have been plenty of underestimations - UA and Universal both took a pass on Star Wars, even Spielberg expected Jaws to be a career-ending bomb after he had finished shooting, and of course the titanic of underestimations - Titanic, expected to bomb so badly that Cameron had to forfeit his enitre salary of $8M plus his share of the gross just to keep the production afloat.
I am aware of companies going under. I think Cutthroat Island is a little less direct than those others, but either way, Carolco did go the way of the dodo. Well, sort of. I mean, Cinergi is here, right? If movies lose money, why did Vajna start a new company doing the same thing? As Einstein said, foolishness is doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Cameron giving up his money was because of the total cost of the production compared to even an average or above average take, not becuase it was expected to bomb. It cost so much it would take a super-huge blockbuster take to cover costs. And it did that (and more) in the end.
But either way, a few cases don't prove the rule. You said 90% of movies lose money. Then you list a couple that did. Your two statements don't agree. And you completely disregard the current business climate when attempting to refute my statements that indicate the impact the current DVD sales market have on balance sheets. It's very possible these bombs actually made money given the current DVD market. It's just it came too late for these production companies.
Anyway, often the problems that cause these production companies to go away are structural or legal technicalities (like wanting to escape liabilities). SKG made plenty of money in their time to stick around, it seems they just spent too much doing it.
(me) I don't believe TV productions in general work on this "90% lose money" principle either. (You deleted my comment about most productions being done to a cost with an idea of the revenues ahead of time.)
(you) Got any hard numbers to support your beliefs? If it weren't 6am in the morning I'd dig up a ton of links to support mine, for now you will just have to be satisifed with Mark Cuban's statement that "more often than not
I think you are forgetting the largest part of the market. Again, TV is mostly cable now. Cable is mostly crap. These small productions ("World's biggest ships!" and other cheap content) are what I was referring to them. You seem to overlook them, instead looking at other end of the market, the wildly speculative productions done by Mark Cuban. You can't use a person who took the biggest chance in movies (releasing simultaneously on DVD, cable and in theaters) as an example of the entire market situation.
Anyway, I know these productions are crap, but they do account for the majority of the productions. They're the least interesting ones, but the largest part of the market, at least by volume.
Yes, I do agree the high-line (network, etc.) market is more speculative. Much of this is done by the networks themselves now (NBC, HBO), but there are still things like "Book of Daniel" out there that underscore your read of this market very well.
Again, on the DVD front, note that even cancelled TV shows hit DVD now. I have the "Keen Eddie" DVDs for example. Plenty of peopl
It surprises me how often "Fair Use" is trotted out when it really only applies to the same circumstances here as it does there (educational, including criticism since it is informative).
The US presumed right to copy recordings you've bought to use them elsewhere stems from the home taping act and presumably from the Betamax case.
Wikipedia has a pretty good article on this.
If I pull my 3 month old phone out of my pocket here and go to the web, it makes the speakers 3 feet from me buzz (and yes, I know why, don't need to explain it to me).
TDMA (GSM) phones put out a lost of electromagnetic hash. If the tower tells the phone to use a high power setting and the phone obliges, it could easily mess up equipment that measures small currents (like an EKG).
And that's with a modern phone. This won't go away or even get better until GSM (and other TDMA techs) go by the wayside. Which doesn't appear like it will be soon.
About 4 years ago now Libya renounced their backing of terrorism in the 80s (and 90s) and said they'd like to return to the world community. And since it was Ghadafi in charge then and now, he had no weaseling to do. He just said he was wrong.
It does happen. It takes a lot of humility to do it, which is why we're unlikely to see the US admit wrongdoing soon. On anything like, say, the Cuba embargo.
Here's from your link:
"Now that the cost of distribution is effectively zero, it does not make sense to try to mark-up the distribution costs so as to pay for the production costs. After all 2000% of $0 is still $0."
You are working from a cost model. Speaking of what "doesn't make sense" (quotes not there to be patronizing, just the sentence reads wrong without it). That's where you work from the idea of fairness. This market isn't working that way, it is working from a "whatever the market will bear" model. They'll cut prices when they think they'll make more by charging lower prices, not when their production costs drop.
Hollywood does not universally work on the principle that only 10% of productions make money. Right now, with DVD profits and such, virtually all movie producions make money, even after advertising costs. Production companies aren't in the business to lose money, they wouldn't keep making movies if they didn't make money on them. The fiction that movies lose money is just Hollywood doing what they do best, telling stories. Look up Buchwald v. Paramount for an example.
I don't believe TV productions in general work on this "90% lose money" principle either. There are many small productions made cheaply, and they are all made to a cost with a general idea of the amount of revenue they can realize and a knowledge that they will almost certainly cover their costs.
Perhaps your description does fit TV productions, as historically if a TV show didn't make it into syndication, it was very likely to lose money. This is temporarily not as true as usual, with DVD profits even from cancelled shows helping out a lot. But likely it will return to normal as the hot market for old TV shows on DVDs dies down somewhat. Also note that with the breadth of cable channels in the US hungry for content to air, many series go to syndication with fewer than 100 shows.