1. Radio stations are forced to sell more advertising to support their increasing royalty fees 2. RIAA buys advertising time to play song clips and album trailers of their choosing 3. ??? 4. Profit!
All that will remain will be viral advertising campaigns disguised as entertainment series.
Imagine a show like, "The Office", which takes place in an actual paper (or otherwise) company who invested to have the brand recognition, like lets say a more competitive paper products company, such as Dixie or Mead. Or Charmin.
Product placement will be so prolific that jokes barely sneak out from behind pyramids of DaSani bottled water and cardboard Budweiser cutouts. The Perry Ellis logo will be emblazoned on every piece of clothing, and even the punchlines to many jokes will involve a brand name in some way or another.
Advertising would no longer be sold based on a show's popularity... shows would be written based on a product's popularity, and its manufacturer's budget. Commercials as we know them will be a thing of the past. They will be the shows. Royalties won't be paid by the shows to the actors; they'll be paid by brand names to the networks. Piracy will be embraced because then you're just stealing what they shouldn't even be able to give away for free.
It's not a far stretch, we're already seeing it more often than we notice. The erosion of the expectations of the masses has begun./equip Reynolds brand tin foil hat
I just bought a reasonably powerful, SMALL and light weight, dual core tablet (i.e. touchscreen w/ stylus) laptop for $999 at BestBuy, which came with Vista, about 2 weeks ago and so far I haven't seen what all the (negative) fuss is about -- and I've done some pretty questionable things with it already...
It's worked flawlessly for me so far, and the pen support is excellent. I did notice that it seems to use 800MB of ram (out of 2GB) when idle, but it also doesn't seem to spike too much when under decent load either. I see no reason to roll back to XP at this point. I'm pretty impressed, and that's not easy.
Sure, XP might perform marginally better, but I haven't had a need for that extra headroom yet, and, in my case, the laptop is primarily for its mobility.
Also, if I may... I must suggest that you all try this tablet PC stuff out. It's the future of computing (at least until we get brain implants.)
I'm a programmer stashed away in an exposed set of 8 cubicals, in what amounts to a closet of a closet, at the farthest end of our building, where I'm bathed in a gazillion watts of fluorescent lighting.
I have to walk a hundred paces just to see the outside. If there was no seating assignment, I'd at least have a chance to get my fair share of natural light -- especially in the winter months when the only daylight I see is on the drive to work.
When it comes to personal effects, programmers (at leas the ones I work with) don't really seem to exhibit anything they're too attached to. And with personal laptops, you can keep some mementos stashed there.
I'd have to give up my plants, and my facetious posters, but it would be well worth it to work in the presence of natural light at least some of the day, instead of these cold buzzing demon tubes that seem to have just the right color temperature to make my eyes feel strained and my head ache. And if you gave me ample facilities and the freedom to use them whenever, I'd probably find being in the office a bit more tolerable.
It may not do anything for my productivity, but it might keep me around longer.
Of course, giving me a private office in the front of the building would probably achieve the best of both worlds, from my perspective.
Anybody that's toyed around with Ableton Live will tell you that it departs significantly from most of the standard UI conventions, but what it replaces them with very quickly becomes far more efficient at navigating project files, and I don't see them abandoning this approach anytime soon.
"why do several hundred million people around the world eat it every day?"
Convenience and habit. It's CERTAINLY not for quality. Back in my younger days when I still ate that garbage, I sent many sandwiches back for "quality" errors.
I'd rather have a home made burger over a McDonalds diarrhea patty any day. Not everybody cares as much about their health as me. Not everybody has the time that I do, or the willpower to stay away from such evil convenience.
In any case, I was trying (and evidently failed) to make a funny. He was talking about McDonalds' quality control, and I was merely jabbing an elbow to insinuate that it's easy to have 100% quality control when (IMHO) they possess no quality whatsoever.
Also, it's a little unfair to compare having your hands inside the chest of a living human, with following a picture-based instruction pamphlet about assembling 6 prepared items into a burger. There's a different risk factor involved! In one case, you can scrape off excess catchup, in the other you're providing tissues and hugs to a mourning family.
We trained kids with down syndrome in high school to do more complex patterns than building burgers.
"Spying" on the citizens of a nation...? If somebody from another country did it to us, I believe they could be put to death under treason and espionage laws. If our own people do it, they just say, "Nothing to see here, move along!"
...has ad blocking software available for it as well.
As far as I'm concerned, this is like banning a TV show from playing on one brand of TV because it has a "Channel Up" button on the remote, even though all the other brands do as well.
Hell, while I'm at it... good luck rendering your flashy ads when I "steal your precious resources" in Lynx... or my own home brewed browser.
Thanks to a modified hosts file, I rarely see ads in Firefox (and on the off chance I'm forced to use IE.)
They should just try banning people with computers from viewing their site. It's a win-win for both sides: They will no longer have "valuable resources" stolen from them, and we'll have one less source of bogus statistics!
My girlfriend (stay with me here) bought a brand new Core 2 Duo from Dell for about $1200 with Vista on it and everything fairly well matched. We installed World of Warcraft on the system. It was capable of rendering the game on the highest settings, but even on the lowest settings the system was having serious internal problems.
The video drivers kept crashing, sometimes as often as every 15 seconds, and not surviving for more than 2 minutes... the screen would flash black for a second and the hard drive would thrash, and then the game would reappear. Once you exited the game, or if you would ALT+TAB or run in windowed mode, you would see a bubble notification popping up from the system tray notifying us that (paraphrasing) "the video card driver had crashed, but Windows Vista was able to recover."
Now, I'm not sure if I should blame Windows Vista, Dell, or the nVidia drivers... but it was in no way fulfilling that the system was able to identify that it was crashing, and recover, yet it was not able to prevent it from crashing in the first place. Nothing improved even after applying every possible update to the system. To my knowledge, it still suffers from the same problem to this day. (No helpful support from Dell, by the way.)
Whoever is responsible for this, somebody really dropped the ball. In any case, I wouldn't touch Vista with a 40-foot pole.
I can just see a bubble popping up to tell me, "A hacker has stolen your personal information, but Windows Vista was able to recover."
When I order a HD movie "OnDemand" through Comcast, it streams and starts right away.
For only $10/mo on top of their base cable modem costs, my downstream speed is increased by 2Mbps (and upstream doubled to 768Kbps), and I have hit sustained download rates of 750KB/s actual data (6Mbps not counting network overhead) while fetching 3GB of data from 40 users on a bit torrent network. I don't know how much HD MPEG4 requires, but that should be enough... it is for the cable box, which is just a cable modem with a video card and a tv tuner.
I live in a podunk town in the middle of nowhere, and everybody I know has Cable or DSL.
Under various circumstances, even perfectly functional humans have trouble interpreting what they see. Camouflage and optical illusions are just two examples that I can think of. Think of the drawing with some circles and some lines that asks, "which circle is larger" and it's clear what the answer is, but when you measure them, they're exactly the same size.
I don't really have a point, I'm just adding human cases to the statement that computer image interpretation is not well defined.
It's funny... I suggested the same idea to my coworkers, but I stressed the importance of having a window so the voter could see it in fact printed the name he selected. I didn't RTFA, though, so it might mention that requirement as well.
Excuse me for being uneducated on USA copyright and trademark law, but this is my two cents...
I wonder if Coca Cola ever sued Pepsi (Cola) or RC Cola or Sam's Cola. "Cola" is the ingredient that defines the category of beverage. Coke/Pepsi/RC/Sam's is really the defining part of the brand, and what has any value. Apple didn't make up the word Pod. They just did their lame practice of slapping a lower-cased "i" on the front of it to appeal to the tech-wannabees and hipster-blogsters and said "Hey this thing *holds* music, like a pod holds peas." In my completely humble non-legal-aware opinion, "i" in iPod is what sets it apart from just a common word, and even then it's just a letter. If I was to make a judgement on this without learning more, I'd only defend the use of "iPod" as a whole. If you don't draw the line there, then what's next. Ford suing Toyota for using the word automobiles?
And furthermore, I don't think it matters much if Apple sold 1,000 iPod or 100,000,000 iPods as long as they did the proper procedures to protect their property, they should be afforded the same level of protection. There's countless other situations where this could be a problem.
ShoutCAST / IceCAST AOL Instant Messenger / MSN Instant Messenger / Yahoo! Instant Messenger What-a-burger / Burger King / Eat at Joe's Burgers Bell Telephone / AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph)
If you ask me, this is insane, and shouldn't be even considered.
It's almost as insane as the iPod craze, and the silly media buzz attached to "podcasting" (which should, if this goes through, violate Apple and Nullsoft's property rights).
If you use a Pad Cypher on the graphics, you can "unlock" the mature content which was "already there." Essentially it would just be a mod that includes the difference between the standard image and the naked image and applies this change. IMHO, you're just unlocking the mature content that was already there.
I know, that's taking it a bit far... but really. If you can't get to the data without modifying the game (by whatever means) IN VIOLATION of the user agreement, then it should be considered arbitrary data.
Considering that it was impossible to invoke this via the standard version of the game, which is what was sold, not the mod, then I believe the rating was appropriate.
The ESRB should wake up and publish to concerned parents: "This rating does not apply to third party modifications which have not been reviewed by the ESRB." Instead, they engage in a witch-hunt.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't ask, don't Intel?
It's all about control.
1. Radio stations are forced to sell more advertising to support their increasing royalty fees
2. RIAA buys advertising time to play song clips and album trailers of their choosing
3. ???
4. Profit!
All that will remain will be viral advertising campaigns disguised as entertainment series.
/equip Reynolds brand tin foil hat
Imagine a show like, "The Office", which takes place in an actual paper (or otherwise) company who invested to have the brand recognition, like lets say a more competitive paper products company, such as Dixie or Mead. Or Charmin.
Product placement will be so prolific that jokes barely sneak out from behind pyramids of DaSani bottled water and cardboard Budweiser cutouts. The Perry Ellis logo will be emblazoned on every piece of clothing, and even the punchlines to many jokes will involve a brand name in some way or another.
Advertising would no longer be sold based on a show's popularity... shows would be written based on a product's popularity, and its manufacturer's budget. Commercials as we know them will be a thing of the past. They will be the shows. Royalties won't be paid by the shows to the actors; they'll be paid by brand names to the networks. Piracy will be embraced because then you're just stealing what they shouldn't even be able to give away for free.
It's not a far stretch, we're already seeing it more often than we notice. The erosion of the expectations of the masses has begun.
HAHAHAHA they gave the parent post an Informative rating... priceless
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8525875&type=product&id=1186007267767&ref=06&loc=01&ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=8525875
I just bought a reasonably powerful, SMALL and light weight, dual core tablet (i.e. touchscreen w/ stylus) laptop for $999 at BestBuy, which came with Vista, about 2 weeks ago and so far I haven't seen what all the (negative) fuss is about -- and I've done some pretty questionable things with it already...
It's worked flawlessly for me so far, and the pen support is excellent. I did notice that it seems to use 800MB of ram (out of 2GB) when idle, but it also doesn't seem to spike too much when under decent load either. I see no reason to roll back to XP at this point. I'm pretty impressed, and that's not easy.
Sure, XP might perform marginally better, but I haven't had a need for that extra headroom yet, and, in my case, the laptop is primarily for its mobility.
Also, if I may... I must suggest that you all try this tablet PC stuff out. It's the future of computing (at least until we get brain implants.)
I'm a programmer stashed away in an exposed set of 8 cubicals, in what amounts to a closet of a closet, at the farthest end of our building, where I'm bathed in a gazillion watts of fluorescent lighting.
I have to walk a hundred paces just to see the outside. If there was no seating assignment, I'd at least have a chance to get my fair share of natural light -- especially in the winter months when the only daylight I see is on the drive to work.
When it comes to personal effects, programmers (at leas the ones I work with) don't really seem to exhibit anything they're too attached to. And with personal laptops, you can keep some mementos stashed there.
I'd have to give up my plants, and my facetious posters, but it would be well worth it to work in the presence of natural light at least some of the day, instead of these cold buzzing demon tubes that seem to have just the right color temperature to make my eyes feel strained and my head ache. And if you gave me ample facilities and the freedom to use them whenever, I'd probably find being in the office a bit more tolerable.
It may not do anything for my productivity, but it might keep me around longer.
Of course, giving me a private office in the front of the building would probably achieve the best of both worlds, from my perspective.
Anybody that's toyed around with Ableton Live will tell you that it departs significantly from most of the standard UI conventions, but what it replaces them with very quickly becomes far more efficient at navigating project files, and I don't see them abandoning this approach anytime soon.
"why do several hundred million people around the world eat it every day?"
Convenience and habit. It's CERTAINLY not for quality. Back in my younger days when I still ate that garbage, I sent many sandwiches back for "quality" errors.
I'd rather have a home made burger over a McDonalds diarrhea patty any day. Not everybody cares as much about their health as me. Not everybody has the time that I do, or the willpower to stay away from such evil convenience.
In any case, I was trying (and evidently failed) to make a funny. He was talking about McDonalds' quality control, and I was merely jabbing an elbow to insinuate that it's easy to have 100% quality control when (IMHO) they possess no quality whatsoever.
Also, it's a little unfair to compare having your hands inside the chest of a living human, with following a picture-based instruction pamphlet about assembling 6 prepared items into a burger. There's a different risk factor involved! In one case, you can scrape off excess catchup, in the other you're providing tissues and hugs to a mourning family.
We trained kids with down syndrome in high school to do more complex patterns than building burgers.
Cheers!
Last time I checked, McDonalds was failing 100% of the time to make anything edible, but doctors at least save a few people with surgery.
"Spying" on the citizens of a nation...? If somebody from another country did it to us, I believe they could be put to death under treason and espionage laws. If our own people do it, they just say, "Nothing to see here, move along!"
I bet Barry Bonds would deny the existence of these asteroids in his system...
...has ad blocking software available for it as well.
As far as I'm concerned, this is like banning a TV show from playing on one brand of TV because it has a "Channel Up" button on the remote, even though all the other brands do as well.
Hell, while I'm at it... good luck rendering your flashy ads when I "steal your precious resources" in Lynx... or my own home brewed browser.
Deny your customers or find a new business model.
Step 1: Buy tissues.
Step 2: Cry
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit! (or, blame Firefox and return to Step 1.)
Thanks to a modified hosts file, I rarely see ads in Firefox (and on the off chance I'm forced to use IE.)
They should just try banning people with computers from viewing their site. It's a win-win for both sides: They will no longer have "valuable resources" stolen from them, and we'll have one less source of bogus statistics!
Sure, this idea looks good on paper... but...
*ducks*
My girlfriend (stay with me here) bought a brand new Core 2 Duo from Dell for about $1200 with Vista on it and everything fairly well matched. We installed World of Warcraft on the system. It was capable of rendering the game on the highest settings, but even on the lowest settings the system was having serious internal problems.
The video drivers kept crashing, sometimes as often as every 15 seconds, and not surviving for more than 2 minutes... the screen would flash black for a second and the hard drive would thrash, and then the game would reappear. Once you exited the game, or if you would ALT+TAB or run in windowed mode, you would see a bubble notification popping up from the system tray notifying us that (paraphrasing) "the video card driver had crashed, but Windows Vista was able to recover."
Now, I'm not sure if I should blame Windows Vista, Dell, or the nVidia drivers... but it was in no way fulfilling that the system was able to identify that it was crashing, and recover, yet it was not able to prevent it from crashing in the first place. Nothing improved even after applying every possible update to the system. To my knowledge, it still suffers from the same problem to this day. (No helpful support from Dell, by the way.)
Whoever is responsible for this, somebody really dropped the ball. In any case, I wouldn't touch Vista with a 40-foot pole.
I can just see a bubble popping up to tell me, "A hacker has stolen your personal information, but Windows Vista was able to recover."
Why would an intelligence designer create a structure that serves no purpose
The obligatory... "Just because we don't know its purpose doesn't mean He didn't put it there for a reason..."
(I support evolution theory, but I just had to play devil's advocate...)
- Andy
I think the infrastructure is already in place.
When I order a HD movie "OnDemand" through Comcast, it streams and starts right away.
For only $10/mo on top of their base cable modem costs, my downstream speed is increased by 2Mbps (and upstream doubled to 768Kbps), and I have hit sustained download rates of 750KB/s actual data (6Mbps not counting network overhead) while fetching 3GB of data from 40 users on a bit torrent network. I don't know how much HD MPEG4 requires, but that should be enough... it is for the cable box, which is just a cable modem with a video card and a tv tuner.
I live in a podunk town in the middle of nowhere, and everybody I know has Cable or DSL.
-@
Under various circumstances, even perfectly functional humans have trouble interpreting what they see. Camouflage and optical illusions are just two examples that I can think of. Think of the drawing with some circles and some lines that asks, "which circle is larger" and it's clear what the answer is, but when you measure them, they're exactly the same size.
I don't really have a point, I'm just adding human cases to the statement that computer image interpretation is not well defined.
- Andy
It's funny... I suggested the same idea to my coworkers, but I stressed the importance of having a window so the voter could see it in fact printed the name he selected. I didn't RTFA, though, so it might mention that requirement as well.
- Andy
No anti-virus software will ever produce an alternate ending to "Terminator 3".
Excuse me for being uneducated on USA copyright and trademark law, but this is my two cents...
I wonder if Coca Cola ever sued Pepsi (Cola) or RC Cola or Sam's Cola. "Cola" is the ingredient that defines the category of beverage. Coke/Pepsi/RC/Sam's is really the defining part of the brand, and what has any value. Apple didn't make up the word Pod. They just did their lame practice of slapping a lower-cased "i" on the front of it to appeal to the tech-wannabees and hipster-blogsters and said "Hey this thing *holds* music, like a pod holds peas." In my completely humble non-legal-aware opinion, "i" in iPod is what sets it apart from just a common word, and even then it's just a letter. If I was to make a judgement on this without learning more, I'd only defend the use of "iPod" as a whole. If you don't draw the line there, then what's next. Ford suing Toyota for using the word automobiles?
And furthermore, I don't think it matters much if Apple sold 1,000 iPod or 100,000,000 iPods as long as they did the proper procedures to protect their property, they should be afforded the same level of protection. There's countless other situations where this could be a problem.
ShoutCAST / IceCAST
AOL Instant Messenger / MSN Instant Messenger / Yahoo! Instant Messenger
What-a-burger / Burger King / Eat at Joe's Burgers
Bell Telephone / AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph)
If you ask me, this is insane, and shouldn't be even considered.
It's almost as insane as the iPod craze, and the silly media buzz attached to "podcasting" (which should, if this goes through, violate Apple and Nullsoft's property rights).
-@
If you use a Pad Cypher on the graphics, you can "unlock" the mature content which was "already there." Essentially it would just be a mod that includes the difference between the standard image and the naked image and applies this change. IMHO, you're just unlocking the mature content that was already there.
I know, that's taking it a bit far... but really. If you can't get to the data without modifying the game (by whatever means) IN VIOLATION of the user agreement, then it should be considered arbitrary data.
Considering that it was impossible to invoke this via the standard version of the game, which is what was sold, not the mod, then I believe the rating was appropriate.
The ESRB should wake up and publish to concerned parents: "This rating does not apply to third party modifications which have not been reviewed by the ESRB." Instead, they engage in a witch-hunt.
A witch! Witch! Burrrrrrrrrrn!!!
- Andy
So you mean to suggest Apple's going the way of "Seinfeld"?
-@
I suspect your inverse relationship theory will be pushed to the limit, as they push this new datacenter to its limit in Stealth II.
quality ~ 1/cgi
Anybody that saw the first installment of Stealth should understand where I'm coming from.
Skycaptain is another one in this category...
Way to go ILM! I want my money back!!!
Comic Book Guy's Voice: "Worst. Movies. Ever."
-@