...and we're back. Like so many other sites on the web, OSNews joined the worldwide protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT-IP Act, which threaten to end free speech, economic innovation, privacy, and the free exchange of information on the web. I don't wish to waste too many words on our participation, so consider this item as a sort of comment lightening rod to make sure that when the next story is posted, we can focus fully on its topic. Update: DC seems to be getting the message the internet sent today.
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Member since:2005-08-18
It's interesting to take into consideration that the technologies to make movies and music of high production values is becoming cheaper by the month.
And, seriously, $200 for a movie? That's fscking insane.
Also look at a recent counter example to "piracy is killing movie profits".
The first Sherlock Holmes movie had a budget of $90 million and made more than $524 at the box office. Please don't tell me piracy is killing the profits. Maybe what's wrong is the profit expectations. Maybe too many shitty movies with high budgets are made.
Maybe the time has come when you will not make insane profits on movies any more but such is life. A lot of businesses and professions has come and gone over the ages and I don't see anyone crying over the fact that you can't become famous and rich by being a woodcutter anymore.
Member since:2010-02-08
Member since:2006-01-24
I would take it one step further in regards to the whole 'losing jobs' thing. I am certain that piracy does result in lost sales, how many lost sales is another matter entirely and it's obviously not anywhere remotely near the one lost sale per illegal copy which is what the content industry is fabricating as facts.
But let's say that there is loss of income, and that this leads to a loss of jobs in that industry. Does that mean that the money people are not spending on content just suddenly disappear? No, obviously not, instead that money is being spent in other areas (perhaps physical goods or services) which in turn employ people, which in turn might employ more people than what would have had the money been spent on what the content industry offers, which in would be better for the economy as a whole.
Obviously this doesn't negate the right of imaginar... intellectual property owners to cry foul when they are not compensated for these copies but to claim that 'american jobs' are at stake seems disingenuous at best
given that what we are talking about here are jobs in a particular industry that are potentially lost, and that the loss of jobs in that area is most likely to generate jobs in other areas.
edit: Oh, and respect to OSNews for the blackout, not being able to access one of your favourite sites at all during a period drives the message home in a much stronger way than a black bar over the logo.
Edited 2012-01-19 08:00 UTC
Member since:2008-01-09
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Member since:
2005-11-13
Now that the 'SOPA protest day' is rounding down, let's talk about the problem of piracy. Many SOPA supporters will tell you that piracy is a real problem because it results in lost sales and the loss of jobs. Well, many people would argue with this reasoning, but let's say for the sake of argument that this is true. Which leads me to ask the following question:
So what?
How many jobs have been lost and companies gone down the crapper as a result of the Internet. If there's one truism about the Internet (and technology in general) is that businesses that either can't or wont adapt to the changes will cease to exist. But for businesses that are destroyed, new ones are created. This is the way it has been since the advent of business, and I'm just not sure why we should feel guilted into trying to save businesses who's end products can now be replicated an infinite amount of times for $0. As we come to grips with this new reality, maybe that means people won't be able to make movies that costs $200 million, and make me feel a little dumber every time I watch them. Is that not ok? Of course, music and books will always exist, as will movies that don't cost a fortune to make. As for apps and games, those who want to make money off of them will probably go to an online/subscription model as a way to curb piracy. This is an end result that a lot of people won't like, but it is just the way of things.
As a final thought, once physical replicators become a reality, are we going to insist that people still buy a loaf of bread, when they can just create one out of thin air? I'm just saying that instead of wasting time trying to stop something that will never be stopped, and labeling pirates as seal-clubbing bastards, maybe... just MAYBE we should try and think about how things are going to work going forward, with piracy being simply a reality, and a business problem for some to work out. Can you figure out a way to sell content that people can download for free? If yes, then great. If no, then you go out of business. It's just as simple as that. You don't have some god-given right to create content and sell it, especially when it's pretty much in the public domain as soon as you put it out there. If that means you have to find a new career, sucks to be you. If you couldn't see this coming, it's your own damn fault.
Edited 2012-01-19 02:00 UTC