511–520 of 844 posts
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Any recommendations?
The intruder with William Shatner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci4dQ2QzBhE The story depicts the machinations of a racist named Adam Cramer (Shatner), who arrives in the fictitious small Southern town of Caxton in order to incite white townspeople to racial violence against black townspeople and court-ordered school integration.
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> We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It's a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.
> Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. No it isn't. It's a workaround. This is an 8 billion dollar deal, there would have to be an impossible amount of piracy for it to count as "competition." This is precisely the reason why government regulation here is correct, as consumers, we don't have a lever long enough to have any real impact on the core problem. And we're just one side of the deal. These types of…
Sure, but it's a trivially easy workaround.
Our focus of attention on matters of regulation ought to be in those areas where working around the problem is not nearly as dead simple as a torrent client, a NAS, and a Plex server.
Between The Expanse and Stargate, Amazon Prime could be a sci-fi power house!
Probably won’t happen though...
> The deal can be viewed as a doubling down on business strategy that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, articulated at a conference in 2016: “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” he had said, referring to Amazon's diverse business divisions. This part is a real nugget.
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The solution is to break up big tech. Amazon shouldn't be ten companies in one. Google shouldn't be able to set web and mobile standards, then reap ad monies by forcing everyone to accept their anticompetitive changes. Apple shouldn't be the sole guardian of iPlatform. You can't have a protection racket on 50% of all commerce (phones >> gaming consoles) and enforce what gets put on the device. These companies don't h…
> Microsoft is literally the only tech giant behaving correctly, and it's probably because they got slapped with antitrust in the 2000s. Ask Slack if they agree. Microsoft used the dominance of Office to take over that market by bundling Teams.
The companies I worked at that had slack licenses still had teams using what they considered to be the best product. Slack, Hipchat (remember them?), and Zoom.
There's also more to it than 'bundling.' Trusting your chat communications to the same company doing your email is a more compelling story than sending it to Slack, Discord, or Zoom. There are a lot of companies that still don't trust 'the cloud' and then you've got governments all over the world and all of their regulations that may block the use of something else.
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> I feel like I am swimming in an ocean of never ending content produced with the same recipe. This is what machine learning, pattern recognition will get us. I watched one show in Amazon prime. One shocking thing I noted besides repetitive plots every few episodes, is that one character say something and after few minutes or next episode another character spoke exactly same sentence in different situation. And it ha…
I think the machine learning part in that is massively exaggerated, perhaps to avoid personal responsibility. Detecting the patterns in commercially successful movies hardly requires complex pattern recognition algorithms. I would claim that most movies made in the past decades were copying ideas that had turned out to be successful earlier. Maybe machine learning can add some tiny extra on top of the recipe, but I t…
You are right of course. I said that in half-jest. It is like at work where every product/project is working on something next generation. Irritates the hell out of me. So in morning meetings I so often ask "Are we fixing it now or it will be part of our next gen product?"
So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.
Currently the best catalog is with illegal streaming services and BitTorrent VOD and (for the cost of VPN).
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I think we're at or approaching a tipping point. For a long while I've not been able to justify the effort it takes to maintain automatic content downloads and a streaming server. But that maintenance cost isn't higher when I want content from an additional platform. If I'm gonna pirate an Amazon/MGM exclusive then I'm gonna cancel Netflix, Hulu, Paramount+ and Apple TV+ too.
Piracy was the Easiest/Only way to get content until ~2008ish. Since then; Netflix and (...x streaming platform) made it easier/better to Pay for the content than pirate it. It does feel like we're approaching a tipping point now in the other direction with all of these streaming fiefdoms. My household has Netflix, Hulu, D+, and Prime streaming now - that's already too many and needs pairing IMO.
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The solution is to break up big tech. Amazon shouldn't be ten companies in one. Google shouldn't be able to set web and mobile standards, then reap ad monies by forcing everyone to accept their anticompetitive changes. Apple shouldn't be the sole guardian of iPlatform. You can't have a protection racket on 50% of all commerce (phones >> gaming consoles) and enforce what gets put on the device. These companies don't h…
> Microsoft is literally the only tech giant behaving correctly, and it's probably because they got slapped with antitrust in the 2000s. Ask Slack if they agree. Microsoft used the dominance of Office to take over that market by bundling Teams.
Their monopoly lawsuit behavior was different — the bundling of windows with forced IE was problematic (largely because windows was everything, and also IE being largely unrelated to the rest of the OS) but much more problematic was their OEM strategies, to enforce and maintain windows as the dominant OS.