But I like the old one...

Arizona Daily Sun Story




Ironically I can not find the old logo to make a comparison... sigh... I'm pretty sure I'm not alone when I say I think it will take alot more then a logo change to make the changes they want.

Riding the bit torrent....

It's been a rough week at work... so I decided to do something just for me tonight... I was going to attack the last thing in the Linux world that I have never tried... I was going to instal Slackware Linux (Que somesort of thematic music) however I seem to have a problem. And I whish it were only related to this one Linux Distrobution but alas it as has been on all of the distro's I've downloaded in the last 6 months.

Yes I'm getting corruptued Linux downloads!

OH THE HUMAINTY OF IT ALL

**note as if this weren't geeky enough I'm about to go off the deep end, if you are not a geek you may want to goto another blog since this is about to get real boring real quick**

About six months ago I had 3 things happen all with in about the same amount of time that I really can't pin my finger on any one event.

1. I got a 200gb SATA hard drive and add in raid board to run it off of (I have the SATA connections on my motherboard but I'm paranoid about them failing so I'm keeping my data drive off of my MOBO SATA ports)

2. I got a Dual Layer DVD-/+R/RW burner, It's SONY DV-700A I've patched the firmware to all hell.

3. I started to use bit torrent to download my LINUX ISO's

Now the part that doesn't make any sense to me is the one where one of these would be making me get bad LINUX ISO's

I have been able to download KNOPPIX from bit torrent and store it on my data drive and burn it with the DVD burner and not have a problem but why can I not burn a good copy of Fedora, Mandrake, SUSE, Slackware, Gentoo, or Free BSD? I've tried burning them at the slowest rate possible I've redownloaded them. I can't think of anything else.

I wouldn't think that they are coming off of the torrent traffic as bad since I'm sure that the bit torrent app has some sort of MD5 check summing going on.

I've burned a million CD's and DVD's on my burner for friends and backup with out a problem.

I've got all of my media stored on my 200GB drive and I haven't had a problem.

This is all just very mysterious to me it's almost like my ISP is somehow corrupting my torrents as they are coming down the wire.

Which I actually wouldn't doubt. Hmmmm.

Oh the light...it burns the flesh!

Good lord it's 9:30 on a Sunday morning and I'm making a post... I must be feeling sick or I just have something to say.

I'm willing to bet that I just feel sick. Very rarely do I have anything worthwhile to say. At least I think so, then again you people are the sick and twisted that keep coming back for more of my goodness :)

OK moving on, What's up with all of these "Magnetic ribbon's" on peoples cars? I keep seeing Yellow "Support our Troops" which I'm all for and Red, White, and Blue in the style of the American flag. I think that one is for supporting our country but I'm not quite sure as I've never seen it up close long enough to actually read it and then there is the Pink ribbon for "Breast Cancer awareness" I don't know about you but I'm a guy and I'm checking my man boobies for tumors... I don't think you can get any more aware then that.

So where are the ribbon's for protectings us from censorship from our own government and the NFL.. by god the Godaddy.com girl was hot and I should have been able to have seen her twice during the superbowl not just once... but no instead we have 30 minutes of mister I'm the most successful surviving beetle.. Yes I didn't like the half time show... I could have defiantly worked with a Brittany Spears "Full wardrobe malfunction" personal thought right there. Seriously when FOX blurs out a cartoon characters rear end because they are afraid of fines from the FCC when 2 years ago they showed the same scene from the same show from the same episode unblurred you know things have gotten out of control. Remember this is FOX this is the same network that brought us low brow humor and scantily clad women on a nightly basis.. and actually it still does.

What about a ribbon for free speech in all of it's forms whether it be by a person speaking or source code to a program.

What about a ribbon for the fact that our nation has 250,000 men and women at war and when they get back they may or may not have all the money they need to continue with higher education if they so choose? OK this one is kind of interesting... but hear me out. I have a good friend who was medically discharged from the Marines about 2 years ago now and has part of the GI Bill paying for school but he still has to work and still has to make other bills. Personal thought but anyone who serves in the military should get a full ride to any public university in their home state on the governments dime. I'm sorry what we pay our Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Airmen. Is pitiful and then they are put in harms way... they deserve a full ride to college.

OK it appears that I actually do have something to say. Maybe just maybe this is the start of something different or it's just me venting... who knows.

Television the last best hope for big media to get digital rights, right the first time.

Television is a interesting media in our day and age. It is the one media where the end consumer has almost total control over what they watch yet at the same time lack the fundamental control that is a given with other forms of media. In our age today a person can purchase any number of different television packages that range from the very basic to everything but the kitchen sink. People if they so choose can even choose to not purchase television and just watch what is broadcast publicly. There is a fundamental problem with any of these television options you (the consumer) have no control over when you get to watch you purchased service.

Think about it, when you get your morning newspaper the ink on the page stays visible for as long as the paper lasts. The ink doesn't disappear a couple of hours after the paper arrives. When you goto the movies there isn't just one showing on one screen there are many showings on many screens making it all the more convenient for you the consumer to par take in the movie experience. How come with television if I miss a show and I forget to tape it I'm out of luck?

I can get all of my printed media on the Internet for free, but I still buy books and magazines. Why well sometimes I just want a very small section of what is the Internet other times it's just nice to have a off line edition. Movies are moving to a on demand format and if you happen to like porn I'm sure that you know all the porn you could ever want from midget porn to super husky amazon porn is available on the Internet for a price. Sure it's a huge download but you keep it for as long as you like in most cases for the same price as going to the store and getting your DVD from there.


Which brings us to television the last of the big media formats to become wildly a on the Internet. Today if you try to download a television show from the Internet you will probably not have anything happen to you. However the Television industry is out there and they are watching. Somewhere someone will get a notice saying if you don't want to get sued you will stop downloading the shows right now.

Ok I can understand why television studios/networks are doing this they are losing money in the form of advertiser dollars every time someone downloads a show. If enough people download a show for free then that is the end of the show because there is no more money being made from it. There was a similar situation not to long ago in the music industry. At first the music industry tried to squash the downloading of songs but that didn't work because for every one service they took down three more popped up to replace it. Finally the music industry got smart started selling music on line for a small fee. Turns out the magic price point for music is somewhere between $.88 and $.99

This led to another problem, formats of the music itself. There are at least FIVE different formats for music files and that is not including the encoding schemes and compression algorithms that may or may not require additional codecs. On top of the technical mess there was also the problem of how to integrate everything so that John Q Public could download their music pretty much trouble free and not have to worry about it.

All of the pieces of the puzzle where there but no one had put them together. Until Apple started a little thing called iTunes. A all in one program that would take care of the music store thing ,the music downloading thing, and the music playing thing. Oh and provided a nifty interface along with looking cool. And Apple gave this little program away for free. What was the catch? You couldn't play music purchased at other stores on iTunes but once you purchased your music from iTunes it was your forever. Pretty quickly everyone moved to iTunes or was trying to be like iTunes when it came to music.

So what now of Television? The reason I bring up iTunes is because it is one of the few successful marriages of marketing and DRM out there. Would a iTunes for Television work? That is a very good question. However once again we have all of the pieces we just don't have them put together in the right order.

First off how do you download a television show that is literally 100X the size of a music file? You can't push it out a single big pipe any kind of user load that would be the end of your service. Instead you share the load. We already have this technology it's called bit torrent. You have a few seeder files out there on the Internet and when someone purchases a show a bit torrent tracker file is sent to their iTunes for television automatically. The downloading begins immediately at a low priority as to not to interrupt the web connection to much. Now that the load is broken up how do you break it up even more? You have to give to receive. In the iTunes for TV program there is a optional feature that is turned off by default but when turned on it allows the shows that you have purchased and downloaded to be shared with other iTunes for TV users. Ok thats nice you say but what do I get out of it? So long as the user continues to share the television shows they have downloaded they will be entitled to something for free every week. Like one free show a week or if they build up enough credit they could download from a selection of movies that are also on iTunes for TV. I know not the cleanest but it works.
How much do you pay for your downloaded TV? The $.99 a song model seems to work pretty well for music. And something very similar would probably work for iTunes for TV as well. A typical season of television will run for 20 to 24 episodes on network television these shows are typically available 6 to 18 months after their original air date on DVD for somewhere between $29.99 and $49.99. That works out somewhere between a $1.10 and just under $2 a show. This is all gravies for the television studio since the money has already been made in merchandising and selling the series to various television networks. A $.99 model would probably work as well in the form of a loss leader. Drawing people in to maybe purchase the extended edition of the show where some sort of fore shadowing occurs that is not really important but is really more for the die hard fans. Lets crunch some numbers here, Star Trek: Enterprise costs approximately $1.6 Million a episode to make for the studio. That is everything actors salaries, food, sets, film, and whatever else goes into a show. When the Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Babel One” aired approx 2.5 million people nation wide tuned in to watch on a Friday night at 8pm. The studio and television network lost money on the episode of Star Trek. Now at $.99 The studio just made about $2.5 Million for a $1.6 Million investment. That is not including any merchandising or syndication or anything else that is just straight downloads. Paramount just made some money.

What is the last piece of the puzzle? Television it self... people will still surf television not willing to spend their hard earned dollars on shows they know nothing about but. But how do most people discover television shows? Word of mouth and surfing channels. You need television to advertise for your download service so you can make money on both fronts.


Now this is my own ramblings and thoughts on the digital media in this current day and age and quite honestly I could be full of it and I wouldn't know. So take this with a grain of salt and remember kids starving artists need to make money too.

NICKEY NICKEY YEEEEE HAAAAAA!


that is all.