Curious, anyone else here like The Cure?

I think Microsoft is going to own the next generation DVD format. And I don’t say that as a Microsoft booster. I think it’s just the route that is going to make the most sense.

 

When I bought the new Terminator 2 DVD, the second DVD came with the full movie at 1080P (that’s P, not I) which is essentially super-duper High Definition TV. It was all in a collection of .WMV files and it all fit on a single DVD.

 

Moreover, with a computer with a DVD drive, I could watch this DVD on any screen – regular TV or the various other HDTV standards. It would just scale to whather and do so pretty seamlessly.

 

What I predict is that you’ll see new DVDs come with support for WMV files. Think about it, one DVD holding a 1080P (1080 lines of resolution) movie. Right now, most DVDs get filled up with a single 480P movie because they are so poorly compressed.

 

So Microsoft will end up owning the next generation format. This is a market Apple could have owned.

There is often a fine line between a "community" and a gang. Some people don't recognize the difference. But there is.

A gang is a self selected group of like minded people who provide unconditional support of one another and consider even relatively minor resistance to their opinions as a great affront that must be attacked.

A gang considers gentle and tolerant behavior between members of the gang but treatment of outsiders can be very nasty, even violent.

The recent melodrama that we saw on the message boards is something that at first looks like just another flamewar.  But looking back on it, what we really have is a confusion between what is a community and what is a gang.

For example, in this recent incident, 3 users, Lady Akasha, Apocalypse67 (to a far lesser extent), and Green Armani, were disgruntled by things they saw on the message boards. Specific behaviors that they considered "unfriendly". But how do you define unfriendly behavior? Well, it seems having looked over their posts, unfriendly behavior is any behavior that disagrees with their points of view.

For instance, in one thread which was yet another complaint about the wallpaper section that, like so many, quickly had one side making baseless accusations against the moderators which eventually got me involved. I said essnetially "I don't care about the wallpaper section. I could care less if any more wallpapers were uploaded." The point of my message was that wallpaper authors do not hold a special leverage. The way we run the wallpaper section is "as-is". Polite discussions on changes are welcomed but threats and peole taking their walls and going are not going to work.

Wallpapers on WinCustomize get more downloads than wallpapers on any other site on the Internet. So we feel justified in the way we run the wallpaper section. I.e. we must be doing something right.

But the response to this was anger and 2 people taking their walls and going because of feeling "insulted". WC was clearly not a "friendly" place.  We don't show "respect" to people here.

All of these words turn out to be code-words for "agreeing with me unconditionally".

All 3 users went to deviantART and proceeded to not just attack WinCustomize in their journals but personally attack the users here and myself specifically with name-calling and the what-not. 

You can see this here:
http://greenarmani.deviantart.com
http://lady-akasha.deviantart.com
http://apocalypse67.deviantart.com

In the Devious comments you can see Lady Akasha and Green Armani saying all kinds of vile things. And yet at the same time, are "disgusted" at the people here and myself in particular. consider that for a moment. I don't recall anyone treating them anywhere nearly as nastily as they are posting over at dA about other people.

In one good example, Green Armani had a problem logging on for some reason. No one had done anything to him. It happens sometimes (not often but it's happened to me too). His first thought was that we had deleted his account for having a differing point of view. He went as far as to imply that the admins of this site are similar to the Nazis and others who would silence dissenters. Except that we had done no such thing. When he managed to log on, several minutes later, no formal apology. Only complaints that he no longer had elite access (which you'll find in every case that these people feel they are entitled to).

But in all of this, the charge is that there is no community here. They're wrong. What we don't encourage here are gangs.  Instead, we value honesty, integrity, objectivity, trust, and fairness. These are the cornerstones of a healthy community. But it's not a gang.

Every once in awhile a community site will find gangs form in their midsts. That is, in my opinion, what we just witnessed.  Such gangs try to impose their views on others and consider any resistance as something to be crushed. the ultimtate code of the gang is that members of the gang are treated with kindness and those outside the gang are treated with utter ruthlessness.

And from reading their posts both here and elsewhere, the ruthlessness and meaness of their personalities has really shown that they don't understand the difference between a community and a gang.

With all the angst on the message boards I thought I would bring some levity.

Despite it being the middle of the summer, WinCustomize is looking like it's going to break the 1.4 MILLION unique visitor mark for the first time ever. That is, 1.4 million unique individuals will visit this site during the month of July.

A year ago that figure was 976,000. So that's a gain of nearly half a million unique visitors per month in the past year.

What he talks about is happening now. And it's hard to really see how big of a deal it will become without looking at the big picture.

When I go to the local Farmer Jack to get groceries, nearly half of the check out lanes are self checkouts now. When I get my gas, it's also done without dealing with a human. ATMs are nothing new but you can see where things go. In the article, Mr. Brain (yes, that's really his name) talks about a recent experience at McDonalds where they ordered from a kiosk rather from a person.

Think about that for a minute. Imagine if every fast food restraunt was able to replace the 4 to 6 people working on any given shift with machines that allowed people to just order for themselves. According to the last census, something like 10 million people work in the fast food industry. You could see 8 million of them elimiated in less than a decade. What's going to replace those jobs?

But that's really only the start of the process. Mr. Brain talks about the next big leap for technology -- fast imaging. When I was in college, I worked at Old Kent Bank as a "Proof operator". When you write a check to someone, it eventually comes back to your bank. My job was to read the chicken scratch put on by us humans and put in the bank number and amount that was then encoded onto the check so that a machine could read it. But by my Junior year, that job had gone away. The new proof machines from Unisys had such powerful imaging systems on them that they could read the handwriting of 98% of people correctly. Today, virtually all checks are done this way. So my summer job was gone (so I went and founded Stardock to pay the bills but I'm not sure that is a general solution for people).

But such machines are big and hugely expensive. But in time, imaging will be something that is nearly perfect and available on devices very small. Why is this a big deal? Because imaging recognition combined with robots like those from Honda (which will only get better in the coming decades) will create machines that can do all kinds of manual labor. Cleaning hotels, streets, restraunts, etc. At some point, a good chunk of the staff in the service industry will be replaced by machines. Not in the near future but in the next 30 to 50 years almost certainly.

The same is true with the manufacturing sector. If one thinks machines are replacing manufacturing jobs now, wait until the machines can "see" and "recognize" things. That's been the real stumbbling block for machines in the workplace. Without visual recognition, there is only so much they can do. Add in voice recognition and you have a pretty useful unpaid menial worker.

Now, some people may say that 50 years is too soon. But imagine where things were in 1900. No airplanes. No cars. Etc. By 1950 we had supersonic flight, nuclear weapons, television, movies, radio, etc. 50 years. And the pace of technological breakthrus is only increasing. The Internet, as we know it today, didn't really exist in a recognizeable form until a little over 10 years ago. Now, I can access the net from my portable cell phone.

So it's not a huge stretch of the imagination that within 50 years we'll see a lot of these things come to pass.

The question is, what will all those people do?

This as good a time as any since this subject is going to have to be dealt with at some point:

Our Story So far...

As long time users know, the amount of traffic this site gets has steadily increased. This month something like 1.3 million unique individuals will visit this website.

Since the dot-com collapse, bandwidth prices have increasingly become painful because there's no realistic way to pay for the site via banner ads. We are getting ready to unveil Textbanners.net this next week and hopefully that will help (users can take out ads on the site directly for as little as $1 per day).

But realistically, we're at something like 50 megabits of bandwidth much of which is dedicated to this site.

Right now, Stardock pays for virtually all of the tab. The goal was always for WinCustomize to become self-sustaining. But as the site has grown, that hope has drifted further and further off. 

But to try to off-set costs, we instituted WinCustomize subscriptions. For $19.95 a user gets a 2 year subscription to the site which gives them unlimited downloads, 2 premium suites, and the WinCustomize browser along with 5,000 free impressions on TextBanners.net. 

Non-subscribers have been restricted to 50 megabytes of bandwidth they could consume in the form of downloads. You'll occasionally see a post by someone who suddenly discovers scruples and expresses his outrage and desire to defend innocent artists everywhere for having to pay to download more stuff. But it's been one of the few ways of getting people to subscribe or at least go away and go to some other site to download stuff.

Subscribers have helped us pay for new hardware, more bandwidth, etc. But it's still a fairly low percentage. Well not just fairly low but amazingly low (far less than 1% of visitors).

One reason for that is because Stardock customers are currently exempt from the bandwidth restriction. So are users with access levels Apprentice and up.

Who should pay the bills?

That's put Stardock in an awkward position. It's facing either having to raise the price on Object Desktop (the proposed price is $69.95 up front and $37.95 for renewals) or put some sort of cap on the amount of megabytes a non-subscriber Stardock customer can get. The proposal on that end is 250 megabytes.

We'd like to hear from you. Which way do you think is most fair? My opinion is that we should go with the 250 meg cap on SDof bandwidthvery few people download that amount of bandwidth so it would only affect a small percent (most of the bandwidth is used by a small percent btw).  Those users can contribute either by subscribing for $20 for 2 years or contributing in other ways (skins, themes, walls, message boards, etc. and gaining higher access).

What's your view?

Cringely has a propsoal for something that might work out for both the music industry and consumers both. A "Son of Napster" concept.

Here it is:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030724.html

What do you think?

Have a laptop with an S-video out and a wireless 802.11B/G connection? Ever thought of putting it to use as the ultimate Media station for your TV when it's time to put it out to pasture?

Our friends at OSNews have a great article talking about some of the misconceptions of Windows vs. Linux. Check it out.

I typically use Internet Explorer for web browsing. I know there are people who swear by Mozilla and Opera but for me, IE works pretty well.

Recently I've found myself trying and using Avant browser. Basically it uses IE components to create a better IE than IE. For instance, it has tabs, it has pop up stopping, it has all sorts of good, useful features. And by using it, you don't lose all yoru customizations, favorites, passwords, helpers, etc. from IE.