The New Flesh |
Saturday, September 29, 2001
The post before this should read as follows, but is truncated and can not be edited thanks to a bug in the blogger system.
Friday, September 28, 2001
Sick of your computer giving you pseudo-random numbers when what you really want are true-random numbers? Go to posted by OwenF at 9/28/2001 05:56:00 PM Thursday, September 27, 2001
What would you get if you put 1000 monkeys in a room with 1000 thesauri and wired their brains together in a big neural network? Lexical Free Net.
Those of you who are Star Trek fans, please sign my online petition here to change that awful new "Enterprise" theme music. Monday, September 24, 2001
On the economic shift of the DivX meme What happened to DivX? I always understood that it was a disc format. But one day during my isolation, a friend of mine offered to "copy me some DivX files" I responded, of course, that I hadn't a DivX machine, and he just looked at me confused. "You mean, like a the codec?" And it was my turn to look confused. It turns out that the DivX meme was co-opted, downgraded from a commercial venture (have you ever heard a more committed-to-death name?) to an orgiastic peer-to-peer free-for-all. The interesting thing is that the two video distribution systems share common economic facets, although the new, "underground" DivX is much cheaper. The old DivX format was a use-once-and-throw-away DVD that you would buy at the video store for the price of a rental and watch once (the disc was software locked).This removed the hassle of video or DVD returning. If you wanted to view the movie it further, you could pay a fee equivalent to what you would pay to buy the DVD, but you could pay from home, eliminating the need to go out and buy the movie. Otherwise, you could use you old DivX titles as coasters. In effect, you could easily and quickly build up a personal movie library, as you bought DivX disks. As time went on, you'd be able to watch any movie you'd ever "rented" without leaving your home, provided you'd paid the one-time fee for lifetime access. The old Divx paradigm consisted of three cost: the initial cost of acquisition (required, for the disc), the hardware price (required, for the DivX player), and the long-term access price (optional, for repeat customers only). The old DivX failed. So what about the new DivX? The new DivX is a banner term for the myriad of pirated video segments using disparate video codecs flooding around the Internet. Or, more correctly, the p2p community. Although some movies are .avi files, others are .mov, .ra, .mpg files and others, although they are referred to, as a class, with the term "divx," with the proper capitalization always in question. The new DivX consists of paying a certain initial cost to access a copy of a movie over the p2p network of choice which can be approximated using [P / M] * [K / S] where; P is the PRICE you pay for monthly internet access (eg: $19.95 for ADSL), M is 2,592,000 (i.e: the number of seconds in a month), K = is the size of the video file, in KILOBYTES (eg: 65066 for That 70's Show Episode 301 - Reefer Madness in .avi format with all the commercials handily removed for my mental health and viewing pleasure), and S is the average SPEED of your download, in kilobytes per second, say 15 for the above mentioned consumer ADSL link with an open (ie: not leech) server and a day-to-day network reliability.) . Using the formula above with the sample data I've indicated, we arrive at the conclusion that downloading a single tv episode cost me 5 cents. A 650MB high-quality VCD movie costs me fifty. This represent's the new DivX's initial cost of acquisition. Like the price you would have paid for a DivX disc, this cost is a one-time personal expenditure that allows you to view the movie temporarily. Unlike the initial cost for a DivX disc, it's cheap. The hardware price of a DivX disc setup is hard to gauge. Although I don't remember DivX disc players ever coming to market, I assume the were something along the lines of a high-end (ie: more non-decoding processor power) DVD player with a phone connection of some kind, probably something that would not need its own line. Basically a black oblong consumer appliance box in retailing in the $500-800 range initially, then dropping if the format became a standard. Of course, that doesn't include the price of a television. These days, a bare-bones computer, capable of running both a high-speed modem and displaying all manner of video files, will likely run you somewhere in the $800 range and prices are always falling. Of course, that doesn't include the price of a monitor. The third cost in both DivX paradigms is long-term access price. In the DivX disc business plan, the average viewer who wanted a copy of the movie to view again and again could try to tape it while it played the first time, or pay the $19.95 (again, this is just a guess) that the DivX overlords charged per movie. This would leave you with a CD-sized disc that you could use to watch the movie in the future. The new DivX offers users a similar, cheaper, option. Downloaded video files, whatever their format, are easily burned onto CDs using consumer CD-R drives and kept on the shelf or swapped with friends. After about a month, storing all the movies one on one's hard drive becomes obviously unfeasible if one is both a pack-rat and a cinema or television buff. While the cost of CD-R drive may push the hardware price of a new-paradigm DivX system over the $800 mark, the cost will quickly be offset by the fact that CD-R media cost less than a dollar a disc. The fact that all these costs are also disguised, in that they are tangential parts of other costs that the user is paying anyway for other reasons, just adds to the appeal of the new DivX paradigm. It's essentially become a micro payment system where the payments are made to hardware manufacturers and internet service providers instead of artists and studios. I think it's safe to say that the DivX meme has been wrested free from the greedy clutches of Hollywood and put to work for the tech sector.
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