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The Internet

Idea Exchange Environment 32

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thats-an-interesting-idea-in-and-of-itself dept.
mebreathing writes: "ShouldExist.org is an idea exchange environment, where users post good ideas and then talk about them. One such idea is about the possibility of extending mp3 or id3 to contain tracks, so whole albums could be encoded into a single mp3, making them easier to find and eliminating skips between tracks. Another idea involves the new DivX codec, and making clickable mpegs that link to URLs of affiliate programs, so movie companies can release movies for free and then make their money by taking a percentage of the profits from all the consumption they induce." This shouldn't feel abnormal to anyone who has ever participated in an open source project, but its kinda nifty. I wonder if anything will come of it.
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Idea Exchange Environment More

Idea Exchange Environment

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  • My, my, that's cutthroat. Occasionally, people share ideas because they just want to see something happen, not because they have any monetary interest in it happening.
  • So when did you change the patent laws without telling the rest of us? So now the US has abandoned priority of invention as a requirement for patent, to match the "race to the patent office" laws of the EU?
  • I found an interesting site today:

    equityengine.com [equityengine.com] is a sort of peer review idea factory/incubator that grants people equity in the companies resulting from their ideas, as well as equity in exchange for work done to implement those ideas.

    If they pull this off, this would be a great way to capture the output of people who have great ideas but poor implementation skills, or lack of follow-through.
    --
  • Maybe I'm cynical (paranoid?), but how do we know that this site wasn't set up (or monitored) by someone wanting a free think-tank that might produce a market-viable idea?
  • This can cut down on the number of silly internet patents. If the site logs all these good ideas, they can be used to defeat silly patents on forward thinking but semi-obvious ideas.

  • If you like shouldexist, check out halfbakery! (Score:4)

    by egnor ( 14038 ) on Sunday June 18, 2000 @07:22AM (#994625) Homepage

    Halfbakery.com [halfbakery.com] is similar to shouldexist, but less full of itself, more active (but that will probably change) and with a somewhat different structure. There are a lot more interesting ideas on halfbakery right now; it's worth checking out. Specifically, the proprietors of shouldexist will need to watch out for some of the problems popularity has brought to halfbakery. (Stupid people posting lots of stupid ideas; flamewars; discussions that go off-topic; duplication; difficulty sorting and categorizing the ideas...)

    Ideas are fun to banter around, but people shouldn't kid themselves that a good idea is really worth something. A good idea (vision) and lots and lots of effort implementing it is worth something. "99% perspiration" and all that.

    Venture capitalists, for example, must constantly educate people that they don't fund ideas, they fund companies -- and there's a lot more to a company than an idea. Ideas, I'm sad to say, are a dime a dozen; people willing, able, and committed to carrying them out are much more rare.

    I imagine sites like halfbakery and shouldexist are more useful not as "think tanks" but as ways for people interested in new ideas to meet each other.

  • Screw that. I'll give whatever ideas I please. If someone does that _they_ are being intellectual muggers, and if the legal system is set up to support them doing it the legal system is wrong. I refuse to stop sharing ideas just because of that. If somebody does that to me I'll just have another idea, fuck 'em. The whole idea of selfcensoring and cutting off all sharing and interaction of ideas due to this threat just offends the hell out of me, and I simply can't accept making any concessions at all in that direction. You only live once, and when you die your money means nothing anymore but your ideas may live on.

  • IP issues (Score:3)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Sunday June 18, 2000 @07:24AM (#994627)
    I'd like to remind you that even if you first had an idea.. up until 8 months from now, if I go and impliment it and patent it, there isn't a damn thing you can do. Think twice before giving someone an idea of yours.
  • . . .but I think the idea exchange here @ /. is excellent. I would welcome other sites that could generate as much interest and discussion. The more, the merrier - or the 21st century version: the more the harder to censor.
  • Since this isn't a bad idea I think I'll start such a place myself. Now everyone submit a whole bunch of great ideas to me. Then we can discuss them and stuff.


    note that by submitting your ideas to me you relinquish all rights to them patent, trademark or otherwise...also by submitting them you agree to not disclose any part of the screwin^H^H^H^H^H^H^H discussion process to anyone


    My Home: Apartment6 [apartment6.org]
  • DecisionMarkets [decisionmarkets.com] actually establishes an idea market, while ShouldExist is basically just unrated commentary. For all the reasons it doesn't work well on hotly contested issues on Slashdot, ShouldExist will not work well.
  • a free think-tank that might produce a market-viable idea
    Umm, I think that's the idea. I think the site hopes its being monitored by someone for just such a thing.

    This place isn't going to pay you for your "insights" - you're giving thoughts away because you believe something should exist. If you think you should make something out of your ideas then come to a private arrangement with some VCs.

  • please, just stop bragging about all the wonderful machines you are using, and how everything should exist for them--it is really annoying---besides why are you watching movies at work
    (admitidly, I am too, but hey, I have a fake job)
    I am not complaining that there is no installer for the vax, now am I?
  • I must admit I didn't think about it before I submitted something.

    Anyway, according to Whois, it's Tucows that registered it.

  • I think it's even worse than that...

    How about when Movie companies start demanding the ability to stop you watching a film as well as knowing when you're watching it. Kind of like pay per view. Only you buy a disc, and they use a serial number on the movie to "allow" you to watch it when you pay them.

    More to the point, the movie industry would know *everyone's* viewing habits. They would know exactly what type of films any individual liked to watch. Aside from the sheer volume of "targeted advertising" that this would generate (read: junk mail), and the (horrifying) telemarketing potential, would you really feel comfortable letting these corporations know so much about you? They've already demonstrated that the can't be trusted to act intelligently due to the whole DeCSS mess. I certainly don't want to give them details of my private life

    Just my 2 pence worth

  • Hai hai!! I agree with what you say about moderation in that it "tends to promote established ideologies on the detriment of minority opinion" I am a big Microsoft advocate, and am also a visionary... but people on slashdot are more Linux ppl and of course more left-brained thinkers.. heheh i guess that's why im on the wrong side of the tracks here in slashdot.. I feel so hated!! ;_; I got a rating of -1 on my last post.. but the ironic thing the issue that I took up prognosticated the future.. i basically said microsoft's strategy with Judge Jackson was to piss him off enough that he would make some stupid comments and hence illegitimize his ruling or at least have others find it as distastefull as his emotional descision making. I got moderated down to -1 and I was called a Trolll snarf snarf.... but the thing is the next day MS denounced Judge Jackson's descision precisely for those reason stated above..heheh see i really do think like Bill *.*

    U evil /.rs who did this to me shall pay...mwa.. mwahaa mhwahhahahahahahaha.. I am Femto goddamit, your all are gonna pay... *POP* ohh heheh sorry I was momentarily possessed by an anime character.. ehem.. Anyway you get my point. Moderation don't work... it keeps genius locked out... >_ -=Griffis=-

  • I've checked out Halfbakery and Decision Markets and for whatever reason I don't find them even nearly as easy to follow as ShouldExist.org and I've found them all to be very quiet - so much so that they can appear to be a waste of time (as in, who is paying attention to these sites such that it's worth my time posting to them?)

    In addition, I've had a rummage around ShouldExist.org and I've found quite a large number of posts for things that Do Exist (.org?). Perhaps there should be a site called "DoesThisExist.org" - otherwise most posts will start off on the wrong foot (or rather, most replies will start off with "already exists").

  • and making clickable mpegs that link to URLs of affiliate programs

    I'd think after a couple of years you wouldn't be able to tell when the ad breaks started and the programs finished. . .

  • I imagine it will be just like Open Source. If they're lucky one, maybe two, things will become wildly popular. Another five or so will be vaguely popular. And the other two million ideas will be hugely popular band wagon events for a few weeks until Attention Deficit Disorder kicks in and the 0.2 release announcement sits on freshmeat for 2 years.
  • Of course people can now argue over who should take credit for these ideas. Just because you post it first doesn't mean you thought of it first. This could also lead to flame wars over "you're so stupid."

  • idea exchange environment = sustainable? (Score:4)

    by Submarine ( 12319 ) on Sunday June 18, 2000 @06:23AM (#994640) Homepage

    The question is: what is a "good idea" and how can an "idea exchange environment for good ideas" not degenerate into an endless stream of flame-wars?

    This problem is as old as the Usenet newsgroups. Sometimes, people get pretty opinionated about stuff, turning any technical or social question into a religious issue. Add some incompetency, some hot heads, and you get the usual stream of sneering, insults and anger that's so prevalent in Slashdot or the newsgroup.

    The real question is: how to keep it from getting out of hand? Some sites, including Slashdot, have chosen moderation. Moderation has basic technical problems: moderators can get overwhelmed by the traffic. Moderated newsgroups or mailing-lists are often late in transmitting messages because the moderator has to exhaust a backlog; in systems where moderation happens after the message has been posted, such as Slashdot, idiots can post messages faster than the moderators can bring them down. Furthermore, moderation tends to promote established ideologies on the detriment of minority opinion. The notion of what is irrelevant rant tends to be belief-dependent. Think of this: a libertarian will tend to moderate down communist speech as irrelevant, stupid flamebait; a Linux advocate will moderate down Windows advocacy as irrelevant flamebait etc.. etc..

    The question remains: how to keep public Internet forums readable? Think of this: in the old days, researchers would read scientific newsgroups. Nowadays, few do, since many scientific newsgroups are filled with spam, crackpots claiming they solved , teenagers asking people to solve their homework, and American politics.

  • Self-promotion at its finest.

    And while I'm at it, for all those other people whining about IP complications, it should be obvious that anyone who actually posts an 'idea' on the WWW is effectively putting it into the public domain, and should not be surprised at all if someone else grabs it and runs with it.
  • This is a great idea. One of the common complaints about the Open Source world is that there is "less innovation" and that the popular projects are playing catch-up to Microsoft and Windows software. (Funny, though.. I can't think of anything MS invented other than "Bob"..)

    This site should be able to spark people's imaginations and hopefully will result in some real innovation!

    One other benefit: in the commercial world, I'm sure many people without the background / expertise to program come up with some great ideas that never see the light of day. Maybe this can help to change that.

    -TomK

  • Of course, if you're downloading the movie for free, how much room will you have to bitch? Especially since it can be counted upon to be of a higher quality than a VCD.

    In practice, the way we see this used in quicktime (or even in current windowsmedia formats) is to have a border at the top and/or bottom with clickable links. This really isn't a bad idea. If Digital Rights Management ends up working pretty well (IE, "secure enough") then this might become a pretty attractive solution for some people, but I think that leaves out the divx codec.

    By the way, I tried using the divx codec to encode an AVI stream, and it worked pretty well and was faster than I expected (on a p3-500, even), so if they ever had a version that was tied to DRM, I think it could be a fairly winning proposition where you'd have a nice high-speed decompressor that studios didn't have to pay for. I doubt that it will, though, since that sort of seems to go against the purpose, so I think we're going to end up seeing that sort of click-to-remove-advertisements release eventually, but I don't think it'll use the divx ;) codec.

  • "clickable mpegs that link to URLs of affiliate programs, so movie companies can release movies for free and then make their money by taking a percentage of the profits from all the consumption they induce"

    "Extend this file format to support something similar to HTML image maps. Then take product placement in movies to the next level: Everything in the movie is clickable. If you're watching a movie and you see a shirt you think is totally fly, you click right on the shirt, and it opens a browser and links to a website that sells that very shirt."

    Quicktime has structures capable of doing this very thing already. This may mean you can do it in MPEG-4.

    I'm not sure of the technical details. I think quicktime does it using its sprite system, and i don't think the sprite system is in MPEG-4. But MPEG-4 has at the least quicktime's track system right..? So it would be relatively easy to reimplement whatever apple uses to handle links in quicktime movies into MPEG-4 as an extention, right? Or you could just actually use quicktime [you could even make the video compressor in the quicktime movie be MPEG if that's important to you], but i realize that isn't an option for most of you.

    please excuse any ignorance in this post.
    anyway, this whole shouldexist.org thing looks unbelievably cool. i've been wishing someone would make something like this for a long time.
  • Are you familiar with id3v2? It allows you to embed anything at all into the id3 tag. Pictures of the artist, lyrics, other mp3s, whatever. And it comes at the beginning of the file, not the end like current id3 tags, so you can use it even when streaming files. See id3v2.org [id3v2.org] for more info and a list of programs that support it.

  • Tru64 version? (Score:3)

    by Cliffton Watermore ( 199498 ) on Sunday June 18, 2000 @06:36AM (#994646) Homepage

    There doesn't appear to be a Tru64 version of the DivX codec installer. This renders it almost useless to me, at work. My workstation is a Tru64 machine.

    When will we see a Tru64 version?

  • You can already do that with mpg123. Just be sure to make the buffersize large enough, and then it will already start decoding the next track while it is decoding the previous track, with an (almost) unnoticable skip during playback. Works perfectly for Pink Floyd CDs at least.
  • i don't see a problem with discussing ideas. the aim of the site looks to be a place to discuss ideas, however crazy or absurd or brilliant. most people have great ideas but will do nothing with them. most people have great ideas that were scribbled down and lost, why not share with others? if your idea is so good, wouldn't you want it implemented? who cares if you get no credit or no cash as it's either the idea is to be implemented (which will benefit YOU and everyone else) or the idea won't be implemented (benefit nobody) so the question is simple, either get off your ass and work on the idea or present it to the world.

    ideally a better system will exist that will allow people to get credit and ideally companies/people that take an idea and run with it will in fact give some credit where it's due but really, one shouldn't care all that much. shouldexist might want to be more like sourceforge.net with ideas being the medium vs software but really ...

    if i have an idea to make the world a better place, i don't much care who implements it.


    -- .sig --
  • "You can already do that with mpg123. Just be sure to make the buffersize large enough, and then it will already start decoding the next track while it is decoding the previous track, with an (almost) unnoticable skip during playback. Works perfectly for Pink Floyd CDs at least."

    (shamless plug comming up)

    And that "(almost) unnoticable skip" is truly gone if you use the latest unstable version of BladeEnc with the recently implemented -nogap switch.

    Believe me, that "all tracks in the same mp3" idea isn't such a good idea as it sounds. It's better to make sure that the ripper takes care of pre- and postgaps (paranoia can do this), the encoder doesn't add any gaps (bladeenc with -nogap) and that the player plays multiple mp3s as one stream (mpg123). That way we have the best of both worlds.

    Tord Jansson
    BladeEnc Maintainer

  • I _LOVE_ this site... I'm just having trouble finding details about how to live the title tag: "Quit your 9-5 and start living the REVOLUTION." Any tips? How can *I* become the next dot millionare?


    -
  • There should be a formal way to write up and register ideas to give them GPL-like protection against commercial hoarding, when a person wants to set his best idea free.

    It should be an open declarative mechanism like copyright (before DMCA), so that anyone in the world can make a contribution to the idea-commons by taking the trouble to write it up properly and registering it in an indexed database. International treaty should recognize published declarations as binding protection of the ideas for the common good. In some respects, this would work like a free patent pool. It would be a good way to publish prospective standards.

    Implementation competition would then be about performing instead of hobbling others' performance. For format, I like the few RFCs I've read much better than the few patents I've read, but perhaps that's a reaction to the attitude showing between the lines.

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