You're assuming that there's an unlimited number of film projects to invest in, so that you can choose to invest in six District 9s rather than one Iron Man 2. But that's not really true at the major-studio level; the supply of people who can bring a studio-quality movie in on time and (mostly) on budget is extremely limited. So even the largest studios only get to place a small number of bets each year. (Paramount, for instance, released only 13 pictures in 2010.) So it makes sense economically to try to make each of those bets count as much as possible.
Let's look at the financials for District 9: $211 million earned worldwide and $30 million of production expenses, for a total profit of $181 million or so.
Now let's look at one of those "big name" movies full of stars, for comparison. How about Iron Man 2? It was full of big-name, big-paycheck actors. It cost a lot more to make than District 9 did -- production budget was $200 million. But it made a total of $622 million worldwide. That's $422 million in profit, more than twice District 9's take.
The reason studios want big-name actors isn't because they're stupid. It's because those actors earn their money. They bring people into the theater who would otherwise never bother to see the flick. There's gobs of people who call themselves fans of "Harrison Ford movies", for instance, even though there's really no such thing as a "Harrison Ford movie" -- he's done all sorts of stuff, from action to drama to comedy to romance, and he's been in movies of wildly varying quality. But they know him and like him, so having his name on the marquee brings them in, earning back his paycheck and then some. (Actors with this kind of drawing power are said to be able to "open a movie" -- that is, to be able to draw in enough people on the power of their name alone to guarantee a good take during the critical first couple of weekends of release, no matter what the critical response to the movie is.)
District 9 was a great movie, don't get me wrong. But if I had to choose between two investments, one that would cost me $30 mil and return $180 mil, and another that would cost $200 mil and would return $600+? If I had the $200 million to spend, choosing the latter one would be a no-brainer.
The time limits on movie lengths aren't about what's theoretically watchable in one sitting (though I would argue that for most people a 3.5 hour movie is too long for that). It's about how many screenings the theater can fit on a given screen per day.
Each screening can accommodate a certain number of people, limited by the total number of seats pointing at that screen. A 4 hour movie lets you sell one ticket per seat per 4 hour block; a 2 hour movie lets you sell two. So longer movies cut directly into revenue, which is a strong incentive to keep them as short as possible.
No, the guy who wrote it (Phil Kaplan, aka "Pud") shut it down after the bubble burst. Ironically, today he's a VC and the founder of a company, Blippy, whose business model ("every time you buy something with your credit card, we post the details of your purchase online for all your friends to see!") sounds almost as silly as the companies he used to make fun of.
If you want a '90s nostalgia fix, he did write a FuckedCompany book after winding the site down.
If you're ok with using a domain that is governed by the rules of a company or government in a foreign country, and you abide by their rules, then what is wrong with that?
Because many people who grab these domains don't understand what "their rules" are, or even that they are dealing with the rules of another country. They just think the TLD sounds cool. And the registrar (who doesn't want to lose a sale) doesn't do anything to explain it to them. Which leads to situations like this.
Even in middle-school, pre-911, without being asked. I had worked out that with enough savings, I could take a knife, stab random strangers and ride across America on an unstoppable pattern-less killing spree. This strategy still rings true in the age of terrorism.
Really takes out a lot of realism when both sides use identical weapons that are just reskinned.
In most of the recent multiplayer FPSes I've played (Modern Warfare, Bad Company 2, etc) the weapons you have access to aren't determined by your team, they're determined by how many points you've racked up in-game. With more points you get access to more advanced weapons, regardless of what nation those weapons actually came from. So anybody on any team can carry an M-16 or an AK-47 if they've earned enough points to unlock those weapons.
If someone's the cop, someone's got to be the robber, someone's got to be the pirate, somebody's got to be the alien. In Medal Of Honor multiplayer, someone has to be the Taliban.
Not true. America's Army solved this problem rather elegantly: there were two teams in any given match, and no matter which team you were on, your teammates were always displayed to you as Americans and the players on the other team displayed as Bad Furrin Terrorists ("OPFOR"). So nobody had to play as a Bad Furrin Terrorist; the BFTs were always the other guys, not you. Given how effectively this approach removes the issue of "playing as the Taliban" I'm a bit amazed EA's developers didn't use it.
[During the American Civil War] the drill sergeants repeatedly found that among the raw recruits there were men so abysmally untaught that they did not know left from right, and hence could not step off on the left foot as all soldiers should. To teach these lads how to march, the sergeants would tie a wisp of hay to the left foot and a wisp of straw to the right; then, setting the men to march, they would chant, “Hay-foot, straw-foot, hay-foot, straw-foot”—and so on, until everybody had caught on. A common name for a green recruit in those days was “strawfoot.”
On the drill field, when a squad was getting basic training, the men were as likely as not to intone a little rhythmic chant as they tramped across the sod—thus:
March! March.! March old soldier march!
Hayfoot, strawfoot,
Belly-full of bean soup—
March old soldier march!
Of course, back then all anyone expected a private to do was stand in line, fire his musket in the general direction of the enemy, and try not to die too fast, so it didn't matter all that much if he was as dumb as a box of rocks...
Microsoft has a long and illustrious history of operating system sales. The model has served the company well on the PC, but if it wants to make money in the phone market, it needs to start thinking like a consumer electronics company and start making its own phones.
I sometimes wonder if Germany might have held out a bit longer if they concentrated more on proven weapons systems and didn't spend so much resources on "Wonder Weapons"; an ME-262 is a heller of an aircraft but what it took to develop it probably would have put 10 ME-109s in the air.
Probably not, since by the time it mattered (1944-1945) the Luftwaffe's biggest shortage was in experienced aircrews, not aircraft. The drain of six years of war had resulted in training standards being dropped dramatically just to get recruits into cockpits as fast as possible to replace casualties. By the time the Me-262 reached service they could barely scrape up enough good pilots to use it, which resulted in numerous cases of Allied airmen shooting down 262s even though they were flying inferior propeller-driven aircraft.
Even if the Germans had chosen to use the resources put into the Me-262 to produce quantities of Me-109/Fw-190s or the like, they would never have been able to fill those cockpits. So in the end it probably didn't matter.
In the 21st century, it seems barbaric to me that you can have a system where tens of millions of citizens aren't protected in the event of conditions that we can easily treat, and where the health service doesn't routinely practice universal preventative medicine.
Dude, over here we haven't even gotten around to accepting evolution yet! Let us at least catch up to the 19th century before you start demanding we get with the 21st.
... primarily because these tables are dynamic: find the part you're currently using (or want to use as your baseline for comparison) in the table, click on it, and then all the other parts in the table are immediately color-coded as to how much of a step forwards or backwards they are from that part, based on a normalized performance rating.
(It's pathetic that the marketing departments at the companies that make these things are so incompetent that we need tools like these to sort out what exactly they're selling us, but until they get on the ball I'm glad these tools exist.)
The only way a standard RSS reader can find out if a feed has updated is by "polling" the feed periodically. PuSH and similar systems remove the need for this polling by pinging the client directly when something changes.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot's crappy AJAX does make for an excellent browser stress test.
You're assuming that there's an unlimited number of film projects to invest in, so that you can choose to invest in six District 9s rather than one Iron Man 2. But that's not really true at the major-studio level; the supply of people who can bring a studio-quality movie in on time and (mostly) on budget is extremely limited. So even the largest studios only get to place a small number of bets each year. (Paramount, for instance, released only 13 pictures in 2010.) So it makes sense economically to try to make each of those bets count as much as possible.
Indeed! I don't normally flack my own writing here, but I made the same point back around the release of the Star Trek reboot. Remaking something can be a powerful way to re-interpret it, to put a new spin on it for a new age.
OK, I'll bite.
Let's look at the financials for District 9 : $211 million earned worldwide and $30 million of production expenses, for a total profit of $181 million or so.
Now let's look at one of those "big name" movies full of stars, for comparison. How about Iron Man 2? It was full of big-name, big-paycheck actors. It cost a lot more to make than District 9 did -- production budget was $200 million. But it made a total of $622 million worldwide. That's $422 million in profit, more than twice District 9's take.
The reason studios want big-name actors isn't because they're stupid. It's because those actors earn their money. They bring people into the theater who would otherwise never bother to see the flick. There's gobs of people who call themselves fans of "Harrison Ford movies", for instance, even though there's really no such thing as a "Harrison Ford movie" -- he's done all sorts of stuff, from action to drama to comedy to romance, and he's been in movies of wildly varying quality. But they know him and like him, so having his name on the marquee brings them in, earning back his paycheck and then some. (Actors with this kind of drawing power are said to be able to "open a movie" -- that is, to be able to draw in enough people on the power of their name alone to guarantee a good take during the critical first couple of weekends of release, no matter what the critical response to the movie is.)
District 9 was a great movie, don't get me wrong. But if I had to choose between two investments, one that would cost me $30 mil and return $180 mil, and another that would cost $200 mil and would return $600+? If I had the $200 million to spend, choosing the latter one would be a no-brainer.
The time limits on movie lengths aren't about what's theoretically watchable in one sitting (though I would argue that for most people a 3.5 hour movie is too long for that). It's about how many screenings the theater can fit on a given screen per day.
Each screening can accommodate a certain number of people, limited by the total number of seats pointing at that screen. A 4 hour movie lets you sell one ticket per seat per 4 hour block; a 2 hour movie lets you sell two. So longer movies cut directly into revenue, which is a strong incentive to keep them as short as possible.
It's not sexist to observe that a woman who has a long history of saying and doing crazy things may be crazy.
No, the guy who wrote it (Phil Kaplan, aka "Pud") shut it down after the bubble burst. Ironically, today he's a VC and the founder of a company, Blippy, whose business model ("every time you buy something with your credit card, we post the details of your purchase online for all your friends to see!") sounds almost as silly as the companies he used to make fun of.
If you want a '90s nostalgia fix, he did write a FuckedCompany book after winding the site down.
Because many people who grab these domains don't understand what "their rules" are, or even that they are dealing with the rules of another country. They just think the TLD sounds cool. And the registrar (who doesn't want to lose a sale) doesn't do anything to explain it to them. Which leads to situations like this.
Indeed.
In most of the recent multiplayer FPSes I've played (Modern Warfare, Bad Company 2, etc) the weapons you have access to aren't determined by your team, they're determined by how many points you've racked up in-game. With more points you get access to more advanced weapons, regardless of what nation those weapons actually came from. So anybody on any team can carry an M-16 or an AK-47 if they've earned enough points to unlock those weapons.
That's true. I was just speaking in the context of America's Army, where the OPFOR were pretty clearly Bad Furrin Terrorists.
Not true. America's Army solved this problem rather elegantly: there were two teams in any given match, and no matter which team you were on, your teammates were always displayed to you as Americans and the players on the other team displayed as Bad Furrin Terrorists ("OPFOR"). So nobody had to play as a Bad Furrin Terrorist; the BFTs were always the other guys, not you. Given how effectively this approach removes the issue of "playing as the Taliban" I'm a bit amazed EA's developers didn't use it.
That sounds familiar...
A bit like recruits during America's own civil war:
Of course, back then all anyone expected a private to do was stand in line, fire his musket in the general direction of the enemy, and try not to die too fast, so it didn't matter all that much if he was as dumb as a box of rocks...
But they recently tried doing just that. And it was an epic failure.
This sounds a lot like Joel Spolsky's "smart and gets things done" test.
Don't worry! That is a well understood condition.
Which is a bit like saying that traveling to the Moon is trivial save for building a Saturn V rocket.
Probably not, since by the time it mattered (1944-1945) the Luftwaffe's biggest shortage was in experienced aircrews, not aircraft. The drain of six years of war had resulted in training standards being dropped dramatically just to get recruits into cockpits as fast as possible to replace casualties. By the time the Me-262 reached service they could barely scrape up enough good pilots to use it, which resulted in numerous cases of Allied airmen shooting down 262s even though they were flying inferior propeller-driven aircraft.
Even if the Germans had chosen to use the resources put into the Me-262 to produce quantities of Me-109/Fw-190s or the like, they would never have been able to fill those cockpits. So in the end it probably didn't matter.
The XKCD threat has officially been upgraded from "Unfunny But Harmless" to "Somewhat Annoying".
Luckily for them, the Internet doesn't scramble its bombers until DEFCON 2 ("Almost As Problematic As 4chan").
English: the PHP of human communication.
Dude, over here we haven't even gotten around to accepting evolution yet! Let us at least catch up to the 19th century before you start demanding we get with the 21st.
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
I have found these resources indispensable in figuring out how modern CPUs and GPUs compare to each other:
... primarily because these tables are dynamic: find the part you're currently using (or want to use as your baseline for comparison) in the table, click on it, and then all the other parts in the table are immediately color-coded as to how much of a step forwards or backwards they are from that part, based on a normalized performance rating.
(It's pathetic that the marketing departments at the companies that make these things are so incompetent that we need tools like these to sort out what exactly they're selling us, but until they get on the ball I'm glad these tools exist.)
The only way a standard RSS reader can find out if a feed has updated is by "polling" the feed periodically. PuSH and similar systems remove the need for this polling by pinging the client directly when something changes.