That's not what's happening here, though. User reviews before release don't make much sense, and comments before release are rarely valuable.
Sure, they're calling them "online troll" because of their politics, but that doesn't seem important here.
And I believe RT already suppresses criticism of films that you're "supposed to" like, by simply not counting any 1-star reviews. Pretty crappy, but old news.
I see no remaining value to old-school news companies. They've all become propaganda outlets for one party or another, and stopped pretending otherwise a couple years ago.
With the internet, you don't have to be a big publisher to have broad reach. You just need to have something interesting to say, And I think people's BS filters work better on the internet - there's a stubborn effect of believing broadcasts and print, no matter how often we're reminded it's all lies.
hy would a short be sweating bullets? The stock is down 15% over the last 12 months.
I've been long Tesla stock from time to time. My buddy goes short from time to time. We both make money.
Tesla's been going violently sideways for almost two years now, and it went sideways for three and a half years before that. It's much ado about nothing.
There is a distinguished engineer who flies in on a private plane, but then it's his plane. Amazon isn't wasteful like that, but they will do practical stuff like hiring a team just to make the paging app better. Like I said, it's not some petty matter of life and death, there are corporate profits at stake.
The amazon app does not work in elevators, unless you installed an AP in your elevator shaft. Think 'faraday cage'. A lot of times people can be in elevators.
And yet you still get paged when the door opens. It's almost as if there was an unlimited budget to make it work well.
Pocsag/flex pagers have better coverage than shitty GSM and WiFi.
Works great on paper. Funny thing: monopoly pager companies aren't so great on upkeep. Plus, people know where their cell phone dead spots are, and can avoid them while on call, but are oblivious to pager dead spots.
The experiment was run. After a couple of years or improving the system, pages showed up faster and more reliably with the app.
The NYT is a crappy example. I can live without any new sources that are publicly traded corporations. The biggest newspaper is not big in the modern scale of things. One million subscribers is on the successful side of a mid-sized YouTube channel.
I think a better example of the problem is modern movies. It's not at all clear that big-budget entertainment can be crowdfunded. It would be nice though to see properties with an established fanbase forced to actually make movies for that fanbase, instead of labeling the fans toxic, to get projects funded.
Various pundits in political and gaming news sphere (of those I follow) generally played around with subscription model to the point where most of the content is free with constant nods to paying patrons on youtube and such. And then they have some kind of a small paywall for extras, with various tiers of payment for more benefits.
It's a model that found its backers.
Everyone I watch: gaming, science, history, and 1 political channel, everyone is crowd funded now.
It's the proven model once your channel is a success, but ad revenue has an advantage for new/small channels. I'm not sure crowdfunding alone is enough. OTOH, does getting $100/month from YouTube really motivate people to keep building their audience? I don't know.
I'm giving Captain Marvel a miss, simply because it's "bland superhero". No hook there for me. The only superhero movies I'm looking forward to are the next Avengers, just to wrap up my interest in Marvel movies, and Shazam (also known as Captain Marvel) because it looks very silly, and I love superhero comedy.
Yup, the budget for waking up engineers at 3AM is "whatever it needs to be". But apps worked much better than I expected for people away from the buildings, where I had figured that pager coverage would be better. Turns out not so much, if you build aggressive retry in on the app side.
Interesting point though about paging people inside hospitals in arbitrary spaces. Of course, adequate WiFi repeaters is "just" budget, but there are other constraints as well.
FYI, people with feet are not really a niche market, your attempts to typify nike shoes does not really match up with reality
Yes, most people buy shoes. No, most shoes sold are not colorful sports shoes, which is where Nike is the dominant brand. This being Slashdot I have to add: women often own many pairs of shoes, more than the uninitiated can understand, but mostly not "sneakers". And most men have to wear something else to work.
We changed razors, mostly because Gillette is too expensive these days for the decreasingly quality that they've also been putting out. Dollar Shave Club and others put out a better bang for the buck product and don't waste money on trying to get political.
I switched to electric, but I started months before the ads. It's just hard for people to switch once they get used to something.
Also of note: no one cares that Nick Fury is played by a black man, it's extremely well done.
Fun fact: that incarnation of Nick Fury always looked like Sam Jackson in the comics, years before the Marvel movies. It was so blatant that he had his lawyers contact Marvel about using his likeness, and they settled on a deal where he'd get first refusal on any movie role.
The character was Samuel L. Jackson before Samuel L. Jackson even knew it existed.
hey should keep the pagers, absolutely. The reason is this:
Pagers use slow transmission protocols that do not need a huge S/N to be properly decoded. That means pagers are going to work almost everywhere you would otherwise get an annoying "No Service" notification on your phone, such as elevators, parking garages, basements, and so on.
Amazon made the transition from physical pagers to an app just a few years ago. Turns out that pager coverage and reliability isn't as good as you'd expect once you get down to only one vendor. Plus, in a disaster where thousands of pages get sent in a short time, you saturate the vendor's infrastructure and pages get delayed by tens of minutes.
The app also sucked at first, and most people on call used both, but within about 2 years it was more reliable on average than physical pagers, and they were lagely abandoned.
For those who don't know, Amazon cares very much about paging people. Paging doctors is merely a matter of life and death; while paging engineers when amazon.com is broke affects profit. Needless to say, far more money gets spent addressing the latter.
It is really cool though to see the machine work from the inside. When anything goes wrong anywhere that affects your ability to buy stuff on amazon.com, it takes less than five minutes before engineers representing dozens of teams are fully engaged with the problem, with most people checking in within 2-3 minutes. Problems are usually localized to one team, usually with an initial theory of cause, within about 10 minutes of the problem appearing. It's amazing to watch from the sidelines when you're not the one on the hook.
"Major global brand" and "niche audience" are compatible. Fashion is a niche, as most clothes are bought for practical reasons, but it's a very profitable one. But I can totally see the point of an ad that deliberately offends older buyers, if that's hurting their brand.
reactions that based on some reactionary ideology that's far from uncommon online (The Force Awakens sucks because a lady with latent Force powers beat up a couple of guys with a space stick).
You know, I'm not sure anyone actually believed that. I think it's entirely a contrived excuse, or so oversimplified as to be wrong.
TFA sucked because it was an uninspired reboot. It added nothing new, and the characters were weak and bland, and their successes unearned. Finn was the only character with any sort of arc (and it was sabotaged by the next film). It played well to the crowd that sees every Transformers film, but that's not the fanbase that buys the merch that is the real money in the franchise.
In fairness, the Ghostbusters backlash was all about "new=bad".
Nope. Fans are excited for Ghostbusters 3, which is not a reboot. It's the same problem with the Star Wars reboot. You will never be successful in capitalizing on a large loyal fanbase if you start by throwing away the very lore and characters they are emotionally attached to. The problem was never "new", it was "replacement".
The movie, on it's own merits, was OK. Not great, but not bad. The problem was that it was both a ghostbusters move with a different cast, and a REBOOT.
More specifically: it's a weak parody from a movie maker with a long successful track record of weak parodies. Had it been "Spirit Chasers" and a parody or genre parody of Ghostbusters, and had the appropriate B-movie budget it would have done fine.
Hollywood has sadly stopped making comedies that aren't parodies (excepting very lowbrow broad humor). I'm a little worried about GB3 because of that. I'd love it as a straight-up adventure story, because I don't trust Hollywood with comedy any more.
Most adults don't wear brightly colored sports shoes as normal daily footwear. The boring mainstream mostly wears either shoes more appropriate for the office, or work boots.
That's the power of democracy. It's not rule by assholes who imagine they're smarter than everyone else. That's why it's the least bad system that's ever been tried.
Sites like RT that allow user ratings are easily gamed and apparently there is nothing we can do about it. No-one has managed to filter this kind of thing, the best tools we have are manual intervention or disabling user ratings.
Sure there is, and you're doing it right now. You pretend that the honest expression of mass opinion is fake, because you disagree with it. No more cognitive dissonance to trouble your enclosed world view. Problem solved.
I'm sure Captain Marvel will do well at the box office
It will do well or poorly based on whether it's an entertaining film. Nothing more. It didn't need any special marketing, as everyone already knows what a Marvel movie is.
Look at Nike. Did the ad with Colin Kaepernick, outrage, videos of people burning their trainers... And Nike's value increased by six billion dollars.
Nike knows their audience. Colin Kaepernick is popular with the sort of people who buy Nike. They market well to their niche.
That same message doesn't "play well in the suburbs". Boring mainstream culture is not a fan, and football overall has suffered diminished audiences. Gillette's ad was a mistake IMO, because it's the boring mainstream culture that buys most razors, but since people almost never switch household brands as an adult, they may be gambling that it will play well to teens and not hurt mainstream sales.
Same message, two different demographic groups, two different results.
some juvenile Fedora wearing basement dwellers no doubt have a problem with female leads
Bad movie after bad movie has gone to this excuse, but it's largely bullshit. Yes, there's some tiny group like that. No, they don't matter. That's not why people didn't like the sad Ghostbusters reboot, That's not why people didn't like The Last Jedi.
A large subsection of the comic-book movie crowd are apparently intimidated by leading ladies.
A non-zero subsection, but there's no reason to believe it's "large", except as a worn-out excuse for a bad movie. No, moviegoers don't hate women. Comic books especially have always led entertainment when it comes to diversity, and comic book fans have never had a problem with that.
If you're going to complain about a work, complain about the aspects of the work that are the actual problem. Otherwise you just make yourself look stupid. This is what made the Red Letter Media takedown of the Star Wars prequels compelling to a large audience: pointing out the actual problems correctly.
But Three-Body Problem wasn't a total loss. It sort-of works as a mystery about how the universe works. It's a non-great book in a good trilogy. Fairly common with new authors.
If you've decide ahead of time there's nothing new under the sun, you're not going to like anything. Sounds like an unpleasant way to go through life.
Three-Body problem was his first book, IIRC, and he didn't get the hang of writing characters in a compelling way until towards the end. What he did start, and improved throughout the series, is great perspectives on how humanity would react to certain new technologies and new events that make us realize how small we are. All from a perspective very different from American and British writers.
The technology in these books makes a solid attempt at not being science fantasy, but the technology isn't really the point of these books, or of non-schlocky SF in general. Good stories are about people, and how they are changed by events.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not what's happening here, though. User reviews before release don't make much sense, and comments before release are rarely valuable.
Sure, they're calling them "online troll" because of their politics, but that doesn't seem important here.
And I believe RT already suppresses criticism of films that you're "supposed to" like, by simply not counting any 1-star reviews. Pretty crappy, but old news.
I see no remaining value to old-school news companies. They've all become propaganda outlets for one party or another, and stopped pretending otherwise a couple years ago.
With the internet, you don't have to be a big publisher to have broad reach. You just need to have something interesting to say, And I think people's BS filters work better on the internet - there's a stubborn effect of believing broadcasts and print, no matter how often we're reminded it's all lies.
hy would a short be sweating bullets? The stock is down 15% over the last 12 months.
I've been long Tesla stock from time to time. My buddy goes short from time to time. We both make money.
Tesla's been going violently sideways for almost two years now, and it went sideways for three and a half years before that. It's much ado about nothing.
There is a distinguished engineer who flies in on a private plane, but then it's his plane. Amazon isn't wasteful like that, but they will do practical stuff like hiring a team just to make the paging app better. Like I said, it's not some petty matter of life and death, there are corporate profits at stake.
The amazon app does not work in elevators, unless you installed an AP in your elevator shaft. Think 'faraday cage'. A lot of times people can be in elevators.
And yet you still get paged when the door opens. It's almost as if there was an unlimited budget to make it work well.
Pocsag/flex pagers have better coverage than shitty GSM and WiFi.
Works great on paper. Funny thing: monopoly pager companies aren't so great on upkeep. Plus, people know where their cell phone dead spots are, and can avoid them while on call, but are oblivious to pager dead spots.
The experiment was run. After a couple of years or improving the system, pages showed up faster and more reliably with the app.
" I can live without any new sources that are publicly traded corporations." = retarded Fox News viewer making bullshit excuses for his treason.
Pretty sure FNC is owned by some sort of News Corporation.
The world would be a better place if publicly traded corporations had no involvement with politics.
The NYT is a crappy example. I can live without any new sources that are publicly traded corporations. The biggest newspaper is not big in the modern scale of things. One million subscribers is on the successful side of a mid-sized YouTube channel.
I think a better example of the problem is modern movies. It's not at all clear that big-budget entertainment can be crowdfunded. It would be nice though to see properties with an established fanbase forced to actually make movies for that fanbase, instead of labeling the fans toxic, to get projects funded.
Various pundits in political and gaming news sphere (of those I follow) generally played around with subscription model to the point where most of the content is free with constant nods to paying patrons on youtube and such. And then they have some kind of a small paywall for extras, with various tiers of payment for more benefits.
It's a model that found its backers.
Everyone I watch: gaming, science, history, and 1 political channel, everyone is crowd funded now.
It's the proven model once your channel is a success, but ad revenue has an advantage for new/small channels. I'm not sure crowdfunding alone is enough. OTOH, does getting $100/month from YouTube really motivate people to keep building their audience? I don't know.
I'm giving Captain Marvel a miss, simply because it's "bland superhero". No hook there for me. The only superhero movies I'm looking forward to are the next Avengers, just to wrap up my interest in Marvel movies, and Shazam (also known as Captain Marvel) because it looks very silly, and I love superhero comedy.
Yup, the budget for waking up engineers at 3AM is "whatever it needs to be". But apps worked much better than I expected for people away from the buildings, where I had figured that pager coverage would be better. Turns out not so much, if you build aggressive retry in on the app side.
Interesting point though about paging people inside hospitals in arbitrary spaces. Of course, adequate WiFi repeaters is "just" budget, but there are other constraints as well.
The problem is that time you *are* on the hook, and that 5 minutes of Amazon.com downtime costs you your job and any prospect at future employment.
Oh, the job market for former Amazon engineers is very hot, no worries there. Almost no one likes working there, so people leave all the time.
FYI, people with feet are not really a niche market, your attempts to typify nike shoes does not really match up with reality
Yes, most people buy shoes. No, most shoes sold are not colorful sports shoes, which is where Nike is the dominant brand. This being Slashdot I have to add: women often own many pairs of shoes, more than the uninitiated can understand, but mostly not "sneakers". And most men have to wear something else to work.
We changed razors, mostly because Gillette is too expensive these days for the decreasingly quality that they've also been putting out. Dollar Shave Club and others put out a better bang for the buck product and don't waste money on trying to get political.
I switched to electric, but I started months before the ads. It's just hard for people to switch once they get used to something.
Also of note: no one cares that Nick Fury is played by a black man, it's extremely well done.
Fun fact: that incarnation of Nick Fury always looked like Sam Jackson in the comics, years before the Marvel movies. It was so blatant that he had his lawyers contact Marvel about using his likeness, and they settled on a deal where he'd get first refusal on any movie role.
The character was Samuel L. Jackson before Samuel L. Jackson even knew it existed.
hey should keep the pagers, absolutely. The reason is this:
Pagers use slow transmission protocols that do not need a huge S/N to be properly decoded. That means pagers are going to work almost everywhere you would otherwise get an annoying "No Service" notification on your phone, such as elevators, parking garages, basements, and so on.
Amazon made the transition from physical pagers to an app just a few years ago. Turns out that pager coverage and reliability isn't as good as you'd expect once you get down to only one vendor. Plus, in a disaster where thousands of pages get sent in a short time, you saturate the vendor's infrastructure and pages get delayed by tens of minutes.
The app also sucked at first, and most people on call used both, but within about 2 years it was more reliable on average than physical pagers, and they were lagely abandoned.
For those who don't know, Amazon cares very much about paging people. Paging doctors is merely a matter of life and death; while paging engineers when amazon.com is broke affects profit. Needless to say, far more money gets spent addressing the latter.
It is really cool though to see the machine work from the inside. When anything goes wrong anywhere that affects your ability to buy stuff on amazon.com, it takes less than five minutes before engineers representing dozens of teams are fully engaged with the problem, with most people checking in within 2-3 minutes. Problems are usually localized to one team, usually with an initial theory of cause, within about 10 minutes of the problem appearing. It's amazing to watch from the sidelines when you're not the one on the hook.
"Major global brand" and "niche audience" are compatible. Fashion is a niche, as most clothes are bought for practical reasons, but it's a very profitable one. But I can totally see the point of an ad that deliberately offends older buyers, if that's hurting their brand.
Weak excuses for bad films.
reactions that based on some reactionary ideology that's far from uncommon online (The Force Awakens sucks because a lady with latent Force powers beat up a couple of guys with a space stick).
You know, I'm not sure anyone actually believed that. I think it's entirely a contrived excuse, or so oversimplified as to be wrong.
TFA sucked because it was an uninspired reboot. It added nothing new, and the characters were weak and bland, and their successes unearned. Finn was the only character with any sort of arc (and it was sabotaged by the next film). It played well to the crowd that sees every Transformers film, but that's not the fanbase that buys the merch that is the real money in the franchise.
In fairness, the Ghostbusters backlash was all about "new=bad".
Nope. Fans are excited for Ghostbusters 3, which is not a reboot. It's the same problem with the Star Wars reboot. You will never be successful in capitalizing on a large loyal fanbase if you start by throwing away the very lore and characters they are emotionally attached to. The problem was never "new", it was "replacement".
The movie, on it's own merits, was OK. Not great, but not bad. The problem was that it was both a ghostbusters move with a different cast, and a REBOOT.
More specifically: it's a weak parody from a movie maker with a long successful track record of weak parodies. Had it been "Spirit Chasers" and a parody or genre parody of Ghostbusters, and had the appropriate B-movie budget it would have done fine.
Hollywood has sadly stopped making comedies that aren't parodies (excepting very lowbrow broad humor). I'm a little worried about GB3 because of that. I'd love it as a straight-up adventure story, because I don't trust Hollywood with comedy any more.
Most adults don't wear brightly colored sports shoes as normal daily footwear. The boring mainstream mostly wears either shoes more appropriate for the office, or work boots.
That's the power of democracy. It's not rule by assholes who imagine they're smarter than everyone else. That's why it's the least bad system that's ever been tried.
Sites like RT that allow user ratings are easily gamed and apparently there is nothing we can do about it. No-one has managed to filter this kind of thing, the best tools we have are manual intervention or disabling user ratings.
Sure there is, and you're doing it right now. You pretend that the honest expression of mass opinion is fake, because you disagree with it. No more cognitive dissonance to trouble your enclosed world view. Problem solved.
I'm sure Captain Marvel will do well at the box office
It will do well or poorly based on whether it's an entertaining film. Nothing more. It didn't need any special marketing, as everyone already knows what a Marvel movie is.
Look at Nike. Did the ad with Colin Kaepernick, outrage, videos of people burning their trainers... And Nike's value increased by six billion dollars.
Nike knows their audience. Colin Kaepernick is popular with the sort of people who buy Nike. They market well to their niche.
That same message doesn't "play well in the suburbs". Boring mainstream culture is not a fan, and football overall has suffered diminished audiences. Gillette's ad was a mistake IMO, because it's the boring mainstream culture that buys most razors, but since people almost never switch household brands as an adult, they may be gambling that it will play well to teens and not hurt mainstream sales.
Same message, two different demographic groups, two different results.
some juvenile Fedora wearing basement dwellers no doubt have a problem with female leads
Bad movie after bad movie has gone to this excuse, but it's largely bullshit. Yes, there's some tiny group like that. No, they don't matter. That's not why people didn't like the sad Ghostbusters reboot, That's not why people didn't like The Last Jedi.
A large subsection of the comic-book movie crowd are apparently intimidated by leading ladies.
A non-zero subsection, but there's no reason to believe it's "large", except as a worn-out excuse for a bad movie. No, moviegoers don't hate women. Comic books especially have always led entertainment when it comes to diversity, and comic book fans have never had a problem with that.
If you're going to complain about a work, complain about the aspects of the work that are the actual problem. Otherwise you just make yourself look stupid. This is what made the Red Letter Media takedown of the Star Wars prequels compelling to a large audience: pointing out the actual problems correctly.
But Three-Body Problem wasn't a total loss. It sort-of works as a mystery about how the universe works. It's a non-great book in a good trilogy. Fairly common with new authors.
Everything I don't like is deus-ex-machina
Yeah, heard that one before. Guess what it's not?
If you've decide ahead of time there's nothing new under the sun, you're not going to like anything. Sounds like an unpleasant way to go through life.
Three-Body problem was his first book, IIRC, and he didn't get the hang of writing characters in a compelling way until towards the end. What he did start, and improved throughout the series, is great perspectives on how humanity would react to certain new technologies and new events that make us realize how small we are. All from a perspective very different from American and British writers.
The technology in these books makes a solid attempt at not being science fantasy, but the technology isn't really the point of these books, or of non-schlocky SF in general. Good stories are about people, and how they are changed by events.