Everyone was excited about the PReP platform which would have provided a common PowerPC hardware base for os vendors to develop for. Prep underwent modifications and becam CHRP. (I think. It's beena long time). But interest in it evaporated pretty quickly. Quick enough so that no generic boxes were produced. Or very few. I think ibmpushed ai/x on it for a while. And I swear that Microsoft did have winnt 3.5 running on PowerPC. It was nt44 that they only supported x86 and dec alpha. Point being microsftdidnt reneg on their "promise" but they did what they said they'd do, no one bought it so they stopped.
Your laptop is generally built with standard parts more or less, so updating its operating system is as easy as popping in a cd or DVD. Yes you may need to do some research to make sure your add ons are compatible, but you can pull them, replace them or what not in order to get it todo what you want To. All these android devices feature a mishmash of hardware, proprietary or not, making end user upgrades impossible without the blessing of the phone maker. Hardly the "freedom" you express hope for.
But so long as users continue to defend what they've got rather than demanding better solutions, the status quo won't change. You'll be stick with closed phones running open software with little or no ability to gain access to the latest tech short of buying a new phone with every os release....
Yes, anyone can call and say they're a bank. And they might know your name, which shouldn't be enough to authenticate, but a few people here and there will fall for it anyways. There's no helping them.
But if someone calls with your name, knows transactions that you've recently made, and has other identifying information (including your credit limit. That way, once they determine your card is "safe" they can offer to raise your limit from XXX (which they know) to YYY (a made up number). Of course that won't do anything, but it's just more information for them to appear legit.
I can't believe there are so many people here overlook all of these issues. Social engineering is a real threat, and giving thieves more and more information so they can be better "armed" by appearing more legitimate is a bad thing. True it's not as bad as leaving a database wide open with creditcard details, but it's still unacceptable that any information of this information should be accessible if a phone is lost.
You're missing the point. They're not calling about google wallet. They're calling about your credit card. You might inquire as to why the phone theft and cc are related and the "rep" would just say "some phone apps store credit card information on the device", and then proceed to read off a list if your recent transactions to "verify" you.
As I said earlier most of us won't fall for this but if you think no one will, then you over rate the intelligence of the human race. Best not to leave that data available to be found in the first place... The fix for this is just a single additional step, it shouldn't have even been an issue.
" hi this is the chase anti fraud department. We've noticed some suspicious activity on your account. Can you verify if you initiated the following charges? Oh you did that's great. I just need to verify if you're in possession of your card right now. Can you please read the 16 digits off the front of it for me?"
I wouldn't fall for it. You and most slashdotters probably wouldn't either. But rest assured there are still millions who would. Those same people who go clicking every link they find in their emails, I'm sure a few of them would succumb to this sort of attack. Letting the their get enough information about you so that they can sound like the should have this info is a bad thing.
I'll jump on the band wagon that says this is incredibly irresponsible. Especially if it's tri that the program is x"protected by a PIN". The developers recognized that the program stores and accesses vital data, but didn't take the next step of insuring access too all of its data would be blocked without that pin.
Oh that's right. It's safe because only someone with root access can access it. Even though rooting an android phone is hardly rocket science. (that last statement is conjecture since I no longer use an android)
I work at a small law firm, and all of our infrastructure is in house. Since I wear a few hats, and with the IT part of my job now the least demanding part, I've been contemplating moving some of our services out. It does get disruptive when there are fires to be out out right when there are deadlines due.
One thing I've been investigating is abandoning exchange for google apps. It would defiantly help up the security, as we'd only need a single open rdp port. And maintenance, service packs, anti-spam subscriptions would mostly become a thing of the past. Uncomfortable with google though, as we do have a lot of confidential information in our mail flow, and their propensity for analyzing very it of data they an get their hands on seems counter to the need for privacyin our communications.
Or course I haven't read their usage agreement so maybe by virtue of paying them for services, they might eschew the need to learn everything they can about us and our clients.
Point being, there seems to be a trade off that makes outsourcing the deal worth looking into, especially for small firms where budgets and manpower face more constraints than with fortune500 companies.
I got a 1st gen iPad a few months ago. Already having an iPhone, not to mention a laptop and a media pc at home, plus a plethora of devices at work, I wasn't sure how much value it would be to me, but I was getting it at a price where I could easily resell it at a profit, so it was a risk free experiment.
Just a few month later, it's become my primary information access device. Be it reading news, streaming ripped DVDs, renting movies, responding to slashdot posts, this is the device I use. It's form factor is great, has battery life to die for, and, as much as I hate the non descript adjective, it "just works"
Mind you it's not a device to get work done on. For that I will always prefer a keyboard and mouse. I've run into nothing that ive thought it should be able to do that it can't, including removing in to servers at the office in a pinch. So, I'd say you should try using it as its meant to be used before knocking it. To say its too locked down to me means you haven't even given it a try before bashing it.
terse/trs/ Adjective: Sparing in the use of words; abrupt:
Again, poster was to my mind stating fact. You're not going to compete with Apple by producing a low-cost piece of crap. Just like other people have pointed out that Bentley's and Kia's occupy different places in the market. But too many people took to to the belief this new Kia of tablets would succeed where the others had failed in trying to dethrone the Bentley model. But it's not flamebait to say that in fewer words.
Well, yeah. From the moment of its announcement til now, it's been heralded as the most serious competitor to the iPad yet. Nevermind that this was said before a single product had shipped, or even a single reviewer had gotten one to write up about. So of course consumers are going to buy into it thinking that it'll do just as good of a job, if not better, as the iPad at every task they want to use it for.
money from pot and cocaine goes back to mexico and filters through the rest of south america, fueling all sorts of violence across the border. heroin funds those same people, plus ends up in the hands of the warlords in afghanistan and pakistan that our troops are fighting. But the disconnect is too great for anyone to correlate their use to the massive amounts of violence at the other end of the chain.
But then, if our concern was trully about the welfare of people, whether they be our own people who are either addicted or rotting in jail, or people in the source countries who are living lives under constant fear of the drug funded narco groups, we'd have to look at things objectively and ask: "which is more realistic, asking the millions of us citizens who are well aware of these dynamics to put aside their vices, let alone asking people whose drug use has escalated to the point that they no longer care about their own well being to endure withdrawal and the complete change of lifestyle required to get off of the stuff, in order to help nameless, faceless peasants half a world away OR legalizing the stuff, regulating it, and allowing companies and individuals to produce it here and distribute it on the cheap, thereby removing billions of dollars from the narco groups coffers?"
One solution requires the getting millions of people who are either unaware or willfully ignorant to make substantial changes to their lifestyle for no descrenable benefit. The other solution requires the majority of about 535 people who are either well informed on the direct and indirect consequences or who are surrounded by people with a lot of knowledge on that issue, to write legislation that would put a permanent end to the black market and all the associated woes involved.
I tend to think the second solution is the only realistic way to put an end it. If you think otherwise, perhaps you'd suggest a realistic solution.
i don't think it was communism that destroyed eastern europes industrial capability. More like american and british bombs. Rest of your point still stands though. Of course, all these years later, Germany is once again europes powerhouse.
and they stopped with the x-serve as well, as they came to realize that thats not their market. They took a stab once they had a solid platform, and learned their lesson. individuals are happy to pay premium prices for their products. corps weren't so willing to do so at the server level. at the workstation level, yes. but not at the standard desktop level.
Nat is defiantly a solution. There are so man devices connected directly to the Internet, consuming precious ip's that,frankly have no real reason for doing so. I worked at a publishing company some time back, thousands of employees, each with an accessible public ip address. So we're talking gobbling up thousands of ip's when through services like NAT, etc they could have shrunk their footprint to 10 or 15 public ip's. Widen that policy across the entire Internet and we'd likely be using a sliver ofthe ip4 space and not even need to contemplate ip6
Take the fridge of the future. It "needs" to be able to look up product information by barcode or RFID, send order requests to the grocer (or most likely to amazon), send diagnostic info, retrieve software updates, and maybe poll the power company to find out if it should ratchet down its energy consumption. All of that can be accomplished while sharing the same public ip address of every other device in the house. Or even every other device in the neighborhood.
Yeah, selling all those iPhones, iPods, iPads, iMacs and MacBooks certainly isn't working for apple. When will they open their eyes to this? In case it wasn't apparent, apple has next to no interest in the enterprise segment.
With the our slay having billions of stars and there being billions over other galaxy's out there , I can't believe we're the only sentient creatures (let alone single celled or multicelled organisms). Whether we ever get s cancer to meet one another, or even detect one another. Is a who,e other issue, given that our (and any other civilizations) existences as advanced technological civilizations will most likely be extremely short lived compared to the age of the cosmos, and most likely separated by millions or billions of years.
Well from an it standpoint I can see distrust of users sprouting from the million upon millions of virus-laden pcs. Bot nets deluging the Internet with spam Trojan key loggers that get installed and empty bank accounts if money and companies of their trade secrets. Government agencies that issue redacted information by drawing colored boxes over text in PDFs. Users f'ing up machines so bad they can't even boot properly.
Some of that is because of faulty software, but so much of it is also due to users blindly clicking ok or running every.exe they encounter. And really no matter how secure the system, once a user actively allows an ap to run, most of the faults lie with the user not the system
So yeah, I have no idea why IT would harbor any distrust towards users. Really, I don't!
You do recall that the time the hostages were held was increased due to the Reagan administration? That his staff, prior to being elected, actively negotiated with the Iranians, and, once a deal had been struck,convinced the iraniansnotto release the hostages until AFTER Reagan was put in office, so that they wouldn't be freed on jimmy Carter's watch?
Yes - playing politics for them (reaganites) trumped bringing home their citizens as soon as possible. So when you pointout the 444 days the hostages were held, know full well that even though 1 day is too long, the time they spent in captivity was actively prolonged by Republicans
And since I'm not logging out prior to posting, please research a little before you mod me down as a troll.
As said before in this thread, everyone taking Apple to task over this is painting an overly broad picture due to their anti-apple mindset. To your example, Apple, in your Ford Scenario, would not be out there suing every manufacturer of a vehicle that relied on a gas engine and had four wheels. They would, though, take the manufacturer of a vehicle that, from every angle viewed, would pass for a Mustang to a casual observer. That's the case here. Other tablets are fine, just as other cars are. But Apple is seeking to disallow tablets designed to so closely resemble their product.
Perhaps design patents aren't the proper venue for this. Asi do agree with your reasoning about the existence of patents. However, another forum should turn out the same result. I'd say the case design should be copyrighted or trademarked, but we all know how most slash dotters feel about copyrights..:)
End point is, if you look at the tablet market, many companies have managed to come up with their own tablets with unique and identifiable designs that don't clearly leach every design aspect from the iPad. That samsung couldn't or didn't do that is their own fault, and to my mind, it's certainly understandable that a company that spent countless hours refining their products design should be able to prevent other players from passively sitting back and doing nothing but waiting for their competitors final design to emerge and then simply utilizing that design just about in its entirety.
To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park - Hollywood has become so enamored in the fact that they can do effects in CG they forgot to ask if they should.
CG might be cheaper than non-CG (debatable) but it certainly hasn't translated into the bottom line:
I referenced a few movies further down as an AC (forgot to sign in) - but nowadays CG heavy movies seem to return about $3 dollars for ever dollar spent, compared to old-school movies produced decades ago, which returned $10 or $15 for every $1 spent; look at Wikipedia's pages for any of the Pirates of the Carribean Movies and compare to the returns obtained by the original star wars franchise, or look further back to the 1960's james bond movies.
CG just hasn't added to the bottom line, and instead seems to have locked filmmakers into the constraint of attempting to do everything in CG that they used to figure out how to do other ways. And more and more movies are being made nowadays that wouldn't have seen the light of day but not for CG. Not because they were so ambitious that they needed CG to complete, but because writers, directors and producers are getting so lazy and letting CG elements drive the story line.
Take the first Jurassic Park - still one of my favorite movies. CG was used but equally important were the life size models. CG was used as a tool to accomplish just the shots that were otherwise impossible with the standard technology and a great film was produced. By the time they got to the third film in the series, the story was completely degraded and someone (directors? writers? or was it the fx house?) decided they ought resort to creating brand new dinosaurs that had never existed before - not because they had to - recycling the old T-rex models would have been sufficient for a new film, but because they had the ability to they just created something brand new...
I won't even start talking about the garbage that is all of the marvel comic book reprises, or transformers or any of the other movies that are being created solely with the eye on creating "spectacular" effects, hoping to draw in audiences by visuals alone rather than by story line and acting.
I hope this experiment is successful and that the majors take a lesson from it. My movie consumption has declined... i used to love going ot the movies, but hardly go anymore. And even my at home watching mostly centers on hunting down old movies compared rather than watching the new crap being dished out....
i already did bangkok. My first trip out of the country. Fun place, i'd go back and see the rest of Thailand (and buy more suits for $75 each), except its a 20-24 hour flight from NYC (which is a 3 hour flight from me already).
Went to cartagena this spring, very cool. I was expecting it to be a dangerous place, but (un)fortunately, nothing happened. I'm planning to return next year when i get some time off again.
Cartagena is actually fairly popular with Europeans, it's American's that don't go, owing to fears of colombia that have been fanned in the media. Case in point, i found that more of the people in the service industry there were fluent in french, german and other european languages than english. And not speaking spanish, it was a bit difficult to figure things out at first!
But yeah, started out taking baby steps. Now I have NK in my sights!
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_3.51
Everyone was excited about the PReP platform which would have provided a common PowerPC hardware base for os vendors to develop for. Prep underwent modifications and becam CHRP. (I think. It's beena long time). But interest in it evaporated pretty quickly. Quick enough so that no generic boxes were produced. Or very few. I think ibmpushed ai/x on it for a while. And I swear that Microsoft did have winnt 3.5 running on PowerPC. It was nt44 that they only supported x86 and dec alpha. Point being microsftdidnt reneg on their "promise" but they did what they said they'd do, no one bought it so they stopped.
Your laptop is generally built with standard parts more or less, so updating its operating system is as easy as popping in a cd or DVD. Yes you may need to do some research to make sure your add ons are compatible, but you can pull them, replace them or what not in order to get it todo what you want To. All these android devices feature a mishmash of hardware, proprietary or not, making end user upgrades impossible without the blessing of the phone maker. Hardly the "freedom" you express hope for.
But so long as users continue to defend what they've got rather than demanding better solutions, the status quo won't change. You'll be stick with closed phones running open software with little or no ability to gain access to the latest tech short of buying a new phone with every os release....
Yes, anyone can call and say they're a bank. And they might know your name, which shouldn't be enough to authenticate, but a few people here and there will fall for it anyways. There's no helping them.
But if someone calls with your name, knows transactions that you've recently made, and has other identifying information (including your credit limit. That way, once they determine your card is "safe" they can offer to raise your limit from XXX (which they know) to YYY (a made up number). Of course that won't do anything, but it's just more information for them to appear legit.
I can't believe there are so many people here overlook all of these issues. Social engineering is a real threat, and giving thieves more and more information so they can be better "armed" by appearing more legitimate is a bad thing. True it's not as bad as leaving a database wide open with creditcard details, but it's still unacceptable that any information of this information should be accessible if a phone is lost.
You're missing the point. They're not calling about google wallet. They're calling about your credit card. You might inquire as to why the phone theft and cc are related and the "rep" would just say "some phone apps store credit card information on the device", and then proceed to read off a list if your recent transactions to "verify" you.
As I said earlier most of us won't fall for this but if you think no one will, then you over rate the intelligence of the human race. Best not to leave that data available to be found in the first place... The fix for this is just a single additional step, it shouldn't have even been an issue.
Phone call:
" hi this is the chase anti fraud department. We've noticed some suspicious activity on your account. Can you verify if you initiated the following charges? Oh you did that's great. I just need to verify if you're in possession of your card right now. Can you please read the 16 digits off the front of it for me?"
I wouldn't fall for it. You and most slashdotters probably wouldn't either. But rest assured there are still millions who would. Those same people who go clicking every link they find in their emails, I'm sure a few of them would succumb to this sort of attack. Letting the their get enough information about you so that they can sound like the should have this info is a bad thing.
I'll jump on the band wagon that says this is incredibly irresponsible. Especially if it's tri that the program is x"protected by a PIN". The developers recognized that the program stores and accesses vital data, but didn't take the next step of insuring access too all of its data would be blocked without that pin.
Oh that's right. It's safe because only someone with root access can access it. Even though rooting an android phone is hardly rocket science. (that last statement is conjecture since I no longer use an android)
Sure shoot the messenger and disregard the many well written points he made.
I work at a small law firm, and all of our infrastructure is in house. Since I wear a few hats, and with the IT part of my job now the least demanding part, I've been contemplating moving some of our services out. It does get disruptive when there are fires to be out out right when there are deadlines due.
One thing I've been investigating is abandoning exchange for google apps. It would defiantly help up the security, as we'd only need a single open rdp port. And maintenance, service packs, anti-spam subscriptions would mostly become a thing of the past. Uncomfortable with google though, as we do have a lot of confidential information in our mail flow, and their propensity for analyzing very it of data they an get their hands on seems counter to the need for privacyin our communications.
Or course I haven't read their usage agreement so maybe by virtue of paying them for services, they might eschew the need to learn everything they can about us and our clients.
Point being, there seems to be a trade off that makes outsourcing the deal worth looking into, especially for small firms where budgets and manpower face more constraints than with fortune500 companies.
Any thoughts for or against?
Look at my UID. I've been around a while!
I got a 1st gen iPad a few months ago. Already having an iPhone, not to mention a laptop and a media pc at home, plus a plethora of devices at work, I wasn't sure how much value it would be to me, but I was getting it at a price where I could easily resell it at a profit, so it was a risk free experiment.
Just a few month later, it's become my primary information access device. Be it reading news, streaming ripped DVDs, renting movies, responding to slashdot posts, this is the device I use. It's form factor is great, has battery life to die for, and, as much as I hate the non descript adjective, it "just works"
Mind you it's not a device to get work done on. For that I will always prefer a keyboard and mouse. I've run into nothing that ive thought it should be able to do that it can't, including removing in to servers at the office in a pinch. So, I'd say you should try using it as its meant to be used before knocking it. To say its too locked down to me means you haven't even given it a try before bashing it.
terse /trs/
Adjective: Sparing in the use of words; abrupt:
Again, poster was to my mind stating fact. You're not going to compete with Apple by producing a low-cost piece of crap. Just like other people have pointed out that Bentley's and Kia's occupy different places in the market. But too many people took to to the belief this new Kia of tablets would succeed where the others had failed in trying to dethrone the Bentley model. But it's not flamebait to say that in fewer words.
Well, yeah. From the moment of its announcement til now, it's been heralded as the most serious competitor to the iPad yet. Nevermind that this was said before a single product had shipped, or even a single reviewer had gotten one to write up about. So of course consumers are going to buy into it thinking that it'll do just as good of a job, if not better, as the iPad at every task they want to use it for.
How, pray tell, is that post flame bait?
Have you seen the fire? I stopped at a best buy, saw one one display and laughed as i put it back down. An iPad killer, it certainly isn't.
yeah, no one thinks about that stuff
money from pot and cocaine goes back to mexico and filters through the rest of south america, fueling all sorts of violence across the border. heroin funds those same people, plus ends up in the hands of the warlords in afghanistan and pakistan that our troops are fighting. But the disconnect is too great for anyone to correlate their use to the massive amounts of violence at the other end of the chain.
But then, if our concern was trully about the welfare of people, whether they be our own people who are either addicted or rotting in jail, or people in the source countries who are living lives under constant fear of the drug funded narco groups, we'd have to look at things objectively and ask: "which is more realistic, asking the millions of us citizens who are well aware of these dynamics to put aside their vices, let alone asking people whose drug use has escalated to the point that they no longer care about their own well being to endure withdrawal and the complete change of lifestyle required to get off of the stuff, in order to help nameless, faceless peasants half a world away OR legalizing the stuff, regulating it, and allowing companies and individuals to produce it here and distribute it on the cheap, thereby removing billions of dollars from the narco groups coffers?"
One solution requires the getting millions of people who are either unaware or willfully ignorant to make substantial changes to their lifestyle for no descrenable benefit. The other solution requires the majority of about 535 people who are either well informed on the direct and indirect consequences or who are surrounded by people with a lot of knowledge on that issue, to write legislation that would put a permanent end to the black market and all the associated woes involved.
I tend to think the second solution is the only realistic way to put an end it. If you think otherwise, perhaps you'd suggest a realistic solution.
i don't think it was communism that destroyed eastern europes industrial capability. More like american and british bombs. Rest of your point still stands though. Of course, all these years later, Germany is once again europes powerhouse.
and they stopped with the x-serve as well, as they came to realize that thats not their market. They took a stab once they had a solid platform, and learned their lesson. individuals are happy to pay premium prices for their products. corps weren't so willing to do so at the server level. at the workstation level, yes. but not at the standard desktop level.
Nat is defiantly a solution. There are so man devices connected directly to the Internet, consuming precious ip's that,frankly have no real reason for doing so. I worked at a publishing company some time back, thousands of employees, each with an accessible public ip address. So we're talking gobbling up thousands of ip's when through services like NAT, etc they could have shrunk their footprint to 10 or 15 public ip's. Widen that policy across the entire Internet and we'd likely be using a sliver ofthe ip4 space and not even need to contemplate ip6
Take the fridge of the future. It "needs" to be able to look up product information by barcode or RFID, send order requests to the grocer (or most likely to amazon), send diagnostic info, retrieve software updates, and maybe poll the power company to find out if it should ratchet down its energy consumption. All of that can be accomplished while sharing the same public ip address of every other device in the house. Or even every other device in the neighborhood.
Yeah, selling all those iPhones, iPods, iPads, iMacs and MacBooks certainly isn't working for apple. When will they open their eyes to this? In case it wasn't apparent, apple has next to no interest in the enterprise segment.
With the our slay having billions of stars and there being billions over other galaxy's out there , I can't believe we're the only sentient creatures (let alone single celled or multicelled organisms). Whether we ever get s cancer to meet one another, or even detect one another. Is a who,e other issue, given that our (and any other civilizations) existences as advanced technological civilizations will most likely be extremely short lived compared to the age of the cosmos, and most likely separated by millions or billions of years.
Well from an it standpoint I can see distrust of users sprouting from the million upon millions of virus-laden pcs. Bot nets deluging the Internet with spam Trojan key loggers that get installed and empty bank accounts if money and companies of their trade secrets. Government agencies that issue redacted information by drawing colored boxes over text in PDFs. Users f'ing up machines so bad they can't even boot properly.
Some of that is because of faulty software, but so much of it is also due to users blindly clicking ok or running every .exe they encounter. And really no matter how secure the system, once a user actively allows an ap to run, most of the faults lie with the user not the system
So yeah, I have no idea why IT would harbor any distrust towards users. Really, I don't!
Who ever rated this funny needs a talking to. Thus comment is one of the most insightful ones on this thread!
You do recall that the time the hostages were held was increased due to the Reagan administration? That his staff, prior to being elected, actively negotiated with the Iranians, and, once a deal had been struck,convinced the iraniansnotto release the hostages until AFTER Reagan was put in office, so that they wouldn't be freed on jimmy Carter's watch?
Yes - playing politics for them (reaganites) trumped bringing home their citizens as soon as possible. So when you pointout the 444 days the hostages were held, know full well that even though 1 day is too long, the time they spent in captivity was actively prolonged by Republicans
And since I'm not logging out prior to posting, please research a little before you mod me down as a troll.
As said before in this thread, everyone taking Apple to task over this is painting an overly broad picture due to their anti-apple mindset. To your example, Apple, in your Ford Scenario, would not be out there suing every manufacturer of a vehicle that relied on a gas engine and had four wheels. They would, though, take the manufacturer of a vehicle that, from every angle viewed, would pass for a Mustang to a casual observer. That's the case here. Other tablets are fine, just as other cars are. But Apple is seeking to disallow tablets designed to so closely resemble their product.
Perhaps design patents aren't the proper venue for this. Asi do agree with your reasoning about the existence of patents. However, another forum should turn out the same result. I'd say the case design should be copyrighted or trademarked, but we all know how most slash dotters feel about copyrights.. :)
End point is, if you look at the tablet market, many companies have managed to come up with their own tablets with unique and identifiable designs that don't clearly leach every design aspect from the iPad. That samsung couldn't or didn't do that is their own fault, and to my mind, it's certainly understandable that a company that spent countless hours refining their products design should be able to prevent other players from passively sitting back and doing nothing but waiting for their competitors final design to emerge and then simply utilizing that design just about in its entirety.
To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park - Hollywood has become so enamored in the fact that they can do effects in CG they forgot to ask if they should.
CG might be cheaper than non-CG (debatable) but it certainly hasn't translated into the bottom line:
I referenced a few movies further down as an AC (forgot to sign in) - but nowadays CG heavy movies seem to return about $3 dollars for ever dollar spent, compared to old-school movies produced decades ago, which returned $10 or $15 for every $1 spent; look at Wikipedia's pages for any of the Pirates of the Carribean Movies and compare to the returns obtained by the original star wars franchise, or look further back to the 1960's james bond movies.
CG just hasn't added to the bottom line, and instead seems to have locked filmmakers into the constraint of attempting to do everything in CG that they used to figure out how to do other ways. And more and more movies are being made nowadays that wouldn't have seen the light of day but not for CG. Not because they were so ambitious that they needed CG to complete, but because writers, directors and producers are getting so lazy and letting CG elements drive the story line.
Take the first Jurassic Park - still one of my favorite movies. CG was used but equally important were the life size models. CG was used as a tool to accomplish just the shots that were otherwise impossible with the standard technology and a great film was produced. By the time they got to the third film in the series, the story was completely degraded and someone (directors? writers? or was it the fx house?) decided they ought resort to creating brand new dinosaurs that had never existed before - not because they had to - recycling the old T-rex models would have been sufficient for a new film, but because they had the ability to they just created something brand new...
I won't even start talking about the garbage that is all of the marvel comic book reprises, or transformers or any of the other movies that are being created solely with the eye on creating "spectacular" effects, hoping to draw in audiences by visuals alone rather than by story line and acting.
I hope this experiment is successful and that the majors take a lesson from it. My movie consumption has declined... i used to love going ot the movies, but hardly go anymore. And even my at home watching mostly centers on hunting down old movies compared rather than watching the new crap being dished out....
i already did bangkok. My first trip out of the country. Fun place, i'd go back and see the rest of Thailand (and buy more suits for $75 each), except its a 20-24 hour flight from NYC (which is a 3 hour flight from me already).
Went to cartagena this spring, very cool. I was expecting it to be a dangerous place, but (un)fortunately, nothing happened. I'm planning to return next year when i get some time off again.
Cartagena is actually fairly popular with Europeans, it's American's that don't go, owing to fears of colombia that have been fanned in the media. Case in point, i found that more of the people in the service industry there were fluent in french, german and other european languages than english. And not speaking spanish, it was a bit difficult to figure things out at first!
But yeah, started out taking baby steps. Now I have NK in my sights!