This article (registration, blah blah) seems to disagree.
Does Slashdot, in fact, make money? Its owners say, yes, sort of. The site is owned by Open Source Development Network Inc., a subsidiary of the VA Software Corporation. Open Source runs a number of technology-related Web sites and an online store, ThinkGeek.
Richard French, senior vice president and general manager for Open Source, declined to break out the income of any one component of the company, except to say, "Slashdot works from a cost point of view and from a revenue perspective."
In fact, he acknowledged, "If you took any one of them on their own, probably none of them would be profitable," he said of Open Source's various Web sites.
But because many of the sites use the same hardy, low-maintenance software developed by Mr. Malda and his team, and because the Internet resources are pooled, the company says it is able to squeeze out a profit from the cluster, and makes further profits from sites that it sets up for businesses.
Little Willie from his mirror Licked the mercury right off, Thinking in his childish error, It would cure the whooping cough. At the funeral his mother Sadly said to Mrs. Browne: "Twas a chilly day for Willie When the mercury went down."
--from
Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes, pseudonymous author given as "Col. D. Streamer" (actually Harry Graham)
...in the "Pascal's Wager" sense of the word. When I make a webpage, I figure that, since it's so easy just to stick a few words in there, I might as well. It's not like it's costing me anything but a few moments of time, and if it is useful for something, so much the better.
Patents don't have anything to do with this. It's not a "we patented this" suit, it's a "they hired us to do this, watched what we were doing, then fired us and ripped us off" suit. Whole different animal entirely.
Calm down, man. Disney's doing a damn good job with Sen so far. I mean, just look at the publicity it's gotten already. Look at Rotten Tomatoes. In the first weekend of its release, Spirited Away has only five fewer reviews than Mononoke has years after it's gone.
Mononoke was just released over here at the wrong time. Miyazaki was insistent that Disney show its good faith by bringing the film over. They did, but it didn't really have an audience. If people had known who Miyazaki was, then sure, they might have given it a shot. (And after "Miyazaki's Spirited Away," more folks just might.) Likewise, if the movie'd had "kiddie appeal" and been something families could attend together. But by and large, not many people went even in the places Disney did screen (and advertise) it. If they could have waited and familiarized the American audiences with Miyazaki through other films, like Spirited Away, then Mononoke would at least have had the name recognition. (And, if it does well, will have the name recognition to boost the other Ghibli films, which the USA Today article said they'd be releasing soon.)
Sure, Disney's not advertising Spirited Away everywhere yet. They don't know if they're going to show it everywhere yet, and it would be pointless to advertise it in places it's not showing. They're going to let it earn its own expansion if it's that good. Remember, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? How it opened in just a few places (because "nobody wants to see a subtitled Chinese movie"), then took the nation by storm? Disney's going to give Spirited Away that chance.
And Disney does know what to do with Miyazaki's films. They're doing quite well with them over in Japan, and in the rest of the world where animation doesn't have quite the kiddievid stigma that Americans attach to it. Be patient...I think they'll do it right this time.
Re:If you liked Princess Mononoke...
on
Review: Spirited Away
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Except that these are illegitimate pirate DVDs (the "English and Chinese subtitles" bit should be a dead giveaway). According to fans who've purchased them, they are actually of rather low quality, sometimes leaving out entire scenes altogether. The DVD of Nausicaa has not yet been released in Japan; since it's Miyazaki's most popular movie, Disney seems to be saving it for last.
Ghibli/Disney has never yet put out a multi-movie DVD set. If you must pirate the movie, download the fansub from KaZaa so that you're not enriching the coffers of people who profit at Ghibli's expense.
There are also WMA/RealMedia clips and things in Yahoo.com's movie section; however, I don't have the URL handy and don't know where it is, so you'll have to search for it. (Searching Yahoo, fancy that.:) Or maybe someone else will find it.
Have you seen the Buckaroo Banzai DVD? It's great fun, because writer Earl Mac Rauch, through the character of Pinky Carruthers, does just that. There's a subtitle track of "obscure trivia" which includes a few jabs here and there at various characters.
Or you could wait for the American DVD, which will almost certainly have the dub and the sub, and play in USA DVD players that aren't region-hacked to boot.
Huh. Until I forced an apt-get update, apt-get claimed that I already had the latest Mozilla. Don't I look stupid now. Oh well. At least I get the new version to play with.
Well, it's nice that they've fixed a security hole in Mozilla, but when are they going to come out with a new Debian package release? I've never had very good luck with trying to compile Mozilla myself, and I prefer to have as many as possible of the programs running on my system managed automatically by dpkg--and as of this moment, the newest Debian Mozilla even in Unstable is still 1.00-3. (I've tried the snapshot version, and found it too buggy to use.)
I've emailed the package maintainer asking when a new version would be out; I've posted about it to the Mozilla newsgroups; I have yet to get a satisfactory answer as to why the Debian release is one and a half versions behind the times. During the pre-1.0 phase, they could usually be counted on to update to the most recent build within a few days of its release; 1.1 has been out for weeks now and still no sign of improvement!
This New York Times story (free registration required, someone else post the no-reg link, yadda yadda) chronicles the squabble between two Warner execs, one of whom wanted to do the darker Batman vs. Superman movie, the other who wanted to do a lighter, more feel-good trilogy of Superman movies instead.
Frankly, I think they should put Bruce Timm and Paul Dini, the geniuses behind the animated Batman/Superman/Batman Beyond/Justice League, in the driver's seat. They've done a wonderful job of reinventing the characters for animation.
According to this article at Superhero Hype, the Reeves thing is just a rumor and not actually true--though all the article really has is hearsay, so it's hard to say whether it is or not. There's a an interview with Brett Ratner in Latino Review, where he mentions he wants Anthony Hopkins for Jor-El, but he doesn't mention Keanu there.
700 at a time? At the moment, it only has about 180, but I can't get connected. I pop onto the channel using an IRC client, and then the server closes connection on me. I reconnect automatically, pop into the channel...and the server closes connection on me.
By the way, CNN Headline Hotwired covered the story again tonight. A link to low-res video captures of all four segments is on the Save Farscape site. You really only need to watch #2 and #4, as they're kind of repeats of each other.
...of mozilla-browser newer than 1.00-3. Don't need all that other stuff on my system; just the browser. But there's no mozilla-browser 1.1 yet...let alone 1.2a.
So, why don't you go look a giFT horse in the mouth?
At this moment, there are 720 users on the giFT OpenFT network, sharing a total of 5.2 terabytes of files. Sure, it's not as much as Kazaa...but it works under Linux and MacOSX and Kazaa doesn't. And it's not as much as Gnutella...but it works at all and Gnutella often doesn't. And the more people use it, the more useful it becomes. (Yeah, you do have to get it from CVS, and update frequently, but the installation instruction page has tips for doing that and it's really quite easy.)
Not everything White Wolf puts out is World of Darkness. I'm blase' about the whole WoD thing, but I'm really fond of Adventure!, their AEonverse pulp roleplaying setting.
Hasbro wants all profit, all the time
on
Layoffs at WotC
·
· Score: 2
I think the reason we're seeing these layoffs is that Hasbro wants a profit margin similar to the one they had when Pokemon and MTG were at their prime, when D&D3 was first released and selling like mad. But Pokemon's popularity is waning, and just about everyone who wants D&D3 has it by now...so they're not making as much money, and something has to go.
Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast ("Hazards of the Coast"?) already sold GenCon to Peter Adkinson, the ousted ex-President of WotC. Perhaps before long they'll sell the RPG stuff to him, too.
All you have to do is come up with a system to buy skill points and attribute points directly with a certain amount of experience instead of buying a level with experience. (Some D20 games like Spycraft already allow trading in experience points for other things, like emergency cash while on a mission.) Probably would take less than half an hour to sit down and work something out.
Are you sure you got a real thing? It seems The One Ring dot Net is claiming they're fake. Could you perhaps provide a little detail to verify it? Describe the first couple minutes, or whatever?
Why do people do that, anyway? Are these deluded anti-pirates who think that wasting their own bandwidth is a good way to stick it to the people sticking it to the man? Or just folks who are easily amused? ("Hey, look, Joe, there's someone else downloading Tenchi Universe #23 'cuz he thinks it's Lord of the Rings!" "Ahahahaha! That's so damn funny!") I mean, I downloaded one of the files that I knew was too small to be anything like a Lord of the Rings movie, and got 100K/sec transfer rates!
Or could this be shills for the movie industry who are trying the "cuckoo's egg" philosophy of making Kazaa less useful to people? Hm...nah, probably too paranoid.
Slashdot Mirror
...can be found here. Good ol' news.google.com. :)
Close, but not quite.
Licked the mercury right off,
Thinking in his childish error,
It would cure the whooping cough.
At the funeral his mother
Sadly said to Mrs. Browne:
"Twas a chilly day for Willie
When the mercury went down."
...in the "Pascal's Wager" sense of the word. When I make a webpage, I figure that, since it's so easy just to stick a few words in there, I might as well. It's not like it's costing me anything but a few moments of time, and if it is useful for something, so much the better.
Patents don't have anything to do with this. It's not a "we patented this" suit, it's a "they hired us to do this, watched what we were doing, then fired us and ripped us off" suit. Whole different animal entirely.
Calm down, man. Disney's doing a damn good job with Sen so far. I mean, just look at the publicity it's gotten already. Look at Rotten Tomatoes. In the first weekend of its release, Spirited Away has only five fewer reviews than Mononoke has years after it's gone.
Mononoke was just released over here at the wrong time. Miyazaki was insistent that Disney show its good faith by bringing the film over. They did, but it didn't really have an audience. If people had known who Miyazaki was, then sure, they might have given it a shot. (And after "Miyazaki's Spirited Away," more folks just might.) Likewise, if the movie'd had "kiddie appeal" and been something families could attend together. But by and large, not many people went even in the places Disney did screen (and advertise) it. If they could have waited and familiarized the American audiences with Miyazaki through other films, like Spirited Away, then Mononoke would at least have had the name recognition. (And, if it does well, will have the name recognition to boost the other Ghibli films, which the USA Today article said they'd be releasing soon.)
Sure, Disney's not advertising Spirited Away everywhere yet. They don't know if they're going to show it everywhere yet, and it would be pointless to advertise it in places it's not showing. They're going to let it earn its own expansion if it's that good. Remember, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? How it opened in just a few places (because "nobody wants to see a subtitled Chinese movie"), then took the nation by storm? Disney's going to give Spirited Away that chance.
And Disney does know what to do with Miyazaki's films. They're doing quite well with them over in Japan, and in the rest of the world where animation doesn't have quite the kiddievid stigma that Americans attach to it. Be patient...I think they'll do it right this time.
Except that these are illegitimate pirate DVDs (the "English and Chinese subtitles" bit should be a dead giveaway). According to fans who've purchased them, they are actually of rather low quality, sometimes leaving out entire scenes altogether. The DVD of Nausicaa has not yet been released in Japan; since it's Miyazaki's most popular movie, Disney seems to be saving it for last.
Ghibli/Disney has never yet put out a multi-movie DVD set. If you must pirate the movie, download the fansub from KaZaa so that you're not enriching the coffers of people who profit at Ghibli's expense.
There are also WMA/RealMedia clips and things in Yahoo.com's movie section; however, I don't have the URL handy and don't know where it is, so you'll have to search for it. (Searching Yahoo, fancy that. :) Or maybe someone else will find it.
Have you seen the Buckaroo Banzai DVD? It's great fun, because writer Earl Mac Rauch, through the character of Pinky Carruthers, does just that. There's a subtitle track of "obscure trivia" which includes a few jabs here and there at various characters.
Or you could wait for the American DVD, which will almost certainly have the dub and the sub, and play in USA DVD players that aren't region-hacked to boot.
Huh. Until I forced an apt-get update, apt-get claimed that I already had the latest Mozilla. Don't I look stupid now. Oh well. At least I get the new version to play with.
Well, it's nice that they've fixed a security hole in Mozilla, but when are they going to come out with a new Debian package release? I've never had very good luck with trying to compile Mozilla myself, and I prefer to have as many as possible of the programs running on my system managed automatically by dpkg--and as of this moment, the newest Debian Mozilla even in Unstable is still 1.00-3. (I've tried the snapshot version, and found it too buggy to use.)
I've emailed the package maintainer asking when a new version would be out; I've posted about it to the Mozilla newsgroups; I have yet to get a satisfactory answer as to why the Debian release is one and a half versions behind the times. During the pre-1.0 phase, they could usually be counted on to update to the most recent build within a few days of its release; 1.1 has been out for weeks now and still no sign of improvement!
This New York Times story (free registration required, someone else post the no-reg link, yadda yadda) chronicles the squabble between two Warner execs, one of whom wanted to do the darker Batman vs. Superman movie, the other who wanted to do a lighter, more feel-good trilogy of Superman movies instead.
Frankly, I think they should put Bruce Timm and Paul Dini, the geniuses behind the animated Batman/Superman/Batman Beyond/Justice League, in the driver's seat. They've done a wonderful job of reinventing the characters for animation.
According to this article at Superhero Hype, the Reeves thing is just a rumor and not actually true--though all the article really has is hearsay, so it's hard to say whether it is or not. There's a an interview with Brett Ratner in Latino Review, where he mentions he wants Anthony Hopkins for Jor-El, but he doesn't mention Keanu there.
Interesting...seems a substantial part of RIAA's propaganda against the peer to peer companies is predicated on the fact that they're making a profit.
I wonder if this means their case would be weaker against giFT.
700 at a time? At the moment, it only has about 180, but I can't get connected. I pop onto the channel using an IRC client, and then the server closes connection on me. I reconnect automatically, pop into the channel...and the server closes connection on me.
Lather, rinse, repeat. How frustrating.
Stargate SG-1, according to CNN.
By the way, CNN Headline Hotwired covered the story again tonight. A link to low-res video captures of all four segments is on the Save Farscape site. You really only need to watch #2 and #4, as they're kind of repeats of each other.
...of mozilla-browser newer than 1.00-3. Don't need all that other stuff on my system; just the browser. But there's no mozilla-browser 1.1 yet...let alone 1.2a.
So, why don't you go look a giFT horse in the mouth?
At this moment, there are 720 users on the giFT OpenFT network, sharing a total of 5.2 terabytes of files. Sure, it's not as much as Kazaa...but it works under Linux and MacOSX and Kazaa doesn't. And it's not as much as Gnutella...but it works at all and Gnutella often doesn't. And the more people use it, the more useful it becomes. (Yeah, you do have to get it from CVS, and update frequently, but the installation instruction page has tips for doing that and it's really quite easy.)
Not everything White Wolf puts out is World of Darkness. I'm blase' about the whole WoD thing, but I'm really fond of Adventure!, their AEonverse pulp roleplaying setting.
I think the reason we're seeing these layoffs is that Hasbro wants a profit margin similar to the one they had when Pokemon and MTG were at their prime, when D&D3 was first released and selling like mad. But Pokemon's popularity is waning, and just about everyone who wants D&D3 has it by now...so they're not making as much money, and something has to go.
Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast ("Hazards of the Coast"?) already sold GenCon to Peter Adkinson, the ousted ex-President of WotC. Perhaps before long they'll sell the RPG stuff to him, too.
All you have to do is come up with a system to buy skill points and attribute points directly with a certain amount of experience instead of buying a level with experience. (Some D20 games like Spycraft already allow trading in experience points for other things, like emergency cash while on a mission.) Probably would take less than half an hour to sit down and work something out.
Are you sure you got a real thing? It seems The One Ring dot Net is claiming they're fake. Could you perhaps provide a little detail to verify it? Describe the first couple minutes, or whatever?
Why do people do that, anyway? Are these deluded anti-pirates who think that wasting their own bandwidth is a good way to stick it to the people sticking it to the man? Or just folks who are easily amused? ("Hey, look, Joe, there's someone else downloading Tenchi Universe #23 'cuz he thinks it's Lord of the Rings!" "Ahahahaha! That's so damn funny!") I mean, I downloaded one of the files that I knew was too small to be anything like a Lord of the Rings movie, and got 100K/sec transfer rates!
Or could this be shills for the movie industry who are trying the "cuckoo's egg" philosophy of making Kazaa less useful to people? Hm...nah, probably too paranoid.