It *is* all about the opening weekend gross these days, according to this story.
Have risk-averse MBAs killed Hollywood's magic? Studio executives, producers, filmmakers, and critics talk about how the movie business, and movies themselves, have changed.
John Pierson, the man behind many an indie, takes stock of what's "independent" today. Plus, interviews with Elvis Mitchell, Allison Anders, Kevin Smith, and Michael Douglas.
The Atlantic Monthly's Charles C. Mann on what Hollywood has learned from Napster. Plus, industry insiders discuss how digital technology and the Internet may transform filmmaking.
A closer look at the business of movies, including the story of how Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" gave birth to the summer blockbuster and changed Hollywood forever.
The premise is that all the studios and distributors are now controlled by a handful of mega corps who make and market movies based on a formula of risk management. They closely estimate and monitor the opening weekend gross, which is indeed used as the yardstick to extrapolate the total return on the movie including first-run, overseas dist, video sales, merchandise, tv and cable runs, etc.
Comparing to movies 5-10 years ago _is_ meaningless. Comparing to Harry Potter is very relevant.
Yeah, that's certainly very confusing, what with the way he hid the actual origin of the content and stuck it in a frame to make it look like it came from his own site. </sarcasm>
For a home user, I agree. I did a dist-upgrade on one of my machines, the other I just downloaded the rescue, root and driver floppies and just installed woody over the network (love my cable modem!). Doing a dist-upgrade over a per-minute dialup could be tough. Then again, can't you get a woody snapshot from cheapbytes or something? Yeah, I just don't see hordes of ppl waiting for CDs to become available when woody releases.
For production, it is probably a bigger deal. I would imagine there are shops that keep close tabs on what version is running and may allow only 'stable'. There are no doubt SAs out there that have a test box or two running woody waiting for the day it goes to stable so they can start upgrading the production machines.
They don't have to, they don't even want to. They would rather see others use a BSD license than GPL. They can bitch and moan all they want, it's a free country.;-)
But is the upgrade any good without the license for the previous version? (I'm not saying Microsoft is right, just asking.)
If your computer came with 95, and you upgraded to 98 with the $89 upgrade version (not the full version), the installer asks you to insert the 95 CD at some point, doesn't it? (been such a long time since I've done anything like that)
Point is, they want you to supply the media and COA that came with the box.
>what if the machine is donated with a non-MS operating system, or for that matter, no operating system at all?
Well, obviously they prefer that you don't take stuff like that. They can publish all the guidelines they want, it's good for a laugh. When they start coming after schools that have accepted PCs without valid Windows licenses, then I'll get all huffy.
Isn't that just a backwards way of saying that the media that comes with a pre-installed OS can't be kept by the donor and potentially reused on another machine?
Surely, if you wanted to throw the Win95 drive out and swap in another larger one and install a licensed copy of XP, MS would have no problem. As long as that 95 CD isn't still in the hands of the original owner, what difference does it make?
But then, what if the donor doesn't have the original pre-installed OS CD? What if he wiped the drive, threw out his unopened CD and installed *gasp* another non-microsoft OS?
Clearly, the school would not want to associate itself with some pinko-commie-unix-installing-freeloader-terrorist!
>requiring their newer/bigger set top box and yet another remote
Not only that, I've noticed a real loss in picture quality on the digital channels. Anytime the video goes through high-motion, you can see lots of crappy compression artifacts (reminds me of a really badly compressed CNN video).
Heh, that episode was on just a couple weeks ago on SciFi and I found myself searching the net for pictures of Angelique Pettyjohn.
"10 quatloos that the newcomer gets into Shanha's drill uniform by the next training cycle!"
"20 quatloos that the newcomers are asexual!"
>semi-legal
Sure, semi-legal is about as valid as semi-pregnant . Wasn't there a story not too long ago about a guy getting into trouble because he just scanned someone's subnet? (too lazy to look up a link, exhausted my energies on looking up that Triskelion reference):-P
Yeah... I remember that they had already had this production finished and scheduled to air when the attacks came. They decided to do some minor editing and air it with no commercials and with some commentary inserted where they would have broken for commercials.
They made sure to explain that "...these interviews were filmed before the attack. You will see people smiling and talking hapily about the twin towers. Some of the people you will see have been missing since 9/11."
I thought it was a good program, with some good/bad timing.
they advertised it saying:
"This program was produced with the intent of being a testament to engineering marvel that was the twin towers of the World Trade Center... now it is their obituary"
Of course the first run was without commercials... subsequent reruns were with ads (although 90% of Discovery Channel's ads are for other DC/TLC programs anyway).
I recall pretty vividly after the impacts, before the collapse, thinking 'that's going to be really hard to ever repair that damage, wonder if they'll have to demolish the upper floors?'
Then the buildings collapsed and I was just stunned in disbelief that this could happen (not the terrorist attack part, the largest buildings in Manhattan collapsing into a smoking pile of rubble part).
I don't think even the people who planned this attack could have expected or even hoped for these buildings to collapse like this.
Drywalling? I thought it was sprayed-on fire-resistant coating on the steel trusses that was blown off by the explosion?
I saw a thing on TCL where a guy was combing through the girders being brought to a scrap yard and he could identify steel from the floors were the fire burned because all the coating was gone.
His theory was that the explosion had blown off the coating, leaving the steel exposed to the heat which weakened the steel and caused the horizontal truss system to fail. Once the trusses that held up the concrete floors started to collapse, the fate of the buildings were sealed.
TLC ran an interesting program about a month ago that went into detail about why the structures collapsed (beyond the obvious, crash, fire, etc).
The looked at factors like the blast having blown the fire protective coating off the steel and the way the building was designed with the majority of the load being carried by the steel skeleton on the perimeter of the buildings, as opposed to columns within. The achilles heel was reported to be the steel trusses running under the floors connecting the outer steel to the core.
The heat from the fire caused these trusses to weaken and fail, leaving the outer steel frame without the stabilizing and load-transfering benefit. By the time the first floor had begun to collapse, there was so much inertia in the falling portion of the structure that it was inevitable that the each floor below would fail under the crushing pressure.
They interviewed the cheif structural engineer and he said that they had designed the structure to withstand an impact from the largest airliner of the day, the 707... flying at low speed and lost in the fog. They didn't anticipate a modern widebody, loaded with enough fuel for a coast-to-coast flight crashing into the buildings at full speed.
He said that even if they took all that into account, he doesn't think there could have been any way to design the buildings to withstand that. The fact that the structures stood as long as they did is actually a testament to the good overall design (so the program said, anyway).
nope. this is common to just about every preference or email management page has buttons bot top and bottom. this is actually a nice feature since you don't havt to scroll all the way down to the bottom of a page to hit 'submit' (or vice versa). 'course, just hitting the enter key usually submits the form anyway.
Samurai Jack has been a pleasant surprise. My kids watch Dexter & PowerPuff and most of the rest of the CN lineup -- I can take most of it or leave it.
Not so with Jack. I've really gotten into it. I think it is probably the best series produced on CN yet. I was surprised to find out it's produced by the same guy who does Dexter (Gennedy Tartovsky), although now that I know I see some similarities in character design and animation style.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the Frontline episode, the monster that ate hollywood.
It *is* all about the opening weekend gross these days, according to this story.
Have risk-averse MBAs killed Hollywood's magic? Studio executives, producers, filmmakers, and critics talk about how the movie business, and movies themselves, have changed.
John Pierson, the man behind many an indie, takes stock of what's "independent" today. Plus, interviews with Elvis Mitchell, Allison Anders, Kevin Smith, and Michael Douglas.
The Atlantic Monthly's Charles C. Mann on what Hollywood has learned from Napster. Plus, industry insiders discuss how digital technology and the Internet may transform filmmaking.
A closer look at the business of movies, including the story of how Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" gave birth to the summer blockbuster and changed Hollywood forever.
The premise is that all the studios and distributors are now controlled by a handful of mega corps who make and market movies based on a formula of risk management. They closely estimate and monitor the opening weekend gross, which is indeed used as the yardstick to extrapolate the total return on the movie including first-run, overseas dist, video sales, merchandise, tv and cable runs, etc.
Comparing to movies 5-10 years ago _is_ meaningless. Comparing to Harry Potter is very relevant.
Belo says that those links "can result in a viewer not understanding that the content is on our client's site"
Yeah right. The link on barkingdog says Dallas Morning News - Dallas businesses assess damage (early edition)
Yeah, that's certainly very confusing, what with the way he hid the actual origin of the content and stuck it in a frame to make it look like it came from his own site. </sarcasm>
For a home user, I agree. I did a dist-upgrade on one of my machines, the other I just downloaded the rescue, root and driver floppies and just installed woody over the network (love my cable modem!). Doing a dist-upgrade over a per-minute dialup could be tough. Then again, can't you get a woody snapshot from cheapbytes or something? Yeah, I just don't see hordes of ppl waiting for CDs to become available when woody releases.
For production, it is probably a bigger deal. I would imagine there are shops that keep close tabs on what version is running and may allow only 'stable'. There are no doubt SAs out there that have a test box or two running woody waiting for the day it goes to stable so they can start upgrading the production machines.
They don't have to, they don't even want to. They would rather see others use a BSD license than GPL. They can bitch and moan all they want, it's a free country. ;-)
>They [Redhat et al.] provide the source
well, you read it that way... I read it this:
I don't think SuSE even provides dowloads of thier distro anymore.
They [SuSE] provide the source, but not the actual ISOs or other form of download
Obviously redhat lets you download the whole distro (I just got done burnin 7.2 CDs "for a friend")
But that being said, that's still not the same as selling "Linux", IMO.
I know what _they_ say, I was interested in what dattaway's point was.
Why don't you test this legal theory out and steal one of these cars yourself?
Does this mean he thinks it is or isn't entrapment? I thought the original post was saying it's not. The tone of his comment seems to disagree.
so, you are saying that this *is* entrapment?
keys in the ignition also?
But is the upgrade any good without the license for the previous version? (I'm not saying Microsoft is right, just asking.)
If your computer came with 95, and you upgraded to 98 with the $89 upgrade version (not the full version), the installer asks you to insert the 95 CD at some point, doesn't it? (been such a long time since I've done anything like that)
Point is, they want you to supply the media and COA that came with the box.
>what if the machine is donated with a non-MS operating system, or for that matter, no operating system at all?
Well, obviously they prefer that you don't take stuff like that. They can publish all the guidelines they want, it's good for a laugh. When they start coming after schools that have accepted PCs without valid Windows licenses, then I'll get all huffy.
Isn't that just a backwards way of saying that the media that comes with a pre-installed OS can't be kept by the donor and potentially reused on another machine?
!
Surely, if you wanted to throw the Win95 drive out and swap in another larger one and install a licensed copy of XP, MS would have no problem. As long as that 95 CD isn't still in the hands of the original owner, what difference does it make?
But then, what if the donor doesn't have the original pre-installed OS CD? What if he wiped the drive, threw out his unopened CD and installed *gasp* another non-microsoft OS?
Clearly, the school would not want to associate itself with some pinko-commie-unix-installing-freeloader-terrorist
thanks, appreciate the info!
>requiring their newer/bigger set top box and yet another remote
... BAH!
Not only that, I've noticed a real loss in picture quality on the digital channels. Anytime the video goes through high-motion, you can see lots of crappy compression artifacts (reminds me of a really badly compressed CNN video).
"100% Digital Quality"?
I thought asbestosis wasn't cancer. I know asbestos is harmful, I didn't think it was a carcinogen?
>wager 427 quatloos
:-P
Heh, that episode was on just a couple weeks ago on SciFi and I found myself searching the net for pictures of Angelique Pettyjohn.
"10 quatloos that the newcomer gets into Shanha's drill uniform by the next training cycle!"
"20 quatloos that the newcomers are asexual!"
>semi-legal
Sure, semi-legal is about as valid as semi-pregnant . Wasn't there a story not too long ago about a guy getting into trouble because he just scanned someone's subnet? (too lazy to look up a link, exhausted my energies on looking up that Triskelion reference)
Yeah... I remember that they had already had this production finished and scheduled to air when the attacks came. They decided to do some minor editing and air it with no commercials and with some commentary inserted where they would have broken for commercials.
They made sure to explain that "...these interviews were filmed before the attack. You will see people smiling and talking hapily about the twin towers. Some of the people you will see have been missing since 9/11."
I thought it was a good program, with some good/bad timing.
they advertised it saying:
"This program was produced with the intent of being a testament to engineering marvel that was the twin towers of the World Trade Center... now it is their obituary"
Of course the first run was without commercials... subsequent reruns were with ads (although 90% of Discovery Channel's ads are for other DC/TLC programs anyway).
>did anyone really think they were going to fall?
I recall pretty vividly after the impacts, before the collapse, thinking 'that's going to be really hard to ever repair that damage, wonder if they'll have to demolish the upper floors?'
Then the buildings collapsed and I was just stunned in disbelief that this could happen (not the terrorist attack part, the largest buildings in Manhattan collapsing into a smoking pile of rubble part).
I don't think even the people who planned this attack could have expected or even hoped for these buildings to collapse like this.
Drywalling? I thought it was sprayed-on fire-resistant coating on the steel trusses that was blown off by the explosion?
I saw a thing on TCL where a guy was combing through the girders being brought to a scrap yard and he could identify steel from the floors were the fire burned because all the coating was gone.
His theory was that the explosion had blown off the coating, leaving the steel exposed to the heat which weakened the steel and caused the horizontal truss system to fail. Once the trusses that held up the concrete floors started to collapse, the fate of the buildings were sealed.
I don't think the sprinklers were turned off.
The report says that the theory is that flying debris from the explosions cut through the water pipes, effectively shutting off the sprinklers.
TLC ran an interesting program about a month ago that went into detail about why the structures collapsed (beyond the obvious, crash, fire, etc).
The looked at factors like the blast having blown the fire protective coating off the steel and the way the building was designed with the majority of the load being carried by the steel skeleton on the perimeter of the buildings, as opposed to columns within. The achilles heel was reported to be the steel trusses running under the floors connecting the outer steel to the core.
The heat from the fire caused these trusses to weaken and fail, leaving the outer steel frame without the stabilizing and load-transfering benefit. By the time the first floor had begun to collapse, there was so much inertia in the falling portion of the structure that it was inevitable that the each floor below would fail under the crushing pressure.
They interviewed the cheif structural engineer and he said that they had designed the structure to withstand an impact from the largest airliner of the day, the 707... flying at low speed and lost in the fog. They didn't anticipate a modern widebody, loaded with enough fuel for a coast-to-coast flight crashing into the buildings at full speed.
He said that even if they took all that into account, he doesn't think there could have been any way to design the buildings to withstand that. The fact that the structures stood as long as they did is actually a testament to the good overall design (so the program said, anyway).
nope. this is common to just about every preference or email management page has buttons bot top and bottom. this is actually a nice feature since you don't havt to scroll all the way down to the bottom of a page to hit 'submit' (or vice versa). 'course, just hitting the enter key usually submits the form anyway.
Samurai Jack has been a pleasant surprise. My kids watch Dexter & PowerPuff and most of the rest of the CN lineup -- I can take most of it or leave it.
Not so with Jack. I've really gotten into it. I think it is probably the best series produced on CN yet. I was surprised to find out it's produced by the same guy who does Dexter (Gennedy Tartovsky), although now that I know I see some similarities in character design and animation style.
check out Rick's guitars
(yeah... I know)
borrow, rip mix burn...
and then share with two friends
...and they share with two friends
......and so on
.........and so on
*gasp* pretty soon, only one copy of Britney's latest crap^H^H^HCD is sold in the entire world!
Finally, thank you. The headline and write-up should be modded (Score:-1 Troll)
it was already taken.
That would have been funny as hell. What did they use, blackbirds? The hell is that?!