Australia tends to get the big-hit series in a fairly timely manner. We're in season 6 of 24, season 3 of Lost and season 2 of Prison Break for example.
But the not-so-big-hit shows, or the ones that are a little off-center and have a cult appeal (like scifi or fantasy) are often subjected to delays. They're the shows that, in the past, were regarded as having a "built in" / guaranteed audience -- the fans of the show would watch them whenever they were on and noone else. In the past, shows like Star Trek and Babylon 5 have fallen into that category in Australia, nowadays it's shows like Stargare and even extends to things like Scrubs. Cult appeal.
Part of the problem is that we only have 4 free-to-air networks, and we also have local content laws that mandate that the networks must show X hours of locally-produced content per day/week/month. That leaves only so much room on the schedule, so the proven hits from the US get the airtime. When the networks run out of episodes they might try something new or different, this often happens outside of our ratings periods. Pay-TV channels are starting to pick up shows that the free-to-air networks have passed by, too.
Another part of the problem is the US sweeps/rerun schedule, where networks usually air a couple of new episodes of a show then go into reruns until the next sweeps/ratings period. If we were to keep same-week-current with the US schedule, we'd likely be subjected to the same annoyances since they're not about to allow the latest episode of a big-name show to premiere overseas are they?
(As an aside, though, this happens with a lot SciFi Channel shows -- I believe they're joint-financed with Sky in the UK which explains why Sky's able to run episodes before SciFi. While we're on the subject though, a few years ago when Stargate was on Showtime, Australia got an episode before the US -- Stargate then disappeared from our schedules a week later)
The other problem is that our TV season really starts at the start of the year. The US season starts in October/November. So of course it will take time for the big hits to filter down.
The times, they are a-changing - on both sides of the Pacific, though.
Here, Channel 10 shows (or started to show) Jericho a day after its US airing. Channel 7's really not that far behind on Lost, 24 and Prison Break, and they gave Family Guy and American Dad a fairly consistent Thursday night timeslot for the last year or so which has gotten us closer to the US schedule than we've ever been. They're more behind on Heroes, but thats been on since the start of the US season so thats fair enough. However, I believe Channel 9's screwing its audience on CSI (complain to Eddie). Channel 2 isn't so bad with Doctor Who, but passing on Torchwood is disappointing. Foxtel channels are getting some things very quickly (BBC World is very fast with Top Gear, Fox 8 is around a day or two behind with WWE, and Comedy Channel gets Daily Show and Colbert Report a day later).
In the US, networks are learning not to erratically schedule reruns during a season. 24 airs 24 episodes in a row. Lost is airing episodes 7-22 all in a row. Battlestar Galactica had no 6-month mid-season break. The networks seem to be slowly trying to find ways to piss off their viewers less, and this might pave the way for international markets to get the shows in a more timely manner.
It's an uphill struggle, but there is some progress. It'll be interesting to see where it goes.
Yeah... has anyone actually bothered to look at the tree and decide if the complaints were warranted?
The kids admitted to breaking some branches for their treehouse, but I'd imagine a 20ft tree is pretty hard for 12 year old kids to "strip every branch".
We ran three Windows Media streams from a tower (with a generator on it also running the judging / scoring system) off a small Fijian island with a small cube-form PC running XP and Raycaster.
We had extra PCs around we could use as backups if it failed, too -- this is obviously a fairly harsh environment (sun, sand, surf, seaspray, and of course theres always the risk of it just falling off the tower in the first place).
This is probably not so much help for your specific requirements, but the system *was* small and portable, which was very important to us for getting it onto the tower, and capable of running multiple streams off a single piece of hardware. Maybe something to consider.
(This was the second year we did this - last year we used plain Windows Media Encoder running three PCs, one to encode each stream -- THAT was a nightmare to manage)
... written by one of Sega's game producers, who theorised that the large number of ways to get a message from one party to the other these days is causing the degradation of the quality of the communication.
In times past, to get a message to someone you had to write them a letter. Then came the telephone. Now we have mail, phone, email, mobiles, SMS, instant messaging and so on and so forth. The wider choice of mediums for the communication means that many people aren't capable of using any one medium to its fullest potential for the clarity and quality of their message. Jack of all trades/mediums, king of none.
My pet peeve with the (ab)use of the langauge these days is people writing a sentence that either includes an incorrect negative or leaves a negative out, thus completely flipping their sentence/statement/instruction from its original intention into informing me or asking me to do something thats the polar opposite of what they want.
We all need inbuilt automatic proofreaders. Roll on, implants...!
The Design Pattern library is a fantastic resource for developers who want to do the 'right' (well, by Yahoo standards, anyway -- I find it very sensible at least) thing with their sites' user interfaces.
I've forwarded it to the designers here at work, hopefully I'll start to see some good come of it in our interface design:)
It's seriously great to see this kind of thing happening.
1. Because exposing your database error message to the client is a Bad Thing To Do(tm). (And the kids using your website don't need to know that your permission-to-spam field is called "spamthesucker" if it triggers an error).
2. Because your application can verify things that your database cannot (my applications check for MX and DNS records on user-supplied email addresses, does your database?).
3. Because sending unchecked, unverified data to your database is a Very Bad Thing To Do(tm).
4. Your application has to pass the data to the database, so why NOT have the application check it before it puts load onto the database?
Really, why WOULDN'T you verify the data at the application layer? You're talking a few extra lines of pretty simple string comparison code.
Silicon Knights, the makers of Eternal Darkness, are no longer a Nintendo second party (which they were at the time ED came out).
I wonder if this is an attempt by Nintendo to stop SK making their own sequel (going from the Rare situation, SK would likely own the rights to their game and characters).
Now every TV exec will be expecting him to produce shows that pull in the kind of audiences the likes of Buffy did. Firefly was a victim of that
Actually Joss has said on several occasions that Firefly outrated Buffy and Angel in spades by virtue of the fact that it was on FOX instead of UPN or WB.
I installed Firefox on my manager's PC when she had spyware all over it. She uninstalled it because she didn't want to change her online banking bookmark.
Not sure which aspect of the story is more worrying:)
Slashdot Mirror
Lately, I've been having a hard time getting CAPTCHA to work the first time.
Same here. CAPTCHAs seem to be getting more and more annoying for actual humans.
And whose idea was it for ReCAPTCHA to include characters like "1/2" and "3/4"? I don't even know how to type those.
WGA Strike = Less new episodes of popular TV shows = less P2P traffic
Torrents have always been a good indicator of popular shows, this should prove that people will watch less TeeVee when there's less scripted content.
Australia tends to get the big-hit series in a fairly timely manner. We're in season 6 of 24, season 3 of Lost and season 2 of Prison Break for example.
But the not-so-big-hit shows, or the ones that are a little off-center and have a cult appeal (like scifi or fantasy) are often subjected to delays. They're the shows that, in the past, were regarded as having a "built in" / guaranteed audience -- the fans of the show would watch them whenever they were on and noone else. In the past, shows like Star Trek and Babylon 5 have fallen into that category in Australia, nowadays it's shows like Stargare and even extends to things like Scrubs. Cult appeal.
Part of the problem is that we only have 4 free-to-air networks, and we also have local content laws that mandate that the networks must show X hours of locally-produced content per day/week/month. That leaves only so much room on the schedule, so the proven hits from the US get the airtime. When the networks run out of episodes they might try something new or different, this often happens outside of our ratings periods. Pay-TV channels are starting to pick up shows that the free-to-air networks have passed by, too.
Another part of the problem is the US sweeps/rerun schedule, where networks usually air a couple of new episodes of a show then go into reruns until the next sweeps/ratings period. If we were to keep same-week-current with the US schedule, we'd likely be subjected to the same annoyances since they're not about to allow the latest episode of a big-name show to premiere overseas are they?
(As an aside, though, this happens with a lot SciFi Channel shows -- I believe they're joint-financed with Sky in the UK which explains why Sky's able to run episodes before SciFi. While we're on the subject though, a few years ago when Stargate was on Showtime, Australia got an episode before the US -- Stargate then disappeared from our schedules a week later)
The other problem is that our TV season really starts at the start of the year. The US season starts in October/November. So of course it will take time for the big hits to filter down.
The times, they are a-changing - on both sides of the Pacific, though.
Here, Channel 10 shows (or started to show) Jericho a day after its US airing. Channel 7's really not that far behind on Lost, 24 and Prison Break, and they gave Family Guy and American Dad a fairly consistent Thursday night timeslot for the last year or so which has gotten us closer to the US schedule than we've ever been. They're more behind on Heroes, but thats been on since the start of the US season so thats fair enough. However, I believe Channel 9's screwing its audience on CSI (complain to Eddie). Channel 2 isn't so bad with Doctor Who, but passing on Torchwood is disappointing. Foxtel channels are getting some things very quickly (BBC World is very fast with Top Gear, Fox 8 is around a day or two behind with WWE, and Comedy Channel gets Daily Show and Colbert Report a day later).
In the US, networks are learning not to erratically schedule reruns during a season. 24 airs 24 episodes in a row. Lost is airing episodes 7-22 all in a row. Battlestar Galactica had no 6-month mid-season break. The networks seem to be slowly trying to find ways to piss off their viewers less, and this might pave the way for international markets to get the shows in a more timely manner.
It's an uphill struggle, but there is some progress. It'll be interesting to see where it goes.
... and amazingly they can do it without damaging *their* core business. :)
Yeah ... has anyone actually bothered to look at the tree and decide if the complaints were warranted?
The kids admitted to breaking some branches for their treehouse, but I'd imagine a 20ft tree is pretty hard for 12 year old kids to "strip every branch".
Rare held on to their own games when Nintendo sold them off (Jet Force Gemini, Perfect Dark, Conker, etc).
But that was a sale, this wasn't.
Just sayin', is all...
We ran three Windows Media streams from a tower (with a generator on it also running the judging / scoring system) off a small Fijian island with a small cube-form PC running XP and Raycaster.
We had extra PCs around we could use as backups if it failed, too -- this is obviously a fairly harsh environment (sun, sand, surf, seaspray, and of course theres always the risk of it just falling off the tower in the first place).
This is probably not so much help for your specific requirements, but the system *was* small and portable, which was very important to us for getting it onto the tower, and capable of running multiple streams off a single piece of hardware. Maybe something to consider.
(This was the second year we did this - last year we used plain Windows Media Encoder running three PCs, one to encode each stream -- THAT was a nightmare to manage)
I'm sure Maxxuss will get it out there...
... has one of my managers gone, then? His out-of-office autoreply claims he will have "no access to email".
Yet I get paged while I'm on holidays. Hmm.
Doesn't Fox News run 24/7?
... written by one of Sega's game producers, who theorised that the large number of ways to get a message from one party to the other these days is causing the degradation of the quality of the communication.
In times past, to get a message to someone you had to write them a letter. Then came the telephone. Now we have mail, phone, email, mobiles, SMS, instant messaging and so on and so forth. The wider choice of mediums for the communication means that many people aren't capable of using any one medium to its fullest potential for the clarity and quality of their message. Jack of all trades/mediums, king of none.
My pet peeve with the (ab)use of the langauge these days is people writing a sentence that either includes an incorrect negative or leaves a negative out, thus completely flipping their sentence/statement/instruction from its original intention into informing me or asking me to do something thats the polar opposite of what they want.
We all need inbuilt automatic proofreaders. Roll on, implants...!
Verisign iDefence charged with selling exploit information to Russian hacker groups
The Design Pattern library is a fantastic resource for developers who want to do the 'right' (well, by Yahoo standards, anyway -- I find it very sensible at least) thing with their sites' user interfaces.
:)
I've forwarded it to the designers here at work, hopefully I'll start to see some good come of it in our interface design
It's seriously great to see this kind of thing happening.
Then two days pass and Timothy reposts a story about it.
So it's YOU running the botnet...
1. Because exposing your database error message to the client is a Bad Thing To Do(tm). (And the kids using your website don't need to know that your permission-to-spam field is called "spamthesucker" if it triggers an error).
2. Because your application can verify things that your database cannot (my applications check for MX and DNS records on user-supplied email addresses, does your database?).
3. Because sending unchecked, unverified data to your database is a Very Bad Thing To Do(tm).
4. Your application has to pass the data to the database, so why NOT have the application check it before it puts load onto the database?
Really, why WOULDN'T you verify the data at the application layer? You're talking a few extra lines of pretty simple string comparison code.
Silicon Knights, the makers of Eternal Darkness, are no longer a Nintendo second party (which they were at the time ED came out).
I wonder if this is an attempt by Nintendo to stop SK making their own sequel (going from the Rare situation, SK would likely own the rights to their game and characters).
Laptops and DVDs, they're so leet...! :|
Maybe they sponsored DeCSS, bring down the system from within... terrorforge.net anyone?
Since when did "AJAX apps work in any browser out there"...?
Someone should have told Google they didn't need to write the Basic HTML interface for Gmail, then.
It's empty - no hard drive, no tax.
:)
Then you go out and buy a hard drive for it.
Hey actually, anyone listening at Apple?
Now every TV exec will be expecting him to produce shows that pull in the kind of audiences the likes of Buffy did. Firefly was a victim of that
Actually Joss has said on several occasions that Firefly outrated Buffy and Angel in spades by virtue of the fact that it was on FOX instead of UPN or WB.
I installed Firefox on my manager's PC when she had spyware all over it. She uninstalled it because she didn't want to change her online banking bookmark.
:)
Not sure which aspect of the story is more worrying
So if they could just click their fingers and fix the PNG bugs like that, WHY THE HELL DIDN'T THEY ALREADY!
Sources say that IE 7.0 - which is code-named "Rincon," they hear - will be a tabbed browser.
Rincon, Ablaham Rincon!
I saved a copy, but I deleted it before I finished watching it.
My mother told me if I can't say anything nice, not to say anything at all, so...