I loved Fight Club, but have a hard time seeing how that indicates that one would enjoy Atomic Blonds. Fight Club is a good movie. Atomic Blonde is not.
but good films from most other countries don't show in most American cinemas
This is 100% true. But it's not that Americans are stupid (or, at least, any more stupid than other people), it's that the smart Americans have stopped going to the movie theaters. Thus "Hollywood is suffering its worst-attended..."
I don't know how movies are being "made for the Chinese".
It's more accurate to say "made for the non-US market", and is the current trend.
This is done primarily by making movies that don't include cultural things that are only relevant to the US and by simplifying dialogue so it doesn't lose as much when translated.
The end result is what we see: tons of action movies.
It's the same people running the corporation now as it was then.
No, it isn't. Google became a public company, so the people running it now are the board of directors. Most of those people haven't been on the board for more than 5 years.
It's easy and painless to do without Google's search. I was skeptical that this was true myself, but I switched away (to DDG) and have found that my search results have actually improved.
Yes, my results have more "false positives" than Google, but the hits tend to much closer to what I was searching for than with Google.
My theory is that it's because Google's "personalization" absolutely ruins the quality of search results. At least, it seems that way, since Google's results started declining in quality when they started doing that, and have been getting worse every year.
the implication that only Google is involved with attempting to influence rankings for search results.
Where is that implied?
There's no such implication that I can see. However, Google manipulating search rankings to its benefit is a worse thing than anyone else doing it, since it's Google who creates the search rankings.
According to Google. The reporter says otherwise. Personally, I think that means I don't know if there was a NDA covering the exchange or not.
If I had to choose a "yes/no" answer to that question, the only basis to make the judgment is who is more credible -- and given Google's recent history, that would have to be the reporter.
Well, personally, the reason I avoid going to movie theaters (excluding the small independent ones -- they're great) is twofold: the "theater experience" is very unpleasant, and the movies are usually bad.
But this...
The problem is exacerbated by an unforgiving social media environment in which bad movies are immediately punished by online word of mouth.
seems to indicate a reason why this is unlikely to change anytime soon: the industry is complaining about the fact that people are hearing that the movies suck before they get a chance to waste their money.
If your business model depends on people being kept ignorant of the quality of your product, you're in a lot of trouble.
(I know that quote is the reporter's commentary and not from the movie industry proper, but I have heard movie industry reps say the same thing several times.)
As a disclaimer, I happen to think that Google is no different than most other multinational corporations -- that is, they are as evil as it is profitable to be.
But so many of the criticisms I read of Google seem to be oblique -- that is, instances of Google playing hardball, but with little indication of actual malice or illegal behavior.
This story is very different from that. This behavior is indefensible and unambiguously abuse of monopoly.
My observation of the youth today is that they're actually less likely to stick within a narrow musical niche than my generation or the generations before. Sometimes the breadth of music I hear them listen to can be quite impressive.
Those sorts of DJs, by the way, still exist. Maybe there's more now than ever, I don't know, but they're pretty common. The difference is that they're online rather than on the radio, but that's essentially the only difference.
Found the millennial, or maybe you're a Gen Y that probably still fits too.
Nope. I'm an old fart.
Radio most definitely was a great way to discover music. Back when DJs decided what to play, fresh bands sent tapes in to radio stations to get exposure, and the industry wasn't dominated by men in suits.
Oh yes, I remember. Pirate radio was great too (and still is). Radio used to be a lot better. It was even very good. I never meant to imply otherwise. But it was not optimal because, even with those DJs, radio only played a fairly narrow slice of the great music that can be heard. Those DJs stuck pretty much to a small number of genres, and there's only so many minutes in a broadcast day, so even within a genre, you could only be exposed to a small handful of truly new stuff.
The younger folks I know who so a lot of streaming avoid using their cell data plan to do it. They use WiFi. If they don't have an available WiFi access point available, they'll still do some streaming but are more frugal about it (such as, they won't just let it play as background noise).
I live in a urban area, though, so there's almost always a WiFi access point available. In a sparser area, the behavior is probably different.
I dunno. If something has been in your life for as far back as you can remember, I think it counts as "traditional". Perhaps not in the (ahem) traditional sense, but certainly in the experiential sense.
Well, I don't listen to the radio or stream. Instead, I have a very large existing music collection and I have agent software that crawls the internet to find new goodies for me.
If the internet apocalypse comes, I'll still have plenty of tunes.
That agent software is an interesting thing. A number of years ago, I had basically stopped buying music because the radio was a musical wasteland and worthless to me in terms of discovering new music, and used record stores pretty much stopped being a thing.
But the agent changed all that. I buy more music now than at any time in my life because of that.
I wish I knew where I picked it up -- I got it somewhere about a decade ago, but have long forgotten where.
I don't stream music myself, but my children do. I know with some services (Spotify, for instance), there is a measure of serendipity that seems roughly on par with radio. They will pick a stream that is a certain "genre" (I put quote marks around that because the genres are often not what I think of as musical genres) -- but the stream will still come out with the oddball discovery anyway.
Yes, I would say it was never optimal. That's not to say it was never good or that they never play anything unexpected.
The essential problem with radio is twofold -- the very limited amount of music that it can play (in terms of the number of minutes per day), and the fact that radio stations must maximize audience size to maximize revenue, which seriously restricts the sort of music you'll hear. Top 40 radio has been a thing from very early on.
College stations and community radio tend to be better about this, but even with them there's a pretty tight filter on what they can and will play.
FM radio is free music of the most commonly popular types of music at very high audio quality. Sure there are commercials, some more than others, but free music.
It's easy to understand -- the selection of music on the radio is incredibly limited. For the most part, if you listen to it for a half hour, you've heard their entire playlist.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all.
You mean Google, explains how it adjusts it search rankings based upon what is the on the page.
No, I mean Google dropping critical articles down the memory hole.
I loved Fight Club, but have a hard time seeing how that indicates that one would enjoy Atomic Blonds. Fight Club is a good movie. Atomic Blonde is not.
so much of foreign cinema disdains the audience
Hmm, that sounds a lot like American movies.
I bet the Americans don't even know it exists.
I don't know about most Americans, but most Americans that I personally know are absolutely aware of this. And some of them are very into it.
but good films from most other countries don't show in most American cinemas
This is 100% true. But it's not that Americans are stupid (or, at least, any more stupid than other people), it's that the smart Americans have stopped going to the movie theaters. Thus "Hollywood is suffering its worst-attended..."
I don't know how movies are being "made for the Chinese".
It's more accurate to say "made for the non-US market", and is the current trend.
This is done primarily by making movies that don't include cultural things that are only relevant to the US and by simplifying dialogue so it doesn't lose as much when translated.
The end result is what we see: tons of action movies.
I'll warn all my friends.
It's the same people running the corporation now as it was then.
No, it isn't. Google became a public company, so the people running it now are the board of directors. Most of those people haven't been on the board for more than 5 years.
I dunno. By my reading, A and B are saying precisely the same thing.
It's easy and painless to do without Google's search. I was skeptical that this was true myself, but I switched away (to DDG) and have found that my search results have actually improved.
Yes, my results have more "false positives" than Google, but the hits tend to much closer to what I was searching for than with Google.
My theory is that it's because Google's "personalization" absolutely ruins the quality of search results. At least, it seems that way, since Google's results started declining in quality when they started doing that, and have been getting worse every year.
anyone still using the internet in 2017 is willfully giving their data directly to the NSA
Fixed that for you.
the implication that only Google is involved with attempting to influence rankings for search results.
Where is that implied?
There's no such implication that I can see. However, Google manipulating search rankings to its benefit is a worse thing than anyone else doing it, since it's Google who creates the search rankings.
According to Google. The reporter says otherwise. Personally, I think that means I don't know if there was a NDA covering the exchange or not.
If I had to choose a "yes/no" answer to that question, the only basis to make the judgment is who is more credible -- and given Google's recent history, that would have to be the reporter.
Google really was a good company in the beginning. That changed when they became a major multinational corporation.
Well, personally, the reason I avoid going to movie theaters (excluding the small independent ones -- they're great) is twofold: the "theater experience" is very unpleasant, and the movies are usually bad.
But this...
The problem is exacerbated by an unforgiving social media environment in which bad movies are immediately punished by online word of mouth.
seems to indicate a reason why this is unlikely to change anytime soon: the industry is complaining about the fact that people are hearing that the movies suck before they get a chance to waste their money.
If your business model depends on people being kept ignorant of the quality of your product, you're in a lot of trouble.
(I know that quote is the reporter's commentary and not from the movie industry proper, but I have heard movie industry reps say the same thing several times.)
As a disclaimer, I happen to think that Google is no different than most other multinational corporations -- that is, they are as evil as it is profitable to be.
But so many of the criticisms I read of Google seem to be oblique -- that is, instances of Google playing hardball, but with little indication of actual malice or illegal behavior.
This story is very different from that. This behavior is indefensible and unambiguously abuse of monopoly.
My observation of the youth today is that they're actually less likely to stick within a narrow musical niche than my generation or the generations before. Sometimes the breadth of music I hear them listen to can be quite impressive.
Those sorts of DJs, by the way, still exist. Maybe there's more now than ever, I don't know, but they're pretty common. The difference is that they're online rather than on the radio, but that's essentially the only difference.
Found the millennial, or maybe you're a Gen Y that probably still fits too.
Nope. I'm an old fart.
Radio most definitely was a great way to discover music. Back when DJs decided what to play, fresh bands sent tapes in to radio stations to get exposure, and the industry wasn't dominated by men in suits.
Oh yes, I remember. Pirate radio was great too (and still is). Radio used to be a lot better. It was even very good. I never meant to imply otherwise. But it was not optimal because, even with those DJs, radio only played a fairly narrow slice of the great music that can be heard. Those DJs stuck pretty much to a small number of genres, and there's only so many minutes in a broadcast day, so even within a genre, you could only be exposed to a small handful of truly new stuff.
The younger folks I know who so a lot of streaming avoid using their cell data plan to do it. They use WiFi. If they don't have an available WiFi access point available, they'll still do some streaming but are more frugal about it (such as, they won't just let it play as background noise).
I live in a urban area, though, so there's almost always a WiFi access point available. In a sparser area, the behavior is probably different.
I dunno. If something has been in your life for as far back as you can remember, I think it counts as "traditional". Perhaps not in the (ahem) traditional sense, but certainly in the experiential sense.
Well, I don't listen to the radio or stream. Instead, I have a very large existing music collection and I have agent software that crawls the internet to find new goodies for me.
If the internet apocalypse comes, I'll still have plenty of tunes.
That agent software is an interesting thing. A number of years ago, I had basically stopped buying music because the radio was a musical wasteland and worthless to me in terms of discovering new music, and used record stores pretty much stopped being a thing.
But the agent changed all that. I buy more music now than at any time in my life because of that.
I wish I knew where I picked it up -- I got it somewhere about a decade ago, but have long forgotten where.
I don't stream music myself, but my children do. I know with some services (Spotify, for instance), there is a measure of serendipity that seems roughly on par with radio. They will pick a stream that is a certain "genre" (I put quote marks around that because the genres are often not what I think of as musical genres) -- but the stream will still come out with the oddball discovery anyway.
So all may not be entirely lost.
Yes, I would say it was never optimal. That's not to say it was never good or that they never play anything unexpected.
The essential problem with radio is twofold -- the very limited amount of music that it can play (in terms of the number of minutes per day), and the fact that radio stations must maximize audience size to maximize revenue, which seriously restricts the sort of music you'll hear. Top 40 radio has been a thing from very early on.
College stations and community radio tend to be better about this, but even with them there's a pretty tight filter on what they can and will play.
FM radio is free music of the most commonly popular types of music at very high audio quality. Sure there are commercials, some more than others, but free music.
It's easy to understand -- the selection of music on the radio is incredibly limited. For the most part, if you listen to it for a half hour, you've heard their entire playlist.
Not everything that is free is worth the price.