You should consider checking out the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, both edited by John Clute. They won't get you onto the very newest stuff (check out the SF magazines and awards for that), but you're bound to find some good older authors you haven't read.
Even more annoying to me is when you go to a site for information about a product, click on the "products" link, and are made to choose between "home", "small business", and "enterprise".
But worst of all are companies who think that if a product is no longer in production then it doesn't bear talking about. "We stopped making that model 15 seconds ago, why would you want to see the specs for that?"
Here's a
new report on it. They're now estimating that Jackson's getting more than 10% - currently estimated at more than NZ$170M (approx. US$85M) for Fellowship alone. This excludes any percentage he gets (which is likely) from merchandising and DVD/VHS sales. Jackson is likely to end up with something like $250M from this.
The Time article they mention is online. It mentions Jackson's 10+%, it also mentions that Harvey Weinstein (of Miramax) gets 5% of gross. And it mentions that New Line's initial investment was only $25M per film which is only about 30% of the costs (presumably they invested further when budget blew out by $40M from $270M to $310M). So I think it is highly likely that New Line are not making anywhere near the sort of money a lot of people think.
You've still got to admit that, some of these CG bits are horrible...
I am yet to see a movie where actual characters get on the back of a CG object - as happened with the cave-troll - which is the slightest bit realistic.
There are bits that jar somewhat, sure. But you shouldn't judge the movie's effects as a whole on a handful of less than perfect shots. Shots which aren't that bad anyway. IMO people are not evaluating them objectively because when they see them their brains are telling them "that's CG" regardless of what their eyes tell them. Your complaint about the cave troll is a case in point - you clearly didn't know that the characters on the cave troll's back were also CG - so the movement is accurate as far as physics goes. You seem to be complaining about compositing that never happened. If the movement didn't look right in a live action shot it wouldn't bother you but since you know it is CG you blaim the effects.
It is not very difficult to make realistically looking CG, as long as it isn't the center of attention. All of your examples are exactly that.
So why has no one been complaining about the Nazgul's horses at the ford, or the tentacles of the Watcher, or the fellowship itself running across the Bridge (in in some of the shots on the stairs). All these things were the centre of attention and also CG yet most people didn't realise that and there have been few complaints.
I agree. I noticed that a lot of the people who complained that the CG in Fellowship was bad were only complaining about the bits that had to be CG - the cave troll, gollum, the eagle. Most of the CG went completely unnoticed because it was so seamless and realistic.
Hmm, you may be right. Inflation adjustment methods used by sites like this one give me the impression that theater grosses are reported, but on the other hand studios are in a much better position to accurately report studio and/or distributor grosses. But then if they are reporting distributor grosses then that's not what goes to the studio either.
Also, I'd be stunned if Jackson, or anybody else, was getting gross points. Points on the net, sure, but gross points?
Tom Cruise is reported to have made $75M on Mission Impossible 2 due to getting gross points. I think a few people have wised up and realised that net points are basically worthless unless you are very careful. The One Ring.net are reporting that Jackson gets 10M + 5% of gross. It may not be true, of course.
According to boxofficemojo.com, The Fellowship of the Ring has made about $860 million worldwide for New Line since its release last year.
The punchline: if nobody in the world buys a ticket for the next two movies, New Line still will have made about a 72% profit on the Lord of the Rings. They could put The Two Towers and The Return of the King on a shelf, finished but unreleased, and still have made a fortune.
Umm, no. That's total ticket sales. Half that money goes to the theaters. And New Line did not put up all the money alone. There are other investors involved who will be taking a large percentage of the gross. Then you need to take out all the money for the people who are receiving gross points. I'm fairly sure Peter Jackson is one, there may be others. New Line will do well out of the trilogy for sure, but it's not as rosy as you make out.
Anyway, at the time, Mac marketshare was about 4% as measured by various independant statistics bodies and (of course;) Google. At the time, Apple claimed 1 in 10 Mac users had upgraded to OS X. Linux market share was a fraction under 2%. If 1/10ths of the Mac market at 4% had upgraded, that gives a market share for OS X as being 0.4% right?
And if that other post you linked to is accurate then the Mac OS share is down to around 2% making them very close overall. On the other hand Google's last monthly zeitgeist has Mac at 5% and Linux at 1%.
The VHS-VHS colour fade is caused by Macrovision. Macrovision is effective because it is supported in hardware - but it's possible to buy (or make) a filter that will remove the Macrovision signal and then the copy will be almost as good as the original. In the case of cheques, etc, the "copy protection" is an area of the original that doesn't reflect bright light as well as the rest of the document. Since photocopiers use bright lights it's effective with them, but it will not show up in a photograph.
Both of these are copies of "analog" sources, so what's happening? There are interference patters embedded in the analog source of both that are amplified to create distortions in digital copies.
Digital's got nothing to do with it. Neither VHS nor photocopiers have any fundamental digital processes at all. Neither are there "interference patterns... that are amplified". What's happening in these cases is that the equipment is sensitive to signals that are out of range in terms of what is required for human perception. However analog audio is very simple and there really is no opportunity to "copy protect" it at that point without hardware assistance a-la Macrovision. But audio is so simple that circumventing the protection would be trival which is why these people would love to have digital signals all the way to the speakers.
The real world isn't ideal, and race cars have bigger contact patches than minivans for one very good reason: more friction.
Yes. The race cars' increased contact area does not directly increase friction, however it does allow the use of softer tire compounds which have higher coefficients of friction.
Thin steel wheels deform a whole lot less than radials and will therefore lose less energy when rolling.
Which is, of course, why trains have them. Naturally they last longer too.
RTFA. The blurb was crap but the article is quite clear - the 5500KM Trans-Pacific Telegraph Cable linked Vancouver via Fanning and Norfolk Island, Fiji, to New Zealand and Southport, Queensland. Canada had already been linked to England via the Trans-Atlantic cable in 1866.
> n will be considerably less than 2^24.
How much less? Factorial math is pretty ugly, but the "half the entropy"(aka square root) rule is pretty widespread when designing cryptographic hashes against birthday attacks.
You're right - I made a mistake there. It's actually more likely to be more than 2^24 so 2^24 is a pretty reasonable figure to use as a lower bound.
Anyway, random keygenerators are older than I am, Red. We're talking about a randomizer to get you around a MAC ban -- one-click unbans don't particularly ask you to type *anything*.
Yep, once someone writes a one-click unban we'll be closer to the fully random case (assuming they use a good algorithm). In the meantime I expect a lot of DEADBEEFBABE and 424242424242 MAC addresses.
If there's many cards on a network, and you want to know how many total you can add before two of them will end up with the same card, the answer's far smaller -- 2^24, which is still pretty huge(it's a bit more than 16 million). It's a different problem because each time you add a new card, the card after has one more it can possibly match with. This is known as the birthday paradox, so named because this precise logic means that given 23 people in a room, there's a +50% chance that two people have the same birthday. Each new person is one more to match with.
Actually this is known as the Birthday Problem. You can learn more about it than you want to at MathWorld. Basically the formula is:
1 - (d! / ((d-n)!d^n)) > 50%
where d is the number of possible options (i.e. 365 for birthdays), and n is the number of selected values (i.e. people).
So for the MAC address case if MAC addresses where randomly allocated (which they're not) you be looking for the smallest n where:
1 - ((2^48)! / ((2^48-n)! (2^48)^n)) > 50%
n will be considerably less than 2^24.
However, all of this is irrelevant as MAC addresses are not randomly picked by manufacturers and won't be randomly picked by people changing them.
Think further along. Now you have companies that COULD be getting windows for free, but because of those damn linux guys they have on staff they have to pay for it.
You're right as far what I said goes, but that is not the case for Bitkeeper. In the Bitkeeper case there are already restrictions in the free use license that make it unpalatable for (closed) corporate use. It is also unlikely that anyone with a reasonable number of developers (more than 20, say) would try to avoid paying for support anyway. Essentially the "anti-competition" clause only affects open source use. So really the situation is more like "you can use Windows for free provided you use it to develop free software other than OSes".
So... if the open source "business model" (I think he means licensing model) can't support the costs of a BitKeeper-type program, then why is that clause there?
He means business model - the "give the product away for free and live of support" idea.
What's he afraid of?
He's afraid that someone will put him out of business trying to build a better replacement and that it will be good enough but not as good as BK, or that it will be as good as BK is now but will never get to the level of perfection he's aiming for. He's also afraid that using BK gives people enough of an insight into how an SCS should work that it would provide his competitors (free or otherwise) a significant advantage that he did not have.
By his own assertion, it will not be able to cover its own development costs, therefore he doesn't need the clause to avoid the competition.
No, what he's saying is that a free equivalent will not be able to cover the development costs that BK has incurred. Essentially a free SCS could not have broken the ground in the way BK has.
According to RMS: If you even run bitkeeper, you can't contribute to CVS or other competetors.
That seems to be quite a restriction. Imagine a Microsoft EULA that says: if you run Windows, you can't contribute to Linux.
You've missed the point. You should have said "imagine a Microsoft EULA that says: if you don't contribute to Linux you can use Windows for free". Not such an issue anymore, is it?
If Sun encourage their service contractors to aggrivate companies who have bought several million dollars of Sun gear over something like this then I'm selling my shares today.
If the common usage becomes "viri", no amount of hemming and hawing is going to stop it.
Maybe so, but there's no evidence that "viri" is in common usage, except by geeks who want to sound 1337. It's certainly not the plural used by the medical community, who have been talking about viruses a lot longer than we have.
AFAIK, there is no way to mount a network drive (or physical, for that matter) to c:\mnt\My_Network_Drive\
I'm not saying you are wrong about the mount thingy, but if MS had figured that one out, I think they'd advertise it like it was the second coming of christ...
You certainly can mount physical drives to any path under NTFS5 (i.e Win2K and up), using NTFS5's reparse points. The mountvol command is one way to do this (see KB article 205524 for details). You can also use the Disk Management applet. As for why MS don't promote this feature, who knows? I guess it's just not that important.
Telstra may be a big ISP, but they are distributed
all over the country( and world). Can you imagine the bandwidth wasted when you pull a copy of the distro.
Telstra won't care about internal bandwidth wastage because Telstra owns the lines so it doesn't cost them anything unless a customer that wants to pay for that bandwidth.
JJ Thompsons backscattering of alpha particles from gold foil - changed to model of the atom from the plum pudding model to the nuclear model
You're confused. The plum pudding atom was JJ Thompson's - it was Ernest Rutherford who did the scattering experiment and proposed the nuclear model of the atom. And that experiment is on the list at number 9.
Slashdot Mirror
You should consider checking out the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, both edited by John Clute. They won't get you onto the very newest stuff (check out the SF magazines and awards for that), but you're bound to find some good older authors you haven't read.
What exactly do you want them to do at this point - replace your CD?
Here's another interesting It has a lot of quotes from Peter Jackson, who makes it quite clear that report box office figures are theater sales, not studio or distributor grosses.
The Time article they mention is online. It mentions Jackson's 10+%, it also mentions that Harvey Weinstein (of Miramax) gets 5% of gross. And it mentions that New Line's initial investment was only $25M per film which is only about 30% of the costs (presumably they invested further when budget blew out by $40M from $270M to $310M). So I think it is highly likely that New Line are not making anywhere near the sort of money a lot of people think.
I agree. I noticed that a lot of the people who complained that the CG in Fellowship was bad were only complaining about the bits that had to be CG - the cave troll, gollum, the eagle. Most of the CG went completely unnoticed because it was so seamless and realistic.
RTFA. The blurb was crap but the article is quite clear - the 5500KM Trans-Pacific Telegraph Cable linked Vancouver via Fanning and Norfolk Island, Fiji, to New Zealand and Southport, Queensland. Canada had already been linked to England via the Trans-Atlantic cable in 1866.
1 - (d! / ((d-n)!d^n)) > 50%
where d is the number of possible options (i.e. 365 for birthdays), and n is the number of selected values (i.e. people).
So for the MAC address case if MAC addresses where randomly allocated (which they're not) you be looking for the smallest n where:
1 - ((2^48)! / ((2^48-n)! (2^48)^n)) > 50%
n will be considerably less than 2^24.
However, all of this is irrelevant as MAC addresses are not randomly picked by manufacturers and won't be randomly picked by people changing them.
He's afraid that someone will put him out of business trying to build a better replacement and that it will be good enough but not as good as BK, or that it will be as good as BK is now but will never get to the level of perfection he's aiming for. He's also afraid that using BK gives people enough of an insight into how an SCS should work that it would provide his competitors (free or otherwise) a significant advantage that he did not have. No, what he's saying is that a free equivalent will not be able to cover the development costs that BK has incurred. Essentially a free SCS could not have broken the ground in the way BK has.
If Sun encourage their service contractors to aggrivate companies who have bought several million dollars of Sun gear over something like this then I'm selling my shares today.
Unfortunately for your theory Google is very good at finding song lyrics given only a small quote. I've done this several times. Try it.
Yeah, I'll give you that.