Have you seen the push for Madagascar? It's insane, but it creates "buzz".
And, imho, with big projects like the Disney animations there must be a massive payoff to justify the expenditure. Ignoring it _is_ setting it up for failure. I believe that to be true of any hollywood "blockbuster".
Not really on topic, or of any use whatsoever, but NASAs group life indurance policy (as of 10 years ago) actually did include loss of life due to space craft disaster.
Setting aside the fact tht TS and FN were not, properly, Disney films, I don't think that the hits are the problem. Someone at Disney has given up on animation. There have been pretty good films (not ohmygodgottaseeita100times good), and the young audience doesn't really care that much about the nuances of story line.
The best example recently is the Heffalump movie. It's a little-kid movie, not the traditional epic, but its great for little kids (I'd say under 5, maybe up to 7 or 8 depending on the child). We saw it with my 2 year old in the theater. When it came out on DVD, we got it. So, if you were head of marketing, and you had a fairly big DVD release, how would you handle the marchandising? Lots of Roo and Lumpy stuffed animals, right? Midshare, get the kids playing with them. Give them something tangible to reinforce the whole Pooh franchise, right?
WRONG! Not only do most of the retail outlets have nothing in the Pooh line except - maybe - a stuffed Pooh bear that isn't tied to the release at all, but even the freakin' Disney Store online doesn't have a Lumpy. None. Nada. Zilch. Now, they did have two Lumpys in the local Disney Store . And those were left over from the shipment after the theatrical release, when the original (meager) shipment of Lumpy and Roo sold out in about a day and a half. Flew off the shelves, according to the DS worker.
No, in my opinion somebody at the top has purposely set the 2D animations up to fail.
Sorry, there is no payback in this. It's not like a class action suit, where you put up $1-$2M in real money with a pretty good chance of getting back 20-30X your investment. Space exploration really is hard, and bigger projects are very unpredictable. Nobody is going to spend $100-$500M on a project, possibly competing with several other companies, for a $200M prize (or even $1-2B prize for that matter). These things take years, and Wall Street is going to expect some returns buy the end of the fiscal quarter.
No, those prizes are for rich folks with nothing better to do and corporations who have a few million in pocket change they'd have to pay taxes on, so they "fund a team" and hope for some good press.
NASA needs to go back to its roots. If you look at the real technical departments at Goddard, some of the smart folks are still there. So is the atmostphere. That spark thats left is going to need a lot of oxygen and some carful tending to earn back NASA the "rocket scientist" moniker, but I think it can be done, and I think Griffin has a chance.
By the way - Griffin has been a Mars mission fanatic for a LONG time. Heck, it was part of the final he gave when I took my graduate class in space vehicle guidance an navigation from him a decade ago. He's one smart guy (and a PITA as a professor, though a nice one). Given enough time, I think he's got a good shot at turning NASA around. If he can't do it, there's not much chance of it happening.
You would be suprised how many parents would just kill to get these things in their schools. Totally irrational, "gotta have a 2006 Excursion for Johhny's soccer practice" kind if irrational. It's all about status.
I live in a town with 4 elementary schools. The fourth was just built about 3-4 years ago. The other three are from the 50's-early 70s. Parents who don't deal with teachers on a regular basis are flocking into the new district. The "new" school already has trailer out back because its overcrowded. The classes are big, the teachers are mediocre (my wife knows several from when she went to high school with them), but the faciliy is "new and shiny". The standardized scores are the lowest of the four schools.
When we moved into town (I have a child which will attend elem school in just over a year), we elimiated any house in the new district. We ended up in our "second choice" school, but we know the class size is always on the small side, and we know one of the K teachers personally and she's great with younger kids and very smart. I don't think they have computers in the classrooms - just a learning lab. Doesn't bother me a bit.
I'd rather have small class sizes, caring teachers, and an active parent base than gee-whiz gadgets in the classroom anyday.
No, C4 detonates. Both gasoline and H2 simple deflagrate, whis is what I was referring to. (the difference is vecolciy of wavefront propagation; detonation occurs faster than sound in the medium, deflagration slower. Blackpowder deflagrates)
There is no real difference between burning and exploding in a fuel-air mixture. The primary differences are in flame probabgation speed, total energy released, and confinement.
The flammability limits for gasoline are 1.4% to 7.6% percent. H2 is 4% to 75%. So sue me, I was off a bit. Nonentheless, gasoline has a much narrower flammable/explosive range (And, yes, those two terms are used interchangably). Google for LEL/LFL and UEL/UFL. It's actually rather hard to get gasoline into an explosive condition, though numerous people manage to do so each year, mostly though bad luck. H2, otoh, is exceedingly easy.
Any H2 which escapes will also be in gas form, whereas gasoline is a liquid at STP and will require evaporation. Gas vapors will hang around for longer, you are correct. But I don't want to be _anywhere_ near several kilos of H2 escaping from pressurized tanks near a charged ultracapacitor. But, hey, that's just me.
Ahem...have you seen to stupid silk super-baggy shorts and tank tops worn in NBA games? I'm not exactly going to recommend that as a fashion statement.
I will assume that you believe Baseball may be considered a sport? I suggest you compare the physical requirements of the two activities. With the possible differences that baseball players are required to sprint 90 feet three or four times a game, whereas golfers tend to walk several miles at a measured pace, They tend to be fairly similar in effort, conditioning and hand-eye coordination.
Sorry, it seems that Peter Paul and Mary happen to be filed about seven different ways by iTunes, depending on how the group is types in cddb/freedb. No, I didn't edit them three years ago when I ripped my whole collection, I put them in a single folder.
Thats the problem I have with non-folder file systems - there's no conformance standards. It takes effort to add a folder, and its relatively obvious when you choose the wrong one. Typing in a data piece from scratch leads to slight (human) variations or misspellings which are not recognized by computers. Incorporate that type of "funcationality" (both for tags and tag classes) error/existing type checking and I'll take a look.
Should have been miles per 6 lbs of hydrogen to give us a gallon-of-weighed-gasoline equivalent. Or per 9.25lbs to give us a deisel fuel equivalent.
Or, perhaps, dollars per mile, since that's what really matters to consumers, all other factors being equal. But that wouldn't be very impressive, since highly compressed H2 costs so freaking much.
I don't know who whispered H2 into dubyas ear, but from a practical perspective, they should be shot. The safety ramifications of a bunch of cars with 5000psi tanks filled with hydrogen makes my skin crawl. And that's not even considering the refilling procedure at your local quickie mart. *shiver*
As bas a gasoline is, I'd rather try not to jump to somehthing that's just bad, but in different ways.
Really? Which oil subsidies would these be? Theoretical back room deals for land? Reductions of taxes to corporations for oil exploration (aka "expenses")?
Given a switch, can you grow enough and refine enough to provide a replacement for oil? And, can you do it competitively with oil prices from 1995, indexed at core inflation rates? I don't want to see another "we can do it for $50/bbl" crap. I want to see $20-25/bbl, 'cause if you try and compete on a "level" footing with oil, the producer countries can live off of less than $20/bbl. This price spike is gravy.
I don't worry about energy positive for these alternative fuels. Show me a dollar positive, competitive product at $0.80/gal (post delivery, pre-tax) and we'll talk.
I hear that. I'd much rather have a bunch of rednecks with access to several kilos of hydrogen. Heck - you can't make that stuff burn, much less explode, without some careful fule-air mixing.
Oh, right, H2 goes BOOM in just about any F-A ration (2-3% up to 97%, or somewhere about there), and balloons form a great containment system.
I say it only takes one or two cars to explode on the highway before H2 is banned for use in passenger vehicles. Gasoline is dangerous, too, but it's a lot harder to ignite and get an explosion.
For years, your father picks up a baseball bat every night and beats you with it. If tonight he picks up that bat, do you expect him to suggest the two of you go out into the back yard and play baseball?
...when will the US stop using their feet to easure length?
When my foot changes to a unit metric length, I'll use that. Until then its feet and meters (which just so happens to be closer to my stride than a yard). Sadly, the end digit of my thumb is an inch and a half, though I suppose that is a useful thing to know for mesuring feet on a 1:8 scale dwawing.
That would be opportunity cost, not real dollars. There is no "cost" when you're talking about most government programs. There's a fixed salary pool in a given year - most folks at these places (NASA, DOD) wouldn't get overtime pay, or differential, or anything else.
No, the work might not get done today, but it won't cost the taxpayer an additional amount - they pay the same amount each year.
Now, if a consultant were hired to come in and fix it, and the federal budget was increased to allow this (cf Iraq War costs), then it would be real money. Otherwise, its just on paper.
Heck, on paper, this/. post cost me almost $15 in lost productivity, but in reality I won't be turning down new work so in effect it has cost me nothing.
This is the result of having a good porduct and one which has a commanding brand name. Nikon does too, as does Apple.
Basically, there point is that they feel they have a good product, and if you're not willing to trust them, go find somebody else to do business with. You $10,000 isn't really worth it to them to (potentially) provide proprietary data to their competitors.
Wow, you guys really are in the dark ages. LDS has a whole new system built on top of the old ones. It's really where the development is occuring this millenium. Get with the program, will ya?
(I'm Jewish by birth, agnostic by life experience; If I've offended someone I've probably done it unintentionally, but will gladly take any credit)
Unfortunately, the physical property logic can only go so far.
There are two uses for DVDdecrypter: 1) You own the disc and want to space/time/media/region shift it. 2) You don't own the disc and want to make an infringing copy of the work therein.
Sony (or whomever) doesn't give a rat's ass about the first. They've already got the cash in hand from the sale, and they know that a backup copy is really just an excuse not to buy a replacement disc at some point in the future.
What they really don't want is you making a copy and then getting rid of the disc. They're not going after Netflix or Walmart because they have deep pockets, and they do buy discs. Lightning_UK just made the process of copying too damned simple. And he is an easy target. *Blam* One more head to place on a stake in front of the castle.
Me too. I've been putting off upgrading because I haven't ahd any issues (yet). My 2 year old can scratch a disc up in 8 to 10 viewings (and those of you with little kids know haw short that can be in calendar time!)
Oddly enough, I also use DVDshrink quite a bit. I've found that my daughter tends to scratch/smudge only the outer 1/2"-3/4" or so of the disc. Now I take her movies, rip them, then use the manual "shrink" option to reduce the content down to about 2.5GB. That leaves the outer section (where her fingers usually dwell) blank. No more stopping/skipping with 20 minutes to go in the film.
I know full well what these programs _can_ be used for. Nonetheless it pisses me off that a corporation has decided to play bully in order to prevent their continued progress/support. Fucking Bastards. Hrumph.
Tell you what, if anyone at this "particular" company would like my personal information for the purpose of contacting me and inspecting the TB of ripped DVDs I have on my FW tower at my house, they need simply reply below.
Of course, they will be quite disappointed to find that the space is filled with a subset of the material currently residing in my 400 disc Jukebox (I'm not done ripping, yet).
You're missing the point. He's made the mistake of pissing off someone with a lot more money than he has. In modern society, that means he can (1) cave or (2) he can watch his life savings and any chance of making a living go down the tubes.
Its just like 1000 years ago, except the alternative was getting run-through.
Or back in highschool, when the senior bully decided to give you the option of your lunch money or a thorogh pounding. Except in this case, the Principal, teachers and, in fact, the entire schoolboard, are convinced that the bully is well within his rights to do so.
Well, big oil business funds the Republicans, why woulnd't a studio-funded Democratic administration stand up for the "rights" of _their_ constituents?
(I'm a democrat, but that doesn't necessarily mean I trust them much more than the republicans...they just have different bases for the same motivator - money)
Hey, its an AC post, but I'm surprised it isn't at least "Funny." Apple made a classic misstep here. Given they're track record - and marketing - of being a consumer friendly organization, it is pretty funny.
Lawyers throw money around like its water, because they can expect to be reimbursed. $500/hr for a partners time while in transit. No problem! Actually, he was dictating a letter at the same time on another case, so he's going to bill both. Not a problem. Heck, I was informed by a lawyer client of mine that I don't charge enough for my expert witness services, he recommended an amount more than double my standard rate. Of course, now I do charge a 50% premium in litigation related work, because I can. I guess its all just business.
No it won't make a difference. "12 Hour Playback" will become "12 Hour Payback*" and the fine print will disclaim any expectation of performance. It's just an expensive paragraph to have to add, but it won't change the actual marketing or product.
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Have you seen the push for Madagascar? It's insane, but it creates "buzz".
And, imho, with big projects like the Disney animations there must be a massive payoff to justify the expenditure. Ignoring it _is_ setting it up for failure. I believe that to be true of any hollywood "blockbuster".
Not really on topic, or of any use whatsoever, but NASAs group life indurance policy (as of 10 years ago) actually did include loss of life due to space craft disaster.
Setting aside the fact tht TS and FN were not, properly, Disney films, I don't think that the hits are the problem. Someone at Disney has given up on animation. There have been pretty good films (not ohmygodgottaseeita100times good), and the young audience doesn't really care that much about the nuances of story line.
The best example recently is the Heffalump movie. It's a little-kid movie, not the traditional epic, but its great for little kids (I'd say under 5, maybe up to 7 or 8 depending on the child). We saw it with my 2 year old in the theater. When it came out on DVD, we got it. So, if you were head of marketing, and you had a fairly big DVD release, how would you handle the marchandising? Lots of Roo and Lumpy stuffed animals, right? Midshare, get the kids playing with them. Give them something tangible to reinforce the whole Pooh franchise, right?
WRONG! Not only do most of the retail outlets have nothing in the Pooh line except - maybe - a stuffed Pooh bear that isn't tied to the release at all, but even the freakin' Disney Store online doesn't have a Lumpy. None. Nada. Zilch. Now, they did have two Lumpys in the local Disney Store . And those were left over from the shipment after the theatrical release, when the original (meager) shipment of Lumpy and Roo sold out in about a day and a half. Flew off the shelves, according to the DS worker.
No, in my opinion somebody at the top has purposely set the 2D animations up to fail.
Sorry, there is no payback in this. It's not like a class action suit, where you put up $1-$2M in real money with a pretty good chance of getting back 20-30X your investment. Space exploration really is hard, and bigger projects are very unpredictable. Nobody is going to spend $100-$500M on a project, possibly competing with several other companies, for a $200M prize (or even $1-2B prize for that matter). These things take years, and Wall Street is going to expect some returns buy the end of the fiscal quarter.
No, those prizes are for rich folks with nothing better to do and corporations who have a few million in pocket change they'd have to pay taxes on, so they "fund a team" and hope for some good press.
NASA needs to go back to its roots. If you look at the real technical departments at Goddard, some of the smart folks are still there. So is the atmostphere. That spark thats left is going to need a lot of oxygen and some carful tending to earn back NASA the "rocket scientist" moniker, but I think it can be done, and I think Griffin has a chance.
By the way - Griffin has been a Mars mission fanatic for a LONG time. Heck, it was part of the final he gave when I took my graduate class in space vehicle guidance an navigation from him a decade ago. He's one smart guy (and a PITA as a professor, though a nice one). Given enough time, I think he's got a good shot at turning NASA around. If he can't do it, there's not much chance of it happening.
You would be suprised how many parents would just kill to get these things in their schools. Totally irrational, "gotta have a 2006 Excursion for Johhny's soccer practice" kind if irrational. It's all about status.
I live in a town with 4 elementary schools. The fourth was just built about 3-4 years ago. The other three are from the 50's-early 70s. Parents who don't deal with teachers on a regular basis are flocking into the new district. The "new" school already has trailer out back because its overcrowded. The classes are big, the teachers are mediocre (my wife knows several from when she went to high school with them), but the faciliy is "new and shiny". The standardized scores are the lowest of the four schools.
When we moved into town (I have a child which will attend elem school in just over a year), we elimiated any house in the new district. We ended up in our "second choice" school, but we know the class size is always on the small side, and we know one of the K teachers personally and she's great with younger kids and very smart. I don't think they have computers in the classrooms - just a learning lab. Doesn't bother me a bit.
I'd rather have small class sizes, caring teachers, and an active parent base than gee-whiz gadgets in the classroom anyday.
No, C4 detonates. Both gasoline and H2 simple deflagrate, whis is what I was referring to. (the difference is vecolciy of wavefront propagation; detonation occurs faster than sound in the medium, deflagration slower. Blackpowder deflagrates)
There is no real difference between burning and exploding in a fuel-air mixture. The primary differences are in flame probabgation speed, total energy released, and confinement.
The flammability limits for gasoline are 1.4% to 7.6% percent. H2 is 4% to 75%. So sue me, I was off a bit. Nonentheless, gasoline has a much narrower flammable/explosive range (And, yes, those two terms are used interchangably). Google for LEL/LFL and UEL/UFL. It's actually rather hard to get gasoline into an explosive condition, though numerous people manage to do so each year, mostly though bad luck. H2, otoh, is exceedingly easy.
Any H2 which escapes will also be in gas form, whereas gasoline is a liquid at STP and will require evaporation. Gas vapors will hang around for longer, you are correct. But I don't want to be _anywhere_ near several kilos of H2 escaping from pressurized tanks near a charged ultracapacitor. But, hey, that's just me.
Ahem...have you seen to stupid silk super-baggy shorts and tank tops worn in NBA games? I'm not exactly going to recommend that as a fashion statement.
I will assume that you believe Baseball may be considered a sport? I suggest you compare the physical requirements of the two activities. With the possible differences that baseball players are required to sprint 90 feet three or four times a game, whereas golfers tend to walk several miles at a measured pace, They tend to be fairly similar in effort, conditioning and hand-eye coordination.
Sorry, it seems that Peter Paul and Mary happen to be filed about seven different ways by iTunes, depending on how the group is types in cddb/freedb. No, I didn't edit them three years ago when I ripped my whole collection, I put them in a single folder.
Thats the problem I have with non-folder file systems - there's no conformance standards. It takes effort to add a folder, and its relatively obvious when you choose the wrong one. Typing in a data piece from scratch leads to slight (human) variations or misspellings which are not recognized by computers. Incorporate that type of "funcationality" (both for tags and tag classes) error/existing type checking and I'll take a look.
Should have been miles per 6 lbs of hydrogen to give us a gallon-of-weighed-gasoline equivalent. Or per 9.25lbs to give us a deisel fuel equivalent.
Or, perhaps, dollars per mile, since that's what really matters to consumers, all other factors being equal. But that wouldn't be very impressive, since highly compressed H2 costs so freaking much.
I don't know who whispered H2 into dubyas ear, but from a practical perspective, they should be shot. The safety ramifications of a bunch of cars with 5000psi tanks filled with hydrogen makes my skin crawl. And that's not even considering the refilling procedure at your local quickie mart. *shiver*
As bas a gasoline is, I'd rather try not to jump to somehthing that's just bad, but in different ways.
Really? Which oil subsidies would these be? Theoretical back room deals for land? Reductions of taxes to corporations for oil exploration (aka "expenses")?
Given a switch, can you grow enough and refine enough to provide a replacement for oil? And, can you do it competitively with oil prices from 1995, indexed at core inflation rates? I don't want to see another "we can do it for $50/bbl" crap. I want to see $20-25/bbl, 'cause if you try and compete on a "level" footing with oil, the producer countries can live off of less than $20/bbl. This price spike is gravy.
I don't worry about energy positive for these alternative fuels. Show me a dollar positive, competitive product at $0.80/gal (post delivery, pre-tax) and we'll talk.
I hear that. I'd much rather have a bunch of rednecks with access to several kilos of hydrogen. Heck - you can't make that stuff burn, much less explode, without some careful fule-air mixing.
Oh, right, H2 goes BOOM in just about any F-A ration (2-3% up to 97%, or somewhere about there), and balloons form a great containment system.
I say it only takes one or two cars to explode on the highway before H2 is banned for use in passenger vehicles. Gasoline is dangerous, too, but it's a lot harder to ignite and get an explosion.
Hey, if Jeff wants to buyt the rights to the Molitor air car and take it out of the trickle-fund condition its in, I'm all for it. Top that, Google!
For years, your father picks up a baseball bat every night and beats you with it. If tonight he picks up that bat, do you expect him to suggest the two of you go out into the back yard and play baseball?
...when will the US stop using their feet to easure length?
When my foot changes to a unit metric length, I'll use that. Until then its feet and meters (which just so happens to be closer to my stride than a yard). Sadly, the end digit of my thumb is an inch and a half, though I suppose that is a useful thing to know for mesuring feet on a 1:8 scale dwawing.
That would be opportunity cost, not real dollars. There is no "cost" when you're talking about most government programs. There's a fixed salary pool in a given year - most folks at these places (NASA, DOD) wouldn't get overtime pay, or differential, or anything else.
/. post cost me almost $15 in lost productivity, but in reality I won't be turning down new work so in effect it has cost me nothing.
No, the work might not get done today, but it won't cost the taxpayer an additional amount - they pay the same amount each year.
Now, if a consultant were hired to come in and fix it, and the federal budget was increased to allow this (cf Iraq War costs), then it would be real money. Otherwise, its just on paper.
Heck, on paper, this
This is the result of having a good porduct and one which has a commanding brand name. Nikon does too, as does Apple.
Basically, there point is that they feel they have a good product, and if you're not willing to trust them, go find somebody else to do business with. You $10,000 isn't really worth it to them to (potentially) provide proprietary data to their competitors.
Wow, you guys really are in the dark ages. LDS has a whole new system built on top of the old ones. It's really where the development is occuring this millenium. Get with the program, will ya?
(I'm Jewish by birth, agnostic by life experience; If I've offended someone I've probably done it unintentionally, but will gladly take any credit)
Well, assuming you paid for the house, um, yes.
Unfortunately, the physical property logic can only go so far.
There are two uses for DVDdecrypter:
1) You own the disc and want to space/time/media/region shift it.
2) You don't own the disc and want to make an infringing copy of the work therein.
Sony (or whomever) doesn't give a rat's ass about the first. They've already got the cash in hand from the sale, and they know that a backup copy is really just an excuse not to buy a replacement disc at some point in the future.
What they really don't want is you making a copy and then getting rid of the disc. They're not going after Netflix or Walmart because they have deep pockets, and they do buy discs. Lightning_UK just made the process of copying too damned simple. And he is an easy target. *Blam* One more head to place on a stake in front of the castle.
Me too. I've been putting off upgrading because I haven't ahd any issues (yet). My 2 year old can scratch a disc up in 8 to 10 viewings (and those of you with little kids know haw short that can be in calendar time!)
Oddly enough, I also use DVDshrink quite a bit. I've found that my daughter tends to scratch/smudge only the outer 1/2"-3/4" or so of the disc. Now I take her movies, rip them, then use the manual "shrink" option to reduce the content down to about 2.5GB. That leaves the outer section (where her fingers usually dwell) blank. No more stopping/skipping with 20 minutes to go in the film.
I know full well what these programs _can_ be used for. Nonetheless it pisses me off that a corporation has decided to play bully in order to prevent their continued progress/support. Fucking Bastards. Hrumph.
Tell you what, if anyone at this "particular" company would like my personal information for the purpose of contacting me and inspecting the TB of ripped DVDs I have on my FW tower at my house, they need simply reply below.
Of course, they will be quite disappointed to find that the space is filled with a subset of the material currently residing in my 400 disc Jukebox (I'm not done ripping, yet).
You're missing the point. He's made the mistake of pissing off someone with a lot more money than he has. In modern society, that means he can (1) cave or (2) he can watch his life savings and any chance of making a living go down the tubes.
Its just like 1000 years ago, except the alternative was getting run-through.
Or back in highschool, when the senior bully decided to give you the option of your lunch money or a thorogh pounding. Except in this case, the Principal, teachers and, in fact, the entire schoolboard, are convinced that the bully is well within his rights to do so.
Well, big oil business funds the Republicans, why woulnd't a studio-funded Democratic administration stand up for the "rights" of _their_ constituents?
(I'm a democrat, but that doesn't necessarily mean I trust them much more than the republicans...they just have different bases for the same motivator - money)
Hey, its an AC post, but I'm surprised it isn't at least "Funny." Apple made a classic misstep here. Given they're track record - and marketing - of being a consumer friendly organization, it is pretty funny.
Lawyers throw money around like its water, because they can expect to be reimbursed. $500/hr for a partners time while in transit. No problem! Actually, he was dictating a letter at the same time on another case, so he's going to bill both. Not a problem. Heck, I was informed by a lawyer client of mine that I don't charge enough for my expert witness services, he recommended an amount more than double my standard rate. Of course, now I do charge a 50% premium in litigation related work, because I can. I guess its all just business.
No it won't make a difference. "12 Hour Playback" will become "12 Hour Payback*" and the fine print will disclaim any expectation of performance. It's just an expensive paragraph to have to add, but it won't change the actual marketing or product.