Interestingly a lot of mininture sets/models were used in LOR2 despite all the CGI. Most looked pretty good... but some of the "Trees Attack" with flood waters were so obviously models that it really glared at me.
Cell Phone cameras must be a hell of a lot better in Japan than they are in the States. And transmission time (not latency) had better be a hell of a lot better too. Otherwise this is just an absurd way to steal a book or content.
Geez, just buy the damn thing. What's wrong with people?
There were much better examples. Even if you don't agree with that particular one. Not having the book by my side at the moment, I can't post one. But I assure you, there are some stunners.
There is a fantastic book: "The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America" that talks about such situations and more. It applies directly to this situation and is an entertaining, often infurating read. It's the sort of book that makes you mad at lots of different people. The examples, all real-world, are excellent.
For example:
The nuns of the Missionaries of Charity believed two abandoned buildings in New York City would make ideal homeless shelters. The city agreed and offered to sell the building for one dollar each. Yet the shelter project faltered: the city's bureaucracy imposed such expensive remodeling requirements on the buildings that the shelter plans were scrapped.
Yeah, I'd have to agree that he is out to lunch on the pricing issue.
Anyone who has even a ounce of marketing experience knows that the "one penny less" technique is effective. It is not misleading, because it *is* the price you sell it at.
But the reason you do it is based on competition. If you sell a widget at $1000 and your competition sells it for $999, they get a larger marketshare. It is just that simple. It would be hard to go to your shareholders and explain why your pricing strategy is obviously out to lunch.
Gas stations are the funniest, though... with their one-tenth-of-a-cent difference.
I'm not sure if anyone pointed this out, but I think it's worth repeating if so... this movie is NOT directed by James Cameron. Think of the difference between Aliens and Alien 3 or 4.
I'm not saying another directory couldn't pull it off okay. But the truth is, if Cmeron did it... it would be good. And if he isn't involved, some directory has very big shoes to fill and seldom does anyone rise to the ocassion.
Yes, the trailer was good. Heck, I'd say even really good! Better than the Hulk trailer. I think they should just stop making movies and make trailers. The Art of the Trailer has reached such refinement that even Final Fantasy looked far-eaching and original in the trailers!
One of my favorite pass-times: Guess which movie the music comes from. In almost all instances the music in a trailer is from a pervious block-buster and not from the movie itself (since scoring is one of the final steps). For a long time everyone was using music from The Rock. Then Gladiator. I couldn't place this one... it sounded somewhat generic but might have been from Gladiator or the last Star Wars or something. I'll have to listen to it a few more times.
I realize this is a touchy subject, but losing weight, even for geeks, is not that difficult if you take some time to study human physiology.
The fact is that most of the commonly held beliefs about losing weight are exactly wrong and only serve to lead one down the path of endless cycles of losing and then gaining back more. If you've ever tried a traditional diet, you know exactly what I am talking about.
I, myself, have struggled with it for many years. I took just about every approach imaginable (and a few I won't even mention here). Sure, some things had short-term benefits but ultimately they lead me right back where I was going.
So what really works?
First I'll tell you, and for many people you'll hate to hear it: eat right and exercise.
Okay, now that that's out of the way, here is the semi-techy explanation. Excuse my over-simplifications because I am looking to cover the subject lightly:
Consider your typical overweight person. He has a high percentage of body fat, and he knows it. How to get thin? Well you could start by reducing caloric input. Sounds reasonable, right? After all, the less you take in the less that becomes body fat.
True, but here is what really happens: When you reduce your caloric intake your body responds to this as if it were a crisis of famine. Blame evolution, but your body is going to think that food is scarce. If the amount of energy input is less than the output needed to live, the body must make up for the excess somehow. And it has two main choices: It can either munch on energy stored in our fat cells (which would be swell) or it can chew away at energy stored in our muscles.
In making this decision, the body considers this critical fact: Muscle mass requires energy to exist, whereas body fat requires very little. So, in a leap of perfectly sound logic, the body consumes the wrong kind of weight. And since muscle weighs a lot more per volume than body fat, the result is weight reduction. The diet seems to work!
It works for awhile, yes. But as you lose muscle mass your basil metabolic rate drops. This causes you to need less and less energy to exist. Do the math. Eventually you reach equilibrium with the input (your diet) and you hit the dreaded plateau we all know too well.
This is so disconcerting that people eventually give up. But here is the killer: Your body has been ravaged! You may have lost weight, but your percentage of body fat is probably worse than when you started. And now you are start eating the "old way" again and soon you are ballooning back up again. And, often, you get worse than when you started.
That's the cycle. And I'm sure a lot of you know it really well.
So how do you break that cycle?
The basic principle is simple: Do the opposite of what doesn't work. Duh.
To do this, you increase your muscle mass. When you do this, your BMR goes up and your body requires more and more energy. Efficient and effective cardio and strength training out requires a really good understanding of how they work to do them right. You can bang away all day long in a gym and not get much results if you don't know what you are doing. More on this in a bit.
Second you feed yourself carefully. I hesitate to use the word 'diet' here because this has nothing to do with starvation. In fact, you typically feed yourself a lot more than you use too. Most importantly, you eat six times a day. This feeding pattern prevents your body from going into "oh my god...we're going to starve" panic mode. You also hydrate a lot more than you are probably use too (10 glasses of water a day).
I'll simplify here for brevity, but the meals consist of a portion of protein and a portion of carbohydrate. A couple of them you add a portion of veggies. A "portion" is roughly the size and thickness of the palm of your hand for protein and your clenched fist for carbs. That simple hand rule is all you need. Note: there is no need to count calor
Interestingly I was wandering through BestBuy two days ago and there, on the shelf, not drawing any attention to itself (heck, it was almost hidden) was several GBA SPs. I had to blink twice, cuz I knew they were not supposed to be out yet.
I guess some stock-dude just put them out there not knowing to hold off until today. No one was grabbing them, but I did.:)
An ouststanding and inslightful post. I've always wondered about the folks who create these shows. Most are so awful, not the ones that appear on NOVA certainly, but the ones that end up being "Proof we didn't land on the Moon" or "UFOs? Real Or not!?" Let me guess.. real?:)
What is really needed is more shows that feature critical thinking skills. Science is interesting to people, by its nature. But when they don't understand how to think for themselves, there is little achieved.
I give a big thumbs up to Pen & Teller's new show 'Bullshit' on Showtime. They apply their... well... style to any issue, from the realitites of bottled water to creationism. It is all underlined by critical thinking skills without beating you on the head with it. And, it is very, very, entertaining.
I couldn't find a reference to this anywhere. The AIBO Energy Station is something you flop your dog-robot onto... but it can't do it itself. I thought it would when I bought it too; just wishful thinking I guess.
Our company offers service on a subscription service and we have had to face this issue as well. Though our history goes back to the days when CompuServe was the big banana and GEnie was #2 (and no one really had heard of the Internet thing), we ultimately ended up providing our service through the web.
When we made this transition, we eventually discovered (quite by accident) that when our online cancelation system malfunctioned our numbers improved noticeably. This lead us to look around and see what others were doing. Sure enough, many others were discovering that their business models worked better the harder they made it to cancel.
And its not a small thing either. You would be amazed by what a difference it makes.
I will admit here and now that we specifically ripped out all our online cancelation in order to improve our business. To cancel, you had to email us or call us. And we didn't make this procedure very obvious either. On purpose.
And it made a big difference to the bottom line.
But there is more to this story than just a confession....
Not long ago we did a complete overhaul of our web presence. During the planning and right up through implementation and release we wrestled with this issue. We knew that having cancelation online was the right thing to do for the customer (present and future). But we knew we had a business to run and lots of competitive pressures barking at the door.
In the end I just decided we needed to do the right thing. There is a way to cancel online, one that is as automatic and painless as we could make it. It's right there under our "my account" area in plain sight. Along with multiple links both textual and iconic on how to email us and call us. And when you call, the person who answers the phone is the person who cancels your account on request.
Like AOL we do ask for a reason, but not to engage in an argument. But rather to collect information and see if there is something we can improve. AOL CS people are paid a bonus for "saving" a customer which is why there was that bizarre exchange reported here. Sure we like to save a customer, but we don't push our CS people (or reward them) in that way.
Are these practices the optimum business strategy? No. I know for a fact they are not. But they are the right thing to do. At the end of the day we all have to do our part to make the online world a better place.
(Feel free to check out our site and browse the 'my account' section to see if we've done right as an online citizen. You don't need an account to go to that page.)
Well in my case I am a founder of the company. It is privately held. And as one of the guys who took all the startup risks, and suffered through many years of poverty wages to get the thing off the ground... I do make the big six-figure salary. But then again, some of my programmers are up there too.
I think this is somewhat different than a high-profile CEO coming into a large publicly traded corporation. Ultimately those CEOs are graded on a scale that has little to do with employee happiness. Stockholder value is the key for them. And layoffs (aka, lowering costs) increase stockholder value.
We all know there are many high-profile CEOs that do dumb things. Like a bone-headed merger (think AOL/Time Warner, or AT&T and NEC) which lead to nothing but massive writeoffs. Then those CEOs get huge bonuses for doing such a "good" job.
In our case, executive management has half of our potential compensation in bonus. And bonus decisions are based on our profitability after all other compensation (including employee bonuses). If we can't figure out how to steer the ship right, then we are the ones who take the hit.
I like to think I'm a "nice" boss. I definitely try to go the extra mile for people. I try to do more than just throw money at things too. But I don't feel comfortable tooting my own horn beyond that point. I'm far from perfect... but I do try. It's impossible to make everyone happy, but its nice when you get a good fit between the management and the non-management members of the team.
This all reminds me, though, of this computer game I played a long time ago. You were the captain of a big sailing ship. You relied on your crew to get you across the ocean. The only decisions you could make as captian was how to treat your crew. On the one hand you could be an evil captain and punish the slightest indiscression, or you could be the "nice boss" and rely solely on trying to be very touchy-feelie. Be to mean and ultimately you'd get a mutany. Be too nice and the crew would slack off and you'd make little progress. I think the game was trying to teach a basic management leasson.
I'm the CEO of a small 14yo IT company. During the recent internet nonsense we were careful not to do anything blately stupid and stuck to our business plan. In doing so, we have avoided being squashed when the bubble burst and in fact are doing quite well.
However, one time in the past we hit a real rough spot. We knew we had to reduce payroll. One of the steps was a temporary paycut.
But unlike the lead story here, the paycut started with the CEO (me) and all of the executive management. Then the highest paid ($80K and up) employees on a voluntary basis. That's right, we ASKED them to do it for the good of the company. Not a single person declined.
I promised that when things got better, I'd return all of the pay. Many smiled but didn't seem to believe that was likely. But, in fact, several months later, things did recover and I tacked on all the lost pay to their next paychecks (including my own).
I think the fact that I was the first to do it made a difference. It was hard, but it worked.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly a lot of mininture sets/models were used in LOR2 despite all the CGI. Most looked pretty good... but some of the "Trees Attack" with flood waters were so obviously models that it really glared at me.
Actually 3) I read about two to three years ago.
;)
You always this obnoxious?
Cell Phone cameras must be a hell of a lot better in Japan than they are in the States. And transmission time (not latency) had better be a hell of a lot better too. Otherwise this is just an absurd way to steal a book or content.
Geez, just buy the damn thing. What's wrong with people?
Actually it just happened to be the pull quote available on Amazon's page on the book.
-- David
There were much better examples. Even if you don't agree with that particular one. Not having the book by my side at the moment, I can't post one. But I assure you, there are some stunners.
There is a fantastic book: "The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America" that talks about such situations and more. It applies directly to this situation and is an entertaining, often infurating read. It's the sort of book that makes you mad at lots of different people. The examples, all real-world, are excellent.
For example:
The nuns of the Missionaries of Charity believed two abandoned buildings in New York City would make ideal homeless shelters. The city agreed and offered to sell the building for one dollar each. Yet the shelter project faltered: the city's bureaucracy imposed such expensive remodeling requirements on the buildings that the shelter plans were scrapped.
ISBN: 0446672289
Yeah, I'd have to agree that he is out to lunch on the pricing issue.
Anyone who has even a ounce of marketing experience knows that the "one penny less" technique is effective. It is not misleading, because it *is* the price you sell it at.
But the reason you do it is based on competition. If you sell a widget at $1000 and your competition sells it for $999, they get a larger marketshare. It is just that simple. It would be hard to go to your shareholders and explain why your pricing strategy is obviously out to lunch.
Gas stations are the funniest, though... with their one-tenth-of-a-cent difference.
I'm not sure if anyone pointed this out, but I think it's worth repeating if so... this movie is NOT directed by James Cameron. Think of the difference between Aliens and Alien 3 or 4.
I'm not saying another directory couldn't pull it off okay. But the truth is, if Cmeron did it... it would be good. And if he isn't involved, some directory has very big shoes to fill and seldom does anyone rise to the ocassion.
Yes, the trailer was good. Heck, I'd say even really good! Better than the Hulk trailer. I think they should just stop making movies and make trailers. The Art of the Trailer has reached such refinement that even Final Fantasy looked far-eaching and original in the trailers!
One of my favorite pass-times: Guess which movie the music comes from. In almost all instances the music in a trailer is from a pervious block-buster and not from the movie itself (since scoring is one of the final steps). For a long time everyone was using music from The Rock. Then Gladiator. I couldn't place this one... it sounded somewhat generic but might have been from Gladiator or the last Star Wars or something. I'll have to listen to it a few more times.
Anyone know which it is?
I realize this is a touchy subject, but losing weight, even for geeks, is not that difficult if you take some time to study human physiology.
The fact is that most of the commonly held beliefs about losing weight are exactly wrong and only serve to lead one down the path of endless cycles of losing and then gaining back more. If you've ever tried a traditional diet, you know exactly what I am talking about.
I, myself, have struggled with it for many years. I took just about every approach imaginable (and a few I won't even mention here). Sure, some things had short-term benefits but ultimately they lead me right back where I was going.
So what really works?
First I'll tell you, and for many people you'll hate to hear it: eat right and exercise.
Okay, now that that's out of the way, here is the semi-techy explanation. Excuse my over-simplifications because I am looking to cover the subject lightly:
Consider your typical overweight person. He has a high percentage of body fat, and he knows it. How to get thin? Well you could start by reducing caloric input. Sounds reasonable, right? After all, the less you take in the less that becomes body fat.
True, but here is what really happens: When you reduce your caloric intake your body responds to this as if it were a crisis of famine. Blame evolution, but your body is going to think that food is scarce. If the amount of energy input is less than the output needed to live, the body must make up for the excess somehow. And it has two main choices: It can either munch on energy stored in our fat cells (which would be swell) or it can chew away at energy stored in our muscles.
In making this decision, the body considers this critical fact: Muscle mass requires energy to exist, whereas body fat requires very little. So, in a leap of perfectly sound logic, the body consumes the wrong kind of weight. And since muscle weighs a lot more per volume than body fat, the result is weight reduction. The diet seems to work!
It works for awhile, yes. But as you lose muscle mass your basil metabolic rate drops. This causes you to need less and less energy to exist. Do the math. Eventually you reach equilibrium with the input (your diet) and you hit the dreaded plateau we all know too well.
This is so disconcerting that people eventually give up. But here is the killer: Your body has been ravaged! You may have lost weight, but your percentage of body fat is probably worse than when you started. And now you are start eating the "old way" again and soon you are ballooning back up again. And, often, you get worse than when you started.
That's the cycle. And I'm sure a lot of you know it really well.
So how do you break that cycle?
The basic principle is simple: Do the opposite of what doesn't work. Duh.
To do this, you increase your muscle mass. When you do this, your BMR goes up and your body requires more and more energy. Efficient and effective cardio and strength training out requires a really good understanding of how they work to do them right. You can bang away all day long in a gym and not get much results if you don't know what you are doing. More on this in a bit.
Second you feed yourself carefully. I hesitate to use the word 'diet' here because this has nothing to do with starvation. In fact, you typically feed yourself a lot more than you use too. Most importantly, you eat six times a day. This feeding pattern prevents your body from going into "oh my god...we're going to starve" panic mode. You also hydrate a lot more than you are probably use too (10 glasses of water a day).
I'll simplify here for brevity, but the meals consist of a portion of protein and a portion of carbohydrate. A couple of them you add a portion of veggies. A "portion" is roughly the size and thickness of the palm of your hand for protein and your clenched fist for carbs. That simple hand rule is all you need. Note: there is no need to count calor
Interestingly I was wandering through BestBuy two days ago and there, on the shelf, not drawing any attention to itself (heck, it was almost hidden) was several GBA SPs. I had to blink twice, cuz I knew they were not supposed to be out yet.
:)
I guess some stock-dude just put them out there not knowing to hold off until today. No one was grabbing them, but I did.
-- David
An ouststanding and inslightful post. I've always wondered about the folks who create these shows. Most are so awful, not the ones that appear on NOVA certainly, but the ones that end up being "Proof we didn't land on the Moon" or "UFOs? Real Or not!?" Let me guess.. real? :)
What is really needed is more shows that feature critical thinking skills. Science is interesting to people, by its nature. But when they don't understand how to think for themselves, there is little achieved.
I give a big thumbs up to Pen & Teller's new show 'Bullshit' on Showtime. They apply their... well... style to any issue, from the realitites of bottled water to creationism. It is all underlined by critical thinking skills without beating you on the head with it. And, it is very, very, entertaining.
>
I couldn't find a reference to this anywhere. The AIBO Energy Station is something you flop your dog-robot onto... but it can't do it itself. I thought it would when I bought it too; just wishful thinking I guess.
-- David
Our company offers service on a subscription service and we have had to face this issue as well. Though our history goes back to the days when CompuServe was the big banana and GEnie was #2 (and no one really had heard of the Internet thing), we ultimately ended up providing our service through the web.
When we made this transition, we eventually discovered (quite by accident) that when our online cancelation system malfunctioned our numbers improved noticeably. This lead us to look around and see what others were doing. Sure enough, many others were discovering that their business models worked better the harder they made it to cancel.
And its not a small thing either. You would be amazed by what a difference it makes.
I will admit here and now that we specifically ripped out all our online cancelation in order to improve our business. To cancel, you had to email us or call us. And we didn't make this procedure very obvious either. On purpose.
And it made a big difference to the bottom line.
But there is more to this story than just a confession....
Not long ago we did a complete overhaul of our web presence. During the planning and right up through implementation and release we wrestled with this issue. We knew that having cancelation online was the right thing to do for the customer (present and future). But we knew we had a business to run and lots of competitive pressures barking at the door.
In the end I just decided we needed to do the right thing. There is a way to cancel online, one that is as automatic and painless as we could make it. It's right there under our "my account" area in plain sight. Along with multiple links both textual and iconic on how to email us and call us. And when you call, the person who answers the phone is the person who cancels your account on request.
Like AOL we do ask for a reason, but not to engage in an argument. But rather to collect information and see if there is something we can improve. AOL CS people are paid a bonus for "saving" a customer which is why there was that bizarre exchange reported here. Sure we like to save a customer, but we don't push our CS people (or reward them) in that way.
Are these practices the optimum business strategy? No. I know for a fact they are not. But they are the right thing to do. At the end of the day we all have to do our part to make the online world a better place.
(Feel free to check out our site and browse the 'my account' section to see if we've done right as an online citizen. You don't need an account to go to that page.)
There was, in fact, a patent long ago involving the use of the XOR to display a mouse cursor on the screen non-destructively.
God... will it ever end!
Well in my case I am a founder of the company. It is privately held. And as one of the guys who took all the startup risks, and suffered through many years of poverty wages to get the thing off the ground... I do make the big six-figure salary. But then again, some of my programmers are up there too.
I think this is somewhat different than a high-profile CEO coming into a large publicly traded corporation. Ultimately those CEOs are graded on a scale that has little to do with employee happiness. Stockholder value is the key for them. And layoffs (aka, lowering costs) increase stockholder value.
We all know there are many high-profile CEOs that do dumb things. Like a bone-headed merger (think AOL/Time Warner, or AT&T and NEC) which lead to nothing but massive writeoffs. Then those CEOs get huge bonuses for doing such a "good" job.
In our case, executive management has half of our potential compensation in bonus. And bonus decisions are based on our profitability after all other compensation (including employee bonuses). If we can't figure out how to steer the ship right, then we are the ones who take the hit.
I like to think I'm a "nice" boss. I definitely try to go the extra mile for people. I try to do more than just throw money at things too. But I don't feel comfortable tooting my own horn beyond that point. I'm far from perfect... but I do try. It's impossible to make everyone happy, but its nice when you get a good fit between the management and the non-management members of the team.
This all reminds me, though, of this computer game I played a long time ago. You were the captain of a big sailing ship. You relied on your crew to get you across the ocean. The only decisions you could make as captian was how to treat your crew. On the one hand you could be an evil captain and punish the slightest indiscression, or you could be the "nice boss" and rely solely on trying to be very touchy-feelie. Be to mean and ultimately you'd get a mutany. Be too nice and the crew would slack off and you'd make little progress. I think the game was trying to teach a basic management leasson.
I'm the CEO of a small 14yo IT company. During the recent internet nonsense we were careful not to do anything blately stupid and stuck to our business plan. In doing so, we have avoided being squashed when the bubble burst and in fact are doing quite well.
However, one time in the past we hit a real rough spot. We knew we had to reduce payroll. One of the steps was a temporary paycut.
But unlike the lead story here, the paycut started with the CEO (me) and all of the executive management. Then the highest paid ($80K and up) employees on a voluntary basis. That's right, we ASKED them to do it for the good of the company. Not a single person declined.
I promised that when things got better, I'd return all of the pay. Many smiled but didn't seem to believe that was likely. But, in fact, several months later, things did recover and I tacked on all the lost pay to their next paychecks (including my own).
I think the fact that I was the first to do it made a difference. It was hard, but it worked.