I mean, a MILLION people watched SGU last night, and that's with a whole bunch of Atlantis fans up-in-arms over it. Let's say that 1M is the audience. At $3 a month, that's $36M a year alone for SGU.
And how much does SGU cost per episode? The intartubes suggests its about $3m an episode to make. So the production cost is somewhere on the order of $70m a year, not $36M a year. At a million people watching, they'd need to be paying nearly $3 *per episode* to cover the cost. And the real problem is, SGU rarely got a million people to watch. IMO, it was my favorite of the SG series (and I *loved* SG1), but it didn't have the pop sci-fi feel of the originals and clearly missed the market.
You can't have much of a show with only a million viewers. There's a reason shows like that get canceled, and why they don't shift production to internet sales -- the viewers just aren't there for it. The only answer for SGU would've been a massive reduction in production values and cutting the very large cast down and getting the cost per episode down by 75%.
Why do you think reality shows are so big? Not because a crapton of people watch them, but because they are *dirt cheap* to make. SyFy's problem (and reason they go with junk B-movieS) is simple: The market isn't big enough to support the costs of making a good sci-fi show. It sucks, but that's the reality.
Pakistan's military didn't notice Bin Laden living in his giant compound a quarter mile from their elite military training school.
Somehow I think we could've flown a bunch of bi-planes trailing a banner with "We're coming for you Bin Laden" in giant letters, with wing walkers and dropping tootsie rolls onto the onlooking public and the military still wouldn't have noticed.
On top of that, there is zero liability, generally, for fraudulent credit card transactions, and they didn't have enough data for real identity theft.
Card numbers getting stolen are a pain in the ass, but I've never seen anywhere liable for anything more than once in a while paying for a year of credit monitoring service or something.
Including, for the benefit of the GP poster, booting from them. No need to dick around with partitions, just boot straight from another VHD if you want a test environment.
Windows has lots of things people don't know is there. Apple's Time Machine? Its been in NTFS for almost a decade, just very few people knew it was there. Mountable disk images? As you said Win7 has them.
Of course, two minutes of Bing searching would've told the GP that... so clearly he didn't want it that badly.
Apparently having an iPhone will make it conceivable to know not only where you are now, but where you have been. Every day. For a long time. Couple this with those cell phone analyzers the Michigan police reportedly have. Think about it. http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/34/3458.asp
Your cell carrier already has all those logs. The police don't need your phone to get it. Then you know they're doing it. A warrant (supposedly) and they can get access to your carrier's internal logs and know exactly where you've been.
I've never gotten that with any of the various rating systems out there (Amazon, XBox, or otherwise).
You lose some number of people who felt motivated to vote for a product they actually do know, but IMO, the noise you cut out is far higher of a benefit than a few lost reviews.
IMO, the real problem stems from the BluRay experience just sucking.
The UIs are all over the place on disks. I've had movies that literally took five minutes to "boot up". And then, odds are, I probably have to sit through six previews that I can't skip. And partway through, it'll fire my network up without asking doing who the fuck knows what.
If given a choice between a BluRay or watching a streaming version, I'll pick streaming because I can get in and out more quickly.
The studios have latched onto BluRay as a way of locking people in to an experience they want to define, not as a way of delivering a movie to viewers.
Generally I agree with most of what you said, but the fact that everything you listed has become automated is important for the US way of life.
Why? The government has been monkeying with what it claims inflation rates are for 20 years, and the fact is the real income level of most people in the US has drastically fallen in the last 20 years. People don't feel it because of cheap debt, the housing bubble and most importantly a dramatic drop in the actual costs of things. It doesn't matter if the real value of the $60k a year you make is half what it was 25 years ago if everything you buy also costs half because of massive increases in productivity.
If everyone was buying well-made durable goods like they did in the 40's and 50's, and if people's food was produced with human labor, that $60k a year would barely be keeping people middle class. No flat screen TVs, no new $30k car every few years, etc.
Now, mind you, I think that would be a much healthier way for live to be in America, but society here is *not* ready for that kind of transition. People see the lifestyle of people massively wealthier than them on TV and think they deserve part of that.
No, but this is Slashdot and the reality distortion field is the rule where certain topics are concerned.
The poster sending it is not surprising, neither are the anti-microsoft drones replying, but it surprises me that the editors would let a story like this through. I mean, seriously, the last story in here talked about how part of MS's proposal involved the certification process, and the problem was Google was claiming they were cheaper and didn't need the certification.
Google was, and is, the one lying.
This is a surprising gaffe for Groklaw. I wonder if it was a legitimate mistake, or something done deliberately.
Kinect is how you feed data to an image recognition/tracking algorithm, Predator is that algorithm. The software side of Kinect has support for efficiently tracking items, but that is so you have the most CPU left for a game. That was the trade-off.
Kinect hardware can do something very useful that Predator can't -- it can tell how far away something else (and thus, judge position or size more accurately).
The predator algorithim (and other ones no doubt under development) using the two sets of data from a Kinect camera will still be superior to an algorithm using just one set of data.
I don't have to speculate about the techology. All I need to to know is that there's nothing particularly strange about the radio waves used in radar. They're not a unique frequency. They're not an unusual power level. They're not unusually polarized. Because of that, it doesn't matter what the alien technology is. If RADAR took it out, they couldn't have gotten here because there's a whole lot of RF between here and wherever they came from.
Thus the point. The original poster was just being stupid, as was the other reply to my post. I *absolutely* with 100% certainty can say that no alien technology will be taken out by our RADAR because they wouldn't have gotten here. Anyone who was a physicist, an engineer, or franky who has a moderate level of common sense would realize that.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, a MILLION people watched SGU last night, and that's with a whole bunch of Atlantis fans up-in-arms over it. Let's say that 1M is the audience. At $3 a month, that's $36M a year alone for SGU.
And how much does SGU cost per episode? The intartubes suggests its about $3m an episode to make. So the production cost is somewhere on the order of $70m a year, not $36M a year. At a million people watching, they'd need to be paying nearly $3 *per episode* to cover the cost. And the real problem is, SGU rarely got a million people to watch. IMO, it was my favorite of the SG series (and I *loved* SG1), but it didn't have the pop sci-fi feel of the originals and clearly missed the market.
You can't have much of a show with only a million viewers. There's a reason shows like that get canceled, and why they don't shift production to internet sales -- the viewers just aren't there for it. The only answer for SGU would've been a massive reduction in production values and cutting the very large cast down and getting the cost per episode down by 75%.
Why do you think reality shows are so big? Not because a crapton of people watch them, but because they are *dirt cheap* to make. SyFy's problem (and reason they go with junk B-movieS) is simple: The market isn't big enough to support the costs of making a good sci-fi show. It sucks, but that's the reality.
Pakistan's military didn't notice Bin Laden living in his giant compound a quarter mile from their elite military training school.
Somehow I think we could've flown a bunch of bi-planes trailing a banner with "We're coming for you Bin Laden" in giant letters, with wing walkers and dropping tootsie rolls onto the onlooking public and the military still wouldn't have noticed.
That joke killed!
On top of that, there is zero liability, generally, for fraudulent credit card transactions, and they didn't have enough data for real identity theft.
Card numbers getting stolen are a pain in the ass, but I've never seen anywhere liable for anything more than once in a while paying for a year of credit monitoring service or something.
I was playing MP2s on my computer almost ten years before that.
And MOD files five years before that.
And (okay, going to stop before I age myself here ...)
Source: I worked for a debt collection agency for a few years.
Good to know the debt collection agencies lie to thier employees as much as their employees lie to their victims.
Including, for the benefit of the GP poster, booting from them. No need to dick around with partitions, just boot straight from another VHD if you want a test environment.
Windows has lots of things people don't know is there. Apple's Time Machine? Its been in NTFS for almost a decade, just very few people knew it was there. Mountable disk images? As you said Win7 has them.
Of course, two minutes of Bing searching would've told the GP that... so clearly he didn't want it that badly.
Hell, I'd pay extra for that level of service at most of the grocery stores around me!
Or perhaps asking how there is any stream of ones and zeroes you can download over the Internet that warrants a gun in your back.
Apparently having an iPhone will make it conceivable to know not only where you are now, but where you have been. Every day. For a long time. Couple this with those cell phone analyzers the Michigan police reportedly have. Think about it. http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/34/3458.asp
Your cell carrier already has all those logs. The police don't need your phone to get it. Then you know they're doing it. A warrant (supposedly) and they can get access to your carrier's internal logs and know exactly where you've been.
With what key?
Oh, yeah, a key that is sitting on that machine.
So really, it obfuscated the backup, relying on security through obscurity.
I've never gotten that with any of the various rating systems out there (Amazon, XBox, or otherwise).
You lose some number of people who felt motivated to vote for a product they actually do know, but IMO, the noise you cut out is far higher of a benefit than a few lost reviews.
Amazon and Apple's reviews are equally worthless.
I belive its on Netflix streaming, if you are so inclined.
I'm surprised anyone on Slashdot is old enough to have had doorgasms. Or floydgasms. Or stonegasms.
Although, you've gotta give to to kids today. Given my choice, I'd prefer a gagagasm anyway.
IMO, the real problem stems from the BluRay experience just sucking.
The UIs are all over the place on disks. I've had movies that literally took five minutes to "boot up". And then, odds are, I probably have to sit through six previews that I can't skip. And partway through, it'll fire my network up without asking doing who the fuck knows what.
If given a choice between a BluRay or watching a streaming version, I'll pick streaming because I can get in and out more quickly.
The studios have latched onto BluRay as a way of locking people in to an experience they want to define, not as a way of delivering a movie to viewers.
I bet it was even hosted on a Windows server!
*waits for applause and laughter*
*sulks away*
Generally I agree with most of what you said, but the fact that everything you listed has become automated is important for the US way of life.
Why? The government has been monkeying with what it claims inflation rates are for 20 years, and the fact is the real income level of most people in the US has drastically fallen in the last 20 years. People don't feel it because of cheap debt, the housing bubble and most importantly a dramatic drop in the actual costs of things. It doesn't matter if the real value of the $60k a year you make is half what it was 25 years ago if everything you buy also costs half because of massive increases in productivity.
If everyone was buying well-made durable goods like they did in the 40's and 50's, and if people's food was produced with human labor, that $60k a year would barely be keeping people middle class. No flat screen TVs, no new $30k car every few years, etc.
Now, mind you, I think that would be a much healthier way for live to be in America, but society here is *not* ready for that kind of transition. People see the lifestyle of people massively wealthier than them on TV and think they deserve part of that.
HD podcasts, streaming music, streaming HD netflix, streaming video events, Steam downloads, VPN and VNC work, remote backups, gaming.
I'd be more interested in knowing how someone can *not* use 250gb a month.
You could try stepping outside once in a while?
No, but this is Slashdot and the reality distortion field is the rule where certain topics are concerned.
The poster sending it is not surprising, neither are the anti-microsoft drones replying, but it surprises me that the editors would let a story like this through. I mean, seriously, the last story in here talked about how part of MS's proposal involved the certification process, and the problem was Google was claiming they were cheaper and didn't need the certification.
Google was, and is, the one lying.
This is a surprising gaffe for Groklaw. I wonder if it was a legitimate mistake, or something done deliberately.
Kinect is how you feed data to an image recognition/tracking algorithm, Predator is that algorithm. The software side of Kinect has support for efficiently tracking items, but that is so you have the most CPU left for a game. That was the trade-off.
Kinect hardware can do something very useful that Predator can't -- it can tell how far away something else (and thus, judge position or size more accurately).
The predator algorithim (and other ones no doubt under development) using the two sets of data from a Kinect camera will still be superior to an algorithm using just one set of data.
Ever spent 15 hours in coach?
The fact that you have a neurological issue doesn't invalidate the techology for the 99% of the population that has no problem with it.
I like stairs. The fact that there are some people in wheelchairs doesn't mean I should have to stick to elevators.
I don't have to speculate about the techology. All I need to to know is that there's nothing particularly strange about the radio waves used in radar. They're not a unique frequency. They're not an unusual power level. They're not unusually polarized. Because of that, it doesn't matter what the alien technology is. If RADAR took it out, they couldn't have gotten here because there's a whole lot of RF between here and wherever they came from.
Thus the point. The original poster was just being stupid, as was the other reply to my post. I *absolutely* with 100% certainty can say that no alien technology will be taken out by our RADAR because they wouldn't have gotten here. Anyone who was a physicist, an engineer, or franky who has a moderate level of common sense would realize that.
Sorry to say it, guy, but no one gives a shit about you.
If you're doing something they'd actually care about, odds are you're smart enough to use PGP for your illegal dealings.
And if not, you're just not that special. No one cares what your e-mails say. Get over yourself.