Actually, the guys who did the "Moeny for Nothing" video went on to found Mainframe.
As an aside - the Sledgehammer video was beautifully animated, while "Money for Nothing" was pretty crude. You can really see from the quality that Aardman had been in business for years and years, while the other video was a first attempt.
Those commercials actually came AFTER Luxo Jr and Tin Toy. The shorts sold them into the ad agencies, no the other way around.
Pixar was a computer company long before they were an entertainment company. Pixar's first product was actually hardware -- a dedicated rendering box. Only after that failed did they release renderman.
No, it's not quite how they got their starts.
on
Despairing of Pixar
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Pixar started life as a spin off of ILM, with Jobs as a major investor. He hoped to make money off of rendering technology and the shorts were mostly done as promotion. Little did he know there was more money in feature films than Renderman software.
Aardman got it's start in the 70's by two animators who loved clay. They sold a show called Morph to the BBC and that made the studio. Nick Park came a decade later. The first Wallace and Gromit was a student film he couldn't finish on his own. Aardman provided the resources for Nick to finish it and the rest is history.
That said, there are a number of OTHER animators who have made decent careers by using one film to finance the next. Bill Plympton comes to mind, as does Don Hertzfeldt.
Mark Osborne's films are similarly great, I wish him lots of luck.
I did a very similar thing - but I bought metal rack rails at the local pro-audio store. I then mounted one of my rackmount boxes to get the width (20.25") and went fron there. I also inset the rails about 2" from the front to allow for a door.
I used a good birch plywood, then edged it and put a nice coat of varathane over it. To finish it off, I put a glass door on it to make it less obtrusive and to cut down on fan noise. Looks great in my office.
I also bought a 4U enclosure for my CPU and stuck it in the rack as well. It's now out of sight and quiet as a mouse.
I just installed a Direct TV system and added on a 35 hour Tivo box for an extra 50 bucks. The cost of the Tivo service is 5 bucks a month on top of the normal bill, but the service includes stuff like season pass... totally worth it.
So... for $50, plus $60/year I have Tivo... and it works great out of the box. I doubt I could build a home brew system any cheaper.
Of course, you have to have Direct TV, but that starts at $34/month, which is a lot less than the cable rates where I live...
My Kazaa Lite still works... I don't feel the need to upgrade anytime soon, so it's not going to make a huge difference to me. Heck, I'm still using Word 97.
Even if the Kazaa Lite website goes away, what's to prevent people from trading the old version of Kazaa Lite on Kazaa?
let a computer pick random groups of zip codes that are adjacent to each other and distibute the districts that way. Make sure each district is apporximately the same population size. Let a judge or other neutral party manage the process.
Oh and don't let Diebold anywhere NEAR the computer.
We can hardly get a space station built in low earth orbit. I would imagine building one at L2 to be even more difficult.
Besides, how do you explain to the Amercian people that getting to L2 is an amazing accomplishment? They barely understand the moon and mars, forget explaining Lagrange points.
I have this horrific vision that "The Crawl," those annoying stock ticker things that run along the bottom on news shows will soon be co-opted by the entertainment division.
I can see it now... during the middle of steamy love scene, you'll see "Got Milk" crawling along the bottom of the screen.
From a production standpoint, it might be easier to create a brand new commercial that the customer can (insert product name here) than manipulating old commercials. You could then sell it by region so that no two areas see the same ad for different products.
This is also better in that customers would see it as a 'new' commercial rather than associate it with the old product...
I can see it now... a commercial for bug spray being mophed into a commercial for hair spray.
Of course, it might cost a little more, but it coul be another niche...
To hopefully fixing this problem. This week, the state mandated that all voting machines print a human-verifiable paper ballot. This is good, but the regulation is supposed to take effect in 2006.
While it's a step in the right direction, it's also ridiculous. A voting technology that is unacceptable in 2006 is also unacceptable today. I certainly hope they push up the deadline to before the 2004 election. There's plenty of time to fix it by then.
If you live in California, please bug the appropriate government officials about this.
Darl seems to be of the same mindset as lawyers who defend mass murderers. He simply represents the tiny subset of the truth that best serves his client. I would imagine by repeating that small subset of the truth day in and day out, Darl sees it as the entire truth, regardless of how truly true that truth is.
You also pointed out that he makes a great deal of money. I'm sure that helps a lot.
the biggest plague of the downhill racer is the rear derailleur - it hangs in a VERY exposed position and is extremely easy to rip off.
Maybe somebody should invent a derailleur cage or something to protect the mechanism from getting ripped off by rocks/stumps/whatever.
I think a previous poster said something about a chain driven bike being 97% efficient. Hard to beat that, so why not just protect the already super-efficient mechanism?
Not that I'm advocating it, but I see a lot of people getting very angry about this issue. I can see this debate getting to the point where some group of angry citizens finds a way to disable or mess up the voting machines. Might be as simple as going into the booths and smashing the touch screens or better yet, something more clever, such as a hack that puts up Abe Lincoln as a candidate or something.
I can see the irony of all e-voting machines being technically disabled and people actually having to vote with pen and paper. Would certainly be a good story for the evening news...
Ok, now that we have that settled, this woman has no idea what she's talking about and yet she's running the system. This is one of the MAJOR problems with e-voting. Everyone running the show has absolutely no clue. This makes it ripe for fraud and abuse.
I say we go back to a form of voting that even a five year old can understand - paper and pencil... or paper and crayon... because five year olds like crayons.
Remember, when dealing with children -- Keep it simple.
One of the best points of the program was when they discussed whether or not string theory could ever be verified experimentally. If it couldn't, most of the physicists had to put it in the category of philosophy rather than science. Interesting how science and philosophy intersects at times.
I also liked the part where they explained 'brane theory. I had been reading about it, but could never quite visualize it. The animation really worked for me.
Slashdot Mirror
I should make a correction. As someone else pointed out earlier, the Aard Man series did come before Morph.
Actually, the guys who did the "Moeny for Nothing" video went on to found Mainframe.
As an aside - the Sledgehammer video was beautifully animated, while "Money for Nothing" was pretty crude. You can really see from the quality that Aardman had been in business for years and years, while the other video was a first attempt.
Those commercials actually came AFTER Luxo Jr and Tin Toy. The shorts sold them into the ad agencies, no the other way around.
Pixar was a computer company long before they were an entertainment company. Pixar's first product was actually hardware -- a dedicated rendering box. Only after that failed did they release renderman.
Pixar started life as a spin off of ILM, with Jobs as a major investor. He hoped to make money off of rendering technology and the shorts were mostly done as promotion. Little did he know there was more money in feature films than Renderman software.
Aardman got it's start in the 70's by two animators who loved clay. They sold a show called Morph to the BBC and that made the studio. Nick Park came a decade later. The first Wallace and Gromit was a student film he couldn't finish on his own. Aardman provided the resources for Nick to finish it and the rest is history.
That said, there are a number of OTHER animators who have made decent careers by using one film to finance the next. Bill Plympton comes to mind, as does Don Hertzfeldt.
Mark Osborne's films are similarly great, I wish him lots of luck.
So, does this mean people in SF can cancel their broadband connections and go 100% WiFi?
I did a very similar thing - but I bought metal rack rails at the local pro-audio store. I then mounted one of my rackmount boxes to get the width (20.25") and went fron there. I also inset the rails about 2" from the front to allow for a door.
I used a good birch plywood, then edged it and put a nice coat of varathane over it. To finish it off, I put a glass door on it to make it less obtrusive and to cut down on fan noise. Looks great in my office.
I also bought a 4U enclosure for my CPU and stuck it in the rack as well. It's now out of sight and quiet as a mouse.
I live in LA... what rain?
I am a bit put off by the fact that many of the channels are on the east coast feed, though. Another good reason for Tivo!
I totally agree. I just got the same deal last month and I'm sold.
I didn't know the $4.95 fee let you have multiple boxes. Looks like my daughter might get her very own Tivo for Christmas.
I just installed a Direct TV system and added on a 35 hour Tivo box for an extra 50 bucks. The cost of the Tivo service is 5 bucks a month on top of the normal bill, but the service includes stuff like season pass... totally worth it.
So... for $50, plus $60/year I have Tivo... and it works great out of the box. I doubt I could build a home brew system any cheaper.
Of course, you have to have Direct TV, but that starts at $34/month, which is a lot less than the cable rates where I live...
My Kazaa Lite still works... I don't feel the need to upgrade anytime soon, so it's not going to make a huge difference to me. Heck, I'm still using Word 97.
Even if the Kazaa Lite website goes away, what's to prevent people from trading the old version of Kazaa Lite on Kazaa?
let a computer pick random groups of zip codes that are adjacent to each other and distibute the districts that way. Make sure each district is apporximately the same population size. Let a judge or other neutral party manage the process.
Oh and don't let Diebold anywhere NEAR the computer.
Well, the ISS was supposed to cost significantly less than $100 billion. I doubt building an L1 port will cost any less.
Buzz is a true hero, but just because Buzz says it's so, don't mean it's so...
Knowing Bush... he'll send 10,000 of our top marines to the lunar surface.
Then have no plan to get them back.
We can hardly get a space station built in low earth orbit. I would imagine building one at L2 to be even more difficult.
Besides, how do you explain to the Amercian people that getting to L2 is an amazing accomplishment? They barely understand the moon and mars, forget explaining Lagrange points.
I have this horrific vision that "The Crawl," those annoying stock ticker things that run along the bottom on news shows will soon be co-opted by the entertainment division.
I can see it now... during the middle of steamy love scene, you'll see "Got Milk" crawling along the bottom of the screen.
Feh.
Moral Hazard implies that the record companies have morals.
They don't.
From a production standpoint, it might be easier to create a brand new commercial that the customer can (insert product name here) than manipulating old commercials. You could then sell it by region so that no two areas see the same ad for different products.
This is also better in that customers would see it as a 'new' commercial rather than associate it with the old product...
I can see it now... a commercial for bug spray being mophed into a commercial for hair spray.
Of course, it might cost a little more, but it coul be another niche...
To hopefully fixing this problem. This week, the state mandated that all voting machines print a human-verifiable paper ballot. This is good, but the regulation is supposed to take effect in 2006.
While it's a step in the right direction, it's also ridiculous. A voting technology that is unacceptable in 2006 is also unacceptable today. I certainly hope they push up the deadline to before the 2004 election. There's plenty of time to fix it by then.
If you live in California, please bug the appropriate government officials about this.
With this in mind, it's easy to be vigorous in defending the legal rights of somebody you detest. It's not self-interest, it's moral duty.
Moral duty or not... I doubt that it's easy.
Darl seems to be of the same mindset as lawyers who defend mass murderers. He simply represents the tiny subset of the truth that best serves his client. I would imagine by repeating that small subset of the truth day in and day out, Darl sees it as the entire truth, regardless of how truly true that truth is.
You also pointed out that he makes a great deal of money. I'm sure that helps a lot.
the biggest plague of the downhill racer is the rear derailleur - it hangs in a VERY exposed position and is extremely easy to rip off.
Maybe somebody should invent a derailleur cage or something to protect the mechanism from getting ripped off by rocks/stumps/whatever.
I think a previous poster said something about a chain driven bike being 97% efficient. Hard to beat that, so why not just protect the already super-efficient mechanism?
I think what I'm starting to see is that - at least in the case of voting, low-tech is the only solution.
Punch cards have problems, OCR has problems, touch screens have problems.
Pen and paper? No problems.
Plus, it's cheap.
Not that I'm advocating it, but I see a lot of people getting very angry about this issue. I can see this debate getting to the point where some group of angry citizens finds a way to disable or mess up the voting machines. Might be as simple as going into the booths and smashing the touch screens or better yet, something more clever, such as a hack that puts up Abe Lincoln as a candidate or something.
I can see the irony of all e-voting machines being technically disabled and people actually having to vote with pen and paper. Would certainly be a good story for the evening news...
Mr Rubin or Ms Lemone?
Ok, now that we have that settled, this woman has no idea what she's talking about and yet she's running the system. This is one of the MAJOR problems with e-voting. Everyone running the show has absolutely no clue. This makes it ripe for fraud and abuse.
I say we go back to a form of voting that even a five year old can understand - paper and pencil... or paper and crayon... because five year olds like crayons.
Remember, when dealing with children -- Keep it simple.
One of the best points of the program was when they discussed whether or not string theory could ever be verified experimentally. If it couldn't, most of the physicists had to put it in the category of philosophy rather than science. Interesting how science and philosophy intersects at times.
I also liked the part where they explained 'brane theory. I had been reading about it, but could never quite visualize it. The animation really worked for me.