The movie industry's worst enemy is itself: it has inserted so many middlemen that it can't trust. Those middlemen have no fealty, they just want to make a buck. With every move to eliminate the middlemen, the middlemen find new ways of keeping involved.
I think you misunderstand the situation. The major studios have developed a system where there are many middlemen so that they can maxmize the export of their costs onto those middlemen. So, in many cases, the middlemen aren't fighting to stay in a lucrative position that allows them to dup movies - they are dupping movies because they don't make any money on distributing or showing the movies!
[Ever noticed how the national chains have been going bankrupt and consolidating over the past couple years? Used to be any city of 100k or so would have four or six independent duplex or quadplex theatres. Now such towns have four or six theatres owned by a single chain.]
I was making nearly $40K at 23yrs of age. (im 26 now.)
I think you didn't participate in the primary portion of the boom. $40k/year for 23-year-olds isn't what the boom was about - it was $80k/year for 23-year-olds, and if you had 5+ years of experience, well, hell, there's $120k in it for you. And that was without considering talent.
[It took me the entire decade of the 90's to become comfortable with being paid large sums of money for something I'd be doing anyhow. Other people never were uncomfortable with it, those are the people who are currently in pain:-).]
Yeah, I know how you feel... I really hate investing in my net worth every month.
I've owned for three years. Only 17% of my payment currently goes towards principal. I put away more than 4x my principal each month in non-house-related accounts.
I really hate how the interest rates are the lowest they have been in at least a decade.
Interest rates are tied to inflation. Inflation causes the effect where after 10 years, you are earning 25% more, your house is worth 25% more, and you are making the same monthly payments. Inflation is very low. The entire own-your-home mythos is based around that. You aren't going to like your mortgage much if the economy tips over into deflation, and you're making constant payments based on lower income for a reduced-price house...
I really hate the five digit deduction I get on my Federal income tax.
You're getting that deduction because you're investing in your bank via interest payments. It's not related to owning a house, it's related to having house-related debt. Also, everywhere I've lived, the cost of renting versus the cost of owning was always very comparable after tax considerations, so the deduction isn't a gain, it's what makes it all a wash. [Amazing how markets work to arbitrage such things away!]
And I really hate the fact that even if I sell my house for exactly what I paid for it, I will still come out at least 15% ahead.
Err, well, you must live in a different world than me. If I sell the house for exactly what I paid for it, I would be +0 in terms of cashflow (no month-to-month savings versus renting - actually, right now renting is cheaper), +0 in terms of gains, -6% for the agent's commission, and -4% for staging and prep work. I'd be +2% because part of my monthly costs goes towards principal. That's -8% or so. [Keep in mind that your down-payment is simply a return of capital, not a gain of any sort.]
Of course, I own my home, I can do whatever I want, I've already got a 20% gain as a cushion, and I plan to stay for a couple more years. But I certainly wouldn't be buying right now if I had any choice in the matter.
A HOUSE IS NOT AN INVESTMENT! IT'S A PLACE TO LIVE!
I think an interesting startup idea would be to resell long-distance service for cost, and charge an extra $x for the "service" of NEVER calling the customer or selling their info. Ever. Even if there's a hopping good deal that you can give them. You could probably make a go of it with only 50k-100k of customers, which should be doable.
Another option would be to allow customers to set up a 900-style first-minute charge. You can go ahead and call me, but it costs a dollar for the first minute. If my mom/brother/friend calls, the dollar is amortized over 20-40 minutes. Telemarketers would pay $1 for 20 seconds of access... of course, I should get to set the value involved. It would also be nice to have a whitelist of people who aren't charged.
Then MYSQL is a minivan. You can just get in and drive it around. Sure it can't carry a crane to the worksite - but who really cares?
This is one thing I hate about the computer industry. Everyone thinks that because their particular system is flexible enough to (badly) handle many things it wasn't directly designed for, that it's a good idea for them to target all those other things as competition.
It's not like some multinational corporation is going to channel their $100B/year of revenue tracking through a MYSQL database. So why should Bob Novice who wants to build a simple email tracker for his family have to use a database which requires six months of training before the word Go?
Long ago, I was a telecommuting independent consultant. Since I was working 40-60 hours a week from home, it made perfect sense to spend >$200/month to get always-on high-speed (well, ISDN) Internet access. After all, it only worked out to $1/hour or something like that, and it only had to save me an hour or two a month to more than pay for itself.
Contrast that with, oh, my mother. She maybe spends 4-6 hours a week on the Internet (and some of that is email, which probably shouldn't count). For $50/month, that's around $2.50/hour. On top of that, having high-speed access is merely convenient for her - it's not like she can get more work done, or bill more for her work, because she doesn't use the Internet for work.
Contrast that with cable television. My parents probably watch 20-30 hours per week, and it probably costs less than $50, and it also gives them access to things they couldn't access with an antenna in the first place. A bargain!
A couple years ago, the city I grew up in (Pipestone, MN) repainted (or otherwise maintained) their water tower. While the guys were up there, they took down some antenna, because neither they, nor anyone at city hall, could figure out why they were there.
Turned out to be a repeater installed twenty years ago by the local radio station, with city permission.
So now I'm imagining some roofer coming down off the roof and telling the homeowner "Uh, listen, you have a chimney up there which doesn't connect to anything. I think it might be causing your leak, do you want me to get rid of it?"
and a baby cam so I can see how my kid is in that rear facing seat.
People often install mirrors in the back seat to allow them to see the baby in the rear-facing seat. There have apparently been incidents where the car is in a low-speed accident, and the accident itself was harmless, but the flying mirror injured the baby. Of course, this applies to any material in the back seat which isn't tied down.
My personal happy TNG ending involved a holodeck. Picard would command "End Program", the holodeck would phase into view (but different and more primitive than normal) and then a young Picard, Riker, Geordie, etc, would all walk out of a holodeck into a compteporary (2005, say) arcade or mall or theme park, promising to come back for another "episode" next week...
And that was before I saw how into things like EverQuest people got. Maybe you wouldn't have even needed the holodeck:-).
Yeah. Of course, if we had a device with a knob which allowed us to increase/decrease gravity, I'm thinking the least of our uses would be communicating with Mars...
I live on the middle of the San Francisco peninsula (Belmont, to be precise, along 101), Oracle literally looms over my house, the area is strewn with.com startups and large tech companies. And I can only get IDSL (aka ISDN with DSL-style metering), because I'm 21,000 feet from the CO. Same thing applied when I lived 30 miles south in Sunnyvale, which is basically ground zero for Silicon Valley.
The problem isn't that the telco doesn't have the tech to give me a good connection. They do. They simply don't want to. If they're unwilling to spend the effort to splice a more convenient DSLAM in there somewhere, why, exactly, are they going to be willing to lay down miles and miles of fiber, no matter how awesome it is?
Stroustrop? C++. Torvalds? Linux. Wall? Perl. See where I'm going with this?
No, not really. Even if you're liberal with the list of people of that caliber, you're talking maybe 1,000 people, total. I'm thinking more than that are going to want to be employed! Beyond that, though, there's a reason those people are well known. They're really really smart. People who are really that smart usually don't have problems getting jobs. [I'm not as smart as those people, and I've never had a problem getting a job.]
As far as resume buzzwords - if that's all you've got, go with it. Personally, I intentionally edit stuff off of my resume, because I don't want to get hit based on buzzword searches. If possible, only list the things you actually would want to work on. If you're trying to display how "well-rounded" you are, then do that by describing the variety of projects you've been involved in.
Good cover letters are essential. But the most important thing is to network, and to get yourself out there. Submitting a resume to an online database is the worst thing possible. In fact, I'll pull the ripcord on an employer if they require me to submit my text-only resume to a 17x5 text field on their website. Employees are too important to treat that way.
I wonder why many digital cameras need a pause between shots? Maybe it's because compression takes awhile, and good compression takes longer? A compression engine that could handle 6.2GB/s would be pretty impressive.
Also impressive would be the ability to transfer the data from the sensors to the compression engine. Standard PCI is on the order of 1Gbit/s, without accounting for overhead. You're talking 50x that much bandwidth between the sensors and the array of compression chips.
I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?
They can't even wait 6 seconds to check if the "news" is a repeat of something posted yesterday, how can you expect them to wait a couple hours to break news of this import! The universe might come unhinged!
Of the dozens of people I've done technical interviews of, the clear factor distinguishing the hires who worked out from those who didn't was their ability to go in-depth on a topic. It annoys the heck out of me to have someone listing an MS degree (or with a decade of "experience") who can't expound on a subject without prompting.
Heck, I recently revisited my resume, and realized that I could still go deep on projects I've not been working on for 5 years or more.
This is the reason why Apple should have "simply" ported their valuable code (appkit, etc) to Linux (or FreeBSD) and not bothered with having Yet Another Unix. Since their value-added is not in the OS layer (for the most part), this would be a more rational decision. There's already a critical mass of people working on making Linux (and FreeBSD) work, no need for Apple to duplicate it all.
[Don't get me wrong. There are areas where the Mach stuff really shines versus Linux. But that's the last war, and NeXT lost it, they should move on. If the OS layer is not your main focus, then you _are_ going to fall behind the curve. They could be concentrating on the areas where they _can_ add value, and contribute directly back to a viable community. Yes, I know about Darwin.]
They could even use a "statite" (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/statite). Basically, a satellite which uses a solar sail to counteract gravity. It's not a satellite, because it doesn't orbit, it hovers.
[Yeah, like we'll be able to build sails like that anytime soon:-).]
...home schooling lacks...*gasp* social interaction
From what I recall of high school, "social interaction" mainly involved being threatened in various ways (most of them non-maiming when I went), for various reasons (most of them stupid). To be honest, social issues wouldn't cause me a second's pause when considering home schooling, because public schools teach you at least as many negative social interactions as positive ones.
The only good thing to come of it is that it gave me enough ambition to make college (*) and a successful career a goal worth working for. But, even 15 years later, I still sometimes catch myself saying or doing mean-spirited things which I believe stem directly from my experiences in a small-town public school. I don't like it, I know I can do better, but it's hard to rise above your upbringing.
[(*) Yes, college was a blessed relief. Finally, in a given day I could talk to more than one or two other people who used their mouths for something other than a conduit for beer.]
Slashdot Mirror
The movie industry's worst enemy is itself: it has inserted so many middlemen that it can't trust. Those middlemen have no fealty, they just want to make a buck. With every move to eliminate the middlemen, the middlemen find new ways of keeping involved.
I think you misunderstand the situation. The major studios have developed a system where there are many middlemen so that they can maxmize the export of their costs onto those middlemen. So, in many cases, the middlemen aren't fighting to stay in a lucrative position that allows them to dup movies - they are dupping movies because they don't make any money on distributing or showing the movies!
[Ever noticed how the national chains have been going bankrupt and consolidating over the past couple years? Used to be any city of 100k or so would have four or six independent duplex or quadplex theatres. Now such towns have four or six theatres owned by a single chain.]
I was making nearly $40K at 23yrs of age. (im 26 now.)
:-).]
I think you didn't participate in the primary portion of the boom. $40k/year for 23-year-olds isn't what the boom was about - it was $80k/year for 23-year-olds, and if you had 5+ years of experience, well, hell, there's $120k in it for you. And that was without considering talent.
[It took me the entire decade of the 90's to become comfortable with being paid large sums of money for something I'd be doing anyhow. Other people never were uncomfortable with it, those are the people who are currently in pain
Yeah, I know how you feel... I really hate investing in my net worth every month.
I've owned for three years. Only 17% of my payment currently goes towards principal. I put away more than 4x my principal each month in non-house-related accounts.
I really hate how the interest rates are the lowest they have been in at least a decade.
Interest rates are tied to inflation. Inflation causes the effect where after 10 years, you are earning 25% more, your house is worth 25% more, and you are making the same monthly payments. Inflation is very low. The entire own-your-home mythos is based around that. You aren't going to like your mortgage much if the economy tips over into deflation, and you're making constant payments based on lower income for a reduced-price house...
I really hate the five digit deduction I get on my Federal income tax.
You're getting that deduction because you're investing in your bank via interest payments. It's not related to owning a house, it's related to having house-related debt. Also, everywhere I've lived, the cost of renting versus the cost of owning was always very comparable after tax considerations, so the deduction isn't a gain, it's what makes it all a wash. [Amazing how markets work to arbitrage such things away!]
And I really hate the fact that even if I sell my house for exactly what I paid for it, I will still come out at least 15% ahead.
Err, well, you must live in a different world than me. If I sell the house for exactly what I paid for it, I would be +0 in terms of cashflow (no month-to-month savings versus renting - actually, right now renting is cheaper), +0 in terms of gains, -6% for the agent's commission, and -4% for staging and prep work. I'd be +2% because part of my monthly costs goes towards principal. That's -8% or so. [Keep in mind that your down-payment is simply a return of capital, not a gain of any sort.]
Of course, I own my home, I can do whatever I want, I've already got a 20% gain as a cushion, and I plan to stay for a couple more years. But I certainly wouldn't be buying right now if I had any choice in the matter.
A HOUSE IS NOT AN INVESTMENT! IT'S A PLACE TO LIVE!
I think an interesting startup idea would be to resell long-distance service for cost, and charge an extra $x for the "service" of NEVER calling the customer or selling their info. Ever. Even if there's a hopping good deal that you can give them. You could probably make a go of it with only 50k-100k of customers, which should be doable.
Another option would be to allow customers to set up a 900-style first-minute charge. You can go ahead and call me, but it costs a dollar for the first minute. If my mom/brother/friend calls, the dollar is amortized over 20-40 minutes. Telemarketers would pay $1 for 20 seconds of access... of course, I should get to set the value involved. It would also be nice to have a whitelist of people who aren't charged.
1) Detect a new compound in inhospitable place.
2) ???
3) Life!
Huh, so I guess that means you didn't read the article, eh?
Then MYSQL is a minivan. You can just get in and drive it around. Sure it can't carry a crane to the worksite - but who really cares?
This is one thing I hate about the computer industry. Everyone thinks that because their particular system is flexible enough to (badly) handle many things it wasn't directly designed for, that it's a good idea for them to target all those other things as competition.
It's not like some multinational corporation is going to channel their $100B/year of revenue tracking through a MYSQL database. So why should Bob Novice who wants to build a simple email tracker for his family have to use a database which requires six months of training before the word Go?
Long ago, I was a telecommuting independent consultant. Since I was working 40-60 hours a week from home, it made perfect sense to spend >$200/month to get always-on high-speed (well, ISDN) Internet access. After all, it only worked out to $1/hour or something like that, and it only had to save me an hour or two a month to more than pay for itself.
Contrast that with, oh, my mother. She maybe spends 4-6 hours a week on the Internet (and some of that is email, which probably shouldn't count). For $50/month, that's around $2.50/hour. On top of that, having high-speed access is merely convenient for her - it's not like she can get more work done, or bill more for her work, because she doesn't use the Internet for work.
Contrast that with cable television. My parents probably watch 20-30 hours per week, and it probably costs less than $50, and it also gives them access to things they couldn't access with an antenna in the first place. A bargain!
A couple years ago, the city I grew up in (Pipestone, MN) repainted (or otherwise maintained) their water tower. While the guys were up there, they took down some antenna, because neither they, nor anyone at city hall, could figure out why they were there.
Turned out to be a repeater installed twenty years ago by the local radio station, with city permission.
So now I'm imagining some roofer coming down off the roof and telling the homeowner "Uh, listen, you have a chimney up there which doesn't connect to anything. I think it might be causing your leak, do you want me to get rid of it?"
I suspect you just bumped their slashdot-related load by 10x...
Grad Student Deconstructs Take-Out Menu
and a baby cam so I can see how my kid is in that rear facing seat.
People often install mirrors in the back seat to allow them to see the baby in the rear-facing seat. There have apparently been incidents where the car is in a low-speed accident, and the accident itself was harmless, but the flying mirror injured the baby. Of course, this applies to any material in the back seat which isn't tied down.
So make certain you mount that babycam well...
My personal happy TNG ending involved a holodeck. Picard would command "End Program", the holodeck would phase into view (but different and more primitive than normal) and then a young Picard, Riker, Geordie, etc, would all walk out of a holodeck into a compteporary (2005, say) arcade or mall or theme park, promising to come back for another "episode" next week...
:-).
And that was before I saw how into things like EverQuest people got. Maybe you wouldn't have even needed the holodeck
it'd take the Earth 8.5 minutes to find out and start heading for interstellar space.
If the sun teleported elsewhere, Earth would be in interstellar space instantaneously!
Yeah. Of course, if we had a device with a knob which allowed us to increase/decrease gravity, I'm thinking the least of our uses would be communicating with Mars...
We could just move Mars closer to Earth.
Or maybe the poster's evolutionary theory simply doesn't work because we don't want to wait 100 million years for secure software to happen.
I live on the middle of the San Francisco peninsula (Belmont, to be precise, along 101), Oracle literally looms over my house, the area is strewn with .com startups and large tech companies. And I can only get IDSL (aka ISDN with DSL-style metering), because I'm 21,000 feet from the CO. Same thing applied when I lived 30 miles south in Sunnyvale, which is basically ground zero for Silicon Valley.
The problem isn't that the telco doesn't have the tech to give me a good connection. They do. They simply don't want to. If they're unwilling to spend the effort to splice a more convenient DSLAM in there somewhere, why, exactly, are they going to be willing to lay down miles and miles of fiber, no matter how awesome it is?
Stroustrop? C++. Torvalds? Linux. Wall? Perl. See where I'm going with this?
No, not really. Even if you're liberal with the list of people of that caliber, you're talking maybe 1,000 people, total. I'm thinking more than that are going to want to be employed! Beyond that, though, there's a reason those people are well known. They're really really smart. People who are really that smart usually don't have problems getting jobs. [I'm not as smart as those people, and I've never had a problem getting a job.]
As far as resume buzzwords - if that's all you've got, go with it. Personally, I intentionally edit stuff off of my resume, because I don't want to get hit based on buzzword searches. If possible, only list the things you actually would want to work on. If you're trying to display how "well-rounded" you are, then do that by describing the variety of projects you've been involved in.
Good cover letters are essential. But the most important thing is to network, and to get yourself out there. Submitting a resume to an online database is the worst thing possible. In fact, I'll pull the ripcord on an employer if they require me to submit my text-only resume to a 17x5 text field on their website. Employees are too important to treat that way.
So, what point are you making? Bad parents are bad parents? You want a prize with that?
I wonder why many digital cameras need a pause between shots? Maybe it's because compression takes awhile, and good compression takes longer? A compression engine that could handle 6.2GB/s would be pretty impressive.
Also impressive would be the ability to transfer the data from the sensors to the compression engine. Standard PCI is on the order of 1Gbit/s, without accounting for overhead. You're talking 50x that much bandwidth between the sensors and the array of compression chips.
From the FAQ:
I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?
They can't even wait 6 seconds to check if the "news" is a repeat of something posted yesterday, how can you expect them to wait a couple hours to break news of this import! The universe might come unhinged!
Of the dozens of people I've done technical interviews of, the clear factor distinguishing the hires who worked out from those who didn't was their ability to go in-depth on a topic. It annoys the heck out of me to have someone listing an MS degree (or with a decade of "experience") who can't expound on a subject without prompting.
Heck, I recently revisited my resume, and realized that I could still go deep on projects I've not been working on for 5 years or more.
This is the reason why Apple should have "simply" ported their valuable code (appkit, etc) to Linux (or FreeBSD) and not bothered with having Yet Another Unix. Since their value-added is not in the OS layer (for the most part), this would be a more rational decision. There's already a critical mass of people working on making Linux (and FreeBSD) work, no need for Apple to duplicate it all.
[Don't get me wrong. There are areas where the Mach stuff really shines versus Linux. But that's the last war, and NeXT lost it, they should move on. If the OS layer is not your main focus, then you _are_ going to fall behind the curve. They could be concentrating on the areas where they _can_ add value, and contribute directly back to a viable community. Yes, I know about Darwin.]
They could even use a "statite" (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/statite). Basically, a satellite which uses a solar sail to counteract gravity. It's not a satellite, because it doesn't orbit, it hovers.
:-).]
[Yeah, like we'll be able to build sails like that anytime soon
...home schooling lacks...*gasp* social interaction
From what I recall of high school, "social interaction" mainly involved being threatened in various ways (most of them non-maiming when I went), for various reasons (most of them stupid). To be honest, social issues wouldn't cause me a second's pause when considering home schooling, because public schools teach you at least as many negative social interactions as positive ones.
The only good thing to come of it is that it gave me enough ambition to make college (*) and a successful career a goal worth working for. But, even 15 years later, I still sometimes catch myself saying or doing mean-spirited things which I believe stem directly from my experiences in a small-town public school. I don't like it, I know I can do better, but it's hard to rise above your upbringing.
[(*) Yes, college was a blessed relief. Finally, in a given day I could talk to more than one or two other people who used their mouths for something other than a conduit for beer.]