Installation of Quicktime DOES provide a warning that earlier versions of Quicktime Pro (6.x and earlier) will be lost. Just because you click through the install screens quickly doesn't mean you can ignore the contents and get pissy about it later.
No, the scientists and physicians who claimed a link have been in a very small minority. Nice attempt to discredit the climate science by implication, though.
The anti-thimerisol movement has been driven largely by parents of autistic children looking for an explanation (I'm not unsympathetic, but that shouldn't affect the scientific method) and the anti-vaccination lobby, which is a mix of paranoiacs and people who can't see that a small number of vaccine-caused deaths is preferable to a larger number of disease-caused deaths.
There are actually legitimate health concerns related to the use of mercury as a preservative, but since they are not as dramatic or emotionally charged as the subject of autism, they seldom enter the discussion.
Furthermore, even in the case where scientific consensus MAY be wrong, it's most sensible for those not directly involved in research challenging the consensus to proceed as if it is correct, unless doing so were demonstrably damaging. For instance, it is pretty sensible to respond to climate change by increasing energy efficiency wherever possible. Worst case scenario is improved productivity, competitiveness, and profit. If, on the other hand, increased efficiency came at the cost of infecting every person with leprosy, then global warming denialists might have more of a point.
The reason for UK-only access is not limited to the TV license fee. Non-UK entities own a variety of international rights to many BBC program(me)s. To allow international access to BBC programming would certainly violate those contracts.
Many BBC shows aren't even entirely owned by the BBC. Before they even go into production they are pre-sold in different territories to finance production. In these cases, no single party can claim proprietorship (terms of each party's oversight and influence on prodution are negotiated in the rights contracts). This allows production of shows that might otherwise be too expensive if confined to a single market.
Even when shows aren't sold (or haven't been yet), the show's format - for instance, the basic structure of Pop Idol/American Idol - is a saleable commodity, the value of which can be diluted through access to other markets' versions.
Cable cards are horribly problematic. They were forced upon the cable companies and if you need one it means you're not renting equipment from the cable company. They really don't give a shit if it's a pain in your ass, because it lets them say "well, our cable-box/DVR/whatever never has these problems".
In three months, I've had 5 or 6 different cable cards in my Series 3 Tivo. Only one has worked the whole time (it's got a dual-tuner, so it needs two). Some never worked at all; others refused to unlock the premium channels I'm paying for; still others have been fine for a few weeks then suddenly stopped working.
For once I'm willing to give MS the benefit of the doubt and assume that the problem is Comcast and the crappy cable cards their cartel has concocted.
Based on TFA, the story isn't credible. The study, which is never named, is said to investigate what is broadly (and very vaguely) described as '"emotive and controversial" history'. No date of release for the study is ever given. Study authors are not named. Schools are not named.
The claims made are:
-"...secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework". The GCSE is a standardized test taken at the end of regular secondary education. Does anyone expect the holocaust to be covered by such a test?
-"In another department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils." How pervasive and menacing can this problem be if it isn't even universal policy within a single school?
-"But the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged what was taught in some local mosques." If this motivation is true, then it deserves criticism, but I wonder what exactly might be said in favor of the Crusades if the mosques had no input? My education had no muslim influences (in fact much of it was at Christian schools), yet I was taught that the only good thing about the crusades was that ignorant Europeans were exposed to Arab civilization which led to them bringing back the seeds of the Renaissance to Europe. Am I missing something?
-"A third school found itself 'strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination'." Umm...yet again, the school apparently DOESN'T cave in, despite being "strongly challenged" by Christian(!) parents. Hmmm...strange that the article's headline blames this all on muslims.
I think it's telling that no historians or educators are quoted in the piece. Atypically for a story with a headline like this, there was no reaction quote from anyone in the Jewish community of Britain (the world's 5th largest at approx. 275,000).
The only government official quoted in the piece is "Chris McGovern, history education adviser to the former Tory government". This man has nothing to do with the study. He's been out of that position for 10 years. It's not even clear whether he's responding to the study itself or to a reporter's quick summary of something he hadn't heard of before. It's even possible that the quote was lifted completely from a completely different context and could have been made many years ago.
Finally, the two paragraphs at the end of the story point towards the study really being about pedagogy and not about the putative topic of political correctness affecting curriculum.
Conservative British newspapers have a long history of doing this sort of nonsense. They will find an isolated case of something outrageous and imply that it applies to the general. Or they will distort a story. Or they will outright make up baseless facts to anger their readers and bolster support for their political position (there is a decade long history of these papers printing bogus stories about EU laws that erode British sovereignty and destroy British tradition). These type of stories all make claims that any reasonable person would be angered by, but the details - when you can find them - seldom bear the stories out.
What is the legal justifications for applying this law to only CDs? In terms of copyright law, is there anything that holds a CD as distinctly different than a vinyl record, tape, DVD, book, comic book, poster, t-shirt, or restaurant menu? If it is allegedly in the public's interest to place these restrictions on one form of IP, wouldn't a greater good be served by extending the law to universally apply to all IP?
As an IT consultant whose business is over 95% Mac, I've never encountered a single pirated copy of Windows running on a Boot Camp Mac. In fact, I've had two clients who purchased two copies each - one for Boot Camp and one for Parallels - because it wasn't clear to them that they had every legal right to use the same license in both instances.
Most Mac VARs will now offer OEM licenses of XP at the time of sale for an Intel Mac if you mention that you're interested in dual-boot. Many will even ship the Mac with both OSes installed and ready to go - nothing quite so ugly as a Windows license key sticker marring the otherwise unblemished bottom of a MacBook Pro.
For most employed adults, the time and hassle of pirating a copy or sidestepping Windows Activation more than offsets the cost of an XP license. And since we're talking about Apple customers, we can assume they're not desperate to pinch pennies.
Finally, just to be pedantic: you can get an OEM copy of XP Pro for about $160 (even less if you want XP Home for some misguided reason), but no $400 computer ships with XP Pro. Also, the performance difference between XP running on any Mac hardware versus XP on a $400 box makes the poster's comparison virtually meaningless.
In related news: Sony denies plans to release compelling content for PSP.
A Sony spokesman today denied that Sony was doing anything that would encourage potential customers to purchase its PSP portable gaming system, currently languishing on store shelves everywhere. "Sony really likes what Nintendo has done with the DS. Apple's video iPod is pretty impressive too. We can't do anything to touch that and we think that even trying would just muddy the waters and possibly confuse customers into purchasing our system". To avoid millions of disappointed customers, Sony has developed a three point program:
1. Keep prices uncompetitively high. 2. Avoid revisions with features competitive to the DS. 3. Keep working hard to thwart hackers trying to run homebrew mods: as the only group interested in the PSP, Sony needs to remain vigilant in case this community comes up with the great games that they haven't.
Other related stories: UMD - Today's Betamax or Today's MiniDisc?
Simultrek was fantastic. Wednesdays at midnight in the early 90s, IIRC. The "Mirror Mirror" episode still ranks among the funniest things I've ever watched.
So an executive for a former innovation company that is now essentially just a services company says that innovation will be replaced by services.
Why should we listen to this guy at all? If he were saying this from a company that was still aggressively moving things forward, then maybe his opinion would carry some weight, but IBM? Who cares? I guess this is part of their new sales pitch.
As if selling an illegal mod chip wasn't bad enough, these geniuses also helpfully loaded up the XBox with 77 pirated games.
The "illegality" of mod chips is pretty debatable, even with the DMCA. Adding drive space and hacking your XBox to run Linux are arguably fair end-user modifications. It's really just about selling stolen software.
And yet Apple, unlike SGI, sells products people want to buy.
Final Cut Pro, while not a perfect product, is certainly competitive with the bug-laden offerings from Avid. Premiere? Are you kidding. That app has never been anything more than a consumer-level product. It used to be bundled for free with video and Firewire cards and still no one in the industry would even toy with it.
Shake is great. Very little competition for it at the high end.
Most of the larger effects houses have been moving towards OSX and Linux for the past 5 years. They're the guys who make the big license purchases. If Autodesk refuses to keep servicing all those customers, you just know that Apple will be happy to sweep in with their own product.
I just don't see it as likely for them to risk a big part of their market by abandoning customers.
What's so bad about TiVo failing?
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So...for the sake of argument, let's say that TiVo goes bankrupt and are unable to find additional financing. What's gonna happen? They'll be bought, probably by one of the larger content distributors (Comcast, DirecTV, Charter, whoever).
Anyone buying TiVo wants two things: 1. The TiVo brand. Can you even name another PVR brand? Nobody says "I've got to PVR that show". TiVo is the ONLY product with any name recognition in the marketplace.
2. The TiVo functionality. As anyone who as ever used one knows, there's no comparison to other PVRs. It's got a great interface and is remarkably stable (not perfect, but pretty close).
To mess with either of those threatens to devalue what they've purchased.
Sure, there might be some rough spots when the new owners cow to pressure from content providers, but ultimately the marketplace wins on these things and it will become incrasingly hard for content providers to explain why they want to sue distributors for allowing their customers to do what they've come to expect.
It seems that whatever cache that the Matrix once had has long since been squandered. The 2nd and 3rd films were largely disappointing. "Enter the Matrix" sold well, but was universally panned.
This game's being developed my Monolith, who have always been something of an also-ran. They're always behind the curve technologically and gameplay has never been quite good enough to garner strong enthusiasm (though the NOLF games had some really funny writing).
On top of that, the Matrix is a bleak world that has always been depicted as stark. Ultimately, it's an empty universe and players will be playing this as characters who know that it isn't "real". What's the bloody point?
If there are people excited about the game, I'm interested in hearing what they're looking forward to and what they expect to distinguish it from other MMORPG games
Seriously, nothing to see here folks. It's common sense.
Hang on, no it's not. If a customre calls with no clue what's causing problems and the Dell support person on the phone knows, common sense (not to mention common decency) dictates that they point them towards a simple spyware solution. Common sense does not suggest you avoid mentioning the likely source of the problem; it does require that you send your customer to the ISP or the OS vender or in any way start them on a fruitless runaround when you could simply say "spybot might solve your problem".
I understand Dell's liability concerns regarding EULA's they know nothing about, but it smacks of cowardice when a corporate behemoth is afraid to give decent tech support. Are they that afraid of Gator and other scumbag spyware companies?
Lemme guess...you didn't actually read the article you're attempting to "discuss" so you make a point that is already addressed (and, I think, dismissed reasonably well) in the essay.
As a person who primarily uses Windows in my business, but makes regular use of Linux and MacOS as well, I feel that I'm reasonably without bias ; I don't feel loyalty to any OS, nor do I think my use of any particular OS at any time reflects on my character. But the fact is that Windows has some big security problems that just don't exist elsewhere.
No doubt the MacOSes and Linux have their vulnerabilities, but most of them are not so simple and painfully obvious. To compound it, MS pushes a communication product (Outlook) which enables and simplifies the automation of malicious activity.
With the exception of Gigli, all of the summer's big-budget films have had great opening weekends - most at the number one position. It's only during the second weekend that the films tanked.
How can this be linked to texting? If it were huge dropoff between the first and second screening, sure, but with a whole week in between perhaps some other technologies are implicated. Some of the likely culprits include: newspapers telephones, television, email, web reviews, and snail mail. Hell, with a whole week to do it, you can pretty much warn the entire country off of a crap movie by face-to-face word of mouth.
If a movie is so bad that people are going to be sending SMS messages during it, it's probably bad enough for them to leave the movie. This sounds like a really weak attempt by studio asshats to blame poor performance on an aspect of youth culture they don't understand.
That $120 million doesn't include marketing and distribution costs. Furthermore, the Hulk movie probably took well over a year in actual production so the return has to be calculated over a longer period. Actual ROI would be much lower than in your example. Of course, that doesn't include foreign, DVD, and merchandising revenues.
Over the past few years I've really gotten into the novels of Patrick O'Brian. They are stories of the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I've always thought it was a lot like Jane Austen with ships, cannon and spies.
With 20 books in his Aubrey-Maturin series, it incredibly manages to maintain a high standard of writing and storytelling to the very end.
O'Brian earns his geek-cred - albeit a 19th century geek-cred - by thoroughly understanding the ins and outs of naval technology of the day.
It's great, engaging stuff and I can't recommend it enough. After two years of patronizingly calling them my "little sailboat books", my wife started paging through one and was instantly hooked. Two months later, she's on the 7th book!
Buy "Master and Commander" and you won't be disappointed.
Which kind of radio do you listen to?
on
TiVo For Radio?
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· Score: 1
It seems that all of the responses to this fall into two categories:
1. People who don't understand why you would want to time-shift top 40 or talk radio.
2. People who listen to NPR.
People in the first group should take note that there is, in fact, radio worth time shifting and check it out.
Nah, sorry. An average successful porn star will probably make $1000 for a straight scene. Oral sex and girl/girl will pay considerably less. An anal scene will pay a bit more. Remember that, regardless of how long the scene lasts, it's going to take a while to set up camera and lights, plan everything out, and do all of the necessary takes before breaking set. So these are far from hourly rates.
Men - at least in straight porn - get paid almost nothing. Very often just a day rate of $150 or so unless they're a real selling point (hard to do for most straight porn)
The cost of production for most porn is $10,000-15,000 for a 90 minute tape, featuring 5-7 seven scenes.
Building a model and tweaking the skin weighting (you'd have to do extensive weighting to accomodate a wide range of positions) would take a lot of time and money. Those costs aside, you'd still have to deal with motion capture. If you capture pantomimed motion (of two separate individuals), it probably won't be convincing (or very sexy). Motion capture data always needs to be cleaned and massaged. These are not tasks for Johnny Camcorder.
Even after you have an efficient and bug-free pipeline worked out, you're still going to be spending a few days of an expensive TD's time for every hour of video. And it would be crappy video: flat lighting, hardware rendered models, blocky hair. Mmmmm, sexy sounding, isn't it?
And for the record, I know of few crack-addled porn stars, but on the other hand I don't think I've ever met one who didn't use cocaine at the drop of a hat.
Star Trek (the business) and Paramount had come to take the films for granted. The film was produced with the assumption that no matter what sort of film they make, they could expect consistent business for it. I have heard Star Trek employees speak about this, "The fans will all see it in the first few weeks the way they always do and we'll make x dollars"(I think they were projecting in the $75 million range). They were also convinced that, regardless of quality, the films will never attract significant business outsid of their fan base.
As a consequence, the production was driven by decisions to maximize profit from the film, not to make the best ST movie possible. They picked an average script, were given a conservative budget, and proceeded to construct a ST film in a paint-by-numbers way.
When the final film proved to be way too long, they excised huge chunks to get it down to an appropriate length. Perhaps the missing sections provide all of the excitement, tension, and depth that are missing from the final film? Nah, don't bet on it. Nemesis was directed by Stuart Baird. Baird is studio-approved mediocrity. Most of his career has been as an unremarkable editor, in the past decade he has become a hack director as well. Baird (who has always struck me as a loud, blustering idiot every time I met him) was considered to have "saved" Tomb Raider at the last minute. IMHO, all he did was rearrange deck chairs at the last minute, and the crap film was accitdentally successful on name recognition alone. Regardless, Paramount felt he was very safe director (and maybe they even felt they owed him a directing gig after Tomb Raider).
So the ST franchise was put into mediocre hands with little consideration for anything but budget. After all, the ST fans would never abandon the series no matter how much it might suck, right?
Right?
Hmmm...well, it appears that this unsinkable franchise, whose fans will be there through thick and thin, has finally expressed a little too much contempt for those fans. And those fans reacted by showing little interest in the film.
Slashdot Mirror
Installation of Quicktime DOES provide a warning that earlier versions of Quicktime Pro (6.x and earlier) will be lost. Just because you click through the install screens quickly doesn't mean you can ignore the contents and get pissy about it later.
No, the scientists and physicians who claimed a link have been in a very small minority. Nice attempt to discredit the climate science by implication, though.
The anti-thimerisol movement has been driven largely by parents of autistic children looking for an explanation (I'm not unsympathetic, but that shouldn't affect the scientific method) and the anti-vaccination lobby, which is a mix of paranoiacs and people who can't see that a small number of vaccine-caused deaths is preferable to a larger number of disease-caused deaths.
There are actually legitimate health concerns related to the use of mercury as a preservative, but since they are not as dramatic or emotionally charged as the subject of autism, they seldom enter the discussion.
Furthermore, even in the case where scientific consensus MAY be wrong, it's most sensible for those not directly involved in research challenging the consensus to proceed as if it is correct, unless doing so were demonstrably damaging. For instance, it is pretty sensible to respond to climate change by increasing energy efficiency wherever possible. Worst case scenario is improved productivity, competitiveness, and profit. If, on the other hand, increased efficiency came at the cost of infecting every person with leprosy, then global warming denialists might have more of a point.
The reason for UK-only access is not limited to the TV license fee. Non-UK entities own a variety of international rights to many BBC program(me)s. To allow international access to BBC programming would certainly violate those contracts.
Many BBC shows aren't even entirely owned by the BBC. Before they even go into production they are pre-sold in different territories to finance production. In these cases, no single party can claim proprietorship (terms of each party's oversight and influence on prodution are negotiated in the rights contracts). This allows production of shows that might otherwise be too expensive if confined to a single market.
Even when shows aren't sold (or haven't been yet), the show's format - for instance, the basic structure of Pop Idol/American Idol - is a saleable commodity, the value of which can be diluted through access to other markets' versions.
Cable cards are horribly problematic. They were forced upon the cable companies and if you need one it means you're not renting equipment from the cable company. They really don't give a shit if it's a pain in your ass, because it lets them say "well, our cable-box/DVR/whatever never has these problems".
In three months, I've had 5 or 6 different cable cards in my Series 3 Tivo. Only one has worked the whole time (it's got a dual-tuner, so it needs two). Some never worked at all; others refused to unlock the premium channels I'm paying for; still others have been fine for a few weeks then suddenly stopped working.
For once I'm willing to give MS the benefit of the doubt and assume that the problem is Comcast and the crappy cable cards their cartel has concocted.
Based on TFA, the story isn't credible. The study, which is never named, is said to investigate what is broadly (and very vaguely) described as '"emotive and controversial" history'. No date of release for the study is ever given. Study authors are not named. Schools are not named.
The claims made are:
-"...secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework". The GCSE is a standardized test taken at the end of regular secondary education. Does anyone expect the holocaust to be covered by such a test?
-"In another department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils." How pervasive and menacing can this problem be if it isn't even universal policy within a single school?
-"But the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged what was taught in some local mosques." If this motivation is true, then it deserves criticism, but I wonder what exactly might be said in favor of the Crusades if the mosques had no input? My education had no muslim influences (in fact much of it was at Christian schools), yet I was taught that the only good thing about the crusades was that ignorant Europeans were exposed to Arab civilization which led to them bringing back the seeds of the Renaissance to Europe. Am I missing something?
-"A third school found itself 'strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination'." Umm...yet again, the school apparently DOESN'T cave in, despite being "strongly challenged" by Christian(!) parents. Hmmm...strange that the article's headline blames this all on muslims.
I think it's telling that no historians or educators are quoted in the piece. Atypically for a story with a headline like this, there was no reaction quote from anyone in the Jewish community of Britain (the world's 5th largest at approx. 275,000).
The only government official quoted in the piece is "Chris McGovern, history education adviser to the former Tory government". This man has nothing to do with the study. He's been out of that position for 10 years. It's not even clear whether he's responding to the study itself or to a reporter's quick summary of something he hadn't heard of before. It's even possible that the quote was lifted completely from a completely different context and could have been made many years ago.
Finally, the two paragraphs at the end of the story point towards the study really being about pedagogy and not about the putative topic of political correctness affecting curriculum.
Conservative British newspapers have a long history of doing this sort of nonsense. They will find an isolated case of something outrageous and imply that it applies to the general. Or they will distort a story. Or they will outright make up baseless facts to anger their readers and bolster support for their political position (there is a decade long history of these papers printing bogus stories about EU laws that erode British sovereignty and destroy British tradition). These type of stories all make claims that any reasonable person would be angered by, but the details - when you can find them - seldom bear the stories out.
What is the legal justifications for applying this law to only CDs? In terms of copyright law, is there anything that holds a CD as distinctly different than a vinyl record, tape, DVD, book, comic book, poster, t-shirt, or restaurant menu? If it is allegedly in the public's interest to place these restrictions on one form of IP, wouldn't a greater good be served by extending the law to universally apply to all IP?
As an IT consultant whose business is over 95% Mac, I've never encountered a single pirated copy of Windows running on a Boot Camp Mac. In fact, I've had two clients who purchased two copies each - one for Boot Camp and one for Parallels - because it wasn't clear to them that they had every legal right to use the same license in both instances.
Most Mac VARs will now offer OEM licenses of XP at the time of sale for an Intel Mac if you mention that you're interested in dual-boot. Many will even ship the Mac with both OSes installed and ready to go - nothing quite so ugly as a Windows license key sticker marring the otherwise unblemished bottom of a MacBook Pro.
For most employed adults, the time and hassle of pirating a copy or sidestepping Windows Activation more than offsets the cost of an XP license. And since we're talking about Apple customers, we can assume they're not desperate to pinch pennies.
Finally, just to be pedantic: you can get an OEM copy of XP Pro for about $160 (even less if you want XP Home for some misguided reason), but no $400 computer ships with XP Pro. Also, the performance difference between XP running on any Mac hardware versus XP on a $400 box makes the poster's comparison virtually meaningless.
In related news: Sony denies plans to release compelling content for PSP.
A Sony spokesman today denied that Sony was doing anything that would encourage potential customers to purchase its PSP portable gaming system, currently languishing on store shelves everywhere. "Sony really likes what Nintendo has done with the DS. Apple's video iPod is pretty impressive too. We can't do anything to touch that and we think that even trying would just muddy the waters and possibly confuse customers into purchasing our system". To avoid millions of disappointed customers, Sony has developed a three point program:
1. Keep prices uncompetitively high.
2. Avoid revisions with features competitive to the DS.
3. Keep working hard to thwart hackers trying to run homebrew mods: as the only group interested in the PSP, Sony needs to remain vigilant in case this community comes up with the great games that they haven't.
Other related stories: UMD - Today's Betamax or Today's MiniDisc?
Simultrek was fantastic. Wednesdays at midnight in the early 90s, IIRC. The "Mirror Mirror" episode still ranks among the funniest things I've ever watched.
So an executive for a former innovation company that is now essentially just a services company says that innovation will be replaced by services.
Why should we listen to this guy at all? If he were saying this from a company that was still aggressively moving things forward, then maybe his opinion would carry some weight, but IBM? Who cares? I guess this is part of their new sales pitch.
"Service without Innovation...We're IBM"
"Oops! I just dropped all of the tapes" isn't nearly as scary as I just dropped the RAID.
As if selling an illegal mod chip wasn't bad enough, these geniuses also helpfully loaded up the XBox with 77 pirated games.
The "illegality" of mod chips is pretty debatable, even with the DMCA. Adding drive space and hacking your XBox to run Linux are arguably fair end-user modifications. It's really just about selling stolen software.
And yet Apple, unlike SGI, sells products people want to buy.
Final Cut Pro, while not a perfect product, is certainly competitive with the bug-laden offerings from Avid. Premiere? Are you kidding. That app has never been anything more than a consumer-level product. It used to be bundled for free with video and Firewire cards and still no one in the industry would even toy with it.
Shake is great. Very little competition for it at the high end.
Most of the larger effects houses have been moving towards OSX and Linux for the past 5 years. They're the guys who make the big license purchases. If Autodesk refuses to keep servicing all those customers, you just know that Apple will be happy to sweep in with their own product.
I just don't see it as likely for them to risk a big part of their market by abandoning customers.
So...for the sake of argument, let's say that TiVo goes bankrupt and are unable to find additional financing. What's gonna happen? They'll be bought, probably by one of the larger content distributors (Comcast, DirecTV, Charter, whoever).
Anyone buying TiVo wants two things:
1. The TiVo brand. Can you even name another PVR brand? Nobody says "I've got to PVR that show". TiVo is the ONLY product with any name recognition in the marketplace.
2. The TiVo functionality. As anyone who as ever used one knows, there's no comparison to other PVRs. It's got a great interface and is remarkably stable (not perfect, but pretty close).
To mess with either of those threatens to devalue what they've purchased.
Sure, there might be some rough spots when the new owners cow to pressure from content providers, but ultimately the marketplace wins on these things and it will become incrasingly hard for content providers to explain why they want to sue distributors for allowing their customers to do what they've come to expect.
It seems that whatever cache that the Matrix once had has long since been squandered. The 2nd and 3rd films were largely disappointing. "Enter the Matrix" sold well, but was universally panned.
This game's being developed my Monolith, who have always been something of an also-ran. They're always behind the curve technologically and gameplay has never been quite good enough to garner strong enthusiasm (though the NOLF games had some really funny writing).
On top of that, the Matrix is a bleak world that has always been depicted as stark. Ultimately, it's an empty universe and players will be playing this as characters who know that it isn't "real". What's the bloody point?
If there are people excited about the game, I'm interested in hearing what they're looking forward to and what they expect to distinguish it from other MMORPG games
It's $299. You could buy an xbox and mod it for the same functionality for under 200 nowadays.
Yes you could. Of course, your own time must be worth next to nothing for you to consider this a savings.
Hang on, no it's not. If a customre calls with no clue what's causing problems and the Dell support person on the phone knows, common sense (not to mention common decency) dictates that they point them towards a simple spyware solution. Common sense does not suggest you avoid mentioning the likely source of the problem; it does require that you send your customer to the ISP or the OS vender or in any way start them on a fruitless runaround when you could simply say "spybot might solve your problem".
I understand Dell's liability concerns regarding EULA's they know nothing about, but it smacks of cowardice when a corporate behemoth is afraid to give decent tech support. Are they that afraid of Gator and other scumbag spyware companies?
Once you go ipod.. you don't go back :)
Once you go iPod, you don't running.
Lemme guess...you didn't actually read the article you're attempting to "discuss" so you make a point that is already addressed (and, I think, dismissed reasonably well) in the essay.
As a person who primarily uses Windows in my business, but makes regular use of Linux and MacOS as well, I feel that I'm reasonably without bias ; I don't feel loyalty to any OS, nor do I think my use of any particular OS at any time reflects on my character. But the fact is that Windows has some big security problems that just don't exist elsewhere.
No doubt the MacOSes and Linux have their vulnerabilities, but most of them are not so simple and painfully obvious. To compound it, MS pushes a communication product (Outlook) which enables and simplifies the automation of malicious activity.
How can this be linked to texting? If it were huge dropoff between the first and second screening, sure, but with a whole week in between perhaps some other technologies are implicated. Some of the likely culprits include: newspapers
telephones, television, email, web reviews, and snail mail. Hell, with a whole week to do it, you can pretty much warn the entire country off of a crap movie by face-to-face word of mouth.
If a movie is so bad that people are going to be sending SMS messages during it, it's probably bad enough for them to leave the movie. This sounds like a really weak attempt by studio asshats to blame poor performance on an aspect of youth culture they don't understand.
That $120 million doesn't include marketing and distribution costs. Furthermore, the Hulk movie probably took well over a year in actual production so the return has to be calculated over a longer period. Actual ROI would be much lower than in your example. Of course, that doesn't include foreign, DVD, and merchandising revenues.
Over the past few years I've really gotten into the novels of Patrick O'Brian. They are stories of the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I've always thought it was a lot like Jane Austen with ships, cannon and spies.
With 20 books in his Aubrey-Maturin series, it incredibly manages to maintain a high standard of writing and storytelling to the very end.
O'Brian earns his geek-cred - albeit a 19th century geek-cred - by thoroughly understanding the ins and outs of naval technology of the day.
It's great, engaging stuff and I can't recommend it enough. After two years of patronizingly calling them my "little sailboat books", my wife started paging through one and was instantly hooked. Two months later, she's on the 7th book!
Buy "Master and Commander" and you won't be disappointed.
It seems that all of the responses to this fall into two categories:
1. People who don't understand why you would want to time-shift top 40 or talk radio.
2. People who listen to NPR.
People in the first group should take note that there is, in fact, radio worth time shifting and check it out.
Nah, sorry. An average successful porn star will probably make $1000 for a straight scene. Oral sex and girl/girl will pay considerably less. An anal scene will pay a bit more. Remember that, regardless of how long the scene lasts, it's going to take a while to set up camera and lights, plan everything out, and do all of the necessary takes before breaking set. So these are far from hourly rates.
Men - at least in straight porn - get paid almost nothing. Very often just a day rate of $150 or so unless they're a real selling point (hard to do for most straight porn)
The cost of production for most porn is $10,000-15,000 for a 90 minute tape, featuring 5-7 seven scenes.
Building a model and tweaking the skin weighting (you'd have to do extensive weighting to accomodate a wide range of positions) would take a lot of time and money. Those costs aside, you'd still have to deal with motion capture. If you capture pantomimed motion (of two separate individuals), it probably won't be convincing (or very sexy). Motion capture data always needs to be cleaned and massaged. These are not tasks for Johnny Camcorder.
Even after you have an efficient and bug-free pipeline worked out, you're still going to be spending a few days of an expensive TD's time for every hour of video. And it would be crappy video: flat lighting, hardware rendered models, blocky hair. Mmmmm, sexy sounding, isn't it?
And for the record, I know of few crack-addled porn stars, but on the other hand I don't think I've ever met one who didn't use cocaine at the drop of a hat.
Star Trek (the business) and Paramount had come to take the films for granted. The film was produced with the assumption that no matter what sort of film they make, they could expect consistent business for it. I have heard Star Trek employees speak about this, "The fans will all see it in the first few weeks the way they always do and we'll make x dollars"(I think they were projecting in the $75 million range). They were also convinced that, regardless of quality, the films will never attract significant business outsid of their fan base.
As a consequence, the production was driven by decisions to maximize profit from the film, not to make the best ST movie possible. They picked an average script, were given a conservative budget, and proceeded to construct a ST film in a paint-by-numbers way.
When the final film proved to be way too long, they excised huge chunks to get it down to an appropriate length. Perhaps the missing sections provide all of the excitement, tension, and depth that are missing from the final film? Nah, don't bet on it. Nemesis was directed by Stuart Baird. Baird is studio-approved mediocrity. Most of his career has been as an unremarkable editor, in the past decade he has become a hack director as well. Baird (who has always struck me as a loud, blustering idiot every time I met him) was considered to have "saved" Tomb Raider at the last minute. IMHO, all he did was rearrange deck chairs at the last minute, and the crap film was accitdentally successful on name recognition alone. Regardless, Paramount felt he was very safe director (and maybe they even felt they owed him a directing gig after Tomb Raider).
So the ST franchise was put into mediocre hands with little consideration for anything but budget. After all, the ST fans would never abandon the series no matter how much it might suck, right?
Right?
Hmmm...well, it appears that this unsinkable franchise, whose fans will be there through thick and thin, has finally expressed a little too much contempt for those fans. And those fans reacted by showing little interest in the film.