>I can't believe a language named "F#" got past
> Microsoft's marketing department. Or are
> they retarded enough to think it won't get
>expanded to "F#@%"?
You think that's bad? As a non-programmer I expanded "F#/OCaml/ML" to "f*ck em all"...
Or.... for the paranoid out there... perhaps with the federal prosecution being dropped and everything else, this is MS's statement directly to programmers:
"Programmers??? F#/OCaml/ML"
The cross-platform client is a Java 1.3 GUI, so it could work on Mac OS X (I haven't checked it out in a while though). They did also have a Java command-line version, and there were even Emacs integrations for that floating around.
I find it very difficult to believe that they're losing only 20% as much as Sony was per machine.
Well, my friends are usually very up on their gaming info, take going to E3 very seriously, have PS2, X-Box, GameCube, PS2 Linux kit, etc. They were doing all their stats carefully, etc. Part of it is probably due to Microsoft planing things, leveraging component manufacturers against each other, and moving production from Mexico to China (Aside from having to move their plants to China, Flextronics is getting squezed out of being the exclusive manufacturer).
Of course, there's always the Microsoft mastery of double-speak wich might involve several linguists and legal experts poring over the actual MS statements just to be sure...
In case you didn't know already, MS is selling Xbox's at a huge loss.
It might not be as much as you think.Microsoft recently told shareholders that the X-Box was just only losing 20% of what Sony was initially losing on the PS2. A friend put that to end up somewhere in the $20-$30 range....And the SEC tends to get a bit grumpy with companies that mislead investors...
This has always amazed me. To compare a 2002 movie's revenues at $8 a seat to a 1977 movie's revenues at $4 a seat and say it outsold Star Wars! Well, duh!
As with most statistics, it's important to understand the concepts. The main point is that they are comparing to the fifth Star Wars movie: "Episode II" (confusing, huh?). This, of course, opened only two few weeks after Spider-Man, so chances are ticket prices are close enough for a valid comparison.
Now why don't we just look at number of tickets sold and see where we stand, keeping in mind that even that metric is skewed...
My guess is because only gross revenues are reported, not individual sales (which can vary just from time of day...)
And another thing that's meaningless is how much a movie did in it's first weekend (as opposed to altogether)...
Actually, that's not so meaningless. The vast majority of movies follow a general pattern where the first weekend is the largest, then they progressively slide from around 33%-50% per weekend. Given that and a little basic math, the first weekend take can be a good indicator.
Now, there are a few movies that don't do this. Titanic was one (actually hit a 28% increase for its second weekend). Of course, that movie stood out for all sorts of reasons, and was an anomoly. Off-hand, I recall Amistad and Mouse Hunt also grew their second weekends. Of course, those two were initial films from an untested new studio, so there's reason for them also.
If you are interested, check some sites like Box Office Mojo or The Numbers and look at the percentage change, not just the raw numbers.
...which is released in late spring when the weather is beautiful and people want to be outdoors instead of in a theater, there are graduations going on, and a million other distractions, is ridiculous at best.
Sounds like you really need to stop relying on personal preference there and look to industry information. Right off hand I see that February is usually down for ticket sales, while late spring is usually when sales really start to take off. My first Google hit checking things even shows just that. Feb 1999: $341,959,083. May 1999: $742,936,211. Doesn't sound "ridiculous" to me.
Meaningless numbers are just that- meaningless. You must look at the meaning behind the statistics and take everything that could affect them into account.
Exactly. Unfortunately, it seems that you are missing on this a little. Go to The Numbers and do some looking up. Pay careful attention to the % change from weekend to weekend. That's quite informative. And even more informative is looking at the change in the change. And ponder things like "Why did 'A Beautiful Mind' have a sudden reverse in change from -24% to +28% for the weekend of 2/15/2002???"
Number of theaters and number of screens are different things.
Good point. In my other comment I mention, the person stated '3,800 or so screens', which matched Memorial Day numbers of 3,876 theatres that I had read.
I went to the-numbers.com and I could not find anything that stipulated whether it listed domestic or international gross. Industry analysts generally look at international gross.
Just click on any of the movie titles listed (Spider-Man, for example). The text they use before listing gross is "Total US Gross".
AoTC was as good as Empire in my opinion, and I am an obsessive SW fanboy. But I never bought into the Power of Myth interpretation. I always saw SW as a 1950's-era space opera/science fantasy, and through those lenses, AoTC rocked.
Just a tiny correction. Those 1950's-era TV space operas were broadcasts of the 1930's-era cinema serials. But I do agree with you on your main point. As one of those serials, AoTC (at least the last half) did rock.
Re:Are you a journalism student?
on
The Empire Stumbles
·
· Score: 3, Informative
nd partially due to the fact that the AOTC was shown on fewer theaters worldwide, and won't even open until next month in some countries...
One point is that the many of the comparisons here are on domestic gross, not international. At least that's what I watch at The Numbers, and jives with what people are citing. And as for number of screens, you can check my other comment for that.
...There is no overarching generaltional statement in the ticket sales of these two movies.
More importantly (since you correctly point out that differences are in general 'negligable'), there are a few things that can be seen in the ticket sales. Among them are the interesting point that Spider-Man's gross did not drop extra on the weekend that AOTC opened. In fact, the decline slowed by a couple of percentage points compared to the decline from first to second weekend. This is especially telling, as many expected that much of the expected Star Wars audience overlapped the expected Spider-Man audience.
The one that really shows an unusual pattern in weekend-to-weekend decline was Titanic. That one started with a 23.8% gain instead of the usuall 33%-50% drop that movies get. And.... we all know how that movie fared.
Yeah, so the 3,800 or so screens that Spider-Man is running on (even more than Shrek), compared to ~1,000 less for Attack of the Clones has nothing to do with it, eh?
Although... studios usually put a lot of research into the number of screens a particular film can support, and generally like to open on as many as they can fill.
BTW, some sources list that Star Wars opened at 3,161 theatres, while Spider-Man opened at 3,615 theatres and then only last weekend bumped up to 3,876. So that's only ~450 less, not ~1,000.
Just a minor point. As I recall, and have read, Joseph Campbell really didn't help Lucas craft the mythos. It was more of an after-the-fact thing that Campbell recognized and Lucas then picked up and ran with to inflate his own 'artistry' and level.
It's not a vast work of high art. However, it's the early cinema serials taken to the pinacle. Just spend a weekend watching the old Buster Crabbeserials, then watch Episode IV. From the settings (the common desert-type area), to the music to the cuts, wipes and dissolves, it's clearly a loving tribute to Flash Gordon.
Even more than pulp sci-fi (which I loved as a Jr. High student, E.E. 'Doc' Smith and all), Star Wars is the direct evolution of Flash Gordon. Remember, those old 30's serials hit TV in the early fifties, right about when Lucas would have been around 10 years old (wich is around how old I was when Star Wars came out and I watched it). So one could easily see his childhood wonder and awe come through there.
Why did they not include the Free Software OpenOffice instead of the closed StarOffice
Because they already have OpenOffice in it's own channel. Subscribe if you want, it's all nice and free. Quite handy, that (I installed it that way myself just this week) .
I've run Enlightenment with virtual desktops on a P133 with 64MB RAM. Quite snappy. (And, yes, I had also run Windowmaker on the same setup just prior to that).
What I'd found was that at the time, GNOME 1.0 was the big culprit. Taking that off and just relying on the paging and launchers and such of E made my PC quite nice. (And, yes, GNOME was even as slow with Windowmaker).
The answer to your dillema is pretty straightforward: when you turn the light on, your *optical* mouse is noticing a change in the pattern on the desk, and interpreting this as the mouse being moved to wake the Mac.
Well that would be a good answer... except that Mac's usually don't wake on mouse activity. For example, with every single mac in our office, wiggling the mouse does nothing. Hitting the shfit key is the prefered way to wake them up.
Well, IANAE(I am not an Ergonomist {of whatever the term is})but I think it's because everybody already knows the order.
Ahhhh. Same thing earlier designers (such as those on the early Sharp Wizards) thought. Then studies were done and it was found that due to the breaks in the sequence (not all on one line) people unfamiliar with either layout were slowed by the alphabetical layout just as much as for the QWERTY ones). Then also that the slowdown goes away once the layout was learned. So there are no real benefit from going alphabetical aside from some following incorrect intuition.
It slowed down those who knew QWERTY, and made no difference to those who didn't
It states that their "salesmen used this slight bit of subterfuge to impress potential customers"... However it failed to get into the typewriter "shoot-outs" that went on during that period, where manufacturers would pit their machines against each other in speed trials. QUERTY came to domminance in those. They world's first and fastest touch-typist also came from the Remingtons' machine promotions. (Look up Frank McGurrin sometime if you care).
(Note that I'm not saying here that Dvorak just the same as QUERTY, but just that QWERTY is much better than some give credit for, and that Dvorak isn't that vastly ahead).
Unfortunately, our dog had a neck infection (year and a half ago) and just that alone ended up totallying close to $1000. Adopting a real dog is usually a very good thing, and even has nice health benefits for the owner.
However, it's a true commitment. Unlike they Aibo, you can't just take out the batteries and leave a dog on the shelf. Just consider well before getting a live animal.
For some, an Aibo would be better. And for some both work. Just watching a dog deal with an RC car can be fun enough.:-)
Unfortunately, I don't have enough free cash to get one of these puppies.:-( However I have at least one coworker who returned his when he found out how limited they were ( and the lack of SDK ) at the time.
I hope this nod to the hackers out there is seen as a good means to motivate sales, even if only a few avail themselves of the opportunity. Between this and the PS2 Linux kit, Sony is at least starting to become a more hacker-friendly company.
Yes, if the person you're sending to is using procmail later on, it could silently delete, but most spam filtering for domains is done using blacklists and other measures right when the SMTP client asks for permission to send. It doesn't make any sense, if you're doing filtering on the server, to accept the email, and if you don't accept it the other end should get errors somewhere. Maybe not logical errors, but some sort of errors.
Ahh. But a large issue is that if a spammer issues a bunch of mail into your server, and some of them are accepted and some of them return errors... then suddenly the spammer has a way to check if addresses are live or not, and has a replacement for the VRFY command.
I'm not saying that this ISP behavior has good reasons, just that it has some reasons. And for some ISPs, that's reason enough. Really sucks for legitimate users, though.
And it's a problem with your mailer. All anti-spam software returns errors to your mailer when you connect, or bounces the email. It wouldn't drop them on the floor, that's not discouraging you at all, you'll still keep sucking up their bandwidth, as you can't possibly know they're being dropped.
Nope. Not all. Perhaps it is supposed to, but not all does. Especially at an ISP. I've sent mail from one of my email accounts (that I pay for) to another (that I also pay for), and the second location just drops them off to the bit-bucket.
Remember, if someone falsifies mail origins, kicking back won't help as much. Or the filtering might kick in a little later in the ISP's server chaining. Or the ISP might feel that would be like supporting the VRFY command, which most do not nowadays just for spamming reasons.
The Mule caused a significant upset to the plan, but only in the short term. Between Seldon anticipating his Plan A failing somewhere along the lines, and all the Gaia stuff later on the Mule didn't really upset the applecart.
But that then changes the whole psychohistory bent and Foundation away from predicting the future, and instead takes it into controlling the future. It kinda makes one wonder how much 'nudging' the second Foundation had been doing up to the point where the Mule showed up.
Hmm... and I guess that changes Harry Seldon from a visionary into a Despot. Well, at least he was a benevolent one.
A few summers ago we had a few show up in the house we were renting in Costa Mesa. They didn't really move, and died pretty quickly (whew), but I had to try to track down what they really were to help my wife relax.
I remember calling them "patato bugs" as a kid, but couldn't find that on the web (aside from real patato bugs. After an evening of searching I finally found that they were really "Jerusalem Crickets".
I had hoped that there was at least somewhere online (college entomology department, etc.) that I could use to identify the bugs, but no dice. Then I checked to see if there was any place that would like to hear about them. Again, no dice. It seems a shame that the scientists out there aren't taking advantage of the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Or.... for the paranoid out there... perhaps with the federal prosecution being dropped and everything else, this is MS's statement directly to programmers:
"Programmers??? F#/OCaml/ML"
StarTeam is from Starbase.
The cross-platform client is a Java 1.3 GUI, so it could work on Mac OS X (I haven't checked it out in a while though). They did also have a Java command-line version, and there were even Emacs integrations for that floating around.
Well, my friends are usually very up on their gaming info, take going to E3 very seriously, have PS2, X-Box, GameCube, PS2 Linux kit, etc. They were doing all their stats carefully, etc. Part of it is probably due to Microsoft planing things, leveraging component manufacturers against each other, and moving production from Mexico to China (Aside from having to move their plants to China, Flextronics is getting squezed out of being the exclusive manufacturer).
Of course, there's always the Microsoft mastery of double-speak wich might involve several linguists and legal experts poring over the actual MS statements just to be sure...
It might not be as much as you think.Microsoft recently told shareholders that the X-Box was just only losing 20% of what Sony was initially losing on the PS2. A friend put that to end up somewhere in the $20-$30 range. ...And the SEC tends to get a bit grumpy with companies that mislead investors...
As with most statistics, it's important to understand the concepts. The main point is that they are comparing to the fifth Star Wars movie: "Episode II" (confusing, huh?). This, of course, opened only two few weeks after Spider-Man, so chances are ticket prices are close enough for a valid comparison.
My guess is because only gross revenues are reported, not individual sales (which can vary just from time of day...)
Actually, that's not so meaningless. The vast majority of movies follow a general pattern where the first weekend is the largest, then they progressively slide from around 33%-50% per weekend. Given that and a little basic math, the first weekend take can be a good indicator.
Now, there are a few movies that don't do this. Titanic was one (actually hit a 28% increase for its second weekend). Of course, that movie stood out for all sorts of reasons, and was an anomoly. Off-hand, I recall Amistad and Mouse Hunt also grew their second weekends. Of course, those two were initial films from an untested new studio, so there's reason for them also.
If you are interested, check some sites like Box Office Mojo or The Numbers and look at the percentage change, not just the raw numbers.
Sounds like you really need to stop relying on personal preference there and look to industry information. Right off hand I see that February is usually down for ticket sales, while late spring is usually when sales really start to take off. My first Google hit checking things even shows just that. Feb 1999: $341,959,083. May 1999: $742,936,211. Doesn't sound "ridiculous" to me.
Exactly. Unfortunately, it seems that you are missing on this a little. Go to The Numbers and do some looking up. Pay careful attention to the % change from weekend to weekend. That's quite informative. And even more informative is looking at the change in the change. And ponder things like "Why did 'A Beautiful Mind' have a sudden reverse in change from -24% to +28% for the weekend of 2/15/2002???"
Good point. In my other comment I mention, the person stated '3,800 or so screens', which matched Memorial Day numbers of 3,876 theatres that I had read.
Just click on any of the movie titles listed (Spider-Man, for example). The text they use before listing gross is "Total US Gross".
Just a tiny correction. Those 1950's-era TV space operas were broadcasts of the 1930's-era cinema serials. But I do agree with you on your main point. As one of those serials, AoTC (at least the last half) did rock.
Well, as I pointed out in a different comment here, the sources I usually use state that Spider-Man opened on 3,615 and AOTC opened on 3,161.
One point is that the many of the comparisons here are on domestic gross, not international. At least that's what I watch at The Numbers, and jives with what people are citing. And as for number of screens, you can check my other comment for that.
More importantly (since you correctly point out that differences are in general 'negligable'), there are a few things that can be seen in the ticket sales. Among them are the interesting point that Spider-Man's gross did not drop extra on the weekend that AOTC opened. In fact, the decline slowed by a couple of percentage points compared to the decline from first to second weekend. This is especially telling, as many expected that much of the expected Star Wars audience overlapped the expected Spider-Man audience.
The one that really shows an unusual pattern in weekend-to-weekend decline was Titanic. That one started with a 23.8% gain instead of the usuall 33%-50% drop that movies get. And.... we all know how that movie fared.
Although... studios usually put a lot of research into the number of screens a particular film can support, and generally like to open on as many as they can fill.
BTW, some sources list that Star Wars opened at 3,161 theatres, while Spider-Man opened at 3,615 theatres and then only last weekend bumped up to 3,876. So that's only ~450 less, not ~1,000.
Just a minor point. As I recall, and have read, Joseph Campbell really didn't help Lucas craft the mythos. It was more of an after-the-fact thing that Campbell recognized and Lucas then picked up and ran with to inflate his own 'artistry' and level.
It's not a vast work of high art. However, it's the early cinema serials taken to the pinacle. Just spend a weekend watching the old Buster Crabbe serials, then watch Episode IV. From the settings (the common desert-type area), to the music to the cuts, wipes and dissolves, it's clearly a loving tribute to Flash Gordon.
Even more than pulp sci-fi (which I loved as a Jr. High student, E.E. 'Doc' Smith and all), Star Wars is the direct evolution of Flash Gordon. Remember, those old 30's serials hit TV in the early fifties, right about when Lucas would have been around 10 years old (wich is around how old I was when Star Wars came out and I watched it). So one could easily see his childhood wonder and awe come through there.
Because they already have OpenOffice in it's own channel. Subscribe if you want, it's all nice and free. Quite handy, that (I installed it that way myself just this week) .
I've run Enlightenment with virtual desktops on a P133 with 64MB RAM. Quite snappy. (And, yes, I had also run Windowmaker on the same setup just prior to that).
What I'd found was that at the time, GNOME 1.0 was the big culprit. Taking that off and just relying on the paging and launchers and such of E made my PC quite nice. (And, yes, GNOME was even as slow with Windowmaker).
Well that would be a good answer... except that Mac's usually don't wake on mouse activity. For example, with every single mac in our office, wiggling the mouse does nothing. Hitting the shfit key is the prefered way to wake them up.
Ahhhh. Same thing earlier designers (such as those on the early Sharp Wizards) thought. Then studies were done and it was found that due to the breaks in the sequence (not all on one line) people unfamiliar with either layout were slowed by the alphabetical layout just as much as for the QWERTY ones). Then also that the slowdown goes away once the layout was learned. So there are no real benefit from going alphabetical aside from some following incorrect intuition.
It slowed down those who knew QWERTY, and made no difference to those who didn't
Actually, that article is inaccurate.
It states that their "salesmen used this slight bit of subterfuge to impress potential customers"... However it failed to get into the typewriter "shoot-outs" that went on during that period, where manufacturers would pit their machines against each other in speed trials. QUERTY came to domminance in those. They world's first and fastest touch-typist also came from the Remingtons' machine promotions. (Look up Frank McGurrin sometime if you care).
It also cites Navy experiments on the Dvorak layout. However... they forgot to mention that it was only one study, compared 14 Dvorak typists to 18 QWERTY typists, and that the experiments were conducted by one Lieutenant-Commander August Dvorak, the navy's top time-and-motion man, and owner of the Dvorak layout patent.
For more (but slightly slanted against Dvorak) see "The Fable of the Keys"
(Note that I'm not saying here that Dvorak just the same as QUERTY, but just that QWERTY is much better than some give credit for, and that Dvorak isn't that vastly ahead).
Well... yes. Perhaps.
Unfortunately, our dog had a neck infection (year and a half ago) and just that alone ended up totallying close to $1000. Adopting a real dog is usually a very good thing, and even has nice health benefits for the owner.
However, it's a true commitment. Unlike they Aibo, you can't just take out the batteries and leave a dog on the shelf. Just consider well before getting a live animal.
For some, an Aibo would be better. And for some both work. Just watching a dog deal with an RC car can be fun enough. :-)
Too Late!
He's been cloned!
Good.
Unfortunately, I don't have enough free cash to get one of these puppies. :-( However I have at least one coworker who returned his when he found out how limited they were ( and the lack of SDK ) at the time.
I hope this nod to the hackers out there is seen as a good means to motivate sales, even if only a few avail themselves of the opportunity. Between this and the PS2 Linux kit, Sony is at least starting to become a more hacker-friendly company.
Hacking hardware == good for sales.
Try this Yahoo link
Ahh. But a large issue is that if a spammer issues a bunch of mail into your server, and some of them are accepted and some of them return errors... then suddenly the spammer has a way to check if addresses are live or not, and has a replacement for the VRFY command.
I'm not saying that this ISP behavior has good reasons, just that it has some reasons. And for some ISPs, that's reason enough. Really sucks for legitimate users, though.
Nope. Not all. Perhaps it is supposed to, but not all does. Especially at an ISP. I've sent mail from one of my email accounts (that I pay for) to another (that I also pay for), and the second location just drops them off to the bit-bucket.
Remember, if someone falsifies mail origins, kicking back won't help as much. Or the filtering might kick in a little later in the ISP's server chaining. Or the ISP might feel that would be like supporting the VRFY command, which most do not nowadays just for spamming reasons.
But that then changes the whole psychohistory bent and Foundation away from predicting the future, and instead takes it into controlling the future. It kinda makes one wonder how much 'nudging' the second Foundation had been doing up to the point where the Mule showed up.
Hmm... and I guess that changes Harry Seldon from a visionary into a Despot. Well, at least he was a benevolent one.
A few summers ago we had a few show up in the house we were renting in Costa Mesa. They didn't really move, and died pretty quickly (whew), but I had to try to track down what they really were to help my wife relax.
I remember calling them "patato bugs" as a kid, but couldn't find that on the web (aside from real patato bugs. After an evening of searching I finally found that they were really "Jerusalem Crickets".
I had hoped that there was at least somewhere online (college entomology department, etc.) that I could use to identify the bugs, but no dice. Then I checked to see if there was any place that would like to hear about them. Again, no dice. It seems a shame that the scientists out there aren't taking advantage of the Internet.