Keep in mind that not all languages are available on all platforms. For instance, Objective-C support was removed in gcc for Cygwin. Unfortunate, as I was wanting to learn Objective-C in the time it takes me to save up for a Mac. *sigh*
What the reasoning beyond this decision was, I couldn't hazard a guess.
Seriously - don't bother with anything else if you're gonna do IDE RAID. Drivers for lots of OSes besides Windows, too (including Linux). I just wish they did OS X!
There's also a theory that says that you may well need to have at least one gas giant further out from your star to help deflect space schmutz from wiping your species out too early. Since we have 4 very large planets further out from our planet, we've got a lot of gravity wells helping to keep the inner system cleaner than it would normally be. Then again, this may be a rather common configuration - if a star forms and a gas giant forms, then the eddys between the forming star and forming gas giant may just be what turns into a smaller planet. Where's a Wayback Machine when you need one? *sigh*
I don't think that's true any longer for U.S. currency, is it? Not that it matters what with the Bush administration's hyper-growth of the national debt (which we're about to default on, btw *sigh*)
And Republicans consider themselves fiscal _conservatives_? Yeah, don't pay our debts - we'll have plenty of money left over! *cringe*
Now all they gotta do is remove that offensive "In God We Trust" from the money, and I'll be much happier. They're about to redesign the $20 (to add more colour), so hopefully this will happen before that. I'm sure our money will still be ugly, but at least it'll be colourful, and hopefully, diety-free.
getting close to July 4th you know what that means
on
OSCAR 7 is Alive
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"They're using our own satellites against us!"
Somebody get ahold of Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith. I've got a project for them.
Or maybe we should just hand this one off to the Men in Black.
Okay, I should have worded this better. Instead of: "Feel free to drive REALLY FREAKING FAST through eastern Oregon or eastern Washington.", I should have said: "Don't bother to stop anywhere in eastern Oregon or eastern Washington." or perhaps, "If you're driving at night anywhere on this trip, these would be good areas as you won't miss seeing anything.":) That also applies to eastern Colorado. And all of Kansas and almost all of South Dakota.
When I moved out to Seattle (have since been forced to leave due to economic circumstance), I drove about 100mph for several hours without stopping through most of eastern Oregon. Fun.
If your trip is coming up soon and you'll be in Seattle by July 4th, then you'll want to take this advice for fireworks:
Go to Gasworks Park (north end of Lake Union) - go there early (like early afternoon, or even late morning), and spend the day until the fireworks starts. This is a amazing fireworks display done by two grandmaster fireworks artists. One is European, I think, and his fireworks display from ground up to a certain height, and then the American one takes from that height on up, all done to classical music. Very nice - easily the best fireworks display in Seattle.
The fireworks display off the Space Needle every New Years is nice but very very short. *sigh* (Just thought I'd mention that while on the subject of fireworks in Seattle.)
Okay, you _need_ to go through the Grand Tetons and through Yellowstone Park in western Wyoming. Enroute, you should pass by Devil's Tower (you know, that place in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Strangely, all the aliens I saw there looked like prairie dogs!). And enroute to Devil's Tower, on the South Dakota side, you might as well see Mount Rushmore, since it's so close. Do not speed on the Wyoming side of the border in the area. (personal experience)
Depending on how much of a straight line you don't want to make, perhaps the cliff dwellings in southern Colorado would be worth your time (having to go through the Rockies down from Wyo is nice, but the Grand Tetons are the most beautiful mountains in the lower 48 United States - the rockies are nothing in comparison, though they are quite nice). The big grey cloud sitting on the horizon is Denver - feel free to drive around it. *cough cough* There's a great raptor (the bird kind, not the dino kind) in Idaho that I forgot both the name and location of. Feel free to drive REALLY FREAKING FAST through eastern Oregon or eastern Washington. Same for eastern Colorado if you go through there. And don't bother to stop in South Dakota for anything except Mount Rushmore - it's like the far side of the moon, basically.
Get a nice big road atlas with detailed maps of each state, and pay attention to the 'scenic routes' marked thereon. They're not kidding, most of the time.
If you go through Oregon and then up into Washington, go all the way to the coast and go up Highway 101 along the coast. Among the most beautiful and peaceful areas you'll likely ever go to. If you go far enough south in Oregon, check out Crater Lake. Very nice.
In Washington State, make it up to the San Juan Islands. In Seattle, take the Underground Tour in Pioneer Square. See the city skyline at night from Alki in West Seattle. Go to the Arboretum. Eat at Copacabana at Pike Place Market (have the lomito soltado or the paella). Spit at the Microsoft campus in Redmond (across the lake from Seattle). Ride the Ducks! (look it up when you get there). Ride the Monorail and go to the observation deck of the Space Needle. Oh yeah, walk all through all levels of the Pike Place Market before you eat at Copacabana. Earlier the better.
I suggest you bring your passport and go up to Vancouver, BC (last time I was there, after 2001-09-11, they were requiring passports - this may have been lifted). Go eat at the Afghan Horseman. Best food you'll likely have. Also try the place a few doors down at the Mongolie Grill. Or the same block - Sheba, an Ethiopian place. That's one great block for food! While you're there, go shopping for CDs - cheapest place in the world to (legally) buy CDs. No joke, no exaggeration - the exchange rate is _schweet!_ While you're in Vancouver ('The Couve'), check out the zoo - it's great. Note: if someone walks up to you in downtown Vancouver asking if you have a 'loonie', don't be worried - a loonie is a Canadian dollar. (there's a Loon on the coin). Their two-dollar coin is, naturally, a 'Twoonie' (sp?).
Oh yeah, back to Oregon, Portland specifically - stop at Powell's Books with access to lots of monetary units - this is undoubtedly the best bookstore on the West coast. I could live there. Fun street in Portland: Hawthorne Street.
Back to Seattle - Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe on the waterfront. Freaky stuff, not for the squeamish (real stuffed heads and unwrapped mummies, etc.)
Other places to eat in Seattle: Tup Tim Thai near Seattle Center - best Thai in Seattle (arguably).
Depending on timing, if you'll be in Seattle during Labor Day Weekend (Sept 30 - Aug 2), you MUST attend 'Bumbershoot', a really great festival with lots and lots of food, music, and other entertainment. Attend as much as possible, and expect crowds and light rain (or sunshine). Carry a bumbershoot (umbrella). Check out the events at www.bumershoot.org. Don't park near apartment buildings - that's for the people who live in the area. Fork over the dough to park at a lot you cheapskates!
Best Chicken Teriyaki in Seattle: 'Nasai Teriyaki' - a few locations in Seattle. My favourite: 'Domeburger' - this is a little dive near where the Kingdome used to be - great chicken teriyaki sauce. Yum yum. Great gyoza (pork dumplings), too!
That's all I can think of for now. Have a great trip and take lots of pix!
Okay, that's a reason. Not a great one, but it's a reason.
Things that are complex and take time to do correctly are the reason computers were made in the first place. Shying away from such situations with computers is not the brightest thing I could think of. Doing so when there are benefits is REALLY not smart.
That's the most idiotic reason for case-sensitivity I've ever heard. If someone has enough access to your system to get a file in one case situation, they've got enough access to get to anything else in the same directory.
The fact is, I've never heard anyone come up with a good idea for case sensitivity. The only one anyone ever comes up with is, "Well, with case sensitivity, I can have a file named 'Hello' and one named 'HELLO', etc." Hello, that's not an advantage - it's confusing as hell!
Case insensitivity with case-retention is the ideal - and that's what HFS+ has. If Apple would just fix their slow-ass hardware, I'd change over in a heartbeat (assuming I had the $).
I'd recommend you scare yourself to death and read Tom Clancy's "Jack Ryan" novels, including 'Rainbow Six'. Especially Rainbow Six. You should definitely read 'The Sum of All Fears', and see why the movie is pathetic in comparison - they chopped out massive parts of the book, and changed what they left almost to the point of unrecognizability. A great book, with an interesting idea on how to actually achieve a workable peace in the Middle East, though it may be too late after 2001-09-11.:(
Other books - I'd recommend all the 'Spenser' books by Robert B. Parker. These are the books that the tv series and tv movies were based on, and if you liked them, you'll be pleased to know these are the same, only much better. It's interesting to start reading them at the beginning (started in the 70's!), and read them all the way through to the most recent one. Interesting character changes.
And, what else, oh, Peter Mayle's 'Provence' books - starting with 'A Year in Provence'. He's got some other related books that are enjoyable, too. Don't take them as gospel on what Provence is like (from what I hear), but they're still very enjoyable.
Okay, first off, a lot of the ticket sales go straight to the movie distributor, NOT to the cinema owner. I've heard it said that the first two months (or maybe 2 weeks? not sure) of SW2 ticket sales has to go to Lucasfilm. Yikes. Okay, so this means that the cinema makes most of it's money from concession sales, NOT from ticket sales. Keep in mind the original poster here said profit, not gross. There are expenses to all the concessions, employee costs (salary & benefits, etc.), other costs such as cleaning costs, etc, plus costs for the building structure and upkeep, etc, insurance, blah blah blah.
The math isn't nearly as simple as you like to make out, and cinemas don't make nearly as much as you're thinking.
Even if all the browsers supported all the standards, you'd still have to code for multiple browsers because of bugs. I have found that that is often the biggest problem - even with simple code like css1, the different browsers will handle even the simplest stuff very differently, thus making 'standards' useless. If the quality isn't there, the standards the browser is supposedly built to don't matter. (and yes, I'm referring to Netscape's bugs in css).
While on the topic of Opera - does it handle HTML layout correctly yet?
As I understand it, studios make money from the ticket sales, but the cinemas themselves, do not; they make money off of the concession sales.
Question - do the studios make money from the film reels themselves - e.g. do they charge a profitable amount of money from 'renting' to the cinemas, or is ALL their profit from the ticket sales?
If all their profit is made from ticket sales alone, then that's a HUGE incentive for the studios to go to digital. No film reproduction costs (biggest reason no switch to higher than 24fps has happened in the movies - higher film reproduction cost), no shipping costs to thousands of theaters every week for heavy film reels, no shipping insurance costs, then there's the REshipping and insurance on the way back. No film storage costs, etc. Damage to the film from crappy projectors, etc.
If they make money from the cinemas aside from the ticket sales (like, $10,000 per week per film reel, whatever), then someone will have to calculate the expenses and see which is more cost effective, but I'm sure digital will still win out.
Another cost issue is the cost of doing digital in the first place - both for studios and for cinemas. The studios have to buy a lot of new equipment, as do the cinemas. Plus no way in hell are all cinemas going to go all-digital anytime in the next 50 years, so the studios are going to have to keep on producing at least SOME films in film format for the non-digital locations.
Then there's the studios that own big-ass cinema chains - part of their draw will be 'all-digital', so to have their cinemas make more money, they'll have to be converted, so they get hit twice by digital conversion.
Now let's look at quality in digital versus film. I've read that Attack of the Clowns was filmed in 1080p (1080 pixels progressive - not interlaced). This is pretty schweet as far as High Def film goes - I've not heard of better, but when this is projected onto a gigantic movie screen, well, let's just say I'm still skeptical. I've not had a chance to see a digitally-projected film, but the bigger the screen, the worse this is going to be. With cinemas making larger and larger multiplexes, with some screens being absolutely huge, 1080p is simply not going to cut it, I feel sure. And how many digitally-filmed & projected movies will be done in 1080p? Most are being recorded in substantially LESS resolution, at least, the independent moviemaking pioneers aren't using equipment like Lucas uses, that I know for a fact. And 1080p is pretty high for current standards - are the digital projectors out there in the cinemas capable of doing 1080p, or only 1080i or 720p? That's a question I've not seen anyone address, and it's hugely important.
If you compare digital vs film in the world of, say, 35mm photography, you'd find out that 1080 lines of vertical resolution per frame is completely laughable - absolutely pathetic! There are film scanners out there you can buy for under $2000 that can do 4000dpi, and drum scanners can do even better. Many of these digital images are never intended to be blown up past poster-size, much less a giant cinema-size screen. So, quality? If you're getting the best image out of film (which you never do - bad projectors, dirty lenses, dirty projection room window, scratched film, crappy projector screen with gum and popcorn 'butter' on it), then yeah, digital may have an advantage on small cinema screens. If your cinema's digital projector doesn't have the same specs as Lucas' 1080p film, which I doubt many do, then I doubt you'll be getting as much out of it.
What does it all add up to? The answer is - it doesn't matter. You'll get what the studios want to give to you, no matter what, so you might as well relax about it.
Well, yeah, and then you piss off _that_ guy by pointing out how the TARDIS can beat everything else. *shrug* What're ya gonna do? The grass is always greener...
> The engineering undergraduate program at Queens University actually > has a disasters course as one of the non-technical electives. ... > Supposedly this engenders a greater sense of responsibility into the > engineers to be.
Perhaps, then, this should be a required class instead of an elective one. *shrug*
If you drop a hammer and a feather in an atmosphere, the hammer will win. Also note in the movie, when Spider-Man (don't forget the dash (tm)!) dove after Mary Jane, he did so in a nice Olympic-approved diving form - Mary Jane was falling in a nice frat-party-got-her-drunk type crouch. He probably had a much lower coefficient of drag. Plus, didn't he shoot her with webbing and pull her to him, then shoot webbing above to divert their fall? I can't remember if he did both web shots or just the latter one. Too fast, too many action scenes for me to remember the picky details of each one. And I missed Lucy Lawless in the movie - but didn't know she was in it until afterwards, so wasn't looking. *shrug*
Still, much more realistic than M&M's floating in a nice double helix!:) Plus, let's face it, Kirsten Dunst has it all over realistic physics, any day of the week.
Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson is the Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia (in the metal bikini) for the new age of young boys. Thing is, she looks a lot better than Carrie Fisher ever did. Kirsten Dunst as a redhead is the real attraction of the movie.
Some of the simulation results indicate that, in addition to cockroaches and Keith Richards, the following items will survive thermonuclear war:
1) an incredible number of AOL CDs. The exact number is to be determined via further testing of ASCI White, once it's reached further performance milestones.
2) Lawyers and Insurance salespeople. (see also: cockroaches)
> a risk most companies won't take--you don't > want your users not being able to use your site.
Judging by the state of usability of the vast majority of sites, I'm thinking that most companies couldn't care less whether people can use their sites or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that not all languages are available on all platforms. For instance, Objective-C support was removed in gcc for Cygwin. Unfortunate, as I was wanting to learn Objective-C in the time it takes me to save up for a Mac. *sigh*
What the reasoning beyond this decision was, I couldn't hazard a guess.
Seriously - don't bother with anything else if you're gonna do IDE RAID. Drivers for lots of OSes besides Windows, too (including Linux). I just wish they did OS X!
There's also a theory that says that you may well need to have at least one gas giant further out from your star to help deflect space schmutz from wiping your species out too early. Since we have 4 very large planets further out from our planet, we've got a lot of gravity wells helping to keep the inner system cleaner than it would normally be. Then again, this may be a rather common configuration - if a star forms and a gas giant forms, then the eddys between the forming star and forming gas giant may just be what turns into a smaller planet. Where's a Wayback Machine when you need one? *sigh*
I don't think that's true any longer for U.S. currency, is it? Not that it matters what with the Bush administration's hyper-growth of the national debt (which we're about to default on, btw *sigh*)
And Republicans consider themselves fiscal _conservatives_? Yeah, don't pay our debts - we'll have plenty of money left over! *cringe*
Now all they gotta do is remove that offensive "In God We Trust" from the money, and I'll be much happier. They're about to redesign the $20 (to add more colour), so hopefully this will happen before that. I'm sure our money will still be ugly, but at least it'll be colourful, and hopefully, diety-free.
"They're using our own satellites against us!"
Somebody get ahold of Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith. I've got a project for them.
Or maybe we should just hand this one off to the Men in Black.
Okay, I should have worded this better. Instead of: "Feel free to drive REALLY FREAKING FAST through eastern Oregon or eastern Washington.", I should have said: "Don't bother to stop anywhere in eastern Oregon or eastern Washington." or perhaps, "If you're driving at night anywhere on this trip, these would be good areas as you won't miss seeing anything." :) That also applies to eastern Colorado. And all of Kansas and almost all of South Dakota.
When I moved out to Seattle (have since been forced to leave due to economic circumstance), I drove about 100mph for several hours without stopping through most of eastern Oregon. Fun.
If your trip is coming up soon and you'll be in Seattle by July 4th, then you'll want to take this advice for fireworks:
Go to Gasworks Park (north end of Lake Union) - go there early (like early afternoon, or even late morning), and spend the day until the fireworks starts. This is a amazing fireworks display done by two grandmaster fireworks artists. One is European, I think, and his fireworks display from ground up to a certain height, and then the American one takes from that height on up, all done to classical music. Very nice - easily the best fireworks display in Seattle.
The fireworks display off the Space Needle every New Years is nice but very very short. *sigh* (Just thought I'd mention that while on the subject of fireworks in Seattle.)
re: toonie vs twoonie
:)
:) I love that joke.
Ah, that was the American spelling.
re: aquarium vs zoo
Actually, I meant to say the aquarium - I haven't been to the zoo. This aquarium will make you a believer. Quite awesome.
re: the Couve
That was a joke. I used to work with a bunch of Canadians. Which reminds me - do you know how they came up with the name Canada?
A: C eh N eh D eh
hahaha!
Okay, you _need_ to go through the Grand Tetons and through Yellowstone Park in western Wyoming. Enroute, you should pass by Devil's Tower (you know, that place in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Strangely, all the aliens I saw there looked like prairie dogs!). And enroute to Devil's Tower, on the South Dakota side, you might as well see Mount Rushmore, since it's so close. Do not speed on the Wyoming side of the border in the area. (personal experience)
Depending on how much of a straight line you don't want to make, perhaps the cliff dwellings in southern Colorado would be worth your time (having to go through the Rockies down from Wyo is nice, but the Grand Tetons are the most beautiful mountains in the lower 48 United States - the rockies are nothing in comparison, though they are quite nice). The big grey cloud sitting on the horizon is Denver - feel free to drive around it. *cough cough* There's a great raptor (the bird kind, not the dino kind) in Idaho that I forgot both the name and location of. Feel free to drive REALLY FREAKING FAST through eastern Oregon or eastern Washington. Same for eastern Colorado if you go through there. And don't bother to stop in South Dakota for anything except Mount Rushmore - it's like the far side of the moon, basically.
Get a nice big road atlas with detailed maps of each state, and pay attention to the 'scenic routes' marked thereon. They're not kidding, most of the time.
If you go through Oregon and then up into Washington, go all the way to the coast and go up Highway 101 along the coast. Among the most beautiful and peaceful areas you'll likely ever go to. If you go far enough south in Oregon, check out Crater Lake. Very nice.
In Washington State, make it up to the San Juan Islands. In Seattle, take the Underground Tour in Pioneer Square. See the city skyline at night from Alki in West Seattle. Go to the Arboretum. Eat at Copacabana at Pike Place Market (have the lomito soltado or the paella). Spit at the Microsoft campus in Redmond (across the lake from Seattle). Ride the Ducks! (look it up when you get there). Ride the Monorail and go to the observation deck of the Space Needle. Oh yeah, walk all through all levels of the Pike Place Market before you eat at Copacabana. Earlier the better.
I suggest you bring your passport and go up to Vancouver, BC (last time I was there, after 2001-09-11, they were requiring passports - this may have been lifted). Go eat at the Afghan Horseman. Best food you'll likely have. Also try the place a few doors down at the Mongolie Grill. Or the same block - Sheba, an Ethiopian place. That's one great block for food! While you're there, go shopping for CDs - cheapest place in the world to (legally) buy CDs. No joke, no exaggeration - the exchange rate is _schweet!_ While you're in Vancouver ('The Couve'), check out the zoo - it's great. Note: if someone walks up to you in downtown Vancouver asking if you have a 'loonie', don't be worried - a loonie is a Canadian dollar. (there's a Loon on the coin). Their two-dollar coin is, naturally, a 'Twoonie' (sp?).
Oh yeah, back to Oregon, Portland specifically - stop at Powell's Books with access to lots of monetary units - this is undoubtedly the best bookstore on the West coast. I could live there.
Fun street in Portland: Hawthorne Street.
Back to Seattle - Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe on the waterfront. Freaky stuff, not for the squeamish (real stuffed heads and unwrapped mummies, etc.)
Other places to eat in Seattle: Tup Tim Thai near Seattle Center - best Thai in Seattle (arguably).
Depending on timing, if you'll be in Seattle during Labor Day Weekend (Sept 30 - Aug 2), you MUST attend 'Bumbershoot', a really great festival with lots and lots of food, music, and other entertainment. Attend as much as possible, and expect crowds and light rain (or sunshine). Carry a bumbershoot (umbrella). Check out the events at www.bumershoot.org . Don't park near apartment buildings - that's for the people who live in the area. Fork over the dough to park at a lot you cheapskates!
Best Chicken Teriyaki in Seattle: 'Nasai Teriyaki' - a few locations in Seattle. My favourite: 'Domeburger' - this is a little dive near where the Kingdome used to be - great chicken teriyaki sauce. Yum yum. Great gyoza (pork dumplings), too!
That's all I can think of for now. Have a great trip and take lots of pix!
Okay, that's a reason. Not a great one, but it's a reason.
Things that are complex and take time to do correctly are the reason computers were made in the first place. Shying away from such situations with computers is not the brightest thing I could think of. Doing so when there are benefits is REALLY not smart.
That's the most idiotic reason for case-sensitivity I've ever heard. If someone has enough access to your system to get a file in one case situation, they've got enough access to get to anything else in the same directory.
The fact is, I've never heard anyone come up with a good idea for case sensitivity. The only one anyone ever comes up with is, "Well, with case sensitivity, I can have a file named 'Hello' and one named 'HELLO', etc." Hello, that's not an advantage - it's confusing as hell!
Case insensitivity with case-retention is the ideal - and that's what HFS+ has. If Apple would just fix their slow-ass hardware, I'd change over in a heartbeat (assuming I had the $).
I'd recommend you scare yourself to death and read Tom Clancy's "Jack Ryan" novels, including 'Rainbow Six'. Especially Rainbow Six. You should definitely read 'The Sum of All Fears', and see why the movie is pathetic in comparison - they chopped out massive parts of the book, and changed what they left almost to the point of unrecognizability. A great book, with an interesting idea on how to actually achieve a workable peace in the Middle East, though it may be too late after 2001-09-11. :(
:)
Other books - I'd recommend all the 'Spenser' books by Robert B. Parker. These are the books that the tv series and tv movies were based on, and if you liked them, you'll be pleased to know these are the same, only much better. It's interesting to start reading them at the beginning (started in the 70's!), and read them all the way through to the most recent one. Interesting character changes.
And, what else, oh, Peter Mayle's 'Provence' books - starting with 'A Year in Provence'. He's got some other related books that are enjoyable, too. Don't take them as gospel on what Provence is like (from what I hear), but they're still very enjoyable.
Sorry, no links today.
> And in 1980 when everyone uses the metric system, you are going to need a new bathroom scale.
:)
Yeah, and we'll have to rearrange the keycaps on our keyboards for DVORAK while we all learn Esperanto.
Okay, first off, a lot of the ticket sales go straight to the movie distributor, NOT to the cinema owner. I've heard it said that the first two months (or maybe 2 weeks? not sure) of SW2 ticket sales has to go to Lucasfilm. Yikes. Okay, so this means that the cinema makes most of it's money from concession sales, NOT from ticket sales. Keep in mind the original poster here said profit, not gross. There are expenses to all the concessions, employee costs (salary & benefits, etc.), other costs such as cleaning costs, etc, plus costs for the building structure and upkeep, etc, insurance, blah blah blah.
The math isn't nearly as simple as you like to make out, and cinemas don't make nearly as much as you're thinking.
Even if all the browsers supported all the standards, you'd still have to code for multiple browsers because of bugs. I have found that that is often the biggest problem - even with simple code like css1, the different browsers will handle even the simplest stuff very differently, thus making 'standards' useless. If the quality isn't there, the standards the browser is supposedly built to don't matter. (and yes, I'm referring to Netscape's bugs in css).
While on the topic of Opera - does it handle HTML layout correctly yet?
As I understand it, studios make money from the ticket sales, but the cinemas themselves, do not; they make money off of the concession sales.
Question - do the studios make money from the film reels themselves - e.g. do they charge a profitable amount of money from 'renting' to the cinemas, or is ALL their profit from the ticket sales?
If all their profit is made from ticket sales alone, then that's a HUGE incentive for the studios to go to digital. No film reproduction costs (biggest reason no switch to higher than 24fps has happened in the movies - higher film reproduction cost), no shipping costs to thousands of theaters every week for heavy film reels, no shipping insurance costs, then there's the REshipping and insurance on the way back. No film storage costs, etc. Damage to the film from crappy projectors, etc.
If they make money from the cinemas aside from the ticket sales (like, $10,000 per week per film reel, whatever), then someone will have to calculate the expenses and see which is more cost effective, but I'm sure digital will still win out.
Another cost issue is the cost of doing digital in the first place - both for studios and for cinemas. The studios have to buy a lot of new equipment, as do the cinemas. Plus no way in hell are all cinemas going to go all-digital anytime in the next 50 years, so the studios are going to have to keep on producing at least SOME films in film format for the non-digital locations.
Then there's the studios that own big-ass cinema chains - part of their draw will be 'all-digital', so to have their cinemas make more money, they'll have to be converted, so they get hit twice by digital conversion.
Now let's look at quality in digital versus film. I've read that Attack of the Clowns was filmed in 1080p (1080 pixels progressive - not interlaced). This is pretty schweet as far as High Def film goes - I've not heard of better, but when this is projected onto a gigantic movie screen, well, let's just say I'm still skeptical. I've not had a chance to see a digitally-projected film, but the bigger the screen, the worse this is going to be. With cinemas making larger and larger multiplexes, with some screens being absolutely huge, 1080p is simply not going to cut it, I feel sure. And how many digitally-filmed & projected movies will be done in 1080p? Most are being recorded in substantially LESS resolution, at least, the independent moviemaking pioneers aren't using equipment like Lucas uses, that I know for a fact. And 1080p is pretty high for current standards - are the digital projectors out there in the cinemas capable of doing 1080p, or only 1080i or 720p? That's a question I've not seen anyone address, and it's hugely important.
If you compare digital vs film in the world of, say, 35mm photography, you'd find out that 1080 lines of vertical resolution per frame is completely laughable - absolutely pathetic! There are film scanners out there you can buy for under $2000 that can do 4000dpi, and drum scanners can do even better. Many of these digital images are never intended to be blown up past poster-size, much less a giant cinema-size screen. So, quality? If you're getting the best image out of film (which you never do - bad projectors, dirty lenses, dirty projection room window, scratched film, crappy projector screen with gum and popcorn 'butter' on it), then yeah, digital may have an advantage on small cinema screens. If your cinema's digital projector doesn't have the same specs as Lucas' 1080p film, which I doubt many do, then I doubt you'll be getting as much out of it.
What does it all add up to? The answer is - it doesn't matter. You'll get what the studios want to give to you, no matter what, so you might as well relax about it.
> The Doctor's TARDIS had constant problems.
:)
Mmm, yeah, like the Falcon was always in perfect working condition.
Well, yeah, and then you piss off _that_ guy by pointing out how the TARDIS can beat everything else. *shrug* What're ya gonna do? The grass is always greener...
> The engineering undergraduate program at Queens University actually
> has a disasters course as one of the non-technical electives.
...
> Supposedly this engenders a greater sense of responsibility into the
> engineers to be.
Perhaps, then, this should be a required class instead of an elective one. *shrug*
If you drop a hammer and a feather in an atmosphere, the hammer will win. Also note in the movie, when Spider-Man (don't forget the dash (tm)!) dove after Mary Jane, he did so in a nice Olympic-approved diving form - Mary Jane was falling in a nice frat-party-got-her-drunk type crouch. He probably had a much lower coefficient of drag. Plus, didn't he shoot her with webbing and pull her to him, then shoot webbing above to divert their fall? I can't remember if he did both web shots or just the latter one. Too fast, too many action scenes for me to remember the picky details of each one. And I missed Lucy Lawless in the movie - but didn't know she was in it until afterwards, so wasn't looking. *shrug*
:) Plus, let's face it, Kirsten Dunst has it all over realistic physics, any day of the week.
Still, much more realistic than M&M's floating in a nice double helix!
Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson is the Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia (in the metal bikini) for the new age of young boys. Thing is, she looks a lot better than Carrie Fisher ever did. Kirsten Dunst as a redhead is the real attraction of the movie.
> Clearly we're a bunch of gawddamned Godless commies compared
:)
> to the good, honest, business-uber-alles people of Seattle, aren't we?
Clearly.
You may have better mass transit in Portland than people in Seattle, but you're still stuck living in Portland.
*grin*
Some of the simulation results indicate that, in addition to cockroaches and Keith Richards, the following items will survive thermonuclear war:
1) an incredible number of AOL CDs. The exact number is to be determined via further testing of ASCI White, once it's reached further performance milestones.
2) Lawyers and Insurance salespeople. (see also: cockroaches)
Next up: Damnation Alley scenarios, yeehaw!
> a risk most companies won't take--you don't
> want your users not being able to use your site.
Judging by the state of usability of the vast majority of sites, I'm thinking that most companies couldn't care less whether people can use their sites or not.