Good grief, Tobey was working for Columbia Pictures, and he's dating the daughter of the head of Universal Studios. It clearly says in the article that Meyer is "the head of a rival studio."
I had intended this remark to be sarcastic humor, but instead I'm bogged in a sea of Insightful versus Overrated moderation. Am I the victim of a mod war?:)
Ahhh! I have to go change my Passport profile and take out all those redit cards I added, and transport those top-secret, mission critical emails and documents I have sitting in my Hotmail account!
Why did I trust Microsoft with all of my personal secrets? They've had such great security in the past.../obvious
After all of these negative reviews based on a two minute trailer (which may or may not contain pieces of file that will actually be shown in the 100-minute version), I think I have a new.sig quote:
"Those who would give up watching a fun movie to spend hours disecting the teaser-trailer deserve neither."
Every cliche needs a little modernization from time to time, right?:)
Did I say that? You are the second person to respond with this. I said I have to sell 100 just to break even from the filing fees. These are fees that go to pay peoples salaries for not doing a damned thing. That's why it's jacked. That's $10K that could be better spent marketing, advertising, or any other expense.
I think you are making an assumption that I am making an assumption that you are assuming something.
I said "a small number of people." This was in response to your complaint that the first 100 sales would be used to pay off the fees. You made it sound like you didn't expect to sell many, so the first 100 sales worth of profit going to cover the costs of "creating" the invention was a big deal. I was pointing out that most business cases for (smaller than an automobile) products include sales expectations in the hundreds of thousands or more. So my second remark was aimed at you choosing more of a niche market for your product.
I think instead of yelling at me and the other guy, you should clarify your original post. Thanks.
After filing, I'm looking at investing almost $8K on this idea. With only the hope that it will work.
No offense, but that's how it's supposed to work. You take some risk and if your idea is good, and you execute it properly, you get a patent that entitles you to make as much money as you can off of it for 20 years. $8,000 on a personal invention is nothing. That's less than I've spent in PC parts in the past 4 years.
So, I have to sell approximately 100 before I even cover the filing fees. Great f*cking deal.
Aww, so what you're saying is that you believe your invention is only marketable to a small number of people, and you're only planning on profiting a very small amount from each one?
I'm not trying to flame here, but even if you secure the patent you're after, it's meaningless unless you have a market. That usually indicates how "useful" the invention is anyway. And in very niche applications, usually your client base will be willing to pay a premium for a superior, innovative invention. So again, if your product is that good, you should be charging more.
Now all of this is ideaological. I am fully aware of how the corporatist politicians and corporations make it so that they can either a) stomp on your patent and make money on it, since you can't afford legal fees to fight them, or b) start you out in their pocket and assume your IP as their own.
I have a co-worker, who, after 30 years with the bank, just got the tech division's FIRST PATENT. You know what he got for it? The CIO took him out to lunch, and he got his picture and a fluff article about him in the company newsletter. Whee.
If you piss off a lot of people for justifiable reasons (e.g., you are the author of Satanic Verses)...
Wow. Just... Wow! Justifiable reasons? Just because Islamic Fundamentalists regarded the author's work as blasphemy requiring personally-executed capital punishment doesn't mean that action is justifiable.
(I've never read The Satanic Versus, but people have written far more hertical and blasphemous things about Christian and Jewish beliefs. Personally, I find that opinions counter to any established school of thought are usually interesting, even if they are conspicuously wrong. What was that quote again? "Nothing is offensive to the rational mind?")
First of all, I was critiquing style and approach on the part of the writer, not the factual legitimacy of the issues.
Secondly, I make my living off supporting Microsoft. If they didn't have (rightly or wrongly) a hugely installed base of clients, and some nice complexity in their operating systems and applications so as to make it difficult for the "average Joe" to install and use them, I wouldn't pull salary and benefits to support their products for my employer (a financial corporation).
Thirdly, who says you have to work for Microsoft? Learn from the lessons of others, or the ones you've obviously learned yourself. Your options are many: Work for a different company, or smaller enterprise. Learn a new trade. Move out of state, or up north to Canada.
No doubt you'll have more freedom there, but warning: blank media costs a lot more.:)
As someone who has been interviewed by a journalist for a similar article (taken completely out of context by the New York Times, no less), I think I detect some serious fudging here.
When a reporter goes to get "the story," they start with something either they THINK they can make a big hit with, or take some cruddy assignment and try to take off with it. They interview some people "in the thick" of the issue, and get some "expert" opinions.
This particular article seems to be a re-hash of some old '90s era brou-ha-ha about FTEs vs. Contractors at Microsoft. And it starts out with "you thought you knew the whole story. But we have MORE horrifying, panic inducing rumor and speculation to throw at you now!"
They then spin sound bites from their interviews to argue their angle for the story. And barring that, take a couple of really positive sound bites, like Jannell Myers did in this article, followed by "but others would tend to disagree!" Follow with the thrust of your angle, without any supporting opinions or evidence.
Throw in the testimony of a psychiatrist who basically says "yeah, people outside of a clique often feel left out; and the people in the clique make fun of them."
To flesh it all out, we go for the "public outrage" angle. We get the implication that all of these poor defenseless contractors go on unemployment when they leave Microsoft, and Microsoft is placing undue liability on Joe Taxpayer by their naughty employment practices!
Honestly, this is one of the most transparent pieces of dispassionate journalism I have seen in months. If I were teaching Journalism 101, Jannell Myers gets an "F-."
I asked him how everyone would have ended up, and he said that Wendell (the nerdy computer geek that Urkel was based on) would have ended up as a Linux kernel developer.
This is not true. You can count on one hand how many interviews Berke has given in in the past 7 years. I'm a bit of a fanboy so I can vouch for that. The kid had nothing to do with Urkel, and the Linux remark only solidifies the troll.
Check out his.sig if you still need proof of trolling.
I think Tycho from Penny Arcade had a pretty good take: (emphasis mine)
----- "These groups will not hesitate to threaten or injure those who tend to interfere with their operations," Malcolm said.
This is the first statement I have ever read where Manga speechlessness - "..." - is the only valid response.
Statements of this kind gnaw at the sensible mind, they chew on it and try to eat it. I won't even gauge the clumsiness with which these two incongruous concepts are lashed together. If you want to see triple-x, explicit evidence of corporations with their hands up your government's ass, working the their jaws like some malevolent Howdy Doody with chilling ramifications for personal liberty, well, there you go. Peer-to-peer file sharing and Terror? Terror? Do they not have dictionaries there? There's another T word you cocks might like, too - give it a try: it's called "Tenuous." The only people terrorized by peer-to-peer file sharing are vastly potent multinational businesses, gripped by the realization that they sell carriages in a world of bullet trains. -----:)
The two objections to email listed in the article are:
1. It breaks your concentration. 2. It misleads you into inefficient problem solving.
I'll go with the second one, as you don't get any hands on experience, or any ad hoc give and take communication about the problems you are addressing. Meetings, phone calls, and face to face are really required for a lot of complex problems. (Many cut and dry tech questions can still be answered efficiently in email, however).
The first point-- that it "breaks your concentration-- to me is a matter of personal reaction to email. Are you compulsively checking it? Do you have audio and visual cues blasting you when something hits your inbox?
I check my email at work frequently, but between phone calls and meetings and moments of work where I need to concentrate. And I certainly don't have the mailbox yelling at me or popping up reminders. My clients, coworkers, et al all get their answers in a timely fashion, just not instantaneously at all times.
IM, on the other hand, is a different story. We're now using Lotus SameTime, and I find myself using the "I am Away" option quite frequently. Maybe the thrust of the article should have been IM and its annoyances?
Amazingly, yes-- I read the article. I know it is quite fashionable to pop in early comments without reading the article, but I was just shining a little skepticism on the "mid-year Japanese launch, US launch by end of year" comment. It's already March. A couple of engineering samples and manufacturing tests hardly covers Quality Assurance, and development time for a "launchable" base of games-- even a dozen or so-- within 90 days for the Japanese market.
Besides the fact that Sony needs (and probably wants, to avoid chaos in the retail sector) a million units on hand before release. That in itself would take (an optimistic) 90 days on a fully ramped manufacturing pipeline.
Again, I am completely uninformed though, as I originally stated.
Whether Cell is ready or not, you still have to go through manufacturing trails, quality assurance, a big Japanese release (with requesite game titles), then a US release.
Even with a reputable source like Bloomberg, the odds that Sony would have a US launch before Christmas would be long, in my completely uninformed opinion.:)
Not sad; it is a necessary reality. "Equality" may be an illusion, but it's one that exists for a reason.
We are close to an optimal situation: equal opportunity. Not necessarily equal "rights," or equal "success," or whatever.
Success (specifically the financial kind, in this case), comes from a series of good decisions and good fortune.
I don't vote Republican, but I do happen to believe that the complaints of "inequality" come from people who have made, and continue to make bad choices. Their circumstances may be exacerbated by bad fortune... their upbringing, the faults of their parents, their geographic location... but with a strong will and an illusion of equal opportunity, all of these factors can be overcome.
My company BRIEFLY bought Dell desktops and laptops. (This company purchases between ten and twenty thousand PCs a year, and about 500 servers.)
My Dell Latitude c600 has been nothing but junk. It sits on my desk all day (since I do VPN from home, I don't need to tote the machine), and yet it has had two failed hard drives. The screen has started to develop bizarre blue and magenta artifacts, which can only be cleared up by wiggling and flexing the display. The trackpad "jumps" if you try to use it (I switched to an external trackball). When the CPU is under heavy duress, a hairdryer-esque fan turns out and shoots plasma-hot air aross my right hand on the trackball.
The first time I actually had to travel with it, it lost it's battery charge in 15 minutes and threw up a warning to shut down, and then shut itself down.
Our desktops proved to be generally OK, but well above the price IBM was offering (once service contacts were negotiated).
Our company buys IBMs now. I'm getting a T30 this month. Woot.:)
If you've seen Tom Hank's job in Joe Versus The Volcano, that pretty much sums up the working conditions for the average corporate software developer. At least in my personal experience as a corporate server operations guy!:)
I'm thankful I dropped out of CS/college now! I get 90% of the salary, and 0% of the student loans!:)
PS - for those who missed the movie, a boring desk job under flickering fluorescent lights for hours on end. Just give Tom some O'Reilly books on his desk, and that's it!
They are saying "electronic distribution," which will probably be something proprietary.
Your post has the classic error of making wrong assumptions and arguing against a position that I have never taken, one of the classic sins of logical thought.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the RIAA spokesman does side work for Microsoft:
The DMCA Anti-Circumvention provision is intended to encourage innovation,
As someone else said: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
No, but there sure is a small circle of executives who make those tough decisions while on the way to the golf club in their 7 series BMW for a nice lobster dinner. ...Neeeya never be able to afford BMW 7 Series, Neeeya!!!
That's all. I love that clip.
Less smoke breaks, bathroom stops, lunch, tea time, cube-aisle conversations about the latest ballgame/hot vidcard/cute intern...
Good grief, Tobey was working for Columbia Pictures, and he's dating the daughter of the head of Universal Studios. It clearly says in the article that Meyer is "the head of a rival studio."
200 replies and nobody mentioned this?
As an aside,
:)
I had intended this remark to be sarcastic humor, but instead I'm bogged in a sea of Insightful versus Overrated moderation. Am I the victim of a mod war?
Ahhh! I have to go change my Passport profile and take out all those redit cards I added, and transport those top-secret, mission critical emails and documents I have sitting in my Hotmail account!
/obvious
Why did I trust Microsoft with all of my personal secrets? They've had such great security in the past...
Wow, you must have been reading JeffK, not Penny Arcade. Penny Arcade is hilarious, and fresh every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
:)
Tycho has in-depth OPINIONS on games, and states them as such. Gabe is one hell of an artist. I send them money to be part of Club Penny Arcade.
So, in short, your opinion is as valid as the name you signed your comment with.
After all of these negative reviews based on a two minute trailer (which may or may not contain pieces of file that will actually be shown in the 100-minute version), I think I have a new .sig quote:
:)
"Those who would give up watching a fun movie to spend hours disecting the teaser-trailer deserve neither."
Every cliche needs a little modernization from time to time, right?
Did I say that? You are the second person to respond with this. I said I have to sell 100 just to break even from the filing fees. These are fees that go to pay peoples salaries for not doing a damned thing. That's why it's jacked. That's $10K that could be better spent marketing, advertising, or any other expense.
I think you are making an assumption that I am making an assumption that you are assuming something.
I said "a small number of people." This was in response to your complaint that the first 100 sales would be used to pay off the fees. You made it sound like you didn't expect to sell many, so the first 100 sales worth of profit going to cover the costs of "creating" the invention was a big deal. I was pointing out that most business cases for (smaller than an automobile) products include sales expectations in the hundreds of thousands or more. So my second remark was aimed at you choosing more of a niche market for your product.
I think instead of yelling at me and the other guy, you should clarify your original post. Thanks.
After filing, I'm looking at investing almost $8K on this idea. With only the hope that it will work.
No offense, but that's how it's supposed to work. You take some risk and if your idea is good, and you execute it properly, you get a patent that entitles you to make as much money as you can off of it for 20 years. $8,000 on a personal invention is nothing. That's less than I've spent in PC parts in the past 4 years.
So, I have to sell approximately 100 before I even cover the filing fees. Great f*cking deal.
Aww, so what you're saying is that you believe your invention is only marketable to a small number of people, and you're only planning on profiting a very small amount from each one?
I'm not trying to flame here, but even if you secure the patent you're after, it's meaningless unless you have a market. That usually indicates how "useful" the invention is anyway. And in very niche applications, usually your client base will be willing to pay a premium for a superior, innovative invention. So again, if your product is that good, you should be charging more.
Now all of this is ideaological. I am fully aware of how the corporatist politicians and corporations make it so that they can either a) stomp on your patent and make money on it, since you can't afford legal fees to fight them, or b) start you out in their pocket and assume your IP as their own.
I have a co-worker, who, after 30 years with the bank, just got the tech division's FIRST PATENT. You know what he got for it? The CIO took him out to lunch, and he got his picture and a fluff article about him in the company newsletter. Whee.
If you piss off a lot of people for justifiable reasons (e.g., you are the author of Satanic Verses)...
Wow. Just... Wow! Justifiable reasons? Just because Islamic Fundamentalists regarded the author's work as blasphemy requiring personally-executed capital punishment doesn't mean that action is justifiable.
(I've never read The Satanic Versus, but people have written far more hertical and blasphemous things about Christian and Jewish beliefs. Personally, I find that opinions counter to any established school of thought are usually interesting, even if they are conspicuously wrong. What was that quote again? "Nothing is offensive to the rational mind?")
How about you stop supporting a monopoly?
:)
First of all, I was critiquing style and approach on the part of the writer, not the factual legitimacy of the issues.
Secondly, I make my living off supporting Microsoft. If they didn't have (rightly or wrongly) a hugely installed base of clients, and some nice complexity in their operating systems and applications so as to make it difficult for the "average Joe" to install and use them, I wouldn't pull salary and benefits to support their products for my employer (a financial corporation).
Thirdly, who says you have to work for Microsoft? Learn from the lessons of others, or the ones you've obviously learned yourself. Your options are many: Work for a different company, or smaller enterprise. Learn a new trade. Move out of state, or up north to Canada.
No doubt you'll have more freedom there, but warning: blank media costs a lot more.
As someone who has been interviewed by a journalist for a similar article (taken completely out of context by the New York Times, no less), I think I detect some serious fudging here.
When a reporter goes to get "the story," they start with something either they THINK they can make a big hit with, or take some cruddy assignment and try to take off with it. They interview some people "in the thick" of the issue, and get some "expert" opinions.
This particular article seems to be a re-hash of some old '90s era brou-ha-ha about FTEs vs. Contractors at Microsoft. And it starts out with "you thought you knew the whole story. But we have MORE horrifying, panic inducing rumor and speculation to throw at you now!"
They then spin sound bites from their interviews to argue their angle for the story. And barring that, take a couple of really positive sound bites, like Jannell Myers did in this article, followed by "but others would tend to disagree!" Follow with the thrust of your angle, without any supporting opinions or evidence.
Throw in the testimony of a psychiatrist who basically says "yeah, people outside of a clique often feel left out; and the people in the clique make fun of them."
To flesh it all out, we go for the "public outrage" angle. We get the implication that all of these poor defenseless contractors go on unemployment when they leave Microsoft, and Microsoft is placing undue liability on Joe Taxpayer by their naughty employment practices!
Honestly, this is one of the most transparent pieces of dispassionate journalism I have seen in months. If I were teaching Journalism 101, Jannell Myers gets an "F-."
...since it only has one plug...
Just out of curiosity, which one would that be;
* The USB keyboard/mouse plug,
* The power plug, or
* The modem / ethernet plug?
Most iMacs I've helped people use the internet on have at least two of these (if you use Airport for network connectivity)!
The moderators have been trolled;
.sig if you still need proof of trolling.
I asked him how everyone would have ended up, and he said that Wendell (the nerdy computer geek that Urkel was based on) would have ended up as a Linux kernel developer.
This is not true. You can count on one hand how many interviews Berke has given in in the past 7 years. I'm a bit of a fanboy so I can vouch for that. The kid had nothing to do with Urkel, and the Linux remark only solidifies the troll.
Check out his
I think Tycho from Penny Arcade had a pretty good take: (emphasis mine)
:)
-----
"These groups will not hesitate to threaten or injure those who tend to interfere with their operations," Malcolm said.
This is the first statement I have ever read where Manga speechlessness - "..." - is the only valid response.
Statements of this kind gnaw at the sensible mind, they chew on it and try to eat it. I won't even gauge the clumsiness with which these two incongruous concepts are lashed together. If you want to see triple-x, explicit evidence of corporations with their hands up your government's ass, working the their jaws like some malevolent Howdy Doody with chilling ramifications for personal liberty, well, there you go. Peer-to-peer file sharing and Terror? Terror? Do they not have dictionaries there? There's another T word you cocks might like, too - give it a try: it's called "Tenuous." The only people terrorized by peer-to-peer file sharing are vastly potent multinational businesses, gripped by the realization that they sell carriages in a world of bullet trains.
-----
No wonder they are losing subcribers, they don't know how to deal with the number one annoyance on the internet today.
Screaming audio-filled pop up flash ads that cover the text you're trying to read for a mandatory period of time?
The two objections to email listed in the article are:
1. It breaks your concentration.
2. It misleads you into inefficient problem solving.
I'll go with the second one, as you don't get any hands on experience, or any ad hoc give and take communication about the problems you are addressing. Meetings, phone calls, and face to face are really required for a lot of complex problems. (Many cut and dry tech questions can still be answered efficiently in email, however).
The first point-- that it "breaks your concentration-- to me is a matter of personal reaction to email. Are you compulsively checking it? Do you have audio and visual cues blasting you when something hits your inbox?
I check my email at work frequently, but between phone calls and meetings and moments of work where I need to concentrate. And I certainly don't have the mailbox yelling at me or popping up reminders. My clients, coworkers, et al all get their answers in a timely fashion, just not instantaneously at all times.
IM, on the other hand, is a different story. We're now using Lotus SameTime, and I find myself using the "I am Away" option quite frequently. Maybe the thrust of the article should have been IM and its annoyances?
AC said: Did you actually read the article?
Amazingly, yes-- I read the article. I know it is quite fashionable to pop in early comments without reading the article, but I was just shining a little skepticism on the "mid-year Japanese launch, US launch by end of year" comment. It's already March. A couple of engineering samples and manufacturing tests hardly covers Quality Assurance, and development time for a "launchable" base of games-- even a dozen or so-- within 90 days for the Japanese market.
Besides the fact that Sony needs (and probably wants, to avoid chaos in the retail sector) a million units on hand before release. That in itself would take (an optimistic) 90 days on a fully ramped manufacturing pipeline.
Again, I am completely uninformed though, as I originally stated.
Whether Cell is ready or not, you still have to go through manufacturing trails, quality assurance, a big Japanese release (with requesite game titles), then a US release.
:)
Even with a reputable source like Bloomberg, the odds that Sony would have a US launch before Christmas would be long, in my completely uninformed opinion.
sad but true
Not sad; it is a necessary reality. "Equality" may be an illusion, but it's one that exists for a reason.
We are close to an optimal situation: equal opportunity. Not necessarily equal "rights," or equal "success," or whatever.
Success (specifically the financial kind, in this case), comes from a series of good decisions and good fortune.
I don't vote Republican, but I do happen to believe that the complaints of "inequality" come from people who have made, and continue to make bad choices. Their circumstances may be exacerbated by bad fortune... their upbringing, the faults of their parents, their geographic location... but with a strong will and an illusion of equal opportunity, all of these factors can be overcome.
My company BRIEFLY bought Dell desktops and laptops. (This company purchases between ten and twenty thousand PCs a year, and about 500 servers.)
:)
My Dell Latitude c600 has been nothing but junk. It sits on my desk all day (since I do VPN from home, I don't need to tote the machine), and yet it has had two failed hard drives. The screen has started to develop bizarre blue and magenta artifacts, which can only be cleared up by wiggling and flexing the display. The trackpad "jumps" if you try to use it (I switched to an external trackball). When the CPU is under heavy duress, a hairdryer-esque fan turns out and shoots plasma-hot air aross my right hand on the trackball.
The first time I actually had to travel with it, it lost it's battery charge in 15 minutes and threw up a warning to shut down, and then shut itself down.
Our desktops proved to be generally OK, but well above the price IBM was offering (once service contacts were negotiated).
Our company buys IBMs now. I'm getting a T30 this month. Woot.
If you've seen Tom Hank's job in Joe Versus The Volcano, that pretty much sums up the working conditions for the average corporate software developer. At least in my personal experience as a corporate server operations guy!
I'm thankful I dropped out of CS/college now! I get 90% of the salary, and 0% of the student loans!
PS - for those who missed the movie, a boring desk job under flickering fluorescent lights for hours on end. Just give Tom some O'Reilly books on his desk, and that's it!
Also it seems to me that MS is getting a little confused, aren't they meant to be sucking up to the RIAA? If so whats with the music sharing?
Did you RTFA? DRM is in effect, yo.
ThreeDegrees client pulls the MP3s/WMAs as a stream; making them allegedly uncopyable.
I didn't say "MP3 file."
They are saying "electronic distribution," which will probably be something proprietary.
Your post has the classic error of making wrong assumptions and arguing against a position that I have never taken, one of the classic sins of logical thought.