Thats the whole point here. You don't get the revenue until you've sunk the production costs on making the show. For another network to take this on they need confidence that they have the audience, and that they CAN make the show.
What if, having made half a series ($9M) your audience turns out to be 20% down on expectations, your now making 130% not 200%. And thats just on the first show out, next week could be down ANOTHER 20% on expectations because you expected it to grow and it didn't... this is risky stuff.
The audience could be UP 20%, then your a commissioning genius and you get babes and porches sent to your home. Down 20% and your wondering wether to leave the show on your CV.
SF is particularly risky because most people don't watch it. You make a show like 'The worlds scariest DIY bikini babes' and pretty much anyone but Ned Flanders will have a look at it. You have potential access to 95% of the audience. With SF its probably more like 10 to 20% - you won't get many sticky flickers.
Farscape Episode Production Costs: $1.5M Advertising Revenue: $3.0M ROI 100%
ST:TNG Repeat Production Costs: $.1M Advertising Revenue: £1.0M ROI 1000%
Return on Investment is better on the shitty repeat. Farscape doesnt have to lose money to be economically unattractive.
Discussion Shows
on
Open Source TV
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There are only a handful of discussion shows that seem to have any kind of legs:
POLITICAL: Question Time, CNN, loads of this SPORTS: Mainly on radio, whole stations dedicated to this ad infinitum ARTS: That film rocked, no iot sucked and it was anti women, shut up germaine! POOOOR MEEEE: Oprah style 'Im fat', 'I hate my wife', 'no one likes me' reassurance stuff - staggering amounts of this IM GREAT: Oprah style 'your writing moves me so much I want to die every time I read a word of it' style stuff.
Geek chat is unlikely to get any decent airtime, and in fact is unlikely to be of any interest. Those who are into this stuff will probably be at least as knowledgable as the folk on the program, and have access to others to have these conversations in any case.
Oprah fans are all sitting at home alone with the baby rocking gently thinking 'I used to love my life'.
WFT is that all about? Email you if I need help? I thought you were busy! Go and give her another boffin' rather than replyu to a bunch of/. lovepuppies.
When the legislation allowing the taking of 'DNA Fingerprints' was first passed it clearly stated that the police must destroy all records and samples of fingerprints taken in relation to an investigation where the individual was not found guilty.
i.e. If you didn't do it, they weren't allowed to keep your DNA.
Well guess what! They kept every last damn sample, and they are now shouting about it as some great thing.
The media puts forward an impression of DNA being foolproof - its his DNA, he's the bad guy! which massivly over states the likelyhood of a wrong conviction.
People are regularly convicted and jailed based solely on DNA evidence, even when a weight of counter evidence is presented. This is pretty scary considering that it is more likely you will be mis-identified than win the lottery.
Its turning out to be a story not just about a bunch of SciFi geeks crying about a lost show, but a protest against corporations directing culture through actions they don't have to justify
Directing Culture??? Thats a bit OTT is it not. Corporations are not about promoting culture, they are about making money. Period. If the show made money in sufficient quantity they would keep it alive.
Personally, I'd rather they bin it than continue on a cheapo budget.
Your average soap opera has a pretty good guide to what people want to see:
Guy shags Girl Guy really wants to shag Girl, Girl shagging other Guy Girl shagging bad guy, living with good guy, has bad guys baby, stays with good guy, leaves good guy for bad guy, bad guy shags her best mate, good guy also shagging her best mate, best mate has bad guys baby, bad guy gets a better offer from another channel and pisses off overnight, good guy gets Aids and dies. Girl and best mate find they 'really' like each other and set up house. Elderly neighbour shocked and sets fire to house.
New guy fancies Girl, AND best mate, who happens to be his ex and had a termination follwioing an interlude when they were 18...
Quite right. The insulation of multiple layers of banana leaves will create a steep temp gradient within the 'rock' leading to an oven like temp within the banana leave packages.
This is a common practice with Aga style ovens - you put everything into a hot oven, you wrap anything that needs a low oven in multiple layers of foil / leaves.
It is always worth testing some bizarro platforms if only to show how much / little progress has been made since they were more common.
One of the problems I have with the standard 3D card benchmarks is that they progress too quickly. My VoodooBanshee scored pretty well when it was bought, and I still use it in my 3rd machine, but I have no way of seeing how well it performs against the current crop because the benchmark tools are annual releases, and the scoring changes so much.
It would be good if these had a popular old system from 1, 2 and 3 years ago to run the same tests on. It would probably result in more sales from us 'dont really know/care' guys because we'd suddenly know that we are only 22% as good as a new card costing just £150.
It's the one-up-manship of the various channels that gets to me. I remember flicking to the BBC coverage just after the second plane hit and seeing the first of the 'backdrops' with the smoking towers and the 'Sept 11 2001: Attack on America' line and thinking "there we go - branding the story already - who will be first to use the towers as the number 11 I wonder??"
I think it is the speedy turnaround of these 'visuals' that is disconcerting. I'd much rather just have the video feed, and a guy in a studio saying 'holey shit' than a million glossy flaping flags with the towers in the background.
It really did feel a little too much like a Chris Morris stunt, a live edition of Brasseye.
I think/. did a great job in just getting the news out there. None of the hype, the gloss, the panic to fly presenters to stand in front of the ruins. Just simple stories to keep everyone up to date.
Gas hydrates are formed when gases are trapped, under pressure and at low temperature (as at the bottom of the ocean), and dissolved in a frozen liquid. In this case, the gases are natural methanes -- the gas we use to heat our homes. These frozen gas hydrates are stable until higher temperatures or lower pressures cause them to decompose (melt). This decomposition releases enormous amounts of trapped gas.
Dead Body - Dig it up. Lots of useful raw materials up there - lack of oxygen might be a downer in terms of refining in situ (thereby reducing pollution down here, reducing mass to be transported etc...) but probably not insurmountable.
Find some water! Start digging. Then start launching metal bars at Earth to be caught in a big orbiting basket!
As someone who spends less time on online games than he does on the toilet I get the point here - just because you don't meet in real life doesn't mean you don't know someone. You can get close to people playing games together, be it monopoly or fragUup.
I'd like to see a/poll looking at %age of social time spent online / onplanet / onTivo. I get the feeling that more and more people are spending a bigger and bigger chunk of their life online. Not a bad thing as such, many people spend nearly all their social time hooked to the TV, the Bar, a SkateBoard.
At the very least, if you are going to go after corporate America, go after the ones that are fucking up people's health, the government, and the planet.
But surely we WANT them to fuck up the government!!!
He didn't have one!! - every time I see him I take the piss and he points me at something like this. Doesn't change the fact he didn't have one. Kylie Minogue EXISTS - doesn't mean doghtys dad 'had' her every night tho'
If you get out of your depth reading Scientific American then I suggest you avoid any scientific material - that would REALLY be over your head.
SciAm, New Scientist etc... all seem to have dumbed down so much over the past 10 years that they now hold little real value. Time was that you could keep up pretty well if you read NS regularly - and have the latest cosmology, cancer and AIDS breakthroughs, computing advances, etc... straight in your head in enough detail to bore people at dinner parties.
Has anyone tried something like this with a quicker (but not too quick) fluid?
This would make an excellent Calendar type device - a glass funnel full of SOMETHING (my rubber bible is at home - anyone got one handy???) that would drip through in about a year.
Great for lecturing opportunities when people say 'what the fuck is THAT' and point at your bell jar full of brown gooey stuff!
. Telling these people, "Get off your ass you fat fuck!" does not help. In fact, I think it exacerbates the problem that you deplore.
While I might take issue with the use of 'these people' I have to say that being told to get off my fat lardy ass worked for me - I'm 70% my former weight and feeling and coding better for it.
Whichever shoes I wear, a 20 - 30 min run every other morning and a swim once a week do the trick. Oh, and I never have any soft drinks, which must help!
I almost always go to bed a little hungry because I refuse to eat after 8pm unless Im out for dinner - I read somewhere that some boxer had this rule, eat a truckload for breakfast, a bundle for lunch and a snack for supper, and nothing after 8.
Doesn't matter what you eat - eat anything - just dont eat much of it after 4pm, and none after 8pm. And go for a run in the morning.
No argument - didn't think the story was THAT interesting - but better than 99% of the other crap I've read this year.
My point was more about the source. Salon is well read. How many other stories are out there that are as good / better that we aren't finding via/. which we should be?
Your synopsis of the story is all well and good - but seriously, this is very 'mainstream geek' in my view. Where is the really interesting stuff!!!!
You know. I skip through Salon a fair bit. Mainly because of all the links on/. to articles there. I catch most of the interesting stuff there before I see it here. Same goes for a stack of other oft-linked sites.
Where are all the new interesting sources of info, articles, stories etc... Surely there must be better material than this on a smaller site. Its no big deal to find a short story on Salon... find one on geocities!
Well... why are we always told these things 'may have come from mars'. It may also have come from Earth, or any other chunk of rock floating about out there.
Hey - it might have come from mars - it might be a fossilised martian poop!
Slashdot Mirror
give me last years Advertising Revenue
Thats the whole point here. You don't get the revenue until you've sunk the production costs on making the show. For another network to take this on they need confidence that they have the audience, and that they CAN make the show.
What if, having made half a series ($9M) your audience turns out to be 20% down on expectations, your now making 130% not 200%. And thats just on the first show out, next week could be down ANOTHER 20% on expectations because you expected it to grow and it didn't... this is risky stuff.
The audience could be UP 20%, then your a commissioning genius and you get babes and porches sent to your home. Down 20% and your wondering wether to leave the show on your CV.
SF is particularly risky because most people don't watch it. You make a show like 'The worlds scariest DIY bikini babes' and pretty much anyone but Ned Flanders will have a look at it. You have potential access to 95% of the audience. With SF its probably more like 10 to 20% - you won't get many sticky flickers.
Farscape Episode Production Costs: $1.5M
Advertising Revenue: $3.0M
ROI 100%
ST:TNG Repeat Production Costs: $.1M
Advertising Revenue: £1.0M
ROI 1000%
Return on Investment is better on the shitty repeat. Farscape doesnt have to lose money to be economically unattractive.
There are only a handful of discussion shows that seem to have any kind of legs:
POLITICAL: Question Time, CNN, loads of this
SPORTS: Mainly on radio, whole stations dedicated to this ad infinitum
ARTS: That film rocked, no iot sucked and it was anti women, shut up germaine!
POOOOR MEEEE: Oprah style 'Im fat', 'I hate my wife', 'no one likes me' reassurance stuff - staggering amounts of this
IM GREAT: Oprah style 'your writing moves me so much I want to die every time I read a word of it' style stuff.
Geek chat is unlikely to get any decent airtime, and in fact is unlikely to be of any interest. Those who are into this stuff will probably be at least as knowledgable as the folk on the program, and have access to others to have these conversations in any case.
Oprah fans are all sitting at home alone with the baby rocking gently thinking 'I used to love my life'.
WFT is that all about? Email you if I need help? I thought you were busy! Go and give her another boffin' rather than replyu to a bunch of /. lovepuppies.
When the legislation allowing the taking of 'DNA Fingerprints' was first passed it clearly stated that the police must destroy all records and samples of fingerprints taken in relation to an investigation where the individual was not found guilty.
i.e. If you didn't do it, they weren't allowed to keep your DNA.
Well guess what! They kept every last damn sample, and they are now shouting about it as some great thing.
The media puts forward an impression of DNA being foolproof - its his DNA, he's the bad guy! which massivly over states the likelyhood of a wrong conviction.
People are regularly convicted and jailed based solely on DNA evidence, even when a weight of counter evidence is presented. This is pretty scary considering that it is more likely you will be mis-identified than win the lottery.
These samples should be binned.
Its turning out to be a story not just about a bunch of SciFi geeks crying about a lost show, but a protest against corporations directing culture through actions they don't have to justify
Directing Culture??? Thats a bit OTT is it not. Corporations are not about promoting culture, they are about making money. Period. If the show made money in sufficient quantity they would keep it alive.
Personally, I'd rather they bin it than continue on a cheapo budget.
Your average soap opera has a pretty good guide to what people want to see:
Guy shags Girl
Guy really wants to shag Girl, Girl shagging other Guy
Girl shagging bad guy, living with good guy, has bad guys baby, stays with good guy, leaves good guy for bad guy, bad guy shags her best mate, good guy also shagging her best mate, best mate has bad guys baby, bad guy gets a better offer from another channel and pisses off overnight, good guy gets Aids and dies. Girl and best mate find they 'really' like each other and set up house. Elderly neighbour shocked and sets fire to house.
New guy fancies Girl, AND best mate, who happens to be his ex and had a termination follwioing an interlude when they were 18...
Star Trek should do more of THAT stuff!!
Quite right. The insulation of multiple layers of banana leaves will create a steep temp gradient within the 'rock' leading to an oven like temp within the banana leave packages.
This is a common practice with Aga style ovens - you put everything into a hot oven, you wrap anything that needs a low oven in multiple layers of foil / leaves.
This guy is an ass!
It is always worth testing some bizarro platforms if only to show how much / little progress has been made since they were more common.
One of the problems I have with the standard 3D card benchmarks is that they progress too quickly. My VoodooBanshee scored pretty well when it was bought, and I still use it in my 3rd machine, but I have no way of seeing how well it performs against the current crop because the benchmark tools are annual releases, and the scoring changes so much.
It would be good if these had a popular old system from 1, 2 and 3 years ago to run the same tests on. It would probably result in more sales from us 'dont really know/care' guys because we'd suddenly know that we are only 22% as good as a new card costing just £150.
It's the one-up-manship of the various channels that gets to me. I remember flicking to the BBC coverage just after the second plane hit and seeing the first of the 'backdrops' with the smoking towers and the 'Sept 11 2001: Attack on America' line and thinking "there we go - branding the story already - who will be first to use the towers as the number 11 I wonder??"
/. did a great job in just getting the news out there. None of the hype, the gloss, the panic to fly presenters to stand in front of the ruins. Just simple stories to keep everyone up to date.
I think it is the speedy turnaround of these 'visuals' that is disconcerting. I'd much rather just have the video feed, and a guy in a studio saying 'holey shit' than a million glossy flaping flags with the towers in the background.
It really did feel a little too much like a Chris Morris stunt, a live edition of Brasseye.
I think
Bermuda Info here relating to this:
Gas hydrates are formed when gases are trapped, under pressure and at low temperature (as at the bottom of the ocean), and dissolved in a frozen liquid. In this case, the gases are natural methanes -- the gas we use to heat our homes. These frozen gas hydrates are stable until higher temperatures or lower pressures cause them to decompose (melt). This decomposition releases enormous amounts of trapped gas.
GM Cows that dont fart so much are being developed right now. see!
Dead Body - Dig it up. Lots of useful raw materials up there - lack of oxygen might be a downer in terms of refining in situ (thereby reducing pollution down here, reducing mass to be transported etc...) but probably not insurmountable.
Find some water! Start digging. Then start launching metal bars at Earth to be caught in a big orbiting basket!
As someone who spends less time on online games than he does on the toilet I get the point here - just because you don't meet in real life doesn't mean you don't know someone. You can get close to people playing games together, be it monopoly or fragUup.
/poll looking at %age of social time spent online / onplanet / onTivo. I get the feeling that more and more people are spending a bigger and bigger chunk of their life online. Not a bad thing as such, many people spend nearly all their social time hooked to the TV, the Bar, a SkateBoard.
I'd like to see a
At the very least, if you are going to go after corporate America, go after the ones that are fucking up people's health, the government, and the planet.
But surely we WANT them to fuck up the government!!!
He didn't have one!! - every time I see him I take the piss and he points me at something like this. Doesn't change the fact he didn't have one. Kylie Minogue EXISTS - doesn't mean doghtys dad 'had' her every night tho'
Bizarrely, the footage of the TV displaying a 3D image appeared in 3D on my TV, without the need for glasses
So - when you moved from one side of the TV to the other it looked different? Did it?
No.
It didn't did it!
doghty at school used to tell us his dad had a 2 wheel drive motorbike. Your not doghty are you???
If you get out of your depth reading Scientific American then I suggest you avoid any scientific material - that would REALLY be over your head.
SciAm, New Scientist etc... all seem to have dumbed down so much over the past 10 years that they now hold little real value. Time was that you could keep up pretty well if you read NS regularly - and have the latest cosmology, cancer and AIDS breakthroughs, computing advances, etc... straight in your head in enough detail to bore people at dinner parties.
Now its all 'blobs' and 'kind of like spagetti'.
Whats odd about old shit appearing on the front page of /.???
It'd be odd NOT to see it! Next up - Windows Me really IS shit
Has anyone tried something like this with a quicker (but not too quick) fluid?
This would make an excellent Calendar type device - a glass funnel full of SOMETHING (my rubber bible is at home - anyone got one handy???) that would drip through in about a year.
Great for lecturing opportunities when people say 'what the fuck is THAT' and point at your bell jar full of brown gooey stuff!
. Telling these people, "Get off your ass you fat fuck!" does not help. In fact, I think it exacerbates the problem that you deplore.
While I might take issue with the use of 'these people' I have to say that being told to get off my fat lardy ass worked for me - I'm 70% my former weight and feeling and coding better for it.
Whichever shoes I wear, a 20 - 30 min run every other morning and a swim once a week do the trick. Oh, and I never have any soft drinks, which must help!
I almost always go to bed a little hungry because I refuse to eat after 8pm unless Im out for dinner - I read somewhere that some boxer had this rule, eat a truckload for breakfast, a bundle for lunch and a snack for supper, and nothing after 8.
Doesn't matter what you eat - eat anything - just dont eat much of it after 4pm, and none after 8pm. And go for a run in the morning.
No argument - didn't think the story was THAT interesting - but better than 99% of the other crap I've read this year.
/. which we should be?
My point was more about the source. Salon is well read. How many other stories are out there that are as good / better that we aren't finding via
Your synopsis of the story is all well and good - but seriously, this is very 'mainstream geek' in my view. Where is the really interesting stuff!!!!
You know. I skip through Salon a fair bit. Mainly because of all the links on /. to articles there. I catch most of the interesting stuff there before I see it here. Same goes for a stack of other oft-linked sites.
Where are all the new interesting sources of info, articles, stories etc... Surely there must be better material than this on a smaller site. Its no big deal to find a short story on Salon... find one on geocities!
Apple provide software for FREE. Apple Good.
/.ers dont like) and lawyers (who no one likes) to do it.
Apple put limitations on the FREE software. Apple Bad.
Apple produce the software to make the drives they sell more attractive.
So it's not unreasonable to protect the software, or to try to protect the software - otherwise it loses its purpose and they will simply drop it.
I think what grates with most people is the way they use the law (that
BUT. How the fuck else can they do it? I doubt they leapt straight to the 'cuff 'em' stage. If you use lawyers you use the law.
Well... why are we always told these things 'may have come from mars'. It may also have come from Earth, or any other chunk of rock floating about out there.
Hey - it might have come from mars - it might be a fossilised martian poop!