I'll bet the reason you can't get to the sales staff is probably because there isn't one anymore. It's like that drug dealer in the Tom Clancy movie "Clear and Present Danger" who has the one assistant with tapes of an office, factory floor, etc. to disguise the fact that they're in a villa in Columbia, enjoying their ill gotten gains while planning world domination. Sound like anyone we know? Are we sure that SCO's executives are even in the country anymore?
If we're really talking end of civilization disruption, and not one due to a transient riot/earthquake/brownout, then you don't want VRLA batteries. You want plain old flooded batteries stored dry that you can add water to, top off when too much water gets boiled off.
VRLA batteries are better for unattended operation, but if you want to play the survivalist's game, you need batteries designed for extreme long-term operation, and a charging/generation system to back it up.
The best set up would be a water-powered ramjet-type generator. You can divert a medium sized stream if you have enough height difference, and camoflauge the intake to prevent nasties from noticing you have a generator source.
The stuff you learn when planning a RIFTs campaign...
Even if a great number of the works produced are of exceptional quality, how valuable are they if there are already a lifetime worth of good books, music, and movies already produced, waiting to be consumed.
Where is this library of great works? In the case of movies, deteriorating, most likely. A friend of mine works for the UCLA Film & Television archives - many very important prints, some the only complete versions, literally are falling apart. Warners doesn't give a shit - they just check them out from time to time to make those DVDs that you and I buy. Eventually, the film will completely fall apart, and no more DVDs will be made from that master print. You'd think they'd take better care of these assets, but they don't, and neither do other studios (with the possible exception of Disneys.)
Music? Who owns all the master recordings for all that recorded music? How many of those master recordings are being converted into new formats, instead of lying there on the shelf, rotting away (think old DAT tapes.) Books? Master plates get mislaid. Publishers get bought out, editors die or retire. Sometimes the only complete, unabridged (or censored, in some cases) copies are owned by the author, and when they pass away...
Sure, a lot of crap will get made (or not made - just because you have a grant doesn't guarantee that you'll produce anything), but the good stuff will get noticed, and at that point, the regular capitalistic trend of throwing money at a sure thing will take over.
What the hell are we going to do with ourselves?
Some honest work for a change, I'd hope. Build/restore houses. Revive old arts and handcraft items that cannot be mass produced. Sample wildlife to create a comprehensive library of the world's genetic resources. Conserve and restore all those movies, books, music, art that will disappear without someone to intervene - digitize it all and make it available to the world, as it should be. These tasks will require specially trained people, not machines (at least for a brief time.)
Personally, I'd love to go into space. Find enough like-minded people with the skills, request an allocation of land and resources (hopefully energy will be insanely cheap by this point, because we're going to have to feed those robots something), and let's build ourselves some rocket ships, space stations, etc. Sure robots will displace us, but when that happens we (the humans) will be on the frontiers, exploring, building, and pushing the boundaries.
I find that preferable to lounging around being a consumer (I do too much of that already), playing games someone else has written, and watching the same crap played over and over on the tv. Or, what I do now for work, which is push electrons back and forth, waiting for the next change from on high that will invalidate all the hours I put in to the current revision of what I've written.
Honest work. Some people will go for it. Others will remain consumers and live at the minimum subsistence levels of society, working just enough to take care of their needs.
Realistically, by buying clothing at thrift stores and food at discount supermarkets, you could probably own your own (modest) home in less than a decade and live rent free for the rest of your life
Live rent free, but not tax free. Buy a home in a decent area, in a state with a growing population, and it is likely that your property taxes will rise in time, along with the assessed value of your developed land. You're still going to have to work, or at least save up enough to take care of basic needs and any miscellaneous taxes (including any unforseen future ones.)
giving a grant is far more preferable AS LONG AS the result is not owned by a corporation or some private entity.
Amen to that. No point in spending money converting a public good to private wealth.
In any case, what you are saying about educating everyone will not have the impact you are assuming. For instance, even if everyone was say computer engineers, a lot of people would be out of jobs.
In the short run, this is correct. In the long run though, this would result in more eligible people applying for and utlizing the scientific and engineering grants, and when recruiting and building a lab, a larger pool of qualified applicants that won't ditch your effort for more money (although they might bail for a cooler project.)
Similarly, for writing or the arts, a larger pool of trained writers/filmmakers/composers/etc SHOULD result in a larger likelyhood that popular works (even master works) will result.
My belief is that a once you get to a critical mass of people with skills for independent analytical thinking (one of the reasons for pursuing higher education), only good things can happen. A bit utopian, true, but it's one of the themes that's advanced by James P. Hogan in his books. One can only hope.
Educating people will not give them a job.
Also true. My hope is that given the right skill set, they'll create new industries and occupations that can employ educated (and non-educated) people. Besides, at the very worst, I'm going to bet that we're going to need qualified technicians to diagnose and repair all those miracle robots of the future. Someone's going to have to educate them, might as well apply some of those funds for that purpose.
When I was reading the article, the blurb about giving everyone $25k per year, no strings attached, smacked of welfare/socialism. Although the intent was to inject funds into the economy, no work was expended to obtain that money on the part of the recipient (ie, I Exist, therefore I am Entitled.)
A better way of handling it would be to couch the disbursment of funds as grants (artistic, research, or otherwise.) At least then there would be the idea of creative/scientific pursuit to benefit society, rather than mindless (and potentially inflationary) consumption.
Also, instead of just handing money over to spend, you could make university-level education available to everyone (a GI grant for retraining, for example) that would pay for room, board, and books for the 4 (or more years) you'd spend. This would be a big boon for universities, companies, and society in general, as it would help shift those put out of work into more advanced fields. In fact, why not give access to university labs and engineering facilities for those so inclined, and encourage more grant money for basic and applied research?
Unfortunately, it is clear that the government will have to control more of this new wealth (in terms of collection and disbursement), unless the corporations suddenly decide to be generous, and start sending rebate checks to everyone. It's either that, or the rise of the megacorporations and a revolutionary-minded underclass.
The problem big problem are those automated dialers who call up, have a big blank pause so your answering machine can have its say, then leave a goddamn long-ass message. If this isn't the phone-equivalent of spam, I don't know what is. Yes, i've put my number on the new do-not-call list, and I tell every punk who tries to sell me something "put me on your do not call list." The "for every company your firm represents" is a new one that I need to remember.
Please tell me that he's planning to give this info to the Wall Street Journal. Sounds like a juicy story, and perfect for giving all of these recalcitrant DAs public black eyes.
Well, if the user is lazy, and stops updating their ham corpus, it does increase the probablity of false positives for messages that contain the random dictionary terms. I think that's what the spammers are hoping will happen.
Just means that users have to be diligent about submitting both ham and spam to be weighed.
Bad for them. The main reason for creating centralized blocklists was so people who reformed, or who kicked spammers off their blocks, could have their IPs relisted without having to worry that random admins had hardcoded filters into their routers. One central source for listing, one central source for delisting.
If they succeed in negating the value of centralized blocklists, guess what - admins will go back to blacklisting blocks manually. Those IP blocks will become useless once enough people add them to their blocklists, and there won't be any easy way of redeeming them.
Anyone who wants to get internet access better get a clause in their contract guaranteeing that the IPs they get weren't abused by someone in the past, or else they might be getting a useless connection.
I take it you don't have a monthly bandwidth cap. E-mail is relatively low bandwidth, but if you get hit with enough messages on a daily basis, it can crimp your montly connection if you're already at the verge of maxing out your transfer limit.
Not to mention that even if you can handle the load, upstream servers that handle many other users might not - contributing to outages and delays that will affect legitimate e-mails...
I'm sure the airlines, hotels, and amusement parks (ie Disney/MGM, Universal, etc.), all of whom use extensive computer networks in their operations, are going to be hopping mad about getting slapped with another tax. Ultimately though, that tax WILL be passed to the end users, just as those airport, taxi, and room taxes are charged on visitors in many jurisdictions.
And what exactly was the point of charging this tax in the first place? Is Florida a little too prosperous for their politicans? Do they feel the need to drive some of their economy to adjoining states?
So what if you've expensed it? Will the state send auditors and declare that your network still has life in it, and thus still needs to be depreciated and taxed?
Keep in mind that this is the state tax, with option of ADDITIONAL taxes at the local and county level. The example they give is 15% for Orange County, FL.
Totally nutzo. Now I know what California businesses are thinking when they flee to Nevada. I wonder if the politicians here in the sunshine state would even consider such an insane thing?
I've got a big pile of books that have been removed from my library, but only a few of them are duds. The rest of them are duplicates - either old books that have been replaced by better copies, or duplicates that were part of lots that I buy off of eBay. If I wanted to lend books out, I'd lend out the dupes (ie, reading copies.)
Put one of those Martian wireless network drives in the garage for nearline semi-remote backups. For cheap offsite backups, get a safety deposit box at the local bank, and put a third set of CDRs there. Bonus is that the safety deposit box is usually in an air-conditioned and humidity controlled vault.
This is the biggest problem with the CD-R market. There's no long-range consistency in the formulation of the discs. Even within the same line, by the same manufacturer, there will be formulation changes, even dye changes. Outside of the brands that make their own discs, it's even worse - you're at the whim of whoever the lowest cost producer was (ie, Sony's discs are outsourced that way.)
I used to buy only TDK. Then I had to switch to Verbatim when TDK started getting cheap on me. Now I'm using Mitsui media. When I started burning CDs on my 2x burner (I now have a pair of 8x burners and a Pioneer DVR-105) I was reasonably confident my data could last up to 10 years (I burned 3 copies, on different brands of CDRs.) Nowadays I haven't a clue as to whether my data will last the year:P
Time to make a fourth copy of my data and put it on a removable HD...
Depressingly, although he mentions the rationale for choosing the hardware and software that he did, with links to vendors, he never mentions if the damn thing actually works! Where's the audio of the teletype humming away? The pictures of the latest weather report, pulled off of some website, displayed as printed text?
The rule of thumb in the industry is that a film must make 3 times it's production cost at the box office TO BREAK EVEN. Now, 360 million is streching it - cost of promotion and prints for this film was probably about 60-80 million domestic, meaning that to break even was about 300-320 million (120 million budget x 2, + 60-80 million.)
Remember, the studios only collect about half of box office gross - the rest goes to the theatre chains. As a result, if Hulk made 130 million at the box office, the studios only got 65 million. With the costs of prints and advertising at about 60-80 million (probably a low figure) Hulk is losing about 115-135 million at this point (-120 cost + 65 box office to studio = 55 + 60-80 p&a).
Now, for the nit-pickers in the audience, true, if the studio and the distributor are one and the same, the studio gets to collect part of that 60 million prints and advertising, but the end result is that the Hulk needed to be a super-mega-blockbuster (along the lines of Titanic) to earn the cost back.
Break-even is the holy grail at the box office today - very few films surpass break even. Instead, the real money comes with cable, pay per view, syndication, and licensing/spin-offs. Get the movie to pay for itself at the box office, and use the great sales as advertising for DVD sales, etc.
The big problem for studios is that they need to make their money back faster - they need films that can open big for a few weekends, because there's no room for a film to build an audience anymore. The only way to open big is to make films with a built-in audience (ie, comic book properties, remakes, or TV spinoffs), or with big stars. As a consequence, they're locked into this death spiral of bigger films that need to make more and more money back in a shorter and shorter span.
There's even strategy for opening shitty movies - advertise the hell out of it to pack in as many people on the opening weekend before word gets out that it sucks. If you don't believe me, ask any marketing exec or producer in the business.
Oh, and one last thing. Remember how the Hulk is losing about $125 million right now? This is why you ask for a cut of GROSS profits, not NET profits. Anyone who was foolish enough to sign for a cut of the net is getting NOTHING right now. Someone who is in for a cut of the gross gets money, even if the studio hasn't made their money back yet. For example, on the HULK, Marvel had gross participation, so they still got money.
Verizon has been collecting "number portability fund" fees on my land-line for years. Can I migrate my number to another carrier? Hell no! Can I get my fees waived/refunded? Sorry, but those funds go into a common pool to provide number portability. But I can't move MY number! Sorry, but your number is in an area where number portability is not offered...
The only way to win this game is not to play - I canceled my second line earlier this year. Take that Verizon!
I wrote a long comment, but I accidentally deleted it (goddamn windows explorer!) Anyways, the essence is read Steven Levy's "Hackers" which provides a historical background of the first couple of generations of computer geeks. It's toward the end of the book (predating the internet or linux) that RMS appears, fighting to maintain a culture that is under assault by commercial interests that are raiding labs for talent, locking up code under nondisclosure, and promoting incompatibilities to try and get a lock on the market.
In this context, RMS isn't being extremist, he's being reactionary - trying to maintain the hacker credo (free exchange of information) in the face of people who are interested only in money. Some of RMS' own comments regarding this period of history are available online. I think his POV is compromise could lead to corruption of the core principles of hacker thought, just as the original free-for-all homebrew computer culture was subsumed by the likes of Microsoft (another storyline which is covered in "Hackers.) I really do recommend reading Levy's book, BTW, along with his historical novel on the development of modern crypto ("Crypto".)
In light of the history, I think that RMS is perfectly justified in his opinions - just witness SCO vs. the GPL. Some asshole with money trying to steal something the community has created, and then even worse, trying to charge money for what formerly could be gotten for free!
My gateway NAT box is a 68k mac (granted, not as ancient as an LCIII). My main workstation is a Radius 81/110 with a G3 upgrade card. I also have a set of Win2k workstations for 3d work and programming, and a bunch of linux boxes running as fileservers (put atalk and samba on the same box, and you can have pre OSX macs talking to Windows boxes via the fileserver, no problem.)
I think one problem is where these IT people are coming from. You get them from major universities, and they'll be more open to mac and linux/unix systems (because they'll have had experience with them.) You get them from government (ie, city, county, state, federal) and they'll be drones who will recommend what they're familiar with.
The key, of course, is to make sure you're serving your customer with the best solution to their problem. What do schools need? I haven't stepped in a k-12 classroom since I left high school almost a decade ago (jeez, where did the time go???) Back then, the only computer lab we had used computers as glorified replacements for typewriters (ie word processing.) Unless you need to run specialized software that requires Windows, I'd set up a set of linux workstations with donated equipment - just sanitize them, standardize them, and boot off of a IDE->flash interface. Force students to save onto a central fileserver and just use the workstations as thin clients.
For applications that require windows, I have no problem with purchasing windows workstations... provided that they fund enough staff hours to keep those machines patched and disinfected on a regular basis!
Thanks for sharing. I remember back in the PS1 days when I tried to get into the Yaroze dev program (true dev PS units were impossible for non-developers to get.) Even the Yaroze units were way too expensive for something I knew I was just going to fiddle around with (and you could only share with other Yaroze members...)
Being able to do development with consumer hardware is the best way for future console developers to get their feet wet. You've got to wonder how console manufacturers like Sony expect to find qualified developers who can crank maximum performance out of equipment for at least a few years after release, if they don't allow anyone to actually write code without paying them an ungodly amount of money just to play with the hardware!
Yes, you can use mod-chips, but being able to run arbitrary code without having to mod your playstation is very, very, very cool:) Nice work!
I've long thought about how minors can earn spendable credits by doing work via the internet. After all, they're consumers too - with lots of time (if not necessarily lots of disposable income.) Give them some way of converting their excess time into spendable cash, and everyone benefits (they get to buy stuff, merchants get extra dollars injected into the economy.) Never thought it'd be through playing a game though! Man, if only I could have earned that kind of money for that time I spent playing games in arcades when I was a kid!
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bet the reason you can't get to the sales staff is probably because there isn't one anymore. It's like that drug dealer in the Tom Clancy movie "Clear and Present Danger" who has the one assistant with tapes of an office, factory floor, etc. to disguise the fact that they're in a villa in Columbia, enjoying their ill gotten gains while planning world domination. Sound like anyone we know? Are we sure that SCO's executives are even in the country anymore?
If we're really talking end of civilization disruption, and not one due to a transient riot/earthquake/brownout, then you don't want VRLA batteries. You want plain old flooded batteries stored dry that you can add water to, top off when too much water gets boiled off.
VRLA batteries are better for unattended operation, but if you want to play the survivalist's game, you need batteries designed for extreme long-term operation, and a charging/generation system to back it up.
The best set up would be a water-powered ramjet-type generator. You can divert a medium sized stream if you have enough height difference, and camoflauge the intake to prevent nasties from noticing you have a generator source.
The stuff you learn when planning a RIFTs campaign...
Even if a great number of the works produced are of exceptional quality, how valuable are they if there are already a lifetime worth of good books, music, and movies already produced, waiting to be consumed.
Where is this library of great works? In the case of movies, deteriorating, most likely. A friend of mine works for the UCLA Film & Television archives - many very important prints, some the only complete versions, literally are falling apart. Warners doesn't give a shit - they just check them out from time to time to make those DVDs that you and I buy. Eventually, the film will completely fall apart, and no more DVDs will be made from that master print. You'd think they'd take better care of these assets, but they don't, and neither do other studios (with the possible exception of Disneys.)
Music? Who owns all the master recordings for all that recorded music? How many of those master recordings are being converted into new formats, instead of lying there on the shelf, rotting away (think old DAT tapes.) Books? Master plates get mislaid. Publishers get bought out, editors die or retire. Sometimes the only complete, unabridged (or censored, in some cases) copies are owned by the author, and when they pass away...
Sure, a lot of crap will get made (or not made - just because you have a grant doesn't guarantee that you'll produce anything), but the good stuff will get noticed, and at that point, the regular capitalistic trend of throwing money at a sure thing will take over.
What the hell are we going to do with ourselves?
Some honest work for a change, I'd hope. Build/restore houses. Revive old arts and handcraft items that cannot be mass produced. Sample wildlife to create a comprehensive library of the world's genetic resources. Conserve and restore all those movies, books, music, art that will disappear without someone to intervene - digitize it all and make it available to the world, as it should be. These tasks will require specially trained people, not machines (at least for a brief time.)
Personally, I'd love to go into space. Find enough like-minded people with the skills, request an allocation of land and resources (hopefully energy will be insanely cheap by this point, because we're going to have to feed those robots something), and let's build ourselves some rocket ships, space stations, etc. Sure robots will displace us, but when that happens we (the humans) will be on the frontiers, exploring, building, and pushing the boundaries.
I find that preferable to lounging around being a consumer (I do too much of that already), playing games someone else has written, and watching the same crap played over and over on the tv. Or, what I do now for work, which is push electrons back and forth, waiting for the next change from on high that will invalidate all the hours I put in to the current revision of what I've written.
Honest work. Some people will go for it. Others will remain consumers and live at the minimum subsistence levels of society, working just enough to take care of their needs.
Realistically, by buying clothing at thrift stores and food at discount supermarkets, you could probably own your own (modest) home in less than a decade and live rent free for the rest of your life
Live rent free, but not tax free. Buy a home in a decent area, in a state with a growing population, and it is likely that your property taxes will rise in time, along with the assessed value of your developed land. You're still going to have to work, or at least save up enough to take care of basic needs and any miscellaneous taxes (including any unforseen future ones.)
Nice thought though.
giving a grant is far more preferable AS LONG AS the result is not owned by a corporation or some private entity.
Amen to that. No point in spending money converting a public good to private wealth.
In any case, what you are saying about educating everyone will not have the impact you are assuming. For instance, even if everyone was say computer engineers, a lot of people would be out of jobs.
In the short run, this is correct. In the long run though, this would result in more eligible people applying for and utlizing the scientific and engineering grants, and when recruiting and building a lab, a larger pool of qualified applicants that won't ditch your effort for more money (although they might bail for a cooler project.)
Similarly, for writing or the arts, a larger pool of trained writers/filmmakers/composers/etc SHOULD result in a larger likelyhood that popular works (even master works) will result.
My belief is that a once you get to a critical mass of people with skills for independent analytical thinking (one of the reasons for pursuing higher education), only good things can happen. A bit utopian, true, but it's one of the themes that's advanced by James P. Hogan in his books. One can only hope.
Educating people will not give them a job.
Also true. My hope is that given the right skill set, they'll create new industries and occupations that can employ educated (and non-educated) people. Besides, at the very worst, I'm going to bet that we're going to need qualified technicians to diagnose and repair all those miracle robots of the future. Someone's going to have to educate them, might as well apply some of those funds for that purpose.
When I was reading the article, the blurb about giving everyone $25k per year, no strings attached, smacked of welfare/socialism. Although the intent was to inject funds into the economy, no work was expended to obtain that money on the part of the recipient (ie, I Exist, therefore I am Entitled.)
A better way of handling it would be to couch the disbursment of funds as grants (artistic, research, or otherwise.) At least then there would be the idea of creative/scientific pursuit to benefit society, rather than mindless (and potentially inflationary) consumption.
Also, instead of just handing money over to spend, you could make university-level education available to everyone (a GI grant for retraining, for example) that would pay for room, board, and books for the 4 (or more years) you'd spend. This would be a big boon for universities, companies, and society in general, as it would help shift those put out of work into more advanced fields. In fact, why not give access to university labs and engineering facilities for those so inclined, and encourage more grant money for basic and applied research?
Unfortunately, it is clear that the government will have to control more of this new wealth (in terms of collection and disbursement), unless the corporations suddenly decide to be generous, and start sending rebate checks to everyone. It's either that, or the rise of the megacorporations and a revolutionary-minded underclass.
The problem big problem are those automated dialers who call up, have a big blank pause so your answering machine can have its say, then leave a goddamn long-ass message. If this isn't the phone-equivalent of spam, I don't know what is. Yes, i've put my number on the new do-not-call list, and I tell every punk who tries to sell me something "put me on your do not call list." The "for every company your firm represents" is a new one that I need to remember.
Please tell me that he's planning to give this info to the Wall Street Journal. Sounds like a juicy story, and perfect for giving all of these recalcitrant DAs public black eyes.
Well, if the user is lazy, and stops updating their ham corpus, it does increase the probablity of false positives for messages that contain the random dictionary terms. I think that's what the spammers are hoping will happen.
Just means that users have to be diligent about submitting both ham and spam to be weighed.
Bad for them. The main reason for creating centralized blocklists was so people who reformed, or who kicked spammers off their blocks, could have their IPs relisted without having to worry that random admins had hardcoded filters into their routers. One central source for listing, one central source for delisting.
If they succeed in negating the value of centralized blocklists, guess what - admins will go back to blacklisting blocks manually. Those IP blocks will become useless once enough people add them to their blocklists, and there won't be any easy way of redeeming them.
Anyone who wants to get internet access better get a clause in their contract guaranteeing that the IPs they get weren't abused by someone in the past, or else they might be getting a useless connection.
I take it you don't have a monthly bandwidth cap. E-mail is relatively low bandwidth, but if you get hit with enough messages on a daily basis, it can crimp your montly connection if you're already at the verge of maxing out your transfer limit.
Not to mention that even if you can handle the load, upstream servers that handle many other users might not - contributing to outages and delays that will affect legitimate e-mails...
I'm sure the airlines, hotels, and amusement parks (ie Disney/MGM, Universal, etc.), all of whom use extensive computer networks in their operations, are going to be hopping mad about getting slapped with another tax. Ultimately though, that tax WILL be passed to the end users, just as those airport, taxi, and room taxes are charged on visitors in many jurisdictions.
And what exactly was the point of charging this tax in the first place? Is Florida a little too prosperous for their politicans? Do they feel the need to drive some of their economy to adjoining states?
So what if you've expensed it? Will the state send auditors and declare that your network still has life in it, and thus still needs to be depreciated and taxed?
Keep in mind that this is the state tax, with option of ADDITIONAL taxes at the local and county level. The example they give is 15% for Orange County, FL.
Totally nutzo. Now I know what California businesses are thinking when they flee to Nevada. I wonder if the politicians here in the sunshine state would even consider such an insane thing?
I've got a big pile of books that have been removed from my library, but only a few of them are duds. The rest of them are duplicates - either old books that have been replaced by better copies, or duplicates that were part of lots that I buy off of eBay. If I wanted to lend books out, I'd lend out the dupes (ie, reading copies.)
Put one of those Martian wireless network drives in the garage for nearline semi-remote backups. For cheap offsite backups, get a safety deposit box at the local bank, and put a third set of CDRs there. Bonus is that the safety deposit box is usually in an air-conditioned and humidity controlled vault.
This is the biggest problem with the CD-R market. There's no long-range consistency in the formulation of the discs. Even within the same line, by the same manufacturer, there will be formulation changes, even dye changes. Outside of the brands that make their own discs, it's even worse - you're at the whim of whoever the lowest cost producer was (ie, Sony's discs are outsourced that way.)
:P
I used to buy only TDK. Then I had to switch to Verbatim when TDK started getting cheap on me. Now I'm using Mitsui media. When I started burning CDs on my 2x burner (I now have a pair of 8x burners and a Pioneer DVR-105) I was reasonably confident my data could last up to 10 years (I burned 3 copies, on different brands of CDRs.) Nowadays I haven't a clue as to whether my data will last the year
Time to make a fourth copy of my data and put it on a removable HD...
Depressingly, although he mentions the rationale for choosing the hardware and software that he did, with links to vendors, he never mentions if the damn thing actually works! Where's the audio of the teletype humming away? The pictures of the latest weather report, pulled off of some website, displayed as printed text?
Jennifer Connelly
Some of her movies include Disney's The Rocketeer, Dark City, and more recently, A Beautiful Mind.
The rule of thumb in the industry is that a film must make 3 times it's production cost at the box office TO BREAK EVEN. Now, 360 million is streching it - cost of promotion and prints for this film was probably about 60-80 million domestic, meaning that to break even was about 300-320 million (120 million budget x 2, + 60-80 million.)
Remember, the studios only collect about half of box office gross - the rest goes to the theatre chains. As a result, if Hulk made 130 million at the box office, the studios only got 65 million. With the costs of prints and advertising at about 60-80 million (probably a low figure) Hulk is losing about 115-135 million at this point (-120 cost + 65 box office to studio = 55 + 60-80 p&a).
Now, for the nit-pickers in the audience, true, if the studio and the distributor are one and the same, the studio gets to collect part of that 60 million prints and advertising, but the end result is that the Hulk needed to be a super-mega-blockbuster (along the lines of Titanic) to earn the cost back.
Break-even is the holy grail at the box office today - very few films surpass break even. Instead, the real money comes with cable, pay per view, syndication, and licensing/spin-offs. Get the movie to pay for itself at the box office, and use the great sales as advertising for DVD sales, etc.
The big problem for studios is that they need to make their money back faster - they need films that can open big for a few weekends, because there's no room for a film to build an audience anymore. The only way to open big is to make films with a built-in audience (ie, comic book properties, remakes, or TV spinoffs), or with big stars. As a consequence, they're locked into this death spiral of bigger films that need to make more and more money back in a shorter and shorter span.
There's even strategy for opening shitty movies - advertise the hell out of it to pack in as many people on the opening weekend before word gets out that it sucks. If you don't believe me, ask any marketing exec or producer in the business.
Oh, and one last thing. Remember how the Hulk is losing about $125 million right now? This is why you ask for a cut of GROSS profits, not NET profits. Anyone who was foolish enough to sign for a cut of the net is getting NOTHING right now. Someone who is in for a cut of the gross gets money, even if the studio hasn't made their money back yet. For example, on the HULK, Marvel had gross participation, so they still got money.
Verizon has been collecting "number portability fund" fees on my land-line for years. Can I migrate my number to another carrier? Hell no! Can I get my fees waived/refunded? Sorry, but those funds go into a common pool to provide number portability. But I can't move MY number! Sorry, but your number is in an area where number portability is not offered...
The only way to win this game is not to play - I canceled my second line earlier this year. Take that Verizon!
I don't watch tv. I do use e-mail. Given that, advertisments via e-mail are more annoying to me than equivalent ads on tv.
I wrote a long comment, but I accidentally deleted it (goddamn windows explorer!) Anyways, the essence is read Steven Levy's "Hackers" which provides a historical background of the first couple of generations of computer geeks. It's toward the end of the book (predating the internet or linux) that RMS appears, fighting to maintain a culture that is under assault by commercial interests that are raiding labs for talent, locking up code under nondisclosure, and promoting incompatibilities to try and get a lock on the market.
In this context, RMS isn't being extremist, he's being reactionary - trying to maintain the hacker credo (free exchange of information) in the face of people who are interested only in money. Some of RMS' own comments regarding this period of history are available online. I think his POV is compromise could lead to corruption of the core principles of hacker thought, just as the original free-for-all homebrew computer culture was subsumed by the likes of Microsoft (another storyline which is covered in "Hackers.) I really do recommend reading Levy's book, BTW, along with his historical novel on the development of modern crypto ("Crypto".)
In light of the history, I think that RMS is perfectly justified in his opinions - just witness SCO vs. the GPL. Some asshole with money trying to steal something the community has created, and then even worse, trying to charge money for what formerly could be gotten for free!
My gateway NAT box is a 68k mac (granted, not as ancient as an LCIII). My main workstation is a Radius 81/110 with a G3 upgrade card. I also have a set of Win2k workstations for 3d work and programming, and a bunch of linux boxes running as fileservers (put atalk and samba on the same box, and you can have pre OSX macs talking to Windows boxes via the fileserver, no problem.)
I think one problem is where these IT people are coming from. You get them from major universities, and they'll be more open to mac and linux/unix systems (because they'll have had experience with them.) You get them from government (ie, city, county, state, federal) and they'll be drones who will recommend what they're familiar with.
The key, of course, is to make sure you're serving your customer with the best solution to their problem. What do schools need? I haven't stepped in a k-12 classroom since I left high school almost a decade ago (jeez, where did the time go???) Back then, the only computer lab we had used computers as glorified replacements for typewriters (ie word processing.) Unless you need to run specialized software that requires Windows, I'd set up a set of linux workstations with donated equipment - just sanitize them, standardize them, and boot off of a IDE->flash interface. Force students to save onto a central fileserver and just use the workstations as thin clients.
For applications that require windows, I have no problem with purchasing windows workstations... provided that they fund enough staff hours to keep those machines patched and disinfected on a regular basis!
Thanks for sharing. I remember back in the PS1 days when I tried to get into the Yaroze dev program (true dev PS units were impossible for non-developers to get.) Even the Yaroze units were way too expensive for something I knew I was just going to fiddle around with (and you could only share with other Yaroze members...)
:) Nice work!
Being able to do development with consumer hardware is the best way for future console developers to get their feet wet. You've got to wonder how console manufacturers like Sony expect to find qualified developers who can crank maximum performance out of equipment for at least a few years after release, if they don't allow anyone to actually write code without paying them an ungodly amount of money just to play with the hardware!
Yes, you can use mod-chips, but being able to run arbitrary code without having to mod your playstation is very, very, very cool
I've long thought about how minors can earn spendable credits by doing work via the internet. After all, they're consumers too - with lots of time (if not necessarily lots of disposable income.) Give them some way of converting their excess time into spendable cash, and everyone benefits (they get to buy stuff, merchants get extra dollars injected into the economy.) Never thought it'd be through playing a game though! Man, if only I could have earned that kind of money for that time I spent playing games in arcades when I was a kid!