How many real people have perfect skin? When they can recreate the sallowness of an alcoholic, the dryness of someone with allergies in spring, the haggardness of someone who's been up all night... that will be realism, perfection is an illusion and people will see right through it in the end... we'll just be so impressed in the meanwhile that it will give the developers a few more years to get it right.
Even surgery and bio-chemistry can't produce perfect skin for people... they still need makeup and air-brushing... when did that become realistic anyways?
I'd say wash it in a washing machine... or the dishwasher if you think it's too delicate or might get caught during the agitation phase... or just soak it in a bucket with a cleaning agent.
Where are the creative and scientific superstars of the past? Remember that those multimillion dollar athletes also pay huge sums for overvalued real estate... no excuse really but they do support a large staff that is equivalent to regular CEOs who have done nothing more than jump through hoops and check off check lists their whole life... it's a bigger problem that you describe...
$100 million for a film.... when 20 to 30 million go to distribution?
from howstuffworks:(http://electronics.howstuffworks.co m/movie-distribution3.htm) "Since opening a movie on 3,000 screens could cost $6 million for the prints alone, the distributor must be sure that the movie can draw enough people to make the costs worthwhile."
there are 37,000 screens in US alone.
Seems to me they should make a less expensive distribution method. Cut it in half.
okay so that's 10% to 15% accounted for.
down to 90 to 85 million.
At least $20 million goes to the star celebrities... pay them less, half even. Ashton Kucher is just not that great an actor. In fact none of them are.. they are just personalities and not always interesting ones... these people just do not deserve what they get, I don't care how much money they bring in. They couldn't do any of it without the people behind the scenes and or next to them in the scenes. Cut it in half.
Well that's 20% to 25% accounted for at least, so far. So we go from 100 million down to 75 million.
Reduce your advertising budget... or use it only for movies that deserve it... blanket advertising will not make a crap movie good and it also won't make it profitable. Let's say another 10 million is for advertising (conservative, I know)... cut it in half. Consumers will pay more attention to the ads they do see, instead of changing the channel after seeing the same trailer 4 times in one night. Scarcity adds value. Use your psychology.
So now we're down to 70 million for a film, we have better distribution methods, correctly valued artists and more effective advertising.
Since it's now clearly obvious that the whole business is being mismanaged... cut management costs in half as well.... to account for the fact that there is a less cumbersome distribution system to administrate and the advertising/media buying strategy has been made more efficient, not to mention that there is necessarily a lot of dead wood lying around as extra assisstants and misc staff for the now missing managers.
Lets say management costs another $20 million, half of which is 10 million... now we're at 60% cost or $60 milllion total.
Seems to me that they stand to make just as much money on their investment, so suddenly they've added an additional $40 million to the ROI not to mention that this will be reflected as a 40% gain on all of a studio's films... say ten a year... that's $400 million saved/earned every year.
This doesn't excuse piracy but damn if it isn't an example of why the movie industry is hurting so bad, so they say.
hmmm yes, apparently you don't get it. You've spent 3 to 4 thousand dollars in the last six months on CDs. How much of that goes to the artist?
You can't tell me that you've also seen videos, promotions or other distribution/marketing materials for those same 300-400 cds as well... there aren't that many cd promotion campaigns around in a six month time span.
Sooo... you've probably paid in excess of $2000 for nothing, or more accurately, to pay for promotion and distribution expenses that were paid for several years ago by previous cd sales.
I'm being very optimistic about how much of your money is going to the music as opposed to the cd/label company.
I'll bet there are tens of thousands of people who instead of paying for obsolete advertising expenses, downloaded the same amount of music for $120, assuming they have a cable modem or DSL account, over a 3 month time span. Then they went out and bought a new car;-p using the 3 grand they saved as a down payment.
A similar number went over to www.allofmp3.com and got a $15/month unlimited download account to legally download even more music.
I hope you're very happy with your jewelcase liners and plastic disks... probably the most expensive packaging ever.
to note.. this isn't personal Amy, just pointing out a few things you may not have thought of.
Not the Quicktime API, the Hardware Plugin API, I believe... this had to do with circumventing the iTunes Sharing restrictions... a guy made a plugin that simply forwarded out past the local network and allowed sharing directly through iTunes again... here's the link:
Ah but the problem is that no one can sell a device or software, or even distribute one apparently, that uses the plugin API without a license from Apple. At least one project I know of was killed by Apple for this very reason. Soooo you can roll your own or... there is no or.
Luckily I already have an impressive resume;-p and I disagree. Opportunities are all around. The only careers you need a degree for are also ones which require a graduate degree and some sort of State license to work, ie: Lawyer, Physician, etc.
Anything else you really want to do is possible. Now most average jobs will be easier to get with one... only because HR doesn't care enough about the position to take the time to find out anything about the applicants. So granted, your run-of-the-mill white collar job is out... but if you know anything about what you want to do there are plenty of opportunities with small companies who just need to get the job done and frankly don't care about a degree and don't ask either. Then there is always things like getting a real estate license, or general contractor's license or any number of qualifications which take maybe $600 and 6 months to get, pilot's license is about 2 years, scuba license to teach or even just to commercially dive is about a year and a half, insurance is about a year, cpa is about a year... none of these require a degree, just a license. Many programmers just do contract work and make more than a salaried programmer easily and also work at home. Starting your own business is relatively easy as well, pay a few fees and start advertising/marketing...
Most people don't work at a job even related to their degree. How many bio-tech people sell insurance? How many MBA's are car salesman? Don't tell me you need an MBA to sell cars..
Good to hear that someone is up to the task, it needs to happen. There is something missing in the law when this sort of travesty is allowed to occur without a method of recourse being in place. These people did nothing wrong and should not have to suffer because of politics or bureaucratic failings.
Seems to work for every other bad situation. Surely the government can't prove in a court of law that he is in fact the terrorist in question. Let the Supreme Court decide what to do about it. That's what they are there for. This is why we have checks and balances... why settle for a presumably bad financing deal on a car he won't even own in 2 years when you can get millions in punitive damages. It might take a while but hell, he's only 19... his parents can support him for a few more years right?
I'm happy, I have a beautiful fiancee, I just finished a 4 year term as Art Director for a software company and I'm currently bidding on several large projects while waiting for the right company to find my resume. I've never found it hard to find interesting and lucrative work to do. Having an open and active mind and a willingness to apply found knowledge is all you really need in this world of ours.
If there is one thing you absolutely need to learn early in life is how to learn, how to find the information you need, how to comprehend and apply that information and how to express to others, in a language and terminology that they appreciate, the total of your learning and knowledge.
GO learn how to do these things and get a degree, any degree, if you want to be able to prove that you are capable of them without having to demonstrate them. Then go and apply for jobs you think are interesting or lucrative. If you apply for enough jobs of this sort you will find one that appeals to you. Do you really care if it uses all the skills you learned in college? Most of those skills will be nearly obsolete in 5 years. The skills that won't be obsolete are the ones concerning how to learn. You can always teach yourself how to do any job. Just remember that it will take you a year or two of study to really understand that new job well enough to earn money at it. Plan ahead.
Personally I think people should change jobs significantly every 5 or 6 years. Start in CS, move to Marketing, switch to engineering and manufacturing, run your own business for a while, teach at a community college, buy a farm, fly a corporate jet, become a paralegal... why not. None of them are really that difficult but they do take some specialized knowledge to do them well, probably about 2 years of serious study will teach you what you need to know for any of them.
283 pages on how to type? Does that cover standard QWERTY keyboards, Dvorak and hunt and peck typing styles? Maybe it's full of pictures... I just can't think of that many instructions on how to type... and surely there's no need to teach platform specific methods, unless you're talking about Intel PC vs. Apple PC;-p in that case it might be more like 566 pages....
This arguement is very time sensitive to new technologies.... yes QT is a CPU hog now, especially when using those proprietary Sorenson commercial codecs they use for trailers... but with new PCs the CPU is not really that big of a bottleneck anymore, now bandwidth on the other hand is, for now.
Consider what happens when movie downloads start becoming popular and Apple re-rolls iTunes as a movie store? People pay good money for movies... not this 99 cent thing... more like 3.99 for a few days of use. Apple continues to improve their codecs, Pixlet, Mpeg4, etc...
you misunderstand what a producer does... I didn't say Director. A producer is basically a project manager with some creative control. They coordinate the programmers, artists, etc. for a particular part of a game.
Same thing with TV and Movies... there are an army of producers, only a few executive producers.
Hmmm.... you do know that Apple makes more money on their 2-4% of the market than 99% of the companies out there who have 20% or more market share. Also remember that individual companies really don't get as much market share as you think. Intel based PCs may have a huge amount of the market and Intel based PCs running Windows have a huge amount of the Desktop PC market but HP or Dell or Gateway or IBM individually only have a fraction of that market.... the more players the less each gets.
I think they are addressing a real problem and if they target their market correctly could end up doing very well.
Why not get a female perspective? Some oversight in all things female... I think if there were female producers looking for jobs in Gaming they would be hired. Give it a try girls... it's a good job and pays reasonably well, I here 60k and up is normal for a game producer.. if you're experienced it goes to 6 digits.
I thought is was a reviw about how good they were. Listening to you it's as if they had nothing but bad things to say... all I read was that having to search through several sources for an answer wasn't what most businesses would call 24/7 support. Just the facts as far as I can tell.
What they didn't say is that for most 24/7 commercial support services you never get an answer or you get the answer "that feature didn't make it into the final release, you'll have to upgrade in two months if you want the feature you paid 50 gs for, sorry, no refunds."
My second recommendation is Sitellite. It is a really nice CMS system which includes versioning out of the box, as well as full search, full granular ACL for both tools and individual pages. It does not have a document file repository as yet though so it isn't the best solution for the question. It does have very user friendly publishing/editing system and is really quite intuitive. It also has a very robust API and the underlying framework is well documented.
Sitellite used to be commercial and was GPLed just this year, it is PHP/MySQL with a Java daemon indexer for search.
Another option I'd recommend for straight CMS for intranet is Sitellite which is a commercial CMS gone GPL this year. It's still pretty early in it's Open Source life span but very mature. Some of the out of the box features are missing but the API is awesome and it's content publishing workflow is perfect for non-technical users. Oh yeah it is PHP/MySQL but uses a Java daemon for it's search index creator.
It incorporates the Wiki features you mentioned, has support for authenticating against Active Directory and LDAP, even SMB if that is what you use and it has a fully implemented ACL system with granular permissions which includes adding files/documents as content and setting global, group and user specific permissions on each file or on folders "with inheritance".
Not to mention one of the best documented APIs around for any OS CMS.
Slashdot Mirror
How many real people have perfect skin? When they can recreate the sallowness of an alcoholic, the dryness of someone with allergies in spring, the haggardness of someone who's been up all night... that will be realism, perfection is an illusion and people will see right through it in the end... we'll just be so impressed in the meanwhile that it will give the developers a few more years to get it right.
Even surgery and bio-chemistry can't produce perfect skin for people... they still need makeup and air-brushing... when did that become realistic anyways?
I'd say wash it in a washing machine... or the dishwasher if you think it's too delicate or might get caught during the agitation phase... or just soak it in a bucket with a cleaning agent.
Where are the creative and scientific superstars of the past? Remember that those multimillion dollar athletes also pay huge sums for overvalued real estate... no excuse really but they do support a large staff that is equivalent to regular CEOs who have done nothing more than jump through hoops and check off check lists their whole life... it's a bigger problem that you describe...
$100 million for a film.... when 20 to 30 million go to distribution?
o m/movie-distribution3.htm)
from howstuffworks:(http://electronics.howstuffworks.c
"Since opening a movie on 3,000 screens could cost $6 million for the prints alone, the distributor must be sure that the movie can draw enough people to make the costs worthwhile."
there are 37,000 screens in US alone.
Seems to me they should make a less expensive distribution method. Cut it in half.
okay so that's 10% to 15% accounted for.
down to 90 to 85 million.
At least $20 million goes to the star celebrities... pay them less, half even. Ashton Kucher is just not that great an actor. In fact none of them are.. they are just personalities and not always interesting ones... these people just do not deserve what they get, I don't care how much money they bring in. They couldn't do any of it without the people behind the scenes and or next to them in the scenes. Cut it in half.
Well that's 20% to 25% accounted for at least, so far. So we go from 100 million down to 75 million.
Reduce your advertising budget... or use it only for movies that deserve it... blanket advertising will not make a crap movie good and it also won't make it profitable. Let's say another 10 million is for advertising (conservative, I know)... cut it in half. Consumers will pay more attention to the ads they do see, instead of changing the channel after seeing the same trailer 4 times in one night. Scarcity adds value. Use your psychology.
So now we're down to 70 million for a film, we have better distribution methods, correctly valued artists and more effective advertising.
Since it's now clearly obvious that the whole business is being mismanaged... cut management costs in half as well.... to account for the fact that there is a less cumbersome distribution system to administrate and the advertising/media buying strategy has been made more efficient, not to mention that there is necessarily a lot of dead wood lying around as extra assisstants and misc staff for the now missing managers.
Lets say management costs another $20 million, half of which is 10 million... now we're at 60% cost or $60 milllion total.
Seems to me that they stand to make just as much money on their investment, so suddenly they've added an additional $40 million to the ROI not to mention that this will be reflected as a 40% gain on all of a studio's films... say ten a year... that's $400 million saved/earned every year.
This doesn't excuse piracy but damn if it isn't an example of why the movie industry is hurting so bad, so they say.
Good response. I was more or less playing devil's advocate for the benefit of /.
hmmm yes, apparently you don't get it. You've spent 3 to 4 thousand dollars in the last six months on CDs. How much of that goes to the artist?
;-p using the 3 grand they saved as a down payment.
You can't tell me that you've also seen videos, promotions or other distribution/marketing materials for those same 300-400 cds as well... there aren't that many cd promotion campaigns around in a six month time span.
Sooo... you've probably paid in excess of $2000 for nothing, or more accurately, to pay for promotion and distribution expenses that were paid for several years ago by previous cd sales.
I'm being very optimistic about how much of your money is going to the music as opposed to the cd/label company.
I'll bet there are tens of thousands of people who instead of paying for obsolete advertising expenses, downloaded the same amount of music for $120, assuming they have a cable modem or DSL account, over a 3 month time span. Then they went out and bought a new car
A similar number went over to www.allofmp3.com and got a $15/month unlimited download account to legally download even more music.
I hope you're very happy with your jewelcase liners and plastic disks... probably the most expensive packaging ever.
to note.. this isn't personal Amy, just pointing out a few things you may not have thought of.
Not the Quicktime API, the Hardware Plugin API, I believe... this had to do with circumventing the iTunes Sharing restrictions... a guy made a plugin that simply forwarded out past the local network and allowed sharing directly through iTunes again... here's the link:
http://icommune.sourceforge.net/history/
Might I suggest that you simply disconnect your ethernet cable for a short period of time... good god man, did it never occur to you?
Ahhh but to an 18 year old $20 - $25 an hour IS a shitload of money.... ;-p
Evolve or die trying.
Ah but the problem is that no one can sell a device or software, or even distribute one apparently, that uses the plugin API without a license from Apple. At least one project I know of was killed by Apple for this very reason. Soooo you can roll your own or... there is no or.
If I'm wrong please reply.
Luckily I already have an impressive resume ;-p and I disagree. Opportunities are all around. The only careers you need a degree for are also ones which require a graduate degree and some sort of State license to work, ie: Lawyer, Physician, etc.
Anything else you really want to do is possible. Now most average jobs will be easier to get with one... only because HR doesn't care enough about the position to take the time to find out anything about the applicants. So granted, your run-of-the-mill white collar job is out... but if you know anything about what you want to do there are plenty of opportunities with small companies who just need to get the job done and frankly don't care about a degree and don't ask either. Then there is always things like getting a real estate license, or general contractor's license or any number of qualifications which take maybe $600 and 6 months to get, pilot's license is about 2 years, scuba license to teach or even just to commercially dive is about a year and a half, insurance is about a year, cpa is about a year... none of these require a degree, just a license. Many programmers just do contract work and make more than a salaried programmer easily and also work at home. Starting your own business is relatively easy as well, pay a few fees and start advertising/marketing...
Most people don't work at a job even related to their degree. How many bio-tech people sell insurance? How many MBA's are car salesman? Don't tell me you need an MBA to sell cars..
Good to hear that someone is up to the task, it needs to happen. There is something missing in the law when this sort of travesty is allowed to occur without a method of recourse being in place. These people did nothing wrong and should not have to suffer because of politics or bureaucratic failings.
Find a good attorney and file a law suit.
Seems to work for every other bad situation. Surely the government can't prove in a court of law that he is in fact the terrorist in question. Let the Supreme Court decide what to do about it. That's what they are there for. This is why we have checks and balances... why settle for a presumably bad financing deal on a car he won't even own in 2 years when you can get millions in punitive damages. It might take a while but hell, he's only 19... his parents can support him for a few more years right?
I'm happy, I have a beautiful fiancee, I just finished a 4 year term as Art Director for a software company and I'm currently bidding on several large projects while waiting for the right company to find my resume. I've never found it hard to find interesting and lucrative work to do. Having an open and active mind and a willingness to apply found knowledge is all you really need in this world of ours.
If there is one thing you absolutely need to learn early in life is how to learn, how to find the information you need, how to comprehend and apply that information and how to express to others, in a language and terminology that they appreciate, the total of your learning and knowledge.
GO learn how to do these things and get a degree, any degree, if you want to be able to prove that you are capable of them without having to demonstrate them. Then go and apply for jobs you think are interesting or lucrative. If you apply for enough jobs of this sort you will find one that appeals to you. Do you really care if it uses all the skills you learned in college? Most of those skills will be nearly obsolete in 5 years. The skills that won't be obsolete are the ones concerning how to learn. You can always teach yourself how to do any job. Just remember that it will take you a year or two of study to really understand that new job well enough to earn money at it. Plan ahead.
Personally I think people should change jobs significantly every 5 or 6 years. Start in CS, move to Marketing, switch to engineering and manufacturing, run your own business for a while, teach at a community college, buy a farm, fly a corporate jet, become a paralegal... why not. None of them are really that difficult but they do take some specialized knowledge to do them well, probably about 2 years of serious study will teach you what you need to know for any of them.
283 pages on how to type? Does that cover standard QWERTY keyboards, Dvorak and hunt and peck typing styles? Maybe it's full of pictures... I just can't think of that many instructions on how to type... and surely there's no need to teach platform specific methods, unless you're talking about Intel PC vs. Apple PC ;-p in that case it might be more like 566 pages....
This arguement is very time sensitive to new technologies.... yes QT is a CPU hog now, especially when using those proprietary Sorenson commercial codecs they use for trailers... but with new PCs the CPU is not really that big of a bottleneck anymore, now bandwidth on the other hand is, for now.
Consider what happens when movie downloads start becoming popular and Apple re-rolls iTunes as a movie store? People pay good money for movies... not this 99 cent thing... more like 3.99 for a few days of use. Apple continues to improve their codecs, Pixlet, Mpeg4, etc...
Apple does want to position QT in the PC market.
you misunderstand what a producer does... I didn't say Director. A producer is basically a project manager with some creative control. They coordinate the programmers, artists, etc. for a particular part of a game.
Same thing with TV and Movies... there are an army of producers, only a few executive producers.
Hmmm.... you do know that Apple makes more money on their 2-4% of the market than 99% of the companies out there who have 20% or more market share. Also remember that individual companies really don't get as much market share as you think. Intel based PCs may have a huge amount of the market and Intel based PCs running Windows have a huge amount of the Desktop PC market but HP or Dell or Gateway or IBM individually only have a fraction of that market.... the more players the less each gets.
I think they are addressing a real problem and if they target their market correctly could end up doing very well.
Why not get a female perspective? Some oversight in all things female... I think if there were female producers looking for jobs in Gaming they would be hired. Give it a try girls... it's a good job and pays reasonably well, I here 60k and up is normal for a game producer.. if you're experienced it goes to 6 digits.
I thought is was a reviw about how good they were. Listening to you it's as if they had nothing but bad things to say... all I read was that having to search through several sources for an answer wasn't what most businesses would call 24/7 support. Just the facts as far as I can tell.
What they didn't say is that for most 24/7 commercial support services you never get an answer or you get the answer "that feature didn't make it into the final release, you'll have to upgrade in two months if you want the feature you paid 50 gs for, sorry, no refunds."
You go and try to find a non-cutsey domain name without a hundred grand to throw down.... seriously, go try it.
thanks for playing
My second recommendation is Sitellite. It is a really nice CMS system which includes versioning out of the box, as well as full search, full granular ACL for both tools and individual pages. It does not have a document file repository as yet though so it isn't the best solution for the question. It does have very user friendly publishing/editing system and is really quite intuitive. It also has a very robust API and the underlying framework is well documented.
Sitellite used to be commercial and was GPLed just this year, it is PHP/MySQL with a Java daemon indexer for search.
Another option I'd recommend for straight CMS for intranet is Sitellite which is a commercial CMS gone GPL this year. It's still pretty early in it's Open Source life span but very mature. Some of the out of the box features are missing but the API is awesome and it's content publishing workflow is perfect for non-technical users. Oh yeah it is PHP/MySQL but uses a Java daemon for it's search index creator.
http://www.sitellite.org
I'd recommend Plone v 2.0
WhyPlone
It incorporates the Wiki features you mentioned, has support for authenticating against Active Directory and LDAP, even SMB if that is what you use and it has a fully implemented ACL system with granular permissions which includes adding files/documents as content and setting global, group and user specific permissions on each file or on folders "with inheritance".
Not to mention one of the best documented APIs around for any OS CMS.
Check it out, it is very robust and scales well.