Even more so as George Lucas himself came up with the idea of merchandising with the first movie in the series (he on purpose kept the right on merch for himself and that's how he became so much financially successful),
I'm not sure if I'm misreading what you're saying here, but, after watching the Netflix series on the Star Wars toys it was told that Kenner, in order to make the toys for the original trilogy (at the time, one single movie) had to pay Lucas and Fox $10k/yr and a 5% royalty to be split between themselves. Kenner made out very well in that one, taking 95% of each toy sold. Sure, Lucas' pockets fattened up a bit, but at the tune of about 2.5% per toy? Lucas took a serious beating in that deal. When Hasbro bought Kenner and missed their yearly $10k payment they had to renegotiate up to 18%, much better for Lucas' end.
That is to say, I don't think Lucas' share of the merchandising is initially what brought him success. I'm sure Disney's cut a much better deal for the merchandising than Lucas had in the past.
"Names for the fix may vary. I call the fix "Nexus One"."
Even meant as a joke, you're right. AT&T drops my calls like I'm on the Unlimited Dropped Call plan. I've lost a call twice on a 2 mile drive just the other day. I'm convinced that AT&T could drop a call made with 2 tin cans and a string and it's infuriating and I've had enough.
You'd think with an influx of millions of new customers due to the iPhone, and the fact that they charge and extra ($30?) charge for iPhone users, they may try to sink some of that cash into strengthening their networks to support their customers. Instead people are told that a 30% dropped call rate is 'acceptable'. Even if they picked up 1M iPhone customers, that's $30M/mo that they didn't have before. What're they doing with this cash?
I left AT&T about 6 or 7 years ago for Verizon, was impressed with the iPhone after the price became reasonable, and begrudgingly switched back. I wish I hadn't. The service has sucked ever since, and I'm going to leave them a second time for the same reason (and this is in two different states.) If the Incredibles weren't back-ordered for so long AT&T would have have lost me again already.
So actually, you're right. The solution for me is going to be one of the Verizon Droid phones.
"Fuck the Rule Book. -- Help some random stranger you really don't care about, who really doesn't care about you or the crap you put up with on a daily basis, which in turn places your job and livelihood at risk."
See, I'd hope that wouldn't put someone's job at risk. Stuff like that *really* matters to me when dealing with a company. Stuff like that *keeps* me with a company. Sure when someone at a company helps me I'm very thankful to them though I can't remember any of their names by the end of the day, but they're part of what makes that company good (in my opinion) and thus the reason why I stay with that company.
Obviously some people are going to have horror stories from companies that I deal with that I think are top-notch for customer service. When you've got that many employees, a lot of people are going to make you look bad whenever someone talks to them, hopefully you've got even more people that make you look GOOD when people talk to them.
"Instead of dual booting why not virtualize. Then you can install many different distros and try them out"
Not only that, but if someone is trying to keep it linux, can't you install a dual boot XP/Linux system, then mount the Windows partition through VMWare? Then you don't even NEED to reboot.
Then again, if you're trying to make it as inconvenient as possible as a sort of 'punishment' for reverting, that doesn't exactly help.
Ehh, we've got hundreds of these here in Vegas already, and I have seen criminals' "Wanted" ads on a few of them. They generally just flash up for 30 seconds or so on pre-existing digital billboards. That being said though, I haven't seen or heard of one being hacked yet... I mean, that's not to say that it -can't- happen, but I think it may be on-par with hacking one of the digital screens outside one of the casinos..
I still haven't found a substitute for in os x, mainly changing tabs in a program like firefox (i'll give command ~ a try tonight, that's the first time i've heard of it).
Actually, cmd+~ doesn't work for me, cmd+~ will switch between -windows- of a program, so if you have two firefox windows open it'll switch between the two of them. If you want to switch between tabs of a browser, cmd+1, cmd+2, cmd+3, cmd+whatever number the tab is will select the tab you want. Same seems to go with most tabbed programs (like adium chat windows do it too.) I wish the new tabbed terminal windows worked that way, but you use cmd+number to select which terminal you want to use already, so I guess that hotkey was already reserved...
Fry's Electronics does this. Nobody I know actually stops for them, I sometimes did just because I just wanted to get on with things, they always caught attitude for it though, but at the same time, it's rude for them to treat me like a thief. I don't shop there anymore unless I absolutely positively have to, I'll drive 20 miles out of my way to give someone else my money if I can. It's not that "if the guy had shown his receipt it would ahve taken less than 5 seconds out of his life," It's that you have no reason to search my bag (unless the alarm went off or someone saw me slip something into my bag or something) so don't treat your customers like criminals.
Any store that tries to check my bag against my receipt loses my business immediately from that day forward. At least with Sam's, well, you agree to it when you sign up for your card, so alright, but I never agreed to anything from Fry's to have my purchases searched on my way out the door.
Y'know which game really did it for me? The Suffering. That one just seemed to get more and more suspenseful as you walked through it. Generally in games I'd run through it just blasting everything in sight, that one I tiptoed around corners and ran backwards while firing and being chased.
I never got around to playing FEAR until recently either, that seems to be pretty damned creepy too.
But yeah, the old RE games were great up until 4, I wasn't impressed by 4.
Which brings up an intersting point, I know I've seen comments by people who work at universities, do you block most P2P ports in the labs? If not (some might not) wouldn't it be possible to install a file sharing ap on a jumpdrive then save them to it? Then who are they sending the notices to?...well, probably whoever logged on to that computer at that time I guess, but does that actually -prove- that they did anything? Insecure networks should be tougher to go after people too...
Can they sue the person providing the insecure network? They aren't up/downloading anything, they just have poor security practices, they could maybe log MAC addresses, but even then that wouldn't help the RIAA out any either. It just all seems so very loose.
Actually I do know SOME people who make their own bread, but they just mix up the ingredients real quick and throw them into a bread maker machine and then in a little bit, they've got bread. But yeah, it's cheaper and quicker to just buy it made. I guess that one's just personal preference..
1) how does this affect so-called "tribute bands?" I once walked around my local arts district, and there was a Beatles cover band absolutely ripping Taxman. Although they were indoors, the windows were open and the copyright violation was plain for all to hear. It appeared that everybody walking by loved it! Are all these bands "out of business" now?
I was wondering that myself. There's a classic rock cover band here in town who plays nothing but kickass classic rock covers. Show is free, drinks are reasonable, band is awesome and they play 3 times a week and this is their _job_. So are they just pretty much screwed now? Gotta find some new jobs? Guess nobody will ever be big anymore since they won't have anything to practice with..
Yeah, that seems regional too though, in CA I used to see a lot of 7-11s, but they started disappearing, in Vegas there's one on damned near every street corner, they're -everywhere-..
Yeah, I was wondering that myself. No matter how far out you go you're 10-15mi out from the middle of the city, you'd think they'd put it somewhere more central so people from the northwest wouldn't have to drive -that- far just to see it. Like was mentioned, LV/Charleston would be a great location, but there's nicer areas to put them, there's a couple I can think of off the top of my head, but probably just because I'm selfish and I want them to be closer to my place. Also too bad someone let the simpsons house die...
I've been restless tonight and couldn't sleep, so I took the ~10mi drive down there just to pass some time, it was great down there, the woman at the counter said that people have been driving from all over town just to get squishees. (I guess I proved her right.)
"The fact is that at times, you are going to have to play by other people's rules. This is why I would say this guy should just buck up and get a bank account of some sort."
I've used the "I read it online" line to get them off of the phone too. The best was, though, when they persisted to try and sell me. They told me "well, this is more convenient because it's at your doorstep!" I told them "Well, my desk is on my way to my door, and I don't even have to open the door for that.." So they say "Yeah but with this you don't even have to turn your computer on!" So I just tell her "Look lady, if I ever really get -that- lazy, I can leave my laptop on my nightstand, wake up, open it, since it'll turn on by itself, and then read it without even leaving _BED_" I think that's the one that won it for me, those people can be -persistent-!
Even in that case, you'd think any reasonable business focused on long term profits would rather have a small piece of 1000 stations than a large piece of the 100 that are left after the smaller ones are forced out of business by jacking up the rates to an unreasonable number. Another thing is if they make it reasonable to make a station, by charging stations based on a % of profits, then that encourages MORE stations to come up because they see that they can afford it. More stations = More small profits, eventually they're rolling in cash because the number of stations has tripled and now they're getting 7% on 3000 stations instead of a large piece of a few hundred right?
Very good point I think. I think it'd make most sense for them to use RHEL Workstation maybe, since the OS isn't free and they can resell it the way they resell RHEL Servers. I do think that'd be a big mistake though since after using it for a while, Ubuntu seems -very- userfriendly and good for beginners in ways that RHEL WS would not be.
"I started playing pinball (which is now again on of my favs, currently restoring a 70's Playboy pin)"
While it may be slightly off topic since I doubt they'd compare in any sense, but one thing I like about pinball is it -forces- you to be absolutely creative to accomplish what you're trying to get through in the game. Kinda like a movie where if you want something to happen, you have to find a way for it to happen, whereas with a cartoon you just make it happen. That's the way I see the difference between games and pinball, somethings are actually impossible in pinball, so it limits what you have to work with, so if you get an outstanding result its due completely to your own skill. In video games you can make anything happen.
That being said, I was never a real FAN of pinball, more of a console gamer, had a pinball machine at one time which was fun and all, but nothing spectacular. Recently I found (I live in Vegas) a pinball museum/arcade with about 250 games (and old machines, like Robotron you mentioned) which, with being able to play these things, machines from the 40s up to some brand new games, I've really grown to appreciate pinball as more of an art, and it's nice that it's different every time you play it. (oh and not to whore out an advert or anything, but more information is at http://pinballmuseum.org/ hey, it's for charity!)
And for some ON topic ranting, I love a lot of the new games, they're a lot of fun, but I always loved the old sierra games. Hero's Quest I, Space Quest, LSL. I loved those ones. They were tougher in a sense that you had to really think about stuff to know what to type where "pick up rock" "throw rock at target" "make thieve's guild sign" or whatnot, that and you couldn't just google "qfg1 walkthrough" if you got stuck either. I think the old games and the new games all have a lot of merit, there's a lot of genius in some of the old games, then again, some of the new stuff is a whole lot of fun and some require the same amount of thinking and puzzle solving, I think God of War had a lot of that to it.
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Even more so as George Lucas himself came up with the idea of merchandising with the first movie in the series (he on purpose kept the right on merch for himself and that's how he became so much financially successful),
I'm not sure if I'm misreading what you're saying here, but, after watching the Netflix series on the Star Wars toys it was told that Kenner, in order to make the toys for the original trilogy (at the time, one single movie) had to pay Lucas and Fox $10k/yr and a 5% royalty to be split between themselves. Kenner made out very well in that one, taking 95% of each toy sold. Sure, Lucas' pockets fattened up a bit, but at the tune of about 2.5% per toy? Lucas took a serious beating in that deal. When Hasbro bought Kenner and missed their yearly $10k payment they had to renegotiate up to 18%, much better for Lucas' end.
That is to say, I don't think Lucas' share of the merchandising is initially what brought him success. I'm sure Disney's cut a much better deal for the merchandising than Lucas had in the past.
"Maybe they think you deserve that, for talking on your phone while driving."
Hopefully someday they invent a way to pipe your phone through your car's radio in order to make it safer for you to drive while on a call.
"Names for the fix may vary. I call the fix "Nexus One"."
Even meant as a joke, you're right. AT&T drops my calls like I'm on the Unlimited Dropped Call plan. I've lost a call twice on a 2 mile drive just the other day. I'm convinced that AT&T could drop a call made with 2 tin cans and a string and it's infuriating and I've had enough.
You'd think with an influx of millions of new customers due to the iPhone, and the fact that they charge and extra ($30?) charge for iPhone users, they may try to sink some of that cash into strengthening their networks to support their customers. Instead people are told that a 30% dropped call rate is 'acceptable'. Even if they picked up 1M iPhone customers, that's $30M/mo that they didn't have before. What're they doing with this cash?
I left AT&T about 6 or 7 years ago for Verizon, was impressed with the iPhone after the price became reasonable, and begrudgingly switched back. I wish I hadn't. The service has sucked ever since, and I'm going to leave them a second time for the same reason (and this is in two different states.) If the Incredibles weren't back-ordered for so long AT&T would have have lost me again already.
So actually, you're right. The solution for me is going to be one of the Verizon Droid phones.
"Fuck the Rule Book. -- Help some random stranger you really don't care about, who really doesn't care about you or the crap you put up with on a daily basis, which in turn places your job and livelihood at risk."
See, I'd hope that wouldn't put someone's job at risk. Stuff like that *really* matters to me when dealing with a company. Stuff like that *keeps* me with a company. Sure when someone at a company helps me I'm very thankful to them though I can't remember any of their names by the end of the day, but they're part of what makes that company good (in my opinion) and thus the reason why I stay with that company.
Obviously some people are going to have horror stories from companies that I deal with that I think are top-notch for customer service. When you've got that many employees, a lot of people are going to make you look bad whenever someone talks to them, hopefully you've got even more people that make you look GOOD when people talk to them.
Same here, Haven't restarted yet though. Hoping we can play DVDs again now...
"Instead of dual booting why not virtualize. Then you can install many different distros and try them out"
Not only that, but if someone is trying to keep it linux, can't you install a dual boot XP/Linux system, then mount the Windows partition through VMWare? Then you don't even NEED to reboot.
Then again, if you're trying to make it as inconvenient as possible as a sort of 'punishment' for reverting, that doesn't exactly help.
How about hacking the billboard ;-)
Ehh, we've got hundreds of these here in Vegas already, and I have seen criminals' "Wanted" ads on a few of them. They generally just flash up for 30 seconds or so on pre-existing digital billboards. That being said though, I haven't seen or heard of one being hacked yet... I mean, that's not to say that it -can't- happen, but I think it may be on-par with hacking one of the digital screens outside one of the casinos..
I still haven't found a substitute for in os x, mainly changing tabs in a program like firefox (i'll give command ~ a try tonight, that's the first time i've heard of it).
Actually, cmd+~ doesn't work for me, cmd+~ will switch between -windows- of a program, so if you have two firefox windows open it'll switch between the two of them. If you want to switch between tabs of a browser, cmd+1, cmd+2, cmd+3, cmd+whatever number the tab is will select the tab you want. Same seems to go with most tabbed programs (like adium chat windows do it too.) I wish the new tabbed terminal windows worked that way, but you use cmd+number to select which terminal you want to use already, so I guess that hotkey was already reserved...
Actually,San Andreas and Vice City had a lawyer in it, Ken somethingorother (Rosenberg, after looking it up :). Sniveling, coke-snorting dude.
Based on Sean Penn's character from Carlito's Way of course!
Fry's Electronics does this. Nobody I know actually stops for them, I sometimes did just because I just wanted to get on with things, they always caught attitude for it though, but at the same time, it's rude for them to treat me like a thief. I don't shop there anymore unless I absolutely positively have to, I'll drive 20 miles out of my way to give someone else my money if I can. It's not that "if the guy had shown his receipt it would ahve taken less than 5 seconds out of his life," It's that you have no reason to search my bag (unless the alarm went off or someone saw me slip something into my bag or something) so don't treat your customers like criminals.
Any store that tries to check my bag against my receipt loses my business immediately from that day forward. At least with Sam's, well, you agree to it when you sign up for your card, so alright, but I never agreed to anything from Fry's to have my purchases searched on my way out the door.
Y'know which game really did it for me? The Suffering. That one just seemed to get more and more suspenseful as you walked through it. Generally in games I'd run through it just blasting everything in sight, that one I tiptoed around corners and ran backwards while firing and being chased.
I never got around to playing FEAR until recently either, that seems to be pretty damned creepy too.
But yeah, the old RE games were great up until 4, I wasn't impressed by 4.
Which brings up an intersting point, I know I've seen comments by people who work at universities, do you block most P2P ports in the labs? If not (some might not) wouldn't it be possible to install a file sharing ap on a jumpdrive then save them to it? Then who are they sending the notices to? ...well, probably whoever logged on to that computer at that time I guess, but does that actually -prove- that they did anything? Insecure networks should be tougher to go after people too...
Can they sue the person providing the insecure network? They aren't up/downloading anything, they just have poor security practices, they could maybe log MAC addresses, but even then that wouldn't help the RIAA out any either. It just all seems so very loose.
Actually I do know SOME people who make their own bread, but they just mix up the ingredients real quick and throw them into a bread maker machine and then in a little bit, they've got bread. But yeah, it's cheaper and quicker to just buy it made. I guess that one's just personal preference..
5 hours of coding, to me, is at the very least $60 worth of chargeable time.
So you throw a $20 price tag on it, and once you sell 3 copies everything else is just gravy?
1) how does this affect so-called "tribute bands?" I once walked around my local arts district, and there was a Beatles cover band absolutely ripping Taxman. Although they were indoors, the windows were open and the copyright violation was plain for all to hear. It appeared that everybody walking by loved it! Are all these bands "out of business" now?
I was wondering that myself. There's a classic rock cover band here in town who plays nothing but kickass classic rock covers. Show is free, drinks are reasonable, band is awesome and they play 3 times a week and this is their _job_. So are they just pretty much screwed now? Gotta find some new jobs? Guess nobody will ever be big anymore since they won't have anything to practice with..
Yeah, that seems regional too though, in CA I used to see a lot of 7-11s, but they started disappearing, in Vegas there's one on damned near every street corner, they're -everywhere-..
Yeah, I was wondering that myself. No matter how far out you go you're 10-15mi out from the middle of the city, you'd think they'd put it somewhere more central so people from the northwest wouldn't have to drive -that- far just to see it. Like was mentioned, LV/Charleston would be a great location, but there's nicer areas to put them, there's a couple I can think of off the top of my head, but probably just because I'm selfish and I want them to be closer to my place. Also too bad someone let the simpsons house die...
I've been restless tonight and couldn't sleep, so I took the ~10mi drive down there just to pass some time, it was great down there, the woman at the counter said that people have been driving from all over town just to get squishees. (I guess I proved her right.)
"The fact is that at times, you are going to have to play by other people's rules. This is why I would say this guy should just buck up and get a bank account of some sort."
Well, there's also money orders....
transcript here
I've used the "I read it online" line to get them off of the phone too. The best was, though, when they persisted to try and sell me. They told me "well, this is more convenient because it's at your doorstep!" I told them "Well, my desk is on my way to my door, and I don't even have to open the door for that.." So they say "Yeah but with this you don't even have to turn your computer on!" So I just tell her "Look lady, if I ever really get -that- lazy, I can leave my laptop on my nightstand, wake up, open it, since it'll turn on by itself, and then read it without even leaving _BED_" I think that's the one that won it for me, those people can be -persistent-!
"You see there is more than one Steve Jobs and thus his "assistants" are in fact copies of himself."
That could explain the $1 salary... Is there just a main Jobs who's underpaying the hell out of his clones and hording the rest for himself?
Even in that case, you'd think any reasonable business focused on long term profits would rather have a small piece of 1000 stations than a large piece of the 100 that are left after the smaller ones are forced out of business by jacking up the rates to an unreasonable number. Another thing is if they make it reasonable to make a station, by charging stations based on a % of profits, then that encourages MORE stations to come up because they see that they can afford it. More stations = More small profits, eventually they're rolling in cash because the number of stations has tripled and now they're getting 7% on 3000 stations instead of a large piece of a few hundred right?
Very good point I think. I think it'd make most sense for them to use RHEL Workstation maybe, since the OS isn't free and they can resell it the way they resell RHEL Servers. I do think that'd be a big mistake though since after using it for a while, Ubuntu seems -very- userfriendly and good for beginners in ways that RHEL WS would not be.
"I started playing pinball (which is now again on of my favs, currently restoring a 70's Playboy pin)"
While it may be slightly off topic since I doubt they'd compare in any sense, but one thing I like about pinball is it -forces- you to be absolutely creative to accomplish what you're trying to get through in the game. Kinda like a movie where if you want something to happen, you have to find a way for it to happen, whereas with a cartoon you just make it happen. That's the way I see the difference between games and pinball, somethings are actually impossible in pinball, so it limits what you have to work with, so if you get an outstanding result its due completely to your own skill. In video games you can make anything happen.
That being said, I was never a real FAN of pinball, more of a console gamer, had a pinball machine at one time which was fun and all, but nothing spectacular. Recently I found (I live in Vegas) a pinball museum/arcade with about 250 games (and old machines, like Robotron you mentioned) which, with being able to play these things, machines from the 40s up to some brand new games, I've really grown to appreciate pinball as more of an art, and it's nice that it's different every time you play it. (oh and not to whore out an advert or anything, but more information is at http://pinballmuseum.org/ hey, it's for charity!)
And for some ON topic ranting, I love a lot of the new games, they're a lot of fun, but I always loved the old sierra games. Hero's Quest I, Space Quest, LSL. I loved those ones. They were tougher in a sense that you had to really think about stuff to know what to type where "pick up rock" "throw rock at target" "make thieve's guild sign" or whatnot, that and you couldn't just google "qfg1 walkthrough" if you got stuck either. I think the old games and the new games all have a lot of merit, there's a lot of genius in some of the old games, then again, some of the new stuff is a whole lot of fun and some require the same amount of thinking and puzzle solving, I think God of War had a lot of that to it.