It may be a cliche to say that today's audiences are more sophisticated... but they are. Go see Sound of Thunder, and watch how many times those non-realistic effects pop you out of your suspension of disbelief. They don't look "real", and in doing so, attract unwanted attention. I suppose they could have avoided them, but it's a bit difficult to have a story about dinosaur hunting and not show a dinosaur...
Actually, this makes the assumption that it's an either/or situation. I think it's far more likely that Apple will, at some point, release a converged video/audio pod. And at the same time, they'll maintain ines of smaller, music-only devices, much as they already have large, small, smaller, and nano-sized devices now, each serving a different market and need.
Should read "The Two-Income Trap" by Elizabeth Warren. She maintains (and has the numbers to back it up) that the major increases stem from two income families competing against single income families, higher demand due to parents trying to position themselves in preferential school districts, and finally, due to predatory "low interest" lending practices.
"Absolutely nothing- it was assumed when I was in college that general programming was enough."
You should be chipping in on one of those threads where people complain that they need to take business and science and english classes when all they want to do is learn PHP.
People hire programmers to solve domain-specific problems. It helps when you hire a person to work on your accounting system that they actually understand business processes and accounting...
I think athletes are overpaid, but quite literally millions of people go tearing off each weekend to sit in stadiums watching their favorite pitcher or quarterback.
Millions of people like Angelina Jolie, and will pay to see her in a film. What's the impact on your bottom line if she's in your movie? What's the impact if she's in someone else's? If a hot star can bring in an extra $10 million in revenue, what's she worth?
Corpse Bride was budgeted at $40 million dollars. Puppets were rumoured at being $30,000 each. The "cheap" digital camera was a Canon EOS-1D Mark II at $8,000 a pop, not counting the custom adaptors so they could use their existing Nikon lenses. And they used 24 of them ($192,000). Filming took not the traditional 12-14 weeks of a normal production, but 52 weeks, not including pre or post-production.
"It seems to me I pay just as much to see a small budget film as I do a big budget... films make back their investment."
For every blockbuster there's a dozen that just break even and another two dozen that don't. You should check out the gross for "Sound of Thunder"...
A "big budget" film is just a bigger risk. The successful films subsidize those that are less so. And until opening day, no one really knows which one is which. Star Wars was "projected" by many to be a total flop.
And indie films typically have much smaller audiences, which in turn need to pay more (the same) to break even.
Most of the things that have gone down in price are things that can be stamped out 1,000 at a time like computer chips. Prices, however, for labor and time and material intensive items like cars and housing have increased dramatically.
Watch the "how it was made" portion of something like LOTR, and see just how many years and how many thousands of highly skilled people it took to produce a few hours of entertainment.
All done, I might add, in the HOPE that people would go to see it, and that if they did you MIGHT get your investment back.
" Do you have the $30,000 or so that even an independant film costs to produce these days..."
No? Well, I suppose you could find backers for a project if you had a good script. 'Course the writer is going to want money, or at least a cut for said script. And the finance people are going to want a profit on the money they're risking. And I suppose that you, the actors, and all the other people involved, are going to want to eat and pay rent and so on while you're producing it.
And you'll need to score it. And edit it. And distribute it. All things that also require dollars that your backers need to front before it can even make a dime.
Wow. Maybe there's a reason why you can't go to the movies for a quarter...
That logic doesn't fly either. The second-run houses are, in effect, subsidized by the first-run houses. Without the first tier to pay for the bulk of the costs of the movie, the second tiers would no dobut need to charge more.
Back when I was growing up, a cup of coffee or a loaf of bread cost a quarter, a shake 50 centers, you could get an entire meal for a buck, and $30,000 was the price of a house, not a car.
I say we take on the nasty, profiteering coffee, bread, ice cream, restaraunt, housing, and auto companies...
Then again, since none of those other things cost the same now as they did then, and since what was once a million dollar movie now routinely costs $50-100 million, why is it again that you're expecting to pay decades-old admission prices?
Sorry, but I consider a buck a song to be a fair price. I thought the $250 I paid for my pod to be a fair price for the value received, otherwise I wouldn't have bought the silly thing.
Too many people think "fair" is somehow either free or at or below cost.
Yeah, that half-a-million or so they ponied up to get a hot artist to sign with them probably isn't a cost...
And why a quarter? You can't even use a pay phone for a quarter these days, and their "cost" is just some electricity. (Well, and the phone. And the lines. And the switches. And the towers. And the maintainence. And the...)
Heck, a quarter probably doesn't even pay the credit card transaction fee.
My point was we don't even have the technology needed for a moon trip, much less a round trip past Mars to and from the asteriod belt with the purpose of locating and moving a suitable asteroid into earth orbit.
By the time we could do that, we probably wouldn't need the asteroid to in the first place...
1) So, if they're distributing crap, then why are you filling up your iPod with it?
2) You only think you know the costs. Somebody is maintaining a large and expensive web site. Somebody is maintaining a bank of servers. Somebody is paying for bandwidth. Somebody is paying the credit card company 20-30 cents per transaction. Somebody is paying for the music. And Apple and the record companies and the artists are all (god forbid) making a profit.
3) Most of the content on my iPods, and my friends, for that matter, come from ripped CDs we already owned. The rest comes from iTunes and Audible. The "most is illegal" assumption strikes me as the standard "everyone else must be doing it" rationalization. Somebody bought 500,000,000 songs off iTunes.
4) "Copying to tape" has been sanctioned almost since the reel-to-reel was invented. I know you enjoyed feeling like a rebel, but your sanctity in that regard is safe.
I think that if the **AAs could limit piracy down to the people willing to risk their part-time jobs at the data center just to steal a song, they'd be EXTREMELY happy.
With mySQL, I get what mySQL AB thinks I should get. Or the Apache foundation. Or in many cases, whatever the project lead thinks is important... or cool.
Probably 99.9% of the "people" who actually use these products are unwilling or unable to make significant changes to such complex code bases. Especially when it means that, should the developer decide not to include your additions, you now have a forked project that has to be modified each and every time a new release, bug fix, or security update occurs.
Yes, they have the potential ability to hire work done. But all that "potential" is usually just that. With free systems, most people are equally powerless.
"...they don't think about things such as your children's best friend using your computer to download stuff."
And so you have no measure of responsibility whatsoever when your property and network are used for illegal purposes?
Odd, because you can bet people would be asking questions about my level of responsibility when that same best friend was injured joyriding in my car. (Actually occured to a friend. He as accused of being irresponsible leaving the keys to his sports car in plain sight on the hall table. Just asking for it to be stolen... and totalled.)
Great. We can't even get back to the moon, and now we need to make a small side trip out to the asteroid belt and back to snag a small carbon rich asteroid so we can make a tether so we can get into space cheaply so we can afforf to go after an asteroid. Seems to be a small chicken-and-egg issue here.
Actually, I have one of the most expensive PDAs on the market, as well as the top end iPod. I never said it had to be cheap. And it doesn't have to be a phone. I did say, however, that people don't want to spend money on a device that ONLY reads books... which is where RocketBook and the others fell down.
Yet another reason why it's a bad idea is that someone has to learn a specialized query language that's supported only by C#. If you do, your developers and code will be locked in. At least SQL knowledge and queries are portable across languages (PHP, CF, etc.).
Of course, Macromedia built ColdFusion to output Java bytecode. Add the proper libs, and it runs on any high-performance Java system, including J2EE systems... where all the performance optimization work is already being done. They just piggyback on top of it.
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It may be a cliche to say that today's audiences are more sophisticated... but they are. Go see Sound of Thunder, and watch how many times those non-realistic effects pop you out of your suspension of disbelief. They don't look "real", and in doing so, attract unwanted attention. I suppose they could have avoided them, but it's a bit difficult to have a story about dinosaur hunting and not show a dinosaur...
Actually, this makes the assumption that it's an either/or situation. I think it's far more likely that Apple will, at some point, release a converged video/audio pod. And at the same time, they'll maintain ines of smaller, music-only devices, much as they already have large, small, smaller, and nano-sized devices now, each serving a different market and need.
Should read "The Two-Income Trap" by Elizabeth Warren. She maintains (and has the numbers to back it up) that the major increases stem from two income families competing against single income families, higher demand due to parents trying to position themselves in preferential school districts, and finally, due to predatory "low interest" lending practices.
You should be chipping in on one of those threads where people complain that they need to take business and science and english classes when all they want to do is learn PHP.
People hire programmers to solve domain-specific problems. It helps when you hire a person to work on your accounting system that they actually understand business processes and accounting...
Millions of people like Angelina Jolie, and will pay to see her in a film. What's the impact on your bottom line if she's in your movie? What's the impact if she's in someone else's? If a hot star can bring in an extra $10 million in revenue, what's she worth?
Yep. Definitely sounds deflationary...
For every blockbuster there's a dozen that just break even and another two dozen that don't. You should check out the gross for "Sound of Thunder"...
A "big budget" film is just a bigger risk. The successful films subsidize those that are less so. And until opening day, no one really knows which one is which. Star Wars was "projected" by many to be a total flop.
And indie films typically have much smaller audiences, which in turn need to pay more (the same) to break even.
Watch the "how it was made" portion of something like LOTR, and see just how many years and how many thousands of highly skilled people it took to produce a few hours of entertainment.
All done, I might add, in the HOPE that people would go to see it, and that if they did you MIGHT get your investment back.
No? Well, I suppose you could find backers for a project if you had a good script. 'Course the writer is going to want money, or at least a cut for said script. And the finance people are going to want a profit on the money they're risking. And I suppose that you, the actors, and all the other people involved, are going to want to eat and pay rent and so on while you're producing it.
And you'll need to score it. And edit it. And distribute it. All things that also require dollars that your backers need to front before it can even make a dime.
Wow. Maybe there's a reason why you can't go to the movies for a quarter...
That logic doesn't fly either. The second-run houses are, in effect, subsidized by the first-run houses. Without the first tier to pay for the bulk of the costs of the movie, the second tiers would no dobut need to charge more.
Well, put that way, since you've already seen them, you don't need to see them again, now do you?
I say we take on the nasty, profiteering coffee, bread, ice cream, restaraunt, housing, and auto companies...
Then again, since none of those other things cost the same now as they did then, and since what was once a million dollar movie now routinely costs $50-100 million, why is it again that you're expecting to pay decades-old admission prices?
Too many people think "fair" is somehow either free or at or below cost.
And why a quarter? You can't even use a pay phone for a quarter these days, and their "cost" is just some electricity. (Well, and the phone. And the lines. And the switches. And the towers. And the maintainence. And the...)
Heck, a quarter probably doesn't even pay the credit card transaction fee.
Why not just put a slave strobe over the plate? Their flash triggers yours, and the plate is overexposed...
By the time we could do that, we probably wouldn't need the asteroid to in the first place...
1) So, if they're distributing crap, then why are you filling up your iPod with it?
2) You only think you know the costs. Somebody is maintaining a large and expensive web site. Somebody is maintaining a bank of servers. Somebody is paying for bandwidth. Somebody is paying the credit card company 20-30 cents per transaction. Somebody is paying for the music. And Apple and the record companies and the artists are all (god forbid) making a profit.
3) Most of the content on my iPods, and my friends, for that matter, come from ripped CDs we already owned. The rest comes from iTunes and Audible. The "most is illegal" assumption strikes me as the standard "everyone else must be doing it" rationalization. Somebody bought 500,000,000 songs off iTunes.
4) "Copying to tape" has been sanctioned almost since the reel-to-reel was invented. I know you enjoyed feeling like a rebel, but your sanctity in that regard is safe.
I think that if the **AAs could limit piracy down to the people willing to risk their part-time jobs at the data center just to steal a song, they'd be EXTREMELY happy.
Probably 99.9% of the "people" who actually use these products are unwilling or unable to make significant changes to such complex code bases. Especially when it means that, should the developer decide not to include your additions, you now have a forked project that has to be modified each and every time a new release, bug fix, or security update occurs.
Yes, they have the potential ability to hire work done. But all that "potential" is usually just that. With free systems, most people are equally powerless.
Ummmm.... like IBM? EDS? Infosys?
And so you have no measure of responsibility whatsoever when your property and network are used for illegal purposes?
Odd, because you can bet people would be asking questions about my level of responsibility when that same best friend was injured joyriding in my car. (Actually occured to a friend. He as accused of being irresponsible leaving the keys to his sports car in plain sight on the hall table. Just asking for it to be stolen... and totalled.)
Great. We can't even get back to the moon, and now we need to make a small side trip out to the asteroid belt and back to snag a small carbon rich asteroid so we can make a tether so we can get into space cheaply so we can afforf to go after an asteroid. Seems to be a small chicken-and-egg issue here.
Actually, I have one of the most expensive PDAs on the market, as well as the top end iPod. I never said it had to be cheap. And it doesn't have to be a phone. I did say, however, that people don't want to spend money on a device that ONLY reads books... which is where RocketBook and the others fell down.
Yet another reason why it's a bad idea is that someone has to learn a specialized query language that's supported only by C#. If you do, your developers and code will be locked in. At least SQL knowledge and queries are portable across languages (PHP, CF, etc.).
Of course, Macromedia built ColdFusion to output Java bytecode. Add the proper libs, and it runs on any high-performance Java system, including J2EE systems... where all the performance optimization work is already being done. They just piggyback on top of it.