We don't have attention spans long enough for story ideas that cannot be swiftly resolved with guns.
Really? We've evolved so much as human beings in 40 years?
Or it is simply that that's what TV and media companies would like us all to believe, in order to excuse the frequently poor crap they produce?
The technology of editing and graphics has allowed people to do more cool shit, but it's used to fill up what's on the screen rather than enhancing it. It's used to distract you, to move you on from what you've seen because it really isn't very good.
There's an old British TV series called Civilisation which was written and presented by Kenneth Clarke. And it's totally gripping to watch despite the fact that it frequently is a man standing in front of a painting or some architecture and just talking about it in a shot that lasts for a few minutes.
Wake me up when one of these guys puts up their personal money to fund a campaign against these laws, or to defend someone who is being prosecuted, or to quit record companies who will do these things
Mars is the equivalent of climbing Everest. The only reason for a man to go there is because it's there.
But where someone could climb Everest with the sponsorship of a newspaper, Mars takes the sort of money that requires government, and it's just not that important.
For me, it's also about something that's clearly abstract and identifiable. People have been going out on boats with duck sounds for decades now. To then have passengers quacking as a collective activity is just an extension of something already established in our culture.
On the other hand, the MGM lion and its roar are clearly nothing to do with the subject of movies. Lions have nothing to do with movies so to put a lion roaring as your logo is clearly trying to pass yourself off as MGM.
But seriously, I took to the HTC Magic quite quickly. At the time, the iPhone didn't have the landscape keyboard, and the magic did, which made using the keyboard so much better.
Have you used the HTC Magic? I really didn't find the UI operation any more complicated than the iPhone. You have a load of icons which you can scroll up and down, click to launch an app.
Quite. It's a bit early for "Android isn't taking off" when there are 2 phones available in the UK.
I own an HTC Magic and just the other day thought about how good a phone it is. My reaction to the iPhone 3GS features went something like this: "Got it already, got it already, got it already". OK, there's a couple of features on the 3GS that it doesn't have, but most of it was nothing new as far as I was concerned.
And while the app store doesn't have as many apps as the iPhone's, most of the useful apps have a good equivalent, and in my experience, Android is getting apps before iPhone.
Oh, and it's on Vodafone, which has a decent 3G network unlike iPhone which is on O2's network.
Interestingly, Dances with Wolves was, for a time, nicknamed "Kevin's Gate" as people thought it was going to bomb like Heaven's Gate.
I'm going to give James Cameron a go on this one. The guy has an amazing track record, and dipped out on films like T3 because he just didn't see a story that could be told.
Frankly, Opera can go suck on a bag of dicks over this. I'm amazed they're still in business with their 0.5% market share.
I like alternative browsers, run mostly FF & Chrome on Windows, used to run Opera and test my apps against Opera, but this is just a pain in the arse for most users who don't really care and just want "the blue E".
No-one is going to see a list of 5 browsers including "Opera" and install it over something from Microsoft, Google or Apple, unless they know about it already
"Under the contract, New Line was to pay a percentage of all gross receipts, after deducting 2.6 times the production costs, plus advertising expenses in excess of a certain amount, according to Eskenazi."
The simple lesson of hollywood accounting is this: you take a percentage of the gross - nothing more, nothing less. It might mean you get a smaller percentage, but there's nothing they can do to bury anything or remove anything.
The thing is that Bob Iger is a different character to previous Disney CEOs. He wants quality more than just cashing in. That's why they bought Pixar and put Lasseter in quite a high position in Disney.
Remember, before the big 4 films of the early 90s (Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Lion King), that Disney had been making dreck and renewed themselves (albeit temporarily).
It's one reason I prefer to charge clients for the job than the hour. Because like the author, by the time I sit down to code, I've worked out precisely what I want to do. When I'm writing code in the evening, I might be reading slashdot, twitter and all that, but I'm quite frequently also buzzing code around in my head. I can almost feel the things forming, juggling around 2 different approaches and letting the brain work out which way it likes better.
It means that when I sit down, the code is more like typing.
the record industry has now joined forces with other entertainment lobby groups to demand that the government takes action to protect their business model
They're not "protecting their business model". "protecting their business model" by lobbying is when an established business tries to erect barriers to new businesses that can outperform them. I've got no time for that, but in this case, the "improved model" that outperforms the record companies is illegal. No-one would argue that because some people steal TVs and sell them down the pub that the model for selling TVs was wrong.
There's some things wrong with copyright, such as a lack of fair use in UK copyright and terms that are too long, but fundamentally, we need it.
The ironic thing here is that Billy Bragg is a socialist and has in the past defended numerous people (e.g. the miners) who demanded special pleading outside of the free market.
The "1/3rd" figure is rubbish. I'd go as far as to say that over 7/8ths of UK business run no custom software whatsoever. It's probably more like 1/3rd of FTSE400 businesses or something.
The 80% figure is probably about right, if you look at it in a certain way. I suspect that BACS runs COBOL (they used to). Most financial companies process in COBOL as changing is just too damn risky.
Churn also matters. The department I left (when I did COBOL) still has a huge number of the same guys in it when I left. And they're not heroic - they're mostly just middle-aged guys who don't want to keep chasing being current with the language-de-jour, want a very secure job and a short drive to work.
Anyone who wants better quality is already using FLAC. It's not like they don't have the space for it on their massive MP3 players or computer hard drives.
And it ain't going to replace MP3s on stores. The format is good enough for most sales.
Sometimes, quite genuinely, there are owners with a personal belief system. I run a consultancy firm, and if certain types of organization approached me, I wouldn't be prepared to work with them. That's not from the perspective of reputation or PR, but just that I have a moral opposition to them personally, and as the owner of the company, I can do that.
There's also the staff issue: certain types of staff like to work with companies that do certain things. I know a web design company that's very green (which is part of the owner's beliefs) and many of the staff like working for them because of things like the fact that they're carbon neutral.
I guess that's something that people don't yet understand very well, that everything is interest driven
The weird thing is that Adam Smith pretty much figured it out 200 years ago, and we're only getting it now. The Wealth of Nations pretty much says that people are out for themselves, while The Theory of Moral Sentiments says that within this, we are naturally sympathetic. So we put our hand in our pocket to help the blind or the deaf, either through a system of benefits or charity.
Pretty simple. The car guys don't because they would be cannibalizing their own profits. Nobody wants to sell a car that's cheaper and will require fewer replacement parts than the cars they're already selling, and that has a huge investment up front in new technologies. It's a lose-lose proposition.
But that's precisely what happened when Japanese car makers came on the scene. They had to outclass the US automakers and so made more robust cars with longer life/less spare parts.
There are companies making electric cars right now (the G-Whiz for instance). Why can't they make a larger family model if they can make a tiny model?
" This is why GM killed the EV because they want you to consume parts and service for the (short) life of the car."
OK. So, why doesn't one of the other car makers make an electric car? There's dozens of them out there. Presumably they would clean up, selling to people. Or why don't a bunch of non-car guys like Apple, Google or Microsoft do it? Or you?
An electric vehicle that can seat 1 adult, 2 children and some shopping would absolutely clean up in the 2nd car market in Europe. So, if people can make a profit from it, and are capable of doing it, why aren't they?
Sure - but where's your quotes from the people who turned down bad ideas? I remember hearing how News Corp nearly bought out one of the "push" internet companies, and bailed out at the last minute, saving themselves hundreds of millions of dollars. They were quite correct in not backing it.
What made those quotes interesting was a lack of vision. The scientist saying that passengers would suffocate hadn't considered that there would be a way to pressuring a tube for people to sit in. Foch maybe hadn't thought about the speed of development of planes. Thatcher hadn't thought about the personality of Sir Keith Joseph.
So, here's my challenge to you: explain a vision of how solar or wind makes sense to Shell beyond what their people have thought. Explain how it's a good bet for them over the next, say, 20 years, despite the fact that the efficiency is, right now, way off the cost of oil.
Now, at some point, the cost of solar/wind is going to meet the cost of oil, I have no doubt. Maybe that will be in 20 years, I don't know. As you seem to think Shell have got it wrong, perhaps you can produce some figures to back up your assertion.
Absolutely. One thing that these people don't realise is that a lot of "CSR" activity is actually carefully calculated in terms of image and profit.
Someone recently explained to me about breast cancer charity. Companies absolutely love sponsoring breast cancer charities. It targets female consumers, and isn't too icky (unlike say, bowel cancer). You can also see things like the various programs that help the farmers who grow products for you. They're basically charging a large premium for your social conscience.
Between Shell's decisions to stop its clean energy investments and to increase its debt load to pay for dividends, the company is solidifying an image of corporate greed over corporate responsibility."
Now, some companies are run by people with a streak of "corporate responsibility". Sometimes, the staff want some "corporate responsibility". But mostly "corporate responsibility" is about profit. It's about looking nice to your more naive customers. In the end, companies will work this stuff out as a trade-off. Amount of income lost to treehuggers who boycott you vs amount of income lost on green projects.
If green projects > treehugger income, you'll get rid of the projects.
OK. Now and again, NOD has a little bubble popup from the Taskbar telling me that definitions have updated, then it quickly goes away.
But I am utterly sick of products I have paid for interrupting me to tell me about special offers. McAfee gave me frequent warnings about the lack of anti-spam, and there was no way I could see to say "stop bothering me". When my subscription ran out, I sought out an alternative.
It just depends. Some sequels really work because they are like new stories with the same characters, or add something based on where the last film finished.
While The Godfather has a satisfactory conclusion, the sequel works brilliantly. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Aliens and T2 likewise. I also quite like Predator II, despite it having little relevant to Predator.
But a lot of sequels are made for reasons of nothing but money, and often do things like mess around with the "universe" of the story.
If bundling IE with Windows is against the law, what do you suggest they do? Give people an FTP client with somewhere to go and download a browser of choice?
Slashdot Mirror
We don't have attention spans long enough for story ideas that cannot be swiftly resolved with guns.
Really? We've evolved so much as human beings in 40 years?
Or it is simply that that's what TV and media companies would like us all to believe, in order to excuse the frequently poor crap they produce?
The technology of editing and graphics has allowed people to do more cool shit, but it's used to fill up what's on the screen rather than enhancing it. It's used to distract you, to move you on from what you've seen because it really isn't very good.
There's an old British TV series called Civilisation which was written and presented by Kenneth Clarke. And it's totally gripping to watch despite the fact that it frequently is a man standing in front of a painting or some architecture and just talking about it in a shot that lasts for a few minutes.
I came here to say this.
Wake me up when one of these guys puts up their personal money to fund a campaign against these laws, or to defend someone who is being prosecuted, or to quit record companies who will do these things
Indeed.
Mars is the equivalent of climbing Everest. The only reason for a man to go there is because it's there.
But where someone could climb Everest with the sponsorship of a newspaper, Mars takes the sort of money that requires government, and it's just not that important.
For me, it's also about something that's clearly abstract and identifiable. People have been going out on boats with duck sounds for decades now. To then have passengers quacking as a collective activity is just an extension of something already established in our culture.
On the other hand, the MGM lion and its roar are clearly nothing to do with the subject of movies. Lions have nothing to do with movies so to put a lion roaring as your logo is clearly trying to pass yourself off as MGM.
OK, maybe I'm a geek ;)
But seriously, I took to the HTC Magic quite quickly. At the time, the iPhone didn't have the landscape keyboard, and the magic did, which made using the keyboard so much better.
Have you used the HTC Magic? I really didn't find the UI operation any more complicated than the iPhone. You have a load of icons which you can scroll up and down, click to launch an app.
Quite. It's a bit early for "Android isn't taking off" when there are 2 phones available in the UK.
I own an HTC Magic and just the other day thought about how good a phone it is. My reaction to the iPhone 3GS features went something like this: "Got it already, got it already, got it already". OK, there's a couple of features on the 3GS that it doesn't have, but most of it was nothing new as far as I was concerned.
And while the app store doesn't have as many apps as the iPhone's, most of the useful apps have a good equivalent, and in my experience, Android is getting apps before iPhone.
Oh, and it's on Vodafone, which has a decent 3G network unlike iPhone which is on O2's network.
Interestingly, Dances with Wolves was, for a time, nicknamed "Kevin's Gate" as people thought it was going to bomb like Heaven's Gate.
I'm going to give James Cameron a go on this one. The guy has an amazing track record, and dipped out on films like T3 because he just didn't see a story that could be told.
Frankly, Opera can go suck on a bag of dicks over this. I'm amazed they're still in business with their 0.5% market share.
I like alternative browsers, run mostly FF & Chrome on Windows, used to run Opera and test my apps against Opera, but this is just a pain in the arse for most users who don't really care and just want "the blue E".
No-one is going to see a list of 5 browsers including "Opera" and install it over something from Microsoft, Google or Apple, unless they know about it already
"Under the contract, New Line was to pay a percentage of all gross receipts, after deducting 2.6 times the production costs, plus advertising expenses in excess of a certain amount, according to Eskenazi." The simple lesson of hollywood accounting is this: you take a percentage of the gross - nothing more, nothing less. It might mean you get a smaller percentage, but there's nothing they can do to bury anything or remove anything.
Bolt was quite good.
The thing is that Bob Iger is a different character to previous Disney CEOs. He wants quality more than just cashing in. That's why they bought Pixar and put Lasseter in quite a high position in Disney.
Remember, before the big 4 films of the early 90s (Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Lion King), that Disney had been making dreck and renewed themselves (albeit temporarily).
It's one reason I prefer to charge clients for the job than the hour. Because like the author, by the time I sit down to code, I've worked out precisely what I want to do. When I'm writing code in the evening, I might be reading slashdot, twitter and all that, but I'm quite frequently also buzzing code around in my head. I can almost feel the things forming, juggling around 2 different approaches and letting the brain work out which way it likes better.
It means that when I sit down, the code is more like typing.
They're not "protecting their business model". "protecting their business model" by lobbying is when an established business tries to erect barriers to new businesses that can outperform them. I've got no time for that, but in this case, the "improved model" that outperforms the record companies is illegal. No-one would argue that because some people steal TVs and sell them down the pub that the model for selling TVs was wrong.
There's some things wrong with copyright, such as a lack of fair use in UK copyright and terms that are too long, but fundamentally, we need it.
The ironic thing here is that Billy Bragg is a socialist and has in the past defended numerous people (e.g. the miners) who demanded special pleading outside of the free market.
The "1/3rd" figure is rubbish. I'd go as far as to say that over 7/8ths of UK business run no custom software whatsoever. It's probably more like 1/3rd of FTSE400 businesses or something.
The 80% figure is probably about right, if you look at it in a certain way. I suspect that BACS runs COBOL (they used to). Most financial companies process in COBOL as changing is just too damn risky.
Churn also matters. The department I left (when I did COBOL) still has a huge number of the same guys in it when I left. And they're not heroic - they're mostly just middle-aged guys who don't want to keep chasing being current with the language-de-jour, want a very secure job and a short drive to work.
And it ain't going to replace MP3s on stores. The format is good enough for most sales.
Sometimes, quite genuinely, there are owners with a personal belief system. I run a consultancy firm, and if certain types of organization approached me, I wouldn't be prepared to work with them. That's not from the perspective of reputation or PR, but just that I have a moral opposition to them personally, and as the owner of the company, I can do that.
There's also the staff issue: certain types of staff like to work with companies that do certain things. I know a web design company that's very green (which is part of the owner's beliefs) and many of the staff like working for them because of things like the fact that they're carbon neutral.
I guess that's something that people don't yet understand very well, that everything is interest driven
The weird thing is that Adam Smith pretty much figured it out 200 years ago, and we're only getting it now. The Wealth of Nations pretty much says that people are out for themselves, while The Theory of Moral Sentiments says that within this, we are naturally sympathetic. So we put our hand in our pocket to help the blind or the deaf, either through a system of benefits or charity.
Pretty simple. The car guys don't because they would be cannibalizing their own profits. Nobody wants to sell a car that's cheaper and will require fewer replacement parts than the cars they're already selling, and that has a huge investment up front in new technologies. It's a lose-lose proposition.
But that's precisely what happened when Japanese car makers came on the scene. They had to outclass the US automakers and so made more robust cars with longer life/less spare parts.
There are companies making electric cars right now (the G-Whiz for instance). Why can't they make a larger family model if they can make a tiny model?
" This is why GM killed the EV because they want you to consume parts and service for the (short) life of the car."
OK. So, why doesn't one of the other car makers make an electric car? There's dozens of them out there. Presumably they would clean up, selling to people. Or why don't a bunch of non-car guys like Apple, Google or Microsoft do it? Or you?
An electric vehicle that can seat 1 adult, 2 children and some shopping would absolutely clean up in the 2nd car market in Europe. So, if people can make a profit from it, and are capable of doing it, why aren't they?
What made those quotes interesting was a lack of vision. The scientist saying that passengers would suffocate hadn't considered that there would be a way to pressuring a tube for people to sit in. Foch maybe hadn't thought about the speed of development of planes. Thatcher hadn't thought about the personality of Sir Keith Joseph.
So, here's my challenge to you: explain a vision of how solar or wind makes sense to Shell beyond what their people have thought. Explain how it's a good bet for them over the next, say, 20 years, despite the fact that the efficiency is, right now, way off the cost of oil.
Now, at some point, the cost of solar/wind is going to meet the cost of oil, I have no doubt. Maybe that will be in 20 years, I don't know. As you seem to think Shell have got it wrong, perhaps you can produce some figures to back up your assertion.
Someone recently explained to me about breast cancer charity. Companies absolutely love sponsoring breast cancer charities. It targets female consumers, and isn't too icky (unlike say, bowel cancer). You can also see things like the various programs that help the farmers who grow products for you. They're basically charging a large premium for your social conscience.
Between Shell's decisions to stop its clean energy investments and to increase its debt load to pay for dividends, the company is solidifying an image of corporate greed over corporate responsibility."
Now, some companies are run by people with a streak of "corporate responsibility". Sometimes, the staff want some "corporate responsibility". But mostly "corporate responsibility" is about profit. It's about looking nice to your more naive customers. In the end, companies will work this stuff out as a trade-off. Amount of income lost to treehuggers who boycott you vs amount of income lost on green projects.
If green projects > treehugger income, you'll get rid of the projects.
I personally use ESET NOD32 for 2 main reasons:-
OK. Now and again, NOD has a little bubble popup from the Taskbar telling me that definitions have updated, then it quickly goes away.
But I am utterly sick of products I have paid for interrupting me to tell me about special offers. McAfee gave me frequent warnings about the lack of anti-spam, and there was no way I could see to say "stop bothering me". When my subscription ran out, I sought out an alternative.
The biggest problem with people not using Firefox is awareness. Once I've told people about it, they try it and frequently don't go back.
It just depends. Some sequels really work because they are like new stories with the same characters, or add something based on where the last film finished.
While The Godfather has a satisfactory conclusion, the sequel works brilliantly. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Aliens and T2 likewise. I also quite like Predator II, despite it having little relevant to Predator.
But a lot of sequels are made for reasons of nothing but money, and often do things like mess around with the "universe" of the story.
I heard a story about another mainframe manufacturer that a guy just came in and changed a dip switch over.
If bundling IE with Windows is against the law, what do you suggest they do? Give people an FTP client with somewhere to go and download a browser of choice?