"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" fulfills much more of the science requirement in Science Fiction. You are correct, "Being John Malkovich" is much more a fantasy than a sci-fi.
His overall point is well taken though, Kaufman is an amazing writer. If you haven't seen "Eternal Sunshine", watch it. His other major motion picture "Adaptation" is also excellent, although not sci-fi at all.
People actually get fired for championing shows that are good but no one watches.
You have a point, but it does seem that someone should be in trouble for obviously botching the promotion and scheduling of a show that has shown potential for a significant fanbase.
this means that they spent $60-65 million on a film that earned $10 million its opening weekend.
Opening at $10 million at the number two spot doesn't seem all that bad to me. Beat out Corpse Bride which I'm sure had a much bigger budget than Serenity. Sure, it's not the blockbuster that we all hoped it would be, but it's not off to a bad start.
Who raises the baby Reevers? Can infants who are "beyond insanity" survive infancy? Great movie, great story, but also a serious problem w/ the Reever social structure.
In the movie, they stated the Reavers have only been in existence for 12 years. Not a significant need to propagate in that time span - thus there isn't an immediate need for 'baby reavers'
Therefore, lots of developers use linux but dont make software for it.
Thing is, it's not difficult to make commercial software for Linux. For example, Trolltech offers Qt with a commercial license. If purchased a developer can create a commercial app that they can sell for Linux (or OSX or Windows - if they purchase the appropriate licenses).
Your 'Make free stuff' step isn't a requirement for an app the runs on Linux.
What if, behind closed doors at Google they're working on an OS? An OS that's based on Linux, yet with the UI and ease-of-use similar to OSX. And on x86 machines it will be able to run Windows software. And then they make the whole thing all open source.
What possible motivation could Google have for doing this, so they could embed more advertising in the OS itself? They would certainly have to charge for this new OS to make any money on it, which would be difficult to do considering how many free linux distros are out there. Their revenue model depends on the most amout of users possible accessing their sites and reading their ads. Wouldn't make much sense to try to complicate matters with a new OS.
Yes, great search engine. But take all that talent and make something really cool! Something revolutionary!
The Google search engine is about as revolutionary as it gets. They have drawn traffic from all over the world and provided a completely new interface to the Internet, and you know what? Search engines still mostly suck. There is a long way to go before there is no more optimization to do in the Google search engine. I'm sure much of the talent they have brought in is to continue to improve their search engine.
Their other endeavours, gmail, google earth, froogle, blogger, etc... are all online offerings. An online office suite would be fitting with their current revenue model - a new OS or Linux disto would not.
Why not? That's what Google did to Yahoo. Yahoo was a bloated portal site, Google rose to the top by being the best search engine possible. It was definitely a subset of Yahoo.
Blackberry has done the same thing to Palm, as discussed in an Slashdot article just a couple days ago. Blackberry is much simpler than a Palm or Windows CE device, but has gained market share and effectively killed Palm.
There are various reasons why applications die, features are not always the primary reason. Cost, reliability, marketing and popularity all play an important part in the way products gain and keep market share.
because Intranets are so fucking useful on a global scale, right?
Don't know about you, but all my intranets connect to the Internet. Actually, thats all the 'Great Firewall' is, an attempt to make China on big intranet. China may even be running their own domain servers and have their own version of ICANN. Some of the intranets I run have their own DNS servers and use names internally that are not available externally. Even if there's fragmentation, anyone that wants to be connected will be able to be connected. US Tax dollars paid for implementation of the current system, US security relies on the current system, it would be apalling if the US Government gave control of something as vital to our society as the root DNS servers over to anyone else.
One thing, this
Bush, his Family First supporters, and Mrs. Clinton...
is not a phrase I would have ever thought would be seen anywhere.
...think that fragmentation would actually be good.
Absolutely. There is no reason, even though the article try to insinuate otherwise, that anyone would have to setup their own Intranet without a connection to the rest of the world. Some countries might try do that to keep their citizens from accessing foreign sites by design, but there is no technical reason it's a necessity. In this case a little diversity and expansion of the technology would be a good thing. Heck, maybe someone will come up with a system better than DNS that we can all switch to.
What, you don't think the US Government is stable? Hell, it's so stable on election day there isn't even any signficant difference in the candidates policy positions. I never said the government was efficient or economical, but it's definitely stable.
Same headline as usual I see. Everything "may" kill the leading product, but the chances of it happening are slim to none.
The chances of the product in the headline killing the 'leading product' may be low, but sooner or later something will kill said product. No product remains the 'leading product' forever. Eventually something will replace Microsoft Office. Lets look at recent history.
Over the last 20 years, the following software products were all the leading products in their market
Yahoo
Palm
Word Perfect
Lotus 123
Pac Man
All of these applications have been replaced by newer and arguably better products. There are no guarantees in any kind of competitive market. Everyone rises and falls. When I was a kid K-Mart was huge and nobody where I live had even heard of Wal-Mart. Now K-Mart is virtually bankrupt. In another 30 years I'm sure someone else will come along. Markets change and apps get 'killed' all of the time.
It may seem ridiculous to say that X is a killer app that will destroy Y, but sooner or later it will happen.
Oh,, sorry world, internet is down today, our leftist parties are calling for a strike today and some spirited employees have sabotaged the servers already. oops.
Exactly what I was thinking. Nothing against India, but they are not very politically stable at the moment. If the US has one thing going for it, we have a very stable government. What advantage would there be for us to give up a critical service like maintaining domain servers and give that management to other, less stable countries.
On top of that, no one has to use the US's domain servers, or for that matter ICANN's domain names. A country like India or China could run all of their own domain servers and just proxy out to any sites in the rest of the world that they wanted their people to see.
Finally, what advantage would there be to other countries if they managed the domain servers. I thought all of the names and IP addresses were allocated through ICANN. The only possible reason that I can see to do this is so they could force IP6 and make the US update, of course they wouldn't have the money to make this work either, so we would still be in a mess.
Um, no. Watching the commercials are payment for the content (in the discussed scheme). TV doesn't make me redistribute. Radio doesn't make me redistribute. Why would I voluntarily pay for distribution costs of something someone else is making money on.
no Supreme Court Justice wants to be the guy who says "Hey, did you guys notice that most of the federal laws on the books are unconstitutional?"
Why not? Last I checked, Supreme Court Justices were appointed for life. I don't think it would be impossible to think that one of the Justices might get a spine and start changing the interpretations for Amendments IX and X.
How screwed would the US government be if somebody like John Roberts took a Supreme Court seat and then decided to start upholding state's rights? I would love to see that, just to add a little extra chaos to our world.
If I'm 'sick at home' I'm probably not home at all - just needed an extra vacation day so thought I'd use on of the 5 sick days the company allots annually. How handy is that laptop going to be then?
I think a lot of people fail to distinguish between cases where strong
passwords are needed, and where they aren't.
That is my biggest complaint. For things that are critical I have a (relatively) strong password scheme, for non-critical things I have one or two passwords I use. What irritates me is when a website I would consider low risk has a bunch of password rules (numbers, non-alphanumeric characters, a length requirement longer than 6 characters). The funniest to me are companies like the electricity or trash pickup. Why do I care if someone breaks into these? What are they going to do, pay my bill? Most sites that are any either don't keep payment info, or won't display it, so where's the risk?
Specifically, it's something "those damn kids" do; which means that of course it's a privilege, not a right, because you know, it's kids.
What's really interesting is 'those damn kids' are the largest demographic retailers, especially the music industry, attempts to appeal to. You would think the entertainment industry would stop trying to alienate their biggest customer base.
Thought we were discussing movie admissions, which isn't exactly a necessity of life. Thought cable and gym memberships were a better comparison than housing.
... it's a bit difficult to have a story about dinosaur hunting and not show a dinosaur...
Much of the effects requirements are directly related to the subject matter. That's why it took Peter Jackson and some huge technological advances in CGI to make LOTR. Many other movies, as the GP stated, can be made without all the special effects. For example, Robert Rodriguez' first movie, El Mariachi. If you haven't seen it, watch it. It was made on a ridiculously low budget with one camera and every scene was made in one take.
To say current audiences are more sophisticated is not really accurate. Much (not all) of the acting, directing and writing in many of the old movies is better than the average drivel that comes out of hollywood now. We are used to more realistic special effects than the movie goers of bygone eras were, thus fueling the need for CGI and fancy effects.
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.
And DVDs. There are many things in the movie industry that are much simpler and cheaper than they used to be. As you pointed out, labor and material intensive items are the most expensive, but CGI is MUCH cheaper than the old modeling techniques that were used previously.
The biggest cost increase in the movies are the actor's salaries. I would imagine that's why LOTR didn't have a lot of star power. Many of the actors (like Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom) weren't exactly household names before LOTR was filmed. I imagine that may have fueled the decision to film all three movies at once. If the movies had been wildly successful (like they are) the actors would have demanded ridiculous salaries.
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.
When I was growing up, pocket calculators were $200, computers were $10,000, Cable TV was for the rich people, and gym or country club memberships were way out of reach for the average person. Now you can get a gym membership for $20/month, everyone has cable, pocket calculators are extremely cheap, but no one buys them because they are already in their cell phones and I can buy a computer for $400. Not everything goes up in price and there is no entitlement for any company to increase their profits forever.
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?
I don't think it's that we think we should pay decades-old prices, it's more that the quality of the movies (arguably) have dropped, the theatres are not run as well as they previously were and DVDs can be bought cheaper than a trip to the movies. Today there is more competition than ever for our entertainment dollar. 30 years ago there were movies, 3 TV channels, AM radio and vinyl. Now I've got 150+ TV channels, 150+ channes of satellite radio, CDs, DVDs, iTunes and the Internet. I would think a little competition for those entertainment dollars should drive prices down.
Slashdot Mirror
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" fulfills much more of the science requirement in Science Fiction. You are correct, "Being John Malkovich" is much more a fantasy than a sci-fi.
His overall point is well taken though, Kaufman is an amazing writer. If you haven't seen "Eternal Sunshine", watch it. His other major motion picture "Adaptation" is also excellent, although not sci-fi at all.
Hopefully OSC can get someone to make Ender's Game the right way
Like maybe Joss Whedon?
People actually get fired for championing shows that are good but no one watches.
You have a point, but it does seem that someone should be in trouble for obviously botching the promotion and scheduling of a show that has shown potential for a significant fanbase.
this means that they spent $60-65 million on a film that earned $10 million its opening weekend.
Opening at $10 million at the number two spot doesn't seem all that bad to me. Beat out Corpse Bride which I'm sure had a much bigger budget than Serenity. Sure, it's not the blockbuster that we all hoped it would be, but it's not off to a bad start.
Who raises the baby Reevers? Can infants who are "beyond insanity" survive infancy? Great movie, great story, but also a serious problem w/ the Reever social structure.
In the movie, they stated the Reavers have only been in existence for 12 years. Not a significant need to propagate in that time span - thus there isn't an immediate need for 'baby reavers'
Therefore, lots of developers use linux but dont make software for it.
Thing is, it's not difficult to make commercial software for Linux. For example, Trolltech offers Qt with a commercial license. If purchased a developer can create a commercial app that they can sell for Linux (or OSX or Windows - if they purchase the appropriate licenses).
Your 'Make free stuff' step isn't a requirement for an app the runs on Linux.
What if, behind closed doors at Google they're working on an OS? An OS that's based on Linux, yet with the UI and ease-of-use similar to OSX. And on x86 machines it will be able to run Windows software. And then they make the whole thing all open source.
What possible motivation could Google have for doing this, so they could embed more advertising in the OS itself? They would certainly have to charge for this new OS to make any money on it, which would be difficult to do considering how many free linux distros are out there. Their revenue model depends on the most amout of users possible accessing their sites and reading their ads. Wouldn't make much sense to try to complicate matters with a new OS.
Yes, great search engine. But take all that talent and make something really cool! Something revolutionary!
The Google search engine is about as revolutionary as it gets. They have drawn traffic from all over the world and provided a completely new interface to the Internet, and you know what? Search engines still mostly suck. There is a long way to go before there is no more optimization to do in the Google search engine. I'm sure much of the talent they have brought in is to continue to improve their search engine.
Their other endeavours, gmail, google earth, froogle, blogger, etc... are all online offerings. An online office suite would be fitting with their current revenue model - a new OS or Linux disto would not.
Yeah, like the Cone of Silence
Why not? That's what Google did to Yahoo. Yahoo was a bloated portal site, Google rose to the top by being the best search engine possible. It was definitely a subset of Yahoo.
Blackberry has done the same thing to Palm, as discussed in an Slashdot article just a couple days ago. Blackberry is much simpler than a Palm or Windows CE device, but has gained market share and effectively killed Palm.
There are various reasons why applications die, features are not always the primary reason. Cost, reliability, marketing and popularity all play an important part in the way products gain and keep market share.
because Intranets are so fucking useful on a global scale, right?
Don't know about you, but all my intranets connect to the Internet. Actually, thats all the 'Great Firewall' is, an attempt to make China on big intranet. China may even be running their own domain servers and have their own version of ICANN. Some of the intranets I run have their own DNS servers and use names internally that are not available externally. Even if there's fragmentation, anyone that wants to be connected will be able to be connected. US Tax dollars paid for implementation of the current system, US security relies on the current system, it would be apalling if the US Government gave control of something as vital to our society as the root DNS servers over to anyone else.
One thing, this
Bush, his Family First supporters, and Mrs. Clinton...
is not a phrase I would have ever thought would be seen anywhere.
...think that fragmentation would actually be good.
Absolutely. There is no reason, even though the article try to insinuate otherwise, that anyone would have to setup their own Intranet without a connection to the rest of the world. Some countries might try do that to keep their citizens from accessing foreign sites by design, but there is no technical reason it's a necessity. In this case a little diversity and expansion of the technology would be a good thing. Heck, maybe someone will come up with a system better than DNS that we can all switch to.
What, you don't think the US Government is stable? Hell, it's so stable on election day there isn't even any signficant difference in the candidates policy positions. I never said the government was efficient or economical, but it's definitely stable.
The chances of the product in the headline killing the 'leading product' may be low, but sooner or later something will kill said product. No product remains the 'leading product' forever. Eventually something will replace Microsoft Office. Lets look at recent history.
Over the last 20 years, the following software products were all the leading products in their market
- Yahoo
- Palm
- Word Perfect
- Lotus 123
- Pac Man
All of these applications have been replaced by newer and arguably better products. There are no guarantees in any kind of competitive market. Everyone rises and falls. When I was a kid K-Mart was huge and nobody where I live had even heard of Wal-Mart. Now K-Mart is virtually bankrupt. In another 30 years I'm sure someone else will come along. Markets change and apps get 'killed' all of the time.It may seem ridiculous to say that X is a killer app that will destroy Y, but sooner or later it will happen.
Oh,, sorry world, internet is down today, our leftist parties are calling for a strike today and some spirited employees have sabotaged the servers already. oops.
Exactly what I was thinking. Nothing against India, but they are not very politically stable at the moment. If the US has one thing going for it, we have a very stable government. What advantage would there be for us to give up a critical service like maintaining domain servers and give that management to other, less stable countries.
On top of that, no one has to use the US's domain servers, or for that matter ICANN's domain names. A country like India or China could run all of their own domain servers and just proxy out to any sites in the rest of the world that they wanted their people to see.
Finally, what advantage would there be to other countries if they managed the domain servers. I thought all of the names and IP addresses were allocated through ICANN. The only possible reason that I can see to do this is so they could force IP6 and make the US update, of course they wouldn't have the money to make this work either, so we would still be in a mess.
Um, no. Watching the commercials are payment for the content (in the discussed scheme). TV doesn't make me redistribute. Radio doesn't make me redistribute. Why would I voluntarily pay for distribution costs of something someone else is making money on.
no Supreme Court Justice wants to be the guy who says "Hey, did you guys notice that most of the federal laws on the books are unconstitutional?"
Why not? Last I checked, Supreme Court Justices were appointed for life. I don't think it would be impossible to think that one of the Justices might get a spine and start changing the interpretations for Amendments IX and X.
How screwed would the US government be if somebody like John Roberts took a Supreme Court seat and then decided to start upholding state's rights? I would love to see that, just to add a little extra chaos to our world.
When TV was commercialized it was paid for with commercials. Bittorrent, like TV is a broadcast medium.
OK, just don't use my outgoing bandwidth to distribute that advertising out to other people, at least not without giving me a cut.
If I'm 'sick at home' I'm probably not home at all - just needed an extra vacation day so thought I'd use on of the 5 sick days the company allots annually. How handy is that laptop going to be then?
I think a lot of people fail to distinguish between cases where strong passwords are needed, and where they aren't.
That is my biggest complaint. For things that are critical I have a (relatively) strong password scheme, for non-critical things I have one or two passwords I use. What irritates me is when a website I would consider low risk has a bunch of password rules (numbers, non-alphanumeric characters, a length requirement longer than 6 characters). The funniest to me are companies like the electricity or trash pickup. Why do I care if someone breaks into these? What are they going to do, pay my bill? Most sites that are any either don't keep payment info, or won't display it, so where's the risk?
Specifically, it's something "those damn kids" do; which means that of course it's a privilege, not a right, because you know, it's kids.
What's really interesting is 'those damn kids' are the largest demographic retailers, especially the music industry, attempts to appeal to. You would think the entertainment industry would stop trying to alienate their biggest customer base.
Thought we were discussing movie admissions, which isn't exactly a necessity of life. Thought cable and gym memberships were a better comparison than housing.
... it's a bit difficult to have a story about dinosaur hunting and not show a dinosaur...
Much of the effects requirements are directly related to the subject matter. That's why it took Peter Jackson and some huge technological advances in CGI to make LOTR. Many other movies, as the GP stated, can be made without all the special effects. For example, Robert Rodriguez' first movie, El Mariachi. If you haven't seen it, watch it. It was made on a ridiculously low budget with one camera and every scene was made in one take.
To say current audiences are more sophisticated is not really accurate. Much (not all) of the acting, directing and writing in many of the old movies is better than the average drivel that comes out of hollywood now. We are used to more realistic special effects than the movie goers of bygone eras were, thus fueling the need for CGI and fancy effects.
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.
And DVDs. There are many things in the movie industry that are much simpler and cheaper than they used to be. As you pointed out, labor and material intensive items are the most expensive, but CGI is MUCH cheaper than the old modeling techniques that were used previously.
The biggest cost increase in the movies are the actor's salaries. I would imagine that's why LOTR didn't have a lot of star power. Many of the actors (like Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom) weren't exactly household names before LOTR was filmed. I imagine that may have fueled the decision to film all three movies at once. If the movies had been wildly successful (like they are) the actors would have demanded ridiculous salaries.
Adding more bureaucracy doesnt help anything, especially in an organization already totally overbloated.
I bet all the developers working in Vista are groaning right now.
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.
When I was growing up, pocket calculators were $200, computers were $10,000, Cable TV was for the rich people, and gym or country club memberships were way out of reach for the average person. Now you can get a gym membership for $20/month, everyone has cable, pocket calculators are extremely cheap, but no one buys them because they are already in their cell phones and I can buy a computer for $400. Not everything goes up in price and there is no entitlement for any company to increase their profits forever.
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?
I don't think it's that we think we should pay decades-old prices, it's more that the quality of the movies (arguably) have dropped, the theatres are not run as well as they previously were and DVDs can be bought cheaper than a trip to the movies. Today there is more competition than ever for our entertainment dollar. 30 years ago there were movies, 3 TV channels, AM radio and vinyl. Now I've got 150+ TV channels, 150+ channes of satellite radio, CDs, DVDs, iTunes and the Internet. I would think a little competition for those entertainment dollars should drive prices down.
I'd pay to see that...