Though I must say that if I had to choose between blood and tits, I'd rather take the second:-)
I'm from Hallmark, a leading world-wide manufacturer of greeting cards. Could I speak to you about perhaps doing some copywriting for our Valentine's Day collection?
Re:"an online community so well-supported that..."
on
The Age of Steam
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It's not a corrupted save, according to the Steam forums. It's a long-standing bug in the game that no one seems to want to address. You can work around it by bringing up the console and doing a bunch of tinkering, but this is the sort of thing that Steam was supposed to make obsolete. One coder should be able to fix this in a day and have the patch rolled out to the entire userbase within hours, so it's quite frustrating to still be waiting to open that door for the past six months.
"an online community so well-supported that..."
on
The Age of Steam
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I love Steam, I love Valve, and I loves me some HL, but I've been trying to walk through that door in "Opposing Force" since LAST SEPTEMBER without crashing the game.
That was a completely made-up thing that combined Spinal Tap's "Dobly" reference with the neverending quest for more channels, more noises, and more everything. Sorry if I got you all excited about something that hasn't quite happened yet.;)
All I know is the US model of business that has developed over the past 10-20 years. Everyone that I know follows the same formula. When the "summer blockbuster" trend came along (I think "Jaws" was the first one) that was what pretty much what cemented the whole business scheme that is still in place. Yes, theatres still have to bid on films, but nationwide theatre chains have been reduced to what concert theatres have been reduced to under Ticketmaster/Nationwide/etc. There's competition, but it's between a tiny number of dominant factions so the "competition" is really just between a few parties that want to keep the pie to themselves. The discount theatres are all chains that fight over the scraps, and some of them make a nice profit doing it.
As I said, this is just my experience. I don't pretend to speak for the entire business.
It's actually a sliding scale. The first 2-4 weeks a film is out the studios will keep upwards of 70% of all ticket sales. In the case of a hotly-anticipated film such as a new Batman or Bond, the percentage will go even higher to 80% or above. Each week that a film plays the scale will adjust slightly in favor of the theatres until it's almost an equitable split, but since most movies make almost all their money within the first month they're out that really doesn't benefit first-run theatres much. What it really *does* benefit are the bargain theatres that show whatever came out 6-8 weeks ago. The studios look at them as a marginal market, so they actually do pretty well compared to the big multiplexes. In the case of my local $2.50 cinema, the popcorn's fresh, the movies are just as good as they were a month ago, and teenagers on their *#&$ing cellphones get kicked out. The only thing I'm missing is 64-channel Dobly Digital, which I'll give up any day just to sit in a theatre full of people who are there to watch a movie and not sit and IM all night.
We're talking about two different things. You're talking about sound quality and I'm talking about performance quality. You take all possible care to make sure that the production sound is good, because it's very difficult to replicate a performance when you're standing in a booth talking into a mic and not interacting with another actor.
You got marked down for using production sound? Wtf? Unless you were doing an assignment that was solely designed to teach the creation of FX that seem natural, I really can't see why in the world that was done. I learned sound recording and design from a guy with almost 90 credits on IMDB as a sound designer and we spent tons of time studying how to get the best sound on a set/location just so you didn't *have* to build it all up later.
In fact there are some cases where words were changed, and the effect was so good I did not notice during repeated viewings until I heard it in the commentary.
That's a worst-case scenario, but yes, it happens. If you're changing dialogue in post it means that you're using editing to change the script (not great,) you let your actors get way off-script and didn't realize that you missed a key bit of dialogue (bad,) or that you never got a clean recording at all and didn't schedule time with your actors for dubbing and now have to cut around your mistake (*very* bad).
That's what I tried, and failed, to say up there. From a performing standpoint, dubbing is a very different and less authentic process than being on a set and interacting with other performers and colors the final result.
and every single uttered syllable, is likely dubed.
That's where you lost it. Most sound effects are dubbed, yes, but there's an entire team of people on a film set dedicated to keeping the dialogue clean and usable. Dubbed dialogue can rarely match the intensity of a real, live recording of a scene and using it almost always robs a performance of some quality.
...is around $.05 and the development costs have already been sunk, can someone pleeeze explain to me how a $60 downgrade to XP isn't profitable?
Look, Microsoft, I've tried my best. I've been on Slashdot for going on a decade now and I *still* use Windows. I use all the classic excuses, y'know? I like my games. I like it when things just work. I hate the command line. Hell, I even spent an hour last night fiddling with Ubuntu just so a couple of my *NIXy friends would stop giving me the stinkeye, and even though it took me nine reboots to get the goddamned CD out of the drive I *STILL* went back to XP, just to hear that familiar bootup chime. But y'know what? This kind of shit is getting harder and harder to defend. Seriously. Pick your battles, you jackoffs. Those of us who keep drinking the Kool-Aid are starting to eyeball Mother McGee's Homemade Colon Tonic, if you get my meaning.
Of course, there's a flip side to that as well. The American desire to get rich quick has completely polluted the whole concept of research and innovation for the sake of science and not just as a means to buy a solid gold Bentley. For every evil corporation that "stole" an idea from a student, I'd wager there's a student who went to a state school on a publicly-paid scholarship, came up with a million-dollar idea, and immediately went "MINE! MINE! ALL MINE!"
...it's quite heartbreaking to see a work that intentionally removed itself from your grasp. It's quite the change from people who expect immortality simply for having cameras pointed at them or semi-literate fiction aimed at people who think MTV is the height of culture.
...is the international reaction to Obama's win. I knew that the reputation of America and Americans had been battered over the past few years, but I never suspected that it was as bad as it was. I watched the results last night, said a little "huzzah!" when Obama was declared, listened as McCain gave a warm, dignified, and gentlemanly concession speech, and then went to bed thinking I'd seen it all. I woke up at about 4:45 this morning and I've been flipping between news stations ever since. I got a little emotional last night during the speeches, but I'm absolutely devastated by the number of non-Americans who are dancing in the streets over Obama's win. I never thought I'd see video of a few hundred Chinese people jumping around and chanting "Obama! Obama!" A reporter in France walked up to a woman and simply said "Obama?" Her face lit up and she simply said "C'est formidable!" Kenyans are throwing feasts in his honor. Arab and Persian states are happy. Israel is happy. Pakistan is happy. Australians are losing their damned minds over it. Russia is... well, they're kinda grumpy, but they're not having a good year. And all morning I've been hitting my usual haunts (/., Fark, CNN, BBC, & more) and I keep seeing messages posted by people from a zillion different countries congratulating us and thanking us for "making the right choice." Before you ask, yes I voted for him, no, I don't think he's the messiah, and yes, I'm still pissed at him for breaking his promise over campaign financing. But even with all that, I still can't shake the feeling that something *seriously* important happened last night. I'm almost 40, so I've seen a few elections, but never in my life have I seen or felt the kind of excitement that's in the air right now. It seems like all sorts of barriers have just... vanished. Racial, political, international, interpersonal, it just all seems different now. I know that part of it is just the morning-after buzz of having your candidate win, but there's something special about having a friend email you and tell you how they got hugged twice in Germany while wearing an Obama t-shirt and walking to the bakery on the corner, then reading a post that says "The Netherlands are happy for you!" The world stood up and took notice of us this morning. I hope he doesn't let us down.
Slashdot Mirror
Though I must say that if I had to choose between blood and tits, I'd rather take the second :-)
I'm from Hallmark, a leading world-wide manufacturer of greeting cards. Could I speak to you about perhaps doing some copywriting for our Valentine's Day collection?
It's not a corrupted save, according to the Steam forums. It's a long-standing bug in the game that no one seems to want to address. You can work around it by bringing up the console and doing a bunch of tinkering, but this is the sort of thing that Steam was supposed to make obsolete. One coder should be able to fix this in a day and have the patch rolled out to the entire userbase within hours, so it's quite frustrating to still be waiting to open that door for the past six months.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I love Steam, I love Valve, and I loves me some HL, but I've been trying to walk through that door in "Opposing Force" since LAST SEPTEMBER without crashing the game.
Seriously.
September.
Fix it.
That was a completely made-up thing that combined Spinal Tap's "Dobly" reference with the neverending quest for more channels, more noises, and more everything. Sorry if I got you all excited about something that hasn't quite happened yet. ;)
All I know is the US model of business that has developed over the past 10-20 years. Everyone that I know follows the same formula. When the "summer blockbuster" trend came along (I think "Jaws" was the first one) that was what pretty much what cemented the whole business scheme that is still in place. Yes, theatres still have to bid on films, but nationwide theatre chains have been reduced to what concert theatres have been reduced to under Ticketmaster/Nationwide/etc. There's competition, but it's between a tiny number of dominant factions so the "competition" is really just between a few parties that want to keep the pie to themselves. The discount theatres are all chains that fight over the scraps, and some of them make a nice profit doing it.
As I said, this is just my experience. I don't pretend to speak for the entire business.
It's actually a sliding scale. The first 2-4 weeks a film is out the studios will keep upwards of 70% of all ticket sales. In the case of a hotly-anticipated film such as a new Batman or Bond, the percentage will go even higher to 80% or above. Each week that a film plays the scale will adjust slightly in favor of the theatres until it's almost an equitable split, but since most movies make almost all their money within the first month they're out that really doesn't benefit first-run theatres much. What it really *does* benefit are the bargain theatres that show whatever came out 6-8 weeks ago. The studios look at them as a marginal market, so they actually do pretty well compared to the big multiplexes. In the case of my local $2.50 cinema, the popcorn's fresh, the movies are just as good as they were a month ago, and teenagers on their *#&$ing cellphones get kicked out. The only thing I'm missing is 64-channel Dobly Digital, which I'll give up any day just to sit in a theatre full of people who are there to watch a movie and not sit and IM all night.
We're talking about two different things. You're talking about sound quality and I'm talking about performance quality. You take all possible care to make sure that the production sound is good, because it's very difficult to replicate a performance when you're standing in a booth talking into a mic and not interacting with another actor.
You got marked down for using production sound? Wtf? Unless you were doing an assignment that was solely designed to teach the creation of FX that seem natural, I really can't see why in the world that was done. I learned sound recording and design from a guy with almost 90 credits on IMDB as a sound designer and we spent tons of time studying how to get the best sound on a set/location just so you didn't *have* to build it all up later.
In fact there are some cases where words were changed, and the effect was so good I did not notice during repeated viewings until I heard it in the commentary.
That's a worst-case scenario, but yes, it happens. If you're changing dialogue in post it means that you're using editing to change the script (not great,) you let your actors get way off-script and didn't realize that you missed a key bit of dialogue (bad,) or that you never got a clean recording at all and didn't schedule time with your actors for dubbing and now have to cut around your mistake (*very* bad).
That's what I tried, and failed, to say up there. From a performing standpoint, dubbing is a very different and less authentic process than being on a set and interacting with other performers and colors the final result.
and every single uttered syllable, is likely dubed.
That's where you lost it. Most sound effects are dubbed, yes, but there's an entire team of people on a film set dedicated to keeping the dialogue clean and usable. Dubbed dialogue can rarely match the intensity of a real, live recording of a scene and using it almost always robs a performance of some quality.
you keep the take with the best visuals and fix the sound later.
I sense... a great disturbance. It's as if millions of mixers, boom ops, and sound editors screamed out in frustration and were suddenly silenced.
Good luck with that.
Love,
anyone who ever used the internet *ever*.
Look, Microsoft, I've tried my best. I've been on Slashdot for going on a decade now and I *still* use Windows. I use all the classic excuses, y'know? I like my games. I like it when things just work. I hate the command line. Hell, I even spent an hour last night fiddling with Ubuntu just so a couple of my *NIXy friends would stop giving me the stinkeye, and even though it took me nine reboots to get the goddamned CD out of the drive I *STILL* went back to XP, just to hear that familiar bootup chime. But y'know what? This kind of shit is getting harder and harder to defend. Seriously. Pick your battles, you jackoffs. Those of us who keep drinking the Kool-Aid are starting to eyeball Mother McGee's Homemade Colon Tonic, if you get my meaning.
I don't believe in Hell, but I wish I did so I could also believe that I was going there for snerting so painfully hard at that...
Jay-Z's so big now he generates his own form of power.
"Allahu akbork?"
Of course, there's a flip side to that as well. The American desire to get rich quick has completely polluted the whole concept of research and innovation for the sake of science and not just as a means to buy a solid gold Bentley. For every evil corporation that "stole" an idea from a student, I'd wager there's a student who went to a state school on a publicly-paid scholarship, came up with a million-dollar idea, and immediately went "MINE! MINE! ALL MINE!"
For a perfect example of the motivation that the OSS community is giving for artists to work for free, kindly see this post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1078345&cid=26298553
...it's quite heartbreaking to see a work that intentionally removed itself from your grasp. It's quite the change from people who expect immortality simply for having cameras pointed at them or semi-literate fiction aimed at people who think MTV is the height of culture.
Really?
Oh, come on...
---edit
I am SO glad I decided to doublecheck before I hit the post button. Who knew I'd been wrong about how to spell a word for the last 20 years?
Surely you mean "Che, never mind?"
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I call Slashdot home. Never will you find a more perfect nexus of horrid punnery and sheer nerd-ism.
You magnificent bastards...
...is the international reaction to Obama's win. I knew that the reputation of America and Americans had been battered over the past few years, but I never suspected that it was as bad as it was. I watched the results last night, said a little "huzzah!" when Obama was declared, listened as McCain gave a warm, dignified, and gentlemanly concession speech, and then went to bed thinking I'd seen it all. I woke up at about 4:45 this morning and I've been flipping between news stations ever since. I got a little emotional last night during the speeches, but I'm absolutely devastated by the number of non-Americans who are dancing in the streets over Obama's win. I never thought I'd see video of a few hundred Chinese people jumping around and chanting "Obama! Obama!" A reporter in France walked up to a woman and simply said "Obama?" Her face lit up and she simply said "C'est formidable!" Kenyans are throwing feasts in his honor. Arab and Persian states are happy. Israel is happy. Pakistan is happy. Australians are losing their damned minds over it. Russia is... well, they're kinda grumpy, but they're not having a good year. And all morning I've been hitting my usual haunts (/., Fark, CNN, BBC, & more) and I keep seeing messages posted by people from a zillion different countries congratulating us and thanking us for "making the right choice." Before you ask, yes I voted for him, no, I don't think he's the messiah, and yes, I'm still pissed at him for breaking his promise over campaign financing. But even with all that, I still can't shake the feeling that something *seriously* important happened last night. I'm almost 40, so I've seen a few elections, but never in my life have I seen or felt the kind of excitement that's in the air right now. It seems like all sorts of barriers have just... vanished. Racial, political, international, interpersonal, it just all seems different now. I know that part of it is just the morning-after buzz of having your candidate win, but there's something special about having a friend email you and tell you how they got hugged twice in Germany while wearing an Obama t-shirt and walking to the bakery on the corner, then reading a post that says "The Netherlands are happy for you!" The world stood up and took notice of us this morning. I hope he doesn't let us down.
Thus endeth my waxing philosophical.