Every movie is a crapshoot. They pay more for creative entities that has been successful before.
They are also responsible for taking good work and gutting it too. Look at all the bad movies that have been made from great books. Charlotte's Web comes to my mind. (Yeah, I'm a HUGE E.B. White fan)
No matter how much market research, pre-screenings, etc they use, their odds of success have only gotten _slightly_ better because it's so hard to make movies.
Yes, it is possible for an independent film to make a profit. Directors have to start somewhere and many of them start by making their own films and selling distribution rights. You must do it yourself.
Don't blame the creative and production unions for everything. They continue to be a response to the unreasonable demands that Producers put on them. The creative and production sides have worked for decades to protect the value and safety of their work.
Now, Joe Schmoe indie studio guy won't put it to you like that, but he knows the game and you should learn it too before maintaining uninformed opinions.
elf-promotion or self-distribution avenues that are absolutely must-have for an indie movie maker?
The ability to take 1000 rejections before 1001 throws you a bone. It's not the first movie that makes you famous or rich or whatever. It's the fourth or fifth successful one.
Most of those promotion systems aren't going to work out. They are working on the 10,000 monkey notion that a classic will eventually be made. What works is, "Sell! Sell! Sell!" As in you being a pest about it absolutely everywhere. It's up to you to move it. If you don't have that, then either hire someone or develop it. You would be better off developing it though. Remember it's business, not art.
Is it prudent to publish on YouTube before making any other distribution deals
No. That's not only does it raise red flags in Legal, the people that actually write the checks have a very dim view of that kind of thing. Their mindset is very much along the lines of the RIAA. They want every opportunity to monetize their property.
I know for a fact this happens with startling regularity.
At very high levels that, coincidentally, are difficult to reach this does not happen as much. Before one gets their "big break" there's LOTS of plagarism.
Let's get down to the brass tacks...... We are funding pictures in the 2 to 50 million dollar range. We are also pursuing co-production opportunities, distributing completed projects, gap financing, and finishing projects in need of completion.....
Which means someone is providing production seed money and he's the face in front of the money.
Here's a the how-to for you sysadmins that want to become Directors.
1. Have a great premise. Remake one of shakespere's plays. (again) Keep the story happening in one or two places you can film in for 8-10 hours at a time without interruption or legal overhead. 2. Have a great script. You've got to turn your re-hashed Classic into a _great_ script.
---Pause to Decide----
You know you are doing a good job if it has been hard work getting this far. This is where you decide if you want to make it yourself or try to shop the script taking the very real risk that a good script from a nobody will probably get knocked off with no financial recourse available.
---I want the Whole Enchilada---
3. Shop your script to every dentist, lawyer, bigwig in town. You need ~$50-100,000 to get a decent-looking production. They get some control, so when they want a cameo or their granddaughter to have a role, the answer is "yes." Believe me, this is how it's done everywhere. 4. Production planning marathon during every waking hour you are not working your day job. 5. Hire filming staff. Make sure your lighting person understands working digital. 6. Take a two-week vacation from your day job in which you will shoot your film. 7. Edit a rough cut. Show to your backers and ask for more money for a good editing, foley, etc.
8. Sell! Sell! Sell! Film festivals, cable tv, independent movie houses. Sell! Sell!
That should be about 2-5 years work for the average fully-employed sysadmin. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
You will have earned your movie-making stripes and can call yourself a director!!
Am I the only desktop admin who has, in the recent past, seen the default browser switch back to IE after and update from Microsoft?
I think it's been a while because I control when updates are applied and I don't remember a recent situation when that occurred.
I have a feeling there may be another update coming to "fix" the default browser. More likely in a new and improved convoluted way involving a dialog box, but still....
I notice you casually forget the second half of the question. There's far less competition in wireless now than in the past. That is an incontrovertible fact.
That you are satisfied enough with your wireless service has affected your perception of value. If you could examine the issue more objectively, you would find the cost of wireless in real dollars hasn't fallen very far. Certainly less than commodities in competitive markets over the same time period.
If my cost to provide a service goes down, yet the market still bears the original price Which it won't. Ever.
get legislation passed that is favorable to your corporation And the legislation would be unfavorable to whom exactly? Fairies? Ignore for a moment the competitors that the telcos harm by burdening their competitors with legislated costs/litigation/etc. Consumers are still *directly* harmed. Consumers pay higher prices and get less utility because there is less competition!
If that's okay with you, then your morals allow for more inequity and general harm to consumers than mine. That's okay.
I get three times as many minutes now for the same rate I paid five or six years ago.
Ohhh you've got me there! Oh wait, you don't.
A market that displays -some- competition would have resulted in far cheaper wireless service to date.
If you took the time to examine the issue, you might find, in real dollars, your wireless bill has not fallen at the rate of most competitive markets. Groceries come to mind.
It's not your fault you don't objectively examine your costs. It's also probably the case you are relatively satisfied with the service. That satisfaction influences your sense of value.
Firms will no longer need to own/maintain the boxes that they use to run their firm's apps.
Ohhh! Ohhh! Ahhh!
no need to have the IT staff
Cumshot
Let's say this isn't another Gartner managerial fairy tale for a minute. Where, ***exactly*** are the cost savings? I just priced a 16-way dl380 g5 for about $5000 with drives and lots of ram. I would run out of bandwidth before I ran out of computing horsepower. That's soon to be the price of a pound of peanuts.
While the parent's tone is strong, there are other factors besides the trojan horse microsoft has delivered to consider. The company is not financially healthy in any way, shape, or form. Management performance is still dismal. SuSe is not a silver bullet, or at least hasn't appeared to save the company.
Argue for a minute that SuSe saves their bacon, there's no proof Novell can out-manage RedHat. Let's say BOTH companies are viable growth assets, then I think Microsoft will open the trojan horse they sent to Novell at bare minimum.
Let's put it another way, have your rates for your wireless phone gone down? Is there more competition in wireless or less in the last 10 years? Telco greed in action.
Unless you are still living in your parents basement, or get your pay check supplemented by the Bank of Mom and Dad, your ideals fail spectacularly when applied to the real world.
The way these things generally work is the term "uncontacted" is used to generate readership rather than reflect reality.
The more accurate phrase is minmal contact. Please remember, they share a forest with other tribes. There's interaction of all kinds.
In this case, geography minimized contact with the industrialized world. Those "uncontacted" tribes probably have at least one person that's gone all the way to the big city wherever it is thought to be.
Also note they are being pushed out by deforestation efforts, so you bet they've been on the wrong side of weapons and dealt with the industrialized world.
I've got three HSRP'd firewall clusters that don't work with the later versions of java installed on my admin machines. So I have pretty old java installs that I can't upgrade and other legacy issues as a result.
Here I am, full of pride and working regular hours because the HSRP works as promised and yet you get in a tight bind when trying to upgrade the nodes on high-availability systems.
I know the CLI cisco admins are spitting coffee out their noses right now, but in some cases the web gui is faster and easier than cli.
Our dev has a DASkeyboard that I test drove for a couple of hours. Great.
One of the things I like about the older keyboards is the finger precision required is actually a bit less than newer keyboards. That makes me much more productive when I'm tired.
I think maybe you and Marcel Proust might have quite a bit in common if you can't handle a Model M. Man Up!
There's a comment saying the Kentucky company is the latest owner of the IBM IP and manufacturing equipment for the keyboard. All of which still resides in Kentucky.
$69 is CHEAP for a decent keyboard. I'm one of those IT guys that's happy to give out the lame excuse for keyboards being shipped with PC's and horde the best of the older keyboards.
Our dev has a DASkeyboard. Very nice too. I'm not l33t enough to go decal-free at 3AM support calls though.
Offtopic: This company is a *perfect* example of the economic potential for manufacturing in the U.S. It's a niche product, high quality, that won't have a market big enough for whatever low-wage empire to ever export the work.
Warning, if KDE3 is your working desktop, you may be wise to copy ~/.kde to restore it if KDE4 doesn't work for you.
1. use the url's above minus the [bracketed] words in/etc/apt/sources.list 2. Set pin priority. I borrowed from http://wiki.debian.org/Kde4schroot I also prioritized a couple of packages to be sure they didn't get upgraded. (mythtv-frontend is my biggie) 3. apt-get update 4. aptitude install -t experimental kde4 (this might take a while to calculate a solution that works for your system) 5. Restart X.
My concern is not so much the desktop environment itself.
How many KDE3-guified apps are going to switch over to KDE4? I don't expect to see very many this year, but next year should be very telling regarding the desktop's popularity.
The point is a CD-RW is NOT designed for long-term storage. The now old-fashioned audio CD is not either despite media conglomerates claims made loong ago.
Do us all a favor then and don't whine when you can't get your photos off the CDRW you made 10 years ago.
would take this stuff seriously? The problem is most will.
1. Sure microsoft delivers above-average returns and that's enough reason for hanging onto it. But stock prices have some -future prospects- built into it. I see none at Microsoft. Zero. Especially when they flush dev resources down the drain for their forthcoming knock-off iPhones that probably won't see the light of day for a decade.
Off-topic
My gut feeling is, there's a growing reality distortion field that most of the people/groups managing funds are working in. If I had to guess, I'd say their math/quant models are wrong because these are a relatively new set of economic conditions. News disguised as PR fills this gap nicely and brings some sense of equilibrium back.
Meanwhile some hack on./ can be laughed at for calling some dev groups blood, sweat and tears, and management's gravy train broken.
Slashdot Mirror
Every movie is a crapshoot. They pay more for creative entities that has been successful before.
They are also responsible for taking good work and gutting it too. Look at all the bad movies that have been made from great books. Charlotte's Web comes to my mind. (Yeah, I'm a HUGE E.B. White fan)
No matter how much market research, pre-screenings, etc they use, their odds of success have only gotten _slightly_ better because it's so hard to make movies.
Yes, it is possible for an independent film to make a profit. Directors have to start somewhere and many of them start by making their own films and selling distribution rights. You must do it yourself.
Don't blame the creative and production unions for everything. They continue to be a response to the unreasonable demands that Producers put on them. The creative and production sides have worked for decades to protect the value and safety of their work.
Now, Joe Schmoe indie studio guy won't put it to you like that, but he knows the game and you should learn it too before maintaining uninformed opinions.
elf-promotion or self-distribution avenues that are absolutely must-have for an indie movie maker?
The ability to take 1000 rejections before 1001 throws you a bone. It's not the first movie that makes you famous or rich or whatever. It's the fourth or fifth successful one.
Most of those promotion systems aren't going to work out. They are working on the 10,000 monkey notion that a classic will eventually be made. What works is, "Sell! Sell! Sell!" As in you being a pest about it absolutely everywhere. It's up to you to move it. If you don't have that, then either hire someone or develop it. You would be better off developing it though. Remember it's business, not art.
Is it prudent to publish on YouTube before making any other distribution deals
No. That's not only does it raise red flags in Legal, the people that actually write the checks have a very dim view of that kind of thing. Their mindset is very much along the lines of the RIAA. They want every opportunity to monetize their property.
I know for a fact this happens with startling regularity.
At very high levels that, coincidentally, are difficult to reach this does not happen as much. Before one gets their "big break" there's LOTS of plagarism.
First of all, he's a "studio head" that has two movies, and a "studio" that's been around for about 1 year. http://www.nehst.com/index.php?page=news
... We are funding pictures in the 2 to 50 million dollar range. We are also pursuing co-production opportunities, distributing completed projects, gap financing, and finishing projects in need of completion.....
Let's get down to the brass tacks...
Which means someone is providing production seed money and he's the face in front of the money.
Here's a the how-to for you sysadmins that want to become Directors.
1. Have a great premise. Remake one of shakespere's plays. (again) Keep the story happening in one or two places you can film in for 8-10 hours at a time without interruption or legal overhead.
2. Have a great script. You've got to turn your re-hashed Classic into a _great_ script.
---Pause to Decide----
You know you are doing a good job if it has been hard work getting this far. This is where you decide if you want to make it yourself or try to shop the script taking the very real risk that a good script from a nobody will probably get knocked off with no financial recourse available.
---I want the Whole Enchilada---
3. Shop your script to every dentist, lawyer, bigwig in town. You need ~$50-100,000 to get a decent-looking production. They get some control, so when they want a cameo or their granddaughter to have a role, the answer is "yes." Believe me, this is how it's done everywhere.
4. Production planning marathon during every waking hour you are not working your day job.
5. Hire filming staff. Make sure your lighting person understands working digital.
6. Take a two-week vacation from your day job in which you will shoot your film.
7. Edit a rough cut. Show to your backers and ask for more money for a good editing, foley, etc.
8. Sell! Sell! Sell! Film festivals, cable tv, independent movie houses. Sell! Sell!
That should be about 2-5 years work for the average fully-employed sysadmin. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
You will have earned your movie-making stripes and can call yourself a director!!
Am I the only desktop admin who has, in the recent past, seen the default browser switch back to IE after and update from Microsoft?
I think it's been a while because I control when updates are applied and I don't remember a recent situation when that occurred.
I have a feeling there may be another update coming to "fix" the default browser. More likely in a new and improved convoluted way involving a dialog box, but still....
I notice you casually forget the second half of the question. There's far less competition in wireless now than in the past. That is an incontrovertible fact.
That you are satisfied enough with your wireless service has affected your perception of value. If you could examine the issue more objectively, you would find the cost of wireless in real dollars hasn't fallen very far. Certainly less than commodities in competitive markets over the same time period.
If my cost to provide a service goes down, yet the market still bears the original price
Which it won't. Ever.
get legislation passed that is favorable to your corporation
And the legislation would be unfavorable to whom exactly? Fairies? Ignore for a moment the competitors that the telcos harm by burdening their competitors with legislated costs/litigation/etc. Consumers are still *directly* harmed. Consumers pay higher prices and get less utility because there is less competition!
If that's okay with you, then your morals allow for more inequity and general harm to consumers than mine. That's okay.
I get three times as many minutes now for the same rate I paid five or six years ago.
Ohhh you've got me there! Oh wait, you don't.
A market that displays -some- competition would have resulted in far cheaper wireless service to date.
If you took the time to examine the issue, you might find, in real dollars, your wireless bill has not fallen at the rate of most competitive markets. Groceries come to mind.
It's not your fault you don't objectively examine your costs. It's also probably the case you are relatively satisfied with the service. That satisfaction influences your sense of value.
centralized IT department will go away.
Ohhh yesss.
Firms will no longer need to own/maintain the boxes that they use to run their firm's apps.
Ohhh! Ohhh! Ahhh!
no need to have the IT staff
Cumshot
Let's say this isn't another Gartner managerial fairy tale for a minute. Where, ***exactly*** are the cost savings? I just priced a 16-way dl380 g5 for about $5000 with drives and lots of ram. I would run out of bandwidth before I ran out of computing horsepower. That's soon to be the price of a pound of peanuts.
While the parent's tone is strong, there are other factors besides the trojan horse microsoft has delivered to consider. The company is not financially healthy in any way, shape, or form. Management performance is still dismal. SuSe is not a silver bullet, or at least hasn't appeared to save the company.
Argue for a minute that SuSe saves their bacon, there's no proof Novell can out-manage RedHat. Let's say BOTH companies are viable growth assets, then I think Microsoft will open the trojan horse they sent to Novell at bare minimum.
That's a nice way to think and I wish it were true for more than a select few. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080530/us_telecom_association_lobbying.html?.v=1 Spending $1.5 million on lobbying, in 3 months. Greed in action.
Let's put it another way, have your rates for your wireless phone gone down? Is there more competition in wireless or less in the last 10 years? Telco greed in action.
Unless you are still living in your parents basement, or get your pay check supplemented by the Bank of Mom and Dad, your ideals fail spectacularly when applied to the real world.
The way these things generally work is the term "uncontacted" is used to generate readership rather than reflect reality.
The more accurate phrase is minmal contact. Please remember, they share a forest with other tribes. There's interaction of all kinds.
In this case, geography minimized contact with the industrialized world. Those "uncontacted" tribes probably have at least one person that's gone all the way to the big city wherever it is thought to be.
Also note they are being pushed out by deforestation efforts, so you bet they've been on the wrong side of weapons and dealt with the industrialized world.
Well said... The shouting down wasn't necessary.
I've got three HSRP'd firewall clusters that don't work with the later versions of java installed on my admin machines. So I have pretty old java installs that I can't upgrade and other legacy issues as a result.
Here I am, full of pride and working regular hours because the HSRP works as promised and yet you get in a tight bind when trying to upgrade the nodes on high-availability systems.
I know the CLI cisco admins are spitting coffee out their noses right now, but in some cases the web gui is faster and easier than cli.
Our dev has a DASkeyboard that I test drove for a couple of hours. Great.
One of the things I like about the older keyboards is the finger precision required is actually a bit less than newer keyboards. That makes me much more productive when I'm tired.
I think maybe you and Marcel Proust might have quite a bit in common if you can't handle a Model M. Man Up!
There's a comment saying the Kentucky company is the latest owner of the IBM IP and manufacturing equipment for the keyboard. All of which still resides in Kentucky.
$69 is CHEAP for a decent keyboard. I'm one of those IT guys that's happy to give out the lame excuse for keyboards being shipped with PC's and horde the best of the older keyboards.
Our dev has a DASkeyboard. Very nice too. I'm not l33t enough to go decal-free at 3AM support calls though.
Offtopic:
This company is a *perfect* example of the economic potential for manufacturing in the U.S. It's a niche product, high quality, that won't have a market big enough for whatever low-wage empire to ever export the work.
I have a funny feeling there will be nothing open about their implementations.
Maybe it's the way Tivo hijacked the Linx kernel?
Maybe it's the media conglomerates ceaseless efforts to charge for every-single-viewing opportunity and location combination.
Maybe it's the media conglomerates long history of discouraging private use at all costs.
Or maybe it's the media conglomerates long history of discouraging the right of resale at all costs.
It's important to note anyway you look at it it's a win for open source projects. The re-use isn't very palatable, but hey some good with some bad.
Warning, if KDE3 is your working desktop, you may be wise to copy ~/.kde to restore it if KDE4 doesn't work for you.
/etc/apt/sources.list
1. use the url's above minus the [bracketed] words in
2. Set pin priority. I borrowed from http://wiki.debian.org/Kde4schroot I also prioritized a couple of packages to be sure they didn't get upgraded. (mythtv-frontend is my biggie)
3. apt-get update
4. aptitude install -t experimental kde4 (this might take a while to calculate a solution that works for your system)
5. Restart X.
Big thanks to the author of the kde4schroot page.
http://wiki.debian.org/Kde4schroot
http://packages.debian.org/experimental/kde4
I'd love to apt-get it on my Debian Lenny boxes. Can you post sources.list entries please?
My concern is not so much the desktop environment itself.
How many KDE3-guified apps are going to switch over to KDE4? I don't expect to see very many this year, but next year should be very telling regarding the desktop's popularity.
the only time I would even think about looking at a ten year old backup is if the other 119 full monthly backups made after it were all bad
That sir puts you in the teeniest tiniest minority that has given backing up your data more than 32 minutes of effort.
Tape, WORM, another hard drive. I could go on.
The point is a CD-RW is NOT designed for long-term storage. The now old-fashioned audio CD is not either despite media conglomerates claims made loong ago.
Do us all a favor then and don't whine when you can't get your photos off the CDRW you made 10 years ago.
Oh if only the unwashed masses understood the peril of backing up to CD/DVD/Blu...
Unless the owners of the Bluray IP buy into this scheme, it's as good as dead. They'll probably knock off the technology anyway because they can.
would take this stuff seriously? The problem is most will.
./ can be laughed at for calling some dev groups blood, sweat and tears, and management's gravy train broken.
1. Sure microsoft delivers above-average returns and that's enough reason for hanging onto it. But stock prices have some -future prospects- built into it. I see none at Microsoft. Zero. Especially when they flush dev resources down the drain for their forthcoming knock-off iPhones that probably won't see the light of day for a decade.
Off-topic
My gut feeling is, there's a growing reality distortion field that most of the people/groups managing funds are working in. If I had to guess, I'd say their math/quant models are wrong because these are a relatively new set of economic conditions. News disguised as PR fills this gap nicely and brings some sense of equilibrium back.
Meanwhile some hack on
Flame on!