Good luck convincing a new generation to go watch it. And even if they do, their minds won't be blown.
Logan's Run did not age well. It's concept though is still full of potential.
And to say that we shouldn't remake films is to say that we should never have more than one theater put on a work of Shakespeare. Every time it's remade the writers and directors bring a new perspective. For all of time people have been retelling stories, but suddenly when it comes to films we're supposed to stop retelling old stories. "It was already told! STOP TELLING IT!" To stop remaking and retelling is to stop the story from evolving and leave it frozen in time. Personally I believe that is far more damaging-- to allow a great story to waste away and become irrelevant to the audience that is humanity.
I prefer my science fiction to have a bit more basis in science personally.
I prefer my *romantic comedies* to have a bit more basis in science personally.
Bad characters, bad plot, bad acting, implausible scenarios and no real drama. I give it an F for everything except the ship design and FX which were beautiful.
It might not have been "about the science" but it at least has to obey common sense.
"Oh my god we're going to suffocate". "How about we just crack open the door to the FOOTBALL STADIUM SIZED NUKE ROOM FULL OF AIR!?"
---
"Oh no the super computer which calculates our trajectory into the sun is fried!" "Don't worry, this laptop here can do it as well!" "Oh good, so the super computer was never important?" "Nope we just needed a reason to have a science where coolant leaks." "Whew! I was worried there for a second!"
---
Then you just general retardation: Sun burns cause space madness etc etc...
And I'm sorry but oxygen scrubbers are several orders of magnitude more effective than a small arboretum. If you can ship a nuke the size of Rhode Island into space you can probably bring along a few regenerative carbon scrubbers.
It all started off so promising... and then came the zombies. None of the problems they faced in the film made any sense at all.
I took out a bunch of loans. Many of them from the government most from private businesses.
I graduated. I started working a month later full time and within 6 months payed off all of my loans before they started accruing interest.
Without the loans I couldn't have afforded College. Even with my tuition rates my school ultimately went bankrupt so I'm not sure how they could have cut costs too much more.
Kin is the low-end product that doesn't have to handle the Windows Mobile 7 requirements.
So right now it has to run on an OS which doesn't have the same hardware requirements. As the hardware catches up to WM7 minimum system specs and they can release a WM7 spec'ed phone at 7th grader cell phone prices they'll transition to the meatier OS.
I suspect they started with the price-point "Free with Contract" and delivered as much as they could cutting whatever corners they had to cut to get there. They also get to beta test the cool webpage which syncs all your phone's stuff on a product which won't potentially hurt the WM7 brand.
There is an old mantra that comes in many forms but essentially it boils down to: You can have it Quick, You can have it Done Well or you can have it Cheap. Pick Two.
I just finished working on a shot for what will be a pretty high profile no-budget short. The only reason I could do it was because I could work on it like you would an Open Source project: on my free time here and there over many months. This doesn't really work well though with production. Even with 100% CG projects you still have a 'pipeline' which all the work has to feed through. Your compositor can't start working until your matchmovers, modelers, lighters and FX animators have all finished their work. Your rigging can't finish until your modelers finish. Your texture artists can't start until the modelers finish. Your modelers can't start until the concept artist is done. There are so many dependencies that you can't just "Check out a bug." Or plug away on a feature for 6 months without holding EVERYBODY else up. What happens with 10 departments all working out of sync is that it just take 60 months. The film can't ship until everybody is done! There are very rarely "rolling updates" especially if you want to release for a film festival. You can't ship half the film and then update it a year later with a version 2.0 "Now with character development and drama!" People often only watch something once. Unless it's really good. But if you're not done, it's probably not very good.
This is even worse for live action. Your camera assistant can't work on a tuesday and your actors on a wednesday. You need everybody you need THERE ON THE DAY. Yes you can switch between assistants on different days but you can't switch between actors. You have to schedule around them.
Lastly and this is perhaps most significant: As much as I care about helping you with your film, it's your film not mine. By necessity I can only make suggestions and not have creative control. I am helping you scratch your itch. I'm not scratching my own. A significant portion of Open Source development is from developers who are helping themselves. "I need a better widget!" So they group up with other developers to make a better widget. If open source was like production it would be "Your company needs a new web server? Well I don't actually have any need for a web server but I will make one as a favor to you."
Also if those big budget projects weren't still around I wouldn't have the financial resources to help out with productions. It's the big budget projects that make me financially secure enough to throw away opportunity costs to work for free and donate my time. If all of a sudden all the commercial big budget work evaporated I would need the money.
Lastly it comes to the quality of work. If I was working on the cheap and didn't have access to the wall of computers payed for on big budget projects and the hard drive full of expensive software payed for by big budget projects I wouldn't be able to deliver the quality I can. "Blah blah blah it's the artist not the pen..." well that's not entirely true with production. There is a big difference between your mom's handicam and 35mm film even if both can deliver "High definition". There's a big difference between the quality of VFX you can deliver when you can spend 100 machine years rendering frames vs my home PC. We can make 'excuses' for Blender's open source projects (I say this with a friend who is one of the artists on Project Peach and Durian) but at the end of the day they aren't on the same quality level for numerous reasons.
And honestly it's a waste. Do we really want the Brad Birds of the world (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0083348/) slaving away at their computer for 10 years for every film? I don't. I want to pay him to make films so that he can focus on that instead of spending 40 hours a week at McDonalds flipping burgers so that he come home.
And no matter how passionate you are about your craft people eventually
I love spending all day pushing pretty buttons. I find buttons are almost always more intuitive and quick.
But I also love CLIs. I use them almost exclusively in scripts. A good CLI can skip most of the need for a custom SDK which is compatible with every programming language. Just about every scripting language and application under the sun that offers customization allows shell commands to be run.
Because PDFs are more than just a word presentation format.
The reason PDF succeeds OVER something like a.txt file are all those features. You can mark it up. You can draw on it. You can add comment bubbles. You can embed images and video. You can even embed 3D models. You can use it for slide presentations.
PDF is a full fledged media presentation format.
The fact that it can also embed fonts and just provide a reliable, cross platform and consistent presentation system without worrying about how it looks on another computer is just one portion of PDF's usefulness. And often when I create a PDF which is just text formatted it's still pretty small.
BTW, most of those awesome tornado videos you see arent from scientists, they're from storm chasers and SKYWARN people.
And do those awesome videos actually offer any scientific data that's useful?
I was really dubious when in Storm Chasers the Tornado Videos.com guys thought their little standard definition handicam was going to provide useful data.
I think consumers are starting to realize that it never is cost effective to purchase a film. At least at the release prices of about $18.
It's 100% about convenience. "I'm going to own this so that I could watch it at a seconds notice." Redbox and streaming are problematic for this psychology since you could watch a streaming movie instantly or probably get to a redbox and rent it for $1. There are very very few movies I own which I've seen 18 times. There are very few movies I own which I've seen 5 times. I should really own about 4-5 movies if it was purely financial.
First of all I think the GP was a little confused in his calculations. What movie is *190* minutes long? The average film length isn't 3 hours and 10 minutes. It's closer to 100min.
So that means $1 a frame = $144k
That's practically no money. Yes a lot of you are saying "ooo I could live on that for a while." The other half of you are saying "Such and such film was made for only $20k." Yes one person could live off of $144k for some time. But 10 people couldn't.
Pretty much the only way films are ever made for less than $100k is because people work for free. You know how people often afford to work for free? By getting payed enough in paying gigs to take time off from work to help out. There are tons of industries where you could do a lot if you don't pay anyone. They often didn't pay anything for their equipment. People who again can only afford to purchase equipment because of paying jobs. If the rental house was generous enough to loan out $10k a day in gear to you because they like your project then you didn't make your film for $0 you made it with tens of thousands of dollars worth of donated time and equipment.
It's one thing to make a couple of films here and there for $15-50k. But nobody should be tricked into thinking that films could be regularly made that rate. Those films cost significantly more to make. The costs were just absorbed by larger productions with deeper wallets who unknowingly funded them.
I get really annoyed by the mantra that big blockbusters kill the small cheap indie film. The small cheap indie film is almost always crewed by blockbuster crews who just got their pay check and health insurance contributions from the blockbuster. If they hadn't just made a blockbuster they would probably be too busy pinching pennies and beating the pavement looking for their next paying gig. If the rental house didn't just get their entire inventory rented out the week before for 16 weeks straight they couldn't afford to loan you any lights or grip.
I'm not saying these indie films are exploiting anyone. I have done my fair share of free labor. I just get pissed off if these people then turn around say "I made this film for only $10k see, film is cheap you don't have to have $1m budgets!" You get one or two freebies in my books. I'm helping you because I want to see the project made even if it's commercially unsuccessful. But if I am working for free or practically free I also expect the person asking me to work for free to work for nothing. And if I learn that you're one of those people who perpetually use volunteer crews and don't make an effort to actually get the proper funding then you're just lazy, go get the $$ to pay the costs you're ignoring. There are a lot of producers that just go from project to project making "$20k" films and never actually do their jobs of trying to sell the film so that someone other than themselves gets payed.
Why are they filtering the commentary and the crowd? Can't they feed the commentator track through another audio channel? Seems like that would make filtering that much easier.
Might as well either way. This company is going to be out of business within 24 months. It's dead already it just hasn't realized it.
Every dieing company always finds one poor sucker to actually run it as long as it'll go. The engine is dead you're just out behind pushing it.
I had a friend who asked for an extremely meager pay raise and change in title. Not even an improved title, just a title he liked better! Like Programmer vs Developer type title change. They both denied his raise and then also denied his title change request. He quit and along with him went a huge portion of the company's clients.
I've seen this happen over and over again. It always ends the same.
Ask for your raise. Ask for your title change. But know that you're working for a zombie. And the first day that they're late on a paycheck quit because you're never getting any more.
Even if the workforce was working OSHA standardized conditions they would still be significantly less expensive.
You make it sound like he's proposing everyone in the world gets payed the same. That's ignoring the vastly different costs of living. It's also ignoring the fact that the GP *didn't say that at all*.
You can pay someone $0.50 a day instead of $0.25 a day. There would still be a financial imperative to use cheap labor overseas and they still wouldn't have our standard of living. They would however be treated decently.
And what do you think happens to things in the lost and found if no one claims them after a few days? Oh, that's right, the employees take them.
So since employees after XXX days can legally take them, or if employees steal them before the legally mandated waiting period is up, it's ok for you or I to steal it? I'm sorry. I didn't realize "But officer if I didn't steal that unlocked car, someone else surely would have!" was a legally defensible position.
At the VERY LEAST the finder should have *notified* the bar owner that he had the phone and how to contact him.
As to "After a few days". In this case that's a moot point. The VERY NEXT DAY the owner of the iPhone returned to the bar and asked if anyone had found a mislaid iPhone. So unless the bartender stole the phone himself that very night the rightful owner, no matter how 'irresponsible' they were would have gotten their property back.
What's bullshit is saying that someone being forgetful means you can steal their property. I hope you set something down for a second turn around and it disappears. Should have kept it chained to your wrist!
Either way. Gizmodo purchased it knowing that either random guy at the bar or if it had been a employee that stole it... that it was stolen. So who stole it is irrelevant in this instance since Jason Chen purchased said stolen property.
Nevertheless they reported the truth and that is what Apple is punishing them for. If Gizmodo had just made up the entire story they would be at WWDC just like all the other tech rags out there.
They aren't being punished for reporting the "Truth". Hundreds of blogs reported the "Truth" and all of them will be attending.
They're being punished for buying stolen property.
Ironically, the term "narcissistic twit" also applies to some dumbass corporation whose tool loses a top secret prototype, after having too many drinks at a public restroom, and hopes the whole legal system bows to their corporate interests and entitlement to total control.
So what you're saying is if you left the keys to your car in the ignition on accident and someone came along and drove it home with the intent of "finding you". Then sold your car to someone else to photograph... you wouldn't hope that the legal system 'bows to your corporate interests' in prosecuting the thieves involved?
Since you're evidently 8 I'm going to teach you something your parents were probably going to teach you pretty soon. If you find property that doesn't belong to you. Give it to the adult who runs the place, he or she is legally the custodian of said *mislaid* property. You don't get to take it home. You don't get to keep it. It's not yours. You have no rights to it.
If you do take it home because for some reason you don't trust the establishment's owner to do the right thing themselves then at least notify them that you found a mislaid item and that if anyone shows up they can reach you at (insert contact information).
If I forgot my phone at a bar (normal crappy flip phone) and someone took it home and never notified the bar. And if I then repeatedly returned the bar checking to see if anyone found a lost phone only to find it later on Ebay.... I can imagine I would be pretty pissed too.
Gizmodo knew the story. They knew the bar wasn't contacted. They obviously knew it wasn't left with the Bar's lost and found. They spent $1,500 on it so they had a pretty high degree of confidence it was the real thing. And they then proceeded to also not contact the most logical person who would know the identity of the owner: the owner of the establishment at which the item was mislaid.
Didn't the guy who found it made a reasonable effort by calling up Apple, asking them if they want it back?
No "reasonable effort" would have been to notify the establishment at which the phone was lost that they had in their possession a 'found' phone.
If they had made that minimal effort or... done the legally correct action of simply *GIVING* the phone to the barkeeper in the first place then the next morning the Apple employee would have dropped by before work and picked up the phone he forgot on the bar.
Taking it home and not telling anyone isn't making a minimal effort.
If I can BMW's customer service line and tell them I found a super secret BMW prototype the guy in India isn't going to be trained or have any method of getting a hold of the CEO than you or I. Apple is so insular that most Apple employees don't even know what the new iPhone looks like.
Lost != stolen. When you lose a book because you forgot about it and left it on a plane, do you call the police and report is stolen? No. If you leave your cell phone on a plane, do you call the cops and report it stolen? No. You might call the airline and see if they can find it, but you sure as hell don't report it as a theft because there was no theft, only you not keeping track of your belongings.
I found a wallet on a counter in a hardware store. Can I keep it? No. The law requires you to give mislaid items to the person operating or employed by the hardware store. The wallet has been mislaid rather than lost, and the owner or operator of the premises is the rightful custodian until the wallet owner comes to claim it.
The "idiot employee" who lost it returned to the bar the next day and asked if anyone had reported finding a missing iPhone. The barkeeper said "no". Why? Because the guy who found it didn't tell anyone. Because the guy who took it home stole it instead of giving it to the bartender or at least notifying the bartender.
I got banned from Gizmodo on this very story for replying to someone who said something like: "Maybe there are legal ramifications involved as to why Apple didn't respond." I replied: "Legal ramifications related to Gizmodo stealing a prototype?"
1 hour later... "You were banned by Jason Chen."
What's really bullshit about it is that it's all of Gawker that you get banned from and all of your comments get deleted on every site. So Jason Chen just banned me from io9 and other sites which Jason Chen has absolutely 0 influence in because I insinuated Gizmodo is full of dirty rotten lowlife thieves who purchase obviously stolen property in order to make a quick buck. The Gawker douche-baggery seems to be limited to Gizmodo.
I have one thing to say about Gizmodo's whining over getting "banned" from WWDC. Fuck Gizmodo. They banned me for pointing out in a comment WHY they were banned from WWDC. If in Gizmodo world commenting the obvious fact that Gizmodo wasn't invited because they stole a prototype is a ban-able offense then I can only imagine the relative scale of being the douche bags who ACTUALLY STOLE IT.
People can say Steve Jobs is childish all they want, but Apple's pettiness is nothing compared to Jason Chen's in this instance.
The law is very clear. If you find something. You give it to the establishment's owner. At the VERY LEAST notify the establishment's owner that you found a phone and that you can be contacted at ###-###-####. Did the guy who found that do that? No. Did Gizmodo? No. Did Gizmodo know that this--the most basic requirement the law provides--action was not performed? Yes. How do we know they knew? Because they bragged in a story that they would only give it to Apple if Apple admitted it was a secret prototype instead of returning it as required by law to the property owner.
If they had followed the law the next morning Embarassed-Unfortunate-Apple-Employee would have gotten his secret phone out of lost and found where it belonged and Jason Chen wouldn't have had all of his gear placed where he belongs: in the courthouse under lock and key.
Hi, my name is Victoria Kolakowski, I used to be an attorney but am now a Judge in the state of CA. After thoroughly reviewing your claims I am confident in saying this person has broken no crimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but you probably saw it in the 70s.
Good luck convincing a new generation to go watch it. And even if they do, their minds won't be blown.
Logan's Run did not age well. It's concept though is still full of potential.
And to say that we shouldn't remake films is to say that we should never have more than one theater put on a work of Shakespeare. Every time it's remade the writers and directors bring a new perspective. For all of time people have been retelling stories, but suddenly when it comes to films we're supposed to stop retelling old stories. "It was already told! STOP TELLING IT!" To stop remaking and retelling is to stop the story from evolving and leave it frozen in time. Personally I believe that is far more damaging-- to allow a great story to waste away and become irrelevant to the audience that is humanity.
And in color! Apparently even shitty movies now are made in color. (With 5.1 sound tracks--what give!?)
I prefer my science fiction to have a bit more basis in science personally.
I prefer my *romantic comedies* to have a bit more basis in science personally.
Bad characters, bad plot, bad acting, implausible scenarios and no real drama. I give it an F for everything except the ship design and FX which were beautiful.
It might not have been "about the science" but it at least has to obey common sense.
"Oh my god we're going to suffocate".
"How about we just crack open the door to the FOOTBALL STADIUM SIZED NUKE ROOM FULL OF AIR!?"
---
"Oh no the super computer which calculates our trajectory into the sun is fried!"
"Don't worry, this laptop here can do it as well!"
"Oh good, so the super computer was never important?"
"Nope we just needed a reason to have a science where coolant leaks."
"Whew! I was worried there for a second!"
---
Then you just general retardation: Sun burns cause space madness etc etc...
And I'm sorry but oxygen scrubbers are several orders of magnitude more effective than a small arboretum. If you can ship a nuke the size of Rhode Island into space you can probably bring along a few regenerative carbon scrubbers.
It all started off so promising... and then came the zombies. None of the problems they faced in the film made any sense at all.
Here is my story:
I took out a bunch of loans. Many of them from the government most from private businesses.
I graduated. I started working a month later full time and within 6 months payed off all of my loans before they started accruing interest.
Without the loans I couldn't have afforded College. Even with my tuition rates my school ultimately went bankrupt so I'm not sure how they could have cut costs too much more.
Kin is the low-end product that doesn't have to handle the Windows Mobile 7 requirements.
So right now it has to run on an OS which doesn't have the same hardware requirements. As the hardware catches up to WM7 minimum system specs and they can release a WM7 spec'ed phone at 7th grader cell phone prices they'll transition to the meatier OS.
I suspect they started with the price-point "Free with Contract" and delivered as much as they could cutting whatever corners they had to cut to get there. They also get to beta test the cool webpage which syncs all your phone's stuff on a product which won't potentially hurt the WM7 brand.
2c.
No comparison.
There is an old mantra that comes in many forms but essentially it boils down to: You can have it Quick, You can have it Done Well or you can have it Cheap. Pick Two.
I just finished working on a shot for what will be a pretty high profile no-budget short. The only reason I could do it was because I could work on it like you would an Open Source project: on my free time here and there over many months. This doesn't really work well though with production. Even with 100% CG projects you still have a 'pipeline' which all the work has to feed through. Your compositor can't start working until your matchmovers, modelers, lighters and FX animators have all finished their work. Your rigging can't finish until your modelers finish. Your texture artists can't start until the modelers finish. Your modelers can't start until the concept artist is done. There are so many dependencies that you can't just "Check out a bug." Or plug away on a feature for 6 months without holding EVERYBODY else up. What happens with 10 departments all working out of sync is that it just take 60 months. The film can't ship until everybody is done! There are very rarely "rolling updates" especially if you want to release for a film festival. You can't ship half the film and then update it a year later with a version 2.0 "Now with character development and drama!" People often only watch something once. Unless it's really good. But if you're not done, it's probably not very good.
This is even worse for live action. Your camera assistant can't work on a tuesday and your actors on a wednesday. You need everybody you need THERE ON THE DAY. Yes you can switch between assistants on different days but you can't switch between actors. You have to schedule around them.
Lastly and this is perhaps most significant: As much as I care about helping you with your film, it's your film not mine. By necessity I can only make suggestions and not have creative control. I am helping you scratch your itch. I'm not scratching my own. A significant portion of Open Source development is from developers who are helping themselves. "I need a better widget!" So they group up with other developers to make a better widget. If open source was like production it would be "Your company needs a new web server? Well I don't actually have any need for a web server but I will make one as a favor to you."
Also if those big budget projects weren't still around I wouldn't have the financial resources to help out with productions. It's the big budget projects that make me financially secure enough to throw away opportunity costs to work for free and donate my time. If all of a sudden all the commercial big budget work evaporated I would need the money.
Lastly it comes to the quality of work. If I was working on the cheap and didn't have access to the wall of computers payed for on big budget projects and the hard drive full of expensive software payed for by big budget projects I wouldn't be able to deliver the quality I can. "Blah blah blah it's the artist not the pen..." well that's not entirely true with production. There is a big difference between your mom's handicam and 35mm film even if both can deliver "High definition". There's a big difference between the quality of VFX you can deliver when you can spend 100 machine years rendering frames vs my home PC. We can make 'excuses' for Blender's open source projects (I say this with a friend who is one of the artists on Project Peach and Durian) but at the end of the day they aren't on the same quality level for numerous reasons.
And honestly it's a waste. Do we really want the Brad Birds of the world (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0083348/) slaving away at their computer for 10 years for every film? I don't. I want to pay him to make films so that he can focus on that instead of spending 40 hours a week at McDonalds flipping burgers so that he come home.
And no matter how passionate you are about your craft people eventually
I love spending all day pushing pretty buttons. I find buttons are almost always more intuitive and quick.
But I also love CLIs. I use them almost exclusively in scripts. A good CLI can skip most of the need for a custom SDK which is compatible with every programming language. Just about every scripting language and application under the sun that offers customization allows shell commands to be run.
Because PDFs are more than just a word presentation format.
The reason PDF succeeds OVER something like a .txt file are all those features. You can mark it up. You can draw on it. You can add comment bubbles. You can embed images and video. You can even embed 3D models. You can use it for slide presentations.
PDF is a full fledged media presentation format.
The fact that it can also embed fonts and just provide a reliable, cross platform and consistent presentation system without worrying about how it looks on another computer is just one portion of PDF's usefulness. And often when I create a PDF which is just text formatted it's still pretty small.
BTW, most of those awesome tornado videos you see arent from scientists, they're from storm chasers and SKYWARN people.
And do those awesome videos actually offer any scientific data that's useful?
I was really dubious when in Storm Chasers the Tornado Videos .com guys thought their little standard definition handicam was going to provide useful data.
I think consumers are starting to realize that it never is cost effective to purchase a film. At least at the release prices of about $18.
It's 100% about convenience. "I'm going to own this so that I could watch it at a seconds notice." Redbox and streaming are problematic for this psychology since you could watch a streaming movie instantly or probably get to a redbox and rent it for $1. There are very very few movies I own which I've seen 18 times. There are very few movies I own which I've seen 5 times. I should really own about 4-5 movies if it was purely financial.
There are also a lot of APs which just got the credit by investing in the film.
But that also wouldn't fall into the category of "cost", quite the opposite.
First of all I think the GP was a little confused in his calculations. What movie is *190* minutes long? The average film length isn't 3 hours and 10 minutes. It's closer to 100min.
So that means $1 a frame = $144k
That's practically no money. Yes a lot of you are saying "ooo I could live on that for a while." The other half of you are saying "Such and such film was made for only $20k." Yes one person could live off of $144k for some time. But 10 people couldn't.
Pretty much the only way films are ever made for less than $100k is because people work for free. You know how people often afford to work for free? By getting payed enough in paying gigs to take time off from work to help out. There are tons of industries where you could do a lot if you don't pay anyone. They often didn't pay anything for their equipment. People who again can only afford to purchase equipment because of paying jobs. If the rental house was generous enough to loan out $10k a day in gear to you because they like your project then you didn't make your film for $0 you made it with tens of thousands of dollars worth of donated time and equipment.
It's one thing to make a couple of films here and there for $15-50k. But nobody should be tricked into thinking that films could be regularly made that rate. Those films cost significantly more to make. The costs were just absorbed by larger productions with deeper wallets who unknowingly funded them.
I get really annoyed by the mantra that big blockbusters kill the small cheap indie film. The small cheap indie film is almost always crewed by blockbuster crews who just got their pay check and health insurance contributions from the blockbuster. If they hadn't just made a blockbuster they would probably be too busy pinching pennies and beating the pavement looking for their next paying gig. If the rental house didn't just get their entire inventory rented out the week before for 16 weeks straight they couldn't afford to loan you any lights or grip.
I'm not saying these indie films are exploiting anyone. I have done my fair share of free labor. I just get pissed off if these people then turn around say "I made this film for only $10k see, film is cheap you don't have to have $1m budgets!" You get one or two freebies in my books. I'm helping you because I want to see the project made even if it's commercially unsuccessful. But if I am working for free or practically free I also expect the person asking me to work for free to work for nothing. And if I learn that you're one of those people who perpetually use volunteer crews and don't make an effort to actually get the proper funding then you're just lazy, go get the $$ to pay the costs you're ignoring. There are a lot of producers that just go from project to project making "$20k" films and never actually do their jobs of trying to sell the film so that someone other than themselves gets payed.
Why are they filtering the commentary and the crowd? Can't they feed the commentator track through another audio channel? Seems like that would make filtering that much easier.
Team Fortress 2 for the 360 was a complete waste. But it was the only way to get portal a the time.
I've always gotten value for my money, I just feel a little annoyed at having to buy Half life 2 3x times.
PCs have had Wake on Magic Packet since at least Windows 98. That's not what they're taking credit for here.
Might as well either way. This company is going to be out of business within 24 months. It's dead already it just hasn't realized it.
Every dieing company always finds one poor sucker to actually run it as long as it'll go. The engine is dead you're just out behind pushing it.
I had a friend who asked for an extremely meager pay raise and change in title. Not even an improved title, just a title he liked better! Like Programmer vs Developer type title change. They both denied his raise and then also denied his title change request. He quit and along with him went a huge portion of the company's clients.
I've seen this happen over and over again. It always ends the same.
Ask for your raise. Ask for your title change. But know that you're working for a zombie. And the first day that they're late on a paycheck quit because you're never getting any more.
Even if the workforce was working OSHA standardized conditions they would still be significantly less expensive.
You make it sound like he's proposing everyone in the world gets payed the same. That's ignoring the vastly different costs of living. It's also ignoring the fact that the GP *didn't say that at all*.
You can pay someone $0.50 a day instead of $0.25 a day. There would still be a financial imperative to use cheap labor overseas and they still wouldn't have our standard of living. They would however be treated decently.
And what do you think happens to things in the lost and found if no one claims them after a few days? Oh, that's right, the employees take them.
So since employees after XXX days can legally take them, or if employees steal them before the legally mandated waiting period is up, it's ok for you or I to steal it? I'm sorry. I didn't realize "But officer if I didn't steal that unlocked car, someone else surely would have!" was a legally defensible position.
At the VERY LEAST the finder should have *notified* the bar owner that he had the phone and how to contact him.
As to "After a few days". In this case that's a moot point. The VERY NEXT DAY the owner of the iPhone returned to the bar and asked if anyone had found a mislaid iPhone. So unless the bartender stole the phone himself that very night the rightful owner, no matter how 'irresponsible' they were would have gotten their property back.
What's bullshit is saying that someone being forgetful means you can steal their property. I hope you set something down for a second turn around and it disappears. Should have kept it chained to your wrist!
Either way. Gizmodo purchased it knowing that either random guy at the bar or if it had been a employee that stole it... that it was stolen. So who stole it is irrelevant in this instance since Jason Chen purchased said stolen property.
Nevertheless they reported the truth and that is what Apple is punishing them for. If Gizmodo had just made up the entire story they would be at WWDC just like all the other tech rags out there.
They aren't being punished for reporting the "Truth". Hundreds of blogs reported the "Truth" and all of them will be attending.
They're being punished for buying stolen property.
Ironically, the term "narcissistic twit" also applies to some dumbass corporation whose tool loses a top secret prototype, after having too many drinks at a public restroom, and hopes the whole legal system bows to their corporate interests and entitlement to total control.
So what you're saying is if you left the keys to your car in the ignition on accident and someone came along and drove it home with the intent of "finding you". Then sold your car to someone else to photograph... you wouldn't hope that the legal system 'bows to your corporate interests' in prosecuting the thieves involved?
Since you're evidently 8 I'm going to teach you something your parents were probably going to teach you pretty soon. If you find property that doesn't belong to you. Give it to the adult who runs the place, he or she is legally the custodian of said *mislaid* property. You don't get to take it home. You don't get to keep it. It's not yours. You have no rights to it.
If you do take it home because for some reason you don't trust the establishment's owner to do the right thing themselves then at least notify them that you found a mislaid item and that if anyone shows up they can reach you at (insert contact information).
If I forgot my phone at a bar (normal crappy flip phone) and someone took it home and never notified the bar. And if I then repeatedly returned the bar checking to see if anyone found a lost phone only to find it later on Ebay.... I can imagine I would be pretty pissed too.
Gizmodo knew the story. They knew the bar wasn't contacted. They obviously knew it wasn't left with the Bar's lost and found. They spent $1,500 on it so they had a pretty high degree of confidence it was the real thing. And they then proceeded to also not contact the most logical person who would know the identity of the owner: the owner of the establishment at which the item was mislaid.
Didn't the guy who found it made a reasonable effort by calling up Apple, asking them if they want it back?
No "reasonable effort" would have been to notify the establishment at which the phone was lost that they had in their possession a 'found' phone.
If they had made that minimal effort or... done the legally correct action of simply *GIVING* the phone to the barkeeper in the first place then the next morning the Apple employee would have dropped by before work and picked up the phone he forgot on the bar.
Taking it home and not telling anyone isn't making a minimal effort.
If I can BMW's customer service line and tell them I found a super secret BMW prototype the guy in India isn't going to be trained or have any method of getting a hold of the CEO than you or I. Apple is so insular that most Apple employees don't even know what the new iPhone looks like.
Lost != stolen. When you lose a book because you forgot about it and left it on a plane, do you call the police and report is stolen? No. If you leave your cell phone on a plane, do you call the cops and report it stolen? No. You might call the airline and see if they can find it, but you sure as hell don't report it as a theft because there was no theft, only you not keeping track of your belongings.
IANAL but these people are:
https://ssl.perfora.net/smartlegalforms.com/guide.asp?level=2&id=620
I found a wallet on a counter in a hardware store. Can I keep it?
No. The law requires you to give mislaid items to the person operating or employed by the hardware store. The wallet has been mislaid rather than lost, and the owner or operator of the premises is the rightful custodian until the wallet owner comes to claim it.
The "idiot employee" who lost it returned to the bar the next day and asked if anyone had reported finding a missing iPhone. The barkeeper said "no". Why? Because the guy who found it didn't tell anyone. Because the guy who took it home stole it instead of giving it to the bartender or at least notifying the bartender.
I got banned from Gizmodo on this very story for replying to someone who said something like:
"Maybe there are legal ramifications involved as to why Apple didn't respond."
I replied:
"Legal ramifications related to Gizmodo stealing a prototype?"
1 hour later...
"You were banned by Jason Chen."
What's really bullshit about it is that it's all of Gawker that you get banned from and all of your comments get deleted on every site. So Jason Chen just banned me from io9 and other sites which Jason Chen has absolutely 0 influence in because I insinuated Gizmodo is full of dirty rotten lowlife thieves who purchase obviously stolen property in order to make a quick buck. The Gawker douche-baggery seems to be limited to Gizmodo.
I have one thing to say about Gizmodo's whining over getting "banned" from WWDC. Fuck Gizmodo. They banned me for pointing out in a comment WHY they were banned from WWDC. If in Gizmodo world commenting the obvious fact that Gizmodo wasn't invited because they stole a prototype is a ban-able offense then I can only imagine the relative scale of being the douche bags who ACTUALLY STOLE IT.
People can say Steve Jobs is childish all they want, but Apple's pettiness is nothing compared to Jason Chen's in this instance.
The law is very clear. If you find something. You give it to the establishment's owner. At the VERY LEAST notify the establishment's owner that you found a phone and that you can be contacted at ###-###-####. Did the guy who found that do that? No. Did Gizmodo? No. Did Gizmodo know that this--the most basic requirement the law provides--action was not performed? Yes. How do we know they knew? Because they bragged in a story that they would only give it to Apple if Apple admitted it was a secret prototype instead of returning it as required by law to the property owner.
If they had followed the law the next morning Embarassed-Unfortunate-Apple-Employee would have gotten his secret phone out of lost and found where it belonged and Jason Chen wouldn't have had all of his gear placed where he belongs: in the courthouse under lock and key.
Can we get a lawyer in here?
Hi, my name is Victoria Kolakowski, I used to be an attorney but am now a Judge in the state of CA. After thoroughly reviewing your claims I am confident in saying this person has broken no crimes.