The thing I I do want it. I would love it if I was only shown ads which were for things that I was truly interested in. It would be wonderful if ads were a product discovery service.
Except they're not. There's not enough margin in that and that's not how advertisers want to reach me.
Take for example and of the music streaming services. Pandora, Spotify, Last.fm, etc. They know exactly what music you like to listen to. So it should be a slam-dunk to target ads to you for stuff you're interested in. Sell you the album you're listening to, sell you tickets to a local show of any of your favorite artists. Hell, alert you some TV show, movie, or game that uses your favorite music in the soundtrack.
But no. You get adverts for songs, artists, and genres that you've explicitly told you never want to hear again. The service that can have surprisingly good accuracy when suggesting new music and artists is quite literally tone deaf when suggesting ads.
The only explanation is that the record labels are dumping so much money to promote X that they buy up all the available slots, whether its appropriate or not. They still think we're listening to the radio and are not an infinitely fragmented audience, so they throw money at it to keep the little guy out. The little guy who would most benefit targeted ads. And the streaming services let them do this, even though it's a disservice to their listeners because the listeners aren't their customers, the record companies are, and they're already on thin ice with them to begin with. So they'll do what it takes to keep them happy.
Now that's just streaming music, but the same factors apply in other areas where targeted ads could work if the players had any interest in playing that game.
Yes, obviously an idiotic statement. But it will sell well. I can't say how many times I heard from clients variations on "Can you make my [software I have to use for work but don't want to learn] work like [software or web site I like]?"
This includes: "Can you make the inventory management system work like Outlook?"
"Can you make the system we create marketing materials in work like Amazon?"
"Can you make our senor network reporting work like Facebook?"
But if you're the company that actually gives into these morons then you have even bigger problems.
I feel after an investment of only 15 minutes I finally figured out what openstack "is".
"Only"? If it takes a knowledgable person 15 minutes to figure out, in the most basic terms, what a product is then that product has a serious problem. It might just be a marketing problem, but it might be simply a useless product.
Condensing your description to three words: ("CPANEL for VMs") is incredibly helpful. It's probably not 100% accurate, but it gets me far enough that I can evaluate if I need to know more or not. Which is completely different from the buzzword full, fact free website that is OpenStack.org.
Sadly I'm betting the people running OpenStack.org are seeing a huge number of hits on their site today and thinking "Sweet! look at all the interest!" when it's really just a bunch of smart people trying to figure out what the hell they're talking about.
Its costs more than the $50 filing fees, you have the paper work and filings for the organization. If you don't do those your corp or LLC will be invalidated and they'll come after you anyway.
As an individual you probably don't want incorporation, you likely want a Limited Liability Company. (LLC) Corporations have a lot of overhead that LLCs don't. However once you start making 6 figures a Corp starts making more sense
This all depends what state you're in. Talk with several accountants and tax attorneys to find out what your options are. They'll likely consult for free. And do go through a person. Don't use one of the "Corporation In A Minute" web sites. It's not that they're a scam, it's that they don't prepare you with the information you need to run your new business entity properly. Not that it's complex, hard, or time consuming but this is what outside experts are for. If you're going to take steps to protect yourself do it right. You wouldn't buy a security system and then fail to install it correctly, right?
For me, without kids or a mortgage, and with a significant other that will support whatever wage I earn, I can make job satisfaction the primary, and in fact only reason for having a job.
However that would change if I had kids or debt or a dependent. Making sure the people you're responsible for are taken care of is your #1 priority. Being fiscally responsible is your #2 priority. Fit "fun" in after those are taken care of.
So, you know, make your life choices wisely if you think you'd like to have more fun.
Do you know how much money promotion costs? How hard it is for anyone to notice a new project? And here is Jazan Wild giving out free promotion for anything with that title! I certainly wouldn't have known about Melissa Marr's book any other way.
Keep up the stellar work, Jazan Wild. I'm sure it's getting you the results you're after.
I admit I skimmed the Slashdot summary and thought it was compressing 3D information into Twitter-sized bites, similar to the Twitter music notation from a while back. But then I click on the links and see RSS FEEDS IN THREE DEES! Not even really in 3D, just with perspective.
I'm not even going to dig up any of my "Oh, just stop with trying to display text in 3D" rants because everyone has to know by now, right? Everyone but these guys. (Hint: Do a search for VRML.)
And what's with the "120 lines of code" crap? I could probably do the same thing in 5 lines of Processing, or a whole lot more of ASM. But this is a stupid thing that should never have been done. And not "stupid as in awesome" like launching flaming pianos with a trebuchet or "stupid as in a challenge" like getting a toaster to play Oregon Trail, but stupid as in pointless with no redeeming value.
So as much as Slashdotters love to bash on people for not pulling the subtle points from the fine article, don't bother with this one. It was a mistake to have made it to the front page, on top o the much greater mistake of actually doing it in the first place.
This story supports my position that tablets are stupid except for a very few vertical business markets, and will go away faster than netbooks once people can see past the hype.
I think you vastly underestimate the market for pure consumption. The average American family spends over $1500 a year on TV and television subscription fees.
"I just received this email from an Amazon spokesperson: 'I wanted to let you know that with Kindle Fire HD there will be a special offers opt-out option for $15. We know from our Kindle reader line that customers love our special offers and very few people choose to opt out. We're happy to offer customers the choice.'"
It's not your reading comprehension that's lacking, it's your ability to use a modern internet search engine. It's actually much faster and easier than bitching in a public forum.
But I suppose airing your lazy ignorance is probably... wait, why would you want to do that again?
No mod points this week to mod you up so I'll just post this to say: Exactly!
To me this is the equivalent of book publishers saying they'll only sell books to people who read them in book clubs.
Well I hate book clubs. I want to read at my own pace, not the pace of the group. And I hate multiplayer games. I want to play on my own schedule. And I want repeatable experiences. Multiplayer games can't offer this.
And add to it that now that my friends and I are all adults, finding time to game together is rare. And when we do have mutual free time we'd rather spend it face-to-face than face-to-screen.
Keeping your craft within a constrained area? Not hard.
Heck, getting a pedal powered craft off the ground isn't that hard. (No really, you can make a pedal powered hovercraft in a weekend. It will only lift you a centimeter, but again, getting off the ground is not that hard.)
But getting 9 feet in the air? That is seriously hard, and no craft I've seen has gotten close. Every single one has used ground effect for their lift, which is why they're all stuck around 18-24" . That's a far cry for supporting your own weight.
Best of luck to them, but they'll seriously need to rethink their craft if they want to win the prize.
With all of the buzz about Skyrim I felt a strong pull to play it. But given my past experiences with their recent games there was no way I was going to spend any money on it. The number and nature of the bugs is simply embarrassing for a AAA title in 2012. Hell, they'd be embarrassing for a budget title in 1990.
Yes, this was known. But the process of pulling them off the ROMs yourself? Documenting the process? Yeah, no one was kind enough to wrap all that up in one place. It's a fun read and if you're not careful even you, Mighty Internet Commenter, might learn something.
Shut the hell up and contribute. Bitching gets no one anywhere.
I doubt it's hard, technically to truly disappear. The hard part is that you have to be willing to leave absolutely everything behind.
Step 1: Phone off, battery out. If battery can't come out it gets destroyed.
Step 2: Wipe and leave behind anything that connects to the Internet.
Step 3: Turn everything into cash immediately.
You won't be able to hide that you're doing a runner, but you can make it harder to get your trail after you do run.
Get a hair cut, color hair (just 2 shades different, not drastic), add/remove facial hair, buy some cheap glasses frames with 0 correction glass in them. Buy entirely different wardrobe, half from Wal-mart, half from thrift stores.
A trip to Kinko's to print a temp set of fraudulent license plates for my car. Or better yet, swap plates with someone with the same model and color as mine. Or best give a buddy who looks like you $500 to drive the car to city X and fly back. You take the train/bus to city Y, in a different time zone from X and forget about the car.
I'm not sure if I'd leave the country or not. (In this case I'm in the US.) It would require a better fake ID and borders are choke points of surveillance. Also fingerprints.
If I felt the need to send "I'm okay" information to my friends or family I'd do it through the post at least a 3 hour drive from where I've set up camp. No return address.
But.. but... but... isn't Bitcoin for people too smart to use government currency? How could these smart people fall for a scam like that?
(Yes, that's snark but lets face it, any time anyone scoffs at Bitcoin a nerd magically pops up and tells them they obviously don't understand Bitcoin well enough.)
I've had one of each generation Kindle and the latest Kindle non-touch/ non keyboard is by far the most rugged of the group. Previous models would break or at least pop out part of the plastic case when dropped from a couple feet. The model cited (I think Amazon calls it simple the "Kindle") has a metal frame that has survived some rather scary drops with no problem.
Previous models also had a significant gap between the screen and the case. It was probably 0.05mm, but it was enough to collect tons of dust. The new model has the screen flush with the case which hasn't trapped any dust on mine. They've also gotten rid of the speakers (no more speaker grill holes) and the headphone jack which remove more access points for dust and dirt.
Not that it's rugged for jungle use straight out of the box, but it's much more rugged than its predecessors. I'd still get a waterproof case for it (though I've splashed it with water a few times with no ill effects) and probably a hard case too. The frame will protect from drops on edge but it will still break if you sit on it.
Really? Has anyone ever intentionally used the YouTube app in iOS? I never have and I've owned an iPhone since v1. If Google wants a iOS Youtube app, please make me download it instead of preloading it. My phone doesn't need crapware.
This will mean that soon most of the posts people see will be promoted posts. (Mom isn't going to pay $200 for her friends to see photos of her darling and Jr. isn't going to pony up so everyone can see how artfully he's skipping class.) This will drive users away, ultimately driving down the value of the promoted posts. Facebook's random post filtering already drives up the noise (I have to post 10x so everyone will see it!) this just amplifies a particular part of the noise, buying the signal that much more.
And this is why IPOs are bad for companies who already have enough cash and no plans. They play to the shareholders and eat the business alive.
Dude. Use capital letters. It will make your text much easier to read and we'll all take you more seriously. You bothered with them in your user name.
They're easy to use. There are two keys for doing it on every keyboard. If you're disabled and using normal shift keys is hard I'd be glad to show you how to use the accessibility features of your computer to make it simple.
I've seen their "shuttle" in person. The workmanship is incredibly poor. I mean even poor for a home-built spaceship mockup. Structurally and aerodynamically it was crap. They are, at best, hobbyists with big dreams. Poke around their web site and look for drop tests or wind-tunnel tests of their flight system. They only thing they have is a video of testing at 2" rocket motor that generates "~30lbs of thrust" for 5 seconds. Good luck getting to space on that. (For comparrison a single Estes E9 rocket motor that sells for $5 at the hobby store can generate 5lbs of thrust for 3 seconds.)
I'm not saying that's it's impossible to go from zero to orbit on $10 million (though it probably is, at least in 2012) but I am saying I wouldn't invest a bent penny to Space Transport and Recovery Systems.
At the same event I saw their mockup I talked with a few guys from Copenhagen Suborbitals. Those guys are the real deal. They've got the skills, the passion, and are working up a pretty substantial track record of successes.
Well, I live out in the middle of freaking nowhere. The best Internet access we can get here is GSM. (Sometimes, depending on the weather. We're a long ways from the tower.) We can't even get satellite here because the phone lines for the terrestrial upstream aren't good enough to transmit data.
At least that was until last week when they laid fiber. And now we can actually, you know, use the internet without driving half an hour. Which is great because one of us out here is in a wheel chair and that half hour drive to town is no insignificant challenge.
Turn off your internet for a week, see how much different your life is. Now try a year. At this point not having internet access in the US means you don't even know about most popular culture.
So some of the money was spent. And it was spent on something that we never could have gotten any other way, and we are very grateful to everyone who subsidized it.
A 80 game is still, when ranked by a buch of people, better than a 70 game. On average.
You can do all kinds of statistical analysis on each reviewer for each platform and each genre of game and make adjustments to them, but at the end of the day you still put the pig in the sausage grinder to get a single number. And that number will not be significantly different than what's there now and the ranking of games will not change.
Compare Metacritic's movie review numbers to Rotten Tomatoes'. They both use different metrics to normalize their data, and yet they both agree on which movies stink and which are great.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing I I do want it. I would love it if I was only shown ads which were for things that I was truly interested in. It would be wonderful if ads were a product discovery service.
Except they're not. There's not enough margin in that and that's not how advertisers want to reach me.
Take for example and of the music streaming services. Pandora, Spotify, Last.fm, etc. They know exactly what music you like to listen to. So it should be a slam-dunk to target ads to you for stuff you're interested in. Sell you the album you're listening to, sell you tickets to a local show of any of your favorite artists. Hell, alert you some TV show, movie, or game that uses your favorite music in the soundtrack.
But no. You get adverts for songs, artists, and genres that you've explicitly told you never want to hear again. The service that can have surprisingly good accuracy when suggesting new music and artists is quite literally tone deaf when suggesting ads.
The only explanation is that the record labels are dumping so much money to promote X that they buy up all the available slots, whether its appropriate or not. They still think we're listening to the radio and are not an infinitely fragmented audience, so they throw money at it to keep the little guy out. The little guy who would most benefit targeted ads. And the streaming services let them do this, even though it's a disservice to their listeners because the listeners aren't their customers, the record companies are, and they're already on thin ice with them to begin with. So they'll do what it takes to keep them happy.
Now that's just streaming music, but the same factors apply in other areas where targeted ads could work if the players had any interest in playing that game.
Yes, obviously an idiotic statement. But it will sell well. I can't say how many times I heard from clients variations on "Can you make my [software I have to use for work but don't want to learn] work like [software or web site I like]?"
This includes:
"Can you make the inventory management system work like Outlook?"
"Can you make the system we create marketing materials in work like Amazon?"
"Can you make our senor network reporting work like Facebook?"
But if you're the company that actually gives into these morons then you have even bigger problems.
"Only"? If it takes a knowledgable person 15 minutes to figure out, in the most basic terms, what a product is then that product has a serious problem. It might just be a marketing problem, but it might be simply a useless product.
Condensing your description to three words: ("CPANEL for VMs") is incredibly helpful. It's probably not 100% accurate, but it gets me far enough that I can evaluate if I need to know more or not. Which is completely different from the buzzword full, fact free website that is OpenStack.org.
Sadly I'm betting the people running OpenStack.org are seeing a huge number of hits on their site today and thinking "Sweet! look at all the interest!" when it's really just a bunch of smart people trying to figure out what the hell they're talking about.
I can't tell you how sad this makes me. Law's only purpose is to serve the people. If the people can't understand it then we're fucked.
Its costs more than the $50 filing fees, you have the paper work and filings for the organization. If you don't do those your corp or LLC will be invalidated and they'll come after you anyway.
As an individual you probably don't want incorporation, you likely want a Limited Liability Company. (LLC) Corporations have a lot of overhead that LLCs don't. However once you start making 6 figures a Corp starts making more sense
This all depends what state you're in. Talk with several accountants and tax attorneys to find out what your options are. They'll likely consult for free. And do go through a person. Don't use one of the "Corporation In A Minute" web sites. It's not that they're a scam, it's that they don't prepare you with the information you need to run your new business entity properly. Not that it's complex, hard, or time consuming but this is what outside experts are for. If you're going to take steps to protect yourself do it right. You wouldn't buy a security system and then fail to install it correctly, right?
But yes, as soon as possible.
For me, without kids or a mortgage, and with a significant other that will support whatever wage I earn, I can make job satisfaction the primary, and in fact only reason for having a job.
However that would change if I had kids or debt or a dependent. Making sure the people you're responsible for are taken care of is your #1 priority. Being fiscally responsible is your #2 priority. Fit "fun" in after those are taken care of.
So, you know, make your life choices wisely if you think you'd like to have more fun.
Do you know how much money promotion costs? How hard it is for anyone to notice a new project? And here is Jazan Wild giving out free promotion for anything with that title! I certainly wouldn't have known about Melissa Marr's book any other way.
Keep up the stellar work, Jazan Wild. I'm sure it's getting you the results you're after.
Is this a blast from the past post from 1998?
I admit I skimmed the Slashdot summary and thought it was compressing 3D information into Twitter-sized bites, similar to the Twitter music notation from a while back. But then I click on the links and see RSS FEEDS IN THREE DEES! Not even really in 3D, just with perspective.
I'm not even going to dig up any of my "Oh, just stop with trying to display text in 3D" rants because everyone has to know by now, right? Everyone but these guys. (Hint: Do a search for VRML.)
And what's with the "120 lines of code" crap? I could probably do the same thing in 5 lines of Processing, or a whole lot more of ASM. But this is a stupid thing that should never have been done. And not "stupid as in awesome" like launching flaming pianos with a trebuchet or "stupid as in a challenge" like getting a toaster to play Oregon Trail, but stupid as in pointless with no redeeming value.
So as much as Slashdotters love to bash on people for not pulling the subtle points from the fine article, don't bother with this one. It was a mistake to have made it to the front page, on top o the much greater mistake of actually doing it in the first place.
I think you vastly underestimate the market for pure consumption. The average American family spends over $1500 a year on TV and television subscription fees.
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-3126_7-57508986/amazon-backtracks-will-offer-$15-opt-out-for-ads-on-kindle-fire-tablets/
"I just received this email from an Amazon spokesperson:
'I wanted to let you know that with Kindle Fire HD there will be a special offers opt-out option for $15. We know from our Kindle reader line that customers love our special offers and very few people choose to opt out. We're happy to offer customers the choice.'"
It's not your reading comprehension that's lacking, it's your ability to use a modern internet search engine. It's actually much faster and easier than bitching in a public forum.
But I suppose airing your lazy ignorance is probably... wait, why would you want to do that again?
No mod points this week to mod you up so I'll just post this to say: Exactly!
To me this is the equivalent of book publishers saying they'll only sell books to people who read them in book clubs.
Well I hate book clubs. I want to read at my own pace, not the pace of the group. And I hate multiplayer games. I want to play on my own schedule. And I want repeatable experiences. Multiplayer games can't offer this.
And add to it that now that my friends and I are all adults, finding time to game together is rare. And when we do have mutual free time we'd rather spend it face-to-face than face-to-screen.
Keeping your craft within a constrained area? Not hard.
Heck, getting a pedal powered craft off the ground isn't that hard. (No really, you can make a pedal powered hovercraft in a weekend. It will only lift you a centimeter, but again, getting off the ground is not that hard.)
But getting 9 feet in the air? That is seriously hard, and no craft I've seen has gotten close. Every single one has used ground effect for their lift, which is why they're all stuck around 18-24" . That's a far cry for supporting your own weight.
Best of luck to them, but they'll seriously need to rethink their craft if they want to win the prize.
Oh god yes, this.
With all of the buzz about Skyrim I felt a strong pull to play it. But given my past experiences with their recent games there was no way I was going to spend any money on it. The number and nature of the bugs is simply embarrassing for a AAA title in 2012. Hell, they'd be embarrassing for a budget title in 1990.
Iceland has 1% the land mass of the US. I could cover the infrastructure costs of that with my pocket change.
Try covering 3.5 million square miles with up-to-date infrastructure sometime.
Christ, what an asshole.
Yes, this was known. But the process of pulling them off the ROMs yourself? Documenting the process? Yeah, no one was kind enough to wrap all that up in one place. It's a fun read and if you're not careful even you, Mighty Internet Commenter, might learn something.
Shut the hell up and contribute. Bitching gets no one anywhere.
I doubt it's hard, technically to truly disappear. The hard part is that you have to be willing to leave absolutely everything behind.
Step 1: Phone off, battery out. If battery can't come out it gets destroyed.
Step 2: Wipe and leave behind anything that connects to the Internet.
Step 3: Turn everything into cash immediately.
You won't be able to hide that you're doing a runner, but you can make it harder to get your trail after you do run.
Get a hair cut, color hair (just 2 shades different, not drastic), add/remove facial hair, buy some cheap glasses frames with 0 correction glass in them. Buy entirely different wardrobe, half from Wal-mart, half from thrift stores.
A trip to Kinko's to print a temp set of fraudulent license plates for my car. Or better yet, swap plates with someone with the same model and color as mine. Or best give a buddy who looks like you $500 to drive the car to city X and fly back. You take the train/bus to city Y, in a different time zone from X and forget about the car.
After that it would depend on how much cash I had and how well connected the people after me wanted me. A good fake ID would be in the loop somewhere, but I honestly don't know anywhere to do that in person any more. Some time at cafés or public libraries with computers (and some attentive browser washing) would probably turn up something. Drive to a city chosen completely at random that I don't have any previous contact with. (No visits, family, friends, etc.) Population of at least 50K.
I'm not sure if I'd leave the country or not. (In this case I'm in the US.) It would require a better fake ID and borders are choke points of surveillance. Also fingerprints.
If I felt the need to send "I'm okay" information to my friends or family I'd do it through the post at least a 3 hour drive from where I've set up camp. No return address.
But.. but... but... isn't Bitcoin for people too smart to use government currency? How could these smart people fall for a scam like that?
(Yes, that's snark but lets face it, any time anyone scoffs at Bitcoin a nerd magically pops up and tells them they obviously don't understand Bitcoin well enough.)
I've had one of each generation Kindle and the latest Kindle non-touch/ non keyboard is by far the most rugged of the group. Previous models would break or at least pop out part of the plastic case when dropped from a couple feet. The model cited (I think Amazon calls it simple the "Kindle") has a metal frame that has survived some rather scary drops with no problem.
Previous models also had a significant gap between the screen and the case. It was probably 0.05mm, but it was enough to collect tons of dust. The new model has the screen flush with the case which hasn't trapped any dust on mine. They've also gotten rid of the speakers (no more speaker grill holes) and the headphone jack which remove more access points for dust and dirt.
Not that it's rugged for jungle use straight out of the box, but it's much more rugged than its predecessors. I'd still get a waterproof case for it (though I've splashed it with water a few times with no ill effects) and probably a hard case too. The frame will protect from drops on edge but it will still break if you sit on it.
Really? Has anyone ever intentionally used the YouTube app in iOS? I never have and I've owned an iPhone since v1. If Google wants a iOS Youtube app, please make me download it instead of preloading it. My phone doesn't need crapware.
This will mean that soon most of the posts people see will be promoted posts. (Mom isn't going to pay $200 for her friends to see photos of her darling and Jr. isn't going to pony up so everyone can see how artfully he's skipping class.) This will drive users away, ultimately driving down the value of the promoted posts. Facebook's random post filtering already drives up the noise (I have to post 10x so everyone will see it!) this just amplifies a particular part of the noise, buying the signal that much more.
And this is why IPOs are bad for companies who already have enough cash and no plans. They play to the shareholders and eat the business alive.
Dude. Use capital letters. It will make your text much easier to read and we'll all take you more seriously. You bothered with them in your user name.
They're easy to use. There are two keys for doing it on every keyboard. If you're disabled and using normal shift keys is hard I'd be glad to show you how to use the accessibility features of your computer to make it simple.
I've seen their "shuttle" in person. The workmanship is incredibly poor. I mean even poor for a home-built spaceship mockup. Structurally and aerodynamically it was crap. They are, at best, hobbyists with big dreams. Poke around their web site and look for drop tests or wind-tunnel tests of their flight system. They only thing they have is a video of testing at 2" rocket motor that generates "~30lbs of thrust" for 5 seconds. Good luck getting to space on that. (For comparrison a single Estes E9 rocket motor that sells for $5 at the hobby store can generate 5lbs of thrust for 3 seconds.)
I'm not saying that's it's impossible to go from zero to orbit on $10 million (though it probably is, at least in 2012) but I am saying I wouldn't invest a bent penny to Space Transport and Recovery Systems.
At the same event I saw their mockup I talked with a few guys from Copenhagen Suborbitals. Those guys are the real deal. They've got the skills, the passion, and are working up a pretty substantial track record of successes.
Well, I live out in the middle of freaking nowhere. The best Internet access we can get here is GSM. (Sometimes, depending on the weather. We're a long ways from the tower.) We can't even get satellite here because the phone lines for the terrestrial upstream aren't good enough to transmit data.
At least that was until last week when they laid fiber. And now we can actually, you know, use the internet without driving half an hour. Which is great because one of us out here is in a wheel chair and that half hour drive to town is no insignificant challenge.
Turn off your internet for a week, see how much different your life is. Now try a year. At this point not having internet access in the US means you don't even know about most popular culture.
So some of the money was spent. And it was spent on something that we never could have gotten any other way, and we are very grateful to everyone who subsidized it.
A 80 game is still, when ranked by a buch of people, better than a 70 game. On average.
You can do all kinds of statistical analysis on each reviewer for each platform and each genre of game and make adjustments to them, but at the end of the day you still put the pig in the sausage grinder to get a single number. And that number will not be significantly different than what's there now and the ranking of games will not change.
Compare Metacritic's movie review numbers to Rotten Tomatoes'. They both use different metrics to normalize their data, and yet they both agree on which movies stink and which are great.