The major difference between your examples and CDs is that a TV etc has all it's cost tied up in the manufacture costs - they go down, the TV goes down. CDs have royalties for the band in the equation so if e.g. the manufacture cost goes down 50%, the final cost to us may only go down 20% because the manufacture costs are a small % of the street price.
Of course, the record companies get around that in most cases by paying the bands far less. Modern deals are derisery and a band could sit at number one for the year and still be on $100 a week.
I don't have numbers handy but it was a huge hit in the UK but a fairly minor one Stateside. Nick PArks said he had a lot of trouble keeping the British humnour in as Dreamworks wanted to excise it under the impression it wouldn't travel well to the US. The fact that the film wasn't a hit vindicated their position in their mind. Parks knew the chances of making the next one the way he wanted was about nil.
Good points although as Mark Kermode (UK film critic) noted, one of the strengths with clay as opposed to CGI is the quality of lighting and in the main, the lighting in the W&G movie was superb. CGI state of the art is damn fine but you can't beat 'real' light for making a scene look good.
I know... I know... FWIW, I use the 'fax your MP' and have had some very good responses and am now on my MP's email mailing list which is actually genuinely interesting and useful.
>and once got a reply from the secretary of state
Dear citizen,
We know where you live and who your family are so please stop asking damn fool questions, if you get my drift.
Kind Regards
Sec. State.
>Hey, just so long as we get to keep our fertility rites, we be cool.
One of my Wiccan friends was showing me their pestle & morter and explained it represented the male and female forms in their rites. Sod that, I was hoping for real nekkid stuff with chicks. I didn't join.
Re:technologist needs to use technology?
on
Jim Gray Is Missing
·
· Score: 1
>he may not have activated it.
'This activation code is not recognised. Please contact microsoft on 0800 PIRACY 123'
Apparently being able to manage my finances makes me public enemy #1
Not at all. I used to have loads stashed away and invested in various tax efficient schemes. What makes you public enemy #1 if having an attitude of superiority that stinks.
Flame away but I'll diss them all I want. It's all about choices. Some of us are smart enough to hold of on having children until we have enough income to afford the larger home and all of the additional expenses that come along when you make the decision to have children
Boy, are you in for a shock. I started a family at 38. I lived in a fair sized house and had *paid off* the mortgage. I had tens of thousands in saving (GBP, not USD i.e. lots). We had the nice home cinema, landscaped garden, new car.
Then kids happened, We lost my wife's income for 5 years. You would be surprised what a huge hit those two make. Then the local school went down hill badly so we had to change to a private one - that was an instant unexpected and very large hit.
We then moved house, partly so my wife could live in the country but mainly because new neighbours moved in who were frankly nightmares. Anyway, we ended up in a nice 400 year old cottage in a village but despite having 3 surveys, 4 specialist additional surveys and multiple estimates for all the work, it turned out the house had more issues than we thought so wiped out the remaining savings. Since then my wife has been made redundant twice.
Bottom line is, no matter how smart you think you are (and you clearly do) you have no idea what the future will bring and your nice cosy life may not be as cosy as you thought. No amount of planning and fiscal care can prevent things happening.
I suggest you kindly fuck off until you grow a clue about the real world and would strongly suggest you stop suggesting people's kids are going to be next years criminals just because their parents are trying very hard to give them the best start in life.
If $25,000 puts a software consultant into debt, it's time he looks for another job. But more likely than not, the story is just exaggerated. The issue is more of whether not the trip is worth $25,000 to Emmett.
It must be lovely to have so much disposable income. Some of us have mortages, kid's school fees and bills to pay. My pay day means I just drift out of being overdrawn for a few days then back to debt. Heck, I had jam sandwiches for lunch today because that's all I can afford and that's with 2-3 jobs on the go. Not everyone has your options or abilities so don't diss someone because they can't magically cough up $25k.
ABout 8 years ago I was at at trade show and got jumped on by an Intel guy. We started chatting about future trends I said then I thought the PC had a huge disadvantage compared to mini's in terms of i/.o and he looked shifty and started to mumble a bit then eventually said 'yes, we know and we're working very hard on a totally new i/o system for PC's. Given the time, it may well have just been what we now have but at least they were aware that fast CPU's are worth nothing if they're waiting for the data.
This is cool - when things get this small it will only be a matter of time before we start seeing PCs that look like C64's or Atari 600XLs i.e. size of a thick keyboard with a few ports at the back. Stick on MAME and have a seriously fun little toy.
Heck, why not just stick on an Atari 800 & C64 emulators too. You could even go really mad and well, use it as a PC with Open Office etc.
I read something recently where someone was talking to some HD engineers at the BBC and they said they don't think adding lines makes much difference but that they wished extra bandwidth was available for faster framerates and less compression. They showed a bit of footage running on two broadcast spec flat panels, one HD, one SD but both from uncompressed sources and the person who wrote about it said there really was very little difference, much to his surprise.
Basically, the argument was that it's the compression most channels use that screws the quality, not the line count.
Confused australians are trying to plug their headphones in to Big Macs. We interviewed Dwayne Bushtucker who said 'I read that they used to use Big Macs for their research but now it was iPods but I figured I'd check if they were compatible. I guess not...'
Back in the late 80's when production values just got silly, my friend's band were in the studio doing their next single. The producer had the singer do the entire song 60 times and he then went through the vocal tracks sylable by sylable dropping the preferred one down to the master vocal track. Crazy.
That said, I understand that some well known and respected singers, still do this including one that is supposed to have one of the best voices around.
>a nuclear missile launch VB app
Worringly, I would say it's quite likely there's a compiled VB4 package somewhere that runs under Win95 on an old Compaq 486 (DX, yay!) that has a tickbox marked 'Have you asked the Americans if it's OK?' that then enables a big red button that does the deed. Worse still, it's 30 lines of code, a 3rd party OCX (From the 'Custom Nuclear Controls Corporation') and cost £3.5bn to develop by a consortium of consultancies. Oh, and they lost the source code and the PC isn't backed up.
>her rather ravaged beaver?
I keep reading about these shots of either her or Lindsey Lohan's 'angry beavers' from their recent commando nights out but I've never seen any. I clearly need to improve my Google skills.
>Is it just me, or is my country going to the dogs?
Going? Wrong tense.
What I find most sad is that when Blair et al first came to power, they were a genuine breath of fresh air compared to the previous Tory incumbants and for the first year/18months they did a lot of really good stuff. Somewhere along the line though they just turned in to carbon copies of those they replaced, if anything worse. I can't think of any aspect of the labour government which doesn't have a whiff of hypocracy, corruption or shallow/misguided thinking. They just seem to churn out reams of badly drafted laws whilst spinning their stories faster than a fast spinny thing. Half the time though the electorate are so uncaring they just get away with it. Heck, Blair even tried to change the ways laws are enacted so he can add/amend them without any reference to parliament, effectively making him a dictator. Luckily my MP was savvy enough to object (and rather strongly at that) to it when I emailed him.
Slashdot Mirror
The major difference between your examples and CDs is that a TV etc has all it's cost tied up in the manufacture costs - they go down, the TV goes down. CDs have royalties for the band in the equation so if e.g. the manufacture cost goes down 50%, the final cost to us may only go down 20% because the manufacture costs are a small % of the street price.
Of course, the record companies get around that in most cases by paying the bands far less. Modern deals are derisery and a band could sit at number one for the year and still be on $100 a week.
I don't have numbers handy but it was a huge hit in the UK but a fairly minor one Stateside. Nick PArks said he had a lot of trouble keeping the British humnour in as Dreamworks wanted to excise it under the impression it wouldn't travel well to the US. The fact that the film wasn't a hit vindicated their position in their mind. Parks knew the chances of making the next one the way he wanted was about nil.
Good points although as Mark Kermode (UK film critic) noted, one of the strengths with clay as opposed to CGI is the quality of lighting and in the main, the lighting in the W&G movie was superb. CGI state of the art is damn fine but you can't beat 'real' light for making a scene look good.
I know... I know... FWIW, I use the 'fax your MP' and have had some very good responses and am now on my MP's email mailing list which is actually genuinely interesting and useful.
>If Blair has any brains or political savvy at all
Ah... there's the rub.
>and once got a reply from the secretary of state
Dear citizen,
We know where you live and who your family are so please stop asking damn fool questions, if you get my drift.
Kind Regards
Sec. State.
>Hey, just so long as we get to keep our fertility rites, we be cool.
One of my Wiccan friends was showing me their pestle & morter and explained it represented the male and female forms in their rites. Sod that, I was hoping for real nekkid stuff with chicks. I didn't join.
>he may not have activated it.
'This activation code is not recognised. Please contact microsoft on 0800 PIRACY 123'
Then kids happened, We lost my wife's income for 5 years. You would be surprised what a huge hit those two make. Then the local school went down hill badly so we had to change to a private one - that was an instant unexpected and very large hit.
We then moved house, partly so my wife could live in the country but mainly because new neighbours moved in who were frankly nightmares. Anyway, we ended up in a nice 400 year old cottage in a village but despite having 3 surveys, 4 specialist additional surveys and multiple estimates for all the work, it turned out the house had more issues than we thought so wiped out the remaining savings. Since then my wife has been made redundant twice.
Bottom line is, no matter how smart you think you are (and you clearly do) you have no idea what the future will bring and your nice cosy life may not be as cosy as you thought. No amount of planning and fiscal care can prevent things happening.
I suggest you kindly fuck off until you grow a clue about the real world and would strongly suggest you stop suggesting people's kids are going to be next years criminals just because their parents are trying very hard to give them the best start in life.
>Don't knock jam sandwiches, man... ;-)
It was the lack of butter that really ruined my day but yup, jam sandwiches aren't all bad
ABout 8 years ago I was at at trade show and got jumped on by an Intel guy. We started chatting about future trends I said then I thought the PC had a huge disadvantage compared to mini's in terms of i/.o and he looked shifty and started to mumble a bit then eventually said 'yes, we know and we're working very hard on a totally new i/o system for PC's. Given the time, it may well have just been what we now have but at least they were aware that fast CPU's are worth nothing if they're waiting for the data.
This is cool - when things get this small it will only be a matter of time before we start seeing PCs that look like C64's or Atari 600XLs i.e. size of a thick keyboard with a few ports at the back. Stick on MAME and have a seriously fun little toy.
Heck, why not just stick on an Atari 800 & C64 emulators too. You could even go really mad and well, use it as a PC with Open Office etc.
I read something recently where someone was talking to some HD engineers at the BBC and they said they don't think adding lines makes much difference but that they wished extra bandwidth was available for faster framerates and less compression. They showed a bit of footage running on two broadcast spec flat panels, one HD, one SD but both from uncompressed sources and the person who wrote about it said there really was very little difference, much to his surprise.
Basically, the argument was that it's the compression most channels use that screws the quality, not the line count.
I'm muslix64 and so's my wife!
Confused australians are trying to plug their headphones in to Big Macs. We interviewed Dwayne Bushtucker who said 'I read that they used to use Big Macs for their research but now it was iPods but I figured I'd check if they were compatible. I guess not...'
Back in the late 80's when production values just got silly, my friend's band were in the studio doing their next single. The producer had the singer do the entire song 60 times and he then went through the vocal tracks sylable by sylable dropping the preferred one down to the master vocal track. Crazy.
That said, I understand that some well known and respected singers, still do this including one that is supposed to have one of the best voices around.
>wish your ancestors would have left behind for you to read
Where did you hide the money?
Thanks dude - looks a bit gnarly tho!
>a nuclear missile launch VB app
Worringly, I would say it's quite likely there's a compiled VB4 package somewhere that runs under Win95 on an old Compaq 486 (DX, yay!) that has a tickbox marked 'Have you asked the Americans if it's OK?' that then enables a big red button that does the deed. Worse still, it's 30 lines of code, a 3rd party OCX (From the 'Custom Nuclear Controls Corporation') and cost £3.5bn to develop by a consortium of consultancies. Oh, and they lost the source code and the PC isn't backed up.
And I used up all my mod points this morning :-( Someone give him a humour point.. Pleeaaase.
>her rather ravaged beaver?
I keep reading about these shots of either her or Lindsey Lohan's 'angry beavers' from their recent commando nights out but I've never seen any. I clearly need to improve my Google skills.
>Who was it cracked Enigma without a computer again?
I think I'm safe in saying it wasn't the Metropolitan or City Police.
>Is it just me, or is my country going to the dogs?
Going? Wrong tense.
What I find most sad is that when Blair et al first came to power, they were a genuine breath of fresh air compared to the previous Tory incumbants and for the first year/18months they did a lot of really good stuff. Somewhere along the line though they just turned in to carbon copies of those they replaced, if anything worse. I can't think of any aspect of the labour government which doesn't have a whiff of hypocracy, corruption or shallow/misguided thinking. They just seem to churn out reams of badly drafted laws whilst spinning their stories faster than a fast spinny thing. Half the time though the electorate are so uncaring they just get away with it. Heck, Blair even tried to change the ways laws are enacted so he can add/amend them without any reference to parliament, effectively making him a dictator. Luckily my MP was savvy enough to object (and rather strongly at that) to it when I emailed him.