I'm not a computer scientist, so I don't know offhand if she deserves the award. However, I know a foolproof way to figure out if she does
Just put either her, or a previous winner of the award, in a sealed room and let me ask converse with them via slips of paper passed back and forth. If I can't tell the difference, then she must deserve the award.
Now, if only I can come up with a clever name for this test...
Water park? You are thinking too small, sir! This needs to be built as a continent-wide series of lakes and canals. For the first time, software pirates will be able to actually sail pirate ships on the job.
You've hit on something important--there's something in the human psyche that responds to this type of formula.
But (as with anything else in art) the devil is in the details. Imagine if every chapter of The Odyssey had Odysseus killing identical Cyclops, over and over again, using the same techniques every time. We'd all get tired of it quickly. Alas, in certain computer games, the player is expected to do just that. Like TFA says, it gets tedious to fight the same wolf over and over again to build up your stats.
Unlike the author of TFA, I'm not claiming there's anything objectively wrong with that kind of gaming. I'm just articulating why, subjectively, I don't find it very entertaining.
Why do people assume that Jade is a human of any race?
She lives on Hillys, a non earth planet, and her best friend is Pey'j, who appears to be a bipedal, talking boar. This raises three possibilities:
POSSIBILITY 1. The game is set a vast span of time into the future--long enough that boars have had the chance to evolve into a bipedal, talking species. In that case, Jade probably bears the same connection to you or I that Pey'j bears to a modern-day boar. (Which means, by the way, that no matter how hot you find Jade, she's going to be as attracted to you as, say, you are to a monkey. The pheremones and whatnot just won't work. (Not strictly on-topic, but still worth noting.))
POSSIBILITY 2. The game is set a moderate time in the future, and Pey'j is the result of man-made genetic alterations. In this case, Jade--given her incredible athleticism and reselience--is probably genetically modified as well. Therefore, her seemingly ethnic physical features might have nothing to do with her ancestry; a society that chooses to create bipedal talking boars probably has a pretty loosy-goosy attitude towards genetics, and is entirely capable of modifying facial features and skin tones to suit whatever the fashion is.
POSSIBILITY 3. Hillys was never settled by humans, and it's a complete coincidence that so many of its beings resemble earth beings. In which case, no matter how much Jade's outsides might look human, her internal organs are probably completely different.
In fact--and I should warn you that SPOILERS FOLLOW! STOP READING IF YOU DON'T WANT THE END OF THIS GAME RUINED FOR YOU!--
I'm not kidding. SPOILERS COMING!
The end of the game makes it clear that Jade isn't even a traditional biological being. She's some kind of personified alien energy or something. So her race is completely irrelevent...
Forget about silly functions like stocking grocery shelves, cleaning, etc. A friend of mine has invented a system that allows AI to do the single most important human activity:
That's right. When the new visually acute robots put you out of a job, and you take your severance check and slink home to watch "Cops," you'll find a robot already hogging the La-Z-Boy, remote control in hand. Not only are we obsolete--our obsolescenece is obsolete, too.
The guy isn't talking about plagiarism; he calls the essay "a plagiarism" with (IMO) tongue planted in cheek. It's not correct to say that it's about plagiarism specifically, because to say that sounds like he's defending plagiarism specifically, when the issues covered in the essay itself are far more broad.
That's an interesting point. However, I'd argue that the guy isn't talking about plagiarism; he calls the essay "a plagiarism" with (IMO) tongue planted in cheek. It's not correct to say that it's about plagiarism specifically, because to say that sounds like he's defending plagiarism specifically, when the issues covered in the essay itself are far more broad.
Where's your proof? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
If he were trying to prove that most people do not have Asperger's Syndrome, he might require extraordinary evidence. But trying to prove that we don't have Apserger's Syndrome is much easier. Admittedly, I've never heard of Apserger's before, but I have to assume it involves being a semicircular or polygonal termination or recess in a building, usually vaulted and used especially at the end of a choir in a church. I'm pretty sure if I were the vaulted polygonal termination of a church, I wouldn't be able to type well enough to use Slashdot.
The iTV / Apple TV... well, aside from the fact that you won't be able to get one for a little while yet, I'm not sure what it'd do for me that I can't already do. Apparently, the marketing went right over my head. Anyone have a summary of why this is an interesting product in a world of tivos, dvrs, frontrow, hi-def dvd and xbox and ps3 and so on? Aside from giving Apple a vector to sell DRM'd movies?
I was wondering the same thing. In fact, I had the same reaction to the iTV that I had to Widgets when they were first announced: this is nice enough, but it seems more like an upgrade to an existing apple product than like a revolutionary new thing.
Then I thought a bit more about the Widget analogy. With hindsight, I can now see the real purpose of Widgets. They're certainly useful on their own, but the long-term purpose of introducing them was to get lots of developers writing useful little stripped down programs--which will now be available on the iPhone. Widgets were what you might call a wedge technology. And Dashborad was just the thin end of that wedge.
So I have to assume that's what iTV is. I'm willing to bet that somewhere in Steve Job's desk is a timeline showing when they'll introduce TiVo like functionality to the AppleTV. (or, for that matter, merge the AppleTV and the iPod into an Archos-like device.) By the time that happens, they'll have had a few generations of experience to work out the basic bugs with the product, and perhaps to develop an ecosystem of third-party software and hardware designed around iTV.
While technically this product is wireless (since it doesn't involve wires), my initial instinct was that it was no more useful than wires (since you still have to make a physicial connection.)
But then I read TFA.
The idea, said T.C. Wingrove, Visteon's senior manager of innovation, is to have a "hot spot" in the car where you set down your phone or iPod and never have to worry about different types of power cords or outlets.
Have there been 100 Mac games worth paying for since the Lisa?
Hey, there are thousands of good games you can play on your Mac. You just have to install Boot Camp first.
Seriously, there is actually a pretty healthy Mac games market. I'm just not sure it's one that appeals to the average Slashdot reader. If you want the latest and whizziest FPS--or if you spend enough time gaming that you need a new epic game every few days--then yeah, you need to run Windows.
But for a more casual gamer, the Mac is a perfectly good option, even without Boot Camp. Many of the most popular Windows games eventually get ported to the Mac--the Sims, Doom III, Jedi Outcast, etc, etc, etc, are all available on a Mac. Then there are companies like Ambrosia Software, Pangea, and Freeverse that make games primarily or exclusively for the Macintosh. The smaller Mac market means that these games will sell fewer copies, and they therefore tend to have smaller development staffs. On the one hand, this means Mac-exclusive games often don't have the vast scope of original PC games. On the other hand, it means there's more room for quirky, off-beat stuff.
Whether or not you like her work, J.K. Rowling is the most financially successful author in the history of the written word. And, no, that is not hyperbole: that is a mathematical fact. According to Forbes magazine, she is the first person in the history of the world to become a billionaire by writing books. Whatever her place in the history of writing as an artform, she has a major place in the history of writing as an industry--equal to Samuel Johnson, the first person to earn a full-time living as a writer in the English language.
Each of her last three books has set a record for the fastest-selling book in history, only to be surpassed by her next book. The best-selling book of 2004 was The Da Vinci Code, which sold about 6 million copies in its first year of release. The best selling book of 2005 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which sold 6.9 million copies in its first 24 hours. Again, putting aside any artistic considerations, JK Rowling sits atop a hugely profitable and influential industry. Imagine if Apple or Ford only announced one product every two years. Don't you think the announcement of that product would get major media attention?
Finally... For those of us who DO love the Harry Potter books, a major part of the fun is engaging in debate and speculation with other fans. This gives us an excuse to do so. And, most likely, after the final book comes out, we'll never again have quite the same opportunity. With any serial fiction--whether it's "Lost" or the Star Wars movies or the Harry Potter series--there comes a point when the secrets of the story become public knowledge, and you can no longer have the pleasure of concocting your own theories to explain the mysteries. So, hey--let us have our fun.
Why would one have to imagine? Isn't this the case? I suppose maybe at 40 you don't cease to be hip in the programming world, but if you don't keep up with whatever tech its the same and could happen when you're 25 or 35 or 55 and we don't get residuals.
The key phrase is "if you don't keep up with whatever tech." In any profession (or, at least, any knowledge-based profession), you'll become obsolete if you don't keep up with developments in the field. In TV writing, however, you will become obsolete no matter how well you keep up. If you take a look at any TV staff, you'll find a bunch of people in their 20's and 30's, a much smaller number of people in their 40's, and almost nobody 50 or above. And it's not because the 50-year-olds have been promoted to managerial status, as I suspect might happen in the progamming world. Those 50-year-olds have either switched fields entirely, or are just not working.
There is much debate in Hollywood as to why this is. Some people argue that the intense hours of a TV show staff job make it an inherently young man's game. Others argue that it's blatant age discrimination--in fact, a group of writers have filed a class-action age discrimination lawsuit. I don't know which is the case
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that everybody should weep over the plight of TV writers. I don't think they deserve any more sympathy than any other group of middle-class Americans doing their best to make a living. I'm just saying they don't deserve any less.
In some ways it is hard to feel for either side, The networks are the typical bloated-big-company-screw-the-little-guy types and the creatives whine about not getting more money beyond what they were already paid.(I'd love to see the Photoshop team decide that they aren't going to deliver CS3 unless Adobe gives them a cut of each sale...)
Actually, a better analogy might be if Adobe had lured the programmers to their jobs with the promise that they WOULD get a cut of each sale. And then Adobe asked them to stay at work even later than they normally do and work on porting CS3 to web-browsers. And then Adobe said, "Even though from your point of view 30 hours spent programming is 30 hours spent programming whatever platform its ends up being used on, we are viewing the web version as a promotional item, and you won't get a cut."
And the programmers said, "But you're selling ad space on the webpage. You're making money off it."
And Adobe said, "Sorry. If you don't like it, take it to your union."
Now imagine that computer programming was a highly unstable profession, where any project you worked on could get canceled at any moment, and in any case, once you hit your 40's, you would cease to be hot and hip and might never work again--which means you'll be living off your software "residuals" for many years to come.
And you've got a pretty good idea of how the Battlestar Galactica writers feel.
If the sign is located in the window of Joe's Cafe, yes.
However, if the sign is located, say, 10 feet west of Joe's, on an east-west street, and if you have to be within 5 feet of the sign to see it, then anybody who sees it while traveling west has already passed Joe's by the time he can see the sign, while anybody who sees it while traveling east has yet to pass Joe's. Voila.
Anyone else first read that as "Intel's Testicle Vision"?
Hmm... I guess multiple cores would be useful there, too, but everybody would need bigger boxer shorts. Plus, the cooling requirements would be steep. Nothing kills the moment like the roar of a fan kicking into action...
According to Sharp's PR, one possible use is as a dashboard display in your car:
So while driving you can see the GPS navigation your kid at the backseat can enjoy Ace Combat on his PS2 while your wife in the passenger seat checks out tourist sites and restaurants all in full-screen view.
That makes a certain amount of sense to me; with viewers essentially strapped in place, you can make sure everybody sees exactly the perspective they're supposed to. Also, in those circumstances, you aren't going to demand especially high resolution--as long as you can make out the information presented, you're OK. (Admittedly, the kid in the backseat playing on his PS2 might want better resolution, but that's his problem. In my day, if we wanted to play PS2, we had to actually get out of our car and walk inside.)
They also mention the possibility of using it for displaying multiple ads in public, so that the ad you see varies depending on whether you are coming ("You're just a few feet away from Joe's Cafe!") or going ("Turn around! You just missed the best restaurant in town!").
Indeed. Anybody want to take bets on how long it takes to go from "buggy, overpriced, and useless" to "cheap and indispensable"? I'm betting 5 years, max.
Of course, when it becomes ubiquitious, there will be certain downsides. You think the "zap the mosquito" ad is annoying now?
Wait until the mosquito starts buzzing around your keyboard.
Hello, McFly (or dumb reporter) but Apple's beta Boot Camp software is not designed to run Vista.
From the first page of the "dumb reporter"'s article:
Who can resist a chance to surf the Web with a beta version of something like Firefox, running on a beta version of Microsoft's next operating system, using a beta version of Apple's Boot Camp software? Not I.
If you actually RTFA, it becomes clear very quickly that his point is, "Hey, except for running a little hot, Vista works pretty well on my Mac laptop, even with everything in beta. That's kind of cool."
The important thing to remember is: this is not an announcement. This is HALF an announcement.
Apple has already invited the media to a special event on September 12, where it is widely expected to announce two things. The first is that the iTunes music store is now going to sell feature-length movies. And the second thing is... well, nobody is quite sure, but it is rumored to be something major. Like, for example, an new version of Airport Express that allows you to stream video as well as music. This would be a big step on the road to making an Apple a true media center.
The fact that Apple has announced its widest-screen-ever iMacs with so little fanfare is a sign that the rumor is true--that Apple does, indeed, have something pretty big up its sleeve. If Apple is indeed about to make a big step forward towards being a media center, a 24-inch iMac suddenly has a new use: it's big enough to start serving as a genuine TV replacement.
Oh, and I'm going to add one more speculation to the mix. When Apple announced that some of the features of its upcoming operating system were "Top Secret", the explanation given was that they didn't want them copied by Vista. I always thought that was a bizarre explanation--is Microsoft really going to cram completely new features into Vista in the next few months? More likely, I thought, was that these "top secret" features depend on hardware that Apple wasn't yet ready to reveal. Specifically, I hypothesized that they were media-related features that would interface with a Mac-branded PVR. I was probably over-optimistic on the PVR thing, but I may have been right that these unnannounced software features tie into a Mac-branded audiovisual device. If so, expect the announcement of the new video-streaming base station to be accompanied by an announcement of new Leopard features to take advantage of it.
Actually, the entertainment industry has several decades of experience in making a profit from two products that can be infinitely reproduced with no marginal cost. Those products are called "TV" and "radio."
Think about it. The cost to broadcast The Jack Benny Show were the same whether one person had his radio turned on or a million--and once those listeners had bought their radios, they could listen to radio all day long without paying any additional costs.
So how did Jack Benny make a living? Advertising.
So the real difference between the pre-digital age and the post-digital age isn't the ability to make copies. It's the ability to fast forward. Seriously. If you couldn't skip the ads, then an additional million people watching Survivor over P2P would be just as profitable for CBS as an additional million people watching it on TV. (Obviously, CBS would need a way to measure the P2P viewership in order to charge advertisers, but they'd just pay Nielson to develop a way of doing it.)
And that's why product placement is the way of the future. I chose Survivor as a deliberate example because there's already a lot of built-in placement there. Reward challenges don't just involve food or money; they involve Fritos and Visa credit cards.
Now, there is still money to be made by interstitial ads, as evidenced by the fact that the broadcast networks still have them. But as more and more people get PVRs, or download shows via P2P with the ads already edited out, product placement is going to become a bigger and bigger percentage of media companies' profits. And at some point, we'll be back to the old days, when shows had titles like The Maxwell House Concert. (Yes, that really was the name of a show!)
People in the entertainment industry know this already, which is why (for example) the union representing TV and film writers made a major push to be included in conversations about product placement. The Writers Guild didn't pick this issue at random--it's the way of of the future.
An interesting question, though, is whether the networks and studios will own that future. I would argue that the most profitable entertainment product of the past several years didn't appear on TV or in the movie theaters. It appeared on Revver.com. I'm referring, of course, to the Eepybird Mentos Fountain video, which cost $300 to make and had already generated $15,000 in advertising revenue for its creators by June (as well as an additional $15,000 for Revver.) By my estimate, it has since earned an additional $15,000 for the Eepybird guys, bringing their total profit to $29,700. That's 99 times their initial investment. By way of comparison, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 cost about $225 million to make. To be as profitable as the Eepybird video, it will need to make more than $22 BILLION.
I don't think the major entertainment companies will vanish. Hollywood, as an institution, has proven remarkably resilient. But I do think that, 20 years from now, the entertainment industry is going to be a lot more decentralized, and a lot more driven by small groups of creators doing relatively low-budget stuff.
Instead of spending money on remastering startrek, why not spend the cash on producing a new, good series?
Here are just a few of the items you have to pay for if you are doing a new series:
1. One-time design expenses for sets, costumes, etc.
2. Ongoing salaries for actors, directors, writers, set decorators, office staff, and all the other members of the small army it takes to produce 26 hours of television a year. Be warned that actor salaries in particular will increase dramatically if the show is a hit.
3. Ongoing upkeep expenses for the sets, costumes, etc.
4. "Residuals"-- that is, payments you make to the directors, writers, and actors when you rerun an episode they worked on. These decrease over time.
5. Costs of new special effects.
6. Publicity.
Here are the items you have to pay for if you are adding special effects to an old series:
1. Cost of new special effects.
2. Residuals (and, since these decrease over time, they will be much less when you are paying them on a 40-year-old series.)
3. Publicity (much of which you'll get for free, since TOS has such strong name recognition already.)
I'm guessing that, for the cost of producing one or two brand-new episodes, they can probably upgrade the FX of an entire season of TOS.
When you are on your deathbed, are you going to be happy that you had a great career that forced you to stay away from your wife and kids? How about you, ladies. Are y'all going to look back fondly on the years you had kids, but even though your husbands could support your family, you worked anyway because "feelin fullfilled" meant more to you than being close to your kids as you rasied them?
There's an interesting, difference between the two questions you've just asked. As far as I can tell, your implication is, "Men will regret it if their career takes too much time away from their families. Women will regret it if they have any career at all."
I see similar implications built into many discussions of work/life balance. For example, there was a recent article in Forbes that said (in essence): "A marriage has a better shot at working if one spouse stays at home. Ergo, the woman should stay at home." Hmmm... Can you spot the hidden sexist assumption there, kids?
MikeRT, I agree with you that the men and women must to be willing to make sacrifices in their careers for the sake of their families. But you seem to be implying that women must make an extra sacrifice: they must sacrifice their own careers for the sake of their husband's career. I don't see the logic behind that.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a computer scientist, so I don't know offhand if she deserves the award. However, I know a foolproof way to figure out if she does
Just put either her, or a previous winner of the award, in a sealed room and let me ask converse with them via slips of paper passed back and forth. If I can't tell the difference, then she must deserve the award.
Now, if only I can come up with a clever name for this test...
Water park? You are thinking too small, sir! This needs to be built as a continent-wide series of lakes and canals. For the first time, software pirates will be able to actually sail pirate ships on the job.
You've hit on something important--there's something in the human psyche that responds to this type of formula.
But (as with anything else in art) the devil is in the details. Imagine if every chapter of The Odyssey had Odysseus killing identical Cyclops, over and over again, using the same techniques every time. We'd all get tired of it quickly. Alas, in certain computer games, the player is expected to do just that. Like TFA says, it gets tedious to fight the same wolf over and over again to build up your stats.
Unlike the author of TFA, I'm not claiming there's anything objectively wrong with that kind of gaming. I'm just articulating why, subjectively, I don't find it very entertaining.
You fools! Don't you see what's happening?
1. The MIT team is raising money for a satellite that will go to Mars.
2. They are getting people to give them the names of their Valentine's to put on the side of another satellite.
3. People who would pay for something like this are geeks; geeks are mostly males; and most males are attracted to women.
4. Ergo, a team of scientists with STRONG MARTIAN CONNECTIONS is collecting the names of hundreds--maybe even thousands--of EARTH WOMEN.
That's right-- MIT IS HELPING MARTIANS STEAL EARTH WOMEN!
(Don't believe me? Here's photographic proof.
Why do people assume that Jade is a human of any race?
She lives on Hillys, a non earth planet, and her best friend is Pey'j, who appears to be a bipedal, talking boar. This raises three possibilities:
POSSIBILITY 1. The game is set a vast span of time into the future--long enough that boars have had the chance to evolve into a bipedal, talking species. In that case, Jade probably bears the same connection to you or I that Pey'j bears to a modern-day boar. (Which means, by the way, that no matter how hot you find Jade, she's going to be as attracted to you as, say, you are to a monkey. The pheremones and whatnot just won't work. (Not strictly on-topic, but still worth noting.))
POSSIBILITY 2. The game is set a moderate time in the future, and Pey'j is the result of man-made genetic alterations. In this case, Jade--given her incredible athleticism and reselience--is probably genetically modified as well. Therefore, her seemingly ethnic physical features might have nothing to do with her ancestry; a society that chooses to create bipedal talking boars probably has a pretty loosy-goosy attitude towards genetics, and is entirely capable of modifying facial features and skin tones to suit whatever the fashion is.
POSSIBILITY 3. Hillys was never settled by humans, and it's a complete coincidence that so many of its beings resemble earth beings. In which case, no matter how much Jade's outsides might look human, her internal organs are probably completely different.
In fact--and I should warn you that SPOILERS FOLLOW! STOP READING IF YOU DON'T WANT THE END OF THIS GAME RUINED FOR YOU!--
I'm not kidding. SPOILERS COMING!
The end of the game makes it clear that Jade isn't even a traditional biological being. She's some kind of personified alien energy or something. So her race is completely irrelevent...
Forget about silly functions like stocking grocery shelves, cleaning, etc. A friend of mine has invented a system that allows AI to do the single most important human activity:
Watching reality TV.
That's right. When the new visually acute robots put you out of a job, and you take your severance check and slink home to watch "Cops," you'll find a robot already hogging the La-Z-Boy, remote control in hand. Not only are we obsolete--our obsolescenece is obsolete, too.
That's an interesting point. However, I'd argue that the guy isn't talking about plagiarism; he calls the essay "a plagiarism" with (IMO) tongue planted in cheek. It's not correct to say that it's about plagiarism specifically, because to say that sounds like he's defending plagiarism specifically, when the issues covered in the essay itself are far more broad.
The iTV / Apple TV... well, aside from the fact that you won't be able to get one for a little while yet, I'm not sure what it'd do for me that I can't already do. Apparently, the marketing went right over my head. Anyone have a summary of why this is an interesting product in a world of tivos, dvrs, frontrow, hi-def dvd and xbox and ps3 and so on? Aside from giving Apple a vector to sell DRM'd movies?
I was wondering the same thing. In fact, I had the same reaction to the iTV that I had to Widgets when they were first announced: this is nice enough, but it seems more like an upgrade to an existing apple product than like a revolutionary new thing.
Then I thought a bit more about the Widget analogy. With hindsight, I can now see the real purpose of Widgets. They're certainly useful on their own, but the long-term purpose of introducing them was to get lots of developers writing useful little stripped down programs--which will now be available on the iPhone. Widgets were what you might call a wedge technology. And Dashborad was just the thin end of that wedge.
So I have to assume that's what iTV is. I'm willing to bet that somewhere in Steve Job's desk is a timeline showing when they'll introduce TiVo like functionality to the AppleTV. (or, for that matter, merge the AppleTV and the iPod into an Archos-like device.) By the time that happens, they'll have had a few generations of experience to work out the basic bugs with the product, and perhaps to develop an ecosystem of third-party software and hardware designed around iTV.
But then I read TFA.
That actually does sound useful.
Have there been 100 Mac games worth paying for since the Lisa?
Hey, there are thousands of good games you can play on your Mac. You just have to install Boot Camp first.
Seriously, there is actually a pretty healthy Mac games market. I'm just not sure it's one that appeals to the average Slashdot reader. If you want the latest and whizziest FPS--or if you spend enough time gaming that you need a new epic game every few days--then yeah, you need to run Windows.
But for a more casual gamer, the Mac is a perfectly good option, even without Boot Camp. Many of the most popular Windows games eventually get ported to the Mac--the Sims, Doom III, Jedi Outcast, etc, etc, etc, are all available on a Mac. Then there are companies like Ambrosia Software, Pangea, and Freeverse that make games primarily or exclusively for the Macintosh. The smaller Mac market means that these games will sell fewer copies, and they therefore tend to have smaller development staffs. On the one hand, this means Mac-exclusive games often don't have the vast scope of original PC games. On the other hand, it means there's more room for quirky, off-beat stuff.
Why is this news? Well...
Whether or not you like her work, J.K. Rowling is the most financially successful author in the history of the written word. And, no, that is not hyperbole: that is a mathematical fact. According to Forbes magazine, she is the first person in the history of the world to become a billionaire by writing books. Whatever her place in the history of writing as an artform, she has a major place in the history of writing as an industry--equal to Samuel Johnson, the first person to earn a full-time living as a writer in the English language.
Each of her last three books has set a record for the fastest-selling book in history, only to be surpassed by her next book. The best-selling book of 2004 was The Da Vinci Code, which sold about 6 million copies in its first year of release. The best selling book of 2005 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which sold 6.9 million copies in its first 24 hours. Again, putting aside any artistic considerations, JK Rowling sits atop a hugely profitable and influential industry. Imagine if Apple or Ford only announced one product every two years. Don't you think the announcement of that product would get major media attention?
Finally... For those of us who DO love the Harry Potter books, a major part of the fun is engaging in debate and speculation with other fans. This gives us an excuse to do so. And, most likely, after the final book comes out, we'll never again have quite the same opportunity. With any serial fiction--whether it's "Lost" or the Star Wars movies or the Harry Potter series--there comes a point when the secrets of the story become public knowledge, and you can no longer have the pleasure of concocting your own theories to explain the mysteries. So, hey--let us have our fun.
Why would one have to imagine? Isn't this the case? I suppose maybe at 40 you don't cease to be hip in the programming world, but if you don't keep up with whatever tech its the same and could happen when you're 25 or 35 or 55 and we don't get residuals.
The key phrase is "if you don't keep up with whatever tech." In any profession (or, at least, any knowledge-based profession), you'll become obsolete if you don't keep up with developments in the field. In TV writing, however, you will become obsolete no matter how well you keep up. If you take a look at any TV staff, you'll find a bunch of people in their 20's and 30's, a much smaller number of people in their 40's, and almost nobody 50 or above. And it's not because the 50-year-olds have been promoted to managerial status, as I suspect might happen in the progamming world. Those 50-year-olds have either switched fields entirely, or are just not working.
There is much debate in Hollywood as to why this is. Some people argue that the intense hours of a TV show staff job make it an inherently young man's game. Others argue that it's blatant age discrimination--in fact, a group of writers have filed a class-action age discrimination lawsuit. I don't know which is the case
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that everybody should weep over the plight of TV writers. I don't think they deserve any more sympathy than any other group of middle-class Americans doing their best to make a living. I'm just saying they don't deserve any less.
In some ways it is hard to feel for either side, The networks are the typical bloated-big-company-screw-the-little-guy types and the creatives whine about not getting more money beyond what they were already paid.(I'd love to see the Photoshop team decide that they aren't going to deliver CS3 unless Adobe gives them a cut of each sale...)
Actually, a better analogy might be if Adobe had lured the programmers to their jobs with the promise that they WOULD get a cut of each sale. And then Adobe asked them to stay at work even later than they normally do and work on porting CS3 to web-browsers. And then Adobe said, "Even though from your point of view 30 hours spent programming is 30 hours spent programming whatever platform its ends up being used on, we are viewing the web version as a promotional item, and you won't get a cut."
And the programmers said, "But you're selling ad space on the webpage. You're making money off it."
And Adobe said, "Sorry. If you don't like it, take it to your union."
Now imagine that computer programming was a highly unstable profession, where any project you worked on could get canceled at any moment, and in any case, once you hit your 40's, you would cease to be hot and hip and might never work again--which means you'll be living off your software "residuals" for many years to come.
And you've got a pretty good idea of how the Battlestar Galactica writers feel.
If the sign is located in the window of Joe's Cafe, yes.
However, if the sign is located, say, 10 feet west of Joe's, on an east-west street, and if you have to be within 5 feet of the sign to see it, then anybody who sees it while traveling west has already passed Joe's by the time he can see the sign, while anybody who sees it while traveling east has yet to pass Joe's. Voila.
Anyone else first read that as "Intel's Testicle Vision"?
Hmm... I guess multiple cores would be useful there, too, but everybody would need bigger boxer shorts. Plus, the cooling requirements would be steep. Nothing kills the moment like the roar of a fan kicking into action...
That makes a certain amount of sense to me; with viewers essentially strapped in place, you can make sure everybody sees exactly the perspective they're supposed to. Also, in those circumstances, you aren't going to demand especially high resolution--as long as you can make out the information presented, you're OK. (Admittedly, the kid in the backseat playing on his PS2 might want better resolution, but that's his problem. In my day, if we wanted to play PS2, we had to actually get out of our car and walk inside.)
They also mention the possibility of using it for displaying multiple ads in public, so that the ad you see varies depending on whether you are coming ("You're just a few feet away from Joe's Cafe!") or going ("Turn around! You just missed the best restaurant in town!").
Indeed. Anybody want to take bets on how long it takes to go from "buggy, overpriced, and useless" to "cheap and indispensable"? I'm betting 5 years, max.
Of course, when it becomes ubiquitious, there will be certain downsides. You think the "zap the mosquito" ad is annoying now?
Wait until the mosquito starts buzzing around your keyboard.
"But I keep typing 11 and nothing's happening"
You know, I think I finally figured out what's going on in that Lost bunker. Hurley's lottery numbers? They're just the universe's error codes.
The BBC seems to have been slashdotted; clicking on the link in the article takes you to their front page.
If you want to RTFA, you can find it here.
From the first page of the "dumb reporter"'s article:
If you actually RTFA, it becomes clear very quickly that his point is, "Hey, except for running a little hot, Vista works pretty well on my Mac laptop, even with everything in beta. That's kind of cool."
The important thing to remember is: this is not an announcement. This is HALF an announcement.
Apple has already invited the media to a special event on September 12, where it is widely expected to announce two things. The first is that the iTunes music store is now going to sell feature-length movies. And the second thing is... well, nobody is quite sure, but it is rumored to be something major. Like, for example, an new version of Airport Express that allows you to stream video as well as music. This would be a big step on the road to making an Apple a true media center.
The fact that Apple has announced its widest-screen-ever iMacs with so little fanfare is a sign that the rumor is true--that Apple does, indeed, have something pretty big up its sleeve. If Apple is indeed about to make a big step forward towards being a media center, a 24-inch iMac suddenly has a new use: it's big enough to start serving as a genuine TV replacement.
Oh, and I'm going to add one more speculation to the mix. When Apple announced that some of the features of its upcoming operating system were "Top Secret", the explanation given was that they didn't want them copied by Vista. I always thought that was a bizarre explanation--is Microsoft really going to cram completely new features into Vista in the next few months? More likely, I thought, was that these "top secret" features depend on hardware that Apple wasn't yet ready to reveal. Specifically, I hypothesized that they were media-related features that would interface with a Mac-branded PVR. I was probably over-optimistic on the PVR thing, but I may have been right that these unnannounced software features tie into a Mac-branded audiovisual device. If so, expect the announcement of the new video-streaming base station to be accompanied by an announcement of new Leopard features to take advantage of it.
Actually, the entertainment industry has several decades of experience in making a profit from two products that can be infinitely reproduced with no marginal cost. Those products are called "TV" and "radio."
Think about it. The cost to broadcast The Jack Benny Show were the same whether one person had his radio turned on or a million--and once those listeners had bought their radios, they could listen to radio all day long without paying any additional costs.
So how did Jack Benny make a living? Advertising.
So the real difference between the pre-digital age and the post-digital age isn't the ability to make copies. It's the ability to fast forward. Seriously. If you couldn't skip the ads, then an additional million people watching Survivor over P2P would be just as profitable for CBS as an additional million people watching it on TV. (Obviously, CBS would need a way to measure the P2P viewership in order to charge advertisers, but they'd just pay Nielson to develop a way of doing it.)
And that's why product placement is the way of the future. I chose Survivor as a deliberate example because there's already a lot of built-in placement there. Reward challenges don't just involve food or money; they involve Fritos and Visa credit cards.
Now, there is still money to be made by interstitial ads, as evidenced by the fact that the broadcast networks still have them. But as more and more people get PVRs, or download shows via P2P with the ads already edited out, product placement is going to become a bigger and bigger percentage of media companies' profits. And at some point, we'll be back to the old days, when shows had titles like The Maxwell House Concert. (Yes, that really was the name of a show!)
People in the entertainment industry know this already, which is why (for example) the union representing TV and film writers made a major push to be included in conversations about product placement. The Writers Guild didn't pick this issue at random--it's the way of of the future.
An interesting question, though, is whether the networks and studios will own that future. I would argue that the most profitable entertainment product of the past several years didn't appear on TV or in the movie theaters. It appeared on Revver.com. I'm referring, of course, to the Eepybird Mentos Fountain video, which cost $300 to make and had already generated $15,000 in advertising revenue for its creators by June (as well as an additional $15,000 for Revver.) By my estimate, it has since earned an additional $15,000 for the Eepybird guys, bringing their total profit to $29,700. That's 99 times their initial investment. By way of comparison, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 cost about $225 million to make. To be as profitable as the Eepybird video, it will need to make more than $22 BILLION.
I don't think the major entertainment companies will vanish. Hollywood, as an institution, has proven remarkably resilient. But I do think that, 20 years from now, the entertainment industry is going to be a lot more decentralized, and a lot more driven by small groups of creators doing relatively low-budget stuff.
Instead of spending money on remastering startrek, why not spend the cash on producing a new, good series?
Here are just a few of the items you have to pay for if you are doing a new series:
1. One-time design expenses for sets, costumes, etc.
2. Ongoing salaries for actors, directors, writers, set decorators, office staff, and all the other members of the small army it takes to produce 26 hours of television a year. Be warned that actor salaries in particular will increase dramatically if the show is a hit.
3. Ongoing upkeep expenses for the sets, costumes, etc.
4. "Residuals"-- that is, payments you make to the directors, writers, and actors when you rerun an episode they worked on. These decrease over time.
5. Costs of new special effects.
6. Publicity.
Here are the items you have to pay for if you are adding special effects to an old series:
1. Cost of new special effects.
2. Residuals (and, since these decrease over time, they will be much less when you are paying them on a 40-year-old series.)
3. Publicity (much of which you'll get for free, since TOS has such strong name recognition already.)
I'm guessing that, for the cost of producing one or two brand-new episodes, they can probably upgrade the FX of an entire season of TOS.
There's an interesting, difference between the two questions you've just asked. As far as I can tell, your implication is, "Men will regret it if their career takes too much time away from their families. Women will regret it if they have any career at all."
I see similar implications built into many discussions of work/life balance. For example, there was a recent article in Forbes that said (in essence): "A marriage has a better shot at working if one spouse stays at home. Ergo, the woman should stay at home." Hmmm... Can you spot the hidden sexist assumption there, kids?
MikeRT, I agree with you that the men and women must to be willing to make sacrifices in their careers for the sake of their families. But you seem to be implying that women must make an extra sacrifice: they must sacrifice their own careers for the sake of their husband's career. I don't see the logic behind that.