I don't know any country where 10-11 episodes is a season, it's usually 25-30. Can you give some example?
What I usually see in my country (the Netherlands), is shows running for about 9 months, every week, with a 2 week break around christmas, and a 2.5 months summer break.
What I understand is that the most expensive thing for most SF and Fantasy series is actually the special effects. Probably mostly hiring guys that can make it look good, instead of like a Youtube after-effects vids or 1960's batman.
That's why you often see them minimizing scenes that need such things.
The other option is to go ST:NG and do mostly talking about virtual problems.
Broadcast television is so 20th century. If you want access to quality older issues, your best hope is from Netflix, Hulu or Amazon.
I wish that those were available outside the USA. even iTunes still doesn't sell TV series or movies where I live (The Netherlands).
Most stuff isn't available here legally, apparently the content owners still hope to some day sell it to one of the local cable networks and are in the mean time just happy to sit on it.
I haven't seen the V reboot, but the original was quite good, if my memory from 25 years ago is anything to go by. It wasn't space opera, but it was good SF for it's day.
And I don't think that the public's appetite for SF is low. Well made titles on the big screen are usually among the biggest blockbusters. Mix in some Fantasy and I think a SF&Fantasy channel could do very well, between reruns of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Star Wars, ET, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, M.I.B., The Matrix, and series like X-files, the Star Treks, Buffy, Charmed, Dr.Who, BSG, Fringe, SG, Supernatural, etc. Add in some superhero stuff like Spiderman and the Dark Knight, SmallVille, Heroes.
And you've got 50% of the biggest grossing movies of all time (adjusted for inflation or not), and quite a few of the top 10 most popular TV series of the last years.
The potential is there.
I don't have SyFy, or the old Sci-Fi where I live (The Netherlands), so for most of this content I need to wait if they decide to release it to Region 2 DVD, or "find" it online.
I've never seen this SG:U, but I understood that it's relatively expensive to do special effects, the soap-opera-y stuff is usually much cheaper. So that's what you get if they try to milk a format.
Thanks, that was actually helpful. I don't live in the USA, so I didn't know what SyFy was either. I had heard of Caprica, and made the correct guess that SG:U had something to do with SG-1.
My main problem is that most of these series don't even make it to TV over here. For me the only way to watch them is on a DVD (if I'm lucky and it gets released to Region 2 at a reasonable price), or illegally.
I would really like if new and old SciFi movies and series were available online just to save me the hassle. I would pay for them. But alas iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc. block my IP because I don't live in the USA. At least in the USA content is relatively available ~1 year after initial airing, over here the content owners block legal access, in the hope that in a few years they might sell it to one of the local cable networks. Which never happens.
We are nowhere near 100% utilization of spectrum, though.
We are much closer to that than you might think. Only certain frequencies are suitable for certain applications. There are actual physical limitations.
I'm working in radioastronomy. There is a serious chance that in the near future only a few remote locations on earth and the backside of the moon will be suitable for any kind of scientific work. Most of the spectrum in most of the inhabited world is allocated and being used. A few frequency ranges are reserved for radioastronomy, but there is a lot of commercial pressure on governments to give that up.
I predict an astronomical observatory on the backside of the moon before 2050. If trends continue, by then it will be the only radio-quiet place left.
The problem with the Word format, is that unlike WordPerfect, it isn't very sane. If you look at a Word document low level, it first has a lot of mark-up and formatting information, and then most of the text. Formats like WordPerfect, HTML, etc., have what I consider more sane formatting, in the sense that there will be markers intermingled with the plain text to indicate where styles, bold, italic and such start and end.
I don't understand the low level Word format, but if you look at it, it seems to be mainly geared at making at as hard as possible to understand what's going on.
It's also why in something like WordPerfect, you can delete all the text between a start tag for example bold, and an end tag and the software will remove both, while in Word pieces can remain, and all of a sudden text starts turning bold, or some other style, when you don't expect it.
Disclaimer: I've used WordPerfect up to version X3 (13), basically until I switched to Mac about 4 years ago. I consider it still better than Word in a lot of aspects. I've used a mix of OpenOffice, MS Office and LaTeX on the Mac. WordPerfect, CorelDraw and SmartDraw are the main reasons I still fire up my old Windows computer every now and then.
while a DLP is a "risk prevention cost" (money someone will pay for "just in case"). Risk management is more specialized, more complicated and requiring more imagination than financial management: the difference between "how and what can go wrong in various and possibly obscure points of my business? Who would benefit of something going wrong for me; who's the possible attacker?" and "How much was spend and what revenue you think you'll get in the next FQ or FY from this-and-that well-known market segments"?
I think that in general the banking crisis has shown us that even companies that should be experts at risk assessment often mess it up. I think that's where the general problem lies: Managing and calculating risks is a hard thing. People tend to downplay or ignore risks, especially less obvious ones, even in nuclear plants or New Orleans. One of the reasons of course is, that it's planning for the unknown. Often you don't have all the information and know all the threats.
A gear seems like a pretty damn obvious object to me, but I'm sure at the time it was first invented it wasn't all that obvious.
Yeah, lot's of things that seem obvious to us took a long time to invent. Heck in the Americas the wheel was never invented. But also I learned that cross-bracing to stiffen and sturdy a construction is a relatively recent invention.
It's only because we see these things every day that they are obvious to us.
Over here in the Netherlands ATMs also run Windows, and OS/2 and other things before that. There might even be some Linux systems in there.
But they haven't had an ATM fee since as long as I can remember (mid-eighties). When they were introduced, it was correctly reasoned that they would be cheaper than human tellers, and their usage should therefore be encouraged. It has had the effect that more and more banks close their smaller branches, and places with less than 10,000 inhabitants often don't have a bank any more at all. Internet banking has played a large part in that as well of course.
But I've always found it weird when going abroad, that ATMs would charge you. (next to sometimes a fee for the international transaction).
I was at work in the Netherlands, and Slashdot was basically the only site that was still in the air. Sites like CNN were unreachable, as were local Dutch sites.
Reason 3: Services like these tend to be U.S.-only, and I've been told they lack foreign counterparts due to country-specific exclusive licensing deals signed before there was a European Union. How much does a U.S. green card cost again?
Yeah, the situation outside the US sucks as far as services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, iTunes etc. are considered. Most check your IP, so it doesn't matter if you're actually American or not.
A fried of mine works at a company where about 20 people make a living selling apps on Windows mobile to the medical world. They now have to do a serious rethink of their business because most of their software was tied to Windows CE/Mobile for the last 10 years. They'll probably go web-based, but then you're depending on the WiFi in the hospital.
It doesn't want to start a wave if the elevation is above 2 meters. Well, about 60% of my country, The Netherlands, is below that magic number. Everywhere I click that's below 2 meters just generates a 10x10 km blue square, so I suppose that's flooded. I took a 20meter tsunami and traced the 2 meter line in my country, having the tsunami travel south-east mostly. Then the blue squares are not entirely filled in, the "water" only flows until it hits things above 20 meters. So basically what this application does, is draw blue squares for anything below the set height above sea level.
For 20 meters, that's about 70% of my country. It reaches as far inland as Eindhoven, Utrecht, Deventer or Assen. Cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam disappear completely.
Fortunately tsunami's in the North Sea are rare, only once in about 10.000 years. If they do occur they seem to be quite devastating according to archaeological records though, google for Doggerland. It's an area about the size of Ireland or Colorado that was washed away in the last known tsunami, in about 5000 B.C.
The next tsunami to occur in the North Sea might kill as many as 10 million people, it would reach the Houses of Parliament in London and places like Amsterdam, most of the Netherlands, Bremen and Hamburg would be completely wiped of the map probably.
I think that tablets have the chance to do what the MP3 players have done: become the way we consume visual media. It's competing with eReaders and portable DVD players, not so much the traditional tablets we used to know. It's not competing with the smartphone or the laptop, even if it can do some of those things as well.
Sure, it can also do data input, but it's primarily a visual media consumption device. It's why Apple tries to make newspapers and such go though iTunes.
I agree with the point you're making, but I want to add that not all consumers end up buying an iPad. Some e-ink eReaders are also quite successful. The iPad isn't some magical tablet device that everyone struggles to define what it's for, it's a tool to read news(papers), books, play movies, take notes, browse the internet, etc. For an Android tablet to compete, it needs to be better as some of those things then the iPad. It's why e-ink eReaders are a better choice for some people, as it's easier to read, especially under direct sunlight.
What Apple did with the tablet, is redefine it from "some weird PC" into something that competes with books and newspapers and portable DVD players, just like the MP3 player competed with CDplayers and walkmans. It's why Apple worries so much about the content.
It might not be the phone manufacturers that build successful Android tables, but maybe Amazon or Barnes&Noble, the NYT or WarnerBrothers. Probably it will be a PC manufacturer like Asus or Dell.
Where Apps were important on the smartphone, content will be on tablets.
Exactly. People compare the iPad to smartphones and netbooks. It's not trying to compete with those. It's trying to replace books, newspapers, TV and the like, just like eReaders and portable DVD players do. It's a content transmission and consumption device, even though it's also capable of other things. That's why content is essential and where Google will have to do the work to make the Adroid tablet a success.
The iPad isn't supposed to compete with a netbook or laptop or smartphone. It's supposed to compete with, books newspapers and DVD players. It's the move from walkman to MP3 player, from phone to smartphone, from typewriter to PC. It should be compared to eReaders and portable DVD players, not netbooks.
I think you are correct. The iPad is a totally new kind of device. It is to graphical media what the MP3 player was to audio media. It will need to mature, but it has the potential to replace the living room TV, newspaper, book shelve, DVD collection, schoolbooks, and a lot of writing tools. Not to mention the PC, laptop and netbook as far as they are used for visual media consumption. The current iPad isn't there yet, but neither was the first MP3 player, PDA, smartphone, IBM PC where they are now.
I think the iPad format has much more potential than most people realize. It's not competing with smartphones and laptops, it's taking on newspapers, books, TV and movies. It's not even the first, there were already eReaders and other stuff, it's just that Apple has upped the stakes a lot, just like they did with iPhone, iPod, Macintosh and even the Apple I&II. It's why Apple is focussing so much on newspapers, books, TV series and movies being available through iTunes. (but in my opinion doing a poor job outside the US on that).
Slashdot Mirror
Discovery Channel(trucks driving on ice? REALLY?)
What I find funny is that if I visit the USA, the Discovery Channel there has a lot more stuff like that than Discovery Europe.
I don't know any country where 10-11 episodes is a season, it's usually 25-30. Can you give some example?
What I usually see in my country (the Netherlands), is shows running for about 9 months, every week, with a 2 week break around christmas, and a 2.5 months summer break.
What I understand is that the most expensive thing for most SF and Fantasy series is actually the special effects. Probably mostly hiring guys that can make it look good, instead of like a Youtube after-effects vids or 1960's batman.
That's why you often see them minimizing scenes that need such things.
The other option is to go ST:NG and do mostly talking about virtual problems.
Broadcast television is so 20th century. If you want access to quality older issues, your best hope is from Netflix, Hulu or Amazon.
I wish that those were available outside the USA. even iTunes still doesn't sell TV series or movies where I live (The Netherlands).
Most stuff isn't available here legally, apparently the content owners still hope to some day sell it to one of the local cable networks and are in the mean time just happy to sit on it.
I haven't seen the V reboot, but the original was quite good, if my memory from 25 years ago is anything to go by. It wasn't space opera, but it was good SF for it's day.
And I don't think that the public's appetite for SF is low. Well made titles on the big screen are usually among the biggest blockbusters. Mix in some Fantasy and I think a SF&Fantasy channel could do very well, between reruns of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Star Wars, ET, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, M.I.B., The Matrix, and series like X-files, the Star Treks, Buffy, Charmed, Dr.Who, BSG, Fringe, SG, Supernatural, etc. Add in some superhero stuff like Spiderman and the Dark Knight, SmallVille, Heroes.
And you've got 50% of the biggest grossing movies of all time (adjusted for inflation or not), and quite a few of the top 10 most popular TV series of the last years.
The potential is there.
I don't have SyFy, or the old Sci-Fi where I live (The Netherlands), so for most of this content I need to wait if they decide to release it to Region 2 DVD, or "find" it online.
I've never seen this SG:U, but I understood that it's relatively expensive to do special effects, the soap-opera-y stuff is usually much cheaper. So that's what you get if they try to milk a format.
Thanks, that was actually helpful. I don't live in the USA, so I didn't know what SyFy was either. I had heard of Caprica, and made the correct guess that SG:U had something to do with SG-1.
My main problem is that most of these series don't even make it to TV over here. For me the only way to watch them is on a DVD (if I'm lucky and it gets released to Region 2 at a reasonable price), or illegally.
I would really like if new and old SciFi movies and series were available online just to save me the hassle. I would pay for them. But alas iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc. block my IP because I don't live in the USA. At least in the USA content is relatively available ~1 year after initial airing, over here the content owners block legal access, in the hope that in a few years they might sell it to one of the local cable networks. Which never happens.
FYI: I live in the Netherlands.
all many of them want are lasers, spaceships, and babes in spandex or leather.
Sounds like someone needs Buck Rogers reruns. ;-)
We are nowhere near 100% utilization of spectrum, though.
We are much closer to that than you might think. Only certain frequencies are suitable for certain applications. There are actual physical limitations.
I'm working in radioastronomy. There is a serious chance that in the near future only a few remote locations on earth and the backside of the moon will be suitable for any kind of scientific work. Most of the spectrum in most of the inhabited world is allocated and being used. A few frequency ranges are reserved for radioastronomy, but there is a lot of commercial pressure on governments to give that up.
I predict an astronomical observatory on the backside of the moon before 2050. If trends continue, by then it will be the only radio-quiet place left.
It's much older. My 2004 cheap supermarket LCD TV already comes with it. (bought at Aldi, for those in Europe that know the chain).
But it's true that not all TVs might have the right port.
The problem with the Word format, is that unlike WordPerfect, it isn't very sane. If you look at a Word document low level, it first has a lot of mark-up and formatting information, and then most of the text. Formats like WordPerfect, HTML, etc., have what I consider more sane formatting, in the sense that there will be markers intermingled with the plain text to indicate where styles, bold, italic and such start and end.
I don't understand the low level Word format, but if you look at it, it seems to be mainly geared at making at as hard as possible to understand what's going on.
It's also why in something like WordPerfect, you can delete all the text between a start tag for example bold, and an end tag and the software will remove both, while in Word pieces can remain, and all of a sudden text starts turning bold, or some other style, when you don't expect it.
Disclaimer: I've used WordPerfect up to version X3 (13), basically until I switched to Mac about 4 years ago. I consider it still better than Word in a lot of aspects. I've used a mix of OpenOffice, MS Office and LaTeX on the Mac. WordPerfect, CorelDraw and SmartDraw are the main reasons I still fire up my old Windows computer every now and then.
while a DLP is a "risk prevention cost" (money someone will pay for "just in case").
Risk management is more specialized, more complicated and requiring more imagination than financial management: the difference between "how and what can go wrong in various and possibly obscure points of my business? Who would benefit of something going wrong for me; who's the possible attacker?" and "How much was spend and what revenue you think you'll get in the next FQ or FY from this-and-that well-known market segments"?
I think that in general the banking crisis has shown us that even companies that should be experts at risk assessment often mess it up. I think that's where the general problem lies:
Managing and calculating risks is a hard thing. People tend to downplay or ignore risks, especially less obvious ones, even in nuclear plants or New Orleans.
One of the reasons of course is, that it's planning for the unknown. Often you don't have all the information and know all the threats.
A gear seems like a pretty damn obvious object to me, but I'm sure at the time it was first invented it wasn't all that obvious.
Yeah, lot's of things that seem obvious to us took a long time to invent. Heck in the Americas the wheel was never invented. But also I learned that cross-bracing to stiffen and sturdy a construction is a relatively recent invention.
It's only because we see these things every day that they are obvious to us.
Over here in the Netherlands ATMs also run Windows, and OS/2 and other things before that. There might even be some Linux systems in there.
But they haven't had an ATM fee since as long as I can remember (mid-eighties). When they were introduced, it was correctly reasoned that they would be cheaper than human tellers, and their usage should therefore be encouraged. It has had the effect that more and more banks close their smaller branches, and places with less than 10,000 inhabitants often don't have a bank any more at all. Internet banking has played a large part in that as well of course.
But I've always found it weird when going abroad, that ATMs would charge you. (next to sometimes a fee for the international transaction).
I was at work in the Netherlands, and Slashdot was basically the only site that was still in the air. Sites like CNN were unreachable, as were local Dutch sites.
This is more insightful then one would think a post about ninjas could be.
Reason 3: Services like these tend to be U.S.-only, and I've been told they lack foreign counterparts due to country-specific exclusive licensing deals signed before there was a European Union. How much does a U.S. green card cost again?
Yeah, the situation outside the US sucks as far as services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, iTunes etc. are considered.
Most check your IP, so it doesn't matter if you're actually American or not.
Knight Rider!
Don't forget The Hoff !
A fried of mine works at a company where about 20 people make a living selling apps on Windows mobile to the medical world. They now have to do a serious rethink of their business because most of their software was tied to Windows CE/Mobile for the last 10 years. They'll probably go web-based, but then you're depending on the WiFi in the hospital.
My country is doomed!
It doesn't want to start a wave if the elevation is above 2 meters. Well, about 60% of my country, The Netherlands, is below that magic number.
Everywhere I click that's below 2 meters just generates a 10x10 km blue square, so I suppose that's flooded. I took a 20meter tsunami and traced the 2 meter line in my country, having the tsunami travel south-east mostly. Then the blue squares are not entirely filled in, the "water" only flows until it hits things above 20 meters.
So basically what this application does, is draw blue squares for anything below the set height above sea level.
For 20 meters, that's about 70% of my country. It reaches as far inland as Eindhoven, Utrecht, Deventer or Assen. Cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam disappear completely.
Fortunately tsunami's in the North Sea are rare, only once in about 10.000 years. If they do occur they seem to be quite devastating according to archaeological records though, google for Doggerland. It's an area about the size of Ireland or Colorado that was washed away in the last known tsunami, in about 5000 B.C.
The next tsunami to occur in the North Sea might kill as many as 10 million people, it would reach the Houses of Parliament in London and places like Amsterdam, most of the Netherlands, Bremen and Hamburg would be completely wiped of the map probably.
I think that tablets have the chance to do what the MP3 players have done: become the way we consume visual media. It's competing with eReaders and portable DVD players, not so much the traditional tablets we used to know. It's not competing with the smartphone or the laptop, even if it can do some of those things as well.
Sure, it can also do data input, but it's primarily a visual media consumption device. It's why Apple tries to make newspapers and such go though iTunes.
I agree with the point you're making, but I want to add that not all consumers end up buying an iPad. Some e-ink eReaders are also quite successful. The iPad isn't some magical tablet device that everyone struggles to define what it's for, it's a tool to read news(papers), books, play movies, take notes, browse the internet, etc.
For an Android tablet to compete, it needs to be better as some of those things then the iPad. It's why e-ink eReaders are a better choice for some people, as it's easier to read, especially under direct sunlight.
What Apple did with the tablet, is redefine it from "some weird PC" into something that competes with books and newspapers and portable DVD players, just like the MP3 player competed with CDplayers and walkmans. It's why Apple worries so much about the content.
It might not be the phone manufacturers that build successful Android tables, but maybe Amazon or Barnes&Noble, the NYT or WarnerBrothers. Probably it will be a PC manufacturer like Asus or Dell.
Where Apps were important on the smartphone, content will be on tablets.
Exactly. People compare the iPad to smartphones and netbooks. It's not trying to compete with those. It's trying to replace books, newspapers, TV and the like, just like eReaders and portable DVD players do. It's a content transmission and consumption device, even though it's also capable of other things. That's why content is essential and where Google will have to do the work to make the Adroid tablet a success.
The iPad isn't supposed to compete with a netbook or laptop or smartphone. It's supposed to compete with, books newspapers and DVD players. It's the move from walkman to MP3 player, from phone to smartphone, from typewriter to PC. It should be compared to eReaders and portable DVD players, not netbooks.
I think you are correct. The iPad is a totally new kind of device. It is to graphical media what the MP3 player was to audio media. It will need to mature, but it has the potential to replace the living room TV, newspaper, book shelve, DVD collection, schoolbooks, and a lot of writing tools. Not to mention the PC, laptop and netbook as far as they are used for visual media consumption. The current iPad isn't there yet, but neither was the first MP3 player, PDA, smartphone, IBM PC where they are now.
I think the iPad format has much more potential than most people realize. It's not competing with smartphones and laptops, it's taking on newspapers, books, TV and movies. It's not even the first, there were already eReaders and other stuff, it's just that Apple has upped the stakes a lot, just like they did with iPhone, iPod, Macintosh and even the Apple I&II. It's why Apple is focussing so much on newspapers, books, TV series and movies being available through iTunes. (but in my opinion doing a poor job outside the US on that).