Posts by John Brown (no body) 25368 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"Of course, local/in person doesn't exactly scale well to make money from..."
Depends on the expectations of the people involved. Theatre has been around for a very long time. It didn't fold because they weren't making enough money. Of course, touring theatre actors are probably not all going to be driving around in flash cars and living the high life.
But the extras casting agencies will often advertise locally for those people, who may have little to no experience, when the location shoot is somewhere "out of the way". We don't really get a lot of filming in our area, but when it does happen, it's "big news" locally and there's always interviews with people who signed up as extras for a few days. Some, but not all, will be students from one or more of the local universities on media studies courses, others will be just "random" people who thought it might be a fun few days work. For example, the Dunkirk beach scene for Atonement was filmed in Redcar not far from me and quite a number of extras where locals who'd never done that before. I think there was mention of some locals being involved in the latest Indiana Jones outing when they filmed up at Bamburgh Castle too.
So, it certainly does happen, but it probably heavily depends on the where the location shoot is happening. Most of the extras are just there as "set dressing" and don't need prior experience and probably come a lot cheaper than agency "pros" or, at worst, are "hired" by the agency on a one off basis.
"I propose an AI to replace Hollywood moguls. Scan them once, give them $200 and see how they like the idea."
Probably the easiest job in Hollywood to replace with AI
Check list of previous blockbusters
If release date < today - 10 years then order remake or reboot
done
I bought my LG when dumb TVs were starting to get hard to find. It is a dumb one, thankfully, but I have no idea what the TV guide, if any might be like. Having cable, I've never actually connected a TV aerial to it. Thinking about it, I have no idea if it's even got a DTV tuner or if it's only got an analogue tuner. I'd have to check the manual to find out :-).
But it does have a very good picture. LG do seem to be pretty good at that bit.
Meanwhile, in real life, Amazon cancelled somones Alexa account over some possibly fictitious dispute and he was having difficulties opening his front door.
Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim
Just search on
amazon alexa account closed by mistake
for many other wonderful stories of how people rely on technology.
"First, it's now 3 years since I bought it and it's still getting updates, including new features like a change of the home screen.
it's clear that at some point not very far in the future, there will be no incentive to buy a new one as long as the current one works."
For most people, the second statement is now and will remain true anyway. As for the first statement, maybe you bought a newly released model or maybe they really are extending their level of s/w and app support. But come back in another 7 years when it's reached 10 years old, the absolute bare minimum expected lifespan of a TV and let us know if it's still getting maintenance updates and which apps no longer work :-)
"Unfortunately I see more manufacturers insisting on the device phoning home every day. It's for your safety obviously as there may be someone nefarious trying to grab your data, ie the manufacturer."
If I ever end up with a TV like that it will because there is no information on the outside of the packaging or in the marketing materiels specifying that and it will be going straight back the retailer as "not fit for purpose"
Oh My God!!!! As was reading your comment, I missed the start of an ad-break and didn't FF, and there was an advert for an EV car and at the end, something along the lines of "Just like The Flash" with the red lighting around the car and then a cut to "The Flash, in Cinemas on $some_date". A fucking "sponsored" ad with it's own "ad break" at the end! It's the end of the world as we know it. Head for the hills! The "preppers" were right.
LG after rebranding from Goldstar I think maintained LG = life's good - more like "lets grab."
FWIW, it was more of a contraction from Lucky Goldstar than an actual rebranding. The "Life's Good" is just a marketing slogan used in the English speaking markets and wasn't related to them becoming LG :-)
"ensured I no longer bought DVDs when travelling."
Well of course not! That's almost but not quite exactly the same as "stealing"!!!! You should only buy stuff in your home market at the price dictated by the seller, not be personally importing "grey" product, probably at a cheaper price while in some other county!
"I hope no one buys this and it shuts down not only LG but anyone else who thinks riding their coat trails is a good idea."
hah! It'll be a roaring success because there will be the sort of bell'n'whistles that attract the great unwashed who have already been brainwashed into giving up their own privacy and actual convenience for some marketing bullshit perceived benefits. And, as others have said further back up, once one does it, all the OEMs will be att it and it'll be very difficult to avoid if you need a new TV.
Anyone in the UK will see the signs just by watching The Gadget Show. They rarely mention downsides, never mention privacy and are all agog at the latest whizzy shiny that uses an app to control your robot lawnmower and is probably raiding your network for juicy data to send to China. The closest they come to critisising any product is when they do comparison reviews, and even then they rarely talk about downsides, just that other products are better. It's probably closely related to the £10,000 worth of gadgets they give away in their weekly lottery. If they rubbish any supplier, the free goods will dry up.
From the horse's mouth, "The company offered the example of a family that moves to a different home, and different climate, and upgrades its clothes drier with routines suited to local conditions."
I had no idea that was even a thing! Are clothes drier currently manufactured to different specs based on the climate they are sold in? I suppose it's probably one sold in northern Europe might be a little different to one sold in a country that is hot and humid, but how many people make household moves between such extremes and take all their white goods with them? Even in the USA, how many people move between Oregon and Florida?
"A constant heat is far nicer to live with, and reducing energy usage is important."
That's true, but it doesn't explain the enormous price which I currently can't afford. At best, I'm on about "average" salary for my location, so that mean many, many people are below me and have absolutely no chance of switching to heat pumps. It's "only" a refrigerator working in "reverse", so it's not exactly new technology, it's just an improvement over years old existing tech, so doesn't explain the enormous cost. And that's not even going near the government insulation requirements which many will have to take on first before qualifying for the grants. And anyway, government grants for "new tech" stuff invariably puts the prices of the subsidised goods up for the consumer, the manufacturer and retailers pocketing big chunks of that grant money.
..and, specifically from the pollution emissions point of view, centralising the pollution to a big gas fired power plant means you only a couple of chimneys with various scrubbers and other mitigations in the one or two big exhausts that are, supposedly, properly monitored and maintained instead of hundreds or thousands of individual small polluters of variable age and quality spread over a large area that may or may not be properly maintained. I'm not even going near the arguments related to end-to-end lifetime pollution of the ICE/EV technology :-:
"I have never seen one where I live. I did see an electric vehicle once, but it wasn't a Muskmobile."
I'm not sure when it started, if it's optional, or if anyone can have them, but number plates on EVs and hybrids tend to gave a green "flash" on them these days. It's not always obvious if a car is an EV or hybrid just by glancing at it unless you have a deep interest in cars, their make/model etc. There's a quite a few out there now that are pretty much exactly the same body as their ICE equivalents. You may have seen more than you think. Even Teslas don't especially stand out, there's nothing exceptional about their look.
"Just wait until the lithium batteries in one of these powerwalls catch fire and burn somebody's house down. The insurance and mortgage companies will soon put a stop to that idea."
There's a lot of these already installed in various parts of the world. I can't say I've seen any reports of them going up in flames. I have no doubt there will be some reports, but not enough to make it a big story yet or I'd probably have noticed by now, Got any links to actual events that might convince me they are a measurable and significant risk?
Not related to solar or power, but I have had occasion over recent years to deal with salesmen over some (to me at least) quite expensive purchases. The ones who start off all excited and talk about various finance deals all seem to cool remarkable quickly if not completely lose interest when I tell them I'm not interested in finance and will be paying either in full or across any interest free period. With consistently low interest rates (and having lived through some REAL high interest rate periods, I don't see the current situation as anything other than "low interest" even now,) it's often more economic to invest in long term home improvements up front than to borrow at variable rates.
The salesmen who stay enthusiastic after telling them about my payment are far more likely to generate a sale from me. I'd rather the salesman was more tied to the company selling the product for his wages/commission/bonus than to some faceless "finance company" with no interest in the goods or services I'm buying.
Agreed. As far as I can tell, his only USP is automated buying and selling of power to/from the grid to maximise profit, and it does seem like relatively small amounts at certain times of the years when the customer will see any of that profit in their bank balances. On the other hand, Tesla get to sell their over-priced systems and cream off a chunk of that trading profit for themselves for no further outlay.
Bulb, as with the other smaller retailers primarily failed because they weren't big enough to buy long term supplier contracts at low market prices and/or bet their business on being able to buy at lower spot prices by using technology to monitor prices and buy low. Once the market began to rise, their business model failed because there were no lower prices to take advantage of and the bigger "more expensive" suppliers were now the low cost suppliers, at least as long as their supplier contracts lasted. The disrupters were severely disrupted, primarily at cost to their their customers. In effect, they were "high speed micro traders", shaving small profits wherever they can find them and once those small profits dried up they were toast.
There is much right, and yet so much wrong with the "facts" presented in your musing. This results in what we now call "fake news". Some truth mixed with half-truths and outright "wrongs", all bundled up to sound reasonable to many readers. So much so, that I really can't be arsed to try to separate out and refute the half- and un-truths from the truths.
It always seems to be the case when climate or energy is debated. It brings out the extremist loons from both ends of the spectrum.
"Renewable generation IS the cheapest in the UK right now, but by the time it's gone through a dozen middlemen the prices are among the worst globally.
Direct your anger at the cause of the problem. Thatcher. Blair. Boris. Weak leadership and NIMBYism."
The first part could be solved by the people named in the second part, but keeps getting kicked down the road. The problem is tha so-called "strike price" of energy, originally designed to smooth out the peaks and troughs in prices and attempt to make nuclear viable in it's early stages. The "strike price" forces UP the prices of renewables in a way the suppliers, even if they wanted (and some do) to sell it at lower price points to the grid.
"I was confused by that myself initially, took a while to work out. The law states abortion is allowed up to week 20. So she was charged with "providing an abortion after 20 weeks", ie any abortion after week 20 breaks that particular law so that s what she was charged with"
Ah, got it! yes, that wasn't especially clear, maybe it ought to have been quoted to show it was the name of the offence. Thanks for clarifying :-)
"It won't be long before we have near 100% automation."
It's already happening, but mainly "experimental" in places like Seoul and Tokyo where there seems to be an appetite for robots, weird gadgets and automation that may or may not catch on around the rest of the world.
"I explain that I don't have a complaint but can't get through to where I need to go via the chatbot, keep getting cut off etc and can they assist? Seems to work okay."
Not being able to get through to the right department sounds like a perfectly valid complaint to me :-)
"I have no direct experience of Virgin, except getting junk-mail (dead tree versions) when the whole road isn't covered by them."
Many years ago, chatting with someone quite senior when it was still Telewest branded as Blueyonder, pre the merger with NTL and their subsequent branding of NTL:Telewest as VirdinMedia and eventual sale to Liberty, I asked about the "mail bombing" and he said it was far, far cheaper to mailbomb an area, town, county etc than to target specific addresses, so getting "unwanted" dead tree spam is just something we all have to live with since the businesses really don't care about much other than costs and profits. I get regular spam from MBNA, have done for years, despite never having any business relationship with them or any of their associated companies. I could almost set my calendar by their regular three monthly spam delivery :-)
I thought if you played a track on repeat for long enough it always naturally evolves into The Ultimate Best Ever Track. :-)
"The whereisroadster.com website is still online and reporting where it is !!"
ta for that link. Sort of interesting, but also has a link to the Falcon Heavy launch and that still gives me tingles watching it again! It's still amazing to watch the two side boosters coming in for a synchronised landing! And while the David Bowie/Starman reference is all over the place, I'd forgotten about the little homage to Douglas Adams with "Don't Panic" on the in-car display panel :-)
Anyone who's not watched the launch since the live stream, I defy you to watch it again now, over "Five Years[*]" later and not get a thrill from it :-)
[*] Another Bowie/Spiders From Mars track :-)
Purported? That would be a case or maybe it did, maybe it didn't if you don't trust the source while waiting for independent verification. But wait, how does that sentence continue? Ah yes, there it is, right in the same sentence, which was verified independently by telemetry. I guess that means it's no longer a "purported" launch, what with that trusted verification and all and is now an actual launch. </snark>
Now, I suppose, theoretically, the word "purported" could relate to how the rocket was fuelled, since the US military telemetry reading probably can't identify the fuel composition with any degree of certainty, but the if that is what the author intended, he didn't do a good job of making that clear.
Sorry, not sorry, but I'm seeing more and more of this weird wordiness making statements self-contradicting these days. I didn't expect to see it in El Reg.
"Like Microsoft Entrails."
I couldn't quite work out why "Entra" didn't sound right and seemed to have negative connotations. It just felt "wrong". But seeing you spell it out as "Entrails" just nailed it. Maybe my subconscious was adding the "ils" and screaming "noooo, keep it away from me" down in the reptilian part of my brain :-)
Yeah, part of my job now involves using InTune so I'm finding my way around it with some corporate documentation and I come across something that looks "wrong". Just above the "wrongness" that my documentation shows as looking different is a "helpful" note from MS telling me I'm seeing the "new look" and to "click here for the old-style look". Thanks MS. Trying to learn a new and complex bit of software while you're changing the interfaces, live, from under me really makes me "love" the "user experience". You bastards!!
"Microsoft product experiences" (whatever the fuck that means!)
A them park ride? At least that's my best guess. My personal experience of Microsoft products is that when they work, they are ok. When they don, it's a fucking nightmare!!! But I don't think I have actual day-to-day "Microsoft product experiences". I do a job, I have tools to do that job. I don't give a fuck who created those tools if and when they work. I'd prefer to choose my own tools, but I have an employer who mandates which tools I use, so I just put up with the shit when it shows it's evil little turd brained "experiences".
"possibly intelligent life is very rare elsewhere in the Universe"
Considering how big we currently know the universe to be, the numbers of galaxies we can see, our knowledge vastly expanded by examples such as the Hubble Deep Sky image, it's simply incredible that Science Fiction has never envisaged more than a few dozen races in any of the concocted universe stories. Even SF like Star Trek with a "federation" spanning a whole quadrant of a single galaxy couldn't seen to imaging more than a few dozen intelligent species. So maybe the SF writers are correct, but even then, maybe being over optimistic :-)
"So, UTF-8 is actually harder than rocket science. Who knew? Personally, I don't believe Perseverance will be able to succeed until it learns to speak like a native. It's time to send an upgrade to handle UTF-8."
I'm not sure Navajo is native to Mars. I could be wrong. There are many legends of Star People and Star Gates etc in Native American folk lore.
"including when any trial period ends, the deadline to cancel, the frequency of charges, the date of payments, and cancellation information – before collecting any billing information from the customer,",
Surely, in a land where the "contract is king", existing contract law ought to cover this. Or does the USA not have a legal concept of an "unfair contract"? Only providing the above information AFTER providing billing details and effectively starting the contract and payments would be unlawful in most civilised jurisdictions.
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