Daily Archives: September 19, 2005

Movie exec again prove they are idiots! 2

This entry was posted in technology on by

The leaders of the film industry have again proved that they are utterly clueless about the 21st century. Instead of rethinking spending upwards of $100 million on crap like war of the worlds, and going out and relearning how to tell stories with films, they are going to flush a bunch of money to try to make their own copy protection. From techdirt.com:

The six leading Hollywood studios are setting up “MovieLabs” a research consortium designed to create all this anti-copying technology that all of us techies have been hiding from the entertainment industry all this time. Apparently, our devious plan to not tell the industry how to stop copying will be foiled now!

If the studios would focus on creating movies that people actually want to see that for a price that they are willing to pay. Who wants to pay $10/person to seek drek like the fantastic four and so many other hollywood failures. The likes of Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts and others don’t need to be paid $20million a pop. Movies like 28 Days Later are shot on digital video (using the Canon XL1s) and look awesome and cost a fraction of the price of many studio flicks. Screw the big studios, and their crappy blockbusters. Go with the independants and find stuff that is really worth watching.

10 Autoblog posts 4

This entry was posted in cars on by

Here are links to 10 great recent autoblog posts. I read autoblog everyday because I am in the auto industry and this site has by far the most complete and up to date car news. These guys have more news any other automotive site I have found and the news keeps coming seemingly real time as it happens.

1. From the 2005 Frankfurt auto show some pics of the new car bodies from former Aston Martin chief designer Henrik Fisker . These designs are classy and have some elements of previous Fisker designs.

2. An interesting article on aerodynamics in Formula 1. This gives you an idea of where some of the insane sums of money spent on F1 go.

3. Volvo is a company long renowned for the safety of their cars. Are they covering up some serious safety problems right now?

4. As more and more technology is being added to our vehicles the ability to monitor what you do and where you go and how fast you get there is increasing. Is this what you really want?

5. Pretty much all of our clothes, toys and consumer electronics are made in china now. Are you ready for cars? The auto industry is one of the few remaining sources of high paying manufacturing jobs left in North America, but not for long.

6. From Opel comes the next generation of the Saturn Vue, easily one of the more uninspired designs on the road today.

7. Hyundai wants to cut their product development time down to 18 months. I have seen many of these initiatives over the years. What they generally amount to is rederining the time when you start counting. Designing a car is a very time consuming process because of the need to coordinate all the different suppliers, and systems and the car makers insistence on tweaking all kinds of things just the way they want instead of following standards, especially for communications.

8. An excellent post on a Pew poll on american consumers attitudes and I agree completely that most americans are hypocrites!

9. A post about Wilbur Ross’s plan to buy Delphi and Collins and Aikmen. I am highly dubious of his chances for success on this one.

10. As a longtime lotus fan I am glad to see that lotus is finally have some comercial success with the Elise. The elise is a wonderful little sports car and I just wish I could afford one. I did have a chance to spend a significant ammount of the time with the Esprit and early nineties Elan when I worked on the ABS for those vehicles on a previous job. I had one particularly memorable high speed drive in an Esprit from Milford to Sault Ste Marie that I will always cherish.