Scientific Breakthrough in Visualizing 3D Blood Leads to Bidding Frenzy

All Hollywood has been abuzz with rumors of a new technology which shows blood in 3D in a much better way. “This is what we have been waiting for”, said an anonymous studio executive, “what we have been begging scientists for all these years”.

The technology, created by a team at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brasil, is said to be able to solve problems in visualizing blood. And not just any blood, blood in 3D in particular.

“Don't expect me to be able to understand scientific mumbo jumbo”, said one executive who was part of a studio bidding team, “I don't know and I don't want to know. What I know is that the audience wants blood and more of it”.

“For years we have been waiting for computer animation to come up with something better than Technicolor Blood #1 and #2, but they have let us down”, said the executive. “Now we don't need to wait for those four-eyed geeks any more, we have the blood we have always wanted and they can go back to their workstations and rot for all we care.”

Is a remake of Fantastic Voyage in 3D in development?

Rumors of the new technology leaked out Monday via the various creative agencies who reported a strong, new interest from the studios for properties that can exploit the new technology. According to Creative Artists, they are seeking all spec scripts with “blood” in the title. “Bloody Monday, Bordello of Blood, Blood in Her Eyes, Oceans of Blood, Tsunami of Blood.... all of these are possible, anything is possible today. We are talking 6 and 7 figure deals as long as people can act fast and write bloody”.

Global Wahrman was able to reach lead author of the paper, Dr. Paula Rosas, in Brasil and asked her what she thought about the excitement that her paper had created. “We have no idea what these Yanqui morons are talking about,” she said, “but if they want to give us a bunch of US Dollars, we are happy to take them. These people seem to be totally crazy!” she laughed.

The paper, entitled Total 3D imaging of phase objects using defocusing microscopy: application

to red blood cells by Rosas, et alia, can be read at the following links:

Abstract:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.2968

Paper:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.2968v1.pdf

The Hills Illuminated by Fire and the Esoteric Prophecy of Human Resources

draft/in progress

At 2AM last night, I walked out onto my patio to check on my garden, where to my surprise I saw that the nearby hills were on fire. A layer of smoke lay over the valley. “Is this the time, Oh Lord”, I thought to myself, “Is now when the world will be cleansed of the sins of the wicked biped mammals who have turned away from the path of righteousness and wallow in the filth of self-aggrandizement and narcissism?”

As I watched a fire seemed to explode on a hill to my left. When I ran to get my camera and returned it had diminished to nothing much. So will the wicked explode, I thought with grim satisfaction, when they are touched by the vengeance of the Lord. A burst of flame and then nothing much.

Is this a sign that the End is near?

As I watched the hills burn down around me, my thoughts turned to happier times, years ago, when I consulted for Viacom in New York. There I made friends with a beautiful woman who was consulting for Human Resources on a special project.  Although we did not know it, Cindy and I were working on different pieces of a much larger, more important,  project than the one we were nominally working on.

We both thought we were on very different aspects of the Interactive Television AT&T Castro Valley Test but in fact those differences were irrelevant.  There was a real project that underlay the apparent project, and this was the project that was truly driving events.  You see, Viacom is a cable company, it exists and profits in a beautiful monopoly ordained by the Lord and granted by Our Government to those who are Worthy.  And in the interests of the Public, these monopolies are reviewed from time to time by the specific agencies of our government that hand out these monopolies to the rich.   Viacom's monopoly was up for review and as part of that review we demonstrated advanced technology in the public's interest, we had Sumner Redstone speaking at the Washington Press Club, I even contributed to the signage of a third party industrial press firm who was working on the publicity for this event.

But soon this very long process that the three of us, Cindy, Sumner and myself, had been involved in would be over and the monopolies given by certain agencies of our government would have been reaffirmed, the little theatre of interactive television having played its part, the forms having been observed, the lobbyists paid.   Then the blessed bloodletting could begin to sacrifice those who would through their wretched jobs stand in the way of the profits that rightfully belonged to the shareholders. 

Some might think that because these types of companies are in fact government created monopolies in their region and sector, that there might be some rules such that some of the money extracted from the consumer might also trickle down to the workers, perhaps in the form of employment.  But such a thing would be anathema in America.  The poor can go fuck themselves for all the government cares as long as they pay the taxes on their pathetic wages.  That is the way it has always been, that is the way it must always be. Anything else would be to turn away from the values that have made this country great.

Because Cindy liked me, she let me see the real Human Resource manuals, not the ones that they let the uninitiated see, but the secret one, the one reserved for the Elect.  She turned to the section on Layoffs and told me that it foretold the future and talked about the end times. She asked me to read it to her out loud.

I turned to the first page and read

The fire of God's vengeance will burn away the corrupt flesh from the body.

“Hallelujah!”, she said, and laughed.

____________________________________________

Mysteries of Underbidding in Visual Effects: Underbidding for Effect and by Mistake

Part one of this series is here.

In part one of our series on the “mysteries of underbidding in visual effects”, we discussed some of the reasons why a vfx production company might deliberately underbid a project where underbidding is defined as charging less money than they theoretically “ought to” have.

I realize that I had left out a very important type of “deliberate underbidding” in part one and that is “underbidding for marketing” or perhaps "underbidding for effect".  It is the phenomenon of bidding at one price but fully intending to spend more money than budgeted in order to achieve a certain level of quality. Robert Abel & Associates was famous for doing this. Every year, at least one project and generally more than one, was given this special attention. The studio would work extra hard on that project and of course it would go over budget, but generally when we were done we had done work that no one else in the world (or very few) could do. The result was that we had excellent, recent work on our reel which we could use to get the next year's worth of work. And of course we had a very happy client, one would hope. Another fringe benefit of such a project is that it helped with recruiting and keeping artists and technical directors as they knew there was a good chance that they would be working on some of the best work of its type in the world. Of course, Bob was considered crazy for doing this, but it worked well for him for many years.

But there are three other categories of “underbidding” and they are (a) underbidding because of a mistake (misunderstanding the scope of work), or (b) underbidding because of coercion, or (c) the project was not particularly underbid at all, except maybe in retrospect, because there are politics going on above and beyond merely getting the work done.

We discuss the “By Mistake” phenomenon in this post.

First, lets recall what a “bid” is. It is essentially an estimate for what a facility thinks they can do a project for, in conjunction with a schedule and other terms and conditions of a contract. It is the facility's combined judgment about what it will take them to do the work described by the client in storyboards, the script, discussions about the project and knowledge that the facility has about what it is like to work with this client and do this type of work. That judgment includes calculations of overhead, of labor, of capital improvements (e.g. computers) as well as opportunity costs and so forth. If the new company has to move during a project (and many new companies have to move), that is also included implicitly in the budget and schedule. It also has built in ideas about the kind of service that the facility will provide and the client will receive. It will not surprise you to hear that a new company will rarely be able to charge the same sort of fees that an established player with many projects to their credit can charge.

Now when a facility is new, they may not have their costs and production processes completely understood. Often new facilities are started with “enthusiasm” and “optimism” which usually means that they have naively underestimated what some of the costs are. Or they may have made some clever arrangements to keep their costs under control but discover that those arrangements do not work out in the real world as well as they do when they are being conceived. Or any of a hundred things that can occur when you are doing a startup.

Also, all leading edge companies in visual effects and other types of advanced media are doing R&D at the same time. If they are not, then they are in the process of going out of business, or at least ceasing to be a leading edge company. Some of this R&D is leaking into the production process in what is hopefully a sane and rational way, but sometimes not always. Some of this same R&D is then lied about, I mean used, in the marketing for the film. Why it may even be that a famous director will claim to have invented some technique that has been in use for 20 years. The point is that a new company in particular is doing R&D and writing software and so forth and that is part of who they are, and has to be paid for.

In terms of startup capital, visual effects companies come in three categories: No startup money whatsoever, a few million from an inheritance, or giant gobs of money from a large corrupt, international media corporation.  For examples of the "startup by inheritance" look at MidOcean Motion or R. Greenberg and Associates and a probable few others in the early days of computer animation that I am less certain of.

Those without any money pay for everything out of production fees, which is a particular form of semi-insane self-destructive behavior. Extraordinarily hard to do, yet always unrewarded, these companies pay for everything out of their fees, and if there is a problem with getting paid they are out of business.

But if they are financed by a large corporation, see for example Sony Imageworks, Digital Domain, the Secret Lab, WBIT, etc, they may gleefully dump millions, possibly hundreds of millions, down the toilet having nothing to show for it but a bunch of cold machines and hot people. Those lucky companies (not me, folks) can now proceed to try and make a profit paying back the interest and principle on those millions of dollars. You see, that money they spent turns out not to be a gift, it was a loan, and intended to be paid back.   How could they have known?  (1)

Therefore, if an unfinanced production company new to the field, bids on a visual effects project and by mistake underbids it, they are faced with some grim choices very quickly. They can either return the project to the client giving them all work done to date, apologize, walk away, and hope they do not get sued. They can try to finance the shortfall through other projects going through the shop which happen to be more profitable. They can try to get the client to accept lesser work. They can fire everybody and the founders can try to finish the project on their own in their garage without pay (usually the founders are not paid anyway).

Therefore, I think you will agree with me that the unfinanced production company rarely makes that kind of mistake twice. It would be better to not get the job than to underbid it and have to make it up somehow. Life is too short.

Of course, the well-financed company can simply choose to spend money they have received for startup purposes in getting the client's work done. To the best of my knowledge, every single well-financed visual effects production company has done exactly that when starting out. I don't think that is a particularly good use of their investors' money, but that is just me.

Therefore, I propose to you that underbidding by mistake rarely happens outside of a new production company, at least in the case of one that is not well-financed.

The real reasons you often hear about underbidding in the context of some sort of problem during production probably is not because they made a mistake bidding the project, except in one glaring circumstance, which is the subject of our next post.

________________________________________

1. Now you are a vice president of another division at the company, only you are expected to make a profit with the money you are allowed to spend, whereas the idiots in visual effects, just *spend* the money and never make a profit, not a profit as it is defined in real business.   Do you suppose that some ungrateful wretches at such a company might try to kill the stupid visual effects department that just loses money?  What do you think?

Great Moments in Ukrainian Diplomacy: The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks

Ukraine!   Ancient land of peace and harmony, how fondly we remember you!  There are whole chunks of the American population who are descended from people who ran screaming from that part of the world.

Political Scientists the world over are gleefully sharpening their knives about events in recent, what we might call, Ukraine. Experienced yet stupid American and European diplomats are reeling in astonishment at what is apparently their first introduction to the history of the region. Could it be that even today not everyone in that part of the world loves each other?

Of course, where there is war, there is diplomacy, or the lack thereof. Diplomacy is sometimes defined as that activity between nations or other groups which attempts to negotiate and resolve conflict. It has its own specialized language (which of course varies by time period) and conventions whose intent is to, among other things, see to it that nations are not accidentally misunderstood. Obviously the potential of misunderstanding is rife when we have very different cultures, languages and factions attempting to work with each other or kill each other or both.

I have recently come across a beautiful example of diplomacy which is worthy on its own merits but has extra value since it also took place in what we are today calling Ukraine.  I am going to present the following anecdote as if it were a colorful incident of history, when in fact if I were being more serious I would really want to dig in and find out just how likely it is that the following diplomatic exchange actually happened.  Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, I always say. 

In 1676, the Turkish Sultan Zehmed IV sent a letter to the Zaporozhian Cossacks stating who he was and that they should surrender to him at once.

The demand from the Sultan was:

As the Sultan; son of Muhammad; brother of the sun and moon; grandson and viceroy of God; ruler of the kingdoms of Macedonia, Babylon, Jerusalem, Upper and Lower Egypt; emperor of emperors; sovereign of sovereigns; extraordinary knight, never defeated; steadfast guardian of the tomb of Jesus Christ; trustee chosen by God Himself; the hope and comfort of Muslims; confounder and great defender of Christians -- I command you, the Zaporogian Cossacks, to submit to me voluntarily and without any resistance, and to desist from troubling me with your attacks.

The reply from the Zaporozhian Cossacks (one of the many Cossack entities) was thought lost to history, but a copy of the letter was found two centuries later. I am going to freely interpret several different proposed translations of this letter but as I do so please keep in mind that by definition the best invective involves the pungent use of idiom and is very difficult to translate and still keep the same color. When for example I tell you to “kiss my ass”, I rarely mean that I literally want you to kiss my ass, although I might depending on the details, but usually the request is meant figuratively.

Detail from Repin's painting about the writing of this letter.  We should all enjoy our work as much as this Cossack

Supposedly, the reply of the Cossacks was:

From the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan! 

O Sultan, you Turkish devil, brother and assistant to Lucifer himself, what kind of knight are you who can not slay a hedgehog with your naked ass? You shit and your army eats. You will not, you son of a bitch, make subjects of the sons of Christians. We have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with you. Go fuck your mother. 

You are a Babylonian kitchen slave, a Macedonian wheelwright, a brewer of alcoholic beverages from Jerusalem, a goat fucker of Alexandria, a swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, a pig of Armenia, a thief of Podolia, a young boy who receives anal sex from Tartary, a hangman of the Kamyanets, a fool of this world and the world to come, an idiot before God, a grandson of the Serpent, and a curve in our penis. A pig's snout, a mare's ass, a dog of the slaughterhouse, an unchristened brow, you should go screw your mother. 

So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife.

You won't even be herding pigs for the Christians.

We do not know the date and we do not own a calendar, but the moon is in the sky and the year is with the Lord, and the day is the same over here as it is over there. 

You may kiss our ass. 

Sincerely,
Koshovyi Otaman Ivan Sirko and the Zaporozhian Host.

Yes, I suppose that this letter could be misunderstood.

____________________________________________

Notes

1. This is a scan of Repin's Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks which was completed in 1891 and hangs in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersberg.   Its Wikipedia page is here.  First Secretary Joseph Stalin is said to have had a reproduction of this painting hanging in his office in the Kremlin.

2. The origins of the Cossacks are much more complicated and vague than I had realized, Their Wikipedia page is  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossacks

3. There is a mangled paper online about some of the issues of the translations of various versions of the reply.  See http://home.uchicago.edu/~vfriedm/Articles/015Friedman78.pdf

Red Line Madness

Some things mortal man was not meant to understand. 

I had occasion yesterday to test an assumption I had made about the Red Line, that the part of the Red Line that went to North Hollywood was indeed a different spur. After all, Downtown LA to Studio City is basically right over the hill through Hollywood.

No, when you get on the part of the Red Line marked for N. Hollywood, it still goes all the way around the LA basin and then extends your crazy ride a little further from Hollywood to N. Hollywood. That would make a 5 or 10 minute trip a nice 30 or 40 minute trip, underground, at high speed, with very loud screeching as the train tries to make up in time what it has lost in distance.

What you can't really see from this map is that the whole 7th Metro to Hollywood Highland is completely in the other direction from N. Hollywood from downtown LA (e.g. Union Station).   Oh well.

I can tell you I would not want to do that commute every day from N. Hollywood to downtown via the Red Line. That would be incredibly annoying. What are these people thinking?

Its like going between Washington DC and New York via Boston. Or from LA to San Diego via San Francisco.

Crazy man.

I guess it saved them some money or something.

Furthermore, I learned something about light rail vs heavy rail, which is that light rail is infinitely preferable to heavy rail.  Infinitely.  Not only is it less expensive to install and maintain, but it is also, generally speaking, less noisy and above ground, which means that it has better air and much better light.  You can see where you are, and see, for example, the Museum of Science & Industry when you go by USC, etc.   Heavy rail, e.g. the Red Line, is noisy, unpleasant and expensive.  Light rail for me!  

We should be grateful that LA has mass transit at all, and not worry too much about whether or not it was well designed (or not).   I suppose.

The Red Line on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Line_(Los_Angeles_Metro)

Submarines, Spies and the Search for Malaysia Airlines 370

Every day when I get up, I check to see the latest news on MH 370, our missing 777. Every night when I give up for the day, I check to see the latest news. Its day 49 or so in the search and I am completely fascinated. Its the O.J. Simpson trial of our generation. There are so many little details, nuances, retractions, infographics, revelations, it goes on and on and on. And somewhere, somehow, there is an airplane, whether 4 miles deep or in Afghanistan, waiting to be discovered.

It is commonly asserted on the Internet forums, that the real location of MH 370 has been known for a long time. Here is a quote from a probably non-crazy person on a related topic from an article in news.com.au which you can find here. 

        Professor David Stupples, an expert in electronic and radio engineering at City University,
        London, believes that officials did not upgrade to a more powerful submersible earlier 
        because they were acting on “good” information.

        “My reading of this is that some as yet undisclosed and very good intelligence is at play,” 

        Prof Stupples said.

        “Intelligence that seems to be so sensitive that it has not been disclosed.”

Well, I do not believe they know exactly where the plane is. But I do believe there is reason to think that they might have some evidence that leads them to a guess where the plane might be.  And I think this might be the case because of one of the great stories of the cold war, a story that is partially in the open and yet by no means is it all in the open, a story about how the US Navy found a lost Soviet submarine that had gone down with all hands and which the Russians could not find.

So who is this "they" I refer to?  My guess is that it is the US Navy and maybe even specifically the part of the US Navy that is concerned with anti-submarine warfare.

The US Navy has a tremendous incentive to track the submarines of other nations, particularly those submarines designed to carry strategic missiles. Even the other side does not know where these submarines are, it is a part of the theory of second strike deterrence that neither side knows exactly where they are. Only the submarine itself knows where it is, except at certain intervals when the submarine raises a radio antenna above the surface and checks in. The rest of the time all that is known is the general area where the submarine is, its patrol area.   The submarine is somewhere in that area with all those nuclear missiles.

So the US Navy developed a variety of ways to track such submarines, and most of them involve listening for them. We listen with grids of sensors on the ocean floor, we tow sensors from ships, we drop buoys from the sky and we listen. We listen all the time and we look for very specific things, and those sounds are the sounds of specific types of ships that travel underwater. The ocean is very noisy and so they have a lot of technology to filter out all the things they don't care about.

So how does that help us find MH 370?

The listening stations generally archive their data for a few weeks. We know this from the story of the missing Soviet submarine. So they can go back, if they choose, and are prompt, and look at the data and see if there was anything unusual that took place within a certain time frame. In the case of the Soviet submarine, there were two explosions in the water one several minutes after another, and the sound thereafter of what sounded like many smaller implosions in the water. As if tanks were imploding. Which is what a submarine would sound like if it sank after a disaster.

What would an airliner sound like if it hit the water?

I dont know, it depends on its speed and angle of impact, I think. But almost certainly big sections of it would break apart and sink. And when they sank, the wings with empty fuel tanks and other parts of it would trap pockets of air and implode as it descended to the bottom. 

So my theory goes like this. That out of interest and a desire to help, the people who run some of these sensors decided to look and see what they could see.  Possibly Pres. Obama asked them to. They looked at the data for the period of time that MH 370 could have been flying, and they looked in the general area of that part of the world, and they heard something anomalous. Maybe it was the plane going in, or maybe it was the sound of imploding parts of the plane, or maybe it was both or something else entirely.

According to my theory they would not talk about what they found, they have no intention of compromising their very expensive, very secret systems that have other much more important missions in life.

But they could say to the Australians, “Look in this area, somewhere within about 10 or 20 miles or so of this point. Look there...”

So that is my conspiracy theory.

Thank you.

______________________________________________

Notes

Wikipedia page on SOSUS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS

Undersea Warfare article on SOSUS

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_25/sosus.htm

I am not very impressed with the Wikipedia article on the K-129 submarine which says nothing about how they found it and has other spurious information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_K-129_(1960)

Mysteries of Underbidding in Visual Effects: Deliberately Underbidding

This is the first in a series of posts on the psychology and process of bidding in visual effects.  In this first series, we look at the issue and problems associated with the so-called "problem of underbidding in visual effects" in which it is alleged that visual effects companies go out of business or get in trouble by underbidding a project.   There are at least four different categories of underbidding that does take place, perhaps, and they are when a visual effects company deliberately underbids, when they are coerced to underbid, when they accidentally underbid and finally, when they have not really underbid at all but the client is being an asshole.

A studio executive recently asked me why visual effects companies underbid projects. The context of the question comes from the commonly held belief in Hollywood that visual effects companies go out of business because they underbid projects and if they didn't do that then they would not go out of business.

Could it be as simple as that?   I guess all those visual effects dummys would have to do to avoid going out of business would be to raise prices.  See!  That wasn't very hard and now the problem is solved, right?

No, not really.

Usually the next words out of a typical director's or producer's mouth, after glibly talking about underbidding that causes industry instability which annoys them,  the next thing that they complain about is that visual effects is way too expensive.    “Oh my god, I cant believe how expensive these nasty awful ugly horrible visual effects companies are”, they say.  "In fact, what should happen is that the visual effects company ought to do the work for free.  Its the least they could do if they werent so ... well... greedy, awful, selfish!"

So we are going to examine this thing called "underbidding" and when we are done I think you will agree with me that it is a symptom of a much larger problem, that problem being that visual effects is a stupid business to be in.  You may quote me.

The first fact of life that one must realize about bidding on visual effects is that the visual effects facility is a “work for hire production service facility”. The facility bids to do certain work for the production at a fixed price and the money it receives on delivery is generally the last money that the facility will see for that project. When the project is over, if the facility does not have another project it must live on its profits and reserve, or just lay everybody off.

So what does underbidding mean?     Rather, what does underbidding mean to people who casually throw that word around?   It means that they think that the facility deliberately and willfully charged less money than they "should" have, and then got into trouble.   Are there any reasons why a facility would in fact deliberately charge less money?    Yes there are, and here are a few of them.   I think you will see that while not necessarily a good idea, that there are legitimate reasons that it happens from time to time.

It might be because they are using the project to get the work and expect to make a profit on other parts of the project. The technical term for this is “loss leader”. If you are bidding on a $1M compositing project and the film needs a few visual effects elements from your 3D group then you very well may underbid those shots to get the whole package.   In an area distinct from visual effects per se, pretty much all digital intermediate facilities are associated with a film lab and "back in the day" would do the DI work for less than cost in return for getting the work to make the prints for exhibition and other services.

Or one might underbid a project in order to break into a different part of the business, perhaps this might be your first feature film project, or your first character animation project. You might underbid the project to give a deal to the production so they will go with you although there are other facilities with a track record in that area that are also bidding.

Or it might be that you bid the project at more or less break even to be certain that you will have any work at all going through the shop because otherwise you will have to lay everyone off.   Running a visual effects or computer animation production facility is a lot like juggling for months or years at a time.   It is quite an art to keep enough work going through a shop so that you don't have to fire everybody.   Thus, a facility might bid a project at less than its full rate to guarantee that it has a certain amount of work going through the shop during that period.  

On a darker note, one might want to drive a competitor out of business so you take their work away by underbidding the project, knowing that you have other lucrative work to make up the difference and they don't. Then of course when you drive them out of business and steal their people, you raise your prices again. This doesn't happen all that often, only just when a facility thinks it will work, then they do it.  (Yes I am being sarcastic again).  In fact the business is filled with nasty players and people do this all the time, as well as using other techniques to try and drive their competitors out of business such as slander.  Every fucking day of the week.

Or one might deliberately underbid because you want to give the filmmaker your best price because you want to work with him/her, or you want to help them get their movie made.  Yes its true, there are such situations where a services company will try to help a small film production.  Pacific Title used to do this all the time, I believe. 

Or one might underbid (or bid at cost) because the client asked you to, promising that one can make it up with overages and change orders, a topic we will discuss in more detail later.  Again, this is very common.

Or you might underbid the project also because the client asked you to, but promised to work with you to keep the costs down and make it work for that amount of money.   Ha.

Or there is the ancient tactic of lowballing a project to get it in the door and then nickle and dime the client in order to make up a profit.   A facility that does this will get a reputation for doing it, and I have one or two in mind as I type this paragraph.

All of these reasons exist in the real world and I have seen all of them in play at one time or another.  I personally, or facilities that I have managed, have bid a project less than we should have for three of these reasons (because the filmmaker was a friend of the partners and we wanted to work with him and help him get his film done, to be considered for a project when we were new in the business and because the client promised to work with us and make the project work for the money available).

You are probably bored by this topic already, but that is just too bad.  Because now we go into the actually interesting stuff: when a facility is being coerced, when they actually make a mistake and what they should do, and when the client is just being an asshole and trying to drive them out of business or put the blame on the production company when it properly lies with the director or the film.

revised 4/25/2014
revised 5/9/2014

Malaysian Airlines 370, CNN and Worker's RIghts

Although we do not know what happened to Malaysia Airlines 370 beyond the certainty that it is a tragedy, we must remember that every cloud has a silver lining and vice versa. The pings may fade away, but an important principle of employee / employer relations has been reaffirmed. Now Americans, and indeed the citizens of the world, can sleep at night in comfort knowing that not a shred of dignity or security is going to be allowed the worker in our global society.

I happened to be staying at a friends' house when flight 370 went missing and the next morning we watched CNN (while getting the kids off to school, yikes, trauma flashback!) when they were first using a flight simulator of a 777 in Canada to demonstrate various ideas about how to navigate a 777 and what is involved in turning off a transponder. There was a pleasant looking CNN reporter and a very young, casually dressed technician, Mitchell Casado, to demonstrate the system and act as our pilot. Mr. Casado was very informed on his topic, well spoken, and presentable. I did notice that he dressed casually (but neatly) and that worked for me. His dress would not have been out of place in any Silicon Valley business except perhaps in the most formal of circumstances, such as a funeral.

Well it didn't work for the big boss. Apparently the owner of Ufly, the company that owns the simulator, received at least two letters from old women who complained that the demo guy was giving all Canadians a bad name. So he fired Casado's ass. Out the door, mother fucker, and dont come back.

Why this is important is as follows.

Government has worked hand-in-hand with business over the last two decades or so to destroy any semblance of workers' rights. The only people with rights are and always must be the owner of the company who has the complete ability to do whatever they want with the worker for any reason. “At Will” are the operative words here. In a downturn economy with 20% or more unemployment and underemployment, with a huge number of people on food stamps, you dont want to be left out in the cold. So you had better toe the line in all ways and all times and with every bit of your energy and will or that could be you out on the street.

By reducing the employee slave to a state of fear and anxiety the proper social roles are maintained.

Our congratulations to Ufly and all Canadians for making this important point about the rights of the worker. They have no rights, whatsoever, termination can be arbitrary and unjust and that is the way it has to be to maintain the sanctity of the free enterprise system that has done so much for the rich in our two countries.

The source for the picture and the news of Casado's just and necessary termination is here.

Choose Your Path to Hell: Windows 7 or 8?

A moment of pleasure, a lifetime of regret. That is how I see my decision to run Windows years ago. Back in the day, I had a Mac and an SGI and neither of them would run Java or PC - based games. Since I wasn't giving up the SGI and since two computers was my limit at the time, I switched to Windows in order to learn Java. Its been hell ever since. If at first you walk down the dark path, forever is your destiny affected.

The time has come to upgrade from Windows XP to another operating system. The Internet has become a cesspit of loonytoon right wingers and malicious code and one can no longer surf to your favorite porn sites at leisure without serious potential ramifications. Fixes to XP security problems will no longer be provided for the general public, so one must move on. But why run Windows at all at this point? The PC game business has died, and besides, any game I developed would not be for Windows. The only reason I continue to run Windows is that I have a handful of applications that I use in my work and I am loathe to give them up. One of them is Canopus ProCoder, a very good software only transcoder and there are a few others. Everything else, including all my writing and spreadsheets and so forth can be done very reliably on Linux.

So your "choices" for upgrade are Windows 7 or Windows 8. I already run 8 on a very inexpensive laptop and I can tell you flat out that I hate it. Maybe I will learn to love it, that happens quite frequently with me, but if so it hasn't happened yet.

In order to help others make this existential choice which will affect the rest of your so-called life, this are the reasons I chose to go with Windows 7.

1. There is a feature in Windows 8 that makes it impossible to delete a file unless you are logged in as Administrator. The only people who use this feature are people who write malicious viruses (virusi) for Windows 8.

2. But as distributed not only is there no Administrator account on Windows 8, the possibility of having such an account is deliberately disabled. So first you have to figure out how to go behind Microsofts back and disable the Administrator disabling code, and then create your administrator account and then, only then, can you delete a file on *your* fucking computer. Not their fucking computer, but your fucking computer. Life is too short for this kind of bullshit.

3.Windows 7 Professional has an XP compatibility mode that is actually a virtual machine with a licensed version of Windows XP already installed. By definition, this compatibility mode will work with your old XP application, albeit perhaps slower depending on things like graphics. Windows 8 hides this mode from you, and may have some other compatibility mode that may or may not work for you. Again, who needs it.

4. Windows 7 has been out for a while and is a mature OS. Windows 8 is a new OS. All new OSs are buggy, period. Its a law of nature. Just like all new rendering technologies are slow.

5. The only reason to use Windows is because one has learned to be productive on it. The Windows 8 UI is completely different and all productivity goes to hell.

6. One can get around the Windows 8 UI with third party software that tries to defeat the new UI and bring back the old one. These third party programs work pretty well, but the new UI creeps in occassionally in spite of this and then you waste minutes trying to figure out how to get out of it and back to work.

7. I hate the way the new UI looks.

8. I hate the way the new UI works.

9. In order to download updates or "apps" you need a Microsoft account so they can violate your privacy and track everything. I don't think I have any privacy on the Internet but I am still loathe to be forced to give Microsoft marketing information on me just to download updates that contain their bug fixes. Its not that big a deal, but I do it under duress. I believe that the concept of your Microsoft account, to let you use their "cloud", big whoopee, is integrated throughout Windows 8.

So down another path to hell and Windows 7 Professional it is.

Interesting Article on Ageism in Silicon Valley

Every once in a while we will just refer to an article or articles that we think are interesting and hope our readers will as well.  This one is on ageism in Silicon Valley.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brutal-ageism