Interesting Links for 27-02-2013

[andrewducker]

• A man tried to rob a bank after paying $500 to a wizard to make him invisible
  (tags: crime funny epicfail )
• How the Oscars proved Hollywood is killing the VFX industry
  (tags: specialeffects cgi movies business )
• How to write dates.
  (tags: date )
• The Norwegian prison where inmates are treated like people (and thus has a very low reoffending rate)
  (

Comments

[cairmen]

Every so often I worry that my approach to making films - which has some obvious disadvantages - is a bit crazy.

Then I read about how Hollywood's doing, and am reassured.

[bart_calendar]

What's crazy is that Hollywood is more sane now than it used to be.

If you read up on the old studio systems it's amazing they were able to complete films at all (and not kill off the majority of their stars.)

[cairmen]

True dat.

My impression is that it hit a peak of sanity around the late '70s / early '80s (studio system mostly defunct, not too much pressure from competition), and has subsequently been sliding downhill again, but yeah, the early Hollywood stuff is crazed.

(I heartily recommend Barbara Hambly's Bride Of The Rat God as an excellent evocation of early Hollywood - great book.)

[bart_calendar]

What through it off track was Spielberg/Lucas making people focus on block busters and the reliance on toys and shit as major revenue sources the introduction of the Weinstein brothers and all their bullshit.

[gonzo21]

I don't know about movie effects, but I know teh gaming VFX world is in trouble because a lot of studios have been opened in India that are massively undercutting studios in America and Europe.

Which is going to be a problem I think for the entire IT sector before long, they're going to need to find a way to compete with much cheaper Indian programmers.

And that's horrendous about Trident, I wish I knew how the makers of the system have got out politicians so very much bought and paid for that there isn't even a debate about it.

[chess]

+1 - I have been trying to explain this to many people a lot recently, to limited success. It would be really nice if the Lib Dems could stop shooting themselves in their own feet repeatedly though.

[chess]

ISTR it isn't the manufacturers of the system so much as the concept of having a nuclear deterrent of this form, which is considered to be useful in keeping a seat at various international negotiating tables.

[momentsmusicaux]

> Edinburgh Council are having their five-yearly transport consultation. Have your say (if you live in Edinburgh).

These are all very well, but they tend to boil down to 'What should we spend money on? What should we stop spending money on?'

And one always tends to say, 'Yes! This is important!' (at least I do). But the surveys are always just recycling, or just transport, or whatever, and I am left wondering what gets cut so the more money that the responses clamour for can be allocated.

[del_c]

Shouldn't that be "Interesting Links for 2013/02/27"? :-)

I use the y-m-d system (with hyphens, for obvious reasons) for file names, but very few of my coleagues are inspired to follow suit.

[simont]

2013-02-27! :-þ

I occasionally wonder if there's a sort of pride thing round here in not giving in to ISO 8601 on the grounds that British People Put Day Before Month and doing it the other way round looks like an American Abomination. If so, it's clearly foolish: the proper point of pride ought to be that British People Use Consistent Endianness and the scope of the abominated Americanism ought to be date representations which either violate that themselves or are abbreviated forms of representations which do.

[andrewducker]

Yup. 2013-02-27 and 27-02-2013 are both consistent, and I don't really care whether we start large and get smaller, or vice versa (although, on consideration, the latter allows you to keep adding indefinite precision without moving anything).

Edit: Scrap that. ISO 8601 makes more sense if you're going to add time, because otherwise you're showing Time (largest to smallest) and then Date (smallest to largest). I shall shift over the subject lines when I remember and am near a computer!

[simont]

There's also an argument, of course, that since each field in the date representation is written in most-significant-first order as per the usual practice for decimal integers, it's still somewhat mixed-endian to write 27-02-2013, and the only fully consistent little-endian representation would be 72-20-3102 :-)

(And although that's basically frivolous, it has a grain of truth in that it's not totally unconnected to the fact that the ISO 8601 representation is best for sorting. You could sort strings containing 72-20-3102 style dates if you were prepared to use a 'colexicographic' ordering in which the comparison is based on the last rather than first differing character, but sorting the traditional British 27-02-2013 style can't be done by anything comparably simple and does require knowledge that a date in a specified format occurs at some particular point in the string.)

[ipslore]

Norway is missing the point! These people are criminals and they have to be punished! :rolleyes: