andrewducker

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.

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.)

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.)

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.

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.

There *is* a debate about it, but like most debates of any consequence in British politics, it's a debate where the Lib Dems are on one side and the other two parties are on the other, and then all the people who agree with the Lib Dems on the issue itself decide to support one of the two parties they disagree with, and scream at the Lib Dems for daring to work with the other party.

+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.

Yes. Yes it would.

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.

So you think it's probably all about most of our politicians wanting to cling to this strange idea of Britain still being a world power?

There are only two excuses that people supporting it have given me that have made any sense, and both of them essentially boil down to that - there's the 'staying on the big boys' table' excuse and the 'we need to avoid losing the expertise to make this kind of stuff and we can only do that by making some occasionally' one.

There's a splendid book by Peter Hennessy that collects the UK cabinet papers (plus some other official documents) relating to nuclear weapons - at least, those that are more than 30 years old.

Regardless of which government is in power, there are three reasons for the UK having The Bomb, which remain remarkably consistent over decades of Cold War. They are:

1. A second centre of command. If the UK is able to launch a devastating nuclear attack against Russia, independent of the US, then it is more difficult for the Soviets to carry out an effective pre-emptive strike than if the sole centre of nuclear command were the US.

2. The seat at the top table. Regardless of the demise of the Empire, the UK can maintain its international status, permanent membership of the UN Security Council and so on, provided it is a significant nuclear power.

3. Nobody wanted France to be the only nuclear power in Europe. (Well, except the French, presumably.)

With the end of the Cold War, reason 1 no longer applies. Reasons 2 and 3 do still apply, but could be achieved with a cheaper weapons system than the Trident replacement that Labour and the Tories want.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.)

yyyy-mm-dd sorts in correct order. that does it for me.

This. I have to run weekly reports for one aspect of my job, and the easiest way to track them is to name the files using the above date method. Puts 'em all in the right order, makes it a piece of piss to find the most recent report, job's a good 'un.

Exactly. In practice, I write dates MM/DD/YY, but when naming files for work, I use YYYYMMDD, as that retains proper file order. :)

Ah, so I am Doing It Rite in my files. I didn't read the linked cartoon properly.

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

Perhaps I missed something -- what is the benefit to continuing to maintain this Trident fleet?

There is no *actual* benefit. The supposed benefits are that it keeps Britain a serious world power (ha!), that it provides jobs (spending twenty-five billion quid on *anything* would provide jobs), and to ensure that France aren't the only Western European country with nuclear weapons (which matters less and less as the EU becomes more and more united).

But Trident's a totemic issue for a lot of Labour people, who think that the reason Labour lost in the mid-80s was in large part because of their support for unilateral disarmament. As long as there are people in the Labour party with even a folk memory of the 1980s, anything that the party supported then will be opposed by them. And both Tories and Labour like looking macho.