Category: What I Think

This is a story by Garry Maddox in the SMH about Universal Pictures plagiarising the Australian production ‘Strange Bedfellows’. If, and I must emphasise, if Messrs Sandler et al have ‘re-interpreted’ the Hogan/Caton ‘comedy’ one must ask a simple question; why bother?

Strange Bedfellows grossed $4.8mil in Australia and probably cost most of that to make (assuming the producers paid tax on it or used it as a neg gear vehicle). The whole movie is one joke that is re-told for 90 minutes.

With Sandler coming off Reign Over Me I thought he may have made the move from slap stick to serious acting. Apparently not.

Link: No laughing matter: US comedy may be a rip-off – Film – Entertainment.

Telstra in its infinite wisdom is using US internet access speeds as the basic standard that Australia should have in their pitch to the Government. Good Lord, even the Americans aren’t happy with the speed data hits their machines. The Japanese have the right idea.
Link: <a title="Podcasting News
» Japanese Internet Access 32 Times Faster Than In US” href=”http://www.podcastingnews.com/2007/06/25/internet-speed-statistics/”>Podcasting News
» Japanese Internet Access 32 Times Faster Than In US.

The major media outlets have for a long time been wanting your images and videos to use in their broadcasts and editions. Now the cheap skates have gone one step further and are telling people what they want! We want it for free but we want you to do it better

It used to be that media outlets paid for rare pix. Now they just expect us to provide them with content.

This is how Rupert gets to be a billionaire; not paying for professionally trained photographers or videographers and letting the consumer believe that the crappy hand held image or video was the best they could get.

Storm Warning/

Don’t argue with them; they know where you live.
Link: What is RSS/Podcasting? – australia.gov.au.

According to this articel from Smarthourse News we could be seeing real ratings from ICE TV in the not too distant future…

Link: Smarthouse News – Business News.

Bring out your dead. Bring ut your dead. That’s the cry you’ll be hearing around the TV end of town. Yet another nail in the coffin of TV broadcasting.

Link: YouTube Coming to Apple TV.

This pains me a little. I am a sometines contributor to the SMH Mashup blog. THis posting by Asher Moses indicates there is some trouble over there – nothing to write about.

My comment, which I imagine won’t be posted, is below.

Link: The Sydney Morning Herald Blogs: MashUp.

“It’s easy to see why Motorola are aren’t responding – they’ve got better things to do with their time.
This is an excellent example of why Fairfax can afford to loose 19 employees. I’d count you and some of the people from the photo desk too.”

Being a board member at Apple must have an upside after dodging bullets re who knew what about options dating. Al Gore here, in his home office with three 30 inch HD Apple screens. Thing is, driving this screen real estate could only be accomplihed with a very serious and highly spec’d MacPro with two extra video cards.

There was a line by an actor (who I can’t recall) in a movie (which I can’t remember) who said (something like): “The criminal mind is far superior to the ordinary.” And if you believe hackers are criminals then this article from Wired proves it.

The guys who invented the copy protection for Blu Ray and HD DVD must be pissed now the genie is out of the bottle. Thing is, at the end of the day you wind up with a 9GB data file. That’s going to take about a week to download. And the crack itself requires some pretty serious teck skills to do. But it won’t be long before some 16 yo kid build a cross platform app to get teh job done. It’ll probably be free, too.

Link: Gadget Lab – Wired Blogs.

The Lambo dealership down the raod from my studio is polishing every car to within an inch of it’s life.