I was reading an article about Twitter being a poor indication of the success of a movie. This according to a recent study by three Princeton Uni students, who collected fifteen million tweets related to 34 movies that were either released in Jan 2012 or were in the running for an Academy Award. They also looked at Rotten Tomatoes (a favourite of mine) and IMDB (not so much). They found out that Tweets tended to be kinder than other social networks but none of them were very good at predicting how movies were going to go at the box office.
They concluded that it might be better to bump up the positive count rather than try and reduce the number of negative reviews. The theory is that the so called viral effect of the positives would take over any negatives in the world of Twitter at least.
For my own subjective perspective I find that looking at Rotten Tomatoes is better that listening to any of the usual review sites. In general if a reviewer hates a movie I and most people I know will generally love it. The opposite is not necessarily true but in some cases it is. Consider for example John Carter of Mars. It was caned by the critics and did not do very well at the box office in the US. As usual Disney marketing sucked because no one knew that it was by the man who wrote Tarzan. The movie had a good storyline, good effects and a good twist at the end. Compare this to The Hunger Games. Critics raved about it because people tried to link it to things like global warming. It did well at the box office and it was OK as a movie but IMESHO not as good as John Carter. In this case the poor reviews by the critics did seem to hurt so I am not sure what the study by the Princeton team really demonstrates.
Game manufacturers have to have some very slick production these days to make a sale. In many cases the combination of a well-known actor or two, a good story line, some nice cutaways and above all a good game playing experience is what is required to make sales and keep the players happy. Dragon Age 2 is not in this category. This game is the result of a frustrated movie director who had a story to tell but couldn’t do it unless they fitted it into a game format. In this case there are a few small pieces of linear action before jumping back to the next scene. Dragon Age 2 took some elements from the original game and simply dropped them. I’m not sure if it was because EA took over the franchise but the result is one of the most boring games I have played to date and there will be no playing of any DA3 if it comes out.
I have been working as a DBA the past few weeks, after being nominated into the role by a contracting agency even after I pointed out that the letters DBA do not appear together anywhere in my resume. A few weeks down the track I have settled into the role quite happily having just built a new disaster recovery database server with maintenance plans, recovery jobs, database backups and so on. Today I found out that the Robocopy utility used by my employer is actually a Microsoft product. This little gem returns the wrong success codes from Batch jobs that require some trickery to allow SQL Agent to report a successful operation. Thankyou Microsoft.
Industry News
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is annoyed that the new Apple iPad, touted as a 4G machine, cannot connect to the Australian 4G network. This is quite simply because the Australian Telcos are idiots. For some reason known only to such organisations Australia always needs to go it alone with their own version of any world standard. This has happened so many times in the past with so many technologies that I have quite simply lost count. To be fair it should be noted by readers that there is no real 4G standard as yet but when one is finally decided on it won’t be what Australia has o matter how important the country thinks it is on the world stage. Note to readers, if you are as yet unaware of this fact that I am an Australian, now you are.
Some notes on new games. Asura's Wrath, nice graphics but not a lot of playability for the money. Catherine a rather interesting puzzle game. Jane's Advanced Strike Fighters with 30 different planes is a nice one for those who like this kind of thing. Neverdead, not so good with about ten hours play time. Street Fighter X Tekken is a good adaption of the genre with good game play. The problem with most oif these game from my point of view is that only Jane’s has a version for the PC.
Hard drives are still up from last year’s prices but I was running out of space so I picked up a new 3TB drive for around A$200 or about 6200 Baht. Not too bad.
The CD is dead, not. Long live the compact disk. People are still buying CDs. It doesn’t matter is they are hidden in the back of the store behind the iTunes advertising cheaper tracks, well in the US perhaps, people keep on buying the silver disks. Digital music is gradually increasing in percentage sales but revenue figures are still well behind the more tangible formats. CD sales are dropping far slower than digital sales are rising. This is as it has been for the past three years. So why it is so (as Professor Julius Sumner Miller used to ask)?
Think distribution. You are in the supermarket queue and you spot the latest popular CD at a very reasonable price, from perhaps a not so major artist. You pop it into your cart because just about everyone still has a CD player at home. You are far less likely to pick up a subscription to iTunes in the same queue to get hold of the same album. You get home, pop into the player and are listening to it in under a minute. Not quite so simple for most people in the digital world. SO the current prediction is that the CD will be around as a format for a long time yet. As an interesting aside it is also still the easiest to copy and pirate at full quality.
Most people with an Android device play Angry Birds. It is free, addictive, challenging at the higher levels and keeps my nieces entertained for hours along with some of my older friends. Angry Birds Space was released a few days ago and has already attracted over 10 million downloads. Pause, add one to that. It really does have zero gravity physics. It will cost you some money for your iPhone but that is the price you pay for going Apple.
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