The Spirit Takes the Fifth ...

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GiveMeTheMusic

Well-Known Member
WHY DO YOU LOVE CAPS :p

To be fair to the girl, I think she is one of Disney's better Princesses and her movie is not without merit. I like seeing her and her spouse in the parks too. I'm just tired of Disney fans living in this bubble where the movie's a blockbuster masterpiece and hand-drawn animation is back for good (and Iger should be praised for it) despite all evidence to the contrary.

They say admiting the problem is the first step to recovery. ;)

Whatever. I'll be waiting for your apology for offending my delicate sensibilities on MSNBC.

Srsly tho - I think fans were so over the moon for an old-fashioned hand-drawn Disney musical that the movie gets a little more credit than it deserves, but I do think it's a good one (even though it's dark as hell). It was not a big success at the box office by any measure, but that was mostly Disney's fault - they bungled the release big time and instead focused their holiday marketing might on the laughably awful Jim Carrey mo-cap Christmas Carol, which got the November release date and promptly flopped (now WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMING?!). If Tiana had been released and pushed then instead of mid-December (a dead period), I think it would have made substantially more money.

Disney made the same mistake back in 2000 - they pushed the crap out of 102 Dalmatians which the public had no interest in, and buried Emperor's New Groove in mid-December. Against all odds (including zero marketing from Disney), the movie made more money than it should have and had legs at the box office. Imagine what could have happened if they actually gave it a decent release date and devoted some energy to it.

In fact, they work very hard to bury WDAS movies. Tangled and Winnie the Pooh both opened on the same day or within five days of a Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movie. Ralph was a fantastic film that was again, incorrectly and undermarketed. If Pixar had made Ralph, it would have received the attention it needed and would have grossed another $100 mil domestically.
 

Animaniac93-98

Well-Known Member
It was not a big success at the box office by any measure, but that was mostly Disney's fault - they bungled the release big time and instead focused their holiday marketing might on the laughably awful Jim Carrey mo-cap Christmas Carol, which got the November release date and promptly flopped (now WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMING?!). If Tiana had been released and pushed then instead of mid-December (a dead period), I think it would have made substantially more money.

I do think not releasing it over the Thanksgiving weekend was a major mistake, but also it was unrealistic to think that one movie alone was going to turn around years of brand mistrust on a dime, on its own. Disney needed a few movies to create trust again and I think giving up on hand-drawn animation so quickly is proof that the executives weren't really keen on bringing it back to begin with.
 

ford91exploder

Resident Curmudgeon
I know I sound like a broken record here but PLEASE, even Spirit has been posting conspiracy, and rumors. I know he has a good track record and I don't want to short change that, but, I think that as of this time all real information coming from any source in Disney is either incorrect or planted. They are sealing up the leaks and if someone wants their job to remain, they are going to close mouth until there is something to actually report, via Disney allowing the information to be released. Anything new that anyone posts right now, is, if you pardon the expression, a Figment of Imagination.

To be clear this is not a support post for Peter, this is a reality check for anyone that has ever posted on this thread, all 2300 posts have had no real information. There has been no topic to stay on. What it degenerates to is of no real consequence to anyone. Stop obsessing about topic unless you can tell us what the topic is!

I would not call it conspiracy talk, simply look at TDO/TWDC's behavior and extrapolate along those lines, TWDC is not going to have a major change in direction until leadership changes, So predicting Price Increases, attraction closures and continuing dimunition of show and overall quality are all safe bets.
 

Goofyernmost

Well-Known Member
I would not call it conspiracy talk, simply look at TDO/TWDC's behavior and extrapolate along those lines, TWDC is not going to have a major change in direction until leadership changes, So predicting Price Increases, attraction closures and continuing dimunition of show and overall quality are all safe bets.
I agree with that, but, I'm referring more to a number of "tinfoil hat" theories connected with NextGen and other topics.
 

ford91exploder

Resident Curmudgeon
I agree with that, but, I'm referring more to a number of "tinfoil hat" theories connected with NextGen and other topics.

True but these days it's a lot harder to draw the line between tinfoil hat and govt's doing it and here is the proof. Two years ago the fact that govt was tracking every phone call was strictly tinfoil hat material, Even I laughed about it, I knew the capability existed to track a LARGE number of phones but all of them was strictly fantasy stuff.

These days what contractors Disney is using is a interesting topic especially in light of the RSA BSAFE crypto package compromise. ie NSA paid RSA 10M in to weaken the default transform so that the entire state of the crypto system could be read in a 32 byte message which is pretty amazing when you consider the seed is 32bytes long.

Here is a pretty good article from Wired it leans toward the technical aspects and why this was a really bad idea If you are looking for black helicopter stuff not for you.

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/12/what-we-really-lost-with-the-rsa-nsa-revelations/

Read it and consider anything encrypted by this is readable by both the NSA and any mathematically literate hacker.
 

PhotoDave219

Well-Known Member
As a "girl" I can definitely see that little girls would prefer Elsa merchandise. Anna isn't a Princess; she's your big sister, your next door neighbour, your cousin.
Elsa is glamorous. Magical. Mysterious.

Ask any guy (willing to play) "Who'd you Rather?" Ain't no one saying Anna.

Do I have to pick? I'm greedy.
 

flynnibus

Premium Member
ie NSA paid RSA 10M in to weaken the default transform so that the entire state of the crypto system could be read in a 32 byte message which is pretty amazing when you consider the seed is 32bytes long.

That is an interesting way of phrasing things to exaggerate what is really known. "paid RSA to weaken..'

But until the NSA considers WDW a terrorist hotspot... I think we are safe from them throwing all their resources behind TWDC to amp up their capabilities.
 

puntagordabob

Well-Known Member
DLR news is that the plans for extorting Christmas ...I mean bringing MVMCP westward have been shelved 'for the foreseeable future'

Not sure who got cold feet, Colglazier or Crofton or both, but Anaheim regulars who have never had to pay extra for holiday entertainment won't for 2014 and the next few years.

Salutes to the DL regulars..... if only we were able to do that here
 

ParentsOf4

Well-Known Member
Using data from touringplans.com, I compared Standby wait times from December 2012 with December 2013.

There were a few huge swings for individual attractions but, overall, wait times were up only 3.2%. Eliminate Dinosaur (up 56%), Kali (up 44%), and Jungle Cruise (up 31%) and cumulative wait times for the remaining attractions tracked by touringplans.com were flat.

The two I’m most interested in are POTC and HM. These attractions do not offer FP, only FP+, which means only onsite guests can select them currently. So far, their wait times are up only a minute or two.

This is an important point to ponder. With only onsite guests receiving access to FP+ and with MK offering so many FP+ options, it appears onsite guests have been making FP+ selections that save the most time. So far, these guests have been pretty smart with their FP+ selections. It doesn’t appear they’ve been selecting POTC or HM in significant numbers.

However, there’s only so much FP+ capacity available on Peter Pan, Pooh, or the 3 mountains. Once onsite guests use their FP+ selections to gobble up a lot of the capacity for these attractions, comparatively little will remain for offsite guests.

Once offsite guests have access to FP+ at MK, are they going to look elsewhere to make their FP+ selections? Will POTC and HM standby lines grow?

After FP+ is available to everyone at MK, I’ll wait for a month of data to accumulate and then post additional results.

Note that this comparison looks only at wait times, not attendance. The Disney earnings call will be in about a month. Usually, Iger or Rasulo provide some high-level guidance concerning attendance. We’ll have to wait to hear what they say in order to better appreciate what this comparison means.
 

ford91exploder

Resident Curmudgeon
That is an interesting way of phrasing things to exaggerate what is really known. "paid RSA to weaken..'

But until the NSA considers WDW a terrorist hotspot... I think we are safe from them throwing all their resources behind TWDC to amp up their capabilities.

Gee a payment of 10 million to make a NSA authored PRNG suite the default - sure sounds like paid to weaken and if you parse RSA's statement like lawyer would they are NOT denying the claim.

From ARS Technica
Risk Assessment / Security & Hacktivism
RSA issues non-denying denial of NSA deal to favor flawed crypto code

Nothing in response denies RSA got $10 million to make Dual EC_DRBG default.
by Dan Goodin - Dec 23 2013, 11:58am EST

85
back-door.jpg

Jeremy Brooks
RSA has issued a statement denying allegations stemming from Friday's bombshell report that the encryption software provider received $10 million from the National Security Agency (NSA) in exchange for making a weak algorithm the preferred one in its BSAFE toolkit.

The press release went live on Sunday, two days after Reuters said the secret contract was part of an NSA campaign to embed encryption software that the agency could break into widely used computer products. RSA's statement was worded in a way that didn't clearly contradict any of the article's most damaging accusations. For instance:

Recent press coverage has asserted that RSA entered into a "secret contract" with the NSA to incorporate a known flawed random number generator into its BSAFE encryption libraries. We categorically deny this allegation.

We have worked with the NSA, both as a vendor and an active member of the security community. We have never kept this relationship a secret and in fact have openly publicized it. Our explicit goal has always been to strengthen commercial and government security.


Stop using NSA-influenced code in our products, RSA tells customers
Firm "strongly recommends" customers stop using RNG reported to contain NSA backdoor.

Later in the release, RSA officials wrote: "RSA, as a security company, never divulges details of customer engagements, but we also categorically state that we have never entered into any contract or engaged in any project with the intention of weakening RSA's products, or introducing potential 'backdoors' into our products for anyone's use."
Taken on its face, the statements seem to assert only that the contract wasn't secret and that the goal of the contract was to improve, not weaken, the cryptographic capabilities of BSAFE. Nothing in the release contradicts the findings of the Reuters article—that RSA accepted $10 million from the NSA in exchange for making the Dual EC_DRBG BSAFE's default pseudo random number generator (PRNG). RSA's defense seems to be that officials didn't know the NSA-influenced deterministic random bit generator had weaknesses that could be exploited to crack adversaries' cryptographic keys.
 
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