A direct quote from JMS on the Church of Joe site referring to
Warner's and the sales figures of B5:TLT:

"they are most pleased as sales have been several orders of magnitude
beyond what they anticipated."

Now, one order of magnitude is 10 times. Several orders of magnitude
would therefore be 100, 1000, 10000 or more times than the anticipated
sales figures.

Unless Warner's expected to sell a dozen copies, someone, somewhere
down this chain of communication, is bullshitting for all they are
worth.

Just how fucking stupid do they take us for?!!!

Paul.

On Thu, 06 Sep 2007 07:40:33 +0100, Paul Harper 
wrote:

>A direct quote from JMS on the Church of Joe site referring to
>Warner's and the sales figures of B5:TLT:
>
>"they are most pleased as sales have been several orders of magnitude
>beyond what they anticipated."

As a follow-up, I did a little digging. TLT never made the
videobusiness.com charts at all, and only made the charts once in the
the-numbers.com site:

http://www.the-numbers.com/dvd/charts/weekly/2007/20070805.php

... with sales of 51,559 and receipts under a million dollars. This in
its first week of release when all the fanboys and girls will get
their copies.

So perhaps they really *were* only expecting a dozen copies to be
sold?

By comparison, the movie 300 has taken 170 million dollars in domestic
US DVD sales to date. And it's still at number 2. Wow! There's money
to be made from them there little silver discs, isn't there. If the
product is right.

Paul.
-- 
. Bill Maher: "Tulips aren't flowers, they're gay onions"
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Paul Harper wrote:
> A direct quote from JMS on the Church of Joe site referring to
> Warner's and the sales figures of B5:TLT:
> 
> "they are most pleased as sales have been several orders of magnitude
> beyond what they anticipated."
> 
> Now, one order of magnitude is 10 times. Several orders of magnitude
> would therefore be 100, 1000, 10000 or more times than the anticipated
> sales figures.

If I recall correctly the term "order of magnitude" can basically refer 
to any fixed multiple.  So I suppose Joe could have been talking in 
binary in which case several orders of magnitude would only be 4, 8 or 
16 time.

Or I suppose (unlikely as this may seem to some) he was speaking 
colloquially and not seeking to make a formal mathematical statement 
about the relationship between sales and expected sales.

> Just how fucking stupid do they take us for?!!!

Well I interpreted the statement as merely indicating sales had 
significantly exceeded expectations - I will leave you to decide for 
yourself how stupid I am.


> 
> Paul.
> 


-- 
Each day a man watched a donkey walk past a high wood fence with one 
plank removed.  Each day he saw a nose, then the ears, then the neck, 
forequarters, back and finally the tail.  He pondered this for a time 
and eventually declared. “I understand now.  The nose causes the tail”