I have to say there direct marketing postcards always get me to look and I'm not prone to looking at junk mail. At least they're advertising.

Thank you for your comments Yingyang.  Just because my view differs from yours doesn't mean that I am a lunatic.  A man with your knowledge and experience should know better than that and refrain from such comments.

For your information, before moving to start a new life here in Australia, I spent twenty years working as a Fund Manager responsible for managing large sums of money in global equity markets.  As part of my work I studied the history of financial trends going back hundreds of years.  I have appeared as a guest on CNN, Bloomberg Television and BBC many times and my views and observations have been published in the world's financial press more times than I can remember.

Please don't assume that just because you disagree with my comments I lack sufficient knowledge.

It wasn't a lack of knowledge, or a difference in views, that drew my comment it was the completely baseless statements, if not falsification of the facts. I'd all like to point out that calling statements crazy is different than calling a person crazy. Below I outline your claims and the facts and/or my opinions as applicable.

Hatman Claims:
1) "The US stock market is approaching a peak in a long bull market that started way back in 1906.  All the impressive numbers put out by marketing people are based on a bull market that will NOT be sustained."
2) "The cracks are already showing by the sub prime problems, which are only the tip of the iceberg."
3) "Haven't you noticed the Japanese market?  Peaked in 1990 at 39,000 and now, nearly twenty years later, it is still down at 14,000.  It is not likely to regain that 39,000 peak for at least another twenty years, perhaps longer."
4) "Financial markets can have very long periods of zero or negative returns, and people have forgotten that.  There is a rude awakening coming, and has already started."
5) "Historically, periods of fifty or sixty years of zero returns in stock markets are not uncommon."

My Responses to each claim:
1) It may be your opinion that the US market is approaching a peak, but it is a complete falsehood that there has been a bull market since 1906 and I would expect someone with 20 years experience not to make such false claims. As I said eariler, the truth is there have been 23 bear markets since 1906 (not including the current market downturn).

2) We disagree about the sub prime problems being the tip of the iceberg but this one is just a difference of opinion rather than a falsehood.

3) Yes the Japanese market peeked in 1990, and it took until 2003 to bottom. However it is disingenuous to compare the Japanese market to the US market, because you and I both know that the stagnation was caused by uniquely Japanese problems which were wholely unrelated to the current problem in the US banking system. The problems in the japanese banking system weren't fixed until 2002.

4) Yes there can be long periods of zero of negative returns, but long is relative (see the actual facts below).

5) Since the US Federal Reserve was created in 1913 (as anyone with any knowledge of economics knows, comparing to anything previous to the creation of the Fed is usless) the average bear market showed a decrease of 32.7% and lasted 1 year and 2 months.  The shortest bear market was the crash in 1987, which lasted less than two months. The longest bear market occurred between November 1938 and April 1942. 

The fact is you made a few outright false statements and may disingenuous one. To quote you "A man with your knowledge and experience should know better than that and refrain from such comments".

Quote from: yingyang0 on January 17, 2008, 21:28

The OP was right about the stock being a winner though. I've been shorting it for the last year and half. It has made me a lot of money. 

I worked hard for the past 6 months at shorting stocks and I love it. I will wait for what they have to say on Jan 31st. Considering the coming (or should I say current) recession, it might hit the advertising industry hard which it ain't a lot of good news for the agency. Or for us as contributors. Time will tell. The good news is that it may hit the bottom in the next year or so.

Well I'll tell you that I already covered because I doubt there is much more downward potential. And the "may hit the bottom in the next year or so" caught my eye because even the biggest bears on the street don't think this downturn will last past Q2. Remember that shorting is one of the few financial activities that has unlimited loss potential. If I still did have a short position I'd at least consider making it into a covered put.

I haven't had a problem getting meanings added to keywords. Just last week I sent a sitemail about "worker" mapping to "manual worker" and they fixed it within 2 days.

The system picks the first meaning if I don't pick one?  OMG, that is awful.

You're right, but for the wrong reasons. People that don't take the time to actually pick the right ones (or even learn the system they're uploading to) shouldn't get the benefit of the auto pick feature. Instead the system should not pick a meaning and any keyword that doesn't have a user-picked option should be deleted. That way photos of computer hard drives don't show up when someone is searching for the concept "savings(financial item)".

Sorry, but what a disappointment! 1.6 Ghz (or 1.8 for the $3K version). I'd rather buy the mac book pro than waste the money on a slightly thinner computer with half the speed. As a big apple buyer (regular mac book, iphone, ipods,etc) I've been very disappointed with MacWorld '08.

As an artist I'm wondering why photo's are so expensive? Just buy a digi camera for a couple hundred bucks, point, shoot and wallah! Next, sort through the dross, do some auto levels with some pirated software, upload the images and keep your fingers crossed. Spray and pray. Who cares if the review list is weeks long. Fill that baby up, with dozens of similar looking images, hey they might accept them all! Woohoo!
Easy peasy. Like takin' candy from a baby. Don't know what the fuss is all about. what? Or am I wrong???

Now for a digital artist, you've probably been drawing since you were 4 years old, you develop some talent (hopefully), plus years learning design at college, then spend a blummin' fortune to buy the software and upgrades, many hundreds of hours learning multiple pieces of software, have a very high spec machine and OS that has to be upgraded frequently to keep up with that software.
Oh and the time. It normally takes me at least a couple of days to produce ONE image. ONE IMAGE! Then you gotta hope that an inspector doesn't turn down the image because they think its not suitable stock ('cos to be honest some inspectors DON'T like anything but photo's for stock, its true).
Grrrrrrr!

I agree that vectors are not overpriced but I found one disparaging point in this post that I couldn't let go (not that the others shouldn't be challenged). Saying that photographers pirate software while "artists" pay a blummin' fortune is highly offensive. First off CS3 Photoshop costs the same as Illustrator, and secondly I'm willing to bet that both can be pirated.

I have many images on pure white but with shadows in which "isolated" is a keyword and is part of the description, and they were never rejected for this (they have been rejected if white is not pure white or has some stray pixels which are not 255-255-255).

That has been my experience too. IS is more forgiving on that than others.

If this is you initial submission to iStock then the stats on the pages don't apply because your submissions are viewed independently from the ones for sale. If this is your initial submission then you should already know that the 3 days is the longest any photo has been in the queue, not the minimum waiting period.

If this is your 4th attempt at being excepted perhaps you should post some links to full size versions of the images you submitted so some of us here can help you.

I would recommend to all the big playes like Yuri, Andres, Lev, � to
- Promote this site like hell (email signature in each eMail, web site, etc.)

And what is your affiliation to the site?

Update: Fluid Mask turns out not to be able to stand up to iStock's exacting standards. It can only do simple images up to iStock's standards, and those can be done with a pen tool in a few minutes. I still like it for use in editing people into and out of photos for my own personal use.

In sum: I don't think it is worth the money unless you're a designer (who doesn't have to be inspected by iStock).

I've no idea why the tiff to jpeg save has this effect and I know it has happened to others as well.

Well that wasn't the problem here because tiff was not used.

Madelaide, I'll try adjusting that.

I still think it is mainly google image search.