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Star Wars Buttons And Lights You May Have Missed (vice.com)
tedlistens writes: At Motherboard, Alex Pasternack writes: "Star Wars is set in a world of wildly advanced technology. But take a good look at the machinery of Star Wars, and you may be surprised to see how wonderfully analog it all is -- buttons! levers! vector graphics! Yes, there are hyperdrives and lightsabers and hologram Princess Leias and droids that know six million languages (including the language of moisture vaporators, along with various etiquette and diplomatic protocols useful across the galaxy). But it's also a world where sometimes you have to hit a robot to get it to work, like an old dashboard radio, a place where the supercomputers are operated manually and where buttons and control panels and screens seem far removed from our own galaxy: tactile, lo-fi, and elegantly simple." May the 4th be with you.
Keep in mind most of this stuff has to work in space, which means it needs rad-hard circuits.
My graphics prof told us that the people hired to do the graphics for Star Wars were instructed to make it look more primitive. The technology already existed to do filled colored polygons and deal with pop-up and so forth. But when Lucas or whoever saw their first pass, they said it looked too good. So for example, in the trench run briefing, you see that they went to green wireframes with massive pop-up problems where big chunks just suddenly appear.
It's low-fi because Dune was lo-fi. As "The Secret History of Star Wars" reveals, the original treatment even included "spice", which became "the force". The SW universe has Tatooine ("totally not the desert planet Arrakis of the Dune series." Dune had a reason for their analog high tech: The Butlerian Jihad forbade machines which could think, and destroyed all instances of such tech. In the Star Wars universe we scratch our heads and wonder why the low-fi... Well, now you know, it was a wonderful aesthetic borrowed from Dune and is thus otherwise inexplicable.
I love the scene where a bearing has fallen off one of the droids and it didn't incapacitate them. The logical result should have been R2D2 spinning in circles.
Why is tactile interface using buttons and levers bad? - is it just because a touch screen is so fashionable currently? Touchscreens serve for some use cases - Emulating buttons in a screen instead of real buttons is like a human living his life (outside the screen) with only one finger . We have so many degrees of control and feedback available in our hands, legs and we should use them effectively to interact with devices. An example is that of a car. This hand-eye-leg combined interface is what creates the feeling of 'oneness' with the machine - like how many of us feel that the car has become our extension - we are in full control.
Touchscreen as the sole interface is a short term aberration and I think soon the industry start bringing back tactile (and not just limited to pressing buttons - but also to levers & knobs).
Fourth of May is "official" Star Wars day.
Please throw your geek card into one of the recycling chutes provided before jumping down a reactor shaft.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Star Wars Buttons And Lights You May Have Missed
Oh my god, you're right, I totally missed the fact that Star Wars is set in a grubby, dirty universe with clunky robots and thinks that fall apart! I mean, it was so subtle I never even saw it. Mind. Blown.
Sheesh.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Many of the props and sets in Star Wars (1977) were not meticulously designed like modern blockbusters. This was considered a low-budget movie.
Lots of props and set details were therefore literally built from junk if only to save money. A lot of it was airplane scrap, in fact. The prop makers also had a manufacturer of high-end record players next door from which they got lots of small parts with minor defects.
As an extreme example there is Obi-Wan's lightsaber: it was built from an 1940's airplane engine, a WWI rifle grenade, a 1970's calculator, a WWII machine gun, a 1930's camera flash and a 1970's faucet knob.
One of my hobbies is building replicas of props from movies, and the Star Wars movie in particular. For me it is great that there are real-parts that I could chase down to build something exactly like in the movies. However, it does sometimes get a bit expensive and there have been clashes with for instance, collectors of vintage cameras.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Designers of 1970s movies used examples from 1970s.
How is this news? Take a look at the Deathstar's control panel. It is right from a 1970s era power station control room, a cutting edge one at that.
Aliens has everything from green-phosphor, text-only teletype-speed consoles to yellow-screen laptops, to low-res monochrome blocky graphics, to huge "TVs" full of monochrome photographs and green text. .
Even for the sentry guns, the remote piloting via a huge satellite uplink, the Earth-based personnel records, the hypersleep computers, the blueprint machines, the health read-outs, the motion sensors, etc. etc. etc.
In a movie, the tech shown is what feels / looks good, not what would actually be used (e.g. nmap in The Matrix Reloaded), and even back in the day teletype terminals were long dead, but the ddddrrrtttttt of text appearing one letter at a time is much more cinematic:
File Closed.
MS definitely does not support Aurebesh (or Elvish).
Does Unicode support runes?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
And here I was thinking that "May the 4th be with you" meant that Forth was the official programming language for computers in the Star Wars universe. (Well, it *does* look somewhat alien.)
Ezekiel 23:20
With the submission dated May 5th. Good ole Slashdot a day late and a dollar short as always.
Does Unicode support runes?
Yes.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
At first glance, when I thought about the analog computer interface you see R2D2 using all the time, I thought "how stupid - a mechanical interface between computers". But then, the more I thought about it, it actually made sense. It's clear it is a rotational interface, like turning a dial. Well, what precision can an object be rotated to? How man "positions" can it be in? It's infinite. Pi never ends or repeats, so you can go into infinite precision as to the rotational position of a knob. They are only limited by their technological ability to detect rotational position (which could be done through an electromagnetic field). So it is conceivable they have the ability to detect the rotational position with some incredible precision, thus a single rotation of the knob, by stopping at some specific position, could transfer a vast amount of information. The interface can of course be 2-way. Sometimes R2 is rotating the interface, and sometimes the host machine is rotating. Anyway, I thought that was interesting.
Better known as 318230.
I have to give the back of my 6 year old Samsung HDTV several whonks a day because there's a loose solder joint in there somewhere and the screen gets vertical lines and the colors go whacky.
Then one dah I gave it a really good whonk and it got better and no problems for weeks now. My 1970s training served me well. Back then the remote control wasying on the floor on a sofa cusbion in front of the TV to watch and flip around during commercials. And actually using the TV guide.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Do do know that Star Wars day is just a manufactured holiday pushed by the greeting card industry, right?
Just another excuse to dress up like a Jawa and engage in gross public drunkenness. It's downright racist.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You'll see things here that look odd or even antiquated to modern eyes. Phones with cords, awkward manual valves, computers that, well, barely deserve the name...
It was all designed to operate against an enemy who could infiltrate and disrupt even the most basic computer systems.
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
The Death Star's "death beam" control panel was a Grass Valley Model 100 Video Switcher, and I know that only because I used one of those at that time.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Look up where Doctor McCoy's medical instruments came from. You'll get the idea.
Vector, as opposed to raster.
Raster is normal x, y pixels. Vector are...vectors in the video buffer, literally hardware scans the buffer for line segment definitions and redraws them every cycle. The electron gun draws line segments at any angle on the phosphor screen, rather than line by line working down the screen. This can slow down with more segments, which is why the Death Star exploding in the old Star Wars arcade game was kinda flashy. Otber arcade games based on vector hardware are Tempest and Battlezone, the game with a tank periscope.
Modern video cards do vector stuff, but they also do fills. It is just ultra-specialized raster graphics hardware.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
First, and most likely -- the writers and designers just plain lacked vision of what advanced tech could be. Compare, for example, 50's SciFi where FTL spaceships still had engineers using slide rules. In Starman Jones, they depend on a dead-tree book for coordinates, and read them aloud to the keypunch entry guy.
In Feeling of Power, there is a handl-held calculator, but its readout consists of pinball-machine-like cylinders with 0:9 printed on them.
THe other factor is that you can't make the movie too far disconnected from what the audience will recognize, or they'll give up on it entirely.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I don't really like the series and haven't managed to make it through any of the new (old?) stuff - even though I bought them. I think one is still in the BluRay player back home - and has been for years. I'm not sure, actually.
But, I don't begrudge you your fun.
For a while, I had huge hair and a very scruffy face with lots of hair. I'd tell people I had "Chewy-chewbacinson's disease" and that it made me grow hair out of odd parts of my body and sometimes make me talk like "ooowwwerreerroooowwwwrraaarraawaaa."
I'm still not really a fan. I did, mostly, enjoy the first three.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Ah yes, we all debate technologies used in this movie with lots of diatribes like in the SpaceX vs. SLS food fight. Here are my favorites:
1. Spacecraft with superluminal speeds over interstellar distances engage in close range combat like 19th century battleships.
2. High power laser or particle beams with a hit/miss ratio just like 20th century bullets from guns.
3. Nobody has to deal with life support systems (i.e. replacing CO2 scrubbers or rig up something like Apollo 13 crew had to do).
4. Food? It seems people only need to eat during plot revealing meetings.
5. Water? Nah, drink booze at a bar where people make plans or get into fights.
6. The top bad guy always wears a cape.
Disclaimer: I only SW movie I saw in a movie theater was the original back in 1977. I saw part of the first two sequels on TV. I have not watched any of the others.
mfwright@batnet.com
You can work a mechanical button without looking, buy sense of touch, just like you can type on a keyboard. Touch screens, on the other hand, provide no tactile feedback; you actually have to stare at the screen to confirm you are pressing the correct "button". So, what are all new cars now being equipped with? That's right, touch screens! Just a matter of time before car manufacturers start getting sued for accidents caused by drivers distracted by trying to use the touchscreen while driving.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's also sometimes effective on starters. *nods* A wooden dowel and a rubber mallet is a must in any real mechanics toolbox. :D
I'm suffering a brain fart. The piece that comes out and pushes into the flywheel to spin it up and start the car sometimes gets stuck and a good healthy whack is often enough to teach it a lesson. Stater? I forget the name and I'm too lazy to Google. While I am an automotive aficonado and I do work on my own cars a little bit, I do not always remember things well and I tend to actually pay people to do the work for me as I hate splitting open my fingers and getting grease lodged in my hand deeply enough that it's nearly impossible to entirely eradicate.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I am not a graphics guy - not even remotely. So, thank you. Do you happen to have more information or, perhaps, a link that will put that stuff into laymen's terms? I don't want to make you work but I really do prefer the good Slashdot explanations more than I prefer the blasé stuff you get from Wikipedia or whatnot.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
... My GE microwave is still like that. It was kind of funny because when I hit it and it actually worked, my thought process wasn't "well, good."
No, my thought process was, "that worked? How? What in a modern, solid state, uC based system would even respond to a hit? As an engineer, the fact that this worked offends me!" After some thought I realized the safety contacts on the door weren't always making a good connection.
It's still easier to pretend I'm the Fonz whenever I want a hot pocket than it is to schedule maintenance.
The Star Wars universe has a serious problem with technological stagnation.
It's not just analog levers and such, which you would actually expect a "hot dog" pilot like Han Solo to prefer over a Star-Trek-like "tell the computer what you'd like the ship to do and let it tend to the details" interface. The general advancement of technology is stagnant at best, and is possibly regressing.
Consider that in A New Hope, the heros are able to plug R2-D2 into the Death Star and "interpret the entire imperial network". At this point, R2-D2 is at least 30-year-old kit. That's the equivalent of being able to use a Macintosh Plus, IBM PC AT, or Trash-80 Color Computer 2, to completely pwn the Pentagon. Obviously, something is seriously wrong there.
You really can't compare civilian technology, given that the original movies and Ep. 7 all take place in the ass-end of space. But consider that the military state-of-the-art has actually regressed. Clone troopers could actually hit their targets, and their armor was actually useful. By Ep 4, the cloning technology has already been lost, their hardware has regressed, and the armor has become useless. TIE fighters underperform the fighters that the clone troopers utilized. Not a single battle droid is seen after. Imperial ships are, in general, manpower-intensive to an almost absurd degree (I believe the complement given for the crew size of a Star Destroyer is 32,000 (!!!).). And, FFS, we have better computer control and targeting foe weapons systems NOW than is evident in the entire Star Wars universe. A US Navy Aegis cruiser or destroyer could down an entire ISD's complement of TIE fighters (72) and have missiles and CWIS rounds to spare.
It gets worse if you consider expanded universe material such as KOTOR to be canon. That brings the period of total stagnation to literally *thousands* of years.
Imagine all the people...
Retro-futuristic. It's a style that has worked successfully for many films and games. Perhaps the sub-conscious clash intrigues our primitive brains?