Neuromancer was the first Scifi book (as far as I'm aware) to feature fully 3D, immersive, abstract CYBERSPACE (called 'Matrix' in the book).
What would you gain from portraying that 'natively 3D' cyberspace with flat 2D filmmaking?
And btw, BladeRunner doesn't 'suck' in Stereo 3D.
The highest score director Vincenzo Natali has on IMDB is 7.5/10 for the 1997 Scifi film "Cube". He has completed 11 projects as director and has never reached a 8/10 on any of them. Average scores by project type are listed here:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0622112/filmorate
Average scores (IMDB) by type of involvement in projects: ---
Art Department 7.24 --
Director 6.59 --
Writer 6.84 --
Thanks 6.77 --
Actor 8.10 --
Miscellaneous Crew 6.50 --
Producer 6.40 --
Unless the strength and originality of Neuromancer's story/characters/universe/plot devices inspires him to "reach new heights", this is going to be a probable 7/10 movie (not bad, but not great either).
They could have given Neuromancer to a heavyweight like Fincher, Scott, Spielberg or someone like Mathieu Cassovitz (of "La Heine" fame) and it would probably have turned out tremendous. Alfonso Cuarón who did a tremendous job on "Children of Men" comes to mind as well.
I hope they don't f%ck this up. Neuromancer is brilliant material. Definitely in the Top 5 best realistic Scifi books category if you ask me.
- that consumers have broad choice, including lower priced substitutes for crucial (i.e. non-luxury) goods - that market forces, including the limited spending power of consumers, keeps the pricing policies of producers in check
If software producers followed these principles and priced their software lower in low-income markets however, you'd get a consumer revolt in the primary high-income market ("I pay $2,000 for my license of BlaCAD and they get it for $800 in country X? WTF?"). Your average Westerner's mindset is "if I have to pay X for this crap, they should pay X as well". And that's partly how we arrived at the 'digital divide', which some people are now trying to fix with initiatives like OLPC.
That's a simple way of looking at it of course. You could argue that giving lower-income territories software "cheaper" might result in a lot of work performed with such software in the West immediately being outsourced to wherever software usage costs happen to be lower in Dollar or Euro terms. But its one way to explain the "lower than Western income, but having to buy at software at Western prices" paradox out there.
I have the feeling that the current OMG-Hidef-GPRS-MP3-Widescreen-Wifi-Flashdisk-Megap ixel craze in electronics will fly apart by the end of 2007 and old school products will come back into vogue.
What was the grand promise of CD-ROM when it first appeared? You can store knowledge on it. Lots of it. Books, dictionaries, maps, almanacs, medical guides, encyclopedias.
These laptops can do the same. Imagine the value of a handcranked laptop that lets a rural community look up:
- Health and hygiene information. What do you do when a six month old develops a high fever and the nearest doctor is eight hours drive away? How do you ensure water and food is kept fresh and clean? How do you treat a wound caused by a sharp, dirty object? How do you recognize the symptoms of blood poisoning, parasitic infections, diabetes or degrading eyesight?
- Farming best practices. How do you keep your livestock healthy? How can you protect your crops from insects and other harmful environmental influences? How do you take proper care of the soil on your plots? What should you plant when and using what technique; how much water will these crops require and what sort of return can you expect at different times of the year?
- Maps and contact info. Where is the nearest hospital, government office, NGO office? How far is it to travel from town A to town B and what sort of transport or lodging is available? What should you look out for when travelling a certain route?
- Law and rights. What do you do when you've borrowed money from someone rich in the community and he claims he owns the rights to your land when you can't repay the loan? Who do you call for legal advice or representation? How can you protect yourself and your community from other forms of harrassment?
- Economic advice. How can you best use your skills to earn a living? What are your services worth? What other skills would be helpful to learn and how would you start to learn them?
- Knowhow. How can you build a clean water reservoir for your community using limited means? How do you make sure that a structure errected to house people or livestock or store farming tools and other property won't get blown down by wind or eaten away by temperature changes, humidity and other environmental factors.
These are just simple examples. You could expand on this and turn these laptops into a very comprehensive and useful information reservoir that helps people living in less than ideal conditions cope with all sorts of everyday problems.
Click through the 'Hall of Belated Fame' pages at the Home of the Underdogs (a popular abandonware site) and you very quickly see how childish today's computer game marketing is compared with some of the more serious fare of the 80s and 90s.
http://www.the-underdogs.info/featured.php
With the FPS kiddies and casual gaming boobs migrating off the PC platform, PC gaming may actually go back to the more complex, cerebral, mature games we used to be able to buy.
It is rather funny that two polygon characters kissing stirs up more controversy than people raining artillery strikes down on other players in the likes of BF2. Oh well. That's gaming for you.
Anybody remember how Digital Media started out? It was all "create your own website, make your own music, shoot and edit your own films, bring your creative vision to life". Sort of like DTP applied to all things audiovisual, multimedia and creative.
Where is industry taking us now? Pay $$$ for a DRM locked audioplayer, $$$$ for DRM locked HD viewing gear, then lots of $$s for each little chunk of hour long or two hour long formulaic audiovisual content. You can view but you cannot copy. You can view but you cannot modify. You can view but you cannot share.
That explains, in my opinion, why the internet landscape is so impoverished of quality audiovisual content today that people hang around viewing junk like what's on Youtube in their millions. P2P has been killed with fear of lawsuits. Indy film/music/games crushed by billion dollar commercial content marketing.
What's left, really, is an impoverished landscape of non-participatory, formulaic view-but-don't touch content that is basically just there to pull another two 10 dollar bills out of your pocket.
"I think that the government has virtually* no business in a contract between two parties over a luxury good or service."
A multi-billion dollar industry forcibly shoving restrictive DRM down a consumer's throat is not a "contract between two parties" my good friend. I have yet to meet a consumer who actually "agrees" with DRM.
Its 32-bit Windows with a fancy DirectX UI ('Aero') and bucketloads of DRM nastiness. People will buy it for its good looks. They won't like what it does to music, video or other content files though.
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Neuromancer was the first Scifi book (as far as I'm aware) to feature fully 3D, immersive, abstract CYBERSPACE (called 'Matrix' in the book). What would you gain from portraying that 'natively 3D' cyberspace with flat 2D filmmaking? And btw, BladeRunner doesn't 'suck' in Stereo 3D.
The highest score director Vincenzo Natali has on IMDB is 7.5/10 for the 1997 Scifi film "Cube". He has completed 11 projects as director and has never reached a 8/10 on any of them. Average scores by project type are listed here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0622112/filmorate Average scores (IMDB) by type of involvement in projects: --- Art Department 7.24 -- Director 6.59 -- Writer 6.84 -- Thanks 6.77 -- Actor 8.10 -- Miscellaneous Crew 6.50 -- Producer 6.40 -- Unless the strength and originality of Neuromancer's story/characters/universe/plot devices inspires him to "reach new heights", this is going to be a probable 7/10 movie (not bad, but not great either). They could have given Neuromancer to a heavyweight like Fincher, Scott, Spielberg or someone like Mathieu Cassovitz (of "La Heine" fame) and it would probably have turned out tremendous. Alfonso Cuarón who did a tremendous job on "Children of Men" comes to mind as well. I hope they don't f%ck this up. Neuromancer is brilliant material. Definitely in the Top 5 best realistic Scifi books category if you ask me.
The whole point of free markets is
- that consumers have broad choice, including lower priced substitutes for crucial (i.e. non-luxury) goods
- that market forces, including the limited spending power of consumers, keeps the pricing policies of producers in check
If software producers followed these principles and priced their software lower in low-income markets however, you'd get a consumer revolt in the primary high-income market ("I pay $2,000 for my license of BlaCAD and they get it for $800 in country X? WTF?"). Your average Westerner's mindset is "if I have to pay X for this crap, they should pay X as well". And that's partly how we arrived at the 'digital divide', which some people are now trying to fix with initiatives like OLPC.
That's a simple way of looking at it of course. You could argue that giving lower-income territories software "cheaper" might result in a lot of work performed with such software in the West immediately being outsourced to wherever software usage costs happen to be lower in Dollar or Euro terms. But its one way to explain the "lower than Western income, but having to buy at software at Western prices" paradox out there.
This is the end
...again
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes
twang...twang...twang...
I have the feeling that the current OMG-Hidef-GPRS-MP3-Widescreen-Wifi-Flashdisk-Megap ixel craze in electronics will fly apart by the end of 2007 and old school products will come back into vogue.
"PS3 Missed Ship Targets" the convoy must have made it safely across the channel then.
for paying lobbyists to spread disinfo about climate science. http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/st ory/0,,1876538,00.html
Sony's already figured out how to hide rootkits on Audio CDs.
What was the grand promise of CD-ROM when it first appeared? You can store knowledge on it. Lots of it. Books, dictionaries, maps, almanacs, medical guides, encyclopedias. These laptops can do the same. Imagine the value of a handcranked laptop that lets a rural community look up: - Health and hygiene information. What do you do when a six month old develops a high fever and the nearest doctor is eight hours drive away? How do you ensure water and food is kept fresh and clean? How do you treat a wound caused by a sharp, dirty object? How do you recognize the symptoms of blood poisoning, parasitic infections, diabetes or degrading eyesight? - Farming best practices. How do you keep your livestock healthy? How can you protect your crops from insects and other harmful environmental influences? How do you take proper care of the soil on your plots? What should you plant when and using what technique; how much water will these crops require and what sort of return can you expect at different times of the year? - Maps and contact info. Where is the nearest hospital, government office, NGO office? How far is it to travel from town A to town B and what sort of transport or lodging is available? What should you look out for when travelling a certain route? - Law and rights. What do you do when you've borrowed money from someone rich in the community and he claims he owns the rights to your land when you can't repay the loan? Who do you call for legal advice or representation? How can you protect yourself and your community from other forms of harrassment? - Economic advice. How can you best use your skills to earn a living? What are your services worth? What other skills would be helpful to learn and how would you start to learn them? - Knowhow. How can you build a clean water reservoir for your community using limited means? How do you make sure that a structure errected to house people or livestock or store farming tools and other property won't get blown down by wind or eaten away by temperature changes, humidity and other environmental factors. These are just simple examples. You could expand on this and turn these laptops into a very comprehensive and useful information reservoir that helps people living in less than ideal conditions cope with all sorts of everyday problems.
Click through the 'Hall of Belated Fame' pages at the Home of the Underdogs (a popular abandonware site) and you very quickly see how childish today's computer game marketing is compared with some of the more serious fare of the 80s and 90s. http://www.the-underdogs.info/featured.php
With the FPS kiddies and casual gaming boobs migrating off the PC platform, PC gaming may actually go back to the more complex, cerebral, mature games we used to be able to buy.
"BTW, WTF is a 'London Oyster Card'?!" http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/fares-tickets/oyster/gen eral.asp
it looks like a smartcard for public transport that sends your usage data into a database
must... find... better... heatsink.... yeaaaarggghh... /RIP
I wish they had thought of this revolutionary "buy once, install multiple times" feature back when Windows 3.0 or DOS were around. /sarcasm
It is rather funny that two polygon characters kissing stirs up more controversy than people raining artillery strikes down on other players in the likes of BF2. Oh well. That's gaming for you.
Is there anything Rockstar won't do to attract a little press attention?
Building windturbines, solar arrays and tide power stuff is so much more fun that doing C++ or SQL. Sorry. =]
Anybody remember how Digital Media started out? It was all "create your own website, make your own music, shoot and edit your own films, bring your creative vision to life". Sort of like DTP applied to all things audiovisual, multimedia and creative. Where is industry taking us now? Pay $$$ for a DRM locked audioplayer, $$$$ for DRM locked HD viewing gear, then lots of $$s for each little chunk of hour long or two hour long formulaic audiovisual content. You can view but you cannot copy. You can view but you cannot modify. You can view but you cannot share. That explains, in my opinion, why the internet landscape is so impoverished of quality audiovisual content today that people hang around viewing junk like what's on Youtube in their millions. P2P has been killed with fear of lawsuits. Indy film/music/games crushed by billion dollar commercial content marketing. What's left, really, is an impoverished landscape of non-participatory, formulaic view-but-don't touch content that is basically just there to pull another two 10 dollar bills out of your pocket.
"I think that the government has virtually* no business in a contract between two parties over a luxury good or service." A multi-billion dollar industry forcibly shoving restrictive DRM down a consumer's throat is not a "contract between two parties" my good friend. I have yet to meet a consumer who actually "agrees" with DRM.
"In Soviet Russia, we send man or woman who make shit content to Gulag in Siberia, one-way trip."
Its 32-bit Windows with a fancy DirectX UI ('Aero') and bucketloads of DRM nastiness. People will buy it for its good looks. They won't like what it does to music, video or other content files though.