George Lucas is not what I would call a particularly dumb person. I don't think many people would, even given the EWOKS.
I have little doubt this movie was shot in many different modes -- dark, light, in-between. And, as the saying goes, a movie is really made in the editing room. Lucas has had many years to seriously consider who he wanted the prequel to appeal to and he probably could have chosen whether "noir" or "political intrigue" or "cheesy kiddie flick" ended up on the cutting room floor. So, he chose "cheesy kiddie flick" and us old-timers will have to live with it.
I'm not necessarily lauding Lucas' move, but he does have a business to run and he's invested what surely amounts to a whole ton of money into Episode I. He could have made a movie for "us" but would he have had the same return on his investment? I doubt it. Personally, I'll probably see it at least twice in the theater, but, unless I had kids, I wouldn't invest seriously in the merchandise. In total, my investment into Episode I will probably run about $100, including 2 or 3 screenings and later purchasing a video or DVD; kids, on the other hand, will probably represent at least a few hundred bucks just in toys alone.
So in general, I don't honestly think us Star Wars "boomers" (yep, I saw it '77) would invest the same amount of cash into the movie as we will for our kids, even if we went to the theater and saw it 5 or 6 times. A small fraction of us has enough desposable income to just trash it all on the collectable stuff (those are always the die-hard collectors anyway). Perhaps it says something about our society when we kow-tow to our kids this way, but this is generally the reality of our consumer culture.
Lucas is in his 50s. The guy will *certainly* never go broke and it is highly improbable that his "Empire" would ever be anything less than seriously important in the film industry, even if Episode I had never come out, but he does have the next 20-25 years of running Lucasfilm to think about. There's no doubt we would have made his film a success at the box office if he had tailored it for us, but he has longer-term issues to consider than a few weeks (or months? or years?) of fan frenzy. After all, what is he going to do after the prequels are done?
I think George will come around the next 2 episodes -- again, in a decidedly calculated fashion. "Empire" was the best of the bunch anyway so we're likely headed for a fuller story line, plots, and characterization. The eye candy is great but wears thin. It'll need more substance if Lucas has any hope of us pulling out a copy of the movie in 5 years to just watch it for the fun of it (which I still do with IV and V -- ROTJ still stinks in my book).
(Personics?) -- Tower had custom cassettes
on
CD vending machines
·
· Score: 1
I saw these in Sam Goody several years ago as well. It was called Personics and you could generate custom cassettes (probably still have that cassette floating around somewhere). They had a large library of songs you could record, but they did not have every single record company sign on to license their music to Personics.
My interest in this service was piqued again when I wanted to generate a custom CD with songs for my wedding reception. I searched the Web for the service and there was at least 1, but they didn't have any "known" music labels licensed to generate custom CDs (i.e., none of the music I actually wanted). I ultimately found 95% of the music I wanted on MP3 and just decoded them to WAV and made a standard audio CD (ahem).
I think Personics kind of faded because it was basically a fad and probably because they just didn't get the kind of comprehensive library they needed.
The Web could potentially transform a service like this now though -- go to a Web site and you'll have the time to really browse through a huge library of music, select what you want, and have it sent to you in the mail. We probably hung around the mall where Sam Goody was for 2 or 3 hours getting a few cassettes made because it took us forever to select the music we wanted. The web could organize a searchable database and offer browseable hiearchies (genre, artist discography, etc.) that you can't get flipping through a book.
I don't see record labels signing on for this service though, considering their skittishness about MP3s. You'd have to be a *really* good salesperson to approach them about getting access to their libraries.
Belief in God "by definition" is irrational? By your definition? Why are billions of people "irrational" then? Much of modern scientific thought comes from people who believed in God (Newton, Einstein). I'd say Einstein was a geek. But... he's irrational too, isn't he? By definition, of course.
You've read books, essays, and various tracts by Aquinas, Augustine, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, and determined that these people were irrational nutcases blindly attached to an "invisible, magic, and all-powerful superbeing?" By definition, right? J.C. Penney, John Rockefeller? They were irrational believers too?
Dogma literally means the teachings of the Catholic church. A very large percentage of Christian believers are not Catholic and therefore not "dogmatic." And many are not formally adherents to any religion. Belief in and committment to God isn't a codified system of rituals and detached faith that comes from a prayer book. It's a lifestyle that involves God daily in what you do.
Perfectly reasonable, rational people believe in God, including geeks, even if, by definition, you think they can't be. Believing in and trusting God *is* difficult for even the most devout believer. Not believing in God is much easier than believing. Dismissing believers as "kooks" and irrational sets you up on a platform of imagined superiority where you can look down on those whackos who actually believe the Bible is Holy Scripture. Perhaps you'll never permit yourself an iota of supposed irrationality and enforce the defiantly right belief that God does not exist, that the churches and believers and Bible-thumpers should all just shut up and leave you alone.
Here's the thing though -- people do believe and those who do believe will likely invade your comfort zone many times in your life. They'll disrupt your blissful intolerance, your hatred of the supernatural and irrational, your indignance that nobody sane can possibly believe in God, your stewardship of egoism. You *do* believe in something after all, even if it is lack of belief, and you're going to have to stand up and proclaim that to those nutcases.
I can understand why people are against religion and God. They'll point to the Crusades, the repression of women and minorities in and out of the church, the Inquisition, the hypocritical televangelists, the repression of literature, movies, and the arts, fatwas on Rushdie, terrorists who kill people "for God". It's much easier to point to the exceptions rather than acknowledge that most believers are reasonable, intelligent, loving, caring people. Few of us look at the crime, drugs, violence, and hatred that exists in our world and automatically assume that every human being is that way. Most believers don't want to stuff God down your throat. They'd rather you come to God. They'd rather your heart accept God rather than dismiss where you're coming from -- your disbelief, your skepticism, your certainty that it's all just irrational nonsense anyway. Believe it or not, perfectly rational people permit that acceptance in their heart. They perceive something that is beyond themselves, their egos, their selfishness.
I've been doing all my WebDBase programming in PHP and MySQL. It is missing some fairly standard SQL database features (views among them), but it's extremely fast and relatively light on system resources (try running Oracle sometime and you'll see what I mean). I am not doing very sophisticated queries so more involved database programming may get stuck on what MySQL lacks, but it is overall an exceptional engine and it's free for non-commercial use. With Apache and PHP3 in toe, it's been exceptionally easy to manipulate databases online. And, after you've been doing queries in MS SQL Server 6.5 long enough, the speed difference is a revelation.
This is hardly unusual and is a perfect thesis of the neolithic corporate philosophy of the RBOCs. I've known RBOC personnel pretty well and the notion of change of any sort of entrenched corporate policy is embedded in layers of management hierarchy that inherently prevents swift customer service resolution issues. On the front lines, CSRs are just as easily plucked from any sampling of people waiting at a bus stop. "Training" is limited to CSR manuals that are not easily digested; in any case, proficient CSRs are very very hard to come by in any organization.
The frustrated BA customer here is going to have move much further up the managerial food chain than a front-line supervisor to get any real action. Having done tech. support, it *is* impossible to support every variety of hardware out there, but a pure 10Base-T connection eliminates the need to exclude any platform. Management that's still clueless about this formed the policy and it must be altered at a higher, more clueful strata. Give customers the right to accept a policy that their platform *can't* be supported, but that they can still get the service and will deal with support issues themselves.
After investigating numerous disk imaging "solutions" (at least 4) the only one that came out a winner was Drive Image or Drive Image Pro from Powerquest. Ghost was consistently *very* buggy in any demo version I used. DI Pro is also a whole lot less expensive than Ghost is and supports all the same features.
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George Lucas is not what I would call a particularly dumb person. I don't think many people would, even given the EWOKS.
I have little doubt this movie was shot in many different modes -- dark, light, in-between. And, as the saying goes, a movie is really made in the editing room. Lucas has had many years to seriously consider who he wanted the prequel to appeal to and he probably could have chosen whether "noir" or "political intrigue" or "cheesy kiddie flick" ended up on the cutting room floor. So, he chose "cheesy kiddie flick" and us old-timers will have to live with it.
I'm not necessarily lauding Lucas' move, but he does have a business to run and he's invested what surely amounts to a whole ton of money into Episode I. He could have made a movie for "us" but would he have had the same return on his investment? I doubt it. Personally, I'll probably see it at least twice in the theater, but, unless I had kids, I wouldn't invest seriously in the merchandise. In total, my investment into Episode I will probably run about $100, including 2 or 3 screenings and later purchasing a video or DVD; kids, on the other hand, will probably represent at least a few hundred bucks just in toys alone.
So in general, I don't honestly think us Star Wars "boomers" (yep, I saw it '77) would invest the same amount of cash into the movie as we will for our kids, even if we went to the theater and saw it 5 or 6 times. A small fraction of us has enough desposable income to just trash it all on the collectable stuff (those are always the die-hard collectors anyway). Perhaps it says something about our society when we kow-tow to our kids this way, but this is generally the reality of our consumer culture.
Lucas is in his 50s. The guy will *certainly* never go broke and it is highly improbable that his "Empire" would ever be anything less than seriously important in the film industry, even if Episode I had never come out, but he does have the next 20-25 years of running Lucasfilm to think about. There's no doubt we would have made his film a success at the box office if he had tailored it for us, but he has longer-term issues to consider than a few weeks (or months? or years?) of fan frenzy. After all, what is he going to do after the prequels are done?
I think George will come around the next 2 episodes -- again, in a decidedly calculated fashion. "Empire" was the best of the bunch anyway so we're likely headed for a fuller story line, plots, and characterization. The eye candy is great but wears thin. It'll need more substance if Lucas has any hope of us pulling out a copy of the movie in 5 years to just watch it for the fun of it (which I still do with IV and V -- ROTJ still stinks in my book).
I saw these in Sam Goody several years ago as well. It was called Personics and you could generate custom cassettes (probably still have that cassette floating around somewhere). They had a large library of songs you could record, but they did not have every single record company sign on to license their music to Personics.
My interest in this service was piqued again when I wanted to generate a custom CD with songs for my wedding reception. I searched the Web for the service and there was at least 1, but they didn't have any "known" music labels licensed to generate custom CDs (i.e., none of the music I actually wanted). I ultimately found 95% of the music I wanted on MP3 and just decoded them to WAV and made a standard audio CD (ahem).
I think Personics kind of faded because it was basically a fad and probably because they just didn't get the kind of comprehensive library they needed.
The Web could potentially transform a service like this now though -- go to a Web site and you'll have the time to really browse through a huge library of music, select what you want, and have it sent to you in the mail. We probably hung around the mall where Sam Goody was for 2 or 3 hours getting a few cassettes made because it took us forever to select the music we wanted. The web could organize a searchable database and offer browseable hiearchies (genre, artist discography, etc.) that you can't get flipping through a book.
I don't see record labels signing on for this service though, considering their skittishness about MP3s. You'd have to be a *really* good salesperson to approach them about getting access to their libraries.
Well... here we go again.
Belief in God "by definition" is irrational? By your definition? Why are billions of people "irrational" then? Much of modern scientific thought comes from people who believed in God (Newton, Einstein). I'd say Einstein was a geek. But... he's irrational too, isn't he? By definition, of course.
You've read books, essays, and various tracts by Aquinas, Augustine, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, and determined that these people were irrational nutcases blindly attached to an "invisible, magic, and all-powerful superbeing?" By definition, right? J.C. Penney, John Rockefeller? They were irrational believers too?
Dogma literally means the teachings of the Catholic church. A very large percentage of Christian believers are not Catholic and therefore not "dogmatic." And many are not formally adherents to any religion. Belief in and committment to God isn't a codified system of rituals and detached faith that comes from a prayer book. It's a lifestyle that involves God daily in what you do.
Perfectly reasonable, rational people believe in God, including geeks, even if, by definition, you think they can't be. Believing in and trusting God *is* difficult for even the most devout believer. Not believing in God is much easier than believing. Dismissing believers as "kooks" and irrational sets you up on a platform of imagined superiority where you can look down on those whackos who actually believe the Bible is Holy Scripture. Perhaps you'll never permit yourself an iota of supposed irrationality and enforce the defiantly right belief that God does not exist, that the churches and believers and Bible-thumpers should all just shut up and leave you alone.
Here's the thing though -- people do believe and those who do believe will likely invade your comfort zone many times in your life. They'll disrupt your blissful intolerance, your hatred of the supernatural and irrational, your indignance that nobody sane can possibly believe in God, your stewardship of egoism. You *do* believe in something after all, even if it is lack of belief, and you're going to have to stand up and proclaim that to those nutcases.
I can understand why people are against religion and God. They'll point to the Crusades, the repression of women and minorities in and out of the church, the Inquisition, the hypocritical televangelists, the repression of literature, movies, and the arts, fatwas on Rushdie, terrorists who kill people "for God". It's much easier to point to the exceptions rather than acknowledge that most believers are reasonable, intelligent, loving, caring people. Few of us look at the crime, drugs, violence, and hatred that exists in our world and automatically assume that every human being is that way. Most believers don't want to stuff God down your throat. They'd rather you come to God. They'd rather your heart accept God rather than dismiss where you're coming from -- your disbelief, your skepticism, your certainty that it's all just irrational nonsense anyway. Believe it or not, perfectly rational people permit that acceptance in their heart. They perceive something that is beyond themselves, their egos, their selfishness.
Even if it appears "irrational."
I've been doing all my WebDBase programming in PHP and MySQL. It is missing some fairly standard SQL database features (views among them), but it's extremely fast and relatively light on system resources (try running Oracle sometime and you'll see what I mean). I am not doing very sophisticated queries so more involved database programming may get stuck on what MySQL lacks, but it is overall an exceptional engine and it's free for non-commercial use. With Apache and PHP3 in toe, it's been exceptionally easy to manipulate databases online. And, after you've been doing queries in MS SQL Server 6.5 long enough, the speed difference is a revelation.
This is hardly unusual and is a perfect thesis of the neolithic corporate philosophy of the RBOCs. I've known RBOC personnel pretty well and the notion of change of any sort of entrenched corporate policy is embedded in layers of management hierarchy that inherently prevents swift customer service resolution issues. On the front lines, CSRs are just as easily plucked from any sampling of people waiting at a bus stop. "Training" is limited to CSR manuals that are not easily digested; in any case, proficient CSRs are very very hard to come by in any organization.
The frustrated BA customer here is going to have move much further up the managerial food chain than a front-line supervisor to get any real action. Having done tech. support, it *is* impossible to support every variety of hardware out there, but a pure 10Base-T connection eliminates the need to exclude any platform. Management that's still clueless about this formed the policy and it must be altered at a higher, more clueful strata. Give customers the right to accept a policy that their platform *can't* be supported, but that they can still get the service and will deal with support issues themselves.
After investigating numerous disk imaging "solutions" (at least 4) the only one that came out a winner was Drive Image or Drive Image Pro from Powerquest. Ghost was consistently *very* buggy in any demo version I used. DI Pro is also a whole lot less expensive than Ghost is and supports all the same features.