I'm an iTunes user, and I say its music sharing is crippled. I don't care what apple's intentions are, if I can no longer use a tool for the purpose I keep it around for, then it's crippled, at least from a semantic standpoint.
Apple worked very hard to get the RIAA to soften up as much as it has with DRM in the iTunes Music Store.
"As much as it has"? Dude, the mp3-streaming thing was just about the only thing that separated Apple's DRM from the DRM schemes on previous pay-for-online-music services. There have been a number of limited-location install schemes where you could only listen to the mp3s on one platform in one music player that you could buy music through before, but iTunes was different because you could go somewhere else and still *listen* to the music, even if it wasn't local. Not anymore.
It's about as funny as somebody saying "Who'd want a Linux portable gaming machine? It'd be a pain in the ass to type 'jump -high' on that little thumbboard."
Hmm. Screwed up the HTML. If you actually care (i don't know how obvious or correct this is), my "major spoiler" at the end of the post i'm replying to was supposed to be that i think in the same way the first movie was just a cinematic exploration of Plato's Cave, the second movie was a cinematic exploration of the conclusion that happens at the very end of this book.
You can't make a sequel without adding complexity. That's what a sequel *IS*. You're basically just proving my point: I say "the people who didn't like Reloaded thought so because they were expecting it to be what the first one was" and you said "Reloaded sucks because it wasn't simple like the first one.":P (Yeah, I realize you still would have thought Reloaded was cheesy and dumb even without the Matrix to judge it against)
Anyway, I get what you're saying, and it would have been REALLY REALLY COOL if they could have kept the koan-like minimalism and preserved the ambiguity of the first one, but i don't know if that was possible; at the least, it would have been rediculously hard to do that and still make the second one actually do anything besides retread the first movie. At the least, it isn't a reasonable expectation to have of filmmakers who are still pretty damn early on in their careers. (If you think the sex scene in Matrix Reloaded was Cheesy, just watch Bound. I mean, yeesh.)
However. The second movie went and "muddled all up" the point of the first movie becuase *the second movie had a different point than the first one*. Personally I prefer this to a movie that doesn't really bring anything new.
I can't really respond to the cheese thing. It was over the top, if you think that's a bad thing then that's your perogative or whatever. I think most of the "cheese" you just kind of have to understand why it was there. (Except for the 100 Smiths scene, that was totally gratuitous ^_^) I have this long rambling defense of why the ravesex scene was there, but I'm going to post it as a reply to this and i may not do it until later.
Anyway, my attempt to respond to your other points:
3. Yeah, i'll give you that. Though I actually found it kind of amusing the way the 100 agent smiths thing just went on and on. In a silly sort of way.
4. Almost all of the subplots were either conclusions of subplots from "The Animatrix", or were setting up subplots to be resolved in the third film. No subplots *really* occured in this film, only plot devices.
5. It didn't prove anything. That entire scene was just this elitist virtual french bastard being a dick and having fun in his own restaurant while totally blowing Neo and Morpheus off. Nothing in the restaurant had anything to do with the movie or anything else. It was just a wierd little arbitrary exploration of what exactly is the nature of the AI and "programs" living in the matrix, and it moved the plot along. And I for one thought the entire scene was absolutely hilarious, whether it was necessary or ont.
Also, the chocolate cake orgasm specifically made it absolutely clear what the bug and "red pill" did in the first movie: it wasn't a pill. It was a computer program that took the appearance of a pill within the matrix.
6. I don't agree, but that's a valid opinion.
7. The room wasn't real.
The room was simply a manifestation of whatever it was that the Architect wanted it to be, given the impact the Architect wanted to have on Neo. The Architect just happened to be a self-important and melodramatic entity. Thus the 100 screens.
8. You have a point here.
9. First, Neo hasn't quite figured out how to take advantage of his own powers.
Second, and most importantly, I think it's been very clearly established Neo isn't exactly the brightest person out there. Hence his tendency to react to just fight off the bad guys rather than trying to figure out how to manipulate the matrix to obliterate them utterly. No one other than Neo has crazy powers, except the Agents, and its been established the Agents are (1) limited because they won't circumvent the system (2) not fighting any *really* important battles.
If you didn't think this one was playing with the nature of reality, you weren't paying attention.
But it wasn't quite the main thrust, I don't think. And the parts that *were* the main thrust, the whole choices/fate/cause and effect thing.. i think that's kind of a subset of "the nature of reality", but it's more subtle and less *general*. And that was my point, that people were expecting everything to be more all-encompassing and for it to be obvious what the point was, like the first one was. (I thought it was pretty cool, though.) I was unclear, sorry.
A LOT of people seem to have very much disliked this movie. This didn't annoy me until I talked to them, and now it does, a little. I don't mind people not liking a movie I liked, but from talking to a lot of such people i'm beginning to cynically suspect that almost everyone who really disliked Matrix Reloaded did so for one simple reason:
They walked into the movie expecting it to be Matrix 1 again, and it isn't. It's a different movie.
That may be a little unfair, but really, most of the people who hated Matrix Reloaded, you ask them why, and what they answer is that the movie basically failed to live up to the specific expectations they had coming in. Well, whatever. I *liked* the surprise of the general tack the movie took, and I for one actually realized before I walked in that it was just going to be a "fun action movie", so I was prepared for that. You know how I know? *BECAUSE THE TRAILERS MADE IT COMPLETELY FRICKING OBVIOUS* that it was going to be a straightforward action movie!
And I'm less sure about this, but: I think the main argument against it seems to be that they missed the "depth" of the first one. Except the second one had its own sort of depth, it just wasn't at all on the same subjects. The first one was full of this very interesting exploration of the meaning of reality. The second one didn't do this, becuase they'd already said everything they had to say on that subject (anyway, the entire second movie almost is spent in the Matrix, and they KNOW what the nature of reality is in the Matrix). The second one just tells a story, but arcing through that story is an also pretty interesting exploration of [mouseover for minor spoiler]. But a lot of people watched it *wanting* this to be an exploration of the nature of reality, and tried to interpret what depth there was as being depth about the nature of reality, from which viewpoint the plot movements seemed asinine and random, the philosophizing seemed irrelivant and trite, and the dialogue seems like bullshit shoehorned in so the movie would have "deep philosophical dialogue" in. But once you get the movie, it works really well. I think.
And it isn't like the ideas in the first one are the most brilliant, original things ever. It was just that the way they were *presented* was brilliant. In a way, the first movie was just an action movie with Plato's Cave as the star. The second movie was just an action movie with [mouseover for MAJOR spoiler] as the star.
(Note: I will acknowledge the second movie had a little bit of trouble getting its momentum started, and the beginning was a little disjointed, and I know that can ruin an entire movie for some people. But I think it redeemed itself pretty quickly..)
It should be interesting to see how these effect the storage market and the film industry. Imagine a game that requires a CD that expires in 48 hours.
Hmm.. When I first read that, I misinterpreted your mention of the "film industry" to mean they'd use this as a plot point.
NEXT SUMMER.. IT'S JAMES BOND.. IN A RACE AGAINST TIME!
[M] James Bond, we need you to get this DVD to a scientist held prisoner in a North Korean jail! [James Bond] Sounds too easy. What's the catch? [M] You only have 48 hours-- before the DVD's copy-protection makes it disintegrate!
And of course james bond slams the dvd into the north korean prisoner's imac with 5 seconds left before the disk oxidizes or whatever, after which we get to see a tense moment while COPYING FILE appears on screen and a progress bar tries to outrun the dying DVD while the seconds tick down... will it be copied in time?
Find out, in.. 007: JAMES SCREWS SOME CHICKS AND THINGS BLOW UP [[ This film is not yet rated ]]
Um... maybe Trinity thought that it was just an exclamation, and wondered what it was in reference to?
Yes, that is why I am saying it is pseudoambiguous whether she's responding as if addressed or not, and that it could just be a coincidence. However, the point is that it happens *every* time, and it is always Trinity and only Trinity who responds, never anyone else. This implies it is meant to be a subtle joke on the screenwriter's part.
Something that a friend of a friend noticed upon spending an entire day watching "the Matrix" over and over while it was still in theaters (they would hide elsewhere in the theatre when the ushers were clearing the seats between showings, then just go back in.. they *claimed* they were doing this for a class.):
Every time that someone says "God" in the movie, Trinity (if she is present) responds as if she was being addressed. This happens at least twice.
Whether she is actually responding is always left kind of pseudoambiguous:
<Neo> Jesus!
<Trinity> What?
<Neo> I used to eat chinese food there..
But, while it could be coincidence, I'm guessing that it just means that Trinity has a healthy amount of self-esteem. If you were a leather-clad female trapped in a hovercraft with a bunch of antisocial geeks, you'd probably start to think you were God too.
Currently I put everything from china into my SPAM-folder and by golly, I'll just blacklist every country that doesn't have anti-SPAM laws.
The interesting thing is this: let's say that the U.S. and EU do both ban spam, and all the spam is coming from outside the U.S. and EU. A *lot* of people will react the same way you do.
That is to say, we'll suddenly see a lot more careless e-mail blocks being placed on large swaths of entire countries, some by individuals, and most likely often by ISPs. We already see a LOT of huge e-mail blocks being done by ISPs, especially AOL, without much concern for collateral damage; it isn't inconcievable that a number of random ISPs might just look at their statistics and shortsightedly go, hmm, 90% of our spam comes from (for example) Indonesia, who is going to be talking to people in Indonesia anyway, i'll just block the whole country (or maybe just most of their IP space).
Once this starts happening, internet users and businesses in (for example) Indonesia are suddenly going to start discovering that they are having trouble communicating with the U.S., and this is because of spammers in their country. I find it likely that if this happens, their response will be to complain to their government to do something about the spammers that are making the americans block them... until one day, spam is illegal in indonesia as well, and shortsighted ISPs in indonesia are going, hey, all my spam's coming from Myanmar, why don't i just block e-mail from there..
So if the US or EU ever adopted real antispam laws, it could start a big domino effect that would cause a lot of other countries to adopt antispam laws as well.
I didn't read the 'preview' very clearly before i posted. I'm tired. Sorry. Missing from my post which i am replying to is this point, which you may have worked out on your own:
Clearly, we want to find a way to illegalize the actions of the herbal viagra salesmen in situation 2 without illegalizing the actions of Joe in situation 1. Would this directive actually achieve that?
At least if the directive really does work the way the article says it does. Consider the two following situations.
Bill writes an angry diatribe on slashdot.org. In Bill's user profile is a link to his website, which contains his e-mail address. Joe comes across slashdot and, offended by the diatribe, writes an angry flame in disagreement and e-mails it to Bill. Bill gets upset by this and sues Joe for sending an "unsolicited e-mail".
Bill writes an angry diatrabe on slashdot.org. In Bill's user profile is a link to his website, which contains his e-mail address. HARVESTER-BOT 3.0 comes across slashdot and, blindly following links, adds Bill's e-mail address to the database of a small business, which then e-mails Bill with an offer for herbal viagra. Bill gets upset by this and sues the business for sending an "unsolicited e-mail".
Seriously, are they actually going to try to put up this directive with no reference to "mass" or "commercial" and without any exceptions, or is this article just poorly written? What about exceptions for, like, accidentally mispelled e-mail addresses? I know that it's highly unlikely people would use the law for that reason, but writing excessively vague laws leads to big problems, as anyone following the DMCA has found.
And how would this directive work in the case of some 'business' which gets some bullshit, but legal, excuse for the idea that Bill has entered into a business relationship with it, and then sends Bill spam forever without a clear sign of how to remove himself from their lists? Is there a link to the directive's actual text? Anywhere?
Looks like a press release in sheeps clothing to me.
It isn't a press release. It's a leak. Notice they don't say "apple" said anything, they said "sources". Their information is so scanty because probably all they have to work with is a small number of sketchy reports from apple employees, probably speaking anonymously, probably terrified of losing their jobs if they reveal so much the information somehow identifies them.
Or, maybe, it's just some guy from Wisconsin playing a prank. I know personally people who are not apple employees who have sent in e-mail from hotmail accounts to MacOSRumors.com claiming to be Apple Employees with top secret information, then just lying through their teeth for a page or so. These e-mails actually got reprinted on MacOSRumors and presented as some kind of huge scoop.
Where's the screenshots?
If they *had* screenshots, and they put them up, Apple Legal would be sending them a cease and desist within a couple of hours. Apple is VERY consistent about demanding any leaked screenshots of unreleased products be removed immediately, and threatening legal action if not. A site like EWeek probably wouldn't want to even bother with putting the screenshots online given they'd only be up for an hour or so and they'd have to get big scary c&d orders.
If you want *real* information, just wait a month. Apple will be actually not only *DEMOING* Panther at the WWDC conference, but they will begin at the same time to send out betas to developers..
I didn't mean anything by it, it was just a half-joking reference to an old slashdot article that i can no longer find on that subject.
Re:Article helps with suspension of disbelief
on
The Science of the Matrix
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· Score: 4, Interesting
[the following contains a minor Matrix spoiler]
This brings up an interesting thought: Why the hell are the machines allowing the Earth's atmosphere to be breathable? Since it would seem the humans' "scorching of the skies" killed off all conventional life on earth other than the humans and the machines, and the machines don't need oxygen, and the only humans that the machines need alive are incased in liquid, couldn't the machines just win a huge victory by unexpectedly flooding the earth's atmosphere with something unbreathable?
Then again, maybe that is exactly what the machines did? We never see any humans go outside during the Matrix, and the only human city is underground. There's that bit at the end where the Nebucannazar (sp?) gets cut open, but we don't see what happens after the EMP blast; maybe the instant the squiddies are dead, the remaining living humans on the hovercraft have to go running for the oxygen masks.
Some thoughts on the whole idea that keeping a bunch of humans alive to use them as an energy source doesn't make any sense, becuase conservation of energy demands you'd put more energy into keeping the humans alive than you could get out:
Question: Isn't it true that a nuclear fusion reaction, if you can figure out how to make one, takes an absolutely fantastic amount of energy to initiate and maintain? I know nothing about nuclear physics, but what i've read seems to indicate that the point of fusion is that you put a fantastic amount of energy in and you get a fantastic amount of energy back. The problem so far is that no one has figured out how to get out more energy than you put in.
So wouldn't it be logical to say that the huge mass of humans *are*, in fact, a net energy drain because energy is needed to create whatever protein the humans use for IV foodstuffs, but they are needed and maintained becuase they can at any time desired be used briefly as a massive source to pull energy from? Note that Morpheus doesn't say that humans are used as generators; he says they're used as batteries. Wouldn't it make sense to suppose that perhaps the human race encased in the Matrix is just there in case the sustained fusion reaction the machines are actually using to generate their power ever goes out and has to be restarted, or in case the machines need to start up a new reactor? Meaning basically, the Matrix is nothing more than a giant UPS? Does this make any sense at all?
None of this, of course, explains why the machines, given a level of technology that would make it possible to build both Zion and the Matrix, wouldn't just harness tidal energy as a power source! Did the americans finally blow up the moon or something?
Anyway, as far as the article's parallell processing thing goes, that seems really silly to me. If the machines have figured out how to use human brains as processors, wouldn't they build the machines themselves using human brains as processors to run the AIs on? You could claim "how do you know they aren't", but i'll tell you how i know they aren't: if they can control biological material to that extent, then they can make machines that the EMP blasts are useless against. I do, however, really like the article author's insinuation that Morpheus actually has no idea what the Matrix is for, and erroneously believes it's a power plant.
(One totally non-power-related possibility of what the Matrix could be used for: possibly the machines really just don't like the idea of making the human race extinct. They don't want the humans running around in the real world and working against the machines' designs, but they're for whatever reason not okay with just wiping the humans out; maybe they don't actually hate the humans, they just don't want the humans to be a threat. Maybe the Matrix is just a means of preservation of the human race, one that the machines get nothing positive out of except as a memento of their creators. (Hitler's original plans for the holocaust apparently stated, after everything was done, the world was conquered, and the holocaust was complete, that one single village of Jews should be left alive, sealed off from the outside world, and allowed to simply live on their lives. In Hitler's warped mind this was supposed to be some kind of preserved-in-amber cultural museum of a dead race, just so future aryan generations could know they existed. I cannot remember the exact details of this and may be partially misremembering it in that there wouldn't actually be any living people in this preserved-in-amber village. Does anyone know what i'm referring to? Anyway, possibly the Matrix is something of that sort.). Or, possibly, the machines actually believe they are working in the humans service and they put the humans into the matrix "for their own good", as some kind of highly warped overzealous implementation of Asimov's zeroth law, on the logic if the humans are trapped in a digital fantasyworld, if they knock themselves out with nuclear holoca
Fortunately, at Nintendo, all our franchises are developed in house, so we've no real risk of such publically embarassing spats.
So what's up with HAL (the Smash Brothers / Earthbound people?) are they an owned subsidiary of Nintendo or what? Or does nintendo just have an unlimited license to use their IP?
Also, what's up with the Rare IP? Microsoft owns Rare now, or whatever, but Smash Brothers Melee, a current product, still contains characters and situations from StarFox. Who owns the StarFox characters? And i assume nintendo still owns all the donkey kong IP, even though SSBM clearly uses lots of the Rare DK Country character models?
Also, i could have sworn that Ice Climber was originally made by someone other than Nintendo, but now everywhere says Nintendo owns the copyright on it. Did i just hallucinate that? And how do you unlock Ice Climber in Animal Crossing short of buying an Action Replay, dammit?
it would be cool to see what could be done with this genre using today's technology and wizardry
Actually, since you asked.. have you heard of Ikaruga? It's supposed to be one of the greatest shooter games of all time, as well as one of the most challenging, and it's just been retooled graphically and otherwise for the Gamecube and rereleased (It was originally a dreamcast game).
Also, despite being a 2d topdown shooter, it supposedly has an absolutely fantastic storyline and pushes the gamecube to somewhere near its technical limit. I haven't played it or seen screenshots, and i don't really plan on playing it, as i wasn't a huge shooter fan, but i've heard nothing but nonstop spooging about it for the last month. Apparently this game is just targed specifically at everyone who misses fun little space shooter games, and manages to hit some kind of pinnacle for the genre.
(I like my gamecube. It's nice to have a machine that seems to be specifically designed to target "everyone who thought video games were better before the invention of the CD-ROM". ^_^)
Most of the flaws in the article don't sound like REAL flaws to me, but rather misinterpretation of what the system is supposed to do.. This is a remote desktop for home users, not an Ellison-like "Network Computer" for the business enviornment
Which of these "business environment" problems aren't also problems for the end user? Let's look at the problems Xeno mentions:
It requires an upgrade to XP Pro. This is just as likely to be a problem for a home user as a business user, with the difference that a home user won't have the company sysadmin available to deal with the Win98->WinXP upgrade if they aren't using XP Home already.
It has the bug with accidentally picking up the wrong wireless network. Well, this isn't going to be a problem for *many* home users, but if you live in an apartment building, there's a nontrivial chance you will be in the range of other wireless networks. I for one live in a college dorm, and i'm fricking surrounded by wireless networks. Home users don't have the problem with a non-security-consious automatic wireless network setup bugging their sysadmin, of course, but they do have the problem that they don't have a sysadmin there to spot any accidental problems in their security setup. (I'm not sure if this last bit is a problem)
And then there's the whole idiotic bit with refusing to allow someone to use the computer just becuase someone's using Terminal Server to a remote display. This is just asinine, and it's as much a problem in the home as in the business environment, moreso because in the business environment everyone is likely to have been given their own computer. In the home environment, you have the whole problem of.. "Hey mom, i'm going to check cnn real quick.. oh, i guess you're already using the tablet". NC or no, if you're paying $1000 for a remote display, which is more than many computers nowadays, i think it seems reasonable to expect you should be *allowed* if you so desire to treat it as a separate computer from the thing it's attatched to, given the limitation is clearly a policy decision within MS and not any kind of technical limitation!
Now given, i think the article was too harsh just because except for the no-multiple-users issue and the price, none of the problems they mention are (to my mind anyway) bad enough to prevent someone from buying the product. (In fact, other than that problem, i think this product is pretty cool, and i'm annoyed nothing of this sort is available for my platform of choice (BRING BACK NXHOST GRR).) However, i think their critisisms were dead-on, and even if they weren't as big a deal as they made them out to be, they definitely seem to be real issues and not a result of trying to assume a home product is a business NC.
The choice of red for the PC is interesting in that it draws your eye to it. I downloaded one of the graph and switched the colors of the bars. Then on first glance the eye is drawn to the Mac and your first thought is that it won whatever the test was about.
Um.. but the mac didn't win what the test was about. It lost.
If they really wanted to show info rather than a predetermined conclusion they would have done both bars in the same color.
You know, i'm going to go out on a limb here and say that maybe they made the graphs after they ran the tests, at which point, their "predetermined conclusion" would have been kind of been moot.
Which would lead me to suspect that maybe they chose to color the Windows bar red because windows won the test. Um.. i mean, it sounds reasonable to pick the color that draws your eye for the successful data, right? It's like a "lookit! this one is the important one!" flag, since you wouldn't otherwise have any indication on first glance whether short or long bars are better.
The link doesn't say anything about Adobe preferring one platform over another, in the slightest. It's just some graphs indicating that PCs as a class perform better than macintoshes, which is something that i don't think anyone is denying at this point.
While that kind of does seem like an endorsement of the PC on adobe's part, it also is just good business sense to explain to your customers what hardware your software runs best on.
Speed at raw data-crunching is just one of the factors in which computing platform you are going to use, though if you're using AfterEffects or Photoshop or something it's going to be a much, much larger factor.
writing a bad article or book can happen, but slashdot pointing and drawing attention for such publication is just lame.
I've noticed that the just about all of the last four or five times that i've seen slashdot post a book review, someone has posted a comment complaining "why is it that all the book reviews on this site are always glowingly positive?"
Now, for once, Slashdot is posting a book review where the reviewer didn't actually like the book, and we have someone complaining about Slashdot posting a negative review. Wheeee..
This site is frequented by programmers, and some of them might have considered buying this book had they just run across it in a store. Now, they will think twice before buying it, and will have clear logical reasons for doing so. Slashdot has served its purpose here, it seems to me. What is it that bothers you about this, that Pete McBreen will have his self-esteem hurt?
Slashdot Mirror
this is not the crippling of iTunes
I'm an iTunes user, and I say its music sharing is crippled. I don't care what apple's intentions are, if I can no longer use a tool for the purpose I keep it around for, then it's crippled, at least from a semantic standpoint.
Apple worked very hard to get the RIAA to soften up as much as it has with DRM in the iTunes Music Store.
"As much as it has"? Dude, the mp3-streaming thing was just about the only thing that separated Apple's DRM from the DRM schemes on previous pay-for-online-music services. There have been a number of limited-location install schemes where you could only listen to the mp3s on one platform in one music player that you could buy music through before, but iTunes was different because you could go somewhere else and still *listen* to the music, even if it wasn't local. Not anymore.
If you don't like the terms, don't buy the music.
OK.
It's about as funny as somebody saying "Who'd want a Linux portable gaming machine? It'd be a pain in the ass to type 'jump -high' on that little thumbboard."
Actually.. that's pretty funny.
Hmm. Screwed up the HTML. If you actually care (i don't know how obvious or correct this is), my "major spoiler" at the end of the post i'm replying to was supposed to be that i think in the same way the first movie was just a cinematic exploration of Plato's Cave, the second movie was a cinematic exploration of the conclusion that happens at the very end of this book.
You can't make a sequel without adding complexity. That's what a sequel *IS*. You're basically just proving my point: I say "the people who didn't like Reloaded thought so because they were expecting it to be what the first one was" and you said "Reloaded sucks because it wasn't simple like the first one." :P (Yeah, I realize you still would have thought Reloaded was cheesy and dumb even without the Matrix to judge it against)
Anyway, I get what you're saying, and it would have been REALLY REALLY COOL if they could have kept the koan-like minimalism and preserved the ambiguity of the first one, but i don't know if that was possible; at the least, it would have been rediculously hard to do that and still make the second one actually do anything besides retread the first movie. At the least, it isn't a reasonable expectation to have of filmmakers who are still pretty damn early on in their careers. (If you think the sex scene in Matrix Reloaded was Cheesy, just watch Bound. I mean, yeesh.)
However. The second movie went and "muddled all up" the point of the first movie becuase *the second movie had a different point than the first one*. Personally I prefer this to a movie that doesn't really bring anything new.
I can't really respond to the cheese thing. It was over the top, if you think that's a bad thing then that's your perogative or whatever. I think most of the "cheese" you just kind of have to understand why it was there. (Except for the 100 Smiths scene, that was totally gratuitous ^_^) I have this long rambling defense of why the ravesex scene was there, but I'm going to post it as a reply to this and i may not do it until later.
Anyway, my attempt to respond to your other points:
3. Yeah, i'll give you that. Though I actually found it kind of amusing the way the 100 agent smiths thing just went on and on. In a silly sort of way.
4. Almost all of the subplots were either conclusions of subplots from "The Animatrix", or were setting up subplots to be resolved in the third film. No subplots *really* occured in this film, only plot devices.
5. It didn't prove anything. That entire scene was just this elitist virtual french bastard being a dick and having fun in his own restaurant while totally blowing Neo and Morpheus off. Nothing in the restaurant had anything to do with the movie or anything else. It was just a wierd little arbitrary exploration of what exactly is the nature of the AI and "programs" living in the matrix, and it moved the plot along. And I for one thought the entire scene was absolutely hilarious, whether it was necessary or ont.
Also, the chocolate cake orgasm specifically made it absolutely clear what the bug and "red pill" did in the first movie: it wasn't a pill. It was a computer program that took the appearance of a pill within the matrix.
6. I don't agree, but that's a valid opinion.
7. The room wasn't real.
The room was simply a manifestation of whatever it was that the Architect wanted it to be, given the impact the Architect wanted to have on Neo. The Architect just happened to be a self-important and melodramatic entity. Thus the 100 screens.
8. You have a point here.
9. First, Neo hasn't quite figured out how to take advantage of his own powers.
Second, and most importantly, I think it's been very clearly established Neo isn't exactly the brightest person out there. Hence his tendency to react to just fight off the bad guys rather than trying to figure out how to manipulate the matrix to obliterate them utterly. No one other than Neo has crazy powers, except the Agents, and its been established the Agents are (1) limited because they won't circumvent the system (2) not fighting any *really* important battles.
If you didn't think this one was playing with the nature of reality, you weren't paying attention.
But it wasn't quite the main thrust, I don't think. And the parts that *were* the main thrust, the whole choices/fate/cause and effect thing.. i think that's kind of a subset of "the nature of reality", but it's more subtle and less *general*. And that was my point, that people were expecting everything to be more all-encompassing and for it to be obvious what the point was, like the first one was. (I thought it was pretty cool, though.) I was unclear, sorry.
A LOT of people seem to have very much disliked this movie. This didn't annoy me until I talked to them, and now it does, a little. I don't mind people not liking a movie I liked, but from talking to a lot of such people i'm beginning to cynically suspect that almost everyone who really disliked Matrix Reloaded did so for one simple reason:
They walked into the movie expecting it to be Matrix 1 again, and it isn't. It's a different movie.
That may be a little unfair, but really, most of the people who hated Matrix Reloaded, you ask them why, and what they answer is that the movie basically failed to live up to the specific expectations they had coming in. Well, whatever. I *liked* the surprise of the general tack the movie took, and I for one actually realized before I walked in that it was just going to be a "fun action movie", so I was prepared for that. You know how I know? *BECAUSE THE TRAILERS MADE IT COMPLETELY FRICKING OBVIOUS* that it was going to be a straightforward action movie!
And I'm less sure about this, but: I think the main argument against it seems to be that they missed the "depth" of the first one. Except the second one had its own sort of depth, it just wasn't at all on the same subjects. The first one was full of this very interesting exploration of the meaning of reality. The second one didn't do this, becuase they'd already said everything they had to say on that subject (anyway, the entire second movie almost is spent in the Matrix, and they KNOW what the nature of reality is in the Matrix). The second one just tells a story, but arcing through that story is an also pretty interesting exploration of [mouseover for minor spoiler]. But a lot of people watched it *wanting* this to be an exploration of the nature of reality, and tried to interpret what depth there was as being depth about the nature of reality, from which viewpoint the plot movements seemed asinine and random, the philosophizing seemed irrelivant and trite, and the dialogue seems like bullshit shoehorned in so the movie would have "deep philosophical dialogue" in. But once you get the movie, it works really well. I think.
And it isn't like the ideas in the first one are the most brilliant, original things ever. It was just that the way they were *presented* was brilliant. In a way, the first movie was just an action movie with Plato's Cave as the star. The second movie was just an action movie with [mouseover for MAJOR spoiler] as the star.
(Note: I will acknowledge the second movie had a little bit of trouble getting its momentum started, and the beginning was a little disjointed, and I know that can ruin an entire movie for some people. But I think it redeemed itself pretty quickly..)
It should be interesting to see how these effect the storage market and the film industry. Imagine a game that requires a CD that expires in 48 hours.
..
Hmm.. When I first read that, I misinterpreted your mention of the "film industry" to mean they'd use this as a plot point.
NEXT SUMMER.. IT'S JAMES BOND.. IN A RACE AGAINST TIME!
[M] James Bond, we need you to get this DVD to a scientist held prisoner in a North Korean jail!
[James Bond] Sounds too easy. What's the catch?
[M] You only have 48 hours-- before the DVD's copy-protection makes it disintegrate!
And of course james bond slams the dvd into the north korean prisoner's imac with 5 seconds left before the disk oxidizes or whatever, after which we get to see a tense moment while COPYING FILE appears on screen and a progress bar tries to outrun the dying DVD while the seconds tick down... will it be copied in time?
Find out, in
007: JAMES SCREWS SOME CHICKS AND THINGS BLOW UP
[[ This film is not yet rated ]]
Um... maybe Trinity thought that it was just an exclamation, and wondered what it was in reference to?
Yes, that is why I am saying it is pseudoambiguous whether she's responding as if addressed or not, and that it could just be a coincidence. However, the point is that it happens *every* time, and it is always Trinity and only Trinity who responds, never anyone else. This implies it is meant to be a subtle joke on the screenwriter's part.
Every time that someone says "God" in the movie, Trinity (if she is present) responds as if she was being addressed. This happens at least twice.
Whether she is actually responding is always left kind of pseudoambiguous:But, while it could be coincidence, I'm guessing that it just means that Trinity has a healthy amount of self-esteem. If you were a leather-clad female trapped in a hovercraft with a bunch of antisocial geeks, you'd probably start to think you were God too.
Currently I put everything from china into my SPAM-folder and by golly, I'll just blacklist every country that doesn't have anti-SPAM laws.
The interesting thing is this: let's say that the U.S. and EU do both ban spam, and all the spam is coming from outside the U.S. and EU. A *lot* of people will react the same way you do.
That is to say, we'll suddenly see a lot more careless e-mail blocks being placed on large swaths of entire countries, some by individuals, and most likely often by ISPs. We already see a LOT of huge e-mail blocks being done by ISPs, especially AOL, without much concern for collateral damage; it isn't inconcievable that a number of random ISPs might just look at their statistics and shortsightedly go, hmm, 90% of our spam comes from (for example) Indonesia, who is going to be talking to people in Indonesia anyway, i'll just block the whole country (or maybe just most of their IP space).
Once this starts happening, internet users and businesses in (for example) Indonesia are suddenly going to start discovering that they are having trouble communicating with the U.S., and this is because of spammers in their country. I find it likely that if this happens, their response will be to complain to their government to do something about the spammers that are making the americans block them... until one day, spam is illegal in indonesia as well, and shortsighted ISPs in indonesia are going, hey, all my spam's coming from Myanmar, why don't i just block e-mail from there..
So if the US or EU ever adopted real antispam laws, it could start a big domino effect that would cause a lot of other countries to adopt antispam laws as well.
I didn't read the 'preview' very clearly before i posted. I'm tired. Sorry. Missing from my post which i am replying to is this point, which you may have worked out on your own:
Clearly, we want to find a way to illegalize the actions of the herbal viagra salesmen in situation 2 without illegalizing the actions of Joe in situation 1. Would this directive actually achieve that?
- Bill writes an angry diatribe on slashdot.org. In Bill's user profile is a link to his website, which contains his e-mail address. Joe comes across slashdot and, offended by the diatribe, writes an angry flame in disagreement and e-mails it to Bill. Bill gets upset by this and sues Joe for sending an "unsolicited e-mail".
- Bill writes an angry diatrabe on slashdot.org. In Bill's user profile is a link to his website, which contains his e-mail address. HARVESTER-BOT 3.0 comes across slashdot and, blindly following links, adds Bill's e-mail address to the database of a small business, which then e-mails Bill with an offer for herbal viagra. Bill gets upset by this and sues the business for sending an "unsolicited e-mail".
Seriously, are they actually going to try to put up this directive with no reference to "mass" or "commercial" and without any exceptions, or is this article just poorly written? What about exceptions for, like, accidentally mispelled e-mail addresses? I know that it's highly unlikely people would use the law for that reason, but writing excessively vague laws leads to big problems, as anyone following the DMCA has found.And how would this directive work in the case of some 'business' which gets some bullshit, but legal, excuse for the idea that Bill has entered into a business relationship with it, and then sends Bill spam forever without a clear sign of how to remove himself from their lists? Is there a link to the directive's actual text? Anywhere?
Outlaw portable mp3 players, and only outlaws will have portable mp3 players inside the ammunition clips of their AK-47s.
Looks like a press release in sheeps clothing to me.
It isn't a press release. It's a leak. Notice they don't say "apple" said anything, they said "sources". Their information is so scanty because probably all they have to work with is a small number of sketchy reports from apple employees, probably speaking anonymously, probably terrified of losing their jobs if they reveal so much the information somehow identifies them.
Or, maybe, it's just some guy from Wisconsin playing a prank. I know personally people who are not apple employees who have sent in e-mail from hotmail accounts to MacOSRumors.com claiming to be Apple Employees with top secret information, then just lying through their teeth for a page or so. These e-mails actually got reprinted on MacOSRumors and presented as some kind of huge scoop.
Where's the screenshots?
If they *had* screenshots, and they put them up, Apple Legal would be sending them a cease and desist within a couple of hours. Apple is VERY consistent about demanding any leaked screenshots of unreleased products be removed immediately, and threatening legal action if not. A site like EWeek probably wouldn't want to even bother with putting the screenshots online given they'd only be up for an hour or so and they'd have to get big scary c&d orders.
If you want *real* information, just wait a month. Apple will be actually not only *DEMOING* Panther at the WWDC conference, but they will begin at the same time to send out betas to developers..
Of this cold-war-era thing.
I didn't mean anything by it, it was just a half-joking reference to an old slashdot article that i can no longer find on that subject.
[the following contains a minor Matrix spoiler]
This brings up an interesting thought: Why the hell are the machines allowing the Earth's atmosphere to be breathable? Since it would seem the humans' "scorching of the skies" killed off all conventional life on earth other than the humans and the machines, and the machines don't need oxygen, and the only humans that the machines need alive are incased in liquid, couldn't the machines just win a huge victory by unexpectedly flooding the earth's atmosphere with something unbreathable?
Then again, maybe that is exactly what the machines did? We never see any humans go outside during the Matrix, and the only human city is underground. There's that bit at the end where the Nebucannazar (sp?) gets cut open, but we don't see what happens after the EMP blast; maybe the instant the squiddies are dead, the remaining living humans on the hovercraft have to go running for the oxygen masks.
Some thoughts on the whole idea that keeping a bunch of humans alive to use them as an energy source doesn't make any sense, becuase conservation of energy demands you'd put more energy into keeping the humans alive than you could get out:
Question: Isn't it true that a nuclear fusion reaction, if you can figure out how to make one, takes an absolutely fantastic amount of energy to initiate and maintain? I know nothing about nuclear physics, but what i've read seems to indicate that the point of fusion is that you put a fantastic amount of energy in and you get a fantastic amount of energy back. The problem so far is that no one has figured out how to get out more energy than you put in.
So wouldn't it be logical to say that the huge mass of humans *are*, in fact, a net energy drain because energy is needed to create whatever protein the humans use for IV foodstuffs, but they are needed and maintained becuase they can at any time desired be used briefly as a massive source to pull energy from? Note that Morpheus doesn't say that humans are used as generators; he says they're used as batteries. Wouldn't it make sense to suppose that perhaps the human race encased in the Matrix is just there in case the sustained fusion reaction the machines are actually using to generate their power ever goes out and has to be restarted, or in case the machines need to start up a new reactor? Meaning basically, the Matrix is nothing more than a giant UPS? Does this make any sense at all?
None of this, of course, explains why the machines, given a level of technology that would make it possible to build both Zion and the Matrix, wouldn't just harness tidal energy as a power source! Did the americans finally blow up the moon or something?
Anyway, as far as the article's parallell processing thing goes, that seems really silly to me. If the machines have figured out how to use human brains as processors, wouldn't they build the machines themselves using human brains as processors to run the AIs on? You could claim "how do you know they aren't", but i'll tell you how i know they aren't: if they can control biological material to that extent, then they can make machines that the EMP blasts are useless against. I do, however, really like the article author's insinuation that Morpheus actually has no idea what the Matrix is for, and erroneously believes it's a power plant.
(One totally non-power-related possibility of what the Matrix could be used for: possibly the machines really just don't like the idea of making the human race extinct. They don't want the humans running around in the real world and working against the machines' designs, but they're for whatever reason not okay with just wiping the humans out; maybe they don't actually hate the humans, they just don't want the humans to be a threat. Maybe the Matrix is just a means of preservation of the human race, one that the machines get nothing positive out of except as a memento of their creators. (Hitler's original plans for the holocaust apparently stated, after everything was done, the world was conquered, and the holocaust was complete, that one single village of Jews should be left alive, sealed off from the outside world, and allowed to simply live on their lives. In Hitler's warped mind this was supposed to be some kind of preserved-in-amber cultural museum of a dead race, just so future aryan generations could know they existed. I cannot remember the exact details of this and may be partially misremembering it in that there wouldn't actually be any living people in this preserved-in-amber village. Does anyone know what i'm referring to? Anyway, possibly the Matrix is something of that sort.). Or, possibly, the machines actually believe they are working in the humans service and they put the humans into the matrix "for their own good", as some kind of highly warped overzealous implementation of Asimov's zeroth law, on the logic if the humans are trapped in a digital fantasyworld, if they knock themselves out with nuclear holoca
Yeah, i know.
Fortunately, at Nintendo, all our franchises are developed in house, so we've no real risk of such publically embarassing spats.
So what's up with HAL (the Smash Brothers / Earthbound people?) are they an owned subsidiary of Nintendo or what? Or does nintendo just have an unlimited license to use their IP?
Also, what's up with the Rare IP? Microsoft owns Rare now, or whatever, but Smash Brothers Melee, a current product, still contains characters and situations from StarFox. Who owns the StarFox characters? And i assume nintendo still owns all the donkey kong IP, even though SSBM clearly uses lots of the Rare DK Country character models?
Also, i could have sworn that Ice Climber was originally made by someone other than Nintendo, but now everywhere says Nintendo owns the copyright on it. Did i just hallucinate that? And how do you unlock Ice Climber in Animal Crossing short of buying an Action Replay, dammit?
What's up with all that?
it would be cool to see what could be done with this genre using today's technology and wizardry
Actually, since you asked.. have you heard of Ikaruga? It's supposed to be one of the greatest shooter games of all time, as well as one of the most challenging, and it's just been retooled graphically and otherwise for the Gamecube and rereleased (It was originally a dreamcast game).
Also, despite being a 2d topdown shooter, it supposedly has an absolutely fantastic storyline and pushes the gamecube to somewhere near its technical limit. I haven't played it or seen screenshots, and i don't really plan on playing it, as i wasn't a huge shooter fan, but i've heard nothing but nonstop spooging about it for the last month. Apparently this game is just targed specifically at everyone who misses fun little space shooter games, and manages to hit some kind of pinnacle for the genre.
(I like my gamecube. It's nice to have a machine that seems to be specifically designed to target "everyone who thought video games were better before the invention of the CD-ROM". ^_^)
Most of the flaws in the article don't sound like REAL flaws to me, but rather misinterpretation of what the system is supposed to do.. This is a remote desktop for home users, not an Ellison-like "Network Computer" for the business enviornment
Which of these "business environment" problems aren't also problems for the end user? Let's look at the problems Xeno mentions:
It requires an upgrade to XP Pro. This is just as likely to be a problem for a home user as a business user, with the difference that a home user won't have the company sysadmin available to deal with the Win98->WinXP upgrade if they aren't using XP Home already.
It has the bug with accidentally picking up the wrong wireless network. Well, this isn't going to be a problem for *many* home users, but if you live in an apartment building, there's a nontrivial chance you will be in the range of other wireless networks. I for one live in a college dorm, and i'm fricking surrounded by wireless networks. Home users don't have the problem with a non-security-consious automatic wireless network setup bugging their sysadmin, of course, but they do have the problem that they don't have a sysadmin there to spot any accidental problems in their security setup. (I'm not sure if this last bit is a problem)
And then there's the whole idiotic bit with refusing to allow someone to use the computer just becuase someone's using Terminal Server to a remote display. This is just asinine, and it's as much a problem in the home as in the business environment, moreso because in the business environment everyone is likely to have been given their own computer. In the home environment, you have the whole problem of.. "Hey mom, i'm going to check cnn real quick.. oh, i guess you're already using the tablet". NC or no, if you're paying $1000 for a remote display, which is more than many computers nowadays, i think it seems reasonable to expect you should be *allowed* if you so desire to treat it as a separate computer from the thing it's attatched to, given the limitation is clearly a policy decision within MS and not any kind of technical limitation!
Now given, i think the article was too harsh just because except for the no-multiple-users issue and the price, none of the problems they mention are (to my mind anyway) bad enough to prevent someone from buying the product. (In fact, other than that problem, i think this product is pretty cool, and i'm annoyed nothing of this sort is available for my platform of choice (BRING BACK NXHOST GRR).) However, i think their critisisms were dead-on, and even if they weren't as big a deal as they made them out to be, they definitely seem to be real issues and not a result of trying to assume a home product is a business NC.
No?
The choice of red for the PC is interesting in that it draws your eye to it. I downloaded one of the graph and switched the colors of the bars. Then on first glance the eye is drawn to the Mac and your first thought is that it won whatever the test was about.
Um.. but the mac didn't win what the test was about. It lost.
If they really wanted to show info rather than a predetermined conclusion they would have done both bars in the same color.
You know, i'm going to go out on a limb here and say that maybe they made the graphs after they ran the tests, at which point, their "predetermined conclusion" would have been kind of been moot.
Which would lead me to suspect that maybe they chose to color the Windows bar red because windows won the test. Um.. i mean, it sounds reasonable to pick the color that draws your eye for the successful data, right? It's like a "lookit! this one is the important one!" flag, since you wouldn't otherwise have any indication on first glance whether short or long bars are better.
And what jpeg artifacts do you refer to?
The link doesn't say anything about Adobe preferring one platform over another, in the slightest. It's just some graphs indicating that PCs as a class perform better than macintoshes, which is something that i don't think anyone is denying at this point.
While that kind of does seem like an endorsement of the PC on adobe's part, it also is just good business sense to explain to your customers what hardware your software runs best on.
Speed at raw data-crunching is just one of the factors in which computing platform you are going to use, though if you're using AfterEffects or Photoshop or something it's going to be a much, much larger factor.
Just ask Kenner for the original plans for this thing, and build it at 2500:1 scale..
Okay, okay, it would be totally against the rules. But it would be really cool!
writing a bad article or book can happen, but slashdot pointing and drawing attention for such publication is just lame.
I've noticed that the just about all of the last four or five times that i've seen slashdot post a book review, someone has posted a comment complaining "why is it that all the book reviews on this site are always glowingly positive?"
Now, for once, Slashdot is posting a book review where the reviewer didn't actually like the book, and we have someone complaining about Slashdot posting a negative review. Wheeee..
This site is frequented by programmers, and some of them might have considered buying this book had they just run across it in a store. Now, they will think twice before buying it, and will have clear logical reasons for doing so. Slashdot has served its purpose here, it seems to me. What is it that bothers you about this, that Pete McBreen will have his self-esteem hurt?