What bothered me most is that he's still trying to tie everything into the Hellmouth series:
You're right! How did I miss that!?
He's basically saying, "you geeks were beat up in school for being good at math and bad at sports, but now you are a Shadowrunner! A renegade who lives by his wits and does battle with huge corporate empires. You are so cool."
He's attempting, once again, to stroke the ego of each and every one of us, hoping it will get us behind his crackpot notions of "corporatism vs. the Rest Of Us".
It's not free, it's just paid for with a different currency.
Heh. Yes, my favorite kind: somebody else's currency.:)
Seriously, if you are capable of ignoring advertisement (and most of us are these days), then what Tiger Woods wears on his hat is completely irrelevent to you.
Logo advertising and "branding" ads, from the Mickey Mouse shadow to last year's Gap ads featuring Luscious Jackson, are not made to sell us their stuff. Pepsi and Coke are two of the biggest advertisers out there, but their ads don't ever get anybody to switch colas... people still drink the one they like. The real reason for these ads is to raise stock value. If a company seems to be omnipresent, investors get a warm, fuzzy feeling about buying shares in them.
Nike is fully aware that you will not buy their shoes just to "be like Mike". A few suckers, maybe, but not most of us. Most people buy athletic gear based on things like comfort, fit, durability, and looks. "Can I work out in these and not get blisters?" is the question that matters.
However, the myth of unwashed masses spending their lunch money on Air Jordans serves Nike very, very well. It creates the impression that they have a product that everybody is salavating for, which raises their market value.
The irony is that pundits who rant about Nike paying Jordan big bucks to rip people off serves Nike's purpose, too. Wall Street types see these rants and say, "wow! Nike is selling $2.50 sneakers to every ghetto kid in America for $175 a pop and getting away with it because everybody loves Michael Jordan... I gotta get in on that action!"
Any actual sales generated by a branding campaign are just icing on the cake.
It's jarring to come across this increasingly plausible vision of the future.
Coffee | Nose > Keyboard
What is really jarring is seeing a professional journalist have the same epiphany that most of us had when we were twelve... and outgrew when we were thirteen.
Shadowrun was a derivative work, and a crappy one at that, which attempted to merge the two most popular role-playing genres, cyperpunk and magical fantasy. It reminds me of a review that Ben Johnson once gave a play he didn't like: "I found it good and original, but what was good was not original, and what was original was not good."
By the way, does anybody else find it amusing that this article is coming out two days after a Federal judge ordered the break-up of what was the world's biggest and richest corporation as recently as last year? I mean, if not even MSFT is above the law, who is?
Something tells me he wrote this entire rant^H^H^H^Hpuff piece in one sitting a couple months ago, and has been releasing it in chunks.
By the way, if Shadowrun is really the future, I wanna be a street shaman. Heh heh. That would be cool.
He-he! What fun sales calls will be for Red Hat, Sun, and Apple vendors:
"Hmmm... Well, you can go with Microsoft products if you really want to bet your job on it, but they probably won't even exist as the same company in a couple years."
"Are you sure you can count on continued support for this product after the break-up?"
"You should really consider going with a company that has a more stable future, otherwise you could be really screwed."
"MS-SQL on NT? Are you sure you want to gamble on a single vendor like Microsoft? With Oracle on UNIX, you have several OS vendors to choose from. Also, NT and SQL will be split apart in a year or two! Who will inherit your support contract?"
We can all hoist them on their own pitard. This will be hilarious.:)
You are right. Microsoft only had to let go of Xenix because their monopoly status, which will no longer be an issue. They can finally migrate to an operating system that Bill Gates has surely wished he could play with for a long time.
However, unless you are the CEO of Corel or Red Hat, you can only see the arival of "BalmerSoft GNU/Linux" and "BG-Office for Linux" to be a Good Thing.
Now we will see if open source and/or free software can really compete with closed source empires, based on merits alone.
My guess is that both baby-Bills will be big players in their markets, but not the only players, and might actually have to innovate for a change in order to stay afloat.
Clerks is an example of what your Lit. Prof. would call a "Man vs. Self" conflict.
Dante lives a life he is not happy with, but he has grown accustomed to feeling sorry for himself, and does nothing to break away from the security his drab existence offers.
Randle is mostly there to vocalize Datne's thoughts. The inner voice that expresses his desires: to take life less seriously, to stand up for himself, and (most of all) to simply escape. Almost every time he does anything he enjoys, it was Randle that prodded him into it. At the climax of the film, he wrestles with Randle, like Jacob wrestling the angel, while coming to terms with his own restless soul.
His girlfriend is a symbol of the ideal life that he fears moving towards. She wants him to go to school and build a future for himself. When given an opportunity to reject her (via a discussion of her torid past, a theme that Smith ressurects in Chasing Amy), he takes it. Not because of the "betrayal" itself, but out of fear of committing to his new life.
The old flame might represent the vices we turn to when we want to avoid reality.
Jay and Silent Bob are there for pacing... they basically are the Rosencratz and Guildenstern of this film. (I knew I could work in a Shakespear reference!)
What makes Clerks such a great film is that you don't really have to be conciously aware of any of this deconstruction babble to enjoy the movie. You can just sit back and laugh at Dante's sad, sad life (...and the creepy story about how Randle's friend broke his own neck.)
He was modded up as funny, but I think he may be on to something. A bunch of geeks staying up all night drinking bad coffee could probably come up with something better than the current system by the time the waitress comes by with their Grand Slam breakfasts.
I'm pretty sure there's a lesson in there somewhere that international committees should be listening to.
Sure, lazy people have no business forming an anarchist community and expecting anything out of it.
That summarized my point far better than anything I said previously. Anarchy does not work when applied to lazy people, but there are lazy people in the world, and any anarchist community is bound to attract them.
By way of demonstration, a lot of Linux users do complain without offering to help out. They flame in the newsgroups of scream at Red Hat support, but have no intention of even reading the source, let alone improving it.
I've never seen a better outline of what makes Katz a bad writer.
Freshman papers! Until you said it, I could not put my finger on where I had seen his style before. Brilliant!
You are also dead-on that Katz does not seem to have a clear idea of who his audience is (which is kind of disturbing in an interactive forum). This is a web page by geeks, of geeks, and for geeks. We don't need a writer to tell us that computer games are sometimes interesting, or that computers change lives. We are up to our eyeballs all week long in the technical trends he writes about. We want our writers to tell us something new.
(BTW: This is not meant a flame, just honest criticism. Being a bad writer does not neccessarilly mean he's a bad journalist. I don't think any other reporter in the country would have, or even could have, written anything like the Hellmouth series.)
Don't bother buying this paperback. I can summarize it and every literary "futurist" book about the "computer revolution" for you in a fraction of the space. All you need to do is define your variables, and it boils down to this:
I think that $CURRENT_TREND is forcing us to re-examine our entire culture.
With my vast imagination, I predict a time when these developments could lead to $OBVIOUS_APPLICATION.
Other clueless liberal-arts majors in my field scoff at the notion, because they don't "get it" like I do.
Technical experts tell me that all this is currently impossible, but that will all change once $FAR_OFF_BREAKTHROUGH happens, and we should be ready.
I have no idea what it will take to make this a reality, but that's because I'm a big-picture person, not a detail person.
You geeks, who clearly never would have thought of this without me, should all get behind my vision so we can make $OBVIOUS_APPLICATION happen someday.
1. You need a job to live. False. Convicts, for example, live without jobs.
Most jobs require a collegiate level of education. Also false. Most jobs do not require a degree, and it's a good thing they don't, because most Americans don't go to college, and many of those that do fail to graduate.
That education is difficult to obtain. False. Both Dan Quale and David Letterman hold degrees from Ball State University in Indiana. 'Nuff Said.
Therefore most of the jobs that people have are required to have people who are intelligent. False. I can prove it in three letters: D M V:)
Most people are intelligent. Flase. Most people are of normal intelligence. That's what makes it normal. QED
Right, because we need to create incentive to get people to go along with being happy, where as they contribute to society's well-being by natural inclination... Er... I'm pretty sure that is backward.
so what you're saying is that fascism is better because it's more productive than anarchism?
No, what I'm saying is capitalism is viable because it rewards productivity, and anarchism is not because it does not.
Fascism did not enter into the discussion, unless you consider all ownership of property to be "fascist", in which case I guess there is little point in continuing the debate.
Not voting just tell the politician than you are no better than a OG thug ridin' in a hooptie smacking you bitchez smokin' a blunt drinking a 40 and pouring some for the dead hommiez living in the ghetto.
Um... gross stereotypes aside, are you implying that urban black folk don't vote!? I would be willing to bet than "OG thug" is more likely to vote then the typical/. geek these days, which is why Gore and Bradley debated at the Apollo instead of on a forum like Slashdot.
I think that's the whole point of why anarchy is a doomed philosophy.
Hypothetical: You are establishing an anarchist state. I live in it. I have 10 houses and a farm, and like it that way. If you try to move in, you will be shot by me or a member of my familily. You can't have anarchy as long as I am around with this attitude, and you can't get rid of me without violence, which invalidates your anarchist philosophy.
You can't coexist with me very well, either, because I will out-produce your society, making us even richer compared to you: The people on my compound must work hard for our keep; while some people in your community will simply live in available houses and eat available food, with no incentive to struggle. Soon, the more outgoing members of your society will notice how we are living in better conditions due to our relative prosperity, and decide to "sell out".
I hope you are right, but in the mean-time, the hype of "pushing the envelope" could end up forcing a lot of small-town theaters out of business, if "digital only" becomes a reality before the hardware is cheap enough.
I love Apple. My G3 probably sees more use than all my other systems combines (especially now that I have a Linux dual boot on it). I also really enjoyed the Toy Story movie.
I'm just baffled why people think that a digital cartoon is a good litmus of whether digital film projection can replace film.
Show me something along the lines of "Lawrence of Arabia" on a digital prjector, and we will have something to discuss. Until then, all you are saying is that computers are good at rendering computer-generated images. Do you follow what I'm trying to get across here?
Star Wars TPM: Actual footage blended with digital FX at photographic quality.
Toy Story 2: A cartoon that was originally intended to be produced for a strait-to-video release.
_Of course_ TS2 looked perfect in digital! It was a perfect reproduction of a digital cartoon.
In TPM, the grass on the battlefield had to look like grass, not cartoon grass, real grass. You noticed the digital artifacts because you were actually looking at what was supposed to be an image of something. When watching the Toy Story movies, you _know_ you are watching computer animation, so your expectations are lower. Sheesh!
I know for a while when I was selling CD players, most of the audio guys really didn't like the sound. Not rich enough.
To the true "golden ears", the 80's era CD players did sound pretty bad, and it was assumed at the time that this was because of the poorly chosen sample rate of 44.1.
As it turns out, crappy D/A conversion was responsible for most of the problems with the "digital sound" of early CD players. (Although, yes, they did sound better than the mass-produced cassette tapes that kids were buying back then.)
These days, you can buy a Rotel CD player for about $350 that even really picky audiophiles will be happy with... but don't tell them they have to let go of their turntable any time soon.
Anyone who says records are inferior has not listened to a Scheffield Labs album on a good system. They are comparing their CD boom box to their old Mickey Mouse portable record player.
I've seen the difference WITH MY OWN EYES between an analog film print and a digital projection OF THE SAME MOVIE.
Yes, I was fortunate enough to live near one of the theaters that was showing Toy Story 2 digitally. I saw it on a standard film projection screen first, and saw the digital version a week or so later...
So, what you are saying is that digital projection is a better format for showing digital cartoons.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right! How did I miss that!?
He's basically saying, "you geeks were beat up in school for being good at math and bad at sports, but now you are a Shadowrunner! A renegade who lives by his wits and does battle with huge corporate empires. You are so cool."
He's attempting, once again, to stroke the ego of each and every one of us, hoping it will get us behind his crackpot notions of "corporatism vs. the Rest Of Us".
Yellow card for you, Jon. You're busted.
Heh. Yes, my favorite kind: somebody else's currency. :)
Seriously, if you are capable of ignoring advertisement (and most of us are these days), then what Tiger Woods wears on his hat is completely irrelevent to you.
Logo advertising and "branding" ads, from the Mickey Mouse shadow to last year's Gap ads featuring Luscious Jackson, are not made to sell us their stuff. Pepsi and Coke are two of the biggest advertisers out there, but their ads don't ever get anybody to switch colas... people still drink the one they like. The real reason for these ads is to raise stock value. If a company seems to be omnipresent, investors get a warm, fuzzy feeling about buying shares in them.
Nike is fully aware that you will not buy their shoes just to "be like Mike". A few suckers, maybe, but not most of us. Most people buy athletic gear based on things like comfort, fit, durability, and looks. "Can I work out in these and not get blisters?" is the question that matters.
However, the myth of unwashed masses spending their lunch money on Air Jordans serves Nike very, very well. It creates the impression that they have a product that everybody is salavating for, which raises their market value.
The irony is that pundits who rant about Nike paying Jordan big bucks to rip people off serves Nike's purpose, too. Wall Street types see these rants and say, "wow! Nike is selling $2.50 sneakers to every ghetto kid in America for $175 a pop and getting away with it because everybody loves Michael Jordan... I gotta get in on that action!"
Any actual sales generated by a branding campaign are just icing on the cake.
Coffee | Nose > Keyboard
What is really jarring is seeing a professional journalist have the same epiphany that most of us had when we were twelve... and outgrew when we were thirteen.
Shadowrun was a derivative work, and a crappy one at that, which attempted to merge the two most popular role-playing genres, cyperpunk and magical fantasy. It reminds me of a review that Ben Johnson once gave a play he didn't like: "I found it good and original, but what was good was not original, and what was original was not good."
By the way, does anybody else find it amusing that this article is coming out two days after a Federal judge ordered the break-up of what was the world's biggest and richest corporation as recently as last year? I mean, if not even MSFT is above the law, who is?
Something tells me he wrote this entire rant^H^H^H^Hpuff piece in one sitting a couple months ago, and has been releasing it in chunks.
By the way, if Shadowrun is really the future, I wanna be a street shaman. Heh heh. That would be cool.
"Hmmm... Well, you can go with Microsoft products if you really want to bet your job on it, but they probably won't even exist as the same company in a couple years."
"Are you sure you can count on continued support for this product after the break-up?"
"You should really consider going with a company that has a more stable future, otherwise you could be really screwed."
"MS-SQL on NT? Are you sure you want to gamble on a single vendor like Microsoft? With Oracle on UNIX, you have several OS vendors to choose from. Also, NT and SQL will be split apart in a year or two! Who will inherit your support contract?"
We can all hoist them on their own pitard. This will be hilarious. :)
Whatever you call it, I just want to stand up in my cube and sing "Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead" over and over. :)
However, unless you are the CEO of Corel or Red Hat, you can only see the arival of "BalmerSoft GNU/Linux" and "BG-Office for Linux" to be a Good Thing.
Now we will see if open source and/or free software can really compete with closed source empires, based on merits alone.
My guess is that both baby-Bills will be big players in their markets, but not the only players, and might actually have to innovate for a change in order to stay afloat.
Dante lives a life he is not happy with, but he has grown accustomed to feeling sorry for himself, and does nothing to break away from the security his drab existence offers.
Randle is mostly there to vocalize Datne's thoughts. The inner voice that expresses his desires: to take life less seriously, to stand up for himself, and (most of all) to simply escape. Almost every time he does anything he enjoys, it was Randle that prodded him into it. At the climax of the film, he wrestles with Randle, like Jacob wrestling the angel, while coming to terms with his own restless soul.
His girlfriend is a symbol of the ideal life that he fears moving towards. She wants him to go to school and build a future for himself. When given an opportunity to reject her (via a discussion of her torid past, a theme that Smith ressurects in Chasing Amy), he takes it. Not because of the "betrayal" itself, but out of fear of committing to his new life.
The old flame might represent the vices we turn to when we want to avoid reality.
Jay and Silent Bob are there for pacing... they basically are the Rosencratz and Guildenstern of this film. (I knew I could work in a Shakespear reference!)
What makes Clerks such a great film is that you don't really have to be conciously aware of any of this deconstruction babble to enjoy the movie. You can just sit back and laugh at Dante's sad, sad life (...and the creepy story about how Randle's friend broke his own neck.)
- Jeremy S. Anderson
Google can find anything. :)
Hmmm... Joss Whedon. Now *that* could be a fun /. interview... :)
You say that as if it was a bad thing.
I think "disaster" is perhaps the wrong word.
I'm pretty sure there's a lesson in there somewhere that international committees should be listening to.
That summarized my point far better than anything I said previously. Anarchy does not work when applied to lazy people, but there are lazy people in the world, and any anarchist community is bound to attract them.
By way of demonstration, a lot of Linux users do complain without offering to help out. They flame in the newsgroups of scream at Red Hat support, but have no intention of even reading the source, let alone improving it.
I've never seen a better outline of what makes Katz a bad writer.
Freshman papers! Until you said it, I could not put my finger on where I had seen his style before. Brilliant!
You are also dead-on that Katz does not seem to have a clear idea of who his audience is (which is kind of disturbing in an interactive forum). This is a web page by geeks, of geeks, and for geeks. We don't need a writer to tell us that computer games are sometimes interesting, or that computers change lives. We are up to our eyeballs all week long in the technical trends he writes about. We want our writers to tell us something new.
(BTW: This is not meant a flame, just honest criticism. Being a bad writer does not neccessarilly mean he's a bad journalist. I don't think any other reporter in the country would have, or even could have, written anything like the Hellmouth series.)
I think that $CURRENT_TREND is forcing us to re-examine our entire culture.
With my vast imagination, I predict a time when these developments could lead to $OBVIOUS_APPLICATION.
Other clueless liberal-arts majors in my field scoff at the notion, because they don't "get it" like I do.
Technical experts tell me that all this is currently impossible, but that will all change once $FAR_OFF_BREAKTHROUGH happens, and we should be ready.
I have no idea what it will take to make this a reality, but that's because I'm a big-picture person, not a detail person.
You geeks, who clearly never would have thought of this without me, should all get behind my vision so we can make $OBVIOUS_APPLICATION happen someday.
Most jobs require a collegiate level of education. Also false. Most jobs do not require a degree, and it's a good thing they don't, because most Americans don't go to college, and many of those that do fail to graduate.
That education is difficult to obtain. False. Both Dan Quale and David Letterman hold degrees from Ball State University in Indiana. 'Nuff Said.
Therefore most of the jobs that people have are required to have people who are intelligent. False. I can prove it in three letters: D M V :)
Most people are intelligent. Flase. Most people are of normal intelligence. That's what makes it normal. QED
Right, because we need to create incentive to get people to go along with being happy, where as they contribute to society's well-being by natural inclination... Er... I'm pretty sure that is backward.
No, what I'm saying is capitalism is viable because it rewards productivity, and anarchism is not because it does not.
Fascism did not enter into the discussion, unless you consider all ownership of property to be "fascist", in which case I guess there is little point in continuing the debate.
Um... gross stereotypes aside, are you implying that urban black folk don't vote!? I would be willing to bet than "OG thug" is more likely to vote then the typical /. geek these days, which is why Gore and Bradley debated at the Apollo instead of on a forum like Slashdot.
Force == Coercion;
Coercion.new->heiriarchy;
Heirarchy != Anarchy.
I think that's the whole point of why anarchy is a doomed philosophy.
Hypothetical: You are establishing an anarchist state. I live in it. I have 10 houses and a farm, and like it that way. If you try to move in, you will be shot by me or a member of my familily. You can't have anarchy as long as I am around with this attitude, and you can't get rid of me without violence, which invalidates your anarchist philosophy.
You can't coexist with me very well, either, because I will out-produce your society, making us even richer compared to you: The people on my compound must work hard for our keep; while some people in your community will simply live in available houses and eat available food, with no incentive to struggle. Soon, the more outgoing members of your society will notice how we are living in better conditions due to our relative prosperity, and decide to "sell out".
Check and mate.
I hope you are right, but in the mean-time, the hype of "pushing the envelope" could end up forcing a lot of small-town theaters out of business, if "digital only" becomes a reality before the hardware is cheap enough.
I'm just baffled why people think that a digital cartoon is a good litmus of whether digital film projection can replace film.
Show me something along the lines of "Lawrence of Arabia" on a digital prjector, and we will have something to discuss. Until then, all you are saying is that computers are good at rendering computer-generated images. Do you follow what I'm trying to get across here?
Toy Story 2: A cartoon that was originally intended to be produced for a strait-to-video release.
_Of course_ TS2 looked perfect in digital! It was a perfect reproduction of a digital cartoon.
In TPM, the grass on the battlefield had to look like grass, not cartoon grass, real grass. You noticed the digital artifacts because you were actually looking at what was supposed to be an image of something. When watching the Toy Story movies, you _know_ you are watching computer animation, so your expectations are lower. Sheesh!
To the true "golden ears", the 80's era CD players did sound pretty bad, and it was assumed at the time that this was because of the poorly chosen sample rate of 44.1.
As it turns out, crappy D/A conversion was responsible for most of the problems with the "digital sound" of early CD players. (Although, yes, they did sound better than the mass-produced cassette tapes that kids were buying back then.)
These days, you can buy a Rotel CD player for about $350 that even really picky audiophiles will be happy with... but don't tell them they have to let go of their turntable any time soon.
Anyone who says records are inferior has not listened to a Scheffield Labs album on a good system. They are comparing their CD boom box to their old Mickey Mouse portable record player.
Yes, I was fortunate enough to live near one of the theaters that was showing Toy Story 2 digitally. I saw it on a standard film projection screen first, and saw the digital version a week or so later...
So, what you are saying is that digital projection is a better format for showing digital cartoons.
Not a very compelling argument.