"The late 70's" didn't change anything on its own. Sure, the technology was just barely becoming available, but Lucas showed how to use it, but more to the point, showed that there was an audience for what he delivered. That helped open the studios' pockets to other innovative filmmakers and productions.
I never said that the entire movie making world owes its new found self to Lucas -- there are plenty of innovations that he didn't play a part in -- but no student of the industry would deny that he and Star Wars caused some fundamental changes. Spielberg probably wouldn't have made CE3K, or ET (dang, Lucas has a lot to answer for!) the Indiana Jones movies wouldn't have happened, and Harrison Ford might have never got beyond the small part he played in American Graffiti.
We can play "what if" games all day, but to deny the impact of the first Star Wars movie (much less so the others, which were far less innovative -- although TESB was much better done) is being either silly or spiteful.
how did star wars change the movie industry forever?
Well, for starters, yes it did make sci-fi more acceptable. (Or rather, acceptable again.) The then-current media scene (TV and movies) was an SF wasteland, all the good (and even mediocre) shows and movies died with the death of the Apollo program.
Lucas also introduced some pretty amazing (for the time) technologies: motion-control cameras, for example. Previous levels of shot composition were done with relatively fixed, flat shots. Take a look at "2001" again and see how flat everything looks. There's no parallax shift as things move relative to each other, and the composite shots are pretty simple.
For the time, the effects were anything but "shitty", they were bleeding edge state of the art. (Well, except perhaps the detonation of Dantooine, that was lame.)
Editing (in terms of number of different scenes, cuts, etc) was also brought to a new level -- remember, back then it was still done with reels of film, a viewer, and a razor blade, none of this "digitize the whole thing and feed it into an Avid (or equiv) non-linear editing suite". (As I recall, it was Lucas' wife who did much of the editing.)
There are also indirect effects -- Lucas invested the money he made off the first "Star Wars" in, among other things, THX sound technologies and Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) FX studios. The latter made some significant contributions to the field computer graphics.
Yes, "Star Wars" (before it was ever called "A New Hope") changed the movie industry forever.
Sales tax is not VAT (value-added tax). Most places that have a sales tax, that tax is only collected at the retail, end-user point of sale. (And then often only on certain things, certain essentials like food may be excluded). Even at a retail store, if you're buying something for resale (and can show a valid sales tax permit) you don't have to pay the sales tax on it.
Many implementations of VAT, on the other hand, add that tax at every step in the process whenever money changes hands (raw materials to manufacturer, manufacturer to wholesaler, wholesaler to retailer, etc.), according to the "value added".
In the US, there may be multiple levels of sales tax -- a statewide tax, and then various county and/or municipal sales taxes. (Plus special tax districts where the extra 1/10% or whatever is designated for a specific use -- stadium tax district, regional transportation tax district, etc.)
Not only that, but you have to pay sales tax (in jurisdictions where that's an issue, there may still be one or two places on the planet that don't have it) on the full retail price. You don't get a rebate of the tax you paid on the difference between the retail and the after-rebate price, so you've paid more sales tax than you would have if the store just offered the item at the lower price in the first place.
Mind, if it's a store rebate rather than a manufacturer rebate, the store itself may be pocketing the difference between the sales tax they collect and the tax they pay on the reported sales. That's almost certainly illegal at least in spirit, but fancy accounting may meet the letter of the law.
Yeah, but there are ways around the "have to be advertised as".
Look at the CompUSA or BestBuy or OfficeMax ads in any Sunday paper. They'd advertise it as $100* in big bold 30-pt letters (slash won't let me change font size). Then in teeny tiny 6-pt letters they'd have (* after $50 mail-in rebate, retail $150).
Sure, technically all the information is there, but you have to read the fine print, which is annoying.
As a data point, DVD sets of TV series run about $2 to $3 per episode. Maybe $4 to $5 per episode for some way overpriced (*cough* Star Trek *cough*) series, but I won't pay that. That's for a 45-minute episode (an hour when aired with commercials).
That's why you test it on a sample file (or a few feet of film) first.
Years (decades) ago, fresh out of school, I had to write a program to compare data sets representing overlapping geographic areas, this written in Basic-Plus on a PDP-11/70 under RSTS/E. My boss, somewhat wary of newbies with their heads stuffed full of theory with no practical application, said "don't worry about fancy algorithms or efficiency, just get it written quickly". Fair enough, so I did. Then ran it on a small sample of the data. It took hours. I extrapolated to the how many files and records we had in total -- it would take forty days of run time. My boss said "okay, go ahead and optimize it".
(I did, mostly by putting the two files being compared on separate drives, and the "virtual array" the program used (a Basic Plus thing) on the third drive. Got the total run-time down to about twenty hours.)
Why is it that religious intolerance is somehow more acceptable in our society than racial intollerance?
You can choose your religion, you can't choose your race.
In general people tend to be less tolerant of others' choices (with which they disagree) than of conditions the other has no control over. This is why so many groups -- from gays to the obese -- tend to insist that their condition is genetic rather than behavioural.
Of course they're sending a "thinking is bad" message. If the advertisers don't get some return on their advertising bucks (read, "if the folks watching the shows don't mindlessly go buy more of whatever the advertisers are selling, whether they need it or not"), they'll stop advertising. No advertising revenue, no big salaries for TV execs.
(Commercial, non-subscription) TV is about selling consumers to advertisers. Anything else is a side-effect.
I rarely watch broadcast TV anymore. I do buy the boxed sets of DVDs of shows that I like, or think I will. (If the price is reasonable -- the various Trek episodes aren't.) I bought "Firefly" sight unseen because I'd heard good things and the price was right.
Perhaps high quality shows will go to a subscription model, maybe on cable first and then DVD. Some shows have already released freebie DVDs of an episode (typically the pilot) to drum up interest.
Linus isn't running the show. He's not paying anybody, he can't fire anybody, he can't make anybody drop one project or idea to work on another.
He can direct some developers to do something and they can tell him to take a hike, or they can do it because they think it's a good idea.
More often, though, there are just many ideas (patches, development threads, what have you) to choose from and Linus "rules" by choosing which goes into his kernel.
The cathedral is about direction. That isn't what Linus does -- he just selects what is best from what the bazaar has produced.
(Sure, he may also make suggestions and remarks that indicate what his selection criteria are, and that may in turn influence kernel developers, but that doesn't prevent someone from coming up with an even better idea that Linus hadn't considered before and changing Linus's mind. That doesn't happen in a cathedral -- do you think some workmen with a brilliant but different idea for St. Paul's would have been paid attention to by Christopher Wren?)
As a general rule, if you're seeing any paging, adding RAM will speed things up. The exception would be something that is really CPU bound. Are you seeing high load factors? (Ie, several times the number of processors you have.)
How about solving problems of radioactive waste disposal,
Well, the problems of radiaoactive waste disposal are much simpler to solve from nuclear power stations than they are from coal-fired power stations -- and nobody is doing much about the latter.
The energy content of the fissionables in coal (mostly thorium) is higher than that of the combustibles -- and if coal-fired plants had to meet Nuclear Regulatory Commission limits on radioactive emmissions (they aren't), they'd all have to be shut down.
I know, you didn't say anything about coal, I'm just pointing out how small the nuclear reactor waste problem really is compared to risks from current power production methods than nobody is complaining about.
I'll have to dig my old 1540/41 out and throw a scope on it. (It started out as a 1540, I bought a firmware upgrade ROM (no EEPROM in those days) to make it a 1541 -- the 1540 was a bit flakey with the C64). I'd swear it has a 6502B in it, and while it's possible they used the faster -- and higher priced -- part in it because they were short on 6502s, I'm fairly sure it was running a higher clock speed.
The brain adapts surprisingly well -- a very short training sequence ("this is left, this is up, this is behind" etc) will do.
I've heard a recording of a moving sound source made with microphones inserted into somebody else's ears, also with microphones in a head-and-shoulders dummy's ears. Amazingly easy to track and to adjust for the slight differnces.
You want left horizontal, left up, overhead, up to the right, as well as up and forward, down and forward, etc....
(Although, to get serious for a moment, with good headphones and appropriately clever signal processing software, you really only need two channels: one for each ear. And maybe a subwoofer. The signal processing software mimics the various psychoacoustic cues you get from sounds in various directions being filtered by your external ear flaps, bouncing off your shoulders, and all the other subtle cues that let you localize a sound source in 3D.)
The ironic thing about those old 1541 drives (and the 1540, which just had earlier firmware), was that they had more processing power than the C64 it connected to.
The C64 had (essentially) a 6502 running at 1 MHz, the 1541 had a 6502B running at 2 MHz.
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I hope paper books become obsolete.
Feh. I hope you get stuck somewhere with dead batteries.
Alderaan, Dantooine, Basketball...whatever.
"The late 70's" didn't change anything on its own. Sure, the technology was just barely becoming available, but Lucas showed how to use it, but more to the point, showed that there was an audience for what he delivered. That helped open the studios' pockets to other innovative filmmakers and productions.
I never said that the entire movie making world owes its new found self to Lucas -- there are plenty of innovations that he didn't play a part in -- but no student of the industry would deny that he and Star Wars caused some fundamental changes. Spielberg probably wouldn't have made CE3K, or ET (dang, Lucas has a lot to answer for!) the Indiana Jones movies wouldn't have happened, and Harrison Ford might have never got beyond the small part he played in American Graffiti.
We can play "what if" games all day, but to deny the impact of the first Star Wars movie (much less so the others, which were far less innovative -- although TESB was much better done) is being either silly or spiteful.
how did star wars change the movie industry forever?
Well, for starters, yes it did make sci-fi more acceptable. (Or rather, acceptable again.) The then-current media scene (TV and movies) was an SF wasteland, all the good (and even mediocre) shows and movies died with the death of the Apollo program.
Lucas also introduced some pretty amazing (for the time) technologies: motion-control cameras, for example. Previous levels of shot composition were done with relatively fixed, flat shots. Take a look at "2001" again and see how flat everything looks. There's no parallax shift as things move relative to each other, and the composite shots are pretty simple.
For the time, the effects were anything but "shitty", they were bleeding edge state of the art. (Well, except perhaps the detonation of Dantooine, that was lame.)
Editing (in terms of number of different scenes, cuts, etc) was also brought to a new level -- remember, back then it was still done with reels of film, a viewer, and a razor blade, none of this "digitize the whole thing and feed it into an Avid (or equiv) non-linear editing suite". (As I recall, it was Lucas' wife who did much of the editing.)
There are also indirect effects -- Lucas invested the money he made off the first "Star Wars" in, among other things, THX sound technologies and Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) FX studios. The latter made some significant contributions to the field computer graphics.
Yes, "Star Wars" (before it was ever called "A New Hope") changed the movie industry forever.
And in The Empire Strikes Back, the dining room scene where the door opens and Leia and Han see Darth Vader standing there -- Vader shoots first.
Yeah, but that only works when the black hole is on the other side of the stargate and we're just feeling its effects through the wormhole.
This one is on this side of the stargate.
Just the thing for backpacking in bear country.
Well, except for the weight...
Sales tax is not VAT (value-added tax). Most places that have a sales tax, that tax is only collected at the retail, end-user point of sale. (And then often only on certain things, certain essentials like food may be excluded). Even at a retail store, if you're buying something for resale (and can show a valid sales tax permit) you don't have to pay the sales tax on it.
Many implementations of VAT, on the other hand, add that tax at every step in the process whenever money changes hands (raw materials to manufacturer, manufacturer to wholesaler, wholesaler to retailer, etc.), according to the "value added".
In the US, there may be multiple levels of sales tax -- a statewide tax, and then various county and/or municipal sales taxes. (Plus special tax districts where the extra 1/10% or whatever is designated for a specific use -- stadium tax district, regional transportation tax district, etc.)
Not only that, but you have to pay sales tax (in jurisdictions where that's an issue, there may still be one or two places on the planet that don't have it) on the full retail price. You don't get a rebate of the tax you paid on the difference between the retail and the after-rebate price, so you've paid more sales tax than you would have if the store just offered the item at the lower price in the first place.
Mind, if it's a store rebate rather than a manufacturer rebate, the store itself may be pocketing the difference between the sales tax they collect and the tax they pay on the reported sales. That's almost certainly illegal at least in spirit, but fancy accounting may meet the letter of the law.
Look at the CompUSA or BestBuy or OfficeMax ads in any Sunday paper. They'd advertise it as $100* in big bold 30-pt letters (slash won't let me change font size). Then in teeny tiny 6-pt letters they'd have (* after $50 mail-in rebate, retail $150).
Sure, technically all the information is there, but you have to read the fine print, which is annoying.
Reverse execution? Are we finally going to see an implementation of the COME FROM statement?
(See also the entry in the jargon file.)
As a data point, DVD sets of TV series run about $2 to $3 per episode. Maybe $4 to $5 per episode for some way overpriced (*cough* Star Trek *cough*) series, but I won't pay that. That's for a 45-minute episode (an hour when aired with commercials).
That's why you test it on a sample file (or a few feet of film) first.
Years (decades) ago, fresh out of school, I had to write a program to compare data sets representing overlapping geographic areas, this written in Basic-Plus on a PDP-11/70 under RSTS/E. My boss, somewhat wary of newbies with their heads stuffed full of theory with no practical application, said "don't worry about fancy algorithms or efficiency, just get it written quickly". Fair enough, so I did. Then ran it on a small sample of the data. It took hours. I extrapolated to the how many files and records we had in total -- it would take forty days of run time. My boss said "okay, go ahead and optimize it".
(I did, mostly by putting the two files being compared on separate drives, and the "virtual array" the program used (a Basic Plus thing) on the third drive. Got the total run-time down to about twenty hours.)
A feature-length film takes up multiple reels. You can do the reels in parallel.
They tried, but lost contact with their probes before they ever got to Mars.
Why is it that religious intolerance is somehow more acceptable in our society than racial intollerance?
You can choose your religion, you can't choose your race.
In general people tend to be less tolerant of others' choices (with which they disagree) than of conditions the other has no control over. This is why so many groups -- from gays to the obese -- tend to insist that their condition is genetic rather than behavioural.
First robot on mars: I think russians...
No, the Russians or more specificially the Soviets had no success with their Mars probes. Ironic for the Red Planet.
They did have the first robotic landers on Venus, however.
Of course they're sending a "thinking is bad" message. If the advertisers don't get some return on their advertising bucks (read, "if the folks watching the shows don't mindlessly go buy more of whatever the advertisers are selling, whether they need it or not"), they'll stop advertising. No advertising revenue, no big salaries for TV execs.
(Commercial, non-subscription) TV is about selling consumers to advertisers. Anything else is a side-effect.
I rarely watch broadcast TV anymore. I do buy the boxed sets of DVDs of shows that I like, or think I will. (If the price is reasonable -- the various Trek episodes aren't.) I bought "Firefly" sight unseen because I'd heard good things and the price was right.
Perhaps high quality shows will go to a subscription model, maybe on cable first and then DVD. Some shows have already released freebie DVDs of an episode (typically the pilot) to drum up interest.
Linus isn't running the show. He's not paying anybody, he can't fire anybody, he can't make anybody drop one project or idea to work on another.
He can direct some developers to do something and they can tell him to take a hike, or they can do it because they think it's a good idea.
More often, though, there are just many ideas (patches, development threads, what have you) to choose from and Linus "rules" by choosing which goes into his kernel.
The cathedral is about direction. That isn't what Linus does -- he just selects what is best from what the bazaar has produced.
(Sure, he may also make suggestions and remarks that indicate what his selection criteria are, and that may in turn influence kernel developers, but that doesn't prevent someone from coming up with an even better idea that Linus hadn't considered before and changing Linus's mind. That doesn't happen in a cathedral -- do you think some workmen with a brilliant but different idea for St. Paul's would have been paid attention to by Christopher Wren?)
Running top I see a lot of paging activity,
As a general rule, if you're seeing any paging, adding RAM will speed things up. The exception would be something that is really CPU bound. Are you seeing high load factors? (Ie, several times the number of processors you have.)
Wasn't that done by Yuri Gagarin back in 1961? And he went around several times.
Okay, I'll grant that the vehicle wasn't very usable after the flight.
How about solving problems of radioactive waste disposal,
Well, the problems of radiaoactive waste disposal are much simpler to solve from nuclear power stations than they are from coal-fired power stations -- and nobody is doing much about the latter.
The energy content of the fissionables in coal (mostly thorium) is higher than that of the combustibles -- and if coal-fired plants had to meet Nuclear Regulatory Commission limits on radioactive emmissions (they aren't), they'd all have to be shut down.
I know, you didn't say anything about coal, I'm just pointing out how small the nuclear reactor waste problem really is compared to risks from current power production methods than nobody is complaining about.
I'll have to dig my old 1540/41 out and throw a scope on it. (It started out as a 1540, I bought a firmware upgrade ROM (no EEPROM in those days) to make it a 1541 -- the 1540 was a bit flakey with the C64). I'd swear it has a 6502B in it, and while it's possible they used the faster -- and higher priced -- part in it because they were short on 6502s, I'm fairly sure it was running a higher clock speed.
Mind, that was 20+ years ago
The brain adapts surprisingly well -- a very short training sequence ("this is left, this is up, this is behind" etc) will do.
I've heard a recording of a moving sound source made with microphones inserted into somebody else's ears, also with microphones in a head-and-shoulders dummy's ears. Amazingly easy to track and to adjust for the slight differnces.
You're thinking 2-dimensionally.
You want left horizontal, left up, overhead, up to the right, as well as up and forward, down and forward, etc....
(Although, to get serious for a moment, with good headphones and appropriately clever signal processing software, you really only need two channels: one for each ear. And maybe a subwoofer. The signal processing software mimics the various psychoacoustic cues you get from sounds in various directions being filtered by your external ear flaps, bouncing off your shoulders, and all the other subtle cues that let you localize a sound source in 3D.)
The ironic thing about those old 1541 drives (and the 1540, which just had earlier firmware), was that they had more processing power than the C64 it connected to.
The C64 had (essentially) a 6502 running at 1 MHz, the 1541 had a 6502B running at 2 MHz.