"It seems to me that eliminating mixed race characters in hopes of appealing to a "predominately white audience" is inherently a racist decision..."
I would have to agree. For the most part I can understand why screenwriters/directors will change a given part of the story (even their reasoning is, well, stupid). Changing the race of a character when it is specifically explained in the book is bigoted. And that's regardless of how it is changed.
Now, that's not to say that I disagree with creative changes when the race or basic look is not mentioned at all in the book. It can add depth to the character and story. Heinlein (as well as many others) deliberately refrained from mentioning racial characteristics. Hell, William Gibson does not mention Molly's hair color at all in Neuromancer (other than the pink wig). Trust me, I checked. It gives the director freedom in casting the right actor, not just the actor with the right "look." Then on the other hand, LeGuin deliberately created a rich, multi-racial world and the filmmakers simply crapped all over it. I find that offensive.
There are so many other details to be nailed down in making a movie, why fuck with things that don't need to be changed? But, then that's just me.
After sacrificing my own countless hours to "Sci-Fi Originals", I've come to the conclusion that it's not the actors, per se. Sure, they put out lackluster and sometime horrible performances, but I've seen some very talented actors do just as crappy a job as the "no-names".
It's not the actors. It's the director. The director doesn't (or didn't) have the ability to pull the best performance out of the actors. Having a script that no one takes seriously doesn't help, either. But, then again, that ultimately is also the director's responsibility.
I find it frustrating to watch a scene fall flat on its face and all the while knowing what the director should have told the actor to get them to understand the scene and where they needed to be emotionally. Which is probably why filmmaking is a hobby of mine.
I think the biggest mistake the W brothers made in Reloaded was to cram all of the important information into a single scene with a man whose face was more interesting than his droning voice, i.e. the Architect.
That scene is the single most important scene in the entire movie. If you weren't paying attention, you missed it.
First, there was no implication of matrices within matrices. The architect spoke of five previous matrices. Each time there was an anomaly that caused the matrix to implode (The anomaly was the dual creation of Neo-One/Smith-virus). Each time, the Architect had presented the One the choice of immediately merging with the Virus and in gratitude, the machines will spare 17 women and 6 men (sound familiar? Morpheus speaks in M1 of the 23 founders of Zion) of his choosing, or he can reject the offer and everybody dies.
In every previous Matrix, the One chose to save the twenty-three of his choosing and face/merge with the Virus. Until Neo. Sure, you can really get deep and discuss the Oracle's manipulations of the whole situation, but that's for another discussion. Neo, told the Architect, the Machines and everyone else to fuck off and go save his girlfriend. At this point, from the POV of the machines, the wheels fell off the cart. Because, the machines need Neo to stop Smith. They couldn't. They never could. They were screwed.
Because Neo rejected their offer, he was now in a position to dictate terms. Of course, it takes him a while to figure that out ("Not too smart, though."), which is most of Revolutions. I don't think Neo really understood his own decision when meeting with the Architect beyond saving Trinity. I don't think it occurred to him until much later that he could be dooming both the humans and machines into extinction by making the choice he did.
When it came down to it, Neo chose the chance for peace and coexistence. That's a resolution. And a damn fine one at that. The whole matrix within a matrix just perpetuates the endless loop and IMHO is a cop-out ending.
Yes, I agree, most people don't pay attention to plot anymore.
He was basing it on slightly different technology that has existed for many years used with microscopes.
If you have a properly designed glass lens and you have a drop of oil between the lens and the subject you can resolve far greater detail than with a normal lens (say 1000x as compared to 300x). The problem was that no one had developed a way to encase the oil so that it would stay stable and clean, while still exibiting the same optic properties.
Until now. I actually remember reading about this company when it first formed. It's cool to see their progress in bringing this technology to market.
I think Frank had conceived suspending the oil in a something like a shield field. I think Varioptic's solution is just a bit more elegant (in spite of being a raving Herbert fan).
Ya know, I'm thinking that it really is only 200 miles per charge ( @ 10 hrs). My Taurus wagon only gets about 270 to 280 miles on a single tank. Still, that's not bad for city driving. For my use, I would only need to plug it in twice a week. Either at home (while I sleep), or even better, at work!
What I want to know is how many KWh's it takes to charge it. That's where you figure out whether it's competitive with gas. It becomes decidedly not fun if you're getting a $1500 power bill each month.
Now, when it comes to swapping out the batteries, well, I would say the biggest problem would be the size and weight of the batteries. The car is 2400 KG (5280 lbs). I would venture to guess that at least 2000 lbs of that would be the batteries. We're not talking about the equivalent of an existing car battery, it's more like 40 or more car batteries.
That's a lot of mass to move around. Not impossible, but definitely an engineering challenge. After working with the electric forlifts here at work, I can definitely tell you multiple hundreds of pounds of batteries are a serious pain in the ass to deal with.
They're tiny (13x13x3 in), you can get them dirt cheap in both Pentium and Alpha flavors (100 - 166Mhz range) and just about any *nix distro will support them.
They're basically the predecessor to the SFF boxen. Just don't lay the Alpha Multia's flat or one of the chips on the underside of the motherboard will overheat and die. But, then again, there are detailed instructions on the NetBSD website on how to use those l33t soldering skills to fix it.
Will M$ get money every time someone licenses VC-9? Yes.
Can M$ decide who gets to license the codec? No.
By Microsoft submitting it to SMTPE as a standard, they relinquish their control over the sale of licenses.
Ya know what? I can live with that. They get their $$$ and we still get to license the technology for FOSS or whatever else we want.
I can guarantee you that if the format becomes the standard, the new versions of Premiere, Avid Xpress and Final Cut Pro, will include support for Blu-Ray. Just as they now include MPEG2. And we probably won't affect the pricing either. Works for me.
Now, all I need is $300K to buy a HD camera with all the goodies, a deck and SDI card for my editing box.
I worked pretty extensively with the XL-1 and XL-1S in a number of independant shorts, including directing two. With ToeKnee, my awesome DP, and the right lighting, we managed to get some very beautiful shots out of those cameras.
However, I just finished a stint as AD on a foreign market feature using the DVC80. The DVC80 is the "News Video" 60i version of the DVX100A. Lemme tell ya, the picture on the Panasonic was a quantum leap in quality from the XL's. Better color and a sharper, more detailed image without looking chunky or aliased. Also much more forgiving with lighting, which is good, 'cause ToeKnee (as Camera) and I were about ready to throttle the DP on that project!
Anyhoo. ..
The Panasonics are shaping up to be the next XL1 for the amateur video market. And with good reason. They rock! As for specs, they have a very high capture resolution per CCD (actually the same chips as the painfully expensive 720p model), which allows for more accurate interpolation, hence the higher detail, full 16bit stereo audio (as opposed to 16bit joint/shared stereo on the XL's), XLR jacks w/ phantom power for audio (as opposed to a separate attachment for the XL's), magnesium alloy chassis (on the DVC80 and 100A), and, my favorite, an anamorphic lens option.
I have also been very impressed with the Audio Technica AT835b shotgun microphones. They have a bass rolloff feature that kills anything below 100Hz (including the bane of all amateur films, the 60 cycle hum), and boosts the mid-bass, to give a rich, clear sound. They don't have that quirky voice/personality that the Sennheiser's do, which is just fine with me.
Also, I remember reading an article about six months or so ago about a 100K indie project in LA where they filmed on HD and then shot pickups with a DVX100 (this was before the 100A was out). From what they said in the article, there was virtually no difference between the two once the HD footage was downconverted to NTSC for editing.
Welcome! Next thing you know, you'll be buying Mole 5K's off Ebay and then wondering how the hell you're gonna power them. Which is a bummer, 'cause they'd be perfect for this one scene...
That is one of the most emotionally intense albums I have ever listened to. Brilliant and passionate.
I had picked it up on a lark, because the record store (Zia's in Phx AZ) was playing her first album which I hadn't heard in a while.
When I played Haunted for the first time, I was futzing around on my computer. I heard it, but I wasn't really listening. But it struck me that there was something special there.
The second time, pow! I went down stairs, kicked back in the recliner and fired up the Infinity's and I listened to it. Really listened to it.
That is one hell of a ride. She wasn't "running with the wolves", she was leading the pack. She should have gotten a grammy for it.
Moekandu
"Don't you mess with a little girl's dreams,
'Cause she's liable to grow up mean!" - Poe "Control"
I think they would do it in a heartbeat... If the right story comes along.
One of the reasons why I think they've concentrated on "family movies" is that there still is a stigma attached to animated movies. And that's unfortunate. Granted, we anime nerds, comic book freaks and sci-fi geeks reject this stigma, but the muggles still far out-number us.
What I love about Pixar, is that they don't let their targetting of the family market interfere with telling a good story.
But, someday... we will see a movie for "grown-ups" created by Pixar.
What it all comes down to is price/performance. Will you get faster rendering by spending the $4K on Gelato, or buying two or three more dual CPU boxen and ingnoring the GPU advantage?
Also, how does the performance of Gelato scale based on the CPU's in the box? Does it render significantly faster if you've got Opterons instead of Athlon MP's or Xeons? What about number of CPU's?
In any case, Gelato needs to be some truly slick stuff, or it won't be able to justify it's price.
I read a study a while back, don't really remember where. ..
But, it discovered that the area that most closely matched the two/four billion dollars (over the four years of the study), was the difference between the CD's shipped to retailers and the CD's actually sold by the retailers. The $2 billion is actually the value of the CD's that are sitting on the retail shelves collecting dust or those that have been remaindered.
More to the point, the RIAA is blaming P2P for the fact that they are not able to easily predict what sells, and it's costing them money in infrastructure. They don't want to really say it that simply, because it makes them look like the asshats they are.
Actually, it sounds like a distorted version of Caves of Steel with a little bit of Robots of Dawn thrown in. Seems like they skipped the second book of the "Robot Novels", Naked Sun.
Still, I kind of keen on seeing it, as I am a fan of Proyas's work.
Didn't anybody listen when we complained that the acting in the new Star Wars films was painfully wooden, and the actors complained that it was because they were working on virtual sets and couldn't place themselves in the roles?
Well, no. See, it wasn't the virtual sets that made the actors' performances wooden. It was the virtual director. Lucas has always struggled with dialogue and drama.
Well, sure the liquids could be affected by gravity to the extent that one liquid is denser than the other, but probably fairly minimal from a less than 10G standpoint.
Also, the full flex response time from one extreme to the other is 10ms, comparable to hard drive access speeds. The Panasonic DVX100 (and related) prosumer video camera actually uses servos attached to the optics to adjust for camera jiggle, tweaking it 480 times a second. The system they've developed here does it without the moving parts and has a greater range of motions, even though it at the worst case only changes 100 times a second (10 milliseconds). Due to the fact that most movement corrections are likely to be small, you could probably get an order of magnitude increase in performance for that particular application.
Also with the right control systems, the unit will be able to adjust to movement (both the camera and the object it is photographing) at an incredible rate! To the user, the camera is always focused on the subject, and can change focus faster than you can move the camera from one subject to another. Imagine getting a nice clear focused picture of the asshat running out of the Quikee Mart with a twelve-pack of cheap beer. Why is it that they always steal the cheap tastless stuff?
It's all about the complexity of the control mechanisms. With the right combination, they may even be able to adjust for chromatic aberration and the like.
I definitely agree that passion is a skill. Hell, it took me years to figure that one out.
But, I also think that you can only take an uncreative person so far into the creative process before they hit that brick wall. Kind of like the end of my first semester of Calculus, but is also a very different type of thought. I think that the ability to see past the rational and utilitarian is, partly, talent.
Talent is also knowing without having been taught. It's like the five year old kid that puts the vibrato in his voice when singing, because it sounds right, not because he was taught to do that.
Granted, you can still be very successful in whatever your endeavors without a lick of talent. But, only if you consciously build your skills. Even the ones that only seem tangent to your passions.
And if you're uncreative? Well, stop dreaming and get back to work. It is the rational thing to do, after all.:P
I've always wanted to be a filmmaker ever since Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But it was just that, want. I had no idea how to get there. I bounced around in interests from writing to TV productions, to programming to whatever. I was involved with a group of friends on a public access TV show.
About three years ago (mostly because of Project Greenlight), I got involved with a group of people that also wanted to make short movies. So we did. Through the course of our first project, we became known as Lime Wrangler Productions. I've been a Prop Master, Script Supervisor, Best Boy, Editor, Gaffer and on two occasions, Director. My second directing job was for Caribou Moving Pictures and we premiere it here in Phoenix, AZ on February 13th.
I had twenty-three years worth of kindling under my ass before I found the match to start it. But now that it's going, I've been running at top speed, 'cause it's burning hot! I haven't made any money at it yet, but that's not really what's important to me at this point.
It doesn't matter when you start, just that you go for it when you're ready. Level designing does take knowledge in a huge variety of subjects, and so does directing. I personally feel fortunate that I was able to learn a lot of that stuff before I ended up in the big chair. Who's to say that our Question Asker hasn't been studying or even merely interested in the kind of stuff he needs to be a good designer?
There's skill and then there's talent. Skill, you can learn, but talent? That's what you're born with. If you've got both of those and determination, you can do anything you set your mind to. If you've got a good attitude it just makes things easier.
What you are describing I personally would not consider ADHD or ADD. Although, it sorta frightens me to think that people like us would be diagnosed as having being ADHD. Harrison Bergeron comes to mind.
In any case, I actually know people who are ADHD. It's not that they learn quickly and then their mind moves on to other things, it's that they simply are not capable on concentrating on any one given thing long enough to understand it. We had a sales guy here at the office that was simply maddening to talk to:
"Here's this thing I want to sell. Is it good?"
"I don't know, we need to test it."
"Oh. Well is it good?"
"Um, dude, we need to test it."
"But, what should I tell the customer?"
"Tell him or her that we are testing it."
"The customer wants it shipped today."
"Yes, only if it tests good."
"Oh. So do you think it will be good?"
"I haven't the slightest idea. That's why we test stuff."
ad nauseum
I don't know if it is representative of all people who are really ADHD, but all the ones I know are a bit high strung. A "bit" being translated as "like a chihuahua on crack". It's like watching a superball zinging off the walls. With the above mentioned salesguy, I constantly had to repeat things to him six or seven times before he began to understand something. It's amazing to watch a guy futz a deal simply because he was not able to stop talking.
That's a far cry from failing a quarter of Biology in high school because you're getting the second highest test scores in the class, but never bothered to crack open the book or do any of the homework. But, then again the teacher was great.
There people in Phoenix that still have not figured out that the speed limit on the 101 is 65, not 55. It's been that way for a year and a half.
I agree. I personally thought the Matrix Trilogy was brilliant.
If the total extent of your education in math is algebra, then calculus looks like garbage. But it's not.
25% of the people who watched The Matrix didn't get it. 50% of the people who watched Reloaded didn't get it. 75% of the people who watched Revolutions didn't get it.
This doesn't suprise me. Most people don't get the subtleties of Shakespeare, but his work is considered brilliant because they've been told so. It's taken for granted.
I can actually picture some minor lord in 1602 telling his friends, "You know, I liked Hamlet and all, and the blood and swordfights were great, but it just wasn't that deep."
I wasn't aware that they actually had the balls to release it under the name Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein. I guess I must have blocked it or sumthin'.
I always thought that the biggest technical problem would be simulating the 1/6th G, for, well, the whole entire movie.
Getting John Gaeta wouldn't be too difficult, I think.
Then again, without resorting to building a set on the moon itself, I always thought it could make a good CG movie. Pixar could pull it off. I don't think Dreamworks could, the acting (and therefore the character animation) would need to be phenomenal to really do it right.
From a story aspect, I would say the biggest hurdle is really getting inside Holly's head to tell the story without resorting to cheesy voice over or John Cusack style monologues. Attributing her tears to the overhead lights instead of her emotions and etc. I think that this particular facet is important to the story.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have to agree. For the most part I can understand why screenwriters/directors will change a given part of the story (even their reasoning is, well, stupid). Changing the race of a character when it is specifically explained in the book is bigoted. And that's regardless of how it is changed.
Now, that's not to say that I disagree with creative changes when the race or basic look is not mentioned at all in the book. It can add depth to the character and story. Heinlein (as well as many others) deliberately refrained from mentioning racial characteristics. Hell, William Gibson does not mention Molly's hair color at all in Neuromancer (other than the pink wig). Trust me, I checked. It gives the director freedom in casting the right actor, not just the actor with the right "look." Then on the other hand, LeGuin deliberately created a rich, multi-racial world and the filmmakers simply crapped all over it. I find that offensive.
There are so many other details to be nailed down in making a movie, why fuck with things that don't need to be changed? But, then that's just me.
After sacrificing my own countless hours to "Sci-Fi Originals", I've come to the conclusion that it's not the actors, per se. Sure, they put out lackluster and sometime horrible performances, but I've seen some very talented actors do just as crappy a job as the "no-names".
It's not the actors. It's the director. The director doesn't (or didn't) have the ability to pull the best performance out of the actors. Having a script that no one takes seriously doesn't help, either. But, then again, that ultimately is also the director's responsibility.
I find it frustrating to watch a scene fall flat on its face and all the while knowing what the director should have told the actor to get them to understand the scene and where they needed to be emotionally. Which is probably why filmmaking is a hobby of mine.
I think the biggest mistake the W brothers made in Reloaded was to cram all of the important information into a single scene with a man whose face was more interesting than his droning voice, i.e. the Architect.
That scene is the single most important scene in the entire movie. If you weren't paying attention, you missed it.
First, there was no implication of matrices within matrices. The architect spoke of five previous matrices. Each time there was an anomaly that caused the matrix to implode (The anomaly was the dual creation of Neo-One/Smith-virus). Each time, the Architect had presented the One the choice of immediately merging with the Virus and in gratitude, the machines will spare 17 women and 6 men (sound familiar? Morpheus speaks in M1 of the 23 founders of Zion) of his choosing, or he can reject the offer and everybody dies.
In every previous Matrix, the One chose to save the twenty-three of his choosing and face/merge with the Virus. Until Neo. Sure, you can really get deep and discuss the Oracle's manipulations of the whole situation, but that's for another discussion. Neo, told the Architect, the Machines and everyone else to fuck off and go save his girlfriend. At this point, from the POV of the machines, the wheels fell off the cart. Because, the machines need Neo to stop Smith. They couldn't. They never could. They were screwed.
Because Neo rejected their offer, he was now in a position to dictate terms. Of course, it takes him a while to figure that out ("Not too smart, though."), which is most of Revolutions. I don't think Neo really understood his own decision when meeting with the Architect beyond saving Trinity. I don't think it occurred to him until much later that he could be dooming both the humans and machines into extinction by making the choice he did.
When it came down to it, Neo chose the chance for peace and coexistence. That's a resolution. And a damn fine one at that. The whole matrix within a matrix just perpetuates the endless loop and IMHO is a cop-out ending.
Yes, I agree, most people don't pay attention to plot anymore.
He was basing it on slightly different technology that has existed for many years used with microscopes.
If you have a properly designed glass lens and you have a drop of oil between the lens and the subject you can resolve far greater detail than with a normal lens (say 1000x as compared to 300x). The problem was that no one had developed a way to encase the oil so that it would stay stable and clean, while still exibiting the same optic properties.
Until now. I actually remember reading about this company when it first formed. It's cool to see their progress in bringing this technology to market.
I think Frank had conceived suspending the oil in a something like a shield field. I think Varioptic's solution is just a bit more elegant (in spite of being a raving Herbert fan).
What I want to know is how many KWh's it takes to charge it. That's where you figure out whether it's competitive with gas. It becomes decidedly not fun if you're getting a $1500 power bill each month.
Now, when it comes to swapping out the batteries, well, I would say the biggest problem would be the size and weight of the batteries. The car is 2400 KG (5280 lbs). I would venture to guess that at least 2000 lbs of that would be the batteries. We're not talking about the equivalent of an existing car battery, it's more like 40 or more car batteries.
That's a lot of mass to move around. Not impossible, but definitely an engineering challenge. After working with the electric forlifts here at work, I can definitely tell you multiple hundreds of pounds of batteries are a serious pain in the ass to deal with.
Very well said.
Thank you.
If I could mod you to +10, I would.
They're tiny (13x13x3 in), you can get them dirt cheap in both Pentium and Alpha flavors (100 - 166Mhz range) and just about any *nix distro will support them.
They're basically the predecessor to the SFF boxen. Just don't lay the Alpha Multia's flat or one of the chips on the underside of the motherboard will overheat and die. But, then again, there are detailed instructions on the NetBSD website on how to use those l33t soldering skills to fix it.
If I could mod you higher than +5, I would.
Will M$ get money every time someone licenses VC-9? Yes.
Can M$ decide who gets to license the codec? No.
By Microsoft submitting it to SMTPE as a standard, they relinquish their control over the sale of licenses.
Ya know what? I can live with that. They get their $$$ and we still get to license the technology for FOSS or whatever else we want.
I can guarantee you that if the format becomes the standard, the new versions of Premiere, Avid Xpress and Final Cut Pro, will include support for Blu-Ray. Just as they now include MPEG2. And we probably won't affect the pricing either. Works for me.
Now, all I need is $300K to buy a HD camera with all the goodies, a deck and SDI card for my editing box.
I worked pretty extensively with the XL-1 and XL-1S in a number of independant shorts, including directing two. With ToeKnee, my awesome DP, and the right lighting, we managed to get some very beautiful shots out of those cameras.
.
However, I just finished a stint as AD on a foreign market feature using the DVC80. The DVC80 is the "News Video" 60i version of the DVX100A. Lemme tell ya, the picture on the Panasonic was a quantum leap in quality from the XL's. Better color and a sharper, more detailed image without looking chunky or aliased. Also much more forgiving with lighting, which is good, 'cause ToeKnee (as Camera) and I were about ready to throttle the DP on that project!
Anyhoo. .
The Panasonics are shaping up to be the next XL1 for the amateur video market. And with good reason. They rock! As for specs, they have a very high capture resolution per CCD (actually the same chips as the painfully expensive 720p model), which allows for more accurate interpolation, hence the higher detail, full 16bit stereo audio (as opposed to 16bit joint/shared stereo on the XL's), XLR jacks w/ phantom power for audio (as opposed to a separate attachment for the XL's), magnesium alloy chassis (on the DVC80 and 100A), and, my favorite, an anamorphic lens option.
I have also been very impressed with the Audio Technica AT835b shotgun microphones. They have a bass rolloff feature that kills anything below 100Hz (including the bane of all amateur films, the 60 cycle hum), and boosts the mid-bass, to give a rich, clear sound. They don't have that quirky voice/personality that the Sennheiser's do, which is just fine with me.
Also, I remember reading an article about six months or so ago about a 100K indie project in LA where they filmed on HD and then shot pickups with a DVX100 (this was before the 100A was out). From what they said in the article, there was virtually no difference between the two once the HD footage was downconverted to NTSC for editing.
Welcome! Next thing you know, you'll be buying Mole 5K's off Ebay and then wondering how the hell you're gonna power them. Which is a bummer, 'cause they'd be perfect for this one scene...
Moekandu
Hell, I'm there dudes!
That's almost as good as Bob Fenster hating a movie. If they think it sucks, it's gotta be good!
That is one of the most emotionally intense albums I have ever listened to. Brilliant and passionate.
I had picked it up on a lark, because the record store (Zia's in Phx AZ) was playing her first album which I hadn't heard in a while.
When I played Haunted for the first time, I was futzing around on my computer. I heard it, but I wasn't really listening. But it struck me that there was something special there.
The second time, pow! I went down stairs, kicked back in the recliner and fired up the Infinity's and I listened to it. Really listened to it.
That is one hell of a ride. She wasn't "running with the wolves", she was leading the pack. She should have gotten a grammy for it.
Moekandu
"Don't you mess with a little girl's dreams,
'Cause she's liable to grow up mean!" - Poe "Control"
I think they would do it in a heartbeat... If the right story comes along.
One of the reasons why I think they've concentrated on "family movies" is that there still is a stigma attached to animated movies. And that's unfortunate. Granted, we anime nerds, comic book freaks and sci-fi geeks reject this stigma, but the muggles still far out-number us.
What I love about Pixar, is that they don't let their targetting of the family market interfere with telling a good story.
But, someday... we will see a movie for "grown-ups" created by Pixar.
What it all comes down to is price/performance. Will you get faster rendering by spending the $4K on Gelato, or buying two or three more dual CPU boxen and ingnoring the GPU advantage?
Also, how does the performance of Gelato scale based on the CPU's in the box? Does it render significantly faster if you've got Opterons instead of Athlon MP's or Xeons? What about number of CPU's?
In any case, Gelato needs to be some truly slick stuff, or it won't be able to justify it's price.
Wait!?!?! Blue Oyster Cult invested in SCO?
Don't fear the Reaper, Darl!
I read a study a while back, don't really remember where. . .
But, it discovered that the area that most closely matched the two/four billion dollars (over the four years of the study), was the difference between the CD's shipped to retailers and the CD's actually sold by the retailers. The $2 billion is actually the value of the CD's that are sitting on the retail shelves collecting dust or those that have been remaindered.
More to the point, the RIAA is blaming P2P for the fact that they are not able to easily predict what sells, and it's costing them money in infrastructure. They don't want to really say it that simply, because it makes them look like the asshats they are.
Actually, it sounds like a distorted version of Caves of Steel with a little bit of Robots of Dawn thrown in. Seems like they skipped the second book of the "Robot Novels", Naked Sun.
Still, I kind of keen on seeing it, as I am a fan of Proyas's work.
Well, sure the liquids could be affected by gravity to the extent that one liquid is denser than the other, but probably fairly minimal from a less than 10G standpoint.
Also, the full flex response time from one extreme to the other is 10ms, comparable to hard drive access speeds. The Panasonic DVX100 (and related) prosumer video camera actually uses servos attached to the optics to adjust for camera jiggle, tweaking it 480 times a second. The system they've developed here does it without the moving parts and has a greater range of motions, even though it at the worst case only changes 100 times a second (10 milliseconds). Due to the fact that most movement corrections are likely to be small, you could probably get an order of magnitude increase in performance for that particular application.
Also with the right control systems, the unit will be able to adjust to movement (both the camera and the object it is photographing) at an incredible rate! To the user, the camera is always focused on the subject, and can change focus faster than you can move the camera from one subject to another. Imagine getting a nice clear focused picture of the asshat running out of the Quikee Mart with a twelve-pack of cheap beer. Why is it that they always steal the cheap tastless stuff?
It's all about the complexity of the control mechanisms. With the right combination, they may even be able to adjust for chromatic aberration and the like.
This is big news. Really.
Moekandu
I definitely agree that passion is a skill. Hell, it took me years to figure that one out.
:P
But, I also think that you can only take an uncreative person so far into the creative process before they hit that brick wall. Kind of like the end of my first semester of Calculus, but is also a very different type of thought. I think that the ability to see past the rational and utilitarian is, partly, talent.
Talent is also knowing without having been taught. It's like the five year old kid that puts the vibrato in his voice when singing, because it sounds right, not because he was taught to do that.
Granted, you can still be very successful in whatever your endeavors without a lick of talent. But, only if you consciously build your skills. Even the ones that only seem tangent to your passions.
And if you're uncreative? Well, stop dreaming and get back to work. It is the rational thing to do, after all.
Moekandu
About three years ago (mostly because of Project Greenlight), I got involved with a group of people that also wanted to make short movies. So we did. Through the course of our first project, we became known as Lime Wrangler Productions. I've been a Prop Master, Script Supervisor, Best Boy, Editor, Gaffer and on two occasions, Director. My second directing job was for Caribou Moving Pictures and we premiere it here in Phoenix, AZ on February 13th.
I had twenty-three years worth of kindling under my ass before I found the match to start it. But now that it's going, I've been running at top speed, 'cause it's burning hot! I haven't made any money at it yet, but that's not really what's important to me at this point.
It doesn't matter when you start, just that you go for it when you're ready. Level designing does take knowledge in a huge variety of subjects, and so does directing. I personally feel fortunate that I was able to learn a lot of that stuff before I ended up in the big chair. Who's to say that our Question Asker hasn't been studying or even merely interested in the kind of stuff he needs to be a good designer?
There's skill and then there's talent. Skill, you can learn, but talent? That's what you're born with. If you've got both of those and determination, you can do anything you set your mind to. If you've got a good attitude it just makes things easier.
Moekandu
Kim Stanley Robinson? He won a Nebula Award in 1993 for Red Mars.
In any case, I actually know people who are ADHD. It's not that they learn quickly and then their mind moves on to other things, it's that they simply are not capable on concentrating on any one given thing long enough to understand it. We had a sales guy here at the office that was simply maddening to talk to:
"Here's this thing I want to sell. Is it good?"
"I don't know, we need to test it."
"Oh. Well is it good?"
"Um, dude, we need to test it."
"But, what should I tell the customer?"
"Tell him or her that we are testing it."
"The customer wants it shipped today."
"Yes, only if it tests good."
"Oh. So do you think it will be good?"
"I haven't the slightest idea. That's why we test stuff."
ad nauseum
I don't know if it is representative of all people who are really ADHD, but all the ones I know are a bit high strung. A "bit" being translated as "like a chihuahua on crack". It's like watching a superball zinging off the walls. With the above mentioned salesguy, I constantly had to repeat things to him six or seven times before he began to understand something. It's amazing to watch a guy futz a deal simply because he was not able to stop talking.
That's a far cry from failing a quarter of Biology in high school because you're getting the second highest test scores in the class, but never bothered to crack open the book or do any of the homework. But, then again the teacher was great.
There people in Phoenix that still have not figured out that the speed limit on the 101 is 65, not 55. It's been that way for a year and a half.
I agree. I personally thought the Matrix Trilogy was brilliant.
If the total extent of your education in math is algebra, then calculus looks like garbage. But it's not.
25% of the people who watched The Matrix didn't get it.
50% of the people who watched Reloaded didn't get it.
75% of the people who watched Revolutions didn't get it.
This doesn't suprise me. Most people don't get the subtleties of Shakespeare, but his work is considered brilliant because they've been told so.
It's taken for granted.
I can actually picture some minor lord in 1602 telling his friends, "You know, I liked Hamlet and all, and the blood and swordfights were great, but it just wasn't that deep."
Oh! You mean Bill's BugHunt!
I wasn't aware that they actually had the balls to release it under the name Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein. I guess I must have blocked it or sumthin'.
Moekandu
I always thought that the biggest technical problem would be simulating the 1/6th G, for, well, the whole entire movie.
.
Getting John Gaeta wouldn't be too difficult, I think.
Then again, without resorting to building a set on the moon itself, I always thought it could make a good CG movie. Pixar could pull it off. I don't think Dreamworks could, the acting (and therefore the character animation) would need to be phenomenal to really do it right.
From a story aspect, I would say the biggest hurdle is really getting inside Holly's head to tell the story without resorting to cheesy voice over or John Cusack style monologues. Attributing her tears to the overhead lights instead of her emotions and etc. I think that this particular facet is important to the story.
Hmmmmm. .
Someday.
Moekandu