Does anyone know of other films that have tried this?
It happens quite a bit, especially with low-grade third, fourth, and fifth sequels.
Although it's at the other end of the genre, a good example is Back to the Future II and Back to the Future III, which were filmed simultaneously as well.
Seeing that they had to refilm a handful of scenes from the first movie as well when filming II, they could've done better by filming all three at the same time.
Much of Superman II was filmed at the same time as Superman (but finished later under a different director),
Rumors have also circulated that all three LOTR movies are filmed at the same time.
Actually, PDF was designed for viewing
on
PDF Virus Spotted
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Most people only have the viewer for obvious reasons so only a small number of people would be affected. Of
course adding VBScript execution to the viewer would be just plain Stupid since PDF files are designed to be
PRINTED and not viewed on screen...
While you are correct in stating that adding VBscript and other such extensions to PDF is stupid, the PDF format was explicity designed with the idea of users being able to view documents in addition to printing them.
PDF was designed as a method for users to share documents without requiring them to all have the software that created the documents. They took a subset of the postscript language and modified it to improve portability (such as font handling), remove some of the printer-specific bits of Postscript, and add features that may be desirable for portable documents (like encryption, for-handling, etc). Yes, the ability to print it correctly was important, but so was on-screen viewing.
That they did a piss-poor job of on-screen previewing (as anyone that uses bitmap fonts in TeX will attest to) in Acrobat notwithstanding, they design it for both viewing and printing.
You know, as a marketing major this is exactly the kind of thing that you're not supposed to do.
Unfortunately, I've actually taken advertising classes (About 8 years ago now, but it can't have changed that much), where the professors insisted that as an advertisor you were supposed to do exactly this---make the name of your product stick in the viewers head. Whether you do it by convincing them the product is good, the marketing jingle is catchy, carpet-bombing with advertising flyers, or just plain irritating the heck out of the viewers. It didn't matter.
The only thing that did
In fact, most of the class was about watching ads, and listening to the professor talk about which ones were effective advertising, and which weren't. Almost universally, he insisted the best ones were always the ones with irritating jingles that didn't talk at all about the products, and just pissed you off. Heck, he spent an entire lecture talking about how Crystal Pepsi was the greatest marketing campaign ever.
The worst part was, all the students bought into this. And hated me because I was always irritated that the ads never told me about the products...
Advertisers are like this, since they were trained to act like this.
(In my own defense, I'm an engineer, not an advertiser. I just took the class to fill up my schedule. I should've listened to one of my engineering classmates who had a degree in adverstising and came back to school to "get a real degree")
What is Think Geek going to do with all of those Free Dimitri shirts they just got in? Nobody is going to want them
now....
Ummm, he is most certainly not free. He is just out on bond awaiting trial. He has no passport, and no freedom of movement (he can't leave California, and he most certainly can't go home to Russia).
Yes, this is an improvement of his general situation, but this is far from over. He still faces the possibility of hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and years in prison.
fairness for those who look on this with skepticism, the computer gaming industry integrates a variety of areas of
research which together can be applied to computer gaming, buy are legitimate areas of study seperately:
Mathmatical modeling, Graphic Arts, a whole variety of areas around AI research from the 70s, and the study of
sociology, in attempts to create acccurate simulations of human responses. Aparently, all we really needed was some
motivation to study these areas, and the pursuit of entertainment is just such a motivator.
You're right, and studies of many game-driven (or at least game-related) computer science topics already are fairly common at academic conferences and meetings. I've sat through uncountable presentations on 3D-modeling, polygon reduction, texture mapping, landscape generation, networked real-time simulations, etc., in which the author(s) made it clear that computer games were one of the primary motivations for the study.
Then again, it cuts both ways---a lot of the technology available for Real Work[tm] was driven by games. A lot of the nice engineering design and visualization packages only started becoming useful on PC platforms after 3D accelerated hardware for the PC started becoming affordable---and we all know that PC 3D video performance is driven by gaming requirements. Also, many games have gotten use as more serious software---flight simulators being used in real pilot training, for example.
The possibilities of increased academic interest in gaming are interesting, because making a really good game requires a lot of useful investigation: user interface design, efficient graphics manipulation, improved realistic rendering, etc.
I still don't get how they think this is a deterrent... The most frequent use of ripping discs these days is to make MP3's of them.
Well, mp3 encoding is lossy (although unless you are foolishly stingy with the bitrate the loss is very slight). Since someone ripping mp3's is willing to accept a slight amount of degradation, they should also be perfectly happy with a nice digitally filtered copy of the song with all the Macrovision glitches removed.
Heck, if your CD player can do it, so can software---your CD player doesn't really do anything all that fancy with filtering anyways.
Then again, don't be surprised---it's not like Macrovisions stuff ever really stopped people from copying VHS tapes or dubbing DVD's onto VHS for their friends...
I really love horrible mpeg stutters, bad picture quality and spikes in sound. Thank you digital cable for showing me the
error of my ways! Now I can get pissed at tv quality on four times as many channels!
Unfortunately, this isn't limited to Digital. On my plain-old-analog cable I have the exact same problem, since my cable provider obtains many of their signals digitally, rebroadcasting them analog on the cable.
The result is the worst of both worlds: bad analog signal of a digital signal showing stutters and dropouts.
I think most anyone that grew up in the early days of computer games feels this way. The early days of computing meant programming with tight memory constraints, little (compared to today) CPU power, and primitive text and graphics output. Thus, to make a good game, you had had to be creative (and a good programmer, much of the time), and the results showed.
A good computer game is like a good novel, it creates the image of a world and forces your mind to fill in the details with your own imagination.
The better text adventure games (and to a lesser extent, some of the earlier graphical RPG's, like Ultima III to VI) did an excellent job of this. Modern games tend to do a very poor job, they just do it with stereo sound and texture maps.
Then again, we shouldn't be surprised. A trip to the movie theatre will show you that for the most part special effects long ago replaced imagination.
I doubt it, since special effects types and directors always seem to favor things that look "cool" over anything realistic. And the rest of the realism goes the wayside due to concerns about "drama" and filming requirments.
Good examples of this include 2-D "shock waves" in space explosions (heck, Lucas went to the trouble of adding these unrealistic effects into the Special Edition of Star Wars) and sound effects in a vacuum.
I can easily envision a director throwing out someones new, accurately-calculated flames because they don't look "firey enough."
I think the article misses the point a bit. Yes, there's a lot of unused fibre out there, with companies laying more every minute. And a lot of this fiber won't be used anytime soon.
However, the fibre is only a small symptom. Remember, as far as the actual medium goes, fiber is relatively cheap compared to the other expenses involved. The real problem is the lack of infrastructure to actually utilize that capacity.
Companies aren't struggling because they laid too much fibre, they're struggling since they haven't been able to sell enough of the rest of their equipment and services.
Most of the companies knew this going in...but if you're going to go to the trouble (and it's immense trouble in some urban areas) to lay out fibre, you might as well lay a lot more than you think you need. It's actually a smart way of planning for future capacity.
However, for those companies (like Nortel, mentioned in the article) that appear to actually have expected to have the clients to fill their capacity, yes they problems. Not because of the fibre itself, but because of a larger mis-estimation of potential business.
This issue isn't anything new, especially for the United States. From the very earliest days of interstate commerce, this has been a sticky issue for any business. For any state they have a legal business presence in ("nexus"), they must meet the legal requirements of that state, creating difficulties as you adjust your business to meet the requirements of multiple (sometimes overlapping and contradicting) jurisdictions. At least at that level, however, problems aren't usually too bad, mostly because states have (in general) similar laws, and to some extent people have the protection of the full-faith-and-credit clause of the constitution.
Expanding this past national borders, however, proves tricky. For example, there has been much haggling in the EU regarding various commercial codes, export/import controls, etc. (I don't have a reference handy, but as an example, there have been some disputes over what legally can be sold as wine and chocolate).
Introduce this on a truly international scale, and you've got a mess. As the cptech web site succintly calls it: "The consequences of global enforcement of non-harmonized laws".
Anyways, I wouldn't worry about it too much, since the US has a rather cavalier attitude concerning treaties it has signed... as one good example, the US signed the Vienna Convention which ensures access of foreign nationals access to their consul if they get arrested, to ensure that their legal rights are retained. While the US loudly protests when our citizens are denied this right, our US states regularly violate this (see the discussions regarding virtually every execution of a foreign national in the last few years), and many state governments have stated that since it is a US treaty and not a treaty with the state, it's not enforceable.
s for most of us who have seen the number of NDA's increasing, the patent clauses entering into out contracts, and the number
of letters from lawyers suggesting that we talk to them before we talk to our colleagues its definately no surprise. Its not much
good for science either, but he who pays the piper....
Indeed, you've hit the nail on the head here.
To maintain and increase the level of technology in our society, it requires research. Research, unfortunately, costs money.
In recent history, many of our larger corporations did much of their R&D work in-house (GE's R&D Center, Bell Labs). And it made a lot of sense to do so, since one of the best ways to make your R&D work profitable is by keeping it proprietary and licensing it. So if your R&D is in-house, it's easier to keep your company secrets secret.
On the flip side of things, Universities traditionally did governmentally and tax-funded research. The important distinction is that, in general (yes, there are a lot of exceptions), Universities worked on basic theoretical research, while Corporate R&D departments generally worked on more applied research.
So what happened? A number of things---Public university funding spent on research declined (whereas money spent on instruction and administration has skyrocketed, but that's another topic), while in the corporate world many R&D departments were gutted since they weren't percieved as being short-term profitable (to look at my previous examples, we all know what's come of Bell Labs, and GE's Corporate R&D center is more of a engineer support center than an R&D center now). But companies still need research, and Universities still need money. The solution of both sides' problems was to have more company-sponsored research.
Alas, the result is that much of our tax money goes, indirectly, to supported corporate R&D work. At least we still have one useful byproduct: universities still produce trained graduates. But unfortunately recent developments, such as the increase in NDA's, and assignment of patent rights to companies, aggravate the situation. As the original article pointed out, for many universities patent income is significant, and now that is being eroded.
Yes, it is an old story, but still one worth examining.
The article specifically says that half of the folks whose papers came up as duplicates were probably the source of the original
material, and most of them were guilty of no more than showing others their work.
Indeed. My primary concern is that in this case, and many others like it, telling exactly who's work is the original (or if both were cribbed from a third source), is difficult, and often becomes a case of each of the students blaming the other.
In some courses, it is easy for the grader to determine which work is original. In other course it's not. I suspect this one is the former, but I also suspect that a significant number of students who did nothing wrong will have to deal with the stress, inconvenience, and humility of having to prove that they did nothing wrong.
As a seasoned systems administrator in a college department and former
student myself, I know that in a college environment, the efforts to
which some students will go to cheat show an astonishing amount of
creativity---breaking into accounts, exploiting lack of permission
control on other users' accounts, searching through the recycle bins,
etc. The use of technology in this environment has made cheating
easier, and harder to trace.
The risk is that some of the students are probably innocent, merely
being guilty of having their own papers copied without their
knowledge. Indeed, we've seen many cases here where the person whose work was copied ends up in a situation where they have to prove their own innocence.
Unfortunately, the technology of online composition and
submission of papers (as typically done at most Universities) lacks
sufficient security, encryption, and authentication standards.
I just fear that the cost of this action could possibly end the academic careers of too many students guilty of nothing more than failing to see how their work could be copied.
Slashdot Mirror
It happens quite a bit, especially with low-grade third, fourth, and fifth sequels.
Although it's at the other end of the genre, a good example is Back to the Future II and Back to the Future III, which were filmed simultaneously as well.
Seeing that they had to refilm a handful of scenes from the first movie as well when filming II, they could've done better by filming all three at the same time.
Much of Superman II was filmed at the same time as Superman (but finished later under a different director),
Rumors have also circulated that all three LOTR movies are filmed at the same time.
While you are correct in stating that adding VBscript and other such extensions to PDF is stupid, the PDF format was explicity designed with the idea of users being able to view documents in addition to printing them.
PDF was designed as a method for users to share documents without requiring them to all have the software that created the documents. They took a subset of the postscript language and modified it to improve portability (such as font handling), remove some of the printer-specific bits of Postscript, and add features that may be desirable for portable documents (like encryption, for-handling, etc). Yes, the ability to print it correctly was important, but so was on-screen viewing.
That they did a piss-poor job of on-screen previewing (as anyone that uses bitmap fonts in TeX will attest to) in Acrobat notwithstanding, they design it for both viewing and printing.
That's why I mentioned it. Crystal Pepsi was a new thing then. And he was sure it was going to revolutionize the industry...
Unfortunately, I've actually taken advertising classes (About 8 years ago now, but it can't have changed that much), where the professors insisted that as an advertisor you were supposed to do exactly this---make the name of your product stick in the viewers head. Whether you do it by convincing them the product is good, the marketing jingle is catchy, carpet-bombing with advertising flyers, or just plain irritating the heck out of the viewers. It didn't matter. The only thing that did
In fact, most of the class was about watching ads, and listening to the professor talk about which ones were effective advertising, and which weren't. Almost universally, he insisted the best ones were always the ones with irritating jingles that didn't talk at all about the products, and just pissed you off. Heck, he spent an entire lecture talking about how Crystal Pepsi was the greatest marketing campaign ever.
The worst part was, all the students bought into this. And hated me because I was always irritated that the ads never told me about the products...
Advertisers are like this, since they were trained to act like this.
(In my own defense, I'm an engineer, not an advertiser. I just took the class to fill up my schedule. I should've listened to one of my engineering classmates who had a degree in adverstising and came back to school to "get a real degree")
Ummm, he is most certainly not free. He is just out on bond awaiting trial. He has no passport, and no freedom of movement (he can't leave California, and he most certainly can't go home to Russia).
Yes, this is an improvement of his general situation, but this is far from over. He still faces the possibility of hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and years in prison.
For now, he just has a much bigger jail cell.
You're right, and studies of many game-driven (or at least game-related) computer science topics already are fairly common at academic conferences and meetings. I've sat through uncountable presentations on 3D-modeling, polygon reduction, texture mapping, landscape generation, networked real-time simulations, etc., in which the author(s) made it clear that computer games were one of the primary motivations for the study.
Then again, it cuts both ways---a lot of the technology available for Real Work[tm] was driven by games. A lot of the nice engineering design and visualization packages only started becoming useful on PC platforms after 3D accelerated hardware for the PC started becoming affordable---and we all know that PC 3D video performance is driven by gaming requirements. Also, many games have gotten use as more serious software---flight simulators being used in real pilot training, for example.
The possibilities of increased academic interest in gaming are interesting, because making a really good game requires a lot of useful investigation: user interface design, efficient graphics manipulation, improved realistic rendering, etc.
Indeed. I've come to think of the best definition of "Dog and Pony Show" as:
"That one time when you pretend that your product actually works like it should, while demonstrating convincely that it doesn't."
Alas, I can't find the original, but the dialog went approximately:
"We can't sell it, we only have the prototype."
"Can't we sell the prototype?"
"The prototype is our competitor's model with duct tape over the label."
I still don't get how they think this is a deterrent... The most frequent use of ripping discs these days is to make MP3's of them.
Well, mp3 encoding is lossy (although unless you are foolishly stingy with the bitrate the loss is very slight). Since someone ripping mp3's is willing to accept a slight amount of degradation, they should also be perfectly happy with a nice digitally filtered copy of the song with all the Macrovision glitches removed.
Heck, if your CD player can do it, so can software---your CD player doesn't really do anything all that fancy with filtering anyways.
Then again, don't be surprised---it's not like Macrovisions stuff ever really stopped people from copying VHS tapes or dubbing DVD's onto VHS for their friends...
Unfortunately, this isn't limited to Digital. On my plain-old-analog cable I have the exact same problem, since my cable provider obtains many of their signals digitally, rebroadcasting them analog on the cable.
The result is the worst of both worlds: bad analog signal of a digital signal showing stutters and dropouts.
A good computer game is like a good novel, it creates the image of a world and forces your mind to fill in the details with your own imagination.
The better text adventure games (and to a lesser extent, some of the earlier graphical RPG's, like Ultima III to VI) did an excellent job of this. Modern games tend to do a very poor job, they just do it with stereo sound and texture maps.
Then again, we shouldn't be surprised. A trip to the movie theatre will show you that for the most part special effects long ago replaced imagination.
I doubt it, since special effects types and directors always seem to favor things that look "cool" over anything realistic. And the rest of the realism goes the wayside due to concerns about "drama" and filming requirments.
Good examples of this include 2-D "shock waves" in space explosions (heck, Lucas went to the trouble of adding these unrealistic effects into the Special Edition of Star Wars) and sound effects in a vacuum.
I can easily envision a director throwing out someones new, accurately-calculated flames because they don't look "firey enough."
I think the article misses the point a bit. Yes, there's a lot of unused fibre out there, with companies laying more every minute. And a lot of this fiber won't be used anytime soon.
However, the fibre is only a small symptom. Remember, as far as the actual medium goes, fiber is relatively cheap compared to the other expenses involved. The real problem is the lack of infrastructure to actually utilize that capacity.
Companies aren't struggling because they laid too much fibre, they're struggling since they haven't been able to sell enough of the rest of their equipment and services.
Most of the companies knew this going in...but if you're going to go to the trouble (and it's immense trouble in some urban areas) to lay out fibre, you might as well lay a lot more than you think you need. It's actually a smart way of planning for future capacity.
However, for those companies (like Nortel, mentioned in the article) that appear to actually have expected to have the clients to fill their capacity, yes they problems. Not because of the fibre itself, but because of a larger mis-estimation of potential business.
This issue isn't anything new, especially for the United States. From the very earliest days of interstate commerce, this has been a sticky issue for any business. For any state they have a legal business presence in ("nexus"), they must meet the legal requirements of that state, creating difficulties as you adjust your business to meet the requirements of multiple (sometimes overlapping and contradicting) jurisdictions. At least at that level, however, problems aren't usually too bad, mostly because states have (in general) similar laws, and to some extent people have the protection of the full-faith-and-credit clause of the constitution.
Expanding this past national borders, however, proves tricky. For example, there has been much haggling in the EU regarding various commercial codes, export/import controls, etc. (I don't have a reference handy, but as an example, there have been some disputes over what legally can be sold as wine and chocolate).
Introduce this on a truly international scale, and you've got a mess. As the cptech web site succintly calls it: "The consequences of global enforcement of non-harmonized laws".
Anyways, I wouldn't worry about it too much, since the US has a rather cavalier attitude concerning treaties it has signed... as one good example, the US signed the Vienna Convention which ensures access of foreign nationals access to their consul if they get arrested, to ensure that their legal rights are retained. While the US loudly protests when our citizens are denied this right, our US states regularly violate this (see the discussions regarding virtually every execution of a foreign national in the last few years), and many state governments have stated that since it is a US treaty and not a treaty with the state, it's not enforceable.
Indeed, you've hit the nail on the head here.
To maintain and increase the level of technology in our society, it requires research. Research, unfortunately, costs money.
In recent history, many of our larger corporations did much of their R&D work in-house (GE's R&D Center, Bell Labs). And it made a lot of sense to do so, since one of the best ways to make your R&D work profitable is by keeping it proprietary and licensing it. So if your R&D is in-house, it's easier to keep your company secrets secret.
On the flip side of things, Universities traditionally did governmentally and tax-funded research. The important distinction is that, in general (yes, there are a lot of exceptions), Universities worked on basic theoretical research, while Corporate R&D departments generally worked on more applied research.
So what happened? A number of things---Public university funding spent on research declined (whereas money spent on instruction and administration has skyrocketed, but that's another topic), while in the corporate world many R&D departments were gutted since they weren't percieved as being short-term profitable (to look at my previous examples, we all know what's come of Bell Labs, and GE's Corporate R&D center is more of a engineer support center than an R&D center now). But companies still need research, and Universities still need money. The solution of both sides' problems was to have more company-sponsored research.
Alas, the result is that much of our tax money goes, indirectly, to supported corporate R&D work. At least we still have one useful byproduct: universities still produce trained graduates. But unfortunately recent developments, such as the increase in NDA's, and assignment of patent rights to companies, aggravate the situation. As the original article pointed out, for many universities patent income is significant, and now that is being eroded.
Yes, it is an old story, but still one worth examining.
Indeed. My primary concern is that in this case, and many others like it, telling exactly who's work is the original (or if both were cribbed from a third source), is difficult, and often becomes a case of each of the students blaming the other.
In some courses, it is easy for the grader to determine which work is original. In other course it's not. I suspect this one is the former, but I also suspect that a significant number of students who did nothing wrong will have to deal with the stress, inconvenience, and humility of having to prove that they did nothing wrong.
The risk is that some of the students are probably innocent, merely being guilty of having their own papers copied without their knowledge. Indeed, we've seen many cases here where the person whose work was copied ends up in a situation where they have to prove their own innocence.
Unfortunately, the technology of online composition and submission of papers (as typically done at most Universities) lacks sufficient security, encryption, and authentication standards.
I just fear that the cost of this action could possibly end the academic careers of too many students guilty of nothing more than failing to see how their work could be copied.