You mean to have a music career *again*. He had a music career before he started acting. Given the age of most people on slashdot, though, you might be too young to remember The Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff.
Indeed. Everyone had that damned album on my street -- it was quite the nightmare.
We had an RHEL3 box which had a truly ancient version of Python installed - more than 2 years old.
While no fan of Redhat (anymore), this is just a lame complaint.
You know, Solaris and it's commercial brethren didn't always include the open source tools we've come to expect these days.
Before AIX, Sun, IRIX, etc. all had open source repositories with binaries rolled into the native package format (these days, often provided by the vendor itself!), we admins got along just fine either compiling most source packages with the stock (or vedor optional) compilers. Heck, if you preferred GCC, it was fairly simple (albeit a day's work) to bootstrap a complete GNU build environment (gcc, gnu-utils, glibc, make, autoconf, automake, etc.) using the stock compilers, and then springboard from there.
Given the supported development environment *included* with RH anymore, anyone who complains about the lack of a specific version of an open source package needs his admin credentials revoked. And don't give me the "support" excuse. If the shop is *that* mission critical, it will buy support for the hardware, the OS on that hardware, and any 3rd party apps running on that OS. Otherwise, suck it up and "configure && make && make install".
The person is in the system, unless they try to leave, it which case that triggers offers of cheaper prices.
No kidding.
The last time I had a cable TV subscription, I called to cancel. I tell ya, it was like pulling teeth. They couldn't grasp that I simply didn't *like* broadcast TV. "I had no problems with the service. It's just that there's simply not enough value in the programming for my $x/month." First they suggested the Basic, non-digital plan. Then they broke out the super-cheap, non-advertised price plan (similar to the cell phone companies). They must have thought we were really poor, 'cause they even tried to give me *vouchers* for free cable for a few months! I couldn't believe it!
but I'm not aware of too many average consumers who have much opposition at all to DRM, generally because they aren't aware
I think they are aware of the *problems* of DRM, but they just don't know to label it as such. Just ask any person who's had to sit through the 20 minutes of commercials on Disney DVDs that they can't skip through. That annoys the shit out of nearly everyone I know, and DRM is the cause. They just don't recognize it as such.
As for flocking towards alternatives... just look at the client list of your favorite P2P client. Not every IP in your bittorrent client is some punk kid "putting it to The Man". Sure, they're not *legal*, but they are non-DRM alternatives. When asshat companies like Maxis are still requiring the CD to be present for The Sims to run (in this age of half-TB drives), they can kiss my ass -- I'll go download the version with the No-CD crack.
That's what I've heard, as well. AT&T may have been teh evil in the 80's, but the stuff that came out of Bell Labs was top notch. Ditto IBM. And now Microsoft.
I know a sharp A.I. and machine learning post-grad who works for a major government lab (who also interned at MS in the early 90's). He told me one day that the A.I. that went into the Clippy engine was initially *too* good, and that the designers at MS had to tone it down to the irritating and near-useless state we all know and love.
It's a shame that the talent that MS had sucked up over the past 3 decades has their work tied up in MS's IP vault. Surely AT&T has much technology hidden from view, but they certainly have released a lot into the public for playing around with (C, UNIX, Plan9, and VNC are all great products many of us benefit from).
One can only speculate how many cool, but defunct, projects are laying around at MS. It's a shame they don't simply release some of this stuff.
Sure he does. More specifically, he knows the spirit of open source licenses, and he gets miffed when companies *just* barely comply to the letter of the licenses to maximize their benefit from using an open source license while at the same time minimizing the benefits the rest of the community get.
#1. If you start a war, you send your kids to the frontlines of whatever country you are attacking.
I think Michael Moore attacked this brilliantly in one of his movies (Fahrenheit 9/11, right?) where he walked around Capital Hill with enlistment forms and handed them to senators/congressmen with kids. Their reactions were priceless.
I'd love to see a national campaign by some anti-war org who tracks politician's kids and tallies whether or not they are serving in the armed forces. I'm sure the numbers would be quite telling.
Yeah, but if all the three-letter agencies spent time doing the useful stuff which you describe, it would put a damper on them jailing so many their own people for victimless crimes (War on Drugs, etc.). If common sense and restraint were part of the government's MO, there's be a lot less of it, and we all know how likely *that* is to happen.
After reviewing his statement for that hearing, I'll revise my opinion of him to that of a pompous asshat. "Oh, look at me! I'm the youngest CEO in the NASDAQ. I sold a company to PGP, Inc., and I bought 4 companies so far with EMusic. I create jobs!"
In spite of being a slick businessman, he was (as they all were, and still are) short-sighted.
What has changed in the file sharing scene since this event? Not much, at least in principle. People are still sharing, with even more bandwidth and impunity than before. Content producers still lobby for more laws, still rake in profits, and continue to sue those who enjoy illegal downloads/uploads. Sure, P2P networks have gotten more diffuse and sneakier, and iTunes exploded onto the scene. But 2007 looks and smells a lot like 2000 in terms of people getting free music. And you know what? RIAA labels and EMusic are still in business! The industry didn't implode! Maybe money *can* be made even when people download free stuff.
So what was the point of all his hot air, again? He still believed, after the walls of artificial scarcity had fallen, that digital IP still had some sort of monetary value that should be protected. He was wrong.
Face it. Napster let the cat out of the bag, and today we're all benefiting with that cat's many offspring. Metallica's recording of "No Leaf Clover" has no value in and of itself anymore. All revenue should be made from added value. Seeing the song performed live adds value. Buying a CD with lyrics and cover art adds value. Being able to purchase the music file from Emusic and iTunes via a slick, drool-proof interface onto a slick hardware player adds value. AllofMP3 raked in money, and it was essentially charging for bandwidth and indexing. Had my credit card not rejected the authorization on their payment site, I would have spent a fair bet on tracks, but instead I spent my time pulling down crap from spotty torrents.
There's value added to water -- one of the most plentiful things on this entire planet! People get water for free (more or less), yet will still go out an buy bottled shit, whether it's a pint of Evian or a gallon of generic distilled water from Wal Mart. Hell, I've got my own well, and I buy the occasional gallon of distilled water. So don't go telling me that the producers of entertainment cannot make a buck if the stuff gets away from them and is available for free.
But make no mistake, chasing loose MP3s around the 'net makes no money for the producers or performers. It only makes money for the lawyers and those who play catch-up with the P2P scene, such as NetPD and Copyright Control Services (mentioned in the transcript I linked to). I argue that inventing value-add to the music tracks is a more profitable pursuit, as opposed to walking against the tide.
If I recall correctly, the CEO of EMusic one of the asshats on the other side of the table against Napster during Orrin Hatch's "Napster Hearings" back in the day? No way I'd patronize that short-sighted man's company.
Right. Any clod with photoshop can retouch a photograph that very few will be able to tell was photoshopped - and also will be able to convey a message. Movies? Not a problem, the same clod can retouch Star Wars into Star Wars - The Special Edition over a long weekend.
Oh, wait...
Outsourcing your work to a team of digital artists to polish up your vision is not my idea of artistry. There's some respect to be paid for the director who, apart from adding sound effects and rearranging scenes, is directly responsible for what's on the developed film.
In my mind, there's a world of difference between Lucas being behind the camera and shooting/directing the same scene in Star Wars over and over again until it's visually perfect and him shooting a scene of Ewan McGregor in front of a green screen and dumping the rest on the ILM team. I view the former as a complete art form on Lucas's part, while the latter isn't.
That doesn't mean that those who do the digital work aren't artists in their own right. I've followed the IRTC for years, and the good scenes are indeed works of art.
Another example. While I appreciate the digital eye candy of Star Wars: 1-3, I don't think they hold a candle to the *artwork* of Episodes 4-6. One example I always trot out is the asteroid flight/fight scenes in Empire vs Clones. The flight of the Millennium Falcon through the asteroids in Empire made me sway in my seat when I watched it on the big screen as a kid. The scene with Obi-Wan and Fett in Clones had nowhere near the same impact, though it may have been visually more "clean".
And of course being twenty years older and having been jaded by twenty years of ever more sophisticated SFX and CGI has nothing to do with it. Again, your glasses have a distinct rose tint.
No, the fact that the asteroids and ships, while not "real" in Empire, were physical objects being filmed had more to do with it. For whatever reason, my brain was faked out enough by real photos of real objects, but it was not by a similar CG scene.
The advertisers who use Ms. Gellar's image for pimping their products don't give a rat's ass about the revenue model of the medium that gave her stardom. All they care about is that she's a "famous" person and that she can push their products.
If, for example, Jolt Cola wanted to pay Star Wars Kid up for commercial appearances, they'd do so solely because he was perceived as a "famous" person that could push a product, in spite of the fact that he's not an actor or earned money elsewhere.
Now.... if your point was noting the chicken/egg paradox of migrating to my lame revenue model, then you indeed have a point. Some producer and set of actors would need to risk producing a show "for nothing" in the hopes that they'll reap returns on their investment when the actors become famous and start doing product endorsements. If it worked, then the model could catch on a snowball into a new era media revenue. As with all new ventures, it takes invested money, a plan, and luck/skill.
Take a glance at this video. My wife and I watched this, and the other related videos, last night after I found the link on Plastic.com in a discussion of Michelle Manhar's Playboy vs real-life appearance.
Certainly, I've known that images have been doctored in various media for a looong time. We've shown many such photo retouching samples to our 11-year-old daughter, as she's now starting to be aware of her perceived beauty.
It's no surprise that such digital manipulation is being used on the big screen.
While I don't have problems with such retouching, I do think that it makes it tough to consider films and photographs that have been doctored genuine art forms anymore. Certainly, much of anything that comes out of Hollywood cannot be taken at face value, but it's become even less genuine over the past 20 years. Before the 80's, if you saw a buxom, beautiful woman (or man, for you ladies out there), you could be much more certain that her hair color, bust size, and other features tied to "beauty" were more or less genuine. Sure, some makeup and soft lighting/focus made the ladies of that era slightly more attractive than they'd appear on the street, but damn, of most of them weren't drop-dead beautiful to begin with.
These days, with hair dyes and wigs, plastic surguery, and now digital manipulation, you can take the cannonical 300-lb fugly plumber, and whip him into a G.Q. model in under an hour with Photoshop. There's a fine line (in my mind, anyway) between the art of making people look good with some makeup, lights, and *good* photography/cinematography and just simply taking any old person, filming them by any old schmuck w/ a camera and then *converting* them to an entirely new person via post-production.
I don't know. It's hard to argue with the industry being at fault for these things, but I feel that imperfections (say, Jewel's crooked tooth) lend personality and uniqueness to a person. Erasing them from the record robs us of the *person* that's behind the image.
Wholesale digital creations, on the other hand, are slightly different than digital effects or enhancements. The Final Fantasy movie a few years back (or that first film from the Matrix shorts collection) was digital art. The T-Rex in Jurassic Park, while cool, was a special effect.
Another example. While I appreciate the digital eye candy of Star Wars: 1-3, I don't think they hold a candle to the *artwork* of Episodes 4-6. One example I always trot out is the asteroid flight/fight scenes in Empire vs Clones. The flight of the Millennium Falcon through the asteroids in Empire made me sway in my seat when I watched it on the big screen as a kid. The scene with Obi-Wan and Fett in Clones had nowhere near the same impact, though it may have been visually more "clean".
Surely there must be others out there who have make the same distinction as I do, and who are bothered by a cheapening of cinema?
Oops! My bad for sloppy pre-post research. I swear, the first source that mentioned the model (rather than just a.223 rifle) said Remington Model 700, and from the Remington site I determined it was a bolt-action. Turns out that they actually purchases a Model 700, but ditched it after being spooked.
The last thing I wanted to do was mis-represent the facts in the case.
Nope, the distribution model is fucked. All hail technology, making it easier and easier to distribute content for which there's no commercial incentive!
How short-sighted! If Sarah Michelle Gellar never got a dime for doing Buffy, she's still rakin' in the bucks for whatever cosmetic company she does commercials for all the time. Sure she won't be rolling naked in quite as large a pile of money as before, but shit, it's still good coin.
Oh, you mean financial incentive for the *producers*? Well, maybe in the age of free online content, stars will have an item in their contracts that says x% of any endorsement proceeds go back to the producers who are responsible for their fame to begin with for Y number of months/years. Shit... older TV/movie stars of yesteryear make tons of money with product endorsements. Sure, the SAG will kick and scream, but hey, this is progress!
That's just one simple (and likely stillborn) idea from someone who hasn't the slightest idea of how show biz actually works. The point is, though, that producers and actors alike will need to both bend to the new reality of free online content. If revenues tied to in-show adverts will be no more, then both parties need to suck it up, get used to slightly less revenue than the old model, and try new things.
People are still stuck using old revenue models with new distributions models. I doubt you can adapt one to new technology but not the other, at least if you want to make any money. Content producers need to be creative in ways to make money, rather than being creative in ways to restrict the availability of content (which only pisses off the audience).
That's just rich! As much as I hated the GOP congress, I see the gun-grabbin' Dems are back in action. I love the hardware they cite as examples in the bill. A fine example of banning (yet again) scary-looking weapons. Good thing the Beltway Sniper used a semi-auto weapon. Oh, wait -- he used a bolt-action Remington Model 700!
Dumb-assed anti-gunners. I tore up my NRA card many years ago (quit hounding your paying members for more money, thereby squandering it all on postage!), but I may have to send them a few bucks after reading this.
Firstly, as one who does contract work from home, I fully appreciate the ability to disappear from the grid and not give 'work' a second thought for hours/days on end.
We have no idea what kind of hardware the GP is maintaining. In the late 80s, you didn't have cheaply manufactured commodity hardware. You had tanks, some of which are still chugging along to this day in obscure closets in corporate America, running legacy code whose original vendor ceased to exist long ago. Even if those boxes in question were PCs from that era, as opposed to minis or big iron you'd find in a production environment (both much more reliable than PCs), they were still much more reliable than today's commodity hardware.
I've helped to maintain HPC environments, and it was a mix of the following:
1) Large, quality, proprietary machines, like SGI Origin 2000s, beefy Sun servers, and big IBM servers. Short of critical core OS upgrades or the rare hardware replacements (many machines kept running with certain hardware failures), these machines simply never went down. They were a sysadmin's dream come true, and a joy to maintain. Between maybe 20 "machines" (blurred in this case, as the O2K was a single image machine from the OS/user perspective, but had 64 "nodes"), I'd have deal with replacing a single piece of hardware (power supply, CPU, piece of RAM, or HD) per year. This applied to even the "cheap" Sparc-10 and 20 pizza boxes littering the data center, which were old when I started that job, which I stayed at for 5 years.
2) High-end, vendor-specific PC hardware. This includes racks of cluster nodes from big vendors like HP, Dell, etc.. With a couple of hundred nodes, these had failures much more often. Sure just due to sheer numbers, but also in proportion to the number of machines. Mostly bad memory or HD failures, but the occasional switch or backplane was not uncommon. Enough to keep a single person busy babysitting half-time.
3) Dirt cheap, beige boxes (sometimes black racks) filled with the lowest price-point commodity hardware our local PC vendor could assemble for us. Several hundred in clusters. Everything would fail, with various levels of severity. All the above previously mentioned hardware, but often motherboards, fans, NICs, and everything in between. I recall a rash of AMD CPU fan failures -- sometimes just killing the CPU, but sometimes fan blades peppering the inside of the case like shrapnel. Good times, indeed! These machines kept a full-time underling swapping hardware most of the time, plus the admin overhead to monitor the state of the nodes.
Note that the difference in number of failures (per machine count) between 1 and 2 was quite great, but not so much between 2 and 3. Certainly not in proportion to the price.
So, machines come in all flavors, and, depending on the GP's hardware, we have no reason to criticize his overhead related to hardware problems. If his employer is too cheap to hire a few on-site Jr. Techs, it wouldn't surprise me that if they used less than reliable hardware. Or skimped on cooling. Or something.
Yes, a good system of setting up and monitoring hardware goes a long way to reduce the workload. However, sometimes it's simply the admin vs the hardware and it's MTBF ratings, and in the cases of 100+ machines, the odds are against you. But, the the guy's defense, I don't believe we've been given enough information to be as harsh as you are sounding.
Should libraries also carry hard-core pornography?
Why not. Didn't libraries used to carry Playboy, Penthouse, etc.? I say, if it's legal to publish at all, a library should have a right to provide it to its patrons. The government need not interfere.
You know... this topic pisses me off to no end. I have a modest nVidia GeForce FX 5200 video card (don't laugh -- it was a 2nd-hand upgrade from my aging G400 Max last year), but I run FreeBSD as my main desktop. Sure, they have a FreeBSD driver (it's even in ports) -- but I run the amd64 version of the OS. Sure, I could run 64-bit Linux and use their driver, but I jumped ship from Linux several years ago, and I just can't stomach the idea of going back.
So, I'm S.O.L. when it comes to 3D acceleration. Not just with nVidia. As far as I know, there are absolutely *no* video chipset makers out there that have released the specs for their acceleration stuff. Not that I was surprised that nVidia hasn't released the specs. However, I *was* totally surprised that there is simply no alternative for me. After much reading of rants on USENET and other forums, it appears that if you run 64-bit FreeBSD on your workstation, you simply cannot have 3D acceleration at this time. This, to me, speaks volumes about the sincerity of these vendors when they talk of supporting open operating systems, as it means that no truly open video hardware exists today. If Linux weren't the darling of the tech press, I doubt they'd support it at all, either.
To video card manufacturers: Open the specs! I'll run out today and purchase the first card that'll give me 3D acceleration for my chosen OS. Plus, I'll send a "You suck, I'm buying Foo Inc.'s hardware now!" letter to nVidia the same day.
To steer things back to the main topic, though, I applaud every time I hear of developers (like OpenBSD's Theo -- rough around the edges he may be) or a distro taking a stand against proprietary code/binaries and not including them. When I started down the open source path many years ago, I had to vet and replace some hardware to get support. As a result, I now run what is (my opinion, of course) much higher quality hardware than I used to ("real" modems vs winmodems, anyone?).
I mean I'm not smashing the stack or anything to get this information, I'm talking about all I have to do is use commands like cd, cat and find. Real hackers tools, eh?
Careful there, fella....
True story. I know a good, sharp guy who, while doing consulting work for a small, rural ISP, downed a production system by mistake. The owners apparently sued him, and during trial, some 'expert' witness tried defend the ISPs position that my friend's cat'ing of/etc/password during the course of his work was hacking and exposed 'confidential' account data. The ISP hosted freakin' shells accounts, so they were obviously dumb-asses for making such a claim, as was the expert witness.
In what turned out to be an example of true justice, the ISP lost their case -- as they should have. However, you get a rich enough plaintiff and slick enough lawyer into the fray, you could very well lose a case that deserves to be won on the merits alone.
But in the US your tax returns cannot be used as evidence against you in other crimes -- such use would be in conflict with the 5th amendment.
Sorry, but the SCOTUS routinely immasculates the US Constitution when taxation powers are in question. See this lively discussion over at Plastic.com with some very well-informed regulars citing much case law to debate the issue.
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"And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper?"
I can't decide what's more embarrassing for that 12-year-old girl: the gay pr0n, or the mother's finger nails.
What a silly bunt.
Indeed. Everyone had that damned album on my street -- it was quite the nightmare.
While no fan of Redhat (anymore), this is just a lame complaint.
You know, Solaris and it's commercial brethren didn't always include the open source tools we've come to expect these days.
Before AIX, Sun, IRIX, etc. all had open source repositories with binaries rolled into the native package format (these days, often provided by the vendor itself!), we admins got along just fine either compiling most source packages with the stock (or vedor optional) compilers. Heck, if you preferred GCC, it was fairly simple (albeit a day's work) to bootstrap a complete GNU build environment (gcc, gnu-utils, glibc, make, autoconf, automake, etc.) using the stock compilers, and then springboard from there.
Given the supported development environment *included* with RH anymore, anyone who complains about the lack of a specific version of an open source package needs his admin credentials revoked. And don't give me the "support" excuse. If the shop is *that* mission critical, it will buy support for the hardware, the OS on that hardware, and any 3rd party apps running on that OS. Otherwise, suck it up and "configure && make && make install".
No kidding.
The last time I had a cable TV subscription, I called to cancel. I tell ya, it was like pulling teeth. They couldn't grasp that I simply didn't *like* broadcast TV. "I had no problems with the service. It's just that there's simply not enough value in the programming for my $x/month." First they suggested the Basic, non-digital plan. Then they broke out the super-cheap, non-advertised price plan (similar to the cell phone companies). They must have thought we were really poor, 'cause they even tried to give me *vouchers* for free cable for a few months! I couldn't believe it!
I think they are aware of the *problems* of DRM, but they just don't know to label it as such. Just ask any person who's had to sit through the 20 minutes of commercials on Disney DVDs that they can't skip through. That annoys the shit out of nearly everyone I know, and DRM is the cause. They just don't recognize it as such.
As for flocking towards alternatives... just look at the client list of your favorite P2P client. Not every IP in your bittorrent client is some punk kid "putting it to The Man". Sure, they're not *legal*, but they are non-DRM alternatives. When asshat companies like Maxis are still requiring the CD to be present for The Sims to run (in this age of half-TB drives), they can kiss my ass -- I'll go download the version with the No-CD crack.
I know a sharp A.I. and machine learning post-grad who works for a major government lab (who also interned at MS in the early 90's). He told me one day that the A.I. that went into the Clippy engine was initially *too* good, and that the designers at MS had to tone it down to the irritating and near-useless state we all know and love.
It's a shame that the talent that MS had sucked up over the past 3 decades has their work tied up in MS's IP vault. Surely AT&T has much technology hidden from view, but they certainly have released a lot into the public for playing around with (C, UNIX, Plan9, and VNC are all great products many of us benefit from).
One can only speculate how many cool, but defunct, projects are laying around at MS. It's a shame they don't simply release some of this stuff.
Sure he does. More specifically, he knows the spirit of open source licenses, and he gets miffed when companies *just* barely comply to the letter of the licenses to maximize their benefit from using an open source license while at the same time minimizing the benefits the rest of the community get.
I think Michael Moore attacked this brilliantly in one of his movies (Fahrenheit 9/11, right?) where he walked around Capital Hill with enlistment forms and handed them to senators/congressmen with kids. Their reactions were priceless.
I'd love to see a national campaign by some anti-war org who tracks politician's kids and tallies whether or not they are serving in the armed forces. I'm sure the numbers would be quite telling.
Yeah, but if all the three-letter agencies spent time doing the useful stuff which you describe, it would put a damper on them jailing so many their own people for victimless crimes (War on Drugs, etc.). If common sense and restraint were part of the government's MO, there's be a lot less of it, and we all know how likely *that* is to happen.
In spite of being a slick businessman, he was (as they all were, and still are) short-sighted.
What has changed in the file sharing scene since this event? Not much, at least in principle. People are still sharing, with even more bandwidth and impunity than before. Content producers still lobby for more laws, still rake in profits, and continue to sue those who enjoy illegal downloads/uploads. Sure, P2P networks have gotten more diffuse and sneakier, and iTunes exploded onto the scene. But 2007 looks and smells a lot like 2000 in terms of people getting free music. And you know what? RIAA labels and EMusic are still in business! The industry didn't implode! Maybe money *can* be made even when people download free stuff.
So what was the point of all his hot air, again? He still believed, after the walls of artificial scarcity had fallen, that digital IP still had some sort of monetary value that should be protected. He was wrong.
Face it. Napster let the cat out of the bag, and today we're all benefiting with that cat's many offspring. Metallica's recording of "No Leaf Clover" has no value in and of itself anymore. All revenue should be made from added value. Seeing the song performed live adds value. Buying a CD with lyrics and cover art adds value. Being able to purchase the music file from Emusic and iTunes via a slick, drool-proof interface onto a slick hardware player adds value. AllofMP3 raked in money, and it was essentially charging for bandwidth and indexing. Had my credit card not rejected the authorization on their payment site, I would have spent a fair bet on tracks, but instead I spent my time pulling down crap from spotty torrents.
There's value added to water -- one of the most plentiful things on this entire planet! People get water for free (more or less), yet will still go out an buy bottled shit, whether it's a pint of Evian or a gallon of generic distilled water from Wal Mart. Hell, I've got my own well, and I buy the occasional gallon of distilled water. So don't go telling me that the producers of entertainment cannot make a buck if the stuff gets away from them and is available for free.
But make no mistake, chasing loose MP3s around the 'net makes no money for the producers or performers. It only makes money for the lawyers and those who play catch-up with the P2P scene, such as NetPD and Copyright Control Services (mentioned in the transcript I linked to). I argue that inventing value-add to the music tracks is a more profitable pursuit, as opposed to walking against the tide.
Short. Sighted.
If I recall correctly, the CEO of EMusic one of the asshats on the other side of the table against Napster during Orrin Hatch's "Napster Hearings" back in the day? No way I'd patronize that short-sighted man's company.
Outsourcing your work to a team of digital artists to polish up your vision is not my idea of artistry. There's some respect to be paid for the director who, apart from adding sound effects and rearranging scenes, is directly responsible for what's on the developed film.
In my mind, there's a world of difference between Lucas being behind the camera and shooting/directing the same scene in Star Wars over and over again until it's visually perfect and him shooting a scene of Ewan McGregor in front of a green screen and dumping the rest on the ILM team. I view the former as a complete art form on Lucas's part, while the latter isn't.
That doesn't mean that those who do the digital work aren't artists in their own right. I've followed the IRTC for years, and the good scenes are indeed works of art.
Another example. While I appreciate the digital eye candy of Star Wars: 1-3, I don't think they hold a candle to the *artwork* of Episodes 4-6. One example I always trot out is the asteroid flight/fight scenes in Empire vs Clones. The flight of the Millennium Falcon through the asteroids in Empire made me sway in my seat when I watched it on the big screen as a kid. The scene with Obi-Wan and Fett in Clones had nowhere near the same impact, though it may have been visually more "clean".
And of course being twenty years older and having been jaded by twenty years of ever more sophisticated SFX and CGI has nothing to do with it. Again, your glasses have a distinct rose tint.
No, the fact that the asteroids and ships, while not "real" in Empire, were physical objects being filmed had more to do with it. For whatever reason, my brain was faked out enough by real photos of real objects, but it was not by a similar CG scene.
If, for example, Jolt Cola wanted to pay Star Wars Kid up for commercial appearances, they'd do so solely because he was perceived as a "famous" person that could push a product, in spite of the fact that he's not an actor or earned money elsewhere.
Now.... if your point was noting the chicken/egg paradox of migrating to my lame revenue model, then you indeed have a point. Some producer and set of actors would need to risk producing a show "for nothing" in the hopes that they'll reap returns on their investment when the actors become famous and start doing product endorsements. If it worked, then the model could catch on a snowball into a new era media revenue. As with all new ventures, it takes invested money, a plan, and luck/skill.
Certainly, I've known that images have been doctored in various media for a looong time. We've shown many such photo retouching samples to our 11-year-old daughter, as she's now starting to be aware of her perceived beauty.
It's no surprise that such digital manipulation is being used on the big screen.
While I don't have problems with such retouching, I do think that it makes it tough to consider films and photographs that have been doctored genuine art forms anymore. Certainly, much of anything that comes out of Hollywood cannot be taken at face value, but it's become even less genuine over the past 20 years. Before the 80's, if you saw a buxom, beautiful woman (or man, for you ladies out there), you could be much more certain that her hair color, bust size, and other features tied to "beauty" were more or less genuine. Sure, some makeup and soft lighting/focus made the ladies of that era slightly more attractive than they'd appear on the street, but damn, of most of them weren't drop-dead beautiful to begin with.
These days, with hair dyes and wigs, plastic surguery, and now digital manipulation, you can take the cannonical 300-lb fugly plumber, and whip him into a G.Q. model in under an hour with Photoshop. There's a fine line (in my mind, anyway) between the art of making people look good with some makeup, lights, and *good* photography/cinematography and just simply taking any old person, filming them by any old schmuck w/ a camera and then *converting* them to an entirely new person via post-production.
I don't know. It's hard to argue with the industry being at fault for these things, but I feel that imperfections (say, Jewel's crooked tooth) lend personality and uniqueness to a person. Erasing them from the record robs us of the *person* that's behind the image.
Wholesale digital creations, on the other hand, are slightly different than digital effects or enhancements. The Final Fantasy movie a few years back (or that first film from the Matrix shorts collection) was digital art. The T-Rex in Jurassic Park, while cool, was a special effect.
Another example. While I appreciate the digital eye candy of Star Wars: 1-3, I don't think they hold a candle to the *artwork* of Episodes 4-6. One example I always trot out is the asteroid flight/fight scenes in Empire vs Clones. The flight of the Millennium Falcon through the asteroids in Empire made me sway in my seat when I watched it on the big screen as a kid. The scene with Obi-Wan and Fett in Clones had nowhere near the same impact, though it may have been visually more "clean".
Surely there must be others out there who have make the same distinction as I do, and who are bothered by a cheapening of cinema?
The last thing I wanted to do was mis-represent the facts in the case.
How short-sighted! If Sarah Michelle Gellar never got a dime for doing Buffy, she's still rakin' in the bucks for whatever cosmetic company she does commercials for all the time. Sure she won't be rolling naked in quite as large a pile of money as before, but shit, it's still good coin.
Oh, you mean financial incentive for the *producers*? Well, maybe in the age of free online content, stars will have an item in their contracts that says x% of any endorsement proceeds go back to the producers who are responsible for their fame to begin with for Y number of months/years. Shit... older TV/movie stars of yesteryear make tons of money with product endorsements. Sure, the SAG will kick and scream, but hey, this is progress!
That's just one simple (and likely stillborn) idea from someone who hasn't the slightest idea of how show biz actually works. The point is, though, that producers and actors alike will need to both bend to the new reality of free online content. If revenues tied to in-show adverts will be no more, then both parties need to suck it up, get used to slightly less revenue than the old model, and try new things.
People are still stuck using old revenue models with new distributions models. I doubt you can adapt one to new technology but not the other, at least if you want to make any money. Content producers need to be creative in ways to make money, rather than being creative in ways to restrict the availability of content (which only pisses off the audience).
Dumb-assed anti-gunners. I tore up my NRA card many years ago (quit hounding your paying members for more money, thereby squandering it all on postage!), but I may have to send them a few bucks after reading this.
Damn! Even NASCAR vehicles are doping! WTF has this world come to?!?
Firstly, as one who does contract work from home, I fully appreciate the ability to disappear from the grid and not give 'work' a second thought for hours/days on end.
We have no idea what kind of hardware the GP is maintaining. In the late 80s, you didn't have cheaply manufactured commodity hardware. You had tanks, some of which are still chugging along to this day in obscure closets in corporate America, running legacy code whose original vendor ceased to exist long ago. Even if those boxes in question were PCs from that era, as opposed to minis or big iron you'd find in a production environment (both much more reliable than PCs), they were still much more reliable than today's commodity hardware.
I've helped to maintain HPC environments, and it was a mix of the following:
1) Large, quality, proprietary machines, like SGI Origin 2000s, beefy Sun servers, and big IBM servers. Short of critical core OS upgrades or the rare hardware replacements (many machines kept running with certain hardware failures), these machines simply never went down. They were a sysadmin's dream come true, and a joy to maintain. Between maybe 20 "machines" (blurred in this case, as the O2K was a single image machine from the OS/user perspective, but had 64 "nodes"), I'd have deal with replacing a single piece of hardware (power supply, CPU, piece of RAM, or HD) per year. This applied to even the "cheap" Sparc-10 and 20 pizza boxes littering the data center, which were old when I started that job, which I stayed at for 5 years.
2) High-end, vendor-specific PC hardware. This includes racks of cluster nodes from big vendors like HP, Dell, etc.. With a couple of hundred nodes, these had failures much more often. Sure just due to sheer numbers, but also in proportion to the number of machines. Mostly bad memory or HD failures, but the occasional switch or backplane was not uncommon. Enough to keep a single person busy babysitting half-time.
3) Dirt cheap, beige boxes (sometimes black racks) filled with the lowest price-point commodity hardware our local PC vendor could assemble for us. Several hundred in clusters. Everything would fail, with various levels of severity. All the above previously mentioned hardware, but often motherboards, fans, NICs, and everything in between. I recall a rash of AMD CPU fan failures -- sometimes just killing the CPU, but sometimes fan blades peppering the inside of the case like shrapnel. Good times, indeed! These machines kept a full-time underling swapping hardware most of the time, plus the admin overhead to monitor the state of the nodes.
Note that the difference in number of failures (per machine count) between 1 and 2 was quite great, but not so much between 2 and 3. Certainly not in proportion to the price.
So, machines come in all flavors, and, depending on the GP's hardware, we have no reason to criticize his overhead related to hardware problems. If his employer is too cheap to hire a few on-site Jr. Techs, it wouldn't surprise me that if they used less than reliable hardware. Or skimped on cooling. Or something.
Yes, a good system of setting up and monitoring hardware goes a long way to reduce the workload. However, sometimes it's simply the admin vs the hardware and it's MTBF ratings, and in the cases of 100+ machines, the odds are against you. But, the the guy's defense, I don't believe we've been given enough information to be as harsh as you are sounding.
Why not. Didn't libraries used to carry Playboy, Penthouse, etc.? I say, if it's legal to publish at all, a library should have a right to provide it to its patrons. The government need not interfere.
How about child porn?
Universally ruled illegal nearly world-wide. Moot point.
So, I'm S.O.L. when it comes to 3D acceleration. Not just with nVidia. As far as I know, there are absolutely *no* video chipset makers out there that have released the specs for their acceleration stuff. Not that I was surprised that nVidia hasn't released the specs. However, I *was* totally surprised that there is simply no alternative for me. After much reading of rants on USENET and other forums, it appears that if you run 64-bit FreeBSD on your workstation, you simply cannot have 3D acceleration at this time. This, to me, speaks volumes about the sincerity of these vendors when they talk of supporting open operating systems, as it means that no truly open video hardware exists today. If Linux weren't the darling of the tech press, I doubt they'd support it at all, either.
To video card manufacturers: Open the specs! I'll run out today and purchase the first card that'll give me 3D acceleration for my chosen OS. Plus, I'll send a "You suck, I'm buying Foo Inc.'s hardware now!" letter to nVidia the same day.
To steer things back to the main topic, though, I applaud every time I hear of developers (like OpenBSD's Theo -- rough around the edges he may be) or a distro taking a stand against proprietary code/binaries and not including them. When I started down the open source path many years ago, I had to vet and replace some hardware to get support. As a result, I now run what is (my opinion, of course) much higher quality hardware than I used to ("real" modems vs winmodems, anyone?).
Careful there, fella....
True story. I know a good, sharp guy who, while doing consulting work for a small, rural ISP, downed a production system by mistake. The owners apparently sued him, and during trial, some 'expert' witness tried defend the ISPs position that my friend's cat'ing of /etc/password during the course of his work was hacking and exposed 'confidential' account data. The ISP hosted freakin' shells accounts, so they were obviously dumb-asses for making such a claim, as was the expert witness.
In what turned out to be an example of true justice, the ISP lost their case -- as they should have. However, you get a rich enough plaintiff and slick enough lawyer into the fray, you could very well lose a case that deserves to be won on the merits alone.
Sorry, but the SCOTUS routinely immasculates the US Constitution when taxation powers are in question. See this lively discussion over at Plastic.com with some very well-informed regulars citing much case law to debate the issue.