We aren't going to be here between the 10th and the 17th.
That's the Week of Slashcott.
We *are* the users, and we're fighting for ourselves (and, believe it or not, you, as well)
Hey, it's awesome and all that the two of yous has worked out who's doing the fight'n for who. And I respect the collegiality of this Slashcott effort. You know, posting informative manifestos in places likely to be seen, again and again and again. And that productive organizing of community labor, yous know - boycott and strike proposals that seem perfectly suited to fixing a borked software release and everything. It's like Tron went Bolshevik at the Main Bus so afterward we'd all be free to turn the Great System off and bask in collective darkness. Real inspiring.
FREEEEEEEDOM!
But, uh, anyway. Could you do me a favor and not do that fighting for me? I'd rather you did it for someone else. I was thinking I'd skip the boycott for now. Because as much as I agree that the new beta needs some fix'n, I'm not ready to raise a pitchfork, raze the sandcastle, and laze'r up Alderaan down into bits over a few bugs and a bit of bad design. The tech world won't end if Dice rolls out a fucked up slashcode release.
Evil Somali warlards won't cry in their morning applejax.
Don Corleone won't make a bitcoin deal you can't refuse and build a toll booth across the Silk Road.
Dice employees won't twirl their greased up mustaches and laugh maniacally as slashdolts frankly press "preview" over and over again all for nothing.
it's a good thing to have an editor respond directly in the comments rather than with prewritten PR. So thanks for stepping out into the rotten vegetable pelting. It sucks. But it's for the best. Many more out here aren't throwing and have cupped their ears to listen instead. And from my perspective, this kind of dialog is what I'd like to hear.
There are some bugs to squash with beta commenting. I'm sure you're aware of that. And like many I think the layout and font selection could use some work. But there's been an abusive overreaction here by some members of the community and I'm sure it's no fun to stand in your shoes right now.
I want to offer some encouragement and to let you know that some of us support the goal of a software upgrade. Yet many of these complaints are valid. So sift out the wheat from the chaff and focus on actionable feedback to get it right. And don't let personal annoyance with overwrought temper tantrums get in the way of doing your job. A lot of people complain, but the fact is that this site still draws a large readership after many successful years. In the long run it's easy to fail. So you guys are doing something right.
Get past this shit and point your guns at/r/technology. There are whole plains full of profit out there in Redditland waiting to be claimed. Competition is good.
The UK doesn't seem to give a toss about its obligations as an EU member, but giving complete police access to medical records without court order appears to violate EU privacy guidelines. Never mind all reasonable expectations of privacy. Here's a telegraph article which suggests that the NHS policy violates EU guidelines and could lead to a ban. That the UK would likely ignore.
Honestly, there are places where national health care systems really do work. But man does the USA/UK alliance do their best to confirm every libertarian paranoid fear about rogue government abusing private data in publicly held records. What a mess.
(Of course, a true communist would reply: it will be free, because taxes will pay for it.)
Taxes have nothing to do with communism. In a communism all productive assets is owned by the state. That means farmland, power plants, factories, and all deeded property. Personal property is excluded; the state doesn't care about your model train collection.
Intellectual property would fall under state deeded property just as housing does. That's because only the state manages property deeds and assigns ownership. That the ownership is automatically assigned to the state merely simplifies bureaucratic administrative overhead. The state might be inefficient in aggregate, but not so in the Registration of Deeds office.
I know it's nit picky, but your statement conflates that communist system with every other government system imagined. Every government that has existed taxed its citizens to provide for a common good. Governments tax to build roads, bridges, schools, military and police departments. New research and development is funded through education grants. For example: the internet. Also: medical research. In fact, a lot of tax money is spent on drug development.
Perhaps you think government shouldn't do these things. Some even think government should be abolished. But to argue the abolishment of government on the pretense that taxes equals communism mixes terms and beliefs such that the rationale is nothing more than nonsense. It's no argument. It's not anticommunist or pro-USA or holds any ideological consistency.
SMS Management and Technology won the IT initial development contract in June 2009 in a deal initially expected to be worth at least $2.5 million per year.
The audit office questioned the value of the project, which is estimated to have reached $38.5 million for associated systems and applications by 30 June 2013.
So, across four years what should have cost $10M wound up costing nearly $40M. However:
Within 18 months, however, four change orders had been processed, increasing the value of the deal to over $15.4 million in the first two years
Thus, change orders from a client who changed milestones mid-stream:
The milestones for the contract were not tightly specified, nor was the extent to which the industry partner staff would be integrated with or separated from internal bureau IT staff roles and deliverables.
Leading to a situation where, "The contract began to resemble a time and materials contract rather than a fixedâfee contract contingent on achieving milestones and deliverables." Meaning that the client kept changing their mind so often the consulting firm was required to baby a system they hadn't thought through to begin with and had thus grown into a monstrosity that served disparate and disorganized goals.
No wonder it went over budget.
But that has nothing to do with open source and everything to do with bad project management. Notice that they've solved the problem by choosing "...a replacement, based on an off-the-shelf software product."
Which, if it meets their needs - bully for them. But is more likely an imposed solution to a problem they hadn't clearly defined to begin with. Thus, it's likely they'll find themselves in the same situation. Not because open source software is bad, or the commercial software is bad, or the consulting firm was probably bad... but because the bureau of meteorology has no idea what it wants to do with this data.
The problem here is with undefined goals set by management. Until they face that fact they'll go round this merry-go-round again and again. And taxpayers will foot the bill.
Most of the arguments against linux are entirely bogus and have been proven untrue.
Here is the problem with Linux. And *BSD as well.
It doesn't run the commercial software I need to successfully fulfill my objectives.
We can point our fingers at Adobe, Microsoft, and other commercial players who limit access of their apps to expand their own markets at the expense of Linux. But the model that open source would engender network effects and overtake commercial players who would shoot their own feet by refusing to develop on the platform...well, that turned out to be false.
The open source community beat commercial players on a limited playing field in server space. And then the commercial players changed the game. Ironically, Linux has become even more irrelevant as a populist movement because of its backend success.
The Linux desktop lost for valid reasons. It's been out there long enough to catch hold and it hasn't. It's long past time to look inward on that front. It's popular failure is entirely self-inflicted.
Perhaps we are indeed witnessing the downfall of the PC era.
Is that good or bad?
For open platforms manufactured by large companies, it's bad. We can still buy barebones PCs and cheap laptops, but there's an obvious transition away toward locked down systems like tablets and consumer products.
OTOH: the old PC was a successor to prior hobby platforms that were fully open. The old ALTAIR / IMSAI, Heathkit, SWTPC, Apple II, etc world of 8 bit before it went corporate. If IBM had had its way, what we're seeing today would have happened much sooner. Ironically, we can thank Microsoft for stalling that outcome for decades. It had already happened twice with mainframe and minicomputer players decades before, as they swiped ideas and technology developed in university labs for commercialization and then locked them down.
So maybe this shift will engender a resurgence of very slow systems designed for hobbyists to built from scratch. A bifurcation of commercial products for the general public and a hobby community that might lead to hands on hardware / software development of entirely new platforms. A real resurgence of competition without commercial pressure because it's being done just for fun.
Such systems wouldn't fulfill the expectations of consumers. Nor should they. But they might be cool to tinker with. And that could have second order effects down the road that could impact future markets in unexpected ways. Or not. And who cares?
A hobbyist / commercial hardware split might be for the best.
I'm still on classic (after 30 seconds or so on beta) so I don't even have anything to complain about until they actually take classic away.
The beta commenting system is so bad I couldn't even preview and post from there. But I'm sympathetic to beta fuck ups. What's actually broken will work out in time and the stylistic issues people dislike will either lead to an exodus or be resolved in some unexpected way. For example, I dumped Final Cut Pro when Apple went to X and have been pleased with Adobe Premiere. But I have to admit that Apple has resolved many of the initial complaints made about FCP X. I'd reconsider now, even though l'm happy with Premiere./. admins have to do something. They're getting eaten alive by Reddit/r/technology and the site is arguably a better service with more interesting comments. I'd like to see a resurrection of/. as a tech news aggregation power site. Reddit is showing real problems with mod abuse. There's an opportunity retune and challenge for audience share here if they get it right. The admins don't have to target all of Reddit. Just the slice they're perfect to steal market share for.
The beta needs work. The comment forum is problematic. Images are a bit too big for my taste and they're not well selected to fit the theme of each story - but that's an editorial problem, not a software glitch. Still, the software clearly isn't ready for prime time. Yet a site update is warranted. And I think/. has plenty of life left in it with the right community and editorial mix.
ADMINS: If you're reading this, why not post a sticky for community bitching and get the site designers involved? Yank this shit from the stories forums and find a proper place for it that's open to discussion with the players and public so no one feels their view has been stifled. It's for the best. You've got a community revolt going on here.
But to the bitchfest crew, this shitstorm of offtopic crapflooding has made/. comments utterly unreadable for ontopic discussion. That sucks. I actually clicked this link to read real comments and got nowhere.
And I'm contributing to the mess. Fuck. Sorry about that.
amacbride wrote: "Um, in the very first sentence..."
You're right and fixed. Thank you! It's the only spelling error of the man's name in the essay. Copyedit errors happen.
"Furthermore, I think 2001 the film works precisely because of the tension between Clarke's fundamentally optimistic view of human nature, and Kubrick's pessimistic one."
Read on and I think you'll find we're very much in agreement on that point. -M
globaljustin wrote: "(when he bothers to try and summarize)"
That's a fair point. I could cut the word count down significantly and recast several of the ideas into separate academic papers. But I was shooting for a more general audience, one who might need a breakdown of the film scene by scene. Those who haven't seen the film more than once. But I could have done better. Every piece of work has its warts.
I'm on to other projects now, but may one day revisit the work and attempt a more concise revision.
OK, so I get it now. Timothy linked to a/. review of that book in the submission intro, and you linked to an Amazon review of that book as well. But the book wasn't written by me. I got confused.
However, I read the Amazon review and thought - beyond her criticisms of a book I haven't read - some of what she said about the movie was very interesting. I'd love to read her essay on 2001 and will definitely do a google search and look for it. I suspect she'd trash my work, but also believe that in her criticisms I'd learn many interesting new things.
On the fence here over whether I'd prefer she review my essay. Woman got a harsh tonue. Lol. -M
I own many of Clarke's books, including 2001. I'm sorry to say, but I think you should check your sources on that one. See here. Further, I checked the essay source and found 26 instances of the name "Clarke" and no misspellings of "Clark". Can you quote a portion of text where you found the error? If so, I'll fix it. -M
Welp, I didn't write or read that book. I didn't write the review. And I didn't comment to the reviewer either, though there was one note written by a "James M" who wasn't me.
Ligeti is pretty avant-garde stuff. He makes extensive use of polyrhythm and chromatic polyharmony. His stuff is meant to be difficult listening. Clashing sounds that evoke discomfort and disturbed emotions. I won't say that my interpretation is an 'explanation' for why Kubrick chose that kind of music for his score, but I do think it's fair to say that he chose it on purpose.
I'm in Aussieland, where everything that moves is poisonous, and it's past 11pm. If there are any questions, I'll try to answer as timely as I can. But the wifey has dibs too.
Pretty fracking cool/. and thanks timothy! And it's aright if you think there's better words out there on the film. Damn thing has embossed more ink on paper than just about any flick in existence. I just couldn't help myself 'cause I love the movie. So I wanted my say too.
This is a vast amount of storage. Obviously, the puzzle they've bought a data palace of a storage facility to assemble doesn't require indefinite storage for everyone. They're looking to cache everything they can get and then filter what's interesting. Maybe they have a range of target levels from indefinite storage of everything collected for one group, a year for another group, a month for a third group, a week for another, all the way down to a day or hours for the entire slush.
They don't need it all. They just need to run whatever algorithms they care about so they can toss whatever they think doesn't matter and keep what does.
Oh yeah. This is very bad. One of the cornerstones of the Republic at its founding was the institution of a public mail service. Because transferring documents and contracts with legal force is crucial to performing business.
What we're seeing here is the dismantling of a public service that the entire Main Street economy is reliant upon to perform day-to-day operations. It's so short sighted, one must wonder if these guys running our country want it to fail.
The issue discussed at the Slate story, and by extension the problem with _Save the Cat,_ is that in an attempt to replicate blockbusters like _Star Wars_ an extremely rigid page-by-page screenwriting forumla has emerged which sucks any creativity out of the process. As a result, deep characterization has been eschewed for flimsy plot elements that are shoehorned in to fit formulaic concerns, rather than crafting organic work that fits character and situation. Which doesn't negate your lament about storytelling by committee as far too common in commercial Hollywood filmmaking. However the work is diluted, whether by committee or by adhering to rigid formula, we're seeing the same damn story repeated again and again with nothing more than the flattest of cardboard cutouts for characters and absurd situations papered over by fast pacing, loud noises and flashy explosions.
I've read Campbell, though not the poem Parzival. Campbell has plenty of dissenters in the litcrit scene as one who's work is overly reductionist. But that's a side issue to the point of my top comment.
The problem with Hollywood films right now can be summed up by they're killing the cat in an attempt to save it. What do I mean?
There's a popular screenwriting book called Save The Cat - The Last Screenwriting Book You'll Ever Need that sets a page by page forumla for events within a typical movie. Things like, an opening image, setting the theme, introducing the hero, start of a B plot at the beginning of Act II, cross points for A and B plots, the great False Defeat, leading up to a Crisis of Self Confidence, and then the Big Payoff.
Blah blah blah blah.
Slate has a good article on how this book as turned movies into showdown of formulaic familiarity.
It's not like the forumla is bad, per se. But if every film had been made this way we'd never have classics like Bridge Over The River Kwai, Laurence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, yada yada yada. Because the formula is limited. At its heart, it harkens back to Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces thesis (which every/. nerd into Star Wars should have heard about). A fine way to tell the Great Hero story, but terrible for deep character studies. And that's what's missing in Hollywood film and why good television like The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones and Mad Men have become so popular (and let's not forget the first few seasons of Battlestar Galactica, which were fantastic).
In fact, George R. R. Martin's entire Song of Ice and Fire series eschews the whole Great Hero narrative and offers flawed characters with conflicting motivations told from multiple points of view, and - sorry to bring this word in on a tech site but... - that's why it's art. Which is also why Transformers isn't.
A lot of people have been discussing issues with the blockbuster cycle and financing, and that's all part of it too. But there is a serious dearth of experimental writing involved too. The whole Hollywood system is screwed up. But let's at least Thank God for HBO and other cable network financing of long form multi-episodic storytelling.
Can't avoid it in parts of AUS. For example, I'm in Perth, WA at the moment and there have been several shark attacks over the last few years that have resulted in killings. But somedays there are crazy waves here and just people come regardless of the history. On average, it's not that dangerous. Still.
I'm no surfer dude. I'll stick to the patrolled beaches.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, it's awesome and all that the two of yous has worked out who's doing the fight'n for who. And I respect the collegiality of this Slashcott effort. You know, posting informative manifestos in places likely to be seen, again and again and again. And that productive organizing of community labor, yous know - boycott and strike proposals that seem perfectly suited to fixing a borked software release and everything. It's like Tron went Bolshevik at the Main Bus so afterward we'd all be free to turn the Great System off and bask in collective darkness. Real inspiring.
FREEEEEEEDOM!
But, uh, anyway. Could you do me a favor and not do that fighting for me? I'd rather you did it for someone else. I was thinking I'd skip the boycott for now. Because as much as I agree that the new beta needs some fix'n, I'm not ready to raise a pitchfork, raze the sandcastle, and laze'r up Alderaan down into bits over a few bugs and a bit of bad design. The tech world won't end if Dice rolls out a fucked up slashcode release.
Evil Somali warlards won't cry in their morning applejax.
Don Corleone won't make a bitcoin deal you can't refuse and build a toll booth across the Silk Road.
Dice employees won't twirl their greased up mustaches and laugh maniacally as slashdolts frankly press "preview" over and over again all for nothing.
Or maybe they will. Mwahahahahaaaaa!!!
Na. It's a sleazy marketing trick. 'Innovative gameplay' in this context is a phrase to be combined with 'conflict of interest'.
Hey,
it's a good thing to have an editor respond directly in the comments rather than with prewritten PR. So thanks for stepping out into the rotten vegetable pelting. It sucks. But it's for the best. Many more out here aren't throwing and have cupped their ears to listen instead. And from my perspective, this kind of dialog is what I'd like to hear.
There are some bugs to squash with beta commenting. I'm sure you're aware of that. And like many I think the layout and font selection could use some work. But there's been an abusive overreaction here by some members of the community and I'm sure it's no fun to stand in your shoes right now.
I want to offer some encouragement and to let you know that some of us support the goal of a software upgrade. Yet many of these complaints are valid. So sift out the wheat from the chaff and focus on actionable feedback to get it right. And don't let personal annoyance with overwrought temper tantrums get in the way of doing your job. A lot of people complain, but the fact is that this site still draws a large readership after many successful years. In the long run it's easy to fail. So you guys are doing something right.
Get past this shit and point your guns at /r/technology. There are whole plains full of profit out there in Redditland waiting to be claimed. Competition is good.
The UK doesn't seem to give a toss about its obligations as an EU member, but giving complete police access to medical records without court order appears to violate EU privacy guidelines. Never mind all reasonable expectations of privacy. Here's a telegraph article which suggests that the NHS policy violates EU guidelines and could lead to a ban. That the UK would likely ignore.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/hea...
Honestly, there are places where national health care systems really do work. But man does the USA/UK alliance do their best to confirm every libertarian paranoid fear about rogue government abusing private data in publicly held records. What a mess.
Taxes have nothing to do with communism. In a communism all productive assets is owned by the state. That means farmland, power plants, factories, and all deeded property. Personal property is excluded; the state doesn't care about your model train collection.
Intellectual property would fall under state deeded property just as housing does. That's because only the state manages property deeds and assigns ownership. That the ownership is automatically assigned to the state merely simplifies bureaucratic administrative overhead. The state might be inefficient in aggregate, but not so in the Registration of Deeds office.
I know it's nit picky, but your statement conflates that communist system with every other government system imagined. Every government that has existed taxed its citizens to provide for a common good. Governments tax to build roads, bridges, schools, military and police departments. New research and development is funded through education grants. For example: the internet. Also: medical research. In fact, a lot of tax money is spent on drug development.
Perhaps you think government shouldn't do these things. Some even think government should be abolished. But to argue the abolishment of government on the pretense that taxes equals communism mixes terms and beliefs such that the rationale is nothing more than nonsense. It's no argument. It's not anticommunist or pro-USA or holds any ideological consistency.
According to TFA:
So, across four years what should have cost $10M wound up costing nearly $40M. However:
Thus, change orders from a client who changed milestones mid-stream:
Leading to a situation where, "The contract began to resemble a time and materials contract rather than a fixedâfee contract contingent on achieving milestones and deliverables." Meaning that the client kept changing their mind so often the consulting firm was required to baby a system they hadn't thought through to begin with and had thus grown into a monstrosity that served disparate and disorganized goals.
No wonder it went over budget.
But that has nothing to do with open source and everything to do with bad project management. Notice that they've solved the problem by choosing "...a replacement, based on an off-the-shelf software product."
Which, if it meets their needs - bully for them. But is more likely an imposed solution to a problem they hadn't clearly defined to begin with. Thus, it's likely they'll find themselves in the same situation. Not because open source software is bad, or the commercial software is bad, or the consulting firm was probably bad... but because the bureau of meteorology has no idea what it wants to do with this data.
The problem here is with undefined goals set by management. Until they face that fact they'll go round this merry-go-round again and again. And taxpayers will foot the bill.
Most of the arguments against linux are entirely bogus and have been proven untrue.
Here is the problem with Linux. And *BSD as well.
It doesn't run the commercial software I need to successfully fulfill my objectives.
We can point our fingers at Adobe, Microsoft, and other commercial players who limit access of their apps to expand their own markets at the expense of Linux. But the model that open source would engender network effects and overtake commercial players who would shoot their own feet by refusing to develop on the platform...well, that turned out to be false.
The open source community beat commercial players on a limited playing field in server space. And then the commercial players changed the game. Ironically, Linux has become even more irrelevant as a populist movement because of its backend success.
The Linux desktop lost for valid reasons. It's been out there long enough to catch hold and it hasn't. It's long past time to look inward on that front. It's popular failure is entirely self-inflicted.
Is that good or bad?
For open platforms manufactured by large companies, it's bad. We can still buy barebones PCs and cheap laptops, but there's an obvious transition away toward locked down systems like tablets and consumer products.
OTOH: the old PC was a successor to prior hobby platforms that were fully open. The old ALTAIR / IMSAI, Heathkit, SWTPC, Apple II, etc world of 8 bit before it went corporate. If IBM had had its way, what we're seeing today would have happened much sooner. Ironically, we can thank Microsoft for stalling that outcome for decades. It had already happened twice with mainframe and minicomputer players decades before, as they swiped ideas and technology developed in university labs for commercialization and then locked them down.
So maybe this shift will engender a resurgence of very slow systems designed for hobbyists to built from scratch. A bifurcation of commercial products for the general public and a hobby community that might lead to hands on hardware / software development of entirely new platforms. A real resurgence of competition without commercial pressure because it's being done just for fun.
Such systems wouldn't fulfill the expectations of consumers. Nor should they. But they might be cool to tinker with. And that could have second order effects down the road that could impact future markets in unexpected ways. Or not. And who cares?
A hobbyist / commercial hardware split might be for the best.
Or, maybe I'm talking nonsense. I often do.
The beta commenting system is so bad I couldn't even preview and post from there. But I'm sympathetic to beta fuck ups. What's actually broken will work out in time and the stylistic issues people dislike will either lead to an exodus or be resolved in some unexpected way. For example, I dumped Final Cut Pro when Apple went to X and have been pleased with Adobe Premiere. But I have to admit that Apple has resolved many of the initial complaints made about FCP X. I'd reconsider now, even though l'm happy with Premiere. /. admins have to do something. They're getting eaten alive by Reddit /r/technology and the site is arguably a better service with more interesting comments. I'd like to see a resurrection of /. as a tech news aggregation power site. Reddit is showing real problems with mod abuse. There's an opportunity retune and challenge for audience share here if they get it right. The admins don't have to target all of Reddit. Just the slice they're perfect to steal market share for.
Competition is good.
The beta needs work. The comment forum is problematic. Images are a bit too big for my taste and they're not well selected to fit the theme of each story - but that's an editorial problem, not a software glitch. Still, the software clearly isn't ready for prime time. Yet a site update is warranted. And I think /. has plenty of life left in it with the right community and editorial mix.
ADMINS: If you're reading this, why not post a sticky for community bitching and get the site designers involved? Yank this shit from the stories forums and find a proper place for it that's open to discussion with the players and public so no one feels their view has been stifled. It's for the best. You've got a community revolt going on here.
But to the bitchfest crew, this shitstorm of offtopic crapflooding has made /. comments utterly unreadable for ontopic discussion. That sucks. I actually clicked this link to read real comments and got nowhere.
And I'm contributing to the mess. Fuck. Sorry about that.
amacbride wrote: "Um, in the very first sentence..."
You're right and fixed. Thank you! It's the only spelling error of the man's name in the essay. Copyedit errors happen.
"Furthermore, I think 2001 the film works precisely because of the tension between Clarke's fundamentally optimistic view of human nature, and Kubrick's pessimistic one."
Read on and I think you'll find we're very much in agreement on that point. -M
globaljustin wrote: "(when he bothers to try and summarize)"
That's a fair point. I could cut the word count down significantly and recast several of the ideas into separate academic papers. But I was shooting for a more general audience, one who might need a breakdown of the film scene by scene. Those who haven't seen the film more than once. But I could have done better. Every piece of work has its warts.
I'm on to other projects now, but may one day revisit the work and attempt a more concise revision.
OK, so I get it now. Timothy linked to a /. review of that book in the submission intro, and you linked to an Amazon review of that book as well. But the book wasn't written by me. I got confused.
However, I read the Amazon review and thought - beyond her criticisms of a book I haven't read - some of what she said about the movie was very interesting. I'd love to read her essay on 2001 and will definitely do a google search and look for it. I suspect she'd trash my work, but also believe that in her criticisms I'd learn many interesting new things.
On the fence here over whether I'd prefer she review my essay. Woman got a harsh tonue. Lol. -M
I own many of Clarke's books, including 2001. I'm sorry to say, but I think you should check your sources on that one. See here. Further, I checked the essay source and found 26 instances of the name "Clarke" and no misspellings of "Clark". Can you quote a portion of text where you found the error? If so, I'll fix it. -M
AC Wrote: "I think maynard needs a girlfriend."
My wife disagrees. -M
I wrote the 2001 essay featured here, but I didn't write or read the book you linked to at Amazon. Nor did I write the review comment.
Welp, I didn't write or read that book. I didn't write the review. And I didn't comment to the reviewer either, though there was one note written by a "James M" who wasn't me.
(scratches head)
Can't say much else here. Sorry.
Ligeti is pretty avant-garde stuff. He makes extensive use of polyrhythm and chromatic polyharmony. His stuff is meant to be difficult listening. Clashing sounds that evoke discomfort and disturbed emotions. I won't say that my interpretation is an 'explanation' for why Kubrick chose that kind of music for his score, but I do think it's fair to say that he chose it on purpose.
Glad you liked the read!
(scrunches up face in consideration)
Hadn't thought of that. Kindof a marginal adaptation of a cool book. Would love to see a remake though.
Uhhh. Hi folks!
I'm in Aussieland, where everything that moves is poisonous, and it's past 11pm. If there are any questions, I'll try to answer as timely as I can. But the wifey has dibs too.
Pretty fracking cool /. and thanks timothy! And it's aright if you think there's better words out there on the film. Damn thing has embossed more ink on paper than just about any flick in existence. I just couldn't help myself 'cause I love the movie. So I wanted my say too.
Whoa.
This is a vast amount of storage. Obviously, the puzzle they've bought a data palace of a storage facility to assemble doesn't require indefinite storage for everyone. They're looking to cache everything they can get and then filter what's interesting. Maybe they have a range of target levels from indefinite storage of everything collected for one group, a year for another group, a month for a third group, a week for another, all the way down to a day or hours for the entire slush.
They don't need it all. They just need to run whatever algorithms they care about so they can toss whatever they think doesn't matter and keep what does.
Oh yeah. This is very bad. One of the cornerstones of the Republic at its founding was the institution of a public mail service. Because transferring documents and contracts with legal force is crucial to performing business.
What we're seeing here is the dismantling of a public service that the entire Main Street economy is reliant upon to perform day-to-day operations. It's so short sighted, one must wonder if these guys running our country want it to fail.
The issue discussed at the Slate story, and by extension the problem with _Save the Cat,_ is that in an attempt to replicate blockbusters like _Star Wars_ an extremely rigid page-by-page screenwriting forumla has emerged which sucks any creativity out of the process. As a result, deep characterization has been eschewed for flimsy plot elements that are shoehorned in to fit formulaic concerns, rather than crafting organic work that fits character and situation. Which doesn't negate your lament about storytelling by committee as far too common in commercial Hollywood filmmaking. However the work is diluted, whether by committee or by adhering to rigid formula, we're seeing the same damn story repeated again and again with nothing more than the flattest of cardboard cutouts for characters and absurd situations papered over by fast pacing, loud noises and flashy explosions.
I've read Campbell, though not the poem Parzival. Campbell has plenty of dissenters in the litcrit scene as one who's work is overly reductionist. But that's a side issue to the point of my top comment.
The problem with Hollywood films right now can be summed up by they're killing the cat in an attempt to save it. What do I mean?
There's a popular screenwriting book called Save The Cat - The Last Screenwriting Book You'll Ever Need that sets a page by page forumla for events within a typical movie. Things like, an opening image, setting the theme, introducing the hero, start of a B plot at the beginning of Act II, cross points for A and B plots, the great False Defeat, leading up to a Crisis of Self Confidence, and then the Big Payoff.
Blah blah blah blah.
Slate has a good article on how this book as turned movies into showdown of formulaic familiarity.
It's not like the forumla is bad, per se. But if every film had been made this way we'd never have classics like Bridge Over The River Kwai, Laurence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, yada yada yada. Because the formula is limited. At its heart, it harkens back to Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces thesis (which every /. nerd into Star Wars should have heard about). A fine way to tell the Great Hero story, but terrible for deep character studies. And that's what's missing in Hollywood film and why good television like The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones and Mad Men have become so popular (and let's not forget the first few seasons of Battlestar Galactica, which were fantastic).
In fact, George R. R. Martin's entire Song of Ice and Fire series eschews the whole Great Hero narrative and offers flawed characters with conflicting motivations told from multiple points of view, and - sorry to bring this word in on a tech site but... - that's why it's art. Which is also why Transformers isn't.
A lot of people have been discussing issues with the blockbuster cycle and financing, and that's all part of it too. But there is a serious dearth of experimental writing involved too. The whole Hollywood system is screwed up. But let's at least Thank God for HBO and other cable network financing of long form multi-episodic storytelling.
Can't avoid it in parts of AUS. For example, I'm in Perth, WA at the moment and there have been several shark attacks over the last few years that have resulted in killings. But somedays there are crazy waves here and just people come regardless of the history. On average, it's not that dangerous. Still.
I'm no surfer dude. I'll stick to the patrolled beaches.