With high unemployment and thousands of people applying for every job that opens, they don't really have to give you a reason why you never got a call. If you suspect there's something funny going on, that they're tossing your resume aside for illegal/unethical/just-plain-dumb reasons, you'd have a heck of a time proving it.
It's only illegal if they get caught, seems to be the basic ethical guideline many companies use. And once caught, they pay the fine and are more subtle about it next time.
And is it just me, or is it common practice that HR in most companies is staffed with the "unfirables" that no other department wanted? Owner's spouse or relatives, owner's ex-spouse with Clauses In The Divorce Papers, owner's golfing buddy who happens to have Pictures Of People Doing Stuff, owner's fling-on-the-side, owner's child-by-fling-on-the-side, etc - that if they had enough technical clue to understand concepts like "name collision" they probably wouldn't be in HR?
Removing the stuff from the Vista source code that shouldn't have been there in the first place? That shouldn't take long: just go back into source control and revert to last-known-good. Namely, Win2K.
I bet what they're doing is finding ways of crippling Windows 7 to "teach" people "how good they had it" with Vista.
Don't get me wrong. I like functionality, I like a well-done AJAX site.
But stop me when you see the problem. What's being talked about is rewriting popular desktop apps to run inside a Web browser, in an environment where you have limited native GUI functionality, no toolkits to speak of, no access to the local filesystem (you know, where your stuff is), no window management, no native menus, network access is limited for security reasons but required because the local filesystem is off limits, all the GUI widgets invented in the last 35 years have to be written from scratch in languages and technologies that don't even work the same from browser to browser. What, was Office too fast on your machine? Being able to load and save your own files on your own hard drive was too convenient?
This was tried a decade ago, people were talking about the browser as an OS and all your apps would run in Java, same problems, you lost everything your native OS provided for you, added a few layers of Slow 'n Buggy, and didn't gain much except, oh, hell, I'm not sure what anyone would have gained except sticking it to Microsoft, and anyone who cared wasn't using Office in the first place. It seems to be the same thing now: surely there are better ways to stick it to Microsoft than writing productivity apps that are so constrained by the browser environment that Office looks good by comparison?
Get the right tool for the right job, folks. If you need groupware, write groupware, don't just assume the need for collaborative writing means that word processing fits nicely inside a Web page. If the point is to thumb nose at Microsoft, write better apps for your OSes of choice.
The legitimate purpose of AJAX is to bring interactivity to those things on a Web site that need it, not to move desktop apps into a smaller box.
To the original question: What's Next is probably already happening in the arena of standalone Javascript engines and Dashboard-like mini apps, that are reasonably lightweight, unobtrusive, and play nicely with the native GUI you're running. Sort of like each Web site you like and use everyday will have an applet or widget that "breaks off" and stays floating, on your desktop or on a Dashboard layer or whatever, to keep some kind of line of interactivity open with the Web site long after you've left it. Like RSS but more tailored to what that site naturally does: tickers, headlines, webcams, music, gamelets, whatever, and in the style of the site itself as visual cue.
Corporatese isn't technical jargon. It wouldn't be an issue if it were. We wouldn't mind if it were technical words for the nuts and bolts of the operation of the company, but it isn't.
Geeks understand the concept of jargon and can even pick up the basics of a jargon in a new field pretty quickly. That's why we hate corporate-speak: it doesn't work like jargon. It's not about using specialized words to communicate complicated ideas quickly, it's about communicating simple ideas in a complicated way in order to sound impressive. It's related to social rank, a thing many geeks don't even believe exist (I know I don't). It doesn't even follow the most basic rule of jargon: that if you don't know what a term means, others in the room do, that the word has a defined meaning. Corporatespeak holds no such reassurance.
Can somebody explain why Yoda is serious in the Old Republic and playful and infantile / senile in the Empire?
He's trying to test Luke's patience (and Luke fails the test: "I cannot teach him, the boy has no patience.") After that, Yoda is dead serious the rest of the film, and only attempts to be funny once in Return of the Jedi ("when 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not").
And what did he do with his laser?
His lightsaber? I think I saw it get dropped during the battle with Palpatine in the big Senate room. I suppose Yoda could have used the Force to retrieve it, but he was probably in a hurry - or figured, in exile, he would not need it.
Besides, when Luke comes around looking for a "great warrior" the last thing Yoda would have wanted to do was break out the lightsaber and show Luke a few cool moves. Luke was stuck in a mindset of expecting Jedi to just be saber-wielding killing machines, something Yoda probably wanted to correct. Seeing Yoda using a lightsaber would only have convinced Luke that the lightsaber makes the Jedi, and he'd have ignored or misinterpreted all the lessons after that.
The WordPerfect port DID ship, albeit it was (obviously) the 80s version that made little use of the GUI and was never updated properly for faster machines and newer versions of the OS. It was the Lotus 123 port that existed but was rumored to have been killed on orders from Commodore itself. (It boggles the mind. Never ascribe to stupidity that which can more easily be explained by mind control rays from Neptune.)
The Amiga did have some good productivity apps (ProWrite, Excellence, Final Copy and Final Writer, Final Calc and TurboCalc, several DTP apps, Scala for Powerpoint-like presentations), it just never made a big deal about them, printing was bizarre, vector font support was somewhere between weird and weak, oh and no one wanted to do business work at interlaced resolutions (took awhile for the Amiga to support progressive VGA resolutions). Oh, and whenever Commodore would ship a business app bundled with the machine, it was never one of the good ones ("KindWords"?), and/or they would botch the bundle ("send in your proof of purchase and a YEAR from now we might remember to send you your apps").
By the time Commodore fixed the technical problems circa 1990, meanwhile the rest of the world had convinced itself there was something inherently "professional" about eight-letter filenames, crashing screensavers, and "Hot Dog Stand" color presets.
It'll be just like the 80s again. I can see it now, the animated boot screen with wavy lines that says "4M1G4 0S 4.0 kr4CK3D 8Y BLU3ZM0B1L3 J3FF i5 A h0M0"
A dongle, huh? Methinks someone in charge of the current Amiga doesn't remember 1989 very well. Dongles back then meant "it might take almost TWO whole days for the kracked (yes, with the k, cuz they all thought it was k00l) version to start making the rounds." Or better yet, "I BOUGHT the damn thing and I still downloaded the kracked version because I lost the dongle."
What they ought to do is ship the OS with a custom USB floppy drive that can read all the various weird Amiga disk formats (including the custom ones used by games). That way it's more of a conceptual dongle - you don't need it to run the OS, but it sure makes it a lot more pleasant if you can actually get to your old disks.
Customers, particularly when managed by bad salespeople, view involvement as a one-way street: they pump in flawed requirements and rapid requirement changes like cannonballs over a castle wall, and do not wait see where they hit.
Usually one client takes up a disproportionate chunk of your development resources because an eager salesdroid sold them the whole solar system for very little money and you can't back out now. There is one, and possible more than one, contact person at that client who is a tireless fountain of bad ideas (if there are more than one, their bad ideas contradict each other, and YOU are part of THEIR internal communications problems) and that just gets heaped on you via a commission-happy salesman, bypassing any kind of review process at your office or theirs - that same contact person never reads the memos that get sent back. Usability? HA! Customer involvement? HA! The cannonballs fly in one direction only.
Maybe it's to do with how they counted 'failure'. It shipped reasonably close to when they said it would, features don't work right, customers hate it, developers acknowledge that it needs a rewrite, but someone surveyed (in upper management, who does not eat the dog food) considers it a success.
Would you consider Microsoft Windows a success or a failure?
I call your cubicle. "Hi, I'm $so_and_so, your boss sent me down here to do $gobbledygook_9000 compliance checks and I need into your computer. Can you log me in with your account please?" You: "Sure, lemme stick my hand on the scanner." Me: "Now type what I tell you. This is a three-line obfuscated Perl trojan^Wprogram to check your computer for compliance..."
The question isn't why people find clowns creepy. The question is how they can still be so popular as "amusement" despite how many people find them creepy. Is it like disco, some kind of social lie where everyone pretends to like it even though they don't?
I've noticed that I respond better to untextured or fake-looking CGI figures animated from motion capture data, than I do to perfectly rendered humans that aren't motion captured.
Or for that matter, human actors doing wire stunts, where the speeds, mass, and motion are all wrong.
In an ep of Doctor Who (Robots of Death) was bandied about the term "Grimwade's Syndrome", a made-up name for a made-up condition where people go crazy in close quarters with robots, because they lack the usual body language to let humans know there are humans in the room.
Not much in Doctor Who turns out to be startlingly prescient, but that certainly did. Grimwade's Syndrome is the best way to describe what the article is talking about - the discomfort of interacting (even one-way, via movie screen) with a "thing" that looks human while every intuitive sense in your brain screams not human.
There's a lot that can be talked about here. I watch our pet bunnies interact with our cat - the cat doesn't try to eat them, which is interesting in itself, but more interesting is how the bunnies respond to the cat. They are confused by her. She is, to them, an only slightly funny-looking bunny, but frustratingly she does not "speak" their language. She doesn't make bunny body language, nor does she respond to it when the bunnies try to communicate with her via body language. I imagine what the bunnies are experiencing is similar to our notional Grimwade's Syndrome, they're interacting with a creepy simulacrum of a bunny that doesn't act quite right.
Or consider this. Because we actually have an "FPU" (Face Processing Unit) in our brains, we pick up on degrees of subtlety in faces - we have perhaps a too-strict sense of beauty, in terms of which faces we find pleasing (ever stop to think how important symmetry is in a face?) - and we see faces anywhere there is even a remotely facelike shape, including the Moon. (I suspect it will come to be the defining characteristic of the human species that we can see a human face there - machine vision systems and alien intelligences will both stare at it and say "I still don't see it".)
Humans therefore tend to react very strongly (understatement) to anything that makes the "FPU" work too hard. If it's sorta like a face but has big things wrong with it, it's "ugly" - maybe even to the point of being a "monster", be it an eyeless skull, a Grey Alien, or a person with a deformity or disfigurement. What IS an ideal, simple thing for the FPU to play with? We may describe an attractive person as "easy on the eyes" but I'd also make a case that the face detector also has an easy time with Hello Kitty, and Hello Kitty looks nothing like Jennifer Connelly. And people tend not to be scared of the "faces" found on the fronts of some cars (unless the driver is a maniac or the car is a Cuda) or of the man in the Moon for that matter, who is greatly distorted and asymmetrical at that. But hey, it's a complex and poorly understood system.
What's interesting is what happens to people who've had damage to that part of the brain. Did anyone else catch the show - mighta been Scientific American Frontiers - where they profiled a guy who had a head injury and now believes his family have been replaced by clones? The kicker was that when they CALLED him and spoke to him over the phone, he believed it was really them, but in person he was certain, despite all better knowledge, that these were not his parents, these were replicants of some kind. Something to do with the part of his brain that considers a person familiar, was malfunctioning, and something at a higher level in his brain was getting uncomfortably confused between people who LOOK like his parents but do not register lower-level feelings of recognition like his parents would. The compulsion to believe this overrode all his better sense: he KNEW these were his real parents, but couldn't make it real in his head.
We're ALL in that boat now with CGI. Our brains are confused: our FPUs are satisfied that the faces look real, but everything else is wrong, the movement is wrong, the behavior is wrong. We process what we're seeing as some kind of weird painting or a reanimated corpse. (And yes, Michael Jackson does trigger this response now that much of his face doesn't move normally when he speaks.) That creepy
C3P0, now that you mention it, has those huge perplexed-looking eyes. A totally neutral robot face DOES look a tiny bit creepy and corpselike. C3P0 looks submissive and nonthreatening, his facial expression works for almost every state of emotion he expresses (also a tribute to Anthony Daniels' ability to make anything in the script sound like it goes with that expression).
Are we really to the point where we begin to talk about human-machine interfaces in terms of RACIAL relations? "Nonthreatening", where have you heard that before?
Still, if C3P0 was a PERFECTLY human-looking android, that same wide-open look would creep you the fuck out, like someone walking around with no eyelids.
Re:But it's not getting cheaper
on
Shrek 2 How-To
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· Score: 1
ILM makes a sizable fraction of their money bailing out the botched productions of others.
I could make a Star Wars remark here, but I won't.
But past a certain point, they looked almost totally real, but there were enough visual and emotive cues that were just _wrong_ that the audiences likened it to watching a reanimated corpse.
Skylab which was allowed to die while waiting for the shuttle to make it better.
Skylab wasn't 'allowed' to die, it was pretty much engineered to be disposable, it had no resupply capability (except whatever could be sent up in the capsules with the crew) - it was sent up with supplies already on board.
The other problem was its orbit. It had been talked about to use the space shuttle to lift Skylab and do some work to it to make it useful again, or at the very least stick a deorbit rocket package on it so it could be brought down in the middle of nowhere without risk of hitting a city. This would have probably happened in 1980, assuming a shuttle rollout in 1979 as planned. But then two things happened: one, a manufacturing problem delayed Columbia's rollout until 1981, and two, Skylab's orbit deteriorated faster than expected. A lot faster.
When a space station decides it doesn't like its orbit anymore, it's not a matter of anyone having to "allow" it to die - rather there's not much you can do to prevent it, just get the hell out of the way. Skylab was not Babylon 5, it had no maneuvering ability of its own, so once its orbit deteriorates enough, eventually the planet gets in its way and Skylab resembles a Lina Inverse fireball attack. We've since seen what happens when spacecraft crash over populated areas.
Now, Skylab was a rush job, we all know that, but it wasn't intended to be a permanent outpost in space - the plan was we would build better ones later after having learned from the mistakes we expected to make on Skylab. Skylab was intended to be the first, not the last, American space station. No one ever explained this to Nixon, apparently: the shuttle was supposed to be a pair with a new space station. Nixon OKd the shuttle but not the station. And it's been downhill from there.
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But these days, that leaves no one.
With high unemployment and thousands of people applying for every job that opens, they don't really have to give you a reason why you never got a call. If you suspect there's something funny going on, that they're tossing your resume aside for illegal/unethical/just-plain-dumb reasons, you'd have a heck of a time proving it.
It's only illegal if they get caught, seems to be the basic ethical guideline many companies use. And once caught, they pay the fine and are more subtle about it next time.
And is it just me, or is it common practice that HR in most companies is staffed with the "unfirables" that no other department wanted? Owner's spouse or relatives, owner's ex-spouse with Clauses In The Divorce Papers, owner's golfing buddy who happens to have Pictures Of People Doing Stuff, owner's fling-on-the-side, owner's child-by-fling-on-the-side, etc - that if they had enough technical clue to understand concepts like "name collision" they probably wouldn't be in HR?
Removing the stuff from the Vista source code that shouldn't have been there in the first place? That shouldn't take long: just go back into source control and revert to last-known-good. Namely, Win2K.
I bet what they're doing is finding ways of crippling Windows 7 to "teach" people "how good they had it" with Vista.
You want Megazoomer. I also pair it up with Blacklight for light-on-dark text.
I gotta gripe about this.
Don't get me wrong. I like functionality, I like a well-done AJAX site.
But stop me when you see the problem. What's being talked about is rewriting popular desktop apps to run inside a Web browser, in an environment where you have limited native GUI functionality, no toolkits to speak of, no access to the local filesystem (you know, where your stuff is), no window management, no native menus, network access is limited for security reasons but required because the local filesystem is off limits, all the GUI widgets invented in the last 35 years have to be written from scratch in languages and technologies that don't even work the same from browser to browser. What, was Office too fast on your machine? Being able to load and save your own files on your own hard drive was too convenient?
This was tried a decade ago, people were talking about the browser as an OS and all your apps would run in Java, same problems, you lost everything your native OS provided for you, added a few layers of Slow 'n Buggy, and didn't gain much except, oh, hell, I'm not sure what anyone would have gained except sticking it to Microsoft, and anyone who cared wasn't using Office in the first place. It seems to be the same thing now: surely there are better ways to stick it to Microsoft than writing productivity apps that are so constrained by the browser environment that Office looks good by comparison?
Get the right tool for the right job, folks. If you need groupware, write groupware, don't just assume the need for collaborative writing means that word processing fits nicely inside a Web page. If the point is to thumb nose at Microsoft, write better apps for your OSes of choice.
The legitimate purpose of AJAX is to bring interactivity to those things on a Web site that need it, not to move desktop apps into a smaller box.
To the original question: What's Next is probably already happening in the arena of standalone Javascript engines and Dashboard-like mini apps, that are reasonably lightweight, unobtrusive, and play nicely with the native GUI you're running. Sort of like each Web site you like and use everyday will have an applet or widget that "breaks off" and stays floating, on your desktop or on a Dashboard layer or whatever, to keep some kind of line of interactivity open with the Web site long after you've left it. Like RSS but more tailored to what that site naturally does: tickers, headlines, webcams, music, gamelets, whatever, and in the style of the site itself as visual cue.
Corporatese isn't technical jargon. It wouldn't be an issue if it were. We wouldn't mind if it were technical words for the nuts and bolts of the operation of the company, but it isn't.
Geeks understand the concept of jargon and can even pick up the basics of a jargon in a new field pretty quickly. That's why we hate corporate-speak: it doesn't work like jargon. It's not about using specialized words to communicate complicated ideas quickly, it's about communicating simple ideas in a complicated way in order to sound impressive. It's related to social rank, a thing many geeks don't even believe exist (I know I don't). It doesn't even follow the most basic rule of jargon: that if you don't know what a term means, others in the room do, that the word has a defined meaning. Corporatespeak holds no such reassurance.
I didn't want to support IE3 when it was brand new. It sucked then too.
Malbolge looks like INTERCAL after a Tool concert.
Can somebody explain why Yoda is serious in the Old Republic and playful and infantile / senile in the Empire?
He's trying to test Luke's patience (and Luke fails the test: "I cannot teach him, the boy has no patience.") After that, Yoda is dead serious the rest of the film, and only attempts to be funny once in Return of the Jedi ("when 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not").
And what did he do with his laser?
His lightsaber? I think I saw it get dropped during the battle with Palpatine in the big Senate room. I suppose Yoda could have used the Force to retrieve it, but he was probably in a hurry - or figured, in exile, he would not need it.
Besides, when Luke comes around looking for a "great warrior" the last thing Yoda would have wanted to do was break out the lightsaber and show Luke a few cool moves. Luke was stuck in a mindset of expecting Jedi to just be saber-wielding killing machines, something Yoda probably wanted to correct. Seeing Yoda using a lightsaber would only have convinced Luke that the lightsaber makes the Jedi, and he'd have ignored or misinterpreted all the lessons after that.
Because I'd rather do business with a group that's motivated by money because I have something to bargain with.
You don't have enough money to truly bargain with Microsoft.
The WordPerfect port DID ship, albeit it was (obviously) the 80s version that made little use of the GUI and was never updated properly for faster machines and newer versions of the OS. It was the Lotus 123 port that existed but was rumored to have been killed on orders from Commodore itself. (It boggles the mind. Never ascribe to stupidity that which can more easily be explained by mind control rays from Neptune.)
The Amiga did have some good productivity apps (ProWrite, Excellence, Final Copy and Final Writer, Final Calc and TurboCalc, several DTP apps, Scala for Powerpoint-like presentations), it just never made a big deal about them, printing was bizarre, vector font support was somewhere between weird and weak, oh and no one wanted to do business work at interlaced resolutions (took awhile for the Amiga to support progressive VGA resolutions). Oh, and whenever Commodore would ship a business app bundled with the machine, it was never one of the good ones ("KindWords"?), and/or they would botch the bundle ("send in your proof of purchase and a YEAR from now we might remember to send you your apps").
By the time Commodore fixed the technical problems circa 1990, meanwhile the rest of the world had convinced itself there was something inherently "professional" about eight-letter filenames, crashing screensavers, and "Hot Dog Stand" color presets.
It'll be just like the 80s again. I can see it now, the animated boot screen with wavy lines that says
"4M1G4 0S 4.0
kr4CK3D 8Y BLU3ZM0B1L3
J3FF i5 A h0M0"
A dongle, huh? Methinks someone in charge of the current Amiga doesn't remember 1989 very well. Dongles back then meant "it might take almost TWO whole days for the kracked (yes, with the k, cuz they all thought it was k00l) version to start making the rounds." Or better yet, "I BOUGHT the damn thing and I still downloaded the kracked version because I lost the dongle."
What they ought to do is ship the OS with a custom USB floppy drive that can read all the various weird Amiga disk formats (including the custom ones used by games). That way it's more of a conceptual dongle - you don't need it to run the OS, but it sure makes it a lot more pleasant if you can actually get to your old disks.
Customers, particularly when managed by bad salespeople, view involvement as a one-way street: they pump in flawed requirements and rapid requirement changes like cannonballs over a castle wall, and do not wait see where they hit.
Usually one client takes up a disproportionate chunk of your development resources because an eager salesdroid sold them the whole solar system for very little money and you can't back out now. There is one, and possible more than one, contact person at that client who is a tireless fountain of bad ideas (if there are more than one, their bad ideas contradict each other, and YOU are part of THEIR internal communications problems) and that just gets heaped on you via a commission-happy salesman, bypassing any kind of review process at your office or theirs - that same contact person never reads the memos that get sent back. Usability? HA! Customer involvement? HA! The cannonballs fly in one direction only.
Maybe it's to do with how they counted 'failure'. It shipped reasonably close to when they said it would, features don't work right, customers hate it, developers acknowledge that it needs a rewrite, but someone surveyed (in upper management, who does not eat the dog food) considers it a success.
Would you consider Microsoft Windows a success or a failure?
Here's a crater on the Moon with such a peak. I guess it really gets around.
They're called rebound peaks and they are a common feature of impact craters, and perfectly natural.
I call your cubicle. "Hi, I'm $so_and_so, your boss sent me down here to do $gobbledygook_9000 compliance checks and I need into your computer. Can you log me in with your account please?" You: "Sure, lemme stick my hand on the scanner." Me: "Now type what I tell you. This is a three-line obfuscated Perl trojan^Wprogram to check your computer for compliance..."
The show you reference is "Nova - Secrets Of The Mind"
Thanks!
The question isn't why people find clowns creepy. The question is how they can still be so popular as "amusement" despite how many people find them creepy. Is it like disco, some kind of social lie where everyone pretends to like it even though they don't?
The skin is too close to all the same shade, and the depth of field defocus effect is distracting. Makes him look painted and four inches tall.
Eyes don't point the same way. Or rather, they do, but there's something wrong with the reflections in them that makes it look like they don't.
A background would help a lot.
I've noticed that I respond better to untextured or fake-looking CGI figures animated from motion capture data, than I do to perfectly rendered humans that aren't motion captured.
Or for that matter, human actors doing wire stunts, where the speeds, mass, and motion are all wrong.
In an ep of Doctor Who (Robots of Death) was bandied about the term "Grimwade's Syndrome", a made-up name for a made-up condition where people go crazy in close quarters with robots, because they lack the usual body language to let humans know there are humans in the room.
Not much in Doctor Who turns out to be startlingly prescient, but that certainly did. Grimwade's Syndrome is the best way to describe what the article is talking about - the discomfort of interacting (even one-way, via movie screen) with a "thing" that looks human while every intuitive sense in your brain screams not human.
There's a lot that can be talked about here. I watch our pet bunnies interact with our cat - the cat doesn't try to eat them, which is interesting in itself, but more interesting is how the bunnies respond to the cat. They are confused by her. She is, to them, an only slightly funny-looking bunny, but frustratingly she does not "speak" their language. She doesn't make bunny body language, nor does she respond to it when the bunnies try to communicate with her via body language. I imagine what the bunnies are experiencing is similar to our notional Grimwade's Syndrome, they're interacting with a creepy simulacrum of a bunny that doesn't act quite right.
Or consider this. Because we actually have an "FPU" (Face Processing Unit) in our brains, we pick up on degrees of subtlety in faces - we have perhaps a too-strict sense of beauty, in terms of which faces we find pleasing (ever stop to think how important symmetry is in a face?) - and we see faces anywhere there is even a remotely facelike shape, including the Moon. (I suspect it will come to be the defining characteristic of the human species that we can see a human face there - machine vision systems and alien intelligences will both stare at it and say "I still don't see it".)
Humans therefore tend to react very strongly (understatement) to anything that makes the "FPU" work too hard. If it's sorta like a face but has big things wrong with it, it's "ugly" - maybe even to the point of being a "monster", be it an eyeless skull, a Grey Alien, or a person with a deformity or disfigurement. What IS an ideal, simple thing for the FPU to play with? We may describe an attractive person as "easy on the eyes" but I'd also make a case that the face detector also has an easy time with Hello Kitty, and Hello Kitty looks nothing like Jennifer Connelly. And people tend not to be scared of the "faces" found on the fronts of some cars (unless the driver is a maniac or the car is a Cuda) or of the man in the Moon for that matter, who is greatly distorted and asymmetrical at that. But hey, it's a complex and poorly understood system.
What's interesting is what happens to people who've had damage to that part of the brain. Did anyone else catch the show - mighta been Scientific American Frontiers - where they profiled a guy who had a head injury and now believes his family have been replaced by clones? The kicker was that when they CALLED him and spoke to him over the phone, he believed it was really them, but in person he was certain, despite all better knowledge, that these were not his parents, these were replicants of some kind. Something to do with the part of his brain that considers a person familiar, was malfunctioning, and something at a higher level in his brain was getting uncomfortably confused between people who LOOK like his parents but do not register lower-level feelings of recognition like his parents would. The compulsion to believe this overrode all his better sense: he KNEW these were his real parents, but couldn't make it real in his head.
We're ALL in that boat now with CGI. Our brains are confused: our FPUs are satisfied that the faces look real, but everything else is wrong, the movement is wrong, the behavior is wrong. We process what we're seeing as some kind of weird painting or a reanimated corpse. (And yes, Michael Jackson does trigger this response now that much of his face doesn't move normally when he speaks.) That creepy
C3P0, now that you mention it, has those huge perplexed-looking eyes. A totally neutral robot face DOES look a tiny bit creepy and corpselike. C3P0 looks submissive and nonthreatening, his facial expression works for almost every state of emotion he expresses (also a tribute to Anthony Daniels' ability to make anything in the script sound like it goes with that expression).
Are we really to the point where we begin to talk about human-machine interfaces in terms of RACIAL relations? "Nonthreatening", where have you heard that before?
Still, if C3P0 was a PERFECTLY human-looking android, that same wide-open look would creep you the fuck out, like someone walking around with no eyelids.
ILM makes a sizable fraction of their money bailing out the botched productions of others.
I could make a Star Wars remark here, but I won't.
But past a certain point, they looked almost totally real, but there were enough visual and emotive cues that were just _wrong_ that the audiences likened it to watching a reanimated corpse.
Grimwade's Syndrome, anyone?
You're right on all points except:
Skylab which was allowed to die while waiting for the shuttle to make it better.
Skylab wasn't 'allowed' to die, it was pretty much engineered to be disposable, it had no resupply capability (except whatever could be sent up in the capsules with the crew) - it was sent up with supplies already on board.
The other problem was its orbit. It had been talked about to use the space shuttle to lift Skylab and do some work to it to make it useful again, or at the very least stick a deorbit rocket package on it so it could be brought down in the middle of nowhere without risk of hitting a city. This would have probably happened in 1980, assuming a shuttle rollout in 1979 as planned. But then two things happened: one, a manufacturing problem delayed Columbia's rollout until 1981, and two, Skylab's orbit deteriorated faster than expected. A lot faster.
When a space station decides it doesn't like its orbit anymore, it's not a matter of anyone having to "allow" it to die - rather there's not much you can do to prevent it, just get the hell out of the way. Skylab was not Babylon 5, it had no maneuvering ability of its own, so once its orbit deteriorates enough, eventually the planet gets in its way and Skylab resembles a Lina Inverse fireball attack. We've since seen what happens when spacecraft crash over populated areas.
Now, Skylab was a rush job, we all know that, but it wasn't intended to be a permanent outpost in space - the plan was we would build better ones later after having learned from the mistakes we expected to make on Skylab. Skylab was intended to be the first, not the last, American space station. No one ever explained this to Nixon, apparently: the shuttle was supposed to be a pair with a new space station. Nixon OKd the shuttle but not the station. And it's been downhill from there.