There are two types of "engineers / scientists" that are necessary for technology to progress: Research engineers and product engineers. 98% of engineers are product; Take a technological innovation and make something useful out of it. The research engineer represents 2%, but that 2% allows the other 98% to contine making products. An industry gets stale and doesn't progress if 100% of the work is put into product developement.
I am a product engineer. I work in the networking industry for a large networking equipment company (the largest), doing ASIC (chip) design. I am dependent upon the physicists and engineers working at IBM / Bell Labs / etc. to come up with better, faster, smaller, lower power semiconductor technology. Without them, I would be dead in the water. Obviously, that is only an example that relates to me, but research in general allows the world to continue moving forward.
On a side note, I know that Microsoft is a bad word around here, but many years ago, they have set up a research center similar to Deep Computing. Dedicated to solving the tough problems.
I think what Mr Katz is saying is that *most* geeks will love the Matrix for what the Matrix shows and conveys about the world of the hacker / virtual reality / etc. There is no such thing as *all* in the real world; it is a common mistake writers make when trying to generalize. The key point of his essay was that The Matrix was able to capture the essence of hacking and virtual reality on a level the The Phantom Menace could only hint at. Yet, the media focused on Star Wars as *the* movie for geeks.
Speaking from my own experience with both, when I watched the Matrix, there were times when I just giggled out loud from what I was watching on the screen. It moved me on a level I have not felt in *many* years. I walked out of the movie theatre with that "bigger than life" feeling. I'm not saying it was a perfect movie, far from it. Just that it captured a culture (hacking) in a way that I have never seen before. On the other hand, The Phantom Menace generated an "eh, it was pretty good, but had some real problems". I walked out of the movie with my feet still planted firmly on terra-firma.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two types of "engineers / scientists" that are necessary for technology to progress: Research engineers and product engineers. 98% of engineers are product; Take a technological innovation and make something useful out of it. The research engineer represents 2%, but that 2% allows the other 98% to contine making products. An industry gets stale and doesn't progress if 100% of the work is put into product developement.
I am a product engineer. I work in the networking industry for a large networking equipment company (the largest), doing ASIC (chip) design. I am dependent upon the physicists and engineers working at IBM / Bell Labs / etc. to come up with better, faster, smaller, lower power semiconductor technology. Without them, I would be dead in the water. Obviously, that is only an example that relates to me, but research in general allows the world to continue moving forward.
On a side note, I know that Microsoft is a bad word around here, but many years ago, they have set up a research center similar to Deep Computing. Dedicated to solving the tough problems.
http://research.microsoft.com
Todd
I think what Mr Katz is saying is that *most* geeks will love the Matrix for what the Matrix shows and conveys about the world of the hacker / virtual reality / etc. There is no such thing as *all* in the real world; it is a common mistake writers make when trying to generalize. The key point of his essay was that The Matrix was able to capture the essence of hacking and virtual reality on a level the The Phantom Menace could only hint at. Yet, the media focused on Star Wars as *the* movie for geeks.
Speaking from my own experience with both, when I watched the Matrix, there were times when I just giggled out loud from what I was watching on the screen. It moved me on a level I have not felt in *many* years. I walked out of the movie theatre with that "bigger than life" feeling. I'm not saying it was a perfect movie, far from it. Just that it captured a culture (hacking) in a way that I have never seen before. On the other hand, The Phantom Menace generated an "eh, it was pretty good, but had some real problems". I walked out of the movie with my feet still planted firmly on terra-firma.