As many people have noted, principal photography (aka "production") for Lord of the Rings was shot in one long stretch for all three films.
However, the "irritating the loyalists/maximizing profit" (due to releasing the Matrix sequels separately) comment shows ignorance of the creative and logistical necessities of film production; the "post-production" process _typically_ outlasts the "principal photography" period, even on average-size films. On SFX-heavy films, this period is stretched out _even_more_.
This is why the 3 LOTR films are being released at yearly intervals (more details on http://lordoftherings.net) - the SFX-heavy post-production process (which also includes dialogue re-recording, sound effects, and music scoring and recording, and massive amounts of editing) takes a _really_really_ long time for _each_ film.
In other words, Matrix fans would be _more_ pissed off by simultaneous release, as they would be waiting for M3 to complete while M2 sat on a shelf.
Even more foolish would be if the filmmakers tried to complete post-prod. for M2 & M3 simultaneously - if you've ever tried to "finish" two major projects at the same time _and_ do a good job on _either_ of them, you would understand how difficult (and destructive to deadlines) this is.
In short, while seprate releases maximize profit; in no way is this a "screwing over" of the fans.
heck, as soon as you can synchronize the movement of these things you've got two hugely interesting aesthetic possibilities to explore:
tiny robot ballet / dynamic B&W bit-map images/graffitti (with tiny-robots as the bits)
multiple simultaneous video-feeds of tiny nature (extreme close up + possible time-lapse + movement of grass growing, insects being born, movement over unusual surfaces, etc.)
usu. if you stop thinking about your long-term goals for five seconds and look at what you've got right now you can most always find something really cool.
I am very interested in what briefs are being prepared by the other side - who is filing them (can amicus briefs be filed on behalf of the plaintiff? IANAL), what their focus is, what they are basing their conclusions on, the cases they reference, etc.
It's all well and good to be self-congraturlatory about these briefs (and yes, they are great work), but I would like to see stories/discussion on what the other side is up to.
After all, what the enemy is doing should be just as interesting and important news as what we are doing ( why else would Slashdot include so much danged MS coverage, anyway...;) )
There's nothing new in this article, it is essentially re-digesting old information within the current context of SJ at Apple.
The best book I have read about SJ/NeXT is "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing" (out of print, get it from your library). This is the "anti-reality-distortion-field" book, and is very condemning of Jobs as a technician, leader, and businessman. While this book is very informative and well-written from these perspectives, it misses a very important perspective.
Those who condemn Jobs as a charlatan and a showman should try considering him from the perspective of someone whose ultimate goal is to make a serious impact on how people look at things, which is typically the role of the "artist" in a society. While Picasso was a bastard of a human being and made plenty of self-indulgent crap as well as revolutionary art, he deserves recognition for introducing powerful and influential new ideas to the culture at large.
So, I think that being the leading "artist for the computer world" is what Jobs is ultimately most interested in, much more so than any particular bottom-line, technical, or political goal regarding computers (though it obviously galls him that the role of "most influential" is not that same as "most successful and dominant").
Now, if someone wrote an analysis of Jobs' performance as an influence on society's changing attitudes and conceptions of computers and computing, I'd buy the book. Of course, the recent "gold rush" mentality has the entire computing community focused on $ and world domination, so I don't see anything not of that perspective coming soon.
I believe that there is a fundamental misconception in the committee's thinking about the issue of user identification, which may be summarized as follows: "The user of a computer may be considered to _be_ the computer."
As insane as this sounds on its face, consider the recent history of "universal identification" technologies which we've had inflicted upon us:
the PIII unique identifier - one identifier per CPU; i.e. every person who uses a given machine (either by sitting in front of it or logging in remotely) is considered to be "the same person". Furthermore, this "identity" is non-transferrable between machines.
cookies - not quite as bad as the PIII uid (as it isn't built in at such a low level), and can be made specific to different users (who have separate log-in accounts)... but forget library-style usage by multiple casual users; plus, cookies are still non-transferrable between machines (for the average/majority user).
It appears to me that the disk copy control technology takes a PIII-like low-level approach of user-identification. In this case, it identifies the user with a single disk (removable or fixed), while further assuming that the user/disk will never run out of room/need to be re-organized/or break (please note the combination of human-level issues as well as technological-level issues).
A less hysterical(?) sounding statement of this misconception might be that the disk copy control technique requires us to consider the _storage mechanism_ and the _data stored on it_ to be identical; this basic assumption is also insane, probably on the logical level (I'll leave a proof to those with spare time), and definitely from a marketplace viewpoint (I doubt Maxtor's legal department would appreciate Microsoft claming ownership of their under-warrantee hard drive which I just installed MS-Office on).
Perhaps I am mistaken in seeing these person/data/computer/storage method conflations as being part of the committee's thought process, but I was wondering if you could comment on whether the commmittee considers "user identification" to be an appreciable aspect of what they are working on.
considering Mac and Unix perspectives
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 2
While the cited articles both fall into the realm of flame bait (or at the least come close), the comments which I see posted here are failing to note the semantic disconnect between Every's original editorial and the responding editorial; this disconnect is due to the fact the articles were written for two very different audiences:
the first audience is Mac users (read as "their primary computer experience is via Macs, with a strongly consistent GUI and applications built on top of and constrained by that GUI")
the second audience is Unix users (read as "their primary computer experience is via Unix, in which use of a CLI-based interface and knowledge of system interactions is, if not paramount, at least a fundamental aspect of the experience")
These two audiences will interpret Every's argument based on very different experiences with computers, and while I think that he has written this article poorly, he is at least trying to make an interesting point. Ordinary people, who do not value interaction with computers for it's own sake, are now the primary users of computer technology. For these users, the fundamental services of a computer are things like "email,web,word processing" - all in a familiar GUI environment. However, to the eyes of the Unix users, these are very high-level operations.
...therefore, Every's main point is:
Since the vast majority of the "computing" audience rarely interacts with the lower-level aspects of the operating system (outside of crashes, which is another flame war entirely), why would they talk about the "operating system" at that level? They will and do consider the "operating system" to be the level at which they interact with the system every day - i.e. "email,web,word processing in the GUI environment with which they are familiar". And in language, majority usage within a population "wins".
You might look at it this way - if the Mac user thinks about the term "operating system" _at all_, they tend to think alon the lines of "I run my Netscape web browser on the MacOS." The Unix user, on the other hand, tends to think along the lines of "I'm using Netscape within Gnome run on top of X which runs on top of the latest stable Linux kernel which is running on a new-model Asus motherboard with Athlon processor".
Of course, "I run Internt Explorer in Windows 98" is the most common interpretation of "operation system" you'll find.
I think that this conceptual divide only resonated with "the faithful" (i.e. Mac users) who had already internalized most of the articles's assumptions, and so were able to fill in the conceptual gaps in Every's (admittedly insufficient) explanation.
So yes, the original article was an excercise in hairsplitting, but so are all but a few of the comments I see here (with a few exceptions: here and here) . Let the term "operating system" be defined by everyone's subjective computer experience and be done with it.
...parting words only indirectly related to the previous thoughts, and designed solely as flame bait: "Besides, why would I trust any Linux nerd's definition of OS? If the Linux community could define what an OS is, than the Linux Standard Base spec wouldn't suck."
Slashdot Mirror
Hewlett Paqard?
...c'mon, _someone_ was gonna say it...
As many people have noted, principal photography (aka "production") for Lord of the Rings was shot in one long stretch for all three films.
However, the "irritating the loyalists/maximizing profit" (due to releasing the Matrix sequels separately) comment shows ignorance of the creative and logistical necessities of film production; the "post-production" process _typically_ outlasts the "principal photography" period, even on average-size films. On SFX-heavy films, this period is stretched out _even_more_.
This is why the 3 LOTR films are being released at yearly intervals (more details on http://lordoftherings.net) - the SFX-heavy post-production process (which also includes dialogue re-recording, sound effects, and music scoring and recording, and massive amounts of editing) takes a _really_really_ long time for _each_ film.
In other words, Matrix fans would be _more_ pissed off by simultaneous release, as they would be waiting for M3 to complete while M2 sat on a shelf.
Even more foolish would be if the filmmakers tried to complete post-prod. for M2 & M3 simultaneously - if you've ever tried to "finish" two major projects at the same time _and_ do a good job on _either_ of them, you would understand how difficult (and destructive to deadlines) this is.
In short, while seprate releases maximize profit; in no way is this a "screwing over" of the fans.
- tiny robot ballet / dynamic B&W bit-map images/graffitti (with tiny-robots as the bits)
- multiple simultaneous video-feeds of tiny nature (extreme close up + possible time-lapse + movement of grass growing, insects being born, movement over unusual surfaces, etc.)
usu. if you stop thinking about your long-term goals for five seconds and look at what you've got right now you can most always find something really cool.It's all well and good to be self-congraturlatory about these briefs (and yes, they are great work), but I would like to see stories/discussion on what the other side is up to.
After all, what the enemy is doing should be just as interesting and important news as what we are doing ( why else would Slashdot include so much danged MS coverage, anyway... ;) )
The best book I have read about SJ/NeXT is "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing" (out of print, get it from your library). This is the "anti-reality-distortion-field" book, and is very condemning of Jobs as a technician, leader, and businessman. While this book is very informative and well-written from these perspectives, it misses a very important perspective.
Those who condemn Jobs as a charlatan and a showman should try considering him from the perspective of someone whose ultimate goal is to make a serious impact on how people look at things, which is typically the role of the "artist" in a society. While Picasso was a bastard of a human being and made plenty of self-indulgent crap as well as revolutionary art, he deserves recognition for introducing powerful and influential new ideas to the culture at large.
So, I think that being the leading "artist for the computer world" is what Jobs is ultimately most interested in, much more so than any particular bottom-line, technical, or political goal regarding computers (though it obviously galls him that the role of "most influential" is not that same as "most successful and dominant").
Now, if someone wrote an analysis of Jobs' performance as an influence on society's changing attitudes and conceptions of computers and computing, I'd buy the book. Of course, the recent "gold rush" mentality has the entire computing community focused on $ and world domination, so I don't see anything not of that perspective coming soon.
As insane as this sounds on its face, consider the recent history of "universal identification" technologies which we've had inflicted upon us:
It appears to me that the disk copy control technology takes a PIII-like low-level approach of user-identification. In this case, it identifies the user with a single disk (removable or fixed), while further assuming that the user/disk will never run out of room/need to be re-organized/or break (please note the combination of human-level issues as well as technological-level issues).
A less hysterical(?) sounding statement of this misconception might be that the disk copy control technique requires us to consider the _storage mechanism_ and the _data stored on it_ to be identical; this basic assumption is also insane, probably on the logical level (I'll leave a proof to those with spare time), and definitely from a marketplace viewpoint (I doubt Maxtor's legal department would appreciate Microsoft claming ownership of their under-warrantee hard drive which I just installed MS-Office on).
Perhaps I am mistaken in seeing these person/data/computer/storage method conflations as being part of the committee's thought process, but I was wondering if you could comment on whether the commmittee considers "user identification" to be an appreciable aspect of what they are working on.
While the cited articles both fall into the realm of flame bait (or at the least come close), the comments which I see posted here are failing to note the semantic disconnect between Every's original editorial and the responding editorial; this disconnect is due to the fact the articles were written for two very different audiences:
These two audiences will interpret Every's argument based on very different experiences with computers, and while I think that he has written this article poorly, he is at least trying to make an interesting point. Ordinary people, who do not value interaction with computers for it's own sake, are now the primary users of computer technology. For these users, the fundamental services of a computer are things like "email,web,word processing" - all in a familiar GUI environment. However, to the eyes of the Unix users, these are very high-level operations.
...therefore, Every's main point is:
I think that this conceptual divide only resonated with "the faithful" (i.e. Mac users) who had already internalized most of the articles's assumptions, and so were able to fill in the conceptual gaps in Every's (admittedly insufficient) explanation.So yes, the original article was an excercise in hairsplitting, but so are all but a few of the comments I see here (with a few exceptions: here and here) . Let the term "operating system" be defined by everyone's subjective computer experience and be done with it.
...parting words only indirectly related to the previous thoughts, and designed solely as flame bait: "Besides, why would I trust any Linux nerd's definition of OS? If the Linux community could define what an OS is, than the Linux Standard Base spec wouldn't suck."