Merchant is, as a whole, rather problematic. You're right: it's a terribly antisemitic play. Except for that one speech, by far the best speech in the entire play. The speech is one glimpse explaining, more cogently than Richard III or Iago ever do, their motivations for acting like monsters for the previous four acts.
And immediately after it, Shylock is exiled (probably to his death), and his daughter goes off to participate in a one-act romantic comedy of mistaken identities which has nothing to do with the rest of the play.
So that quote is, in fact, quite in context, but the context is, uh, out of context.
I once saw a rendition with Hal Holbrook as a very troubled and sympathetic Shylock, and Holbrook's daughter as Jessica. They solved the problematic fifth act by having her be horrified at what's just gone on, as the audience's point-of-view character. It's not what Shakespeare intended, but it worked brilliantly.
In theory you could have been right, if you were writing in a compiled language: you convert everything into one string of machine instructions which can be optimized as a mass, rather than suffering some of the inefficiencies of a monolithic TCP and IP stack beneath your program that you can't optimize further. That sort of thing does actually happen on microcontrollers.
However, PHP is a scripting language, so those optimizations don't get made. What could take a half-dozen machine instructions instead takes several hundred. Nothing against the language; it's far better than C for banging out web apps. Just not comms drivers.
Further, TCP and IP as implemented in a kernel (whether Linux, MS, or OS/X) are optimized to within an inch of their lives, with zillions of programmers scrutinizing them. Those stacks are all written in C or even hand-optimized assembly. No matter how smart you are, you're going to have a hard time beating the performance of that code.
You can market to particular sub-groups, as long as they have money. If you play music that attracts teenagers, and then sell to advertisers that want to market to teenagers, you can charge more for your airtime even if only 50,000 teenagers are listening rather than 100,000 people all over the spectrum.
Conversely, old people don't listen to Britney Spears, so you don't sell advertising time to Geritol. But Geritol will pay a fortune for TV time on Matlock.
The trick is finding a content which attracts a demographic that can be sold to. And if you happen to like a style that doesn't appeal neatly to some demographic that can be delivered to marketers, then, as you say, "radio sucks".
Consider all of the numbers that can be generate by a computer program. (Let's talk for the moment just about terminating computer programs.) You can denumerate them by listing the computer programs that generate them, in order. You can order the computer programs by treating their sequence of bytes in machine code (for any machine you choose) as an N-byte number.
If you want to extend this to nonterminating programs with multiple outputs, we can work in pairs: program N running 1 step, program N running 2 steps, etc. You can then order those pairs.
Note that we're not actually running the programs. The program that generates pi runs infinitely, but it's expressed by a fairly short program.
Or look at it from the other direction: consider the set of all computer programs, in order. Aggregate the numerical output from each program (terminating or not), and you have a denumerably infinite set of numbers (one for each program. Let's assume that each program has only one output; you can always transform a program with multiple outputs to several programs with a single output.)
So there you go, the author's conclusion: any number that can be generated by a computer program is denumerable (that is, it's denumerated by the machine code for the program itself).
Which leaves you, bizarrely, with an uncountably infinite set of numbers, otherwise indistinguishable from the infinitely smaller first set, which do not fit into this denumeration, none of which you can name.
Right. That's why the reviewer says "there are (at least) two kinds of infinite sets". Infinity is, I suppose, somewhat more than two, no matter which infinity you choose. But you can do a lot of interesting stuff with just the two he mentions.
Major label bands are often heavily influenced by producers provided by the labels. Unlike a movie producer, who is essentially a conduit for money, a record producer has a lot to say about the final sound. The raw, "unprofessional" sound that plagues most indie records is absent in major-label recordings.
A lot of what makes a band identifiable actually comes in the control room. The label's producers can totally change the sound. (For example, they can add a lot more cowbell.)
Mind you, many people hate the generic, bland sound you get from the labels' producers, and love the more real sound you get from independent producers. Some bands are horrified to hear their first release, which sounds nothing like them, but others greatly benefit from the trained ears of the labels' producers.
As with generic brands at the grocery, often they are lower quality than the major labels. Me, I buy generic drugs and butter but stick with the premium brands of ice cream and frozen vegetables.
A major-label band has at least been vetted by somebody willing to throw money at it, which means they have some minimum level of non-suckiness. As Sturgeon's Law says, 90% of everything, including independent bands, is crap. The real trick is knowing what you like and knowing how to find it. There are truly superior independent bands, and good luck finding them among the thousands of wanna-bes. If you love music enough, you just enjoy the process.
The law exists because the radio airwaves are theoretically a public trust. The government has parcelled out those wavelengths on your behalf, which is why you don't get to use them for your own broadcasts.
In return, the radio stations are expected to play what you want to hear, with a certain (regulated) amount of time allowed for playing advertisements to support the process. If they were playing the music for pay, that would be increasing the advertising time, time that they're supposed to be spending on playing stuff in the public's interest for free.
That is the theory. Practice, of course, is somewhat different. It is certainly convenient that the FCC regulates the bandwidth; otherwise, loud and greedy broadcasters would take up every frequency, including the ones you use for Bluetooth, garage door openers, and wi-fi.
But vast swaths of spectrum are sold well below market price because you're not allowed to bid on it. They do limit how much of the spectrum can be owned by any one company, but it turns out to be surprisingly much.
For what it's worth, I've heard William Shatner do that speech. He was actually pretty good, but the music was very 70s and made for a horrific presentation.
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels, Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that have dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object: can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million; And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder: Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide on man, And make imaginary puissance; Think when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth; For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times, Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass: for the which supply, Admit me Chorus to this history; Who prologue-like your humble patience pray, Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
Since there'll probably be a 0.9 final out in a few days, I'll stick with my 0.8 at the moment. But I'd really like to get a look at the new theme. Unfortunately I can't find one on their site. Has anybody got a picture they can share?
Dunno. I have one friend who likes to sit absolutely in the back row, and I think it's because she prefers to have a wall at her back. We've never sat in the next-to-last row. Personally, I don't like it because the projector can be really loud from there.
I guess it's all just a matter of taste. I like to sit in a place where I can stretch my legs out, which usually means the front row (but in a stadium theater, there are usually two front rows, the second of which is at a reasonable distance from the screen.)
The article refers to web traffic, not total internet traffic.
As for your bet, I dunno. Spam accounts for a great many messages, but each is comparatively small, at least from what I've seen. The idea is to send out as many messages as possible, so I'm not sure if they'd want to send images directly in the spam, and certainly not videos. (I never look at the spam, so I can't tell for sure.)
Porn, on the other hand, is all about pictures and videos, which are massive bandwidth hogs.
I guess you could add up all of the 0wned computers spewing spam as fast a their broadband connections will carry them, and compared that to the total number of servers on the porn sites, each hoping to get enough paying traffic to fill up the pricey pipes.
I'd also be curious about the traffic taken up by worms.
Oh, there were massive differences between the Iliad and Troy. I was mostly just baiting you.
In this version Patroclus has become Achilles' beloved cousin, which made us all snigger. Me perhaps most of all; I once played Achilles in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and Thersites calls Patroclus "Achilles' bitch". Literally.
There are some even more vigorous differences between the book and the the movie, not the least of which is the time frame, both that the war has been compressed from ten years to a month, and that the movie covers events before and after the Iliad.
Many characters meet different ends than legend tells. I'll avoid spoiling them, but you could really hear the gasps from those who had read the book going, "Wait a minute, THAT kind of changes things!"
Yet (I know you didn't ask, and I'm getting increasingly off-topic), I actually quite enjoyed it. It _was_ pretty much just summer fare, and rather devoid of literary merit. But they got many things right, and you could tell that when they tinkered with the story, it was deliberate and not out of ignorance.
They had deliberatly decided to tell the story without the gods, as a war movie (appropriate, given that there's reason to believe that the events are true, to at least some degree). When we see Thetis, she's up to her hips in the ocean, seeking shells to make a necklace. Is she a nymph, or just a woman? You can read it either way. That's my favorite example where it was clear that they knew the story and worked around it without working against it.
On the other hand, I could reel off a hundred massive differences, and if you love Homer's text seeing the movie may just tick you off. But I really liked the performances: Pitt as Achilles, Peter O'Toole as Priam, and especially Eric Bana as Hector.
I wonder if we could get Mel Gibson to make The Iliad, in the original Greek.
Oh, man, if you skipped Love Actually, you really missed out.
Yeah, the world is full of crummy movies. But I've seen literally dozens of movies that made me extremely happy, from Branagh's Henry V to South Park (that is, great literature and lowbrow silliness).
Funny: when it's Brad Pitt killing people, it's lowbrow summer movie season. When it's a guy chanting the same story in Greek, it's high literature.
The picture is far better on a movie screen than it is on your TV, at least until they start printing high-definition DVDs, and it's far bigger than your TV. The sound is usually better, too, unless you've gone to great lengths to set up a top-notch sound system. You may not want to see Brad Pitt killing people, but if you're going to, I'd think you'd enjoy it more when you can see all the details.
So I like to watch movies in the theater. I don't buy concessions, and I guess I'm taking advantage of those people for whom a movie just isn't a movie without $6 worth of popcorn and a $3 soda, who are the ones really paying for that fancy movie projector that I enjoy so much.
That's pretty scary. I use a NAT box to serve as a primitive firewall, which prevents that problem. But that's only because I have multiple computers that share a connection, a problem most people don't have.
Every once in a rare while I have to bypass the NAT box and direct-connect to the Internet (usually to debug a networking problem). It feels like standing in a shooting range.
There are two major schools of thought among actors: internalist and externalist.
Internalist is most often associated with the Stanislavsky "Method": feel it inside and it will come out on the outside. The Method has been taken to stupid lengths that have been much parodied ("What's my motivation?"), but the core is extremely sound. Audiences are extremely sensitive to faked emotions, and internalist acting makes for very compelling performances.
Externalist acting predates internalist acting, but it's still much used. It's basically the school of thought that says, "I don't care what you feel; as long as it looks good on film, I'm happy." It's necessary for a lot of things. You can't lose yourself in a fight scene, for example, because that's how actors get hurt (especially on stage.) But other than that, it's largely out of favor among top-flight actors and directors.
Most modern actors use a combination of the two techniques, but the balance is different for every actor.
I bring this up because computer animation is the ultimate externalist acting. You have a physical control over the "muscles" of a virtual actor far beyond that which you have over yourself. That's why externalist acting often fails: you may think "this is what I look like when I'm angry/happy/sad", but you just don't have the control over the hundreds of little muscles in your face.
I've been incredibly impressed by what emotions they can get a virtual actor to do. I remember thinking it for the first time watching Barbie at the end of Toy Story II, doing her flight attendant "bye bye, buh bye, bye-ee" routine. She clearly had a "fake smile", in contrast to the real smiles. Everybody knows the difference, but it takes an extraordinary eye to reproduce it precisely.
Shrek and Fiona showed me layered emotions I'd be hard pressed to reproduce myself.
Now these guys are adding voice, where there are even more fine gradations, and it hasn't been as well studied. Artists have been dissecting people's faces for centuries and every art student knows the name, origin, insertion, and purpose of every single muscle in the face.
The voice will prove harder, but I've looked into some of those programs and it looks like a good start. It's a lot of work to specify the exact shape of a line reading, but as with faces, they'll probably get it eventually.
It flies precisely in the face of what I've been taught as a director. I tend to the internalist school most of the time, and you never, ever specify the details of a line reading to an actor. You give intents, motivations, impulses, and try to help the actor find the natural way to get what you want out of a line. If you give the actor a line reading, it will read falsely to an audience, because the line reading won't match up to the rest of the clues that the audience gets about what the character feels (body language, timing, facial expressions). These details are too hard to control, so you give emotional directions instead. It's tedious, but the result will be more compelling.
It would be interesting to direct an actor who did have minute control over voice and body, as this film will show. It's probably too early for the thing to be 100% successful, but I'd really like to find out.
I use my.yahoo.com as my general news source, and I find that quotes.yahoo.com is a more friendly way to keep track of my stocks than my broker. I visit each several times a day.
But I haven't visited the main page in quite some time.
So you only listen to 50 songs on a regular basis. Wouldn't it be cool if you had every song you'd ever owned available on the fly? When you know precisely the right song for this exact mood, and it's right there, that's pretty awesome.
Do you need it? Of course not. You don't really need any of this. It's entertainment. You need your insulin shots, or your defibrillator.
Some people really, really, really like to have all their music with them all the time. (Not me. I don't listen to music. But I have many friends who do.) It only takes a few hundred thousand of 'em to make it worthwhile for Apple to make this.
Having read the patent (yes, I actually read the patent, rather than firing up the usual "I'm gonna patent breathing" posts), I can't claim to be thrilled with it, but it's not quite as obvious as the post makes it appear.
This isn't mouse double-clicking. They're talking about physical buttons on a PDA-type device. Click once to play your voice note; double-click to record.
This is obviously derived pretty trivially from mouse double-clicking (for which I could see no patent cited), but honestly I can't think of any devices except mice that use double-clicks. My cell phone doesn't; my VCR doesn't. They do reference patents on using the same button to scroll through options, but that's different from a double-click.
It's pretty obvious, but if it's so obvious, why didn't Palm do it? (I'm assuming that they didn't. I've never really used a PalmPilot. They do reference the PalmPilot user's manual.)
He was talking custom-burned CDs, which would cost more. Custom-printed artwork would have to be done on a color laser or other such printer, which will cost more than offset printing. Handling is far more expensive, since each CD is individually dealt with and shipped rather than being packed into large boxes.
Not to mention running the web site itself, which always seems to cost far more than one expects. In this case you'd need bandwidth for playing previews, which is expensive. And the difference between 99.9% uptime and 99.9999% uptime costs a lot.
As for the price of LPs vs CDs, some of it is collusion, and some of it is just what the market will bear. LPs have a far smaller market than CDs.
I don't think your price is likely. The going rate for online music, which doesn't have the additional physical costs of burning and shipping CDs, is ten bucks. And it's a tricky economic position at that. Just a high-quality one-off printing of the custom jacket would have a raw cost in materials close to $.40.
Still, it's a good idea for iTunes or one of its competitors. I'm sure the price would come out closer to $13 or $14 just to cover costs. In the end it would cost as much as an album (especially since it would be equivalent to buying an album, if you chose exactly the same tracks).
But you'd be able to pick exactly the tracks you wanted, without having to fool around with a CD burner and blank disks. I know you as a slashdotter have no difficulty with this, and it's not all that hard, but people will always pay for convenience. If you don't own a CD burner, it would cost $50 as an add-on, the equivalent to the burn-and-mail premium of ten disks purchased this way.
But $3.99? No chance. That wouldn't even cover the expenses of running the web site.
And as for supply and demand: people currently pay $16 per disc because that's how much they want the music. If you stop buying it, they'll drop the prices. Would you buy four times as much music if the price were $4?
Actually, you'd have to buy more like ten times as much, because the margin on a $4 disc couldn't be more than a buck (or more likely negative), whereas the profit on a $16 disc is more like $10. So you'd have to buy ten times as much music for them to make the same amount of momey.
The record labels set their prices for the most profit. That's what supply and demand means.
They're not losing money at the present prices; they're merely not making it as fast as they used to. They may well need a new price point; the profit might be better at $12 or even $9.99. But remember that a price cut comes straight out of the profit: if they earn $10 on a $16 disc, then they earn only $4 on a $9.99 disc. They'd have to sell two-and-a-half times as many discs to make the same amount of money, and that's a huge marketing effort.
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Merchant is, as a whole, rather problematic. You're right: it's a terribly antisemitic play. Except for that one speech, by far the best speech in the entire play. The speech is one glimpse explaining, more cogently than Richard III or Iago ever do, their motivations for acting like monsters for the previous four acts.
And immediately after it, Shylock is exiled (probably to his death), and his daughter goes off to participate in a one-act romantic comedy of mistaken identities which has nothing to do with the rest of the play.
So that quote is, in fact, quite in context, but the context is, uh, out of context.
I once saw a rendition with Hal Holbrook as a very troubled and sympathetic Shylock, and Holbrook's daughter as Jessica. They solved the problematic fifth act by having her be horrified at what's just gone on, as the audience's point-of-view character. It's not what Shakespeare intended, but it worked brilliantly.
Hey, look! Over there! It's the boat!
In theory you could have been right, if you were writing in a compiled language: you convert everything into one string of machine instructions which can be optimized as a mass, rather than suffering some of the inefficiencies of a monolithic TCP and IP stack beneath your program that you can't optimize further. That sort of thing does actually happen on microcontrollers.
However, PHP is a scripting language, so those optimizations don't get made. What could take a half-dozen machine instructions instead takes several hundred. Nothing against the language; it's far better than C for banging out web apps. Just not comms drivers.
Further, TCP and IP as implemented in a kernel (whether Linux, MS, or OS/X) are optimized to within an inch of their lives, with zillions of programmers scrutinizing them. Those stacks are all written in C or even hand-optimized assembly. No matter how smart you are, you're going to have a hard time beating the performance of that code.
You can market to particular sub-groups, as long as they have money. If you play music that attracts teenagers, and then sell to advertisers that want to market to teenagers, you can charge more for your airtime even if only 50,000 teenagers are listening rather than 100,000 people all over the spectrum.
Conversely, old people don't listen to Britney Spears, so you don't sell advertising time to Geritol. But Geritol will pay a fortune for TV time on Matlock.
The trick is finding a content which attracts a demographic that can be sold to. And if you happen to like a style that doesn't appeal neatly to some demographic that can be delivered to marketers, then, as you say, "radio sucks".
It's true, and it's fairly easy to demonstrate.
Consider all of the numbers that can be generate by a computer program. (Let's talk for the moment just about terminating computer programs.) You can denumerate them by listing the computer programs that generate them, in order. You can order the computer programs by treating their sequence of bytes in machine code (for any machine you choose) as an N-byte number.
If you want to extend this to nonterminating programs with multiple outputs, we can work in pairs: program N running 1 step, program N running 2 steps, etc. You can then order those pairs.
Note that we're not actually running the programs. The program that generates pi runs infinitely, but it's expressed by a fairly short program.
Or look at it from the other direction: consider the set of all computer programs, in order. Aggregate the numerical output from each program (terminating or not), and you have a denumerably infinite set of numbers (one for each program. Let's assume that each program has only one output; you can always transform a program with multiple outputs to several programs with a single output.)
So there you go, the author's conclusion: any number that can be generated by a computer program is denumerable (that is, it's denumerated by the machine code for the program itself).
Which leaves you, bizarrely, with an uncountably infinite set of numbers, otherwise indistinguishable from the infinitely smaller first set, which do not fit into this denumeration, none of which you can name.
Right. That's why the reviewer says "there are (at least) two kinds of infinite sets". Infinity is, I suppose, somewhat more than two, no matter which infinity you choose. But you can do a lot of interesting stuff with just the two he mentions.
Major label bands are often heavily influenced by producers provided by the labels. Unlike a movie producer, who is essentially a conduit for money, a record producer has a lot to say about the final sound. The raw, "unprofessional" sound that plagues most indie records is absent in major-label recordings.
A lot of what makes a band identifiable actually comes in the control room. The label's producers can totally change the sound. (For example, they can add a lot more cowbell.)
Mind you, many people hate the generic, bland sound you get from the labels' producers, and love the more real sound you get from independent producers. Some bands are horrified to hear their first release, which sounds nothing like them, but others greatly benefit from the trained ears of the labels' producers.
As with generic brands at the grocery, often they are lower quality than the major labels. Me, I buy generic drugs and butter but stick with the premium brands of ice cream and frozen vegetables.
A major-label band has at least been vetted by somebody willing to throw money at it, which means they have some minimum level of non-suckiness. As Sturgeon's Law says, 90% of everything, including independent bands, is crap. The real trick is knowing what you like and knowing how to find it. There are truly superior independent bands, and good luck finding them among the thousands of wanna-bes. If you love music enough, you just enjoy the process.
The law exists because the radio airwaves are theoretically a public trust. The government has parcelled out those wavelengths on your behalf, which is why you don't get to use them for your own broadcasts.
In return, the radio stations are expected to play what you want to hear, with a certain (regulated) amount of time allowed for playing advertisements to support the process. If they were playing the music for pay, that would be increasing the advertising time, time that they're supposed to be spending on playing stuff in the public's interest for free.
That is the theory. Practice, of course, is somewhat different. It is certainly convenient that the FCC regulates the bandwidth; otherwise, loud and greedy broadcasters would take up every frequency, including the ones you use for Bluetooth, garage door openers, and wi-fi.
But vast swaths of spectrum are sold well below market price because you're not allowed to bid on it. They do limit how much of the spectrum can be owned by any one company, but it turns out to be surprisingly much.
Hey! Get your own rock!
For what it's worth, I've heard William Shatner do that speech. He was actually pretty good, but the music was very 70s and made for a horrific presentation.
I think William Shakespeare said it best:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
God I love that speech.
Thanks. Wish I could use my new mod points for ya, but them's the rules.
Since there'll probably be a 0.9 final out in a few days, I'll stick with my 0.8 at the moment. But I'd really like to get a look at the new theme. Unfortunately I can't find one on their site. Has anybody got a picture they can share?
Now THAT's funny.
Dunno. I have one friend who likes to sit absolutely in the back row, and I think it's because she prefers to have a wall at her back. We've never sat in the next-to-last row. Personally, I don't like it because the projector can be really loud from there.
I guess it's all just a matter of taste. I like to sit in a place where I can stretch my legs out, which usually means the front row (but in a stadium theater, there are usually two front rows, the second of which is at a reasonable distance from the screen.)
The article refers to web traffic, not total internet traffic.
As for your bet, I dunno. Spam accounts for a great many messages, but each is comparatively small, at least from what I've seen. The idea is to send out as many messages as possible, so I'm not sure if they'd want to send images directly in the spam, and certainly not videos. (I never look at the spam, so I can't tell for sure.)
Porn, on the other hand, is all about pictures and videos, which are massive bandwidth hogs.
I guess you could add up all of the 0wned computers spewing spam as fast a their broadband connections will carry them, and compared that to the total number of servers on the porn sites, each hoping to get enough paying traffic to fill up the pricey pipes.
I'd also be curious about the traffic taken up by worms.
Oh, there were massive differences between the Iliad and Troy. I was mostly just baiting you.
In this version Patroclus has become Achilles' beloved cousin, which made us all snigger. Me perhaps most of all; I once played Achilles in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and Thersites calls Patroclus "Achilles' bitch". Literally.
There are some even more vigorous differences between the book and the the movie, not the least of which is the time frame, both that the war has been compressed from ten years to a month, and that the movie covers events before and after the Iliad.
Many characters meet different ends than legend tells. I'll avoid spoiling them, but you could really hear the gasps from those who had read the book going, "Wait a minute, THAT kind of changes things!"
Yet (I know you didn't ask, and I'm getting increasingly off-topic), I actually quite enjoyed it. It _was_ pretty much just summer fare, and rather devoid of literary merit. But they got many things right, and you could tell that when they tinkered with the story, it was deliberate and not out of ignorance.
They had deliberatly decided to tell the story without the gods, as a war movie (appropriate, given that there's reason to believe that the events are true, to at least some degree). When we see Thetis, she's up to her hips in the ocean, seeking shells to make a necklace. Is she a nymph, or just a woman? You can read it either way. That's my favorite example where it was clear that they knew the story and worked around it without working against it.
On the other hand, I could reel off a hundred massive differences, and if you love Homer's text seeing the movie may just tick you off. But I really liked the performances: Pitt as Achilles, Peter O'Toole as Priam, and especially Eric Bana as Hector.
I wonder if we could get Mel Gibson to make The Iliad, in the original Greek.
Oh, man, if you skipped Love Actually, you really missed out.
Yeah, the world is full of crummy movies. But I've seen literally dozens of movies that made me extremely happy, from Branagh's Henry V to South Park (that is, great literature and lowbrow silliness).
Shrek also ruled.
Funny: when it's Brad Pitt killing people, it's lowbrow summer movie season. When it's a guy chanting the same story in Greek, it's high literature.
The picture is far better on a movie screen than it is on your TV, at least until they start printing high-definition DVDs, and it's far bigger than your TV. The sound is usually better, too, unless you've gone to great lengths to set up a top-notch sound system. You may not want to see Brad Pitt killing people, but if you're going to, I'd think you'd enjoy it more when you can see all the details.
So I like to watch movies in the theater. I don't buy concessions, and I guess I'm taking advantage of those people for whom a movie just isn't a movie without $6 worth of popcorn and a $3 soda, who are the ones really paying for that fancy movie projector that I enjoy so much.
That's pretty scary. I use a NAT box to serve as a primitive firewall, which prevents that problem. But that's only because I have multiple computers that share a connection, a problem most people don't have.
Every once in a rare while I have to bypass the NAT box and direct-connect to the Internet (usually to debug a networking problem). It feels like standing in a shooting range.
There are two major schools of thought among actors: internalist and externalist.
Internalist is most often associated with the Stanislavsky "Method": feel it inside and it will come out on the outside. The Method has been taken to stupid lengths that have been much parodied ("What's my motivation?"), but the core is extremely sound. Audiences are extremely sensitive to faked emotions, and internalist acting makes for very compelling performances.
Externalist acting predates internalist acting, but it's still much used. It's basically the school of thought that says, "I don't care what you feel; as long as it looks good on film, I'm happy." It's necessary for a lot of things. You can't lose yourself in a fight scene, for example, because that's how actors get hurt (especially on stage.) But other than that, it's largely out of favor among top-flight actors and directors.
Most modern actors use a combination of the two techniques, but the balance is different for every actor.
I bring this up because computer animation is the ultimate externalist acting. You have a physical control over the "muscles" of a virtual actor far beyond that which you have over yourself. That's why externalist acting often fails: you may think "this is what I look like when I'm angry/happy/sad", but you just don't have the control over the hundreds of little muscles in your face.
I've been incredibly impressed by what emotions they can get a virtual actor to do. I remember thinking it for the first time watching Barbie at the end of Toy Story II, doing her flight attendant "bye bye, buh bye, bye-ee" routine. She clearly had a "fake smile", in contrast to the real smiles. Everybody knows the difference, but it takes an extraordinary eye to reproduce it precisely.
Shrek and Fiona showed me layered emotions I'd be hard pressed to reproduce myself.
Now these guys are adding voice, where there are even more fine gradations, and it hasn't been as well studied. Artists have been dissecting people's faces for centuries and every art student knows the name, origin, insertion, and purpose of every single muscle in the face.
The voice will prove harder, but I've looked into some of those programs and it looks like a good start. It's a lot of work to specify the exact shape of a line reading, but as with faces, they'll probably get it eventually.
It flies precisely in the face of what I've been taught as a director. I tend to the internalist school most of the time, and you never, ever specify the details of a line reading to an actor. You give intents, motivations, impulses, and try to help the actor find the natural way to get what you want out of a line. If you give the actor a line reading, it will read falsely to an audience, because the line reading won't match up to the rest of the clues that the audience gets about what the character feels (body language, timing, facial expressions). These details are too hard to control, so you give emotional directions instead. It's tedious, but the result will be more compelling.
It would be interesting to direct an actor who did have minute control over voice and body, as this film will show. It's probably too early for the thing to be 100% successful, but I'd really like to find out.
I use my.yahoo.com as my general news source, and I find that quotes.yahoo.com is a more friendly way to keep track of my stocks than my broker. I visit each several times a day.
But I haven't visited the main page in quite some time.
So you only listen to 50 songs on a regular basis. Wouldn't it be cool if you had every song you'd ever owned available on the fly? When you know precisely the right song for this exact mood, and it's right there, that's pretty awesome.
Do you need it? Of course not. You don't really need any of this. It's entertainment. You need your insulin shots, or your defibrillator.
Some people really, really, really like to have all their music with them all the time. (Not me. I don't listen to music. But I have many friends who do.) It only takes a few hundred thousand of 'em to make it worthwhile for Apple to make this.
Having read the patent (yes, I actually read the patent, rather than firing up the usual "I'm gonna patent breathing" posts), I can't claim to be thrilled with it, but it's not quite as obvious as the post makes it appear.
This isn't mouse double-clicking. They're talking about physical buttons on a PDA-type device. Click once to play your voice note; double-click to record.
This is obviously derived pretty trivially from mouse double-clicking (for which I could see no patent cited), but honestly I can't think of any devices except mice that use double-clicks. My cell phone doesn't; my VCR doesn't. They do reference patents on using the same button to scroll through options, but that's different from a double-click.
It's pretty obvious, but if it's so obvious, why didn't Palm do it? (I'm assuming that they didn't. I've never really used a PalmPilot. They do reference the PalmPilot user's manual.)
He was talking custom-burned CDs, which would cost more. Custom-printed artwork would have to be done on a color laser or other such printer, which will cost more than offset printing. Handling is far more expensive, since each CD is individually dealt with and shipped rather than being packed into large boxes.
Not to mention running the web site itself, which always seems to cost far more than one expects. In this case you'd need bandwidth for playing previews, which is expensive. And the difference between 99.9% uptime and 99.9999% uptime costs a lot.
As for the price of LPs vs CDs, some of it is collusion, and some of it is just what the market will bear. LPs have a far smaller market than CDs.
I don't think your price is likely. The going rate for online music, which doesn't have the additional physical costs of burning and shipping CDs, is ten bucks. And it's a tricky economic position at that. Just a high-quality one-off printing of the custom jacket would have a raw cost in materials close to $.40.
Still, it's a good idea for iTunes or one of its competitors. I'm sure the price would come out closer to $13 or $14 just to cover costs. In the end it would cost as much as an album (especially since it would be equivalent to buying an album, if you chose exactly the same tracks).
But you'd be able to pick exactly the tracks you wanted, without having to fool around with a CD burner and blank disks. I know you as a slashdotter have no difficulty with this, and it's not all that hard, but people will always pay for convenience. If you don't own a CD burner, it would cost $50 as an add-on, the equivalent to the burn-and-mail premium of ten disks purchased this way.
But $3.99? No chance. That wouldn't even cover the expenses of running the web site.
And as for supply and demand: people currently pay $16 per disc because that's how much they want the music. If you stop buying it, they'll drop the prices. Would you buy four times as much music if the price were $4?
Actually, you'd have to buy more like ten times as much, because the margin on a $4 disc couldn't be more than a buck (or more likely negative), whereas the profit on a $16 disc is more like $10. So you'd have to buy ten times as much music for them to make the same amount of momey.
The record labels set their prices for the most profit. That's what supply and demand means.
They're not losing money at the present prices; they're merely not making it as fast as they used to. They may well need a new price point; the profit might be better at $12 or even $9.99. But remember that a price cut comes straight out of the profit: if they earn $10 on a $16 disc, then they earn only $4 on a $9.99 disc. They'd have to sell two-and-a-half times as many discs to make the same amount of money, and that's a huge marketing effort.