Surely, at this cheap price, only thugs on the street will be buying it. Oh wait, that's over 10 times what a nice.22 pistol costs...
And the 20 inches: how is that going to prevent it from being used against you? If you're struggling with someone over a gun, you're in close proximity. They grab it, pull the trigger: voila, you've got a bullet in yourself - you were well within 20cm from the gun, because you were trying to grab it.
This, unlike computers, might have a total of 10 interested buyers in the US. Why would I want this hideous, crippled gun (which likely has very little attention put into the actual firearm mechanism compared to even something like an entry-level Ruger) when I can get a uh, Ruger.22 in the $300 ballpark?
And for self defense, how about something a little bigger than.22?.22 is for gangster thugs, target practice, and shooting rodents. Anyone who would buy a sci-fi gun like that, with such poor ability, and a glowing light on it for the purpose of self-defense deserves to be killed.
Buying the product is a choice. Being stuck with it, and unable to do anything outside the vendor's intended use, is not - particularly if you are not aware of such a thing. It's like moving to a communist country under the promises of flowers and free healthcare and getting shoved in prison for thoughtcrime.
If there were actual ways to circumvent these shortcomings it'd be one thing, but the platform is pretty locked down. It's a PMP which has access to an app store utilized by several other devices, not a general purpose computer (though the hardware could be used as such).
There are a couple big, major differences between Japan of 20 years ago and China of today.
1) China is not limited militarily, either externally or externally. 2) China is a cruel and totalitarian society/government in many ways, both towards their subjects (jailing them with cruel treatments for minor offenses) and towards outsiders (Tibet). 3) China has repeatedly ignored the desires of its allies and trade partners in the quest for more profit (selling arms to Iran/wherever). This goes hand-in-hand with numerous examples of military espionage against the West (and the US in particular). 4) They have a gender-disproportionate populace (more males than females) which is historically very highly correlated with military expansionism. 5) They disregard any international interests in their reverse engineering and re-implementation of anything designed elsewhere for the purposes of stealing the technology. 6) They control many of the third world UN delegates and maneuver to undermine any efforts of said organization (climate change, arms, pollution, etc.). 7) Chinese culture is incredibly racist and xenophobic. They make Old European mores on racism look quaint. 8) Unlike Japan, they do not live on a small island with limited resources and do not rely upon the good will of others for their self-continuation in commerce. 9) China has been imperialist for the better part of a decade, with colonies all along he eastern coast of Africa (why many of the US yuppie expats living in Shanghai seem to think that the US is an evil imperial regime and love China, even now that Bush is out of office, is beyond me). 10) Potentially most important to the US and the West at large, they have no cultural respect for the US as Japan did (does).
So yeah, it's a slightly different ballgame than it was with Japan. Slightly. I would argue that most of the reasons for China's bleak future more heavily support violent Chinese expansion.
Your software is likely not terribly useful, difficult to set up, and/or not as useful as something which is easier to set up. It might also be ugly compared to the competition.
You might also have an unreasonable requirement; eg. Postgresql (not MySQL, etc.) for a backend database on, say, a note/reminder application. That's a bit of a headache to setup. Poor documentation? There ya go - most people aren't intimately familiar w/ every piece of software out there and wouldn't be able to follow the sparse breadcrumbs of documentation. (Just guessing here, I don't know your project.)
Let me take gxemul, an architecture emulator (ARM, MIPS, Motorola 88K, PowerPC, and SuperH). It's got very limited utility - IE, mainly for nostalgic users, hobbyists, or possibly as a way to make cross-compilation easier (by doing it 'native'). I've used it for the latter two purposes, and it does a good enough job that I got what I needed to get done (mostly).
As far as I know, it's got a single active developer. The IRC channel has under a dozen users, with maybe 2-3 active at a time max (last I checked). Yet, as a project, it seems to do pretty well.
Something you might try: packaging your project for a couple distributions and trying to get it added, with yourself as the package maintainer. I know that awesome (the window manager) is packaged in most distros at a reasonably current version, despite its fast paced development (it's under 2 years old, as a project). Having those packages available has certainly helped spread its adoption.
I highly doubt Hulu or anyone else will ever support H264. By the time they start to move away from Flash, there will be something else on the horizon.
There's a reason why they encapsulate their shows/movies in Flash and inhibit more than a token 'buffer' (making a marginally slow connection, either to or from Hulu, useless for their site). They want to make it as difficult as possible for people to 'steal' the show from them.
Arguably, if the hard drive is your limitation today for common computing tasks, you're doing something wrong.
Yes, it's still a limitation, but there are many ways to mitigate that bottleneck for large environments: dedicated RAM drives, massive amounts of RAM, cache servers, SSDs, and so on. In many cases, it's cheaper to just throw another identical system with rotational disks at the problem.
For a common user, SSDs are the way to go. Most have under 1Gb of music, maybe 10Gb of other media (I'd wager). Maybe a couple gigabytes of pictures, depending on their age, quality of their digital camera, et cetera. And this is for a "savvy" user; most have under 1Gb of total data. SSDs make perfect sense for these users.
The biggest limitation on a computer's abilities for personal use in the past 10 years have been the amount of RAM the system has, the video card, and finally the hard drive. Provided the disk does not fail, a 10-year-old system with a decent video card for the day and a fair amount of RAM (512M would cut it, probably, but 1Gb wouldn't be unreasonable) is still going to be more computer than most people will ever need.
As for hard disks sucking and nobody doing anything about it... you can get a 1.5Tb disk for under $100 - and 1.5Tb is not far from the top-density model. You couldn't even get a 500Gb disk several years years ago, and for a long time you couldn't get one for under $300. So things are changing. Obviously hard drive manufacturers are doing something, just not what you want: the industry demands have been elsewhere; namely, they want more cheap storage than faster storage (which has seemingly always been an afterthought).
LightPeak is just around the corner; as a bus, it will blow away SATA. I imagine we'll start seeing single-enclosure RAID-0/1/5 disks with large amounts of RAM to decrease write lag sooner than later. Combine the two things and you'll have a reason to shut up.
Yet, most people can not play the games in the stores on their computers, because most people have computers which are old.
By "old" I mean something running XP with 256-512M of RAM and, if they're lucky, integrated ATI video - but it's most likely Intel crap. They might have a dualcore processor, but odds are it's late Pentium 4 or equivalent.
No, I don't think people with computers like this are "behind the curve". They're the average, and there are a fair number of what PC Magazine would call "power users" who have computers with specifications like those above.
Meanwhile, games like Fallout 3, Crysis, or even something like Red Alert 3 (1.5 years old) will not play on such a system. Hell, even "retro" games like (say) Deus Ex with higher quality textures or Max Payne will struggle on something like those - and those are 7+ years old. Those newer games will only be "just" playable on a $100 card on a fast, modern system (faster than Phenom).
I'd wager you'd be hard pressed to play most year-old games on a "high end" laptop or desktop from Dell/HP or similar, short of getting the top-end model. Like, in the $800+ ballpark.
So, the (winter) weather is little different than the upper western Midwestern states, then. *grumble* Though it is more consistent.
Those with seasonal depression need not apply, I suppose. The summers would indeed be nice.
Re:And we're trusting you because....
on
Hiding From Google
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The irony is that Google probably doesn't care all that much about a specific user, or users as an individual. They're looking for types of users and their associated buying habits.
Except that the two other major Graphics providers, Intel and AMD, both give the Linux community far better support than NVIDIA. Intel is writing excellent well-integrated open source drivers themselves, which AMD is providing full specs, which has allowed others to write drivers. AMD's making the specs available is far better Linux support than NVIDIA making closed source drivers available.
Yet, the Intel video cards are such crap it hardly matters, and the ATI support barely even works for most chipsets commonly available (such as anything you'd find on a motherboard).
Nvidia is, at least, doing something right for Linux. The others are trying to get something right.
I don't think you give "the average guy" enough credit. After all, good movies are not made popular by movie geeks. They're made popular by the common man (and woman). People would quickly stop going to the movies if every actor were like Dolf Lungden (or w/e his name is). You need a Bruce Willis or Angelina Jolie to sell films.
I suppose you'd want us to remit a bill for services rendered to the UN after we quit that, too?
Which brings up an interesting possibility. After the UN disbands due to lack of funding, I can certainly see the world's rabble pounding on the doorsteps of Europe with a heightened fervor due to the lack of the US there at their shoulder. Chances are Europe would have their hands full with warring nations coming to loot and plunder (whether as organized groups or individuals) from Russia, Arabia, and Africa.
Let's mix high art and low, TV and theater, toss it all into the pot, mix things up, and do something new.
I hear him saying one of two things.
1) We need the finite resources and labor which others provide, and we're SOL when it comes to actually acquiring those materials in a non-manipulative fashion. 2) He's suggesting we enslave the world for those resources and labor - through militaristic action and threats, like the Chinese are doing, successfully.
Like, why can't a black or asian guy play the lead in MacBeth?
How about an Othello re-imaging with a black male lead? ("O", 2001)
Are greedy kings somehow relevant only to white people?
No, guy in blackface (or something similar) in that role played a Persian in that role a couple years ago. (If we're going to keep repeating the lie as a society that "race doesn't matter" the least we could do is not give any credence to claims of racism for something like blackface).
Or why couldn't a white guy play a role as a slave?
Because we have been told, as a society, that it is racist/socially unacceptable/whatever to have films which are such racially insensitive to those who "actually have been enslaved" (as if blacks enslaved by whites are the only kind of slaves).
Besides, there's Sparticus, if you haven't seen it. Good film.
(Also, are you a troll? I can't think of a single "slavery" movie since Gladiator, and there was only one notable black slave throughout that film. Seems to me you're race baiting.)
Acting is -acting-.
Ah, I see. Seems to me you don't understand how it works, and would likely be one of about 5 people who would enjoy watching purple dome-headed aliens which speak Bulgarian and wear kilts invade the alps on flying carpets.
Acting is not just acting, it's creating a character. It has to be believable, or it will suck. That is why studios can't just pull anyone off the streets, or hire any old SAG member: they won't accomplish the same thing as a name brand actor.
Let's mix high art and low, TV and theater, toss it all into the pot, mix things up, and do something new.
I'm so tired of recycled culture. Can we let Grease die already and stop using it for high school musicals, reimaging franchise after franchise, and so on? We're getting to the point of mixing franchises (AVP, which was, coincidentally, very profitable due to the lack of a name-brand actor/actress) and regular franchise parodies (the "dog" in Planet 51), reimaging of books into films... all of this having a near-spiritual cultural significance to many. It's fucking nuts.
I'm glad at least a couple newer films are mostly original, like Law Abiding Citizen or the stuff put out by Pixar and Dreamworks. But for the most part, the best we have to look for is a reimaging of a 20-year-old franchise (AVP, Terminator), another sequel to a majorly overdone franchise (Spiderman 23), or some such thing.
I know a lot more becomes capable with CG, and some good films have resulted from it (LotR trilogy comes to mind). But c'mon, lets not raid the popular fiction of the past for the popular fiction of the future: let's make something interesting and new, and not nostalgic. I'm tired of having flashbacks to my childhood as a direct result of the stuff coming out of the studios today.
Failing that (very likely), how about we go outside and do something with our hands, sit and do something with our minds, and make something new? Failing that, go fuck around.
But the studios like those attention whores: they sell movies. A big-name actor is more than just someone in a movie: they're a sales aid, a movie feature, a plot device, etc. They're good for business.
You realize that studios used to "own" actors through exclusive contracts, right? The problem is that studios do not "own" the actors exclusively anymore, as they did then. They would "trade" actors amongst each other, but at the end of the day, a studio would essentially/mostly profit from a single actor's work. There was none of the diversity that there is now.
So yeah, if studios went to artificial actors, you could expect to see 20 of increasingly generic films with the same actors in them. The new and exciting would likely go away, and the cost of movies would likely go up, if anything. But the studios (you know, the same ones which pushed the DMCA?) would, at least, own all of the film assets again!
Actually, Terminator Salvation didn't have "young Arnold" in it, as CGI or old footage. They used a stand-in actor (I think it was this guy) who wore a 'prosthetic' face/mask. The guy's body/physique was a bit off, but it was close!
Using rendered models not only saves you the millions that big name actors typically demand, but you no longer need to hire filming locations, stage stunts etc... Actors face becoming obsolete sooner or later.
You haven't thought this one through, I don't think. You still need to hire big-name actors, especially if you want a "character franchise" (which many people like due to the continuity and studios like due to compulsive sales - "oh look, another Clint Eastwood film!").
Once a character is developed, they're stuck with the same actor unless they want to kill the character in the process of finding a new actor. I doubt that's something they'd want to do.
On the other hand, the character - arguably something very close to IP in the movie world would remain with the studio which develops it, which is a bit of a throwback towards what studios have been after since it stopped: "owned" actors who worked for one studio, and one studio only. So maybe they'd push it through anyway.
The obvious goal is the elimination of human actors which will assure higher profit margins for the film industries.
Will. Not. Happen.
The studios have been trying to "kill off" the movie star for almost 50 years now. It's a wet dream that keeps resurfacing, and is not likely to be possible at any time.
Why?
Stars become stars due to their on-screen personas. That persona is partially the script, but it largely the personality of the actor shining through. That personality is not something which can be 'manufactured' in a studio: it belongs to an individual. Imagine: another Die Hard movie in 30 years, but with someone who not only has the ability of someone like Christopher Lambert, but the personality. Yeah, not going to happen: you'll need that original 'personality'.
Star actors sell movies, not only by their looks but also by the characters they play, and their personalities. There will always be "we need a Harrison Ford type" (I think Shia LaBeouf is it, currently, until he gets replaced, the brand/variety dies, or it becomes the "Shia LaBeouf type"), but there will never be "another John Wayne".
That, and if it could be done, it would be prohibitively expensive. They'd still need actors to display emotions and personality, and would likely at least want good ones so pulling it off wouldn't be completely half-assed. People would stop going to movies if they were bad.
You most certainly could not do "studio developed characters". Even if done well, such attempts seem to come off kind of generic and 'plastic' - and not due to technology limitations. There are enough generic people in the world; most of them do not watch movies to see more of themselves.
C'mon, man. Osama bin Laden is like... oh, Santa Claus. He's the guy who keeps on giving!
We've killed his #2, what, 10 times by now? Granted, they were different #2s, and were probably the #1 of some Taliban group not OBL's #2, but yeah, it's been a couple times by now.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely, at this cheap price, only thugs on the street will be buying it. Oh wait, that's over 10 times what a nice .22 pistol costs...
And the 20 inches: how is that going to prevent it from being used against you? If you're struggling with someone over a gun, you're in close proximity. They grab it, pull the trigger: voila, you've got a bullet in yourself - you were well within 20cm from the gun, because you were trying to grab it.
This, unlike computers, might have a total of 10 interested buyers in the US. Why would I want this hideous, crippled gun (which likely has very little attention put into the actual firearm mechanism compared to even something like an entry-level Ruger) when I can get a uh, Ruger .22 in the $300 ballpark?
And for self defense, how about something a little bigger than .22? .22 is for gangster thugs, target practice, and shooting rodents. Anyone who would buy a sci-fi gun like that, with such poor ability, and a glowing light on it for the purpose of self-defense deserves to be killed.
Buying the product is a choice. Being stuck with it, and unable to do anything outside the vendor's intended use, is not - particularly if you are not aware of such a thing. It's like moving to a communist country under the promises of flowers and free healthcare and getting shoved in prison for thoughtcrime.
If there were actual ways to circumvent these shortcomings it'd be one thing, but the platform is pretty locked down. It's a PMP which has access to an app store utilized by several other devices, not a general purpose computer (though the hardware could be used as such).
There are a couple big, major differences between Japan of 20 years ago and China of today.
1) China is not limited militarily, either externally or externally.
2) China is a cruel and totalitarian society/government in many ways, both towards their subjects (jailing them with cruel treatments for minor offenses) and towards outsiders (Tibet).
3) China has repeatedly ignored the desires of its allies and trade partners in the quest for more profit (selling arms to Iran/wherever). This goes hand-in-hand with numerous examples of military espionage against the West (and the US in particular).
4) They have a gender-disproportionate populace (more males than females) which is historically very highly correlated with military expansionism.
5) They disregard any international interests in their reverse engineering and re-implementation of anything designed elsewhere for the purposes of stealing the technology.
6) They control many of the third world UN delegates and maneuver to undermine any efforts of said organization (climate change, arms, pollution, etc.).
7) Chinese culture is incredibly racist and xenophobic. They make Old European mores on racism look quaint.
8) Unlike Japan, they do not live on a small island with limited resources and do not rely upon the good will of others for their self-continuation in commerce.
9) China has been imperialist for the better part of a decade, with colonies all along he eastern coast of Africa (why many of the US yuppie expats living in Shanghai seem to think that the US is an evil imperial regime and love China, even now that Bush is out of office, is beyond me).
10) Potentially most important to the US and the West at large, they have no cultural respect for the US as Japan did (does).
So yeah, it's a slightly different ballgame than it was with Japan. Slightly. I would argue that most of the reasons for China's bleak future more heavily support violent Chinese expansion.
It sure was entertaining to watch my FIL bitch about how I'd broken something on his laptop, because the Internet wasn't working...
While he was talking on his 2.4GHz phone.
With the microwave cooking his dinner.
No, no degree of explanation helps the matter. Most people are like this; they don't get the whole 'frequency' thing at all.
Your software is likely not terribly useful, difficult to set up, and/or not as useful as something which is easier to set up. It might also be ugly compared to the competition.
You might also have an unreasonable requirement; eg. Postgresql (not MySQL, etc.) for a backend database on, say, a note/reminder application. That's a bit of a headache to setup. Poor documentation? There ya go - most people aren't intimately familiar w/ every piece of software out there and wouldn't be able to follow the sparse breadcrumbs of documentation. (Just guessing here, I don't know your project.)
Let me take gxemul, an architecture emulator (ARM, MIPS, Motorola 88K, PowerPC, and SuperH). It's got very limited utility - IE, mainly for nostalgic users, hobbyists, or possibly as a way to make cross-compilation easier (by doing it 'native'). I've used it for the latter two purposes, and it does a good enough job that I got what I needed to get done (mostly).
As far as I know, it's got a single active developer. The IRC channel has under a dozen users, with maybe 2-3 active at a time max (last I checked). Yet, as a project, it seems to do pretty well.
Something you might try: packaging your project for a couple distributions and trying to get it added, with yourself as the package maintainer. I know that awesome (the window manager) is packaged in most distros at a reasonably current version, despite its fast paced development (it's under 2 years old, as a project). Having those packages available has certainly helped spread its adoption.
I highly doubt Hulu or anyone else will ever support H264. By the time they start to move away from Flash, there will be something else on the horizon.
There's a reason why they encapsulate their shows/movies in Flash and inhibit more than a token 'buffer' (making a marginally slow connection, either to or from Hulu, useless for their site). They want to make it as difficult as possible for people to 'steal' the show from them.
Arguably, if the hard drive is your limitation today for common computing tasks, you're doing something wrong.
Yes, it's still a limitation, but there are many ways to mitigate that bottleneck for large environments: dedicated RAM drives, massive amounts of RAM, cache servers, SSDs, and so on. In many cases, it's cheaper to just throw another identical system with rotational disks at the problem.
For a common user, SSDs are the way to go. Most have under 1Gb of music, maybe 10Gb of other media (I'd wager). Maybe a couple gigabytes of pictures, depending on their age, quality of their digital camera, et cetera. And this is for a "savvy" user; most have under 1Gb of total data. SSDs make perfect sense for these users.
The biggest limitation on a computer's abilities for personal use in the past 10 years have been the amount of RAM the system has, the video card, and finally the hard drive. Provided the disk does not fail, a 10-year-old system with a decent video card for the day and a fair amount of RAM (512M would cut it, probably, but 1Gb wouldn't be unreasonable) is still going to be more computer than most people will ever need.
As for hard disks sucking and nobody doing anything about it... you can get a 1.5Tb disk for under $100 - and 1.5Tb is not far from the top-density model. You couldn't even get a 500Gb disk several years years ago, and for a long time you couldn't get one for under $300. So things are changing. Obviously hard drive manufacturers are doing something, just not what you want: the industry demands have been elsewhere; namely, they want more cheap storage than faster storage (which has seemingly always been an afterthought).
LightPeak is just around the corner; as a bus, it will blow away SATA. I imagine we'll start seeing single-enclosure RAID-0/1/5 disks with large amounts of RAM to decrease write lag sooner than later. Combine the two things and you'll have a reason to shut up.
Yet, most people can not play the games in the stores on their computers, because most people have computers which are old.
By "old" I mean something running XP with 256-512M of RAM and, if they're lucky, integrated ATI video - but it's most likely Intel crap. They might have a dualcore processor, but odds are it's late Pentium 4 or equivalent.
No, I don't think people with computers like this are "behind the curve". They're the average, and there are a fair number of what PC Magazine would call "power users" who have computers with specifications like those above.
Meanwhile, games like Fallout 3, Crysis, or even something like Red Alert 3 (1.5 years old) will not play on such a system. Hell, even "retro" games like (say) Deus Ex with higher quality textures or Max Payne will struggle on something like those - and those are 7+ years old. Those newer games will only be "just" playable on a $100 card on a fast, modern system (faster than Phenom).
I'd wager you'd be hard pressed to play most year-old games on a "high end" laptop or desktop from Dell/HP or similar, short of getting the top-end model. Like, in the $800+ ballpark.
So, the (winter) weather is little different than the upper western Midwestern states, then. *grumble* Though it is more consistent.
Those with seasonal depression need not apply, I suppose. The summers would indeed be nice.
The irony is that Google probably doesn't care all that much about a specific user, or users as an individual. They're looking for types of users and their associated buying habits.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but ReactOS is using ndiswrapper for most things, too.
Except that the two other major Graphics providers, Intel and AMD, both give the Linux community far better support than NVIDIA. Intel is writing excellent well-integrated open source drivers themselves, which AMD is providing full specs, which has allowed others to write drivers. AMD's making the specs available is far better Linux support than NVIDIA making closed source drivers available.
Yet, the Intel video cards are such crap it hardly matters, and the ATI support barely even works for most chipsets commonly available (such as anything you'd find on a motherboard).
Nvidia is, at least, doing something right for Linux. The others are trying to get something right.
Interesting. Does that work with stuff like Hulu as well? I barely visit youtube, but I tend to watch something on Hulu a couple times a week...
First Verizon and now T-Mobile have always managed to charge me the correct amount every month.
That's amazing. Seems like almost every other month we've got to contend with verizon billing issues.
I don't think you give "the average guy" enough credit. After all, good movies are not made popular by movie geeks. They're made popular by the common man (and woman). People would quickly stop going to the movies if every actor were like Dolf Lungden (or w/e his name is). You need a Bruce Willis or Angelina Jolie to sell films.
Typical.
I suppose you'd want us to remit a bill for services rendered to the UN after we quit that, too?
Which brings up an interesting possibility. After the UN disbands due to lack of funding, I can certainly see the world's rabble pounding on the doorsteps of Europe with a heightened fervor due to the lack of the US there at their shoulder. Chances are Europe would have their hands full with warring nations coming to loot and plunder (whether as organized groups or individuals) from Russia, Arabia, and Africa.
Good luck!
Let's mix high art and low, TV and theater, toss it all into the pot, mix things up, and do something new.
I hear him saying one of two things.
1) We need the finite resources and labor which others provide, and we're SOL when it comes to actually acquiring those materials in a non-manipulative fashion.
2) He's suggesting we enslave the world for those resources and labor - through militaristic action and threats, like the Chinese are doing, successfully.
Of the two, I'd pick the second.
Seriously?
Like, why can't a black or asian guy play the lead in MacBeth?
How about an Othello re-imaging with a black male lead? ("O", 2001)
Are greedy kings somehow relevant only to white people?
No, guy in blackface (or something similar) in that role played a Persian in that role a couple years ago. (If we're going to keep repeating the lie as a society that "race doesn't matter" the least we could do is not give any credence to claims of racism for something like blackface).
Or why couldn't a white guy play a role as a slave?
Because we have been told, as a society, that it is racist/socially unacceptable/whatever to have films which are such racially insensitive to those who "actually have been enslaved" (as if blacks enslaved by whites are the only kind of slaves).
Besides, there's Sparticus, if you haven't seen it. Good film.
(Also, are you a troll? I can't think of a single "slavery" movie since Gladiator, and there was only one notable black slave throughout that film. Seems to me you're race baiting.)
Acting is -acting-.
Ah, I see. Seems to me you don't understand how it works, and would likely be one of about 5 people who would enjoy watching purple dome-headed aliens which speak Bulgarian and wear kilts invade the alps on flying carpets.
Acting is not just acting, it's creating a character. It has to be believable, or it will suck. That is why studios can't just pull anyone off the streets, or hire any old SAG member: they won't accomplish the same thing as a name brand actor.
Let's mix high art and low, TV and theater, toss it all into the pot, mix things up, and do something new.
I'm so tired of recycled culture. Can we let Grease die already and stop using it for high school musicals, reimaging franchise after franchise, and so on? We're getting to the point of mixing franchises (AVP, which was, coincidentally, very profitable due to the lack of a name-brand actor/actress) and regular franchise parodies (the "dog" in Planet 51), reimaging of books into films... all of this having a near-spiritual cultural significance to many. It's fucking nuts.
I'm glad at least a couple newer films are mostly original, like Law Abiding Citizen or the stuff put out by Pixar and Dreamworks. But for the most part, the best we have to look for is a reimaging of a 20-year-old franchise (AVP, Terminator), another sequel to a majorly overdone franchise (Spiderman 23), or some such thing.
I know a lot more becomes capable with CG, and some good films have resulted from it (LotR trilogy comes to mind). But c'mon, lets not raid the popular fiction of the past for the popular fiction of the future: let's make something interesting and new, and not nostalgic. I'm tired of having flashbacks to my childhood as a direct result of the stuff coming out of the studios today.
Failing that (very likely), how about we go outside and do something with our hands, sit and do something with our minds, and make something new? Failing that, go fuck around.
But the studios like those attention whores: they sell movies. A big-name actor is more than just someone in a movie: they're a sales aid, a movie feature, a plot device, etc. They're good for business.
You realize that studios used to "own" actors through exclusive contracts, right? The problem is that studios do not "own" the actors exclusively anymore, as they did then. They would "trade" actors amongst each other, but at the end of the day, a studio would essentially/mostly profit from a single actor's work. There was none of the diversity that there is now.
So yeah, if studios went to artificial actors, you could expect to see 20 of increasingly generic films with the same actors in them. The new and exciting would likely go away, and the cost of movies would likely go up, if anything. But the studios (you know, the same ones which pushed the DMCA?) would, at least, own all of the film assets again!
Actually, Terminator Salvation didn't have "young Arnold" in it, as CGI or old footage. They used a stand-in actor (I think it was this guy) who wore a 'prosthetic' face/mask. The guy's body/physique was a bit off, but it was close!
Using rendered models not only saves you the millions that big name actors typically demand, but you no longer need to hire filming locations, stage stunts etc... Actors face becoming obsolete sooner or later.
You haven't thought this one through, I don't think. You still need to hire big-name actors, especially if you want a "character franchise" (which many people like due to the continuity and studios like due to compulsive sales - "oh look, another Clint Eastwood film!").
Once a character is developed, they're stuck with the same actor unless they want to kill the character in the process of finding a new actor. I doubt that's something they'd want to do.
On the other hand, the character - arguably something very close to IP in the movie world would remain with the studio which develops it, which is a bit of a throwback towards what studios have been after since it stopped: "owned" actors who worked for one studio, and one studio only. So maybe they'd push it through anyway.
The obvious goal is the elimination of human actors which will assure higher profit margins for the film industries.
Will. Not. Happen.
The studios have been trying to "kill off" the movie star for almost 50 years now. It's a wet dream that keeps resurfacing, and is not likely to be possible at any time.
Why?
Stars become stars due to their on-screen personas. That persona is partially the script, but it largely the personality of the actor shining through. That personality is not something which can be 'manufactured' in a studio: it belongs to an individual. Imagine: another Die Hard movie in 30 years, but with someone who not only has the ability of someone like Christopher Lambert, but the personality. Yeah, not going to happen: you'll need that original 'personality'.
Star actors sell movies, not only by their looks but also by the characters they play, and their personalities. There will always be "we need a Harrison Ford type" (I think Shia LaBeouf is it, currently, until he gets replaced, the brand/variety dies, or it becomes the "Shia LaBeouf type"), but there will never be "another John Wayne".
That, and if it could be done, it would be prohibitively expensive. They'd still need actors to display emotions and personality, and would likely at least want good ones so pulling it off wouldn't be completely half-assed. People would stop going to movies if they were bad.
You most certainly could not do "studio developed characters". Even if done well, such attempts seem to come off kind of generic and 'plastic' - and not due to technology limitations. There are enough generic people in the world; most of them do not watch movies to see more of themselves.
C'mon, man. Osama bin Laden is like... oh, Santa Claus. He's the guy who keeps on giving!
We've killed his #2, what, 10 times by now? Granted, they were different #2s, and were probably the #1 of some Taliban group not OBL's #2, but yeah, it's been a couple times by now.
What was lacking, for decades, was the political will.
Was lacking? Pay much attention to the news, per chance?
Try it... about 3 of the web pages in the world will actually display... Two of them are probably in Ugandan.