Absolutely. ROTK will be robbed if they don't get it.
Usually, during films with large amounts of CG, I'll notice it. I'll be sceptical of it, and I'll think, "wow, that looks fake" - such as the second matrix. That film's major fight scene was horrible, in terms of "suspension of disbelief" - the graphics (at times) looked like a high-res video game, to some degree, in that the figures weren't moving properly, and other such things. Not to say it wasn't impressive, though. Just not believeable.
For ROTK, I very rarely thought, "Hey, Gollum is corporeal" - and that was only due to the fact that I -knew- he wasn't real, and that he was rendered, prior to seeing the film. He was so astoundingly well done that, despite all my skepticism, I did not notice that he wasn't actually there most of the time. His interaction with the 'real actors' and environment was flawless, as was his life-like movement, etc.
Additionally, the main battle scene was incredible. In the back of my mind, I knew that the hordes were rendered, but I never once "realized" it. I didn't even realize it until I just now thought about it. The distinction between what was rendered, and what was not, was not readily perceiveable. When the Riders of Rohan rode into the horde, which orcs/etc. were real? were the horsemen real? Now that I think about it - were the elephants real? It wasn't readily discernable. They all looked damned real to me.
Overall, LOTR has put eveything that has come before it, and everything that has come at the same time, to shame, in terms of 3D realism. None of the Jurassic Park films come close. Hulk certainly doesn't. X-Men 2 didn't strike me as actually using all too many rendered effects (nothing immidiately comes to mind - were they just well done, or weren't there that many afterall?). Pirates of the Carribbian was pretty impressive, I thought - what with the undead/living graphical transitions that occured during the light of a full moon. However, nothing even came close to matching the incredible nature of ROTK. Even the lava flows looked quite realistic, and that's something that's fairly difficult to get right, I hear.
I don't know about other phones, but I'm pretty sure that my kyocera 1135 as you described.
I called 911 a while ago due to someone seemably passed out on the sidewalk a half year ago. The phone said something alone the lines of, "911 Emergency Mode" after the call, and I could exit the 'mode' as I saw fit. I'm guessing that as long as I was in that mode, I was trackable.
Granted, this doesn't mean that the phones aren't trackable without that mode being on. This is the government we're talking about here.
Yet another good reason/possible application for open source software - freedom. I like knowing what the things I buy are capable of doing, and if one of those things is tell the authorities where I am, when freethink is illigial, and I'm an outlaw, well. I don't think I like that very much.
I think the most likely scenario will be that every windows machine out there will be exploited to its fullest due to the new exploits that are found. You think Slammer and MSBlaster, or sircam caused a lot of bandwidth and downtime woes? That ain't nothin', baby.
It would almost instantly become impossible to use a Windows machine in anything but a very locked down environment: "User" accounts only, no IE, no Windows Explorer, no Outlook, and no Office. You'd very quickly see vendors migrate to other operating systems (MacOS, Linux, and *BSD being the largest, in my mind.)
It's been my theory for a long time that the whole predictions of the past that programmers would be in short supply in the future was a tactic by the business industry to flood the human resource market with cheaper labor. Suddenly, everyone's going in for CS degrees. We need programmers now, damn it! So what do we do? We petition the gov't for more HB-1 workers, because there's -such- a drastic shortage! Well, they got what they succesfully wanted.
Now they're predicting that there will be even less programming jobs in the US in the future. What does that mean? Well, I postulate that big business has gotten what they want again: less US folks are going into programming as a result, and many are leaving, partially due to the lack of jobs (having simply disappeared, or having gone overseas). The result is, CS degrees are no longer desireable to be had by students, and "computer science" has been devalued by the industry as a simple hack job no different than that of a carpenter apprentice's work. (If this were so, why would there be so many Academics that say and feel otherwise, and why is "computer science" as complex, if not more so, than other things that are claimed as a 'science' - such as economics, human 'science', social 'science' and the like?)
Ultimately, large businesses overseas are then able to get the cheapest labor possible. No longer will there be that much of an outcry at the jobs in CS being sent overseas, because most CS jobs don't pay much anyway, and they're difficult to do - just like manual labor, in that respect. Except it's difficult mental work, not physical. Traditionally, throughout history, mental work has been seen of higher value than physical labor.
It makes you wonder why things have changed: greed? Monopoly? Shift of political power from the government (or the people) to corporations? What?
Most definately, re: Liv Tyler. There is one particular point in the film when she beams an incredibly radiant smile at one of the hobbits (I think). So viciously and openly sexual, it's hard to explain. It just said, "I'm a mischevious nymph" in huge 72-point font.
Quite possibly because the second films had no directable story. They were just a sequence of loosely held together scenes with the same characters, within the same world. The chain of events could have plausably been in a different order; not so with The Matrix.
There were a lot less subtle things in the second two films than there was in the first; that, and the third film completely ignored some of the things that happened in the second: namely, the part in the end where he fried the sentinels. The second film fell short by simply seeming like a sequel to a popular teen flick (aka, American Pie or such): you had all the familiar faces, you had the romantic interests that were hinted at, and then you've got shallow character development to make it seem like there's actually a point to it, when it has no significant bearing on the story at all.
The conclusion of the original Star Wars trilogy is similar to the ending of the LotR movies in that fashion: they conclude on a happy note of bliss, not the resolution of the disaster.
IMO, such conclusions don't work too well with shorter films, but when you've got an epic story that spans several films, it's almost a necessity to bring closure, completeness, and a "human" touch to the films.
That said, I wish they'd had the Battle of Hobbiton in RotK: they could have cut out some of the excessive emotional hobbit-blathering between Frodo and Sam, reduced some of the battle scenes slightly, and had less "pensive waiting" scenes, etc. Surely they could have carved off 10 minutes of the film in such a fashion - enough for the Hobbiton battle, I think. And really, that would have aided a lot of "hell yes" coolness to the film: after all, one of the nifty things about the books is that it puts much more emphasis on Merry and Pippin kicking ass in battle scenes, and that's not really grasped in the film. Showing a bunch of hobbits kicking the shit out of a bunch of half-orcs and men would be great.
Does anyone else think it's interesting how films seem to be getting much, much longer? There have been numerous 2+ hour films in the last year or two, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Kill Bill (vol 1), the second two Matrix films, all three LotR films, and seemably a couple others. Are people's attention spans getting longer again (due to the internet vs. TV, maybe?), or is this just a trend of a series of 3 3-hour 'compilation' stories?
At any rate, I'm not sure if I like it or dislike it. Part of me enjoys being able to have 3 hours of film to properly tell a story; another part of me thinks that they intentionally pad the films to make them longer (as with LotR and the overly-emotional and excessive dialog at times); yet a third part of me wonders, "Where's the goddamn intermission, I've got to piss!" - they did have intermissions back in the day for really long films. Why not now? It's painful to sit there with a full bladder, but more often than not, it's preferable to missing 5+ minutes of a film you paid $7+ to see (more if you're on a date).
When you have a winning formula, you use it again.
Ever hear of Romeo and Juliet? Done -literally- dozens of times, and there have been untold millions of stories that take the same formula. This is the same thing, except instead of being a "tragic romance" or a "adventurous epic" or such, it's "mock horror".
If you went to it expecting shakespeare or a 'real' horror film, you'll be disappointed, just like you'll be disappointed with soemthing like "Terminator 3" (an action/adventure film) if you're expecting something like Star Wars (any of them, all epic adventures). It's your own damned fault. I don't like trash romance films and enjoy epics; some people are the other way around. Deal with it.
Lucky for you, you got to see it. It hasn't been released yet, it's just in pre-screenings right now to see if people "like it enough" to put it in theaters.
Unless you know of somewhere other than select theaters that it could be gotten/viewed, that is. I'd pay money for that. I've been waiting for the film for about 2 years now.
The problem with the "Extra features" on DVDs is that, more often than not, the original film wasn't good in the first place: it didn't draw you in and make you part of the world, the environment, etc.
Good examples of films that do tend to do this are the Kevin Smith films, the original Star Wars films, the LotR films. There's extra value there because the films weren't just simply thrown together hastily, and there are some interesting things about the creation of the film that viewers might be interested in (for instance, how many horses were actually used for RotK, etc.)
Best: (in my personal order) Pirates of the Carribbian - wonderful, wonderful film. They need to get this script writer together with this director again, they do wonderful work: a stellar epic. This is, IMO, a good film all around, not just for this year. LotR: RotK - despite the *spoiler alert* fact that they removed the Hobbiton battle and all Sauruman scenes and the seemingly endless emotional orations between Sam and Frodo (which reminded me a lot of "Anne of Green Gables" - hell on earth!), it's still one of the best of the year. X-Men 2 - what can I say, I'm a comic geek. I still pretend in my mind that I'm Wolverine, and I'm 21. The fact that it was well done was fantastic. Bruce Almighty - One of the better films Carrey has done, IMO. I laughed so hard it hurt during this film, and I usually do not laugh during movies - I don't tend to find most of them terribly funny or witty. This was both, and it managed to pull it off without resorting to too much trash humor. I'm a Carrey fan again, now that he's doing less shite like Me, Myself, and Irene. A Guy Thing - Also a very funny movie. Jason Lee and Julia Stiles - two of my favorite actors. And Stiles is bloody hot to beat. The fact that I was getting married at roughly the same time as it came out increased its hilarity (and making it fairly intimidating at the same time).
Most of the above films will eventually end up on my shelves.
Worst: (in order of suckitude to not-so-suckitude) Gigli - Ben Affleck and J-Lo. Both trying to act - and Affleck like a calm and cool italian. It can't get worse. I was groaning about 3 seconds into the previews, it was so bad (and I didn't even see the film) (no, I didn't watch it, but there's no way it could have been good, and IMDB reports it as the 6th WORST FILM EVER at 1.8/10 - only.1 better than greats such as Troll 2 and Space Mutiny - all said, I'm ashamed that two of the lowest 10 were this year.) Daredevil - It had potential, it really did. The previews weren't too bad, it had the Alias chick in it... and Ben Affleck. What the fuck? I swear, everything that fool touches turns to swine filth. In my mind, he is no better typified than by his role in Mallrats - that, IMO, is the pinacle of his acting ability, being as that is quite probably his true colors. The fact that he seems to have been "given" roles that Harrison Ford would have done in his younger years (The Sum Of All Fears, Changing Lanes) Hulk - They screwed up. It sucked. Matrix: Revolutions - a horrible disappointment, and thus it finds itself on my Shit List. I thought they couldn't screw it up any worse than they did Reloaded, so I saw it. Boy was I wrong. What a dull, dull film. I almost got up and left half way through. Matrix: Reloaded - Quite disappointing, overall. The encounters in Zion were anti-climatic, and the special effects and Neo fight scenes were way over done (and somewhat cheesy/noticeably rendered). After the original, this paled: though the highway scene was pretty intense, it didn't come close to the coolness of the Lobby Scene, which will go down through history as a turning point in how action movies are filmed.
Most of the "bad" films likely won't be watched again (if even for the first time, in a certain case), and if then, only because someone else rents/owns it and we've got nothing else for the evening.
The Bicentennial man was based off of the 'collective' works of Asimov's Robots trilogy as well as a couple of his other robots (I, Robot, etc.) books, not just one story or book. All of the books were, of course, based in the same world.
You're right though - the film sucked horribly. It's along the lines of condencing Tolkien's LotR to a single film. Wouldn't work too well, would it?:P
If linux wants to keep gaining headway, something is going to have to be done on the desktop; XFree is a hoggish bitch. Surely there could be a better X implimentation.
For philosophical reasons, I don't see MS's success as anything but bad. One, they are a large corporation, and in a related fashion, a (proven) monopoly. They leverage an obscene amount of power - it's like having a patent on water, in terms of today's business world. Such a large organization can not be unilaterally trusted with such power. This is why we're -supposed- to have a government: regulation of trade and things such as monopolies, so that the little guy does not get walked all over, and competition remains.
The future of software is in support, not development; everyone knows this. Microsoft's practices fly in the face, once again, of the little guy making money from such support - because he's simply not allowed the tools to do it. Hardly nobody does vehicle repairs in their own 2-car garrage. Most people bring their cars to mechanics for repair. What if those mechanics weren't allowed to know how those cars work? They wouldn't be able to do their jobs properly. What's more, if information on how the cars were made wasn't allowed to be made public, then Joe Tinkerer wouldn't be able to fix his own car, either.
Not until looking at some of those OS sites (some of which I've never heard of before, such as SkyOS - which didn't boot fully, coincidentally) did I fully realize how far along linux has come along in the last 3 years.
I think that, a mere 3 years ago, linux distros were roughly as mature as SkyOS (as listed under the OSes that didn't fully work). It had quite limited hardware support and didn't have a terribly large amount of truely useful X applications. There was Netscape 4, beta builts of Mozilla, and StarOffice, and that's pretty much it. (I might be thinking back 4 years ago, not 3, on some o fthis stuff, but the effect is roughly the same).
Now, linux as a whole is starting to become a serious threat for MS in nearly all areas - at least, in those areas where it hasn't already proven that MS products are inferior (such as the server domain). Three years is an incredibly short amount of time for all the progress that's been made, when you consider that in the last 3 years, MS has made very minimal, if any, progress in the quality of any of their applications. Sure, they've released new versions, and some have marginal improvements (such as stability), but since Windows 2000, not much has happened - despite the massive number of full-time programmers that Microsoft has.
In the last 3 years, we've seen KDE spring up from nowhere and 3 point-0 releases, all of which advancing significantly over the previous one. With each release, we've seen more applications with more features. Gnome/eximian has done quite similar things, going from gtk 1.x on up to gtk2, going from the slow, painful, and poorly designed gnome 1.x to the fairly slick and useful eximian releases. we've got open office which competes on par with MS Office in nearly every standalone scenario. The list just goes on, and it amazes me to think that it's only been 3 (4?) years.
I'm sure I'll be modded down for 'flaming' for this, but it needs to be said, despite my love for open software.
Do you really think that the attitude of replacing old frameworks is exclusive to MS, who does it for financial gain? No. Open source communities are -constantly- reinventing the wheel - look at all the open source projects out there just for word processing; don't you think they could share a little bit more of a common codebase, say, for the inport/export of 3rd party file formats? That would make sense: everyone would benefit from more coverage, and some people could use a very lightweight word processor (because that's what they need, and they don't want the bloat, or their system simply can't run the heavier OO.org, etc. etc.).
Granted, improvement needs to be done, but there are way too many efforts to retool the wheel. GUI toolkits are another good (bad?) example of this: why not simply have a single, colaborative framework for the things like AA, font rendering, 3D accel, etc., and maybe even the application hooks, and then simply have the individual toolkits impliment an abstraction layer so that someone can use (say) Konqueror using GTK if they want to, or Evolution using QT, instead of wasting all the overhead on both TKs?
What makes you think people would want to migrate back to MS products?
What they are (and will be) using is free software. It's of higher technical quality, in addition to the fact that it doesn't cost anything.
Microsoft could only give them their software in a hope that they might use it - that would be the best change MS would have, really.
In addition, for the fraction of what they spend on MS products annually, surely they could invest a hundred thousand or two (not a significant amount when you consider that they'd be spending $1.2M dollars for those 4k systems, @ the bargain price of $300/seat) of it into the sallaries of 3, 4, or 5 high-quality developers, or maybe offer bounties (as other companies/people/groups have) for features they want implimented, or for other software that they need? The money has been budgeted for software in the past, and groups have gotten by, so shaving a 200k off that huge 'discount' would be fairly insignificant. Why not pass some of the benefit back to the people that pay the gov't, by making the gov't run more efficiently?
Gee, that's funny. Why do people keep upgrading to the latest version of Windows/Office/etc. if they don't like anything new? There have certainly been some very significant changes in MS products in the "last 10 years" - how is this transition any different than any other, which doesn't get any hype at all?
Nowadays, there's very little you can do that's "legitimate" in the eyes of greed: browse the web, download email, listen to internet audio broadcasts, play games on other servers.
Don't even think about hosting your own server (even if you're not using any more bandwidth than you would if you were sending files over AIM to friends). Filesharing is also out the door. In some cases, they'll go as far as to block ICMP so you can't do 'dangerous' things like ping and traceroute folks, being as that is a -business- class product (that explains a lot, doesn't it? This has happened to me, btw).
Yes, but implying that you're doing something immoral/illigal - isn't that slander? Or maybe blackmail? "Don't download as much as your contract says you can, or we'll have you investigated."
C&C generals was actually the first RTS I played more than once or twice. I found after playing for 1-2 weeks the AI was painfully dumb. Are most RTS games that bad?
Yes, most of them are that bad. However, it seems to me that Westwood is a particularly bad proponent of bad AI. I suspect they get away with it for several reasons.
One, most people aren't intelligent enough to notice. It's much more difficult to distinguish bad tactics (especially when 90% of what your opponent does is hidden from you) than how a Grunt in Half-Life doesn't quite run for cover when he should, or how someone is behaving oddly in CounterStrike (a bot).
Two, current RTSes are limited in how much AI will actually do for the game. The current stock of RTS games are all (at least all I've seen) just build-order games. You build more buildings to get more powerful units, and thus it's fairly simple to optimize that order so as to squish anyone that hasn't learned it.
Furthermore, current RTSes don't "need" better computer AI (or unit AI), because of the above mentioned player inefficiency. The computer can simply use the optimized methods, or even do so much as cheat, to make the game 'challenging' (when in fact it is simply more difficult and more frustrating).
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Absolutely. ROTK will be robbed if they don't get it.
Usually, during films with large amounts of CG, I'll notice it. I'll be sceptical of it, and I'll think, "wow, that looks fake" - such as the second matrix. That film's major fight scene was horrible, in terms of "suspension of disbelief" - the graphics (at times) looked like a high-res video game, to some degree, in that the figures weren't moving properly, and other such things. Not to say it wasn't impressive, though. Just not believeable.
For ROTK, I very rarely thought, "Hey, Gollum is corporeal" - and that was only due to the fact that I -knew- he wasn't real, and that he was rendered, prior to seeing the film. He was so astoundingly well done that, despite all my skepticism, I did not notice that he wasn't actually there most of the time. His interaction with the 'real actors' and environment was flawless, as was his life-like movement, etc.
Additionally, the main battle scene was incredible. In the back of my mind, I knew that the hordes were rendered, but I never once "realized" it. I didn't even realize it until I just now thought about it. The distinction between what was rendered, and what was not, was not readily perceiveable. When the Riders of Rohan rode into the horde, which orcs/etc. were real? were the horsemen real? Now that I think about it - were the elephants real? It wasn't readily discernable. They all looked damned real to me.
Overall, LOTR has put eveything that has come before it, and everything that has come at the same time, to shame, in terms of 3D realism. None of the Jurassic Park films come close. Hulk certainly doesn't. X-Men 2 didn't strike me as actually using all too many rendered effects (nothing immidiately comes to mind - were they just well done, or weren't there that many afterall?). Pirates of the Carribbian was pretty impressive, I thought - what with the undead/living graphical transitions that occured during the light of a full moon. However, nothing even came close to matching the incredible nature of ROTK. Even the lava flows looked quite realistic, and that's something that's fairly difficult to get right, I hear.
I don't know about other phones, but I'm pretty sure that my kyocera 1135 as you described.
I called 911 a while ago due to someone seemably passed out on the sidewalk a half year ago. The phone said something alone the lines of, "911 Emergency Mode" after the call, and I could exit the 'mode' as I saw fit. I'm guessing that as long as I was in that mode, I was trackable.
Granted, this doesn't mean that the phones aren't trackable without that mode being on. This is the government we're talking about here.
Yet another good reason/possible application for open source software - freedom. I like knowing what the things I buy are capable of doing, and if one of those things is tell the authorities where I am, when freethink is illigial, and I'm an outlaw, well. I don't think I like that very much.
I think the most likely scenario will be that every windows machine out there will be exploited to its fullest due to the new exploits that are found. You think Slammer and MSBlaster, or sircam caused a lot of bandwidth and downtime woes? That ain't nothin', baby.
It would almost instantly become impossible to use a Windows machine in anything but a very locked down environment: "User" accounts only, no IE, no Windows Explorer, no Outlook, and no Office. You'd very quickly see vendors migrate to other operating systems (MacOS, Linux, and *BSD being the largest, in my mind.)
It's been my theory for a long time that the whole predictions of the past that programmers would be in short supply in the future was a tactic by the business industry to flood the human resource market with cheaper labor. Suddenly, everyone's going in for CS degrees. We need programmers now, damn it! So what do we do? We petition the gov't for more HB-1 workers, because there's -such- a drastic shortage! Well, they got what they succesfully wanted.
Now they're predicting that there will be even less programming jobs in the US in the future. What does that mean? Well, I postulate that big business has gotten what they want again: less US folks are going into programming as a result, and many are leaving, partially due to the lack of jobs (having simply disappeared, or having gone overseas). The result is, CS degrees are no longer desireable to be had by students, and "computer science" has been devalued by the industry as a simple hack job no different than that of a carpenter apprentice's work. (If this were so, why would there be so many Academics that say and feel otherwise, and why is "computer science" as complex, if not more so, than other things that are claimed as a 'science' - such as economics, human 'science', social 'science' and the like?)
Ultimately, large businesses overseas are then able to get the cheapest labor possible. No longer will there be that much of an outcry at the jobs in CS being sent overseas, because most CS jobs don't pay much anyway, and they're difficult to do - just like manual labor, in that respect. Except it's difficult mental work, not physical. Traditionally, throughout history, mental work has been seen of higher value than physical labor.
It makes you wonder why things have changed: greed? Monopoly? Shift of political power from the government (or the people) to corporations? What?
Most definately, re: Liv Tyler. There is one particular point in the film when she beams an incredibly radiant smile at one of the hobbits (I think). So viciously and openly sexual, it's hard to explain. It just said, "I'm a mischevious nymph" in huge 72-point font.
Quite possibly because the second films had no directable story. They were just a sequence of loosely held together scenes with the same characters, within the same world. The chain of events could have plausably been in a different order; not so with The Matrix.
There were a lot less subtle things in the second two films than there was in the first; that, and the third film completely ignored some of the things that happened in the second: namely, the part in the end where he fried the sentinels. The second film fell short by simply seeming like a sequel to a popular teen flick (aka, American Pie or such): you had all the familiar faces, you had the romantic interests that were hinted at, and then you've got shallow character development to make it seem like there's actually a point to it, when it has no significant bearing on the story at all.
The conclusion of the original Star Wars trilogy is similar to the ending of the LotR movies in that fashion: they conclude on a happy note of bliss, not the resolution of the disaster.
IMO, such conclusions don't work too well with shorter films, but when you've got an epic story that spans several films, it's almost a necessity to bring closure, completeness, and a "human" touch to the films.
That said, I wish they'd had the Battle of Hobbiton in RotK: they could have cut out some of the excessive emotional hobbit-blathering between Frodo and Sam, reduced some of the battle scenes slightly, and had less "pensive waiting" scenes, etc. Surely they could have carved off 10 minutes of the film in such a fashion - enough for the Hobbiton battle, I think. And really, that would have aided a lot of "hell yes" coolness to the film: after all, one of the nifty things about the books is that it puts much more emphasis on Merry and Pippin kicking ass in battle scenes, and that's not really grasped in the film. Showing a bunch of hobbits kicking the shit out of a bunch of half-orcs and men would be great.
Does anyone else think it's interesting how films seem to be getting much, much longer? There have been numerous 2+ hour films in the last year or two, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Kill Bill (vol 1), the second two Matrix films, all three LotR films, and seemably a couple others. Are people's attention spans getting longer again (due to the internet vs. TV, maybe?), or is this just a trend of a series of 3 3-hour 'compilation' stories?
At any rate, I'm not sure if I like it or dislike it. Part of me enjoys being able to have 3 hours of film to properly tell a story; another part of me thinks that they intentionally pad the films to make them longer (as with LotR and the overly-emotional and excessive dialog at times); yet a third part of me wonders, "Where's the goddamn intermission, I've got to piss!" - they did have intermissions back in the day for really long films. Why not now? It's painful to sit there with a full bladder, but more often than not, it's preferable to missing 5+ minutes of a film you paid $7+ to see (more if you're on a date).
When you have a winning formula, you use it again.
Ever hear of Romeo and Juliet? Done -literally- dozens of times, and there have been untold millions of stories that take the same formula. This is the same thing, except instead of being a "tragic romance" or a "adventurous epic" or such, it's "mock horror".
If you went to it expecting shakespeare or a 'real' horror film, you'll be disappointed, just like you'll be disappointed with soemthing like "Terminator 3" (an action/adventure film) if you're expecting something like Star Wars (any of them, all epic adventures). It's your own damned fault. I don't like trash romance films and enjoy epics; some people are the other way around. Deal with it.
Lucky for you, you got to see it. It hasn't been released yet, it's just in pre-screenings right now to see if people "like it enough" to put it in theaters.
Unless you know of somewhere other than select theaters that it could be gotten/viewed, that is. I'd pay money for that. I've been waiting for the film for about 2 years now.
The problem with the "Extra features" on DVDs is that, more often than not, the original film wasn't good in the first place: it didn't draw you in and make you part of the world, the environment, etc.
Good examples of films that do tend to do this are the Kevin Smith films, the original Star Wars films, the LotR films. There's extra value there because the films weren't just simply thrown together hastily, and there are some interesting things about the creation of the film that viewers might be interested in (for instance, how many horses were actually used for RotK, etc.)
Best: (in my personal order)
.1 better than greats such as Troll 2 and Space Mutiny - all said, I'm ashamed that two of the lowest 10 were this year.)
Pirates of the Carribbian - wonderful, wonderful film. They need to get this script writer together with this director again, they do wonderful work: a stellar epic. This is, IMO, a good film all around, not just for this year.
LotR: RotK - despite the *spoiler alert* fact that they removed the Hobbiton battle and all Sauruman scenes and the seemingly endless emotional orations between Sam and Frodo (which reminded me a lot of "Anne of Green Gables" - hell on earth!), it's still one of the best of the year.
X-Men 2 - what can I say, I'm a comic geek. I still pretend in my mind that I'm Wolverine, and I'm 21. The fact that it was well done was fantastic.
Bruce Almighty - One of the better films Carrey has done, IMO. I laughed so hard it hurt during this film, and I usually do not laugh during movies - I don't tend to find most of them terribly funny or witty. This was both, and it managed to pull it off without resorting to too much trash humor. I'm a Carrey fan again, now that he's doing less shite like Me, Myself, and Irene.
A Guy Thing - Also a very funny movie. Jason Lee and Julia Stiles - two of my favorite actors. And Stiles is bloody hot to beat. The fact that I was getting married at roughly the same time as it came out increased its hilarity (and making it fairly intimidating at the same time).
Most of the above films will eventually end up on my shelves.
Worst: (in order of suckitude to not-so-suckitude)
Gigli - Ben Affleck and J-Lo. Both trying to act - and Affleck like a calm and cool italian. It can't get worse. I was groaning about 3 seconds into the previews, it was so bad (and I didn't even see the film) (no, I didn't watch it, but there's no way it could have been good, and IMDB reports it as the 6th WORST FILM EVER at 1.8/10 - only
Daredevil - It had potential, it really did. The previews weren't too bad, it had the Alias chick in it... and Ben Affleck. What the fuck? I swear, everything that fool touches turns to swine filth. In my mind, he is no better typified than by his role in Mallrats - that, IMO, is the pinacle of his acting ability, being as that is quite probably his true colors. The fact that he seems to have been "given" roles that Harrison Ford would have done in his younger years (The Sum Of All Fears, Changing Lanes)
Hulk - They screwed up. It sucked.
Matrix: Revolutions - a horrible disappointment, and thus it finds itself on my Shit List. I thought they couldn't screw it up any worse than they did Reloaded, so I saw it. Boy was I wrong. What a dull, dull film. I almost got up and left half way through.
Matrix: Reloaded - Quite disappointing, overall. The encounters in Zion were anti-climatic, and the special effects and Neo fight scenes were way over done (and somewhat cheesy/noticeably rendered). After the original, this paled: though the highway scene was pretty intense, it didn't come close to the coolness of the Lobby Scene, which will go down through history as a turning point in how action movies are filmed.
Most of the "bad" films likely won't be watched again (if even for the first time, in a certain case), and if then, only because someone else rents/owns it and we've got nothing else for the evening.
I hear they were done sometime the day before, and just released it on a cronjob so they could get the benefits of both worlds. :)
You're all wrong.
:P
The Bicentennial man was based off of the 'collective' works of Asimov's Robots trilogy as well as a couple of his other robots (I, Robot, etc.) books, not just one story or book. All of the books were, of course, based in the same world.
You're right though - the film sucked horribly. It's along the lines of condencing Tolkien's LotR to a single film. Wouldn't work too well, would it?
If linux wants to keep gaining headway, something is going to have to be done on the desktop; XFree is a hoggish bitch. Surely there could be a better X implimentation.
For philosophical reasons, I don't see MS's success as anything but bad. One, they are a large corporation, and in a related fashion, a (proven) monopoly. They leverage an obscene amount of power - it's like having a patent on water, in terms of today's business world. Such a large organization can not be unilaterally trusted with such power. This is why we're -supposed- to have a government: regulation of trade and things such as monopolies, so that the little guy does not get walked all over, and competition remains.
The future of software is in support, not development; everyone knows this. Microsoft's practices fly in the face, once again, of the little guy making money from such support - because he's simply not allowed the tools to do it. Hardly nobody does vehicle repairs in their own 2-car garrage. Most people bring their cars to mechanics for repair. What if those mechanics weren't allowed to know how those cars work? They wouldn't be able to do their jobs properly. What's more, if information on how the cars were made wasn't allowed to be made public, then Joe Tinkerer wouldn't be able to fix his own car, either.
There's a difference there.
MS has source available.
If linux users had such source available to look at, you better damned well believe there'd be no more need for MS, anywhere.
Not until looking at some of those OS sites (some of which I've never heard of before, such as SkyOS - which didn't boot fully, coincidentally) did I fully realize how far along linux has come along in the last 3 years.
I think that, a mere 3 years ago, linux distros were roughly as mature as SkyOS (as listed under the OSes that didn't fully work). It had quite limited hardware support and didn't have a terribly large amount of truely useful X applications. There was Netscape 4, beta builts of Mozilla, and StarOffice, and that's pretty much it. (I might be thinking back 4 years ago, not 3, on some o fthis stuff, but the effect is roughly the same).
Now, linux as a whole is starting to become a serious threat for MS in nearly all areas - at least, in those areas where it hasn't already proven that MS products are inferior (such as the server domain). Three years is an incredibly short amount of time for all the progress that's been made, when you consider that in the last 3 years, MS has made very minimal, if any, progress in the quality of any of their applications. Sure, they've released new versions, and some have marginal improvements (such as stability), but since Windows 2000, not much has happened - despite the massive number of full-time programmers that Microsoft has.
In the last 3 years, we've seen KDE spring up from nowhere and 3 point-0 releases, all of which advancing significantly over the previous one. With each release, we've seen more applications with more features. Gnome/eximian has done quite similar things, going from gtk 1.x on up to gtk2, going from the slow, painful, and poorly designed gnome 1.x to the fairly slick and useful eximian releases. we've got open office which competes on par with MS Office in nearly every standalone scenario. The list just goes on, and it amazes me to think that it's only been 3 (4?) years.
I'm sure I'll be modded down for 'flaming' for this, but it needs to be said, despite my love for open software.
Do you really think that the attitude of replacing old frameworks is exclusive to MS, who does it for financial gain? No. Open source communities are -constantly- reinventing the wheel - look at all the open source projects out there just for word processing; don't you think they could share a little bit more of a common codebase, say, for the inport/export of 3rd party file formats? That would make sense: everyone would benefit from more coverage, and some people could use a very lightweight word processor (because that's what they need, and they don't want the bloat, or their system simply can't run the heavier OO.org, etc. etc.).
Granted, improvement needs to be done, but there are way too many efforts to retool the wheel. GUI toolkits are another good (bad?) example of this: why not simply have a single, colaborative framework for the things like AA, font rendering, 3D accel, etc., and maybe even the application hooks, and then simply have the individual toolkits impliment an abstraction layer so that someone can use (say) Konqueror using GTK if they want to, or Evolution using QT, instead of wasting all the overhead on both TKs?
What makes you think people would want to migrate back to MS products?
What they are (and will be) using is free software. It's of higher technical quality, in addition to the fact that it doesn't cost anything.
Microsoft could only give them their software in a hope that they might use it - that would be the best change MS would have, really.
In addition, for the fraction of what they spend on MS products annually, surely they could invest a hundred thousand or two (not a significant amount when you consider that they'd be spending $1.2M dollars for those 4k systems, @ the bargain price of $300/seat) of it into the sallaries of 3, 4, or 5 high-quality developers, or maybe offer bounties (as other companies/people/groups have) for features they want implimented, or for other software that they need? The money has been budgeted for software in the past, and groups have gotten by, so shaving a 200k off that huge 'discount' would be fairly insignificant. Why not pass some of the benefit back to the people that pay the gov't, by making the gov't run more efficiently?
Gee, that's funny. Why do people keep upgrading to the latest version of Windows/Office/etc. if they don't like anything new? There have certainly been some very significant changes in MS products in the "last 10 years" - how is this transition any different than any other, which doesn't get any hype at all?
It's not. Just another upgrade.
Don't mess with Texas.
You must have a very nice provider.
Nowadays, there's very little you can do that's "legitimate" in the eyes of greed: browse the web, download email, listen to internet audio broadcasts, play games on other servers.
Don't even think about hosting your own server (even if you're not using any more bandwidth than you would if you were sending files over AIM to friends). Filesharing is also out the door. In some cases, they'll go as far as to block ICMP so you can't do 'dangerous' things like ping and traceroute folks, being as that is a -business- class product (that explains a lot, doesn't it? This has happened to me, btw).
Yes, but implying that you're doing something immoral/illigal - isn't that slander? Or maybe blackmail? "Don't download as much as your contract says you can, or we'll have you investigated."
My gripe is that my ISP has blocked off important services. Like ICMP. Yes, I said ICMP, FFS.
C&C generals was actually the first RTS I played more than once or twice. I found after playing for 1-2 weeks the AI was painfully dumb. Are most RTS games that bad?
Yes, most of them are that bad. However, it seems to me that Westwood is a particularly bad proponent of bad AI. I suspect they get away with it for several reasons.
One, most people aren't intelligent enough to notice. It's much more difficult to distinguish bad tactics (especially when 90% of what your opponent does is hidden from you) than how a Grunt in Half-Life doesn't quite run for cover when he should, or how someone is behaving oddly in CounterStrike (a bot).
Two, current RTSes are limited in how much AI will actually do for the game. The current stock of RTS games are all (at least all I've seen) just build-order games. You build more buildings to get more powerful units, and thus it's fairly simple to optimize that order so as to squish anyone that hasn't learned it.
Furthermore, current RTSes don't "need" better computer AI (or unit AI), because of the above mentioned player inefficiency. The computer can simply use the optimized methods, or even do so much as cheat, to make the game 'challenging' (when in fact it is simply more difficult and more frustrating).