Re:I loved the original, but..
on
Tron: Legacy
·
· Score: 1
So even a computer simulated Flynn ages visibly, but Clu does not? And why does the computer simulated Flynn have to eat green beans, anyway? Does he get hungry? How many milliseconds does it take for him to get hungry in the real world? If he does get hungry, then do computer simulated green beans solve the computer simulated hunger problem? Wait, I thought the isomorphic algorithms were supposed to cure hunger, disease, and everything else? If Flynn doesn't even have it licked in the computer world, how was he supposed to fix it all in the real world? Oh well -- here's some more Daft Punk.
That's right. The reason everything doesn't always go your way is because everybody else in the world is an idiot, and you're a genius. Geniuses are hated and feared because they are so superior. If people would only think properly (or at all?) then geniuses would take their rightful place as the benevolent kings of this sad world of brainless sheep. Oh well, back to World of Warcraft.
I was a bit worried about exaggerated 3D effects, but they were well done, subtle and immersive. In fact I really didn't notice which scenes were done in 2D and which were 3D - that's how subtle the use was.
YET AGAIN! People are always saying this about these modern 3D movies: "The 3D was so subtle it was hardly distracting at all!" Not distracting? I'm asking you -- begging you -- why the Hell do I have to wear glasses to watch movies these days if I can't even tell which scenes are 2D and which are 3D? What is more distracting than wearing glasses when you don't need glasses?
The writing was idiotic (Spoilers?)
on
Tron: Legacy
·
· Score: 2
I can hardly count the number of things about the script for Tron: Legacy that made no sense whatsoever. As the subject says, although I'll try to keep it tame, there be spoilers here:
The first thing that happens to Sam when he enters the computer world is they cut off his clothes and re-clothe him in "computer clothes." Huh? Are they used to guys just showing up wearing Earth clothes now? When Flynn entered the computer world in the original Tron, he looked like all the other computer programs.
Computer clothes look like clothes. Walls look like walls, floors look like floors, doors look like doors. You can actually slam the door, in a computer. If you drive a computer car on a computer racetrack, your tires leave computer rubber on the road (rubber?). There are clouds in the sky (why?), and ships use thrusters to fly around (is there even air?). Basically, this wasn't the world of Tron from the first movie -- it was Attack of the Clones with extra neon.
If you're the absolute lord and master of the world of the computer, and you want to blow up a building inside the world of the computer, you have your goons stick magnetic explosive discs to the inside walls of the buildings as you make your dramatic exit, then watch the upper floors of the building explode from the street below, like it's Die Hard.
There's a major villain type character that's hunting our heroes throughout the movie -- that is, until he decides he's actually a hero type character, for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Similarly, Sam is told to go see a character who is supposed to be able to help him out. Said character has been living a double life -- outwardly he's a flamboyant club promoter (do computer programs need entertainment?) but secretly he's a super something-or-other. But NO! He's not, because he reveals that he's actually been secretly leading a triple life, because he's actually a villain after all, despite the fact that this seems like a really bad idea for a guy who's been living a double life, as evidenced by the fact that the guy who he's supposed to be secretly serving just decides to kill him.
At the beginning of the film is a bunch of techno-gobbledigook and mumbo-jumbo about ENCOM OS 12 and how it used to be free but it's not free anymore, except oh wait, Sam, in a bold act of base jumping with a parachute, managed to post it on the Web, so it's on the Web now, so it's free, but wait, we'll issue a press release and say it was always supposed to be free, on the Web, and this was all part of the plan, and uh... wait, don't we make videogames?
At the beginning of the movie Sam is a rebellious character who like to play nasty pranks on ENCOM, such the aforementioned acts of twiddling servers with a Nokia phone and jumping off buildings. By the end, he decides to wise up and seize power as the majority shareholder of ENCOM. That's all well and good, but just what was it that happened in the computer world that convinced him to do that? How did CLU 2's plan for world domination have anything whatsoever to do with the struggle for control of ENCOM -- a struggle which wasn't even happening before Sam went into the computer?
CLU wants to lead the programs out of the computer to rule the real world, the same way that Sam got in. How does that work, exactly? Well, it must work, because Olivia Wilde's elf character manages it at the end... but no, seriously, how does that work, exactly?
Isomorphic algorithms. They'll cure disease, end hunger, and generally save the world. Because they're isomorphic, I guess.
I give up. The list goes on and on. This movie pretty much required you to check your brain at the door -- and frankly, I didn't find the visuals all that impressive. Avatar tried to create a realistic alien world with its 3-D computer rendered visuals; Tron: Legacy tries to create a sterile, inorganic environment dressed in neon and glass. It gets old to look at. In fact, the whole movie gets old, fast. I found myself looking at my watch often and I was glad when it was finally over.
But, yes, much of the rest of the software industry of the last couple of decades is comprised of idiots producing bloated crap, not having got much further conceptually than "I NEED THE COMPUTER TO DO THIS TEN TIMES SO I WRITE A FOR I=1 TO 10 LOOP". Whence Java. Do you disagree?
I think thousands of 22-year-old CS grads with a firm command of the Jedi-like powers of LISP could rebuild the entire computer industry in their image, cast aside the programming bad habits of the past and lead us forward, Tron-like, in a new Golden Age of software purity... if it were even remotely practical to do so. And there's the rub.
Perhaps, but you do need a C compiler to build Emacs (and the earliest versions did not embed a LISP interpreter at all). Emacs is arguably not an editor written in LISP, but an editor written for programmers who like LISP.
Yeah, but like the man said, that's far from the only factor to consider when choosing a language. Pretty much any CS grad from a reputable school will tell you that LISP (or Scheme, or another variant) is a superior language to anything else on the market. That said, name me ten major commercial software products that are written in LISP. Scratch that, name me one. It must be because the entire software industry as it has existed since the 1970s is stupider than last year's crop of CS graduates, huh?
Geert Wilders' party, who is against islamisation of the Netherlands, not against muslims as persons
Without any knowledge of Dutch politics, let me just say that I'm against the uglification of the Netherlands, but not against ugly people as persons. It's a mistake often made.
Riiiiight. I wonder, where do people go who want to be able to find people to maintain their software for, say, a decade? Except for COBOL, of course...
Errrr... Java debuted in 1995, and 2000 saw J2SE 1.3... it's almost 2011 now, does that count as a decade?
I haven't seen much consumer electronics equipment that could survive a combat environment. Seems like just the sand alone in Iraq would mess up a lot of devices pretty quick.
And that's the thing -- it's all well and good to say that a certain piece of equipment will give soldiers some kind of advantage, but after a while the "advantage" becomes the norm. What happens then, when a piece of equipment that a soldier has come to rely upon just stops working? Do they carry on like before they had the equipment, or does what was once an advantage become a disadvantage, as the soldiers have to essentially retrain themselves on the fly?
Batteries, cracked screens, fouled-up input devices, software bugs... there's a reason why equipment designed for the military costs so much more than consumer equipment..
I'm not sure that the idea of a "process" is sufficient for a patent. Especially if all it takes to get a patent is adding "on the internet" or "using a browser" or similar.
You seem to be suffering from the delusion that the description of a patent on Slashdot is the same as the actual language of the patent. Most real-world patents comprise many pages of text, much of which is boilerplate and gobbledigook.
Come on, this is such a stupid argument. Sure, I agree that what your cousin is doing this afternoon is pretty banal and unimportant. But what my cousin is doing this afternoon could be funny, interesting, amusing, or just nice to know because he's my cousin. And it makes no difference to me whether you're interested in what he has to say or not.
But who needs e-mail when we already have fax machines.
I don't think "the government requires everything to have a backdoor." I just think that if the FBI, or the NSA, or the CIA, or the U.S. Marshals, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of the Interior, or Homeland Security, or any one of any number of Byzantine U.S. government organizations approaches a large company like HP and says "Hey, we buy a bunch of stuff from you, do you mind if we have a backdoor?" I think in 90 percent of cases the answer will be "Sure, no problem." You don't need a conspiracy when the people will just grin and go along with whatever the government says.
Drudge may be unpopular among many but it still has a huge following and can draw on support from the right-wing astroturfing machine.
I hear this kind of thing a lot: People hate Drudge, Drudge Report is slanted, biased, etc., etc. I agree that you can see that the Drudge Report editors often like to spin stories a certain way, but I don't see how it's much different than the summaries and headlines on Slashdot. Newspaper editors have always spun headlines to get attention, and headlines are all the Drudge Report really posts. If anything, Drudge doesn't editorialize anywhere near as much as the/. editors do. Maybe the site does tend to lean a bit to the right, but not rabidly so -- I doubt it leans anywhere near right enough for the serious Fox News followers. I find the site to be a very useful aggregator that allows me to skim through stories from various news sources, including ones I wouldn't normally seek out to read. It seems like a valuable service to me, and it's free. Assuming you're capable of thinking for yourself when you read a headline, what's not to like?
Wheres the -1 clueless? Installing tomato and coreboot isnt remotely close to "compiling firmware" for them, any more than sticking an ubuntu install disk in your PC is rolling your own operating system.
I don't think the GP's point is that there's something wrong with sailing. More that when most people "take time off," they do so to go bird watching, or to take the kids to Disneyland, or just to lie around on a beach getting tanned. Ellison "takes time off" to command the crew of a multimillion-dollar racing yacht that's the fastest in the world.
I would add that when the hardware was kicking ass in the early 90s, they were selling that hardware to noobs with lots of fresh VC money but very little understanding of why they might actually need hardware that kicked that much ass. I doubt much of the Sun hardware that got sold in those days was ever pushed to its full potential, and that paved the way for the next generation of startups to try to do it all on Linux instead.
McNealy can talk all he wants about how he wishes Sun had opened Solaris sooner, and how access to the source code is what made Linux successful, but I call B.S. Free access to the source code isn't what made Linux attractive; it's what allowed hobbyists, and later serious paid developers, to refine Linux into an OS that could compete with Solaris without the price tag of expensive Sun hardware. It wasn't Solaris but Sun's vertical stack that people wanted to get away from. Unless you were sure you needed all that hardware, the premium you had to pay to get Solaris simply wasn't worth it once Linux was stable enough for production environments. Even if Solaris had been GPL way back when, I doubt many people would have paid Sun tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to run a free OS on Sun servers.
In a world where proprietary Unix was viable, there was a moment in time when Sun's vertical hardware and software solution stack was the best deal going. Then that moment passed.
Nobody every bought JRockit as a stand alone replacement for HotSpot.
Did BEA ever try to sell JRockit as a standalone replacement for HotSpot? Perhaps it made more sense to sell a product with a higher price tag. No sense selling souped-up carburetors when you could offer the whole sports car.
That's the GP's point. Say instead that IBM didn't have to create Java or Linux (and incur the cost of doing so) -- instead, it could just step in and immediately profit from both, while Sun, which didn't seem to understand how IBM was pulling it off, managed to profit from neither.
I've long said that the difference between IBM and Oracle is one of approach.
If you invite Oracle into your shop, Oracle will come in, look around, tell you all your current hardware and software is crap, and if you rip it all out and standardize on solutions from Oracle your business will run much better. Oracle then makes a killing selling you software licenses and support contracts and you have many of the same headaches you had before, only now the only company you can call is Oracle.
If you invite IBM into your shop, IBM will come in, look around, tell you what a great job you've been doing and how, with a little tweak here and there, it can get all your existing infrastructure running along like never before, with everything talking to everything else and all your problems solved. IBM then makes a killing billing you countless hours of consulting and selling you middleware to make that dream scenario happen, though it never really will.
Sun did neither of these things. Sun sold stuff. Sun did not make a killing.
Except of course that if you were doing a true film adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- which arguably has never really been done before -- you'd have to confront the fact that Frankenstein never revived dead people in the original story. The actual construction of the "fiend" is left ambiguous.
I understand this complaint about Inception, but somehow it still worked for me. A lot of it was the visual spectacle, which I will argue was done with a lot of class. The film really looked great. But I suspect maybe Nolan sort of tricked me, too, by withholding just enough of the characters' motivations and the back-story of the world in general that I ended up writing most of the movie in my own head. It's not a bad trick if you can pull it off.
George Lucas actually manages it a lot himself. For example, everybody knows that the villain of The Phantom Menace is named Darth Sidious, and yet that name is never mentioned in the film itself. Maybe that particular example is more a triumph of merchandising than of marketing -- but what's a "Darth" anyway? And what's a "Grand Moff"? And Kessell -- where's that? We know they have spice mines, and it sounds like "the Kessell run" is some kind of smuggling route, but why are spices so valuable in the Star Wars universe that they're worth smuggling? The food in Tunisia is pretty spicy -- do they not have spicy food on Tatooine? Is there a shortage? And why are there so many bounty hunters in the Star Wars universe, and who do they hunt when they're not hunting Han Solo? Not the Rebels, apparently -- they don't even work for the Empire very often ("we don't need those scum"). And none of them seem interested enough in men who have the death sentence on twelve systems to hang out at bars in Mos Eisley spaceport -- the spaceport, no less -- so what's their deal? And why would you build a robot that can understand spoken language perfectly well but can only communicate in beeps and boops? Do the companies who build protocol droids engage in predatory business practices? I could go on and on... but the point is, in a fantastic setting, often what fascinates you is the half that you're never told.
It's even better than that. Every few years he can release a new edition of the Star Wars movies featuring "deleted scenes" and "lost footage" that he creates from whole cloth using CG models of dead actors. And even better than that, nine months prior to the re-release of the films, he can release an "old" YouTube video of an interview with Mark Hamill where he talks about all the cool scenes he acted in that were filmed for the original trilogy, but which we never saw because they were cut.
Slashdot Mirror
So even a computer simulated Flynn ages visibly, but Clu does not? And why does the computer simulated Flynn have to eat green beans, anyway? Does he get hungry? How many milliseconds does it take for him to get hungry in the real world? If he does get hungry, then do computer simulated green beans solve the computer simulated hunger problem? Wait, I thought the isomorphic algorithms were supposed to cure hunger, disease, and everything else? If Flynn doesn't even have it licked in the computer world, how was he supposed to fix it all in the real world? Oh well -- here's some more Daft Punk.
That's right. The reason everything doesn't always go your way is because everybody else in the world is an idiot, and you're a genius. Geniuses are hated and feared because they are so superior. If people would only think properly (or at all?) then geniuses would take their rightful place as the benevolent kings of this sad world of brainless sheep. Oh well, back to World of Warcraft.
I was a bit worried about exaggerated 3D effects, but they were well done, subtle and immersive. In fact I really didn't notice which scenes were done in 2D and which were 3D - that's how subtle the use was.
YET AGAIN! People are always saying this about these modern 3D movies: "The 3D was so subtle it was hardly distracting at all!" Not distracting? I'm asking you -- begging you -- why the Hell do I have to wear glasses to watch movies these days if I can't even tell which scenes are 2D and which are 3D? What is more distracting than wearing glasses when you don't need glasses?
I can hardly count the number of things about the script for Tron: Legacy that made no sense whatsoever. As the subject says, although I'll try to keep it tame, there be spoilers here:
I give up. The list goes on and on. This movie pretty much required you to check your brain at the door -- and frankly, I didn't find the visuals all that impressive. Avatar tried to create a realistic alien world with its 3-D computer rendered visuals; Tron: Legacy tries to create a sterile, inorganic environment dressed in neon and glass. It gets old to look at. In fact, the whole movie gets old, fast. I found myself looking at my watch often and I was glad when it was finally over.
But, yes, much of the rest of the software industry of the last couple of decades is comprised of idiots producing bloated crap, not having got much further conceptually than "I NEED THE COMPUTER TO DO THIS TEN TIMES SO I WRITE A FOR I=1 TO 10 LOOP". Whence Java. Do you disagree?
I think thousands of 22-year-old CS grads with a firm command of the Jedi-like powers of LISP could rebuild the entire computer industry in their image, cast aside the programming bad habits of the past and lead us forward, Tron-like, in a new Golden Age of software purity ... if it were even remotely practical to do so. And there's the rub.
Perhaps, but you do need a C compiler to build Emacs (and the earliest versions did not embed a LISP interpreter at all). Emacs is arguably not an editor written in LISP, but an editor written for programmers who like LISP.
Yeah, but like the man said, that's far from the only factor to consider when choosing a language. Pretty much any CS grad from a reputable school will tell you that LISP (or Scheme, or another variant) is a superior language to anything else on the market. That said, name me ten major commercial software products that are written in LISP. Scratch that, name me one. It must be because the entire software industry as it has existed since the 1970s is stupider than last year's crop of CS graduates, huh?
Geert Wilders' party, who is against islamisation of the Netherlands, not against muslims as persons
Without any knowledge of Dutch politics, let me just say that I'm against the uglification of the Netherlands, but not against ugly people as persons. It's a mistake often made.
Riiiiight. I wonder, where do people go who want to be able to find people to maintain their software for, say, a decade? Except for COBOL, of course...
Errrr... Java debuted in 1995, and 2000 saw J2SE 1.3... it's almost 2011 now, does that count as a decade?
I haven't seen much consumer electronics equipment that could survive a combat environment. Seems like just the sand alone in Iraq would mess up a lot of devices pretty quick.
And that's the thing -- it's all well and good to say that a certain piece of equipment will give soldiers some kind of advantage, but after a while the "advantage" becomes the norm. What happens then, when a piece of equipment that a soldier has come to rely upon just stops working? Do they carry on like before they had the equipment, or does what was once an advantage become a disadvantage, as the soldiers have to essentially retrain themselves on the fly?
Batteries, cracked screens, fouled-up input devices, software bugs... there's a reason why equipment designed for the military costs so much more than consumer equipment..
I'm not sure that the idea of a "process" is sufficient for a patent. Especially if all it takes to get a patent is adding "on the internet" or "using a browser" or similar.
You seem to be suffering from the delusion that the description of a patent on Slashdot is the same as the actual language of the patent. Most real-world patents comprise many pages of text, much of which is boilerplate and gobbledigook.
As I understand it, Google moved beyond the original PageRank algorithm long ago, so good luck with your PageRank-derived business.
Come on, this is such a stupid argument. Sure, I agree that what your cousin is doing this afternoon is pretty banal and unimportant. But what my cousin is doing this afternoon could be funny, interesting, amusing, or just nice to know because he's my cousin. And it makes no difference to me whether you're interested in what he has to say or not.
But who needs e-mail when we already have fax machines.
I don't think "the government requires everything to have a backdoor." I just think that if the FBI, or the NSA, or the CIA, or the U.S. Marshals, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of the Interior, or Homeland Security, or any one of any number of Byzantine U.S. government organizations approaches a large company like HP and says "Hey, we buy a bunch of stuff from you, do you mind if we have a backdoor?" I think in 90 percent of cases the answer will be "Sure, no problem." You don't need a conspiracy when the people will just grin and go along with whatever the government says.
Drudge may be unpopular among many but it still has a huge following and can draw on support from the right-wing astroturfing machine.
I hear this kind of thing a lot: People hate Drudge, Drudge Report is slanted, biased, etc., etc. I agree that you can see that the Drudge Report editors often like to spin stories a certain way, but I don't see how it's much different than the summaries and headlines on Slashdot. Newspaper editors have always spun headlines to get attention, and headlines are all the Drudge Report really posts. If anything, Drudge doesn't editorialize anywhere near as much as the /. editors do. Maybe the site does tend to lean a bit to the right, but not rabidly so -- I doubt it leans anywhere near right enough for the serious Fox News followers. I find the site to be a very useful aggregator that allows me to skim through stories from various news sources, including ones I wouldn't normally seek out to read. It seems like a valuable service to me, and it's free. Assuming you're capable of thinking for yourself when you read a headline, what's not to like?
Wheres the -1 clueless? Installing tomato and coreboot isnt remotely close to "compiling firmware" for them, any more than sticking an ubuntu install disk in your PC is rolling your own operating system.
Unless, of course, you compile the firmware.
I don't think the GP's point is that there's something wrong with sailing. More that when most people "take time off," they do so to go bird watching, or to take the kids to Disneyland, or just to lie around on a beach getting tanned. Ellison "takes time off" to command the crew of a multimillion-dollar racing yacht that's the fastest in the world.
I would add that when the hardware was kicking ass in the early 90s, they were selling that hardware to noobs with lots of fresh VC money but very little understanding of why they might actually need hardware that kicked that much ass. I doubt much of the Sun hardware that got sold in those days was ever pushed to its full potential, and that paved the way for the next generation of startups to try to do it all on Linux instead.
McNealy can talk all he wants about how he wishes Sun had opened Solaris sooner, and how access to the source code is what made Linux successful, but I call B.S. Free access to the source code isn't what made Linux attractive; it's what allowed hobbyists, and later serious paid developers, to refine Linux into an OS that could compete with Solaris without the price tag of expensive Sun hardware. It wasn't Solaris but Sun's vertical stack that people wanted to get away from. Unless you were sure you needed all that hardware, the premium you had to pay to get Solaris simply wasn't worth it once Linux was stable enough for production environments. Even if Solaris had been GPL way back when, I doubt many people would have paid Sun tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to run a free OS on Sun servers.
In a world where proprietary Unix was viable, there was a moment in time when Sun's vertical hardware and software solution stack was the best deal going. Then that moment passed.
Nobody every bought JRockit as a stand alone replacement for HotSpot.
Did BEA ever try to sell JRockit as a standalone replacement for HotSpot? Perhaps it made more sense to sell a product with a higher price tag. No sense selling souped-up carburetors when you could offer the whole sports car.
That's the GP's point. Say instead that IBM didn't have to create Java or Linux (and incur the cost of doing so) -- instead, it could just step in and immediately profit from both, while Sun, which didn't seem to understand how IBM was pulling it off, managed to profit from neither.
I've long said that the difference between IBM and Oracle is one of approach.
If you invite Oracle into your shop, Oracle will come in, look around, tell you all your current hardware and software is crap, and if you rip it all out and standardize on solutions from Oracle your business will run much better. Oracle then makes a killing selling you software licenses and support contracts and you have many of the same headaches you had before, only now the only company you can call is Oracle.
If you invite IBM into your shop, IBM will come in, look around, tell you what a great job you've been doing and how, with a little tweak here and there, it can get all your existing infrastructure running along like never before, with everything talking to everything else and all your problems solved. IBM then makes a killing billing you countless hours of consulting and selling you middleware to make that dream scenario happen, though it never really will.
Sun did neither of these things. Sun sold stuff. Sun did not make a killing.
In 20 years there won't even be be any film or movie actors. They won't be needed anymore because it will be far cheaper to create them digitally.
Obligatory: Yeah, but who's gonna fly 'em, kid? You??
Except of course that if you were doing a true film adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- which arguably has never really been done before -- you'd have to confront the fact that Frankenstein never revived dead people in the original story. The actual construction of the "fiend" is left ambiguous.
I understand this complaint about Inception, but somehow it still worked for me. A lot of it was the visual spectacle, which I will argue was done with a lot of class. The film really looked great. But I suspect maybe Nolan sort of tricked me, too, by withholding just enough of the characters' motivations and the back-story of the world in general that I ended up writing most of the movie in my own head. It's not a bad trick if you can pull it off.
George Lucas actually manages it a lot himself. For example, everybody knows that the villain of The Phantom Menace is named Darth Sidious, and yet that name is never mentioned in the film itself. Maybe that particular example is more a triumph of merchandising than of marketing -- but what's a "Darth" anyway? And what's a "Grand Moff"? And Kessell -- where's that? We know they have spice mines, and it sounds like "the Kessell run" is some kind of smuggling route, but why are spices so valuable in the Star Wars universe that they're worth smuggling? The food in Tunisia is pretty spicy -- do they not have spicy food on Tatooine? Is there a shortage? And why are there so many bounty hunters in the Star Wars universe, and who do they hunt when they're not hunting Han Solo? Not the Rebels, apparently -- they don't even work for the Empire very often ("we don't need those scum"). And none of them seem interested enough in men who have the death sentence on twelve systems to hang out at bars in Mos Eisley spaceport -- the spaceport, no less -- so what's their deal? And why would you build a robot that can understand spoken language perfectly well but can only communicate in beeps and boops? Do the companies who build protocol droids engage in predatory business practices? I could go on and on ... but the point is, in a fantastic setting, often what fascinates you is the half that you're never told.
It's even better than that. Every few years he can release a new edition of the Star Wars movies featuring "deleted scenes" and "lost footage" that he creates from whole cloth using CG models of dead actors. And even better than that, nine months prior to the re-release of the films, he can release an "old" YouTube video of an interview with Mark Hamill where he talks about all the cool scenes he acted in that were filmed for the original trilogy, but which we never saw because they were cut.