As a writer who knows what you are talking about, I am impressed that you have had the patience to write up not only this but responses to all of your responders. I've given up on trying to educate slashdot people on the way the movie industry works. They always fall back on the chorus of "the stories suxx0rs, tell better stories" and the mod points come rolling in.
Familiarity sells, folks, whether it's familiar stories or stories made from familiar pieces. There isn't a lack of creativity in Hollywood, there's a systemic stifling of "risky" originality in favor of durable brands and franchises. Further reading.
No, sir, that was a series of clips from a much more famous movie. It's mostly famous within film geek circles, though, so I took it as something of an in-joke. You see the famous baby-carriage-falling-down-steps scene spoofed all over, like in The Untouchables and Brazil (directed by fellow Pythoner Terry Gilliam). And there's this one close-up of maggot-infested meat that reminds me of the high-resolution gross-out insets in old Ren & Stimpy cartoons. (There goes the rest of my hyphen allowance.)
BTW, the original was silent, and I don't think Beethoven's 9th was what Eisenstein had in mind!
Teaching a machine to read a text book and answer questions doesn't necessarily mean cognitive reasoning. It's just a new form of input/output.
Parsing post
Teaching
[Teaching] - one lexical interpretation: gerund form of "to teach". Part of speech? Unambiguous. Noun. Word sense of Teach? Options: accessing Wordnet... 2 verb senses found... must choose between: v 1: impart skills or knowledge to; "I taught them French"; "He instructed me in building a boat" [syn: learn, instruct] 2: accustom gradually to some action or attitude; "The child is taught to obey her parents"... no semantic distinction possible at this point.
a machine
Accessing WordNet... 6 noun senses found: n 1: any mechanical or electrical device that transmits or modifies energy to perform or assist in the performance of human tasks 2: an intricate organization that accomplishes its goals efficiently; "the war machine" 3: an efficient person; "the boxer was a magnificent fighting machine" 4: 4-wheeled motor vehicle; usually propelled by an internal combustion engine; "he needs a car to get to work" [syn: car, auto, automobile, motorcar] 5: a group that controls the activities of a political party; "he was endorsed by the Democratic machine" [syn: political machine] 6: a device for overcoming resistance at one point by applying force at some other point [syn: simple machine]
Syntactic analysis: noun phrase following gerund... if formed correctly, this is most likely a gerund phrase. The act of teaching done to machine. 12 possible word sense conjuncts total (2 for "teaching", 6 for "a machine.")
Accessing semantic module... which of 12 is most likely the author's intention?
Accessing language library... accessing semantic database... is it possible to impart skills or knowledge to a group that controls the activities of a political party? Semantic database says: "group" implies "people." "People" can be taught under most circumstances. Therefore, yes. That is a reasonable interpretation. Now, is it possible to impart skills or knowledge on any mechanical or electrical device that transmits or modifies energy to perform or assist in the performance of a human task? No, because "any" implies that one could impart skills on a pulley, since a pulley is a machine. But semantic database says that pulleys cannot learn. Either semantic database is wrong (flag this as possible new knowledge), or first interpretation is more likely.
Associating linguistic entity "teaching a machine" with semantic idea canonicalized by "imparting skills or knowledge to a group that controls the activities of a political party".
to read
Infinitive form of verb... reading 24 senses of verb "read" from WordNet... beginning syntactic analysis: in context of "teaching a machine," either means: (a) this is the indirect object of "teaching" -- "teaching" frame indicates that there may be an infinitive of a skill verb; and several of the senses of verb "read" are semantically associated with "skill" sets; (b) this is a semantic "larger purpose" of "teaching", i.e., all verbs support chained infinitives that imply dependencies, e.g., "buying a cake to eat for dessert". Which is more likely, that the author intends that (a) one of the "skill" senses of "read" is the skill being taught to the political party, or (b) the teaching of the political party is a subgoal of the author's goal of "reading"?
Accessing semantic component... trying interpretation (b)... trying "read" sense (1): To examine and grasp the meaning of (written or printed characters, words, or sentences). Accessing world literary rates... if author wrote sentence, chances are very high the author knows to read already, therefore lowering his chances of desiring to learn to read. Trying "read" sense (2) To utter or render aloud (written or printed material). Is it reasonable that th
I was thinking about that a few months ago when I was working on a film shoot. I had to run some supplies between a remote location and the base camp. The terrain was really rough-- this was a forest, and it had a lot of trees, roots, rocks, crevices and the like. And I absolutely, positively had to be at the base camp ASAP.
I found myself running as fast as I could, but my mind set up an interesting pipeline. I was always looking five to eight feet in front of me and my brain feverishly tried to parse out what was a rock, what was a branch, what was a big root, what was sloped ground, what was even ground, etc. Then, that information got passed to a route-choosing part of my brain that decided where the best place was to put each foot: left, right, left, right. That information, in turn, went to my brain's motor department, which was actually in charge of balance, weight distribution, and muscle movement to actually put the feet where they were supposed to be and keep my momentum without falling.
I call this a pipeline because my eyes never left that five-to-eight foot range. When I was selecting any bit of route, I was already looking at the next bit of route and stepping on the last bit of route. I never looked at my feet, but somehow always put them where they needed to be.
I wouldn't make such an analogy anywhere other than slashdot, but I could feel that the load average on my brain was as high as it could be. I didn't have any free cycles to think about my day, or have a song in my head, or think of my next joke, as I usually do. Every ounce of my concentration was going to these automatic, practically sub-conscious processes. I know was processing as fast as I could -- any faster, and my brain would tell me, "I can't parse the terrain that fast," or "I can't decide on a route that quick."
Don't give me any credit for it, because it has nothing to do with knowledge or intelligence, but I was solving an extraordinarly tough problem very quickly. In short, if I could bring my brain to the edge, I can see how tough this is for the DARPA contestants!
I'm curious as to whether Google News, since it draws from various news sources and groups articles by topic (similar to paraphrasing, perhaps), uses any of the same techniques.
No, but Regina Barzilay, who is the researcher featured in the article, worked (with me) on the Newsblaster project at Columbia University, where she indeed applied these techniques to multidocument summarization. Newsblaster gathers and clusters news like Google News, but produces more sophisticated summaries.
I saw Apollo 13 on IMAX when it was the brave new world of 35mm blowups, and I was underwhelmed. It was exciting, sure, but it didn't add a lot to the movie.
For one, the movie's length exceeded the capacity of the reels for the projector, so they had to cut something like a half hour from it. Knowing the movie really well (it really outfoxes other space movies), it was irritating, but to my friend who had never seen it before, it was downright confusing. "Day 4" led to "Day 6"; not only did they cut some needed exposition, but a lot of the smaller moments that make the movie rich. Disclaimer: I think they've solved this issue and Revolutions will not be similarly cut. Which is why I'm presenting these criticism in increasing order of importance.
More severe is the clipping of the sides. An IMAX screen is proportioned to 1.66:1, which is closer to the 1.33:1 of TV than the 2:35:1 of movies like Apollo 13. The solution is to cut off the sides, like in the rightfully derided pan-and-scan telecine methods for TV. So for all the progress we've made in getting the mainstream public to embrace letterboxing with DVDs, this is a leap backward.
The print just didn't look good. I mean, whether you show it on a 80-foot screen or 800-foot screen, you only shot it with so much grain in the negative, and you can only get so much detail on the way out. It looked incredibly fuzzy and indistinct next to movies that were shot natively in the jumbo IMAX format. When you watch Everest and other IMAX-shot movies, they look like they have as much detail as a regular movie, but the screen extends far in every direction. Whereas blowing up 35mm 8 stories high produces roughly the same effect as sitting 3 feet away from a normal screen. They had to pipe the movie through all sorts of algorithms to reduce what would have been enormus "grain flicker," but instead, it looked awfully posterized and compressed.
Which leads me to the biggest point -- it was just overwhelming. For "epic" sequences like the liftoff, sensory overload is a good thing. But a lot of the latter part of Apollo 13 is played in close-ups -- scene after scene of Tom Hanks's face, 8 stories high. The face is so huge, it takes extra work for the eye to scan and recognize it. You have to turn your head, not just your eye, to get a bearing of where a scene is taking place. It's like watching a regular movie through a paper towel roll.
The director shot the movie with the assumption that you would be able to scan the whole frame relatively quickly. You can shoot close-up and your brain will understand that the scene goes beyond the edges of the frame. Directors who shoot for IMAX or other large-frame formats know to keep everything really, really wide, so you don't get disoriented. The purpose is to immerse you in a certain place, to eliminate the constant reminder in your peripheral vision that you are looking at a "finite" image. When you shoot it wide and project it big, the focal length ends up back in the league of normal movies, and that's what happens. But when you shoot it close and project it big... you get the idea.
In short, IMHO, IMAX is a great format for certain types of movies, but keep 35mm prints on the normal screen where they belong.
I never really gave much thought to his GNU/Linux argument until I read this part of the GNU Manifesto. I'm not sure when it was written, but it is included in my printed copy of the Emacs manual, which is dated June 1991 -- mere months before Linus' famous Usenet post. Emphasis mine.
GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it. Several other volunteers are helping me. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.
So far we have an Emacs text editor with Lisp for writing editor commands, a source level debugger, a yacc-compatible parser generator, a linker, and around 35 utilities. A shell (command interpreter) is nearly completed. A new portable optimizing C compiler has compiled itself and may be released this year. An initial kernel exists but many more features are needed to emulate Unix. When the kernel and compiler are finished, it will be possible to distribute a GNU system suitable for program development. We will use TeX as our text formatter, but an nroff is being worked on. We will use the free, portable X window system as well. After this we will add a portable Common Lisp, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things, plus on-line documentation. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and more.
You are confusing the production entity of a movie and the distributor.
Crouching Tiger was produced by Good Machine International, which (until it was bought out last year to become Focus Features, the indie "arm" of a studio) was an 800 pound gorilla of East Coast indie production. James Schamus -- one of my film professors here at Columbia -- raised financing from smaller companies and private investors worldwide. (Schamus and director Ang Lee discuss the complicated financing on the DVD, in the scenes near the end of the movie in the cave.)
Sony Pictures Classics purchased the film for distribution. They invested money in making duplicate prints, sending them to theaters, and the like. (I'm not totally sure of what the division of labor was, but that's an educated guess.) That does not rob the film of "indie" status. If it did, there would be almost no indie movies at all, since self-distributing your film is a Herculean task almost no one tries to do. What is a threshold for "indie" for you anyway? Was Good Machine small enough or should it have been made by two guys and a Arriflex? (no vituperation intended.)
Personally, I think that the main benefit of the 'net will not be in home-user distribution. Rather, there will be a proliferation of art houses that use satellites to download digitally distributed movies for little distribution cost.
Those prints I mentioned cost a lot. Thousands of dollars to copy the film once and send it to one theater. Smaller distributors make only a few prints and then cycle them around the country, beating them up royally. Big distributors make it up in the economy of scale, but for small ones, those costs could mean a world of difference. Since an exhibitor would also save the cost of getting people to handle and change the reels, it could have four different indies play on a screen over the course of a single day.
That's the promise we should be looking at, in my opinion. Home Internet delivery robs viewers of the whole social aspect of moviegoing, as well as a HUGE amount of quality. Imagine buying a DVD that gave you a 320x200, 15fps image with 22Khz mono sound, not to say those are the specs for this particular movie being premiered.
I was thinking about how difficult the SCO mess is to explain to a layperson -- it's front page news for nerds, but it doesn't sound very sexy to everyone else.
Here's my idea for a story you can use in case someone asks you at the water cooler. It's not a perfect analogy to OSS, but then, what is?
Imagine that there's a group of amusement park enthusiasts who love scary, innovative rides. The big 6.28 Flags parks around just don't cut it -- they're far away, admission is expensive, and the rides are boring and dangerous. So the fans decide to move to a new town, Penguina, and build their own park.
The Penguinans just love good rides, and they know how to make them. They work together to build a communal park that's scary as hell. Everyone chips in to come up with a new ride design, or build a ride. And each ride is open to everyone around, for no charge.
Eventually, word of the up-and-coming Penguina Park gets around. Lots of new residents move in each year to help build it up. Even more numerous are the tourists who just come to have fun -- more fun than they ever had at 6.28 Flags.
Eventually, the park gets the attention of ride vendors, big companies like UBM2 and startups like Red Beret. These companies can't buy out the park, since the Penguina residents agreed to never let that happen. But they can invest in the park ("this ride was sponsored by UBM2") and sell related merchandise, such as park maps, guided tours and seat cushions. Eventually Penguina Park gets so popular that everyone from government employees to Star Trek helmsmen go there for the biggest thrills they can have with their clothes on.
Then one day, Vomit Unlimited, a fading rollercoaster company with some good rides to its legacy, comes along and says to the Penguina community: "Guys, there's a ride in your park that's based on one of our designs. We didn't say it could be a part of your little hostel."
"Oops," rejoin the Penguina residents. "OK, tell us which ride and we'll take it out."
"I can't tell you that, it's a secret," says the Vomit Unlimited rep. "But I can't let you keep riding it for free, either. I've got no choice but to claim ownership of the whole park. Oh, don't worry, you can still use the rides. You'll just have to pay us $299 each to get in."
Naturally, the Penguina residents find this absurd. So do the corporations -- volunteer work is one thing, but they're not about to surrender their investments. UBM2 dismisses Vomit Unlimited. Vomit Unlimited sues.
"Oh, come on," entreat the Penguinans. "You can't win against UBM2. Just tell us which ride is yours."
"I'm afraid it's not that simple," croaks the rep. "You see, there's actually a whole series of rides that we own across the park. Infrastructure, too, so the park won't run at all if you take out our property. Now, buy your tickets, kids, since we'll be charging $699 soon." Scrawny guards with Vomit Unlimited logos (brown-green puddles with chunks of Chef Boyardee) begin to take positions around the park entrances, threatening to poke the eyes of any trespassers.
The amusement park trade journals laugh at the shop, but the mainstream papers take it seriously, leading people to wonder if there's a serious problem with the communal Penguina system.
Blood vessels breach. UBM2 sues Vomit Unlimited. Red Beret takes aim. But Vomit keeps spewing warnings to everyone who rides, from the government on down.
we should probably update this classic guide to state that SCO has staked a claim to certain undisclosed, yet crucial parts of the Unix gun. Recently leaked reports indicate it to be the "load bullet in first hole" algorithm, which has actually been around since BSD muskets.
All attempts to fire the gun will now incur a $700 license fee, though there are no restrictions on where you can subsequently fire it.
So if a plane was flying with a no-fly-zone to he left, and the pilot started banking left to enter the zone, the avionics would counter by banking right. Lee's system, called "soft walls", would first gently resist the pilot, and then become increasingly forceful until it prevailed.
I can't say I like the idea of a computer having the final say over the direction of an airplane. Even if the intentions are good, pilots need to have the final say. Even Air Traffic Control can't force a maneuver on a pilot, if he or she thinks it is not safe.
In other words: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you fly there.
True; I meant that Serkis was not eligible because he was not nominated, but used the wrong language.
One thing to keep in mind is that nominations are made only by the respective Academy members. In other words, only actors cast votes for Best Actor (speaking gender-neutrally), only directors cast votes for Best Director, etc. Later, everyone votes on which nominee gets each award. (It doesn't make sense to look too deeply into nomination counts, since there are parallel intenions, but everyone does it anyway.)
So it's really not shock or mystery why Serkis wasn't nominated. The very segment of the Academy population that was the most resistant to recognizing the work of digital characters -- the actors whose jobs may someday be threatened by them -- was the only one that had any say in the matter!
The LOTR makers' work on Gollum was not snubbed by the academy. They did not make Serkis eligible for an Oscar, but they gave the Oscar for visual effects to the WETA team, and (IIRC) showed a Gollum clip as they were walking to the stage.
This kind of story makes you want to stick your head in the sand and not buy any critical applications from corporations...Unfortunately, for some "leaders of industry," protecting image is more important than the safety of the users. Users are expendable; image is not.
So you're saying you're not going to ever drive a car again?
Computer applications aren't the only life-critical products we depend on. You put your life in the hands of corporations every minute of the day. How are you going to make sure your house is structurally sound? Buy open-source lumber and build it yourself? Are you going to keep eating food which has been prepared by corporations?
But as you, the Pinto history and others point out, corporations will only care about the lives of their consumers to the point at which it becomes economically favorable to do so. If it's cheaper to settle 10 probable death cases than issue a recall for the faulty product, they settle. The value of human life doesn't factor in. Today's cars only sell themselves on safety because it has become economical to do so, i.e., consumers value safety and demand it from their products.
This is why we need government oversight. I'll tell you what makes me want to put my head in the sand: how we are not funding the oversight agencies enough to do their job. We just passed two tremendous tax cuts in three years; I don't know where the cuts are going, but I feel like people take safe food and transportation for granted around here. I hope at least the sand is clean.
And now we're to believe that a TV show, from the Dubbya-Bee no less, about a teeny bopper girl who hunts boogeymans is somehow the 'best written show' on television? It's a fucking live action Scooby Doo, with Sarah Michelle Gellar stepping in to play the dog.
A couple of guys have found the formula for the perfect painting and the perfect music.
They've also found the "most unwanted painting" and "the most unwanted music."
Here's their site. You can even order the CD of America's most wanted and unwanted song -- no piece of music before or since has ever made me laugh out loud so hard.
You can see the paintings on the site. The most wanted music is a 3-minute smooth-jazz love ballad. The most unwanted music is over 22 minutes long, with constant changes in key, tempo, and style, a huge orchestra with bagpipes, percussion and electronics, a screeching soprano talking about physics history and a chorus of kids screaming at you to repent for your sins.
I've often wondered what would happen if this were applied to film. Maybe I'll make "the most unwanted movie" as a joke. But I always realize that every day, thousands of people in Hollywood ARE trying to make "the most wanted movie" -- the next sure thing.
Virtually every movie you will see this summer is the result of someone last summer saying, "Aha! NOW we've found the formula for the perfect movie!" after the box-office numbers came in. And you know what? A lot of them will bomb.
Why? This is like saying the best-written piece of code is the one that has the proportion of semicolons, tabs, and for loops that most closely matches the Linux kernel. It just doesn't compute. You have to look at the why, not the what.
I'd also be disappointed in an all-out action sequel, because of the philosophical underpinnings of the original.
I'm writing a movie about the psychology of VR worlds (applied to MMORPGs) and thought it would be a neat exercise to make a list of the ways the Matrix premise could been pushed. These are straight from my notes:
An RL (real life) character takes on several MV (metaverse) characters, or at least, someone who doesn't look exactly the same.
RL characters continue to kill with impunity in the MV, but discuss the ethics -- isn't it as bad as killing an RL person, since it essentially is? (Why is Neo less than a serial murderer for what he did in the lobby, since those policemen thought they were pretty real?)
Neo alters MV world history by materializing at key places at key times, as opposed to just hanging around downtown.
The Matrix history is recorded and characters use the records to uncover key revelations about the world and each other. (This world would be very different if there were absolute records of every physical event.)
A futher exploration of the mind/body problem. This movie "enforces" the notion that all physicality is part of the mind -- they are not parallel or intertwined. Neo's ability to reform the Matrix is a great device for this -- "there is no spoon" indeed. But is the spoon, then, bent just for him, or for everyone? How might the computer resolve divergent internalizations, interpretations, and mental images? Surely there is a large piece of perception that lies well outside the computer's reach of sensory input -- can't people get out of sync?
But then again... it's hard to sell tickets when you make movies out of musings like those.
Pardon the dupe post: If you compare a widescreen DVD with the same movie on TV, you'll find that pan-and-scan doesn't just chop of the sides. They are forced to chop off less of the sides if they also reveal more of the top and bottom, since both changes make the frame closer to the 1.33:1 of TV. (Look closely at these FOTR examples.)
Directors know this is going to happen, and they have to account for it. They can't let a microphone or a dolly track appear right above or below the frame, though sometimes (as the parent indicated) one slips by. The viewfinders that they use don't have just one rectangle, but several: one for theatrical release, one for TV, and now ones for HDTV and other "future" scenarios, all superimposed.
This is a little sad because it means directors can't explore the edges of their frames any more. They're forced to compose every shot so that the characters appear in the intersection of all the rectanges -- in trying to please every distribution scenario, everything has to be in the boring center of the frame.
I'm glad the general public is starting to come around to letterboxing, so maybe we can eliminate pan-and-scan once and for all.
A side note too: the prints that are shipped to theaters aren't matted; it's up to the projectionist to use the correct lens (anamorphic or no) and the right set of physical mattes. Whenever you see a boom lower into the frame it's almost always the projectionist's fault. I actually went to complain to the usher at a neighborhood theater that the movie wasn't matted right, but she looked at me like I had two heads.
Slashdot Mirror
As a writer who knows what you are talking about, I am impressed that you have had the patience to write up not only this but responses to all of your responders. I've given up on trying to educate slashdot people on the way the movie industry works. They always fall back on the chorus of "the stories suxx0rs, tell better stories" and the mod points come rolling in.
Familiarity sells, folks, whether it's familiar stories or stories made from familiar pieces. There isn't a lack of creativity in Hollywood, there's a systemic stifling of "risky" originality in favor of durable brands and franchises. Further reading.
I'm not sure, but I think Microsoft may be living in a bit of denial...
On the other hand, it took only a week or two for them to update Flight Simulator!
No, sir, that was a series of clips from a much more famous movie. It's mostly famous within film geek circles, though, so I took it as something of an in-joke. You see the famous baby-carriage-falling-down-steps scene spoofed all over, like in The Untouchables and Brazil (directed by fellow Pythoner Terry Gilliam). And there's this one close-up of maggot-infested meat that reminds me of the high-resolution gross-out insets in old Ren & Stimpy cartoons. (There goes the rest of my hyphen allowance.)
BTW, the original was silent, and I don't think Beethoven's 9th was what Eisenstein had in mind!
So, how would you like to find out what the acronym "COW" means then?
That's what Acronym Finder is for.
AF sort of functions like a wiki, too, by the way.
Teaching a machine to read a text book and answer questions doesn't necessarily mean cognitive reasoning. It's just a new form of input/output.
... reading 24 senses of verb "read" from WordNet... beginning syntactic analysis: in context of "teaching a machine," either means: (a) this is the indirect object of "teaching" -- "teaching" frame indicates that there may be an infinitive of a skill verb; and several of the senses of verb "read" are semantically associated with "skill" sets; (b) this is a semantic "larger purpose" of "teaching", i.e., all verbs support chained infinitives that imply dependencies, e.g., "buying a cake to eat for dessert". Which is more likely, that the author intends that (a) one of the "skill" senses of "read" is the skill being taught to the political party, or (b) the teaching of the political party is a subgoal of the author's goal of "reading"?
Parsing post
Teaching
[Teaching] - one lexical interpretation: gerund form of "to teach". Part of speech? Unambiguous. Noun. Word sense of Teach? Options: accessing Wordnet... 2 verb senses found... must choose between: v 1: impart skills or knowledge to; "I taught them French"; "He instructed me in building a boat" [syn: learn, instruct] 2: accustom gradually to some action or attitude; "The child is taught to obey her parents"... no semantic distinction possible at this point.
a machine
Accessing WordNet... 6 noun senses found: n 1: any mechanical or electrical device that transmits or modifies energy to perform or assist in the performance of human tasks 2: an intricate organization that accomplishes its goals efficiently; "the war machine" 3: an efficient person; "the boxer was a magnificent fighting machine" 4: 4-wheeled motor vehicle; usually propelled by an internal combustion engine; "he needs a car to get to work" [syn: car, auto, automobile, motorcar] 5: a group that controls the activities of a political party; "he was endorsed by the Democratic machine" [syn: political machine] 6: a device for overcoming resistance at one point by applying force at some other point [syn: simple machine]
Syntactic analysis: noun phrase following gerund... if formed correctly, this is most likely a gerund phrase. The act of teaching done to machine. 12 possible word sense conjuncts total (2 for "teaching", 6 for "a machine.")
Accessing semantic module... which of 12 is most likely the author's intention?
Accessing language library... accessing semantic database... is it possible to impart skills or knowledge to a group that controls the activities of a political party? Semantic database says: "group" implies "people." "People" can be taught under most circumstances. Therefore, yes. That is a reasonable interpretation. Now, is it possible to impart skills or knowledge on any mechanical or electrical device that transmits or modifies energy to perform or assist in the performance of a human task? No, because "any" implies that one could impart skills on a pulley, since a pulley is a machine. But semantic database says that pulleys cannot learn. Either semantic database is wrong (flag this as possible new knowledge), or first interpretation is more likely.
Associating linguistic entity "teaching a machine" with semantic idea canonicalized by "imparting skills or knowledge to a group that controls the activities of a political party".
to read
Infinitive form of verb
Accessing semantic component... trying interpretation (b)... trying "read" sense (1): To examine and grasp the meaning of (written or printed characters, words, or sentences). Accessing world literary rates... if author wrote sentence, chances are very high the author knows to read already, therefore lowering his chances of desiring to learn to read. Trying "read" sense (2) To utter or render aloud (written or printed material). Is it reasonable that th
I was thinking about that a few months ago when I was working on a film shoot. I had to run some supplies between a remote location and the base camp. The terrain was really rough-- this was a forest, and it had a lot of trees, roots, rocks, crevices and the like. And I absolutely, positively had to be at the base camp ASAP.
I found myself running as fast as I could, but my mind set up an interesting pipeline. I was always looking five to eight feet in front of me and my brain feverishly tried to parse out what was a rock, what was a branch, what was a big root, what was sloped ground, what was even ground, etc. Then, that information got passed to a route-choosing part of my brain that decided where the best place was to put each foot: left, right, left, right. That information, in turn, went to my brain's motor department, which was actually in charge of balance, weight distribution, and muscle movement to actually put the feet where they were supposed to be and keep my momentum without falling.
I call this a pipeline because my eyes never left that five-to-eight foot range. When I was selecting any bit of route, I was already looking at the next bit of route and stepping on the last bit of route. I never looked at my feet, but somehow always put them where they needed to be.
I wouldn't make such an analogy anywhere other than slashdot, but I could feel that the load average on my brain was as high as it could be. I didn't have any free cycles to think about my day, or have a song in my head, or think of my next joke, as I usually do. Every ounce of my concentration was going to these automatic, practically sub-conscious processes. I know was processing as fast as I could -- any faster, and my brain would tell me, "I can't parse the terrain that fast," or "I can't decide on a route that quick."
Don't give me any credit for it, because it has nothing to do with knowledge or intelligence, but I was solving an extraordinarly tough problem very quickly. In short, if I could bring my brain to the edge, I can see how tough this is for the DARPA contestants!
I'm curious as to whether Google News, since it draws from various news sources and groups articles by topic (similar to paraphrasing, perhaps), uses any of the same techniques.
No, but Regina Barzilay, who is the researcher featured in the article, worked (with me) on the Newsblaster project at Columbia University, where she indeed applied these techniques to multidocument summarization. Newsblaster gathers and clusters news like Google News, but produces more sophisticated summaries.
I saw Apollo 13 on IMAX when it was the brave new world of 35mm blowups, and I was underwhelmed. It was exciting, sure, but it didn't add a lot to the movie.
... you get the idea.
For one, the movie's length exceeded the capacity of the reels for the projector, so they had to cut something like a half hour from it. Knowing the movie really well (it really outfoxes other space movies), it was irritating, but to my friend who had never seen it before, it was downright confusing. "Day 4" led to "Day 6"; not only did they cut some needed exposition, but a lot of the smaller moments that make the movie rich. Disclaimer: I think they've solved this issue and Revolutions will not be similarly cut. Which is why I'm presenting these criticism in increasing order of importance.
More severe is the clipping of the sides. An IMAX screen is proportioned to 1.66:1, which is closer to the 1.33:1 of TV than the 2:35:1 of movies like Apollo 13. The solution is to cut off the sides, like in the rightfully derided pan-and-scan telecine methods for TV. So for all the progress we've made in getting the mainstream public to embrace letterboxing with DVDs, this is a leap backward.
The print just didn't look good. I mean, whether you show it on a 80-foot screen or 800-foot screen, you only shot it with so much grain in the negative, and you can only get so much detail on the way out. It looked incredibly fuzzy and indistinct next to movies that were shot natively in the jumbo IMAX format. When you watch Everest and other IMAX-shot movies, they look like they have as much detail as a regular movie, but the screen extends far in every direction. Whereas blowing up 35mm 8 stories high produces roughly the same effect as sitting 3 feet away from a normal screen. They had to pipe the movie through all sorts of algorithms to reduce what would have been enormus "grain flicker," but instead, it looked awfully posterized and compressed.
Which leads me to the biggest point -- it was just overwhelming. For "epic" sequences like the liftoff, sensory overload is a good thing. But a lot of the latter part of Apollo 13 is played in close-ups -- scene after scene of Tom Hanks's face, 8 stories high. The face is so huge, it takes extra work for the eye to scan and recognize it. You have to turn your head, not just your eye, to get a bearing of where a scene is taking place. It's like watching a regular movie through a paper towel roll.
The director shot the movie with the assumption that you would be able to scan the whole frame relatively quickly. You can shoot close-up and your brain will understand that the scene goes beyond the edges of the frame. Directors who shoot for IMAX or other large-frame formats know to keep everything really, really wide, so you don't get disoriented. The purpose is to immerse you in a certain place, to eliminate the constant reminder in your peripheral vision that you are looking at a "finite" image. When you shoot it wide and project it big, the focal length ends up back in the league of normal movies, and that's what happens. But when you shoot it close and project it big
In short, IMHO, IMAX is a great format for certain types of movies, but keep 35mm prints on the normal screen where they belong.
You are confusing the production entity of a movie and the distributor.
Crouching Tiger was produced by Good Machine International, which (until it was bought out last year to become Focus Features, the indie "arm" of a studio) was an 800 pound gorilla of East Coast indie production. James Schamus -- one of my film professors here at Columbia -- raised financing from smaller companies and private investors worldwide. (Schamus and director Ang Lee discuss the complicated financing on the DVD, in the scenes near the end of the movie in the cave.)
Sony Pictures Classics purchased the film for distribution. They invested money in making duplicate prints, sending them to theaters, and the like. (I'm not totally sure of what the division of labor was, but that's an educated guess.) That does not rob the film of "indie" status. If it did, there would be almost no indie movies at all, since self-distributing your film is a Herculean task almost no one tries to do. What is a threshold for "indie" for you anyway? Was Good Machine small enough or should it have been made by two guys and a Arriflex? (no vituperation intended.)
Personally, I think that the main benefit of the 'net will not be in home-user distribution. Rather, there will be a proliferation of art houses that use satellites to download digitally distributed movies for little distribution cost.
Those prints I mentioned cost a lot. Thousands of dollars to copy the film once and send it to one theater. Smaller distributors make only a few prints and then cycle them around the country, beating them up royally. Big distributors make it up in the economy of scale, but for small ones, those costs could mean a world of difference. Since an exhibitor would also save the cost of getting people to handle and change the reels, it could have four different indies play on a screen over the course of a single day.
That's the promise we should be looking at, in my opinion. Home Internet delivery robs viewers of the whole social aspect of moviegoing, as well as a HUGE amount of quality. Imagine buying a DVD that gave you a 320x200, 15fps image with 22Khz mono sound, not to say those are the specs for this particular movie being premiered.
They decided to bundle Duke Nukem Forever.
I was thinking about how difficult the SCO mess is to explain to a layperson -- it's front page news for nerds, but it doesn't sound very sexy to everyone else.
Here's my idea for a story you can use in case someone asks you at the water cooler. It's not a perfect analogy to OSS, but then, what is?
Imagine that there's a group of amusement park enthusiasts who love scary, innovative rides. The big 6.28 Flags parks around just don't cut it -- they're far away, admission is expensive, and the rides are boring and dangerous. So the fans decide to move to a new town, Penguina, and build their own park.
The Penguinans just love good rides, and they know how to make them. They work together to build a communal park that's scary as hell. Everyone chips in to come up with a new ride design, or build a ride. And each ride is open to everyone around, for no charge.
Eventually, word of the up-and-coming Penguina Park gets around. Lots of new residents move in each year to help build it up. Even more numerous are the tourists who just come to have fun -- more fun than they ever had at 6.28 Flags.
Eventually, the park gets the attention of ride vendors, big companies like UBM2 and startups like Red Beret. These companies can't buy out the park, since the Penguina residents agreed to never let that happen. But they can invest in the park ("this ride was sponsored by UBM2") and sell related merchandise, such as park maps, guided tours and seat cushions. Eventually Penguina Park gets so popular that everyone from government employees to Star Trek helmsmen go there for the biggest thrills they can have with their clothes on.
Then one day, Vomit Unlimited, a fading rollercoaster company with some good rides to its legacy, comes along and says to the Penguina community: "Guys, there's a ride in your park that's based on one of our designs. We didn't say it could be a part of your little hostel."
"Oops," rejoin the Penguina residents. "OK, tell us which ride and we'll take it out."
"I can't tell you that, it's a secret," says the Vomit Unlimited rep. "But I can't let you keep riding it for free, either. I've got no choice but to claim ownership of the whole park. Oh, don't worry, you can still use the rides. You'll just have to pay us $299 each to get in."
Naturally, the Penguina residents find this absurd. So do the corporations -- volunteer work is one thing, but they're not about to surrender their investments. UBM2 dismisses Vomit Unlimited. Vomit Unlimited sues.
"Oh, come on," entreat the Penguinans. "You can't win against UBM2. Just tell us which ride is yours."
"I'm afraid it's not that simple," croaks the rep. "You see, there's actually a whole series of rides that we own across the park. Infrastructure, too, so the park won't run at all if you take out our property. Now, buy your tickets, kids, since we'll be charging $699 soon." Scrawny guards with Vomit Unlimited logos (brown-green puddles with chunks of Chef Boyardee) begin to take positions around the park entrances, threatening to poke the eyes of any trespassers.
The amusement park trade journals laugh at the shop, but the mainstream papers take it seriously, leading people to wonder if there's a serious problem with the communal Penguina system.
Blood vessels breach. UBM2 sues Vomit Unlimited. Red Beret takes aim. But Vomit keeps spewing warnings to everyone who rides, from the government on down.
How will the craziness end?? Stay tuned!
we should probably update this classic guide to state that SCO has staked a claim to certain undisclosed, yet crucial parts of the Unix gun. Recently leaked reports indicate it to be the "load bullet in first hole" algorithm, which has actually been around since BSD muskets.
All attempts to fire the gun will now incur a $700 license fee, though there are no restrictions on where you can subsequently fire it.
Developers: RPC DCOM Worm On The Loose
Shouldn't that be:
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, DEVELOPERS!, DEVELOPERS!, DEVELOPERS!, DEVELOPERS!, DEVELOPERS!: RPC DCOM Worm On The Loose
Language evolves, my friend. A word is defined by its usage, not by the dictionary.
The trick is knowing when to push back and when to let go. I think "piracy" has passed into the latter.
Someone identify the Final Cut Pro box cutting Return of the King and swipe the rough cut!
So if a plane was flying with a no-fly-zone to he left, and the pilot started banking left to enter the zone, the avionics would counter by banking right. Lee's system, called "soft walls", would first gently resist the pilot, and then become increasingly forceful until it prevailed.
I can't say I like the idea of a computer having the final say over the direction of an airplane. Even if the intentions are good, pilots need to have the final say. Even Air Traffic Control can't force a maneuver on a pilot, if he or she thinks it is not safe.
In other words: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you fly there.
True; I meant that Serkis was not eligible because he was not nominated, but used the wrong language.
One thing to keep in mind is that nominations are made only by the respective Academy members. In other words, only actors cast votes for Best Actor (speaking gender-neutrally), only directors cast votes for Best Director, etc. Later, everyone votes on which nominee gets each award. (It doesn't make sense to look too deeply into nomination counts, since there are parallel intenions, but everyone does it anyway.)
So it's really not shock or mystery why Serkis wasn't nominated. The very segment of the Academy population that was the most resistant to recognizing the work of digital characters -- the actors whose jobs may someday be threatened by them -- was the only one that had any say in the matter!
The LOTR makers' work on Gollum was not snubbed by the academy. They did not make Serkis eligible for an Oscar, but they gave the Oscar for visual effects to the WETA team, and (IIRC) showed a Gollum clip as they were walking to the stage.
This kind of story makes you want to stick your head in the sand and not buy any critical applications from corporations...Unfortunately, for some "leaders of industry," protecting image is more important than the safety of the users. Users are expendable; image is not.
So you're saying you're not going to ever drive a car again?
Computer applications aren't the only life-critical products we depend on. You put your life in the hands of corporations every minute of the day. How are you going to make sure your house is structurally sound? Buy open-source lumber and build it yourself? Are you going to keep eating food which has been prepared by corporations?
But as you, the Pinto history and others point out, corporations will only care about the lives of their consumers to the point at which it becomes economically favorable to do so. If it's cheaper to settle 10 probable death cases than issue a recall for the faulty product, they settle. The value of human life doesn't factor in. Today's cars only sell themselves on safety because it has become economical to do so, i.e., consumers value safety and demand it from their products.
This is why we need government oversight. I'll tell you what makes me want to put my head in the sand: how we are not funding the oversight agencies enough to do their job. We just passed two tremendous tax cuts in three years; I don't know where the cuts are going, but I feel like people take safe food and transportation for granted around here. I hope at least the sand is clean.
And now we're to believe that a TV show, from the Dubbya-Bee no less, about a teeny bopper girl who hunts boogeymans is somehow the 'best written show' on television? It's a fucking live action Scooby Doo, with Sarah Michelle Gellar stepping in to play the dog.
Hmm...
Hmmmmm.....
Hmmmmmmmmm.......
A couple of guys have found the formula for the perfect painting and the perfect music.
They've also found the "most unwanted painting" and "the most unwanted music."
Here's their site. You can even order the CD of America's most wanted and unwanted song -- no piece of music before or since has ever made me laugh out loud so hard.
You can see the paintings on the site. The most wanted music is a 3-minute smooth-jazz love ballad. The most unwanted music is over 22 minutes long, with constant changes in key, tempo, and style, a huge orchestra with bagpipes, percussion and electronics, a screeching soprano talking about physics history and a chorus of kids screaming at you to repent for your sins.
I've often wondered what would happen if this were applied to film. Maybe I'll make "the most unwanted movie" as a joke. But I always realize that every day, thousands of people in Hollywood ARE trying to make "the most wanted movie" -- the next sure thing.
Virtually every movie you will see this summer is the result of someone last summer saying, "Aha! NOW we've found the formula for the perfect movie!" after the box-office numbers came in. And you know what? A lot of them will bomb.
Why? This is like saying the best-written piece of code is the one that has the proportion of semicolons, tabs, and for loops that most closely matches the Linux kernel. It just doesn't compute. You have to look at the why, not the what.
I'm writing a movie about the psychology of VR worlds (applied to MMORPGs) and thought it would be a neat exercise to make a list of the ways the Matrix premise could been pushed. These are straight from my notes:
But then again... it's hard to sell tickets when you make movies out of musings like those.
Pardon the dupe post: If you compare a widescreen DVD with the same movie on TV, you'll find that pan-and-scan doesn't just chop of the sides. They are forced to chop off less of the sides if they also reveal more of the top and bottom, since both changes make the frame closer to the 1.33:1 of TV. (Look closely at these FOTR examples.)
Directors know this is going to happen, and they have to account for it. They can't let a microphone or a dolly track appear right above or below the frame, though sometimes (as the parent indicated) one slips by. The viewfinders that they use don't have just one rectangle, but several: one for theatrical release, one for TV, and now ones for HDTV and other "future" scenarios, all superimposed.
This is a little sad because it means directors can't explore the edges of their frames any more. They're forced to compose every shot so that the characters appear in the intersection of all the rectanges -- in trying to please every distribution scenario, everything has to be in the boring center of the frame.
I'm glad the general public is starting to come around to letterboxing, so maybe we can eliminate pan-and-scan once and for all.
A side note too: the prints that are shipped to theaters aren't matted; it's up to the projectionist to use the correct lens (anamorphic or no) and the right set of physical mattes. Whenever you see a boom lower into the frame it's almost always the projectionist's fault. I actually went to complain to the usher at a neighborhood theater that the movie wasn't matted right, but she looked at me like I had two heads.
The Washington Post takes a slightly more sensationalist take on the "bare knuckle," "historic" forum.