It was indeed, as you say, an awesome article about the awesome graphics.
What a shame the computer use wasn't THAT technically accurate. Or that the plot - THE KEY COMPONENT of the movie - could've had a fraction of that skill and talent put into it.
And Slashdot hasn't done a lot of Legacy discussion (there's probably more Original discussion here). So, given that we're not bagging the article itself, please let us express our disappoinment with the incredible disparity of works and efforts here.
I'm sorry (and not passive-aggressively, either); I'm afraid you're entirely wrong in almost every way except for your direct quotes.
In the opening scene when Flynn is talking to Sam, he states that He, Tron and CLU developed a system where all information was free and open and about how beautiful that is.
Unfortunately, the system to which you're/Kevin was referring was the System that TRON and CLU were in; Flynn's standalone "sun4m" in the arcade's basement; without even so much as a serial port connected to it. The only ways in and out were the CD drive (from Betrayal), the Laser (and whatever bodgied-up USB port Sam apparently used to connect his Nokia smartphone to a 1980s computer). You've actually made CLU's point - Flynn locked them into this "digital Galapagos Island" and left them to rot for their equivalent of (assuming the director's stated 50:1 ratio of) a thousand years.
At the Encom OS 12 release in Legacy Allan asks about the prices charged for Flynn OS, renamed Encom OS, and is then told that the idea of sharing or giving away the software disappeared with Flynn.
The Disney chronology says Flynn retired from game design (and hence, software production) in 1985 to focus on his "research"; then disappeared in 1989. So for 24-odd years, Flynn was not in charge of Encom. If you read Betrayal or listen to what Alan said in Legacy, Kevin left the running of the company to the Board.
We can very safely assume that the behaviour Mackie displays in the midnight boardroom meeting is Standard Operating Procedure for Encom - commercial software.
Even before all of that, we only ever saw Flynn's game software in arcade machines. Before the real world's Fuzebox or Pandora, how many open-source arcade games have you seen?
Then the source is released, which makes the OS open source, even if just due to malicious reasons.
Richard M. Stallman and his katanas would like a horribly painful word with you. Steve Ballmer will smash what's left of you with a chair.
The source was stolen. For Sam to have made Encom OS12 "Open Source", he would have to have re-licensed it as Open Source.
Which, by the way, shows how little Kitsis and Horowitz know. Dillinger Jr.'s solution to "say it was the plan to release it free all along" would collapse the very moment the TRON-world's version of Slashdot were to download the torrent and inspect the licensing terms inside.
Then Sam is arguing with the security guard on the roof and says "You can't steal something that was designed to be free."
"Licensed". Not "designed". Thank you for providing yet more evidence that Kitsis and Horowitz are clueless, pathetic, incompetent hacks who couldn't be bothered doing an ounce of research, let alone critical thinking, before being paid thousands of dollars for their ignorant scribblings inscribed upon a beautifully-graphically-polished, well-musically-scored, yet-still-excrementally-stinking turd.
I'm sure she doesn't need me to; but I would weep for Bonnie MacBird. I would love dearly to be able to read a copy of her original draft of TRON before sellout-Lisberger, Disney or Charlie Haas got to it.
I too, quasi-worshipped Lisberger, until I heard what he did to MacBird's original script (and noticed how he'd gotten behind the new movie too, after comparing it with his statements in the 20th Anniversary DVD).
I'm relatively sure there are also other references in Legacy and 2.0 which talk about free and open systems.
I doubt there's anything about it in the first movie though.
Actually, by the criteria you're using, there was. TRON, in trying to convince Dumont to hide them from the System Guards and let him access the I/O Tower, told Dumont that "this could be a free System again"; that Dumont would have "Programs lining up to use" the Tower again.
... speaks more of the admins who assume that "CLI" == "C:\ prompt". Or the idiots who think "CLI" == "the GUI in front of me is therefore made unusable". The people at "GUI Industries" can't make a link or shortcut to the appropriate script?
Why would you trust an admin who can't, as TFA indicates, edit a text file?
The username derives not from the movie, but my surname. And the points we discuss here are forcing me to control and choose my language carefully, But you're very welcome.:-)
Yes... um... you're missing the point. The point is not that it's an artificial reality and any rules which can be conceived can be applied.
The point is twofold: - that all the things which made TRON unique and engaging have been stripped out and hence made it into another undifferentiated fantasy setting and - that Kitsis and Horowitz are exceptionally poor writers who screwed up the movie with egregiously bad writing.
I mean, let's not take "that's not how computers work" into account: - I could still bag it for not adhering to the original TRON (the Disney site said Dr Gibbs wrote the MCP). - Disney did the big cross-media thing (Evolution the game and Betrayal the comic). The storylines of the cross-media contradicted the movie. That's not-good writing right there. - The movie contradicted itself INTERNALLY. Question 1a: What made Quorra so special? Question 1b: Why, then, did Flynn say he partially wrote Quorra? Question 2a: Why couldn't Rinzler go after the Runner off the Grid? Question 2b: So how did CLU and co. go after Quorra and the Flynns from Kevin's hideout and why couldn't Rinzler have done that originally?
Disney 0xFFFFed up bigtime. Disney not only hired a pair of pathetic hacks who couldn't be bothered to logic-check their own writing, but Disney didn't even do any quality checking. If we wrote code like that, IT WOULDN'T COMPILE.... and yet, Disney are rolling in the freaking cash. I didn't wait 28 years to have a career-inspiring movie get wrecked-up by people whose STANDARD JOB it is to not wreck-up movies and get paid to do it.
(The following is a meta-post, with only the hint of a threat of a future on-topic posting.)
I don't know who's downvoting all these comments. I appreciate the "informative" and "humorous" nature of this.
Fine, mods. Downvote me, I don't give a flying. It'll just prove the point; there's a lot of downvoting of perfectly reasonable comments and criticisms here. Parent AC is right, it was stupid to run a program without even trying to know what it does.... I'd include a further criticism of the movie's poor writing and handling of Flynn even HAVING the laser in his basement, but the last criticism I posted of the writers got a 0 and I wouldn't be surprised to see it dropped further. Sheesh. It's like being on ${other_fora_I_won't_name}.
So, in Legacy, Programs have hair and skin texture, don't have any processing purpose or interaction with their original Users. The Cycles have Engines and need to be "on the Grid" for their power; the fact that in the original movie they did things that were physically impossible was missed to make them "more realistic" for Legacy.
So, you're saying that in spite of the fact that Kitsis and Horowitz took the unworldly, non-physical, utterly different TRON universe and turned it into Generic Disney Fantasy Fodder Universe #12B WASN'T ENOUGH... and that now "TRON" will just be a person's nickname.
Just when I thought Disney, Kitsis and Horowitz couldn't COMPLETELY 0xFFFF up "TRON" anymore. Pricks.
Syd Mead ws in my hometown on tour last year. I asked what he thought of the upcoming movie. His reply amounted to "Disney have very good lawyers". What a crying shame Lisberger went along with this. I wonder what Bonnie MacBird thought of it all.
I wish that was globally true; but the majority of people seem to disagree. Worse, a majority of that majority most likely hasn't seen the original.
I've been on a number of fora discussing the movie. When I point out the plot holes or the superior writing of the original (and no, I'm not being sarcastic, yes I know it was an effects-driven movie), I've seen responses that include "come on, you have to cut them some slack, no it was really good, how sad it must be in your world if you think Legacy was bad, could you do better"... in spite of the fact I'm not being paid to do so (and in spite of that, I still think I could indeed do better.
I swear, I can't tell if these are too-young and illiterate, critical-thinking incapable idiots or Disney astroturfers.
Would it be possible to fork an Open Source TRON? Write a version with new characters and strip out all the Disney trademarks so those bastards couldn't sue when the community puts out something better than those sad hack writers Horowitz and Kitsis?
I suppose he completely forgot about Firefox 3.6 while he was kissing Ballmer's shiny bum, and the 12 (?) beta releases that FF put out, or the 2 release candidates.
Actually, he didn't. Bott mentioned the betas in the first paragraph.
Which makes his other idiotic comments even more cryingly laughable.
the programs get all excited about finding power. WTF? Hardware uses power; what programs want is memory.
Assuming you accept the possibility of anthropomorphic programs, "power" works if you take it as a representation of "share of processor time". "Memory" becomes volumetric space into which they can extend themselves, or otherwise operate.
The Discs work if you take them as representations of file descriptors, especially on a UNIX-like machine.
The staves the Guards carried would be kill, sending Signals to Programs.
The flash of light that came out-and-up of a derezzing Program would be its exit code. And rather than Programs, they should really be Processes.
... but "TRON: Legacy" still doesn't work.
Why no, I don't spend too much time thinking about TRON, why do you ask?
Speaking of I/O.. the I/O towers! For all the praise Tron got for its graphics, you'd think they'd be able to get the color of I/O towers right.
... okay, I'll bite. what colour does an I/O tower need to be?
... to Charles Stross's flash-forward from "Accelerando"?
"My name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I correct in thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is a director of a company called, uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one-eight-four dot ninety-seven dot A-for-able dot B-for-baker dot five, incorporated?"
"Uh." Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. "Hold on a moment." When the retinal patterns fade, he pulls on his glasses and powers them up. "Just a second now." Browsers and menus ricochet through his sleep-laden eyes. "Can you repeat the company name?"
"Sure." Glashwiecz repeats himself patiently. He sounds as tired as Manfred feels.
"Um." Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It's flashing for attention. There's a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn't propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. "I'm afraid I'm not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contractor with non-executive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I've ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who's in charge if you want."
"Yes?" The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out; the guy's in New Jersey, it must be about three in the morning over there.
Malice – revenge for waking him up – sharpens Manfred's voice. "The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!" He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug him.
I congratulate you on what is a good idea. Its only flaw is that it assumes that the *intended* target audience (i.e. as many people as possible, it's a BBC story) will actually get up and (look up the exchange rate && get a pen-or-calculator).
So what happens if one day your girlfriend accidentally knocks the rune stone out of alignment or slips and deals the wrong Tarot card? She comes teary-eyed to you and says "I love you, I love you so much, but the stars and my spirit-guide say we have to split up. Goodbye, it's been nice knowing you. Maybe you can get your chakras realigned in time for your next life and we might meet again"?
... harmless stuff. Sure.
Bogus or bogus, there's a heap of BAD advice that can come out of it.
> If he doesn't want to migrate to Vista, that's fine. More power to him. But these "opinion articles" > with their "I can't be bothered to figure out a slightly different Control Panel - instead, I > switched operating systems!" matra are just annoying and stupid.
With respect: you are desperately mistaken. Any business person who thinks-and-announces the way you just have will crash and burn and even people in Microsoft believe that; and I'll tell you why.
Something you might want to remember is that "I can't be bothered to figure out a slightly different [...]" was a major method use/d in Microsoft published FUD.
Also, don't forget the 1997 Microsoft internal memo to Bill Gates, later quoted in the European Commission's 2004 findings, that said... [quote]
"The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most ISVs would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead...
"It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO, our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties [...] Customers constantly evaluate other desktop platforms, [but] it would be so much work to move over that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move.
"In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago." [/quote] (wikisearch for "vendor lock-in" if you need the direct European Commission citation for the quote.)
Yes, that's API and not user experience. Realise, however, that Developers are "users" of a system as well, just at a deeper level and with more "flexibility". Users stick with an interface, you call that stupid and annoying. Developers stick to an API, Microsoft general managers acknowledge they'd be dead without it.
(My postgrad study [Open Source in the public sector] had me delivering a presentation just 24 hours ago where I had to present that very quote as an illustration of proprietary software company lock-in. This was convenient timing.)
Why is it surprising that developers (open or closed source) have adopted the useful parts of each others' development models? They don't exist in vacuums...
The article's CONTENT and its summary don't match up. Article reads:
On the other side of the coin, open-source software developers have adopted aspects of the proprietary model. Most notably, these open-source companies are seeking profit from the sale of licenses, support and professional services. Some even offer indemnification to company executives deploying the open-source software.
So, the PROPRIETARY software developers are getting feedback, collaborating, developing FASTER. The Open Source developers are "oh, just recently seeking profit from services" *cough*VALinux*cough*, and offering indemnification.
The summary is: proprietary software developers have adopted Open Source methodologies. Open Source developers are still developing damn good software the damn good way. Open Source COMPANIES are just trying to turn a buck.
> I still want to anthropomorphize it and believe its doing
> it intelligently instead of just randomly selecting
> points and discarding those that don't give good results.
Erm... "discarding those that don't give good results"...... isn't that intelligent behaviour?
Your anthropomorphisation is actually correct... simply because the process of Evolution IS intelligent - natural selection makes decisions based on circumstances. The ID crowd, of course, don't get this... simply because they're too busy pushing their agenda.
There have been discussions on sites like The Panda's Thumb and PZ's Pharyngula, and no less that website "Uncommon Descent". A good Christian woman said she had no problem with calling Evolution a kind of "Intelligent Design" anyway BECAUSE of the mechanisms of natural selection. She was always polite, she'd followed the entire debate, responded to every single point they'd raised with actual science AND references.
They claimed she didn't know what she was talking about. She was, of course, banned by the Uncommon Descent moderators.
The first thing I thought on reading the headline was "call me back when there's a TRON MMOG... and not before". Let's be honest, whatever shortcomings an MMOG might have in modelling the physical world, how's there going to be any problem modelling a world like TRON's?
And if you could enter your world as a "User" or otherwise have your "Program" running around according to it's own script when you weren't in control, it would be pretty cool.
The first problem with that is the Jedi problem. Every Player and its freaking dog would want to be a User. I wanted to suggest that the User could be a reachable rank, but then there'll just be grinders doing that too. It's hard to balance against human nature. May I suggest - leave the User as something special.
For thematic balance's sake, may I instead suggest: have Players enter as Programs and Programs only.
Sure, for something that other MMOGs don't have (? disclaimer: I have almost no MMOG experience beyond old-school telnettable MUDs), have the Program be accompanied by an optional Player-scriptable Bit (or Byte, for the TRON 2.0ers). If the MMOG provides some kind of API for simple scripting...? How many programming geeks would THAT pull in? No, nothing that would allow grinding (or design the quests so's they can't be done by Bits?). What about something basically like C-Robots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crobots?
Probably the era of the MCP would be the ideal time.... As you recall, the MCP controlled all the NPCs while the programs were essentially independant reflections of their users...
Again, beg pardon, but I'd like to disagree. A big complaint a lot of "Star Wars" fans have is that the games nearly-never stray outside the realm of the stuff in the movies. Look at SW's novels, comics, pen/paper RPG materials, videogames. There's the Republic Commando stuff, the New Jedi Order stuff, the new Legacy stuff. Penny Arcade, I believe, complained that all the flight-sims were just damn X-Wings and TIE fighters... why couldn't we fly against (even a moddable?) Yuuzhan Vong coralskipper?
The SW analogies are pretty appropriate (and I recently completed another seasonal SW binge). You read the wealth of books out there, get into the games and the Dark Horse comics... when you get back to the movies, you can't help but think "ah, but they developed THAT tiny point so well in THIS book"... TRON 2.0 game may not have been perfect, but it introduced a LOT of things that Lisberger and MacBird had never written. Conversely, a lot of incidental 1.0 stuff has never been touched (except in the realms of mostly obscure fan-fiction). Don't forget also, the TRON 2.0 comic is being published and up to two(?) issues. They'll certainly introduce stuff - especially of a darker flavour - that was never conceivable in 1.0 and couldn'tve gotten into Disney-flavoured 2.0.
2.0 introduced the Net. Why not have multiple domains? One can have an MCP. One can be an "open system". One can have tyrannical MCP-like senior ICPs. One can be virus-ridden. One can be a purely "WS-Mindows" server, one could be a Nilux box*.
(*yes, it annoyed me that Jet could port into a PDA, but it looked as if Encom used nothing but Windows servers. My box of choice is Debian).
In short: please, hypothetical TRON-MMOG developer, don't lock it down to a time, PLEASE. Besides, it just means your game will date like Carbon-14, only so much faster.
As much as the thought of a Disney MMORPG bothers me, I (and I imagine other programmers) could probably really get into and enjoy something like this. Kinda like Second Life but with Neon...:)
And with a game component for those who don't want to script Bits. Hear-hear. Absolutely, hear-hear. I second a TRON-MMOG. In fact, I even almost-salivate for one. Yes, I would plunk down hard cash for one. Haven't for Galaxies, haven't for any other MMOG. But damn, I would for such a (well-executed) beast.
... although I agree with every single straight-shooter and plain speaker (heck, "agree" isn't the word, so much as "scream hell yeah"), there are a couple of problems.
Somewhere above, Theatetus spoke about being able to direct an MBA to an RFC and wanting to see a document that defined the buzzword bingo-like terms.
Unfortunately, there IS such a document. Worse, an entire library of such books and three national-global standards.
I'm planning, today, to apply for a job of senior tech support.
One criterion was "experience in using job tracking tools". Which sounds pretty innocuous in and of itself.
But not when you realise two more of the selection criteria were to have an understanding of "ITIL" (the Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and "AS8018 aka BS15000" (which is also "ISO20000").
Oh. And specific and very detailed job-tracking is a critical component of ITIL / ITIL v3 / AS8018 / BS15000 / ISO20000. So much for innocuousness.
These are, sadly, standards which basically bring the (netherhell)world of Business Process Management, right down to specific processes... right to what they so charmingly term "Information Technology Services Management".
Try looking for information about it. Your brain will melt and seep through your tear ducts. Wikipedia, fortunately, has it written at least somewhat less confusingly.
To make the whole damn thing even MORE blatantly neurotoxic?
The standards, being ludicrously specific and anal (and expensive to obtain), still only claim themselves to be a "framework"... and freely acknowledging that a great deal of customisation is required to tailor it to a specific workplace.
Meaning you're STILL screwed because you almost may as well just build your whole IT standards base on your own damn self.... we let managers in the front door. And now they've replicated and infested. The Fifth Sherman Tank of the Apocalypse.
... appearance is more important than, say, performance metrics. Or pricing. Or history of repeated and drastic flaws in the "competition".... after all, that's the historical behaviour that brought commercial standings today to their lofty position, isn't it?
> "I blame the IT community, I blame the IT leadership, over and over and over again, about their inability to articulate correctly the business opportunity that we've got here," Quinn said.
I blame the business community for not realising that the "sandals and ponytail set" are the ones who GAVE YOU this working technology!
Perhaps it behooves you to consider, you pointy-headed business morons, that:
- function is more important than form - the form of which you so disapprove BROUGHT you this function for free - and perhaps your tiny-minded preconceptions, given the EVIDENCE, might possibly require a little review?
It's like the [RI|MP]AA... they want "fresh, new acts"... but anything that doesn't fall neatly into their metrics and feature matrix equates to "unmarketable".
Horse before cart. Apples and oranges. Insert here your favoured aphorism.
Not to mention the beautiful irony at the end of the article. To justify the investigation into his "unauthorised trips", he says "You can only stand in the public arena for so long and have mud thrown at you".
What's the brown, wet, clingy substance on his hands he throws at the "sandals and ponytail set"?... at least we're not wasting money on Armani suits when he flings it at us.
... due to Microsoft's bad design and implementation (and user ignorance, but that can be circumvented to at least some degree with better design and implementation).
... what makes anybody here think that OneCare, Vista (with its "completely rewritten, new" kernel and TCP/IP stack) or whatever anti-malware it is Microsoft ends up producing...
... WON'T BE EQUALLY POORLY DESIGNED AND IMPLEMENTED?
Slashdot Mirror
It was indeed, as you say, an awesome article about the awesome graphics.
What a shame the computer use wasn't THAT technically accurate. Or that the plot - THE KEY COMPONENT of the movie - could've had a fraction of that skill and talent put into it.
And Slashdot hasn't done a lot of Legacy discussion (there's probably more Original discussion here). So, given that we're not bagging the article itself, please let us express our disappoinment with the incredible disparity of works and efforts here.
In the opening scene when Flynn is talking to Sam, he states that He, Tron and CLU developed a system where all information was free and open and about how beautiful that is.
Unfortunately, the system to which you're/Kevin was referring was the System that TRON and CLU were in; Flynn's standalone "sun4m" in the arcade's basement; without even so much as a serial port connected to it. The only ways in and out were the CD drive (from Betrayal), the Laser (and whatever bodgied-up USB port Sam apparently used to connect his Nokia smartphone to a 1980s computer). You've actually made CLU's point - Flynn locked them into this "digital Galapagos Island" and left them to rot for their equivalent of (assuming the director's stated 50:1 ratio of) a thousand years.
At the Encom OS 12 release in Legacy Allan asks about the prices charged for Flynn OS, renamed Encom OS, and is then told that the idea of sharing or giving away the software disappeared with Flynn.
The Disney chronology says Flynn retired from game design (and hence, software production) in 1985 to focus on his "research"; then disappeared in 1989. So for 24-odd years, Flynn was not in charge of Encom. If you read Betrayal or listen to what Alan said in Legacy, Kevin left the running of the company to the Board.
We can very safely assume that the behaviour Mackie displays in the midnight boardroom meeting is Standard Operating Procedure for Encom - commercial software.
Even before all of that, we only ever saw Flynn's game software in arcade machines. Before the real world's Fuzebox or Pandora, how many open-source arcade games have you seen?
Then the source is released, which makes the OS open source, even if just due to malicious reasons.
Richard M. Stallman and his katanas would like a horribly painful word with you. Steve Ballmer will smash what's left of you with a chair.
The source was stolen. For Sam to have made Encom OS12 "Open Source", he would have to have re-licensed it as Open Source.
Which, by the way, shows how little Kitsis and Horowitz know. Dillinger Jr.'s solution to "say it was the plan to release it free all along" would collapse the very moment the TRON-world's version of Slashdot were to download the torrent and inspect the licensing terms inside.
Then Sam is arguing with the security guard on the roof and says "You can't steal something that was designed to be free."
"Licensed". Not "designed". Thank you for providing yet more evidence that Kitsis and Horowitz are clueless, pathetic, incompetent hacks who couldn't be bothered doing an ounce of research, let alone critical thinking, before being paid thousands of dollars for their ignorant scribblings inscribed upon a beautifully-graphically-polished, well-musically-scored, yet-still-excrementally-stinking turd.
I'm sure she doesn't need me to; but I would weep for Bonnie MacBird. I would love dearly to be able to read a copy of her original draft of TRON before sellout-Lisberger, Disney or Charlie Haas got to it.
I too, quasi-worshipped Lisberger, until I heard what he did to MacBird's original script (and noticed how he'd gotten behind the new movie too, after comparing it with his statements in the 20th Anniversary DVD).
I'm relatively sure there are also other references in Legacy and 2.0 which talk about free and open systems.
I doubt there's anything about it in the first movie though.
Actually, by the criteria you're using, there was. TRON, in trying to convince Dumont to hide them from the System Guards and let him access the I/O Tower, told Dumont that "this could be a free System again"; that Dumont would have "Programs lining up to use" the Tower again.
... speaks more of the admins who assume that "CLI" == "C:\ prompt".
Or the idiots who think "CLI" == "the GUI in front of me is therefore made unusable". The people at "GUI Industries" can't make a link or shortcut to the appropriate script?
Why would you trust an admin who can't, as TFA indicates, edit a text file?
Having seen both movies and played 2.0, I have to ask... where did you get that idea?
/me bows.
The username derives not from the movie, but my surname. And the points we discuss here are forcing me to control and choose my language carefully, But you're very welcome. :-)
Yes... um... you're missing the point. The point is not that it's an artificial reality and any rules which can be conceived can be applied.
The point is twofold:
- that all the things which made TRON unique and engaging have been stripped out and hence made it into another undifferentiated fantasy setting and
- that Kitsis and Horowitz are exceptionally poor writers who screwed up the movie with egregiously bad writing.
I mean, let's not take "that's not how computers work" into account:
- I could still bag it for not adhering to the original TRON (the Disney site said Dr Gibbs wrote the MCP).
- Disney did the big cross-media thing (Evolution the game and Betrayal the comic). The storylines of the cross-media contradicted the movie. That's not-good writing right there.
- The movie contradicted itself INTERNALLY. Question 1a: What made Quorra so special? Question 1b: Why, then, did Flynn say he partially wrote Quorra? Question 2a: Why couldn't Rinzler go after the Runner off the Grid? Question 2b: So how did CLU and co. go after Quorra and the Flynns from Kevin's hideout and why couldn't Rinzler have done that originally?
Disney 0xFFFFed up bigtime. Disney not only hired a pair of pathetic hacks who couldn't be bothered to logic-check their own writing, but Disney didn't even do any quality checking. If we wrote code like that, IT WOULDN'T COMPILE. ... and yet, Disney are rolling in the freaking cash. I didn't wait 28 years to have a career-inspiring movie get wrecked-up by people whose STANDARD JOB it is to not wreck-up movies and get paid to do it.
(The following is a meta-post, with only the hint of a threat of a future on-topic posting.)
I don't know who's downvoting all these comments. I appreciate the "informative" and "humorous" nature of this.
Fine, mods. Downvote me, I don't give a flying. It'll just prove the point; there's a lot of downvoting of perfectly reasonable comments and criticisms here. Parent AC is right, it was stupid to run a program without even trying to know what it does. ... I'd include a further criticism of the movie's poor writing and handling of Flynn even HAVING the laser in his basement, but the last criticism I posted of the writers got a 0 and I wouldn't be surprised to see it dropped further. Sheesh. It's like being on ${other_fora_I_won't_name}.
So, in Legacy, Programs have hair and skin texture, don't have any processing purpose or interaction with their original Users. The Cycles have Engines and need to be "on the Grid" for their power; the fact that in the original movie they did things that were physically impossible was missed to make them "more realistic" for Legacy.
So, you're saying that in spite of the fact that Kitsis and Horowitz took the unworldly, non-physical, utterly different TRON universe and turned it into Generic Disney Fantasy Fodder Universe #12B WASN'T ENOUGH... and that now "TRON" will just be a person's nickname.
Just when I thought Disney, Kitsis and Horowitz couldn't COMPLETELY 0xFFFF up "TRON" anymore. Pricks.
Syd Mead ws in my hometown on tour last year. I asked what he thought of the upcoming movie. His reply amounted to "Disney have very good lawyers". What a crying shame Lisberger went along with this. I wonder what Bonnie MacBird thought of it all.
... and still tried to log in with a "backdoor".
I wish that was globally true; but the majority of people seem to disagree. Worse, a majority of that majority most likely hasn't seen the original.
I've been on a number of fora discussing the movie. When I point out the plot holes or the superior writing of the original (and no, I'm not being sarcastic, yes I know it was an effects-driven movie), I've seen responses that include "come on, you have to cut them some slack, no it was really good, how sad it must be in your world if you think Legacy was bad, could you do better"... in spite of the fact I'm not being paid to do so (and in spite of that, I still think I could indeed do better.
I swear, I can't tell if these are too-young and illiterate, critical-thinking incapable idiots or Disney astroturfers.
Would it be possible to fork an Open Source TRON? Write a version with new characters and strip out all the Disney trademarks so those bastards couldn't sue when the community puts out something better than those sad hack writers Horowitz and Kitsis?
Actually, he didn't. Bott mentioned the betas in the first paragraph. Which makes his other idiotic comments even more cryingly laughable.
After they escape the game grid (which I'll admit was fairly realistically done),
More than you know. Daniel Wellman's blog has an article on how it actually happened on his Apple IIgs.
the programs get all excited about finding power. WTF? Hardware uses power; what programs want is memory.
Assuming you accept the possibility of anthropomorphic programs, "power" works if you take it as a representation of "share of processor time". "Memory" becomes volumetric space into which they can extend themselves, or otherwise operate.
The Discs work if you take them as representations of file descriptors, especially on a UNIX-like machine.
The staves the Guards carried would be kill, sending Signals to Programs.
The flash of light that came out-and-up of a derezzing Program would be its exit code. And rather than Programs, they should really be Processes.
... but "TRON: Legacy" still doesn't work.
Why no, I don't spend too much time thinking about TRON, why do you ask?
Speaking of I/O.. the I/O towers! For all the praise Tron got for its graphics, you'd think they'd be able to get the color of I/O towers right.
... okay, I'll bite. what colour does an I/O tower need to be?
Anything starting with "httarrh//".
I congratulate you on what is a good idea. Its only flaw is that it assumes that the *intended* target audience (i.e. as many people as possible, it's a BBC story) will actually get up and (look up the exchange rate && get a pen-or-calculator).
... was that an excuse^W reason to not RTFA?
So what happens if one day your girlfriend accidentally knocks the rune stone out of alignment or slips and deals the wrong Tarot card? She comes teary-eyed to you and says "I love you, I love you so much, but the stars and my spirit-guide say we have to split up. Goodbye, it's been nice knowing you. Maybe you can get your chakras realigned in time for your next life and we might meet again"?
... harmless stuff. Sure.
Bogus or bogus, there's a heap of BAD advice that can come out of it.
> If he doesn't want to migrate to Vista, that's fine. More power to him. But these "opinion articles"
> with their "I can't be bothered to figure out a slightly different Control Panel - instead, I
> switched operating systems!" matra are just annoying and stupid.
With respect: you are desperately mistaken. Any business person who thinks-and-announces the way you just have will crash and burn and even people in Microsoft believe that; and I'll tell you why.
Something you might want to remember is that "I can't be bothered to figure out a slightly different [...]" was a major method use/d in Microsoft published FUD.
Also, don't forget the 1997 Microsoft internal memo to Bill Gates, later quoted in the European Commission's 2004 findings, that said...
[quote]
"The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most ISVs would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead...
"It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO, our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties [...] Customers constantly evaluate other desktop platforms, [but] it would be so much work to move over that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move.
"In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago."
[/quote] (wikisearch for "vendor lock-in" if you need the direct European Commission citation for the quote.)
Yes, that's API and not user experience. Realise, however, that Developers are "users" of a system as well, just at a deeper level and with more "flexibility". Users stick with an interface, you call that stupid and annoying. Developers stick to an API, Microsoft general managers acknowledge they'd be dead without it.
(My postgrad study [Open Source in the public sector] had me delivering a presentation just 24 hours ago where I had to present that very quote as an illustration of proprietary software company lock-in. This was convenient timing.)
The article's CONTENT and its summary don't match up. Article reads:
So, the PROPRIETARY software developers are getting feedback, collaborating, developing FASTER.
The Open Source developers are "oh, just recently seeking profit from services" *cough*VALinux*cough*, and offering indemnification.
The summary is: proprietary software developers have adopted Open Source methodologies. Open Source developers are still developing damn good software the damn good way. Open Source COMPANIES are just trying to turn a buck.
> I still want to anthropomorphize it and believe its doing > it intelligently instead of just randomly selecting > points and discarding those that don't give good results. Erm... "discarding those that don't give good results"... ... isn't that intelligent behaviour?
Your anthropomorphisation is actually correct... simply because the process of Evolution IS intelligent - natural selection makes decisions based on circumstances. The ID crowd, of course, don't get this... simply because they're too busy pushing their agenda.
There have been discussions on sites like The Panda's Thumb and PZ's Pharyngula, and no less that website "Uncommon Descent". A good Christian woman said she had no problem with calling Evolution a kind of "Intelligent Design" anyway BECAUSE of the mechanisms of natural selection. She was always polite, she'd followed the entire debate, responded to every single point they'd raised with actual science AND references.
They claimed she didn't know what she was talking about. She was, of course, banned by the Uncommon Descent moderators.
The first problem with that is the Jedi problem. Every Player and its freaking dog would want to be a User. I wanted to suggest that the User could be a reachable rank, but then there'll just be grinders doing that too. It's hard to balance against human nature. May I suggest - leave the User as something special.
For thematic balance's sake, may I instead suggest: have Players enter as Programs and Programs only.
Sure, for something that other MMOGs don't have (? disclaimer: I have almost no MMOG experience beyond old-school telnettable MUDs), have the Program be accompanied by an optional Player-scriptable Bit (or Byte, for the TRON 2.0ers). If the MMOG provides some kind of API for simple scripting...? How many programming geeks would THAT pull in? No, nothing that would allow grinding (or design the quests so's they can't be done by Bits?). What about something basically like C-Robots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crobots?
Again, beg pardon, but I'd like to disagree. A big complaint a lot of "Star Wars" fans have is that the games nearly-never stray outside the realm of the stuff in the movies. Look at SW's novels, comics, pen/paper RPG materials, videogames. There's the Republic Commando stuff, the New Jedi Order stuff, the new Legacy stuff. Penny Arcade, I believe, complained that all the flight-sims were just damn X-Wings and TIE fighters... why couldn't we fly against (even a moddable?) Yuuzhan Vong coralskipper?
The SW analogies are pretty appropriate (and I recently completed another seasonal SW binge). You read the wealth of books out there, get into the games and the Dark Horse comics... when you get back to the movies, you can't help but think "ah, but they developed THAT tiny point so well in THIS book"... TRON 2.0 game may not have been perfect, but it introduced a LOT of things that Lisberger and MacBird had never written. Conversely, a lot of incidental 1.0 stuff has never been touched (except in the realms of mostly obscure fan-fiction). Don't forget also, the TRON 2.0 comic is being published and up to two(?) issues. They'll certainly introduce stuff - especially of a darker flavour - that was never conceivable in 1.0 and couldn'tve gotten into Disney-flavoured 2.0.
2.0 introduced the Net. Why not have multiple domains? One can have an MCP. One can be an "open system". One can have tyrannical MCP-like senior ICPs. One can be virus-ridden. One can be a purely "WS-Mindows" server, one could be a Nilux box*.
(*yes, it annoyed me that Jet could port into a PDA, but it looked as if Encom used nothing but Windows servers. My box of choice is Debian).
In short: please, hypothetical TRON-MMOG developer, don't lock it down to a time, PLEASE. Besides, it just means your game will date like Carbon-14, only so much faster.
And with a game component for those who don't want to script Bits. Hear-hear. Absolutely, hear-hear. I second a TRON-MMOG. In fact, I even almost-salivate for one. Yes, I would plunk down hard cash for one. Haven't for Galaxies, haven't for any other MMOG. But damn, I would for such a (well-executed) beast.
... although I agree with every single straight-shooter and plain speaker (heck, "agree" isn't the word, so much as "scream hell yeah"), there are a couple of problems.
... we let managers in the front door. And now they've replicated and infested. The Fifth Sherman Tank of the Apocalypse.
Somewhere above, Theatetus spoke about being able to direct an MBA to an RFC and wanting to see a document that defined the buzzword bingo-like terms.
Unfortunately, there IS such a document. Worse, an entire library of such books and three national-global standards.
I'm planning, today, to apply for a job of senior tech support.
One criterion was "experience in using job tracking tools". Which sounds pretty innocuous in and of itself.
But not when you realise two more of the selection criteria were to have an understanding of "ITIL" (the Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and "AS8018 aka BS15000" (which is also "ISO20000").
Oh. And specific and very detailed job-tracking is a critical component of ITIL / ITIL v3 / AS8018 / BS15000 / ISO20000. So much for innocuousness.
These are, sadly, standards which basically bring the (netherhell)world of Business Process Management, right down to specific processes... right to what they so charmingly term "Information Technology Services Management".
Try looking for information about it. Your brain will melt and seep through your tear ducts. Wikipedia, fortunately, has it written at least somewhat less confusingly.
To make the whole damn thing even MORE blatantly neurotoxic?
The standards, being ludicrously specific and anal (and expensive to obtain), still only claim themselves to be a "framework"... and freely acknowledging that a great deal of customisation is required to tailor it to a specific workplace.
Meaning you're STILL screwed because you almost may as well just build your whole IT standards base on your own damn self.
... what about clients to a tech help desk, then? :-)
... appearance is more important than, say, performance metrics. Or pricing. Or history of repeated and drastic flaws in the "competition". ... after all, that's the historical behaviour that brought commercial standings today to their lofty position, isn't it?
... at least we're not wasting money on Armani suits when he flings it at us.
> "I blame the IT community, I blame the IT leadership, over and over and over again, about their inability to articulate correctly the business opportunity that we've got here," Quinn said.
I blame the business community for not realising that the "sandals and ponytail set" are the ones who GAVE YOU this working technology!
Perhaps it behooves you to consider, you pointy-headed business morons, that:
- function is more important than form
- the form of which you so disapprove BROUGHT you this function for free
- and perhaps your tiny-minded preconceptions, given the EVIDENCE, might possibly require a little review?
It's like the [RI|MP]AA... they want "fresh, new acts"... but anything that doesn't fall neatly into their metrics and feature matrix equates to "unmarketable".
Horse before cart. Apples and oranges. Insert here your favoured aphorism.
Not to mention the beautiful irony at the end of the article. To justify the investigation into his "unauthorised trips", he says "You can only stand in the public arena for so long and have mud thrown at you".
What's the brown, wet, clingy substance on his hands he throws at the "sandals and ponytail set"?
Vented, I return to dealing with users; exeunt.
... due to Microsoft's bad design and implementation (and user ignorance, but that can be circumvented to at least some degree with better design and implementation).
... what makes anybody here think that OneCare, Vista (with its "completely rewritten, new" kernel and TCP/IP stack) or whatever anti-malware it is Microsoft ends up producing...
... WON'T BE EQUALLY POORLY DESIGNED AND IMPLEMENTED?