Peter Jackson was better known for Heavenly Creatures, Braindead, Meet the Feebles, and Bad Taste. The last three all hit cult status and demonstrated his ability to work with 'creatures', which is a major part of the LOTR trilogy. It's not a huge leap from any of his earlier films to one laden with orcs, elves, huge battles and gore.
Star Wars has awful writing, crap characters, and terrible use of tropes. It's basically a knight's fantasy tale in space. What saves the show is the amazing visuals and occasional truly memorable scene. When broken down it becomes the simple tale of a young apprentice who meets and old warrior destined to die before he completes the apprentice's training. The apprentice saves a princess.
Luke - apprentice Obi - Old knight / mentor / trainer Leia - Princess Han - Vagabond Chewy - the dog / sidekick Darth - bad guy in black Emperor - bad's guy's king
It's pretty much Robin Hood or any of a thousand old tales that have been told to death...but it works because he placed it in a new setting and backed it up with truly memorable shots.
As far as TV goes, it's hard to beat the police procedural for being the most repetitive, tedious and formulaic form of entertainment this side of reality TV. I've watched more than my fair share and would rate CSI as being the worst offender - though Bones and NCIS are top contenders too.
It's always the same. The lead characters have 22 minutes or 44 minutes in which to solve a murder. It's almost always a murder unless you watch Law and Order SVU - in which case you get a few rapes and other assorted crimes.
The murderer is usually introduced early in the piece and is given a little camera time, but not much. The team follow 2-3 blind leads / evidence until in the last 4 minutes they stumble on a new piece of evidence that clearly IDs a surprise character.
House is even worse TBH. Patient comes in with mysterious illness. They don't know what it is and misdiagnose it two times before getting it right. Often the patient is made worse by their treatment. The third diagnosis comes out of the blue and is almost always right. Patient recovers. House acts like a dick at some point in the show and some side plot takes up 2-3 mins as well. I don't watch House anymore. No need when you can watch the first two minutes, then the final three and see everything worth seeing;p
Pollen can break down in our bodies, dust get's encased in mucus and expelled and smoke - well, you don't want to be inhaling too much of that at a time. As you said our bodies 'evolved' to handle most of those threats - including becoming smart enough to not expose ourselves to them. Plastic however is only about 100 years old. I'm pretty sure we haven't evolved enough since the early 1900s to develop resistance to inhaling an aerosolized version of this already toxic chemical.
C has scope rules that hide global variables when local ones are declared in scope also. C can also do all manner of weird and often unwanted things.
The main difference is that C can't be programmed by the monkeys who usually slap web pages together...it's just too exacting, while Javascript can. Famously, you can shoot yourself in both the foot and the face at the same time in C. Javascript doesn't even have a trigger let alone any ammo in the chamber.
That's the one I learnt from in 1987. Relational databases haven't changed that radically since then and the knowledge is applicable to any implementation of them.
BYTE, Creative Computing and Dr. Dobbs were my crack back then, especially Dr. Dobbs since I am a programmer. I don't miss PC Mag. It was irrelvant even back then, and more so after the internet took off. Why do I want to read an article that is 3 months out of date on which printer I should buy (surprise, it was always one with a lot of advertising in that issue, often right next to the 'article') ? Don't even get me started on those idiots, Pournelle and Dvork.
It's pretty easy to slap a mobo into a case and maybe some cards and call it building a PC.
In the day I can recall BYTE magazine running a series of articles that published the schematics to a computer you could actually assemble from parts at home. You needed to actually place all the resisters, ICs, and gubbins on the board, and solder it all together and hopefully get a working machine from that.
Ah, the good old days! The most insane overclock I ever saw back in 486 days was a friend of mine who dragged his 386 around to play a bit of Doom. We were all running 486DX33 / 486DX66 machines which powered through Doom and figured the 386 would be a pretty poor contender - right until he fired it up and loaded the game. It was screaming along as well as the 486s were, and that's when he told me he had overclocked it to something like 99mz. He reckons it took ages to find a chip he could do that to, but there were tons of them at his work no longer in use so he swapped them in and out till he found a really good one:D
Let's not forget the ever present 'loyalty cards' that stores want you to use when you pay. This is simply a primary key into a juicy database full of everything you buy from every store and every form of retail outlet they have.
Over here in Aus they generally entice you with a tiny discount off your petrol when you spend or some flybuy points that you will never get enough of to actually fly anywhere on. The major supermarket chains also own most of the petrol stations, the liquor stores and god knows what else, so you are almost always buying from them.
There's nothing stopping them using this data however the like, including selling it, or letting the NSA 'borrow' it. I used to care, but nowadays I really don't give a fuck who knows what brand of peanut butter I buy. I hardly ever see advertisements anyway, what does it matter to me how much effort they put into targeting them at me when I use ad-blockers and DL my TV from the net with the ads already cut out.
While you schmucks were all jerking off about how evil it is I managed to score all these important genius new inventions. Applaud me world, I am an innovator! I now have a patent for:
* downloading a shopping list * downloading a list of music I don't want to hear played * uploading a playlist * sideloading a playlist * pressing the letter 'e' on a keyboard * gravity - stop downloading my gravity for free or I will sue you! * hexagonal pixels - they are the FUTURE! * holograms with interlaced lines, analog noise, bad reception and occasional analog flickering
Time to buy that personal island I've always wanted.
And I guarantee you could tell the difference with black and white film. A digital shot will look like the sensor used to take the shot. Unless you use Photoshop to apply 'grain' and tonal changes to the shot it will lack character. That's not to say it will be a bad shot, just that it will be clean, the grain will be digital in nature, and it will have fairly predictable tonal characteristics.
When using film I have massive amounts of control over how my image is reproduced. Using combinations of negative and developer, push and pull processing or even cross processing I can achieve effects that you can only achieve in Photoshop and only as a reasonable approximate assuming it even has an analogue for the process I've used. I can further vary this via my selection of printing paper and even toners within the development baths.
Photoshop has only very basic settings for applying a 'film' grain to an image. B&W negatives on varying film stock developed at differing temperatures in varying developer baths can produce a vast array of results you can only dream of.
e.g. Ilford Delta 400 Pro developed with Rodinal at 20 degrees and printed onto a matte paper stock.
1. Every recruiter I've worked with has taken PDF. I don't generally upload my CV to a "recruitment site" since these are far less efficient at getting me a placement than a recognised recruitment agency. 2. This is a valid point if you have to group edit a lot of documents. That's a reasonably common situation inside an organisation, but much less common if you're just Joe Average. Personally I have never had issues with converting to.DOC and back as needed, but YMMV. 3. PDF is like one button press...seriously! Press the 'save' button, then mash the 'save to PDF' key. Done!
* Conversion engines...again, while I agree they are not perfect, I have never had an issue with OO being able to I/O a version that is almost identical to the copy I am editing. Perhaps it's the way I mark up my documents.
As for freely editing a PDF...97 / 100 times I don't want the document recipient to edit the document. In the rare case I ever do I will send them a fairly plain.DOC file. I've never had issues with this. You might want to review how you are marking up your documents.
I assume the issue with AutoCAD is the way they lock the installation to the hardware that MS generates for the mobo / video card / mem / etc. It would be pretty easy to image the base install onto your machines and just hand install AutoCAD on top of that. They also have a licence manager, so you could add an unlicensed AutoCAD to the image, then use the app to apply a licence after installation. I used that very thing when I upgraded my old PC and 3DS needed activation.
He's not the only one. I used to work for a major bank that was merging with two other banks at the time. They had three different banking systems, 12 document preparation systems, and literally thousands of different document templates, most of which used some amount of VB code.
Over the course of two years I re-wrote about 3,500 of those document templates, moving them from early defunct versions of VB to VB5 (IIRC). Most of them I was able to switch to a generic document template. I then used a tool I hacked together to rip bookmarks from the original and create new.doc files that used functions in the template to gather data and place it correctly inside the document - ready for printing.
Finally, a document preparation system was written that could communicate with the back-end banking systems, pull the data it needed, and prepare the document without user intervention. It was a network node based system - which was cool for the 90's, but somewhat more common these days.
My point being, don't under-estimate the amount of crappy glue that might be out there running a given business. It kept myself and my trainee two years and we still hadn't replaced it all by the time I moved to the UK. Hell, there was even a Lotus spreadsheet in there with millions of dollars worth of errors in it's reporting figures. It's now an Excel spreadsheet, and no doubt some clown has gone and added a bunch of errors back in again ^.^
OpenOffice has provided the ability to save as a PDF for years now. Why didn't you save your CV as a PDF which is known to display correctly pretty much everywhere?
Like you, I've been watching the evolution of Gates from the early days. I started out disliking him and his predatory business practices. In the early days it seemed to me like he stole almost all of the good things that made Microsoft strong (DOS-CPM, Windows-MacOS, MSN-Internet, Zune-iPod, etc). The company used highly unethical means to absorb, overpower, or destroy competitors. It's products seemed nothing more that badly cloned copies of more innovative ideas.
Over time though I have watched him develop from a robber-baron into a humanitarian who's charity work is invaluable to innumerable people. His character has mellowed, and although Microsoft itself still has many of it's old evil traits I no longer see him as inseparable from that.
He has become...strangely likeable to me, and I never thought I would say that.
If what I remember hearing is correct, when he dies he will leave a nominal amount to his family / friends, and the vast bulk of his earnings will go to charities. I have no reason at all now to call him anything but a good man.
At first they came for the COBOL programmers and I said nothing because I didn't like whitespace having special meaning. Then they came for the LISP programmers and I said nothing because I didn't care for parentheses. Then they came for the C programmers and I said nothing because I had C++ and OOP....
In a position I held a while ago I had a pair of programmers about as unlike as you can get.
One was fast, quick to offer a solution, never wanted to write docs and always made a hash of them when he did. He got code out fast, but it was often flawed in every way you can imagine and frequently didn't pass anything but the most obvious use case.
The other was quite slow. She asked me a lot of questions and we spent time going over the best strategies for solving a problem before she wrote her code. Her code was always excellent, well thought out, to standards, and documented. It ran well with only the occasional need for me to provide a re-work to ensure it scaled to meet the demands of a 24/7 high volume web site.
After numerous years of working together (both programmers) we slowly would down that account as we lost it to a joint venture from Microsoft, Accenture and Dell. When asked who we should downsize it didn't even take a moment to decide, the guy who churned out the code at lightning speed got the axe.
The reasons?
His code hardly ever worked beyond a the most casual testing. He had a low aptitude for learning. I re-wrote a lot of his work, which was expensive for our company as I was client facing and senior and he was mid-level. He was a bit of a twat.
In the long run the slow, methodical, programmer was far better at her job than Mr 24 hours, earned the company more many and caused us far less grief.
Code comps are a terrible way to decide who to hire.
The people who would most benefit from this technology just don't care about quality. They are the ones who shoot video on their crappy phone handset and upload it at a terrible resolution onto YouTube. Oddly, this has led to the situation where my TV is now capable of playing back full HD content but mostly ends up displaying low grade badly shot footage that looks like it come from 1990's Russia. We can thank YouTube, camera phones, and Tosh.0 for much of this. News broadcasts which I pick up in HD 720/1080p often look like a blurry mess until the feed switches back to the studio. Feeds from security cameras on the street and in shops are even worse. How they expect you to be able to identify a suspect from a 4fps 160x120 grainy picture is beyond me.
At the other end are the people who care about quality and might like your product. They are most likely using high quality consumer / prosumer / pro grade cameras, good lighting, and a tripod. They will receive a much reduced benefit from anything you have developed.
I guess your target market then is YouTube and the other video services. They add it to their back end processes and apply it to any uploads as needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Peter Jackson was better known for Heavenly Creatures, Braindead, Meet the Feebles, and Bad Taste. The last three all hit cult status and demonstrated his ability to work with 'creatures', which is a major part of the LOTR trilogy. It's not a huge leap from any of his earlier films to one laden with orcs, elves, huge battles and gore.
Star Wars has awful writing, crap characters, and terrible use of tropes. It's basically a knight's fantasy tale in space. What saves the show is the amazing visuals and occasional truly memorable scene. When broken down it becomes the simple tale of a young apprentice who meets and old warrior destined to die before he completes the apprentice's training. The apprentice saves a princess.
Luke - apprentice
Obi - Old knight / mentor / trainer
Leia - Princess
Han - Vagabond
Chewy - the dog / sidekick
Darth - bad guy in black
Emperor - bad's guy's king
It's pretty much Robin Hood or any of a thousand old tales that have been told to death...but it works because he placed it in a new setting and backed it up with truly memorable shots.
As far as TV goes, it's hard to beat the police procedural for being the most repetitive, tedious and formulaic form of entertainment this side of reality TV. I've watched more than my fair share and would rate CSI as being the worst offender - though Bones and NCIS are top contenders too.
It's always the same. The lead characters have 22 minutes or 44 minutes in which to solve a murder. It's almost always a murder unless you watch Law and Order SVU - in which case you get a few rapes and other assorted crimes.
The murderer is usually introduced early in the piece and is given a little camera time, but not much. The team follow 2-3 blind leads / evidence until in the last 4 minutes they stumble on a new piece of evidence that clearly IDs a surprise character.
House is even worse TBH. Patient comes in with mysterious illness. They don't know what it is and misdiagnose it two times before getting it right. Often the patient is made worse by their treatment. The third diagnosis comes out of the blue and is almost always right. Patient recovers. House acts like a dick at some point in the show and some side plot takes up 2-3 mins as well. I don't watch House anymore. No need when you can watch the first two minutes, then the final three and see everything worth seeing ;p
Pandora is IMHO one of the best sci-fi films in the last few years. Little wonder it's a foreign film.
The DVD is a coupon for the service. You received the actual service when you cashed in the coupon by installing it on your PC and playing the game.
Software is never sold, it is always licenced.
What's the chance those studies were funded by the companies that sell PLA? Pretty decent I would say.
Pollen can break down in our bodies, dust get's encased in mucus and expelled and smoke - well, you don't want to be inhaling too much of that at a time. As you said our bodies 'evolved' to handle most of those threats - including becoming smart enough to not expose ourselves to them. Plastic however is only about 100 years old. I'm pretty sure we haven't evolved enough since the early 1900s to develop resistance to inhaling an aerosolized version of this already toxic chemical.
C has scope rules that hide global variables when local ones are declared in scope also. C can also do all manner of weird and often unwanted things.
The main difference is that C can't be programmed by the monkeys who usually slap web pages together...it's just too exacting, while Javascript can. Famously, you can shoot yourself in both the foot and the face at the same time in C. Javascript doesn't even have a trigger let alone any ammo in the chamber.
That's the one I learnt from in 1987. Relational databases haven't changed that radically since then and the knowledge is applicable to any implementation of them.
BYTE, Creative Computing and Dr. Dobbs were my crack back then, especially Dr. Dobbs since I am a programmer. I don't miss PC Mag. It was irrelvant even back then, and more so after the internet took off. Why do I want to read an article that is 3 months out of date on which printer I should buy (surprise, it was always one with a lot of advertising in that issue, often right next to the 'article') ? Don't even get me started on those idiots, Pournelle and Dvork.
It's pretty easy to slap a mobo into a case and maybe some cards and call it building a PC.
In the day I can recall BYTE magazine running a series of articles that published the schematics to a computer you could actually assemble from parts at home. You needed to actually place all the resisters, ICs, and gubbins on the board, and solder it all together and hopefully get a working machine from that.
Ah, the good old days! The most insane overclock I ever saw back in 486 days was a friend of mine who dragged his 386 around to play a bit of Doom. We were all running 486DX33 / 486DX66 machines which powered through Doom and figured the 386 would be a pretty poor contender - right until he fired it up and loaded the game. It was screaming along as well as the 486s were, and that's when he told me he had overclocked it to something like 99mz. He reckons it took ages to find a chip he could do that to, but there were tons of them at his work no longer in use so he swapped them in and out till he found a really good one :D
In any case the government can force you to hand over the keys by law. You can sit in a cell until you do in some countries.
Let's not forget the ever present 'loyalty cards' that stores want you to use when you pay. This is simply a primary key into a juicy database full of everything you buy from every store and every form of retail outlet they have.
Over here in Aus they generally entice you with a tiny discount off your petrol when you spend or some flybuy points that you will never get enough of to actually fly anywhere on. The major supermarket chains also own most of the petrol stations, the liquor stores and god knows what else, so you are almost always buying from them.
There's nothing stopping them using this data however the like, including selling it, or letting the NSA 'borrow' it. I used to care, but nowadays I really don't give a fuck who knows what brand of peanut butter I buy. I hardly ever see advertisements anyway, what does it matter to me how much effort they put into targeting them at me when I use ad-blockers and DL my TV from the net with the ads already cut out.
While you schmucks were all jerking off about how evil it is I managed to score all these important genius new inventions. Applaud me world, I am an innovator! I now have a patent for:
* downloading a shopping list
* downloading a list of music I don't want to hear played
* uploading a playlist
* sideloading a playlist
* pressing the letter 'e' on a keyboard
* gravity - stop downloading my gravity for free or I will sue you!
* hexagonal pixels - they are the FUTURE!
* holograms with interlaced lines, analog noise, bad reception and occasional analog flickering
Time to buy that personal island I've always wanted.
And I guarantee you could tell the difference with black and white film. A digital shot will look like the sensor used to take the shot. Unless you use Photoshop to apply 'grain' and tonal changes to the shot it will lack character. That's not to say it will be a bad shot, just that it will be clean, the grain will be digital in nature, and it will have fairly predictable tonal characteristics.
When using film I have massive amounts of control over how my image is reproduced. Using combinations of negative and developer, push and pull processing or even cross processing I can achieve effects that you can only achieve in Photoshop and only as a reasonable approximate assuming it even has an analogue for the process I've used. I can further vary this via my selection of printing paper and even toners within the development baths.
Photoshop has only very basic settings for applying a 'film' grain to an image. B&W negatives on varying film stock developed at differing temperatures in varying developer baths can produce a vast array of results you can only dream of.
e.g. Ilford Delta 400 Pro developed with Rodinal at 20 degrees and printed onto a matte paper stock.
1. Every recruiter I've worked with has taken PDF. I don't generally upload my CV to a "recruitment site" since these are far less efficient at getting me a placement than a recognised recruitment agency. .DOC and back as needed, but YMMV.
2. This is a valid point if you have to group edit a lot of documents. That's a reasonably common situation inside an organisation, but much less common if you're just Joe Average. Personally I have never had issues with converting to
3. PDF is like one button press...seriously! Press the 'save' button, then mash the 'save to PDF' key. Done!
* Conversion engines...again, while I agree they are not perfect, I have never had an issue with OO being able to I/O a version that is almost identical to the copy I am editing. Perhaps it's the way I mark up my documents.
As for freely editing a PDF...97 / 100 times I don't want the document recipient to edit the document. In the rare case I ever do I will send them a fairly plain .DOC file. I've never had issues with this. You might want to review how you are marking up your documents.
I assume the issue with AutoCAD is the way they lock the installation to the hardware that MS generates for the mobo / video card / mem / etc. It would be pretty easy to image the base install onto your machines and just hand install AutoCAD on top of that. They also have a licence manager, so you could add an unlicensed AutoCAD to the image, then use the app to apply a licence after installation. I used that very thing when I upgraded my old PC and 3DS needed activation.
Last week I let apt-get install it for me, since they finally had a Linux version available.
He's not the only one. I used to work for a major bank that was merging with two other banks at the time. They had three different banking systems, 12 document preparation systems, and literally thousands of different document templates, most of which used some amount of VB code.
Over the course of two years I re-wrote about 3,500 of those document templates, moving them from early defunct versions of VB to VB5 (IIRC). Most of them I was able to switch to a generic document template. I then used a tool I hacked together to rip bookmarks from the original and create new .doc files that used functions in the template to gather data and place it correctly inside the document - ready for printing.
Finally, a document preparation system was written that could communicate with the back-end banking systems, pull the data it needed, and prepare the document without user intervention. It was a network node based system - which was cool for the 90's, but somewhat more common these days.
My point being, don't under-estimate the amount of crappy glue that might be out there running a given business. It kept myself and my trainee two years and we still hadn't replaced it all by the time I moved to the UK. Hell, there was even a Lotus spreadsheet in there with millions of dollars worth of errors in it's reporting figures. It's now an Excel spreadsheet, and no doubt some clown has gone and added a bunch of errors back in again ^.^
OpenOffice has provided the ability to save as a PDF for years now. Why didn't you save your CV as a PDF which is known to display correctly pretty much everywhere?
Like you, I've been watching the evolution of Gates from the early days. I started out disliking him and his predatory business practices. In the early days it seemed to me like he stole almost all of the good things that made Microsoft strong (DOS-CPM, Windows-MacOS, MSN-Internet, Zune-iPod, etc). The company used highly unethical means to absorb, overpower, or destroy competitors. It's products seemed nothing more that badly cloned copies of more innovative ideas.
Over time though I have watched him develop from a robber-baron into a humanitarian who's charity work is invaluable to innumerable people. His character has mellowed, and although Microsoft itself still has many of it's old evil traits I no longer see him as inseparable from that.
He has become...strangely likeable to me, and I never thought I would say that.
If what I remember hearing is correct, when he dies he will leave a nominal amount to his family / friends, and the vast bulk of his earnings will go to charities. I have no reason at all now to call him anything but a good man.
At first they came for the COBOL programmers ...
and I said nothing because I didn't like whitespace having special meaning.
Then they came for the LISP programmers
and I said nothing because I didn't care for parentheses.
Then they came for the C programmers
and I said nothing because I had C++ and OOP.
In a position I held a while ago I had a pair of programmers about as unlike as you can get.
One was fast, quick to offer a solution, never wanted to write docs and always made a hash of them when he did. He got code out fast, but it was often flawed in every way you can imagine and frequently didn't pass anything but the most obvious use case.
The other was quite slow. She asked me a lot of questions and we spent time going over the best strategies for solving a problem before she wrote her code. Her code was always excellent, well thought out, to standards, and documented. It ran well with only the occasional need for me to provide a re-work to ensure it scaled to meet the demands of a 24/7 high volume web site.
After numerous years of working together (both programmers) we slowly would down that account as we lost it to a joint venture from Microsoft, Accenture and Dell. When asked who we should downsize it didn't even take a moment to decide, the guy who churned out the code at lightning speed got the axe.
The reasons?
His code hardly ever worked beyond a the most casual testing.
He had a low aptitude for learning.
I re-wrote a lot of his work, which was expensive for our company as I was client facing and senior and he was mid-level.
He was a bit of a twat.
In the long run the slow, methodical, programmer was far better at her job than Mr 24 hours, earned the company more many and caused us far less grief.
Code comps are a terrible way to decide who to hire.
The people who would most benefit from this technology just don't care about quality. They are the ones who shoot video on their crappy phone handset and upload it at a terrible resolution onto YouTube. Oddly, this has led to the situation where my TV is now capable of playing back full HD content but mostly ends up displaying low grade badly shot footage that looks like it come from 1990's Russia. We can thank YouTube, camera phones, and Tosh.0 for much of this. News broadcasts which I pick up in HD 720/1080p often look like a blurry mess until the feed switches back to the studio. Feeds from security cameras on the street and in shops are even worse. How they expect you to be able to identify a suspect from a 4fps 160x120 grainy picture is beyond me.
At the other end are the people who care about quality and might like your product. They are most likely using high quality consumer / prosumer / pro grade cameras, good lighting, and a tripod. They will receive a much reduced benefit from anything you have developed.
I guess your target market then is YouTube and the other video services. They add it to their back end processes and apply it to any uploads as needed.