This happened to be just last week. I have to give a little backstory here, but it won't take long.
I worked for an internet company as a media designer in the tailspin months of the.com burst. The usual story, endlessly related here - incompetent management who didn't understand the technology they were selling, endless promises to employees about shares and bonuses, not being paid the last month I worked there, etc. I managed to pull out two computers before the offices were locked, and consider myself lucky.
A few days after the company folds, the CEO - a man I considered a personal friend - calls me on the phone, begging me to finish a presentation I was working on. He needs it to help him round up investors, he says. It will help me get paid back quicker. Again, endless promises.
I, ever the fool, complete the presentation. It costs me a few hours, a hundred dollars in a studio to do the audio. I deliver it to him on time. And then don't hear from the guy for two years.
Last week, I hear that said CEO (who is still running the same business, after a merger) is asking around for me. It turns out I might have some content on CD that a client is bugging him about. Sure enough, he leaves several calls on my voicemail. Starts off all buddy, and gets around to asking me to look for this CD.
I never return his call, which I think is more effective than any "fu-k you" I could scream down the phone. He's asking me to do more work for free, without paying me for work I've done in the past? Screw him, and screw any employer who treats their employees that way.
It's been said in previous posts, but I'll reiterate it here. It doesn't matter if your employer is your best friend. It doesn't matter if he invites you around to barbeques, trusts you to babysit his kids, or gives you weekends at his cabin. When it comes to business, he is your employer. An honest day's work deserves an honest day's pay. Good employers - and good employees - both recognise that. Anything else is an abuse of any non-business relationship you may have.
I saw it a few nights ago here in Calgary, and have been meaning to write up a review. Seems I was beaten to it... Aside from the cuts, there's a few things that readers have thus far failed to mention.
First, while I was worried about the digital transfer on the far larger IMAX screen ("pixels as big as fists pummeling your eyes!") the picture looked very nice and clean, with a couple of exceptions. On the very rare occassion, very thin lines that are close to horizontal or vertical get a distinct case of the "jaggies", where one can see the staircase effect of pixelisation. (This is most evident during the Lucasfilm logo at the opening and at a moment during the descent of Senator Amidala's ship to Corsucant).
Second, the sound is incredible. Those who haven't heard a well-tuned theatre - and IMAXi are amoung the world's best - will get a kick out of that aspect of the movie alone.
Last - a traditional IMAX movie focuses on vistas - grand sweeping praries and the like - and where Episode II is most like this, it works very well. At other points - closeups of actor's faces, in particular - the IMAX image can be too revealing, much as the higher resolution of HDTV is acknowledged to reveal the flaws of those appearing on television. There are other scenes - that of Anakin next to the Jawa sandcrawler while searching for his mother on Tatooine, for example - that the framing of the scene is just "off".
To those intending to go, I would recommend arriving early and getting seats near the center of the theatre, for the most compelling experience - again, big vistas work well from most any viewpoint, but not head-shots. For me, it was more than worth the price of admission.
I honestly don't know what's up with the submissions process. I submitted this review last night, immediately after returning from the movie. Since Slashdot doesn't have any way to leave feedback with a rejecttion, I guess I'm looking for comments as to how this review could have been made better.
(And guys - if you're looking to improve the quality of submissions Slashdot gets, it would probably be a really good idea to allow a limited form of feedback for rejections - even if it was just a choice from a drop-down menu ("This story was rejected because we have a writer working on the same story right now", for example.)
Oh - and in response to one user's post - go see it, but with lowered expectations.
Review: Minority Report
Reviewers of Spielberg's latest film are falling over each other to laud his new, gritty noir vision of the future, "Minority Report", based on the Phillip K Dick short story of the same name. Roger Ebert loves it; the movie is currently standing at 93% at Rotten Tomatoes, and Salon gives it a thumbs-up. But what's the reaction of your average geek?
(Full disclosure - while I am familiar with his work, I have not read the Phillip K. Dick story - so you're not going to read any comments about how the movie did or did not live up to the book. It stands and falls here on its own merits. Plot of the movie is discussed, but the ending is not given away. Plot of other Spielberg movies is also referenced.)
For those of you who have not yet been saturated by press releases or the trailer - Tom Cruise plays John Anderton, an investigator in the "pre-crime" police division of Washington D.C. in 2054. The department's work is facilitated by "pre-cogs", beings with the power to see the future - in particular, future murders. Alerted to crimes before they happen, the pre-crime unit can interpret the waking dreams of the pre-cogs and intercept the perpetrators before the event. This program has been such a success that murders in the D.C. area have been practically eliminated, and the government is considering taking the pre-crime unit national. Pre-cogs, it is claimed, are never wrong.
As a final safety check, federal investigator Danny Witwer (played by Colin Farrell) is sent to inspect the pre-crime facility. Anderson and his boss, Director Burgess (Max von Sydow) fear that the program is going to be taken away from them. However, things quickly get far more complex than mere power games over jurisdiction.
Another alert from the pre-cog pops up. This time, Anderson sees himself killing a man - a man he does not know. Convicted by the infallibility of his own system and convinced he has been set-up, Anderson runs, determined to escape his own destiny by finding out who framed him.
The Washington DC that he runs to is a computerized Paniopticon, biometric readers omnipresent and blithely accepted by the populace. However the street (to paraphrase William Gibson) always finds a means to subvert every technological innovation - and to continue to run, Cruise must sink into the underbelly of the world he knows and confront his own past.
As a geek, your acceptance of Minority Report's plot will depend a great deal upon your stance on temporal paradoxes. The effectiveness of the pre-crime unit rests in the belief that once the future is "seen" it must occur, and Anderton's unit is therefore justified in taking pre-emptive action. However, as Witwer points out, by intervening you have forestalled the event - is it therefore right to incarcerate someone who has not committed an offense? Determinism is assumed to be a fact, but it turns into a question central to the film.
Spielberg has received a lot of recent press claiming how much "darker" and dystopian this movie is than much of his early work. I've seen comments that extrapolate from "Saving Private Ryan" through "A.I." to this movie that suggest the man is on a trip that rivals Poe in bleakness. Suffice it to say that anyone who believes this has "E.T" burned into their minds but has forgotten "Empire of the Sun" or even "The Color Purple", films as equally as grim as "Minority Report".
In fact there comes a point about fifteen minutes before the end of the film where Spielberg could have wrapped it up, leaving every plot thread neatly tied, and delivered a much darker ending. However Hollywood, or his own essential optimism, has driven him to deliver a brighter alternative, much like "A.I." It is not a completely unsatisfactory conclusion - the climax involves a very nice moral conflict - but it is not the bleak outlook I expected from reading the pieces on Spielberg's new "dark vision".
Spielberg does not fail to hit upon themes that are central to his work - the breathtaking innocence of childhood; the loss of humanity and its possible redemption; and the two-edged sword of technology. (Spielberg is no starry-eyed technologist - the potential misuse of man's tools has been an ongoing thesis since "Duel". In "Minority Report" there is an interesting sub-theme of technology as a new religion, with Anderton, the tool user, set against Witwer, a traditionally trained Jesuit seminarian before he became a cop.
Spielberg's visualization of the near-future of 2054 is complete and compelling. Animated advertising crawls over every surface; enhanced personalization of every experience has come at the price of a sharp loss in privacy; the gap between the well-to-do and the drug-addled poor has grown massively. One wonders, however, if the appearance in the film of companies we have today is there for verisimilitude or is merely clever product placement - how many corporations do you expect to survive another 50 years with the same logo? And while the technology shown is (for the most part) very believable, it is ironic that the cause behind the pre-cogs ability is somewhat glossed over.
In his directing Spielberg has taken note of his younger, hungrier competitors, such as David Fincher.. Part of this change was to hire Alex McDowell (the production designer of "Fight Club" and "The Crow"). In addition, his camerawork, in cooperation with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (who worked with him on "Schindler's List") is more fluid than ever, using juxtaposition and video techniques to sometimes dazzling effect. And unlike his peer Lucas, who seems happy to place ultra-mirrored spacecraft in pristine environments and shiny robots on rich green grass, Spielberg's use of CGI is more subtle, "dirtier" and almost invisibly integrated in the scenes.
In terms of the cast, Tom Cruise is, well, Cruise. He's been chosen for roles for twenty years because he is an effective actor who is also cute, charming and bankable. His role as Anderton doesn't tax those abilities in any way. Max Von Sydow is the slightly scary Old Testament father figure he established himself in even before "The Exorcist". To me, the most effective player in the cast is Colin Farrell. Given a smaller role with far less screen time than Cruise he still succeeds in making his character deep, complex, and far more dynamic than the leading man's, with better lines and sharper delivery.
The plot is certainly enough to keep you guessing, with enough twists and turns to throw most. The movie has one "discovery" and an attendant chase scene that does stretch credibility somewhat, but otherwise the plotting is coherent and relatively bulletproof. There are holes, but none large enough to spoil the movie.
As a vision of the future, "Minority Report" is chock-full of ideas. As a movie, or even as a cyberpunk thriller, it leaves a little to be desired. After the film you won't want to tear your eyes out, but you may feel a sense of disappointment that Spielberg, who has demonstrated time and again that he can be deeply insightful into the human condition, warn of the dangers of technology while showcasing its attractions, and deliver a wild ride, could not quite succeed in delivering all three at once in this movie.
Progressive is not "twice as good" as interlaced. Keep in mind you're still drawing from interlaced source material - ultimately, it's up to the player / modulator to accomplish the de-interlacing. The end result is not twice as good to the average naked eye. You, my friend, are romping in the same green Elysian feilds as those who believe that 2GHz must be twice as good as 1GHz.
Besides, have you seen the price of modern progressive DVD players? I don't even want to think about what the first-adopter cost of equivalent units will be when HD-DVD comes out.
If your company can afford to delay the purchase of a new storage system I would urge you to consider the up-coming blue-ray high-definition DVDs. This advance is the primary reason why I have not bought any form of DVD media yet. A double-layered HD-DVD will clock in at 50 gigabytes - depending on your storage needs, that might well be enough to contain all your archived documentation, with no need for a jukebox solution.
For data storage, this will be a godsend - and the prospect of a 1080i high-defintion movie on a single disk has me salivating.
The problem with the format, as I see it, is twofold:
When can it be introduced? HD-DVDs for data can't be introduced soon enough - but the entertainment companies will logically want to wait until "standard" DVDs thoroughly saturate the market before introducing HD-DVD.
Will the MPAA and its ilk keep their hands off it? With a good projector, screen and viewing environment 1080i will be within spitting distance of a true theatrical experience. Naturally, the MPAA will be terrified of this experience being compromised, and at the prospect of HD films being distributed on the web (on the other hand, the sheer file size of HD movie files might preclude that - I don't see cable companies increasing their user bandwidths anytime soon.)
When can it be expected? Most bets are on 2004 / 2005. Maybe they'll learn from the DVD-R / DVD+RW / DVD-RAM fiasco to stick to a common read-write standard, tho I wouldn't put money on it. If they do decide to fight, it might be 2006 before the standard is settled - which is a real long wait, in computer terms.
Anyway, my $0.01 (the Canadian exchange rate sucks)
This (in particular, speech processing) is the place. Other than improved graphics / simulation (which is mostly dependant on the video card, in any case), user-independant speech processing and AI are the only things I can think of that will need the processing power that is coming down the track.
3D, when it is successful, will be VERY dfferent
on
3D TV For The Masses?
·
· Score: 1
This is somewhat off-topic, but it comes to mind every time someone mentions "3D-TV" - especially a proposal like this, where the marketing message is basically "convert your film/videotape to 3D!"
The problem, as I see it, is that we have developed a specific visual language for film over the last 100 years. Think of the last movie you saw, with its jump-cuts, zooms, pans whatever. Now think of the last 3D movie - or if not that, how holograms are used in Star Wars. The camera either doesn't move at all, or moves freely, like a flight sim. It doesn't jump around, and you tend to stay inside the same scene. While it's a very good point (as already mentioned) that 3D environments can cause simulator sickness (and not even those - my ex-wife used to get vertigo even watching long camera dolly shots in action films) think about how much more disorienting standard film techniques will be when applied to 3D movies.
That implies to me that when 3D does actually work for mass entertainment as a replacement for film and television they will be both immersive (the holograms are around you, rather than stuck in a corner of your room) and considerably slower-paced than modern cinema.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked for an internet company as a media designer in the tailspin months of the .com burst. The usual story, endlessly related here - incompetent management who didn't understand the technology they were selling, endless promises to employees about shares and bonuses, not being paid the last month I worked there, etc. I managed to pull out two computers before the offices were locked, and consider myself lucky.
A few days after the company folds, the CEO - a man I considered a personal friend - calls me on the phone, begging me to finish a presentation I was working on. He needs it to help him round up investors, he says. It will help me get paid back quicker. Again, endless promises.
I, ever the fool, complete the presentation. It costs me a few hours, a hundred dollars in a studio to do the audio. I deliver it to him on time. And then don't hear from the guy for two years.
Last week, I hear that said CEO (who is still running the same business, after a merger) is asking around for me. It turns out I might have some content on CD that a client is bugging him about. Sure enough, he leaves several calls on my voicemail. Starts off all buddy, and gets around to asking me to look for this CD.
I never return his call, which I think is more effective than any "fu-k you" I could scream down the phone. He's asking me to do more work for free, without paying me for work I've done in the past? Screw him, and screw any employer who treats their employees that way.
It's been said in previous posts, but I'll reiterate it here. It doesn't matter if your employer is your best friend. It doesn't matter if he invites you around to barbeques, trusts you to babysit his kids, or gives you weekends at his cabin. When it comes to business, he is your employer. An honest day's work deserves an honest day's pay. Good employers - and good employees - both recognise that. Anything else is an abuse of any non-business relationship you may have.
I saw it a few nights ago here in Calgary, and have been meaning to write up a review. Seems I was beaten to it... Aside from the cuts, there's a few things that readers have thus far failed to mention.
First, while I was worried about the digital transfer on the far larger IMAX screen ("pixels as big as fists pummeling your eyes!") the picture looked very nice and clean, with a couple of exceptions. On the very rare occassion, very thin lines that are close to horizontal or vertical get a distinct case of the "jaggies", where one can see the staircase effect of pixelisation. (This is most evident during the Lucasfilm logo at the opening and at a moment during the descent of Senator Amidala's ship to Corsucant).
Second, the sound is incredible. Those who haven't heard a well-tuned theatre - and IMAXi are amoung the world's best - will get a kick out of that aspect of the movie alone.
Last - a traditional IMAX movie focuses on vistas - grand sweeping praries and the like - and where Episode II is most like this, it works very well. At other points - closeups of actor's faces, in particular - the IMAX image can be too revealing, much as the higher resolution of HDTV is acknowledged to reveal the flaws of those appearing on television. There are other scenes - that of Anakin next to the Jawa sandcrawler while searching for his mother on Tatooine, for example - that the framing of the scene is just "off".
To those intending to go, I would recommend arriving early and getting seats near the center of the theatre, for the most compelling experience - again, big vistas work well from most any viewpoint, but not head-shots. For me, it was more than worth the price of admission.
(And guys - if you're looking to improve the quality of submissions Slashdot gets, it would probably be a really good idea to allow a limited form of feedback for rejections - even if it was just a choice from a drop-down menu ("This story was rejected because we have a writer working on the same story right now", for example.)
Oh - and in response to one user's post - go see it, but with lowered expectations.
Review: Minority Report
Reviewers of Spielberg's latest film are falling over each other to laud his new, gritty noir vision of the future, "Minority Report", based on the Phillip K Dick short story of the same name. Roger Ebert loves it; the movie is currently standing at 93% at Rotten Tomatoes, and Salon gives it a thumbs-up. But what's the reaction of your average geek?
(Full disclosure - while I am familiar with his work, I have not read the Phillip K. Dick story - so you're not going to read any comments about how the movie did or did not live up to the book. It stands and falls here on its own merits. Plot of the movie is discussed, but the ending is not given away. Plot of other Spielberg movies is also referenced.)
For those of you who have not yet been saturated by press releases or the trailer - Tom Cruise plays John Anderton, an investigator in the "pre-crime" police division of Washington D.C. in 2054. The department's work is facilitated by "pre-cogs", beings with the power to see the future - in particular, future murders. Alerted to crimes before they happen, the pre-crime unit can interpret the waking dreams of the pre-cogs and intercept the perpetrators before the event. This program has been such a success that murders in the D.C. area have been practically eliminated, and the government is considering taking the pre-crime unit national. Pre-cogs, it is claimed, are never wrong.
As a final safety check, federal investigator Danny Witwer (played by Colin Farrell) is sent to inspect the pre-crime facility. Anderson and his boss, Director Burgess (Max von Sydow) fear that the program is going to be taken away from them. However, things quickly get far more complex than mere power games over jurisdiction.
Another alert from the pre-cog pops up. This time, Anderson sees himself killing a man - a man he does not know. Convicted by the infallibility of his own system and convinced he has been set-up, Anderson runs, determined to escape his own destiny by finding out who framed him.
The Washington DC that he runs to is a computerized Paniopticon, biometric readers omnipresent and blithely accepted by the populace. However the street (to paraphrase William Gibson) always finds a means to subvert every technological innovation - and to continue to run, Cruise must sink into the underbelly of the world he knows and confront his own past.
As a geek, your acceptance of Minority Report's plot will depend a great deal upon your stance on temporal paradoxes. The effectiveness of the pre-crime unit rests in the belief that once the future is "seen" it must occur, and Anderton's unit is therefore justified in taking pre-emptive action. However, as Witwer points out, by intervening you have forestalled the event - is it therefore right to incarcerate someone who has not committed an offense? Determinism is assumed to be a fact, but it turns into a question central to the film.
Spielberg has received a lot of recent press claiming how much "darker" and dystopian this movie is than much of his early work. I've seen comments that extrapolate from "Saving Private Ryan" through "A.I." to this movie that suggest the man is on a trip that rivals Poe in bleakness. Suffice it to say that anyone who believes this has "E.T" burned into their minds but has forgotten "Empire of the Sun" or even "The Color Purple", films as equally as grim as "Minority Report".
In fact there comes a point about fifteen minutes before the end of the film where Spielberg could have wrapped it up, leaving every plot thread neatly tied, and delivered a much darker ending. However Hollywood, or his own essential optimism, has driven him to deliver a brighter alternative, much like "A.I." It is not a completely unsatisfactory conclusion - the climax involves a very nice moral conflict - but it is not the bleak outlook I expected from reading the pieces on Spielberg's new "dark vision".
Spielberg does not fail to hit upon themes that are central to his work - the breathtaking innocence of childhood; the loss of humanity and its possible redemption; and the two-edged sword of technology. (Spielberg is no starry-eyed technologist - the potential misuse of man's tools has been an ongoing thesis since "Duel". In "Minority Report" there is an interesting sub-theme of technology as a new religion, with Anderton, the tool user, set against Witwer, a traditionally trained Jesuit seminarian before he became a cop.
Spielberg's visualization of the near-future of 2054 is complete and compelling. Animated advertising crawls over every surface; enhanced personalization of every experience has come at the price of a sharp loss in privacy; the gap between the well-to-do and the drug-addled poor has grown massively. One wonders, however, if the appearance in the film of companies we have today is there for verisimilitude or is merely clever product placement - how many corporations do you expect to survive another 50 years with the same logo? And while the technology shown is (for the most part) very believable, it is ironic that the cause behind the pre-cogs ability is somewhat glossed over.
In his directing Spielberg has taken note of his younger, hungrier competitors, such as David Fincher.. Part of this change was to hire Alex McDowell (the production designer of "Fight Club" and "The Crow"). In addition, his camerawork, in cooperation with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (who worked with him on "Schindler's List") is more fluid than ever, using juxtaposition and video techniques to sometimes dazzling effect. And unlike his peer Lucas, who seems happy to place ultra-mirrored spacecraft in pristine environments and shiny robots on rich green grass, Spielberg's use of CGI is more subtle, "dirtier" and almost invisibly integrated in the scenes.
In terms of the cast, Tom Cruise is, well, Cruise. He's been chosen for roles for twenty years because he is an effective actor who is also cute, charming and bankable. His role as Anderton doesn't tax those abilities in any way. Max Von Sydow is the slightly scary Old Testament father figure he established himself in even before "The Exorcist". To me, the most effective player in the cast is Colin Farrell. Given a smaller role with far less screen time than Cruise he still succeeds in making his character deep, complex, and far more dynamic than the leading man's, with better lines and sharper delivery.
The plot is certainly enough to keep you guessing, with enough twists and turns to throw most. The movie has one "discovery" and an attendant chase scene that does stretch credibility somewhat, but otherwise the plotting is coherent and relatively bulletproof. There are holes, but none large enough to spoil the movie.
As a vision of the future, "Minority Report" is chock-full of ideas. As a movie, or even as a cyberpunk thriller, it leaves a little to be desired. After the film you won't want to tear your eyes out, but you may feel a sense of disappointment that Spielberg, who has demonstrated time and again that he can be deeply insightful into the human condition, warn of the dangers of technology while showcasing its attractions, and deliver a wild ride, could not quite succeed in delivering all three at once in this movie.
So Bill was the inspiration behind "Unbreakable". Yes, it all makes sense now...
Besides, have you seen the price of modern progressive DVD players? I don't even want to think about what the first-adopter cost of equivalent units will be when HD-DVD comes out.
For data storage, this will be a godsend - and the prospect of a 1080i high-defintion movie on a single disk has me salivating.
The problem with the format, as I see it, is twofold:
- When can it be introduced? HD-DVDs for data can't be introduced soon enough - but the entertainment companies will logically want to wait until "standard" DVDs thoroughly saturate the market before introducing HD-DVD.
- Will the MPAA and its ilk keep their hands off it? With a good projector, screen and viewing environment 1080i will be within spitting distance of a true theatrical experience. Naturally, the MPAA will be terrified of this experience being compromised, and at the prospect of HD films being distributed on the web (on the other hand, the sheer file size of HD movie files might preclude that - I don't see cable companies increasing their user bandwidths anytime soon.)
When can it be expected? Most bets are on 2004 / 2005. Maybe they'll learn from the DVD-R / DVD+RW / DVD-RAM fiasco to stick to a common read-write standard, tho I wouldn't put money on it. If they do decide to fight, it might be 2006 before the standard is settled - which is a real long wait, in computer terms.Anyway, my $0.01 (the Canadian exchange rate sucks)
"Don't critisize. Create a better alternative."
This (in particular, speech processing) is the place. Other than improved graphics / simulation (which is mostly dependant on the video card, in any case), user-independant speech processing and AI are the only things I can think of that will need the processing power that is coming down the track.
This is somewhat off-topic, but it comes to mind every time someone mentions "3D-TV" - especially a proposal like this, where the marketing message is basically "convert your film/videotape to 3D!"
The problem, as I see it, is that we have developed a specific visual language for film over the last 100 years. Think of the last movie you saw, with its jump-cuts, zooms, pans whatever. Now think of the last 3D movie - or if not that, how holograms are used in Star Wars. The camera either doesn't move at all, or moves freely, like a flight sim. It doesn't jump around, and you tend to stay inside the same scene. While it's a very good point (as already mentioned) that 3D environments can cause simulator sickness (and not even those - my ex-wife used to get vertigo even watching long camera dolly shots in action films) think about how much more disorienting standard film techniques will be when applied to 3D movies.
That implies to me that when 3D does actually work for mass entertainment as a replacement for film and television they will be both immersive (the holograms are around you, rather than stuck in a corner of your room) and considerably slower-paced than modern cinema.