Re:Simple reason for the "bomb": It was too early
on
The Story of Tron
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Disney did the Black Hole 2 years earlier, and in the 70s did a number of sci-fi films (some funny, some not - Escape/Return to Witch Mountain, Cat from Outer Space) so they'd already established that they could do serious, if teen-oriented, scifi. Hell, Disney was on the cutting edge of the "epic" film back in the 60s with 20,000 Leagues and a few others.
I agree the timing was just a little early. We needed Wargames *first*. Show us what happens outside the computer world when a modern computer "thinks", then the audience might be ready for what might happen inside that world.
Personally, I love Tron, always did, its a reason I'm in software now. But among this crowd, I know i'm an apologist so I'm not going to bother to try to justify it.
And box-office flop or not, its more than in the black with HBO and home-video sales, like every disney "flop". People FAR too often complain about Disney making box office flops (about half of their animated feature canon didn't make a profit in the box office, including Fantasia, Pinnochio, Bambi, Alice in Wonderland, and the well-known flops of the 90s-00s), but over time, the films have serious legs in the home video market and continue to be watched today, which is not something you can say for many at-the-time blockbusters.
Jim Henson's works are the same way (Dark Crystal, Labyrinth). As is Princess Bride, and other classics in hindsight like Wizard of Oz.
Its like comparing Salieri to Mozart. Salieri was the more popular AT THE TIME, especially his operas (AFAIK, he never had a flop, Mozart had 2). But its Mozart we listen to today.
Only Hollywood judges quality by its at the moment popularity. The real judgement happens far later, when you realize that 25 years on people ARE STILL WATCHING IT (crappy script and all), which can't be said for MOST films from 1981-1982.
I'll take Cringely's take on it: people overestimate change in the short term and underestimate change in the long term.
thinking there's "no big thing" coming totally misses the fact that *most* people never saw the "next big thing" except those actually making it.
There will be a next big thing, and like every "next big thing", nobody will see it coming. That's the whole point. If you can see the next big thing, YOU go make it.
jackass has no imagination left.
about all I can say about "next big things" is that there are so many developers out there that it can be easily cloned within a matter of days, open-source or not.
The making of on the DVD Walking with [Prehistoric] Beasts for the BBC showed the evidence that Austrolopithacines were hunted by dinofelis and other cats (sabretooth and not) 3.4 million years ago. The markings on the human skulls, when put next to the cat skulls, are unmistakably teeth.
my linux box ripped through sony's "protection" as if it wasn't there. cdrdao showed exactly where the data tracks were and easily allowed me to make a copy with no filesystem. their protection system was based entirely on user ignorance, and the trouble is those who actually rip their own cds and make their own backups (as i do, since my car has a knack for eating cds) aren't ignorant.
once again, trying to get machines to "think"
on
Polite Cell Phones
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
how would such stuff know that something is out of copyright? does it make the assumption of 75 years past author's death (or whatever the corporate policy is these days) and thus come out wrong the next time Disney gets Congress to pass the Sonny Bono Memorial Copyright Extention Act #2?
does it mean that all software has to connect to some copyright database (that doesn't exist) to determine the status of things?
which would mean he learned a different lesson "in college" than i did, 'cause i got fired from an on-campus job when i "statee my heartfelt and sincere opinion, backed up with factual evidence" (translation: opened my big mouth) to the wrong person...
excuse me mr. AC, but even from 4.0 to 4.1 to 4.2 (and on) the changes made, mostly security related, that have broken my (completely standards compliant) code.
To make my moon contradiction a little more clear:
the tides show that the moon seems to exert a force on the water. does this mean it exerts a force on the earth? possibly, but in reality not.
but up until Newton, that was the prevailing view. "gravity" meant that all things exerted a force and the motions of things were the result of these forces colliding and cancelling each other out. the moon had a pull, the earth had a pull, the earth's pull was bigger. this is how any "layman" might see things even today.
it is not what is meant by *mutual* attraction. mutual attraction means that both objects are pulling each other with the same force, the force we now call Gravity. That is not an intuitive thing; it took a LOT of mathematical derivation to prove (and the Tides have nothing to do with it).
The water in the tides moves towards the moon because the force of attraction between the two has less mass to move with the water than it does with the moon, and that is not intuitive or obvious when you look at the tides. it *looks* like the moon pulls the water.
of course, all this may be moot, as the original poster who "had troubles with the understanding of the theory of gravity" may be talking about the modern particles physics theories of *why* mass has this property of mutual attraction, with its gravitons and/or the possible ties to e-m theory, rather than the simple (by comparison) mathematical abstractions of Newton and Einstein.
please don't make the same mistake as the person i replied to in thinking this is MY view. I know physics, i know gravity, i know the numbers, i've even, for the hell of it, derived Keplers 3rd law constant by inserting the mass of the sun into Newton's equation.
the theory of mutual attraction is a *mathematical* abstraction, it is a concept not readily grasped just by looking up at the sky. nobody goes "i can see it now" after looking at Newton's formula. it was derived from thousands of observations taken over 2000 years from Ptolemy to Brahe and beyond, combined with the papers of Kepler and Galileo, and in Newton's case a hell of a lot of free time thanks to a plague.
one can picture a planet in orbit as a kind of tether, where without the tether the ball goes straight but with the tether the ball curves to the center, and then think only the *big* object is responsible for that tether, rather easily...until you look at big objects working with each other, and that requires looking at the numbers. it is NOT something you just "see". learn the numbers or accept that its "what the scientists say" and trust that things like Apollo show that they're right.
that is why it is a theory that people don't understand or "believe". but i never said i didn't understand it.
finally, the boat and the Iowa will only orbit each other if one or the other are already in motion when they came within each others' fields. again, "in the absense of other forces or inertias". If both are placed next to each other with no other motions, they will collide.
and the tides do not demonstrate mutual attraction -- they don't, by simple observation of an amature, demostrate that the moon and the earth are mutually pulling at each other or that the water is pulling the moon.
all the tides demonstrate is that the moon is pulling on the water. that is a fact of gravity, not the theory
this does not demonstrate the theory of gravity which states that there is a *mutual* attraction.
i was summarizing the popular view, not my own. I was a physics major in college; I know what the hell gravity is. if you read what i wrote, i had the phrase in the absense of other forces or inertias, which is exactly what you assume i didn't say.
actually, i can understand his "gravity" problem, because gravity as a fact is we fall towards the earth, but gravity as a theory is that of mutual attraction, that in the absense of other forces and inertias, two objects will pull toward each other, relative to their masses, rather than one pulling the other. Looking at just what happens on this planet, there's no support for such a concept.
Of course, that just means this "non-believer" hasn't looked at anything more than what's on this planet. The facts that support the modern theory of gravity are out there, in space, and not a single observation has put the Newton-Einstein model at risk. In fact, many predictions of Einstein's on this have been demonstrated after his death.
The fact that he, and the BBC, are calling it "believe in" really tells me that it was a loaded question and loaded survey. Science isn't something someone has to "believe" in. Either one accepts a scientific theory as best supporting the factual evidence, or one doesn't. There's nothing to "believe", only accept or reject.
"Believe" is a loaded term. As Dogma pointed out, people can change an idea, but they won't change a belief.
who the hell marked that as "troll" ??? -- simply saying that Ruby is not a silver bullet or that it won't have the same aging problems as every other language in software HISTORY hardly qualifies as "trolling".
Ruby has yet to show itself to me as "something better". it simply "something else". Python was "something better" and has managed to still be too damn much trouble every time I say "i'm going to do this project in python so i can learn the damn language".
and go back and read my post: even if i wanted to switch, i might not be able to because my webhost company may not support the language (though with mine, i could probably talk them into it if i felt like it), and that doesn't solve the REAL problem of PHP (upgrades break backwards compatibility), it merely sidesteps it by changing dependencies.
There is nothing in Ruby so far that has shown me that it won't be doing exactly the same thing of breaking backwards compatibility ever major upgrade the way php has.
its the lesser-known things, the ones deprecated for "security" or whatever reasons, that are the problems, like when PHP got rid of global forms variables. every php upgrade i've endured has changed some semi-unspoken rule about something that has broken my code until i get around to fixing it. php5 may be the easiest upgrade, or may be the worst, but in any case, it is time that an ISP/web-hosting companies customers (including myself) have to plan for and for several sites, the demand is the opposite: we don't have time to plan for it, so please don't upgrade.
php's reputation for screwing backwards compatibility is finally betraying them.
the fact that because of all of the php-4 compliant code that it breaks, few ISPs doing web hosting services are in any hurry to upgrade because too many customers simply don't have the time to rewrite their applications to be compliant with php-5, much less take advantage of any or all of the new features.
this is hitting me hard as i'm trying to put together an xml-intensive app and am stuck using home-grown open-source XML parsing and generating packages, mostly unfinished, that won't be finished because they've been superseeded by the php5 libraries that i can't use yet.
I don't want The Washington Post headlines in my "inbox" -- that's for my portal/home page.
I don't want personal blog entries from my friends in my "inbox" as I get too much email as it is. Those are aggregated into a single page via LiveJournal's syndication support, mixed in with my friends already on LJ so I don't have to pull in their RSS feeds.
I don't want the "table of contents" feed from IBM Developerworks in an "inbox" - that's a place where LiveBookmarks works best. ` Occasionally-updating blog entries like political columns and science news (and anti-ID stories/rants) are what generally gets the Thunderbird treatment (although I also get those in my livejournal friends listing).
Each feed has a different purpose, so each goes in the specific place where its most usable.
don't visit the iTunes store. i don't. i merely use iTunes to rip my cd's 'cause its reliable, and has a decent GUI for fixing id3 tags set by crappy entries in cddb.
are there really 5000 "reviewers" in the UK to start with? I didn't think there were *that* many newspapers left on the planet, much less great britain.
Eno and Fripp worked together LONG before Eno worked with U2. They were on the same record label, EG (Fripp via King Crimson, Eno in Roxy Music with Brian Ferry) and were good friends during the mid 70s prior to Fripp leaving the music industry post-74-Crimson. The album "No Pussyfooting" was the first in the experiments that would become Frippertronics, and then Soundscapes when he went all-digital in the late 80s and early 90s.
just as some islands have created giants, other islands have shown a trend to producing pygmies, particularly in the elephant family (mammoths found off the coast of north america) and in the hominids (modern pygmies and homo floresiensis).
more importantly, the Judge wrote this decision with the inevitable Kansas case in mind. he makes it very clear in his findings that "science can not be defined differently" (pg 70) from a definition based on "the scientific method" (pg 65) (i.e., methodological naturalism and the emphasis on physical evidence and causality).
Slashdot Mirror
Disney did the Black Hole 2 years earlier, and in the 70s did a number of sci-fi films (some funny, some not - Escape/Return to Witch Mountain, Cat from Outer Space) so they'd already established that they could do serious, if teen-oriented, scifi. Hell, Disney was on the cutting edge of the "epic" film back in the 60s with 20,000 Leagues and a few others.
I agree the timing was just a little early. We needed Wargames *first*. Show us what happens outside the computer world when a modern computer "thinks", then the audience might be ready for what might happen inside that world.
Personally, I love Tron, always did, its a reason I'm in software now. But among this crowd, I know i'm an apologist so I'm not going to bother to try to justify it.
And box-office flop or not, its more than in the black with HBO and home-video sales, like every disney "flop". People FAR too often complain about Disney making box office flops (about half of their animated feature canon didn't make a profit in the box office, including Fantasia, Pinnochio, Bambi, Alice in Wonderland, and the well-known flops of the 90s-00s), but over time, the films have serious legs in the home video market and continue to be watched today, which is not something you can say for many at-the-time blockbusters.
Jim Henson's works are the same way (Dark Crystal, Labyrinth). As is Princess Bride, and other classics in hindsight like Wizard of Oz.
Its like comparing Salieri to Mozart. Salieri was the more popular AT THE TIME, especially his operas (AFAIK, he never had a flop, Mozart had 2). But its Mozart we listen to today.
Only Hollywood judges quality by its at the moment popularity. The real judgement happens far later, when you realize that 25 years on people ARE STILL WATCHING IT (crappy script and all), which can't be said for MOST films from 1981-1982.
I'll take Cringely's take on it: people overestimate change in the short term and underestimate change in the long term.
thinking there's "no big thing" coming totally misses the fact that *most* people never saw the "next big thing" except those actually making it.
There will be a next big thing, and like every "next big thing", nobody will see it coming. That's the whole point. If you can see the next big thing, YOU go make it.
jackass has no imagination left.
about all I can say about "next big things" is that there are so many developers out there that it can be easily cloned within a matter of days, open-source or not.
The making of on the DVD Walking with [Prehistoric] Beasts for the BBC showed the evidence that Austrolopithacines were hunted by dinofelis and other cats (sabretooth and not) 3.4 million years ago. The markings on the human skulls, when put next to the cat skulls, are unmistakably teeth.
my spelling sucked long before i got email access...all email and bitnet (pre-AIM) did was get rid of my capitals and punctiation...
my linux box ripped through sony's "protection" as if it wasn't there. cdrdao showed exactly where the data tracks were and easily allowed me to make a copy with no filesystem. their protection system was based entirely on user ignorance, and the trouble is those who actually rip their own cds and make their own backups (as i do, since my car has a knack for eating cds) aren't ignorant.
since people obviously don't anymore...
how would such stuff know that something is out of copyright? does it make the assumption of 75 years past author's death (or whatever the corporate policy is these days) and thus come out wrong the next time Disney gets Congress to pass the Sonny Bono Memorial Copyright Extention Act #2?
does it mean that all software has to connect to some copyright database (that doesn't exist) to determine the status of things?
its an impossible problem.
which would mean he learned a different lesson "in college" than i did, 'cause i got fired from an on-campus job when i "statee my heartfelt and sincere opinion, backed up with factual evidence" (translation: opened my big mouth) to the wrong person...
excuse me mr. AC, but even from 4.0 to 4.1 to 4.2 (and on) the changes made, mostly security related, that have broken my (completely standards compliant) code.
To make my moon contradiction a little more clear:
the tides show that the moon seems to exert a force on the water. does this mean it exerts a force on the earth? possibly, but in reality not.
but up until Newton, that was the prevailing view. "gravity" meant that all things exerted a force and the motions of things were the result of these forces colliding and cancelling each other out. the moon had a pull, the earth had a pull, the earth's pull was bigger. this is how any "layman" might see things even today.
it is not what is meant by *mutual* attraction. mutual attraction means that both objects are pulling each other with the same force, the force we now call Gravity. That is not an intuitive thing; it took a LOT of mathematical derivation to prove (and the Tides have nothing to do with it).
The water in the tides moves towards the moon because the force of attraction between the two has less mass to move with the water than it does with the moon, and that is not intuitive or obvious when you look at the tides. it *looks* like the moon pulls the water.
of course, all this may be moot, as the original poster who "had troubles with the understanding of the theory of gravity" may be talking about the modern particles physics theories of *why* mass has this property of mutual attraction, with its gravitons and/or the possible ties to e-m theory, rather than the simple (by comparison) mathematical abstractions of Newton and Einstein.
please don't make the same mistake as the person i replied to in thinking this is MY view. I know physics, i know gravity, i know the numbers, i've even, for the hell of it, derived Keplers 3rd law constant by inserting the mass of the sun into Newton's equation.
the theory of mutual attraction is a *mathematical* abstraction, it is a concept not readily grasped just by looking up at the sky. nobody goes "i can see it now" after looking at Newton's formula. it was derived from thousands of observations taken over 2000 years from Ptolemy to Brahe and beyond, combined with the papers of Kepler and Galileo, and in Newton's case a hell of a lot of free time thanks to a plague.
one can picture a planet in orbit as a kind of tether, where without the tether the ball goes straight but with the tether the ball curves to the center, and then think only the *big* object is responsible for that tether, rather easily...until you look at big objects working with each other, and that requires looking at the numbers. it is NOT something you just "see". learn the numbers or accept that its "what the scientists say" and trust that things like Apollo show that they're right.
that is why it is a theory that people don't understand or "believe". but i never said i didn't understand it.
finally, the boat and the Iowa will only orbit each other if one or the other are already in motion when they came within each others' fields. again, "in the absense of other forces or inertias". If both are placed next to each other with no other motions, they will collide.
and the tides do not demonstrate mutual attraction -- they don't, by simple observation of an amature, demostrate that the moon and the earth are mutually pulling at each other or that the water is pulling the moon.
all the tides demonstrate is that the moon is pulling on the water. that is a fact of gravity, not the theory
this does not demonstrate the theory of gravity which states that there is a *mutual* attraction.
i was summarizing the popular view, not my own. I was a physics major in college; I know what the hell gravity is. if you read what i wrote, i had the phrase in the absense of other forces or inertias, which is exactly what you assume i didn't say.
actually, i can understand his "gravity" problem, because gravity as a fact is we fall towards the earth, but gravity as a theory is that of mutual attraction, that in the absense of other forces and inertias, two objects will pull toward each other, relative to their masses, rather than one pulling the other. Looking at just what happens on this planet, there's no support for such a concept.
Of course, that just means this "non-believer" hasn't looked at anything more than what's on this planet. The facts that support the modern theory of gravity are out there, in space, and not a single observation has put the Newton-Einstein model at risk. In fact, many predictions of Einstein's on this have been demonstrated after his death.
The fact that he, and the BBC, are calling it "believe in" really tells me that it was a loaded question and loaded survey. Science isn't something someone has to "believe" in. Either one accepts a scientific theory as best supporting the factual evidence, or one doesn't. There's nothing to "believe", only accept or reject.
"Believe" is a loaded term. As Dogma pointed out, people can change an idea, but they won't change a belief.
who the hell marked that as "troll" ??? -- simply saying that Ruby is not a silver bullet or that it won't have the same aging problems as every other language in software HISTORY hardly qualifies as "trolling".
Ruby has yet to show itself to me as "something better". it simply "something else". Python was "something better" and has managed to still be too damn much trouble every time I say "i'm going to do this project in python so i can learn the damn language".
and go back and read my post: even if i wanted to switch, i might not be able to because my webhost company may not support the language (though with mine, i could probably talk them into it if i felt like it), and that doesn't solve the REAL problem of PHP (upgrades break backwards compatibility), it merely sidesteps it by changing dependencies.
There is nothing in Ruby so far that has shown me that it won't be doing exactly the same thing of breaking backwards compatibility ever major upgrade the way php has.
its the lesser-known things, the ones deprecated for "security" or whatever reasons, that are the problems, like when PHP got rid of global forms variables. every php upgrade i've endured has changed some semi-unspoken rule about something that has broken my code until i get around to fixing it. php5 may be the easiest upgrade, or may be the worst, but in any case, it is time that an ISP/web-hosting companies customers (including myself) have to plan for and for several sites, the demand is the opposite: we don't have time to plan for it, so please don't upgrade.
php's reputation for screwing backwards compatibility is finally betraying them.
the fact that because of all of the php-4 compliant code that it breaks, few ISPs doing web hosting services are in any hurry to upgrade because too many customers simply don't have the time to rewrite their applications to be compliant with php-5, much less take advantage of any or all of the new features.
this is hitting me hard as i'm trying to put together an xml-intensive app and am stuck using home-grown open-source XML parsing and generating packages, mostly unfinished, that won't be finished because they've been superseeded by the php5 libraries that i can't use yet.
different RSS readers for different RSS feeds.
I don't want The Washington Post headlines in my "inbox" -- that's for my portal/home page.
I don't want personal blog entries from my friends in my "inbox" as I get too much email as it is. Those are aggregated into a single page via LiveJournal's syndication support, mixed in with my friends already on LJ so I don't have to pull in their RSS feeds.
I don't want the "table of contents" feed from IBM Developerworks in an "inbox" - that's a place where LiveBookmarks works best.
`
Occasionally-updating blog entries like political columns and science news (and anti-ID stories/rants) are what generally gets the Thunderbird treatment (although I also get those in my livejournal friends listing).
Each feed has a different purpose, so each goes in the specific place where its most usable.
don't visit the iTunes store. i don't. i merely use iTunes to rip my cd's 'cause its reliable, and has a decent GUI for fixing id3 tags set by crappy entries in cddb.
are there really 5000 "reviewers" in the UK to start with? I didn't think there were *that* many newspapers left on the planet, much less great britain.
Eno and Fripp worked together LONG before Eno worked with U2. They were on the same record label, EG (Fripp via King Crimson, Eno in Roxy Music with Brian Ferry) and were good friends during the mid 70s prior to Fripp leaving the music industry post-74-Crimson. The album "No Pussyfooting" was the first in the experiments that would become Frippertronics, and then Soundscapes when he went all-digital in the late 80s and early 90s.
just as some islands have created giants, other islands have shown a trend to producing pygmies, particularly in the elephant family (mammoths found off the coast of north america) and in the hominids (modern pygmies and homo floresiensis).
more importantly, the Judge wrote this decision with the inevitable Kansas case in mind. he makes it very clear in his findings that "science can not be defined differently" (pg 70) from a definition based on "the scientific method" (pg 65) (i.e., methodological naturalism and the emphasis on physical evidence and causality).