Integrated graphics are those that share system memory. Have a look at the technical specs for the low end Macbook. See the part where it says "NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory?"
Now take a look at the listing for the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. See the part where it says "NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics?" Note that the ONLY Macbooks with discrete graphics are some of the Macbook Pros (not all of them), which have BOTH integrated and discrete graphics.
Whoopsie. Might want to check your facts next time.
Actually, the more I think about it, the co-op patronage model might be a big hit. It would get people more involved with the production of their culture. Like the latest chart topping hit? I had a part in making that.
They are, but they don't HAVE to be. So far they're all iPhone clones, perhaps with a mediocre keyboard thrown in somewhere. The hardware is where anything review-worthy is going to be though. Even if it's just battery life.
Estimates are that the movie cost about $250 million to make, NOT 400 million, and well in line with the other big movies of the last couple of years. Toss some advertising on that pile. The glasses are cheap, probably worth about a nickel each. Plastic polaroid film is not expensive.
That's why it wasn't presented as a book. If you want to read a book, read a book. Movies are not books because of the visual effects. A plot is a nice bonus, but not required.
People always pan movies for relying too much on special effects. The point of a movie is visual effects. If you want to focus on a great story, read a book. It's great if you can put a good story with a good movie, but the story is not the focus of the medium.
Titanic, Dark Knight, Spiderman, Star Wars, Pirates, Jurassic Park, Transformers... all these have mediocre or classic plots. The Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies are all stories everyone knows very well from the books (Lord of the Rings in particular is a remake of a remake of a book that embodies some pretty classic archetypes). The Disney/Pixar movies are generally (not always) variations on classic stories.
The very successful movies seem to mostly take stories that everyone is familiar with and make them come alive. As far as I remember Jurassic Park didn't have a plot, but everyone I know who saw it in theatre remembers the moment they saw a believable dinosaur for the first time.
Most estimates put Avatar at around $250 million to make, about the same as the last Harry Potter and cheaper than the last Spiderman or Pirates of the Caribbean. Regular films these days (except romantic comedies) cost $100 million +, so you aren't going to make ten of them for $250 million. Sherlock Holmes, for example, cost about $90 million.
People watch old stories retold. They don't watch novel stories as much. We like our archetypes.
Actually, the Gaia concept in the latter part of the Foundation series (1982) is a fictionalization of the actual Gaia hypothesis, by James Lovelock (1960's). Asimov used the idea more than once (Nemesis, 1989). The Avatar Gaia is more similar to the original Lovelock Gaia than is Asimov's in that Cameron uses chemical/electrical connections between organisms instead of telepathy.
There were reasonably plausible mechanisms for pretty much everything that happened in the movie. The magic tree and the spirits of the ancestors might have just intervened, god-like, as they do in so many other movies, but Cameron and his writers actually bothered to provide a mechanism. All the native organisms on the planet have something like a nervous system, with external connections, and form a large scale meta-organism.
There's smaller-scale precedent for that kind of system here on Earth, from microorganisms that can exist independently or form colonies that you'd swear were multicellular organisms (such as slime molds) to your own body, which is composed of many cells, most of which are actually bacteria.
The science isn't half bad, for a movie. There was a pretty good writeup about the things they got right and the things they got wrong (they did put a lot of thought into the science). I thought it was on badastronomy.com but I can't find it now.
I was thinking more about what happens post-production. The model now is to fund a project, produce it, then flog the thing for as much money as you can possibly get. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of grant funded productions follow much the same model, do they not?
A proper patron system would have the patrons contributing mostly because they wanted to see something made (which is kind of the case with grants but definitely not the case with corporations) but more importantly, the people involved with the project would make money from creating art and not from selling it afterward.
So if you wanted to see Cameron make a new movie (say that one he calls Avatar that he's been pitching on his blog), you'd donate $5 (probably to be held in escrow). If enough people donated, he'd get to go ahead with production. When the movie was finished, everyone could see it or download it for the cost of running the theatre or providing the bandwidth. No need to worry about copyright, and (good) artists still have a way to make a living.
Midend laptops like (the lower) MacBooks. MacBook Pros have always had decent discrete graphics, which is one of the primary factors differentiating them from the cheaper Macbooks.
Maybe we need to go back to art's roots - a patron system. Except instead of a single rich guy to be your patron, you could have a legion of adoring fans who are all willing to give you $1 to finance your next album. Once it's finished, the music is released into the public domain.
If you were a decent act I don't think you'd have too much trouble getting fans to donate. And when you lost your touch you'd be retired.
It could be regression to the mean. You only start giant construction projects during a boom period, and when a boom regresses to the mean our growth-requiring economic theory calls it a recession.
"I'd say about 25% of us are enthusiastic about it. The other 75% are just spinning their wheels to show their parents or friends that they are busy, or simply disinterested pre-med students"
It gets better in grad school. Problem is, stats show that non-US students are dramatically more likely to go on to do an advanced degree than are US students.
Yeah, that was weird. Canadian universities offer free tuition to faculty's children. I guess giving away $50,000 / year is a little harder than $3500.
What? Are you suggesting that my bank's website should verify whether I'm connecting over wifi vs. a wired connection, or a hub vs. a switch, etc. THEN decide whether to use SSL or not? Or perhaps I should have to remember to click a button when I'm on a potentially eavesdroppable connection?
SSL takes the right approach - if the information should be secure then encrypt it, regardless of whether it might possibly be somewhat secure by other means.
As far as the certificate infrastructure is set up, I'd go with an SSH-type system where everyone generates their own keys and the first time you connect you carefully confirm you connected to what you wanted to, but the central signing authority model does have some advantages, as well as disadvantages.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and the NY Times said 500 million. A number they made up, and it seems they did their math wrong anyway.
It seems pretty well accepted that actual cost of making the movie was about 230-250 million, which is cheaper than several other blockbusters of the last few years.
The people who actually paid for it (and ought to know) appear to think they only spent 237 milliion on it.
Perhaps you should try to keep up.
Integrated graphics are those that share system memory. Have a look at the technical specs for the low end Macbook. See the part where it says "NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory?"
Now take a look at the listing for the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. See the part where it says "NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics?" Note that the ONLY Macbooks with discrete graphics are some of the Macbook Pros (not all of them), which have BOTH integrated and discrete graphics.
Whoopsie. Might want to check your facts next time.
Actually, the more I think about it, the co-op patronage model might be a big hit. It would get people more involved with the production of their culture. Like the latest chart topping hit? I had a part in making that.
They are, but they don't HAVE to be. So far they're all iPhone clones, perhaps with a mediocre keyboard thrown in somewhere. The hardware is where anything review-worthy is going to be though. Even if it's just battery life.
Estimates are that the movie cost about $250 million to make, NOT 400 million, and well in line with the other big movies of the last couple of years. Toss some advertising on that pile. The glasses are cheap, probably worth about a nickel each. Plastic polaroid film is not expensive.
The Truman show was a rehash of various ideas that had been in books for a long time.
"Were this story presented as a book"
That's why it wasn't presented as a book. If you want to read a book, read a book. Movies are not books because of the visual effects. A plot is a nice bonus, but not required.
People always pan movies for relying too much on special effects. The point of a movie is visual effects. If you want to focus on a great story, read a book. It's great if you can put a good story with a good movie, but the story is not the focus of the medium.
Take a look at the top grossing movies of all time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films.
Titanic, Dark Knight, Spiderman, Star Wars, Pirates, Jurassic Park, Transformers... all these have mediocre or classic plots. The Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies are all stories everyone knows very well from the books (Lord of the Rings in particular is a remake of a remake of a book that embodies some pretty classic archetypes). The Disney/Pixar movies are generally (not always) variations on classic stories.
The very successful movies seem to mostly take stories that everyone is familiar with and make them come alive. As far as I remember Jurassic Park didn't have a plot, but everyone I know who saw it in theatre remembers the moment they saw a believable dinosaur for the first time.
Most estimates put Avatar at around $250 million to make, about the same as the last Harry Potter and cheaper than the last Spiderman or Pirates of the Caribbean. Regular films these days (except romantic comedies) cost $100 million +, so you aren't going to make ten of them for $250 million. Sherlock Holmes, for example, cost about $90 million.
People watch old stories retold. They don't watch novel stories as much. We like our archetypes.
It's a tribute. Those in the know are supposed to appreciate the in joke and those who aren't think it's the 121st element or something.
Yes, scads of habitable planets, from the interior to the periphery of a solar system. Very realistic, that.
Actually, the Gaia concept in the latter part of the Foundation series (1982) is a fictionalization of the actual Gaia hypothesis, by James Lovelock (1960's). Asimov used the idea more than once (Nemesis, 1989). The Avatar Gaia is more similar to the original Lovelock Gaia than is Asimov's in that Cameron uses chemical/electrical connections between organisms instead of telepathy.
There were reasonably plausible mechanisms for pretty much everything that happened in the movie. The magic tree and the spirits of the ancestors might have just intervened, god-like, as they do in so many other movies, but Cameron and his writers actually bothered to provide a mechanism. All the native organisms on the planet have something like a nervous system, with external connections, and form a large scale meta-organism.
There's smaller-scale precedent for that kind of system here on Earth, from microorganisms that can exist independently or form colonies that you'd swear were multicellular organisms (such as slime molds) to your own body, which is composed of many cells, most of which are actually bacteria.
The science isn't half bad, for a movie. There was a pretty good writeup about the things they got right and the things they got wrong (they did put a lot of thought into the science). I thought it was on badastronomy.com but I can't find it now.
I was thinking more about what happens post-production. The model now is to fund a project, produce it, then flog the thing for as much money as you can possibly get. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of grant funded productions follow much the same model, do they not?
A proper patron system would have the patrons contributing mostly because they wanted to see something made (which is kind of the case with grants but definitely not the case with corporations) but more importantly, the people involved with the project would make money from creating art and not from selling it afterward.
So if you wanted to see Cameron make a new movie (say that one he calls Avatar that he's been pitching on his blog), you'd donate $5 (probably to be held in escrow). If enough people donated, he'd get to go ahead with production. When the movie was finished, everyone could see it or download it for the cost of running the theatre or providing the bandwidth. No need to worry about copyright, and (good) artists still have a way to make a living.
Less space too. Try getting one of those things to accurately store more than a few bytes.
Two computers running Linux then. Even better, two notebook computers running Linux.
The point is, it's the hardware that distinguishes (or could distinguish) two Android phones.
Midend laptops like (the lower) MacBooks. MacBook Pros have always had decent discrete graphics, which is one of the primary factors differentiating them from the cheaper Macbooks.
"but in big numbers we could be considered gadgets"
Crappy battery life (have to be charged three times a day), won't fit in a pocket, crash a lot, requires constant maintenance, no wifi.
Maybe we need to go back to art's roots - a patron system. Except instead of a single rich guy to be your patron, you could have a legion of adoring fans who are all willing to give you $1 to finance your next album. Once it's finished, the music is released into the public domain.
If you were a decent act I don't think you'd have too much trouble getting fans to donate. And when you lost your touch you'd be retired.
"This dude is the poster boy for what everyone hated about the dotcom era - a lot of hype and no substance."
You say that like it ended with the dotcom era.
It could be regression to the mean. You only start giant construction projects during a boom period, and when a boom regresses to the mean our growth-requiring economic theory calls it a recession.
"I'd say about 25% of us are enthusiastic about it. The other 75% are just spinning their wheels to show their parents or friends that they are busy, or simply disinterested pre-med students"
It gets better in grad school. Problem is, stats show that non-US students are dramatically more likely to go on to do an advanced degree than are US students.
Yeah, that was weird. Canadian universities offer free tuition to faculty's children. I guess giving away $50,000 / year is a little harder than $3500.
You can already have a cluster the size of your wallet, with the keyboard, monitor, packaging, cooling apparatus, interconnects, etc. dwarfing it.
What? Are you suggesting that my bank's website should verify whether I'm connecting over wifi vs. a wired connection, or a hub vs. a switch, etc. THEN decide whether to use SSL or not? Or perhaps I should have to remember to click a button when I'm on a potentially eavesdroppable connection?
SSL takes the right approach - if the information should be secure then encrypt it, regardless of whether it might possibly be somewhat secure by other means.
As far as the certificate infrastructure is set up, I'd go with an SSH-type system where everyone generates their own keys and the first time you connect you carefully confirm you connected to what you wanted to, but the central signing authority model does have some advantages, as well as disadvantages.