Sigh. You were doing so well, until the very end. The ipad has competitors that are "good enough" right now. Just not, as it happens from Rim. (Or any scrapped-together me-too device called "Surface".) But to Apple fanatics, no competitor will ever be good enough, simply because, as a competitor, it lacks the fruit logo. With Apple fans, there isn't any point in discussing a competitor that is "good enough", because nothing could possibly be. It's a null exercise.
That a single company can't produce a popular device in a very diverse environment, doesn't mean that any of the other participants are "all conquering".
Get involved with an open source project. Go for fame rather than money. When you're looking for a job or internship, it certainly can't hurt for you to have your name attached to a few successful projects.
The situations are not exactly parallel, but after dot com bust, I was out of work for two years. I spent that time writing a CMS and putting together an internet hosting service -- small potatoes, maxed out at ten clients -- got a backpack, stuffed it with a good selection of tools and did piecemeal small business system and network support. When the economy improved and companies started interviewing again, I could show that I hadn't spent two years on the couch watching the sci-fi channel -- I had actually accomplished something, because "I feel the need to be useful". It put me ahead of the pack.
Showing commitment to your vocation, even (especially?) when you're not getting paid to do so, may put you ahead of the pack at a crucial time.
Trivial. Primary reason: It has an attached keyboard.
Fail, the keyboard is attachable, you can use it perfectly fine without a keyboard, just like you can attach a keyboard to an iPad.
"use it fine" in this case stipulates either a third-party application that is touch-centric, or doing trivial things with the OS-included utilities like turning your music on and off.
The OS is most definitely not a tablet OS
Fail again, unless of course you can define what is and is not a tablet OS, but i bet you'll end up proving Android is not a tablet OS in the process. Explain how the WoA Surface is not a tablet but devices like the iPad and Asus Transformer are tablets.
With both Android and IOS, you can get serious work done without keyboard and mouse, because in both cases the environment was designed from the ground up to be touch-centric. Windows is a KVM operating system with a few touch features. Due to policies within Microsoft, it can not be anything else. The designers *know* that you can do casual stuff on the touch screen but for anything serious you will need a keyboard and some kind of pointing device. Hence, designing the hardware to make that possible. The fact that Microsoft designed their own device that sells with a keyboard included demonstrates that they believe it's necessary. They are trying to redefine "tablet" as a netbook with a touchscreen. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. And it looks like the media is letting them get away with it.
The problem with TNG is that there were so many good episodes... and so many mediocre episodes. And several that started plot lines that were never completed.
I always considered "The Best of Both Worlds" to be a three-parter, including the episode "Family". That might be a good place to start.
Other interesting parings might be "the trouble with tribbles" followed by "more tribbles, more troubles", and "mirror, mirror", "the tholian web", and "through a mirror, darkly".
"Yesterday's Enterprise" was another really good episode.
As far as the movies are concerned, you can easily skip 1, 5, 9 and 10
Norton is great. The Stars Are Ours was the first novel I read by her, in grade school, and it affected me deeply. A lot of her novels appear to take place in the same universe -- one rich with the detritus of dead civilizations and made dangerous by partially-functioning alien technology. Even the time travel stories appear to share the same aliens and a lot of the same technology as the later stories.
I remember being really excited when I heard The Beast Master had been optioned as a movie... Ur... that didn't turn out well. Norton deserved better.
I read Storm Over Warlock to my daughter when she was about eleven. She loved it. We tried to get through the sequel Assignment in Otherwhere, but she was bored by it. Not every Norton novel is a gem, but enough are that they're worth looking for.
I swear to you -- if Paramount had any sense at all, they'd acquire the rights for Star Rangers and turn it into a series set in the far future of the Star Trek Federation -- where civilization has broken down, the origin of man has been forgotten, and a few broken down ships still maintain patrols out of a sense of duty. It would be fascinating, unlike anything else that's ever been on television, and (in my opinion) wildly popular.
I started reading to my daughter when she was less than two years old. I don't know if she was actually following the story, but she seemed to like hearing my voice.
When she was about seven or eight, I started her with the Heinlein juveniles. She *really* enjoyed Have Space Suit, Will Travel and Red Planet. She thought Podkayne of Mars was funny and sad, but a very good story. The version I had was the one with both endings -- the original and the softened ending Heinlein was asked by his publisher to write. She said she preferred the original, sadder ending. When she was nine or ten I took a chance and read her The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, pointing out that there was a connection to The Rolling Stones. She loved it. She liked the character of Mike the computer so much that I was required to very cautiously read to her -- edited on the fly -- The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
I read to her the funnier parts of Hogfather, and she insisted on hearing the entire novel. We went on to Thief of Time (because she loved the Susan character), then backfilled with Mort and Soul Music, and eventually read every single Discworld novel, at her request. She likes that I do the voices. (The voice of Death hurts my throat.)
I read her L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time, and that led to all the Murray stories, except Many Waters, which bored her, and A House Like a Lotus, which I couldn't bring myself to read to her because of the attempted rape scene that was central to the story. (She can read it on her own, now that she's a teenager.)
Sadly, she lost interested in our nightly reading sessions about halfway through junior high, and now that she's graduated high school those days are probably over for good. My recommendation is just to start with a juvenile you really enjoyed as a kid, something you can read with enthusiasm, and see if it grabs him.
Asimov's adult fiction is well written, scientifically accurate, and fairly dry. But Asimov lived another life, as author "Paul French", when he wrote the juvenile "Lucky Starr" series. They're quite well written space adventure, and will easily hold the attention of an eight year old. The first book is "David Starr, Space Ranger".
Trivial. Primary reason: It has an attached keyboard.
If anyone felt the need to continue, one might also say: The *reason* it has an attached keyboard, is that it runs Windows, which is a KVM-based operating system which recently in its life has had a few touch screen gestures wedged in. The OS is most definitely not a tablet OS, and Microsoft knows this, hence the keyboard, and I'm willing to bet, some kind of pointing device. They're attempting to redefine "tablet" as a netbook with a touch screen. And as with anything Microsoft does, there will be people who buy into it.
> 'And that could put free software for end users very much at risk.'
*if* you choose to buy the netbook (it's not really a tablet) that Microsoft has rebranded "surface". At this time I don't see any reason to do that. The people who jump in pretty much deserve whatever they get.
Don't be obtuse. That's a paraphrase of "the best gun is the one you have on you", referring to having a less capable device actually on your person being better than having a more capable device at home. I do 24 hour on-call, as do a lot of Slashdot participants, and I suspect *they* knew what I meant.
I sometimes use Logmein Ignition to do casual administration rather than carry the laptop everywhere I go. A 7 inch tablet is just about enough screen area to do serious admin, and it's still small enough to fit in my pocket.
I haven't bought a tablet yet because I have been waiting for something like this. 7 inches because it will be easy to carry, (the only useful computer is one you have with you) and from a source where I have a chance in hell of ever seeing an OS update. I thought the Samsung Galaxy 7 was my device, but negative experiences with the first Galaxy phone decided me against it.
Which is actually a brilliant move on their part. It mitigates the lack of a usable touch-only interface. One of the ways to truly merge the tablet and desktop environments into a single code base is to make tablets more like desktops -- which means including a proper keyboard and presumably some kind of pointing device (so you have analog to left and right mouse buttons). The closer you can get the tablet hardware to work like desktop hardware, the less coding you have to do to support tablets. It's a matter of managing consumer expectations.
We own a tablet running Win 7 Pro, and tablet support is painful at best. The keyboard often covers where you're trying to type when it pops up, and the gestures to imitate left and right mouse buttons are arcane. It's a touch interface layer trying to imitate keyboard/mouse instead of an OS built from the ground up to support touch-only. It became clear early on that Windows tablets would only be useable for anything more than casual use with a separate keyboard and mouse. Looks like someone at Microsoft has come to the same conclusion.
So just as notebooks had to grow from the low power low resource devices into higher cost, low end laptops in order to to be shipped with Windows, so do tablets have to grow a keyboard appendage in order to be shipped with Windows. And some people will just accept that.
I wonder if a case could be made that cognitive dissonance experienced at a young age has prevented the development of proper reasoning skills. If you're told repeatedly that something is true that you can see is false, (or vice-versa) or told at a young age that something did not happen when you have direct experience that it did, the experience does strange things to your brain.
I still think you are underestimating how many crap low budget movies are made, and I am also a bit loathe to accept a $20 million movie as "low budget".
E.g. have you watched Titanic II? That certainly qualifies but it's crap. The four Tremors movies? Perhaps the first one is a stretch at $11 million, but the others certainly qualify. I found those great, but hardly an epitome of wonderful acting.
IMDB has 7,014 feature films from 2010 (I avoided 2011 as some of them weren't actually released yet). Most of them must be low budget; there just isn't enough money in the industry for even a thousand $20M+ movies a year. Half of them don't even have a rating listed in the overview.
My view is still the same: There are many more excellent low budget movies than there are excellent high budget movies, but it is because there are so many more low budget movies than high budget movies.
Are you kidding? All of the Tremors movies were great. (The fourth one less so.) They were edgy and quirky and had interesting characters. The series also had its moments, and didn't deserve to be canceled after only one season.
In terms of raw numbers you are of course correct, but I submit that the percentage is higher also, for the reasons I have cited.
Where this falls apart is that I purposely seek out small independent movies precisely because it has been my experience that they are better written and better acted. I do not see low budget movies just because everyone else sees them. I saw "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" ($5M in 2002) before it was cool. Similar with "Son of Rambow" (4M pounds in 2007), Sunshine Cleaning ($8M in 2008) and dozens of others. People do watch those small movies you're talking about before they get trendy. Viewership has to start somewhere.
Explore a bit -- experience some small independents -- it may broaden your horizons.
For a trivial example, I will never forgive George Clooney for his clownish performance in the debacle that was Batman and Robin ($125M in 1997 dollars) but was quite impressed, in spite of myself, with his performance in The American ($20M in 2010 dollars) and with the movie as a whole. There's no question that everything about The American was superior to Batman and Robin despite being 1/5 the budget.
Pitch Black, at $23M in 2000 dollars, was an excellent film. Riddick, for $110M in 2004, was a mess. It was a mess with cooler effects, but a mess nevertheless.
Sometimes a big budget is necessary -- the remake of King Kong manage to hold together despite its massive budget, and Lord of the Rings could not have been remotely attempted without serious money behind it. And then there's John Carter -- a $250M pile of steaming crap. I think the difference is how much the director's vision is preserved in the final product. A work of love from one dynamic, talented person tends to produce a well crafted product. A work based on the decisions of producers anxious to protect their investment, does not. As the budget increases in size, there's a natural tendency to shift from the former to the latter.
It's like there's some kind of rule that any budget over $100M automatically means plot, characterization and acting goes right out the window.
You are unlikely to watch more than a tiny proportion of $100k movies. Most are crap, but the filter between you and them is probably very very good. In comparison, you will probably watch at least 10% of $100M movies, and that filter just isn't strong enough to avoid crap. That is why you have better luck with $100k movies than with $100M movies, even though $100M movies are much better on average.
Not sure why a movie with a $100M+ budget leads directly to not being able to filter out the crap. I don't get the connection between budget and the perception of crap, except they appear from my experience to be proportional. I have a couple of theories about that, part of which is that the studio is less likely to take chances with big budget movies, which tend to make them fractured, mediocre and formulaic. And so, we get big ticket abominations like John Carter, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Prometheus, that have big action scenes and phenomenal special effects, but no coherent story.
Moreover, it looks likely that we have differing definitions of "better". To me "better" does not mean cool sets and huge bombastic special effects. I'm not twelve anymore -- eye candy doesn't, by itself, make for a good movie going experience.
I'm pretty sure I haven't seen very many $100K movies -- my high school produced a horror film in the seventies that actually got on TV and won an award, but I'm pretty sure you're not talking about that. I have seen quite a few low budget independent films, and my perception is that when you don't have giant robots or huge spaceships, you tend to get better dialog, more consistent acting, better characterization, and a tighter story. Not always, but often enough to make it the way to bet.
Good point, but I think it's important to ask one's self, how important, really, is seeing the movie right this very moment? It's just entertainment, and unless it really sucks, it'll still be in theaters next weekend. And if it really sucks, you probably wouldn't have enjoyed it anyway.
In our case (yours and mine) if the theaters don't offer enough decent sized screens in 2D, they lose our business and harbor ill will in our section of the population. If we represent a significant portion of the population, they'll feel the squeeze and either relent, try to be satisfied with lower gross, or go out of business. If not, there's always home video.
I begrudge them slightly. For every projector showing 3d that means fewer time slots for me to be able to watch the movie in 2d. Sure, it's not the end of the world, but is a minor inconvenience.
That's a good point. I don't often think of that because going to movies just isn't as important as it used to be. This is partly due to improvements in the cost and quality of home cinema (and you can have beer!) but also partly because it seems like there are fewer and fewer movies these days that are first-run must-sees. This may be because I'm older now and my values have changed, but it really seems to me like there's way too much mediocre cinema out there. The last three films seen in-theater were Avengers, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Prometheus. Of those, only the first one was worth seeing, at all. Let alone in theater. The latter two, I profoundly regret the time and money wasted.
Motion blur is not a fix. It's part of the problem.
60 hz in a CRT is not tolerable, unless you live in a country where the room lights are a significantly different frequency so they don't strobe together. 70 at minimum, but over 80 has more psychological than physical effect.
> I rather vote on good acting and content rather that super good quality visuals
Oh man... oh man, don't get me started. I wasted money on Prometheus last night. Paid extra for a high end theater with excellent sound. WTF? It's like Ridley Scott had a stroke 2/3 of the way through principle filming. There was a time when a Scott film was an automatic must-see. Instead we get a bunch of loosely connected digital effects. Great sound, though. Yeesh.
It's like there's some kind of rule that any budget over $100M automatically means plot, characterization and acting goes right out the window.
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh. You were doing so well, until the very end. The ipad has competitors that are "good enough" right now. Just not, as it happens from Rim. (Or any scrapped-together me-too device called "Surface".) But to Apple fanatics, no competitor will ever be good enough, simply because, as a competitor, it lacks the fruit logo. With Apple fans, there isn't any point in discussing a competitor that is "good enough", because nothing could possibly be. It's a null exercise.
That a single company can't produce a popular device in a very diverse environment, doesn't mean that any of the other participants are "all conquering".
Except to fanbois.
Get involved with an open source project. Go for fame rather than money. When you're looking for a job or internship, it certainly can't hurt for you to have your name attached to a few successful projects.
The situations are not exactly parallel, but after dot com bust, I was out of work for two years. I spent that time writing a CMS and putting together an internet hosting service -- small potatoes, maxed out at ten clients -- got a backpack, stuffed it with a good selection of tools and did piecemeal small business system and network support. When the economy improved and companies started interviewing again, I could show that I hadn't spent two years on the couch watching the sci-fi channel -- I had actually accomplished something, because "I feel the need to be useful". It put me ahead of the pack.
Showing commitment to your vocation, even (especially?) when you're not getting paid to do so, may put you ahead of the pack at a crucial time.
Trivial. Primary reason: It has an attached keyboard.
Fail, the keyboard is attachable, you can use it perfectly fine without a keyboard, just like you can attach a keyboard to an iPad.
"use it fine" in this case stipulates either a third-party application that is touch-centric, or doing trivial things with the OS-included utilities like turning your music on and off.
The OS is most definitely not a tablet OS
Fail again, unless of course you can define what is and is not a tablet OS, but i bet you'll end up proving Android is not a tablet OS in the process.
Explain how the WoA Surface is not a tablet but devices like the iPad and Asus Transformer are tablets.
With both Android and IOS, you can get serious work done without keyboard and mouse, because in both cases the environment was designed from the ground up to be touch-centric. Windows is a KVM operating system with a few touch features. Due to policies within Microsoft, it can not be anything else. The designers *know* that you can do casual stuff on the touch screen but for anything serious you will need a keyboard and some kind of pointing device. Hence, designing the hardware to make that possible. The fact that Microsoft designed their own device that sells with a keyboard included demonstrates that they believe it's necessary. They are trying to redefine "tablet" as a netbook with a touchscreen. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. And it looks like the media is letting them get away with it.
The problem with TNG is that there were so many good episodes... and so many mediocre episodes. And several that started plot lines that were never completed.
I always considered "The Best of Both Worlds" to be a three-parter, including the episode "Family". That might be a good place to start.
Other interesting parings might be "the trouble with tribbles" followed by "more tribbles, more troubles", and "mirror, mirror", "the tholian web", and "through a mirror, darkly".
"Yesterday's Enterprise" was another really good episode.
As far as the movies are concerned, you can easily skip 1, 5, 9 and 10
Don't let them watch any episodes of Enterprise (with the possible exception of "In a mirror, darkly"). It's the only way to retain your credibility.
Norton is great. The Stars Are Ours was the first novel I read by her, in grade school, and it affected me deeply. A lot of her novels appear to take place in the same universe -- one rich with the detritus of dead civilizations and made dangerous by partially-functioning alien technology. Even the time travel stories appear to share the same aliens and a lot of the same technology as the later stories.
I remember being really excited when I heard The Beast Master had been optioned as a movie... Ur... that didn't turn out well. Norton deserved better.
I read Storm Over Warlock to my daughter when she was about eleven. She loved it. We tried to get through the sequel Assignment in Otherwhere, but she was bored by it. Not every Norton novel is a gem, but enough are that they're worth looking for.
I swear to you -- if Paramount had any sense at all, they'd acquire the rights for Star Rangers and turn it into a series set in the far future of the Star Trek Federation -- where civilization has broken down, the origin of man has been forgotten, and a few broken down ships still maintain patrols out of a sense of duty. It would be fascinating, unlike anything else that's ever been on television, and (in my opinion) wildly popular.
I started reading to my daughter when she was less than two years old. I don't know if she was actually following the story, but she seemed to like hearing my voice.
When she was about seven or eight, I started her with the Heinlein juveniles. She *really* enjoyed Have Space Suit, Will Travel and Red Planet. She thought Podkayne of Mars was funny and sad, but a very good story. The version I had was the one with both endings -- the original and the softened ending Heinlein was asked by his publisher to write. She said she preferred the original, sadder ending. When she was nine or ten I took a chance and read her The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, pointing out that there was a connection to The Rolling Stones. She loved it. She liked the character of Mike the computer so much that I was required to very cautiously read to her -- edited on the fly -- The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
I read to her the funnier parts of Hogfather, and she insisted on hearing the entire novel. We went on to Thief of Time (because she loved the Susan character), then backfilled with Mort and Soul Music, and eventually read every single Discworld novel, at her request. She likes that I do the voices. (The voice of Death hurts my throat.)
I read her L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time, and that led to all the Murray stories, except Many Waters, which bored her, and A House Like a Lotus, which I couldn't bring myself to read to her because of the attempted rape scene that was central to the story. (She can read it on her own, now that she's a teenager.)
Sadly, she lost interested in our nightly reading sessions about halfway through junior high, and now that she's graduated high school those days are probably over for good. My recommendation is just to start with a juvenile you really enjoyed as a kid, something you can read with enthusiasm, and see if it grabs him.
Asimov's adult fiction is well written, scientifically accurate, and fairly dry. But Asimov lived another life, as author "Paul French", when he wrote the juvenile "Lucky Starr" series. They're quite well written space adventure, and will easily hold the attention of an eight year old. The first book is "David Starr, Space Ranger".
> Prove that it is not a tablet.
Trivial. Primary reason: It has an attached keyboard.
If anyone felt the need to continue, one might also say: The *reason* it has an attached keyboard, is that it runs Windows, which is a KVM-based operating system which recently in its life has had a few touch screen gestures wedged in. The OS is most definitely not a tablet OS, and Microsoft knows this, hence the keyboard, and I'm willing to bet, some kind of pointing device. They're attempting to redefine "tablet" as a netbook with a touch screen. And as with anything Microsoft does, there will be people who buy into it.
> 'And that could put free software for end users very much at risk.'
*if* you choose to buy the netbook (it's not really a tablet) that Microsoft has rebranded "surface". At this time I don't see any reason to do that. The people who jump in pretty much deserve whatever they get.
Don't be obtuse. That's a paraphrase of "the best gun is the one you have on you", referring to having a less capable device actually on your person being better than having a more capable device at home. I do 24 hour on-call, as do a lot of Slashdot participants, and I suspect *they* knew what I meant.
I sometimes use Logmein Ignition to do casual administration rather than carry the laptop everywhere I go. A 7 inch tablet is just about enough screen area to do serious admin, and it's still small enough to fit in my pocket.
I haven't bought a tablet yet because I have been waiting for something like this. 7 inches because it will be easy to carry, (the only useful computer is one you have with you) and from a source where I have a chance in hell of ever seeing an OS update. I thought the Samsung Galaxy 7 was my device, but negative experiences with the first Galaxy phone decided me against it.
Which is actually a brilliant move on their part. It mitigates the lack of a usable touch-only interface. One of the ways to truly merge the tablet and desktop environments into a single code base is to make tablets more like desktops -- which means including a proper keyboard and presumably some kind of pointing device (so you have analog to left and right mouse buttons). The closer you can get the tablet hardware to work like desktop hardware, the less coding you have to do to support tablets. It's a matter of managing consumer expectations.
We own a tablet running Win 7 Pro, and tablet support is painful at best. The keyboard often covers where you're trying to type when it pops up, and the gestures to imitate left and right mouse buttons are arcane. It's a touch interface layer trying to imitate keyboard/mouse instead of an OS built from the ground up to support touch-only. It became clear early on that Windows tablets would only be useable for anything more than casual use with a separate keyboard and mouse. Looks like someone at Microsoft has come to the same conclusion.
So just as notebooks had to grow from the low power low resource devices into higher cost, low end laptops in order to to be shipped with Windows, so do tablets have to grow a keyboard appendage in order to be shipped with Windows. And some people will just accept that.
Mmm hm. This must be that civil discourse I keep hearing about.
Ron Wyden is my senator, and although we agree on very little, today he is my hero.
Which was a brilliant paraphrase of Orwell's "how many fingers am I holding up?" (Although that ended differently.)
But yes, you're right.
I wonder if a case could be made that cognitive dissonance experienced at a young age has prevented the development of proper reasoning skills. If you're told repeatedly that something is true that you can see is false, (or vice-versa) or told at a young age that something did not happen when you have direct experience that it did, the experience does strange things to your brain.
I still think you are underestimating how many crap low budget movies are made, and I am also a bit loathe to accept a $20 million movie as "low budget".
E.g. have you watched Titanic II? That certainly qualifies but it's crap. The four Tremors movies? Perhaps the first one is a stretch at $11 million, but the others certainly qualify. I found those great, but hardly an epitome of wonderful acting.
IMDB has 7,014 feature films from 2010 (I avoided 2011 as some of them weren't actually released yet). Most of them must be low budget; there just isn't enough money in the industry for even a thousand $20M+ movies a year. Half of them don't even have a rating listed in the overview.
My view is still the same: There are many more excellent low budget movies than there are excellent high budget movies, but it is because there are so many more low budget movies than high budget movies.
Are you kidding? All of the Tremors movies were great. (The fourth one less so.) They were edgy and quirky and had interesting characters. The series also had its moments, and didn't deserve to be canceled after only one season.
In terms of raw numbers you are of course correct, but I submit that the percentage is higher also, for the reasons I have cited.
Where this falls apart is that I purposely seek out small independent movies precisely because it has been my experience that they are better written and better acted. I do not see low budget movies just because everyone else sees them. I saw "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" ($5M in 2002) before it was cool. Similar with "Son of Rambow" (4M pounds in 2007), Sunshine Cleaning ($8M in 2008) and dozens of others. People do watch those small movies you're talking about before they get trendy. Viewership has to start somewhere.
Explore a bit -- experience some small independents -- it may broaden your horizons.
For a trivial example, I will never forgive George Clooney for his clownish performance in the debacle that was Batman and Robin ($125M in 1997 dollars) but was quite impressed, in spite of myself, with his performance in The American ($20M in 2010 dollars) and with the movie as a whole. There's no question that everything about The American was superior to Batman and Robin despite being 1/5 the budget.
Pitch Black, at $23M in 2000 dollars, was an excellent film. Riddick, for $110M in 2004, was a mess. It was a mess with cooler effects, but a mess nevertheless.
Sometimes a big budget is necessary -- the remake of King Kong manage to hold together despite its massive budget, and Lord of the Rings could not have been remotely attempted without serious money behind it. And then there's John Carter -- a $250M pile of steaming crap. I think the difference is how much the director's vision is preserved in the final product. A work of love from one dynamic, talented person tends to produce a well crafted product. A work based on the decisions of producers anxious to protect their investment, does not. As the budget increases in size, there's a natural tendency to shift from the former to the latter.
It's like there's some kind of rule that any budget over $100M automatically means plot, characterization and acting goes right out the window.
You are unlikely to watch more than a tiny proportion of $100k movies. Most are crap, but the filter between you and them is probably very very good. In comparison, you will probably watch at least 10% of $100M movies, and that filter just isn't strong enough to avoid crap. That is why you have better luck with $100k movies than with $100M movies, even though $100M movies are much better on average.
Not sure why a movie with a $100M+ budget leads directly to not being able to filter out the crap. I don't get the connection between budget and the perception of crap, except they appear from my experience to be proportional. I have a couple of theories about that, part of which is that the studio is less likely to take chances with big budget movies, which tend to make them fractured, mediocre and formulaic. And so, we get big ticket abominations like John Carter, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Prometheus, that have big action scenes and phenomenal special effects, but no coherent story.
Moreover, it looks likely that we have differing definitions of "better". To me "better" does not mean cool sets and huge bombastic special effects. I'm not twelve anymore -- eye candy doesn't, by itself, make for a good movie going experience.
I'm pretty sure I haven't seen very many $100K movies -- my high school produced a horror film in the seventies that actually got on TV and won an award, but I'm pretty sure you're not talking about that. I have seen quite a few low budget independent films, and my perception is that when you don't have giant robots or huge spaceships, you tend to get better dialog, more consistent acting, better characterization, and a tighter story. Not always, but often enough to make it the way to bet.
Good point, but I think it's important to ask one's self, how important, really, is seeing the movie right this very moment? It's just entertainment, and unless it really sucks, it'll still be in theaters next weekend. And if it really sucks, you probably wouldn't have enjoyed it anyway.
In our case (yours and mine) if the theaters don't offer enough decent sized screens in 2D, they lose our business and harbor ill will in our section of the population. If we represent a significant portion of the population, they'll feel the squeeze and either relent, try to be satisfied with lower gross, or go out of business. If not, there's always home video.
I begrudge them slightly. For every projector showing 3d that means fewer time slots for me to be able to watch the movie in 2d. Sure, it's not the end of the world, but is a minor inconvenience.
That's a good point. I don't often think of that because going to movies just isn't as important as it used to be. This is partly due to improvements in the cost and quality of home cinema (and you can have beer!) but also partly because it seems like there are fewer and fewer movies these days that are first-run must-sees. This may be because I'm older now and my values have changed, but it really seems to me like there's way too much mediocre cinema out there. The last three films seen in-theater were Avengers, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Prometheus. Of those, only the first one was worth seeing, at all. Let alone in theater. The latter two, I profoundly regret the time and money wasted.
Motion blur is not a fix. It's part of the problem.
60 hz in a CRT is not tolerable, unless you live in a country where the room lights are a significantly different frequency so they don't strobe together. 70 at minimum, but over 80 has more psychological than physical effect.
> I rather vote on good acting and content rather that super good quality visuals
Oh man... oh man, don't get me started. I wasted money on Prometheus last night. Paid extra for a high end theater with excellent sound. WTF? It's like Ridley Scott had a stroke 2/3 of the way through principle filming. There was a time when a Scott film was an automatic must-see. Instead we get a bunch of loosely connected digital effects. Great sound, though. Yeesh.
It's like there's some kind of rule that any budget over $100M automatically means plot, characterization and acting goes right out the window.
Taking deep breaths now...
Hrm I wonder if converting footage captured at 48fps, when converted to 24, will look strobey.
If so, that would suck, but I don't see how it could happen that way. If 24fps native doesn't look strobey, 48fps at 2:1 pulldown shouldn't.