Hold on about the Internet prediction. I understand that one of the science fiction authors of the late 19th century - early 20th predicted a system very much like the WWW. I'll have to do some digging, but it was very close in it's description.
From my perspective, what mostly captivated young audiences of the original move was the special effects. They were phenomenal for the time and in some ways had an influence on the video gaming industry to come.
The plots, to my mind, always had a sort of thrown together at the last minute appearance to them, with little thought to the overall story.
Call me a complete nutter, but I laughed til I cracked a rib at the special. It really does reach the "So bad it's good" threshold for me; perhaps not for everyone, but I loved it.
Just as a by the by, it's interesting to note that there was a post on airliners.net's forum, a full year before 9/11, asking about WTC's ability to sustain a direct hit by an aircraft. I have no reason to suspect that it was malicious, but it certainly was creepy.
You dragged your needle across your records? Um... we may have to have a little chat about exactly *how* one is meant to use the vinyl medium. My technique was to carefully place the stylus in the groove and let it play, which, as noted, often yielded glorious results.
Well now you mention it, back in the late 70's or early 80's an electronic music composer called Tomita encoded data into at least one of the records he pressed for decoding on the home computers of the day. Obviously one would use the cassette version of the album but still...
Actually Betamax never left, very much like vinyl. And over the years turntables have been improving steadily (or more precisely, the tonearms and cartridges).
People associate records with scratchiness and noise, but a properly cleaned records that is not badly damages will yield wonderful results.
Well I do think SL has a chance at survival, but it really has to improve graphics massively from its current 1990s era levels along with the awful navigation system.
If they gave users a more impressive graphical environment to play in I think they'd be in much better shape.
I, for one, would dearly love an explanation of exactly what 'cloud computing' means in this context. First the blurb goes on about what appears to be an app store, then in the next sentence seems to indicate that it exists to facilitate scientific computing needs. What the heck does one have to do with the other?
I really do dislike these nebulous, ill-defined buzz-technologies which baffle my tiny, dinosaur-like brain...
In the current key/mouse interface, there's a big difference between the mental processes in pressing a physical key and operating a mouse. With a keyboard your fingers reach to press a button which stays stationary, but with a mouse and other free-range positioning device or interface much greater mental activity is necessary. You have to move the on-screen pointer to the position desired and then click on it - the positioning mechanism is that much different from simply keying that a certain amount of stress and inaccuracy results. I personally dislike having to take my hands away from the keyboard to do any kind of interface function as I lose a certain amount of mental flow owing to the disparity in brain processing which results.
In light of this, a keyboard-based system of moving and manipulating windows seems preferable. I would posit that a great many functions for doing one's daily work on a windowed system are quite do-able without taking one's hand off the keyboard with a properly thought-out set of commands assigned to the existing standard input device, with a few additions. Indeed one can almost do that today, but the keyboard-centric paradigm will need to be adopted as standard for the majority of applications for it to truly increase productivity.
Anyone who has had the experience of typing on a laptop with a single-touch pad will know how maddening it is to suddenly find that the cursor has repositioned itself at another paragraph, thus buggering up your latest bestselling novel, due to a misinterpreted palm touchdown. Add multitouch to the mix and I can only imagine the fun.
I do remember now how this got raves from the computer press at the time. It would seem logical that this be the successor to the OS they were looking for - so why was this not pursued? Licensing restrictions?
Very insightful - Mars needs the equivalent of a killer app to make it viable, so that in the long run it will make the whole enterprise economically viable.
I think the overall effect of just the act of successfully landing a human on Mars will be immense, and impact man's view of religion, philosophy and expand our worldview into a universeview.
Haha, I posted a similar comment last week about the trailer and got my bumbum smacked royally by rabid fanboys. Now this story appears on/. I guess I wasn't alone in my assessment...
As I noted to the other professional Slashdotter who replied, I did indeed watch in full res. And frankly if I need to watch in full res to not be completely offput by the graphics then there's something fundamentally wrong.
I *did* watch in full rez - and yep, jarringly unrealistic CGI. Didn't impress, sorry.
As for teasing - I didn't feel at all teased, but I did feel like I was watching a video game, which is exactly what most of these sorts of movies have become; indeed, one could say that the very first Star Wars was the prototype for movie-as-videogame-thrillride.
Honestly it unintentionally looks like one of those movies where they combine obvious animation with real filmed characters. It just doesn't work here for me, but I'm sure those weaned on game consoles will love it (which, again, is probably the whole point - I think your response to my post was essentially saying "Waaa, the bad man criticized my XBox!")
This does not bode well. The CGI, which would have been impressive on an XBox or PS3, instead jars with the real-life scenes. They make no attempt to even hint at a plot, which tells me that they have essentially strung together a parade of impressive FX to hang on the bones of an irrelevant story. And you can guarantee that they will not take any time to let the story breath underneath all of those explosions.
Semi-completely unrelated, I noticed long ago that analog cell call quality is vastly better than digital. This was driven home to me when recently I got my hands on an old analog handset. I fired it up to see if I could connect to anything, and behold! it did. It seemed to connect to the local telco's recorded message saying that you have no service, etc., but it gave me a chance to listen to the sound quality, and it was as good as a land line, and oddly more pleasant to listen to than the digital artifacts generated by the variable bitrate of digital cell service.
Slashdot Mirror
Hold on about the Internet prediction. I understand that one of the science fiction authors of the late 19th century - early 20th predicted a system very much like the WWW. I'll have to do some digging, but it was very close in it's description.
From my perspective, what mostly captivated young audiences of the original move was the special effects. They were phenomenal for the time and in some ways had an influence on the video gaming industry to come.
The plots, to my mind, always had a sort of thrown together at the last minute appearance to them, with little thought to the overall story.
Call me a complete nutter, but I laughed til I cracked a rib at the special. It really does reach the "So bad it's good" threshold for me; perhaps not for everyone, but I loved it.
However, Jar-Jar... No, just no...
Dude that was awesome. Surprised I haven't seen that before *grins* - thanks.
Just as a by the by, it's interesting to note that there was a post on airliners.net's forum, a full year before 9/11, asking about WTC's ability to sustain a direct hit by an aircraft. I have no reason to suspect that it was malicious, but it certainly was creepy.
You dragged your needle across your records? Um... we may have to have a little chat about exactly *how* one is meant to use the vinyl medium. My technique was to carefully place the stylus in the groove and let it play, which, as noted, often yielded glorious results.
But hey, whatever floats your boat...
Well now you mention it, back in the late 70's or early 80's an electronic music composer called Tomita encoded data into at least one of the records he pressed for decoding on the home computers of the day. Obviously one would use the cassette version of the album but still...
Actually Betamax never left, very much like vinyl. And over the years turntables have been improving steadily (or more precisely, the tonearms and cartridges).
People associate records with scratchiness and noise, but a properly cleaned records that is not badly damages will yield wonderful results.
It could possibly be that those 38 million people are incredibly boring and not worth writing more than a couple of paragraphs.
Just sayin'.
Well I do think SL has a chance at survival, but it really has to improve graphics massively from its current 1990s era levels along with the awful navigation system.
If they gave users a more impressive graphical environment to play in I think they'd be in much better shape.
Erm... Linux company? Try Unix :-)
I, for one, would dearly love an explanation of exactly what 'cloud computing' means in this context. First the blurb goes on about what appears to be an app store, then in the next sentence seems to indicate that it exists to facilitate scientific computing needs. What the heck does one have to do with the other?
I really do dislike these nebulous, ill-defined buzz-technologies which baffle my tiny, dinosaur-like brain...
In the current key/mouse interface, there's a big difference between the mental processes in pressing a physical key and operating a mouse. With a keyboard your fingers reach to press a button which stays stationary, but with a mouse and other free-range positioning device or interface much greater mental activity is necessary. You have to move the on-screen pointer to the position desired and then click on it - the positioning mechanism is that much different from simply keying that a certain amount of stress and inaccuracy results. I personally dislike having to take my hands away from the keyboard to do any kind of interface function as I lose a certain amount of mental flow owing to the disparity in brain processing which results.
In light of this, a keyboard-based system of moving and manipulating windows seems preferable. I would posit that a great many functions for doing one's daily work on a windowed system are quite do-able without taking one's hand off the keyboard with a properly thought-out set of commands assigned to the existing standard input device, with a few additions. Indeed one can almost do that today, but the keyboard-centric paradigm will need to be adopted as standard for the majority of applications for it to truly increase productivity.
Anyone who has had the experience of typing on a laptop with a single-touch pad will know how maddening it is to suddenly find that the cursor has repositioned itself at another paragraph, thus buggering up your latest bestselling novel, due to a misinterpreted palm touchdown. Add multitouch to the mix and I can only imagine the fun.
Hell the goatse guy could fit a Dalek up there...
I do remember now how this got raves from the computer press at the time. It would seem logical that this be the successor to the OS they were looking for - so why was this not pursued? Licensing restrictions?
Or to put it another way, the head empties as the penis fills up....
Very insightful - Mars needs the equivalent of a killer app to make it viable, so that in the long run it will make the whole enterprise economically viable.
I think the overall effect of just the act of successfully landing a human on Mars will be immense, and impact man's view of religion, philosophy and expand our worldview into a universeview.
Haha, I posted a similar comment last week about the trailer and got my bumbum smacked royally by rabid fanboys. Now this story appears on /. I guess I wasn't alone in my assessment...
To expand on that "yes":
I watched it. It sucks.
As for what I want: CGI that's good enough that it truly allows me to suspend my disbelief. It didn't do this at any resolution.
Yes.
As I noted to the other professional Slashdotter who replied, I did indeed watch in full res. And frankly if I need to watch in full res to not be completely offput by the graphics then there's something fundamentally wrong.
Still sucks.
I *did* watch in full rez - and yep, jarringly unrealistic CGI. Didn't impress, sorry.
As for teasing - I didn't feel at all teased, but I did feel like I was watching a video game, which is exactly what most of these sorts of movies have become; indeed, one could say that the very first Star Wars was the prototype for movie-as-videogame-thrillride.
Honestly it unintentionally looks like one of those movies where they combine obvious animation with real filmed characters. It just doesn't work here for me, but I'm sure those weaned on game consoles will love it (which, again, is probably the whole point - I think your response to my post was essentially saying "Waaa, the bad man criticized my XBox!")
This does not bode well. The CGI, which would have been impressive on an XBox or PS3, instead jars with the real-life scenes. They make no attempt to even hint at a plot, which tells me that they have essentially strung together a parade of impressive FX to hang on the bones of an irrelevant story. And you can guarantee that they will not take any time to let the story breath underneath all of those explosions.
No.
Semi-completely unrelated, I noticed long ago that analog cell call quality is vastly better than digital. This was driven home to me when recently I got my hands on an old analog handset. I fired it up to see if I could connect to anything, and behold! it did. It seemed to connect to the local telco's recorded message saying that you have no service, etc., but it gave me a chance to listen to the sound quality, and it was as good as a land line, and oddly more pleasant to listen to than the digital artifacts generated by the variable bitrate of digital cell service.