The guy who played gollum, yes there actually was a guy in a suit and his name was Andy Serkis, deserves all kinds of credit. He did a marvelous job bringing the character to life. If you look Neo for example, he was basically cg the whole movie anyways.
And nobody's going to nominate Keanu Reeves for an acting Oscar either.
(One exception: He was very good in The Gift.)
Re:Should be funny - doesn't have to be
on
LOTR The Musical!
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
They turned the 5-part, 1200-page Les Miserables into a serious three hour show which many think is one of the best musicals ever.
Copyrights and patents are protection against strangers. Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights.
Anyone else think the SCO press release reads like something a 12 year lawyer's son old would come out with in a schoolyard fight? I was waiting for the "So there. Hmph!" at the end of that paragraph.
I used to work for a major insurance company. One of that company's major advantages was the technical ability of its underwriting/risk assessment/rating (actuarial) area. Ie, the business invested a lot of money in hiring very smart people and giving them nice computing toys to examine different risk factors to formulate the likely claim rate for a certain mix of factors (eg age, location, etc) which was then used as the basis of pricing insurance products.
Getting product pricing right is very important in insurance because unlike most businesses you incur most of your costs (in the form of claims) after the customer has paid you their money, not before, which is more typically the case.
These prices were not published, partly because the pricing ended up so complex to describe and so personalised to the individual customer that it would have been difficult to come up with a way of presenting it simply, and partly because the pricing structure embedded one of the company's competitive advantages, ie its underwriting function.
What we found was that at least one of our competitors organised a campaign to "reverse engineer" our company's rating book by paying a bunch of people to ring us up and get quotes. Ie, in the case of car insurance, they'd ring up and say they were a 25 year old male living in suburb X driving model Y. Then they'd ring up saying they're a 25 year old male living in suburb X driving model Z. Etc.
This way they'd be able to consistently match or beat our pricing merely by investing in 500 phone calls, rather than by investing in millions of dollars in brains and gear.
So this would be at least one instance where data mining for product pricing would be, if not necessarily illegal, then certainly mercenary.
(Note that merely matching another insurance company's prices won't necessarily always help you because there are other factors that affect your cost:income ratio, but certainly this tactic has given me food for thought over the years.)
Slashdor IS a blog. [...] Slashdot, like other blogs, pollutes search engine searches with their "permalinks," [...] Certainly, Google's criteria for what defines a blog might be helpful, but it seems to me like you're subjectively deciding which blogs are legitimate news sources and which are "some kid rambling on."
If the purpose of a blogs.google.com is to filter out the wheat from the chaff then/. is surely considered wheat - after all, it's included in news.google.com.
And here I've always thought "John Henry" was a synonym for "penis". (!)
Fascinating site - thanks. I guess the thing I hadn't considered was human insecurity. In some ways, on a purely technical level, a machine outworking / outrunning / outcalculating a person is no big deal - if anything a tribute to human ingenuity.
On the other hand if that machine is going to take away your livelihood (or, perhaps in the case of chess, your sense of superiority) it's a lot bigger deal.
Nobody got outraged when that new-fangled mechanical auto-mobile contraption started to outpace the world's fastest human runners. Yet a computer beating a grandmaster in chess was an apocalpytic event. As others have pointed out chess can be won by using a fairly unsophisticated brute force mathematical approach at which computers excel. It's really no big deal.
I'm much more intrigued by developments in artificial creativity - poems, musical compositions, jokes, stories; where the rules governing the construction of these works are much more elusive. When a computer-generated novel wins the Booker Prize we'll have passed a signficant
threshold.
Or to come back to the chess comparison - if a computer programme which adopted a human approach to chess playing, eg calculating no more than three or four moves ahead rather than nine or ten, evaluating a dozen potential decision branches rather than thousands, beat a human grand master - that would be a more significant advance in AI.
It would be like building a human-shaped robot which was able to out-run (not just outpace) a person, rather building a mechanical device which gets there by adopting an entirely different paradigm: wheels, not legs; brute force chess move evaluation, not (largely) intuitive leaps.
I spend way more time than I should blowing things up playing RTS games but one of the most immersive experience I've ever had was a half-game, half-novel called Portal on the Amiga.
I see that it's now available online, but it's just not the same without the classy, understated graphics and ambient sound. That's why I couldn't get into the hardcopy version either.
The QWERTY keyboard is like Microsoft Windows. Sure prolonged use might be harmful to your health, but it's good enough for most people and it's got near-complete market penetration. It's not going to go away without a radical user interface paradigm shift.
These days, if you order a "Coke" and they only have Pepsi products, your server will have been trained to ask "is Pepsi okay," because Coke occastionally sends reps out to look for restaurants who are substituting Pepsi for Coke orders without telling customers, and suing the asses off anybody they catch doing it.
Have Coke's lawyers been sending cease and desist letters to the Columbian drug lords then?
If the President of the United States can permit himself to be used as the sock puppet of well organised special interest groups, then everyone should have the same right!
On the other hand, you're likely to be much more convincing when it's clear that you're capable of formulating and articulating an argument without repetitiously spouting the boilerplate catch phrases of others...
Slashdot Mirror
Does that mean you can get only ONE penis enlarged?
Do you get to choose which one?
(One exception: He was very good in The Gift.)
They turned the 5-part, 1200-page Les Miserables into a serious three hour show which many think is one of the best musicals ever.
Gates says he runs Linux at home = He is a hypocrite. EVIL!!!
In Soviet Russia the grits enjoy you, you insensitive clod!
Getting product pricing right is very important in insurance because unlike most businesses you incur most of your costs (in the form of claims) after the customer has paid you their money, not before, which is more typically the case.
These prices were not published, partly because the pricing ended up so complex to describe and so personalised to the individual customer that it would have been difficult to come up with a way of presenting it simply, and partly because the pricing structure embedded one of the company's competitive advantages, ie its underwriting function.
What we found was that at least one of our competitors organised a campaign to "reverse engineer" our company's rating book by paying a bunch of people to ring us up and get quotes. Ie, in the case of car insurance, they'd ring up and say they were a 25 year old male living in suburb X driving model Y. Then they'd ring up saying they're a 25 year old male living in suburb X driving model Z . Etc.
This way they'd be able to consistently match or beat our pricing merely by investing in 500 phone calls, rather than by investing in millions of dollars in brains and gear.
So this would be at least one instance where data mining for product pricing would be, if not necessarily illegal, then certainly mercenary.
(Note that merely matching another insurance company's prices won't necessarily always help you because there are other factors that affect your cost:income ratio, but certainly this tactic has given me food for thought over the years.)
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Nice to see behaviour that's both principled and commercially astute.
Fascinating site - thanks. I guess the thing I hadn't considered was human insecurity. In some ways, on a purely technical level, a machine outworking / outrunning / outcalculating a person is no big deal - if anything a tribute to human ingenuity.
On the other hand if that machine is going to take away your livelihood (or, perhaps in the case of chess, your sense of superiority) it's a lot bigger deal.
I'm much more intrigued by developments in artificial creativity - poems, musical compositions, jokes, stories; where the rules governing the construction of these works are much more elusive. When a computer-generated novel wins the Booker Prize we'll have passed a signficant threshold.
Or to come back to the chess comparison - if a computer programme which adopted a human approach to chess playing, eg calculating no more than three or four moves ahead rather than nine or ten, evaluating a dozen potential decision branches rather than thousands, beat a human grand master - that would be a more significant advance in AI.
It would be like building a human-shaped robot which was able to out-run (not just outpace) a person, rather building a mechanical device which gets there by adopting an entirely different paradigm: wheels, not legs; brute force chess move evaluation, not (largely) intuitive leaps.
I see that it's now available online, but it's just not the same without the classy, understated graphics and ambient sound. That's why I couldn't get into the hardcopy version either.
...be known as Loo-nix?
Here's a valuable but soon-to-be-free tip
by Anonymous on Friday, May 02 @01:57PM
As of August 12, 2009, the following work shall be hereby entered in the Public Domain.
Under Microsoft DOS, type a ^Z (control-Z) to signify EOF (end of file).
Gosh, darn, now I've spilled the beans.
Followed by:
Is this a /. comment???
Anwered by:
Probably
who the hell else would come through and type something like that to this little sight [sic]:0? I can't imagine LIS ppls would do this :P
The QWERTY keyboard is like Microsoft Windows. Sure prolonged use might be harmful to your health, but it's good enough for most people and it's got near-complete market penetration. It's not going to go away without a radical user interface paradigm shift.
... and raise you news.com.com.com.com.
Unless of course you're talking about some other Federation of Planets...
On the other hand, you're likely to be much more convincing when it's clear that you're capable of formulating and articulating an argument without repetitiously spouting the boilerplate catch phrases of others...