I agree, the music seemed to be higher budget, sounded good- to be expected...but if memory serves, a number of songs didn't make it from the movie to soundtrack in the first Matrix. One thing I really hate about movie soundtracks, is they usually leave out at least one or two songs people really wanted to be able to get.
Hey Jude, done by the Muziako(sp?) Orchestra, from the soundtrack to The Royal Tenenbaums, was left off the soundtrack, despite that it was practically the title song; it ran right smack at the beginning of the movie, uncut.
It was omitted supposedly due to "licensing reasons"(former Beatles members wouldn't allow it) but mysteriously managed to work its way into the Collector's Edition of the soundtrack. Translation: they got people to buy the original soundtrack, then made them buy an even more expensive second soundtrack with only a few extra songs, just to get the -awesome- version of Hey Jude.
Yes, it was unethical as hell, but I was under the deluded thinking that if you trash a free game the free games stop coming. I wish I could tell you I knew better, but back then I did not.
...said as if to imply that manufacturers don't bias the samples(or access, especially pre-release, and especially with expensive goods) to people who gloat about them.
I know that the digital camera review sites pretty much gloat about every single camera they get- if there's anything negative, its little nitpicky things; "oh, I didn't quite like the texture on the grip". Sometimes they toss in a disclaimer about the camera being pre-production and thus 'things might be different'.
To memory, not a single review on any of the big digicam review sites mentioned the horrible focusing problems on the Canon D60 until well after they were on the market; a lot of D60s had front/back focusing problems, and the focusing system itself was quickly found to be slow as shit.
Reviewers gushed about the Canon Powershot G1; when I bought mine, 8 months later, I found there were all sorts of oddball restrictions on what combinations of modes and features you could use that none of the reviewers had mentioned. It was slow as shit to operate. It always seemed to generate noisy, out of focus pictures. While they mentioned the horrible bleed-over on bright spots from the CCD, they didn't mention the horrible washed-out look you'd get in a lot of pictures where anything even remotely bright was in the frame(it looks like you're in a cloud of fog, basically.) Every 'sample' picture I saw posted looked picture-perfect, and after shooting thousands upon thousands of frames with my camera, I have rarely, if at all, been able to duplicate the quality I've seen in many sample pictures posted on review sites.
I learned my lesson: wait until others have bought whatever you're looking at, see what comes up on the message boards in places like photo.net, and go to a store and try it out yourself(in many cases with digicams for example, you can even rent them- and sometimes the store gives a credit towards the purchase price for money you drop on renting). Similar things can be said about games- try before you buy(many stores have systems set up with demos), and see what people in the messageboards say, taking what they say with a BIG grain of salt. Most people on the message boards and mailing lists:
Don't have to worry about pleasing Company A so they get an advance copy of The Next Big Thing(or at all)
Don't have to worry about having the Next Big Thing so they can draw hits to their site
Don't have to worry about keeping advertisers happy by drawing hits to the site
Don't have to worry about displeasing advertisers who might be selling the product that's being reviewed(hello- lots of review sites sell adspace to online sites etc that sell the very products they review!)
Don't have to worry about enticing people to buy through affiliate links/banner ads. Are you going to write a bad review if you've got 5 links at the bottom for affiliates where people can buy Product X and you get some money? How could you POSSIBLY be objective?!?
...but that doesn't mean they're not, say, someone in Company A's marketing department, hyping up the product- it's been proven to happen, and those were just the morons who were too blatant about it.
Reviewers are con-artists, and cheats- there are FEW honest ones among them, and the story author admits to being one, and even tries to make us feel sorry for him. Sorry, I don't. The whole setup is loaded with wash-my-back-I-wash-yours deals.
Anyone else notice that the scene with her falling out the window looks completely fake? Her head moves really weird, in time with each uzi firing a round...her head jumps around or something, really wierd- didn't look right at all.
I wonder how much scruitiny the big fight scene with the 100 Agent Smiths will stand up to...it sure looked good at full speed. Too bad mplayer doesn't have a slow-mo button. Grrrrr. xine does...
Seriously, that is the biggest description I've seen in the 5-6 years I've been reading slashdot. Reminds me about Katz; just keeps going, and going...
Speaking of The Man Everyone Loves to Hate, the King Of Pontification...where is the guy? We haven't heard a peep from him in ages(not that this is a bad thing, actually.)
Well, the authentication mechanism does seem unsecure
Yeah, that seems to be the party line, except it's BS; talk about knee-jerk reactions. Instead of just saying "oo, oo, it's insecure!", recognize that:
A)Few people have a minor's social security number. How many of -them- care about the kid's grades?
B)grades, attendance record, etc are not even remotely 'sensitive' information. My bank only needs my account # and PIN to get MONEY! Whoa! How insecure!
C)unless I missed something, it's just a display. Nothing can be changed. So the access control mechanism just needs to be good enough to keep jokers(ie, mostly, your classmates) from looking at your grades. How many of your classmates know your SS #? None, I hope- only place they could get that info is off your license if you're old enough to drive and your state still does license #= SS #, or if they overlook you filling out paperwork. If they do get your grades(ie, all of the sudden Johnny knows all of Billy's grades), then the appropriate parties get saturday detention so they can philosophize the morning away and do a little high-school-social-class mixing.
"Now, you've only got 30 minutes on the USS Doomed before the zeta boop epsilon radiatior-the-writers-invented-to-solve-a-plot-hol e kills you, so make sure you transport back before then. Of course, you'll be a few minutes late, but you'll be fine when I rush you to sickbay and Picard says gee-golly-thanks, and it'll all just prove I'm just the nagging-mom type. So here's your damn mittens, Geordi. Go be the hero while I go nag Wesley so the viewers have someone to identify with."
while we spend our expensive time by rev. engineering codecs, optimizing code, writing demuxers, they improve the gui. then they 'steal' the others and win. we have no chance against xine
As usual, he's got a major chip on his shoulder. It was always one thing or another:
-compilers that caused the program to crash or do odd things(mplayer's configure script would refuse to run unless you had certain versions of GCC, and no- it wasn't 'the broken one that shipped with redhat' that it would object to). Funny, but nobody else had such unusual compiler requirements.
-licensing problems(some of the rants are truly spectacular.) At one point he went and dug up other projects that he felt were worse violators, as if to try and shift people's attention/justify his own problem. It was pathetic.
-Distros "incorrectly building" the player(I think it was how they were linking to libraries), which would then send floods of users to them(and, of course, they think all their users are idiots). Mplayer is by far the most anal-retentive about distribution of binaries, and as a result, the distros have told them to kiss off distro-style(ie, mplayer's been dropped from the major distros)
Mplayer got a bad review for (surprise!) having "developers [who] were unfriendly and... documentation incomplete and insulting." His response? He attacks the author of the review with several bullet-points in the DOCS TO MPLAYER ITSELF! As someone once told me, "it's better to keep your mouth shut and let people wonder if you're an a jerk, than to open it and remove all doubt."
In each case, it was "mplayer versus the world", and in his opinion, the world could go screw itself. The docs, the website, even the messages in the configure script and the program itself- were all confrontational, and/or insulting; sorry, I don't like software that cops an attitude. This guy, if not the entire team, had serious problems with keeping their mouths in check. So, when I hear he's leaving, I can only say GOOD.
As I download this latest release, I can't help but remember how nothing changed with each release candidate up to this; the volume control doesn't work, the OSD is broken, some files give it complete conniptions but play fine in Xine, and it takes an enormous amount of CPU power now. Used to take about 2-5% of my CPU, now it takes 50%. Playback is jerky, too. Xine? None of these problems(sync is often better, playback is smooth, CPU usage is minimal/non-existent.)
Maybe the reason he's pissed off is because Xine is using his code(as they can- if you didn't like the concept of others using your code, you shouldn't have made the project open-source), but using it -BETTER-.
This is far more telling: "A Dr Hall from the Nuclear Physics Faculty ANU, around 1994, wrote a very nasty letter to me warning me I'd be ostracized by the the Science Establishment if I didn't change my attitude. He meant I had to be subservient, pay homage and grovel to my intellectual and scientific inferiors. People like me are no good at all at being a follower of any religion."
The answer to that one is "no, you shouldn't go calling the head of the Australian Royal Academy of Science a 'bitch' after she warns you that she considers your communications with her threatening."
Like most people who claim to have 'disproven' various laws of physics, they don't understand, or misapply, other laws. He presents zero physical evidence, except a tangle of his own theories and "proofs', none of which can be found. The incredibly poor grammar only helps to confuse the reader- someone get the boy a book on proper grammar and punctuation and tell him to come back in a year. While he's at it, he can publish all these proofs, and give exact references to where his work has been stolen(ie, where has it shown up, please.)
Regardless, if he's threatening/harassing members of the scientific community, then there should be legal action against him, and as part of that, he should be psychologically evaluated.
The whole thing is pretty absurd, hence I feel silly being serious about this...but...making it that much easier to consume soda, which is LOADED with calories(among other things- mostly from sugars), is only going to give you diabetes sooner and plump you up mighty quick. I forget exactly what economists call it, but you're more likely to spend money that's easily accessed. Ie, the bag of chips next to you is gonna get eaten faster than the one downstairs in the drawer.
Seriously, folks- get out and walk, jog, run, bike, skate/skateboard/rollerblade to the local corner store, and carry the 6-pack back. If you're lucky, it'll all balance out. you'll get your daily exercise(what is it, minimum 30 minutes raised heart rate per day?), which means you'll feel better(excercise creates endorphines), and you'll live longer, too. You'll also get to excercise the brain, and reduce eye fatigue, since you'll be moving your eyes a lot and focusing on different things.
There's also cool stuff like(gasp!) water, fruit juice, and vegetable juice. All three are much healthier for you, and(at least IMHO) taste better. I'm not saying switch off soda completely- just go for variety; it's probably the most common thing you hear from nutritionists- eat a little of everything. It's more fun/interesting, too:-)
700,000 people a year die from heart disease. "A little exercise won't kill you" is truer than you think, and eating healthy is great insurance. Ask people who just came out of having heart-bypass operations or their first heart attack, or just got diagnosed with diabetes, and ask them if they wish they had eaten better. I'd be amazed if the answer isn't 100% "Yes".
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 06, @04:13PM (#5674448)
Go suck a cock.
Whassamatta, didn't want to burn your karma on such a childish comment? In any case, I'm dying to know- why was I deserving of this comment?
This is why the movie is mid-series
on
Review: Cowboy Bebop
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
One thing I liked in Cowboy Bebop was the sad ending. No happy ending, no hollywood crap, good japanese drama
The movie 'takes place' mid-series if I recall. It was really cheating most of the US to show them the complete series first- the movie should have been timed to premiere in the US around ep 20 or so, but well before the last episodes. Sadly, I think the only reason this is in theaters(and/or perhaps the reason it took so long) is because it's about terrorism; as a topic for entertainment, first it was taboo, now it's all the rage.
It doesn't have to have a sad ending to be good, by the way. Watch the third Patlabor movie some time if you like the whole political intrigue/detective story(which is part of what Knockin' on Heaven's Door is about.)
Personally, I would have been just as happy if Cowboy Bebop had a happy ending, since I enjoyed every episode. If anything, the sad ending was a huge let-down. Then again, the first episode in the series was a pretty tragic, and should have been a clue that they'd go any-which-way.
I've already seen the movie(it was fansubbed at -least- a year ago); I highly recommend it; everything you've come to love in the bebop series. There is a GREAT dogfight sequence, worth the cost of the ticket alone, and two great hand-to-hand combat scenes. I will probably go to see it in the theaters, since I a)support anime and b)I want to see the great artwork up close and personal.
(currently watching Read Or Die- let's hear it for secret agent librarians, yeah!)
When are people going to realise we need to spend money on educating, sheltering, clothing and feeding people, and giving them proper medical care, before we send ships off into the Atlantic to see if theres a faster way to India?
I can't seriously believe this was originally modded 4/insightful. THank god it's been knocked down.
It's very simple. India was a known source of vast resources(and to counter the knee-jerk reaction- space may be full of resources, but unlike the resources in India, we have NO way to get TO them, extract them, and send them back, in any sort of reasonable way. There is nothing in space we can't find or make on earth cheaper than going out to get it). Exploration to figure out a 'better' way of reaching India had clear goals. Also, the amount of money PALES in comparison; we've flushed TRILLIONS of dollars into space exploration. The King of Spain gave columbus enough for a couple ships and supplies, and since ships(and supplies) were pretty common in those days, it didn't take a whole lot of money. It would be like Bush giving NASA a couple of cargo ships, today. Not hundreds of research centers, hundreds of aerospace contractors, two space stations, half a dozen billion-dollar space vehicles...etc.
Space? None of the above. NO clear goals(name one clear goal. "Scientific exploration"? Yeah, that's clear.) Prohibitively expensive equipment. Oh, you say "get to mars" is a clear goal? Look at the Moon, morons. What the HELL did going to the moon get us? ABSA-fucking-loutley NOTHING except a bunch of damn rocks sitting in a display case. How many hundreds of thousands of man-hours did we waste, not to mention the money- on a bunch of rocks? I see nothing different from Mars, or any of the other planets....and since it's physically impossible to break the speed of light(to cut another knee-jerk reaction, unlike 'the world is flat', we've got damn good collaborative evidence that the speed of light is the end of the speedometer), we have no chance of ever getting beyond our solar system. We might as well stick a label on the scale of the focusing knob of the world's telescopes, that reads "irrelevant.' Same thing goes for this moronic 'search for life'. I'm sure there IS life elsewhere in the galaxy. Will we ever find out or be able to do anything about it? Nope. Too far away. Who gives a crap? I don't want to meet most of the people on this planet, why would I want to meet someone from -another- planet?
However, your analogy is quite accurate in two regards- a)the king came under increasing pressure to explain the amount of money he was giving Columbus, who pretty much succeeded by dumb shit luck...and b)Columbus's discovery resulted in plauge, death, destruction, and war, the likes of which had never been seen before. We exterminated an entire continent of people as a result of his discoveries.
If tomorrow the space station finds a wormhole and we end up on some planet that's just like ours, has a bunch of nice resources, and people whose weapons aren't quite as cool as ours, are we going to repeat our history?
No space station or wormhole needed, we're already doing that juuuuust fine in Iraq, although the pricetag is pretty impressive- $80 billion. That's $330 per every man, woman and child in the US. We could end hunger in the US tomorrow if we distributed $80 billion to soup kitchens and homeless shelters. TOss some of it towards Habitat For Humanity, and we could put a serious dent in homelessness, too.
When will someone realise this[space elevator] is what we need? *sigh*.
Okay, this is gonna get me a flambait since you all love the space stuff, but whatever- I don't care. I'm so sick of hearing space this, space that. I'm THROUGH.
When are people going to realize that we need to spend money on educating, sheltering, clothing and feeding people, and giving them proper medical care...-and THEN- on the toys like space stations? We're putting the cart before the horse by working out all these galatic mysteries before we figure out how to run a responsble, effective, efficient society that co-exists with the planet it's located on. I am NOT suggesting we abandon scientific research- I just think that the government has no business funding research that does not benefit people/humanity in some tanigible way. Seeing pictures of a galaxy 10,000 lightyears away, or figuring out the earth's gravity does thus-and-such, does not feed the homeless guy in the cardboard box on the corner of Main Street and 5th.
Clothing, feeding, sheltering, and keeping healthy every person sounds pretty pie-in-the-sky, don't it? I bet going to the moon sounded pretty absurd too, once...and that should make you pause and think. The major difference is that the first actually accomplishes something useful- the second allows the very symbol of wealth(healthy, strong, well educated people) to play. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
Society seems to have gone the way of the 10 year old kid who just got home from school; do homework, or play with the Nintendo? Society seems to have checked out of handling the basic problems, and is instead playing with its useless toys. Look at the article recently about all the VC companies sitting around desperate for places to invest their money, which they're throwing at things like insanely useless things as WIFI.
If we can't find the money to feed people, why do we have piles of it lying around to throw at the most abusrd, useless things? You may be able to see the city lights from space, but you can't see the starving children.
and it's sure as hell not illegal.
[forwarding/copying/publishing email]
Actually, it is- as one poster said "what, do you copyright everything you write?" The answer is no- as an anonymous poster pointed out, I don't have to- the Berne Convention does it for me. That makes it 100% illegal for you to reproduce, modify, etc- in any means(including electronic) the document, except under fair use. Obviously storage of the email doesn't apply- it's commonly understood by the sender that the email has to be stored at several points along the journey. Same thing for mailing lists- people know mailing lists are archived, and that they go to zillions of people.
and btw -- you can definitely tape-record a conversation as long as ONE of the parties involved gives their consent
Good point- I had it wrong, it's the berne convention, not wiretapping/taping laws. HOWEVER- your statement is wrong as well, it varies GREATLY state to state. In CA, it is completely illegal to tape any conversation, phone or otherwise, unless all parties are aware of the recording; this was reinforced in a 2002 CA supreme court ruling.
If it's interstate, you fall under federal laws as well(one party). I found a great page here that seems to be written by/for PI's; these guys have a LOT at stake(they can loose their licenses, and since most of what they record could end up in court, they could end up in jail, too), and several note that the 'strictest' rule applies in an interstate call- ie, state A, state B, or federal- whatever's strictest. Ie, if state XY has a all-parties law, but you call from YZ, XY can still go after you.
(otherwise, answering machines would be illegal... duh!)
Eh? Most people capable of dialing telephones realize you're being recorded when you leave a message on an answering machine. If you were to then sell that message to the local TV station, well, I dunno about that- it could probably still be argued that you has a reasonable expectation that the communication was private- ie, only would be heard by members of the household.
The dude who posted the article should have had the common decency to obscure the name of the person at Microsoft that he was corresonding with. I have had my name posted on the internet with correspondance I made on behalf of my employer and it always makes me uncomfortable.
IANAL, but it's not just obnoxious, it's illegal- regardless of whether you obscure the names. Unless I specify otherwise, any communication I send you is intended for you, and you only. If you forward it to someone else, or, say, post it online for all to read, I can sue you. It's quite similar to how you may not tape-record a conversation without my permission.
Unless the content is quite obviously harmless, I ask the permission of the sender before forwarding a message from them to a mailing list(or cc'ing others in a reply that contains part of their comments, quoted.) It is at the very least considered good manners.
MS could quite easily slap him with a cease-and-desist letter, although it'd probably draw even more attention to the matter, one which, at the very least, seems almost entirely pointless and will be forgotten in a day or two.
So, the plant-man Jolly Green Giant is conscious that his "biological clock" is ticking
Though supposedly scientists now think men have biological clocks too...it's women who are 'famous' for have 'ticking' gotta-have-kids clocks. In both sexes, it's designed to get you to reproduce while you're healthy, but women face a rather finite deadline...with guys, it's not quite as....uh...firm...
Of course, you all seem to have forgotten that the Jolly Green Giant HAS a kid already- 'Sprout'. further proof you can find anything on Google:-).
What a good role model, though- I've never seen a Mrs. Giant around. Maybe the food companies are trying to brainwash the american public into a lack of family values! Quick, someone tell the religious right to boycott vegetables!:-)
It's not the same- you don't need to know where people are, just their screen names. Same benefits as Redezvous, only it works over more than just a local LAN. It's not better for everything/everyone. Both have specific advantages, I just think a collaborative editor based off Jabber is more flexible in the end. That, again, does not make it better.
You don't have to be "sitting at a meeting", but you do need a Mac. Of course nothing stops you from buying a Mac if you want to.
How incredibly arrogant. Gee...except money, personal preferences, or the applications they use aren't available for the Macintosh(I'm talking specific software, not overall. Don't get even more arrogant by saying "all the good stuff is ported"). I'm a Macintosh user. Always will be; I use both Linux and MacOS X. But I'm not arrogant enough to say "well, nothing stops you from buying a mac" to the twelve people I have to work with...or anyone else for that matter.
Not sure what using LaTeX has to do with any of this.
Not much. I simply mentioned that collaborative writing on the project I was doing was a royal pain.
Hydra does support LaTeX color syntaxing
Color syntaxing is useless if your people don't know latex. I'd love to give them a copy of Lyx, but only one guy has a mac(and he's using OS 9) and the other 11 people are Windows users. LyX on windows requires Cygwin, which I spent hours trying to install myself, and got nowhere.
and will eventually work with typesetting your documents too from what it says in the FAQ. Of course TeXShop already does that nicely on OS X.
LyX runs on OS X. It's also free/open-source. Yawn.
Getting edits from many users for a shared LaTeX file seems to work great with Hydra. I just had a friend share a paper I wrote on a machine across campus and I was able to find it instantly with Hydra (and Rendevous), add my LaTeX modifications and was done. A quick run of latex at the command line on his end and we were set!
You were all set because you were only importing non-latex once. When you've got 50 pages, 12 authors, a need for constant revision, and you're the only one that knows LaTeX, there's simply no easy way to let them submit changes to you; I can't retypeset the whole damn thing every time regardless of the editor; even a chapter would take an hour or more. I can't expect them to preserve tags, either, when they go about moving/deleteing/changing big blocks of text.
Cool tools like this that I can setup in seconds and teach ANYONE to use in a minute are why I'll never mess with Linux for desktop work again. My time is money!
You can teach people LaTeX in a minute? Impressive. These people have enough trouble with email- you want me to explain to them how LaTeX files work? "Hmm, they must be useless", you say. I suppose their intensive knowledge about high performance driving is why they're working on the book...nahhh.
...and no, Word is not an acceptable alternative for publishing a 60 page book.
I am skeptical about doing pair programming remotely... From my (limited) experience you need to be physically next to the other person, and in fact the whole point is that there is one keyboard that you take turns on, not simultaneous typing.
Think of it more like...'live' CVS. Think of it also not in terms of just programming, but other text editing- like, say, a book. According to the Jabber guys, this sort of stuff is incredibly handy for legal documents, which are heavily co-authored.
If you've got six guys in a meeting room, six laptops, and one doc, you can quickly say "okay, bob, edit section 6. Jane, section 3" etc..nobody needs to worry about re-syncing copies of the doc, or CVS servers, or any of that...and people can even watch as the guy edits his particular section. Maybe they notice something amiss, and mention it- "okay, can you rewrite that phrase?" While Bob continues writing, Jane corrects the one phrase...etc. Each team member can work with any number of other people(including zero, ie, on their own.)
While it's fun to joke about people trading insults and deleteing other's writing, that's moot- if you don't have good team dynamics and people are hostile/uncooperative/ego-tripping, that's a people problem, not a technology problem. You can't solve people problems with technology. Well, you can, but it's often far more time-consuming. What takes a sysadmin an hour or two(configure proxy to block porno sites) can often be solved by a 1 minute phone call to HR("Bob is swamping the line browsing porno" HR to Bob: "Surf porn sites again, and you're fired.")
The Jabber guys were looking to use the Jabber protocol to make a collaborative editor, too...among other things. They're looking to have Jabber, since it's XML based, get used for much more than just text messaging.
This Rendezvous editor looks great for "a bunch of macheads sitting at a meeting"...but Until Rendezvous is extended to more platforms and actively used, this is useless for most people- I serve as 'editor' of a large manual, and nobody else in the group of about 12 has a Mac(I use Lyx/Latex for the manual...and that makes getting edits in from people is a total PITA.)
something Jabber based would be much cooler, since there are clients for everything...and it'll work over a WAN, the internet, etc...not just a local LAN...which means we could have a collaborative worksession, despite Everyone in the club being spread out across New england and lower canada.
That said, I can't find any info about any editors that actually use Jabber yet, though...
With digital projection, why not rent out a movie theater for a super bowl party?
...because among other things, it'd be illegal. Listen closely to the disclaimer the NFL broadcasts at least once or twice during each game. Theoretically, you're not even allowed to tell your friend how the game went- reporting on the game is expressly prohibited unless you get their permission.
flash-poor browsers (and lazy or stubborn flash-avoiding users)
Flash != web. Much as macromedia would like you to believe, it ain't; it is a highly proprietary, expensive-to-author format. The plugin's a pain in the ass even on Windows or Macintosh- you're always having to upgrade it, or you've got the wrong particular "flavor".
I wish web designers would get it through their thick skulls- flash is okay if you want to do some southpark webtoon, but it should be a MINOR part of the site- never something that controls navigation, or represents all of the site content. Same for Javascript.
Throwing me to a "you need to have flash installed to view this site" is one sure-fire way to guarantee I'm going to visit your competitor's site. Flash gets you nothing- it's just for lazy designers who are too stupid to learn how to properly code HTML.
Being an amateur photographer, I can tell you that a good SLR lets you do things with perspective and for/background (using fstops and really good lighting and film conditions) that a digital really doesnt do. One is really really blur the distinction between "near" and "far" in a photo. (Stopping the lens down really really far allows the background stuff to be just as "in focus" as the near-ground.. so you lose that whole "main object crisp everything else fuzzy" image type.)
This is quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
You're talking about Depth of Field, and it applies to ALL cameras, regardless of whether you're exposing film or a CCD(or, nowadays, a CMOS sensor). Lens size(consumer digicams have smaller lenses for the most part) and aperature affect depth of field. Lots of consumer digicams let you control, at least to some degree, the aperature. My three year old Powershot G1 lets me pick anything from about F2.2 to F8, in about 10 steps or so, I think. 2.2 isn't particularly fast, and F8 is pretty poor for fully stopped down, but it's a prosumer digicam that's 3 years old.
As for overall look, A cheap point-and-shoot film camera will produce results akin to a consumer digital camera, although digital cameras generate far better images from a resolution standpoint now- film point-and-shoots, particularly APS ones(APS is much smaller than 35mm film), have horrible optics, sometimes fixed focus...ugh.
An SLR with a nice lens will prduce the same results as a digital SLR with a nice lens. Lens quality is one of the biggest factors- crappy lenses have poor contrast and show artifacts, particular zooms- pincushioning in particular...contrast is poor in zooms usually as well, as they have more glass elements. Multicoated lenses these days are better, but they still don't beat a prime lens. If you want "wow", nothing beats a nice prime 28, 35, or 50- the image will jump out at you.
As for perspective- that's a function of the position of the film and lens(not always the same!) to the object- not the type of media you're capturing to. Medium and large format cameras let you do it by changing the angle of the lens to the film in all sorts of ways; SLRs can do similar tricks with what's known as a Tilt lens, or a Tilt and Shift. Tilt applies to perspective, shift refers to the focus. What is builtin to many medium/large format cameras will cost you around $1k for an SLR- tilt/shift lenses are not cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, the music seemed to be higher budget, sounded good- to be expected...but if memory serves, a number of songs didn't make it from the movie to soundtrack in the first Matrix. One thing I really hate about movie soundtracks, is they usually leave out at least one or two songs people really wanted to be able to get.
Hey Jude, done by the Muziako(sp?) Orchestra, from the soundtrack to The Royal Tenenbaums, was left off the soundtrack, despite that it was practically the title song; it ran right smack at the beginning of the movie, uncut.
It was omitted supposedly due to "licensing reasons"(former Beatles members wouldn't allow it) but mysteriously managed to work its way into the Collector's Edition of the soundtrack. Translation: they got people to buy the original soundtrack, then made them buy an even more expensive second soundtrack with only a few extra songs, just to get the -awesome- version of Hey Jude.
...said as if to imply that manufacturers don't bias the samples(or access, especially pre-release, and especially with expensive goods) to people who gloat about them.
I know that the digital camera review sites pretty much gloat about every single camera they get- if there's anything negative, its little nitpicky things; "oh, I didn't quite like the texture on the grip". Sometimes they toss in a disclaimer about the camera being pre-production and thus 'things might be different'.
To memory, not a single review on any of the big digicam review sites mentioned the horrible focusing problems on the Canon D60 until well after they were on the market; a lot of D60s had front/back focusing problems, and the focusing system itself was quickly found to be slow as shit.
Reviewers gushed about the Canon Powershot G1; when I bought mine, 8 months later, I found there were all sorts of oddball restrictions on what combinations of modes and features you could use that none of the reviewers had mentioned. It was slow as shit to operate. It always seemed to generate noisy, out of focus pictures. While they mentioned the horrible bleed-over on bright spots from the CCD, they didn't mention the horrible washed-out look you'd get in a lot of pictures where anything even remotely bright was in the frame(it looks like you're in a cloud of fog, basically.) Every 'sample' picture I saw posted looked picture-perfect, and after shooting thousands upon thousands of frames with my camera, I have rarely, if at all, been able to duplicate the quality I've seen in many sample pictures posted on review sites.
I learned my lesson: wait until others have bought whatever you're looking at, see what comes up on the message boards in places like photo.net, and go to a store and try it out yourself(in many cases with digicams for example, you can even rent them- and sometimes the store gives a credit towards the purchase price for money you drop on renting). Similar things can be said about games- try before you buy(many stores have systems set up with demos), and see what people in the messageboards say, taking what they say with a BIG grain of salt. Most people on the message boards and mailing lists:
...but that doesn't mean they're not, say, someone in Company A's marketing department, hyping up the product- it's been proven to happen, and those were just the morons who were too blatant about it.
Reviewers are con-artists, and cheats- there are FEW honest ones among them, and the story author admits to being one, and even tries to make us feel sorry for him. Sorry, I don't. The whole setup is loaded with wash-my-back-I-wash-yours deals.
Anyone else notice that the scene with her falling out the window looks completely fake? Her head moves really weird, in time with each uzi firing a round...her head jumps around or something, really wierd- didn't look right at all.
I wonder how much scruitiny the big fight scene with the 100 Agent Smiths will stand up to...it sure looked good at full speed. Too bad mplayer doesn't have a slow-mo button. Grrrrr. xine does...
Seriously, that is the biggest description I've seen in the 5-6 years I've been reading slashdot. Reminds me about Katz; just keeps going, and going...
Speaking of The Man Everyone Loves to Hate, the King Of Pontification...where is the guy? We haven't heard a peep from him in ages(not that this is a bad thing, actually.)
Rumor has it preproduction units will be showing up for ass-kissi^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H review at the major digital camera review websites.
Astronomer 1:"Did you hear that?"
Astronomer 2:"Yeah, sounded like a couple thousand Canon D10 owners saying 'Ahhhh CRAP'."
Yeah, that seems to be the party line, except it's BS; talk about knee-jerk reactions. Instead of just saying "oo, oo, it's insecure!", recognize that:
A)Few people have a minor's social security number. How many of -them- care about the kid's grades?
B)grades, attendance record, etc are not even remotely 'sensitive' information. My bank only needs my account # and PIN to get MONEY! Whoa! How insecure!
C)unless I missed something, it's just a display. Nothing can be changed. So the access control mechanism just needs to be good enough to keep jokers(ie, mostly, your classmates) from looking at your grades. How many of your classmates know your SS #? None, I hope- only place they could get that info is off your license if you're old enough to drive and your state still does license #= SS #, or if they overlook you filling out paperwork. If they do get your grades(ie, all of the sudden Johnny knows all of Billy's grades), then the appropriate parties get saturday detention so they can philosophize the morning away and do a little high-school-social-class mixing.
Calm down, people...
"Now, you've only got 30 minutes on the USS Doomed before the zeta boop epsilon radiatior-the-writers-invented-to-solve-a-plot-hol e kills you, so make sure you transport back before then. Of course, you'll be a few minutes late, but you'll be fine when I rush you to sickbay and Picard says gee-golly-thanks, and it'll all just prove I'm just the nagging-mom type. So here's your damn mittens, Geordi. Go be the hero while I go nag Wesley so the viewers have someone to identify with."
As usual, he's got a major chip on his shoulder. It was always one thing or another:
-compilers that caused the program to crash or do odd things(mplayer's configure script would refuse to run unless you had certain versions of GCC, and no- it wasn't 'the broken one that shipped with redhat' that it would object to). Funny, but nobody else had such unusual compiler requirements.
-licensing problems(some of the rants are truly spectacular.) At one point he went and dug up other projects that he felt were worse violators, as if to try and shift people's attention/justify his own problem. It was pathetic.
-Distros "incorrectly building" the player(I think it was how they were linking to libraries), which would then send floods of users to them(and, of course, they think all their users are idiots). Mplayer is by far the most anal-retentive about distribution of binaries, and as a result, the distros have told them to kiss off distro-style(ie, mplayer's been dropped from the major distros)
Mplayer got a bad review for (surprise!) having "developers [who] were unfriendly and ... documentation incomplete and insulting." His response? He attacks the author of the review with several bullet-points in the DOCS TO MPLAYER ITSELF! As someone once told me, "it's better to keep your mouth shut and let people wonder if you're an a jerk, than to open it and remove all doubt."
In each case, it was "mplayer versus the world", and in his opinion, the world could go screw itself. The docs, the website, even the messages in the configure script and the program itself- were all confrontational, and/or insulting; sorry, I don't like software that cops an attitude. This guy, if not the entire team, had serious problems with keeping their mouths in check. So, when I hear he's leaving, I can only say GOOD.
As I download this latest release, I can't help but remember how nothing changed with each release candidate up to this; the volume control doesn't work, the OSD is broken, some files give it complete conniptions but play fine in Xine, and it takes an enormous amount of CPU power now. Used to take about 2-5% of my CPU, now it takes 50%. Playback is jerky, too. Xine? None of these problems(sync is often better, playback is smooth, CPU usage is minimal/non-existent.)
Maybe the reason he's pissed off is because Xine is using his code(as they can- if you didn't like the concept of others using your code, you shouldn't have made the project open-source), but using it -BETTER-.
This is far more telling:
"A Dr Hall from the Nuclear Physics Faculty ANU, around 1994, wrote a very nasty letter to me warning me I'd be ostracized by the the Science Establishment if I didn't change my attitude. He meant I had to be subservient, pay homage and grovel to my intellectual and scientific inferiors. People like me are no good at all at being a follower of any religion."
The answer to that one is "no, you shouldn't go calling the head of the Australian Royal Academy of Science a 'bitch' after she warns you that she considers your communications with her threatening."
Like most people who claim to have 'disproven' various laws of physics, they don't understand, or misapply, other laws. He presents zero physical evidence, except a tangle of his own theories and "proofs', none of which can be found. The incredibly poor grammar only helps to confuse the reader- someone get the boy a book on proper grammar and punctuation and tell him to come back in a year. While he's at it, he can publish all these proofs, and give exact references to where his work has been stolen(ie, where has it shown up, please.)
Regardless, if he's threatening/harassing members of the scientific community, then there should be legal action against him, and as part of that, he should be psychologically evaluated.
http://www.google.com/search?q=aspartame
Then again, with names like the "Worldwide Anti-Aspartame Movement"(WAAM), they're not exactly putting a good, non-loony image forward, are they? :-)
The whole thing is pretty absurd, hence I feel silly being serious about this...but...making it that much easier to consume soda, which is LOADED with calories(among other things- mostly from sugars), is only going to give you diabetes sooner and plump you up mighty quick. I forget exactly what economists call it, but you're more likely to spend money that's easily accessed. Ie, the bag of chips next to you is gonna get eaten faster than the one downstairs in the drawer.
Seriously, folks- get out and walk, jog, run, bike, skate/skateboard/rollerblade to the local corner store, and carry the 6-pack back. If you're lucky, it'll all balance out. you'll get your daily exercise(what is it, minimum 30 minutes raised heart rate per day?), which means you'll feel better(excercise creates endorphines), and you'll live longer, too. You'll also get to excercise the brain, and reduce eye fatigue, since you'll be moving your eyes a lot and focusing on different things.
There's also cool stuff like(gasp!) water, fruit juice, and vegetable juice. All three are much healthier for you, and(at least IMHO) taste better. I'm not saying switch off soda completely- just go for variety; it's probably the most common thing you hear from nutritionists- eat a little of everything. It's more fun/interesting, too :-)
700,000 people a year die from heart disease. "A little exercise won't kill you" is truer than you think, and eating healthy is great insurance. Ask people who just came out of having heart-bypass operations or their first heart attack, or just got diagnosed with diabetes, and ask them if they wish they had eaten better. I'd be amazed if the answer isn't 100% "Yes".
Go suck a cock.
Whassamatta, didn't want to burn your karma on such a childish comment? In any case, I'm dying to know- why was I deserving of this comment?
The movie 'takes place' mid-series if I recall. It was really cheating most of the US to show them the complete series first- the movie should have been timed to premiere in the US around ep 20 or so, but well before the last episodes. Sadly, I think the only reason this is in theaters(and/or perhaps the reason it took so long) is because it's about terrorism; as a topic for entertainment, first it was taboo, now it's all the rage.
It doesn't have to have a sad ending to be good, by the way. Watch the third Patlabor movie some time if you like the whole political intrigue/detective story(which is part of what Knockin' on Heaven's Door is about.)
Personally, I would have been just as happy if Cowboy Bebop had a happy ending, since I enjoyed every episode. If anything, the sad ending was a huge let-down. Then again, the first episode in the series was a pretty tragic, and should have been a clue that they'd go any-which-way.
I've already seen the movie(it was fansubbed at -least- a year ago); I highly recommend it; everything you've come to love in the bebop series. There is a GREAT dogfight sequence, worth the cost of the ticket alone, and two great hand-to-hand combat scenes. I will probably go to see it in the theaters, since I a)support anime and b)I want to see the great artwork up close and personal.
(currently watching Read Or Die- let's hear it for secret agent librarians, yeah!)
I can't seriously believe this was originally modded 4/insightful. THank god it's been knocked down.
It's very simple. India was a known source of vast resources(and to counter the knee-jerk reaction- space may be full of resources, but unlike the resources in India, we have NO way to get TO them, extract them, and send them back, in any sort of reasonable way. There is nothing in space we can't find or make on earth cheaper than going out to get it). Exploration to figure out a 'better' way of reaching India had clear goals. Also, the amount of money PALES in comparison; we've flushed TRILLIONS of dollars into space exploration. The King of Spain gave columbus enough for a couple ships and supplies, and since ships(and supplies) were pretty common in those days, it didn't take a whole lot of money. It would be like Bush giving NASA a couple of cargo ships, today. Not hundreds of research centers, hundreds of aerospace contractors, two space stations, half a dozen billion-dollar space vehicles...etc.
Space? None of the above. NO clear goals(name one clear goal. "Scientific exploration"? Yeah, that's clear.) Prohibitively expensive equipment. Oh, you say "get to mars" is a clear goal? Look at the Moon, morons. What the HELL did going to the moon get us? ABSA-fucking-loutley NOTHING except a bunch of damn rocks sitting in a display case. How many hundreds of thousands of man-hours did we waste, not to mention the money- on a bunch of rocks? I see nothing different from Mars, or any of the other planets....and since it's physically impossible to break the speed of light(to cut another knee-jerk reaction, unlike 'the world is flat', we've got damn good collaborative evidence that the speed of light is the end of the speedometer), we have no chance of ever getting beyond our solar system. We might as well stick a label on the scale of the focusing knob of the world's telescopes, that reads "irrelevant.' Same thing goes for this moronic 'search for life'. I'm sure there IS life elsewhere in the galaxy. Will we ever find out or be able to do anything about it? Nope. Too far away. Who gives a crap? I don't want to meet most of the people on this planet, why would I want to meet someone from -another- planet?
However, your analogy is quite accurate in two regards- a)the king came under increasing pressure to explain the amount of money he was giving Columbus, who pretty much succeeded by dumb shit luck...and b)Columbus's discovery resulted in plauge, death, destruction, and war, the likes of which had never been seen before. We exterminated an entire continent of people as a result of his discoveries.
If tomorrow the space station finds a wormhole and we end up on some planet that's just like ours, has a bunch of nice resources, and people whose weapons aren't quite as cool as ours, are we going to repeat our history?
No space station or wormhole needed, we're already doing that juuuuust fine in Iraq, although the pricetag is pretty impressive- $80 billion. That's $330 per every man, woman and child in the US. We could end hunger in the US tomorrow if we distributed $80 billion to soup kitchens and homeless shelters. TOss some of it towards Habitat For Humanity, and we could put a serious dent in homelessness, too.
Okay, this is gonna get me a flambait since you all love the space stuff, but whatever- I don't care. I'm so sick of hearing space this, space that. I'm THROUGH.
When are people going to realize that we need to spend money on educating, sheltering, clothing and feeding people, and giving them proper medical care...-and THEN- on the toys like space stations? We're putting the cart before the horse by working out all these galatic mysteries before we figure out how to run a responsble, effective, efficient society that co-exists with the planet it's located on. I am NOT suggesting we abandon scientific research- I just think that the government has no business funding research that does not benefit people/humanity in some tanigible way. Seeing pictures of a galaxy 10,000 lightyears away, or figuring out the earth's gravity does thus-and-such, does not feed the homeless guy in the cardboard box on the corner of Main Street and 5th.
Clothing, feeding, sheltering, and keeping healthy every person sounds pretty pie-in-the-sky, don't it? I bet going to the moon sounded pretty absurd too, once...and that should make you pause and think. The major difference is that the first actually accomplishes something useful- the second allows the very symbol of wealth(healthy, strong, well educated people) to play. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
Society seems to have gone the way of the 10 year old kid who just got home from school; do homework, or play with the Nintendo? Society seems to have checked out of handling the basic problems, and is instead playing with its useless toys. Look at the article recently about all the VC companies sitting around desperate for places to invest their money, which they're throwing at things like insanely useless things as WIFI.
If we can't find the money to feed people, why do we have piles of it lying around to throw at the most abusrd, useless things? You may be able to see the city lights from space, but you can't see the starving children.
Actually, it is- as one poster said "what, do you copyright everything you write?" The answer is no- as an anonymous poster pointed out, I don't have to- the Berne Convention does it for me. That makes it 100% illegal for you to reproduce, modify, etc- in any means(including electronic) the document, except under fair use. Obviously storage of the email doesn't apply- it's commonly understood by the sender that the email has to be stored at several points along the journey. Same thing for mailing lists- people know mailing lists are archived, and that they go to zillions of people.
and btw -- you can definitely tape-record a conversation as long as ONE of the parties involved gives their consent
Good point- I had it wrong, it's the berne convention, not wiretapping/taping laws. HOWEVER- your statement is wrong as well, it varies GREATLY state to state. In CA, it is completely illegal to tape any conversation, phone or otherwise, unless all parties are aware of the recording; this was reinforced in a 2002 CA supreme court ruling.
If it's interstate, you fall under federal laws as well(one party). I found a great page here that seems to be written by/for PI's; these guys have a LOT at stake(they can loose their licenses, and since most of what they record could end up in court, they could end up in jail, too), and several note that the 'strictest' rule applies in an interstate call- ie, state A, state B, or federal- whatever's strictest. Ie, if state XY has a all-parties law, but you call from YZ, XY can still go after you.
(otherwise, answering machines would be illegal... duh!)
Eh? Most people capable of dialing telephones realize you're being recorded when you leave a message on an answering machine. If you were to then sell that message to the local TV station, well, I dunno about that- it could probably still be argued that you has a reasonable expectation that the communication was private- ie, only would be heard by members of the household.
IANAL, but it's not just obnoxious, it's illegal- regardless of whether you obscure the names. Unless I specify otherwise, any communication I send you is intended for you, and you only. If you forward it to someone else, or, say, post it online for all to read, I can sue you. It's quite similar to how you may not tape-record a conversation without my permission.
Unless the content is quite obviously harmless, I ask the permission of the sender before forwarding a message from them to a mailing list(or cc'ing others in a reply that contains part of their comments, quoted.) It is at the very least considered good manners.
MS could quite easily slap him with a cease-and-desist letter, although it'd probably draw even more attention to the matter, one which, at the very least, seems almost entirely pointless and will be forgotten in a day or two.
Though supposedly scientists now think men have biological clocks too...it's women who are 'famous' for have 'ticking' gotta-have-kids clocks. In both sexes, it's designed to get you to reproduce while you're healthy, but women face a rather finite deadline...with guys, it's not quite as....uh...firm...
Of course, you all seem to have forgotten that the Jolly Green Giant HAS a kid already- 'Sprout'. further proof you can find anything on Google :-).
What a good role model, though- I've never seen a Mrs. Giant around. Maybe the food companies are trying to brainwash the american public into a lack of family values! Quick, someone tell the religious right to boycott vegetables! :-)
It's not the same- you don't need to know where people are, just their screen names. Same benefits as Redezvous, only it works over more than just a local LAN. It's not better for everything/everyone. Both have specific advantages, I just think a collaborative editor based off Jabber is more flexible in the end. That, again, does not make it better.
You don't have to be "sitting at a meeting", but you do need a Mac. Of course nothing stops you from buying a Mac if you want to.
How incredibly arrogant. Gee...except money, personal preferences, or the applications they use aren't available for the Macintosh(I'm talking specific software, not overall. Don't get even more arrogant by saying "all the good stuff is ported"). I'm a Macintosh user. Always will be; I use both Linux and MacOS X. But I'm not arrogant enough to say "well, nothing stops you from buying a mac" to the twelve people I have to work with...or anyone else for that matter.
Not sure what using LaTeX has to do with any of this.
Not much. I simply mentioned that collaborative writing on the project I was doing was a royal pain.
Hydra does support LaTeX color syntaxing
Color syntaxing is useless if your people don't know latex. I'd love to give them a copy of Lyx, but only one guy has a mac(and he's using OS 9) and the other 11 people are Windows users. LyX on windows requires Cygwin, which I spent hours trying to install myself, and got nowhere.
and will eventually work with typesetting your documents too from what it says in the FAQ. Of course TeXShop already does that nicely on OS X.
LyX runs on OS X. It's also free/open-source. Yawn.
Getting edits from many users for a shared LaTeX file seems to work great with Hydra. I just had a friend share a paper I wrote on a machine across campus and I was able to find it instantly with Hydra (and Rendevous), add my LaTeX modifications and was done. A quick run of latex at the command line on his end and we were set!
You were all set because you were only importing non-latex once. When you've got 50 pages, 12 authors, a need for constant revision, and you're the only one that knows LaTeX, there's simply no easy way to let them submit changes to you; I can't retypeset the whole damn thing every time regardless of the editor; even a chapter would take an hour or more. I can't expect them to preserve tags, either, when they go about moving/deleteing/changing big blocks of text.
Cool tools like this that I can setup in seconds and teach ANYONE to use in a minute are why I'll never mess with Linux for desktop work again. My time is money!
You can teach people LaTeX in a minute? Impressive. These people have enough trouble with email- you want me to explain to them how LaTeX files work? "Hmm, they must be useless", you say. I suppose their intensive knowledge about high performance driving is why they're working on the book...nahhh.
...and no, Word is not an acceptable alternative for publishing a 60 page book.
Think of it more like...'live' CVS. Think of it also not in terms of just programming, but other text editing- like, say, a book. According to the Jabber guys, this sort of stuff is incredibly handy for legal documents, which are heavily co-authored.
If you've got six guys in a meeting room, six laptops, and one doc, you can quickly say "okay, bob, edit section 6. Jane, section 3" etc..nobody needs to worry about re-syncing copies of the doc, or CVS servers, or any of that...and people can even watch as the guy edits his particular section. Maybe they notice something amiss, and mention it- "okay, can you rewrite that phrase?" While Bob continues writing, Jane corrects the one phrase...etc. Each team member can work with any number of other people(including zero, ie, on their own.)
While it's fun to joke about people trading insults and deleteing other's writing, that's moot- if you don't have good team dynamics and people are hostile/uncooperative/ego-tripping, that's a people problem, not a technology problem. You can't solve people problems with technology. Well, you can, but it's often far more time-consuming. What takes a sysadmin an hour or two(configure proxy to block porno sites) can often be solved by a 1 minute phone call to HR("Bob is swamping the line browsing porno" HR to Bob: "Surf porn sites again, and you're fired.")
This Rendezvous editor looks great for "a bunch of macheads sitting at a meeting"...but Until Rendezvous is extended to more platforms and actively used, this is useless for most people- I serve as 'editor' of a large manual, and nobody else in the group of about 12 has a Mac(I use Lyx/Latex for the manual...and that makes getting edits in from people is a total PITA.)
something Jabber based would be much cooler, since there are clients for everything...and it'll work over a WAN, the internet, etc...not just a local LAN...which means we could have a collaborative worksession, despite Everyone in the club being spread out across New england and lower canada.
That said, I can't find any info about any editors that actually use Jabber yet, though...
...but Someone's gotta say it.
:-)
Wasssaaaaaaabiiiiii!
Okay, I'm done
...because among other things, it'd be illegal. Listen closely to the disclaimer the NFL broadcasts at least once or twice during each game. Theoretically, you're not even allowed to tell your friend how the game went- reporting on the game is expressly prohibited unless you get their permission.
Flash != web. Much as macromedia would like you to believe, it ain't; it is a highly proprietary, expensive-to-author format. The plugin's a pain in the ass even on Windows or Macintosh- you're always having to upgrade it, or you've got the wrong particular "flavor".
I wish web designers would get it through their thick skulls- flash is okay if you want to do some southpark webtoon, but it should be a MINOR part of the site- never something that controls navigation, or represents all of the site content. Same for Javascript.
Throwing me to a "you need to have flash installed to view this site" is one sure-fire way to guarantee I'm going to visit your competitor's site. Flash gets you nothing- it's just for lazy designers who are too stupid to learn how to properly code HTML.
This is quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
You're talking about Depth of Field, and it applies to ALL cameras, regardless of whether you're exposing film or a CCD(or, nowadays, a CMOS sensor). Lens size(consumer digicams have smaller lenses for the most part) and aperature affect depth of field. Lots of consumer digicams let you control, at least to some degree, the aperature. My three year old Powershot G1 lets me pick anything from about F2.2 to F8, in about 10 steps or so, I think. 2.2 isn't particularly fast, and F8 is pretty poor for fully stopped down, but it's a prosumer digicam that's 3 years old.
As for overall look, A cheap point-and-shoot film camera will produce results akin to a consumer digital camera, although digital cameras generate far better images from a resolution standpoint now- film point-and-shoots, particularly APS ones(APS is much smaller than 35mm film), have horrible optics, sometimes fixed focus...ugh.
An SLR with a nice lens will prduce the same results as a digital SLR with a nice lens. Lens quality is one of the biggest factors- crappy lenses have poor contrast and show artifacts, particular zooms- pincushioning in particular...contrast is poor in zooms usually as well, as they have more glass elements. Multicoated lenses these days are better, but they still don't beat a prime lens. If you want "wow", nothing beats a nice prime 28, 35, or 50- the image will jump out at you.
As for perspective- that's a function of the position of the film and lens(not always the same!) to the object- not the type of media you're capturing to. Medium and large format cameras let you do it by changing the angle of the lens to the film in all sorts of ways; SLRs can do similar tricks with what's known as a Tilt lens, or a Tilt and Shift. Tilt applies to perspective, shift refers to the focus. What is builtin to many medium/large format cameras will cost you around $1k for an SLR- tilt/shift lenses are not cheap.