I have no memory of the soundtrack music. That in and of itself might say something. I'm a musician, but it just didn't register.
Thus it had a successful soundtrack. A good movie soundtrack only compliments the movie, but is not intrusive. There's nothing worse than being highly involved in the scene and suddenly the music rings out and you think, oh, that's Will Smith's theme again!
When they cut the original Matrix movie, they made a point to edit the scenes without any temp scoring so that they would stand on their own without music, thus leaving the music to be composed as a compliment, rather than the scenes being edited to fit the music.
It took a couple of viewings of Fellowship before I started picking out the themes in the soundtrack. A friend of mine thought the score was terrible initially because he didn't remember it, but loved it after a few more listens.
Memorable themes seem to be needed in musicals, superhero movies and... Titanic, I guess.:)
IMO there's nothing worse than a show which is long past its prime being flogged like a dead horse. All the great comedy series are great because they stopped before they got bad - Fawlty Towers, Seinfeld, The Office.
While that may be true (Friends was long past its due) the poster you are replying to was talking about the Fox network. Fox has murdered many excellent shows long before their due.
Firefly? Wonderfalls? Futurama? The Tick? Family Guy?
But from my perspective, iTunes/AAC is 10x more proprietary than WMA and Apple has not been anywhere near as forthcoming with developers as M$oft has been over WMA.
Umm... AAC is an international standard, recognized by the International Standards Organization (ISO). Take a look at MPEG-2 NBC/MPEG-4 Audio standard ISO/IEC 13818-7, 14496-1,2 and 3 for more information. It was designed by the MPEG group to be the successor of MP3.
It looks like Apple is poised to win the online digital music vending business. They right now have the best promotions to attract people to find out about their service, and I think the Pepsi promotion this February will bring a LOT of users to the service. iTunes is free and you get a free song. Heck, buying cases of Pepsi and getting a couple of free songs.
I just installed iTunes for Windows the other day and was amazed at how easy it was to use... mirroring the thoughts of countless reviews of the service. This is the key, because if it's easy to use, average-joe user (i.e. the big market) will like to use it. And with the best fair-use policies of all of them, and many artists backing them (rebooted or not, why would Metallica suddenly feel good about a product named 'Napster'?) I think this is the one chance for legal music downloads succeeding.
The problem with the business model of all of these is that the same thing is available free. Well now it's cheap... 99 cents you can buy ONLY the songs you like instead of the entire album where only 3 songs are good, and they are better quality than what is on Kazaa.
The iPod's huge market share certainly doesn't hurt their case.
You know, I've agreed with your sentiment for a long time. But recently I bought a Sony Clie SJ33 as a birthday gift for probably the most amazing, beautiful girl in the world, and after seeing her daily use with it, I've changed my mind on this.
I started with Palms ever since I got a Palm 1000. You know, that boxy dark-grey thing that had 128kb of memory long before Palm realized that independent developers would write thousands upon thousands of applications for the platform. Back then, they did one thing and one thing well--organize. Finally, there was some device I could hold in my hand that could actually improve my day-to-day life. Something that wasn't merely a toy but a real, useful tool.
I eventually moved up to a Palm Vx for the 8mb RAM, LiIon battery and small form-factor. To me those were great features that complemented the key point of it all--to organize. I loved my Palm Vx and shook my head with disgust as the Palms that came after disappointed me. The next Palms traded battery life for fancy colour screens and suddenly you were paying extra for features that didn't matter.
Well, this Clie SJ33 has changed my mind. Now they are actually coming out non-organizer features that are actually useful. The MP3 playback integrated with the Palm alone makes this handheld amazing. Sure, you can carry around your Palm, music playing device and cellphone. I've done that before, but I always had heavy, bulging and uncomfortable pockets as a result. The best solution I've seen is more than three years old, and it's the eholster which tucks your miniature high-tech devices under your arms. Unfortunately they aren't actually usable because they actually look like real gun-holsters and pulling out a PDA has made a few people around me jump as it looked like I was drawing a gun. Practical, but doesn't work too well in this post 9-11 society. This girl that I speak of prefers wearing pocketless skirts over bulding pants, so integrating the music player with a small form-factored Palm works perfectly for her.
Digital cameras on a Palm also work very well, found on the Zire 71 mentioned in this Slashdot article and also the memory stick cameras, not to mention the built in one on the Sony CLIE PEGNX70V or PEGNZ90. Sure, they are barely 1 megapixel, but they are a lot of fun. Basically if you're like me, you're going to have your Palm on you at all times. But I only think to bring my camera to social events. So now you have the ability to capture anything, anytime as you go through life. See a funny subway ad that you want to show your girlfriend? See Natalie Portman walking down the street and want to take a picture with her? End up spontaneously at a party and want to take some pictures? Sure the quality won't be up there, but you can still capture some memories at unexpected moments.
I could go on with the many more features available, but my point being that mere organizing changed my life, but now they are adding features that can also improve my day-to-day life, and everyday these features dive cheaper and cheaper.
I tried for a long time to get my best friend into watching the show. When I finally convinced him to watch through season 1, at the same time he watched Dark Angel.
After seeing a few episodes, he told me that while he recognized that the Buffy episodes were well-written and the characters were interesting, vampires and demons just didn't interest him, whereas in Dark Angel the premise kept him going even through the bad episodes.
He argued that the premise was key. Because in five, ten seasons later, they still would be fighting vampires.
How wrong he was. He managed to get through it, and realize that even the premise, the status-quo, the concept of the show was ever changing. Sure, the overall idea is that Buffy is the chosen one who must slay vampires. Season three toned down the vampire content and focussed on highschool life. Season four was about how college separates you from your friends, and tried to bring science into the mix. Season five was about family, and what it means to be a Slayer. Season six was about growing up and responsibility.
I guess it's no surprise that Buffy is now his favourite show, even though he still isn't into vampires or demons. Even the cool premise of Dark Angel didn't save the bad writing, and he eventually got bored and stopped watching.
This is probably because angsty wimps are more interesting.
Badass demon. I mean, those two words have told the entire story. Demon is gonna come and try to kick your ass. The good guys have to kill it. Badass demon probably will taunt them before dying at the hero's hands.
Anyway, Angel isn't angsty. He's brooding. He's not depressed all the time. He's a badass when he needs to be, he's kind to people when he needs to be, his character is a bit deeper than either demon you mention.
But it wasn't the angst. In fact, it was more the lack of angst. Anne Rice books, though they kinda wear on you after the first half dozen or so, at least have some amount of feeling. At least with angsty books, there has to be a bit of introspection in the characters. A certain amount of emotional depth which is inherent in the plotline.
That kinda strikes me as funny, because I always thought that that was the key to Buffy. It's all about the emotion, and does stray on the side of being too angsty at times (which is why last season was so unpopular).
Honestly, these character never get a break. They often lose, and lose hard. I'd love to see a 'meddling kids save the day episode' once in a while because sometimes I think the show is way too depressing.
Buffy dies. Buffy's mom dies. Xander leaves Anya at the altar. Angel becomes evil. Tara is killed, and Willow becomes evil seeking revenge.
If that all sounded really cheesy or melodramatic, realize that we're talking about seven years of plot twists. I guess I can't really express it without it sounding stupid, but it's almost the mission statement that the characters can never be happy.
The SNR of television is so incredibly low, that I can understand why you think that. But there are actually a few gems that play out well on television.
The strength of TV is that the medium allows you to have a visual novel. Movies suffer from incredibly flat characterizations, because there just isn't time for your to learn who people really are in two hours. The except to this are character movies, movies which pushes everything aside and make you learn who the people are.
You can develop complicated storylines and have complicated people. The problem is, many shows don't.
Why? Because it is much easier for someone flipping channels to stop and watch episodic shows that fall into a nice formula and don't depend on continuity. As in, it's not too confusing for the casual viewer. It's hard to plan your life around the television schedule.
So on the other side, continuity heavy shows are completely incomprehensible to all except the core fans because they rely on the knowledge of years of development of both plot and character for the meaningful payoffs.
Friends is (was) a good example of a show that managed to play both sides of the game. They kept continuity between episodes and continually changed the status-quo. They would trade apartments, date other people, even get married. Yet the stories were told in such a way that, if you watch carefully, you'll notice that they recap the key events in the first few minutes of conversation without feeling like "Last time on Friends..."
Buffy, Angel, 24, Alias, these are continuity heavy shows that can lock out the casual viewer. They do require a heavy commitment to fully appreciate. In just last week's Buffy episode, they made a passing reference to a season one episode when a girl started to disappear when nobody payed any attention to her.
And then there's the noise, everywhere, all the time. Shows that make you watch someone eat worms, or are ads for trading cards, or just plain insult your intellegence.
But there is better stuff out there, if you care to give things a chance.
I would argue that it's one of the more intelligent shows on television. Buffy has always gotten a bad reputation for its name. It even turned me off from watching it.
But when I sat down and watched a few, it was surprising how dramatic the show was. The key to the show is that there's a real human element to it. The characters are played as real people despite the fantasy situation, which is incredibly rare and refreshing. How many times in mass media have you seen fantasy and sci-fi characters played out as flat caracatures? Sci-fi is often too obsessed with the technological and short changes interesting characterizations. No, this show is great because it is about people. It uses the fantasy element to put them in extraordinary situations.
Take Buffy's death. She died at the end of season five, and her friends were horrified. At the beginning of the next season, her friends had found a spell to bring her back, to save her from whatever unspeakable hell dimension she was in. (If you are finding this ridiculous, use a little imagination. I mean, Star Trek was just as hokey; how many deflector dish realignments before it got silly?) So they bring her back to life. Now most shows would have left it at that, destroying the entire dramatic element of the death. But the twist was this: Buffy had gone to Heaven, and her friends had ripped her out and brought her back. After feeling the nirvana of Heaven, it's safe to imagine it would be hard to find any joy in living once back on Earth. She had to deal with this difficult experience all season long. This, as will all of the plot elements have realistic and far-reaching consequences.
Seriously. They mix comedy, action, but especially drama. It's definitely not the cheesy show the title would have you believe.
I don't think HTML is really intended to be more than a layout/formatting tool at this point. The original purposes may have been different, but at this point, isn't that why XML is so useful?
XML can be used to classify the content. Perhaps from that generate HTML to apply styles, formatting and layout.
Teasers for movie sequels usually are there to say -- hey we got a sequel coming out in 1 year! Get ready for it. So they're going to rely on the stuff you liked in the first movie to advertise it -- songs, action, etc.
Plus they're not going to give away even minor spoilers about the plot/concept this early... and movie trailers tend to be cut very strangely since remember they are meant to get the general public to get INTO the movie theatre, not be an accurate representation of the movie.
Joss Whedon hated Alien Resurrection as well. His scripts are written be to delivered in a very specific way, and many directors just don't 'get' it. Here's a clip from an interview, talking about his work on X-Men and leading into Alien Resurrection.
JW: X-Men was very interesting in that, by that time, I actually had a reputation in television. I was actually somebody. People stopped thinking I was John Sweden on the phone. And then, in X-Men, not only did they throw out my script and never tell me about it; they actually invited me to the read-through, having thrown out my entire draft without telling me. I was like, "Oh, that's right! This is the movies! The writer is shit in the movies!" I'll never understand that. I have one line left in that movie. Actually, there are a couple of lines left in that are out of context and make no sense, or are delivered so badly, so terribly... There's one line that's left the way I wrote it.
O: Which is?
JW: "'It's me.' 'Prove it.' 'You're a dick.'" Hey, it got a laugh.
O: It's funny that the only lines I really remember from that movie are that one and Storm's toad comment.
JW: Okay, which was also mine, and that's the interesting thing. Everybody remembers that as the worst line ever written, but the thing about that is, it was supposed to be delivered as completely offhand. [Adopts casual, bored tone.] "You know what happens when a toad gets hit by lightning?" Then, after he gets electrocuted, "Ahhh, pretty much the same thing that happens to anything else." But Halle Berry said it like she was Desdemona. [Strident, ringing voice.] "The same thing that happens to everything eeelse!" That's the thing that makes you go crazy. At least "You're a dick" got delivered right. The worst thing about these things is that, when the actors say it wrong, it makes the writer look stupid. People assume that the line... I listened to half the dialogue in Alien 4, and I'm like, "That's idiotic," because of the way it was said. And nobody knows that. Nobody ever gets that. They say, "That was a stupid script," which is the worst pain in the world. I have a great long boring story about that, but I can tell you the very short version. In Alien 4, the director changed something so that it didn't make any sense. He wanted someone to go and get a gun and get killed by the alien, so I wrote that in and tried to make it work, but he directed it in a way that it made no sense whatsoever. And I was sitting there in the editing room, trying to come up with looplines to explain what's going on, to make the scene make sense, and I asked the director, "Can you just explain to me why he's doing this? Why is he going for this gun?" And the editor, who was French, turned to me and said, with a little leer on his face, [adopts gravelly, smarmy, French-accented voice] "Because eet's een the screept." And I actually went and dented the bathroom stall with my puddly little fist. I have never been angrier. But it's the classic, "When something goes wrong, you assume the writer's a dork." And that's painful.
You know, I would have agreed with you maybe a year ago. Who would want to watch a show called Buffy: The Vampire Slayer anyway??
But then one of my friends started raving about how good this series is, and he's the kind of guy who doesn't watch a show just for the good looking women.
Slowly he managed to convince me to watch the show. While season 1 was pretty bad and gave the necessary backstory, season 2 and 3 gave me some of the best hours of TV I've watched.
Angel is one of the best villians I have ever seen in my life. Sure, Darth Vader killed a lot of people and Kevin Spacey in Se7en made you want to throw up, but Angel was cruel, vicious and stabbed you in the heart with every mean word he said. The buildup of Angel as a good guy beforehand is what creates the intense emotional weight of Angel as a bad guy.
Meanwhile Xander, Willow, Oz, and all the regulars have such a great ensemble together. Joss Whedon gives them some great, witty dialogue and you find these people would be people that you'd actually want to be friends with.
This is a show that never sells out for an easy plot. When the show has twists, turns and surprises, it earns it. Even in all the silliness of the episode Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered, where Amy's love spell screws up and makes all the girls go after Xander, this act has repercussions. Willow is upset afterwards for how she was forced to act with Xander, for example.
Hush, an episode where the characters can't speak, nominated for an Emmy.
The Body, an episode where Buffy's mother dies, and the BEST episode ever for portrayal of a death. Many long cuts, slow scenes, very realistic, and no music through the entire show.
Recently, the Buffy Musical was a great achievement, even UPN allowed the show to run 9 minutes longer than the usual 44 minutes for an episode.
The show sounds really cheesy, the ideas really campy, but it never takes itself too seriously and makes fun of itself a lot. Throws in some excellently written emotional plotlines and earns the audiences' feelings. Even actors who want to get on the show usually have to convince their Agents. "You want to be on Buffy the WHAT??"
If you're not convinced, check out Buffy creator/writer/producer/director/superhero Joss Whedon's interview on The Onion and you can see how intense and visonary this guy is.
The flaw with your argument rests with the analogy.
Photocopiers are like the ability to copy files. Both have many very legal purposes, and the need to use them for the legal reasons far outweigh the need to delete files.
Morpheus and Napster primarily trade copyrighted MP3s. Even if you assume they made the software with the intention to trade uncopyrighted works (which is not the case) they still are used primarily for illegal activity.
So then obviously, it becomes a target for legal action.
Today where I work was hit by your standard email remailing virus. You know the kind -- attachment annakournikova.jpg.vbs, that when opened runs that nasty VBScript that emails everyone on your list.
Such a simple, dumb, preventable 'virus', which is nothing more than a simple VBScript than a real virus, cost us a lot. All of the email movement had to be frozen to keep the email service alive. Not being able to communicate with our clients is suicide in what we do (though I won't elaborte on who I work for). Not to mention the lost hours of productivity with much of our IT staff running around to get this thing fixed.
Such a dumb, simple, problem, and it shut us down for a whole day. I don't know how much money that was worth, but I can guarantee you, it was a lot.
(NB -- Yes, yes, turn of VBScript, etc. etc. But I'm not the one making the security decisions...)
I think that HTML has its place in the email world, whether we like it or not. At work our help desk has to respond to emails from other internal departments where they are having trouble with something. And anyone who's tried to help out a friend who doesn't know too much about computers should realize that its incredibly hard to use the phone or even a text email to convey how to do things.
Even the syntax Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Display Properties confuses most of them. So the solution that works is to put screenshots to illustrate how to do it. There really isn't any more elegant way short of physically finding the caller and working at his/her desk.
So agreed, we open up the security can of worms when we allow HTML. Perhaps there are solutions... non-HTML ways? Or only allowing internal email html to access resources (images) on the internal network? But many workplaces have important uses for the extra features with HTML, so instead of choosing the easy way out, (abolish HTML) perhaps we can find a better solution, if only out of necessity.
We can see this with the PSX2, which has had chips specially fabricated for it, unlike the X-Box and Dreamcast, which use PC technology designed for Microsoft Word.
Consoles sold a lot better in the 80's because they were very good at what they did: play games. The controls were quick and easy, the games had intuitive interfaces. The hardware was designed for a purpose, to make games. So the Super Nintendo hardware & libraries could get programmers moving those sprites around quickly and easily, while PC makers had write libraries and code that would get the PC to work to its potential as an all-purpose device.
Fast forward to 2001, where the average MS Word-using office worker needs only a P2-300 at most to survive, and yet Intel & AMD are trying to convince them that 1 GHZ will give their MS Word an incredible speed increase. So PC games have much too much power, and the console can barely compete. But perhaps with a monopoly and a kickass piece of hardware designed for gaming the consoles can come back and become a better than blah experience.
Usually all the hype is about possible brand new planets being discovered. But I guess it's not 'cool' to be like the crowd... it's 'in' to be a rebel... and so Pluto gets demoted.
This really got my geeky juices excited when I saw this. One piece of source code that could compile/run unchanged into 7 different languages. Listed in the source they are: ANSI COBOL, ISO Pascal, ANSI Fortran, ANSI C (lint free), Shell script (GNU Bash, Ksh, sh), PostScript, and 8086 machine language. No matter which you use, the magical words "Hello World" will appear!
Slashdot Mirror
While that may be true (Friends was long past its due) the poster you are replying to was talking about the Fox network. Fox has murdered many excellent shows long before their due.
Firefly?
Wonderfalls?
Futurama?
The Tick?
Family Guy?
Justin.
Not really. Laws are in place to have penalties for doing the wrong thing. That's not the same as 'not doing the right thing'.
Laws don't make you do the 'right thing'. You could simply just do nothing.
Agreed.
It makes that email address on your resume pretty worthless quick...
Umm... AAC is an international standard, recognized by the International Standards Organization (ISO). Take a look at MPEG-2 NBC/MPEG-4 Audio standard ISO/IEC 13818-7, 14496-1,2 and 3 for more information. It was designed by the MPEG group to be the successor of MP3.
Justin
It looks like Apple is poised to win the online digital music vending business. They right now have the best promotions to attract people to find out about their service, and I think the Pepsi promotion this February will bring a LOT of users to the service. iTunes is free and you get a free song. Heck, buying cases of Pepsi and getting a couple of free songs.
I just installed iTunes for Windows the other day and was amazed at how easy it was to use... mirroring the thoughts of countless reviews of the service. This is the key, because if it's easy to use, average-joe user (i.e. the big market) will like to use it. And with the best fair-use policies of all of them, and many artists backing them (rebooted or not, why would Metallica suddenly feel good about a product named 'Napster'?) I think this is the one chance for legal music downloads succeeding.
The problem with the business model of all of these is that the same thing is available free. Well now it's cheap... 99 cents you can buy ONLY the songs you like instead of the entire album where only 3 songs are good, and they are better quality than what is on Kazaa.
The iPod's huge market share certainly doesn't hurt their case.
Sure, name sucks from a marketing standpoint. But did anyone really think "xfree86" is a very marketable name?
You know, I've agreed with your sentiment for a long time. But recently I bought a Sony Clie SJ33 as a birthday gift for probably the most amazing, beautiful girl in the world, and after seeing her daily use with it, I've changed my mind on this.
I started with Palms ever since I got a Palm 1000. You know, that boxy dark-grey thing that had 128kb of memory long before Palm realized that independent developers would write thousands upon thousands of applications for the platform. Back then, they did one thing and one thing well--organize. Finally, there was some device I could hold in my hand that could actually improve my day-to-day life. Something that wasn't merely a toy but a real, useful tool.
I eventually moved up to a Palm Vx for the 8mb RAM, LiIon battery and small form-factor. To me those were great features that complemented the key point of it all--to organize. I loved my Palm Vx and shook my head with disgust as the Palms that came after disappointed me. The next Palms traded battery life for fancy colour screens and suddenly you were paying extra for features that didn't matter.
Well, this Clie SJ33 has changed my mind. Now they are actually coming out non-organizer features that are actually useful. The MP3 playback integrated with the Palm alone makes this handheld amazing. Sure, you can carry around your Palm, music playing device and cellphone. I've done that before, but I always had heavy, bulging and uncomfortable pockets as a result. The best solution I've seen is more than three years old, and it's the eholster which tucks your miniature high-tech devices under your arms. Unfortunately they aren't actually usable because they actually look like real gun-holsters and pulling out a PDA has made a few people around me jump as it looked like I was drawing a gun. Practical, but doesn't work too well in this post 9-11 society. This girl that I speak of prefers wearing pocketless skirts over bulding pants, so integrating the music player with a small form-factored Palm works perfectly for her.
Digital cameras on a Palm also work very well, found on the Zire 71 mentioned in this Slashdot article and also the memory stick cameras, not to mention the built in one on the Sony CLIE PEGNX70V or PEGNZ90. Sure, they are barely 1 megapixel, but they are a lot of fun. Basically if you're like me, you're going to have your Palm on you at all times. But I only think to bring my camera to social events. So now you have the ability to capture anything, anytime as you go through life. See a funny subway ad that you want to show your girlfriend? See Natalie Portman walking down the street and want to take a picture with her? End up spontaneously at a party and want to take some pictures? Sure the quality won't be up there, but you can still capture some memories at unexpected moments.
I could go on with the many more features available, but my point being that mere organizing changed my life, but now they are adding features that can also improve my day-to-day life, and everyday these features dive cheaper and cheaper.
You've hit the nail on the head.
I tried for a long time to get my best friend into watching the show. When I finally convinced him to watch through season 1, at the same time he watched Dark Angel.
After seeing a few episodes, he told me that while he recognized that the Buffy episodes were well-written and the characters were interesting, vampires and demons just didn't interest him, whereas in Dark Angel the premise kept him going even through the bad episodes.
He argued that the premise was key. Because in five, ten seasons later, they still would be fighting vampires.
How wrong he was. He managed to get through it, and realize that even the premise, the status-quo, the concept of the show was ever changing. Sure, the overall idea is that Buffy is the chosen one who must slay vampires. Season three toned down the vampire content and focussed on highschool life. Season four was about how college separates you from your friends, and tried to bring science into the mix. Season five was about family, and what it means to be a Slayer. Season six was about growing up and responsibility.
I guess it's no surprise that Buffy is now his favourite show, even though he still isn't into vampires or demons. Even the cool premise of Dark Angel didn't save the bad writing, and he eventually got bored and stopped watching.
This is probably because angsty wimps are more interesting.
Badass demon. I mean, those two words have told the entire story. Demon is gonna come and try to kick your ass. The good guys have to kill it. Badass demon probably will taunt them before dying at the hero's hands.
Anyway, Angel isn't angsty. He's brooding. He's not depressed all the time. He's a badass when he needs to be, he's kind to people when he needs to be, his character is a bit deeper than either demon you mention.
That kinda strikes me as funny, because I always thought that that was the key to Buffy. It's all about the emotion, and does stray on the side of being too angsty at times (which is why last season was so unpopular).
Honestly, these character never get a break. They often lose, and lose hard. I'd love to see a 'meddling kids save the day episode' once in a while because sometimes I think the show is way too depressing.
Buffy dies. Buffy's mom dies. Xander leaves Anya at the altar. Angel becomes evil. Tara is killed, and Willow becomes evil seeking revenge.
If that all sounded really cheesy or melodramatic, realize that we're talking about seven years of plot twists. I guess I can't really express it without it sounding stupid, but it's almost the mission statement that the characters can never be happy.
Kinda reminds me of Party of Five.
The SNR of television is so incredibly low, that I can understand why you think that. But there are actually a few gems that play out well on television.
The strength of TV is that the medium allows you to have a visual novel. Movies suffer from incredibly flat characterizations, because there just isn't time for your to learn who people really are in two hours. The except to this are character movies, movies which pushes everything aside and make you learn who the people are.
You can develop complicated storylines and have complicated people. The problem is, many shows don't.
Why? Because it is much easier for someone flipping channels to stop and watch episodic shows that fall into a nice formula and don't depend on continuity. As in, it's not too confusing for the casual viewer. It's hard to plan your life around the television schedule.
So on the other side, continuity heavy shows are completely incomprehensible to all except the core fans because they rely on the knowledge of years of development of both plot and character for the meaningful payoffs.
Friends is (was) a good example of a show that managed to play both sides of the game. They kept continuity between episodes and continually changed the status-quo. They would trade apartments, date other people, even get married. Yet the stories were told in such a way that, if you watch carefully, you'll notice that they recap the key events in the first few minutes of conversation without feeling like "Last time on Friends..."
Buffy, Angel, 24, Alias, these are continuity heavy shows that can lock out the casual viewer. They do require a heavy commitment to fully appreciate. In just last week's Buffy episode, they made a passing reference to a season one episode when a girl started to disappear when nobody payed any attention to her.
And then there's the noise, everywhere, all the time. Shows that make you watch someone eat worms, or are ads for trading cards, or just plain insult your intellegence.
But there is better stuff out there, if you care to give things a chance.
That's a bit harsh.
I would argue that it's one of the more intelligent shows on television. Buffy has always gotten a bad reputation for its name. It even turned me off from watching it.
But when I sat down and watched a few, it was surprising how dramatic the show was. The key to the show is that there's a real human element to it. The characters are played as real people despite the fantasy situation, which is incredibly rare and refreshing. How many times in mass media have you seen fantasy and sci-fi characters played out as flat caracatures? Sci-fi is often too obsessed with the technological and short changes interesting characterizations. No, this show is great because it is about people. It uses the fantasy element to put them in extraordinary situations.
Take Buffy's death. She died at the end of season five, and her friends were horrified. At the beginning of the next season, her friends had found a spell to bring her back, to save her from whatever unspeakable hell dimension she was in. (If you are finding this ridiculous, use a little imagination. I mean, Star Trek was just as hokey; how many deflector dish realignments before it got silly?) So they bring her back to life. Now most shows would have left it at that, destroying the entire dramatic element of the death. But the twist was this: Buffy had gone to Heaven, and her friends had ripped her out and brought her back. After feeling the nirvana of Heaven, it's safe to imagine it would be hard to find any joy in living once back on Earth. She had to deal with this difficult experience all season long. This, as will all of the plot elements have realistic and far-reaching consequences.
Seriously. They mix comedy, action, but especially drama. It's definitely not the cheesy show the title would have you believe.
I don't think HTML is really intended to be more than a layout/formatting tool at this point. The original purposes may have been different, but at this point, isn't that why XML is so useful?
XML can be used to classify the content. Perhaps from that generate HTML to apply styles, formatting and layout.
There is no Nobel Prize for math. The Fields Medal is given for contributions to math.
Justin
A few things.
Teasers for movie sequels usually are there to say -- hey we got a sequel coming out in 1 year! Get ready for it. So they're going to rely on the stuff you liked in the first movie to advertise it -- songs, action, etc.
Plus they're not going to give away even minor spoilers about the plot/concept this early... and movie trailers tend to be cut very strangely since remember they are meant to get the general public to get INTO the movie theatre, not be an accurate representation of the movie.
Joss Whedon hated Alien Resurrection as well. His scripts are written be to delivered in a very specific way, and many directors just don't 'get' it. Here's a clip from an interview, talking about his work on X-Men and leading into Alien Resurrection.
JW: X-Men was very interesting in that, by that time, I actually had a reputation in television. I was actually somebody. People stopped thinking I was John Sweden on the phone. And then, in X-Men, not only did they throw out my script and never tell me about it; they actually invited me to the read-through, having thrown out my entire draft without telling me. I was like, "Oh, that's right! This is the movies! The writer is shit in the movies!" I'll never understand that. I have one line left in that movie. Actually, there are a couple of lines left in that are out of context and make no sense, or are delivered so badly, so terribly... There's one line that's left the way I wrote it.
O: Which is?
JW: "'It's me.' 'Prove it.' 'You're a dick.'" Hey, it got a laugh.
O: It's funny that the only lines I really remember from that movie are that one and Storm's toad comment.
JW: Okay, which was also mine, and that's the interesting thing. Everybody remembers that as the worst line ever written, but the thing about that is, it was supposed to be delivered as completely offhand. [Adopts casual, bored tone.] "You know what happens when a toad gets hit by lightning?" Then, after he gets electrocuted, "Ahhh, pretty much the same thing that happens to anything else." But Halle Berry said it like she was Desdemona. [Strident, ringing voice.] "The same thing that happens to everything eeelse!" That's the thing that makes you go crazy. At least "You're a dick" got delivered right. The worst thing about these things is that, when the actors say it wrong, it makes the writer look stupid. People assume that the line... I listened to half the dialogue in Alien 4, and I'm like, "That's idiotic," because of the way it was said. And nobody knows that. Nobody ever gets that. They say, "That was a stupid script," which is the worst pain in the world. I have a great long boring story about that, but I can tell you the very short version. In Alien 4, the director changed something so that it didn't make any sense. He wanted someone to go and get a gun and get killed by the alien, so I wrote that in and tried to make it work, but he directed it in a way that it made no sense whatsoever. And I was sitting there in the editing room, trying to come up with looplines to explain what's going on, to make the scene make sense, and I asked the director, "Can you just explain to me why he's doing this? Why is he going for this gun?" And the editor, who was French, turned to me and said, with a little leer on his face, [adopts gravelly, smarmy, French-accented voice] "Because eet's een the screept." And I actually went and dented the bathroom stall with my puddly little fist. I have never been angrier. But it's the classic, "When something goes wrong, you assume the writer's a dork." And that's painful.
You know, I would have agreed with you maybe a year ago. Who would want to watch a show called Buffy: The Vampire Slayer anyway??
But then one of my friends started raving about how good this series is, and he's the kind of guy who doesn't watch a show just for the good looking women.
Slowly he managed to convince me to watch the show. While season 1 was pretty bad and gave the necessary backstory, season 2 and 3 gave me some of the best hours of TV I've watched.
Angel is one of the best villians I have ever seen in my life. Sure, Darth Vader killed a lot of people and Kevin Spacey in Se7en made you want to throw up, but Angel was cruel, vicious and stabbed you in the heart with every mean word he said. The buildup of Angel as a good guy beforehand is what creates the intense emotional weight of Angel as a bad guy.
Meanwhile Xander, Willow, Oz, and all the regulars have such a great ensemble together. Joss Whedon gives them some great, witty dialogue and you find these people would be people that you'd actually want to be friends with.
This is a show that never sells out for an easy plot. When the show has twists, turns and surprises, it earns it. Even in all the silliness of the episode Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered, where Amy's love spell screws up and makes all the girls go after Xander, this act has repercussions. Willow is upset afterwards for how she was forced to act with Xander, for example.
Hush, an episode where the characters can't speak, nominated for an Emmy.
The Body, an episode where Buffy's mother dies, and the BEST episode ever for portrayal of a death. Many long cuts, slow scenes, very realistic, and no music through the entire show.
Recently, the Buffy Musical was a great achievement, even UPN allowed the show to run 9 minutes longer than the usual 44 minutes for an episode.
The show sounds really cheesy, the ideas really campy, but it never takes itself too seriously and makes fun of itself a lot. Throws in some excellently written emotional plotlines and earns the audiences' feelings. Even actors who want to get on the show usually have to convince their Agents. "You want to be on Buffy the WHAT??"
And the spin-off is quality. Angel can be described as the best stuff on TV you're not watching.
If you're not convinced, check out Buffy creator/writer/producer/director/superhero Joss Whedon's interview on The Onion and you can see how intense and visonary this guy is.
The flaw with your argument rests with the analogy.
Photocopiers are like the ability to copy files. Both have many very legal purposes, and the need to use them for the legal reasons far outweigh the need to delete files.
Morpheus and Napster primarily trade copyrighted MP3s. Even if you assume they made the software with the intention to trade uncopyrighted works (which is not the case) they still are used primarily for illegal activity.
So then obviously, it becomes a target for legal action.
Their SQL Server 2000 has been declared better than *something*...
Today where I work was hit by your standard email remailing virus. You know the kind -- attachment annakournikova.jpg.vbs, that when opened runs that nasty VBScript that emails everyone on your list.
Such a simple, dumb, preventable 'virus', which is nothing more than a simple VBScript than a real virus, cost us a lot. All of the email movement had to be frozen to keep the email service alive. Not being able to communicate with our clients is suicide in what we do (though I won't elaborte on who I work for). Not to mention the lost hours of productivity with much of our IT staff running around to get this thing fixed.
Such a dumb, simple, problem, and it shut us down for a whole day. I don't know how much money that was worth, but I can guarantee you, it was a lot.
(NB -- Yes, yes, turn of VBScript, etc. etc. But I'm not the one making the security decisions...)
I think that HTML has its place in the email world, whether we like it or not. At work our help desk has to respond to emails from other internal departments where they are having trouble with something. And anyone who's tried to help out a friend who doesn't know too much about computers should realize that its incredibly hard to use the phone or even a text email to convey how to do things.
Even the syntax Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Display Properties confuses most of them. So the solution that works is to put screenshots to illustrate how to do it. There really isn't any more elegant way short of physically finding the caller and working at his/her desk.
So agreed, we open up the security can of worms when we allow HTML. Perhaps there are solutions... non-HTML ways? Or only allowing internal email html to access resources (images) on the internal network? But many workplaces have important uses for the extra features with HTML, so instead of choosing the easy way out, (abolish HTML) perhaps we can find a better solution, if only out of necessity.
We can see this with the PSX2, which has had chips specially fabricated for it, unlike the X-Box and Dreamcast, which use PC technology designed for Microsoft Word.
Consoles sold a lot better in the 80's because they were very good at what they did: play games. The controls were quick and easy, the games had intuitive interfaces. The hardware was designed for a purpose, to make games. So the Super Nintendo hardware & libraries could get programmers moving those sprites around quickly and easily, while PC makers had write libraries and code that would get the PC to work to its potential as an all-purpose device.
Fast forward to 2001, where the average MS Word-using office worker needs only a P2-300 at most to survive, and yet Intel & AMD are trying to convince them that 1 GHZ will give their MS Word an incredible speed increase. So PC games have much too much power, and the console can barely compete. But perhaps with a monopoly and a kickass piece of hardware designed for gaming the consoles can come back and become a better than blah experience.
Usually all the hype is about possible brand new planets being discovered. But I guess it's not 'cool' to be like the crowd... it's 'in' to be a rebel... and so Pluto gets demoted.
This really got my geeky juices excited when I saw this. One piece of source code that could compile/run unchanged into 7 different languages. Listed in the source they are: ANSI COBOL, ISO Pascal, ANSI Fortran, ANSI C (lint free), Shell script (GNU Bash, Ksh, sh), PostScript, and 8086 machine language. No matter which you use, the magical words "Hello World" will appear!
Click here for the link.