Its interesting to see Apple to have such great products, but get so hung up on the minutia of wanting to control the hardware so badly, that they fail to see the real gold was in getting the software on as many units as possible.
Google isn't dumb, though. They see the real money they can make by getting in bed with the phone manufacturers and network providers. Thus, they invented a phone OS that undercuts anyone that would want to make money making something better, and allows the phone vendors and networks as much if not more control over the end user experience than they've ever had.
Is there actual numbers on this? I though the norm on the marketplace was to sell everything for free but with ads. And now Google has competition from Amazon's app store, which is probably going to have a much more favorable business proposition for devs than Google's, since Amazon can accept payments from most anywhere on Earth, has better tie-ins with their store, etc.
A phone OS that pays for itself by pushing ads to you will always be a very special sort of hell. At least when Windows was beating Apple, Windows didn't sell you flower delivery and movie trailers in the process.
When the value of the tablet finally exceeds the trouble you go to claiming "how much better" your netbook is to your friends, and finally to yourself. Then you can make keeping the tablet customized and updated and flashed and jailbroken your new personal hobby for a few years.
Though this does raise the question of why Blockbuster, cable companies, ISPs et al still ask for it with impunity. Obviously many high-up judges and politicians have mobile phones, Internet connections etc., so why haven't any of them kicked up a stink about this and stopped a supposedly illegal practice?
Video rentals and utility providers need your SSN because they have to make a credit decision before giving you service. If you have negative credit or a history of stiffing creditors they have to know that, because they work on a contract, and they want to know if you have a history of breaking contracts.
(Woody Allen pulls Alexander Hamilton and John Adams from behind a curtain:)
I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work! Your whole concept of our constitution is wrong. How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!
You could legitimately argue (in court, if necessary) that your signature was forged.
That would extract you from the contract, at best, but most of the trouble with forged signatures is unwinding the damage that happens subsequent to the signature happening, like creation of credit accounts, purchases, and all of the fun stuff associated with identity theft. Merely saying "my signature was forged" is rarely enough to clean this up, and it can require years of effort with a sword hanging over your head before most people are able to repair their reputation.
It'd be much better if you could head off that damage before it started by having a system where it was actually difficult to forge someones credentials in the first place. Yes, it makes actual cases of fraud harder to refute, but with a well-designed system it makes fraud much more difficult to initiate. I would just be happy with any system that takes away the importance of your SSN and your mothers maiden name. Because that's the system we have now, and despite a lot of re-marketer's representations here, it's extremely dangerous for individuals, because it makes it so easy for anyone to forge a credit decision on your behalf.
I don't know enough about the Android graphics API, but if it's designed properly it should be possible for the client to always call the same function and the underlying implementation to select the code path most optimized for the platform. Mac OS X has one CoreGraphics API, and it either composites on the GPU or on the CPU depending on what's available. I don't see why Amdroiid can't do the same.
I dunno, I was reading the wikipedia plot synopsis and it says that the 2 years of urine were right before the flight, Jude Law's death and the launch were at the same time, and that Hawke just didn't bring any urine to the last test because he wasn't expecting it.
That doesn't make any sense, the "launch" was intercut with Jude Law self-immolating in his conveniently man-sized incinerator. I had the impression the two events happened at the same time. Though I admit my memory of the film is quite flaky.
Wait a second, didn't anyone ever notice that Ethan Hawke and Jude Law look different? How did they deal with the fact that Ethan Hawke is walking around spilling someone elses DNA everywhere?
The only thing more annoying than a critic is a fan who defends a movie on the basis of its high concept and thinks that a cool idea and scientific rigor can somehow paper over the fact that a film is boring and that the characters are cardboard cutouts of the director's MESSAGE.
Oh, and it's Uma Thurman, not Gwyneth Paltrow who was the female lead in Gattaca.
You're absolutely right. I think my point still holds mutatis mutandis.
I think it's pretty clear that Niccol was implying the two years of urine were intended for the mission. It was a clumsy and inept beat to cap a film of clumsy and inept beats. Any implication that the Hawke character was going to reveal himself and launch a revolution from space is completely your exegesis, it's just not in the film.
Your reading of the themes is nice, but it's irrelevant because the story is implausible and the characters aren't believable. The story has to make sense a be interesting before you can have the luxury of having it "mean" something.
In the future are human beings going to start tampering with the human genome? If the answer at any point in the future is yes, then the science in Gattaca is likely realistic.
Realistic right down to the refrigerator full of urine and blood that Ethan Hawke will somehow smuggle onto his space mission.
There's a lot of technological realism in the film, to be sure -- the cars don't make noise because they run on electricity, Maya Rudolph is able to determine at birth the probability of an infant developing disease, DNA tests are accomplished with small, handheld devices and Gwyneth Paltrow is able to take designer drugs that keep her alive, etc. All of this is good, but it's all a hodgepodge that isn't held together by a compelling story. Everything is so heavy with symbolism and flat -- the characters are just more very well-machined props in the end.
I mean like, we don't have a disagreement here -- but I can think of a lot of very realistic sci-fi films, and I can think of a lot of really good films with good characters and plot, but never the twine doth meet.
2010 was a good hard scifi film, not 2001 at all, but it was interesting. A much better Hyams film BTW was Outland, which is a completely realistic depiction of mining on Io. Think Event Horizon, but with Sean Connery, a great thriller storyline, and drug addicts doing crazy things instead of a haunted spaceship.
Oh yeah, the brother and Jude Law were different characters. I can't imagine how I could have combined the two in my mind, they were both so well drawn-out and differentiated, with their own motives, dreams, signifying traits... (heh).
Paltrow is listless and doesn't seem to know what she is supposed to be doing half the time. Ethan Hawke seems to have zero passion in anything, his desire to go into space is almost completely by attribution.
great photography
I think people have been trained at this point to identify low-key, backlit sets with liberal use of high color-temperature lighting as "great photography."
deep motifs
(Translation: College sophmores use this movie to write B+ papers.)
solid soundtrack
Yes I remember when editors were using it as temp score for atmospheric scenes in good movies. It was great because it was this moody vamping mush that had no theme and could work under anything without being recognized.
realistic depiction of a possible future
A future where characters are, to put it bluntly, idiots who don't think. And maybe that was the point of the movie, but it's a shitty way to do drama or tell a story.
You think the future will be as flashy as Blade Runner
I confess I don't find the prospect of a Blade Runner future to be "flashy," but that's a film with pretty awful story problems, too. It's basically 10 or 15 awesome spec TV commercials cut together at the seams.
Well, I mean there's having a moral message, and then there's having the antagonist turn in one of the worst performances of his life, all of the secondary bad guys being the most cringe-inducing, mustache-twirling heavies this side of Snidely Whiplash. And then there's the completely lifeless romantic subplot, and the utterly non- ending where the leads settle their conflict with a swimming contest and the brother just commits suicide. Oh, and I'm sure that once they discover the guy on the mission faked his DNA tests, urine tests and skin scrapings in his computer keyboard, for, what, 20 years(!!!), I'm sure there will be no repercussions that would endanger the mission...
It was a bad movie, only the subject matter, and then only an elevator pitch of the subject matter, was remotely interesting. The execution on a basic storytelling level was... no good. And I say this as someone that really liked Niccol's Lord of War, but you do see some of the same problems, where he just MUST make his moral point and so he has characters do things that are completely unbelievable in the context of the story.
"GATTACA" is considered the "most realistic." The fact that its politics is so obvious, its smarmy moralizing oozes from every frame, and it's "space mission" at the end consists of people in 3-piece suits entering what looks like an elevator in the lobby of a modern office seem not to weigh against it. I think we're seeing at work the presumption that in order for a film to be considered scientifically-accurate, it must first be considered a terrible bore.
It's only a rent in this case if the the spread results from an information asymmetry. A bid-ask spread happens in the open as a part of the quotation, so it's (ideally) subject to competition and market makers take the spread as a legitimate cost of doing business. Better to make people pay for liquidity in the open than have machines crank it out in the dark, where they can suddenly and mysteriously withdraw it.
To me a wide bid-ask spread is a small price to pay if the alternative is brokers using their access to the market information in order to extract rents from people who don't have such good information.
You could always pay bus drivers by the number of pickups, case workers by children placed, and teacher per passing grade. But as Domino's Pizza discovered when they made drivers pay for late pizza, perverse incentives can kill. It's very difficult to compensate people according to simple performance metrics, particularly in large organizations with lots of dependencies and large projects over long timescales.
Slashdot Mirror
Google isn't dumb, though. They see the real money they can make by getting in bed with the phone manufacturers and network providers. Thus, they invented a phone OS that undercuts anyone that would want to make money making something better, and allows the phone vendors and networks as much if not more control over the end user experience than they've ever had.
Is there actual numbers on this? I though the norm on the marketplace was to sell everything for free but with ads. And now Google has competition from Amazon's app store, which is probably going to have a much more favorable business proposition for devs than Google's, since Amazon can accept payments from most anywhere on Earth, has better tie-ins with their store, etc.
A phone OS that pays for itself by pushing ads to you will always be a very special sort of hell. At least when Windows was beating Apple, Windows didn't sell you flower delivery and movie trailers in the process.
Yes. Google's seeing a lot of gold from Android installs.
When the value of the tablet finally exceeds the trouble you go to claiming "how much better" your netbook is to your friends, and finally to yourself. Then you can make keeping the tablet customized and updated and flashed and jailbroken your new personal hobby for a few years.
It's illegal? Good!
Though this does raise the question of why Blockbuster, cable companies, ISPs et al still ask for it with impunity. Obviously many high-up judges and politicians have mobile phones, Internet connections etc., so why haven't any of them kicked up a stink about this and stopped a supposedly illegal practice?
Video rentals and utility providers need your SSN because they have to make a credit decision before giving you service. If you have negative credit or a history of stiffing creditors they have to know that, because they work on a contract, and they want to know if you have a history of breaking contracts.
(Woody Allen pulls Alexander Hamilton and John Adams from behind a curtain:)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/quotes?qt0373304
That would extract you from the contract, at best, but most of the trouble with forged signatures is unwinding the damage that happens subsequent to the signature happening, like creation of credit accounts, purchases, and all of the fun stuff associated with identity theft. Merely saying "my signature was forged" is rarely enough to clean this up, and it can require years of effort with a sword hanging over your head before most people are able to repair their reputation.
It'd be much better if you could head off that damage before it started by having a system where it was actually difficult to forge someones credentials in the first place. Yes, it makes actual cases of fraud harder to refute, but with a well-designed system it makes fraud much more difficult to initiate. I would just be happy with any system that takes away the importance of your SSN and your mothers maiden name. Because that's the system we have now, and despite a lot of re-marketer's representations here, it's extremely dangerous for individuals, because it makes it so easy for anyone to forge a credit decision on your behalf.
Well, I did the sound effects for 2012, but I assure you that has NOTHING to do with my annoyance at this article :)
Right but he's leaving Jude's DNA everywhere and claiming to be Jude. Wouldn't people notice he didn't look like the famous swimmer?
I don't know enough about the Android graphics API, but if it's designed properly it should be possible for the client to always call the same function and the underlying implementation to select the code path most optimized for the platform. Mac OS X has one CoreGraphics API, and it either composites on the GPU or on the CPU depending on what's available. I don't see why Amdroiid can't do the same.
I dunno, I was reading the wikipedia plot synopsis and it says that the 2 years of urine were right before the flight, Jude Law's death and the launch were at the same time, and that Hawke just didn't bring any urine to the last test because he wasn't expecting it.
Wait a second, didn't anyone ever notice that Ethan Hawke and Jude Law look different? How did they deal with the fact that Ethan Hawke is walking around spilling someone elses DNA everywhere?
Oh, and it's Uma Thurman, not Gwyneth Paltrow who was the female lead in Gattaca.
You're absolutely right. I think my point still holds mutatis mutandis.
I think it's pretty clear that Niccol was implying the two years of urine were intended for the mission. It was a clumsy and inept beat to cap a film of clumsy and inept beats. Any implication that the Hawke character was going to reveal himself and launch a revolution from space is completely your exegesis, it's just not in the film.
Your reading of the themes is nice, but it's irrelevant because the story is implausible and the characters aren't believable. The story has to make sense a be interesting before you can have the luxury of having it "mean" something.
Realistic right down to the refrigerator full of urine and blood that Ethan Hawke will somehow smuggle onto his space mission.
There's a lot of technological realism in the film, to be sure -- the cars don't make noise because they run on electricity, Maya Rudolph is able to determine at birth the probability of an infant developing disease, DNA tests are accomplished with small, handheld devices and Gwyneth Paltrow is able to take designer drugs that keep her alive, etc. All of this is good, but it's all a hodgepodge that isn't held together by a compelling story. Everything is so heavy with symbolism and flat -- the characters are just more very well-machined props in the end.
I mean like, we don't have a disagreement here -- but I can think of a lot of very realistic sci-fi films, and I can think of a lot of really good films with good characters and plot, but never the twine doth meet.
2010 was a good hard scifi film, not 2001 at all, but it was interesting. A much better Hyams film BTW was Outland, which is a completely realistic depiction of mining on Io. Think Event Horizon, but with Sean Connery, a great thriller storyline, and drug addicts doing crazy things instead of a haunted spaceship.
Oh yeah, the brother and Jude Law were different characters. I can't imagine how I could have combined the two in my mind, they were both so well drawn-out and differentiated, with their own motives, dreams, signifying traits... (heh).
Great acting,
Paltrow is listless and doesn't seem to know what she is supposed to be doing half the time. Ethan Hawke seems to have zero passion in anything, his desire to go into space is almost completely by attribution.
great photography
I think people have been trained at this point to identify low-key, backlit sets with liberal use of high color-temperature lighting as "great photography."
deep motifs
(Translation: College sophmores use this movie to write B+ papers.)
solid soundtrack
Yes I remember when editors were using it as temp score for atmospheric scenes in good movies. It was great because it was this moody vamping mush that had no theme and could work under anything without being recognized.
realistic depiction of a possible future
A future where characters are, to put it bluntly, idiots who don't think. And maybe that was the point of the movie, but it's a shitty way to do drama or tell a story.
You think the future will be as flashy as Blade Runner
I confess I don't find the prospect of a Blade Runner future to be "flashy," but that's a film with pretty awful story problems, too. It's basically 10 or 15 awesome spec TV commercials cut together at the seams.
High Fidelity
Well, I mean there's having a moral message, and then there's having the antagonist turn in one of the worst performances of his life, all of the secondary bad guys being the most cringe-inducing, mustache-twirling heavies this side of Snidely Whiplash. And then there's the completely lifeless romantic subplot, and the utterly non- ending where the leads settle their conflict with a swimming contest and the brother just commits suicide. Oh, and I'm sure that once they discover the guy on the mission faked his DNA tests, urine tests and skin scrapings in his computer keyboard, for, what, 20 years(!!!), I'm sure there will be no repercussions that would endanger the mission...
It was a bad movie, only the subject matter, and then only an elevator pitch of the subject matter, was remotely interesting. The execution on a basic storytelling level was... no good. And I say this as someone that really liked Niccol's Lord of War, but you do see some of the same problems, where he just MUST make his moral point and so he has characters do things that are completely unbelievable in the context of the story.
"GATTACA" is considered the "most realistic." The fact that its politics is so obvious, its smarmy moralizing oozes from every frame, and it's "space mission" at the end consists of people in 3-piece suits entering what looks like an elevator in the lobby of a modern office seem not to weigh against it. I think we're seeing at work the presumption that in order for a film to be considered scientifically-accurate, it must first be considered a terrible bore.
It's only a rent in this case if the the spread results from an information asymmetry. A bid-ask spread happens in the open as a part of the quotation, so it's (ideally) subject to competition and market makers take the spread as a legitimate cost of doing business. Better to make people pay for liquidity in the open than have machines crank it out in the dark, where they can suddenly and mysteriously withdraw it.
To me a wide bid-ask spread is a small price to pay if the alternative is brokers using their access to the market information in order to extract rents from people who don't have such good information.
That cromulent metaphor embiggens this thread.
You could always pay bus drivers by the number of pickups, case workers by children placed, and teacher per passing grade. But as Domino's Pizza discovered when they made drivers pay for late pizza, perverse incentives can kill. It's very difficult to compensate people according to simple performance metrics, particularly in large organizations with lots of dependencies and large projects over long timescales.