. Now, they plan to get rid of productive employees.
They said they were unloading a lot of Sales employees. Sales is not the definition of "productive". I would prefer they fire 3,000 sales people and invest in 3,000 developers who can make the products better. They should also simplify their sales process so that it's not such a nightmare to license and track your purchases. It's super easy to use the Windows Store to see what apps you own. Have you ever tried to figure out how many licenses you have of any Microsoft Software? It's next to impossible. We track it in a spreadsheet that's constantly out of date where our licenses have gone.
- Make the products better. - Invest in a nice easy web portal like they have for Office 365 for adding more licenses and assigning them. - Reduce the licensing complexity by reducing the package count. Slack's pricing is easy and straight forward: Free, Standard and Plus. Now try to calculating how many CAL licenses... whether or not you're allowed to run Windows 10 Pro in a VM or whether or not you're allowed to run a redundant domain controller. You have to be a professional Microsoft sales person to understand what you need to buy.
I consider destruction of the two party system more important than voting for someone I dislike a little less.
That's like saying "I think it's unsportsmanlike to hold a football. I think American Football should only be played with one's feet!" You'll just lose. Over and over again when your opponents use their hands. Handicapping yourself does nothing but work against your interests. It doesn't change the game. It doesn't change the rules... it just makes a fool out of you.
If you want to "destroy the two party system" the only way to do it is to change the rules that everybody plays by to make it advantageous to be a third party.
The only way C wins is if C can either pull enough votes from A and B, or draws all of B's votes. It could and has happened, but it's extraordinarily rare. Usually A or B will adopt the the strongest primary platform of C to keep those votes for themselves.
Conversely to your last point, by the time C ever challenges A and B it will need to have compromised on so many to attract A and B's existing voters that it will have become nearly identical to either A or B.
If the Green party wants to build a progressive platform that attracts 51% of the population... they'll look just like the Democratic party. If the libertarian party wants to attract 51% of the population... they'll end up just like the GOP... well... maybe not the GOP as it is today, which is kind of a mess ideologically at the moment but it'll look like some variation of what the GOP will end up stabilizing into.
The two main parties are in a natural equilibrium of sorts. All that would happen with a massive disruption such as a third party emerging out of nowhere is for the equilibrium to be momentarily disrupted before returning to a very similar state. People's core beliefs don't change quickly.
Netscape became Firefox which did just fine. And Netscape has its share of proprietary extensions that were just as non-standard as Microsofts because the web sucked without them back in 1999. Most of microsoft's DHTML became HTML5... which was only ratified like last year. Nobody is willing to sit around for a decade for a standards body to work.
POSIX is alive and well in Linux. Windows wasn't a Unix based operating system so it's not shocking it wouldn't stick to Unix compatibility.
Xenix was from the 80s and Microsoft clearly wasn't interested to focus on Windows. It's not like Microsoft slowly extended Unix until it became Windows and Linux/Unix is dead today.
You mostly just listed a bunch of competing products as if that is anything like what is happening today.
They haven't nominated Hillary yet. Her coronation is next week
I didn't know that nominating the primary candidate with the most votes of any party in a democratic election was a "coronation". Did Kings also win the most votes? It's been a while since I read up on monarchies, guess I forgot that detail.
it's only the establishment people who are going to call this "violating privacy".
So it would be a good use of the NSA's infrastructure to spy on Trump's campaign? I guess call me a corporate establishment shill but that sounds pretty sketchy.
Change tracking / historical retention can be achieved in many ways. Depending on what you want to preserve and how you expect to need to recover it, you can simply backup the transaction logs, regularly backup the database itself, or create a history table for each table you need historical data on and create a trigger that copies affected rows, along with a timestamp column with a default of SYSDATETIME() or similar, on UPDATE or DELETE.
Or... instead of triggering a database wide update because a user changed their name.. just use a key like everybody else in every other database schema.
The US has a choice between a politician so sleezy as to be a caricature of a cliche politician, and a narcicistic psychopath who would quite happily plunge the world into world war 3 if someone makes fun of the size of his hands.
I love how people assume Hillary is "a sleezy politician" based on the word of a "narcissistic psychopath and pathological liar who would plunge the world into world war 3."
Here's a wild idea. Maybe Hillary isn't a sleezy politician and the narcissistic pathological liar who would plunge the world into world war 3 is... *gasp* lying about her just like he lies about everything else.
The most dirt Trump seems to have on Hillary is:
1) She kept a private email server against institution best practices which ended up having 100 emails (out of hundreds of thousands) that had information the FBI considers top secret. 2) She kept a private email server against institution policy in which someone emailed her classified documents that were mis-labeled. 3) She passed NAFTA while first lady (which the CBO has concluded neither really hurt nor helped employment overall). (But Trump is totally fine with his VP who is a huge free trade advocate). 4) She voted for giving Bush the power to use military force against Sadaam. (But Trump is totally fine with his VP making the same choice.) 5) She won't say "Radical Islamic Terrorism" enough.
Even for a narcissistic pathological liar like Trump that's a pretty short list of attacks.
You can't just lay more spectrum. There are physical limitations to how much bandwidth you can push through the air. Especially when you want to remain compatible with existing cellular technologies used elsewhere in the world.
It's not sleazy to end a sweetheart grandfathered deal that they only ever continued out of the "kindness of their hearts" for the customer's goodwill. If I move into an apartment for $1,000 a month and a year later when my lease is up my landlord allows me to stay at $1,000 a month even though the new rental rate is $2,000 they still can decide in 6 months if I'm throwing loud parties every month that they aren't going to keep me on my old less expensive lease. They can say "You know what, we're not interested in renewing your lease." or they can say "If you're going to be eliciting complaints regularly from your neighbors for noise you're going to have to pay the latest full monthly rate for a unit of your size which is $2,000.
"Maybe it's technically legal but it's still sleazy" applies as much or more in my opinion to being given an unlimited *phone* plan and then using it to substitute a fixed land-line internet plan at the latest network speeds even though you originally probably signed on for an unlimited 1mbps connection.
Another good metaphor would be you move into a pet-friendly apartment building. But you have a dog that endlessly barks. They can decide that while they are pet friendly *your* pet is not welcome and choose to not renew a lease. To be even more accurate it would be like moving into a pet friendly apartment, the apartment building being sold to a new owner and pets being banned, but anyone currently renting can keep a pet indefinitely. A year later your pet turns out to be a nuisance and you are evicted because your pet is loud.
Their unlimited plan is unlimited. But if your unlimited usage is exceedingly high they can decide they don't want to sell you an unlimited plan anymore.
I know people who setup a wifi hotspot with their unlimited Verizon plan and then serve dozens of people on job sites for months on end uploading media and video. They're not normal users. I can understand why Verizon wouldn't want them anymore.
Similarly I use 10TB of backblaze for $50/year. I'm I imagine not-profitable. So I could understand if they told me that I have 2 months and then they don't want me as a customer anymore even though it's Unlimited. It's unlimited but not every unlimited customer is one they want. Maybe you go over one month and they allow you to spike for free. But I can see how a sustained money loser is not someone they are interested in keeping on. (Then again with backblaze I've converted numerous people to be customers and became a cloud storage customer at work so I imagine their generosity has paid off now.)
We had a point-to-point data connection between two of our buildings. It was unreliable to say the least as soon as the weather took a turn for the worse.
They didn't drive. I posted an image of them very much parked on a sound stage with a fan and a green screen.
No film relies exclusively on CG except for animated films. Even the worst offenders of over-the-top CG according to you also have practical effects. I understand exactly what's being said and what it comes down to is "when I like the movie they used CG properly" "When I don't like the movie they used practical effects!" Because there is no objective distinction between the actual film-making approaches used between a regular cgi reliant blockbuster and what they did on Fury Road. Fury Road relied heavily on fans and greenscreens where the vehicles were effectively props. And there are plenty of big blockbusters where they have an on-set vehicle that's actually filmed.
So every film is guilty of what you accuse them of. You only though seem to apparently care when it fits your narrative.
Please stop with this meme. When we talk about CGI we are talking about complete computer remakes of entire scenes for no reason, often even rendering the main cast themselves.
Entire canyon environments weren't created in CG? http://www.konbini.com/en/wp-c... The wheels weren't entirely replaced and the entire ground moving under the vehicles wasn't added in post to make shots of parked vehicles look like they were driving fast? http://oneperfectshotdb.com/wp...
It's not a meme that a substantial portion of Mad Max Fury Road was shot on greenscreen. As much as any other big blockbuster like The Avengers. The only difference is that many Mad Max Fury Road (which I loved) are in plain denial about the extent of the CG in the film. There is a reason it was nominated for VFX.
1984 being right in there with a movie you could shoot with one camera and no computer to be seen.
Except if you make it look like 2016 New York people won't buy it because it's present day and they know that the present day isn't exactly like the film. It will look like their known universe while existing in a future or alternate universe.
So unless you set your entire film in-doors with slightly different fashion or you have a massive budget to build a slightly alternate reality technology/architecture/fashion world for them to visit outside it's going to feel claustrophobic. CG will make your film better. CG made Children of Men *better*. You could tell the whole story of a near-future without CG but imagine children of men without his drive through London--but-not-London-as-you-know-it.
For instance take a look at this shot from Children of Men where they added a video sign to the bus. Sure they could film in London, but why bother, the end result is perfect and it is substantially cheaper. Or you could cut the 'gag' but you miss out on a nice subtle homage to children of Men's encouragement of suicide which enriches the immersion into the world. https://www.fxguide.com/wp-con...
CGI lets you create camera moves which are not possible in real life, in the sense that even if there was a fantasy/sci-fi/action/whatever thing going on, there's nowhere that you could physically place a camera which would get that shot.
Easy to avoid. But also easy to do with real cameras too. Star Wars shot all of its sci-fi stuff as a miniature. You can make a camera on a motion-controlled miniature rig however you want as well. We're also always tearing down the limitations of what's an "impossible" shot in the real world. All of the great directors have been hunting for a unique shot that nobody else could pull off. You have the zoom-dolly aka hitchcock effect that's non-physical. You have wire cams these days for flying at high speed through trees. Some people build out entire rigs around a car so that the camera can placed on a gimbal almost anywhere outside a vehicle. There have been "process trailers" for ages where entire film crews ride around on a trailer with a car on blocks filming handheld in through the window. Gimbals make nearly impossible shots look smooth. Steadicam completely changed what "A real camera can do" by adding long smooth takes up stairs etc. Even take a look at the famous long shot from Soy Cuba in 1964: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That's an "impossible" camera. The Matrix they even tried to launch the camera famously on rockets to achieve bullet time. With smaller go-pros it just might be possible today!
The actor playing the brother was not actually informed of how ET was going to be revealed, so the shock you see on his face is very real.
And nothing at all prevents film makers from putting in a terrifying character on set for the actors to reference. That's not an indictment of CG that's an indictment of directors failing to utilize the onset tools that are available to them. Conversely let me throw this back at this argument from a different perspective. People have a really hard time acting against an emotionless puppet. With CG and performance capture you can put a real actor in place that is human and can fully emote to give an actor something to act-against, and then paint them out and replace them with a CG character that isn't a stiff E.T. puppet. So you can get what you want when you want it. You can get the shock of the gore with real gore (and then replace the actual alien bursting from the chest with a CG replacement in post). You get the gore interaction with actors and you get something that doesn't look on-film like a bloody rubber dildo.
To some extent that was also my observation watching The Force Awakens. The first scene from A New Hope, with the Rebel space ship being attacked by the vaster Star Destroyer still works really well, but the space scenes in the new film, and indeed in the Prequels, just don't have the same feel.
That's probably because you were a kid when you first saw it. I saw The Phantom Menace as an 11 year old and the opening scene blew my mind! But here's the funny thing, both opening scenes from The Phantom Menace and A New Hope are miniatures. Almost all of the hangers in A Phantom Menace are miniatures. The Phantom Menace has a TON of miniature work. It has substantially more miniature work than probably the entire original series combined. A massive quantity of the Phantom Menace spaceship shots were all miniatures.
There were awful miniatures and there were awful matte paintings. Today there is awful CG.
For every 2001 there was a 2000 and 2 buck rogers from the 30th centuries with shoddy miniature work. Today for every rushed CG shot in a film there were 3,000 you didn't even realize were CG because they were perfect.
Every time someone whines about the quality of a CG shot I remind them of what things used to look like: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_grTE...
This really is how absurd the argument is. By his reckoning The Lion King should have been awful since 0 frames of the film were real with real lions! Apparently UP had no room for a soul because it was all CG!
There are awful 80s and 90s movies that have no heart and no humanity and rely on shoddy gore squibs and bad miniatures. Every decade has had it's share of unwatchable films with large budgets. Waterworld had very little CGI and very little humanity and it was ridiculously expensive because it did it all for real on the ocean. By golly when that fish man jumps out of the water, that's a real person wearing prosthetics! And yet somehow nobody walked away from Waterworld with a sense of wonder about a guy with prosthetic gills.
What sets this decade apart isn't CG it's the fact that we are currently living it. When you look at all of the films of the 80s you can pick out 3-4 really amazing ones that represent a film every 2-3 years and say "Look how great the 80s were!" But if you're in year 6 of a decade you're statistically not living in the year where a great film was released. Every decade is great in retrospect because you only need a handful of examples to represent a decade while you need a new movie every weekend to watch. If you watch 30 movies a year in all likelihood the one you watch this weekend will not be one you would cite as the greatness of the '10s.
But just looking back I would say Guardians of the Galaxy was great and CG intensive, Inception was great and CG intensive, The Lego Movie and Inside Out were both great and entirely CG, Big Hero 6 was great and all CG, TED was funny and CG, Both planet of the apes films were very good and CG led characters (Compare the new planet of the apes to the horrible Tim Burton CGI free one!), I liked Men in Black 3, didn't think it was any worse than the original, The Wolf of Wallstreet was packed with CG and very good.
It's easy to find good movies in 2010-2016 but you need a year or two to forget how many shitty movies you also watched. You only remember the great Disney movies you watched as a kid. You forgot for the most part "The Cat from Outerspace".
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19% is better than OSX or Linux. So I guess pathetic relative to a paid OS.
. Now, they plan to get rid of productive employees.
They said they were unloading a lot of Sales employees. Sales is not the definition of "productive". I would prefer they fire 3,000 sales people and invest in 3,000 developers who can make the products better. They should also simplify their sales process so that it's not such a nightmare to license and track your purchases. It's super easy to use the Windows Store to see what apps you own. Have you ever tried to figure out how many licenses you have of any Microsoft Software? It's next to impossible. We track it in a spreadsheet that's constantly out of date where our licenses have gone.
- Make the products better.
- Invest in a nice easy web portal like they have for Office 365 for adding more licenses and assigning them.
- Reduce the licensing complexity by reducing the package count. Slack's pricing is easy and straight forward: Free, Standard and Plus. Now try to calculating how many CAL licenses... whether or not you're allowed to run Windows 10 Pro in a VM or whether or not you're allowed to run a redundant domain controller. You have to be a professional Microsoft sales person to understand what you need to buy.
I consider destruction of the two party system more important than voting for someone I dislike a little less.
That's like saying "I think it's unsportsmanlike to hold a football. I think American Football should only be played with one's feet!" You'll just lose. Over and over again when your opponents use their hands. Handicapping yourself does nothing but work against your interests. It doesn't change the game. It doesn't change the rules... it just makes a fool out of you.
If you want to "destroy the two party system" the only way to do it is to change the rules that everybody plays by to make it advantageous to be a third party.
The only way C wins is if C can either pull enough votes from A and B, or draws all of B's votes. It could and has happened, but it's extraordinarily rare. Usually A or B will adopt the the strongest primary platform of C to keep those votes for themselves.
Conversely to your last point, by the time C ever challenges A and B it will need to have compromised on so many to attract A and B's existing voters that it will have become nearly identical to either A or B.
If the Green party wants to build a progressive platform that attracts 51% of the population... they'll look just like the Democratic party. If the libertarian party wants to attract 51% of the population... they'll end up just like the GOP... well... maybe not the GOP as it is today, which is kind of a mess ideologically at the moment but it'll look like some variation of what the GOP will end up stabilizing into.
The two main parties are in a natural equilibrium of sorts. All that would happen with a massive disruption such as a third party emerging out of nowhere is for the equilibrium to be momentarily disrupted before returning to a very similar state. People's core beliefs don't change quickly.
"Hey Putin, I just launched all of our nukes, enjoy being a parking lot, thought I would give you the heads up that it was me who ordered it!"
*One Nuclear disaster later*
"I didn't think he would take it seriously! It was obviously a joke!"
Netscape became Firefox which did just fine. And Netscape has its share of proprietary extensions that were just as non-standard as Microsofts because the web sucked without them back in 1999. Most of microsoft's DHTML became HTML5... which was only ratified like last year. Nobody is willing to sit around for a decade for a standards body to work.
POSIX is alive and well in Linux. Windows wasn't a Unix based operating system so it's not shocking it wouldn't stick to Unix compatibility.
Xenix was from the 80s and Microsoft clearly wasn't interested to focus on Windows. It's not like Microsoft slowly extended Unix until it became Windows and Linux/Unix is dead today.
You mostly just listed a bunch of competing products as if that is anything like what is happening today.
She didn't pass anything as first lady, that's not how it works
That was my point. Trump talks about all the things she did while first lady such as NAFTA. It's absurd.
They haven't nominated Hillary yet. Her coronation is next week
I didn't know that nominating the primary candidate with the most votes of any party in a democratic election was a "coronation". Did Kings also win the most votes? It's been a while since I read up on monarchies, guess I forgot that detail.
it's only the establishment people who are going to call this "violating privacy".
So it would be a good use of the NSA's infrastructure to spy on Trump's campaign? I guess call me a corporate establishment shill but that sounds pretty sketchy.
Change tracking / historical retention can be achieved in many ways. Depending on what you want to preserve and how you expect to need to recover it, you can simply backup the transaction logs, regularly backup the database itself, or create a history table for each table you need historical data on and create a trigger that copies affected rows, along with a timestamp column with a default of SYSDATETIME() or similar, on UPDATE or DELETE.
Or... instead of triggering a database wide update because a user changed their name.. just use a key like everybody else in every other database schema.
The US has a choice between a politician so sleezy as to be a caricature of a cliche politician, and a narcicistic psychopath who would quite happily plunge the world into world war 3 if someone makes fun of the size of his hands.
I love how people assume Hillary is "a sleezy politician" based on the word of a "narcissistic psychopath and pathological liar who would plunge the world into world war 3."
Here's a wild idea. Maybe Hillary isn't a sleezy politician and the narcissistic pathological liar who would plunge the world into world war 3 is... *gasp* lying about her just like he lies about everything else.
The most dirt Trump seems to have on Hillary is:
1) She kept a private email server against institution best practices which ended up having 100 emails (out of hundreds of thousands) that had information the FBI considers top secret.
2) She kept a private email server against institution policy in which someone emailed her classified documents that were mis-labeled.
3) She passed NAFTA while first lady (which the CBO has concluded neither really hurt nor helped employment overall). (But Trump is totally fine with his VP who is a huge free trade advocate).
4) She voted for giving Bush the power to use military force against Sadaam. (But Trump is totally fine with his VP making the same choice.)
5) She won't say "Radical Islamic Terrorism" enough.
Even for a narcissistic pathological liar like Trump that's a pretty short list of attacks.
this strongly suggests that Assange has a favorite here.
Trump?
You can't just lay more spectrum. There are physical limitations to how much bandwidth you can push through the air. Especially when you want to remain compatible with existing cellular technologies used elsewhere in the world.
It's not sleazy to end a sweetheart grandfathered deal that they only ever continued out of the "kindness of their hearts" for the customer's goodwill. If I move into an apartment for $1,000 a month and a year later when my lease is up my landlord allows me to stay at $1,000 a month even though the new rental rate is $2,000 they still can decide in 6 months if I'm throwing loud parties every month that they aren't going to keep me on my old less expensive lease. They can say "You know what, we're not interested in renewing your lease." or they can say "If you're going to be eliciting complaints regularly from your neighbors for noise you're going to have to pay the latest full monthly rate for a unit of your size which is $2,000.
"Maybe it's technically legal but it's still sleazy" applies as much or more in my opinion to being given an unlimited *phone* plan and then using it to substitute a fixed land-line internet plan at the latest network speeds even though you originally probably signed on for an unlimited 1mbps connection.
Another good metaphor would be you move into a pet-friendly apartment building. But you have a dog that endlessly barks. They can decide that while they are pet friendly *your* pet is not welcome and choose to not renew a lease. To be even more accurate it would be like moving into a pet friendly apartment, the apartment building being sold to a new owner and pets being banned, but anyone currently renting can keep a pet indefinitely. A year later your pet turns out to be a nuisance and you are evicted because your pet is loud.
Their unlimited plan is unlimited. But if your unlimited usage is exceedingly high they can decide they don't want to sell you an unlimited plan anymore.
I know people who setup a wifi hotspot with their unlimited Verizon plan and then serve dozens of people on job sites for months on end uploading media and video. They're not normal users. I can understand why Verizon wouldn't want them anymore.
Similarly I use 10TB of backblaze for $50/year. I'm I imagine not-profitable. So I could understand if they told me that I have 2 months and then they don't want me as a customer anymore even though it's Unlimited. It's unlimited but not every unlimited customer is one they want. Maybe you go over one month and they allow you to spike for free. But I can see how a sustained money loser is not someone they are interested in keeping on. (Then again with backblaze I've converted numerous people to be customers and became a cloud storage customer at work so I imagine their generosity has paid off now.)
http://www.bitmanagement.com/p...
Looks like a google earth/GIS type application for loading terrain and city data. It's not a stereo head tracked 360 "VR" application.
We had a point-to-point data connection between two of our buildings. It was unreliable to say the least as soon as the weather took a turn for the worse.
Hence the importance of responsive applications.
They didn't drive. I posted an image of them very much parked on a sound stage with a fan and a green screen.
No film relies exclusively on CG except for animated films. Even the worst offenders of over-the-top CG according to you also have practical effects. I understand exactly what's being said and what it comes down to is "when I like the movie they used CG properly" "When I don't like the movie they used practical effects!" Because there is no objective distinction between the actual film-making approaches used between a regular cgi reliant blockbuster and what they did on Fury Road. Fury Road relied heavily on fans and greenscreens where the vehicles were effectively props. And there are plenty of big blockbusters where they have an on-set vehicle that's actually filmed.
So every film is guilty of what you accuse them of. You only though seem to apparently care when it fits your narrative.
Please stop with this meme. When we talk about CGI we are talking about complete computer remakes of entire scenes for no reason, often even rendering the main cast themselves.
So they drove through a giant fire tornado?
http://animation-boss.com/imag...
There is a large formation of rocks with a giant waterfall spout built into it?
http://animation-boss.com/imag...
http://oneperfectshotdb.com/wp...
The main character's robotic arm was a real prosthetic?
https://hardinthecity.files.wo...
The cars weren't composited in for safety?
http://www.gizmodo.jp/images/2...
http://i2.wp.com/www.cgmeetup....
http://i2.wp.com/www.cgmeetup....
Entire canyon environments weren't created in CG?
http://www.konbini.com/en/wp-c...
The wheels weren't entirely replaced and the entire ground moving under the vehicles wasn't added in post to make shots of parked vehicles look like they were driving fast?
http://oneperfectshotdb.com/wp...
It's not a meme that a substantial portion of Mad Max Fury Road was shot on greenscreen. As much as any other big blockbuster like The Avengers. The only difference is that many Mad Max Fury Road (which I loved) are in plain denial about the extent of the CG in the film. There is a reason it was nominated for VFX.
https://vimeo.com/132806170
1984 being right in there with a movie you could shoot with one camera and no computer to be seen.
Except if you make it look like 2016 New York people won't buy it because it's present day and they know that the present day isn't exactly like the film. It will look like their known universe while existing in a future or alternate universe.
So unless you set your entire film in-doors with slightly different fashion or you have a massive budget to build a slightly alternate reality technology/architecture/fashion world for them to visit outside it's going to feel claustrophobic. CG will make your film better. CG made Children of Men *better*. You could tell the whole story of a near-future without CG but imagine children of men without his drive through London--but-not-London-as-you-know-it.
For instance take a look at this shot from Children of Men where they added a video sign to the bus. Sure they could film in London, but why bother, the end result is perfect and it is substantially cheaper. Or you could cut the 'gag' but you miss out on a nice subtle homage to children of Men's encouragement of suicide which enriches the immersion into the world.
https://www.fxguide.com/wp-con...
CGI lets you create camera moves which are not possible in real life, in the sense that even if there was a fantasy/sci-fi/action/whatever thing going on, there's nowhere that you could physically place a camera which would get that shot.
Easy to avoid. But also easy to do with real cameras too. Star Wars shot all of its sci-fi stuff as a miniature. You can make a camera on a motion-controlled miniature rig however you want as well. We're also always tearing down the limitations of what's an "impossible" shot in the real world. All of the great directors have been hunting for a unique shot that nobody else could pull off. You have the zoom-dolly aka hitchcock effect that's non-physical. You have wire cams these days for flying at high speed through trees. Some people build out entire rigs around a car so that the camera can placed on a gimbal almost anywhere outside a vehicle. There have been "process trailers" for ages where entire film crews ride around on a trailer with a car on blocks filming handheld in through the window. Gimbals make nearly impossible shots look smooth. Steadicam completely changed what "A real camera can do" by adding long smooth takes up stairs etc. Even take a look at the famous long shot from Soy Cuba in 1964:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That's an "impossible" camera. The Matrix they even tried to launch the camera famously on rockets to achieve bullet time. With smaller go-pros it just might be possible today!
The actor playing the brother was not actually informed of how ET was going to be revealed, so the shock you see on his face is very real.
And nothing at all prevents film makers from putting in a terrifying character on set for the actors to reference. That's not an indictment of CG that's an indictment of directors failing to utilize the onset tools that are available to them. Conversely let me throw this back at this argument from a different perspective. People have a really hard time acting against an emotionless puppet. With CG and performance capture you can put a real actor in place that is human and can fully emote to give an actor something to act-against, and then paint them out and replace them with a CG character that isn't a stiff E.T. puppet. So you can get what you want when you want it. You can get the shock of the gore with real gore (and then replace the actual alien bursting from the chest with a CG replacement in post). You get the gore interaction with actors and you get something that doesn't look on-film like a bloody rubber dildo.
To some extent that was also my observation watching The Force Awakens. The first scene from A New Hope, with the Rebel space ship being attacked by the vaster Star Destroyer still works really well, but the space scenes in the new film, and indeed in the Prequels, just don't have the same feel.
That's probably because you were a kid when you first saw it. I saw The Phantom Menace as an 11 year old and the opening scene blew my mind! But here's the funny thing, both opening scenes from The Phantom Menace and A New Hope are miniatures. Almost all of the hangers in A Phantom Menace are miniatures. The Phantom Menace has a TON of miniature work. It has substantially more miniature work than probably the entire original series combined. A massive quantity of the Phantom Menace spaceship shots were all miniatures.
http://www.slightlywarped.com/...
Everybody jumps to complaining about the Prequels while the prequels were often practical where people were complaining CG looks bad.
There were awful miniatures and there were awful matte paintings. Today there is awful CG.
For every 2001 there was a 2000 and 2 buck rogers from the 30th centuries with shoddy miniature work. Today for every rushed CG shot in a film there were 3,000 you didn't even realize were CG because they were perfect.
Every time someone whines about the quality of a CG shot I remind them of what things used to look like:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_grTE...
This really is how absurd the argument is. By his reckoning The Lion King should have been awful since 0 frames of the film were real with real lions! Apparently UP had no room for a soul because it was all CG!
There are awful 80s and 90s movies that have no heart and no humanity and rely on shoddy gore squibs and bad miniatures. Every decade has had it's share of unwatchable films with large budgets. Waterworld had very little CGI and very little humanity and it was ridiculously expensive because it did it all for real on the ocean. By golly when that fish man jumps out of the water, that's a real person wearing prosthetics! And yet somehow nobody walked away from Waterworld with a sense of wonder about a guy with prosthetic gills.
What sets this decade apart isn't CG it's the fact that we are currently living it. When you look at all of the films of the 80s you can pick out 3-4 really amazing ones that represent a film every 2-3 years and say "Look how great the 80s were!" But if you're in year 6 of a decade you're statistically not living in the year where a great film was released. Every decade is great in retrospect because you only need a handful of examples to represent a decade while you need a new movie every weekend to watch. If you watch 30 movies a year in all likelihood the one you watch this weekend will not be one you would cite as the greatness of the '10s.
But just looking back I would say Guardians of the Galaxy was great and CG intensive, Inception was great and CG intensive, The Lego Movie and Inside Out were both great and entirely CG, Big Hero 6 was great and all CG, TED was funny and CG, Both planet of the apes films were very good and CG led characters (Compare the new planet of the apes to the horrible Tim Burton CGI free one!), I liked Men in Black 3, didn't think it was any worse than the original, The Wolf of Wallstreet was packed with CG and very good.
It's easy to find good movies in 2010-2016 but you need a year or two to forget how many shitty movies you also watched. You only remember the great Disney movies you watched as a kid. You forgot for the most part "The Cat from Outerspace".