Actually, being one of the film-y crowd, we saw a filmmaker who isn't as bright as he thought he was, who thought he put more into the script than was really there.
But I don't think you understand how film people look at film, if you think it's a matter of reading more into something than is there. Any child can see what the author intends to put into a work, if the work is at least mediocre. The revelatory stuff is what the author has said in spite of himself, that he's not aware of.
Um, what is important is not the cosmology per se. It's the moral universe portrayed, the relationship between the individual, the world at large, and the choices they have to make. And the fact that Flynn has to disabuse Tron of the idea of the Users' infallability also suggests that the filmmaker was reserving true diety elsewhere.
By bandying about the word "legislation", you set up a dichotamy that doesn't exist. The situation right now is that the software industry enjoys special legislation which holds it exempt from civil liability suits. What is being considered is the removal of that special legislation. Your revision of the situation sets up a big-bad-government versus efficient-market scenario that, aside from being a bit of cliche, doesn't even apply here.
Liability means holding someone responsible for a cost: if the failure of software that shouldn't have failed costs company X $1 million, then liability is a matter of having the responsibility for that failure taken by someone who provided a good or service that didn't meet the reasonable expectations of the consumer. One doesn't wait until the invisible hand fixes things "in the long run;" like Keynes noted, "in the long run we're all dead." (Another Keynes quote: "the market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent.")
The article mentioned a shift in political attitude: lawmakers are considering suspending the protection against liabilty that software makers now enjoy.
Insofar as it's true that software is flakier and more vulnerable than other products, the questions we might ask are the extent to which liabiliy has motivated other product manufacturers to be a lot more careful in their manufacturing processes, and the extent to which software is "inherently" impossible to get right. Is that perception that software should be exempt from the sort of standards that other goods have accurate, or has that perception been constructed by years of poor software and a lack of accountability?
Heh, no, I was around then (high school) and I remember it. We were horrified because we knew what had happened since - and Lisburger was speaking as if he still thought Gates was some populist hero.
Normally, I don't really care about moderation - I maxed out a long, long time ago, and all I do every time I post is to risk losing a point of karma or two. Sure, it's gratifying to get a bit of kudos, but it doesn't really matter to me that much - I try to resist editorial moderation (I always make a point of spending at least two mod points on well-presented points of view that I disagree with) and just go on with saying what I have to say.
That said, I find it disturbing to think that someone would moderate my (parent) post a troll. It should be obvious that I personally don't agree with the director on this point, but I was at the SFMOMA screening at which Lisburger spoke, and he did in fact make this claim. I can only guess that someone is so horrified by the idea that anyone out there isn't the mortal enemy of Bill Gates, that the very idea of it threatens them. Talk about profound lack-of-a-life.
For one thing, a work - even a bad one - can be informed by ideas that the author isn't aware of. In fact, many bad works are bad because the author isn't allowing things in except what they are conscious of: the best stuff usually comes from the unconscious and the intuitions of the author, not just his planning.
That said, the director was pretty consciously trying to make an allegory. In fact, it was somewhat hamfisted: he thought his point was so profound, that it would carry the movie, when it didn't. It was a bad movie on that basis: it was really great as a visual piece, as an adaptation of the aesthetics of the arcade into cinema. Largely, that work was done by art directors and production designers. Film, like video games, it should be noted, is a group work, not an individual one; most films are social productions involving hundreds of people. Usually, the director's instincts determine the direction - ha ha - of the film's sensibilities, but great people can smuggle excellence into a mediocre production.
I agree with your criticisms of the script and story, but I think Tron is best remembered for its art direction, costume work, and production design. It took a page from the German expressionists and translated it into a technological era. Not an easy thing to do, and something that really hasn't caught on: most of the aesthetics of SF film are either of the Blade Runner grunge variety or the super-clean 2001: A Space Odyssey stripe. Tron translated the aesthetics of the arcade onto the silver screen.
Lisberger said that Disney didn't really mess with his film that much except to throw in a couple lame jokes. He had started producing it as an independent film but was relieved to be bailed out by Disney. The badness of the film rests on the original producer's shoulders, not Disney's.
Some amusing tidbits include the fact that many of the people later involved in Toy Story wanted to work on Tron, but were kept from doing so by their bosses. Also, Tron was denied the AFI Special Effects Award because it was thought, at the time, that using a computer was "cheating!"
Ha. In the talk given by the director after the screening a saw yesterday, he said that he viewed Flynn/Tron as Bill Gates and Microsoft, freeing the computer from the mainframe model of IBM, who was represented by the villain, and bringing the power of the PC to the end-user. Those of us in the audience were horrified.
I saw a special screening of this movie at the SF Museum of Modern Art. The director spoke afterwards. Here are my observations:
It is visually stunning, even now, even with a crappy print. I noticed that comic artist Moebius was involved with the art direction - it struck me how much of a debt the work also owed to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and
even a little bit to the samurai genre, as well as Spartacus.
The script is still excrutiatingly bad, and the director didn't have
a clue. He really had no idea. I wish we could have had, instead, the presence of the set designer (Roger Shook), the costumer designer
(Eloise Jensson - who the director actually fired at one point) and the rest of the production design and art design teams. Some of the
director's remarks were inadvertantly racist, his philosophical sensibilities were childlike, and his sense of his own importanceinflated. The fact that he hasn't done much else of note (see
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Lisberger,+Steven) pretty much shows that he was definitely not the best factor behind Tron. But as far as he knew, he
was all the director the world needs.
I wondered about the geneology of the idea of cyberspace - specifically, the projection of a metaphor of inhabitable space onto
networked computers. Tron preceded Neuromancer. Did Lisberger know about Vernor Vinge? Is Tron really the first to avail itself of the metaphor of computers as a navigable space.
The directors made a comparison with The Matrix that was unfortunate, but
interesting. In some ways, Tron is a traditional, evangalistic
Protestant Christian film (our purpose is to understand the wishes of our User, and thus to fulfill our role in creation - the MCP is theologically comparable to Satan), while the Matrix is part of a tradition of
Gnostic paranoia (the creator of our world is malicious and decieving - reality is something to be transcended) - sometimes with Messianic elements, sometimes without
it - that sprung up in a lot of mid-90's films. (I usually think of
trends in narrative structure as reflections of the anxieties and
stresses of the times in which they occur.)
Utter nonsense. Americans do not drive farther distances than anyone else - the vast majority of driving is the same sort of mostly-local commuting/shopping/errands sort of thing that people do all over the world. Europeans drive as much as Americans do, the go into the mountains to ski, and so forth. The reasons for the popularity of SUV's is far and away the marketting of them as status symbols, as well as the car-size inflation that occurs when everyone else has one and the consequent sense of insecurity.
Re:For those interested in the Singularity
on
True Names
·
· Score: 2
I've always seen the idea of singularity in the context of the dialectical tradition (Hegel, Marx, and maybe Darwin) - just like we cannot get information from beyond the event horizon of a real singularity, the singularity as a historical moment is that point past which by definition we can not comprehend. So attempts to discuss what it is like, what its substructure is, and so forth, are by definition futile.
Word has problems, but no Unix software comes close to enabling anyone who doesn't live downstairs from Donald Knuth to assemble a document with embedded charts, graphs, images, etc. with relative ease. There's no comparison yet, and Gnome Office is a long way off.
I say this as someone who uses AbiWord and Gnumeric regularly, is a big fan of their development, and hopes to see them take off as viable alternatives (although transparent import/export is going to be crucial to their success, if success is defined as practical useability in real-world other-people-inhabited environments. I agree with RMS on a lot - I think that freedom has an intrinsic value whether or not it creates better software - but that only should provide incentive for developing free alternatives, not provide a basis for pretending they are here yet when they really aren't.
Well, apparently you didn't get your computer to send Word docs. That's the point. There are a good dozen workarounds, including some save-as options for RTF or DOC formats. You define "your convenience" as not including interoperability with the 90% of the working world that uses Microsoft Office, that's your choice.
You'll notice the parent poster said "letters," not "email." You know, those things you print on paper and put in envelopes?
And as I've noted below, if a job is on the line you can do what the millions of people around the world who can't afford a computer at all do: go down to a Kinko's or such and rent a computer for 10 minutes to convert your resume to Word format. Sorry, I'm not about to play the sad violins for someone who can't figure that out.
If a job were on the line, anyone could go to a Kinko's, spend 2 dollars and convert their document to Word using a computer they leased for 15 minutes.
What a bunch of whiny babies - if that requirement is such a burden, how do you expect single mothers on AFDC to ever pull themselves up?
Themes are just appearences, colors and placements of widgets. They are fairly irrelevant.
Roles and profiles are more important. What libraries should be loaded? What facilities should be immediately accessable, and which can be buried? Is the user a power user who has a strong conceptual understanding of the entire machine? A single-application user who understands, say, a piece of video-editing software but needs more help dealing with, or to avoid having to deal with, permissions and file-systems? Is the machine going to mostly be used as a black box, or a kiosk? Is easy upgradeability important, or will it suffice to keep it fairly static?
Roles and profiles aren't new and a lot of distros look for them on install - slackware did this quite nicely. However, I don't think it's implemented with enough granularity or thoughtfulness yet, nor with a mind towards optimization either.
As I read the thread, ACK!! was describing his ideal work environment and needs. You said that he should just customize the environments that are available to his needs and (implicitly) stop complaining that things aren't quite to his liking out of the box.
ACK!!'s feedback is actually important and valuable. The more people who adequately represent their own needs, the easier it is to create templates for profiling users and develop systems that fit those profiles. Yes, technically, with enough customization, 95% of distros can be made to fit 95% of the needs of 95% of the people, but relying too much on customization means that a lot of redundant work goes on (if over half the users are spending 2 hours making the same customization, wouldn't it make sense to make that customization available as a default?) and a lot of people who don't have the time to customize will go elsewhere (might not bother you, but personally I believe in network effects - the more people who use the platform I use, the more development will happen on that platform, and the more goodies I get.) Since open source development doesn't have focus groups and useability labs and market research, forums like this are frankly pretty good ways to present wishlists, complaints, and the like.
The reason that geeks fail in meeting customer/end-user needs so often: they take someone else's preferences as an attack on their own. Really, why did you bother to post this? You think that the parent poster was calling for the annihilation of KDE/Gnome? He was expressing preferences and the reasons for them. A distro/environment that provides what he needs out-of-the-box means a lot fewer admin hassles and the freedom to just get working: it's why I used Debian instead of compiling and configuring every damned little thing by myself.
And besides, the customizability of the KDE/Gnome environments is somewhat restricted by very complex interdependencies.
How about "neither of the above?" When have foreign multinationals lifted a country's economy? Feeding people keeps them from starving, and is a necessary-but-not-sufficient prerequisite for creating a stable society with an effective local economy.
But you're changing the topic anyway, as well as creating a strawman when you talk about micromanaging lives.
The problem is that the right worked - effectively - to shut down the public sector efforts to feed the hungry, house the homeless, provide public health, and educate, thinking that they were avoiding a "slippery slope" into world government. Instead, bypassing the UN and going straight to the WTO, we get the world government in the interests of greed.
Well, a lot of left-wing people were worried about corporate control of the Internet and corporate transcendence over national soveriegnty, and we got called anti-globalists, socialists, or communists. Most of the right complained a lot harder about environmental restrictions on business than about SLAPP suits and other corporate power exercises.
Slashdot Mirror
But I don't think you understand how film people look at film, if you think it's a matter of reading more into something than is there. Any child can see what the author intends to put into a work, if the work is at least mediocre. The revelatory stuff is what the author has said in spite of himself, that he's not aware of.
Um, what is important is not the cosmology per se. It's the moral universe portrayed, the relationship between the individual, the world at large, and the choices they have to make. And the fact that Flynn has to disabuse Tron of the idea of the Users' infallability also suggests that the filmmaker was reserving true diety elsewhere.
Liability means holding someone responsible for a cost: if the failure of software that shouldn't have failed costs company X $1 million, then liability is a matter of having the responsibility for that failure taken by someone who provided a good or service that didn't meet the reasonable expectations of the consumer. One doesn't wait until the invisible hand fixes things "in the long run;" like Keynes noted, "in the long run we're all dead." (Another Keynes quote: "the market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent.")
Insofar as it's true that software is flakier and more vulnerable than other products, the questions we might ask are the extent to which liabiliy has motivated other product manufacturers to be a lot more careful in their manufacturing processes, and the extent to which software is "inherently" impossible to get right. Is that perception that software should be exempt from the sort of standards that other goods have accurate, or has that perception been constructed by years of poor software and a lack of accountability?
Heh, no, I was around then (high school) and I remember it. We were horrified because we knew what had happened since - and Lisburger was speaking as if he still thought Gates was some populist hero.
That said, I find it disturbing to think that someone would moderate my (parent) post a troll. It should be obvious that I personally don't agree with the director on this point, but I was at the SFMOMA screening at which Lisburger spoke, and he did in fact make this claim. I can only guess that someone is so horrified by the idea that anyone out there isn't the mortal enemy of Bill Gates, that the very idea of it threatens them. Talk about profound lack-of-a-life.
That said, the director was pretty consciously trying to make an allegory. In fact, it was somewhat hamfisted: he thought his point was so profound, that it would carry the movie, when it didn't. It was a bad movie on that basis: it was really great as a visual piece, as an adaptation of the aesthetics of the arcade into cinema. Largely, that work was done by art directors and production designers. Film, like video games, it should be noted, is a group work, not an individual one; most films are social productions involving hundreds of people. Usually, the director's instincts determine the direction - ha ha - of the film's sensibilities, but great people can smuggle excellence into a mediocre production.
I agree with your criticisms of the script and story, but I think Tron is best remembered for its art direction, costume work, and production design. It took a page from the German expressionists and translated it into a technological era. Not an easy thing to do, and something that really hasn't caught on: most of the aesthetics of SF film are either of the Blade Runner grunge variety or the super-clean 2001: A Space Odyssey stripe. Tron translated the aesthetics of the arcade onto the silver screen.
Some amusing tidbits include the fact that many of the people later involved in Toy Story wanted to work on Tron, but were kept from doing so by their bosses. Also, Tron was denied the AFI Special Effects Award because it was thought, at the time, that using a computer was "cheating!"
Ha. In the talk given by the director after the screening a saw yesterday, he said that he viewed Flynn/Tron as Bill Gates and Microsoft, freeing the computer from the mainframe model of IBM, who was represented by the villain, and bringing the power of the PC to the end-user. Those of us in the audience were horrified.
Utter nonsense. Americans do not drive farther distances than anyone else - the vast majority of driving is the same sort of mostly-local commuting/shopping/errands sort of thing that people do all over the world. Europeans drive as much as Americans do, the go into the mountains to ski, and so forth. The reasons for the popularity of SUV's is far and away the marketting of them as status symbols, as well as the car-size inflation that occurs when everyone else has one and the consequent sense of insecurity.
I've always seen the idea of singularity in the context of the dialectical tradition (Hegel, Marx, and maybe Darwin) - just like we cannot get information from beyond the event horizon of a real singularity, the singularity as a historical moment is that point past which by definition we can not comprehend. So attempts to discuss what it is like, what its substructure is, and so forth, are by definition futile.
I say this as someone who uses AbiWord and Gnumeric regularly, is a big fan of their development, and hopes to see them take off as viable alternatives (although transparent import/export is going to be crucial to their success, if success is defined as practical useability in real-world other-people-inhabited environments. I agree with RMS on a lot - I think that freedom has an intrinsic value whether or not it creates better software - but that only should provide incentive for developing free alternatives, not provide a basis for pretending they are here yet when they really aren't.
Well, apparently you didn't get your computer to send Word docs. That's the point. There are a good dozen workarounds, including some save-as options for RTF or DOC formats. You define "your convenience" as not including interoperability with the 90% of the working world that uses Microsoft Office, that's your choice.
And as I've noted below, if a job is on the line you can do what the millions of people around the world who can't afford a computer at all do: go down to a Kinko's or such and rent a computer for 10 minutes to convert your resume to Word format. Sorry, I'm not about to play the sad violins for someone who can't figure that out.
What a bunch of whiny babies - if that requirement is such a burden, how do you expect single mothers on AFDC to ever pull themselves up?
It's all about the golden rule. Who has the gold, makes the rules.
Roles and profiles are more important. What libraries should be loaded? What facilities should be immediately accessable, and which can be buried? Is the user a power user who has a strong conceptual understanding of the entire machine? A single-application user who understands, say, a piece of video-editing software but needs more help dealing with, or to avoid having to deal with, permissions and file-systems? Is the machine going to mostly be used as a black box, or a kiosk? Is easy upgradeability important, or will it suffice to keep it fairly static?
Roles and profiles aren't new and a lot of distros look for them on install - slackware did this quite nicely. However, I don't think it's implemented with enough granularity or thoughtfulness yet, nor with a mind towards optimization either.
ACK!!'s feedback is actually important and valuable. The more people who adequately represent their own needs, the easier it is to create templates for profiling users and develop systems that fit those profiles. Yes, technically, with enough customization, 95% of distros can be made to fit 95% of the needs of 95% of the people, but relying too much on customization means that a lot of redundant work goes on (if over half the users are spending 2 hours making the same customization, wouldn't it make sense to make that customization available as a default?) and a lot of people who don't have the time to customize will go elsewhere (might not bother you, but personally I believe in network effects - the more people who use the platform I use, the more development will happen on that platform, and the more goodies I get.) Since open source development doesn't have focus groups and useability labs and market research, forums like this are frankly pretty good ways to present wishlists, complaints, and the like.
And besides, the customizability of the KDE/Gnome environments is somewhat restricted by very complex interdependencies.
But you're changing the topic anyway, as well as creating a strawman when you talk about micromanaging lives.
The problem is that the right worked - effectively - to shut down the public sector efforts to feed the hungry, house the homeless, provide public health, and educate, thinking that they were avoiding a "slippery slope" into world government. Instead, bypassing the UN and going straight to the WTO, we get the world government in the interests of greed.
Clearly, this man has never owned a pug.
Well, a lot of left-wing people were worried about corporate control of the Internet and corporate transcendence over national soveriegnty, and we got called anti-globalists, socialists, or communists. Most of the right complained a lot harder about environmental restrictions on business than about SLAPP suits and other corporate power exercises.