That reminds me, I saw a few people walk out of FIght Club when I went to see it in the theater. It was during the scene where Brad Pitt was letting himself get beat up by "Lou". There was blood everywhere, and then you see some guy puke into a trash barrel, apparently in disgust at the sight of all that blood. At that point, a teenage girl in the seat next to me simply got up and walked out. She was sitting out in the lobby, waiting for her friends, after the movie was over. She did not look happy.
Yep, it really is that long. It's Shakespeare's longest play. Branaugh's movie clocks in at exactly 240 minutes, and it's the only filmed version that includes every line of dialogue. Every other version, including the one with Laurence Olivier, has been trimmed.
Incidentally, Branaugh's version was the last major movie to be shot in 70mm. Man, what incredible picture quality. It was like you could just get up out of your chair and walk right into the screen. It's really too bad 70mm has fallen out of favor. I'd love to see Lord of the Rings in that format!
They don't just store the final images, they store the models, textures, animation files, and effectively have multiple copies of each shot, due to the fact that parts are done in layers and then composited (and they keep the separate layers even after the compositing is done). For very complex shots, the data size can end up being quite a few gigabytes per frame.
BTW, digital projectors have not yet reached the level of 3000x2000 resolution. The TI projectors demonstrated so far have been only 1280x1024, which is less than even HDTV. JVC just recently announced they have a next generation version of their D-ILA chip that is capabale of about 2000x1500, which is an improvment, but still not up to full film resolution.
Also note that there are only about 18 digital projectors in the entire world right now that are actually installed in movie houses. That number isn't increasing either, because those are all freebies that were given away by the manufacturers as promotional items. They're through giving them away now. Instead, they've started selling them. No theaters have actually bought any, yet. Given the high cost of the projectors (about $300,000 vs. $30,000 for a film projector) and the financial shakiness of the movie theater chains, I seriously doubt you'll see widespread digital projection for many, many years. That's a good thing, because the technology needs a chance to mature. At the moment, the resolution, color saturation, and contrast range just isn't as good as a high-quality film print. You wouldn't want them to replace all the film projectors out there with the technology as it currently stands. It needs some improvement first.
I think there are some books that really can't make the transition to film well. LOTR is one.
I dunno, I think if done the "right way", that is as close to being uncut as possible, it could work.
Imagine if each of the 3 films were 4 hours long (with an intermission). Now imagine if every character and every line of dialogue were included. It might be difficult for some people to sit throught, but it would be a truly faithful adaptation. It's theoretically possible. Just look at Kenneth Branaugh's uncut, 4-hour version of Hamlet. That's something I never thought I'd see on screen, but even that eventually happened.
Buying the Playstation 2 solely as a DVD player is not the way to go if you're looking for cheap. You can get a name brand, bare bones DVD player for far less than the price of a Playstation 2. Hell, they were selling Toshiba DVD players in the fscking Safeway the other day for $199 each! PS2-as-DVD-player is not cheap.
I'm really happy Clinton vetoed this. But I'm sure he did it for completely selfish reasons. The media were getting ready to get worked up into a frenzy over this. The president of CNN, and the editors-in-chief of several major newspapers sent Clinton a letter urging him to veto the bill. I think he did it just so the press wouldn't give him a hard time. He's a short-timer; he doesn't want anything negative to happen at the last minute that would hurt his "legacy" (not that he has much of one in the first place).
When the press wants something from politicians, they usually get it. The last thing any public figure wants is an angry media.
Notice I just said to vote for "someone else", but didn't say who. That is left as an exercise for the reader. I seriously didn't have anyone in mind.
Of course the Rebuplicans talk about the courts, too. Both of the mainstream parties use the topic of the Supreme Court for political football (to borrow a phrase from another poster).
Thing is, no matter who is president, they can't just appoint whomever they want. The opposing party will be able tie up the confirmations, even if they are the minority in Congress. The president will have to appoint either moderates or "stealth" candidates who usually do not turn out the way they were expected to in the first place.
I'm happy to see that there is at least one person left in the world with two working eyeball in his head who can see the difference between film and video.
By the way, if you plan on running your brand-new print of Rocky Horror as long as your previous one (over a decade, whew!) you might want to consider using FilmGuard. It's a non-evaporative cleaner that is applied using rollerpads. You can learn more about it by going to Film-Tech.com and clicking on the "cleaning" link in the bottom browser frame. Film-Tech also has some nice weblog-like forums where projectionists from all over the world share tips and advice.
I think that would be very impractical. I actually did some experiments on erasing magnetic media for a science project when I was in school. I tried to see how difficult it was to shield VHS tapes from magnetic erasure. The thing I found was that it was so hard to erase a tape in the first place that there's pretty much no way you can accidentally erase those damn things. I can tell you it would take a very powerful magnetic field to erase VHS tapes from a distance, and that probably applies to most other forms of magnetic storage as well.
Here's a desciption of my little science project: At first, I figured I could take a small dime-store magnet and pass it within few inches of a VHS tape, and it would wreak total havoc. Nope. Nothing happened. There was no noticeable degradation of the video signal at all. So, I went to Radio Shack and asked for some bigger magnets. I discovered that a device existed for just what I wanted -- a high capacity bulk eraser. This was a small hand-held device that contained a monster electromagnet and was powered by plugging it directly into 120V wall socket. Apparently it didn't even bother converting the power to DC, since it had a very loud 60Hz hum when turned on. To give you an idea just how powerful this sucker was, I was able to place a set of keys on the floor, then hold the bulk eraser in the air about 6 inches above it, when I turned it on the keys would jump up and stick to the magnet (rattling very loudly with that same 60Hz hum I mentioned).
So I bought one of these erasers and took it home to try it out. The instructions said that in order to truly erase information stored on magnetic media (that is, sufficiently randomize the data so that the media became indistinguishable from blank, unrecorded media), you needed a decaying magnetic field. To produce this using the bulk eraser, one had to start with the eraser right up against the media to be erased, then while moving the eraser in circles, slowly pull back to a distance of a few feet. So I decided to try this using the videotape. When I turned on the eraser, the tape actually stuck to the damn thing, it was so powerful. Wow. What little metal there was inside the VHS tape was still enough to actually lift it off the table when it was within reach of the bulk eraser's uber-magnet. I figured the tape must have been erased instantly, so I didn't even bother with the decaying field bit -- I just turned off the eraser and popped the tape in the player expecting to see static. To my suprise, the test pattern I had recorded was virtually unscathed! There was just a little bit of signal degradation visible, and that was it!
Turns out, the instructions for the bulk eraser weren't kidding. In order to erase a VHS tape I had to very slowly pull back from the tape while moving it in circles, starting with the magnet right up against the cassette's outer shell and taking a good 30 seconds to a mintue to pull the eraser back away from it while going around in circles. Even when I did this as carefully as I could, I found that although the tape was reduced to mostly static, there was still a little bit of signal left behind on the tape -- enough, in fact, to tell what was once on it. No matter how much I tried, I was never able to completely erase a VHS tape, even with an extremely powerful electromagnet at close range. I also found that if I put the tape inside small lockbox so that I could only get within few inches of it, the eraser was pretty much useless, even when I pressed it right up against the outside of the lockbox's surface. Just a couple of inches of distance were enough to prevent erasure from one of the most powerful magnets I'd ever seen. The conclusion I reached from this project was that magnetic media is actually quite durable, and that all you need to protect it is to just keep people from getting to close to it.
If you were to install something in a doorway with the intention of erasing a computer's hard drive as it passed through, the magnets would have to be so powerful that they would yank people's keys out of their pockets. The FBI goons would probably be able to feel their firearms being tugged on, which might make them a wee bit suspicious. And even with extremely powerful magnets, you still would have a hard time creating the "decaying" field effect necessary to sufficiently randomize the data.
Now, I know what some people reading this are going to think. A VHS tape is a very different beast from one of today's high-capacity hard disks. For one thing, a hard disk has its information stored digitally, meaning it's an all-or-nothing situation. The data doesn't get degraded, it just becomes unreadable. Also, if any of the filesystem's metadata gets erased, it will also render the disk unreadable. Finally, information on hard disks is recorded at much higher density than the VHS tapes I was experimenting with, so they are much more sensitive to erasure my magnetic fields. Well, all of those points are valid, and yes, it probably would take a little less to erase a HD than a VHS tape, but even damaged or partially erased disks can be read by data recovery facitilties, which have clean room equipment and can go through and scan disks at the lowest possible level. To prevent the Feds from getting any data off your disks, you would have to make absolutely sure that the magnetic media were totally randomized, and that would take some pretty elaborate and specific conditions. I just don't think it would be practical to set up a doorway device that could erase a disk that passed through it.
One other bit of anecdotal evidence: I've got an iMac sitting on my desk at work, and it performs a monitor degaussing every time I wake up the display. The degaussing coils are so powerful they produce distortion in a 17-inch monitor sitting about two feet away. Now consider that the iMac's hard drive is inside the same case as those degaussing coils. In fact, it's just a few inches away from them. Yet it remains intact through all those magnetic disturbances.
I think a much better scheme would be to have a "kill switch" on your machine. Put a small battery-operated circuit board inside your computer that is capable of powering up the hard disk and sending it low-level format commands. Make it remote controlled. Then, using your remote control, activate it as the feds are taking your machine out the door. The hard drive would be erased by the time they got to it back to their offices.
Goldeneye? That's nothing compared to Conker's Bad Fur Day. Just try watching that 5 minute preview. It's definitely not for kids. It's funny as hell, though.
Thank you for posting that. I'm glad at least one person has some sense about this issue. The Democrats will always try to hold the spectre of the Supreme Court over voters' heads. To the people who fall in line with this fear tactic, let me ask you: When exactly do you think you will be free of this? Next election? The one after that? Do you really think they will ever stop hounding you about it? Of course not.
When a major political party can't give you a good reason to vote for it, and instead resorts to fear tactics, it's time to withdraw your support for it. Don't just cave in and do what they say. Show 'em you won't be swayed by FUD -- vote for someone else!
No shit. Hell, you have to offer up your first born child just to get a static IP the way it is now. Static IPs used to come standard with broadband, but providers quickly realized that was worth something to people, so naturally they started charging more for it. The lack of static IPs is currently an artificial shortage, but just wait maybe 3-4 more years and there will be a real shortage, due to IPv4's address space running out. (Now watch closely as this thread devolves into a flamewar about IPv6 vs. NAT.)
According to this article on Salon, the U.S. Department of Justice has declared the organized vote swapping scheme legal. Relevant details are in the last paragraph, under the heading "Phone a friend".
I sent in two sets of comments (one set of reply comments, and another set of comments after the hearings at Stanford Law School). Neither set showed up on their website. Argh.
I wonder how many other comments got dropped like that. They should at least have some sort of error handling mechanism to send you an e-mail telling you your comments did not go through.
What? That's weird. Your directional keys aren't arranged in a compass-like fashion. Hell, your forward and backward keys are actually reversed! How do you keep them straight? I can't ever remember which keys are which unless they are arranged in an inverted-T shape.
Interesting note: seems that the inverted-T-centered-about-the-"S"-key has become the de facto standard for the default setup in most new 3D games. I call it the "ass-wad" cluster (after the keys A-S-W-D.)
C for down/crouch and space for up/jump are also part of this setup. I've gotten used to it, and I like it. Now, if we could just get game makers to agree that X is next weapon and Z is previous weapon I'd never have to change anything from the default setup!
True, but MS has the money and the clout to spin this however they want, which will be "those malicious open-source people are to blame", all the while glossing over the fact that it is their lax approach to security that caused it. As usual, the "news" outlets will go right along with it.
Looks like the "public forum" listed on the schedule on Wednesday might be a good time and place to show up, however, I'll bet they will be very prepared for that, and will probably have pre-selected people to come up and ask non-embarassing questions. I doubt it will be very "public" or much of a "forum".
Instead, I think the actual board meeting on Thursday would be better. I'm definitely going to be there, with protest signs. Possibly a bullhorn, too.
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That reminds me, I saw a few people walk out of FIght Club when I went to see it in the theater. It was during the scene where Brad Pitt was letting himself get beat up by "Lou". There was blood everywhere, and then you see some guy puke into a trash barrel, apparently in disgust at the sight of all that blood. At that point, a teenage girl in the seat next to me simply got up and walked out. She was sitting out in the lobby, waiting for her friends, after the movie was over. She did not look happy.
Incidentally, Branaugh's version was the last major movie to be shot in 70mm. Man, what incredible picture quality. It was like you could just get up out of your chair and walk right into the screen. It's really too bad 70mm has fallen out of favor. I'd love to see Lord of the Rings in that format!
BTW, digital projectors have not yet reached the level of 3000x2000 resolution. The TI projectors demonstrated so far have been only 1280x1024, which is less than even HDTV. JVC just recently announced they have a next generation version of their D-ILA chip that is capabale of about 2000x1500, which is an improvment, but still not up to full film resolution.
Also note that there are only about 18 digital projectors in the entire world right now that are actually installed in movie houses. That number isn't increasing either, because those are all freebies that were given away by the manufacturers as promotional items. They're through giving them away now. Instead, they've started selling them. No theaters have actually bought any, yet. Given the high cost of the projectors (about $300,000 vs. $30,000 for a film projector) and the financial shakiness of the movie theater chains, I seriously doubt you'll see widespread digital projection for many, many years. That's a good thing, because the technology needs a chance to mature. At the moment, the resolution, color saturation, and contrast range just isn't as good as a high-quality film print. You wouldn't want them to replace all the film projectors out there with the technology as it currently stands. It needs some improvement first.
No way they are using compression. Movie special effects are almost always done in uncompressed Cineon format.
I dunno, I think if done the "right way", that is as close to being uncut as possible, it could work.
Imagine if each of the 3 films were 4 hours long (with an intermission). Now imagine if every character and every line of dialogue were included. It might be difficult for some people to sit throught, but it would be a truly faithful adaptation. It's theoretically possible. Just look at Kenneth Branaugh's uncut, 4-hour version of Hamlet. That's something I never thought I'd see on screen, but even that eventually happened.
Pretty much every DVD player these days comes with DTS output. It's become a "me-too" feature that is all but standard issue.
Buying the Playstation 2 solely as a DVD player is not the way to go if you're looking for cheap. You can get a name brand, bare bones DVD player for far less than the price of a Playstation 2. Hell, they were selling Toshiba DVD players in the fscking Safeway the other day for $199 each! PS2-as-DVD-player is not cheap.
Quite the opposite. Only a bunch 19 & 20 year olds could post some of the immature crap that shows up here.
(Go ahead, mod me down. See if I care.)
Seriously, though. Are there many /.ers with kids? Anyone?
When the press wants something from politicians, they usually get it. The last thing any public figure wants is an angry media.
Holy crap. You're kidding, right? For $7500 I'd want one under 100!
The 3D graphical file browser seen in Jurassic Park was fsn, a throwaway, proof-of-concept tool developed at SGI. It was real.
Of course the Rebuplicans talk about the courts, too. Both of the mainstream parties use the topic of the Supreme Court for political football (to borrow a phrase from another poster).
Thing is, no matter who is president, they can't just appoint whomever they want. The opposing party will be able tie up the confirmations, even if they are the minority in Congress. The president will have to appoint either moderates or "stealth" candidates who usually do not turn out the way they were expected to in the first place.
I'm happy to see that there is at least one person left in the world with two working eyeball in his head who can see the difference between film and video.
By the way, if you plan on running your brand-new print of Rocky Horror as long as your previous one (over a decade, whew!) you might want to consider using FilmGuard. It's a non-evaporative cleaner that is applied using rollerpads. You can learn more about it by going to Film-Tech.com and clicking on the "cleaning" link in the bottom browser frame. Film-Tech also has some nice weblog-like forums where projectionists from all over the world share tips and advice.
Here's a desciption of my little science project: At first, I figured I could take a small dime-store magnet and pass it within few inches of a VHS tape, and it would wreak total havoc. Nope. Nothing happened. There was no noticeable degradation of the video signal at all. So, I went to Radio Shack and asked for some bigger magnets. I discovered that a device existed for just what I wanted -- a high capacity bulk eraser. This was a small hand-held device that contained a monster electromagnet and was powered by plugging it directly into 120V wall socket. Apparently it didn't even bother converting the power to DC, since it had a very loud 60Hz hum when turned on. To give you an idea just how powerful this sucker was, I was able to place a set of keys on the floor, then hold the bulk eraser in the air about 6 inches above it, when I turned it on the keys would jump up and stick to the magnet (rattling very loudly with that same 60Hz hum I mentioned).
So I bought one of these erasers and took it home to try it out. The instructions said that in order to truly erase information stored on magnetic media (that is, sufficiently randomize the data so that the media became indistinguishable from blank, unrecorded media), you needed a decaying magnetic field. To produce this using the bulk eraser, one had to start with the eraser right up against the media to be erased, then while moving the eraser in circles, slowly pull back to a distance of a few feet. So I decided to try this using the videotape. When I turned on the eraser, the tape actually stuck to the damn thing, it was so powerful. Wow. What little metal there was inside the VHS tape was still enough to actually lift it off the table when it was within reach of the bulk eraser's uber-magnet. I figured the tape must have been erased instantly, so I didn't even bother with the decaying field bit -- I just turned off the eraser and popped the tape in the player expecting to see static. To my suprise, the test pattern I had recorded was virtually unscathed! There was just a little bit of signal degradation visible, and that was it!
Turns out, the instructions for the bulk eraser weren't kidding. In order to erase a VHS tape I had to very slowly pull back from the tape while moving it in circles, starting with the magnet right up against the cassette's outer shell and taking a good 30 seconds to a mintue to pull the eraser back away from it while going around in circles. Even when I did this as carefully as I could, I found that although the tape was reduced to mostly static, there was still a little bit of signal left behind on the tape -- enough, in fact, to tell what was once on it. No matter how much I tried, I was never able to completely erase a VHS tape, even with an extremely powerful electromagnet at close range. I also found that if I put the tape inside small lockbox so that I could only get within few inches of it, the eraser was pretty much useless, even when I pressed it right up against the outside of the lockbox's surface. Just a couple of inches of distance were enough to prevent erasure from one of the most powerful magnets I'd ever seen. The conclusion I reached from this project was that magnetic media is actually quite durable, and that all you need to protect it is to just keep people from getting to close to it.
If you were to install something in a doorway with the intention of erasing a computer's hard drive as it passed through, the magnets would have to be so powerful that they would yank people's keys out of their pockets. The FBI goons would probably be able to feel their firearms being tugged on, which might make them a wee bit suspicious. And even with extremely powerful magnets, you still would have a hard time creating the "decaying" field effect necessary to sufficiently randomize the data.
Now, I know what some people reading this are going to think. A VHS tape is a very different beast from one of today's high-capacity hard disks. For one thing, a hard disk has its information stored digitally, meaning it's an all-or-nothing situation. The data doesn't get degraded, it just becomes unreadable. Also, if any of the filesystem's metadata gets erased, it will also render the disk unreadable. Finally, information on hard disks is recorded at much higher density than the VHS tapes I was experimenting with, so they are much more sensitive to erasure my magnetic fields. Well, all of those points are valid, and yes, it probably would take a little less to erase a HD than a VHS tape, but even damaged or partially erased disks can be read by data recovery facitilties, which have clean room equipment and can go through and scan disks at the lowest possible level. To prevent the Feds from getting any data off your disks, you would have to make absolutely sure that the magnetic media were totally randomized, and that would take some pretty elaborate and specific conditions. I just don't think it would be practical to set up a doorway device that could erase a disk that passed through it.
One other bit of anecdotal evidence: I've got an iMac sitting on my desk at work, and it performs a monitor degaussing every time I wake up the display. The degaussing coils are so powerful they produce distortion in a 17-inch monitor sitting about two feet away. Now consider that the iMac's hard drive is inside the same case as those degaussing coils. In fact, it's just a few inches away from them. Yet it remains intact through all those magnetic disturbances.
I think a much better scheme would be to have a "kill switch" on your machine. Put a small battery-operated circuit board inside your computer that is capable of powering up the hard disk and sending it low-level format commands. Make it remote controlled. Then, using your remote control, activate it as the feds are taking your machine out the door. The hard drive would be erased by the time they got to it back to their offices.
Goldeneye? That's nothing compared to Conker's Bad Fur Day. Just try watching that 5 minute preview. It's definitely not for kids. It's funny as hell, though.
When a major political party can't give you a good reason to vote for it, and instead resorts to fear tactics, it's time to withdraw your support for it. Don't just cave in and do what they say. Show 'em you won't be swayed by FUD -- vote for someone else!
No shit. Hell, you have to offer up your first born child just to get a static IP the way it is now. Static IPs used to come standard with broadband, but providers quickly realized that was worth something to people, so naturally they started charging more for it. The lack of static IPs is currently an artificial shortage, but just wait maybe 3-4 more years and there will be a real shortage, due to IPv4's address space running out. (Now watch closely as this thread devolves into a flamewar about IPv6 vs. NAT.)
According to this article on Salon, the U.S. Department of Justice has declared the organized vote swapping scheme legal. Relevant details are in the last paragraph, under the heading "Phone a friend".
I wonder how many other comments got dropped like that. They should at least have some sort of error handling mechanism to send you an e-mail telling you your comments did not go through.
Interesting note: seems that the inverted-T-centered-about-the-"S"-key has become the de facto standard for the default setup in most new 3D games. I call it the "ass-wad" cluster (after the keys A-S-W-D.)
C for down/crouch and space for up/jump are also part of this setup. I've gotten used to it, and I like it. Now, if we could just get game makers to agree that X is next weapon and Z is previous weapon I'd never have to change anything from the default setup!
True, but MS has the money and the clout to spin this however they want, which will be "those malicious open-source people are to blame", all the while glossing over the fact that it is their lax approach to security that caused it. As usual, the "news" outlets will go right along with it.
Instead, I think the actual board meeting on Thursday would be better. I'm definitely going to be there, with protest signs. Possibly a bullhorn, too.
Actually, I'm pretty sure all the desktops in "Contact" were done using HP's incarnation of the motif window manager.
"Party's over!" (Hee, hee!)