The great thing about this isn't that Hatch was cast just to throw a bone to the fans of the old show, but rather that Hatch is great in the role of Tom Zarek. His performance is really spectacular. It's understated and deliberately opaque. You're not supposed to know whether Zarek is a good guy or a bad guy, and you don't!
In other words, his performance on the new "Battlestar Galactica" is head-and-shoulders above any of his performances on the old "Battlestar Galactica." Maybe just because he's older and more experienced as an actor, sure, but the fact that he's been given much better writing doesn't hurt one bit.
Some of the best parts of "The Return of Starbuck" went into an episode of the new series called "Act of Contrition."
The writers of the new show really go out of their way to give nods to the old show. Some are overt, but there are lots more that are too subtle for all but the most observant to notice. For instance, during the miniseries, Adama gives his monster speech at the funeral. At one point he says, "'Life here began out there.' Those are the first words of the sacred scrolls." Some may remember, of course, that the first words of the prologue of the original 1970-whatever pilot were "There are those who believe that life here began out there." Incredibly subtle stuff.
And the writers are right up front about the ways that their interpretation of the premise differs from the original. The first words of both the pilot and every regular episode come in the form of a title card that opens the show. The card simply says: "The cylons were created by man." It's like saying, "Here's how it is, take it or leave it." I respect that.
There's lots of stuff like that. It's fun to keep an eye out for it.
There's a shot in the pilot that's very much like that. Galactica does their light-jump thing to Ragnar Anchorage. From fairly close up, we see Galactica disappear in a flash of light. Then we cut to a wide shot of Ragnar's upper atmosphere, all blue and purple and black, and you're expecting to see Galactica zoom back in all dramatic like. But instead, there's this tiny flash of light, and the camera crash-zooms in as tight as it can, and Galactica is still just a little speck.
It looks exactly like there was a camera guy in a space suit standing on a moon shooting the whole thing live.
It gave the whole scene a great sense of scale, I thought. I loved it.
No, it matters. If you have a TiVo, aggregate data about who records what is collected by the company. Unless you've opted out, I mean. I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true of other recorders.
The Web site Titan TV, which some people use to program their recorders, also keeps track of what the most-recorded shows are.
So there's more to it than just Nielsens...though those are very important.
Your "e-mail Sci-Fi" idea is a non-starter, though. Given all the 14-year-old nerds who acted like the world had ended when "Farscape" was (deservedly) cancelled, don't you think Sci-Fi knows all about how one guy with a VB script can stuff company in-boxes?
While I agree with you completely, there was one other scene in the miniseries that, in my opinion, kicked the ass of the original.
Near the end, during the "after the fight" montage, Tigh goes back to his cabin, takes out his liquor bottle, and drops it into the trash can by his desk.
We cut away to other scenes, other characters reacting to their new circumstances.
Then we cut back to Tigh. He's fished the bottle out of the trash, has it sitting in the middle of his desk, and is sitting in his chair with his chin on his hand just staring at it.
That, to me, said more about Tigh's character and how the show plans to deal with flaws than anything else in the entire 180-plus minutes. These are real people with real flaws. Tigh's not a lovable scoundrel. He's the best damn XO in the fleet who also happens to be a drunk with massive stupidity when it comes to women.
There are no heroes here. There are just regular people trying to survive under unbelievably hard conditions.
Which, I guess from a certain point of view, makes them all heroes after all.
I was thinking about this this morning, coincidentally. I think the polytheistic culture of the Colonials stands as a pretty good metaphor for modern western culture. Though practically nobody is actually polytheistic in our culture, taken as a whole our society could be thought of that way.
I think the monotheism/polytheism thing is more of an excuse to tell a story about the conflict between pluralism and zealotry than anything else.
That's not true at all. In fact, the effects for this show were inspired more by "Black Hawk Down" than by "Firefly." But they have a very "Firefly" look to them because they were done by the same people working at the same effects houses.
Keep your eye on Zoic. They're doing amazing work.
There is no "Imperious Leader." You misunderstood the closing scene of the pilot.
And I'd suggest you check out Ron Moore's latest blog entry. He goes to great length to explain that the intricate technological details behind the 33-minute thing just don't matter. He says:
A deeper truth is, I was never interested in coming up with an explanation for Why? Never. I mean, I suppose I could've come up with a sufficiently important-sounding bit of technobabble that would've made sense (you see, the Cylon double-talk sensors tracking the Olympic Carrier's nonsense drive signature needed 15 minutes to relay the made-up data wave through the pretend continuum, then the Cylon navigational hyper silly system needed another 10 minutes to recalculate the flux capacitor, etc.) but what would that have really added to the drama? How does explaining that 33 minute interval help our understanding of Laura's terrible moment of decision, or bring us to any greater knowledge of Dualla's search for her missing family and friends, or yield insight into Baltar's morally shattered psyche?
If you're the kind of person who wants to hear lengthy technical explanations of incidental plot points -- and there's nothing wrong with those people -- don't waste your time with this show. This is not a genre show. It's a character-driven drama that just happens to be set in space and include robots.
The show doesn't get much better than the first episode, "33." "The Hand of God" is very good, as is "Colonial Day," and no episode is really anything less than outstanding. But "33" has been the high point so far, I think.
They don't have anything close to enough crew to man all action stations in shifts. This is consistent with Navy procedures; when you're in active combat, nobody's in his rack. Everybody's got a job to do, and everybody does it.
So yeah, this was actually completely realistic. In fact, it was a level of attention to detail that impressed the hell out of me.
It was indeed, but it was a little different from a straight rerun. It was edited down from a 3-hour cut to a 2-hour cut. Scenes were rearranged in some places, and in a couple of instances different takes were used.
The show is being shot in high-definition video at 24 frames per second, a format commonly referred to as "24p." This helps keep costs down, production schedules shorter and quality higher.
Quartz Extreme isn't something you run. It's a feature of the OS to offload some processing of 2D graphics to the GPU. Your Mac works exactly the same whether it supports Quartz Extreme or not. It's just that it's less CPU-intensive with Quartz Extreme.
$265? Screw that. Other World has 1 GB sticks of PC2700 for $190. I've bought RAM and other things from them many times and have never had a complaint.
Um. Nobody buys Apple RAM. You buy the 1 GB RAM stick from somebody like Other World for $190 and either install it yourself if you're savvy, or take it to your local Apple Store for them to put in for you if you're not.
Every time Apple ships a machine, folks come crawling out of the woodwork to complain that (1) 256 MB isn't enough and (2) Apple's RAM is too expensive. It's like they're unaware of third-party RAM or something.
I'd bet you my last penny that Apple will never call anything the "G5M."
Apple is all about branding. The company makes conscious decisions to establish strong, recognizable brands and to hold on to them. For example, consider the iPod family. Apple has the iPod, the iPod mini and now the iPod shuffle. There's no iPod 2, no iPod XL, no iPod IL-99, no iPod 90210. Apple, in general, eschews alphabet soup.
G5 is a brand. If you notice, Apple has enormous graphics for the "G5" logotype. G4 was a brand, too. There were lots of processors from Motorola, IBM and Freescale that were all branded "G4."
The idea that Apple would ever name anything "G5M" goes against all that. It doesn't sound right to me.
I have heard that Longhorn is to Windows XP as Panther was to Jaguar. That is, it's a major new release, but not a complete rewrite. There's a new version of the kernel, for example, but it's not a new kernel. And so on.
It's entirely possible that I'm mistaken; I care about Microsoft's plans slightly less than I care about the weather in Singapore. But if I'm right, then no, Longhorn is not being "built from the ground up." It's just an upgrade that's years behind its original release schedule.
Apple lives and dies by expectations. Remember the iPod mini? Rumor sites reported the week before it was announced that it would be a 5 GB device priced at $199. The actual product, of course, was a 4 GB device priced at $249. The reaction from analysts and investors was devastating, despite the fact that the iPod mini went on to sell like a house on fire.
It's entirely reasonable that Apple would try to manage consumer expectations regarding the Obvious Next Big Thing. If buzz starts that a PowerBook G5 is coming next month, when it fails to materialize Apple's stock price will take a hit.
Besides, the G4 still has an awful lot of life left in it. It's a damn fine processor, the only major drawback of which is that it has a memory bus that doesn't really compare with the current state of the art. But in many cases --iBooks, eMacs, Mac minis --that's not really important.
The only one I can think of that you missed is the one that started it all: smart playlists in iTunes.
NetNewsWire also has smart feeds, but they're implemented in a different way. You can create a feed that runs, say, a Blogdigger query. The results come to you as an RSS feed. The downside of this is that Blogdigger search results are really ugly as RSS feeds go. But that's an implementation detail.
NNW also has regular smart feeds, of course, where it aggregates entries from your own subscriptions based on criteria. I'm fairly certain that the program uses Apple's SearchKit for that.
Beyond "hey, search," the Apple and Microsoft approaches couldn't be more different.
The Microsoft approach called for a massive SQL database to store all filesystem data, making every search of the filesystem, from a directory listing up, a database query. I think I read somewhere that this approach was subsequently dropped in favor of something else, but I don't know that for sure.
The Apple approach is much more lightweight, which is undoubtedly why they're able to ship years before Microsoft. Spotlight consists of a metadata server program with a database back-end (I don't remember whether it's actually SQLite or some other way of storing the data) and and an extensible metadata importer. When a file is closed, the metadata importer program gets a notification to re-import the metadata for that file. If a plug-in exists for that file's type, the importer passes the file's path to it and gets a data structure of metadata attributes back.
So you see, Apple's approach is completely different from Microsoft's. Which means, apart from the fact that both companies noticed a nail and started working on hammers, there's really no reason to talk about anybody copying anybody.
The reason for this is that a 64-bit application will be slower than an identical application compiled for 32-bit addressing every time.
See, in 64-bit mode, the computer uses 64-bit-wide pointers instead of 32-bit-wide pointers. That means only half as many pointers can fit in registers or the various caches. Which means that, in most respects, you effectively cut your cache sizes in half when you compile for 64-bit.
Apple has no plans to release 64-bit versions of the Cocoa or Carbon frameworks, so your user-interactive applications are going to continue to be 32-bit for the foreseeable future. But Tiger will have increased 64-bit support for the core system libraries so Oracle can release a 64-bit version of their database, for instance.
Despite the hype, 64-bit computing is just not something that normal folks need. I had an SGI Octane on my desk for two years and I don't think I ever once compiled or ran a 64-bit program.
Slashdot Mirror
I hereby moderate this story -1, Flamebait. Also, due to bad posting from Michael's subnet, he's hereby banned from posting any articles for 48 hours.
The great thing about this isn't that Hatch was cast just to throw a bone to the fans of the old show, but rather that Hatch is great in the role of Tom Zarek. His performance is really spectacular. It's understated and deliberately opaque. You're not supposed to know whether Zarek is a good guy or a bad guy, and you don't!
In other words, his performance on the new "Battlestar Galactica" is head-and-shoulders above any of his performances on the old "Battlestar Galactica." Maybe just because he's older and more experienced as an actor, sure, but the fact that he's been given much better writing doesn't hurt one bit.
Some of the best parts of "The Return of Starbuck" went into an episode of the new series called "Act of Contrition."
The writers of the new show really go out of their way to give nods to the old show. Some are overt, but there are lots more that are too subtle for all but the most observant to notice. For instance, during the miniseries, Adama gives his monster speech at the funeral. At one point he says, "'Life here began out there.' Those are the first words of the sacred scrolls." Some may remember, of course, that the first words of the prologue of the original 1970-whatever pilot were "There are those who believe that life here began out there." Incredibly subtle stuff.
And the writers are right up front about the ways that their interpretation of the premise differs from the original. The first words of both the pilot and every regular episode come in the form of a title card that opens the show. The card simply says: "The cylons were created by man." It's like saying, "Here's how it is, take it or leave it." I respect that.
There's lots of stuff like that. It's fun to keep an eye out for it.
There's a shot in the pilot that's very much like that. Galactica does their light-jump thing to Ragnar Anchorage. From fairly close up, we see Galactica disappear in a flash of light. Then we cut to a wide shot of Ragnar's upper atmosphere, all blue and purple and black, and you're expecting to see Galactica zoom back in all dramatic like. But instead, there's this tiny flash of light, and the camera crash-zooms in as tight as it can, and Galactica is still just a little speck.
It looks exactly like there was a camera guy in a space suit standing on a moon shooting the whole thing live.
It gave the whole scene a great sense of scale, I thought. I loved it.
No, it matters. If you have a TiVo, aggregate data about who records what is collected by the company. Unless you've opted out, I mean. I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true of other recorders.
...though those are very important.
The Web site Titan TV, which some people use to program their recorders, also keeps track of what the most-recorded shows are.
So there's more to it than just Nielsens
Your "e-mail Sci-Fi" idea is a non-starter, though. Given all the 14-year-old nerds who acted like the world had ended when "Farscape" was (deservedly) cancelled, don't you think Sci-Fi knows all about how one guy with a VB script can stuff company in-boxes?
While I agree with you completely, there was one other scene in the miniseries that, in my opinion, kicked the ass of the original.
Near the end, during the "after the fight" montage, Tigh goes back to his cabin, takes out his liquor bottle, and drops it into the trash can by his desk.
We cut away to other scenes, other characters reacting to their new circumstances.
Then we cut back to Tigh. He's fished the bottle out of the trash, has it sitting in the middle of his desk, and is sitting in his chair with his chin on his hand just staring at it.
That, to me, said more about Tigh's character and how the show plans to deal with flaws than anything else in the entire 180-plus minutes. These are real people with real flaws. Tigh's not a lovable scoundrel. He's the best damn XO in the fleet who also happens to be a drunk with massive stupidity when it comes to women.
There are no heroes here. There are just regular people trying to survive under unbelievably hard conditions.
Which, I guess from a certain point of view, makes them all heroes after all.
I was thinking about this this morning, coincidentally. I think the polytheistic culture of the Colonials stands as a pretty good metaphor for modern western culture. Though practically nobody is actually polytheistic in our culture, taken as a whole our society could be thought of that way.
I think the monotheism/polytheism thing is more of an excuse to tell a story about the conflict between pluralism and zealotry than anything else.
That's not true at all. In fact, the effects for this show were inspired more by "Black Hawk Down" than by "Firefly." But they have a very "Firefly" look to them because they were done by the same people working at the same effects houses.
Keep your eye on Zoic. They're doing amazing work.
And I'd suggest you check out Ron Moore's latest blog entry. He goes to great length to explain that the intricate technological details behind the 33-minute thing just don't matter. He says:
If you're the kind of person who wants to hear lengthy technical explanations of incidental plot points -- and there's nothing wrong with those people -- don't waste your time with this show. This is not a genre show. It's a character-driven drama that just happens to be set in space and include robots.
The show doesn't get much better than the first episode, "33." "The Hand of God" is very good, as is "Colonial Day," and no episode is really anything less than outstanding. But "33" has been the high point so far, I think.
They don't have anything close to enough crew to man all action stations in shifts. This is consistent with Navy procedures; when you're in active combat, nobody's in his rack. Everybody's got a job to do, and everybody does it.
So yeah, this was actually completely realistic. In fact, it was a level of attention to detail that impressed the hell out of me.
It was indeed, but it was a little different from a straight rerun. It was edited down from a 3-hour cut to a 2-hour cut. Scenes were rearranged in some places, and in a couple of instances different takes were used.
The show is being shot in high-definition video at 24 frames per second, a format commonly referred to as "24p." This helps keep costs down, production schedules shorter and quality higher.
No, definitely not correct. There's only one Tiger. The same OS runs on G5s and on older machines.
Quartz Extreme isn't something you run. It's a feature of the OS to offload some processing of 2D graphics to the GPU. Your Mac works exactly the same whether it supports Quartz Extreme or not. It's just that it's less CPU-intensive with Quartz Extreme.
$265? Screw that. Other World has 1 GB sticks of PC2700 for $190. I've bought RAM and other things from them many times and have never had a complaint.
Um. Nobody buys Apple RAM. You buy the 1 GB RAM stick from somebody like Other World for $190 and either install it yourself if you're savvy, or take it to your local Apple Store for them to put in for you if you're not.
Every time Apple ships a machine, folks come crawling out of the woodwork to complain that (1) 256 MB isn't enough and (2) Apple's RAM is too expensive. It's like they're unaware of third-party RAM or something.
No. "From G3 to G5, from iBook to Xserve, there is just one kernel and set of core system libraries for Tiger."
There's absolutely no reason to have a 64-bit kernel, anyway. Why would you need to address more than 2 GB of RAM in your kernel?
Start->Programs->Accessories->System tools->File and settings transfer wizard
Golly, how intuitive!
(Sorry, I know I shouldn't make fun of Microsoft's "Start" menu. It's like picking on the retarded kid.)
I'd bet you my last penny that Apple will never call anything the "G5M."
Apple is all about branding. The company makes conscious decisions to establish strong, recognizable brands and to hold on to them. For example, consider the iPod family. Apple has the iPod, the iPod mini and now the iPod shuffle. There's no iPod 2, no iPod XL, no iPod IL-99, no iPod 90210. Apple, in general, eschews alphabet soup.
G5 is a brand. If you notice, Apple has enormous graphics for the "G5" logotype. G4 was a brand, too. There were lots of processors from Motorola, IBM and Freescale that were all branded "G4."
The idea that Apple would ever name anything "G5M" goes against all that. It doesn't sound right to me.
I have heard that Longhorn is to Windows XP as Panther was to Jaguar. That is, it's a major new release, but not a complete rewrite. There's a new version of the kernel, for example, but it's not a new kernel. And so on.
It's entirely possible that I'm mistaken; I care about Microsoft's plans slightly less than I care about the weather in Singapore. But if I'm right, then no, Longhorn is not being "built from the ground up." It's just an upgrade that's years behind its original release schedule.
Apple lives and dies by expectations. Remember the iPod mini? Rumor sites reported the week before it was announced that it would be a 5 GB device priced at $199. The actual product, of course, was a 4 GB device priced at $249. The reaction from analysts and investors was devastating, despite the fact that the iPod mini went on to sell like a house on fire.
It's entirely reasonable that Apple would try to manage consumer expectations regarding the Obvious Next Big Thing. If buzz starts that a PowerBook G5 is coming next month, when it fails to materialize Apple's stock price will take a hit.
Besides, the G4 still has an awful lot of life left in it. It's a damn fine processor, the only major drawback of which is that it has a memory bus that doesn't really compare with the current state of the art. But in many cases --iBooks, eMacs, Mac minis --that's not really important.
The only one I can think of that you missed is the one that started it all: smart playlists in iTunes.
NetNewsWire also has smart feeds, but they're implemented in a different way. You can create a feed that runs, say, a Blogdigger query. The results come to you as an RSS feed. The downside of this is that Blogdigger search results are really ugly as RSS feeds go. But that's an implementation detail.
NNW also has regular smart feeds, of course, where it aggregates entries from your own subscriptions based on criteria. I'm fairly certain that the program uses Apple's SearchKit for that.
Beyond "hey, search," the Apple and Microsoft approaches couldn't be more different.
The Microsoft approach called for a massive SQL database to store all filesystem data, making every search of the filesystem, from a directory listing up, a database query. I think I read somewhere that this approach was subsequently dropped in favor of something else, but I don't know that for sure.
The Apple approach is much more lightweight, which is undoubtedly why they're able to ship years before Microsoft. Spotlight consists of a metadata server program with a database back-end (I don't remember whether it's actually SQLite or some other way of storing the data) and and an extensible metadata importer. When a file is closed, the metadata importer program gets a notification to re-import the metadata for that file. If a plug-in exists for that file's type, the importer passes the file's path to it and gets a data structure of metadata attributes back.
So you see, Apple's approach is completely different from Microsoft's. Which means, apart from the fact that both companies noticed a nail and started working on hammers, there's really no reason to talk about anybody copying anybody.
That rumor has already been debunked. What got described as "piles" in the rumor mill was actually Exposé.
Remember all those rumors about a mouse with a wheel on it? Turned out to be the design for the iPod click wheel.
Ironically, the rumor mill often gets the details right but the big picture wrong.
The reason for this is that a 64-bit application will be slower than an identical application compiled for 32-bit addressing every time.
See, in 64-bit mode, the computer uses 64-bit-wide pointers instead of 32-bit-wide pointers. That means only half as many pointers can fit in registers or the various caches. Which means that, in most respects, you effectively cut your cache sizes in half when you compile for 64-bit.
Apple has no plans to release 64-bit versions of the Cocoa or Carbon frameworks, so your user-interactive applications are going to continue to be 32-bit for the foreseeable future. But Tiger will have increased 64-bit support for the core system libraries so Oracle can release a 64-bit version of their database, for instance.
Despite the hype, 64-bit computing is just not something that normal folks need. I had an SGI Octane on my desk for two years and I don't think I ever once compiled or ran a 64-bit program.