- Ten times as many movies are being released as 10 or 20 years ago.
- The political correctness movement making movies painfully formulaic.
- The _public_ wants remakes.
- And the death spiral of crappy movies -> fewer go -> less money to make movies -> crappier movies.
However, last year brought three movies to my neighborhood that were superb: Capote, The Constant Gardener, and Broken Flowers
TCG and BF were extreme stinkers and I am not going to attempt Capote (can't stand PSH).
As to Netflix, how come no one is super pissed off at Netflix for scamming us with the promise of "unlimited" movies that turns into 3 a week if you are lucky.
The cultural crimes of Hollywood became most evident with E.T. and have grown worse and more evident with time.
Back when ET came out, our family watched it at the local drive-in -- economical for the 5 of us. Shortly after the movie started we all looked at each other and went "Huh?", and we drove out of the drive-in a few minutes later.
ET is indeed a major sign post indicating the decline of Hollywood. I think Spielberg makes mostly crap movies -- and according to his intro to the restored version of Lawrence Of Arabia even S.S. himself was blown away by LoA, one of the last great movies by one of the last great directors.
What bothers me are blatant, shameless plugs that serve no other purpose. Like "iRobot," for example, when Will Smith makes a point of showing off his "vintage" Converse shoes that are totally out of place in the future world, and serve no other purpose in the plot...Maybe if it came up later in the film...but IIRC, they never came up again
Ok, I am obviously in a minority of/.ers because I liked "I, Robot" (a lot, actually). The converse shoes come up later when they are dirty/ruined from an accident and he is pissed about it. Also, they have a very 1970s retro style to them which is a BIG part of Will Smith's character. And there were essentially no other major placements in the movie...
A slow frame rate saves money, big time. No need to have the actors or stunt people actually be able to do anything. No need to have the stunt person (male) look like the actor (female). And with CGI mixed into the action, less CGI frames to render. All in all, 2 or 3 times cheaper to rip off the viewing public.
even considering that recent movies have a bit of a bias due to initial popularity.
We all know that imdb.com ratings are now almost completely useless due to the "initial popularity" (i.e. totally bogus) votes. I used to be a super fan of imdb comments but now what I do is ONLY read the negative comments. I simply refuse to read 9* or 10* comments and in fact once I am convinced a movie is a turkey I will click the "No, this comment was not helpful" for these "Best movie ever" comments. Just my way of sticking it to the man.
One that I have not heard anyone mention is the time it takes to:
- drive to the theater
- find parking
- hike to the building
- line up for tickets
- and then, worst of all, wait for the show to start -- maybe I am alone here but I don't want to pay major $ to miss the first few minutes (even though I can't stand the trailers)
- hike back to car
- drive home
People these days have less time than they had. Parents have no extra time. And on the other hand you can pause a DVD at home for minutes, hours or days. How else can busy people fit in watching a 3 hour movie?
I saw 2001 at the Oak theater in Vancouver, Canada when it was released originally. It was truly a cool film to see in a theater. Some years later I saw Star Wars (the first one) and I liked it enough to see it twice in the theater. Another film that qualifies IMO is Lawrence of Arabia and I saw that in a retro theater a few years ago -- it played to a packed house of real film fans and we loved the experience. But in thinking about it, I knew I would like it going into the theater, and I doubt there is any film out there that will make me want to go to a theater again. I think those who say theater movies are for kids are right.
Why doesn't some group of white hats get together to search for machines that are open and then close those machines via turning their firewall on, or if the machine is too old/limited/compromised already then disable it sufficiently such that the OS must be reinstalled?
I guess it is time for you to find out, beginning with the spelling.
People of my parents' generation (70+) have false teeth. People of my generation (50+) generally have most of their own teeth, but they're mostly bog with a thin external shell of enamel (or a crown). People of my childrens' generation (20-30) have perfect teeth - no fillings, no crowns, no problems. Guess which generation grew up with flouridated water.
Wow, I guess scientists could learn from your methodology then.
Seriously, I'll just say (1) I'm a chemical engineer with 10 years of chemistry courses that all say the same thing -- briefly that Fluoride is more toxic than lead and almost as toxic as arsenic, (2) fluorine is the most reactive element known to man, (3) the average dental program has zero or one chemistry course in it, whereas I took about a dozen higher ed. chem. courses, (4) everyone can research the issue for themselves, (5) click this http://www.just-think-it.com/the-f-db.htm to find out if your water supply is poisoned.
After switching to Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper (aka Liquid Crack) I was heading for 5 to 6 20oz bottles a day (at work) plus 5 to 10 12oz cans every two days (at home).
...100 ounces at work...48 ounces at home...over 1 gallon of soda a day!...If that had been the fully leaded version, you would have had over
1800 calories a day in colas alone (Dr. Pepper (my liquid crack) is 150 cal/12 ounce can
Get your units straight, you are only 3 orders of magnitude wrong. But don't feel to bad about it, even my stupid gov. doesn't know the difference between cal and kcal.
I calculate a minimum of 100 oz at work, __30__ oz at home, divided by 150 cal per 12 oz = 1625 cal. I see no "3 orders of magnitude" error. If you are referring to the fact that all our food calories are 3 orders of mag. wrong, that is true. However in this case, the person was making an apples to apples comparison and there were no unit errors, just the 1625 vs 1800 calorie error.
So, "anon pr*ck" (i.e. male) is consuming at least 1,625,000 real calories per day of soda and their RDA of calories is in the 2,xxx,000 range. Bottom line is the same, IF it was leaded soda then ~80% of RDA calories would be from soda.
Diet coke definitely promotes obesity. Emulsifiers in cola go straight to our lymph system and stay there. Since diet cola drinkers in general drink more cola than regular cola drinkers, they gain more weight (in the lymph system). As a check on this, notice that the cola drinker type has very flabby (fluid) flesh, whereas say a football linebacker is a tree trunk with pads.
One cup a day is all the body responds to anyway (less in fact). After that the dependency goes up but the benefits do not. Pretty soon you are knocking back 2+ cups a day just to feel not quite as good as when you weren't drinking. At that point it is time to knock off the stuff for a day or two, then fire up that virtuous cycle again.
Apologies for how I worded this. What I was trying to say is that LAME _is_ written with SMP & HT in mind. Another application that wasn't would push _both_ of the intel pseudo-CPUs to 100% utilization, not just one. I am very happy with how LAME functions. Mea culpa.
I use Ultra Player, locked at version 2.112 for forever and just a 3MB download. I moved to it when I saw the CPU utilization spikes that early versions of Media Player caused. http://www.ultraplayer.com/
As to stability, I had no stability problems with 98.
Sorry but I doubt this. I was a great 98SE fan and moved to XP for only one big reason -- system resources. I could not, for example, chat using Yahoo IM, browse and have Word open without running low on resources to the point of something croaking. Also, YIM would get flaky and force a reboot (couldn't get back into conferences otherwise). MS was very smart in how they kept 9x/ME crippled in this way (and MSN Messenger was even more of a resource/RAM hog than YIM).
I'm still trying to find out what XP offers ME, the single guy living alone who "upgraded" to XP. And I thank all of you who responded to the post.
If you are a true one-app-at-a-time user then stick with 98, but I doubt that you are if you are on/.
Problem is that most "upgrades" are not that but bug fixes the software company decided to charge for. windows 98 for example was a windows 95 bugfix.
I'm not even a Microsoft user or customer, and even I know that is not true. Win98 had real features beyond Win95.
Ballmer himself stated that Win98 fixed 5,000 bugs in Win95.
NO, you don't have to have multi-threaded applications to get benefits from a multi-CPU system. When was the last time you EVER ran one program on your computer? Take a look at the Task List some day... there are probably 20-30 threads listed there at any one time.
In my task manager list I rarely have any thread or application using 10% let alone 100% of the processor...unless I go off and run some application (or type "dir/s" from c:\ -- try it...). However, when I LAME something I see that one of my intel's cores goes to 100% while the other does not, so I DO find that applications need to be written for multi core systems.
And why do you arbitrarily pick the thing that the Wright brothers achieved as the first significant step? The Wright brothers, even if you accept their disputed claim, were merely the first to fly with a self-propelled plane. But surely a far greater achievement was that of by the glider pioneers who preceded them by decades - Otto Lilienthal and the like - who actually proved that a heavier-than-air machine could fly, and built up the basic understanding of wings and aerodynamics without which the Wright brothers would never have had a frame to strap their engine into?
The progression of gliding begins with a child holding a piece of paper above their head, then jumping. After that it is only about flight duration.
Wright innovations like realizing that the propeller was like the wing, and designing both for maximum lift (unlike everyone else), using a wind tunnel (unlike anyone else) to a level of propeller efficiency comparable to propellers made 100 years later IS remarkable.
As is their work with engines. I believe it was about 5 horsepower but about as heavy as a modern automotive engine. And, as mentioned earlier, their work with control services, introducing one that no one else had ever used before.
In short, comparing gliders to airplanes is like comparing the typewriter to the computer.
There are a lot of standard complaints that are thrown around that don't bear out. In behavior finance this is the demonstration of revealed preferences over stated preferences.
Actually you have to first factor out the 10 million rich morons willing to watch just about any crap movie each week -- both their $ and their opinions. Once you do that, you find that people prefer good movies.
Everyone likes to turn to the classic bit on the lack of imagination in Hollywood when there is little evidence that the movie-going masses would have preference for "more imaginative" movies.
The n minus ten million care about movie quality.
...even though its just a Netflix order away.
Netflix is a scam of the first order. They have been class action sued over their promises-vs-action, and they lost. Ripoff is too kind a word.
Basically they want special effects. And not just any special effects, modern special effects.
The ten million morons do.
And that leads to the emergent behavior of movie goers: they expect repetition.
Unfortunately the masses want to be part of the masses, 'tis true.
Audiences no longer go to movies to see something different every time. They want comfort food.
We all want comfort food. Yes, that means we tend to eat the same food. Yes, that means we want movies that are "similar" in some ways. No it does not mean we want formulaic, cliched, FX-laden, story-shy, arrogant crap.
Luc Besson...Leon...The Fifth Element.
I'll give you 2 of his movies, but even then the int'l version of The Professional blows, frankly.
This years Academy films are not about PCness... They were dramas....The (overblown) PC thing is about white guys feeling victimized for being forced to condider other points of view. No one was forced to make or see these movies. They just happen to be decent stories that were vehicles for good acting...
Given that the 5 "best" picture nominees grossed less than $200M in total, there is no evidence they are "decent stories", but implied evidence that they favor the ongoing PC agendas of Hollywood. And the same situation happened last year and the year before. When WAS the last good film?! I would say "I, Robot"...and what did it win? Nothing from "the Academy": http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/awards
Would you like to explain how King Kong, Walk the Line or Pride and Prejudice were PC films?.
Pride and Prejudice is a centuries old chick flick, bleck. King Kong was, by all accounts, fit for teenage masturbation and nothing more. Walk The Line is about all I would call a half way decent movie.
The reason the term "PC" is used is that "the Academy" is clearly not listening to the people. Check out the Top 50 '2000s' movies on imdb.com, the most popular 2005 movie according to We The People was "Sin City", yet that received zero nominations. On the other hand, the geisha movie wins three oscars...to go with its raspberry award.
Basically Hollywood could care less about us. Once in a while they accidentally nominate a good movie (e.g. Batman Begins) but they make sure it doesn't get nominated for much or win anything (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0372784/awards).
We have to do our part, boycotting crap like War Of The Worlds, and even crap actors like Jessica Alba (Fantastic Crap). And when the little movies and concepts succeed, we succeed, so we should put our money down on the good ones -- part of the reason I bought The Matrix 10-DVD set.
Small movie sells and big movie copies. It's that simple.
There is a software parallel to this: someone makes a good software and a big software dinosaur buys them out. Someone makes a better browser, 37 years later MS clones the featureset. Linux innovates, MS...ok, the parallel doesn't work in every case.
Slashdot Mirror
- Ten times as many movies are being released as 10 or 20 years ago.
- The political correctness movement making movies painfully formulaic.
- The _public_ wants remakes.
- And the death spiral of crappy movies -> fewer go -> less money to make movies -> crappier movies.
TCG and BF were extreme stinkers and I am not going to attempt Capote (can't stand PSH).
As to Netflix, how come no one is super pissed off at Netflix for scamming us with the promise of "unlimited" movies that turns into 3 a week if you are lucky.
Back when ET came out, our family watched it at the local drive-in -- economical for the 5 of us. Shortly after the movie started we all looked at each other and went "Huh?", and we drove out of the drive-in a few minutes later.
ET is indeed a major sign post indicating the decline of Hollywood. I think Spielberg makes mostly crap movies -- and according to his intro to the restored version of Lawrence Of Arabia even S.S. himself was blown away by LoA, one of the last great movies by one of the last great directors.
Ok, I am obviously in a minority of /.ers because I liked "I, Robot" (a lot, actually). The converse shoes come up later when they are dirty/ruined from an accident and he is pissed about it. Also, they have a very 1970s retro style to them which is a BIG part of Will Smith's character. And there were essentially no other major placements in the movie...
A slow frame rate saves money, big time. No need to have the actors or stunt people actually be able to do anything. No need to have the stunt person (male) look like the actor (female). And with CGI mixed into the action, less CGI frames to render. All in all, 2 or 3 times cheaper to rip off the viewing public.
We all know that imdb.com ratings are now almost completely useless due to the "initial popularity" (i.e. totally bogus) votes. I used to be a super fan of imdb comments but now what I do is ONLY read the negative comments. I simply refuse to read 9* or 10* comments and in fact once I am convinced a movie is a turkey I will click the "No, this comment was not helpful" for these "Best movie ever" comments. Just my way of sticking it to the man.
- drive to the theater
- find parking
- hike to the building
- line up for tickets
- and then, worst of all, wait for the show to start -- maybe I am alone here but I don't want to pay major $ to miss the first few minutes (even though I can't stand the trailers)
- hike back to car
- drive home
People these days have less time than they had. Parents have no extra time. And on the other hand you can pause a DVD at home for minutes, hours or days. How else can busy people fit in watching a 3 hour movie?
I saw 2001 at the Oak theater in Vancouver, Canada when it was released originally. It was truly a cool film to see in a theater. Some years later I saw Star Wars (the first one) and I liked it enough to see it twice in the theater. Another film that qualifies IMO is Lawrence of Arabia and I saw that in a retro theater a few years ago -- it played to a packed house of real film fans and we loved the experience. But in thinking about it, I knew I would like it going into the theater, and I doubt there is any film out there that will make me want to go to a theater again. I think those who say theater movies are for kids are right.
Why doesn't some group of white hats get together to search for machines that are open and then close those machines via turning their firewall on, or if the machine is too old/limited/compromised already then disable it sufficiently such that the OS must be reinstalled?
I guess it is time for you to find out, beginning with the spelling.
People of my parents' generation (70+) have false teeth. People of my generation (50+) generally have most of their own teeth, but they're mostly bog with a thin external shell of enamel (or a crown). People of my childrens' generation (20-30) have perfect teeth - no fillings, no crowns, no problems. Guess which generation grew up with flouridated water.
Wow, I guess scientists could learn from your methodology then.
Seriously, I'll just say (1) I'm a chemical engineer with 10 years of chemistry courses that all say the same thing -- briefly that Fluoride is more toxic than lead and almost as toxic as arsenic, (2) fluorine is the most reactive element known to man, (3) the average dental program has zero or one chemistry course in it, whereas I took about a dozen higher ed. chem. courses, (4) everyone can research the issue for themselves, (5) click this http://www.just-think-it.com/the-f-db.htm to find out if your water supply is poisoned.
You bet there will be. Right up until Google buys Boxxet like they did Pyra (i.e. blogger technology) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2775249.stm.
to wreck a keyboard, even the great IBM original. This was the only IBM keyboard I've ever seen fail too.
Get your units straight, you are only 3 orders of magnitude wrong. But don't feel to bad about it, even my stupid gov. doesn't know the difference between cal and kcal.
I calculate a minimum of 100 oz at work, __30__ oz at home, divided by 150 cal per 12 oz = 1625 cal. I see no "3 orders of magnitude" error. If you are referring to the fact that all our food calories are 3 orders of mag. wrong, that is true. However in this case, the person was making an apples to apples comparison and there were no unit errors, just the 1625 vs 1800 calorie error.
So, "anon pr*ck" (i.e. male) is consuming at least 1,625,000 real calories per day of soda and their RDA of calories is in the 2,xxx,000 range. Bottom line is the same, IF it was leaded soda then ~80% of RDA calories would be from soda.
Worse than that, tea in general has high concentrations of fluoride. http://www.just-think-it.com/f-facts.htm
Diet coke definitely promotes obesity. Emulsifiers in cola go straight to our lymph system and stay there. Since diet cola drinkers in general drink more cola than regular cola drinkers, they gain more weight (in the lymph system). As a check on this, notice that the cola drinker type has very flabby (fluid) flesh, whereas say a football linebacker is a tree trunk with pads.
Floyd Maxwell,
and yes I drink Maxwell House
Apologies for how I worded this. What I was trying to say is that LAME _is_ written with SMP & HT in mind. Another application that wasn't would push _both_ of the intel pseudo-CPUs to 100% utilization, not just one. I am very happy with how LAME functions. Mea culpa.
I use Ultra Player, locked at version 2.112 for forever and just a 3MB download. I moved to it when I saw the CPU utilization spikes that early versions of Media Player caused. http://www.ultraplayer.com/
Sorry but I doubt this. I was a great 98SE fan and moved to XP for only one big reason -- system resources. I could not, for example, chat using Yahoo IM, browse and have Word open without running low on resources to the point of something croaking. Also, YIM would get flaky and force a reboot (couldn't get back into conferences otherwise). MS was very smart in how they kept 9x/ME crippled in this way (and MSN Messenger was even more of a resource/RAM hog than YIM). I'm still trying to find out what XP offers ME, the single guy living alone who "upgraded" to XP. And I thank all of you who responded to the post.
If you are a true one-app-at-a-time user then stick with 98, but I doubt that you are if you are on /.
I'm not even a Microsoft user or customer, and even I know that is not true. Win98 had real features beyond Win95. Ballmer himself stated that Win98 fixed 5,000 bugs in Win95.
In my task manager list I rarely have any thread or application using 10% let alone 100% of the processor ...unless I go off and run some application (or type "dir /s" from c:\ -- try it...). However, when I LAME something I see that one of my intel's cores goes to 100% while the other does not, so I DO find that applications need to be written for multi core systems.
The progression of gliding begins with a child holding a piece of paper above their head, then jumping. After that it is only about flight duration.
Wright innovations like realizing that the propeller was like the wing, and designing both for maximum lift (unlike everyone else), using a wind tunnel (unlike anyone else) to a level of propeller efficiency comparable to propellers made 100 years later IS remarkable.
As is their work with engines. I believe it was about 5 horsepower but about as heavy as a modern automotive engine. And, as mentioned earlier, their work with control services, introducing one that no one else had ever used before.
In short, comparing gliders to airplanes is like comparing the typewriter to the computer.
Actually you have to first factor out the 10 million rich morons willing to watch just about any crap movie each week -- both their $ and their opinions. Once you do that, you find that people prefer good movies.
Everyone likes to turn to the classic bit on the lack of imagination in Hollywood when there is little evidence that the movie-going masses would have preference for "more imaginative" movies.
The n minus ten million care about movie quality.
Netflix is a scam of the first order. They have been class action sued over their promises-vs-action, and they lost. Ripoff is too kind a word.
Basically they want special effects. And not just any special effects, modern special effects.
The ten million morons do.
And that leads to the emergent behavior of movie goers: they expect repetition.
Unfortunately the masses want to be part of the masses, 'tis true.
Audiences no longer go to movies to see something different every time. They want comfort food.
We all want comfort food. Yes, that means we tend to eat the same food. Yes, that means we want movies that are "similar" in some ways. No it does not mean we want formulaic, cliched, FX-laden, story-shy, arrogant crap.
Luc Besson...Leon...The Fifth Element.
I'll give you 2 of his movies, but even then the int'l version of The Professional blows, frankly.
Given that the 5 "best" picture nominees grossed less than $200M in total, there is no evidence they are "decent stories", but implied evidence that they favor the ongoing PC agendas of Hollywood. And the same situation happened last year and the year before. When WAS the last good film?! I would say "I, Robot"...and what did it win? Nothing from "the Academy": http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/awards
Would you like to explain how King Kong, Walk the Line or Pride and Prejudice were PC films?.
Pride and Prejudice is a centuries old chick flick, bleck. King Kong was, by all accounts, fit for teenage masturbation and nothing more. Walk The Line is about all I would call a half way decent movie.
The reason the term "PC" is used is that "the Academy" is clearly not listening to the people. Check out the Top 50 '2000s' movies on imdb.com, the most popular 2005 movie according to We The People was "Sin City", yet that received zero nominations. On the other hand, the geisha movie wins three oscars...to go with its raspberry award.
Basically Hollywood could care less about us. Once in a while they accidentally nominate a good movie (e.g. Batman Begins) but they make sure it doesn't get nominated for much or win anything (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0372784/awards).
We have to do our part, boycotting crap like War Of The Worlds, and even crap actors like Jessica Alba (Fantastic Crap). And when the little movies and concepts succeed, we succeed, so we should put our money down on the good ones -- part of the reason I bought The Matrix 10-DVD set.
There is a software parallel to this: someone makes a good software and a big software dinosaur buys them out. Someone makes a better browser, 37 years later MS clones the featureset. Linux innovates, MS...ok, the parallel doesn't work in every case.