Manipulators
Seems like a great way to get speaker wire across the living room.
Speaking of home theater, Sound and Vision has a thorough comparison of the current best LCD vs. the best Plasma. Some worry about lifespan and burn-in on plasma, but I’ve seen burn in on quite a few LCDs too. Mostly computer monitors but also others. One of these days I’ll find a technical explanation for something that we were led to believe wasn’t possible…
I guess a lot has changed since this blog was technically active. One thing I decided to do in the last year was forsake a decent vacation to Hawaii or somesuch, and instead my wife and I enrolled in the Trading Academy. It was a strange route we took to bring us to the point where we decided to trade stocks, but I think it was worth it.
On September 6, 1970, Islamic terrorists attempted the near-simultaneous hijacking of 4 separate jetliners as they took off fully fueled for a flight across the Atlantic.
3 of the 4 jets were successfully hijacked by people who had smuggled weapons aboard.
The 4th jet was an El Al flight. Then, (as now) they put more emphases on the safety of their passengers and flights then squeezing out every cent of profit. There were intended to be 4 hijackers on that flight but El Al flagged two of them as suspicious so they didn’t make it aboard. When the two hijackers onboard made the attempt multiple armed Israeli sky marshals responded and with a lot of luck (a grenade was dropped but did not explode) the only death was one of the hijackers.
The two denied boarding on the El Al flight instead boarded a Pan Am flight, there was an attempt by El Al to warn of their suspicions about the two but it was poorly relayed and ineffective.
All three of the hijacked planes landed in the middle-east, eventually every single passenger was set free but the aircraft (and a fourth hijacked later) were destroyed.
As I read this account last night I couldn’t help but seethe with rage. WTF is wrong with “us” in ‘the west’ that what little we remember we manage to take the wrong lessons from? (The first WTC bombing comes to mind as well–anti crash-through barriers and vehicle inspection but not better evacuation training or response planing.)
We threw a couple dollars at screening and x-ray and assured ourselves that everything was fine. Did we put air marshalls on trans-Atlantic flights? No, we pretended that doing the least possible must have resolved the problem and then forgot about the incidents.
Do you think TODAY there are air marshalls on every trans-Atlantic flight? Except on El Al, I mean…
About 40 years from now I fully expect somebody to be reading an account of September 11, 2001 and slapping their head in disbelief that something fairly similar was allowed to happen yet again, killing an order of magnitude more people.
In the meantime I highly recommend Emergency, Crisis on the Flight Deck (2nd edition) written by Stanley Stewart. I’ve read a lot about airline disasters and incidents but this had many that were news to me, and it is quite powerfully written.
Wow. I think the experience of Golden Compass is best described as 180 degrees different from The Legend of Narnia (AKA The Passion of the Lion).
The basic premise, the core ideas driving at the heart of the story are far more interesting than Narnia’s. But the execution, dear god. The way this movie was executed should lead to the execution of every writer and executive that worked on it, and the execution of the director should be botched and last 113 agonizing minutes.
The exposition is clumsy and damn-near endless (including a long clip at the end spelling out the need for the sequels) but the worst feature has to be the acting. Even the CG polar bear overacts dreadfully. As does every other single character except possibly Nicole Kiddman (maybe it’s the botox). After setting this trend the director makes sure you don’t miss a “nuance” by framing most shots so the face of the actor EMOTING fills the screen. Sam Eliot’s a great actor, when properly cast and with a director who doesn’t hit him in the face with the camera lens every other shot (the intervening shots are 1-shots from below, making him HEROIC). The Seafaring king reminds me of DeNiro’s mincing Pirate Captain in Stardust but somehow LESS SUBTLE.
The only thing this movie really has going for it are the visuals. There are truly extraordinary vehicles that go far beyond tired steampunk to something actually original, especially the vehicles of the Magisterium. The CG animal companions aren’t bad, and the polar bear fight towards the end is surprisingly powerful, if again overacted… by CG bears…
Having seen it I can certainly understand all the negative reviews it has gotten, but not the positive ones. Ebert gave it 4 starts for crying out loud. Maybe if you have an especially stupid or impressionable child… this would probably entertain and (more importantly) shut it up.
I suppose the underlying (if somewhat under-emphasized) message to question authority would be good for any young spawn to be exposed to… but I doubt the message carries much weight when it’s set in an explicitly fantasy world and the audience starts to root for the misbehaving little brat to fall down a well. Far more clearly than question authority the message the movie is likely to impart is LIE *alot* and everything will work out for the best.
Working in VFX I usually stay around through end credits, and I am certain I know some people who worked on this (who I’d like to congratulate–as I said, visually it is stunning in places) but I couldn’t stomach sitting through the end song to save my life. If I’d been handcuffed to the chair I’d have chewed off my own hand to get away. This movie couldn’t be more clear in its blatant attempts to copy the success of Lord of the Rings and Narnia, right down to trying to do a Lord of the Rings original song that relates to the movie. Except, that is, without anybody with talent writing (or performing) the song. “Lyraaa… LYRA, her spirit walks beSIDE her, LYRIA!” OUCH! Just bit into my wrist tendons to stop me from going through and typing out any more of that drivel… that was pretty nearly the complete lyrics though… again and again.
So when I saw a poorly informed blurb claiming Vista is 50% slower than XP I wrote it off as BS. But then a couple people sent it to me so I looked into it in more depth…
Original Story.
And I confirm my call of BULLSHIT. CIO Today? Devil Mountain Software? It’s like Gartner group FUD but without even the name of Gartner to back it. It’s transparently a company trying to make a name for themselves by saying something controversial and hoping nobody actually looks into what they said. Which isn’t likely given the claim…
1st, their benchmarks are *Office Tasks*. Exactly what modern computer can’t run even the latest Office (which is an improvement, over OfficeXP, BTW) blazing fast? But if you string together a macro of every action in every Office program… you have… a fucking worthless benchmark!
2nd, There have already been plenty of comparisons of XP to Vista in 3D games and even 3D apps, far more relevant to any of us following IT for VFX… They show a slight difference, often going both ways but with a slight edge to XP.
3rd, There is always going to be somebody afraid of the next thing (Gartner / CIO Today), these same people said the same things about XP (and they were right, **initially** and Win2k–where they couldn’t have been more wrong, even when it first came out it was an order of magnitude better than NT4).
–Newsflash: new OSs will have bugs in addition to the improvements… but eventually the bugs get worked out, then you just have improvements. The security improvements made XP a must-have (eventually), those plus virtualization plus other improvements will eventually make Vista must have too, hopefully around SP1. We’ll see.
But the fact that we know people who are now successfully using Vista64 for Lightwave far outweighs this ‘Devil Mountain’ BS.
I’m trying to figure out if it just seems like I’m getting nothing done, or if I’m actually getting nothing done.
Right mouse clicks on groups of files. These should NEVER invoke a wait-state for the user. This happens on Mac and Windows, at equally annoying rates. I’m guessing it’s checking every file in the selection against every possible action. However, all I want is an action that’s in the main menu that pops up. Why should I have to wait to do this?
Yes, some things have keyboard shortcuts (copy, paste, delete), but others might not, typically some contextual menu add-ons.
Us VFX guys have to deal with a lot of files a lot of the time. Please, make this a non-issue in Leopard and Vista.
In other news, there were some Apple, Inc. announcements today that were pretty cool. Probably make me spend some money in a few months.
Not only will this blog remain relevant; it will directly relate to pertinent things.