Posts by Dave 126 10667 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
Avalon (2001) is a live action film from Mamoru Oshii (director of Ghost in the Shell) on the theme of immersive VR. It's in English, despite being a Japanese-Polish co-production. I liked it, though it might be to everyone's taste.
Thematic SPOILER ALERT: Lay off your video games for a bit and go out side in the daylight and smell the roses and hear an orchestra.
> Looking at the Wikipedia article, it absolutely pancaked at the box office and has been heavily savaged on Rottten Tomatoes. So I'm not sure it really counts as a cult classic ;)
That almost sounds like a textbook definition of 'cult classic!'
I've seen it, it was alright, I'm wouldn't go out of my way to watch it again.
Using just initials has been a way for writers to avoid their sex getting in the way of their work, for example the crime writer P.D James.
If you read P.G Wodehouse, where a slushy romantic novelists called Rosie M Banks is central to a few plots, you'll know why Iain (M.) Banks dropped his middle initial initially. He was keen to keep the M out of respect for a relative (IIRC) and writing in a 'genre' (sci-fi) gave him the opportunity to reinstate it. The use of the M or otherwise was consistent, except for his book Transitions where the M was used in some territories but not others. The treatment if the M was a bit meta, given that the book itself was essentially his contempory 20th/21st century fiction with a dose of sci-fi.
Let's just say it's the same parallel universe as the one in which Jodorowsky made Dune. Although in this universe it's unlikely that Ridley Scott would have had Dan O'Bannon and H.R. Giger available (amongst others) to make Alien.
Hmmm, what we're doing Mr Sane is meta alternative history!
Meta in this context is taken to mean referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential.
It can be subtle. Duncan Jones' film Moon plays on the viewers potential mistrust of the moon base's AI - informed by the knowledge that the viewer has seen HAL in 2001. As Christopher Nolan said of Interstellar "it's impossible to make a movie on these themes without having a conservation with 2001"
Cronenburgh's version of The Naked Lunch is meta - it's not a direct adaptation, but partly tells the story of the book's writing.
Strangely enough, one of the few brilliant bits of Scott's Prometheus (amongst much frustrating stupidity) is when Micheal Fassbinder's android David watching David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. It's meta (Ridley Scott nodding to an undisputed masterpiece of cinematography, itself an adaptation of a very self aware and deliberately idiosyncratic book that was rewritten many times), but carries hints at the plot ahead (an android watching a cinematic depiction of a man who in his own words felt angst over 'serving two masters'.)
The other brilliant part of Prometheus is of course Idris Elba playing a concertina. The rest was a mess.
> Does it do threaded SMS messages?
That depends upon which app you use to handle your SMS messages. For example, I've ditched the message app on my Samsung in favour of the Google SMS app I used on my previous phone.
Hmm, that reminds me- I must install an app to show the Time Sent tag on incoming SMS messages... for some stupid reason many Android SMS apps only show when one's phone recieved the message.
> My current pet peeve is my LG G4, that can only be answered by swiping a green button across the screen.
That's weird - is there nothing that can help you in Settings > Accessibility? There should be an option to answer calls with the Volume Up physical key.
An alternative would be to use a compatible walker case, and answer calls by opening the case. However, I can appreciate that if you have limited dexterity a wallet case might cause you more faff.
It'd be a weird part of the UX for LG to mess around with for no good reason. Maybe the carrier faffed with it?
Sensor and lens aside, your proper camera consists of a screen, processor, storage and a battery.
On modern phones the screen is typically higher res and more colour accurate than those in cameras, the on board storage is far faster than anything this side of a DSLR, and the processors are more capable.
Of course these factors don't affect all styles of photography, but since you have these components already on the phone there's little downside to attaching a good sensor and lens to them - other than cost. And indeed that is what we're seeing in the market; quality of camera often being the chief differentiator between a £300 phone and a £600 phone.
The same is true of guitar tuners - smartphones make for faster, more accurate guitar tuners than dedicated devices because they have more microphones and the processing power to make use of the inputs. The big screen makes the UI easier to use, and the storage makes it trivial to supply them with tuning schemes for a wide range of stringed instruments.
I went in holiday recently so for first time in ages I dug out my 'premium compact' camera, a Lumix LX-7. a fairly big sensor and a wide max aperture, it's great for low light snaps while still fitting in a jacket pocket. However, you have to know what you're doing with it. A companion on the holiday had an iPhone 8 Plus, and I was seriously impressed by the pictures it took. The phone had a lot more 'brains' than my camera, and would choose its automatic settings (white balance, focus point, noise vs shutter time) more quickly than I could adjust the settings on my camera. After the shot is captured, the iPhone had more brains to output a JPEG - something that I would have manually tweak my camera's RAW output on a computer to match.
There were of course a few situations where the bigger camera took better images (low light portraits) but much of the time the results appeared to the viewer as a draw - even if the iPhone 'cheats' (fake bokeh - background blurring - etc)
I love my Lumix, but it is a faff. Ironically enough, it is less of a faff now I have a Galaxy S8 - I can connect the camera's SD card to the phone via USB-OTG* and dump its contents to the phone's copious onboard storage. I can then more easily review photos on a high res colour accurate screen, and more easily select photos for saving or deletion.
*I don't want to put the camera's microSD card into the phone directly because I don't trust the phone not to put app data on a card I'm soon to remove.
Printing fidelity hasn't improved (it can't), so modern phone cameras are more than capable of shooting a 'Lady Smith-Smyth sharing a joke with Tarquin' type snap to fill up the pages.
The adverts and fashion shoots are all shot on big cameras ( Canon to Hasselblad) but the front row of the catwalk is all fashion editors holding iPhones.
@tony72
If you pick up a copy of Vogue you'll get an idea that what you say might have held true a few years ago but is no longer the case.
The adverts and fashion shoots are shot on professional equipment (Canon, Nikon, even Hasselblad), but so much of the fashion blogging and gossip media is shot on iPhones.
Printing fidelity of even printed media hasn't improved, so a modern phone camera wit
> There may be a few professional and pro-am photographers that choose to use a smartphone as a primary camera, and would care about having significantly above-average camera on their phone, but the vast majority of them are going to use a proper camera.
Sorry, no, that's no longer the case. There are far more fashion journalists who are happy to use iPhine cameras than there are sports photographers who use Canons. If you don't believe me then pick up a copy of Vogue and look at yhevrukv
Samsung's value varies thought the refresh cycle. Last month I bought a brand new Galaxy S8 for less than a OnePlus 5T costs. I wouldn't have bought it at full price.
I'm hoping that I'll get even more value from it by keeping good care of it - glass screen protector and tough case. Waterproofing is reassuring, as is wireless charging (which means the phone remains usable even if its USB connector gets damaged).
The Samsung software / skin isn't quite as annoying as I feared.
What are Huawei like at updating their camera software down the line?
Multiple sources on the internet suggest that an update OnePlus released for their 5T a couple of months after the phone's original release drastically improved its low light photography.
There are also ports of Google's Pixel Camera app to some other vendors handsets - though it might be hard for any such port to work well with this Huawei phone's unusual camera hardware.
Lyndon is amazing, each scene looks like an oil painting. Kubrick had to compose each scene carefully because the wide aperture meant few bits of the scene could be in focus.
These days digital cameras are more sensitive than film - so the oil painting aesthetic of the BBC's Wolf Hall is easier to achieve without the shallow depth of focus.
Clarke had written and explored aspects about AIs before - The City and The Stars, for example - independently of his friend Asimov. The plot surrounding HAL is more rooted in Clarke's previous take on AI than it is Asimov's (MultiVac, the Robot stories).
The power suits make an appearance in Starship Troopers 3, along with the return of Rico, nudity and exploding heads. Whilst the special effects are sub par, the political satire is in the spirit of the Verhoeven's Troopers movie, with the elites pretending that they are now born again Christians instead of fascists.
It's really fun if you watch it with low expectations.
I have no plans to watch Starship Troopers 2.
Dark Star, with various contributions from Dan O'Bannon. He would go on to write another Monster on a Spaceship movie you might have heard of: Alien.
Some of the other creative talent on Alien were first assembled for an aborted Dune movie project.
Kubrick was a photographer... and a former chess hustler. I've heard that Ridley Scott can draw like Ruebens. Visual people.
For rounded corners in hardware, there are lots of examples - it comes from ergonomics but also from manufacturing constraints (sharp corners and zero draught angles are a recipe for injection moulding problems.) A specific arrangement of elements is the only way to describe Trade Dress, which what I assume you are talking about. Trade Dress might be the shape of a Coke bottle, or BMW's kidney grill.
For rounded corners in icons (a la iOS), you could look at the work done for the Nostromo's on board graphics in Ridley Scott's Alien, designed by Ron Cobb. "Semiotic Standard For All Commercial Trans-Stellar Utility Lifter And Heavy Element Transport Spacecraft. "
https://typesetinthefuture.com/2014/12/01/alien/
There was a book by Umberto Eco in which a counselor says that she has never met a child who has been traumatised by adult graphic content, except for one who had watched Disney's Snow White.
Children are designed to ignore stuff they can't grok. It's the stuff tailor made to press their buttons that lingers and affects them - see: Bambi's mum, Watership Down etc. Or, in my case, an episode of the animated Pink Panther in which he unscrews the tail of a rattlesnake... when the rattlesnake wakes up, shakes and then looks at his missing tail he bursts into tears. That upset be for days.
This layman's simple approach (though there may be factors in ignorant of):
- Telcos know where their genuine masts are.
- Phones know where they are ( GPS, maps of WiFi etc)
- Phones know roughly where the masts they connect to are (response time)
If all of the above data is collected it should be trivial to spot spoof masts. To collect the data would just require a good number of handsets to have an app to send connected mast locations to an agency to analyse the data.
There would be nothing stopping Apple from releasing ARM MacBooks and ARM+Intel MacBook Pros - the latter only using the more power-hungry chip when it needs to. Intel have the packaging technology to combine heterogenous chips, as we have seen with their recent Core + AMD package.
As a CAD user, I'm used to the concept of only being able to use computers with GPUs, and so paying extra for hardware that many users don't need.
Calm down Bob, all the report suggests is that a mature OS that is built around mouse and keyboard is being ported to silicon that is more power efficient.
It's successfully jumped architecture before, from Power to Intel. More than once, if you count it in its NeXtStep clothing.
It has nothing to do with the UI.
> I mentioned a unified macOS and iOS
That's not what the Bloomberg report is talking about. OSX on ARM is not the same as OSX merging with iOS any more than they already are (you can write common code for a messaging application, but use a different GUI for iOS and OSX)
All this report suggests is that Apple are mulling over OSX on ARM - ideal for the sort of workloads (browsing, blogging) a MacBook is currently put to, given the battery life gains to be made.
Apple will maintain controls and guides as to how a small-screen finger-driven GUI works, how a stylus-driven application works, how a predominately finger driven GUI with optional keyboard works, and how a non-touchscreen desktop GUI works.
> Taking control of the tweaks to the CPU design that was created by ARM and licensed by Apple with License To Tweak?
They do more than just tweak ARM, they have designed their own GPUs and other silicon and integrated the whole lot into very capable SoCs.
Every ARM licencee can tweak, but few have Apple's resources. Add to that their control of the OS and drivers.
> I can guarantee if someone sold unrepairable cars then there would be a revolt. This is no different.
You do realise that to build a car from its parts catalogue would cost many times its list price? The cost of replacement car parts - often hidden from us directly because of insurance companies - subsidises the cost of new cars. It's been that way for decades.
This revolt of which you speak - I've seen no sign of it in response to easily damaged and expensive colour-matched bumpers fitted to almost all new cars.
A laptop with multiple architectures is fairly trivial - Apple already make one. Their chip that runs the touchbar is ARM.
No reason the primary CPU can't be ARM, and have an application that requires x86 or 64 run on a discrete x86 chip. To do it crudely would just require treating the x86 as a separate machine and using MacOS's equivilent of XWindows.
The idea of silicon sitting doing nothing is common - its central to the Big.Little design of many ARM-based chips
Indeed, it's the orders that are added late in the Discovery's planning stage, following the discovery of the lunar monolith, that cause the conflict in HAL. No malfunction, no murderous intent for the sake of it. The original orders to merely explore the Jovian system were developed fairly openly, whereas the amendments came from covert agencies / politicians.
And course with the good Dr Asimov being a Jewish atheist scholar of the old testament, he would have been familiar with the folklore of the Golem - which predates Mary Shelly. Though I believe his doctorate was in biochemistry.
Sidenote: the recent reboot of the classic computer game Sam and Max has the titular psychopathic rabbit exclaim: "By the scared sideburns of Isaac Asimov!".
Kubrick agreed that HAL's processors would most likely be housed in something the size of a shoebox (he wasn't ignorant of miniaturisation and short paths between nodes), but deliberately took artistic licence because having Bowman floating around a room-sized HAL is a more striking and dramatic image.
> 2001: A Space Odyssey has haunted pop culture with anxiety about rogue AIs for half a century
2001's HAL wasn't responsible for a popular fear of robots and AI... many of Asimov's robot stories from the 50s revolve around efforts to counteract the 'Frankenstein Complex' of the fictional general public - hence the efforts of Dr Susan Calvin and her staff at US Robots and Mechanical Men Inc.
Your comment make me think of a related question... which Google quickly answered:
A discrete keyboard with trackpoint exists. Worth considering, especially since chopping and changing one's cursor constroller (mouse, trackspad, graphics tablet etc) is a good way to avoid RSI.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lenovo-Thinkpad-Compact-Keyboard-Trackpoint/dp/B00F3U4TQS
I'm not sure that turning on interior lights will aid the human driver's view of the road at night.
Also, automatically turning on exterior lights can cause confusion to other road users (it looks like the blinking we use to let other drivers know we see them and they can pull out of a junction). This is one of the reasons that simple automatic headlights (i.e if less than X amount of light hits a CCD then turn on lights) are fitted anymore.
> . I don't trust these self driving cars at all. And the IDIOTS in the government and at these corporations
So, the OP doesn't trust self driving cars, but then he doesn't trust human beings either. Neither is an invalid view in itself, but it would seem the pragmatic approach is to work out which to mistrust the least - or not go near a road. :)
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