Week 24

Saw this in Berlin -- very cool. There isn't a single controller, "master of puppets", but multiple controllers working in tandem.

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I think the colors on this man's outfit permanently blinded me.. My God.. I took the snapshot while I was watching the lecture video for MIT OCW Signal Processing class, taped back in 70s. I had to watch it to find out more something, but I am not able to focus, the colors on the teacher literally lull your mind.

Joking aside this is Alan V. Oppenheim, who wrote the book on signal processing.. But.. what is up with that tie ? This is messed up stuff right there. I fear the kind of fashion wave that can make a man wear this, I am not kidding. Forget WWI and II man, we left some scarily ridicolous period of time behind. Wheew.

Instead of simply censoring topics critical of the government or that make China look bad, the study finds, the country’s human censors specifically target posts that could lead to protests or other forms of collective action, leaving ample room for China’s web users to criticize its government [..].  

“This is an enormous program. Hundreds of thousands of people are involved to help the government keep secrets…and the interesting paradox is an enormous program like that, designed to keep people from seeing things, actually exposes itself,” Mr. King said in an interview. “An elephant leaves big footprints.” [..]

“Negative posts do not accidentally slip through a leaky or imperfect system,” the paper notes. “The evidence indicates that the censors have no intention of stopping them, instead they are focused on removing posts that have collective action potential, regardless of whether or not they cast the Chinese leadership and their policies in a favorable light.” [..]

The average Chinese netizen can use clever wordplay and wit to skirt these first two mechanisms, Mr. King says [..]

With IP addresses now depleted, the Internet Society is leading the launch of IPv6 to allow the web to continue growing.

Without adopting IPv6, people surfing the web will have to go through a transitional gateway before entering a non-updated site using IPv4, making the experience slower. On launch day Wednesday, website owners are encouraged to permanently enable IPv6 — the next generation of Internet protocol.

“World IPv6 Launch Day is a lot larger than people understand,” John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, told Mashable in an email. “IPv6 is the single largest upgrade in the history of the Internet. It’s not a small decision for the major content providers to turn on IPv6 and leave it on.

“Going forward, Internet users will be forced to go through transition gateways to reach businesses that do not similarly upgrade by adding IPv6 connectivity, with the result being slower connections and services for their customers,” Curran added.” The good news is that done properly, Internet users globally will not notice any significant difference in their daily lives.”

It is no secret fans, fanboys of the Star Wars saga (of the first three.. err - last three movies), hated Lucas' approach to the prequels. I've been following the feud for a while now. At first Lucas was welcoming criticism, happily noding, chalking it off to fans who were older now and SW always containing little childish fun, he thought the criticism would eventually go away. It didnt. Lucas was still unmoved for a good while about this tho, even fighting back on talk shows, interviews. That pissed off the fans, and Lucas' apparent stubborness started to rub all fans the wrong way, it seems.

Now things got to such a point that the backlash even managed to seep into shows like Chuck, where one of the characters, a die-hard SW fan, loses his memory and wants to remember his old likes, habits, his jokster friend (trying to be mean) tells him  to watch Star Wars movies, starting with Phantom Menace -- the most universally hated episode of all 6 installments. #slam! Hillarious scene.

So - did SW "first" three episodes suck?

I guess it was good to see some sort of story (or backstory in this case) taking place in the same universe as SW.

Did fanboys expect too much? From a blockbuster movie, I dont think so. Fans seem to have expected heroism, a grand big space opera with bad-ass Darth Vader showing up again, instead what they got was a subpar action movie featuring some flappy eared creature, lots of teenage angst coupled with shoddy romance. The movies could do more to satisfy fans' expectations.

My belief is that the Star Wars franchise suffered from too much centralized control. Just as second wave mentality is bad in all walks of life starting from politics to business, it is also bad in movie making. iPhone is hacked and extended by its users, whether Apple likes it or not, in the same vain, SW could have used some outsourcing, some crowdsourcing of its creation and its future direction. At least choosing another director, letting go of all SW related copyrights would be a good start. Maybe then, Lucas would be making mere millions, instead of billions, but is the alternative worth to being remembered as a joke, the man who destroyed the franchise he himself created?

Artistic creations which are universally liked are few, and are a nice-to-have. But they involve ingredients from earlier efforts, earlier experiments which might have failed, and are themselves experiments in some weird, untried direction. They owe too much to the creativity of the well they spring from to be shut off to outside and declared off limits. It is a good thing Lucas finally got the message. Maybe he'll practice some of that Zen Buddhism that he seems to love now -- learning to let go.

Then I guess the largest software ever written by humanity, the Linux OS, could also not have been written unless there was a company behind it. Oh wait.. There wasnt a big company behind Linux. Whatup!

The story behind Kinect is a little more complicated than this confused article reports. MS wants marketshare in gaming so badly they offer things like this, cheaply, so they swallow costs either up-front, or per unit sale. Mass production, mass consumption at work? Partly. In services we see M$ consultants runnin around offering to build Web sites for free, all the time.

So it is not true that a hardware like Kinect could never come into being any other way. There is a weird interplay between mass market, non-market forces here (who paid for Christopher Bishop's checks during his tenure in academy I wonder) which still is not being taken into account properly in many walks of life. A mother teaches a kid to eat, walk, talk, and  take a shit, and the workforce takes this finished product and puts him to work. Who did most of the work on the kid? Are all actors responsible to prepare someone for the workforce compensated for all their hard work?

Back to Kinect: Hackability, ahem, tinkerability (is that a word?) of a platform, tool is a bonus, yes. Same is true for opening up APIs of your site to outside world so your tool  / site can be customized. Just as in Linux case, connection to the ideas "out there" is important. This is not a one-size-fits-all age. People want to play, modify, customize things, tinker with your products. 

"Kinect hackers may not have cared about video games, but what they wanted — a device containing specific high-tech components for just $150 — was achievable specifically because of its connection to something with the scale of the Xbox system. Only a company the size of Microsoft could afford the massive research-and-development costs, and only mass-market appeal could make such a product financially viable"

Continuum. It's a nice little scifi show; but the future it paints is entirely out of the realm of possibility. A corporation takes over the Congress, and hi-tech toys, weapons, etc are used to maintain control over the citizens. There are freedom fighters of course, and they come back in time to "change" things. Blah blah. Unending conversations ensue about if science is bad or good, which plays into US cultural fault line between "prohibition (containing, controlling something)" vs "freedom (as in letting go)", but the fault line is pretty "odd" to begin with, which makes any discussion viewed through its lense even more so.

New generation hi-tech will rip centralized forces apart. Noone will be able to stop this. 1984 does not apply here, not anymore. Maybe Continuum is also trying to give the message the central institutions still can flex some muscle if they wanted to, but in truth, they really can't.

Continuum necessarily paints its imaginery future as bad, and its freedom fighters with their methods of terror even worse. Main character of the show, a Jodie Foster look-alike who is a cop from the future and defender of the status quo will probably evolve into seeing that future as "bad" as well, not sure how many episodes will that take.

The tech scenes are pretty cool, acting is fine, fighting sequences are also watchable. Continuum does not take many chances with its casting though, besides Carlos and the future cop (a Jodie Foster look-alike as I said before), you keep seeing that guy from Eureka, that girl from Regenesis, that dude from Stargate SG-1 -- all established characters from other scifi shows. Lost was a sucky show, but it at least it was courageous in its casting. It brought some very new faces to the forefront.

Is science bad or good? This is such a pointless discussion. If your culture has not entirely gone FUBAR, any sane person can look at the data and see that science is good. Research into particle physics might have made the atomic bomb possible, but in countless other ways, it provided economic advances and improved people's lives. And .. how many times was The Bomb used? Twice? Which made everyone even more aware how horrible its uses were and then we get the Cold War, which was basically a bitch fight in all but a name.

Continuum's approach in creating its universe seems to have been to take all major events of late and throw them into a big bowl. Take corporations gone mad, terrorism, freedom fighters, the Congress, technology, throw them into some mix and stir. What seems to have come out of this bowl does not entirely makes sense, things do not fit, hence it does not capture the viewer (well okay, me).

Anyway - I give the show an A on execution, a C- on overall structure.

One of the fundamental rules of criticism is to review a work within the expectations and standards of its genre. I can’t do that with Prometheus, because it didn’t fit within a genre. And I don’t say that in a good way.

Some movies bust their genres. “Alien” busted out of the Space Opera genre by being a monster flick. “Outland” busted out of the Space Opera genre by being a Western set in space.

But what is Prometheus? It begins as one of those “Big Vision” movies, and I immediately thought of “2001” while watching its prologue scene. Then we find ourselves aboard an expedition travelling to another world in search of something-or-other, very much like 2001.

But no, as soon as the people get there they begin to behave like teen-agers in a monster movie. They argue and split up, as if adults selected to travel across space in a small ship are selected specifically for their inability to function as a team. Scientists take their helmets off because the air seems to have the right proportions of gasses without stopping to wonder if they could be killed by pathogens or viruses.

I’m ok with this kind of behaviour in a monster movie, that’s part of the genre's formula, people do stupid things and there are bad consequences. The point of the movie is to revel in the bad consequences, and you can’t have them if the characters behave like intelligent adults who have seen monster movies before.

But Prometheus isn’t a monster movie. There’s some blood and some gore and some people die pointlessly and others die heroically, but the movie tries to stay true to its big vision while acting like it's about monsters. Only without the monsters. Well, there are fine special effects and indeed there may or may not be a Creature From Outer Space in this movie. But I assure you, there is nothing that inspires the kind of dread that the movie Alien inspired.

In a big vision film, I want to care about the characters. Propping up an endless series of cardboard clichés only to knock them down requires making them stupid so that I can feel a little contempt for them. But how does it work to contrast “big vision” with contemptible characters?

In the end, I found that I had watched a big vision film diluted by its diversions into monsterdom. Or perhaps a monster film that was diluted by the hubris of trying to make us think Big Vision Thoughts. Either way, it didn’t work for me.