In Tron and The Social Network it was very obvious that a real hacker had been involved in designing the terminal scenes. It makes a big difference to how seriously I take the rest of the movie - Kudos to them!
Interesting read, nice to see a movie making this kind of effort.
On a side note: I watched this movie on a streaming site... (i.e., I watched it in poor quality).
That was a bad choice.
The plot, storyline, and dialogue is kind of weak. The visuals certainly are not. Watch this in high-res quality, and think of it as an over-budgeted Daft Punk music video instead of a movie, and you'll have a great time watching it.
I think in this way it was a perfect successor to the original. Beautiful impressive visuals (each for their time, remember) with a 'cyberpunk-lite' plot to provide a reason for those visuals.
As far as cyberpunk in media that dare actually include cyberspace aspects (so for example, not Blade Runner), I think it stacks up pretty well. The Matrix 'cheats' by explicitly declaring that their cyberspace was built to seem real, and Johnny Mnemonic, rather bluntly, falls on it's face when trying to pull it off (I do love that movie though).
>think of it as an over-budgeted Daft Punk music video instead of a movie
Check out the Disney cartoon Tron Uprising -- it has a similar but different visual style, a dash of Aeon Flux, and gorgoeus sound deisgn that builds directly off the Daft Punk soundtrack. The story is okay too especially as it gets much darker towards the end of the season.
A few weeks ago I watched the pilot episode of Lewis, a British TV detective/crime drama that is set in the surroundings of Oxford university, UK. One of the characters in the episode was a PhD student in mathematics and the key to the mystery could be found in one of the papers for his PhD dissertation. The detectives found the paper in question on the character's computer and opened it up for the viewers to see. Lo and behold, the paper was clearly typeset in LaTeX. Someone apparently went out of their way to make this little detail look just right!
Maybe its just me, but it seems like movies are getting better and better in getting those tiny but ever so important technical details right.
Question for any graphics programmers or CG people: As a graphics programmer, how appealing is the CG industry? Based on this, the picture I got was that a lot of the programming he did was driven by shortcomings in the preexisting CG software that artists in the field use.
I'm a Computer Engineering student interested in the field and I haven't entirely decided if I'm interested in the applications of graphics programming yet, although I don't have much to go on because I have limited graphics programming experience.
My personal opinion is, it depends (how's that for a cop-out)
My take is as follows. You can have a restaurant with just a chef. You can have a trading company with just a trader. You can have a tech company with just a program. And you have have a CG animation company with just an animation.
That means that at each of those types of companies, the rest of the people are support staff for the company's main line of work.
At a trading company everyone not a trader is support staff for the traders. At an animation company everyone is support staff for the animators. etc...
That's reflected in your position at the company.
Now for the "it depends" part. If it doesn't bother you to be support staff because the stuff you do you enjoy or because being part of the team of someone making that kind of entertainment is enough reward then fine.
There's also always exceptions. For example there are programmers who have advanced the state of the art of CG while at those companies (the hair in Monsters Ink, The water in The Perfect Storm, the crowds in Lord of the Rings) etc.. so if you fancy yourself someone who can advance that state of the art you might find that appealing. On the other hand I suspect it's getting harder and harder to have a big contribution there.
If you start a shop or work there early on and you take off - it's about the same as any startup - big highs, big lows, big work, impressive product, big impact, big money.
If you work there after it becomes big - it's like working at any game dev shop for EA.
The emacs part is cool, but this article mostly just illustrated how little I understand about the effects in movies. Each thing he talked about making seemed simple, but then the effect in the movie was mindblowing and overwhelming. Great read (also, the font is so big and beautiful, love that).
I hate the font. It's practically unreadable in Chrome on Windows. Not eased by the fact that I'm dyslexic so struggle to follow a line of text anyway.
I really wish web developers stopped cocking about with type-faces. Most of the time they don't test it on other platforms, and nearly all of the time they don't consider the usability for people with either poorer eye site or other reading difficulties.
Quite frankly, I'm gutted and annoyed at this site because the content looks interesting but I can't read more than 2 lines of the fucking thing (thus ended up having to edit the CSS in Chromes inspect tool). Very annoying and completely necessary.
Alt (assuming you actually mean Meta ;) is completely unnecessary for emacs. Meta-<Key> can always be produced by pressing ESC <Key>
I guess technically ctrl is also unnecessary since you could type out whole commands with M-x (ESC x command). It wouldn't be fun, but you could do it.
For what it is worth I use an "otaku" Happy Hacking KeyBoard Pro 2 (HHKB Pro 2) with "blank" black keys and I remapped | to HYPER+[ (and I'm of course using right alt as a "new" modifier, HYPER).
tl;dr: you can't never be sure how Emacs hacker have configured their keys/modifiers ; )
I just discovered Alias and my wife and I have been watching episodes back to back. The show does a good job of making the contents of various displays legitimate. In one scene, the 'tech guy' (Marshall) has to build some source code - and I saw various familiar libtool/autoconf symbols scroll by.
It's been years since I've seen it, but I remember a hilarious scene where Jack Bristow is talking to someone in an IM-like window; his choice of text is giant red Comic Sans and his messages are devoid of grammar and punctuation.
You could argue that this is typical of the average IM user in the early 2000s, but it seemed incongruous for the character.
Agreed. I gave up a couple sentences in and had to run it through Readability to read it. Hairline fonts (Helvetica Neue Ultra Light, in this case) are not really intended for body copy.
Of course, the font choice is not the only thing that makes this practically illegible. It's too large, the leading's cramped, and it could probably use a max-width to prevent excessively long lines in larger viewports.
I really like how most browsers have a very usable webdev tool, so I just changed the font, line-spacing and document width until it was good. I don't always go through that trouble, but ihn this case the page was simple enough and the content seemed worth it.
I always dreamed how much fun a job making these computer "GUI" scenes would be. You would go apeshit adding all sorts of dashboards and widgets and things that look pretty but not work.
Why does he have an issue with Jurassic Park? Lex was using fsn, which would have been available at the time for IRIX - although not used in any serious production environments that I'm aware of.
It seems like movies are going to some trouble to get "real" computing into movies. I mean, real computers aren't dramatic so they don't get much screen time, but still. Another recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047807
I'm horrible about remembering specialized commands, so I "ps | grep" all the time. Sometimes grep shows up in the output, sometimes it doesn't, and yet life goes on... :-)
[+] [-] stbullard|13 years ago|reply
See also:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5088722 3 comments
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404976 80 comments
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212825 0 comments
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3107258 0 comments
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3598197 0 comments
[+] [-] rsingla|13 years ago|reply
My bad!
[+] [-] kitsune_|13 years ago|reply
After a month I admitted total and utter failure.
Whoever came up with that program is a mad genius. It's absolutely mind blowing what you can achieve with procedural operators and networks.
It's somewhat similar in spirit to Cycling 74's MAX and other visual programming environments.
[+] [-] shawndumas|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathanmoore|13 years ago|reply
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Opening-Titles
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Solar-Sailor
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Rectifier-Globe
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Throne-Room
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Fireworks
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Portal-Climax
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Board-Room
- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Disc-Game
[+] [-] s_husso|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clicks|13 years ago|reply
On a side note: I watched this movie on a streaming site... (i.e., I watched it in poor quality).
That was a bad choice.
The plot, storyline, and dialogue is kind of weak. The visuals certainly are not. Watch this in high-res quality, and think of it as an over-budgeted Daft Punk music video instead of a movie, and you'll have a great time watching it.
[+] [-] jlgreco|13 years ago|reply
As far as cyberpunk in media that dare actually include cyberspace aspects (so for example, not Blade Runner), I think it stacks up pretty well. The Matrix 'cheats' by explicitly declaring that their cyberspace was built to seem real, and Johnny Mnemonic, rather bluntly, falls on it's face when trying to pull it off (I do love that movie though).
[+] [-] KVFinn|13 years ago|reply
Check out the Disney cartoon Tron Uprising -- it has a similar but different visual style, a dash of Aeon Flux, and gorgoeus sound deisgn that builds directly off the Daft Punk soundtrack. The story is okay too especially as it gets much darker towards the end of the season.
The show is 5 seconds from being cancelled but the first episode is still free on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjbwVzJR8w4
Rest on iTunes/Amazon/Xbox/whatever
[+] [-] ihuman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greyfade|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adunk|13 years ago|reply
Maybe its just me, but it seems like movies are getting better and better in getting those tiny but ever so important technical details right.
[+] [-] transitionality|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcescalante|13 years ago|reply
I'm a Computer Engineering student interested in the field and I haven't entirely decided if I'm interested in the applications of graphics programming yet, although I don't have much to go on because I have limited graphics programming experience.
[+] [-] greggman|13 years ago|reply
My take is as follows. You can have a restaurant with just a chef. You can have a trading company with just a trader. You can have a tech company with just a program. And you have have a CG animation company with just an animation.
That means that at each of those types of companies, the rest of the people are support staff for the company's main line of work.
At a trading company everyone not a trader is support staff for the traders. At an animation company everyone is support staff for the animators. etc...
That's reflected in your position at the company.
Now for the "it depends" part. If it doesn't bother you to be support staff because the stuff you do you enjoy or because being part of the team of someone making that kind of entertainment is enough reward then fine.
There's also always exceptions. For example there are programmers who have advanced the state of the art of CG while at those companies (the hair in Monsters Ink, The water in The Perfect Storm, the crowds in Lord of the Rings) etc.. so if you fancy yourself someone who can advance that state of the art you might find that appealing. On the other hand I suspect it's getting harder and harder to have a big contribution there.
[+] [-] confluence|13 years ago|reply
If you work there after it becomes big - it's like working at any game dev shop for EA.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brennenHN|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laumars|13 years ago|reply
I really wish web developers stopped cocking about with type-faces. Most of the time they don't test it on other platforms, and nearly all of the time they don't consider the usability for people with either poorer eye site or other reading difficulties.
Quite frankly, I'm gutted and annoyed at this site because the content looks interesting but I can't read more than 2 lines of the fucking thing (thus ended up having to edit the CSS in Chromes inspect tool). Very annoying and completely necessary.
[+] [-] Torn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrhho|13 years ago|reply
edit: For that matter, how did he type "ps -ef | grep -i os12" with no "|" key?
[+] [-] Ogre|13 years ago|reply
I guess technically ctrl is also unnecessary since you could type out whole commands with M-x (ESC x command). It wouldn't be fun, but you could do it.
[+] [-] jlgreco|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esrauch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fafner|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martinced|13 years ago|reply
tl;dr: you can't never be sure how Emacs hacker have configured their keys/modifiers ; )
[+] [-] sriramk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daragh|13 years ago|reply
You could argue that this is typical of the average IM user in the early 2000s, but it seemed incongruous for the character.
[+] [-] FaisalAbid|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterjmag|13 years ago|reply
Of course, the font choice is not the only thing that makes this practically illegible. It's too large, the leading's cramped, and it could probably use a max-width to prevent excessively long lines in larger viewports.
Fascinating article, though!
[+] [-] kapilkale|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tripzilch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plorkyeran|13 years ago|reply
The OS X rendering is ugly, but the windows rendering is unreadably thin.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|13 years ago|reply
Alt+V, y, n
[+] [-] subsystem|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|13 years ago|reply
See: CSI, NCIS, Bones, etc.
[+] [-] deltasquared|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicholassmith|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvivek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atdrummond|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draftable|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rschmitty|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobyjsullivan|13 years ago|reply
http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/post/39827269109/when-one-...
Hehehe
[+] [-] ynniv|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wingman4l7|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RexRollman|13 years ago|reply