Movies

[Mad78]

I saw Dia Hard 4 yesterday. Lots of fun and really worth seeing if you liked the other Die Hard movies.

[Krytos]

I'm tempted to see Die Hard 4. I like the others and Bruce.. but it's got that kid from the Mac ads. That guy bugs me, mainly because he's in the mac ads.

(Which is weird, because with exception of Steve Jobs and those ads I like Macs ... but not iPods or iPhones)

[Mad78]

The actor is actually very good in his role of a computer hacker.

[SOCL]

The actor is actually very good in his role of a computer hacker.

Did he use a Mac?

[Mad78]

Nah, he's on Linux.

[SOCL]

Nah, he's on Linux.

Funny, because he does Mac adverts. Unless I'm thinking of the wrong fellow...

[DarthTofu]

Quite possibly the best foreign comedy ever.

 

Shaolin Soccer had me doubled over laughing, even if it was dubbed. The humor style is slapstick by and large, with amazing visual effects that, thankfully, are not the primary focus, though are still important to the plot, acting as one giant joke.

 

It covers the story of a soccer team made entirely of Kung Fu masters, going out to win the Chinese Soccer world cup. It's almost never serious, except for one small part of the plot, and is one of my new favorite movies. I recommend any and all who like comedy see it!

[Krytos]

Nah, he's on Linux.

Funny, because he does Mac adverts. Unless I'm thinking of the wrong fellow...

I think Mad was just referring to the movie

[JediHunter]

personally every time i see that guy i think of his role in Galaxy Quest.. i think he plays the nerd well... oh and i keep thinking about him in Jeepers Creepers... i really wish he never would have done those Mac ads.. even though sometimes they are funny... i hate hate.. hate... hate.. Macs.. nothing personal.. just hate em.

[DarthTofu]

Why does everyone hate Macs? As Douglas Adams put it, "The Macintosh was originally a great design- give it so few functions that it can't possibly crash! But then they went on and made all sorts of new fancy programes for it, so now whenever I open the tool bar it causes the lights to dim in all homes connected to the same power grid as me!" (Paraphrased from The Salmon of Doubt)

 

The only Mac I've ever used, truth-be-told, was an old model, about sixteen years old or so, that was donated away only recently. It was a dependable enough computer, though some of the functions it had performed five years ago randomly dissapeared at one point. That was really the only issue I ever had with it.

 

I honestly have no opinion on Macs- why does everyone hate 'em?

[Mad78]

I personnaly really quite like them.

[Krytos]

I honestly have no opinion on Macs- why does everyone hate 'em?

Well, like I said I don't mind them. But here's pretty much where I'm coming from... warning, long

 

Mac OS X is pretty stable ... more than XP? Well, personal experience is at Uni I've had more Macs crash than PC's (and the PCs were original Compaq then Dell) over 3 and a half years. Of course, the majority of the time the Macs were using higher end programs such as Photoshop and Maya, the PCs varied much more from word processing to photoshop and flash. So it's a hard argument - I'd say they are more stable except for a couple of recent problems where two macs struggled to "eject" my USB drive. 5 minutes 23 seconds for one to disconnect, the other hung and crashed the system. And with Macs, more stable or not there are little to no error messages or abilities to recover once something has crashed. And it's true they don't have "cryptic" errors ... most of the time. Errors like "..has crashed for an unknown reason.." don't help much either. And Mac specific programs crash with errors such as ".. error 451.." Nothing cryptic there

 

OS X is pretty, that's for sure. But it does get tired quickly (ok, going from XP to OS X it always feels fresh but staying with OS X does get tiring. For me, it's the over use of grey, that's probably all). The smooth animations for window movement etc. is nice - but it lags resizing a simple window. Buttons are nice etc. etc. And in my personal experience, having my work area "pretty" inspires me to work and work better. So the GUI is a big plus in most area for OS X.

 

Using the OS to work on is fine as well, I wasn't too big of a fan with navigation through hard drives though, felt sloppy - but some of that was my Uni's fault. The dock bar is nice - again pretty and has functionality. As a replacement for the Start bar ... well, no. It can augment it but isn't a good replacement in my opinion. I do like it in some ways, I've got a docking bar emulator on my PC for additional programs rather than cluttering the desktop with icons.

And this gets to OS X biggest draw back in my experience - multitasking. It's fine with a handful of things going, 4 programs or so, but I'm use to doing a lot of things at once, and having multiple files opened in programs (such as photoshop). The docking bar can't handle it, and you loose your programs easily. There are quick keys such as F9 to bring up all the windows to see what's happening (which some people think is fantastic) but I find it a cumbersome way of flicking between programs - nice, but again it's not a good substitute for something as simple as the start bar. Alt tab is there (mac tab) but only really shows an icon of what your going to - not much help with multiple program entities open ie. Word or web browsers.

 

Personally I'd like an OS that combines both. Simplicity of Windows with the niftiness of OS X. Vista, well, it does some of that - but with so much copyrighting it'll only happen in 3rd party apps. The F9 functions, called Expose, is very nice and I was hoping Vista would have a version of it - alas, it does not. The problem with these Mac versions are, they come in handy and are a great add-on - but aren't a good substitute. Which is probably why there are a lot of quick keys in OS X, it requires a lot of these smaller functions to get the same "simple" functionality we know in Windows.

 

I find it worst when using a program that opens up smaller windows within it - such as Photoshop or Maya. Here's an example in Maya, you're working on a scene and open up the material editor, make a material and then minimise it to get it out of the way - you don't close it because you know you'll need it again, several times again. You then render, open up other dialogues such as the dope sheet editor and curve editor, hyper graph etc. before minimising them for later use. Now you need to get back your material editor. In Windows there'd be a minimised tab within the program down the bottom. OS X it's on the docking bar, where it has a scaled down version of it as an icon ... which you can't actually make out what it's showing you. So you need to hover over it to wait for the text to appear or click on them randomly and hope you're opening the right window - I often end up opening a window from another program that I've minimised like from Photoshop. This is an overall design floor that, quiet frankly, is a big turn off for my personal use. Less so for work use when I'd more likely be using one or two programs - but even then I, and teachers, have had annoying problems with it.

 

Another problem. You can't maximise windows to fill the entire screen with the maximise button - most of the time it resizes to the size of the document or stops at the dock bar (even if you've got it hiding). Sure you can try to drag the bottom right corner to make it bigger than the maximiser allows, but it's rarely filling the screen and is much more time consuming than pressing a button. Now, 9/10 programs - no biggy. But when you're using a graphics editing program and need 100% of the available space it's annoying - ditto for a laptop. Especially in a program like photoshop where there are a lot of free floating tool bars. It feels cluttered, but what's worse is you are constantly try to select the edge of an image, use the scroll bars, click on a tool bar and end up selecting the desktop dropping the program away. Frustrating. I remember my first year in a Mac lab, 1 hour of people grunting and cursing "stop dropping to the desktop! ... oh, but you're so pretty." (the last part was from a foreign female student who was actually saying that .. constantly).

 

And finally multitasking the CPU, or lack thereof. Windows assigns memory usage and CPU power to programs depending on their need. If I'm running IE and 3d Max while rendering, Max gets the preference (and worse comes to worse I can also change it so my desired program gets more memory and CPU performance) in power while my other program still runs, even if sluggish. Having a program selected in Windows increases its priority as well, so if I'm rendering and playing music and music sounds like it's skipping I just select Media Player and problem solved (albeit the render takes a little longer).

In OS X, the currently selected program gets the priority and even if there's program that needs more power for good reason it will have to live with whatever is left over from the "primary program". My perfect analogy to this was in one class I'd set up a test in Maya for some rendering with mental ray, mean while had Fire fox running to fill in the time while I wasn't listening to the tutor. The renders took roughly 3-4 minutes to do, and as I was experimenting this meant adjusting a variable and then re-rendering over and over again. So the average time wasn't changing much if at all. After starting a frame to render and ignoring the tutor I jumped on FF to browse the web. The tutor starting talking about something interesting, so I turned to pay attention. 15 minutes later I turned back to my computer and started browsing again. Then I remembered my render, so jumped back to Maya and it was STILL rendering. Why? Because the OS decided that Fire fox needed more processing power than Maya because I was using that at the time. This left jack all for Maya to use while rendering, and thus a 3 minute render became 15 minutes.

That's not the only instance of that problem I, or others, have experienced.

 

Finally, most recently I've been very anti-apple due to iPods, the related commercial, Steve Jobs arrogance and the Mac ads that have so much bull crap in them I just get annoyed.

And I don't doubt for a second that those ads have made me overly biased, which is a shame - because I've only written bad things. OS X has lots of good things as well. Maybe some day I'll write about them

 

In conclusion, OS X is a good Operating System. Simple as that. Windows XP is a good OS. Vista should, hopefully be one too once all the first service pack comes out and other companies update their drivers for it. But, like all OS's, they all have faults - and they all have some pretty hefty faults.

XP isn't what I'd call stable - I still have programs crash and hang. It's not pretty compared to OS X (but that's a fundamental floor based on how the OS renders graphics .. among others). But it is easy to navigate and control. Extra functionality, on the other hand, is too hard to use or find for most people

OS X isn't perfectly stable, or as secure as Apple claims it is. It's easy to use, often too easy and lacks functionality. It lacks some of the simplest features in Windows that makes windows popular. At the same time it is often very easy to set things up to work on them ... often. But as my expansive post shows it is flawed.

Vista, haven't touched so not going there. But we all know that it's flawed (and from recent reading a lot of those problems might not be Microsoft's fault ... maybe that's a lie )

[Mad78]

I agree (how about that for a simple answer )

[JediHunter]

oh my god... i think that is one of the longest replies I have ever seen!

[Jahled]

Lots and lots and lots of words

 

When I was at Bigpictures spending all day in Photoshop, it was on a Mac, and one thing that amazed me was the shear power of the thing. I could have an entire photoshoot open (2500-odd pixel, 1.5mb each generally) and the machine would glide along quite smoothly.

 

I work on a crappy office Dell now.

[DarthTofu]

Okay, that was officially longer than my attention span, Krytos I read the first few paragraphs before getting tremendously bored because I know nothing about operating systems. When the machines rebel against us all I'll be good for is getting them to the blue screen of death.

 

Now, then, on topic: Calvin and Hobbs with post-it notes.

[budious]

One would assume that Mac OS X would be fundamentally stable because it is based on BSD, a derivative of Unix operating system. Apple coded a new interface for an otherwise Unix based kernel and subsystem. Of course, if the hardware is crap, which many Apples are despite their cost, than you count on that operating system to crash unexpectedly. Same can be said for PC hardware, I see threads all over the Internet complaining about Windows Vista but so far it has been flawless on my laptop, mostly Intel Centrino branded components so one would assume they have proper drivers integrated to Vista while many hardware manufacturers have not.

[Krytos]

Apologise to all, I have a tendency to "waffle" on if tired

 

@J: By no means was I saying they're bad - especially when compared to some PCs around (Not a fan of Dell at all ... except for their high end LCDs which are usually Samsung panels, just cheaper ). They've always been good performers - but the illusion that Mac's are what are needed for graphics has always been annoying to me - use what you prefer, simple. I find it somewhat poetic that they now use PC hardware

And they still hold some advantages over PCs, and I'd wager, will always in their own way.

Maybe I should have pointed out that I like Macs a little more towards the start of that longish post

 

@Bud: That was my general feeling too, just without using the OS yet. I have the feeling that the majority of complaints are three fold: bleeding hearts that like to complain about anything Microsoft (seriously just read some of the posts of slashdot), poor driver support (which has little to do with Microsoft, rather the developers of the hardware) and the unfortunate hardware requirements.

 

Now, back on topic

 

Dare I ask if anyone went to see that latest Harry Potter? I'm not a fan of the series (and by that, I simply don't read the books or see the movies) but the most recent one didn't look too bad on the trailers.

Thoughts?

[Evaders99]

I did. If you're judging it as a standalone movie, it doesn't make any sense. There's too much that you'll be scratching your head over.

 

As part of the series however, it is widely better than the first movies. Yes it is darker, there's the whole teen angst issues, lots of action and battle, and some good comedy bits. I would say it is on-par with the previous movie, Goblet of Fire.

 

(Is anyone else wondering when the actors grew so tall.. all except Dan, he didn't seem to grow as much as the rest of them hehe)

[Darth_Rob]

With work and all, I'll have to wait until Monday night to see Potter. Jerks.

[JediHunter]

Thats one movie I'm actually making a point not to see... I just never got into the whole Harry Potter thing.. as a movie I can see its appeal to the older audiences.. but as a book I don't get it... so.. Off to the book thread!

[Mad78]

I will be going to see it with my parents... Its a kind of tradition.

[DarthTofu]

I saw it yesterday- this one is done far better than the last two, and is considerably more true to the book. That might not be entirely true, since five was my least favorite and I've only read it about three times, but I still thought they pulled off a better movie than the third and fourth.

 

The characters are finally in robes again, which makes sense given some of the jokes throughout the books. Sirius is developed finally rather than just being a random little existence, their Luna Lovegood is decidedly random and eccentric (Very good) and Umbrage is so evil that you don't even love to hate her. You just hate her with a passion.

 

Spoilers follow:

 

The only things I had any problems with were:

1) Grawp. He looks far too digital, and in the end kind of like the fat kid you see in the supermarket trying to get his mother to buy him a donut.

2) The prophecy. Only half of it is ever heard or discussed in the movie, and Dumbledore never gives Harry the full version of it.

3) (This is just because I wanted to see it more than anything) They skip the visit to St. Mungo's (sp?) hospital and don't see Lockhart. I'm sorry, but I liked that in the book.

4) Sirius was pushed when he went behind the curtain in the arch, he didn't get advada kadavera... ed (sp?) That's more of a minor issue, and having Bellatrix do it adds to her insanity, so I suppose it works.

 

All in all I had far fewer issues with this movie than I had with three or four. This guy is probably about the same as Chris Columbus was when he did the first and second movies and didn't feel the need to add random non-canonical details to them.

 

Edit: After a bit more reflection and memory jogging (I've only read the book maybe three times sicne it came out) I realized that there were some more things left out that I'd like to see, though only one is "major."

 

More spoiler-esque complaints follow in black.

 

Kreacher (sp?) had more of a cameo than anything else. Where in the book he was responsible for getting Sirius killed, he did nothing more than mumble a bit on only one occassion in the movie.

Also: Harry and Cho never had their awkward relationship that didn't really work out not work out. Harry kissed her, they were sort of together, he turned on her after she betrays them (In the book her friend did so) and it turns out that she was magicked into betraying them?

 

Sorry, but I wanted to see the SNEAK hex Hermione put on their list for the D.A. I also kind of would have preferred that Dobby be there to go around the Room of Requirement, as well as for one to simply need to think very hard three times in a row about what they needed to have happen rather than simply having a need for it.

 

Oh, yeah, and stunning spells don't knock you out suddenly? What's the point of 'em, then? Why not just use Expeliarmus instead of Stupefy, then, eh? Strikes me as rather foolish not to have those knock people out.

 

Alright, that's it for fanboy whining part two.

Edited July 14, 2007 by DarthTofu

[Darth_Rob]

I can't see it yet. I just found out that on Wednesday morning the mall had a watermain break, and it leaked down into the movie theatres, which have been closed since. Im just hoping its all reopen by Monday.

[Mad78]

I saw Metamorphosis today... Don't see it. to really know what i thought of the film just read my review on IMDB.

Lifeless, 14 July 2007

2/10

Author: mad-1989 from Switzerland

 

First let me be honest. I did not watch all this movie. I watched the first five minutes and when I realized that I had nearly fallen to sleep I decided that I may as well fast forward and see if it got any more interesting later on... It didn't. This film is just a collection of lame attempts to make a story which is already uninteresting and badly told into something that it would never become: a decent horror movie. Because I feel it is important to say that even a movie with poor special effects can still be good if it is well made. This film isn't and will only put you into a deep state of sleep if you attempt to watch it. Lastly I feel it is important to say that I think this movie is in the public domain so if you feel that you must absolutely watch it then a little search on the internet will surely show you a place where you won't need to pay to watch this pile of cinematographic dung.