To be fair, I don't think "Snakes on a Plane" was ever quite that cynically-minded in the first place; remember that, back when it happened, the "self-consciously cheesy B-style-movie" thing wasn't such a cliche, and they apparently changed the title to "Pacific Flight 121" at one point before Samuel L Jackson supposedly made them change it back. (I wonder if "Snakes on a Plane" was only originally intended to be a working title reflecting a high concept movie).

Yes, they did reshoot and alter parts of the film in response to its pre-release Internet fame, but I don't think it started out as being cynical. It's only when soulless Hollywood t***s try ripping off and repeating the phenomenon that it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

Of course, the irony with "Snakes on a Plane" is that despite becoming a massively-popular Internet meme, this didn't translate into box-office success. Despite heightened expectations of its performance, the film itself turned out to be a relative flop, so go figure.

When I first saw this on the BBC news site my first thought was that this was beyond parody.

Charlie Brooker apparently stopped doing TV Go Home (a bizarre send-up of British TV listings) when reality TV ideas started coming up with ideas that were becoming as strange as his joke versions (e.g. "Touch the Truck in which contestants must continually touch a truck for 24 hours in order to win the truck as a prize").

This is the movie version of that- it already sounds like something that would have belonged in a comedy parody in recent years. You could try sending it up or taking the p***, but why bother?

The particularly silly bit in the BBC report is the comment, "In this new universe, as you'll soon find out, there's much more to Tetris than simply clearing lines." Er, no, there isn't. That's why you're going to have to make up virtually everything about it.

When the "Space Invaders" film was mooted, I (along with everyone else) thought it was ludicrous, since the original game was little more than "you are shooting waves of aliens [which we understand are "invading" from "space" going by the two-word "plot" written on the arcade cabinet]". It was likely to be little more than transparent attempt to graft a nostalgia-invoking brand on a generic sci-fi movie, which- going by recent Hollywood films- was unlikely to have much more plot than the original game.

But "Tetris: The Movie" takes the biscuit. I wasn't engaging in hyperbole when I said it was beyond parody- I don't think there's anything you can say about this sort of thing that makes it sound more ludicrous than simply restating the idea itself.

Enough of that. Here's a little musical relief.

Interestingly, the widely-propogated assertion that the Apple III's vent-less, fan-less case (pushed by Jobs) was to blame for its exceptionally-high failure rate has been disputed.

From the Wikipedia "Apple III" article:-

Yes, you are correct, the Wikipedia article on LEDs states that:-

I don't know how common this is though, compared to the blue-LED-based method that Mars Saxman describes.

If you came to that conclusion on your own, I'd congratulate you on (possibly) being extremely perceptive, but also surprised that you weren't aware that it's already been widely reported in the past few years that, yes, blue light is apparently very bad news from the point of view of being sleep-inhibiting:-

Example story

Blue light presumably being far more of an issue in recent years due to (a) the increase in use of electronics and (b) the blue LED fad. (*)

I've seen an alarm clock with blue numbers- presumably because blue LEDs are cool!!!!!!11111- which struck me as an absolutely horrible idea. As did a ******* blue-coloured baby nightlight (because even baby deserves to be kept awake by fashionable blue LEDs. Sheesh.)

(*) FWIW, the blue LED fad seems to have died down in the past couple of years, and white LEDs are the new hotness. Which is a good thing from an aesthetic point of view (**) but I suspect those white LEDs still contain a lot of blue. Especially the more bluish-white ones which may well just be blue ones with phosphor coating (as some "white" LEDs apparently are).

(**) Nothing against blue LEDs as a concept, it's great that they were invented. What I hate is their gratuitous use- or rather, misuse- in consumer goods, both because they're overused and the novelty wore off long ago, but also because they're far more distracting in context than red ones ever were.

What are "political woahs"? It sounds like something out of "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure in Scotland". ;-P

And as if the English are any better; go out in any crap nowhere provincial town there late on Saturday night and I'm sure you'll see as much drink-fuelled disorder as anywhere in Scotland.

What's your point? That Scotland won't be "contributing" when it remains a part of the United Kingdom, somehow?

Your comment on "city states" sounds far more reminiscent of the direction in which London is heading. It's already approaching an entity in its own right within England, increasingly unbalancing the United Kingdom and heavily influenced by tax-dodging multinational companies.

The "City of London" (a historic title which refers only to the financial "square mile" rather than the other several hundred square miles of London itself) is notoriously undemocratic, prominent way, *way* beyond its nominal area, and interferes on behalf of its corporate paymasters in the working of the UK in general:-

http://www.theguardian.com/com...

Sounds like a badly mixed metaphor to me- tall poppy syndrome- which I assume is what you had in mind- tends to have a more specific use referring to people attacked for their achievements or prominence by their peers within a particular society, and I'm not sure this is a good example of that.

That's correct. Though I intentionally left it out above of the above post (I'm longwinded enough and it was less relevant there), I've commented in the past (e.g. in this post and several others in that thread) that TNG's effects shots were at best (AFAIK) composited on SD video from film sources, if not entirely generated on SD video.

Hence a 100% authentic HD transfer of the original unmodified TNG episodes would be impossible, purely because certain shots only ever existed in SD.

(If they were to be upscaled- as I understood they did for some regular scenes were they couldn't locate the original footage- they would stand out like a sore thumb among the HD-scanned shots, as ST:TNG's analogue NTSC video was soft and crappy even in SD and there's no way on earth they'd be able to convincingly upscale it).

Funny you should say this. A while back I was thinking that- for this reason- MS should have "partnered" with a Japanese company for the original XBox launch there, paying them a cut of the profits there in exchange for "contributing" some token (but easily played-up) role in its "development" and the agreement to use that company's name prominently in marketing the product.

In reality they'd actually be paying the Japanese company near-free royalties in exchange for the right to use them as a trojan horse for the notoriously hard-to-break Japanese market. Yes, it might grate slightly, but 80% of ten times as much profit is still preferable in the long term. The exaggerated "development" role would be a way of countering accusations that the Japanese company were doing little more than marketing an American console... of course they weren't, it's well-known that they contributed significantly to the XBox joint-venture!

The agreement would have to have been drawn up carefully in advance (without being overly explicit about its cynical intent) to avoid MS being held hostage later on, and ultimately the XBox brand is the one that should be being promoted- the Japanese company's name being a means to get a foot in the door, and possibly phased out or reduced later on.

I'm sure that Xzibit would have something canine-related to say about that.

This touches on something I've mentioned previously- namely, why older TV shows shot and mastered entirely on film still aren't necessarily "HD", even though the medium itself *happens* to be capable of resolving that much detail.

An HD production requires *everything* to have been done to HD standards. If not, it's quite possible that props, makeup et al that were only ever expected to look good on a standard-definition set of the time will show their deficiencies far more obviously under the scrutiny of HD.

There were no doubt good reasons for shooting on film- either technical or aesthetic (film converted to standard-def video for transmission still looks different to natively-shot video)- but decades before HD was even a twinkle in anyone's eye, I doubt they were going to waste their limited TV budget on detailing they (reasonably) assumed no-one was ever going to see.

I suspect that the original Enterprise model was more detailed as it would have been used a lot, and having a higher-quality model in the first place would give them more flexibility in terms of close-ups, etc.

Bingo. I bet the one-off single-show models were done as well as required- and no more. (Particularly as ST:TNG was from the shot-on-film-but-mastered-on-video era that- ironically- gave poorer quality than the all-film ST:TOS).

I accept what you're saying, but the point was that he mirrored the OP's comment in order to make a point- presumably- that this form of "seeing" was just as valid as seeing with the eyes, or rather that, if that wasn't seeing, then "touching" with the fingers wasn't "touching" either.

But it doesn't work because putting "touching" in quotes implies that this isn't actually touching, when it *is* in effect the definition of touching- there's no more direct way you can "touch" something with your own fingers, and it's arguable whether it's meaningful to argue what constitutes touching below that scale.

The "seeing" example quite plainly *was* more indirect, and that's the point I was making.

No- you're trying to be a smartass here, but it doesn't really work, because there isn't any more direct form of "touch"- i.e. the sensation- than that. Insofar as the sensation of "touch"- or the mechanism underlying it- has any meaning when you examine it at such a close, microscopic level, that *is* what "touching" is.

This contrasts with the OP's example of scientists "seeing" on the screen on an electron microscope, where there quite obviously *is* a level of abstraction from directly seeing something (via the interaction of photons with the object and then one's own eyes). So, no- you didn't make a point.

Attention-deficit-rebranding so that no-one knows what the **** is what has long been an apparent obsession with Microsoft, and going by this story, they don't seem to be improving.

I already posted this elsewhere a couple of years back and re-posted it at least once on Slashdot- but no point reinventing the wheel so:-

Further thoughts on this are that it may be a reflection of Microsoft's internal political structure and culture, and power struggles, with every newcomer needing to stamp his or her identity on the product, regardless of whether that's beneficial. Either that and/or the environment is conducive to horrendously expensive branding and marketing consultants topping up their cocaine money by suggesting rebrandings at regular intervals- again, regardless of whether it's really needed or not.