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You should all know about MovieLens, the sight that makes film recommendations for you, based on collaborative filtering. It did the rounds of the web a few years back, and I regularly use it as a double check on films I should probably see. In about 95% of cases (yep, 19 out of 20), it is pretty dead on. If you’ve not used it, check it out.
So today I decided to see one of the top recommendations for me. Amongst the first 10 films in the list, most of which were foreign or arthouse films, out jumped Ocean’s Twelve, showing at the local, and at the end of it’s run so I was expecting a nice empty cinema. Well done MovieLens, you just made 1 out of 20, and Hoyts, you’re next on my list.
I admit it, I enjoyed Ocean’s Eleven, and Steven Soderbergh is one of my favourite hollywood directors, with Sex, Lies, and Videotape being one of my favourite films of all time, and him probably one of the few people who could possibly remake Solaris and make it different yet just as good as the original.
However, after the first 15 minutes of Ocean’s Twelve, it is obvious that there’s no real story here, just a linear and very obvious narrative, with no real twists or turns, no even remotely interesting heist, a bunch of wasted movie business in-jokes, and a final 10 minutes that attempts to reframe the entire narrative, effectively sticking two fingers up to an up to this point faithful audience, who just sat through 115 minutes of padding, waiting for the twist.
The Sixth Sense this aint, and you’ve got to ask whether writer George Nolfi actually understands the difference. With Ocean’s Twelve, the wrong story is more believable and understandable than the 10 minute correction at the end, if of course you can see past all the glitches and physical impossibilities. Moving LASER alarms? Get outa here. But then what would you expect from a writer whose only other public credit seems to be the co-writing, and subsequent ruining, of the screenplay of the Michael Crichton novel Timeline.
Product placement, flawed story, impossible physics, incorrect technical details, bad acting, and patronising the audience. Enough of Ocean’s Twelve, I could go on all day but it still wouldn’t get my AUD$14.50 and the 125 minutes of my life back. Which brings me to Hoyts.
Now on to their fourth generation web site, and still failing miserably to understand even the basics of user interface design, you’ve got to wonder whether being under the MSN banner is any better than the previous sites built in-house. Marginally.
So I wait in line outside the cinema, due to “cleaning” apparently, and when we are finally let in 15 minutes late, there’s still stray bits of popcorn and lolly wrappers over most of the seats. Luckily enough, most of the sheep tended to sit up the back as per usual, which meant I had a choice of about three different clean seats in the centre. It makes you wonder why cinema’s bother installing surround sound and the movie studios bother spending so much time on the production and the technology, when most people just sit behind the back speakers anyway. No matter, better seats for me I guess.
Finally we get to the end of this laborious film, the sheep all file out when the very first line of credit comes up, and then the lights come on. Hello? Then Cecilia and Tim enter the theatre with their trusty brooms and buckets, intending most likely to repeat the most excellent job they did last time. But do they apologise and turn the lights back off? Of course not. I’m not saying that everyone should stay for the credits, but I could give a dozen good reasons why people may wish to see them, and it makes me wonder why these ignoramuses have never asked themselves why hollywood even bothers spending money to put them there.
Welcome yet again to the dumbing down of society. While the information and personal publishing revolution is about it explode into the mainstream, it is good to see that hollywood still fails to understand that we are intelligent beings who deserve better. Copy their films for all I care, maybe it will help them get a clue.
On the other hand, a few weeks ago I was lucky enough to see the amazing A Very Long Engagement, by the fabulous Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and the experience was better by a degree of magnitude. Clean seats, good focus, courteous and intelligent staff (The Cremorne Orpheum), great story, twists and turns, clever deceptions, and believable characters. Upon checking with MovieLens… Ahh that’s better, 4.5 almost dead on. 18 more films to look forward to…
Eddie spends her pocket money obsessively hoarding fireworks and carefully planning for cracker night. When it finally it arrives, Eddie and her family head to the local football oval. In the frosty air Eddie lights the fuse of her first cracker and experiences a pivotal moment, one of the seemingly small experiences of childhood, that affects us for the rest of our lives.
Today was a big day for my blog. My most popular post, Dear Vodafone and your mp3 ringtone DRM, welcome to the blogosphere, about how DRM and paranoia are slowing, if not holding back, the advance of technology and culture, topped at least twice the number of page views in the last 6 weeks as my second most popular post. OK, it is more a rant about Vodafone, but I promise, the idea was in my conscious mind at the time.
In fact, one of the follow up posts The Vodafone et al DRM content conspiracy is a little more to the point, and asks why go to so much trouble, when there is only a negative benefit for Sony Ericsson and Vodafone.
Anyway, I was virtual dumpster diving tonight for unfinished blog posts (emailed blog posts to myself, which were never completed), when I came across this wonderful piece of research by Anne Galloway, which coincidentally pretty much nails what I was probably trying to say. Unfortunately there is no HTML splash (permalink) for the paper, which is a PDF, so I’ll have to hyperlink directly to it: Design for Hackability.
Design for hackability. Please.
There was a time, pretty much before the mid-90s, when portability of computing environments was more prevelant than today. Well, at least until literally today.
In the 1980s, I would travel with a box of 9 x 5.25″ diskettes in my kit bag. Five contained various cracking and copying tools, much of it my own code, two or three would contain a development environment and various assembly source snippets from my home library, and the rest would be a couple of different operating systems, and maybe a recent work in progress. The extra space would be enough for up to three disks if I picked any up in my travels. The beauty of it was you could boot up on anyone’s machine, and it pretty much looked and behaved exactly like your own machine. Portability.
Fast forward to the early to mid-90s, when hard drives really took off. I can’t count how many times I carried my Quantum 105S (105MB) hard drive to user groups, conferences and friends places. Everyone had a SCSI card, so your entire home set up could be carried under your arm and work the same on virtually any other machine. My old 11ms super reliable Q105S made many a journey overseas to U.S. conferences, and is still running.
That was of course before security knew what a hard drive was, which usually made for an interesting experience coming through customs. This was just about the time when switching power supplies started to become standard, which also nicely solved the U.S. 110V vs. Australia 240V problem. Anyone want to buy a couple of my old step down transformers? They’re some of the very few things I have left since L* did her accidental clean out of our back room.
But come Windows 2000 and onwards, the O/S pretty much started binding to the hardware, and because hardware is so variable in the PC market, carrying around drives wasn’t too much of a problem, but carrying around your home boot up drive was. Add the fact that most drives then went internal, and goodbye portability. Sure, we had the old SyQuest 44MB removable cartridge drive, followed by countless Iomega removable devices, but how many people had the drive to use them on?
And then Macs started locking the O/S to the hardware as well, not as bad as Windows, considering the proprietary nature of the machine, but booting on different boxes, while doable, became problematic.
Larry Ellison (what a great photo!), blinkered billionaire buffoon that he is, thought the NC or Net Computer would be the next revolution in computing, not necessarily for portability, but it would at least provide the common platform upon which we could possibly return to real portability of personal content stores that would work on every machine. Although he failed to understand that a single specification for a generic computer would be outdated very quickly indeed, a simple oversight perhaps due to the fact that he’s an idiot. The other failing of the NC was that people want their individuality, which is the whole digital device revolution we’re seeing at the moment. Turning us into a bunch of NC compliant clones probably flies in the face of this. So anyway, after the NC idea failed, he returned yet again to making dollars off the now 27 year old Oracle RDBMS. Although I’m proud to say that it was the 1998 Sydney Hobart Yacht Race that turned Larry off both ocean racing and Australia, all in the same week.
The interesting thing about ol’ blinkered buffoon Ellison, is that he’s also on the Apple board, mostly if not all to do with his friendship with Steve Jobs, and probably little to do with his innovation or clairvoyant skills. Which is why it is becoming more and more obvious that Steve Jobs is really The Guy. I was a doubter when Jobs came back to Apple, but now I’m well and truly for him. Which brings me to…
Goodbye to portability. Until today that is. The new Mac Mini brings us to a new era in portability. No bigger than a large hard back book, or ironically roughly the same as the SyQuest 44MB removable drive, this baby you can take with you anywhere. I know there’s been, and will continue to be a lot of coverage on the Mac Mini, but really, this is what a computer should be. I look at the tower case under my desk for my lowly 333Mhz Windows box, and I laugh, then I look at my various Macs, and while some of the iMacs are fairly luggable, the Mac Mini puts them all to shame.
I could take my Mini to work and use it with my Windows peripherals, I could take it to conferences and guarantee I have everything I need and that it works before demos etc. I could take it to friends places, instead of my firewire drive which doesn’t boot. And more importantly, I can put it on top of my home stereo, or I can put it in my work room, or even take it on holidays.
PC manufacturers never really copied the beauty of the iMac, a single self contained unit, luggable, and if you got one of the later graphite (like mine) or snow models, then they also came in arguably standard computer colours. This time I think it will be different. We’ll start to see smaller Wintel boxes start to appear, but nowhere near as inexpensive as you’d expect. PCs are cheap because the hardware is big, cheap and mass produced, all big problems when trying to copy the Mac Mini.
Like the iPod, after a few iterations we’ll see a fast usable Mac Mini, which gives people an easy way to if not switch from Windows, then at least try it out, and the ability to detach you and your desktop computer from your desktop.
This is what a computer should be, a portable appliance. You can see it in the mobile phone space, the PDA, the tablet PC and MP3/iPod space, technology is finally converging, and this is the first major computer manfacturer to really make the push. Bring it on.
What makes a design seem intuitive?
Users can complete their objective when current knowledge equals target knowledge….