Thursday, December 24, 2009

Nokia N900


=====================

The good: The Nokia N900 offers a powerful mobile Web browser, plenty of storage, a 5-megapixel camera, and an ultrasharp display. It's also fast, multitasks well, and has excellent call quality. Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, and GPS are all onboard.

The bad: The user interface isn't very intuitive. Ovi Store for the N900 isn't live yet, limiting the number of available apps, and it doesn't sync with Exchanger Server 2003. The phone is a bit bulky and not all apps work in portrait mode.

The bottom line: While it has yet to reach its full potential, the Nokia N900 is a powerful mobile device with excellent browsing capabilities and vast customization options. However, its unintuitive interface and other limitations make this a smartphone for tech enthusiasts and early adopters only.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Avatar Mirrors Emotions With Motion Capture

Exploring Pandora, Avatar's Lush World

Cблъсъци в IMDB форума за филма AVATAR

1-ви сблъсък:
An Eco-pacifist Space Propaganda Film
Honestly, I lost my faith in Cameron when he made Titanic. Avatar looks to put the final nail in his coffin. When I saw the preview I knew it would be a PC propaganda piece for eco-guilt and left-wing politics. I also knew there was no hope in seeing the dorky looking Alien Smurfs with their suck caveman weapons get wiped out. Now that would be a movie worth seeing! Sorry but I cannot root against the human race (especially with all the cool military tech), call me biased.

The whole idea of some primitive alien race using nonsensical fantasty inspired creatures that look like eco-dragons to defeat a high-tech army is the pinnacle of stupidity. It is like some teenage boy lacking testosterone came up with the plot. Lets see, lets combine fern gully, thundercats and the smurfs for the good guys and lets make the bad guys "greedy" corporate humans hell bent on "destroying the planet" in their unsustainable need for energy to fuel their capitalist consumerism. The only thing that can save the planet is the primitive zen/native american/tribal beliefs in eco-harmony. Spare me the lecture on your economic illiteracy Cameron.

The crappy video game for this should be hillarious, especially with all the kids confused why they cannot play with the cool robo-mechs with machine guns and instead get to be "Dorky Smurf", decked out in loin cloth armor, armed with a biodegreadable bow and arrow! Controls will include a button for "tree planting", "eco-meditation", "recycling your weapons" and "low carbon footprint" (you walk lightly and hardly breathe).

What a waste of CGI. Apparently Cameron spent millions getting Smurfette's breasts "right". How hard is it to get them right? Just make them big! Maybe next time he can spend as much time on a real plot where you can actually root for the human race? Nah, pushing left-wing propaganda is more important than entertainment. Right Cameron?

Sadly this movie will appeal to eco-pacifists who have been brainwashed that we are destroying the planet and the human race is evil.

Maybe because I am human I have a problem with being considered evil but hey that is just me
====================
"...Sadly this movie will appeal to eco-pacifists who have been brainwashed that we are destroying the planet and the human race is evil..."

Oh, so.... you're saying that WE'RE NOT DESTROYING THE PLANET?
And, dude, you're so caught up with 'cool military tech' and and shouting your anti-eco idiocy, that you're missing the whole point of the movie. The 'cavemen' as you're referring to them, ARE THE HUMANS in this story. The military are the *beep* neanderthals.

And I think your post makes very clear how in touch you are with the pinnacle of stupidity: YOUR OWN.
======================
So if you lost faith in Cameron some twelve years ago, why did you make him richer by paying to see Avatar?
=====================
Who said I paid?
====================
Uh, why don't you go back to trashing the planet and leave the rest of us to enjoy this intelligent, thought-provoking, well-made movie. I'm sure your descendants will thank you when the planet is a polluted, war-scarred, post-apocalyptic wasteland. (Oh, but wait, I'm sure they'll just find another planet to trash and kill the natives so they can live there.)

You should actually see the movie before you decide to criticise it. Maybe you'll actually learn something.
======================
Another movie where the bad guys win in the end, I guess. This is the trend in Hollywood these days.
==================

Another movie where the bad guys win in the end, I guess. This is the trend in Hollywood these days.
Yeah, because the "good guys" really won in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan , didnt they?

I wont mention My Lai Massacre, Fallujah or Abu Gharib either. I mean, what other "trends" could they start.

If anything, Cameron "white washed" it.
=============================
The crappy video game for this should be hillarious, especially with all the kids confused why they cannot play with the cool robo-mechs with machine guns and instead get to be "Dorky Smurf", decked out in loin cloth armor, armed with a biodegreadable bow and arrow! Controls will include a button for "tree planting", "eco-meditation", "recycling your weapons" and "low carbon footprint" (you walk lightly and hardly breathe).

-----

I laughed pretty hard at this paragraph. While I enjoyed the film, I have to say that it's clear that this current wave of "climate change" propaganda is a farce that has been perpetuated to get the elites in society richer. You think all the money being invested will somehow reap benefits for our "children's children"? I'm in London and it's the coldest winter I've experienced in a long time. We only experienced a few days of summer weather this year. Listen when I say it's just an agenda for politicians to release ridiculous amounts of funds that will evemtually go into their bank accounts.
===========================
You are correct. It WAS a late response. Now go find out WHY.

Please describe the "fast buck" America has made from anything we've done in the ME.

Everybody has an agenda - don't fool yourself into thinking some people don't. But stop using terms like "deniers"... ad hominem is a logical fallacy.
===========================
Sorry to say it...

But I think you're mental capacity and intellect isnt up to par to understand the message of the film. Or atleast you're not seeing the big picture.


(1) "Dorky" smurfs. - You lost me after you described a different race as "dorky".

(2) You MISSED the message, so I'll de-brief you in as short of a statement as possible.

ALL BEINGS that have LIFE in them are actually VESSELS.... as in just BODIES.
The "hero" in the film, has seen this fact and understood that the only different thing between all living things are their bodies, and their soul or spirit is actually all part of a greater power...

This is SHOWN and PROVEN on the film by his ability to LIVE on a different body. His mind, his soul is the same... but his body is different.

So in essence, he is FIGHTING with HUMANS who are blinded to this fact. To save innocent and peace abiding race as well as saving the "greater power" which is the source of ALL LIFE on the planet.


The HUMANS in this film is depicted onto 2 different categories.... the "GOOD" which are the Scientists/Researchers.... and the "BAD" which represents the HUMANS willing to DESTROY nature and RISK killing other life forms for PROFIT.

PROFIT or MONEY is man made, MONEY leads to GREED. And GREED has blinded MEN and WOMEN to destroy nature and life to satisfy their greed.

The HERO has realized that LIFE and NATURE is all what is important and what matters... not some man-made item such as Money.

The hero did not betray "humans" he simply realized the TRUTH.

then you go ahead with research to try to justify that our world is fine...
WTF.. seriously, the MOVIE is a fantasy film, set on 2154.
And if you pay attention the "hero" mentioned that the earth doesnt have any trees left ("no greens") and are mining other
===========================
2-ви сблъсък:
следвасл
ссссссссссссссссссссссссссссссссссссссссс=========mjjjadhkjm==========================


7 Things About Avatar





"It's like dreaming with your eyes open..."

Много красиви картини има във филма

collections of Cameron's quotes:

1. Inspiration “My inspiration is every single science fiction book I read as a kid. And a few that weren't science fiction. “The Edgar Rice Burroughs books, H. Rider Haggard — the manly, jungle adventure writers. I wanted to do an old-fashioned jungle adventure, just set it on another planet, and play by those rules.”

2. Pandora “Pandora is Earth like, it has lush rainforests filled with incredible life forms like a 1,000 foot tall trees, a myriad of creatures, some of which are quite beautiful, some of which are quite terrifying.“

3. Na’vi “Pandora’s natives, the Na’vi, live in a state that we would consider primitive –bows and arrows, that sort of thing – but who ultimately prove to be much wiser than we are.
They’re 10 feet tall, blue skin, striped like tigers and quite fierce looking. They normally live harmoniously in their forest environment, but can be ferocious when provoked.”

4. Avatars “Humans can’t breathe the air on Pandora, so it was decided to create a human/Na’vi hybrid via genetic engineering, called the Avatars. They’re living, breathing bodies in a real world, not synthetic alter egos- this is not a Matrix style story. They’re controlled by a human driver, who projects their consciousness onto the Avatar body.”

5. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) “Our main character, Jake Sully, a marine who is wounded in combat, paralysed and goes to Pandora. In his Avatar body, he can walk, he can run, he can live again. He finds himself caught between the military/industrial complex on Earth and the Na’vi.”

6. Effects “We’ve pioneered new effects technology and we’re shooting the film in stereoscopic 3D, while the live action portion uses cameras that took us nine years to develop.”

7. 3D Movie “The goal was to combine these new filmmaking technologies with powerful narratives, visuals and design, and to create this fully immersive cinematic experience. Not like watching a movie, more like taking the journey.”

=======================

Вчера (19/12/2009) гледах AVATAR - трябва да се види филма - задължително в кино с 3D
Не мога да не се сетя за Second Life
=============
От тук-там за филма и ....

Avatar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In Hinduism, Avatar or Avatara (Devanagari अवतार, IAST avatāra, Sanskrit for "descent" viz., from heaven to earth, from the verbal root tṝ "to

cross over") refers to a deliberate descent of a deity from heaven to earth, and is mostly translated into English as "incarnation", but

more accurately as "appearance" or "manifestation", as it corresponds more closely to the view of Docetism in Christian theology, as

distinct from the idea of incarnation in mainstream Christology and its implication of God 'in the flesh'.[1][2]
The term is most often associated with Vishnu, though it has also come to be associated with other deities.[3]
Varying lists of avatars of Vishnu appear in Hindu scriptures, including the ten (daśāvatāra) of the Garuda Purana and the twenty-two

avatars in the Bhagavata Purana, though the latter adds that the incarnations of Vishnu are innumerable.[4] The avatars of Vishnu are a

primary component of Vaishnavism. While Vishnu is typically spoken of as the source of the avatars, in Vaishnavism, Narayana, Vasudeva,

and Krishna are also described as the source. While Shiva and Ganesha are also described as descending in the form of avatars, with the

Ganesha Purana and the Mudgala Purana detailing Ganesha's avatars specifically, the avatars of Vishnu carry a greater theological

prominence than those of Shiva or Ganesha and upon examination relevant passages are directly imitative are imitative of the earlier

Vishnu avatar lists.[1][5]
One of the earliest references to avatar is in the Bhagavad Gita (c. 3138 BC), which describes the typical role of an avatar of Vishnu—to

bring dharma, or righteousness, back to the social and cosmic order:[1][3]
============================================================================

What is an Avatar in Second Life?

You may have heard the term "avatar" from friends, on the Web or in the news. For example, there's the James Cameron-directed movie

"Avatar" and a popular animated TV show "Avatar: The Last Airbender." But, what exactly is an avatar in Second Life? In a virtual world,

an avatar is a digital persona that you can create and customize. It's you — only in 3D. You can create an avatar that resembles your real

life or create an alternate identity. The only limit is your imagination. Who do you want to be?
============================

Plot Summary:
"Avatar," a live action film with a new generation of special effects, takes us to a spectacular world beyond imagination,

where a reluctant hero embarks on a journey of redemption and discovery as he leads an epic battle to save a civilization.
"Avatar" delivers a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film

disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story.

The story's hero is Jake Sully, a former Marine confined to a wheelchair. Bitter and disillusioned, he's still a warrior at heart. All

Jake ever wanted was something worth fighting for, and he finds it in the place he least expected: on a distant world. Jake has been

recruited to join an expedition to the moon Pandora, which corporate interests are strip-mining for a mineral worth $20 million per

kilogram on Earth. To facilitate their work, the humans use a link system that projects a person's consciousness into a hybrid of humans

and Pandora's indigenous humanoids, the Na'vi. This human-Na'vi hybrid – a fully living, breathing body that resembles the Na'vi but

possesses the individual human's thoughts, feelings and personality – is known as an "avatar."

In his new avatar form, Jake can once again walk. His mission is to interact with and infiltrate the Na'vi with the hope of enlisting

their help – or at least their acquiescence – in mining the ore. A beautiful Na'vi female, Neytiri, saves Jake's life, albeit reluctantly,

because even in his avatar body, Jake represents to her the human encroachment on the Na'vi's unspoiled world.

As Jake's relationship with Neytiri deepens, along with his respect for the Na'vi, he faces the ultimate test as he leads an epic conflict

that will decide nothing less than the fate of an entire world.
============================
synopsis:
warning mild spoilers may follow:
Sam Worthington is a Marine sent to an alien planet. The humans have had little luck communicating with the tribalistic native aliens.

Their solution is to combine human and alien DNA into a hybrid clone. the marine and other scientists get hooked up into a full neural

interface with their 'alien clone'. Think the matrix but with a real life avatar. They go out in their new bodies to communicate with the

aliens and convince them to allow humans to rape their planet (lots of ecological overtones.) After that it is the obvious route of

sympathizing with the natives and fighting back against the human invaders.
===============================
December 18, 2009
A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic

By MANOHLA DARGIS
With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life

included — as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the

natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with

Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the

most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.

The story behind the story, including a production budget estimated to top $230 million, and Mr. Cameron’s future-shock ambitions for the

medium have already begun to settle into myth (a process partly driven by the publicity, certainly). Every filmmaker is something of a

visionary, just by virtue of the medium. But Mr. Cameron, who directed the megamelodrama “Titanic” and, more notably, several of the most

influential science-fiction films of the past few decades (“The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), is a filmmaker whose ambitions

transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable

of producing the big WOW.

The scale of his new movie, which brings you into a meticulous and brilliantly colored alien world for a fast 2 hours 46 minutes, factors

into that wow. Its scope is evident in an early scene on a spaceship (the year is 2154), where the passengers, including a paraplegic ex-

Marine, Jake (Sam Worthington, a gruffly sensitive heartthrob), are being roused from a yearslong sleep before landing on a distant

inhabited moon, Pandora. Jake is woken by an attendant floating in zero gravity, one of many such aides. As Jake himself glides through

the bright cavernous space, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore, as someone soon quips (a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Cameron’s

favorite film). You also know you’re not in the gloom of “The Matrix.”

Though it’s easy to pigeonhole Mr. Cameron as a gear head who’s more interested in cool tools (which here include 3-D), he is, with

“Avatar,” also making a credible attempt to create a paradigm shift in science-fiction cinema. Since it was first released in 1999, “The

Matrix,” which owes a large debt to Mr. Cameron’s own science-fiction films as well as the literary subgenre of cyberpunk, has hung

heavily over both SF and action filmmaking. Most films that crib from “The Matrix” tend to borrow only its slo-mo death waltzes and

leather fetishism, keeping its nihilism while ditching the intellectual inquiries. Although “Avatar” delivers a late kick to the gut that

might be seen as nihilistic (and how!), it is strangely utopian.

It doesn’t take Jake long to feel the good vibes. Like Neo, the savior-hero of the “Matrix” series played by Keanu Reeves, Jake is himself

an avatar because he’s both a special being and an embodiment of an idea, namely that of the hero’s journey. What initially makes Jake

unusual is that he has been tapped to inhabit a part-alien, part-human body that he controls, like a puppeteer, from its head to its

prehensile tail. Like the rest of the human visitors who’ve made camp on Pandora, he has signed on with a corporation that’s intent on

extracting a valuable if mysterious substance from the moon called unobtainium, a great whatsit that is an emblem of humanity’s greed and

folly. With his avatar, Jake will look just like one of the natives, the Na’vi, a new identity that gives the movie its plot turns and

politics.

The first part of Jake’s voyage — for this is, above all, a boy’s rocking adventure, if one populated by the usual tough Cameron chicks —

takes him from a wheelchair into a 10-foot, blue-skinned Na’vi body. At once familiar and pleasingly exotic, the humanoid Na’vi come with

supermodel dimensions (slender hips, a miniature-apple rear); long articulated digits, the better to grip with; and the slanted eyes and

twitchy ears of a cat. (The gently curved stripes that line their blue skin, the color of twilight, bring to mind the markings on mackerel

tabby cats.) For Jake his avatar, which he hooks into through sensors while lying in a remote pod in a semiconscious state, is at first a

giddy novelty and then a means to liberation.

Plugging into the avatar gives Jake an instant high, allowing him to run, leap and sift dirt through his toes, and freeing him from the

constraints of his body. Although physically emancipated, he remains bound, contractually and existentially, to the base camp, where he

works for the corporation’s top scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, amused and amusing), even while taking orders from its

head of security, Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a military man turned warrior for hire. A cartoon of masculinity, Quaritch strides

around barking orders like some intransigent representation of American military might (or a bossy movie director). It’s a favorite

Cameron type, and Mr. Lang, who until this year had long been grievously underemployed, tears into the role like a starved man gorging on

steak.

Mr. Cameron lays out the fundamentals of the narrative efficiently, grabbing you at once with one eye-popping detail after another and on

occasion almost losing you with some of the comically broad dialogue. He’s a masterly storyteller if a rather less nimble prose writer.

(He has sole script credit: this is personal filmmaking on an industrial scale.) Some of the clunkier lines (“Yeah, who’s bad,” Jake

taunts a rhinolike creature he encounters) seem to have been written to placate those members of the Michael Bay demographic who might

find themselves squirming at the story’s touchier, feelier elements, its ardent environmentalism and sincere love story, all of which kick

in once Jake meets Neytiri, a female Na’vi (Zoë Saldana, seen only in slinky Na’vi form).

Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in “Avatar” back in

the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn’t exist until recently. New

digital technologies gave him the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an actor’s physical movements into a

computer-generated image (CGI). Until now, by far the most plausible character created in this manner has been slithery Gollum from Peter

Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” cycle. The exotic creatures in “Avatar,” which include an astonishment of undulating, flying, twitching and

galloping organisms, don’t just crawl through the underbrush; they thunder and shriek, yip and hiss, pointy teeth gleaming.

The most important of these are the Na’vi, and while their movements can bring to mind old-fashioned stop-motion animation, their faces

are a triumph of tech innovation, with tremors and twitches that make them immediately appealing and empathetic. By the time Neytiri

ushers Jake into her world of wonders — a lush dreamscape filled with kaleidoscopic and bioluminescent flora and fauna, with pink

jellyfishlike creatures that hang in the air and pleated orange flowers that snap shut like parasols — you are deep in the Na’vi-land.

It’s a world that looks as if it had been created by someone who’s watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau television or, like Mr. Cameron, done

a lot of diving. It’s also familiar because, like John Smith in “The New World,” Terrence Malick’s retelling of the Pocahontas story, Jake

has discovered Eden.

An Eden in three dimensions, that is. In keeping with his maximalist tendencies, Mr. Cameron has shot “Avatar” in 3-D (because many

theaters are not equipped to show 3-D, the movie will also be shown in the usual 2), an experiment that serves his material beautifully.

This isn’t the 3-D of the 1950s or even contemporary films, those flicks that try to give you a virtual poke in the eye with flying

spears. Rather Mr. Cameron uses 3-D to amplify the immersive experience of spectacle cinema. Instead of bringing you into the movie with

the customary tricks, with a widescreen or even Imax image filled with sweeping landscapes and big action, he uses 3-D seemingly to close

the space between the audience and the screen. He brings the movie to you.

After a few minutes the novelty of people and objects hovering above the row in front of you wears off, and you tend not to notice the 3-

D, which speaks to the subtlety of its use and potential future applications. Mr. Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but

he’s an old-fashioned filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise as Jake eventually does. On the face of

it there might seem something absurd about a movie that asks you to thrill to a natural world made almost entirely out of zeroes and ones

(and that feeds you an anticorporate line in a corporately financed entertainment). But one of the pleasures of the movies is that they

transport us, as Neytiri does with Jake, into imaginary realms, into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz.

If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it’s because “Avatar” is as much about our Earth as the universe

that Mr. Cameron has invented. But the movie’s truer meaning is in the audacity of its filmmaking.

Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life

(instead of iPhone size), if only because we were children. Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and

sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What’s often missing is awe,

something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn’t changed cinema, but with

blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder.

“Avatar” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Gun and explosive violence, death and despair.

AVATAR

Opens on Friday December 18, 2009 nationwide.

Written and directed by James Cameron; director of photography, Mauro Fiore; edited by Mr. Cameron, John Refoua and Stephen Rivkin; music

by James Horner; visual effects supervisor, Joe Letteri; production designers, Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; produced by Mr. Cameron

and Jon Landau; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 2 hours 46 minutes.

WITH: Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoë Saldana (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Grace Augustine), Stephen Lang (Col. Miles Quaritch),

Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon), Giovanni Ribisi (Carter Selfridge), Joel David Moore (Norm), C C H Pounder (Mo’at), Wes Studi (Eytukan)

and Laz Alonso (Tsu’Tey).