Hacker Cinema
RED
2010 · Film · 111 min
Part of RED Collection
Directed by Robert Schwentke
ActionAdventureComedyCrimeThriller
After surviving an assault from a squad of hit men, retired CIA black ops agent Frank Moses reassembles his old team for an all-out war. Frank reunites with old Joe, crazy Marvin and wily Victoria to uncover a massive conspiracy that threatens their lives. Only their expert training will allow them to survive a near-impossible mission -- breaking into CIA headquarters.
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11 comments on Hacker News
I remember walking away from that film thinking Bruce Willis would need something to rescue his career.
And my goodness, didn't he luck out with RED and Moonrise Kingdom.
I think you can maintain the feedback loop without degrading the user experience if you actually ask them what they want to be shown.
The problem lies in that "engagement" definition : if the user clicked on a thumb, then they must have been attracted to it. In reality, there is considerably more explanation for that click : They could be looking for a specific title, mistakenly thought _this_ actor was playing in the movie, clicked on it to reset the search, wondered if this was a show or a film, missclicked, just picked the least annoying in an ocean of shitty propositions... An algorithm alone can never find its way for better suggestions if it lacks _intent_. The outcome of this lack of data and the lack of data scientists' imagination, will always be stuck in a local minima.
So, what solution do you have to gather this precious intent and act on it ? Well, you start small on predictable things : "what would you recommend to Agatha if they liked _Expendables_ ?" "Is _RED_ a good addition to the list if I'm looking for Action/Comedy films ?"
And later "Are you looking for Action/Comedy films ? here is some proposals"
It works the same for different approaches, for picking thumbnails, or promoting movies. Just ask user for what's motivate them. If Netflix had asked me last week, I would have told them their catalog is getting worse and worse so we prefer using disney+ instead.
Prime and Crunchyroll have the same problem as Netflix: they don't own (much) of the content they offer. And are entirely at the mercy of the content hoarders like Disney and Warner Brothers.
Just checked. In Sweden the featured videos in Amazon Prime are: Shrek (2001), Red (2010), Twilight (2008), Top Gun (1986), Life of Pi (2012) etc. with a hodgepodge of Amazon's own content and recent-ish movies ranging from Madea's Farewell Tour to Amazon's Chemical Hearts to SCOOB!
Yeah, nah. I get the same crap with Netflix.
Cinema cameras need to be able to record at 4k (real 4k, 4048x2028) at upto 32bit per channel. 24 times a second.
Thats a lot of data. Now, RED at the time didn't have a way of recording to large disk arrays, (unlike the alexa) so they used their own SSD pack things.
This limited the amount of space, and shooting time.
So they needed a way of doing more than RLE compression.
This meant that they had to start chucking away some data. With standard JPEG, you throw away 3/4 of the blue and green channels (kinda, its a different colour space) and then compress the rest.
The problem? in VFX the blue and green channels are crucial for "pulling a key" (green/blue screen work, the less clear, the more manuakl cleanup needed, which costs $$$). So all that 4k resolution will be useless because in practice, the bit that the VFX team need will be < HD res.
So RED used JPEG2000 that uses wavelets to compress things. Roughly speaking, instead of storing a per pixel value, you group chunks of the image together and store the _change in frequency_, that is the difference in colour between pixels.
This doesn't reduce the resolution so much and doesn't produce square artefacts like oldschool JPEG. The problem is that its quite CPU intensive. To the point that it would take >30 seconds to decode a frame.
GPUs make it trivial to do it in real time now, but back then, its was a massive faff.
Also, RED are masters of bullshit and marketing. There is quality loss, its just they never tell you that.
Please explain how crowd-funding a movie even makes sense? There are plenty of movies with actors I love that are terrible. Have you seen RED (or worse, RED 2)? For the same reason your boss doesn't pay you for the month you haven't worked yet, you shouldn't expect people to produce movies without any reliable way of getting paid.
I thought RED was an alright movie at best. To be quite honest, I am surprised they made a sequel.
I like those actors too, even though neither are surefire promises that a movie is great (seen the Star Wars prequels or Red lately?). More to the point - why do I care about how they interact with Siri? I guess Apple is subtly implying that if you use Siri, you are but one degree of separation from famous/cool people. Cute, but a sad lowering of the bar for a company that once looked for customers that were trying to change the world.
If you're after a specific individual, a far better target than their computer would be their cell phone. Computers are complex and stationary. Cell phones are eminently more susceptible to this type of attack because the government can compel carriers to use technology that is already in place. No malware package required.
Working in telecom was enlightening for me. There's a feature called "executive barge in" that pops up from time to time when shopping for PBX systems. Executive barge in allows a user with the appropriate rights to open an audio channel to any phone connected to the switch, bypassing the alerting phase. That is to say, the phone never rings; the audio channel just opens. Most systems provide some sort of brief alert tone, but this is entirely implementation based. There's nothing implicit about opening a channel that would require a tone.
All digital phone systems have the ability to implement a feature like this. Cell phones are digital phones. With old analog (POTS) phones, when the phone was "on hook", there was a physical change in the connection of the copper pairs. In modern phone systems on-hook/off-hook is just a software state. There is no physical difference. Opening an audio channel is a distinct event, completely separate from the alerting signal [1] in common cell phone protocols.
The bottom line is that if you're really concerned that someone is listening in, you should watch the horrible movie "RED" and imitate John Malkovich's character the best you can.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/54495209/UMTS-3G-WCDMA-Call-Flows
Cool, it deserved it. It was an excellent movie. The Social Network was my own personal pick for "best movie of 2010", although - to be fair - I didn't see every movie released in 2010. But I would rank it above Inception, Shutter Island, Tron:Legacy, True Grit, Harry Potter, and Red - out of the other good movies that come to mind from last year.
Nice pacing, good acting, great score, inspirational, entertaining, thought-provoking, it really had everything. It was a great trip inside the world that a lot of us live in / aspire to live in. Maybe a non-hacker wouldn't see it in quite the same light, but I really thought it was just excellent.
My Choice: The Social Network
Why? Largely because I find it inspirational, vis-a-vis my own entrepreneurial ambitions. I've watched it twice already, and every time I watch that, I feel very inspired to sit down and start hacking, and work on building something.
I'm not the world's biggest fan of Mark Zuckerberg, or even of Facebook; but the movie was well-done, entertaining AND inspirational. What more can you ask for?
Honorable Mentions:
Red
Inception
Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Pt 1
Looking forward to:
Tron: Legacy
This simply isn't true.
I just watched RED a few days ago (in my home) and it just opened 2 weeks ago, if that.
Ditto on Monsters, which I saw before it opened around here.
And tonight I'll be watching Social Network, which is in the theaters everywhere but it's just not convenient for me to drag my gf and her 6 and 9 year old to see a movie they won't want to sit through (well she will, but the kids, not likely).
I'd be willing to pay for this privilege - aka watching in the comfort of my own home - but they leave me no choice in the matter.