Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Gaidin
It's not really something for a rational explanation when the war against the machines spawns a religion that spawns a new commandment in the OC Bible. Picture the Machine War of Terminator on a Galactic Scale. Now picture humanity's response once they won and were staring at the rubble. 10,000 years later the religion is history, but the certain parts of the culture. Thall shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. Is not.
Yes but dune takes it to an 11. There is no reason not to have super computers for example. Just to throttle them at any approach to be sentient. I mean its nice to have a Mentat but while he or she is busy trying brute force crack your 16 digit luggage password who is doing the math on that asteroid that might be on a collision course for your home world? Any great house almost assuredly needs not one but a least an IBM steno pool sized amount from the days of the 50s.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Quote:
Originally Posted by
conon394
Yes but dune takes it to an 11. There is no reason not to have super computers for example. Just to throttle them at any approach to be sentient. I mean its nice to have a Mentat but while he or she is busy trying brute force crack your 16 digit luggage password who is doing the math on that asteroid that might be on a collision course for your home world? Any great house almost assuredly needs not one but a least an IBM steno pool sized amount from the days of the 50s.
The Mentat doesn't brute force crack your 16 digit password. The mentat is the human computer. Functionally, the mentat is what they did for lack of sentient AI computers with massive memory banks. Cracking 16 digit passwords? Please. Try pure functional data analysis. And the more data the mentat has, the better approximation they give.
Though, it is revealed in Chapterhouse: Dune that the first Mentat is a human slave trained by an AI computer during the war. But, potato potato.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
At least in the movies/tv series, the mentats didn't do anything impressive. They mostly died, after messing up the plans of their masters.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Paul Atreides did pretty good.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Kyriakos
At least in the movies/tv series, the mentats didn't do anything impressive. They mostly died, after messing up the plans of their masters.
Also I'm not sure you realized the character positions of the mentats in the books, what they know, when they know it, when they can act on it. Things like that. Stuff that makes a mentat worthwhile.
But I'm also not sure you're interested.
So there's that.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
I didn't reach the mentat chapters - only read the first chapter.
Then again it wouldn't be unprecedented if the author just wasn't at the time the book was written that aware of what powers computers could have. Even far more recent books - eg the Necromancer - have ridiculous claims about computers, for example someone there was trying to sell a few kb of ram, a supposed important commodity.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Kyriakos
Then again it wouldn't be unprecedented if the author just wasn't at the time the book was written that aware of what powers computers could have.
When AI almost won the war to take over the universe, what potential greater power wasn't the author aware of?
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Gaidin
The Mentat doesn't brute force crack your 16 digit password. The mentat is the human computer. Functionally, the mentat is what they did for lack of sentient AI computers with massive memory banks. Cracking 16 digit passwords? Please. Try pure functional data analysis. And the more data the mentat has, the better approximation they give.
Though, it is revealed in Chapterhouse: Dune that the first Mentat is a human slave trained by an AI computer during the war. But, potato potato.
Fair enough. Like I said I was never really a fan. I am about on Dune where somebody would be if they were commenting on the new JRRT thing amazon is doing after recalling I (theoretically) only read the Hobbit in HS the LOTR once but ignored the appendix and recall watching Jackson's movies a while ago. I think I wait out this thread to see what the reaction to the movie is.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Quote:
Originally Posted by
John Doe
When AI almost won the war to take over the universe, what potential greater power wasn't the author aware of?
Can't say. Going by how mentats are presented in the Lynch movie and the SyFy series, they aren't very computer-like. Eg that Harkonnen guy seemed very alarmed by what the Atreides mentat said just before he died, but then didn't mind being next to Leto and promptly died from the poison gas.
Are the Navigators a type of (mutated) mentat? At least they had serious calculations to do, to allow the ships not exiting where there is a mass.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Quote:
Originally Posted by
saxdude
No offence but this strikes me as missing the mountain for the pebble. The whole point of setting up the story as it is, was so that you don't waste time arguing over the technical
aspects of the universe.
It's like complaining about how obviously idiotic and convoluted the concept of lightsabers actually is.
Actually, I think the lightsaber is a cool device, it was a way to bring sword fighting in a believable way into a futuristic world with blasters. The Jedi, with their ability to sense the future, could move their light saber into position where the blast bolt would be and block it. Ans thr light sabers were powerful, able to cut through blaster doors, as you saw in the Phantom Menance.
The point is, that you want to do things in a least somewhat believable way, not just because the author says so. Dune is a lot like The Last Jedi, where things happen just because the director wants to do things that way, however much it makes no sense. Science Fiction requires a "suspension of disbelief", but you won't get that suspension by the reader or audience if keep doing things without laying the foundation for the rrader and audience to suspend their disbelief. Dune, like The Last Jedi, does not lay that groundwork, thr author/director does stuff simply because that is the way the author/director wants it that way. The original Flash Gordon had people fighting with swords, that made no sense when people had ray guns.- just pick up a ray gun and blast the person with the sword. Star Wars made using the light saber believable, because the Jedi could stop blaster bolts with it, and it cut through doors that were blaster proof. The light saber made sense for the Jedi, who were more into defense than offense - "Not as random as a blastrr. A more elegent weapon for a more.civilized age", you could see the Jedi prdferring to using an elegant lightsaber over a crude blaster.
In the books, Dune brought back knives in fighting in a hamfisted way - the shields were just an obvious and crude plot device to bring back knife fighting into a futuristic world, but having shields explode when hit by lasers made no sense, and was like TLJ ships suddenly running out of fuel for hyper jumping with no good reason or justification, because a lazy director wanted his movie that way and could be bothered to come up with a plausible justification. The movies actually do a much better job in making the use of knives believable than the book - personal shields block energy weapons and high speed projectiles like bullets, but would allow slow movie objects like knives tomgo through. If nothing penetrated a shield, you could not pick up anything, or turn a door knob. The excuse "its just fiction, so the author can do whatever they want" is not really true, not if you want to make good fiction. You can't just decide to make Superman evil, without laying the proper believable work. You can't assert that people could give up all computers but still maintain an interstellar technological society with space flight. Advance AI, yes, but all computers? No. Lazy story writing.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
If shields just exploded (as in a nuclear explosion) when hit by lasers, shouldn't that have turned every war into a stalemate? ^_^
And that's only assuming the enemy side was already in force on the ground, and had no suicidal people. Otherwise, they could just target a shield from orbit, using Navigators or something.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Kyriakos
Can't say. Going by how mentats are presented in the Lynch movie and the SyFy series, they aren't very computer-like. Eg that Harkonnen guy seemed very alarmed by what the Atreides mentat said just before he died, but then didn't mind being next to Leto and promptly died from the poison gas.
Are the Navigators a type of (mutated) mentat? At least they had serious calculations to do, to allow the ships not exiting where there is a mass.
The Mentats train themselves to fall back to what they call a "Naive Mind" without preconception or prejudice that can extract patterns or logic of data from what they're given. Essentially, they're the computing mind combined with the creativity of humanity. If this were the "crack the 16 digit password" stereotype that conon put forward, one typical engineer might have to spend quite some time programming the hardware and set it loose to brute force the password and wait again, quite some time for the program to then happen. The mentat, based on the person whose password they're cracking, analyzes who they are, their life history, and gets their password in one try.
The Navigators are another monster. They are outrageously addicted to spice from Arrakis, and are mutated from it. They are prescient, not trained to analyze the data. This prescience, lets them fly the guild heighliners at FTL speeds throughout the galaxies without flying them into stars.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Common Soldier
Actually, I think the lightsaber is a cool device, it was a way to bring sword fighting in a believable way into a futuristic world with blasters. The Jedi, with their ability to sense the future, could move their light saber into position where the blast bolt would be and block it. Ans thr light sabers were powerful, able to cut through blaster doors, as you saw in the Phantom Menance.
The point is, that you want to do things in a least somewhat believable way, not just because the author says so. Dune is a lot like The Last Jedi, where things happen just because the director wants to do things that way, however much it makes no sense. Science Fiction requires a "suspension of disbelief", but you won't get that suspension by the reader or audience if keep doing things without laying the foundation for the rrader and audience to suspend their disbelief. Dune, like The Last Jedi, does not lay that groundwork, thr author/director does stuff simply because that is the way the author/director wants it that way. The original Flash Gordon had people fighting with swords, that made no sense when people had ray guns.- just pick up a ray gun and blast the person with the sword. Star Wars made using the light saber believable, because the Jedi could stop blaster bolts with it, and it cut through doors that were blaster proof. The light saber made sense for the Jedi, who were more into defense than offense - "Not as random as a blastrr. A more elegent weapon for a more.civilized age", you could see the Jedi prdferring to using an elegant lightsaber over a crude blaster.
In the books, Dune brought back knives in fighting in a hamfisted way - the shields were just an obvious and crude plot device to bring back knife fighting into a futuristic world, but having shields explode when hit by lasers made no sense, and was like TLJ ships suddenly running out of fuel for hyper jumping with no good reason or justification, because a lazy director wanted his movie that way and could be bothered to come up with a plausible justification. The movies actually do a much better job in making the use of knives believable than the book - personal shields block energy weapons and high speed projectiles like bullets, but would allow slow movie objects like knives tomgo through. If nothing penetrated a shield, you could not pick up anything, or turn a door knob. The excuse "its just fiction, so the author can do whatever they want" is not really true, not if you want to make good fiction. You can't just decide to make Superman evil, without laying the proper believable work. You can't assert that people could give up all computers but still maintain an interstellar technological society with space flight. Advance AI, yes, but all computers? No. Lazy story writing.
See, all you're doing with the lightsabers is retroactively rationalizing a thing you like to make sense, it's not hard to rip the whole concept of lightsabers into shreds if you really want to think about it.
For one, relying on the force is a literal deus ex machina. Secondly, seeing the future does not preclude the use of a sword, just get out of the way and shoot back with an objectively superior ranged weapon. Third, if your lasers are so slow that a sentient being's reflexes are enough to evade it, how ever advanced they may be, then get a gun. Armour that is resistant to bullets is never suggested in the movies and is a post-film rationalization, which wouldn't matter because jedi don't wear armor apparently. Lastly, swords are not defensive weapons.
None of that is any more reasonable than what is presented in DUNE, yet you only accept it because you like it more.
Again, a lot of you are missing the forest for the tree's trying to debate the technical aspects of a universe when it never really mattered a whole lot to the story. Timey Wimey bladebla, they can't use guns cause' reasons, move along with what actually matters please. Or be a massive nerd and make up a whole extended universe to rationalize things that don't need to be thought of, if that's your prerogative.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Common Soldier
Actually, I think the lightsaber is a cool device, it was a way to bring sword fighting in a believable way into a futuristic world with blasters. The Jedi, with their ability to sense the future, could move their light saber into position where the blast bolt would be and block it. Ans thr light sabers were powerful, able to cut through blaster doors, as you saw in the Phantom Menance.
I'm just going to say this paragraph kills your point. "I like it therefor senseless technology and abilities are acceptable in this world!!!"
Dune is hardly the only low-tech sci-fi with space travel with cultural reasons to avoid high tech computers. And doing a good job in-world to show it. You should look around at the sci-fi channel's BSG sometime.
Now, if you just can't stand the fact that a lasgun blast puts the power output of a shield into the nuclear levels... and the shield only lets slow moving objects through... You should just avoid the story and the thread.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Quote:
If this were the "crack the 16 digit password" stereotype that conon put forward, one typical engineer might have to spend quite some time programming the hardware and set it loose to brute force the password and wait again, quite some time for the program to then happen. The mentat, based on the person whose password they're cracking, analyzes who they are, their life history, and gets their password in one try.
OK can't resist. That is workable if you start with the guess that password is something I can remember and construct out of phases (obviously in reality you are right most passwords are vulnerable to the person and thus so much the famous Mitnick hacking was so boring and only half so exciting as on TV.). Although I would hope in fact the Mentat would first suggest just turning my keyboard over or rifling my wallet for a password list. But what if I found an A. Turing to program my dune era Ferranti Mark 1 and simply used a true random digit password they would have no meta data to work with. But again I am only working with recollections of one and half books.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Quote:
Originally Posted by
conon394
OK can't resist. That is workable if you start with the guess that password is something I can remember and construct out of phases (obviously in reality you are right most passwords are vulnerable to the person and thus so much the famous Mitnick hacking was so boring and only half so exciting as on TV.). Although I would hope in fact the Mentat would first suggest just turning my keyboard over or rifling my wallet for a password list. But what if I found an A. Turing to program my dune era Ferranti Mark 1 and simply used a true random digit password they would have no meta data to work with. But again I am only working with recollections of one and half books.
You have already recommended with your posts that you haven't read the entire 6 Herbert books much less liked them. Much less familiarized yourself with them. If you can't at least google the dune fandom wiki that gets deep into the Mentat theory and why I can use your sick "16 digit password" stuff with how the mentats work and why they can do what they do, then you really have no leg to stand on.
You need to not just understand the world, but the characters and how they're built.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Looks terrible...
Oh god... I just realized but it has the kid from "The King" in the lead role. Why does this little :wub: persist in tormenting me?
Definitely skipping this one, none of the nerds I hang out with is enthusiastic about it anyway.
Dune is that movie that everyone for the past 50 years has wanted to make. How many directors so far have attempted to get the rights or actually acquired the rights and made an awful movie? I am tempted to make a list but it wasn't just Jodorowsky or David Lynch. They are never going to get it right, just give up and don't get your hopes up.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
So it looks like that the movie has been released, did anyone see it already? Comments?
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
In the UK we have to wait for 21 October,
There are some low quality copy on pirate sites,
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
Wut you mean that in Italy we can see it and you in the UK cannot? Really :D
Brexit anyone?? :laughter:
ok sorry, silly jokes aside, anyone has seen it?