Word: virtually
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Interestingly, some of the directors are contemptuous of the field in which they've risen to the top. "Music videos are largely rubbish," says Glazer, whose video Virtual Insanity, for the trippy Euro-dance group Jamiroquai, is nominated for a record 10 MTV awards. Says Sigismondi: "I don't watch [MTV]. I'm really not up on what's trendy. I'm in my own little world...
Glazer's video for Jamiroquai is less flashy but nonetheless eye catching. The band is mostly unknown in the States; its current album, Traveling Without Moving, is a mere echo of stronger, tighter, better American R. and B. from the '70s. Virtual Insanity, a rant against technology that draws heavily, if not entirely successfully, on Stevie Wonder for musical inspiration, is the only truly catchy song on the album. In the video we see Jamiroquai's singer, Jay Kay, standing alone in a mostly empty room. The floor seems to move as he dances, sings and poses; furniture appears...
...years of R. and D.--and more money, he says, than it would be worth--to create a fully realized, ready-for-its-close-up human from digital scratch. But that day is surely coming. Computer graphics--CG, in industry shorthand--have already been used to create loosely rendered virtual stunt people suitable for brief action sequences. The buzz has it that James Cameron's forthcoming Titanic will represent a leap forward with its use of CG extras, detailed down to the misty breath they exhale in the cold night air, although one source who has seen completed footage from...
...direst threat to Windows hegemony may be Java, the Web-minded programming language created at Sun Microsystems in the early '90s. Java's great strength is its "portability"; in a Java-centric future, developers could write programs not for one OS at a time but for the Java Virtual Machine, the software that could run numerous next-wave computers: PCs, smart cell phones, personal digital assistants, stripped-down network computers and so on. "What should Apple do next?" asks Sun CEO and Java evangelist Scott McNealy. "Put 100% energy behind Java. Innovate, compete and add value. That's so obvious...
...stunned by the crass reference to the Russian space station Mir as a "Rube Goldberg contraption" [NOTEBOOK, July 28]. Mir was built and has operated on a virtual shoestring for more than twice as long as intended by its original design specifications. While it is not sophisticated by U.S. standards, it has made valuable contributions to the body of scientific knowledge. By comparison, America's aerospace program has been historically bloated, redundant and rife with its own spectacular failures, including the Hubble Space Telescope, Apollo 13, failed Vanguard launches and, yes, the unfortunate deaths in the Challenger disaster. I applaud...