CuthbertJ - 01 September 2012 01:04 PM

All the explanations here make some sense, but I think are way to literal.  If that’s all it was was some very advanced machine, well then what’s the mystery. And why would Clark have been so evasive about it. He was an extremely brilliant guy with sharp wit. When asked, if all it was was a super machine, I would have expected him to reply “well it’s obviously just a piece of advanced technology you twit”.  He may have been a technologist through and through but if you read his other books, you know he’s got a definite poetic side to him.

This was one of the funny things about 2001.  It was derived from Clarke’s story “The Sentinel” which was about some alien device found on the Moon.

How much of the stuff in the movie was added by Kubrik?  How much control/influence did Clarke have?  Would Clarke rather go along with anything that was not TOO RIDICULOUS to get a decent movie made.

psik

psikeyhackr - 04 September 2012 09:47 AM

CuthbertJ - 01 September 2012 01:04 PM

All the explanations here make some sense, but I think are way to literal.  If that’s all it was was some very advanced machine, well then what’s the mystery. And why would Clark have been so evasive about it. He was an extremely brilliant guy with sharp wit. When asked, if all it was was a super machine, I would have expected him to reply “well it’s obviously just a piece of advanced technology you twit”.  He may have been a technologist through and through but if you read his other books, you know he’s got a definite poetic side to him.

This was one of the funny things about 2001.  It was derived from Clarke’s story “The Sentinel” which was about some alien device found on the Moon.

How much of the stuff in the movie was added by Kubrik?  How much control/influence did Clarke have?  Would Clarke rather go along with anything that was not TOO RIDICULOUS to get a decent movie made.

psik

I didn’t know it was derived from another of his stories. I’ll have to check that out.  I’ve read that he and Kubrik worked together extensively.  As for the monolith, everyone makes good points about it being a mechanical device of some type.  Like I said, if that’s the case then I’d like to ask Clarke, so what’s the big deal? Why the obfuscation?

George - 03 September 2012 10:45 AM

Yeah, well, that’s my point. The space station has to rotate to create gravity but the discovery of the tool usage happened within a second. The science of physics has to be perfect, where social sciences don’t have to follow any rules whatsoever. Meh.

I get what you mean.  My pet peeve is when the aliens have like 3 stubby blunt “fingers”.  There’s no way they’d be able to develop sophisticated technology with such primitive hands.

CuthbertJ - 04 September 2012 10:16 AM

George - 03 September 2012 10:45 AM

Yeah, well, that’s my point. The space station has to rotate to create gravity but the discovery of the tool usage happened within a second. The science of physics has to be perfect, where social sciences don’t have to follow any rules whatsoever. Meh.

I get what you mean.  My pet peeve is when the aliens have like 3 stubby blunt “fingers”.  There’s no way they’d be able to develop sophisticated technology with such primitive hands.

I wouldn’t be so sure. Fred Flintstone only had four fingers and they had some pretty cool tech for a bunch of dino era folks and then of course the Jetsons managed to build flying cars and robots with only four fingers. Maybe three fingers is just one too few though lol

I don’t know about the number of fingers, but HERE is an interesting article on the size of animals, by J. B. S. Haldane. Worth reading!

BTW, cartoon characters usually have only three fingers because it saves the animators time to produce the art. Serious animated movies, however, like the Pixar and Disney stuff for example, have humans with four fingers and BLINKING EYES! I guess it really does help to get the biology right to allow the audience to concentrate on the story instead.

Write4U - 04 September 2012 05:00 AM

And it’s kernel type is “monolithic”.

Ho, stop! I only introduced UNIX as one of my favourite movie glitches, more or less in line with Han Solo’s flight which took only x parsecs. I did not introduce it in connection of the contents of ‘2001’!

Monolithic kernels are architectures for operating systems, opposed to microkernels. From here:

Monolithic kernels, which have traditionally been used by Unix-like operating systems, contain all the operating system core functions and the device drivers (small programs that allow the operating system to interact with hardware devices, such as disk drives, video cards and printers). This is the traditional design of UNIX systems. A monolithic kernel is one single program that contains all of the code necessary to perform every kernel related task.

The microkernel approach consists of defining a simple abstraction over the hardware, with a set of primitives or system calls to implement minimal OS services such as memory management, multitasking, and inter-process communication. Other services, including those normally provided by the kernel, such as networking, are implemented in user-space programs, referred to as servers. Microkernels are easier to maintain than monolithic kernels, but the large number of system calls and context switches might slow down the system because they typically generate more overhead than plain function calls.

Windows NT originally was based on a pure microkernel approach. That is the reason why it was so terribly slow. When Microsoft choose for the hybrid approach to mitigate the performance problems they also introduced a lot of errors (inconsistencies between the kernel and the device drivers) which caused the famous blue screen of death. That’s the way to know that a lot of teller machines are based on Windows NT:

And now I probably told you more than you wanted to know…

GdB - 04 September 2012 10:49 PM

Write4U - 04 September 2012 05:00 AM

And it’s kernel type is “monolithic”.

Ho, stop! I only introduced UNIX as one of my favourite movie glitches, more or less in line with Han Solo’s flight which took only x parsecs. I did not introduce it in connection of the contents of ‘2001’!

Monolithic kernels are architectures for operating systems, opposed to microkernels. From here:

Monolithic kernels, which have traditionally been used by Unix-like operating systems, contain all the operating system core functions and the device drivers (small programs that allow the operating system to interact with hardware devices, such as disk drives, video cards and printers). This is the traditional design of UNIX systems. A monolithic kernel is one single program that contains all of the code necessary to perform every kernel related task.

The microkernel approach consists of defining a simple abstraction over the hardware, with a set of primitives or system calls to implement minimal OS services such as memory management, multitasking, and inter-process communication. Other services, including those normally provided by the kernel, such as networking, are implemented in user-space programs, referred to as servers. Microkernels are easier to maintain than monolithic kernels, but the large number of system calls and context switches might slow down the system because they typically generate more overhead than plain function calls.

Windows NT originally was based on a pure microkernel approach. That is the reason why it was so terribly slow. When Microsoft choose for the hybrid approach to mitigate the performance problems they also introduced a lot of errors (inconsistencies between the kernel and the device drivers) which caused the famous blue screen of death. That’s the way to know that a lot of teller machines are based on Windows NT:

And now I probably told you more than you wanted to know…

On the contrary GdB, thank you for taking the time to explain the differences.
I was just intrigued by the name UNIX (heard it before) but had no clue how it worked. Then I saw the word “monolithic” and it struck me as having perhaps a relationship to the Monolith in 2001…...   You know me, i’ll dig up something, pertinent or not…