Slashdot Mirror

http://montypython.50webs.com/...

I get it ... you recognize that it's Monty Python, and that it has something to do with being incapacitated. Unfortunately, you've committed a faux pas by selecting a quote that's from The Holy Grail, when there were so many others that would've been appropriate from that scene alone. As 'resting' and 'pining for the fjords' have already mentioned, you still had your option of either side of the conversation, either claiming it's dead or denying it.

I personally would've gone with a 'stunned' or 'prolonged squawk' reference ... maybe 'nailed to the perch' reference if those had already been mentioned:

Mr. Praline: Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Owner: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
Mr. Praline: The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
Owner: Nononono, no, no! 'E's resting!
Mr. Praline: All right then, if he's restin', I'll wake him up! (shouting at the cage) 'Ello, Mister Polly Parrot! I've got a lovely fresh cuttle fish for you if you show...
(owner hits the cage)
Owner: There, he moved!
Mr. Praline: No, he didn't, that was you hitting the cage!
Owner: I never!!
Mr. Praline: Yes, you did!
Owner: I never, never did anything...
Mr. Praline: (yelling and hitting the cage repeatedly) 'ELLO POLLY!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o'clock alarm call!
(Takes parrot out of the cage and thumps its head on the counter. Throws it up in the air and watches it plummet to the floor.)
Mr. Praline: Now that's what I call a dead parrot.
Owner: No, no.....No, 'e's stunned!
Mr. Praline: STUNNED?!?
Owner: Yeah! You stunned him, just as he was wakin' up! Norwegian Blues stun easily, major.
Mr. Praline: Um...now look...now look, mate, I've definitely 'ad enough of this. That parrot is definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not 'alf an hour ago, you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk.
Owner: Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for the fjords.
Mr. Praline: PININ' for the FJORDS?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did he fall flat on his back the moment I got 'im home?
Owner: The Norwegian Blue prefers keepin' on it's back! Remarkable bird, id'nit, squire? Lovely plumage!
Mr. Praline: Look, I took the liberty of examining that parrot when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.
(pause)
Owner: Well, o'course it was nailed there! If I hadn't nailed that bird down, it would have nuzzled up to those bars, bent 'em apart with its beak, and VOOM! Feeweeweewee!
Mr. Praline: "VOOM"?!? Mate, this bird wouldn't "voom" if you put four million volts through it! 'E's bleedin' demised!
Owner: No no! 'E's pining!
Mr. Praline: 'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

Thermal to electrical efficiency:
Light water: 32-36%
LFTR: 45%
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor#Economy_and_efficiency

Fuel Efficiency:
Light/Hard water: ~0.5% burned
LFTR: over 99% burned
Source: http://thorium.50webs.com/

Sometimes I think Nintendo harvests energy from people shouting 'gimmick' and uses it to power their R&D division.

I wouldn't be too surprised; it's at least a renewable energy source. ;)

In all seriousness, I think they might actually do something similar -- Nintendo has long focused on gaining and maintaining a lead in the industry by being disruptive, and seeing how many people are upset can be one way of gauging how disruptive you're being. This fellow has written quite a bit about Nintendo's disruptive strategies, and most of what I've read sounds spot-on.

I'd recommend Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy for starters. The article is long, but worth the read.

Cheers,

Sometimes I think Nintendo harvests energy from people shouting 'gimmick' and uses it to power their R&D division.

I wouldn't be too surprised; it's at least a renewable energy source. ;)

In all seriousness, I think they might actually do something similar -- Nintendo has long focused on gaining and maintaining a lead in the industry by being disruptive, and seeing how many people are upset can be one way of gauging how disruptive you're being. This fellow has written quite a bit about Nintendo's disruptive strategies, and most of what I've read sounds spot-on.

I'd recommend Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy for starters. The article is long, but worth the read.

Cheers,

Maybe they noticed the success of casual gaming (Wii mostly), and figured that better profits await if they can sell equipment to wider audience.

Or maybe they're gluing feathers onto their bodies and trying to fly. I wouldn't say "casual" is exactly the right word for Nintendo's strategy.

If you don't know who Malstrom is, read his site, particularly the article called Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy, where he basically bashes hardcore gaming and... well, see for yourself.

His blog has opened my eyes. More people should read his stuff. He might not be right about everything, but it's a refreshing change from the crappy hardcore industry press and idiot "analysts" who pull stuff out of their behinds.

If you don't know who Malstrom is, read his site, particularly the article called Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy, where he basically bashes hardcore gaming and... well, see for yourself.

His blog has opened my eyes. More people should read his stuff. He might not be right about everything, but it's a refreshing change from the crappy hardcore industry press and idiot "analysts" who pull stuff out of their behinds.

I suspect that the people who joke about the lack of sex after marriage are the people who screwed up somewhere along the way and aren't getting any anymore.

Either that or they're Monty Python fans.

MR. HARRY BLACKITT: Look at them, bloody Catholics, filling the bloody world up with bloody people they can't afford to bloody feed.

MRS. BLACKITT: What are we dear?

MR. BLACKITT: Protestant, and fiercely proud of it.

MRS. BLACKITT: Hmm. Well, why do they have so many children?

MR. BLACKITT: Because... every time they have sexual intercourse, they have to have a baby.

MRS. BLACKITT: But it's the same with us, Harry.

MR. BLACKITT: What do you mean?

MRS. BLACKITT: Well, I mean, we've got two children, and we've had sexual intercourse twice.

there has been 'significant disruption' to the games industry's business model.

Yes and it's called the Wii.

Everyone nodding their heads in agreement should read Malstrom's articles. Pre-1985 everyone knew the standard controller was a joystick. Then Nintendo released the button controller, and it became the standard. The joystick is still around for some specialist games like flight simulators, but new games have replaced it. Ironically, buttonpad games may soon be confined to the PC.

WWAKD (What Would A Klingon Do?)

http://klingonsforjesus.50webs.com/

Some argue that these days a "hardcore" game* tends to have guaranteed progression (you get ahead as long as you keep playing) but instead is very long and "epic", taking a long time to finish. Meanwhile the "new" gaming the Wii brought focusses more on immediate challenge and high scores with short "content" for the games and a design more reminescent of the arcade days with each play starting from the beginning and ending not long after, at best storing the resulting score. Weird as that may sound, the current market does indeed have a tendency to make easy but time consuming games that quite frankly seem to assert the player is a total idiot who has no idea what an analog stick does (if that was the case he wouldn't have gotten the console set up) and once he figured that out should never be subjected to anything requiring more thought than pulling levers in the right order that's spelt out in ten different places.

*=These articles, for example, though they assert that hardcore refers to the core market of gaming which is as good a definition as any other considering noone really knows what "hardcore" means.

I don't think it's true anyway. While more hardware power is likely in the next system it's more of a secondary concern for Nintendo (they'll slap some in but not throw much money at it). If you read these there's pretty convincing arguments (though sometimes brought in a pretty annoying style) about what path Nintendo is following, what that involves and what that doesn't involve. To Nintendo more raw power is not a step ahead, they're developing into a completely different direction. Going for a pure power improvement would kill them, it would negate all the things they did right with the Wii (identifying that more hardware power is not needed much by the consumer and identifying underdeveloped aspects of consoles that consumers DO need).

In short, Wii HD would spell doom for Nintendo and you can be sure they won't do that.

No, business strategy.

Wow, that's an amazing vista. You sure were lucky, especially since from what friends from alaska have told me, it's more typical to grow up with this view out their window.

Here is an interesting counter-perspective on "it's the casual games selling Wiis". http://malstrom.50webs.com/birdman.html Premise: the Wii is a disruptive technology. The goal is not simply to target casual gamers. Rather, it is to redefine the way gamers enter and evolve in the marketplace.

The iPhone is aimed at trendy young males, the DS is aimed at pretty much anyone who wants to play a game. It has the bases covered with plenty of good and successful games for kids (Nintendogs and Pokemon are big system sellers, especially the former), "serious" games for adults (mostly Brain Age but lots of other games too) and of course the franchise standbys and hardcore games for the veteran gamer. Noteworthy is that the games that sell the system are good in their own right (to beat e.g. Nintendogs you can't just make a game about pets, you must make a game that shows the most desirable traits of pets in a fashion that's believable and disbelief-suspending to the user). One big difference between the iPhone and DS is that the DS has Nintendo who would still provide a strong baseload of games even if everyone else has no faith in the system, Apple relies completely on third parties who can leave the system or just churn out crappy mass games that tarnish the image of the system. This site offers a theory on how Nintendo is succeeding with the DS and Wii and having a big impact on what games get made is instrumental to that move.

Not only that, Nintendo already took Apple's usual strength of improving UIs, the hardware Nintendo sells isn't a usability nightmare that Apple could capitalize on. Nintendo provides a cheap, reliable (including long battery life) and usable system with plenty of good to great software. Hell, they're even selling shiny white plastic now.

I wish my connection was that quick, I could game better. http://canimakeonemillion.50webs.com/

I do agree that movie piracy is becoming a problem, but know where near as large a problem as it is hyped up to be in the media. Donate and I will love you.

• Tbird import silently drops any file from consideration for importing if it doesn't have an _exact_ file type of 'TEXT' - even though it also checks, seemingly, to make sure the first four bytes of the file are _exactly_ the string 'From'. Why the need for this belt-and-braces set of tests for what is, after all, and importer function - something that should be as expansive and forgiving as possible? Why no consideration that files coming from another platform might have a blank type field, no way for the user to specify looser checking (such as "if it ends in .mbx or .mbox it's likely safe to consider it a mailbox") - and no warning to the user that something's been skipped. If no valid files are found to import because of the type code problem, the importer hangs forever. my quick fix: write a Perl script that uses the SetFile() function and call it from a 'find' run at the command line.
• Line-ending characters. Parts of the importer seem happy with DOS line endings - but other parts choke if they find a DOS line-end (x0D0A) or Unix (x0D only) end. How hard is it to have a "get next line" routine that handles this correctly? After all, we're dealing with an import function here, something that should be able to deal with data that's not exactly perfect.my quick fix: use "find" and "flip" to convert all mailbox files to Mac-style line-endings.
• High-order characters. If the importer _does_ finally find what it thinks is a mailbox, and gets past the line ending problem, but encounters (seemingly) ANY high-order characters in the mail file, it stops importing the message and skips to the next one, silently truncating it. Unfortunately, characters like x93/x94 (beginning and ending curly quote marks) are really, really popular in HTML-ized mail. So you end up with Swiss cheese for an imported mail store if you've got anything other than old vanilla plain-text email to import. my quick fix: use the (excellent) OS X hex editor 0xED to look at the raw files and test various solutions, then use "find" and "tr" from a bash script to substitute low-order characters for the ones Tbird didn't like in each mailbox in turn.

As I said, there may have been other steps in this process that I've forgotten.

My point isn't that these solutions, in my case, were that hard. But figuring out what was wrong, and implementing them, took huge amounts of time and patience. An ordinary user would never have these means (knowledge of command-line Unix utilities, and insight into what might be failing) at his/her disposal. And they surely wouldn't have gone to these lengths to diagnose and correct the problems. (Although, to be honest, an ordinary user wouldn't have 10-15 years of email saved up that they wanted to convert to a new platform).

And - more importantly, and some of the reason for this rant - I think that import/conversion function, especially in FOSS software, have a greater need to be as friendly and bulletproof as possible, because the user's still quite possibly in the "I'm going to try it out and see if I want to use it instead of my old [proprietary] application if it doesn't work'. But in Tbird, seemingly, Import's it's at most an afterthought, and extremely fragile even AFTER you've used third-party apps like Eudora Rescue or Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to try and get around the known issues, limitations, and deficiencies in the code. That isn't the way it should be in an app that's trying to compete for mind and market share with some pretty damn good commercial or closed-source apps.

I'm heavy Eudora user and have over a decade of archived mailboxes. It has always used the unix-mail style text format for mailboxes, with attachments saved separately. (I guess we all know Outlook stores everything in one horrible PST file.)

But... Eudora had terrible problems corrupting mailboxes all through the late 1990's and early 2000's. They finally got it fixed about four years ago. I'd search for an email I knew was there, I could grep it, but it was gone from the message list. Looking at the text file, I'd see the delimiting blank line between messages got crushed. It took them a long time to fix that. Handling nonprintable characters and line endings correctly seems to have been the problem. I think they even let ASCII 26 (x1A) into the files, which acts as an EOF in many Windows/DOS text formats.

As for MIME/HTML, at least in Windows, Eudora handles it two ways. You can choose to use "Microsoft's Viewer" (default) or Eudora's rendering, which has had bugs but now seems stable.

Overall, Eudora has not been as perfect as described here, but much better and safer than Outlook. And right now, it is stable. The almost-current 7.0.1.0 version lasted over a year, I believe. In any case, the release schedule has been slow lately.

You can read about "Eudora Rescue" here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_Issues_:_I mport_From_Eudora#Importing_Eudora_Mail_with_Eudor a_Rescue
and here:
http://qwerky.50webs.com/eudorarescue/
I haven't used it since I didn't hear about it until after I stopped seeing ASCII 26's, etc.