I don't see how anyone can dislike the first part.
The very start of the episode will go down as the funniest scene in Trek history, the rewrite of the final scene of First Contact. They even had the music and everything. It watched it twice before I realized they hadn't gotten the guy who played Cochrane back, but it was amazingly well edited.
And continuity on the mirror universe seems okay. The logo for the Empire is an dagger through the earth, whereas in the future it's a dagger though the Klingon's three-pointed symbol. Obviously, this empire hasn't hooked up with the Klingons yet.
The racism was a nice touch, as was the comment about this Empire not lasting forever, which we know it doesn't.
Here's a weird thought: Did that Zephran Cochrane just met up with the mirror universe's Pichard, who, told him that he's about to save the earth by conquering the Vulcans?;)
Wouldn't it be weird if each universe was a self-fulling prophecy?
...revive ST-TNG with Riker as captin of the Enterprise E...
Or another ship, or whatever. And Troi. They seem to have no career and are happy to do guest spots on Trek, so let's give them a new ship and a show. And there are two other series that can guest star.
I mean, can we honestly not think of a plotline here? The Dominion War just ended! Let's have a series about rebuilding after a war. Make it a metaphor for Iraq or something...Trek used to be able to do things like that.
People forget cops work with district attorneys. If they need a search warrant, they first think, with years of experience: Do I have enough evidence to get one?
If they think so, but aren't sure, they can just go and ask the DA for his opinion. It's a handy free lawyer who wants someone convicted, but the DA knows pestering the judge with warrants he'll turn down is not the way to accomplish anything.
And then they go see the judge.
They do this for two reasons: It looks bad to get search warrants turned down, because then their boss wonders, 'Is he presenting the evidence correctly? Does he understand how the process works?'.
I'm not talking about illegal stuff, I'm talking about not bothering to check alibis beforehand. A search warrant is the last thing the police should do...there should be a reasonable case pointing at someone, and there should logically be something there to help it. If the judge sees an obvious way the case could be improved or weakened without the search warrant, they might not give one until the police try that.
The other reason is it looks bad, statistically, to have cops asking for a lot of warrants they don't get.
Of course, the other way around doesn't look that great, either. People need to realize that 'amount turned down' isn't that useful. All that tells you is how good police are at guessing what the judge will say.
Look at 'amount of search warrants that lead to conviction', that might be revealing. Or how many search warrants were on an innocent man? How many were on a guilty man that didn't actually help the case? (A much smaller privacy violation, to be sure, but one never-the-less.)
What part of 'all other things being equal' did you miss?;)
Not waiting for memory is faster than waiting for it, period. It has nothing to do with the amount of CPU a program costs, and rarely anything to do with processor specific optimizations.
And that's unmeasurable within Linux and thus can't possibly be what was being talking about. CPU time, as exposed to any OS, includes memory access time! You can play semantic games and say 'This was CPU time and this was memory time and this was bus time etc etc.', but Linux sure as hell doesn't keep track of what is what. In fact, it probably can't.
In Linux, all you get is 'This program used X milliseconds of CPU time', and it's straight out of the scheduler. It doesn't include disk access, because disk access causes the program to give back control to the scheduler for a while.
If it uses less milliseconds, it's faster. If it uses more, it's slower. It's not rocket science.
Now, there can be differences in disk access if the programs are different sizes, and that can make the program appear slower or not, but it is just gibberish to say something 'uses more CPU but complete code execution faster'. How long code excution takes to complete is how much CPU it uses.
This topic got me interested, and I googled. A typical can will currently support about 250 pounds. While ten cans obviously will support 460 pounds, it probably wasn't evenly distributed.
However, 250 pounds is a hell of a lot of force to apply to your forehead with your hand. Especially via banging it instead of slowly pushing it.
In the past, however, the aluminum was much thicker, and thus, presumably, much harder to compress.
Any idiot can bend a beer can in half with one hand.
When people talk about doing that, however, they're talking about holding an empty but undamaged beer sticking straight out from their forehead, and then banging the end with the palm of their other hand and crumpling it.
Empty undamaged beer cans can hold people up if they're careful. The metal in the can can bend, but it won't 'crush'. It's incredibly hard to pound them flat on a table from straight up. It's near impossible to do it on your forehead.
Think of the different between breaking a stick in half, and pulling a stick in half.
Most people who do it cheat by denting the side with their thumb at the last second, and hit it at a slight angle. I don't actually know if it is possible to actually do.
Fun experiment if you have a weight set. Put the heaviest weights you can lift on a bar. Position two empty cans that far apart on concrete, upside down, lift the weights onto the dents in the bottom. They will hold it. Then, get a stick, and tap a side of the can a few times. At some point, you will slightly dent it.
Ironically, with tin cans, it's easier to crush them from the end. For one thing, they're missing one end, and thus the tube can bend easier. And they often have 'ripples' in their side that ruins their structural ingerity.
As far as I know, ReactOS and Wine are working together. ReactOS is working on the kernel and whatnot, and is using parts of Wine as the system libraries.
And, of course, if the OS can't access the TPM chip because it is unsigned, like Linux, it will be unable to access the data on the hard drive on the same computer.
The point of this is to render Windows partitions unreadable from Linux via illegal-to-bypass encryption, and call it a 'feature'.
Of course, they're probably not going to default it to on...but unlike other security features, I bet it will appear on screen during install, saying 'Do you wish to enable secure startup?'.
Then later: 'Yeah, I tried that Knoppix CD you gave me, but I couldn't get to any of my stuff.'
Meanwhile, people who steal laptops will just boot them up, and use them to get the data off, like they always have, because people use stupid passwords or none at all. If you're using an actual software security system to keep people out of a computer, it already has encryption!
What I like about that site is that it mocks USE flags, but does not explain why. It can't, because they actually do make things faster.
I use Gentoo. I turn off things I don't use. Obviously I don't have an identical system to compare to, but I'm fairly sure that, for example, not having Firefox load Gnome bindings on start up does make it faster, because I use KDE and don't normally have gnome libraries in memory.
The same thing with mplayer. mplayer has all sorts of stupid-ass libraries it links to by default, like jpeg support. If I want to look at jpegs I know where to find a picture viewer. Likewise, SVGAlib. Don't need it, don't use it, don't even have it installed. If this was a binary-based system, I'd have to install it if I wanted mplayer. (Or, instead, I wouldn't be able to get mplayer using it if I did want it.)
Or kerberos. No kerberos on my system, because it doesn't actually make any sense on single machine that doesn't log into anything else.
Of course, the real thing speeding up Gentoo these days is 'prelink'. Like me, I don't have a lot of memory, and I tend to stay in text mode all the time, but I will go into X and watch KDE fire up. And then pop in and out of X for an hour, and then kill X and bring it back an hour later, etc. prelink has made this much faster.
Does the Internet have any use besides 'communications'?
I mean, think about it. All the Internet does it provide instant and delayed communcation between two specific people, one person and the whole world, two computers, and various other random combinations.
What are you talking, using more CPU but running faster? What the heck does that mean?
The measure of how much CPU a program uses is how much time the processor spends on it. Hence, all other things being equal, something that runs faster has to use less CPU.
Now, there are other things that affect performance, like speed in pulling it off the disk, but you said 'code execution' would be faster, which is just crazy talk.
Unless you're trying to make some point about how much of the CPU is in use at a certain time. Yes, optimizing for a certain processor does mean that branches and caches and whatnot will be optimized for that process, but there's no way you can be seeing that unless you're running programs through some sort of CPU simulator step-by-step. And I don't know what the point of talking about that would be...it's a good thing.
No, I'm not confusing it, I'm responding to people who think 'The Matrix' was intelligent sci-fi, because, ooo, we're all really living in a computer simulation! Man, that really makes you think...if you've never had any exposure to real science fiction at all.;) Hell, Red Dwarf did that.
I don't see your fourth point at all, I think it's actually the second point...morality and civility in a frontier.
And disagree with your third, I think the reason technology is 'ineffective' is because the government wants it to be so. The last time you let poor people have high tech, they started a war. From what little we've seen of the non-frontier, it looks like quite a lot of core problems have been solved. The core 'problem' is, in fact, the malcontents who refuse to fit in and instead 'head west'.
But, yes, there was a philosophical framework framework there. Interestingly enough, it isn't the same one as in Buffy and Angel, and that was obvious the second Mal threw that guy into their engine.
Although it somewhat hard to tell, because the viewpoint is completely different...people who are vigilantes against evil, vs. the losers in a war who aren't trying to do anything.
You saw the episodes as they aired? In that order?
Well, that was half your problem, right there. Fox aired them in a nonsensical order. Of course you can't watch the characters evolve.
Borrow a DVD from a friend and watch Serenity, the actual first episode. You know, where it explains everything that's going on and who everyone is. That, for reference, was the episode that aired last, and it's very possible you missed it, considering how irregular the airings of Firefly were.
And you definitely missed the three episodes that never aired.
Once you watch all the episodes in order, then you get to comment on characterization.;)
And us fans aren't fanatics who insist Firefly is the best thing since sliced bread. Farscape had declining ratings and high production costs, and it at least got a miniseries send off. BSG is still going strong. But I, for example, love Farscape and BSG too, and if you gave me a choise of one more year of one series (Pretending BSG had been cancelled.), I have no idea which one I'd pick.
Neither of those, however, were killed thanks to Fox being pure evil and apparently delibrately sabatoging the series. By not giving Firefly respect, a correct episode order (and not preempting it randomly), and any ads, Fox basically did the same thing to it, as, well, Futurama, another show with a proven creator.
Non-fans don't quite realize how poorly Firefly was treated. Fox treats all their sci-fi shows like that, though, so it's not surprising.
Okay, it's not normally trying to be intelligent.;)
Or let's just say, there are no deep concepts or metaphors underlying the series, besides the obvious 'the american west after the civil war' metaphor. There's no responsiblity of the world, no attempt at redemption, no 'This is what it means to be a (woman|man) in the universe and this is the kinds of choices you make.'
Unlike his other shows, which were about those things.
Actually, it's possible that, as time went by, we'd see metaphors like that (This is what it means to be a team, maybe?), so I guess it's more accurate to say there were no obvious deep metaphors in the bits we saw.;) Buffy managed to get there in 11 episodes ('Giles, I don't want to die.'), and Angel got there in one, but it could take longer this time.
My point was, for people looking for 'intelligent' sci-fi, to just get the Buffy and Angels DVDs and stop expecting it from this movie. Although I have a feeling that the people who proudly talk about 'intelligent' sci-fi are exactly the people who wouldn't touch Buffy with a ten-foot pole solely because the name isn't pretentious enough. Which is probably a good thing.
People aren't out there thinking 'I wonder if this movie is worth 8 dollars' and willing to rush out ad spend 20 dollars so they can find out. That makes no sense.
Slashdot Mirror
The very start of the episode will go down as the funniest scene in Trek history, the rewrite of the final scene of First Contact. They even had the music and everything. It watched it twice before I realized they hadn't gotten the guy who played Cochrane back, but it was amazingly well edited.
And continuity on the mirror universe seems okay. The logo for the Empire is an dagger through the earth, whereas in the future it's a dagger though the Klingon's three-pointed symbol. Obviously, this empire hasn't hooked up with the Klingons yet.
The racism was a nice touch, as was the comment about this Empire not lasting forever, which we know it doesn't.
Here's a weird thought: Did that Zephran Cochrane just met up with the mirror universe's Pichard, who, told him that he's about to save the earth by conquering the Vulcans? ;)
Wouldn't it be weird if each universe was a self-fulling prophecy?
Or another ship, or whatever. And Troi. They seem to have no career and are happy to do guest spots on Trek, so let's give them a new ship and a show. And there are two other series that can guest star.
I mean, can we honestly not think of a plotline here? The Dominion War just ended! Let's have a series about rebuilding after a war. Make it a metaphor for Iraq or something...Trek used to be able to do things like that.
Enterprise did suck. It has, this season, stopped sucking.
It includes 'time loops', 'alternate dimensions', 'out of phase', 'trapped in fiction', etc, etc.
Oh, and Brimstone is actually a show where Nazis made sense. ;)
About the only way to get a legit search warrant thrown out is to show the cops lied to get it.
If they think so, but aren't sure, they can just go and ask the DA for his opinion. It's a handy free lawyer who wants someone convicted, but the DA knows pestering the judge with warrants he'll turn down is not the way to accomplish anything.
And then they go see the judge.
They do this for two reasons: It looks bad to get search warrants turned down, because then their boss wonders, 'Is he presenting the evidence correctly? Does he understand how the process works?'.
I'm not talking about illegal stuff, I'm talking about not bothering to check alibis beforehand. A search warrant is the last thing the police should do...there should be a reasonable case pointing at someone, and there should logically be something there to help it. If the judge sees an obvious way the case could be improved or weakened without the search warrant, they might not give one until the police try that.
The other reason is it looks bad, statistically, to have cops asking for a lot of warrants they don't get.
Of course, the other way around doesn't look that great, either. People need to realize that 'amount turned down' isn't that useful. All that tells you is how good police are at guessing what the judge will say.
Look at 'amount of search warrants that lead to conviction', that might be revealing. Or how many search warrants were on an innocent man? How many were on a guilty man that didn't actually help the case? (A much smaller privacy violation, to be sure, but one never-the-less.)
Not waiting for memory is faster than waiting for it, period. It has nothing to do with the amount of CPU a program costs, and rarely anything to do with processor specific optimizations.
And that's unmeasurable within Linux and thus can't possibly be what was being talking about. CPU time, as exposed to any OS, includes memory access time! You can play semantic games and say 'This was CPU time and this was memory time and this was bus time etc etc.', but Linux sure as hell doesn't keep track of what is what. In fact, it probably can't.
In Linux, all you get is 'This program used X milliseconds of CPU time', and it's straight out of the scheduler. It doesn't include disk access, because disk access causes the program to give back control to the scheduler for a while.
If it uses less milliseconds, it's faster. If it uses more, it's slower. It's not rocket science.
Now, there can be differences in disk access if the programs are different sizes, and that can make the program appear slower or not, but it is just gibberish to say something 'uses more CPU but complete code execution faster'. How long code excution takes to complete is how much CPU it uses.
However, 250 pounds is a hell of a lot of force to apply to your forehead with your hand. Especially via banging it instead of slowly pushing it.
In the past, however, the aluminum was much thicker, and thus, presumably, much harder to compress.
When people talk about doing that, however, they're talking about holding an empty but undamaged beer sticking straight out from their forehead, and then banging the end with the palm of their other hand and crumpling it.
Empty undamaged beer cans can hold people up if they're careful. The metal in the can can bend, but it won't 'crush'. It's incredibly hard to pound them flat on a table from straight up. It's near impossible to do it on your forehead.
Think of the different between breaking a stick in half, and pulling a stick in half.
Most people who do it cheat by denting the side with their thumb at the last second, and hit it at a slight angle. I don't actually know if it is possible to actually do.
Fun experiment if you have a weight set. Put the heaviest weights you can lift on a bar. Position two empty cans that far apart on concrete, upside down, lift the weights onto the dents in the bottom. They will hold it. Then, get a stick, and tap a side of the can a few times. At some point, you will slightly dent it.
Ironically, with tin cans, it's easier to crush them from the end. For one thing, they're missing one end, and thus the tube can bend easier. And they often have 'ripples' in their side that ruins their structural ingerity.
You haven't heard of the spyware that installed .NET, have you? 20 frickin megs.
As far as I know, ReactOS and Wine are working together. ReactOS is working on the kernel and whatnot, and is using parts of Wine as the system libraries.
The point of this is to render Windows partitions unreadable from Linux via illegal-to-bypass encryption, and call it a 'feature'.
Of course, they're probably not going to default it to on...but unlike other security features, I bet it will appear on screen during install, saying 'Do you wish to enable secure startup?'.
Then later: 'Yeah, I tried that Knoppix CD you gave me, but I couldn't get to any of my stuff.'
Meanwhile, people who steal laptops will just boot them up, and use them to get the data off, like they always have, because people use stupid passwords or none at all. If you're using an actual software security system to keep people out of a computer, it already has encryption!
Programs don't need X percent of the CPU for Y time. They need X CPU cycles, and how soon they finish is simply how soon they get them.
That's funny, all I I ever see about Gentoo is other people talking about how that's all they see Gentoo users saying.
I use Gentoo. I turn off things I don't use. Obviously I don't have an identical system to compare to, but I'm fairly sure that, for example, not having Firefox load Gnome bindings on start up does make it faster, because I use KDE and don't normally have gnome libraries in memory.
The same thing with mplayer. mplayer has all sorts of stupid-ass libraries it links to by default, like jpeg support. If I want to look at jpegs I know where to find a picture viewer. Likewise, SVGAlib. Don't need it, don't use it, don't even have it installed. If this was a binary-based system, I'd have to install it if I wanted mplayer. (Or, instead, I wouldn't be able to get mplayer using it if I did want it.)
Or kerberos. No kerberos on my system, because it doesn't actually make any sense on single machine that doesn't log into anything else.
Of course, the real thing speeding up Gentoo these days is 'prelink'. Like me, I don't have a lot of memory, and I tend to stay in text mode all the time, but I will go into X and watch KDE fire up. And then pop in and out of X for an hour, and then kill X and bring it back an hour later, etc. prelink has made this much faster.
It turned out to be very complicated: I had to plug it in, and then mount it.
No, seriously, what kinds of thumbdrives have problems in Linux?
I mean, think about it. All the Internet does it provide instant and delayed communcation between two specific people, one person and the whole world, two computers, and various other random combinations.
It doesn't do anything else.
The measure of how much CPU a program uses is how much time the processor spends on it. Hence, all other things being equal, something that runs faster has to use less CPU.
Now, there are other things that affect performance, like speed in pulling it off the disk, but you said 'code execution' would be faster, which is just crazy talk.
Unless you're trying to make some point about how much of the CPU is in use at a certain time. Yes, optimizing for a certain processor does mean that branches and caches and whatnot will be optimized for that process, but there's no way you can be seeing that unless you're running programs through some sort of CPU simulator step-by-step. And I don't know what the point of talking about that would be...it's a good thing.
I don't see your fourth point at all, I think it's actually the second point...morality and civility in a frontier.
And disagree with your third, I think the reason technology is 'ineffective' is because the government wants it to be so. The last time you let poor people have high tech, they started a war. From what little we've seen of the non-frontier, it looks like quite a lot of core problems have been solved. The core 'problem' is, in fact, the malcontents who refuse to fit in and instead 'head west'.
But, yes, there was a philosophical framework framework there. Interestingly enough, it isn't the same one as in Buffy and Angel, and that was obvious the second Mal threw that guy into their engine.
Although it somewhat hard to tell, because the viewpoint is completely different...people who are vigilantes against evil, vs. the losers in a war who aren't trying to do anything.
'alien' ass?
As my point was, duh, there are no aliens in Firefly.
Well, that was half your problem, right there. Fox aired them in a nonsensical order. Of course you can't watch the characters evolve.
Borrow a DVD from a friend and watch Serenity, the actual first episode. You know, where it explains everything that's going on and who everyone is. That, for reference, was the episode that aired last, and it's very possible you missed it, considering how irregular the airings of Firefly were.
And you definitely missed the three episodes that never aired.
Once you watch all the episodes in order, then you get to comment on characterization. ;)
And us fans aren't fanatics who insist Firefly is the best thing since sliced bread. Farscape had declining ratings and high production costs, and it at least got a miniseries send off. BSG is still going strong. But I, for example, love Farscape and BSG too, and if you gave me a choise of one more year of one series (Pretending BSG had been cancelled.), I have no idea which one I'd pick.
Neither of those, however, were killed thanks to Fox being pure evil and apparently delibrately sabatoging the series. By not giving Firefly respect, a correct episode order (and not preempting it randomly), and any ads, Fox basically did the same thing to it, as, well, Futurama, another show with a proven creator.
Non-fans don't quite realize how poorly Firefly was treated. Fox treats all their sci-fi shows like that, though, so it's not surprising.
Telling people to break the law isn't illegal in the US, dumbass.
Or let's just say, there are no deep concepts or metaphors underlying the series, besides the obvious 'the american west after the civil war' metaphor. There's no responsiblity of the world, no attempt at redemption, no 'This is what it means to be a (woman|man) in the universe and this is the kinds of choices you make.'
Unlike his other shows, which were about those things.
Actually, it's possible that, as time went by, we'd see metaphors like that (This is what it means to be a team, maybe?), so I guess it's more accurate to say there were no obvious deep metaphors in the bits we saw. ;) Buffy managed to get there in 11 episodes ('Giles, I don't want to die.'), and Angel got there in one, but it could take longer this time.
My point was, for people looking for 'intelligent' sci-fi, to just get the Buffy and Angels DVDs and stop expecting it from this movie. Although I have a feeling that the people who proudly talk about 'intelligent' sci-fi are exactly the people who wouldn't touch Buffy with a ten-foot pole solely because the name isn't pretentious enough. Which is probably a good thing.
People aren't out there thinking 'I wonder if this movie is worth 8 dollars' and willing to rush out ad spend 20 dollars so they can find out. That makes no sense.
However, the worse sci-fi film ever made is, in fact, Supernova.