Manufactuerers should not be expected to support their products after the warranty has run out, however, if the problem is something that was widespread and a design or production defect, then they should cover the cost of repairs no matter what, since they essentially gave the customer a failure waiting to happen.
The iMac would be a good example of this. Random and widespread analog video board failures plagued the first generation of iMacs. This caused DOA machines and computers that would completely fail within 2 years - as mine did. Even though "The Green Light Of Death" hit machine after machine after machine, the only thing Apple did was have the part in question replaced with a part that apparently was of the same design - resulting in some people claiming they had to go back time and time again.
Did Apple care? Ummm.....welll....there was a technote on the subject. But it said that if it was out of the (short) warranty period a user would have to have the work done themselves. At a cost of $300, or so. And with people saying they had to do this numerous times in a row, I was not particularly inclined to spend the money.
Sure, my machine was out of warranty, if there was some random fluke and some random bit of hardware failed, I would grumble, but not expect anything from Apple. However, I believe my machine suffered from a defect, one that Apple was aware of and chose not to remedy. The hardware was destined to fail, and I believe they had sufficent evidence to realize this.
A Dump their money into web sites run by people with absolutely no experience at anything other than Quake, with no financial plan other than "we will make some money someday" and absolutely no means of generating revenue, or any ideas about how to go about doing so and no particular motivation to figure one out...
Or
B Invest in a new field, where along with the considerable risks and investment needed, people are making serious cash already and their are limitless oppertnities and significant demand?
NASA has shown a total unwillingness to assist private space ventures in any way shape or form. While one might be tempted to ask why, considering it would be in the agency's best interest to "spread out the load" so to speak/ It is because allowing someone to do what they have done would be a disaster for them.
Right now, nobody else is launching manned spacecraft or space stations. When NASA does, they ask for tons of money. It takes them forever to get anything done and they still cut corners like crazy - not in saftey, mind you....NASA have thankfully become safety freaks....but instead, they cut features, missions, R&D, etc.
Look at how crippled the ISS is and compare it to what was origionally proposed and how much what we have cost us.
Then, consider what a private consortium could offer for much, much less. A station that can have inhabitants who are not full time maintence workers, who have no time for any other meaningful activity (as with the ISS) can encourage further development in space (unlike the ISS, which will be the permanent space facility for the next two decades if NASA has their way) further exploration (unlike the ISS, where the upper regions of Earth's atmosphere can be explored again and again) can encourage further research (unlike the ISS, which will invent remarkable crystals and that's about it)
NASA would have a hard time justifying its budget once a 3rd party station became operational. People would stop assuming "space costs that much" and start asking how effectively NASA spends their money and why the other guys can strech a buck much futher than the more experienced organization
Well, I guess it is better than "I have a BRILLIANT plan to make lots of money offering high speed Internet access, something that people really want! The only trouble is, you have to next door to the phone company! Let's call it DSL and invest billions into it! We'll make a profit in no time! Everybody lives next to a switching station!"
- Adobe goes after Sklyarov, gets criminal charges filed against him and makes an example out of the guy for their benefit.
- There is a public outcry and protests. Adobe sees this as a direct threat to their corprate image and as a direct result....their sales.
- Adobe meets with EFF, and drops their support for the case, post-indictment.
- It is a PR victory for Adobe, they say they made a mistake, and their critics back down, the protests stop and Adobe looks like a good company that made a bad mistake and is owning up to it.
- Since this is a criminal case, not a civil one, Adobe cannot drop the charges against Sklyarov. The prosecution continues, Adobe looks like an innocent bystander in the whole matter and one of the "good guys" or at least no longer the enemy. With their corprate image restored, it's a win-win situation for them. Sklyarov goes on trial to be made an example of, and no one is viewing them as the "big bad corporation" anymore.
It was a cunning, calculated move, and I wonder how long it will take people to realize this. Everything Adobe wanted has been accomplished. They win. Sklyarov and everyone else loses.
We assume anyone living in between the two regions is a bum hick yokel or a soccer mom.
The incorrectness of your assumption is the key to the existance of our assumption, so I would assume that further assumptions on your part will be of equally questionable accuracy, assuming of course, the assumption is made with the same kind of genuis the first one was. Our assumption stands, yours sits in a heap in the corner of the room frayed and withered from my elitest northeastern attitude.
People tend to think Macs are the most expensive computer solution.
I wonder where they get that idea?
Oh yeah....after looking at the Apple Store.....Nearly $2000 bucks for a computer and they still want to charge you another $100 for a video card that came out after 1999? Please.
If you spend $1300 on a new iBook it doesn't even come with enough RAM to run the OS installed on the hard drive. Apple has a nifty little icon / badge for OS X on their site. It reminds you 128MB of RAM is required.
The new iBooks came out in May, OS X came out in March and the iBook has only 50% of the RAM Apple demands for their new OS. So much for the beneifts of "making the whole widget".
What's next? iMacs begin exploding on startup- but it's good news for Mac users.
Mine did.
The Green Light Of Death claimed my iMac last Thanksgiving. After months of slowly deteriorating video, I turned it on to hear a SNAP, CRACKLE, POP, BANG as the analog board fried itself.
Apple's attitude has always been "Yeah, we know about it, but unless your shortest-in-the-industry warranty is still in effect, you will have to pay for it yourself"
All $300 of it.
It didn't matter how many other iMac owners had experianced the same thing, Apple was not going to fix it unless I paid. Some people did, I refused to. Some people have claimed to go through several analog board replacements because the replacement is of identical design to the one that failed in the first place.
..........The Legend Of The Rangers could easily turn into a new series. Judging by his comments, it looks like it will happen. The film itself is done, and it's being compared to In The Beginning quality-wise.
Then of course, SciFi is still thinking about bringing Crusade back.
Let's not forget the B5 feature film, which may very well see the light of day (but not for a few years).
...that when one of their unmanned testbeds blows up for some stupid reason, it's an eternity before they can try again.
When one of their hydrogen tanks decided to leak and destroy one of the (now canceled) research craft not so long ago, NASA said they would try again, once a new hydrogen tank arrived.
In 10+ months!
It takes them so freakin' long to do *anything*. 6 hours just to prepare the meals on the ISS.
How can you possibly spend 6 hours reheating food!?!
Will millitary and law enforcement information be off-limits to anyone under 18? Because you know, hearing about, or seeing depictions of anything remotely related to violence apparently is the ONE AND ONLY reason kids commit horrible crimes these days...or that's what I gather from listening to Joe Lieberman.
With his logic, such a system would be another part of the "cultural pollution" he likes to refer to when hinting at future censorship.
(Hey, "cultural pollution"...where have I heard terms like THOSE before?)
In America today, there is a common inability to admit that you got screwed over by circumstances beyond anyone's control. There always needs to be someone to blame, something to do, some way to "get back" at the people/person who caused your pain. That's not always possible. When there are suspects to be tried, compensatory damages to be collected from the wrongdoer we have our "justice", no matter the real benefit, at least we can say "somebody paid for what happened".
We are so used to it, this automatic satisfaction, we cannot begin to understand that things aren't always "fixable". That unlike the sitcoms we grew up on, not everything can be neatly wrapped up in a set period of time. When there is an absence of "justice", when there is no tit-for-tat, we freak out.
We have grown up believing hopelessness is not a white, middle class, suburban feeling. It is something felt by people half the world away, when we see them on the nightly news. Hopelessness is for people in some foreign-looking hellhole, not an upscale, midwestern community.
The parents in Littleton are trying to find something to fill the dark void in their life, the part of them that was ripped out by events beyond their...or really anyone's control. I have sympathy for their plight, but they should not continue on their quest to place blame where it doesn't belong. It's not easy to simply blame two people who are now dead, we can't get our ideal "justice"...but we have to realize and accept that we don't always get the satisfaction we want...or need. There will be no day in court, no explinations, no chance to scream at Eric and Dylan for the lives they ended.
There are far too many questions still lingering after two long years, and it seems we are nearly out of answers. No one will ever get to ask Why, to dig into the motivations of the killers, to get anything but the slightest hint of the thoughts behind the massacre.
Such is life.
With the inability to even begin to understand anything beyond what was seen in the hallways of Columbine on that afternoon, it is impossible and irresponsible to make assumptions about the deeper issues, the intangible aspects of what was going through their minds, what might of driven them to do what they did. Suing game publishers for billions of dollars is not justice, it does not punish anyone who was involved in any way, it does not bring back the dead, nor does it honor their memory. This is lashing out plain and simple. Lashing out against people who had no part in their troubles. Who didn't do anything, but who are simply convenent targets for rage, the rage of people without any answers, without any hope and who have a disabling inability to deal with the events in their life.
After all that has happened, you think people would have learned by now that no good comes from doing such things.
I implore the parents of the Columbine victims to stop this crusade...even if it suceeds there will be no tangible benefit...except the piece of mind that somebody paid.
I don't think we as a society can afford that.
(Note: I strongly suggest people watch the film The Sweet Hereafter)
One of the most interesting aspects of the film...
on
Review: Blow
·
· Score: 4
I'm willing to bet most people are unaware of the fact Blow was filmed on varying film stock.
(If this looks familiar, it's because I already posted this on ArsTechnica last night)
What a fucking great film. Usually the high point of any movie-going experiance is to sit through the uber-cool previews, hoping in vain that the feature will live up to the excitement and emotional rush of the 2 minute ads.
That was not the case here.
I expected to get a Tomb Raider trailer, but was sorely disspointed. I did get to see a Pearl Harbor preview, but my initial excitement had an undercurrent of remorse, as I remembered not only all the men who died that day, but the fact Pearl Harbor is a love story...and it stars Ben Affleck.
So, onto the movie....
Blow begins as most great drug epics do, near the end, with a few choice words from the final chapter in the story...the much wiser...and older (damnit...Depp is one creepy fuck as a 60-something guy...the real George Jung looks like Terry Gilliam...Johnny is what I imagine Joan Rivers would look like after a nuclear war)
This movie screams Major Fucking Drug Epic from the very beginning. No question about it. You know it's going to be one sweet ride, and you are itching for it to begin like the...oh never mind.
The next 1.8 hours or so are spent following the rise and fall of Mr. George Jung and his magnificent empire in white. And green....lots of green.
"We're going to need a bigger boat."
Different hues, mind you, different hues.
The eventual fall and collapse of Jung's business and life rather than a simple footnote, we see the whole fucking thing from beginning to end. No three minute montage for us this time. The final scenes in the prision are memorable as they are heartbreaking.
Speaking of heartbreaking, I don't know what it was, but I found myself on the verge of tears during all the scenes with his daughter. This is what happens when you write real characters, not annoying or hopelessly "cute" caricatures that drag down the plot and the movie. Kudos to the man behind the keyboard...
The cast was perfect and carried the movied perfectly. Franka Pontente was a surprise...you see her in the credits but forget she exists until you realize who she is in the film. Rachel Griffiths appears, amazingly in a mother role...7 years ago she was a 20-something in Muriel's Wedding now, a 50-60 year-old mother of Johnny Depp, sporting a Massachusetts accent. That's what I call range.
Ray Liotta was brilliant...and if you thought he was only capable of being a mean, hardass character, then just wait and see this fucking movie.
Paul Rubens as a gay hairdresser? Why not?
A far cry from Pee-Wee Herman and "The Spleen". Yeah, he's pushing 50, but don't think for a minute he isn't one hell of an actor with one hell of a screen presence.
Bobcat Golthwait! Bobcat! Where the fuck have you been?!!!! Good to see you! Thanks for not bringing Pauly Shore!
To the point here...see this movie...if you have...see it again.
Why would an operating system need 3 gigs of hd space and 128 megs ram minimum!? That is insane.
Yes, it is. But it's becoming the trend these days. OS X has the same system requirements, of course it would make sense for Apple of all people to ship brand-new, just-announced computers with the ability to run their own OS, but that isn't happening.
Once upon a time, there was an old joke: "Windows 95 is MacOS '84". Seems like they once again grabbed MacOS features:
I should probably start out by saying you are really grasping at straws here.
1. The login dialog with all users listed. I sure hope that in a large network, it'll just show the logon name box.
Login Dialog with all the users listed...hmm...I believe I had that in my Linux box before OS X.
2. The big-ass icons. OSX, anyone
Average monitor size and resolution has increased dramtically from when the current icon sizes were set in stone. This is natural progression here, nothing more.
3. Big, bright, lots of pretty colors. Granted, this isn't a Mac thing per se, but Macs (IMHO) have always been more colorful, ahead of the rather drab PC world.
The fact you bothered to include that on your list really shows the weakness of your argument. Using color in a UI is hardly new, or an example of Microsoft "stealing" from Apple.
Mac Zelots have been freaking out ever since the first screenshots of WinXP, making ridiculous claims about Microsoft "stealing" from them.
These are the same people who thought that Apple was shipping "fake" OS X CDs in the retail box to "fool" people until some super-secret "real" release that was to occur sometime after it began appearing on store shelves.
As much as I detest the "everything is a web page" Windows UI, I find few similarities between it and that near-useless monstrosity known as Aqua.
MS simply took the standard Windows appearance, rounded off all the corners, made liberal use of the color blue, replaced the Start Menu with and ugly Start Slab, while sticking the MacOS 9 Rubber Ducky in the public screenshots. Probably in an attempt to bait the Mac Zelots looking for *something* to justify their often irrational and passionate hatred of Microsoft, which is at times, probably enough to make even Linus groan. (The Duck most likey came from a royalty-free clipart collection, the kind that many businesses use.)
Luna is hardly MacOS-ish. It is an even uglier version of the same UI they have been using since 1995, which despite the claims of fanatics, is not very close to the classic Mac UI at all, and even further from Aqua.
The only similarities that I *can* find are that both Luna and Aqua are worse than their predecessors (though Aqua is prettier than Platinum). UI design seems to have taken a nosedive in the past year. The big commercial UIs look and function like really bad GNOME and AfterStep hacks.
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Manufactuerers should not be expected to support their products after the warranty has run out, however, if the problem is something that was widespread and a design or production defect, then they should cover the cost of repairs no matter what, since they essentially gave the customer a failure waiting to happen.
The iMac would be a good example of this. Random and widespread analog video board failures plagued the first generation of iMacs. This caused DOA machines and computers that would completely fail within 2 years - as mine did. Even though "The Green Light Of Death" hit machine after machine after machine, the only thing Apple did was have the part in question replaced with a part that apparently was of the same design - resulting in some people claiming they had to go back time and time again.
Did Apple care? Ummm.....welll....there was a technote on the subject. But it said that if it was out of the (short) warranty period a user would have to have the work done themselves. At a cost of $300, or so. And with people saying they had to do this numerous times in a row, I was not particularly inclined to spend the money.
Sure, my machine was out of warranty, if there was some random fluke and some random bit of hardware failed, I would grumble, but not expect anything from Apple. However, I believe my machine suffered from a defect, one that Apple was aware of and chose not to remedy. The hardware was destined to fail, and I believe they had sufficent evidence to realize this.
For some reason I thought it was going to be on at 9pm, so when I woke up from a nap around that time, I found that I had missed it.
Will the pilot be re-run before next week's ep? I'd like to see it before I dive into the rest of the series.
Thanks
Should venture capitalists :
A Dump their money into web sites run by people with absolutely no experience at anything other than Quake, with no financial plan other than "we will make some money someday" and absolutely no means of generating revenue, or any ideas about how to go about doing so and no particular motivation to figure one out...
Or
B Invest in a new field, where along with the considerable risks and investment needed, people are making serious cash already and their are limitless oppertnities and significant demand?
NASA has shown a total unwillingness to assist private space ventures in any way shape or form. While one might be tempted to ask why, considering it would be in the agency's best interest to "spread out the load" so to speak/ It is because allowing someone to do what they have done would be a disaster for them.
Right now, nobody else is launching manned spacecraft or space stations. When NASA does, they ask for tons of money. It takes them forever to get anything done and they still cut corners like crazy - not in saftey, mind you....NASA have thankfully become safety freaks....but instead, they cut features, missions, R&D, etc.
Look at how crippled the ISS is and compare it to what was origionally proposed and how much what we have cost us.
Then, consider what a private consortium could offer for much, much less. A station that can have inhabitants who are not full time maintence workers, who have no time for any other meaningful activity (as with the ISS) can encourage further development in space (unlike the ISS, which will be the permanent space facility for the next two decades if NASA has their way) further exploration (unlike the ISS, where the upper regions of Earth's atmosphere can be explored again and again) can encourage further research (unlike the ISS, which will invent remarkable crystals and that's about it)
NASA would have a hard time justifying its budget once a 3rd party station became operational. People would stop assuming "space costs that much" and start asking how effectively NASA spends their money and why the other guys can strech a buck much futher than the more experienced organization
Well, I guess it is better than "I have a BRILLIANT plan to make lots of money offering high speed Internet access, something that people really want! The only trouble is, you have to next door to the phone company! Let's call it DSL and invest billions into it! We'll make a profit in no time! Everybody lives next to a switching station!"
- Adobe goes after Sklyarov, gets criminal charges filed against him and makes an example out of the guy for their benefit.
- There is a public outcry and protests. Adobe sees this as a direct threat to their corprate image and as a direct result....their sales.
- Adobe meets with EFF, and drops their support for the case, post-indictment.
- It is a PR victory for Adobe, they say they made a mistake, and their critics back down, the protests stop and Adobe looks like a good company that made a bad mistake and is owning up to it.
- Since this is a criminal case, not a civil one, Adobe cannot drop the charges against Sklyarov. The prosecution continues, Adobe looks like an innocent bystander in the whole matter and one of the "good guys" or at least no longer the enemy. With their corprate image restored, it's a win-win situation for them. Sklyarov goes on trial to be made an example of, and no one is viewing them as the "big bad corporation" anymore.
It was a cunning, calculated move, and I wonder how long it will take people to realize this. Everything Adobe wanted has been accomplished. They win. Sklyarov and everyone else loses.
Your assumption of our assumption is incorrect.
We assume anyone living in between the two regions is a bum hick yokel or a soccer mom.
The incorrectness of your assumption is the key to the existance of our assumption, so I would assume that further assumptions on your part will be of equally questionable accuracy, assuming of course, the assumption is made with the same kind of genuis the first one was. Our assumption stands, yours sits in a heap in the corner of the room frayed and withered from my elitest northeastern attitude.
Oh yeah....after looking at the Apple Store.....Nearly $2000 bucks for a computer and they still want to charge you another $100 for a video card that came out after 1999? Please.
If you spend $1300 on a new iBook it doesn't even come with enough RAM to run the OS installed on the hard drive. Apple has a nifty little icon / badge for OS X on their site. It reminds you 128MB of RAM is required.
The new iBooks came out in May, OS X came out in March and the iBook has only 50% of the RAM Apple demands for their new OS. So much for the beneifts of "making the whole widget".
..........The Legend Of The Rangers could easily turn into a new series. Judging by his comments, it looks like it will happen. The film itself is done, and it's being compared to In The Beginning quality-wise.
Then of course, SciFi is still thinking about bringing Crusade back.
Let's not forget the B5 feature film, which may very well see the light of day (but not for a few years).
It's a good time to be a B5 fan.
I'm gonna order me some dry ice and overclock the hell out of my flashlight!
Woohoo!
....5 people move out of Canada and the resulting sales drop is enough to launch a lawsuit.
...that when one of their unmanned testbeds blows up for some stupid reason, it's an eternity before they can try again.
When one of their hydrogen tanks decided to leak and destroy one of the (now canceled) research craft not so long ago, NASA said they would try again, once a new hydrogen tank arrived.
In 10+ months!
It takes them so freakin' long to do *anything*. 6 hours just to prepare the meals on the ISS.
How can you possibly spend 6 hours reheating food!?!
What is the hold-up here?
.....you realize a bunch of squatters living under blue tarps in a self-created techno-ghetto probably have faster Internet access than you
Will millitary and law enforcement information be off-limits to anyone under 18? Because you know, hearing about, or seeing depictions of anything remotely related to violence apparently is the ONE AND ONLY reason kids commit horrible crimes these days...or that's what I gather from listening to Joe Lieberman.
With his logic, such a system would be another part of the "cultural pollution" he likes to refer to when hinting at future censorship.
(Hey, "cultural pollution"...where have I heard terms like THOSE before?)
In America today, there is a common inability to admit that you got screwed over by circumstances beyond anyone's control. There always needs to be someone to blame, something to do, some way to "get back" at the people/person who caused your pain. That's not always possible. When there are suspects to be tried, compensatory damages to be collected from the wrongdoer we have our "justice", no matter the real benefit, at least we can say "somebody paid for what happened".
We are so used to it, this automatic satisfaction, we cannot begin to understand that things aren't always "fixable". That unlike the sitcoms we grew up on, not everything can be neatly wrapped up in a set period of time. When there is an absence of "justice", when there is no tit-for-tat, we freak out.
We have grown up believing hopelessness is not a white, middle class, suburban feeling. It is something felt by people half the world away, when we see them on the nightly news. Hopelessness is for people in some foreign-looking hellhole, not an upscale, midwestern community.
The parents in Littleton are trying to find something to fill the dark void in their life, the part of them that was ripped out by events beyond their...or really anyone's control. I have sympathy for their plight, but they should not continue on their quest to place blame where it doesn't belong. It's not easy to simply blame two people who are now dead, we can't get our ideal "justice"...but we have to realize and accept that we don't always get the satisfaction we want...or need. There will be no day in court, no explinations, no chance to scream at Eric and Dylan for the lives they ended.
There are far too many questions still lingering after two long years, and it seems we are nearly out of answers. No one will ever get to ask Why, to dig into the motivations of the killers, to get anything but the slightest hint of the thoughts behind the massacre.
Such is life.
With the inability to even begin to understand anything beyond what was seen in the hallways of Columbine on that afternoon, it is impossible and irresponsible to make assumptions about the deeper issues, the intangible aspects of what was going through their minds, what might of driven them to do what they did. Suing game publishers for billions of dollars is not justice, it does not punish anyone who was involved in any way, it does not bring back the dead, nor does it honor their memory. This is lashing out plain and simple. Lashing out against people who had no part in their troubles. Who didn't do anything, but who are simply convenent targets for rage, the rage of people without any answers, without any hope and who have a disabling inability to deal with the events in their life.
After all that has happened, you think people would have learned by now that no good comes from doing such things.
I implore the parents of the Columbine victims to stop this crusade...even if it suceeds there will be no tangible benefit...except the piece of mind that somebody paid.
I don't think we as a society can afford that. (Note: I strongly suggest people watch the film The Sweet Hereafter )
I'm willing to bet most people are unaware of the fact Blow was filmed on varying film stock.
The 60s scenes were filmed with '60s-era film
The 70s scenes were filmed with '70s-era film
etc, etc
(If this looks familiar, it's because I already posted this on ArsTechnica last night)
What a fucking great film. Usually the high point of any movie-going experiance is to sit through the uber-cool previews, hoping in vain that the feature will live up to the excitement and emotional rush of the 2 minute ads.
That was not the case here.
I expected to get a Tomb Raider trailer, but was sorely disspointed. I did get to see a Pearl Harbor preview, but my initial excitement had an undercurrent of remorse, as I remembered not only all the men who died that day, but the fact Pearl Harbor is a love story...and it stars Ben Affleck.
So, onto the movie....
Blow begins as most great drug epics do, near the end, with a few choice words from the final chapter in the story...the much wiser...and older (damnit...Depp is one creepy fuck as a 60-something guy...the real George Jung looks like Terry Gilliam...Johnny is what I imagine Joan Rivers would look like after a nuclear war)
This movie screams Major Fucking Drug Epic from the very beginning. No question about it. You know it's going to be one sweet ride, and you are itching for it to begin like the...oh never mind.
The next 1.8 hours or so are spent following the rise and fall of Mr. George Jung and his magnificent empire in white. And green....lots of green.
"We're going to need a bigger boat."
Different hues, mind you, different hues.
The eventual fall and collapse of Jung's business and life rather than a simple footnote, we see the whole fucking thing from beginning to end. No three minute montage for us this time. The final scenes in the prision are memorable as they are heartbreaking.
Speaking of heartbreaking, I don't know what it was, but I found myself on the verge of tears during all the scenes with his daughter. This is what happens when you write real characters, not annoying or hopelessly "cute" caricatures that drag down the plot and the movie. Kudos to the man behind the keyboard...
The cast was perfect and carried the movied perfectly. Franka Pontente was a surprise...you see her in the credits but forget she exists until you realize who she is in the film. Rachel Griffiths appears, amazingly in a mother role...7 years ago she was a 20-something in Muriel's Wedding now, a 50-60 year-old mother of Johnny Depp, sporting a Massachusetts accent. That's what I call range.
Ray Liotta was brilliant...and if you thought he was only capable of being a mean, hardass character, then just wait and see this fucking movie.
Paul Rubens as a gay hairdresser? Why not?
A far cry from Pee-Wee Herman and "The Spleen". Yeah, he's pushing 50, but don't think for a minute he isn't one hell of an actor with one hell of a screen presence.
Bobcat Golthwait! Bobcat! Where the fuck have you been?!!!! Good to see you! Thanks for not bringing Pauly Shore!
To the point here...see this movie...if you have...see it again.
End Transmission
Apple will probably repackage it as one of their homoginized iApps to allow newbies to create multimedia presentations.
Yes, it is. But it's becoming the trend these days. OS X has the same system requirements, of course it would make sense for Apple of all people to ship brand-new, just-announced computers with the ability to run their own OS, but that isn't happening.
Mac Zelots have been freaking out ever since the first screenshots of WinXP, making ridiculous claims about Microsoft "stealing" from them.
These are the same people who thought that Apple was shipping "fake" OS X CDs in the retail box to "fool" people until some super-secret "real" release that was to occur sometime after it began appearing on store shelves.
As much as I detest the "everything is a web page" Windows UI, I find few similarities between it and that near-useless monstrosity known as Aqua.
MS simply took the standard Windows appearance, rounded off all the corners, made liberal use of the color blue, replaced the Start Menu with and ugly Start Slab, while sticking the MacOS 9 Rubber Ducky in the public screenshots. Probably in an attempt to bait the Mac Zelots looking for *something* to justify their often irrational and passionate hatred of Microsoft, which is at times, probably enough to make even Linus groan. (The Duck most likey came from a royalty-free clipart collection, the kind that many businesses use.)
Luna is hardly MacOS-ish. It is an even uglier version of the same UI they have been using since 1995, which despite the claims of fanatics, is not very close to the classic Mac UI at all, and even further from Aqua.
The only similarities that I *can* find are that both Luna and Aqua are worse than their predecessors (though Aqua is prettier than Platinum). UI design seems to have taken a nosedive in the past year. The big commercial UIs look and function like really bad GNOME and AfterStep hacks.
Those "communist regimes" were hardly communist. They were nothing more than your run-of-the-mill dictatorships that claimed to be communist.
The VGS is a great product. But so far, Connectix has lost bigtime, and not only with the massive legal fees and piles of injunctions.
The company has made almost zero-profit thanks to rampant piracy. Needless to say, they've felt a bit burned by this.
Now, they finally get a chance to make some money.