Personally I don't have the experience to do such programming, and I guess that accounts for most (almost all) people on/.. I don't even know how to hack my own driver. I can barely understand a simple C program.
I don't even know where I am! What's this big glowy panel in front of me? Does this button do something?
Look, the device needs to have a way to update its own firmware, right? Usually this is in code, in the firmware. If you overwrite the firmware, and you fuck this part up, you can't update over your FUBAR custom firmware. The general public considers this "bricked" because they don't want to start soldering stuff to the JTAG terminal or whatever.
Consider this wild notion: Allow all the firmware except the bootloader to be overwritten by the bootloader. Then if you brick it, you can still use the bootloader to fix it.
Why is it important that linux drivers have source available but we don't worry so much about seeing the firmware source? Should we be pushing to see firmware source too? Instead should it not matter about seeing driver source? I'd love to hear your perspectives.
Every device in my machine that does anything particularly useful is going to be largely or wholly proprietary. I appreciate it when the hardware (by way of its firmware) can provide an interface to the OS that isn't needlessly complicated (technically or legally) to reimplement for various OSes and platforms. This makes it much easier to get a driver in source form - which in turn makes it a lot easier to carry support for the device up to a new version of the Linux kernel (since Linux doesn't have a stable ABI for binary-only drivers, binary-only drivers break now and then) or to a new processor architecture (i.e. x86 to x86-64 several years back).
I am not an enemy of proprietary software, I just want to be able to do more with software libre.
Is that there are still plenty of 10-year-olds in the world who also don't know what good storytelling is, and are easily impressed by gee-whiz special effects. When I was 10, the ORIGINAL Battlestar Galactica was enough for me. Just have one big in-space fight per episode and pew-pew with the spaceships and I was happy. Today I can't make myself sit through an episode of that shit.
The thing about the original Battlestar Galactica is that some of it was actually quite good. But the original run of the show (i.e. not "1980") was very short and it wound up being something like 50%-60% bad episodes.
How 'cost effective' does it need to be when it's got a guaranteed audience of male tweens, teens, 20s... plus all the geek girls. And the nostalgia audience too (that's my demographic, btw.).
The audience seems "guaranteed" but in fact it isn't. If the audience doesn't enjoy the show, they won't stick with it.
Blender is free. It has been used to create various animated shorts showcasing what it can do (Elephant's Dream, Big Buck Bunny and Sintel).
To be fair, it should be noted that a big reason they produced Elephant's Dream, Big Buck Bunny, and Sintel, was so they could give Blender a shake-down: figure out what was wrong with it that made production of such works difficult or problematic and attempt to fix it.
For guys like me, who want to try out 3-D modeling and animation without laying down a bunch of cash to do so, it's a pretty sweet deal. But at this point, I think it's fair to say that the Blender Foundation has a lot more to gain from someone using their software to produce a TV show than the people producing the TV show do.
I never said the number of Earths in the set of Infinite Earths was not infinite. Admittedly I'm going out on a limb by saying they're countably infinite but that's just for the sake of making a joke.
A lot of people thought they couldn't do greater than "Infinite Earths" - I mean, it's Infinite. You can't have more Earths than Infinite Earths, right? But, as it turns out, the Infinite Earths were countably infinite. This is why they were able to define a mapping of their Infinite Earths onto the natural number set (Earth One, Earth Two, Earth Three, etc.).
But this time around, the number of Earths is Uncountably Infinite. Not only can we get Earths infinitely different from our own, we can also get infinitely subtle variations. We can take two Earths with differences so minor as to be nearly indistinguishable, and find a third that is somewhere between the two. So even though the original Infinite Earths were, in fact, Infinite, there are still more of them in the new Uncountably Infinite Earths.
One of the weakest points in the Doctor Who movie was the notion that the Daleks would have anything we might call a criminal justice system.
It was totally meaningless to have the Daleks put the Master on trial anyway. They didn't even show any Daleks on-screen. It could have just as easily been the Timelords holding the trial, with the Doctor taking the Master's remains somewhere else...
I was hoping they'd keep the ganger version around to explain how the Doctor from the season opener dies in his current regeneration.
You got to consider, though: Amy asks if gangers can "die" - but a more important question is, can they regenerate? Remember the Doctor regenerates before he's shot the second time...
"[...] they are the most reliably defeatable enemies in the universe."
Thing is, the Daleks were only defeated once in the new series (Parting Of The Ways), all the other times, only the current plan was defeated, and the Daleks escaped to plot again.
I'm sorry... What?
Dalek: The Dalek is not technically defeated, but self-destructs. Parting of the Ways: Whole fleet, approximately half a million Daleks including the Emperor disintegrated Doomsday: Thousands of Daleks sucked into the hellish interdimensional void, four escape. Evolution of the Daleks: One Dalek turns himself into a mutant hybrid, gets killed by the others. Two more killed by human Dalek-slaves. one escapes. The Stolen Earth: Another fleet of about half a million Daleks: casings hacked so they spin around all goofy-like and explode. Another half a million Daleks dead, of which I guess three survived?
I'd say those all count as "defeats". "Victory of the Daleks" wasn't a defeat for obvious reasons...:)
Personally where I think they lost it is the "self-rescue" time travel when he was locked in the box. The whole part about not crossing your own timestream was what kept the series sane from the obvious solution - just go back in time and warn/stop/do something before it becomes a problem. Or indeed a future doctor can now show up and save the current one from anything. That was a limit to his power, when he became linked to the events he had to stay and fight, he couldn't just run back to the TARDIS and fix everything. Now he's just jumping around as he pleases, like in the Christmas special where he's rewriting the man's memories while he's standing there. Why is not that the answer to every villain now, go back in time and stop them from becoming villains? Now they have to hide his omnipotence behind absurdity, like it's all some kind of game to him. They need to dial back that mania a notch or two.
Christmas episodes are a bit of a special case - they're Christmas Episodes.
But they specifically addressed the mop+fez scenario: "Why can't we just go back and change it?" "It'd be a paradox that could destroy the universe." "He did it before." "...And, to be fair, the universe did explode..."
I've been extremely disappointed with this season and last. Matt Smith has done absolutely nothing for me. While Tennant quickly won me over, I've given Smith plenty of time to find his groove and have zero excitement about the stories like I had with the last doctor.
It's a shame as we're getting to the end of the regenerations, but they need to do something to give some life back to this franchise, it's a shame it's going down the toilet so fast.
Could not agree less. I think the show has never been better. In practically every way imaginable I think it's superior to Eccleston's and Tennant's runs. I think Matt is fabulous as the Doctor and I think Amy and Rory are excellent as companions.
It's not as though I really have a lot of bad things to say about the Tenth Doctor and his run - except maybe that he never seemed to find a companion-relationship that worked (Rose pined for him and then went away, Martha pined for him and then went away, Donna did sort of a Mary Sue for him, then had to go away) - it just seems to me that Smith's run has been really solid.
"The Doctor's Wife" is perhaps one of the best episodes I've ever seen. It completely eclipses anything that had David Tennant in it. The script and the acting.
What about "Midnight"?
That one always struck me as an odd sort of experiment - "What if the Doctor were in a perilous situation and the people around him reacted realistically instead of falling in line?" As such I think it was very cool but maybe not "one of the best"...
Since they rebooted the series they have been pushing more for time paradoxes running stories. For example "Bad Wolf", "Torchwood", "Saxon" and "There is something on your back". Each season it appears to get more and more in your face. In this series it appears to be the woman through the hatch, which makes sense now since the last weekend.
So at the start of each series they do appear to be a mess but wrap up nicely.
I don't know: I mean, before learning about The Flesh it wasn't really clear how these strange things were happening to Amy - but the Eyepatch lady kept appearing pretty regularly, and the Doctor kept looking at the preggo-scope to remind us that something was up... (Plus there was a photo of Amy in the little girl's room!) It seemed to me that it had to be something like that - somehow Amy was somewhere else, in that place with the Eyepatch Lady... So it didn't entirely make sense before this weekend, but I don't think it was a total mystery the way "Bad Wolf" was up until "The Parting of the Ways"...
I'm not sure I'd agree that the Doctor has become a caricature of himself, but certainly the quality of the plots has suffered.
Moffat's desire to have a strong overarching plot means that nothing ever makes sense until the very end.
I don't think that's a bad thing, as long as the episodes along the way are enjoyable, and as long as it all makes sense in the end.
For instance, the "trust me" scene in "Flesh and Stone" - to me, it didn't make any sense the first time around. (Of course, that scene was explained in "The Big Bang"...) That episode also introduced the idea that the cracks could erase things: they also took this opportunity to remind us of some of the things that happened in "Eleventh Hour" - the duck pond (there were never any ducks, of course, because they were erased. This is also another hint about Amy's life.) The "trust me" scene was basically just a mystery - without knowing that erased things could be brought back (an idea introduced in "Cold Blood") it was pretty much an unsolvable mystery for the viewers... But the 2-parter was enjoyable on its own so the mysteries (which I mostly didn't notice anyway) weren't too distracting.
In the end, the dangling mysteries from Season 5 (apart from the bit in "The Lodger", and the various references to The Silence, which tie into Season 6) were all concluded pretty nicely. I think it worked. I'd agree that it's kind of a gimmicky way to arrange a story - but really it's just a mystery. Mysteries are fun because you're pulled along by little hints that give you the feeling of coming closer to the answer - and then a lot hinges on how the mystery is resolved in the end. In other words, the process of picking up the clues along the way can be fun even if the conclusion is unsatisfactory (hence, people enjoying "Lost", etc.) - but in this case I think the conclusion was well executed, too.
Already last season the new Doctor was a little too full of himself, but I was quite shocked to find that it got infinitely worse this season.
Agreed. It seems like the new way the Doctor gets out of impossible situations always begins with something like "Do you know who I am? I did X, I did Y, I'm the Doctor, you should fear me!", sometimes ending with the bad guys just picking up and scampering away.
I'm not a fan of the Doctor's showboating, either... Eye-roll every time there's mention of "The Oncoming Storm" or anything like that. But do consider the circumstances of the two cases in which it happened in the 2010 series:
1: vs. the Atraxi. The Atraxi were already content, having re-captured Prisoner Zero, and were leaving, when The Doctor called them back to bitch them out. 2: vs. the alliance: The Doctor didn't know it but he was the reason all those aliens were there in the first place. So all his showboating really did was confirm for them that their trap was working.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it would take more mules than the country has to power a single Google search farm (and no other sources of power are available)? ~
And all the mules are busy transporting mud from neighboring Elbonia anyway.
"There's two hours of my life I'm never going to get back."
As opposed to the other hours of your life that you can get back... how?
If the time is well spent, you don't want it back.
obviously people in Moran, Israel are getting kickbacks from the tethering restrictions... sheesh.
First thing I thought of was the song "Mr. Moran" by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones...
Personally I don't have the experience to do such programming, and I guess that accounts for most (almost all) people on /.. I don't even know how to hack my own driver. I can barely understand a simple C program.
I don't even know where I am! What's this big glowy panel in front of me? Does this button do something?
Look, the device needs to have a way to update its own firmware, right? Usually this is in code, in the firmware. If you overwrite the firmware, and you fuck this part up, you can't update over your FUBAR custom firmware. The general public considers this "bricked" because they don't want to start soldering stuff to the JTAG terminal or whatever.
Consider this wild notion:
Allow all the firmware except the bootloader to be overwritten by the bootloader. Then if you brick it, you can still use the bootloader to fix it.
Why is it important that linux drivers have source available but we don't worry so much about seeing the firmware source? Should we be pushing to see firmware source too? Instead should it not matter about seeing driver source? I'd love to hear your perspectives.
Every device in my machine that does anything particularly useful is going to be largely or wholly proprietary. I appreciate it when the hardware (by way of its firmware) can provide an interface to the OS that isn't needlessly complicated (technically or legally) to reimplement for various OSes and platforms. This makes it much easier to get a driver in source form - which in turn makes it a lot easier to carry support for the device up to a new version of the Linux kernel (since Linux doesn't have a stable ABI for binary-only drivers, binary-only drivers break now and then) or to a new processor architecture (i.e. x86 to x86-64 several years back).
I am not an enemy of proprietary software, I just want to be able to do more with software libre.
Is that there are still plenty of 10-year-olds in the world who also don't know what good storytelling is, and are easily impressed by gee-whiz special effects. When I was 10, the ORIGINAL Battlestar Galactica was enough for me. Just have one big in-space fight per episode and pew-pew with the spaceships and I was happy. Today I can't make myself sit through an episode of that shit.
The thing about the original Battlestar Galactica is that some of it was actually quite good. But the original run of the show (i.e. not "1980") was very short and it wound up being something like 50%-60% bad episodes.
So a lot depends on which episode you watch.
How 'cost effective' does it need to be when it's got a guaranteed audience of male tweens, teens, 20s ... plus all the geek girls. And the nostalgia audience too (that's my demographic, btw.).
The audience seems "guaranteed" but in fact it isn't. If the audience doesn't enjoy the show, they won't stick with it.
Blender is free. It has been used to create various animated shorts showcasing what it can do (Elephant's Dream, Big Buck Bunny and Sintel).
To be fair, it should be noted that a big reason they produced Elephant's Dream, Big Buck Bunny, and Sintel, was so they could give Blender a shake-down: figure out what was wrong with it that made production of such works difficult or problematic and attempt to fix it.
For guys like me, who want to try out 3-D modeling and animation without laying down a bunch of cash to do so, it's a pretty sweet deal. But at this point, I think it's fair to say that the Blender Foundation has a lot more to gain from someone using their software to produce a TV show than the people producing the TV show do.
See, I thought it was good, because there was *no* visible monster. It was all Tennant.
It wasn't all Tennant. Quite a lot of it was the other people on the bus-thing.
I never said the number of Earths in the set of Infinite Earths was not infinite.
Admittedly I'm going out on a limb by saying they're countably infinite but that's just for the sake of making a joke.
A lot of people thought they couldn't do greater than "Infinite Earths" - I mean, it's Infinite. You can't have more Earths than Infinite Earths, right? But, as it turns out, the Infinite Earths were countably infinite. This is why they were able to define a mapping of their Infinite Earths onto the natural number set (Earth One, Earth Two, Earth Three, etc.).
But this time around, the number of Earths is Uncountably Infinite. Not only can we get Earths infinitely different from our own, we can also get infinitely subtle variations. We can take two Earths with differences so minor as to be nearly indistinguishable, and find a third that is somewhere between the two. So even though the original Infinite Earths were, in fact, Infinite, there are still more of them in the new Uncountably Infinite Earths.
Old episodes: we can go anywhere in the universe and here we are in the English countryside AGAIN.
In the 2005 series they put a stop to that.
Instead, they just went to London and Cardiff a lot. :)
One of the weakest points in the Doctor Who movie was the notion that the Daleks would have anything we might call a criminal justice system.
It was totally meaningless to have the Daleks put the Master on trial anyway. They didn't even show any Daleks on-screen. It could have just as easily been the Timelords holding the trial, with the Doctor taking the Master's remains somewhere else...
The first thing I thought of when I saw the coloured daleks was that the Doctor had fallen into an episode of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
(That's what you get for having children who lived and breathed Power Rangers for several years.)
It's good that you included a Wikipedia link, otherwise people might not have gotten the reference.
I was hoping they'd keep the ganger version around to explain how the Doctor from the season opener dies in his current regeneration.
You got to consider, though: Amy asks if gangers can "die" - but a more important question is, can they regenerate? Remember the Doctor regenerates before he's shot the second time...
"[...] they are the most reliably defeatable enemies in the universe."
Thing is, the Daleks were only defeated once in the new series (Parting Of The Ways), all the other times, only the current plan was defeated, and the Daleks escaped to plot again.
I'm sorry... What?
Dalek: The Dalek is not technically defeated, but self-destructs.
Parting of the Ways: Whole fleet, approximately half a million Daleks including the Emperor disintegrated
Doomsday: Thousands of Daleks sucked into the hellish interdimensional void, four escape.
Evolution of the Daleks: One Dalek turns himself into a mutant hybrid, gets killed by the others. Two more killed by human Dalek-slaves. one escapes.
The Stolen Earth: Another fleet of about half a million Daleks: casings hacked so they spin around all goofy-like and explode. Another half a million Daleks dead, of which I guess three survived?
I'd say those all count as "defeats". "Victory of the Daleks" wasn't a defeat for obvious reasons... :)
Personally where I think they lost it is the "self-rescue" time travel when he was locked in the box. The whole part about not crossing your own timestream was what kept the series sane from the obvious solution - just go back in time and warn/stop/do something before it becomes a problem. Or indeed a future doctor can now show up and save the current one from anything. That was a limit to his power, when he became linked to the events he had to stay and fight, he couldn't just run back to the TARDIS and fix everything. Now he's just jumping around as he pleases, like in the Christmas special where he's rewriting the man's memories while he's standing there. Why is not that the answer to every villain now, go back in time and stop them from becoming villains? Now they have to hide his omnipotence behind absurdity, like it's all some kind of game to him. They need to dial back that mania a notch or two.
Christmas episodes are a bit of a special case - they're Christmas Episodes.
But they specifically addressed the mop+fez scenario:
"Why can't we just go back and change it?"
"It'd be a paradox that could destroy the universe."
"He did it before."
"...And, to be fair, the universe did explode..."
I've been extremely disappointed with this season and last. Matt Smith has done absolutely nothing for me. While Tennant quickly won me over, I've given Smith plenty of time to find his groove and have zero excitement about the stories like I had with the last doctor.
It's a shame as we're getting to the end of the regenerations, but they need to do something to give some life back to this franchise, it's a shame it's going down the toilet so fast.
Could not agree less. I think the show has never been better. In practically every way imaginable I think it's superior to Eccleston's and Tennant's runs. I think Matt is fabulous as the Doctor and I think Amy and Rory are excellent as companions.
It's not as though I really have a lot of bad things to say about the Tenth Doctor and his run - except maybe that he never seemed to find a companion-relationship that worked (Rose pined for him and then went away, Martha pined for him and then went away, Donna did sort of a Mary Sue for him, then had to go away) - it just seems to me that Smith's run has been really solid.
"The Doctor's Wife" is perhaps one of the best episodes I've ever seen. It completely eclipses anything that had David Tennant in it. The script and the acting.
What about "Midnight"?
That one always struck me as an odd sort of experiment - "What if the Doctor were in a perilous situation and the people around him reacted realistically instead of falling in line?" As such I think it was very cool but maybe not "one of the best"...
> The new episodes make almost zero sense
Since they rebooted the series they have been pushing more for time paradoxes running stories. For example "Bad Wolf", "Torchwood", "Saxon" and "There is something on your back". Each season it appears to get more and more in your face. In this series it appears to be the woman through the hatch, which makes sense now since the last weekend.
So at the start of each series they do appear to be a mess but wrap up nicely.
I don't know: I mean, before learning about The Flesh it wasn't really clear how these strange things were happening to Amy - but the Eyepatch lady kept appearing pretty regularly, and the Doctor kept looking at the preggo-scope to remind us that something was up... (Plus there was a photo of Amy in the little girl's room!) It seemed to me that it had to be something like that - somehow Amy was somewhere else, in that place with the Eyepatch Lady... So it didn't entirely make sense before this weekend, but I don't think it was a total mystery the way "Bad Wolf" was up until "The Parting of the Ways"...
I'm not sure I'd agree that the Doctor has become a caricature of himself, but certainly the quality of the plots has suffered.
Moffat's desire to have a strong overarching plot means that nothing ever makes sense until the very end.
I don't think that's a bad thing, as long as the episodes along the way are enjoyable, and as long as it all makes sense in the end.
For instance, the "trust me" scene in "Flesh and Stone" - to me, it didn't make any sense the first time around. (Of course, that scene was explained in "The Big Bang"...) That episode also introduced the idea that the cracks could erase things: they also took this opportunity to remind us of some of the things that happened in "Eleventh Hour" - the duck pond (there were never any ducks, of course, because they were erased. This is also another hint about Amy's life.) The "trust me" scene was basically just a mystery - without knowing that erased things could be brought back (an idea introduced in "Cold Blood") it was pretty much an unsolvable mystery for the viewers... But the 2-parter was enjoyable on its own so the mysteries (which I mostly didn't notice anyway) weren't too distracting.
In the end, the dangling mysteries from Season 5 (apart from the bit in "The Lodger", and the various references to The Silence, which tie into Season 6) were all concluded pretty nicely. I think it worked. I'd agree that it's kind of a gimmicky way to arrange a story - but really it's just a mystery. Mysteries are fun because you're pulled along by little hints that give you the feeling of coming closer to the answer - and then a lot hinges on how the mystery is resolved in the end. In other words, the process of picking up the clues along the way can be fun even if the conclusion is unsatisfactory (hence, people enjoying "Lost", etc.) - but in this case I think the conclusion was well executed, too.
I think Matt Smith has the potential to be a brilliant Doctor.
Already is, IMO.
Already last season the new Doctor was a little too full of himself, but I was quite shocked to find that it got infinitely worse this season.
Agreed. It seems like the new way the Doctor gets out of impossible situations always begins with something like "Do you know who I am? I did X, I did Y, I'm the Doctor, you should fear me!", sometimes ending with the bad guys just picking up and scampering away.
I'm not a fan of the Doctor's showboating, either... Eye-roll every time there's mention of "The Oncoming Storm" or anything like that. But do consider the circumstances of the two cases in which it happened in the 2010 series:
1: vs. the Atraxi. The Atraxi were already content, having re-captured Prisoner Zero, and were leaving, when The Doctor called them back to bitch them out.
2: vs. the alliance: The Doctor didn't know it but he was the reason all those aliens were there in the first place. So all his showboating really did was confirm for them that their trap was working.
Yeah, why doesn't those 2000 years of experience kick in for him?
Experience doing what? Sitting around guarding a great big box? There's only so much you can learn from that. :)
(But they established in a bit of dialogue in this season that he only remembers that stuff "sometimes"...)