I really enjoyed the Star Trek reboot. In my opinion, it was the the best of the Star Trek movies (but I was never a Trekkie) - yes, I know some people would hang me over that statement. I liked some of the original TV show and movies (as well as Enterprise) but as I said, my life didn't revolve around Star Trek. I just think the new movie was the best of the Star Trek films.
I love the old Star Trek films, but a lot of them are kind of crap. I mean, there's a lot I like in those films but a lot that I think just went really painfully wrong, too. I love how "Star Trek: The (Slow-)Motion Picture" tried to give us a little 2001 vibe and put the crew against something so vast as to be almost incomprehensible - but it was the recycled "Nomad" story, with too much wanking over the (admittedly beautiful) new model, and various problems due to production time running out or whatever... Trek 2 was pretty solid but "super-intelligent" Khan couldn't read through the simplest of secret codes, and they copped out on Spock's death before they even got to the credits. Trek 3 was like Trek 2's leftover baggage getting resolved, Trek 4 was like a big series of self-deprecating jokes, Trek 5 was.. I don't know, just kind of painful, I thought. And Trek 6 had its strengths but also a lot of stupid stuff - and the crew was getting pretty long in the tooth by this point. "Generations" was kind of dull and a bit unfocused, broken up into a bunch of sub-plots like a TV episode, featured the unnecessary return and then re-death of Kirk, and then the Enterprise getting brought down by a Klingon BoP of all things... (With the same BoP footage they'd been reusing since Trek 3!) - though it's got some pretty nice Galaxy-class eye candy (if you can look past the 4-footer dressing applied to the 6-footer) First Contact couldn't decide which of two movies it really wanted to be, and lowered itself to some action movie catch phrase moments... Insurrection - I'd have to see it again. And Nemesis, I think it's fair to say it wanted to be another "Wrath of Khan" rather badly. A lot of motivations didn't seem to make any sense, and... more telepathic rape. Yay. It is impressive how Ron Perlman can throw himself into all these roles without need for much make-up, though.
If the best one can say about Trek 2009 is that it's better than that sorry lot, then that's really unfortunate.
I frankly wouldn't know one style of sword-fighting from another. But they did go out of their way in the dialogue to bring up fencing...
Sulu: "Let me go on this awesome suicide mission. I'm trained in hand-to-hand combat." Kirk (later on): "What kind of hand-to-hand training did you have?" Sulu: "Fencing."
Then there was the whole thing about where Spock was waiting. Somewhere where Vulcan was visible in the sky?
Somewhere close enough to Vulcan that you can see it clearly with the naked eye, but far enough away that it doesn't get drawn in and destroyed when Vulcan turns into a black hole...
I think they made the whole "reboot" thing way too literal, and that IMO hurt the movie. The story doesn't really work the way it's told, "Nero goes back in time, changing history and that's why everything is different now" - it's just excess baggage that gets dragged around for the whole movie.
No, it really wasn't. Almost every Star Trek movie ever has been deeply flawed, admittedly, but I don't consider the Abrams movie to be any kind of exception.
First of all, you're getting angry over a cartoon about turtles that have become ninjas.
Secondly, you haven't even seen what he is proposing. So he changes their origin? big fucking deal. Get over it.
Well, if they're aliens instead of mutants doesn't that make it TANT? Or is it Teenage Mutant Alien Ninja Turtles (TMANT)?
I think the origin thing I could handle. The bigger issue is Bay himself. After what he did with Transformers I don't want to watch another of his movies.
And, let's be fair - a lot of people enjoyed Bay Transformers. Just, I didn't. By all rights I should have, Transformers (the franchise, I mean) is awesome. But after the first one I was unwilling to see either of the sequels in the theaters. If they show up on Netflix, maybe then I'll watch 'em - assuming I can find some time to watch it alone, so I don't have to subject my wife to it...
Ah, haven't seen that one. Nevertheless, it stands, if anything, as evidence that Bay's efforts will not--nay cannot--ruin TMNT. If the first, hugely-popular, utterly-commercialized cartoon series didn't ruin it, I think it's safe to say that nothing will.
Step 4: Make sure you put plenty of military wank in it
Se...well I'd say transformers 3 but pretty much anything Bay does if he can squeeze in some muscle bound dudebros in camo he is sooo going for it. I have to agree with Movie Bob over at Zero Punctuation that Bay likes to dry hump the Pentagon WAY too damned much.
It's the price you pay for having F-22's in your picture.
What I want from Linux is not a system that necessarily could compete with Windows or Mac, or attract large numbers of "average" users to use it.
What I enjoy about Linux is that it's a system that suits me. I like that it doesn't patronize me, or get all in my face about things I'm trying to do, the way Windows does. And every time I see a Linux app that behaves in a way that I associate with Windows (for instance, warning me when I change the extension of a file from ".jpg" or ".jpeg", or ".htm" to ".html") I get annoyed, and wish people writing Linux software wouldn't fixate themselves so much on creating software that suits the "average user".
I am a computer hobbyist, and that is awesome. Linux is an operating system in which a lot of the development effort has been centered around making it a great system for computer hobbyists. And that is, frankly, a bit problematic. There's no clear direction or leadership, and as such some really basic things have taken a really long time to materialize and/or stabilize. But I can work with that, and I choose to work with that, because most of the system is set up to support me in the way I choose to interact with the computer.
Whoever created all of the PDFs out there. It was not the PDF fairy.
Not quite.
I create PDF files pretty regularly, as the GP poster said, via "print to PDF"-type features. I never edit PDF files. So not all the PDF files out there were created by a PDF editor.
(Of course, a more complete PDF editing system would mean being able to do things like create a table of contents - so yeah, it can be important to have real PDF software.)
You cannot blame the OS for a game company's choices.
Well, it's not fair, but yes you can, and people do. "Linux sucks because I can't play my favorite game on it." There you go, Linux blamed for a game company's choice.
The problem with alternative apps like acrobat->gimp is that ultimately software is a tool (and so are some users;-)). If you are a graphics guy with 10+ years experience using an app, you are very very quick at doing hundreds of different things with the software. Through in gimp, sure you might be able to do all the things that you can do in photoshop but there will be a huge learning curve. If you are billing 100+ per hour for your time and some stupid "free" app cuts your productivity in half for a few weeks that is a problem.
Professional use, I'd absolutely agree. I don't think Gimp is on Photoshop's level at all (though people did tend to call it a "Photoshop alternative" - I think that there may have been some truth to that when Gimp was new - when there weren't a lot of apps out there that did the simpler jobs one tended to associate with Photoshop. These days, free image editors of Gimp's caliber are a lot more common, and Photoshop goes beyond that in a number of ways.
But I think that for the majority of users, an app on Gimp's level is enough.
Short and easy to spell? Agamemnon, Odysseus, Triptolemus, Hephaestus, Anesidora, Prometheus, Cytherea, Persephone, Pausanias, etc, etc.
I had Odysseus, Heracles, and Demeter as server names, but people kept misspelling them as "Ulysses", "Hercules", and "Ceres". It was a very frustrating situation.
Let me tell you, I tried this, and it really hasn't stood the test of time. In 1994 I set up a small network with names like "Homer", "Bart", and "Flanders" - nobody remembers those characters any more! People keep telling me to rename them "Peter", "Meg", and "Quagmire"... I don't know what that's all about, some old TV show that got cancelled years ago I think.
But if you said that you are lying, then that statement is a lie, which means you speak the truth. But if you speak the truth then you are lying. But you cannot be lying because that would mean you speak the truth... ERROR -- ERROR -- NORMAN, PLEASE ASSIST....
the ipad is a AWESOME device or textbooks, reading about dinosaurs and having animations or being able to have interactive parts is incredibly cool.
Well, yes... except in this case the animation and interactivity parts would all be lies, because nobody has ever seen a dinosaur move, much less interacted with one.
For that matter, no one has seen a dinosaur in any form other than fossilized skeletal remains. All the illustration and sculpture we see featuring dinosaurs with flesh on them is also fiction. Even some of the assembled skeletons have turned out to be wrong. It's fiction based on our best reasoned guesses about how the animals probably looked, but fiction nonetheless.
If such fiction is well-reasoned, then it is not without value.
I'm kind of surprised nobody's mentioned this aspect, because it seems sort of obvious to me.
HP can make a *lot* of money selling for lack of a better term "open" tablets.
I am a bit skeptical about that... I mean, tinkerers can be very enthusiastic about a product that's fun to hack on - but there aren't necessarily enough of them to make it worth manufacturing a tablet for them...
The whole project lost its focus: Palm used to be a neat piece of software for a PDA. It was not bloated with a file system, with Flash, and with all this other junk that has become the primary focus of Apple.
I think it's worth bearing in mind that their OS design was a great fit for the kind of devices they could produce in the late 90s. These days, the capabilities of a handheld machine are a lot better, so what would have been "bloat" thirteen years ago is now pretty reasonable in terms of the functionality provided vs. the resources consumed.
Slashdot Mirror
Moon (2009)
I hate to admit it, because this kind of weakens the argument that one can make a good sci-fi movie work in theaters...
But I never heard of that movie.
I really enjoyed the Star Trek reboot. In my opinion, it was the the best of the Star Trek movies (but I was never a Trekkie) - yes, I know some people would hang me over that statement. I liked some of the original TV show and movies (as well as Enterprise) but as I said, my life didn't revolve around Star Trek. I just think the new movie was the best of the Star Trek films.
I love the old Star Trek films, but a lot of them are kind of crap. I mean, there's a lot I like in those films but a lot that I think just went really painfully wrong, too. I love how "Star Trek: The (Slow-)Motion Picture" tried to give us a little 2001 vibe and put the crew against something so vast as to be almost incomprehensible - but it was the recycled "Nomad" story, with too much wanking over the (admittedly beautiful) new model, and various problems due to production time running out or whatever... Trek 2 was pretty solid but "super-intelligent" Khan couldn't read through the simplest of secret codes, and they copped out on Spock's death before they even got to the credits. Trek 3 was like Trek 2's leftover baggage getting resolved, Trek 4 was like a big series of self-deprecating jokes, Trek 5 was.. I don't know, just kind of painful, I thought. And Trek 6 had its strengths but also a lot of stupid stuff - and the crew was getting pretty long in the tooth by this point. "Generations" was kind of dull and a bit unfocused, broken up into a bunch of sub-plots like a TV episode, featured the unnecessary return and then re-death of Kirk, and then the Enterprise getting brought down by a Klingon BoP of all things... (With the same BoP footage they'd been reusing since Trek 3!) - though it's got some pretty nice Galaxy-class eye candy (if you can look past the 4-footer dressing applied to the 6-footer) First Contact couldn't decide which of two movies it really wanted to be, and lowered itself to some action movie catch phrase moments... Insurrection - I'd have to see it again. And Nemesis, I think it's fair to say it wanted to be another "Wrath of Khan" rather badly. A lot of motivations didn't seem to make any sense, and... more telepathic rape. Yay. It is impressive how Ron Perlman can throw himself into all these roles without need for much make-up, though.
If the best one can say about Trek 2009 is that it's better than that sorry lot, then that's really unfortunate.
I frankly wouldn't know one style of sword-fighting from another. But they did go out of their way in the dialogue to bring up fencing...
Sulu: "Let me go on this awesome suicide mission. I'm trained in hand-to-hand combat."
Kirk (later on): "What kind of hand-to-hand training did you have?"
Sulu: "Fencing."
Then there was the whole thing about where Spock was waiting. Somewhere where Vulcan was visible in the sky?
Somewhere close enough to Vulcan that you can see it clearly with the naked eye, but far enough away that it doesn't get drawn in and destroyed when Vulcan turns into a black hole...
I think they made the whole "reboot" thing way too literal, and that IMO hurt the movie. The story doesn't really work the way it's told, "Nero goes back in time, changing history and that's why everything is different now" - it's just excess baggage that gets dragged around for the whole movie.
You're forgetting one thing, Star Trek was good..
No, it really wasn't. Almost every Star Trek movie ever has been deeply flawed, admittedly, but I don't consider the Abrams movie to be any kind of exception.
I think you need to take a step back.
First of all, you're getting angry over a cartoon about turtles that have become ninjas.
Secondly, you haven't even seen what he is proposing. So he changes their origin? big fucking deal. Get over it.
Well, if they're aliens instead of mutants doesn't that make it TANT? Or is it Teenage Mutant Alien Ninja Turtles (TMANT)?
I think the origin thing I could handle. The bigger issue is Bay himself. After what he did with Transformers I don't want to watch another of his movies.
And, let's be fair - a lot of people enjoyed Bay Transformers. Just, I didn't. By all rights I should have, Transformers (the franchise, I mean) is awesome. But after the first one I was unwilling to see either of the sequels in the theaters. If they show up on Netflix, maybe then I'll watch 'em - assuming I can find some time to watch it alone, so I don't have to subject my wife to it...
Ah, haven't seen that one. Nevertheless, it stands, if anything, as evidence that Bay's efforts will not--nay cannot--ruin TMNT. If the first, hugely-popular, utterly-commercialized cartoon series didn't ruin it, I think it's safe to say that nothing will.
Hah, good point. :)
That's fine, if you're ok with women loving your money and not you.
They can love the money, as long as it's me they have sex with.
You forgot
Step 4: Make sure you put plenty of military wank in it
Se...well I'd say transformers 3 but pretty much anything Bay does if he can squeeze in some muscle bound dudebros in camo he is sooo going for it. I have to agree with Movie Bob over at Zero Punctuation that Bay likes to dry hump the Pentagon WAY too damned much.
It's the price you pay for having F-22's in your picture.
What I want from Linux is not a system that necessarily could compete with Windows or Mac, or attract large numbers of "average" users to use it.
What I enjoy about Linux is that it's a system that suits me. I like that it doesn't patronize me, or get all in my face about things I'm trying to do, the way Windows does. And every time I see a Linux app that behaves in a way that I associate with Windows (for instance, warning me when I change the extension of a file from ".jpg" or ".jpeg", or ".htm" to ".html") I get annoyed, and wish people writing Linux software wouldn't fixate themselves so much on creating software that suits the "average user".
I am a computer hobbyist, and that is awesome. Linux is an operating system in which a lot of the development effort has been centered around making it a great system for computer hobbyists. And that is, frankly, a bit problematic. There's no clear direction or leadership, and as such some really basic things have taken a really long time to materialize and/or stabilize. But I can work with that, and I choose to work with that, because most of the system is set up to support me in the way I choose to interact with the computer.
Acrobat != Adobe Reader
Whoever created all of the PDFs out there. It was not the PDF fairy.
Not quite.
I create PDF files pretty regularly, as the GP poster said, via "print to PDF"-type features. I never edit PDF files. So not all the PDF files out there were created by a PDF editor.
(Of course, a more complete PDF editing system would mean being able to do things like create a table of contents - so yeah, it can be important to have real PDF software.)
You cannot blame the OS for a game company's choices.
Well, it's not fair, but yes you can, and people do. "Linux sucks because I can't play my favorite game on it." There you go, Linux blamed for a game company's choice.
The problem with alternative apps like acrobat->gimp is that ultimately software is a tool (and so are some users ;-)). If you are a graphics guy with 10+ years experience using an app, you are very very quick at doing hundreds of different things with the software. Through in gimp, sure you might be able to do all the things that you can do in photoshop but there will be a huge learning curve. If you are billing 100+ per hour for your time and some stupid "free" app cuts your productivity in half for a few weeks that is a problem.
Professional use, I'd absolutely agree. I don't think Gimp is on Photoshop's level at all (though people did tend to call it a "Photoshop alternative" - I think that there may have been some truth to that when Gimp was new - when there weren't a lot of apps out there that did the simpler jobs one tended to associate with Photoshop. These days, free image editors of Gimp's caliber are a lot more common, and Photoshop goes beyond that in a number of ways.
But I think that for the majority of users, an app on Gimp's level is enough.
Kudos on the Macross signature.
Eh, "Micronians" is a Robotech-ism, though... In Macross it's "Miclone" (micro/clone)
Short and easy to spell? Agamemnon, Odysseus, Triptolemus, Hephaestus, Anesidora, Prometheus, Cytherea, Persephone, Pausanias, etc, etc.
I had Odysseus, Heracles, and Demeter as server names, but people kept misspelling them as "Ulysses", "Hercules", and "Ceres". It was a very frustrating situation.
Not true. We can also come up with My Little Pony names. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether that makes it better or worse.
Derpy Hooves! I want my workstation to be called Derpy Hooves!
A long time ago, I used star trek ships
That must be a frustrating naming convention, since all Star Trek ships are named "Enterprise"
Let me tell you, I tried this, and it really hasn't stood the test of time. In 1994 I set up a small network with names like "Homer", "Bart", and "Flanders" - nobody remembers those characters any more! People keep telling me to rename them "Peter", "Meg", and "Quagmire"... I don't know what that's all about, some old TV show that got cancelled years ago I think.
Sure. Unfortunately, due to budget cuts the local police cannot join the meeting.
That's OK. Batman has plenty of money.
No, these are bold-faced lies!.
But if you said that you are lying, then that statement is a lie, which means you speak the truth. But if you speak the truth then you are lying. But you cannot be lying because that would mean you speak the truth... ERROR -- ERROR -- NORMAN, PLEASE ASSIST....
the ipad is a AWESOME device or textbooks, reading about dinosaurs and having animations or being able to have interactive parts is incredibly cool.
Well, yes... except in this case the animation and interactivity parts would all be lies, because nobody has ever seen a dinosaur move, much less interacted with one.
For that matter, no one has seen a dinosaur in any form other than fossilized skeletal remains. All the illustration and sculpture we see featuring dinosaurs with flesh on them is also fiction. Even some of the assembled skeletons have turned out to be wrong. It's fiction based on our best reasoned guesses about how the animals probably looked, but fiction nonetheless.
If such fiction is well-reasoned, then it is not without value.
No, but if you rip out the battery it can make a great incendiary device.
Keep it up! There's no way this is ever getting old!
I'm kind of surprised nobody's mentioned this aspect, because it seems sort of obvious to me.
HP can make a *lot* of money selling for lack of a better term "open" tablets.
I am a bit skeptical about that... I mean, tinkerers can be very enthusiastic about a product that's fun to hack on - but there aren't necessarily enough of them to make it worth manufacturing a tablet for them...
The whole project lost its focus: Palm used to be a neat piece of software for a PDA. It was not bloated with a file system, with Flash, and with all this other junk that has become the primary focus of Apple.
I think it's worth bearing in mind that their OS design was a great fit for the kind of devices they could produce in the late 90s. These days, the capabilities of a handheld machine are a lot better, so what would have been "bloat" thirteen years ago is now pretty reasonable in terms of the functionality provided vs. the resources consumed.