Have you ever tried to USE Solaris on x86?
on
No Solaris 9 for x86
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· Score: 2, Troll
It's a complete fscking joke! God forbid you want to install a decent raid controller (say 64bit 66MHz for example), even if you find one that is "supported" by Sun and the vendor, I bet money you'll be on the phone with the vendor for three days trying to find a working set of drivers. It's dead slow on Intel. Install DOS, it's faster and has better support.
I get stuck dealing with it because the poor fools we support absolutely MUST have "development" boxes that mirror the production boxes. All the production (Oracle 8i DB) is Solaris on Sun hardware. We can't afford Sun boxes for testing, but the platform has to be the same, hence the need for Solaris on Intel: cheap Sun development boxes. Putting Oracle 8i and Solaris 2.7/2.8 on Intel is like trying to install OS/2 Warp on a Commodore 64. Managers get pissed when you bill them a shitload of time (2+ days on some occasions) just for a working OS install. Especially when you write "Use Linux next time" in the comments field.;)
Every chance I get I hammer management relentlessly, without pity or mercy, about what a shitfest this OS is on Intel. There is NO excuse, Linux can be made to simulate a Sun environment with precious little effort. Thank GOD that Sun finally decided to can this thing. Now I get to sit back and laugh hysterically since they have no choice except to use Linux. SuSE + Oracle = 10,000x faster performance on Intel than Solaris.
In case you couldn't tell, I have enough frustration energy from dealing with this OS to light up a small star system for a few years...
I've nothing against Solaris on SUN hardware, mind you. It kicks a hell of a lot of ass there. There's something very nice about an OS optimized specifically for the hardware it runs on. Must be why Mac users are always smiling (or it could be the drugs they are on, what do I know...)
MCSE's suck. Seriously. I suspect Microsoft is to blame for that, since I know people who 1) never touched the os, 2) never went to boot camp, and 3) passed all the NT4 MCSE tests on the first try. They aren't all that smart either. To be fair, I can almost say the same for Novell CNE, but at least in that case the hacker in question was a genius. He only took about 2 months of hands on administration to turn into a real CNE.
I have a MCSE. I worked about as hard for that as I would have work for a B- in a summer class of Physics 101. I'm not that smart either, but I do have some level of intuition for solving PC problems. Getting a Sair LCA was actually a bit harder than the MCSE.
The problem with the MCSE is that it doesn't test you on real world microsoft products. It tests you on Microsoft's Theory of OS Operation, something that is largely Myth. There are the Microsoft answers you need to pass the tests, and the real world answers you need to fix the problems. These only agree about half of the time. That might have something to do with the usual 50% hit/miss ability of MCSE's to solve problems.
I haven't tried the 2K certs yet. I could probably pass them cold, but I have more important things to do. I sit here happily hacking FreeS/WAN for our fledgling corporate VPN, pouring through Sair books and getting ready to finish off the Level 2 tests for my LCE at Linuxworld in NY. At least I'm learning something. Maybe later I'll go for the LPI tests, I hear those are the best. Linux is a hell of a lot more fun than Windows.
Who calls tech support? They never know anything. Only decent tech support I've ever used was Symantec, Tripplite, and Lonetar. Everyone else barely knows the name of their product, let alone what is wrong with it.
Well, all the violence was cut from the fight scenes (hence the rushed choppy feel), and all the real non story-related character development hit the cutting room floor (30min of it at least). As far as rushed, I think I can live with that.;)
Readding the missing footage might do a lot towards addressing your first two problems with the film.
Actually, Sauron was quite humanlike. He's mentioned in the Silmarillion many times, infiltrating, eavesdropping, plotting and poisoning everything he can. He rather effortlessly passed for an elf and a human during certain times in the past, and was even called beautiful. He didn't get the nickname Deceiver by playing cheap parlor tricks;) I suppose he could have looked like anything he chose.
I liked him in the films, but I wouldn't have minded seeing him do more. Wave the ring, turn a phalanx of troops to dust, etc.
I also would have liked it more if Isildur's cutting the ring loose looked less like an accident in a moment of desperation and more like a really angry warrior taking a piece out of Sauron's hide. Isildur was a badass in the books.
Woah, left out a crucial bit of info there...
on
Info on the LOTR:FOTR DVD
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The DVD editions will have a solid R rating. For those of you who are more perceptive, I'm sure you noticed during the fights that there are a lot of folks swinging, but not a whole lot of hits. There were a lot of quick cuts made to the fight scenes to make the films PG13 (so they could get the kids in the theater of course), and this is one of the reasons why the fight scenes are so wild and crazy... you are missing about a fifth of the action.
Remember that this is Peter "Brain Dead" Jackson. He has done his share to set the bar for film gore. You cna probably expect the fight scenes to be a lot more like BraveHeart and Gladiator on the DVDs.
I'm looking forward to the 40 minutes of character development that hit the floor myself...
Ah, bullshit man, you're coming at it from the wrong angle. The ONLY thing you need in the cookie is the time of the last page viewing for each story. Every article on slashdot has always had the date and time stamped in, as does every post. You can use that to at least identify the newer data since your last visit on a story by story basis. You could twiddle the code enough to make a viewing mode that, although not perfect, would certainly be much better than "newest first". Not easy, but not impossible.
Another alternative is to look at how EZBoard does it. Slashdot's a very different beast, but the principle is still the same. I wonder if it would scale well to a discussion board this big... individual EZBoard communities are nowhere near this large.
That Star Wars, once an Icon for originality and daring filmmaking, should now become an Icon for corporate filmmaking and the typical crap coming out of Hollywood nowdays. What a collective kick in the face. Thanks George, I'm still clawing the dirt out of my teeth from TPM.
Don't feed me any pussy arguments about Lucas not owing his fans anything. That's bullshit of the highest order. His fans made him into what he is today. Granted, Lucas created Star Wars, the IP is his, and I support his right to do whatever he wants with it. That does not mean I won't tear him to shreds for destroying the artistic integrity of his work. Artistic merit is not decided by the creator of the art, it is decided by the reception of the art by the audience and the reception of the art ONLY.
It's about Greedo shooting first. That sums up everything. All those clever little edits to the original trilogy to make it less daring... we should have suspected something then. We walked into TPM like walking into a brick wall. Everyone was willing to give Lucas so much credit because Indiana jones and Star Wars were so awesome. I think Lucas has just burned up all the leeway he's going to be allowed. I haven't felt this dirty since Metallica's sellout.
You know what reaction the AOTC (or Starwars 90210) trailer has been getting in any theater I've seen it in? Snorts, guffaws, shrugs, rolling eyes. When I attended the midnight LOTR premiere, that crowd was VERY harsh. The trailer was openly booed by the audience, with a few in the back even shouting "SELLOUT" over the general chatter. The word is out... It's not that N'Synch is awful (which they are), it's just the mere IDEA that Lucas would include them in the first place.
I'm not sure if I'll go see it in the theater at all. I think I'll download a rip of this one first and give it a good look. I know this one will be pirated before it hits the silver screen, just due to the number of disgruntled SW fans. If the rip looks good, maybe I'll go see it. I won't hold my breath. This movie just looks like a rehas of Titanic and Pearl Harbor with Lightsabers. Big friggin deal. How pedestrian.
I won't be buying any SW DVDs, including the original series if they contain the edits. I'll make my own DVDs from the original Laserdisc editions before I give Lucas one more dollar.
I'd so love to be wrong on this one...
Re:So, all you people who are panning Ep2....
on
Attack of the Clones
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· Score: 1
I'll download a rip of it. If the rip looks honestly decent and enetertaining, I'll actually go see it in the theater, but I'm having trouble believing that this might happen.
I'll vote with my pocketbook in the DVD department. I won't be buying any of the SW DVDs, even the original series, because of the butchering done by Lucas. Greedo shoots first? Please. Instead I'll hunt down a set of the SW Laserdiscs and make my own set of DVDs from that material, because that's the best we can expect from SW anymore, and it won't have the bullshit edits.
I just hope he doesn't butcher Indy 4 like he has Star Wars.
Now they can just pay you a fat check, scan your image and voice once and use it in as many films as they like. Anyone want to take bets on how long it will be before they bring out a modern movie with John Wayne plaing the starring role? It's possible, even easy. After all, they did it with Brandon Lee in The Crow, but that was because they had no other choice. How long before that becomes an accepted way of making a film?
I'd give it 10 years at most before we see mainstream pictures using dead actors. That could go to a really bad place... corporations and movie studios with licenses to particular actors' digital counterparts, licensing of their digital avatars, patents on the technology... we could see a very real mess develop... after all, precedent of a sort is already set with currently existing animated characters (Mickey Mouse, Aki Ross, Jar Jar Binks, Gollum, etc.) and if those rules were applied to living actors I expect people would not be pleased...
Some of you will say that computer actors will never be as good as the real thing. You'd be wrong of course... not to say it would be easy, but 99% as good as the real thing is close enough for 99% of the people. Readers on this site in particular should know exactly what CGI technology is capable of, and it's definitely not out of reach. Better start thinking about it now, if we see it happening perhaps we can do something to prevent it from going down the wrong road.
I own a Sony 4:3 HDTV, the 61' model. Cost me $4k. I and my roomates were moving into a new apartment and decided that the 21' just looked too damn small in the living room. Plus, we're a geek house, so there is the toy factor to consider.
If you only watch television, the improvement over standard projection TVs is definitely NOT worth any investment. Save your money. This is true even with the HDTV feeds you can get from sattelite providers. The picture gain in my mind seems to be about 10-15% at most. That's not worth nearly double the cost.
Now, if you watch movies and not television (like myself) and you have a DVD player, then definitely consider getting HDTV. DVD movies look far, far better on HDTV, so you'll get a lot more value out of the DVDs you buy. Our DVD library is at 150 films and counting up steadily... in the dark it's very close to watching a movie screen on a 61'. The picture quality is such that you don't even notice the letterbox effect in the dark, since you can't see the black bands. I considered springing for a letterbox set, but frankly there just isn't enough material that uses letterbox to justify that price increase on an already expensive HDTV set. 61' is plenty big enough to show letterbox at a good size anyway.
We play a lot of games. The PS2 looks very good on the HDTV, but not all that much better than normal television. Our XBox, on the other hand, looks like DVD compared to VHS... huge improvement in picture quality. Beating Halo in Legendary on that set was a blast... co-op play kicks a lot of ass when the screen, split 4 ways, still gives every player a viewing area comparable to most TV sets, AND with the full quality, nothing pixellated.
We have a PC linked to the TV for watching rips and whatever other misc media we manage to download, be it movie rips, anime music videos, or pr0n. The PC image looks pretty sharp, but without a video card capable of 480i or 1080i output you won't get much out of it. Most PC graphics cards capable of that output are very pricey, hopefully those will drop in the future as well. I'll definitely be buying one once they do.
It all depends on how much time you spend in front of the set. I wouldn't upgrade unless you need a new one. May as well wait until 2006 if you can, your old set will fail eventually and by then it'll be really cheap to pick up an uber-tv.
Decent Server System with a 64bit PCI bus: ~$700
Nine (9) 100GB WDC ATA100 Hard Drives: ~$1800
3Ware Escalade 7850 64bit ATA-Raid Card: ~$475
Yes it runs Linux!
Having 700GB of fast online storage at home with RAID5 reliability, all for ~$3000, is how you tell your geek-girlfriend you love her. At least, that's the best excuse I can find for spending that much on it.:P
I'm waiting until they start making drives in the 150GB range to build mine, so that with the 8-drive setup it'll still reach a terabyte in total. You'll lose one for the parity info, and you have to order 9 drives so you have one on hand in case of a failure... after all, backup devices that can back up that much data will cost you more than the system did in the first place.
Trust me, it beats sifting through folders of CD-ROMs looking for data... especially when you realize your CD-ROMs are starting to flake from age and abuse...
Re:A plea to the hard core LOTR fans
on
Behind the Scenes
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you want to know some of the details of the story it's on the LOTR website at www.lordoftherings.net.
The Scouring of the Shire is indeed in the films, and gets a lot of time. The Grey Havens at the end is appearently something very special for Peter.. he's gone on reacord saying filming the ending nearly broke him. That's good enough for me, last time I heard those words was JMS talking about the final episode of B5, and that nearly broke me...
What a load of horseshit. Somebody please beat this author upside the head with the clue bat.
Linux already won the war. You can take this jumping zealotism and open source philosophy smokescreen and get rid of it. Linux will win (is winning / has won) for a few very simple reasons.
1. Linux gives you more freedom. This is the NUMBER ONE Microsoft killer. No draconian content controls, no list of things you can't do or shouldn't do with your hardware and software. Source code so you can do whatever the hell you want, if you are smart enough, or can afford the talent.
2. Linux costs you NOTHING compared to Microsoft. Linux requires you to invest time and learn a few things about your networks and systems. After that time investment (which you have to make with Microsoft as well) you are done paying for your software.
3. Linux (thanks to GPL, GNU and Open Source philosophy) is beyond the control of anyone. It cannot be sued, bought, tamed, subdued, or extended because it has no front to attack, and a vicious ironclad legal defense against IP issues thanks to the GPL.
That's all we need. There are dozens of other reasons, but they amount to jack compared to these simple facts. This guarantees my freedom (and everyone else) from Microsoft or any other vendor (M$ is NOT the only threat here guys).
In case you hadn't noticed, Microsoft's Licensing agreements and absurdly high costs are driving companies AWAY from Microsoft in droves, to say nothing of what XP's draconian content controls are doing for artists and home users.
Hey hackers, want to make a shitload of many and get good job security? Position yourself to take advantage of the mass Windows to Linux migrations that will be heading your way in the future. Maybe 3 years, maybe 5, maybe even as long as 10... but it's coming.
Looking forward to the day when Microsoft is just another Apple, IBM, Sun or Redhat.
The too much data argument is bullshit. If they feed that data into a computer there are no limits at all on what they can do with it, and they know it. You don't need manpower to analyze that data, you need a team of genius programmers to turn it into a database that violates every aspect of privacy for every us citizen. Do you really want that kind of power in the hands of our government?
How hard is it REALLY to secure a plane?
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 1
Ok look, I'm just getting sick of people saying you cannot secure an aircraft against hijackers. That is total bullshit. We can make those things as secure as tanks and military jets, it just requires a little paradigm shift in airplane design. For example...
Separate the cockpit/flight deck from the rest of the airplane. No way through, period, and make the bulkhead that separates them capable of withstanding just about any attack. The flight deck is entered from the OUTSIDE of the plane via a separate door. Once in the air there is no way in hell anyone can get from the passenger area into the flight deck or vice-versa.
True, this doesn't make it impossible to hijack, however it makes it several of orders of magnitude harder to do, and a bunck of knife wielding psychos are not going to be able to hijack an aircraft with that kind of design. It would take a well equipped military team to hijack something like that, and we'd notice that kind of equipment going on board.
Probably wouldn't be a bad idea to have closed circuit television that allows those on the flight deck to view what is happening in the rest of the plane. We might even want to transmit that data back to the airport now, we have the technology to do it.
What if the pilot has a problem? The flight crew is usually 5 people isn't it? We have a pilot, co-pilot, and an engineer at least? Hey, if all three of them somehow suffer a fatal heart attack the flight was doomed from the beginning, I'll take my chances with that one. The odds of that are a lot less than the odds of what happened on Tuesday happening again.
And why in hell isn't there a GPS transmitter or similar device in the standard "black box" that makes it easy to locate? AFAIK they don't do that. It would make them awfully easy to find...
Seriously... how in HELL can an aircraft enter a no-fly zone on a crystal clear morning and strike a building, and then a SECOND one somehow does the same thing 18 minutes later, not seeing the billowing black cloud from the first one? Man this is gonna start a shitstorm... what a miserable morning...
Long time ago, some idiots in court ruled that companies are "legal entities" and have the same degree of rights and abilities that people do under that law. Oops. Guess they didn't see what that would cost us.
For my money, corpoate entities should be treated like criminals with regards to what rights they get... but that's just me and I know I'm whacked...
This is everyone's favorite argument, and of course like most of the popular ones it's mostly bullshit.
You should have the right to shout "FIRE" at the top of your lungs in a crowded theatre. That's a free speech issue.
You also have to bear up to the consequences of your actions, IE taking responsibility (and punishment if necessary) of the resulting paniced crowd rushing blindly towards the exit. This is a civil liability issue. NOT a speech one.
We don't have to make it illegal to shout "FIRE" in order to solve that kind of problem. It's like inciting to riot. Your speech for that is protected, your ability to do so is most definitely not.
It's a fine line, but that's what these examples that open the floodgates are all about... courting that fine line to the point of absurdity.
Racial hate speech is the same sort of thing. We can't forbid it, we can only punish those who act on it, because we punish the ACT, not the speech that caused it or led to it. One can talk about murder without reservation (unless in high school it seems) however one cannot actually commit murder without bearing the consequences.
I agree, there can be no middle ground... all or nothing. Give an inch, they take a mile... just because those first few inches were more reasonable than the rest doesn't justify it.
People are stupid. It's a fact of life./shrug If anyone has a solution to that problem, well... I'll vote you into office and you're welcome to take a stab at the matter. Good luck, you'll need it.
I find it particularly amusing that the most powerful computing science the world can conceive of is based on apparently illogical theories and imaginary numbers. Sure, they work, but that's gotta keep a few scientists awake and staring at the walls at night. Good for them:)
Imagine what the tiniest error could do in a logic matrix this complicated... how susceptible to interference is the quantum bit?
Also imagine the possibilities for networking... if you were to take into consideration the "action at a distance" effect to transmit data somehow you could transmit a great deal of data in zero time. You'd still have to send that first bit, but after that, you could (possibly?) maintain an instantaneous communication state regardless of distance. Guess we won't have to build fiber lines to Mars anymore:)
Great, the site has gone down now before I finally got to the G article... either an elite hack, slashdot effect or certain parties don't want us to know that information:) Wonder if there are any spanners out there keeping tabs on this stuff... if you take time travel into consideration you can build a computer that will provide you with the answer instantly before it does the actual calculations... just have it send the answer information back in time. Put that in your pipe and smoke it:)
Want to end this bullshit War?
on
"Traffic"
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· Score: 1
I simply don't have the strength to rant about this topic again, so I'll let others do it for me. The only thing I would do is point out a possible solution. The only way to change the system is to CHANGE the system. Vote Libertarian. At least they have the common decency to spell out how they really feel about every issue under the sun. Read the War on Drugs policy:)
I can't believe I'm actually advocating a political party... and on slashdot no less... I must be mad. Oh well, Monday is a good day to be mad.
Why can't you blend P2P with Client/Server?
on
Gnutella's Challenge
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· Score: 2
Maybe I'm just an idiot but it seems to me that the easiest way to solve this problem is to have two flavors of Gnutella. A server flavor and a client flavor. The client is pretty much just what the napster program is - dump app that simply finds a server and submits queries but does no real work except to maintain a list of what it provides. The server program should be what Gnutella is, a peer-to-peer system that maintains a loose association of machines with record of where all the data on the network lies, including all the clients.
This would facilitate a hybrid network with servers run by anybody that chooses to run one, in any country, so it is safe to say that the servers cannot be shut down by an authority, especially since anyone can just set up another and join it to the network. This way we only have the server-machines communicating so it reduces the load on the network and brings gnutella's problems back to a manageable level. The client machines simply find themselves a server and then figure out where best to link to the network and go from there.
Seems that gnutella's problem is that it is too distributed. Granted, a p2p system can idealistically work, but I don't think we have the bandwidth for it. If the network was more static than it is it would also work but since it is ever changing it makes it much harder to track everything.
So, has anyone ever tried anything like this before? Did it work? If not can those problems be solved? Any networking gurus out there care to take a shot at this? It can't be a new idea, it's just too obvious.
Well, maybe he is in politics to "scratch an itch", that itch being caused by the rash we've gotten thanks to big government riding all of our backs for the last century. Just a random thought:) That's the kind of itch I expect the majority of/. has felt from time to time.
Question to ask yourself sometime - if you were president (not running, but actually president) what would you do? Think about it:)
Slashdot Mirror
It's a complete fscking joke! God forbid you want to install a decent raid controller (say 64bit 66MHz for example), even if you find one that is "supported" by Sun and the vendor, I bet money you'll be on the phone with the vendor for three days trying to find a working set of drivers. It's dead slow on Intel. Install DOS, it's faster and has better support.
;)
I get stuck dealing with it because the poor fools we support absolutely MUST have "development" boxes that mirror the production boxes. All the production (Oracle 8i DB) is Solaris on Sun hardware. We can't afford Sun boxes for testing, but the platform has to be the same, hence the need for Solaris on Intel: cheap Sun development boxes. Putting Oracle 8i and Solaris 2.7/2.8 on Intel is like trying to install OS/2 Warp on a Commodore 64. Managers get pissed when you bill them a shitload of time (2+ days on some occasions) just for a working OS install. Especially when you write "Use Linux next time" in the comments field.
Every chance I get I hammer management relentlessly, without pity or mercy, about what a shitfest this OS is on Intel. There is NO excuse, Linux can be made to simulate a Sun environment with precious little effort. Thank GOD that Sun finally decided to can this thing. Now I get to sit back and laugh hysterically since they have no choice except to use Linux. SuSE + Oracle = 10,000x faster performance on Intel than Solaris.
In case you couldn't tell, I have enough frustration energy from dealing with this OS to light up a small star system for a few years...
I've nothing against Solaris on SUN hardware, mind you. It kicks a hell of a lot of ass there. There's something very nice about an OS optimized specifically for the hardware it runs on. Must be why Mac users are always smiling (or it could be the drugs they are on, what do I know...)
MCSE's suck. Seriously. I suspect Microsoft is to blame for that, since I know people who 1) never touched the os, 2) never went to boot camp, and 3) passed all the NT4 MCSE tests on the first try. They aren't all that smart either. To be fair, I can almost say the same for Novell CNE, but at least in that case the hacker in question was a genius. He only took about 2 months of hands on administration to turn into a real CNE.
I have a MCSE. I worked about as hard for that as I would have work for a B- in a summer class of Physics 101. I'm not that smart either, but I do have some level of intuition for solving PC problems. Getting a Sair LCA was actually a bit harder than the MCSE.
The problem with the MCSE is that it doesn't test you on real world microsoft products. It tests you on Microsoft's Theory of OS Operation, something that is largely Myth. There are the Microsoft answers you need to pass the tests, and the real world answers you need to fix the problems. These only agree about half of the time. That might have something to do with the usual 50% hit/miss ability of MCSE's to solve problems.
I haven't tried the 2K certs yet. I could probably pass them cold, but I have more important things to do. I sit here happily hacking FreeS/WAN for our fledgling corporate VPN, pouring through Sair books and getting ready to finish off the Level 2 tests for my LCE at Linuxworld in NY. At least I'm learning something. Maybe later I'll go for the LPI tests, I hear those are the best. Linux is a hell of a lot more fun than Windows.
Who calls tech support? They never know anything. Only decent tech support I've ever used was Symantec, Tripplite, and Lonetar. Everyone else barely knows the name of their product, let alone what is wrong with it.
Well, all the violence was cut from the fight scenes (hence the rushed choppy feel), and all the real non story-related character development hit the cutting room floor (30min of it at least). As far as rushed, I think I can live with that. ;)
Readding the missing footage might do a lot towards addressing your first two problems with the film.
Actually, Sauron was quite humanlike. He's mentioned in the Silmarillion many times, infiltrating, eavesdropping, plotting and poisoning everything he can. He rather effortlessly passed for an elf and a human during certain times in the past, and was even called beautiful. He didn't get the nickname Deceiver by playing cheap parlor tricks ;) I suppose he could have looked like anything he chose.
I liked him in the films, but I wouldn't have minded seeing him do more. Wave the ring, turn a phalanx of troops to dust, etc.
I also would have liked it more if Isildur's cutting the ring loose looked less like an accident in a moment of desperation and more like a really angry warrior taking a piece out of Sauron's hide. Isildur was a badass in the books.
The DVD editions will have a solid R rating. For those of you who are more perceptive, I'm sure you noticed during the fights that there are a lot of folks swinging, but not a whole lot of hits. There were a lot of quick cuts made to the fight scenes to make the films PG13 (so they could get the kids in the theater of course), and this is one of the reasons why the fight scenes are so wild and crazy... you are missing about a fifth of the action.
Remember that this is Peter "Brain Dead" Jackson. He has done his share to set the bar for film gore. You cna probably expect the fight scenes to be a lot more like BraveHeart and Gladiator on the DVDs.
I'm looking forward to the 40 minutes of character development that hit the floor myself...
Ah, bullshit man, you're coming at it from the wrong angle. The ONLY thing you need in the cookie is the time of the last page viewing for each story. Every article on slashdot has always had the date and time stamped in, as does every post. You can use that to at least identify the newer data since your last visit on a story by story basis. You could twiddle the code enough to make a viewing mode that, although not perfect, would certainly be much better than "newest first". Not easy, but not impossible.
Another alternative is to look at how EZBoard does it. Slashdot's a very different beast, but the principle is still the same. I wonder if it would scale well to a discussion board this big... individual EZBoard communities are nowhere near this large.
That Star Wars, once an Icon for originality and daring filmmaking, should now become an Icon for corporate filmmaking and the typical crap coming out of Hollywood nowdays. What a collective kick in the face. Thanks George, I'm still clawing the dirt out of my teeth from TPM.
Don't feed me any pussy arguments about Lucas not owing his fans anything. That's bullshit of the highest order. His fans made him into what he is today. Granted, Lucas created Star Wars, the IP is his, and I support his right to do whatever he wants with it. That does not mean I won't tear him to shreds for destroying the artistic integrity of his work. Artistic merit is not decided by the creator of the art, it is decided by the reception of the art by the audience and the reception of the art ONLY.
It's about Greedo shooting first. That sums up everything. All those clever little edits to the original trilogy to make it less daring... we should have suspected something then. We walked into TPM like walking into a brick wall. Everyone was willing to give Lucas so much credit because Indiana jones and Star Wars were so awesome. I think Lucas has just burned up all the leeway he's going to be allowed. I haven't felt this dirty since Metallica's sellout.
You know what reaction the AOTC (or Starwars 90210) trailer has been getting in any theater I've seen it in? Snorts, guffaws, shrugs, rolling eyes. When I attended the midnight LOTR premiere, that crowd was VERY harsh. The trailer was openly booed by the audience, with a few in the back even shouting "SELLOUT" over the general chatter. The word is out... It's not that N'Synch is awful (which they are), it's just the mere IDEA that Lucas would include them in the first place.
I'm not sure if I'll go see it in the theater at all. I think I'll download a rip of this one first and give it a good look. I know this one will be pirated before it hits the silver screen, just due to the number of disgruntled SW fans. If the rip looks good, maybe I'll go see it. I won't hold my breath. This movie just looks like a rehas of Titanic and Pearl Harbor with Lightsabers. Big friggin deal. How pedestrian.
I won't be buying any SW DVDs, including the original series if they contain the edits. I'll make my own DVDs from the original Laserdisc editions before I give Lucas one more dollar.
I'd so love to be wrong on this one...
I'll download a rip of it. If the rip looks honestly decent and enetertaining, I'll actually go see it in the theater, but I'm having trouble believing that this might happen.
I'll vote with my pocketbook in the DVD department. I won't be buying any of the SW DVDs, even the original series, because of the butchering done by Lucas. Greedo shoots first? Please. Instead I'll hunt down a set of the SW Laserdiscs and make my own set of DVDs from that material, because that's the best we can expect from SW anymore, and it won't have the bullshit edits.
I just hope he doesn't butcher Indy 4 like he has Star Wars.
Now they can just pay you a fat check, scan your image and voice once and use it in as many films as they like. Anyone want to take bets on how long it will be before they bring out a modern movie with John Wayne plaing the starring role? It's possible, even easy. After all, they did it with Brandon Lee in The Crow, but that was because they had no other choice. How long before that becomes an accepted way of making a film?
I'd give it 10 years at most before we see mainstream pictures using dead actors. That could go to a really bad place... corporations and movie studios with licenses to particular actors' digital counterparts, licensing of their digital avatars, patents on the technology... we could see a very real mess develop... after all, precedent of a sort is already set with currently existing animated characters (Mickey Mouse, Aki Ross, Jar Jar Binks, Gollum, etc.) and if those rules were applied to living actors I expect people would not be pleased...
Some of you will say that computer actors will never be as good as the real thing. You'd be wrong of course... not to say it would be easy, but 99% as good as the real thing is close enough for 99% of the people. Readers on this site in particular should know exactly what CGI technology is capable of, and it's definitely not out of reach. Better start thinking about it now, if we see it happening perhaps we can do something to prevent it from going down the wrong road.
I own a Sony 4:3 HDTV, the 61' model. Cost me $4k. I and my roomates were moving into a new apartment and decided that the 21' just looked too damn small in the living room. Plus, we're a geek house, so there is the toy factor to consider.
If you only watch television, the improvement over standard projection TVs is definitely NOT worth any investment. Save your money. This is true even with the HDTV feeds you can get from sattelite providers. The picture gain in my mind seems to be about 10-15% at most. That's not worth nearly double the cost.
Now, if you watch movies and not television (like myself) and you have a DVD player, then definitely consider getting HDTV. DVD movies look far, far better on HDTV, so you'll get a lot more value out of the DVDs you buy. Our DVD library is at 150 films and counting up steadily... in the dark it's very close to watching a movie screen on a 61'. The picture quality is such that you don't even notice the letterbox effect in the dark, since you can't see the black bands. I considered springing for a letterbox set, but frankly there just isn't enough material that uses letterbox to justify that price increase on an already expensive HDTV set. 61' is plenty big enough to show letterbox at a good size anyway.
We play a lot of games. The PS2 looks very good on the HDTV, but not all that much better than normal television. Our XBox, on the other hand, looks like DVD compared to VHS... huge improvement in picture quality. Beating Halo in Legendary on that set was a blast... co-op play kicks a lot of ass when the screen, split 4 ways, still gives every player a viewing area comparable to most TV sets, AND with the full quality, nothing pixellated.
We have a PC linked to the TV for watching rips and whatever other misc media we manage to download, be it movie rips, anime music videos, or pr0n. The PC image looks pretty sharp, but without a video card capable of 480i or 1080i output you won't get much out of it. Most PC graphics cards capable of that output are very pricey, hopefully those will drop in the future as well. I'll definitely be buying one once they do.
It all depends on how much time you spend in front of the set. I wouldn't upgrade unless you need a new one. May as well wait until 2006 if you can, your old set will fail eventually and by then it'll be really cheap to pick up an uber-tv.
Decent Server System with a 64bit PCI bus: ~$700
:P
Nine (9) 100GB WDC ATA100 Hard Drives: ~$1800
3Ware Escalade 7850 64bit ATA-Raid Card: ~$475
Yes it runs Linux!
Having 700GB of fast online storage at home with RAID5 reliability, all for ~$3000, is how you tell your geek-girlfriend you love her. At least, that's the best excuse I can find for spending that much on it.
I'm waiting until they start making drives in the 150GB range to build mine, so that with the 8-drive setup it'll still reach a terabyte in total. You'll lose one for the parity info, and you have to order 9 drives so you have one on hand in case of a failure... after all, backup devices that can back up that much data will cost you more than the system did in the first place.
Trust me, it beats sifting through folders of CD-ROMs looking for data... especially when you realize your CD-ROMs are starting to flake from age and abuse...
If you want to know some of the details of the story it's on the LOTR website at www.lordoftherings.net.
The Scouring of the Shire is indeed in the films, and gets a lot of time. The Grey Havens at the end is appearently something very special for Peter.. he's gone on reacord saying filming the ending nearly broke him. That's good enough for me, last time I heard those words was JMS talking about the final episode of B5, and that nearly broke me...
What a load of horseshit. Somebody please beat this author upside the head with the clue bat.
Linux already won the war. You can take this jumping zealotism and open source philosophy smokescreen and get rid of it. Linux will win (is winning / has won) for a few very simple reasons.
1. Linux gives you more freedom. This is the NUMBER ONE Microsoft killer. No draconian content controls, no list of things you can't do or shouldn't do with your hardware and software. Source code so you can do whatever the hell you want, if you are smart enough, or can afford the talent.
2. Linux costs you NOTHING compared to Microsoft. Linux requires you to invest time and learn a few things about your networks and systems. After that time investment (which you have to make with Microsoft as well) you are done paying for your software.
3. Linux (thanks to GPL, GNU and Open Source philosophy) is beyond the control of anyone. It cannot be sued, bought, tamed, subdued, or extended because it has no front to attack, and a vicious ironclad legal defense against IP issues thanks to the GPL.
That's all we need. There are dozens of other reasons, but they amount to jack compared to these simple facts. This guarantees my freedom (and everyone else) from Microsoft or any other vendor (M$ is NOT the only threat here guys).
In case you hadn't noticed, Microsoft's Licensing agreements and absurdly high costs are driving companies AWAY from Microsoft in droves, to say nothing of what XP's draconian content controls are doing for artists and home users.
Hey hackers, want to make a shitload of many and get good job security? Position yourself to take advantage of the mass Windows to Linux migrations that will be heading your way in the future. Maybe 3 years, maybe 5, maybe even as long as 10... but it's coming.
Looking forward to the day when Microsoft is just another Apple, IBM, Sun or Redhat.
The too much data argument is bullshit. If they feed that data into a computer there are no limits at all on what they can do with it, and they know it. You don't need manpower to analyze that data, you need a team of genius programmers to turn it into a database that violates every aspect of privacy for every us citizen. Do you really want that kind of power in the hands of our government?
Ok look, I'm just getting sick of people saying you cannot secure an aircraft against hijackers. That is total bullshit. We can make those things as secure as tanks and military jets, it just requires a little paradigm shift in airplane design. For example...
Separate the cockpit/flight deck from the rest of the airplane. No way through, period, and make the bulkhead that separates them capable of withstanding just about any attack. The flight deck is entered from the OUTSIDE of the plane via a separate door. Once in the air there is no way in hell anyone can get from the passenger area into the flight deck or vice-versa.
True, this doesn't make it impossible to hijack, however it makes it several of orders of magnitude harder to do, and a bunck of knife wielding psychos are not going to be able to hijack an aircraft with that kind of design. It would take a well equipped military team to hijack something like that, and we'd notice that kind of equipment going on board.
Probably wouldn't be a bad idea to have closed circuit television that allows those on the flight deck to view what is happening in the rest of the plane. We might even want to transmit that data back to the airport now, we have the technology to do it.
What if the pilot has a problem? The flight crew is usually 5 people isn't it? We have a pilot, co-pilot, and an engineer at least? Hey, if all three of them somehow suffer a fatal heart attack the flight was doomed from the beginning, I'll take my chances with that one. The odds of that are a lot less than the odds of what happened on Tuesday happening again.
And why in hell isn't there a GPS transmitter or similar device in the standard "black box" that makes it easy to locate? AFAIK they don't do that. It would make them awfully easy to find...
Seriously... how in HELL can an aircraft enter a no-fly zone on a crystal clear morning and strike a building, and then a SECOND one somehow does the same thing 18 minutes later, not seeing the billowing black cloud from the first one? Man this is gonna start a shitstorm... what a miserable morning...
Long time ago, some idiots in court ruled that companies are "legal entities" and have the same degree of rights and abilities that people do under that law. Oops. Guess they didn't see what that would cost us.
For my money, corpoate entities should be treated like criminals with regards to what rights they get... but that's just me and I know I'm whacked...
Ding! We have a winner!
I'm sick of Republicrats anyway.
I like Libertarians.
www.lp.org
Well...
/shrug If anyone has a solution to that problem, well... I'll vote you into office and you're welcome to take a stab at the matter. Good luck, you'll need it.
This is everyone's favorite argument, and of course like most of the popular ones it's mostly bullshit.
You should have the right to shout "FIRE" at the top of your lungs in a crowded theatre. That's a free speech issue.
You also have to bear up to the consequences of your actions, IE taking responsibility (and punishment if necessary) of the resulting paniced crowd rushing blindly towards the exit. This is a civil liability issue. NOT a speech one.
We don't have to make it illegal to shout "FIRE" in order to solve that kind of problem. It's like inciting to riot. Your speech for that is protected, your ability to do so is most definitely not.
It's a fine line, but that's what these examples that open the floodgates are all about... courting that fine line to the point of absurdity.
Racial hate speech is the same sort of thing. We can't forbid it, we can only punish those who act on it, because we punish the ACT, not the speech that caused it or led to it. One can talk about murder without reservation (unless in high school it seems) however one cannot actually commit murder without bearing the consequences.
I agree, there can be no middle ground... all or nothing. Give an inch, they take a mile... just because those first few inches were more reasonable than the rest doesn't justify it.
People are stupid. It's a fact of life.
right here
Heh, well boss, one out of three isn't too bad...
I find it particularly amusing that the most powerful computing science the world can conceive of is based on apparently illogical theories and imaginary numbers. Sure, they work, but that's gotta keep a few scientists awake and staring at the walls at night. Good for them :)
:)
:) Wonder if there are any spanners out there keeping tabs on this stuff... if you take time travel into consideration you can build a computer that will provide you with the answer instantly before it does the actual calculations... just have it send the answer information back in time. Put that in your pipe and smoke it :)
Imagine what the tiniest error could do in a logic matrix this complicated... how susceptible to interference is the quantum bit?
Also imagine the possibilities for networking... if you were to take into consideration the "action at a distance" effect to transmit data somehow you could transmit a great deal of data in zero time. You'd still have to send that first bit, but after that, you could (possibly?) maintain an instantaneous communication state regardless of distance. Guess we won't have to build fiber lines to Mars anymore
Great, the site has gone down now before I finally got to the G article... either an elite hack, slashdot effect or certain parties don't want us to know that information
I simply don't have the strength to rant about this topic again, so I'll let others do it for me. The only thing I would do is point out a possible solution. The only way to change the system is to CHANGE the system. Vote Libertarian. At least they have the common decency to spell out how they really feel about every issue under the sun. Read the War on Drugs policy :)
I can't believe I'm actually advocating a political party... and on slashdot no less... I must be mad. Oh well, Monday is a good day to be mad.
Maybe I'm just an idiot but it seems to me that the easiest way to solve this problem is to have two flavors of Gnutella. A server flavor and a client flavor. The client is pretty much just what the napster program is - dump app that simply finds a server and submits queries but does no real work except to maintain a list of what it provides. The server program should be what Gnutella is, a peer-to-peer system that maintains a loose association of machines with record of where all the data on the network lies, including all the clients.
This would facilitate a hybrid network with servers run by anybody that chooses to run one, in any country, so it is safe to say that the servers cannot be shut down by an authority, especially since anyone can just set up another and join it to the network. This way we only have the server-machines communicating so it reduces the load on the network and brings gnutella's problems back to a manageable level. The client machines simply find themselves a server and then figure out where best to link to the network and go from there.
Seems that gnutella's problem is that it is too distributed. Granted, a p2p system can idealistically work, but I don't think we have the bandwidth for it. If the network was more static than it is it would also work but since it is ever changing it makes it much harder to track everything.
So, has anyone ever tried anything like this before? Did it work? If not can those problems be solved? Any networking gurus out there care to take a shot at this? It can't be a new idea, it's just too obvious.
Well, maybe he is in politics to "scratch an itch", that itch being caused by the rash we've gotten thanks to big government riding all of our backs for the last century. Just a random thought :) That's the kind of itch I expect the majority of /. has felt from time to time.
:)
Question to ask yourself sometime - if you were president (not running, but actually president) what would you do? Think about it