I'm going to get mauled for this... but I really enjoyed reading The Hobbit and think it will make a great movie.
The LoTR movies were good, and so were the books. The problem I had with the LoTR movie is the same problem I have with any massive chronicle. Namely, special effects -- no matter how great -- cannot even really compare with imagination. Plus, there's so much happening in LoTR movie that my small brain got a little lost. The same thing happened with Transformers, X-Men, The Mummy, etc..
The Hobbit is a perfect book for a movie. There's a quest, the bad guys are clearly defined, the good guys are funny and personable. There are adventures along the way. There's humor. There are pretty women. There's fighting, trolls, river journeys. In short, everything that makes an enjoyable fairy tale is in The Hobbit.
(My other pet peeve with BIG movies is that the hero/heroine must actively advance the plot. In many of the Harry Potter movies, Harry Potter doesn't do a whole lot except "fulfill a destiny". I'm left with the feeling that any idiot could be placed in the role and because there was a prophecy to fulfill, the idiot would complete it. I'm much more in favor of someone knowing there's a prophecy and doing his/her darndest to fight that prophecy.)
Seems that personalization uses some sort of Bayes slope and eventually all the "choices" that I make on what to read ends up in the Entertainment section somewhere because I clicked on a link for Linux kernel and because Lady Gaga wore a carmine fez one day, my news feed starts showing content related to Twilight premieres in France.
I have keywords ("camping hiking" "restaurant review broward" "heather graham") because that's the only news I care about. So far so good...
I agree... But I also think that we spend far too much time looking at past accomplishments rather than pushing forward. Keeping a hunk of metal around to inspire a child (or an adult for that matter) may be valid, but maybe those funds are better spent on telescopes or model rockets.
I understand that there's a memory associated with the object and certainly the shuttle played a role in Earth history. But ultimately, it's just an object. As I'm gearing and girding up for another hurricane season, I keep on thinking how much *stuff* I have. I admire those people -- and in Russia it seems to be a cultural thing -- who can easily give up objects. Maybe it's years of living under the USSR, or maybe it's the bleak landscape (in some areas), but my Russian friends seem not to fret about throwing things away. Me? I have a ticket stub from a U2 concert that I'm keeping. I have a cigarette lighter from my crashed 3000GT. I have a couple cartridges from an Atari 2600. They're just junk, but I have not been able to throw them away.
Hell, maybe it's the crappy cars they keep on telling me about. All of them were just a moment away from the trash heap anyway.
Depends on what you're trying to accomplish with the picture. Many people have slammed Polaroid instant pictures. They're generally washed out, the center flash makes faces look ghostlike, the whites are unbalanced (especially after drinking). But there are galleries of Polaroid art out there. The photographers worked within the medium to create interesting images that could not be taken with an SLR without manipulation. Sure, the iPhone is nowhere near as versatile as a traditional *SLR or even a dedicated Point-and-Shoot, but it can take iPhone pictures and can certainly create art in the right hands.
I have a couple compound bows also but a shoulder injury precludes me from getting much good at it (left shoulder rotator injury). I was once pretty good, meaning that I could hit a big straw bale at 25 yards. But yeah, if you're nothching an arrow in my direction, I'm making the assumption that you intend to kill me and will adjust accordingly.
Depends on where you live. Down here in S. Florida I once worked in a small company where everyone owned at least a pistol. In my previous company I regularly went to the range with four or five co-workers. On my block at least six homes have firearms and the firearms per household ratio is higher than 1.0.
I see shooting in many ways to be like archery. It's not something I'd consider using for defense, but the peace and satisfaction it gives me is healthy. On shooting days I wake up at 5AM, don't drink coffee, don't have road rage, etc., because those things will affect how well I shoot. It's very calming to put a target 100 yards out and hit it (and yes, 100 yards is not very long but I'm happy). Some people may thousands a year for therapy or yoga or sensory deprivation electronics, I get my relaxation from a couple hours at the range.
Oracle licensing is based on CPU performance, number of CPUs, etc.. IBM Power systems can selective enable/disable processors so as we need them, we turn them on. This gives us some flexibility in purchasing as we don't have to purchase until we need the extra resources.
Screw you, Octopus God. Screw you and your mumbing, wax-faced followers. Screw your fish-faced, torch bearing disciples. Screw your stupid devotional violin music. Screw your strange, spectral lights when I'm trying to sleep. U Arkham's football team sucks. Their human-skin footballs are non-standard.
Re:List geek cooking instructions here
on
Cooking For Geeks
·
· Score: 1
Some traditional geek dishes, ordered by country of nationality:
Vietnamese cat foo >/home/bowl
New Guinea finger >/home/bowl head foo>/home/bowl man foo >/home/bowl toe foo >/home/bowl (punintended) cadaver >/home/bowl (need Internet webdav though)
Japanese raw/dev/foo (for Linux users only)
Vegetarians tree >/home/bowl logger >/home/bowl (oh wait, maybe this is for New Guinea)
Divorced Cannibals with grudges ex | cut | fold >/home/bowl
Just wanted to add that while I was vacationing in Maui a few weeks ago (please see the pictures), I drank a coffee.. Yum. I'm going to quote some lyrics:
"The sun so bright it leaves no shadows, only scars, carved into stone on the face of the earth."
I like cameras and coffee and pens.
I joined the group, "Lost is retarded."
I just added Radiohead to my list of Likes.
Here's my new picture. It's me with the Dolphin cheerleaders. Yes, that's me.
Here's me at Hard Rock. I'm too cool for Hard Rock. I'm too cool for Hard Rock though, so I have an appropriately bored expression.
It is a big deal. It is, in point of fact, a monstrous deal.
In 1910, mathematics courses began realizing that even though complex axiomatic systems could never be entirely self-consistent, they could nevertheless be used to solve some interesting problems. Fast forward a few decades and this new math is being used to design computing systems.
This may seem like no big deal, but it means that we're on the cusp of a new reality. We are being prepared for something. The recent news of BSE is a precursor to the reality of SSE (Simian Spongiform Encephalopathy). The shows on TV about survival (Survivorman, The Colony, Man vs. Wild) is there to prepare a population for the upcoming zombie apocalypse. Yes, you laugh, and think that I'm joking, but all these signs cannot be ignored.
First, a Asian macaque goes mad and starts feasting on other macaques. It happens in the midst of a dense forest, so no one knows except a scientist studying coffee been mutations. Then, in a mental health facility in Rotterdam, a Peet's barrista suddenly goes mad and attacks his nurse, biting her on the neck. Six days later, a lawyer representing the interests of a global food conglomerate kills his co-worker... brutally... with teeth.
This class is, on the surface, just a class. In reality it is preparation for TEOTWAWKI.
I understand your skepticism. However, you must believe in the interconnectedness of things to understand why this works.
Reality is one vast machine. All actions are interconnected like gears in an elaborate clock. Looking at ants moving grains of sand can help divine the motions of the stock market. A woman dresses up one day determines (or is a consequence of) her horse winning a race at Belmont. The random drip of water flowing through a cave imprints "Rita Hayworth is a goddess" on the cave wall.
And a Google marketing rep, privy to the details of the announcement, wears a mongoose boa one day. The front-page coders, not privy to this information, think it looks clownlike. A man in a Chewbacca costume robs a liquor store. A blind ferret bites the toe of an American tourist in Sydney. Unable to finish the appropriate Javascript version of Fallout 4, the coders throw in some code from their existing type-ahead library.
The other day I accidentally went to facebok.com. It was pretty obviously a typo squat, but what was more alarming was that the fake survey they provided had some correct information filled out (age, sex, etc..) Try it with and without cookies and it seems that that info is stored either locally or via the advertiser information sharing.
Yup... there are so many dependencies on application and OS code that hardware capability matters very little.
I recently tried to tune a workload on a pSeries system. We gave it half a processor and 2 virtuals (with the Power version of hyperthreading so it saw 4 processors). Performance was a dog. Load was only 60% of capacity though. We doubled the number of virtual processors but kept the overall entitlement. Load dropped to 40%. Added another couple virtuals and load dropped to 25%. No increase in throughput. It's a classic example of a thread-limited workload... No matter how many processors we could add, the jobs would only run on two. Bumping up those processors might gave 2% here and there, but the bottleneck wasn't CPU. After the development team redid some code (and reduced the number of database calls from 1500 to under 100), the performance improved from 2-3 seconds to 0.9 seconds.
I suppose it depends on your motivations. Do you do what you do because of hate or because you have a passion about something? Or maybe you're somewhere in between and decide to make the most practical choice.
Gadgets force us to communicate in sound bites. We dig the new shiny. Our attentions no longer span, but spin. Subtle phrasing replaced by clever phrasing replaced by catch phrases. "Think" is a four-letter word. Four letter words are old school. Grammar mocked as elitist. Push2Talk is DoubleSpeak. Allusions wander, lost. News at 11.
Indeed, there will always be stupid people doing stupid things. Technology does allow more people to do things that one was a specialized art, though. For example, before desktop publishing software, printing was an arcane art requiring dark rooms, cameras, understanding of graphics and typography, etc.. We can argue that pages look a lot uglier now than they did in the past, but so it is. The same with anti-lock brakes, chain guards, and other safety devices that thwart Darwin Award filtration of the gene pool.
As to GPS units, I've been in a car with someone who almost ran into a wall because he insisted that the GPS told him to turn. I've also known a girl who got lost because she wanted to go north so "turned left at the ocean" (she lived on the Florida East Coast and one day took a trip to Naples on the Florida West Coast.)
Same with me... In school I was very much introverted. Two decades later I'm on a couple sports teams, give talks, make films. I've done rock climbing, gojo ryu, dragon boating, and other team/partner sports too. Difference is that I'm still very much introverted and still am more relaxed when I'm by myself. Not that I don't like social interaction -- actually find it interesting -- but I would often rather read a book alone on the beach than mingle at a party.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to get mauled for this... but I really enjoyed reading The Hobbit and think it will make a great movie.
The LoTR movies were good, and so were the books. The problem I had with the LoTR movie is the same problem I have with any massive chronicle. Namely, special effects -- no matter how great -- cannot even really compare with imagination. Plus, there's so much happening in LoTR movie that my small brain got a little lost. The same thing happened with Transformers, X-Men, The Mummy, etc..
The Hobbit is a perfect book for a movie. There's a quest, the bad guys are clearly defined, the good guys are funny and personable. There are adventures along the way. There's humor. There are pretty women. There's fighting, trolls, river journeys. In short, everything that makes an enjoyable fairy tale is in The Hobbit.
(My other pet peeve with BIG movies is that the hero/heroine must actively advance the plot. In many of the Harry Potter movies, Harry Potter doesn't do a whole lot except "fulfill a destiny". I'm left with the feeling that any idiot could be placed in the role and because there was a prophecy to fulfill, the idiot would complete it. I'm much more in favor of someone knowing there's a prophecy and doing his/her darndest to fight that prophecy.)
Seems that personalization uses some sort of Bayes slope and eventually all the "choices" that I make on what to read ends up in the Entertainment section somewhere because I clicked on a link for Linux kernel and because Lady Gaga wore a carmine fez one day, my news feed starts showing content related to Twilight premieres in France.
I have keywords ("camping hiking" "restaurant review broward" "heather graham") because that's the only news I care about. So far so good...
Compared with your self-absorbed proclivity to pack rat junk, its not even in the same ballpark. Not even on the same planet.
It actually is on the same planet. The rest of your post is invalidated. I win.
I agree... But I also think that we spend far too much time looking at past accomplishments rather than pushing forward. Keeping a hunk of metal around to inspire a child (or an adult for that matter) may be valid, but maybe those funds are better spent on telescopes or model rockets.
I understand that there's a memory associated with the object and certainly the shuttle played a role in Earth history. But ultimately, it's just an object. As I'm gearing and girding up for another hurricane season, I keep on thinking how much *stuff* I have. I admire those people -- and in Russia it seems to be a cultural thing -- who can easily give up objects. Maybe it's years of living under the USSR, or maybe it's the bleak landscape (in some areas), but my Russian friends seem not to fret about throwing things away. Me? I have a ticket stub from a U2 concert that I'm keeping. I have a cigarette lighter from my crashed 3000GT. I have a couple cartridges from an Atari 2600. They're just junk, but I have not been able to throw them away.
Hell, maybe it's the crappy cars they keep on telling me about. All of them were just a moment away from the trash heap anyway.
Depends on what you're trying to accomplish with the picture. Many people have slammed Polaroid instant pictures. They're generally washed out, the center flash makes faces look ghostlike, the whites are unbalanced (especially after drinking). But there are galleries of Polaroid art out there. The photographers worked within the medium to create interesting images that could not be taken with an SLR without manipulation. Sure, the iPhone is nowhere near as versatile as a traditional *SLR or even a dedicated Point-and-Shoot, but it can take iPhone pictures and can certainly create art in the right hands.
Heck, there are plenty of bright sides. It's postively a glowing sphere of joy.
You get to hide your own Easter eggs.
Every day you meet new people.
You never worry about stuff. Car? What car?
(I kid, I kid... but laughter *is* the best medicine.)
I have a couple compound bows also but a shoulder injury precludes me from getting much good at it (left shoulder rotator injury). I was once pretty good, meaning that I could hit a big straw bale at 25 yards. But yeah, if you're nothching an arrow in my direction, I'm making the assumption that you intend to kill me and will adjust accordingly.
Depends on where you live. Down here in S. Florida I once worked in a small company where everyone owned at least a pistol. In my previous company I regularly went to the range with four or five co-workers. On my block at least six homes have firearms and the firearms per household ratio is higher than 1.0.
I see shooting in many ways to be like archery. It's not something I'd consider using for defense, but the peace and satisfaction it gives me is healthy. On shooting days I wake up at 5AM, don't drink coffee, don't have road rage, etc., because those things will affect how well I shoot. It's very calming to put a target 100 yards out and hit it (and yes, 100 yards is not very long but I'm happy). Some people may thousands a year for therapy or yoga or sensory deprivation electronics, I get my relaxation from a couple hours at the range.
This is nothing new.
Oracle licensing is based on CPU performance, number of CPUs, etc.. IBM Power systems can selective enable/disable processors so as we need them, we turn them on. This gives us some flexibility in purchasing as we don't have to purchase until we need the extra resources.
Dude, that's so simple...
P = NP when N=1.
Where's my prize?
Screw you, Octopus God. Screw you and your mumbing, wax-faced followers. Screw your fish-faced, torch bearing disciples. Screw your stupid devotional violin music. Screw your strange, spectral lights when I'm trying to sleep. U Arkham's football team sucks. Their human-skin footballs are non-standard.
Some traditional geek dishes, ordered by country of nationality:
Vietnamese /home/bowl
cat foo >
New Guinea /home/bowl /home/bowl /home/bowl /home/bowl (punintended) /home/bowl (need Internet webdav though)
finger >
head foo>
man foo >
toe foo >
cadaver >
Japanese /dev/foo (for Linux users only)
raw
Vegetarians /home/bowl
tree >
logger >/home/bowl (oh wait, maybe this is for New Guinea)
Divorced Cannibals with grudges /home/bowl
ex | cut | fold >
Native American /home/bowl
bison >
So, umm, how about Bangkok residents? Or folks from Palmer's Head? Or Fort Dix? Morehead? Red Lick? Boone's Blow? Phuk?
Just wanted to add that while I was vacationing in Maui a few weeks ago (please see the pictures), I drank a coffee.. Yum. I'm going to quote some lyrics:
"The sun so bright it leaves no shadows, only scars, carved into stone on the face of the earth."
I like cameras and coffee and pens.
I joined the group, "Lost is retarded."
I just added Radiohead to my list of Likes.
Here's my new picture. It's me with the Dolphin cheerleaders. Yes, that's me.
Here's me at Hard Rock. I'm too cool for Hard Rock. I'm too cool for Hard Rock though, so I have an appropriately bored expression.
I like U2.
It is a big deal. It is, in point of fact, a monstrous deal.
In 1910, mathematics courses began realizing that even though complex axiomatic systems could never be entirely self-consistent, they could nevertheless be used to solve some interesting problems. Fast forward a few decades and this new math is being used to design computing systems.
This may seem like no big deal, but it means that we're on the cusp of a new reality. We are being prepared for something. The recent news of BSE is a precursor to the reality of SSE (Simian Spongiform Encephalopathy). The shows on TV about survival (Survivorman, The Colony, Man vs. Wild) is there to prepare a population for the upcoming zombie apocalypse. Yes, you laugh, and think that I'm joking, but all these signs cannot be ignored.
First, a Asian macaque goes mad and starts feasting on other macaques. It happens in the midst of a dense forest, so no one knows except a scientist studying coffee been mutations. Then, in a mental health facility in Rotterdam, a Peet's barrista suddenly goes mad and attacks his nurse, biting her on the neck. Six days later, a lawyer representing the interests of a global food conglomerate kills his co-worker... brutally... with teeth.
This class is, on the surface, just a class. In reality it is preparation for TEOTWAWKI.
I understand your skepticism. However, you must believe in the interconnectedness of things to understand why this works.
Reality is one vast machine. All actions are interconnected like gears in an elaborate clock. Looking at ants moving grains of sand can help divine the motions of the stock market. A woman dresses up one day determines (or is a consequence of) her horse winning a race at Belmont. The random drip of water flowing through a cave imprints "Rita Hayworth is a goddess" on the cave wall.
And a Google marketing rep, privy to the details of the announcement, wears a mongoose boa one day. The front-page coders, not privy to this information, think it looks clownlike. A man in a Chewbacca costume robs a liquor store. A blind ferret bites the toe of an American tourist in Sydney. Unable to finish the appropriate Javascript version of Fallout 4, the coders throw in some code from their existing type-ahead library.
This is how we know.
The other day I accidentally went to facebok.com. It was pretty obviously a typo squat, but what was more alarming was that the fake survey they provided had some correct information filled out (age, sex, etc..) Try it with and without cookies and it seems that that info is stored either locally or via the advertiser information sharing.
Bastards, I use Elinks. Couldn't they at least humor me and do background=#00000000 and set the font to courier 10 in neon green?
Yup... there are so many dependencies on application and OS code that hardware capability matters very little.
I recently tried to tune a workload on a pSeries system. We gave it half a processor and 2 virtuals (with the Power version of hyperthreading so it saw 4 processors). Performance was a dog. Load was only 60% of capacity though. We doubled the number of virtual processors but kept the overall entitlement. Load dropped to 40%. Added another couple virtuals and load dropped to 25%. No increase in throughput. It's a classic example of a thread-limited workload... No matter how many processors we could add, the jobs would only run on two. Bumping up those processors might gave 2% here and there, but the bottleneck wasn't CPU. After the development team redid some code (and reduced the number of database calls from 1500 to under 100), the performance improved from 2-3 seconds to 0.9 seconds.
Re: American wives
American wives are awesome. Kinky, daring, willing to be a sugar mamma.
You just got to watch out for their husbands.
I kid.. I kid.
I suppose it depends on your motivations. Do you do what you do because of hate or because you have a passion about something? Or maybe you're somewhere in between and decide to make the most practical choice.
Gadgets force us to communicate in sound bites. We dig the new shiny. Our attentions no longer span, but spin. Subtle phrasing replaced by clever phrasing replaced by catch phrases. "Think" is a four-letter word. Four letter words are old school. Grammar mocked as elitist. Push2Talk is DoubleSpeak. Allusions wander, lost. News at 11.
Indeed, there will always be stupid people doing stupid things. Technology does allow more people to do things that one was a specialized art, though. For example, before desktop publishing software, printing was an arcane art requiring dark rooms, cameras, understanding of graphics and typography, etc.. We can argue that pages look a lot uglier now than they did in the past, but so it is. The same with anti-lock brakes, chain guards, and other safety devices that thwart Darwin Award filtration of the gene pool.
As to GPS units, I've been in a car with someone who almost ran into a wall because he insisted that the GPS told him to turn. I've also known a girl who got lost because she wanted to go north so "turned left at the ocean" (she lived on the Florida East Coast and one day took a trip to Naples on the Florida West Coast.)
Same with me... In school I was very much introverted. Two decades later I'm on a couple sports teams, give talks, make films. I've done rock climbing, gojo ryu, dragon boating, and other team/partner sports too. Difference is that I'm still very much introverted and still am more relaxed when I'm by myself. Not that I don't like social interaction -- actually find it interesting -- but I would often rather read a book alone on the beach than mingle at a party.