I use Wing (http://wingware.com./ I feel it's the best Python IDE available for any platform. It can run on OS X, although it will do so in X. This may or may not matter to you, depending on your development proclivities. Komodo would be my second choice.
briefly recommended: James Gleick's bio of Newton
on
The Unknown Newton
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Pantheon published a bio of Newton last year by James Gleick (Chaos, Genius). It's concise and consistently interesting.
It looks like these cars are more hype than help in the battle against pollution and foreign fuel reliance."
It's one thing to point out that the EPA fuel efficiency test is a chronic source of mis-information, but all cars go through this test and few average their advertised efficiency under practical conditions, whether they are hybrid or not. So, it would be nice if Mr. Timothy would spare us the FUD.
My father has a Prius, my girlfriend's brother-in-law has a Prius, and I have a close friend with the Honda "pod-car" hybrid, and all of them report EXCELLENT mileage: far better than they could get with any comparable conventional automobile.
But it isn't that simple. What the Wired article alludes to without really exploring it is that efficiency is related to driving habits. You can drive a hybrid like any other car, of course, but if you want the best efficiency out of a hybrid, you have to learn to drive it efficiently. That's one of the reasons the Prius has the computer display in the center of the console: so you can relate how you drive with how the engine is utilized. Mastering regenerative braking is one of these details. Learning the most efficient routes around town is another.
Another important aspect of hybrids that the Wired article ignores is emissions. Vehicles like the Prius are ultra-low emissions vehicles (ULEV), which to my mind, we need more of.
An argument could be made that a video game is as suited to instpire a film as a work of literature. Vast sums of money and time are habitually invested in adapting novels to film, and people seem to enjoy watching them. But artistically speaking, there's a complex question. If you merely translate the written story to screen, you can be obsessively faithful, you can provide inventive visuals, you can try to get good performances from actors, but the end product is unlikely to surpass the original work or stand on its own. If, instead, you use the source material as general inspiration but build an original movie that departs from the source as much as necessary to take full advantage of the artistic potential of the film medium, you have the potential (seldom realised, of course) to produce a work of art that stands alone. On the other hand, if you depart too much, then it can seem less appropriate to name the film for the inspiring source.
So why couldn't a game (e.g. Doom) result in a good movie? It probably wouldn't turn out so good if you just tried to stage the "story" (such as it is) that loosely organizes the video game experience. But there's no reason someone couldn't make an entertaining and exciting (and even intelligent) film about the legions of hell overrunning a research base on Mars. For one thing, you're not saddled with the hundreds of pages of language, verbosity, internality and -- don't forget -- legacy, of esteemed literature.
Also, don't forget that last year they took an amusement park ride and made a film ("Pirates of the Caribbean") that was far more fun than it had any right to be.
I am one of (apparently) many people who got badly burned by the original Jaz. Come to think of it, all three people besides myself that I know that bought into Jaz (it all cost quite a bit of money in those days) experienced massive data loss over time. Personally, I lost several years of archival work due to unreadable Jaz media. It only took a couple years -- far fewer than the time period the media was supposedly rated for.
After reviewing my options (pretty much limited to spending another fortune on a third party data recovery company), my response was to recover what data I could and then throw away every Iomega product I had. I will never purchase another product from them, ever.
Am I being extreme? I don't think so. This was many years ago, and I was pretty angry. I'm willing to stand by my judgment. Perhaps if Iomega had actually taken responsibility for their flawed product at the time and offered assistance to people like me who were trying to recover data, I might have felt differently about them.
Answer: running time. The movies have shifted end points because the books are of different length, RotK being the shortest. Any time you make a film for theatrical distribution, running time is a huge problem, because long run times cut down on the number of screenings per day, which cuts into ticket sales revenue potential.
It is to Jackson's credit that he is taking full advantage of the DVD to release a version of each film that does not take theatrical scheduling into account.
Quite a bit of intelligent and deeply detailed writing on this subject (and many more) has graced the pages of Widescreen Review. Their point of view is strongly in favor of waiting for a higher density, higher bitrate DVD formats over trying to rig the existing DVD format for high definition content. They claim the inside perspective is that high definition DVD is at least five (5) years away. They have also provided extensive coverage of the new D-Theater D-VHS high definition consumer tape format that is available right now for people with fancy video projectors and deep pockets. D-Theater doesn't look like it will ever be a mass-market technology, but its apparently a really nice interim technology and it seems to deliver video that truly does rival quality theatrical media. (If your projector is up to snuff, of course.) The problem I see is that the existing DVD format has become a huge success, with the consumer electronics and movie industries heavily investing in it and heavily profiting in it. Consumers love the format, despite its irritating, customer-hostile feaures (such as region encoding and material the user interface prevents you from fast-forwarding through or skipping). I doubt either industry wants to compromise or confuse such a successful market. (Similarly, gamers have been so happy playing Half Life and its mods that Valve hasn't bothered to release a completely new game product in many years.)
A lot of people in this thread are speculating about the difficulty of migrating NT desktops to *nix desktops and the problem of resistance from non-IT folk that don't like "change". So I'll ask the obvious question: what about using OS X as a stepping stone from Microsoft to *nix. Allegedly, OS X has a GUI that's easy to swallow, it's got Office, and it's got *nix hidden inside. Are there other problems with the Mac product line that preclude their adoption inside a large enterprise?
(I am not a Mac user, nor do I work for or with large enterprises, but I'm so alienated from M$ that I'm contemplating taking this route myself.)
Hold on. CTHD is NOT a great film; certainly not in any artistic sense. However, it may be an entertaining film, depending on your sensibilities.
First, note that there is actually relatively little fighting in CTHD, and there is an unusually large quantity of plot-service and melodrama for the genre. CTHD is almost the anti-Jackie Chan movie.
Also, keep in mind that while CTHD spends a great deal of time servicing a plot, the plot makes no sense in the first place, so don't expect it to. Indeed, what plot there is is resolved in an arbitrary and perfunctory manner at the end. Heck, there isn't even a real fight scene at the climax: instead you get a sudden flash of motion blur and special effects and then you have to wait for the requisite people to die. What you do get is a lot of wistful pseudo-spritual talk and a couple underdeveloped love stories. Actually, what I was thinking as I sat in the theater was that CTHD is "The English Patient" of kung-fu movies. (And I don't intend that as a compliment.)
A word on the vaunted choreography: sure the choreography is craftily done, however much of it is un-physical (there is seldom any sense of physical contact other than sound effects) and is ultimately lost in the murky lighting and blurriness of the slow shutter speeds that are used. What bothered me most were the wire effects. In the Matrix, when the actors did super-human feats such as running up walls, they did so in ways that were almost credible with our normal perceptions of physics. In CTHD, the actors simply levitate and fly; in those moments when their feet brush the ground, they look more like they're tapping their feet than kicking off. Suspension of disbelief was impossible for me in these flying scenes because it was so obvious that the actors were literally swinging on a line: their pendulum trajectories were blatantly obvious. From my point of view, the choreography of Drunken Master II ("The Legend of Drunken Master"), rereleased in theaters a couple months ago, was far more impressive and exciting.
The bottom line is that if you are a kung-fu fan, you will probably enjoy CTHD, provided your expectations are not too high going in. Furthermore, if you are a kung-fu fan with a girlfriend who is not a kung-fu fan, this film is probably a safe date.
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I use Wing (http://wingware.com./ I feel it's the best Python IDE available for any platform. It can run on OS X, although it will do so in X. This may or may not matter to you, depending on your development proclivities. Komodo would be my second choice.
Pantheon published a bio of Newton last year by James Gleick (Chaos, Genius). It's concise and consistently interesting.
It's one thing to point out that the EPA fuel efficiency test is a chronic source of mis-information, but all cars go through this test and few average their advertised efficiency under practical conditions, whether they are hybrid or not. So, it would be nice if Mr. Timothy would spare us the FUD.
My father has a Prius, my girlfriend's brother-in-law has a Prius, and I have a close friend with the Honda "pod-car" hybrid, and all of them report EXCELLENT mileage: far better than they could get with any comparable conventional automobile.
But it isn't that simple. What the Wired article alludes to without really exploring it is that efficiency is related to driving habits. You can drive a hybrid like any other car, of course, but if you want the best efficiency out of a hybrid, you have to learn to drive it efficiently. That's one of the reasons the Prius has the computer display in the center of the console: so you can relate how you drive with how the engine is utilized. Mastering regenerative braking is one of these details. Learning the most efficient routes around town is another.
Another important aspect of hybrids that the Wired article ignores is emissions. Vehicles like the Prius are ultra-low emissions vehicles (ULEV), which to my mind, we need more of.
An argument could be made that a video game is as suited to instpire a film as a work of literature. Vast sums of money and time are habitually invested in adapting novels to film, and people seem to enjoy watching them. But artistically speaking, there's a complex question. If you merely translate the written story to screen, you can be obsessively faithful, you can provide inventive visuals, you can try to get good performances from actors, but the end product is unlikely to surpass the original work or stand on its own. If, instead, you use the source material as general inspiration but build an original movie that departs from the source as much as necessary to take full advantage of the artistic potential of the film medium, you have the potential (seldom realised, of course) to produce a work of art that stands alone. On the other hand, if you depart too much, then it can seem less appropriate to name the film for the inspiring source.
So why couldn't a game (e.g. Doom) result in a good movie? It probably wouldn't turn out so good if you just tried to stage the "story" (such as it is) that loosely organizes the video game experience. But there's no reason someone couldn't make an entertaining and exciting (and even intelligent) film about the legions of hell overrunning a research base on Mars. For one thing, you're not saddled with the hundreds of pages of language, verbosity, internality and -- don't forget -- legacy, of esteemed literature.
Also, don't forget that last year they took an amusement park ride and made a film ("Pirates of the Caribbean") that was far more fun than it had any right to be.
I am one of (apparently) many people who got badly burned by the original Jaz. Come to think of it, all three people besides myself that I know that bought into Jaz (it all cost quite a bit of money in those days) experienced massive data loss over time. Personally, I lost several years of archival work due to unreadable Jaz media. It only took a couple years -- far fewer than the time period the media was supposedly rated for.
After reviewing my options (pretty much limited to spending another fortune on a third party data recovery company), my response was to recover what data I could and then throw away every Iomega product I had. I will never purchase another product from them, ever.
Am I being extreme? I don't think so. This was many years ago, and I was pretty angry. I'm willing to stand by my judgment. Perhaps if Iomega had actually taken responsibility for their flawed product at the time and offered assistance to people like me who were trying to recover data, I might have felt differently about them.
Answer: running time. The movies have shifted end points because the books are of different length, RotK being the shortest. Any time you make a film for theatrical distribution, running time is a huge problem, because long run times cut down on the number of screenings per day, which cuts into ticket sales revenue potential.
It is to Jackson's credit that he is taking full advantage of the DVD to release a version of each film that does not take theatrical scheduling into account.
You'll get the spider in December.
Quite a bit of intelligent and deeply detailed writing on this subject (and many more) has graced the pages of Widescreen Review. Their point of view is strongly in favor of waiting for a higher density, higher bitrate DVD formats over trying to rig the existing DVD format for high definition content. They claim the inside perspective is that high definition DVD is at least five (5) years away. They have also provided extensive coverage of the new D-Theater D-VHS high definition consumer tape format that is available right now for people with fancy video projectors and deep pockets. D-Theater doesn't look like it will ever be a mass-market technology, but its apparently a really nice interim technology and it seems to deliver video that truly does rival quality theatrical media. (If your projector is up to snuff, of course.)
The problem I see is that the existing DVD format has become a huge success, with the consumer electronics and movie industries heavily investing in it and heavily profiting in it. Consumers love the format, despite its irritating, customer-hostile feaures (such as region encoding and material the user interface prevents you from fast-forwarding through or skipping). I doubt either industry wants to compromise or confuse such a successful market. (Similarly, gamers have been so happy playing Half Life and its mods that Valve hasn't bothered to release a completely new game product in many years.)
A lot of people in this thread are speculating about the difficulty of migrating NT desktops to *nix desktops and the problem of resistance from non-IT folk that don't like "change". So I'll ask the obvious question: what about using OS X as a stepping stone from Microsoft to *nix. Allegedly, OS X has a GUI that's easy to swallow, it's got Office, and it's got *nix hidden inside. Are there other problems with the Mac product line that preclude their adoption inside a large enterprise?
(I am not a Mac user, nor do I work for or with large enterprises, but I'm so alienated from M$ that I'm contemplating taking this route myself.)
Hold on. CTHD is NOT a great film; certainly not in any artistic sense. However, it may be an entertaining film, depending on your sensibilities. First, note that there is actually relatively little fighting in CTHD, and there is an unusually large quantity of plot-service and melodrama for the genre. CTHD is almost the anti-Jackie Chan movie. Also, keep in mind that while CTHD spends a great deal of time servicing a plot, the plot makes no sense in the first place, so don't expect it to. Indeed, what plot there is is resolved in an arbitrary and perfunctory manner at the end. Heck, there isn't even a real fight scene at the climax: instead you get a sudden flash of motion blur and special effects and then you have to wait for the requisite people to die. What you do get is a lot of wistful pseudo-spritual talk and a couple underdeveloped love stories. Actually, what I was thinking as I sat in the theater was that CTHD is "The English Patient" of kung-fu movies. (And I don't intend that as a compliment.) A word on the vaunted choreography: sure the choreography is craftily done, however much of it is un-physical (there is seldom any sense of physical contact other than sound effects) and is ultimately lost in the murky lighting and blurriness of the slow shutter speeds that are used. What bothered me most were the wire effects. In the Matrix, when the actors did super-human feats such as running up walls, they did so in ways that were almost credible with our normal perceptions of physics. In CTHD, the actors simply levitate and fly; in those moments when their feet brush the ground, they look more like they're tapping their feet than kicking off. Suspension of disbelief was impossible for me in these flying scenes because it was so obvious that the actors were literally swinging on a line: their pendulum trajectories were blatantly obvious. From my point of view, the choreography of Drunken Master II ("The Legend of Drunken Master"), rereleased in theaters a couple months ago, was far more impressive and exciting. The bottom line is that if you are a kung-fu fan, you will probably enjoy CTHD, provided your expectations are not too high going in. Furthermore, if you are a kung-fu fan with a girlfriend who is not a kung-fu fan, this film is probably a safe date.