Supermarket home delivery has been standard in the UK for almost a decade now. For £4-5, they'll deliver an entire order by truck in several crates. All the major supermarkets do this, though Asda's coverage is spotty. (Asda being of course owned by Wal-Mart!) And you don't have to journey to a hideous fluorescent-lit barn on a Saturday and want to kill every other person there.
The UK is smaller than the US, but for urban or suburban areas this sort of delivery service should be quite doable.
Steven Soderbergh's new musical version of Cleopatra proves an incredible box-office same-old same-old. Starring Catherine Zeta-Jones as the fishnet-clad vaudeville jazz empress and Hugh Jackman as the mutant self-healing Roman general — in 3-D! —the film carries the Ocean's Eleven franchise somewhere beyond its ultimate extent.
"I've always wanted to do a musical," Soderbergh said. "All the ones that were coming along just weren't for me. This one, however, involved dumptrucks full of money backed up to my house."
And All That Cleopatra — In 3-D! opens with Pompey (Richard Gere) coming to Egypt to recruit Cleopatra to the cause ("Mister Cellophane"). Antony leaves Cleopatra to go back to Rome and not shag Octavia (Anna Paquin) ("Funny Honey"). Cleopatra, furious at the news, kills Richard Gere — in 3-D! — because, frankly, he deserves it ("All I Care About"). Meanwhile, Antony, having first conspired with Octavius (Magneto), falls out with him and uses Cerebro to take control of the western third of the Roman Empire with Cleopatra — in 3-D! ("Cell Block Tango")
Antony. "But Octavius knows about Cerebro?!"
Caesar. "Of course, Antony. I helped him build it."
In a 3-D musical tour-de-force, Caesar (Patrick Stewart) dies at the Senate at the hands of Brutus (Popeye) (“We Both Reached For The Gun"), Cleopatra fakes her death to get Antony to like her (";Razzle Dazzle"), Antony fakes faking his death to get over Cleopatra and dies in her arms ("I Can't Do It Alone" — with zither solo on Jackman's adamantium claws) and Cleopatra dies of an aspidistra ("I Move On"). All die. Oh! the embarrassment.
This ending having been rejected by test audiences, a finale is tacked on with one thousand Agent Smiths engaging in CGI sword-fu — in 3-D! — while Brad Pitt gets out of the casino with his haul intact. Since this makes no sense even to the drooling lackwits they manage to find for test audiences, Cleopatra starts a new 3-D vaudeville jazz act with Octavia which is vastly successful ("And All That Jazz"). A happy ending!
Soderbergh pooh-poohed suggestions that the film would be some sort of low-rent exploitation quickie that would insult the intelligence of any creature smarter than a flatworm. "I can assure you this will be the most artistically satisfying creation in my entire career as a director," he said, lighting a cigar off a hundred-dollar bill before laying back on a great big bed made of money.
"DUMPTRUCKS!" Soderbergh emphasised. "FULL OF MONEY! BACKED UP TO MY HOUSE!"
Hey, I just got my first smartphone: a BlackBerry Curve 9300 3G. It's great. Unlike every iThing and Android I've ever tried to use, I don't want to smash it to pieces with a toffee hammer. (It also does Ogg and FLAC out the box, which surprised me - I thought Thomson charged 10x as much for the MP3 licence if you did that.) Unfortunately, RIM is run by insane incompetents and BB is a dead platform walking. Gah.
Desperate to stay competitive against iPhone and Android mobile devices, Microsoft has released a two-pound lump of actual cow faeces that they claim constitutes a phone.
Windows Phone 7, in development for several years, strips the mobile telephone down to its fundamental essence: futility, annoyance, malfunction, inconvenience and a socially unacceptable odour. Confounding analyst expectations, the turd is in fact shined.
US mobile carriers hailed the turd as the perfect physical complement to their world-famous customer service. "This powerful product will promote our growth!" said John Harrobin of Verizon Wireless. "We're marketing them as edible."
"We think we can really work the brand equity," said Steve Ballmer, modelling the optional shoulder-length rubber gloves. "Everyone works with our stuff all day every day. They know who Microsoft is and what we do."
"How about making our customers actually swallow our bullshit physically?" said John Harrobin. "Windows Phone 7 was my idea."
Virgin Media will shortly trial 1.5Gbps cable Internet, but only to festering dot-com media cocks who live actually around Shoreditch itself.
"As the pace of technological change increases," said the ISP in the press release all the papers copied word for word, "it is vitally important to public health that these people have as absolutely much incentive as possible never to leave their homes. Wanking themselves silly over gigabytes of high-definition porn also reduces their likelihood of reproducing."
With the warmer weather, the Hoxton toxic waste pool has been growing and spreading, with reports of hipster infestations washing up as far afield as Hackney.
If the creative industries cannot be kept under control, by 2015 the entire population of Britain may be beret-wearing latte-sipping surrender monkeys telling you how much they just can't stand hipsters. Virgin Media is currently rolling out 100Mbps broadband to two million of the most endangered residential premises in the hope of effective quarantine.
In the wider world, high speed Internet will apparently let consumers access all manner of as yet nonexistent socially-redeeming services made of magic beans and pink unicorns, which actually means BitTorrenting a pirated movie in under five minutes. And hitting your download cap in another ten.
Virgin Media also announced that its overall revenue for the first quarter was up 5.7 percent to £982m, as a result of the utter lack of any connection between making money on a service and actually being able to provide it in a manner even slightly resembling reliability or competence.
(I used it around 4.2 and reduced the suck to tolerable levels with much effort, but it was really slow on the box in question. Machines should be faster by then.)
If I knew that Mark Shuttleworth was personally using Unity for all his daily work, I'd feel better about it. At least then there would be someone who loved it.
"I'll grant this: Unity seems to be a OK interface for netbooks and possibly touchpads."
No, I tried it and it sucks on netbooks too. It doesn't actually work reliably, and the bits that do work don't let you do quite a lot of stuff that the classic interface does.
I have installed Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. The new Unity interface is stupidly shit. Half the stuff literally does not work on my netbook. If you woke up one day and thought:
"Gosh, I'd really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I'm using a locked-down phone running an obsolete version of Android through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can't think of a better user experience"
- this gets you quite a lot of the way there.
If you want it to feel a bit more like a computer, log out, select "Ubuntu Classic" and log back in and then you'll only have the Mac ripoff menu arrangements to contend with.
I actually liked the old UNR interface. I wonder where it all went horribly wrong.
She did not write that for Watching The Watchers - she wrote it for the Wikimedia Blog and they just took it. Please correct this and link to the original source.
HEY HEY 16K, What Does That Get You Today, Thursday (NNGadget) — As well as attempting to give the major record and television companies whatever they want until the end of time, Lord Carter's Digital Britain report includes tax breaks for "culturally British" computer game development.
Planned games include Lard Warrior (“the goal is to sit playing a game. The graphics are truly horrifying and needed us to go to 3.5-dimensional to fit the player's avatar on the screen. Rated 18+ for explicit neck beards"), CCTV Panopticon (“take pictures of the CCTV cameras in your high street until arrested under the Terrorism Act for having your own camera in public, defeat final boss with Doctorow Attack"), Bottled Tan Snorter (“get into celebrity magazines and shag footballers, lose points for any sign of intelligence, insufficient nipple slips or words of two syllables") and Cynical Apathist (“write outraged blog posts and comments with amusing satires of events of the day while working a job directly keeping the hideous machinery alive and running, avoid removal by the Guardian moderator"). A committee will also form a group to do a study concerning a team to write a ZX Spectrum emulator for the iPhone, with a cassette interface emulator that sends Apple 99p every time you get an "R: Tape Loading Error."
The games industry has warned in the past that developers are being lured away to other countries by the prospect of being paid more than shit. Conservative Shadow Arts Minister Ed Vaizey has leapt upon the opportunity, with promises of incentives for talented developers to stay in Britain and not be lured away by better pay in America. "We'll keep their passports from them until they reach 'Achievement Unlocked.'"
Having finally released Digital Britain, Lord Carter has resigned from the government and is returning to private industry. "Of course, Digital Britain remains a completely objective assessment of the way forward for the nation in the twenty-first century, and should in no way be thought of as my CV for a series of lucrative consultancies with the large media companies I've just given everything they've ever asked for. And a pony."
HEY HEY 16K, Need To Know, Thursday (Big K) — Nokia, through the Symbian Foundation, has made the code for the Symbian smartphone OS open source, putting several aging geeks in raptures of delight.
"The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."
The Foundation hopes to pit Symbian against Windows Mobile. "There's no way it can compete against our superior features, like WAP browsing, infrared connect to your laptop and, of course, the serial port." It also hopes to set the stage for a march on the USA. "The Americans will fall before our superior engineering! Psion worked on the ZX81, you know."
There are currently about 330 million Symbian devices in the world, at least fifteen of whose owners can actually use the web browser without wanting to throw the damned thing through a window and just get an iPhone. "Just think," said Berkin, "now anyone can improve their phone! Well, they could if Nokia made phones the user could flash. But still!"
The Foundation issued a press release about how the open-sourcing of Symbian was welcomed by free software advocates and other aging hippies. "Developers everywhere will want to study Symbian," said Eben Moglen, "to hack on it, and to write applications for it. This could be even bigger than the Amiga."
ASSCAP, Asscrap, Monday (NNN) — After its recent successes suing girl scouts over singing copyrighted songs around campfires, the American Super-Society of Composers, Authors and Performers has filed a brief in a lawsuit against AT&T arguing that its members deserve payment every time a mobile phone rings.
The owners of the musical compositions are already paid for each ringtone download, but this does not cover ASCAP public performance royalties.
"The musicians and songwriters are the true creators of objective value in society," said ASCAP spokesdroid Ayn Rand. "They deserve your support. How would civilisation survive without Crazy Frog or the Nokia Tune? Which changes one note from the 1902 'Gran Vals' by Francisco Tárrega, so is completely original and deserving of royalties.
"To this end, we are bringing suits against those individuals who, having purchased RIAA-licensed ringtones, do not then silence them when in public. Statutory damages of $80,000 should have a salutary effect on our coffers and, of course, our public image."
Further lawsuits will then be brought against those who silence their mobile phones. "4'33' by John Cage is a copyrighted work. Without the money going to his estate, he may never write another measured piece of silence again." This will be followed by suits against those whistling or humming music in public, then those thinking about music in any form without a licence.
In support of their position, ASCAP pointed to vast public outpourings of sympathy from millions of people who never wanted to hear a tinny thirty-second burst of cheesy synthetic R&B coming from a phone ever again in their lives.
Personal preference: because it's close enough to Debian, pretty much;-) Most of what we'll be using it for is to run Java (and Sun^WOracle Java at that, not even the distro OpenJDK). So we can do that and treat it as an almost-sane operating system.
In practice, we're about to switch from Solaris 10 on SPARC to Ubuntu Server in x86 VMs. Coulda been RHEL 5, wasn't. (We had no need of commercial support and the hosting company had Ubuntu as a standard offering. I have my qualms, but it should be possible to beat into robustness.)
CentOS is Red Hat for almost all practical purposes except if you're running proprietary software that lists RHEL as supported.
In my experience, Red Hat's actual tech support is shit. OTOH, buying a licence does help pay for all their work.
The trouble with the Zune? They (a) put wifi in (b) didn't put a web browser in. They could have had the iPod Touch beaten by six months and made everyone realise they could have a full working Internet in their pocket!... and they just didn't. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The marketing phrase (1, 2) appears to be "head and shoulders above the iPhone" - they seem to think that if they say that a lot people might believe it.
So yeah, it's got a standardised website commenter buzz phrase. iPhone and Android don't!
Slashdot Mirror
In the UK, they operate on the basis that you can return anything you get delivered for any reason or none.
Supermarket home delivery has been standard in the UK for almost a decade now. For £4-5, they'll deliver an entire order by truck in several crates. All the major supermarkets do this, though Asda's coverage is spotty. (Asda being of course owned by Wal-Mart!) And you don't have to journey to a hideous fluorescent-lit barn on a Saturday and want to kill every other person there.
The UK is smaller than the US, but for urban or suburban areas this sort of delivery service should be quite doable.
Steven Soderbergh's new musical version of Cleopatra proves an incredible box-office same-old same-old. Starring Catherine Zeta-Jones as the fishnet-clad vaudeville jazz empress and Hugh Jackman as the mutant self-healing Roman general — in 3-D! —the film carries the Ocean's Eleven franchise somewhere beyond its ultimate extent.
"I've always wanted to do a musical," Soderbergh said. "All the ones that were coming along just weren't for me. This one, however, involved dumptrucks full of money backed up to my house."
And All That Cleopatra — In 3-D! opens with Pompey (Richard Gere) coming to Egypt to recruit Cleopatra to the cause ("Mister Cellophane"). Antony leaves Cleopatra to go back to Rome and not shag Octavia (Anna Paquin) ("Funny Honey"). Cleopatra, furious at the news, kills Richard Gere — in 3-D! — because, frankly, he deserves it ("All I Care About"). Meanwhile, Antony, having first conspired with Octavius (Magneto), falls out with him and uses Cerebro to take control of the western third of the Roman Empire with Cleopatra — in 3-D! ("Cell Block Tango")
In a 3-D musical tour-de-force, Caesar (Patrick Stewart) dies at the Senate at the hands of Brutus (Popeye) (“We Both Reached For The Gun"), Cleopatra fakes her death to get Antony to like her (";Razzle Dazzle"), Antony fakes faking his death to get over Cleopatra and dies in her arms ("I Can't Do It Alone" — with zither solo on Jackman's adamantium claws) and Cleopatra dies of an aspidistra ("I Move On"). All die. Oh! the embarrassment.
This ending having been rejected by test audiences, a finale is tacked on with one thousand Agent Smiths engaging in CGI sword-fu — in 3-D! — while Brad Pitt gets out of the casino with his haul intact. Since this makes no sense even to the drooling lackwits they manage to find for test audiences, Cleopatra starts a new 3-D vaudeville jazz act with Octavia which is vastly successful ("And All That Jazz"). A happy ending!
Soderbergh pooh-poohed suggestions that the film would be some sort of low-rent exploitation quickie that would insult the intelligence of any creature smarter than a flatworm. "I can assure you this will be the most artistically satisfying creation in my entire career as a director," he said, lighting a cigar off a hundred-dollar bill before laying back on a great big bed made of money.
"DUMPTRUCKS!" Soderbergh emphasised. "FULL OF MONEY! BACKED UP TO MY HOUSE!"
Hey, I just got my first smartphone: a BlackBerry Curve 9300 3G. It's great. Unlike every iThing and Android I've ever tried to use, I don't want to smash it to pieces with a toffee hammer. (It also does Ogg and FLAC out the box, which surprised me - I thought Thomson charged 10x as much for the MP3 licence if you did that.) Unfortunately, RIM is run by insane incompetents and BB is a dead platform walking. Gah.
Desperate to stay competitive against iPhone and Android mobile devices, Microsoft has released a two-pound lump of actual cow faeces that they claim constitutes a phone.
Windows Phone 7, in development for several years, strips the mobile telephone down to its fundamental essence: futility, annoyance, malfunction, inconvenience and a socially unacceptable odour. Confounding analyst expectations, the turd is in fact shined.
US mobile carriers hailed the turd as the perfect physical complement to their world-famous customer service. "This powerful product will promote our growth!" said John Harrobin of Verizon Wireless. "We're marketing them as edible."
"We think we can really work the brand equity," said Steve Ballmer, modelling the optional shoulder-length rubber gloves. "Everyone works with our stuff all day every day. They know who Microsoft is and what we do."
"How about making our customers actually swallow our bullshit physically?" said John Harrobin. "Windows Phone 7 was my idea."
Photo: Steve Ballmer ecstatic at Windows Phone 7 sales.
Virgin Media will shortly trial 1.5Gbps cable Internet, but only to festering dot-com media cocks who live actually around Shoreditch itself.
"As the pace of technological change increases," said the ISP in the press release all the papers copied word for word, "it is vitally important to public health that these people have as absolutely much incentive as possible never to leave their homes. Wanking themselves silly over gigabytes of high-definition porn also reduces their likelihood of reproducing."
With the warmer weather, the Hoxton toxic waste pool has been growing and spreading, with reports of hipster infestations washing up as far afield as Hackney.
If the creative industries cannot be kept under control, by 2015 the entire population of Britain may be beret-wearing latte-sipping surrender monkeys telling you how much they just can't stand hipsters. Virgin Media is currently rolling out 100Mbps broadband to two million of the most endangered residential premises in the hope of effective quarantine.
In the wider world, high speed Internet will apparently let consumers access all manner of as yet nonexistent socially-redeeming services made of magic beans and pink unicorns, which actually means BitTorrenting a pirated movie in under five minutes. And hitting your download cap in another ten.
Virgin Media also announced that its overall revenue for the first quarter was up 5.7 percent to £982m, as a result of the utter lack of any connection between making money on a service and actually being able to provide it in a manner even slightly resembling reliability or competence.
I hereby propose that Unity be renamed "Ubuntu Vista".
Or KDE 4, which might not suck by then ;-)
(I used it around 4.2 and reduced the suck to tolerable levels with much effort, but it was really slow on the box in question. Machines should be faster by then.)
If I knew that Mark Shuttleworth was personally using Unity for all his daily work, I'd feel better about it. At least then there would be someone who loved it.
"I'll grant this: Unity seems to be a OK interface for netbooks and possibly touchpads."
No, I tried it and it sucks on netbooks too. It doesn't actually work reliably, and the bits that do work don't let you do quite a lot of stuff that the classic interface does.
Ahahaha, they want to remove classic mode for 11.10!
At that point I'll be switching to Mint or Debian Sid.
I have installed Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. The new Unity interface is stupidly shit. Half the stuff literally does not work on my netbook. If you woke up one day and thought:
"Gosh, I'd really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I'm using a locked-down phone running an obsolete version of Android through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can't think of a better user experience"
- this gets you quite a lot of the way there.
If you want it to feel a bit more like a computer, log out, select "Ubuntu Classic" and log back in and then you'll only have the Mac ripoff menu arrangements to contend with.
I actually liked the old UNR interface. I wonder where it all went horribly wrong.
Yuh. My first thought was "wow, that many people left for LibreOffice?"
She did not write that for Watching The Watchers - she wrote it for the Wikimedia Blog and they just took it. Please correct this and link to the original source.
It'll almost certainly be a GhostScript derivative, not something by Adobe. Open source, remember?
HEY HEY 16K, What Does That Get You Today, Thursday (NNGadget) — As well as attempting to give the major record and television companies whatever they want until the end of time, Lord Carter's Digital Britain report includes tax breaks for "culturally British" computer game development.
Planned games include Lard Warrior (“the goal is to sit playing a game. The graphics are truly horrifying and needed us to go to 3.5-dimensional to fit the player's avatar on the screen. Rated 18+ for explicit neck beards"), CCTV Panopticon (“take pictures of the CCTV cameras in your high street until arrested under the Terrorism Act for having your own camera in public, defeat final boss with Doctorow Attack"), Bottled Tan Snorter (“get into celebrity magazines and shag footballers, lose points for any sign of intelligence, insufficient nipple slips or words of two syllables") and Cynical Apathist (“write outraged blog posts and comments with amusing satires of events of the day while working a job directly keeping the hideous machinery alive and running, avoid removal by the Guardian moderator"). A committee will also form a group to do a study concerning a team to write a ZX Spectrum emulator for the iPhone, with a cassette interface emulator that sends Apple 99p every time you get an "R: Tape Loading Error."
The games industry has warned in the past that developers are being lured away to other countries by the prospect of being paid more than shit. Conservative Shadow Arts Minister Ed Vaizey has leapt upon the opportunity, with promises of incentives for talented developers to stay in Britain and not be lured away by better pay in America. "We'll keep their passports from them until they reach 'Achievement Unlocked.'"
Having finally released Digital Britain, Lord Carter has resigned from the government and is returning to private industry. "Of course, Digital Britain remains a completely objective assessment of the way forward for the nation in the twenty-first century, and should in no way be thought of as my CV for a series of lucrative consultancies with the large media companies I've just given everything they've ever asked for. And a pony."
HEY HEY 16K, Need To Know, Thursday (Big K) — Nokia, through the Symbian Foundation, has made the code for the Symbian smartphone OS open source, putting several aging geeks in raptures of delight.
"The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."
The Foundation hopes to pit Symbian against Windows Mobile. "There's no way it can compete against our superior features, like WAP browsing, infrared connect to your laptop and, of course, the serial port." It also hopes to set the stage for a march on the USA. "The Americans will fall before our superior engineering! Psion worked on the ZX81, you know."
There are currently about 330 million Symbian devices in the world, at least fifteen of whose owners can actually use the web browser without wanting to throw the damned thing through a window and just get an iPhone. "Just think," said Berkin, "now anyone can improve their phone! Well, they could if Nokia made phones the user could flash. But still!"
The Foundation issued a press release about how the open-sourcing of Symbian was welcomed by free software advocates and other aging hippies. "Developers everywhere will want to study Symbian," said Eben Moglen, "to hack on it, and to write applications for it. This could be even bigger than the Amiga."
I believe these mostly have resistive touch screens rather than capacitative ones. If you're fine with a stylus ...
ASSCAP, Asscrap, Monday (NNN) — After its recent successes suing girl scouts over singing copyrighted songs around campfires, the American Super-Society of Composers, Authors and Performers has filed a brief in a lawsuit against AT&T arguing that its members deserve payment every time a mobile phone rings.
The owners of the musical compositions are already paid for each ringtone download, but this does not cover ASCAP public performance royalties.
"The musicians and songwriters are the true creators of objective value in society," said ASCAP spokesdroid Ayn Rand. "They deserve your support. How would civilisation survive without Crazy Frog or the Nokia Tune? Which changes one note from the 1902 'Gran Vals' by Francisco Tárrega, so is completely original and deserving of royalties.
"To this end, we are bringing suits against those individuals who, having purchased RIAA-licensed ringtones, do not then silence them when in public. Statutory damages of $80,000 should have a salutary effect on our coffers and, of course, our public image."
Further lawsuits will then be brought against those who silence their mobile phones. "4'33' by John Cage is a copyrighted work. Without the money going to his estate, he may never write another measured piece of silence again." This will be followed by suits against those whistling or humming music in public, then those thinking about music in any form without a licence.
In support of their position, ASCAP pointed to vast public outpourings of sympathy from millions of people who never wanted to hear a tinny thirty-second burst of cheesy synthetic R&B coming from a phone ever again in their lives.
Personal preference: because it's close enough to Debian, pretty much ;-) Most of what we'll be using it for is to run Java (and Sun^WOracle Java at that, not even the distro OpenJDK). So we can do that and treat it as an almost-sane operating system.
In practice, we're about to switch from Solaris 10 on SPARC to Ubuntu Server in x86 VMs. Coulda been RHEL 5, wasn't. (We had no need of commercial support and the hosting company had Ubuntu as a standard offering. I have my qualms, but it should be possible to beat into robustness.)
CentOS is Red Hat for almost all practical purposes except if you're running proprietary software that lists RHEL as supported.
In my experience, Red Hat's actual tech support is shit. OTOH, buying a licence does help pay for all their work.
The trouble with the Zune? They (a) put wifi in (b) didn't put a web browser in. They could have had the iPod Touch beaten by six months and made everyone realise they could have a full working Internet in their pocket! ... and they just didn't. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The marketing phrase (1, 2) appears to be "head and shoulders above the iPhone" - they seem to think that if they say that a lot people might believe it.
So yeah, it's got a standardised website commenter buzz phrase. iPhone and Android don't!
"There was clear signs that Android would be the next Sybian"
I know some people love their phones, but that's getting into Jerry Springer territory.
Official Evince for Windows MSI.