To begin with the producers and writers went to a great deal of trouble in the miniseries to set up the idea that the battlestar is antiquated, and in the finale of Season 2A we get to see what a modern Battlestar looks like. I think that perhaps they might have had a little more exposition about the consequences to a society that has become dependent on technology that then rebels - there would almost certainly have been some kind of neo luddite reaction after the first Cylon war in the colonies and and the Colonies would have had to go backwards technologically speaking after the dpearture of the Cylons who one assumes did much of the work before the war. As for Props lokking just like modern Earth, including Starbucks jeep, I actually find the tendency to re-invent everything in many Sci Fi shows dreadfully distratcting. I have a certain residual affection for ST TNG, but the future technology often gets used as a deus ex machina and many of the off ship sets looked like they had been made from the Lost In Space remainder bin.
Add in many of the stock sci-fi conceits such as telepathy, mono-form planets, Aliens who are all Humaniod except for odd bumbs, earshapes, mottled skin or even antenae (and all manage to speak standard english without accent and seemingly without translation devices most of the time) and much of Sci Fi really is a guilty pleasure. BSG has almost none of these often cringeworthy elements.
The other big difference is that in most SCI-Fi Malevolent aliens are far too often completely devoid of any motivation and are one dimensional, think Daleks or Borg. When they are humanised they lose their scare value. The Cylons in the New BSG manage to be both humanly complex and frightening.
And people who think that Stargate (either version) or for that matter Firefly can compare favourably with the new BSG need to grow up. As for TOS fans who are disapointed that the new show is not more faithful to the old one I think James Lileks comment summed it up "very sad".
Complaints about the sexual content strike me as especially misplaced - maybe such people should stick to watching re-runs of leave it to beaver. Likewise the complaints about the handy cam cinema verite style - I will admit such a style can get overused (eg on the Sheild, though that is a show I love), but I don't think it is overused on BSG, There are plenty scenes where long takes and Pans are used instead , but when the director wants to communicate action the handy cam is very effective, and it also gets used to effectively communicate where the characters are physically in realtion to each other - and I find that very effective.
First of all I did point out that Telstra was not alone in abusing it's monopoly power, and in many countries the situation is much worse (I even mentioned afghanistan).
But telecomunications costs too much and delivers too little all over the world for similar reasons; where it sia governemnt monopoly it si all too often seen as a cash cow to be mercilessly milked and where privatisation has occured it has too often been structured to produce a revenue windfall rather than to create a solid, dynamic and cost effective communications infrastructure.
The area population density arguemnt doesn't cut it, first off Australia's poulation is heavily clustered in urban area's and within these areas the scale economics are no different than most other devloped nations. For regional and rural populations ( and I am in that category living 70 k from the nearest town), Telstra service continues to be appaling and very high priced. Telstra complains about the infrastructure costs involved when a: THey signed off on the Universal Service Obligation that is the flip side of their ability to extort massive profits elsewhere. and b: The problem is siignificantly of their own making, they still maintain a large fixed line infrastructure even though it would be cheaper for them to switch amny of their customers to wireless, for the sole reason that doing so would force them to admit just how extortianate their wirless charges are.
The suggestion that Tel$tra might resent Micro$ofts monopolistic rent seeking price practices is so ironic that it is not even ironic (as Baldrick would say).
Tel$tra's business practices make Micro$oft seem a paragon of open access in comparison. Telstra is little more than a revival of the old (and justly reviled) Roman practice of tax farming, and it's massive profits come at the expense of decent information infrastructure and impose a disproportinate economic cost.
Of course there are many Telco's around the world who similarly abuse their monopoly control of the local loop. Governments should wake up and realise that Telecoms constitute startegic infrastucture and that the short term windfalls that might arise from the creation of private monopolies and cartels come at the expense of massive flow on costs to the economy as a whole through communication costs being much higher than they should be.
If we privatised all roads and allowed them to be run by gigantic vertically integrated transport conglomerates with no restrtictions on their prices the result would not be difficult to predict, a starving economy dominated by hugely profiatable transport congomerates. To see what this looks like one has only to go to modern day afghanistan, the ubiquotous "toll gates" are the sign posts of an economy there are no public goods exist and the result is a diminishing of private goods as well.
My recent experience installing Linux vs Windows XP:
A windows 98 SE laptop (Gateway Solo 9100xl , 400 P3/128 MB ram) with a quite a lot of software on it upgrading using XP Proffessional: To cut a long story short after 3 attempts I just formatted and did a clean install , which you might say is no big deal except that I then needed to reinstall and restore configurations for all my software , and that task took the better part of 2 days before everything was back how I wanted it.
A Red Hat Linux Desktop computer (P2 400 / 128 mb Ram and lots of preipherals including scanner (scsi) GFX tablet, 2 x Graphic cards, TV Capture Card, 2 CDroms, ZIP, Quickcam.. a challenge for any OS) being upgraded from 7 to 7.2 ( having previously gone from Red Hat 5.2 and 6.0) only partially RPM based with a great deal of software compiled from source.
System back online 45 minutes later with everything working as it should , add another hour whilst I poked around a nd customized the kernel
PS (Pre Script) How DID you know I was looking for a SQL for XML solution!
I remember writing a business plan for an online music catalog where you could create your own compilation CD back in 1992, and I am sure that I was not the only one. I even approached a few record companies with the idea, zero interest. They have treated their customers like shit for so long why should they be surprised when we hit the fan (to truly mangle some metaphors).
Well they have missed the boat on straight audio, but they could still do it with DVD compilations of Music Videos, (another business plan I have floating around that those dumb f***ks won't look at).
For straight audio sales the only model I can see working is a subscription based service , and even that would need a lot of addons to make it compelling against the P2P alternative.
A couple to start:
The ability to locate a song/track without knowing the artist or title but by the rough time that you heard it on the radio, and a quick RA preview to verify that that is the one.
MP3 Karaoke: Lyrics of every song that scroll in time to that song, sure that this needs a xml solution:)
The big question would be how to divvy up the loot, or more to the point who would do the Divvying , personally I would like to see it handled by a complete 3rd party, giving it direct to artists and producers, I have always thought the record companies claims about the cost of marketing talent are total BS, they must be the only industry where the people who do most of the advertising for their ware (the radio stations) actually pay THEM!
There are a lot of cool and useful things that you could do with open box PC based PBX (here in Australia they are referred to as PABX, hav no idea why). I especially dream of all the cool things that you could do by integrating the PBX with an SME's ERM database , maintaining phone logs for every customer, bringing up the customers details based on caller-id.
My question is just how much do you need the co-operation of the telco to get a system like this to work , i.e I might want 4 lines in but I don't want 4 different numbers, is there an open standard, or am I forced to involve the telco in how I setup my PBX?
Now if they X11 could just master fonts.
on
GUIs for Everyone
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· Score: 1
Linux as an OS is agnostic as to the GUI, which is as it should be ; as a result there is a GUI to satisfy pretty much any user or task. What is missing? IMHO just 2 things.
A standard that would make it easier for applications to adapt to the GUI they operate in : eg A QT or Gnome based app will appear as such even in a Blackbox session. No doubt sometimes (perhaps mostly) this is a good thing , but it would be nice if the GUI solution was a little bit better layered.
Fonts, need I say more? Fact is most of our time interacting with a PC is spent either reading , producing or interacting with Text based information and the graceless, complicated way in which Fonts are handled under Xfree86/X11 are IMO the biggest hurdle to Linux on the desktop. Much more so than Application availability.
Slashdot Mirror
To begin with the producers and writers went to a great deal of trouble in the miniseries to set up the idea that the battlestar is antiquated, and in the finale of Season 2A we get to see what a modern Battlestar looks like. I think that perhaps they might have had a little more exposition about the consequences to a society that has become dependent on technology that then rebels - there would almost certainly have been some kind of neo luddite reaction after the first Cylon war in the colonies and and the Colonies would have had to go backwards technologically speaking after the dpearture of the Cylons who one assumes did much of the work before the war. As for Props lokking just like modern Earth, including Starbucks jeep, I actually find the tendency to re-invent everything in many Sci Fi shows dreadfully distratcting. I have a certain residual affection for ST TNG, but the future technology often gets used as a deus ex machina and many of the off ship sets looked like they had been made from the Lost In Space remainder bin.
Add in many of the stock sci-fi conceits such as telepathy, mono-form planets, Aliens who are all Humaniod except for odd bumbs, earshapes, mottled skin or even antenae (and all manage to speak standard english without accent and seemingly without translation devices most of the time) and much of Sci Fi really is a guilty pleasure. BSG has almost none of these often cringeworthy elements.
The other big difference is that in most SCI-Fi Malevolent aliens are far too often completely devoid of any motivation and are one dimensional, think Daleks or Borg. When they are humanised they lose their scare value. The Cylons in the New BSG manage to be both humanly complex and frightening.
And people who think that Stargate (either version) or for that matter Firefly can compare favourably with the new BSG need to grow up. As for TOS fans who are disapointed that the new show is not more faithful to the old one I think James Lileks comment summed it up "very sad".
Complaints about the sexual content strike me as especially misplaced - maybe such people should stick to watching re-runs of leave it to beaver. Likewise the complaints about the handy cam cinema verite style - I will admit such a style can get overused (eg on the Sheild, though that is a show I love), but I don't think it is overused on BSG, There are plenty scenes where long takes and Pans are used instead , but when the director wants to communicate action the handy cam is very effective, and it also gets used to effectively communicate where the characters are physically in realtion to each other - and I find that very effective.
First of all I did point out that Telstra was not alone in abusing it's monopoly power, and in many countries the situation is much worse (I even mentioned afghanistan).
But telecomunications costs too much and delivers too little all over the world for similar reasons; where it sia governemnt monopoly it si all too often seen as a cash cow to be mercilessly milked and where privatisation has occured it has too often been structured to produce a revenue windfall rather than to create a solid, dynamic and cost effective communications infrastructure.
The area population density arguemnt doesn't cut it, first off Australia's poulation is heavily clustered in urban area's and within these areas the scale economics are no different than most other devloped nations. For regional and rural populations ( and I am in that category living 70 k from the nearest town), Telstra service continues to be appaling and very high priced. Telstra complains about the infrastructure costs involved when a: THey signed off on the Universal Service Obligation that is the flip side of their ability to extort massive profits elsewhere. and b: The problem is siignificantly of their own making, they still maintain a large fixed line infrastructure even though it would be cheaper for them to switch amny of their customers to wireless, for the sole reason that doing so would force them to admit just how extortianate their wirless charges are.
The suggestion that Tel$tra might resent Micro$ofts monopolistic rent seeking price practices is so ironic that it is not even ironic (as Baldrick would say).
Tel$tra's business practices make Micro$oft seem a paragon of open access in comparison. Telstra is little more than a revival of the old (and justly reviled) Roman practice of tax farming, and it's massive profits come at the expense of decent information infrastructure and impose a disproportinate economic cost.
Of course there are many Telco's around the world who similarly abuse their monopoly control of the local loop. Governments should wake up and realise that Telecoms constitute startegic infrastucture and that the short term windfalls that might arise from the creation of private monopolies and cartels come at the expense of massive flow on costs to the economy as a whole through communication costs being much higher than they should be.
If we privatised all roads and allowed them to be run by gigantic vertically integrated transport conglomerates with no restrtictions on their prices the result would not be difficult to predict, a starving economy dominated by hugely profiatable transport congomerates. To see what this looks like one has only to go to modern day afghanistan, the ubiquotous "toll gates" are the sign posts of an economy there are no public goods exist and the result is a diminishing of private goods as well.
My recent experience installing Linux vs Windows XP:
A windows 98 SE laptop (Gateway Solo 9100xl , 400 P3/128 MB ram) with a quite a lot of software on it upgrading using XP Proffessional: To cut a long story short after 3 attempts I just formatted and did a clean install , which you might say is no big deal except that I then needed to reinstall and restore configurations for all my software , and that task took the better part of 2 days before everything was back how I wanted it.
A Red Hat Linux Desktop computer (P2 400 / 128 mb Ram and lots of preipherals including scanner (scsi) GFX tablet, 2 x Graphic cards, TV Capture Card, 2 CDroms, ZIP, Quickcam.. a challenge for any OS) being upgraded from 7 to 7.2 ( having previously gone from Red Hat 5.2 and 6.0) only partially RPM based with a great deal of software compiled from source.
System back online 45 minutes later with everything working as it should , add another hour whilst I poked around a nd customized the kernel
Windows easier than Linux to install, my ass.
PS (Pre Script) How DID you know I was looking for a SQL for XML solution!
I remember writing a business plan for an online music catalog where you could create your own compilation CD back in 1992, and I am sure that I was not the only one. I even approached a few record companies with the idea, zero interest. They have treated their customers like shit for so long why should they be surprised when we hit the fan (to truly mangle some metaphors).
Well they have missed the boat on straight audio, but they could still do it with DVD compilations of Music Videos, (another business plan I have floating around that those dumb f***ks won't look at).
For straight audio sales the only model I can see working is a subscription based service , and even that would need a lot of addons to make it compelling against the P2P alternative.A couple to start:
The big question would be how to divvy up the loot, or more to the point who would do the Divvying , personally I would like to see it handled by a complete 3rd party, giving it direct to artists and producers, I have always thought the record companies claims about the cost of marketing talent are total BS, they must be the only industry where the people who do most of the advertising for their ware (the radio stations) actually pay THEM!
There are a lot of cool and useful things that you could do with open box PC based PBX (here in Australia they are referred to as PABX, hav no idea why). I especially dream of all the cool things that you could do by integrating the PBX with an SME's ERM database , maintaining phone logs for every customer, bringing up the customers details based on caller-id.
My question is just how much do you need the co-operation of the telco to get a system like this to work , i.e I might want 4 lines in but I don't want 4 different numbers, is there an open standard, or am I forced to involve the telco in how I setup my PBX?
Linux as an OS is agnostic as to the GUI, which is as it should be ; as a result there is a GUI to satisfy pretty much any user or task. What is missing? IMHO just 2 things.