Now, if we are willing to expand into the 80's, then (damn I wish I could do a here) BRING BACK MAX!
DVD box!!!
DVD box!!!
DVD box!!!
I did manage to record most of the shows, but I missed the last five or six, including the one where Max falls in love with a computer. But that was back in the days when VHS tapes cost enough that I always recorded in 6-hour mode, so they're really lo-rez.
And I'm still pissed that Buckaroo Banzai and (I think) UHF are both in rights limbo as far as getting on DVD is concerened. BB was part of a dozen or so movie deal where one of the movies had a problem with the rights, so of course every one of them in the entire deal has been fucked up for years.
Buck Roger's gorgeous sidekick's name was Erin Gray. Don't ask me why I remember that. As an 8-year-old I had a crush on both her and Lynda Carter (Wonder Woman).
I thought Princess Ardala (Pamela Hensley) was much better. Erin Gray's character was such an icy glacier that I thought she was UN-sexy. But then I was 15 years old, so the motherly personality of Colonel Wilma Deering wasn't very endearing. But I agree with you about Lynda Carter.
Of course in the second season they decided to completely scrap it as an action show (maybe the FX for those fighter ship battles ate up too much of the budget) and turned it into a lame Star Trek clone. They basically just left Princess Ardala and all that interplanetary squabble behind in favor of the "Planet of the Week Club".
I was a big fan of BG back in the day. Then they started showing the reruns. Faux-wife and I sat down to watch it for old time nostalgia. It was the classic episode with the cross-shaped glowing white space ship that they show in the opening credits. Let me tell you something. It Sucked. It sucked more than anything I had seen in a long time. Faux-wife was deeply saddened to see a show she loved growing up as one of the worst pieces of TV sci-fi to ever be rebroadcast. The plot was sickly. The characters where two dimensional in the extreme. I was under the impression that I would be privilege to the benefit of watching it older and wiser. I would see new things I had missed before.
Battlestar Galactica was NOT the worst SF series of all time. Its semi-sequel Galactica '80 (with a premise that appeared a few months earlier as a parody in Cracked magazine #159!) was at least an order of magnitude worse than the original series.
At least the original series killed off Rick Springfield in the first episode!:-)
I remember doing a bit of research back when DirectTV sent their "card killer" download back in January. All I can say is that this is likely to be the end of the H card. Not that Hughes really wants to eat the cost of replacing millions of active non-hacked H cards, but they may have to now. Unless this trick also works with HU cards, that is.:-)
OTOH, it would be quite frightening to watch it browse the newsgroups...
Might I suggest as a start (including the DejaGoogle archives): alt.religion.kibology, alt.slack, alt.discordia, and alt.sci.physics.plutonium.
If Cyc can survive that much intentional kookiness, and can grok the TOTALITY of the PLUTONIUM ATOM while still having a proper understanding of nuclear physics, then it can truly be considered intelligent.
And since Cyc is a program, not a robot, under those rules it is just fine to destroy the Earth. (Cyc knows, of course, that destroying the earth means killing all the people on it.)
The First Amendment only controls the government's ability to stop speech. If every ISP in the USA decided to block spammers, that's their right. If customers decide to boycott ISPs that won't block spammers, that's their right, too.
But opt-out simply doesn't work. It just puts you on the "live fish" list, for which the spammers can charge extra money. I'm more for fraud charges against spammers who insist on concealing their identity.
Then you've never tried to install Solaris x86. I tried this back in the Solaris 7 days (when they had that "free plus $15 for shipping" offer three or so years ago) and found out that their X servers didn't support any video card manufactured in the (then) past two years, and wouldn't take a "backward compatible" later version from the same manufacturer, either. The only fallback option was 640x480x16 VGA. It was unbelievably ugly. And the only text mode option was 25x80 (unlike Linux, which can give you 60x80 on most VGA cards). It wouldn't even boot with an ATI All In Wonder 98 because the _text_ mode console driver was incompatible with that card!
...and while IE 5.0 properly rendered "Unicode '&#' escapes", Mozilla didn't. I presume it will work properly with the in-spec & instead of a bare ampersand.
It looked okay in Mozilla (which was only set to Japanese auto-detect, not UTF-8), but looked like garbage on IE 5.0 until I manually selected UTF-8.
However, the Japanese characters in my sig are done with Unicode '&#' escapes, and seem to display properly on most Unicode-aware browsers, in spite of charset headers and character set settings.
The problem is that you would need a tracking system for each dish to watch anything but DSS. DSS doesn't need a tracking system because it's only on one geosync bird, so you only have to aim it once. And even then, you'd still have to have a way to combine the signals from the receivers in each dish.
It goes both ways, too. There's a trading community for videos of Japanese animation, some fansubs (sometimes even ripped from awful quality nth-generation 6-hour VHS tapes!), some new shows.
Because of the speed of the internet, fansubs of shows in Japan are now becoming available while the show is still in-season. In the extreme case, Inu Yasha episode 24 subtitled was posted on Usenet the day after 25 was broadcast (FWIW, 25 was delayed a week because of a baseball game).
Of course I don't have time to watch very many of these videos since I'm so busy downloading (384K DSL) and uncompressing them and burning them to CD-R.:-) Usenet alone has enough stuff on it that I have no need for IRC trading, and it's more a bandwidth-efficient distribution method anyhow.
P.S. I can proudly say that I still have not seen Star Wars Episode I.
There I was, with my Powerbook and external CD-RW burner on the kitchen table. I had disc 1 still in the drive from installing it, start up the game, then click on "New Game". And I had a glass of water in front of the CD-RW drive. At the edge of the table. I know, that was kind of stupid, but when I clicked on the button, WHAM! the drive ejects, and pushes the glass of water right off the table! "Please insert disc 2!"
Good thing it was a plastic glass and only water was inside.
As far as the game itself goes, the first time I tried to play it (this is on a Mac, remember), it worked pretty well. But after that the audio and/or video in the cinema scenes insisted on being choppy. So I installed all 2+ GB of it on the hard drive and had no further technical troubles.
It's definitely an improvement to be able to scan around the viewpoints with QTVR, over having what amounts to a pretty slide show. The cool part is how they manage to get video motion going while still doing a QTVR projection. Kudos to the wizards on the QuickTime team for bringing us this technology (which is probably not too useful outside of making Myst better.:-)
One important non-spoiler hint: when you get to where there are three display screens with focus controls, try clicking and dragging on the display screens. I was absolutely unable to grok that the display screens themselves were a control until reading a walkthrough which implied that there was some sort of directional control.
Correction. The Japanese learn English words very early. Because the classes are a required part of the cirriculum. But they don't learn much English grammar, and are almost never taught proper pronounciation. The "All your base are belong to us" thing is a perfect example of what happens when the translator is not a native speaker of the destination language. So-called "Japlish" (crazy mixed-up uses of English words) is another example of what this causes.
Americans rarely learn Japanese.
Because until recently, there weren't many classes offered, because there wasn't much interest compared to the much easier (for English speakers) big-four European languages (FIGS). And most of those that are offered are not much better than the English taught to Japanese, nor do they teach reading that would even qualify as a first-grade level (by not teaching any kanji, and often not even kana).
Now that anime is getting more popular, there is a reason to learn. You're simply not going to learn a language unless you have a lot of reading/listening material that doesn't put you to sleep. I took two semesters of Spanish in college (two semesters any language being required to graduate), and barely learned anything, despite being in central Texas where it's the second language. (Korean seems to be in third place.) Once I realized the only benefit I could get from learning Spanish was better TV news reports on NASA (I am not making this up), I gave up trying to learn any more.
At least when I finally made the decision to learn Japanese, all that poor Spanish became useful (the pronouncation is similar, and both have heavily conjugated verbs). Anyone who makes an effort to read lots of manga and watch lots of subtitled anime can pick up a decent command of the language in a year, and be reading like a (slow) fifth-grader after three or four years.
Which goes to show that most school language classes are worthless unless you want to learn, and unnecessary if you make an effort to learn. But you still spend a lot of money on books either way. ^_^
To paraphrase a message above, "there's the whole problem of Brits not getting most of the humor...". With only one "u" in "humor".
The format of Battlebots is a parody of American sports (with two "s"es), pro wrestling in particular. As for the violence, I guess Brits would rather see the competitors get sliced and diced by the house robots than fight each other. And I guess you can't see any point to the driving skills needed in Battlebots, because after all, the Brits don't have NASCAR.
This was supposed to be the user interface that would change the world (how many times has that been said in press releases?) And it turns out to be Yet Another Freaking Browser, only with some sort of "we give you a net account too, but only if you already have an ISP, of course" extra, perhaps like Apple's iTools, except they're taking themselves way too seriously. Oh boy, I get truck-sized icons, and I can put little labels on them, too! Where do I sign up!
And this group supposedly included a couple of genuises from the original Macintosh development team? Maybe they should have gotten Tog on that team, too.
Anyhow, OS X's graphics model is based on PDF, so I presume it has to deal with the rights protection too. How long before someone comes up with a patch for OS X now that it's reached Golden Master? Developers already have copies of the GM version, and it's less than two weeks before the release date.
As for Debian, I think they should distribute with it turned off. But the source should have a #define that allows it to be turned on easily by someone who has enough clue to recompile from source.
Re:Only one problem: NO ONE LIVES THERE!!!!
on
The Dot in .mars
·
· Score: 3
It's a lot easier to talk to a geosynchronous satellite a couple of miles up than it is to talk to another planet that's not only millions of miles away, but isn't even always visible from whatever side of Earth happens to be pointing in its general direction. Even with a worldwide network of tracking stations, sometimes Sol or Luna gets in the way.
Just imagine being on Mars and being unable to read/. for a whole week because Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun. Will you be tough enough to survive it?
Interesting points about Ryoko's relationship to 'I Dream of Jeanie,'
J: How about "Ryoko"? Is "Nene" the model of "Ryoko"?
H: No. Kajishima and I both like a classic America soap opera called "I dream of Jeannie"(1965-1970, copyrights Screen Gems, Inc.) We like Jeannie a lot and wanted to use her in our works back then. (I still like Jeannie now, sort to speak.) She is the original "Ryoko".
Much love-comedy anime is really IDoJ mixed in with Three's Company. The original IDoJ show was Urusei Yatsura, a decade or so before Tenchi Muyo. Lum and Ryoko both pop in on the male lead without warning, but unlike Lum and Jeannie, Ryoko has street smarts and isn't clueless about life in 20th century Earth.
Other series of this genre are Ah My Goddess and Mamotte Shugogetten. MS has aspects of all the other series (IDoJ, UY, TM, AMG), with the female lead Shaolin being at least as clueless about the 20th Century as Jeannie. And she has a magical widget that she (and a couple of dozen sidekicks) can live in, though it's much more compact (and not as vulnerable) as Jeannie's bottle. I'm up to manga book #11 in the series so far and hoping to find more.
It sounds to me that region 8 would only effectively play non-regioned disks...
I have discs advertised as "all region" which are coded for regions 1-6, and I have discs which don't advertise a region which are coded for regions 1-8.
I suspect they are using region 1, as it is the region with the most material, and the region most convienent to the shuttle which brings them up. They could have a laptop with a hacked DVD-ROM player (DVD Genie, etc.), but I doubt it.
Slashdot Mirror
DVD box!!!
DVD box!!!
DVD box!!!
I did manage to record most of the shows, but I missed the last five or six, including the one where Max falls in love with a computer. But that was back in the days when VHS tapes cost enough that I always recorded in 6-hour mode, so they're really lo-rez.
And I'm still pissed that Buckaroo Banzai and (I think) UHF are both in rights limbo as far as getting on DVD is concerened. BB was part of a dozen or so movie deal where one of the movies had a problem with the rights, so of course every one of them in the entire deal has been fucked up for years.
I thought Princess Ardala (Pamela Hensley) was much better. Erin Gray's character was such an icy glacier that I thought she was UN-sexy. But then I was 15 years old, so the motherly personality of Colonel Wilma Deering wasn't very endearing. But I agree with you about Lynda Carter.
Of course in the second season they decided to completely scrap it as an action show (maybe the FX for those fighter ship battles ate up too much of the budget) and turned it into a lame Star Trek clone. They basically just left Princess Ardala and all that interplanetary squabble behind in favor of the "Planet of the Week Club".
Battlestar Galactica was NOT the worst SF series of all time. Its semi-sequel Galactica '80 (with a premise that appeared a few months earlier as a parody in Cracked magazine #159!) was at least an order of magnitude worse than the original series.
At least the original series killed off Rick Springfield in the first episode! :-)
You forgot to add: "Now what was your username again?"
Toast burns bootable Slackware .iso files just fine. I've burned 7.1 with it and it boots on any BIOS that supports El Torito (?) booting.
I remember doing a bit of research back when DirectTV sent their "card killer" download back in January. All I can say is that this is likely to be the end of the H card. Not that Hughes really wants to eat the cost of replacing millions of active non-hacked H cards, but they may have to now. Unless this trick also works with HU cards, that is. :-)
Might I suggest as a start (including the DejaGoogle archives): alt.religion.kibology, alt.slack, alt.discordia, and alt.sci.physics.plutonium.
If Cyc can survive that much intentional kookiness, and can grok the TOTALITY of the PLUTONIUM ATOM while still having a proper understanding of nuclear physics, then it can truly be considered intelligent.
And since Cyc is a program, not a robot, under those rules it is just fine to destroy the Earth. (Cyc knows, of course, that destroying the earth means killing all the people on it.)
But opt-out simply doesn't work. It just puts you on the "live fish" list, for which the spammers can charge extra money. I'm more for fraud charges against spammers who insist on concealing their identity.
Then you've never tried to install Solaris x86. I tried this back in the Solaris 7 days (when they had that "free plus $15 for shipping" offer three or so years ago) and found out that their X servers didn't support any video card manufactured in the (then) past two years, and wouldn't take a "backward compatible" later version from the same manufacturer, either. The only fallback option was 640x480x16 VGA. It was unbelievably ugly. And the only text mode option was 25x80 (unlike Linux, which can give you 60x80 on most VGA cards). It wouldn't even boot with an ATI All In Wonder 98 because the _text_ mode console driver was incompatible with that card!
...and while IE 5.0 properly rendered "Unicode '&#' escapes", Mozilla didn't. I presume it will work properly with the in-spec & instead of a bare ampersand.
However, the Japanese characters in my sig are done with Unicode '&#' escapes, and seem to display properly on most Unicode-aware browsers, in spite of charset headers and character set settings.
The problem is that you would need a tracking system for each dish to watch anything but DSS. DSS doesn't need a tracking system because it's only on one geosync bird, so you only have to aim it once. And even then, you'd still have to have a way to combine the signals from the receivers in each dish.
Because of the speed of the internet, fansubs of shows in Japan are now becoming available while the show is still in-season. In the extreme case, Inu Yasha episode 24 subtitled was posted on Usenet the day after 25 was broadcast (FWIW, 25 was delayed a week because of a baseball game).
Of course I don't have time to watch very many of these videos since I'm so busy downloading (384K DSL) and uncompressing them and burning them to CD-R. :-) Usenet alone has enough stuff on it that I have no need for IRC trading, and it's more a bandwidth-efficient distribution method anyhow.
P.S. I can proudly say that I still have not seen Star Wars Episode I.
Good thing it was a plastic glass and only water was inside.
As far as the game itself goes, the first time I tried to play it (this is on a Mac, remember), it worked pretty well. But after that the audio and/or video in the cinema scenes insisted on being choppy. So I installed all 2+ GB of it on the hard drive and had no further technical troubles.
It's definitely an improvement to be able to scan around the viewpoints with QTVR, over having what amounts to a pretty slide show. The cool part is how they manage to get video motion going while still doing a QTVR projection. Kudos to the wizards on the QuickTime team for bringing us this technology (which is probably not too useful outside of making Myst better. :-)
One important non-spoiler hint: when you get to where there are three display screens with focus controls, try clicking and dragging on the display screens. I was absolutely unable to grok that the display screens themselves were a control until reading a walkthrough which implied that there was some sort of directional control.
Server missing for 4 years found, still ticking
Correction. The Japanese learn English words very early. Because the classes are a required part of the cirriculum. But they don't learn much English grammar, and are almost never taught proper pronounciation. The "All your base are belong to us" thing is a perfect example of what happens when the translator is not a native speaker of the destination language. So-called "Japlish" (crazy mixed-up uses of English words) is another example of what this causes.
Because until recently, there weren't many classes offered, because there wasn't much interest compared to the much easier (for English speakers) big-four European languages (FIGS). And most of those that are offered are not much better than the English taught to Japanese, nor do they teach reading that would even qualify as a first-grade level (by not teaching any kanji, and often not even kana).
Now that anime is getting more popular, there is a reason to learn. You're simply not going to learn a language unless you have a lot of reading/listening material that doesn't put you to sleep. I took two semesters of Spanish in college (two semesters any language being required to graduate), and barely learned anything, despite being in central Texas where it's the second language. (Korean seems to be in third place.) Once I realized the only benefit I could get from learning Spanish was better TV news reports on NASA (I am not making this up), I gave up trying to learn any more.
At least when I finally made the decision to learn Japanese, all that poor Spanish became useful (the pronouncation is similar, and both have heavily conjugated verbs). Anyone who makes an effort to read lots of manga and watch lots of subtitled anime can pick up a decent command of the language in a year, and be reading like a (slow) fifth-grader after three or four years.
Which goes to show that most school language classes are worthless unless you want to learn, and unnecessary if you make an effort to learn. But you still spend a lot of money on books either way. ^_^
The format of Battlebots is a parody of American sports (with two "s"es), pro wrestling in particular. As for the violence, I guess Brits would rather see the competitors get sliced and diced by the house robots than fight each other. And I guess you can't see any point to the driving skills needed in Battlebots, because after all, the Brits don't have NASCAR.
And this group supposedly included a couple of genuises from the original Macintosh development team? Maybe they should have gotten Tog on that team, too.
Anyhow, OS X's graphics model is based on PDF, so I presume it has to deal with the rights protection too. How long before someone comes up with a patch for OS X now that it's reached Golden Master? Developers already have copies of the GM version, and it's less than two weeks before the release date.
As for Debian, I think they should distribute with it turned off. But the source should have a #define that allows it to be turned on easily by someone who has enough clue to recompile from source.
Just imagine being on Mars and being unable to read /. for a whole week because Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun. Will you be tough enough to survive it?
Much love-comedy anime is really IDoJ mixed in with Three's Company. The original IDoJ show was Urusei Yatsura, a decade or so before Tenchi Muyo. Lum and Ryoko both pop in on the male lead without warning, but unlike Lum and Jeannie, Ryoko has street smarts and isn't clueless about life in 20th century Earth.
Other series of this genre are Ah My Goddess and Mamotte Shugogetten. MS has aspects of all the other series (IDoJ, UY, TM, AMG), with the female lead Shaolin being at least as clueless about the 20th Century as Jeannie. And she has a magical widget that she (and a couple of dozen sidekicks) can live in, though it's much more compact (and not as vulnerable) as Jeannie's bottle. I'm up to manga book #11 in the series so far and hoping to find more.
Perhaps, but "Moonraker" seems like a truly appropriate film for the ISS.
I have discs advertised as "all region" which are coded for regions 1-6, and I have discs which don't advertise a region which are coded for regions 1-8.
I suspect they are using region 1, as it is the region with the most material, and the region most convienent to the shuttle which brings them up. They could have a laptop with a hacked DVD-ROM player (DVD Genie, etc.), but I doubt it.
Oh, is that going to be the one where Captain Picard[tm] is the leader of a squad of crime-fighting mutants?