Are you kidding? Russell Crowe was AMAZING in Gladiator. He totally made the movie the success it was. Name a better leading man that year. He WAS that roman general. Imagine if say, Kevin Costner had played it? How that guy still gets major roles is completely beyond me.
I had two cats, Cricket and Ruffles. Cricket was shy and kinda dumb, Ruffles is very dominant and clever.
If I was petting Cricket, and Ruffles came into the room, Ruffles would usually glare at Cricket, and Cricket would leave, so Ruffles could have undivided affection.
One day, this kind of irked me, so when Ruffles came into the room, I put my hand firmly on Cricket to prevent her from leaving, and shooed Ruffles away.
I kid you not, Ruffles looked at me with an expression of hurt betrayal, and then hissed at Cricket, and stalked out. *I* was the one shooing her away, but Ruffles was able to reason that Cricket was the indirect cause of this. Yowza!
To be fair, I didn't really give it a fair chance. It was definitely as good and addicting as the first one. I suppose perhaps because I liked the first one so much, my expectations were higher (perhaps unreasonably so) for the sequel, and it didn't "grab" me in the same way that the first one did when it originally came out.
I've seen a fair bit of Warcraft III (although I haven't really played it myself much) and I thought I'd offer a few insights...
First, the graphics. Very cool, but at the same time a bit dissapointing. You can't rotate the camera. At all. All you can do is zoom and tilt from a near overhead view down to an angle closer to the ground... but the camera ALWAYS faces north.
That being said.. it works great. The game plays just like Warcraft II, but with much cooler graphics, and more unit diversity. Extremely easy to dive right into if you've played Warcraft II or Starcraft. I disagree with the reviewer that it's all about the rush. It's not. Blizzard is going for a smaller, more diverse army approach. Unit limit is 90. Which brings us to heroes. (I can't BELIEVE the reviewer didn't talk about heroes)
Heroes are what really make Warcraft III more compelling that its predecessors (which is very high praise) These are like RPG characters.. they have experience, they level, they can collect magic items, they get really powerful magic spells. They ALSO increase the combat effectiveness of any group of creatures they lead into battle.
All this means that instead of hordes of faceless grunt swarms, you have smaller, more carefully built and selected combat groups, led into battle by a character you've worked building up, who actually has a name, who you actually care, yes care about his welfare. You will know despair when you see the message "Lord Darkthorne (Lvl 8) has been slain in combat".
Despite the lack of camera rotation, the 3D graphics are VERY well done. Creatures don't look like polygons, they look almost hand drawn. I just wish they had pushed the envelope with the 3D technology a little more. Ground Control is a perfect example of how to do camera control in a ground based 3D RTS. And camera control is everything. It's what made Homeworld so amazing.
Overall concluding thoughts? I was dissapointed with Diablo II, I thought it was almost a (very large) expansion to Diablo I, with a stupid quasi-3D graphic gimmick. I am NOT dissapointed with Warcraft III. It shines of Blizzard quality. The legendary Blizzard play balance and more importantly, personality, is here, and here in spades. Warcraft III is going to FLY off the shelves when it's done. And they have MONTHS left to improve it even more! I can't wait to see what the campaigns are like.
I will pay for convenience. I will pay for service. I will pay for value-added features.
I will NOT pay for the cost of manufacturing shiny plastic disks and shipping them around the world. THE INTERNET HAS MADE THIS FORM OF DISTRIBUTION OBSOLETE.
There will still be a CD/DVD/other market. People will continue to collect stuff. People collect lots of obsolete stuff. I collect DVDs even though I could acquire DivX of anything I want.
The media companies want to retain totalitarian control of all media. It's what they do. It's not for the benefit of the creators, no matter what they say. It's for their profit margins. It's to continue making money the way they always have. They are NOT entitled to do this by crippling technology and disempowering the public.
"If not, what? Just going to put everyone out of work, right?"
Try and step outside our broken, plutocratic, dollars-and-cents civilization for one second and think of the utopian society advanced technology COULD provide for the human race one day.
Imagine an ideal world where virtually all of humanity's essential needs are provided by automated processes, and most people don't NEED to work. Stop fucking laughing and tell me why this is inconceivable to you. It's a dream, yes. We're nowhere close. But it's possible, one day. It's something to work towards. The Sun provides unlimited free energy, it's just a question of harnessing it efficiently enough.
These types of dreams will never be realized as long as we keep fucking over each other for profit and greed. Unfortunately greed (and shortsighted stupidity) is an inherent property of the human animal. We're turning into the goddamn Ferengi and nobody's even noticing.
He mentions the "Analog Hole" in the introductory statement, which, as far I understand, means that if you send a signal to a legacy television, the signal entering the television is standard, copyable analog ("Temporarily in the clear", as he puts it). The solution proposed is to make all TVs do an internal black box decryption.
Won't work. Someone will hack the decryption and build their own decoder. (Likely in software) Violation of DMCA, so what? They'll release it anonymously and open source.
Won't work. Someone will rip a TV apart and figure out how to make the black box dance.
Won't work. Someone will stick a freakin VIDEO RECORDER in optimum conditions in front of the TV, rip it, and release it. It's a home movie as far as the video recorder is concerned.
Ditto all the above for encrypted speaker signals and microphones.
Will the average person do this? Of course not. BUT IT ONLY TAKES ONE PERSON. There will ALWAYS be one person.
If you hide it, we will find it. If you guard it, we will free it. If you hoard it, we will spread it.
The global distribution and copying of information is now essentially costless. Deal with it. Welcome to the twenty-first fucking century.
I've been thinking about this for a long time too... I hadn't really though about him being genetic engineered though, although it's a good theory too... I was thinking, what if Palpatine is actually his father?
It makes so much sense... if the Emperor has "Skywalker blood", it would explain why he is so powerful in the Force, it would explain how he is able to seduce Anakin into ultimately joining him, the very same offer Anakin later makes to his own son, Luke. It would make a beautifully symmetrical story of family redemption, with Palpatine being evil, Luke being good, and Anakin is the "balance" in between. Lucas HAS planned out the overall story outline since the very beginning.
"who's been publishing online longer than some slashdot readers have walked erect"
I would submit that some/. readers don't walk erect at ALL, thereby invalidating any sense of seniority this statement might otherwise have implied. Consider a wheelchair bound reader. Or possibly a child who hasn't learned to walk yet, but sits on a parent's lap and stares at the screen, or similarily some type of animal.
These last two don't count as reading, you say? I beg to differ. And for incontestable proof, I turn to Jamie Lee Curtis, keeper of all thoughts wise:
Otto: "Aha! Apes don't read Nietzsche!" Wanda: "Yes they DO, Otto, they just don't understand it!" - A Fish Called Wanda
(Yes, it's been one of those days)
Moderation Totals: Silly=2, Directionless=1, Waste of Electrons=3, Total=6
I have more than a hundred DVDs in my collection, even though I know perfectly well how to obtain as many DivX's as I like.
I do have a pirated copy of Fellowship of the Rings, but I've seen it 7 times in the theatre and will purchase the DVD the day it comes out, so I feel perfectly justified. MPAA would still accuse me of depriving them of profits, though.
"put that in your "2 out of 10" pipe and smoke it, Mr. Valenti"
Fuckin A. This kind of argument really pisses me off. They claim their have to be controls in place to guarantee that they rake in more money, because what they do is really expensive, and only 2 out of 10 of their products turn a profit.
Guess what?
NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM. Not the consumer's problem. Supply and demand, bubba. It makes the world turn. If movies aren't making as much money as it costs to produce them, then make them cheaper, or go find another line of work. Less ambitious projects, pay the stars less, work more efficiently, cut corners, whatever. The Constitution makes no guarantee that you will be able to continue profitting as you always have, otherwise scribes would have a monopoly on book producing, and printing presses (not to mention laser printers) would be illegal. If you gamble by spending 9 digit sums making a movie, YOU'RE GAMBLING. Don't come crying to us when you can't get people to pay you hundreds of millions of dollars to expose themselves to some nicely arranged photons and sound waves. I can't either.
It's the same old spiel with the recording industry... "well most music albums don't turn a profit, which is why we have to pass that cost-of-failure price onto you, the consumer". What a load of monopolistic doubleplusgoodspeak.
"in order to transport movies as agreed to by the consumer on a rent, buy or pay-per-view basis with heightened security"
Mr. Valenti, please define a public library, and explain how making everything rental or pay per use will benefit the general public.
"what the critics mean by "innovation" is legalizing the breaking of protection codes, without which there is no protection"
Copyright law already protects these works. You're not talking about protection, you're talking about corporate mandated enforcement.
The future is independent content producers, who use the internet as their distribution medium, instead of short sighted, money grubbing, creatively vacant middlemen. The trick will be figuring out how to ensure creators get paid adequately.
It used to get confused about where the head was positioned, so it would move it a long distance until it physically collided with the edge of the platter to re-align itself. Fruits of reading "Commodore DOS" back to back;)
The Double Meat conspiracy? The one where she takes the new job, and finds out the old lady is eating everyone? You thought that was one of the bets episodes ever?? WHY? Please explain the appeal... because my friend and I (long time Buffy fans) thought it was one of the WORST episodes ever. It just seemed... unbalanced. Just kinda weird and creepy.. and not in a good X-Files way.
I thought "Hush" was one of the best ever... loved the musical too. Whedon wrote all the music and lyrics himself, and the entire cast trained for 3 months so they could all sing their own parts.:)
*Wonders how we went from talking about CmdrTaco's wedding to Buffy, and watches the sky nervously for the inevitable "-1 Offtopic"*
No shit... 1.3.1's memory management and garbage collector are whacked.
Re:It's a big step up, but there is still distance
on
Java2 SDK v. 1.4 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"I've been working on a server that takes a lot of connections in Java, and you can finally do it with the support of "select" in Java 1.4."
I've been using NBIO (Non-Blocking IO) for quite some time, getting very good results. Been waiting for Java 1.4 to go final so I can start working with java.nio
This was the best part of The Phantom Menace 3rd person adventure game... in the Gungan city you could kill EVERY SINGLE GUNGAN.. well, except for Jar Jar:( Since the goal of the mission is to rescue him.
Still, it's great fun to watch a tiny Gungan child run away screaming about monsters right before you cut em to ribbons:)
One of my biggest gripes is feature-creep. The essential functionality is planned out at the beginning, a realistic timeframe is projected, and coding beings.
THEN, on a sometimes daily basis: "Can we add this? How much trouble would it be to put this in? Can you squeeze this in? It would be really great if we could add this. I was thinking this would be a good thing to have in there. Just something to think about."
ARGH! Then they get all upset when the timeframe begins to get stretched. It's not our fault they don't take the time to carefully think it through at the beginning.
Well they're both renewable, I never said otherwise. Hemp paper production would be far more efficient though, and you can grow it anywhere. The more important renewable aspect of it is as a fuel... you can run a low emissions car off of hemp oil.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding? Russell Crowe was AMAZING in Gladiator. He totally made the movie the success it was. Name a better leading man that year. He WAS that roman general. Imagine if say, Kevin Costner had played it? How that guy still gets major roles is completely beyond me.
I had two cats, Cricket and Ruffles. Cricket was shy and kinda dumb, Ruffles is very dominant and clever.
If I was petting Cricket, and Ruffles came into the room, Ruffles would usually glare at Cricket, and Cricket would leave, so Ruffles could have undivided affection.
One day, this kind of irked me, so when Ruffles came into the room, I put my hand firmly on Cricket to prevent her from leaving, and shooed Ruffles away.
I kid you not, Ruffles looked at me with an expression of hurt betrayal, and then hissed at Cricket, and stalked out. *I* was the one shooing her away, but Ruffles was able to reason that Cricket was the indirect cause of this. Yowza!
To be fair, I didn't really give it a fair chance. It was definitely as good and addicting as the first one. I suppose perhaps because I liked the first one so much, my expectations were higher (perhaps unreasonably so) for the sequel, and it didn't "grab" me in the same way that the first one did when it originally came out.
I've seen a fair bit of Warcraft III (although I haven't really played it myself much) and I thought I'd offer a few insights...
First, the graphics. Very cool, but at the same time a bit dissapointing. You can't rotate the camera. At all. All you can do is zoom and tilt from a near overhead view down to an angle closer to the ground... but the camera ALWAYS faces north.
That being said.. it works great. The game plays just like Warcraft II, but with much cooler graphics, and more unit diversity. Extremely easy to dive right into if you've played Warcraft II or Starcraft. I disagree with the reviewer that it's all about the rush. It's not. Blizzard is going for a smaller, more diverse army approach. Unit limit is 90. Which brings us to heroes. (I can't BELIEVE the reviewer didn't talk about heroes)
Heroes are what really make Warcraft III more compelling that its predecessors (which is very high praise) These are like RPG characters.. they have experience, they level, they can collect magic items, they get really powerful magic spells. They ALSO increase the combat effectiveness of any group of creatures they lead into battle.
All this means that instead of hordes of faceless grunt swarms, you have smaller, more carefully built and selected combat groups, led into battle by a character you've worked building up, who actually has a name, who you actually care, yes care about his welfare. You will know despair when you see the message "Lord Darkthorne (Lvl 8) has been slain in combat".
Despite the lack of camera rotation, the 3D graphics are VERY well done. Creatures don't look like polygons, they look almost hand drawn. I just wish they had pushed the envelope with the 3D technology a little more. Ground Control is a perfect example of how to do camera control in a ground based 3D RTS. And camera control is everything. It's what made Homeworld so amazing.
Overall concluding thoughts? I was dissapointed with Diablo II, I thought it was almost a (very large) expansion to Diablo I, with a stupid quasi-3D graphic gimmick. I am NOT dissapointed with Warcraft III. It shines of Blizzard quality. The legendary Blizzard play balance and more importantly, personality, is here, and here in spades. Warcraft III is going to FLY off the shelves when it's done. And they have MONTHS left to improve it even more! I can't wait to see what the campaigns are like.
"Ok. If they put it on-line, will you buy it?"
I will pay for convenience. I will pay for service. I will pay for value-added features.
I will NOT pay for the cost of manufacturing shiny plastic disks and shipping them around the world. THE INTERNET HAS MADE THIS FORM OF DISTRIBUTION OBSOLETE.
There will still be a CD/DVD/other market. People will continue to collect stuff. People collect lots of obsolete stuff. I collect DVDs even though I could acquire DivX of anything I want.
The media companies want to retain totalitarian control of all media. It's what they do. It's not for the benefit of the creators, no matter what they say. It's for their profit margins. It's to continue making money the way they always have. They are NOT entitled to do this by crippling technology and disempowering the public.
"If not, what? Just going to put everyone out of work, right?"
Try and step outside our broken, plutocratic, dollars-and-cents civilization for one second and think of the utopian society advanced technology COULD provide for the human race one day.
Imagine an ideal world where virtually all of humanity's essential needs are provided by automated processes, and most people don't NEED to work. Stop fucking laughing and tell me why this is inconceivable to you. It's a dream, yes. We're nowhere close. But it's possible, one day. It's something to work towards. The Sun provides unlimited free energy, it's just a question of harnessing it efficiently enough.
These types of dreams will never be realized as long as we keep fucking over each other for profit and greed. Unfortunately greed (and shortsighted stupidity) is an inherent property of the human animal. We're turning into the goddamn Ferengi and nobody's even noticing.
He mentions the "Analog Hole" in the introductory statement, which, as far I understand, means that if you send a signal to a legacy television, the signal entering the television is standard, copyable analog ("Temporarily in the clear", as he puts it). The solution proposed is to make all TVs do an internal black box decryption.
Won't work. Someone will hack the decryption and build their own decoder. (Likely in software) Violation of DMCA, so what? They'll release it anonymously and open source.
Won't work. Someone will rip a TV apart and figure out how to make the black box dance.
Won't work. Someone will stick a freakin VIDEO RECORDER in optimum conditions in front of the TV, rip it, and release it. It's a home movie as far as the video recorder is concerned.
Ditto all the above for encrypted speaker signals and microphones.
Will the average person do this? Of course not. BUT IT ONLY TAKES ONE PERSON. There will ALWAYS be one person.
If you hide it, we will find it. If you guard it, we will free it. If you hoard it, we will spread it.
The global distribution and copying of information is now essentially costless. Deal with it. Welcome to the twenty-first fucking century.
I've been thinking about this for a long time too... I hadn't really though about him being genetic engineered though, although it's a good theory too... I was thinking, what if Palpatine is actually his father?
It makes so much sense... if the Emperor has "Skywalker blood", it would explain why he is so powerful in the Force, it would explain how he is able to seduce Anakin into ultimately joining him, the very same offer Anakin later makes to his own son, Luke. It would make a beautifully symmetrical story of family redemption, with Palpatine being evil, Luke being good, and Anakin is the "balance" in between. Lucas HAS planned out the overall story outline since the very beginning.
"would anyone in their right minds ever believe when Jim says..."
Yes. Anyone who isn't familiar with IEradicator or 98lite would believe it. Which, last time I did a head count, was 99.999% of the population.
This is why we pray the prosecution team is on the ball and can educate the court.
Come ON... you were ALL thinking it.
;)
Or if you weren't, you certainly are now
"who's been publishing online longer than some slashdot readers have walked erect"
/. readers don't walk erect at ALL, thereby invalidating any sense of seniority this statement might otherwise have implied. Consider a wheelchair bound reader. Or possibly a child who hasn't learned to walk yet, but sits on a parent's lap and stares at the screen, or similarily some type of animal.
I would submit that some
These last two don't count as reading, you say? I beg to differ. And for incontestable proof, I turn to Jamie Lee Curtis, keeper of all thoughts wise:
Otto: "Aha! Apes don't read Nietzsche!"
Wanda: "Yes they DO, Otto, they just don't understand it!"
- A Fish Called Wanda
(Yes, it's been one of those days)
Moderation Totals: Silly=2, Directionless=1, Waste of Electrons=3, Total=6
I have more than a hundred DVDs in my collection, even though I know perfectly well how to obtain as many DivX's as I like.
I do have a pirated copy of Fellowship of the Rings, but I've seen it 7 times in the theatre and will purchase the DVD the day it comes out, so I feel perfectly justified. MPAA would still accuse me of depriving them of profits, though.
"put that in your "2 out of 10" pipe and smoke it, Mr. Valenti"
Fuckin A. This kind of argument really pisses me off. They claim their have to be controls in place to guarantee that they rake in more money, because what they do is really expensive, and only 2 out of 10 of their products turn a profit.
Guess what?
NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM. Not the consumer's problem. Supply and demand, bubba. It makes the world turn. If movies aren't making as much money as it costs to produce them, then make them cheaper, or go find another line of work. Less ambitious projects, pay the stars less, work more efficiently, cut corners, whatever. The Constitution makes no guarantee that you will be able to continue profitting as you always have, otherwise scribes would have a monopoly on book producing, and printing presses (not to mention laser printers) would be illegal. If you gamble by spending 9 digit sums making a movie, YOU'RE GAMBLING. Don't come crying to us when you can't get people to pay you hundreds of millions of dollars to expose themselves to some nicely arranged photons and sound waves. I can't either.
It's the same old spiel with the recording industry... "well most music albums don't turn a profit, which is why we have to pass that cost-of-failure price onto you, the consumer". What a load of monopolistic doubleplusgoodspeak.
"in order to transport movies as agreed to by the consumer on a rent, buy or pay-per-view basis with heightened security"
Mr. Valenti, please define a public library, and explain how making everything rental or pay per use will benefit the general public.
"what the critics mean by "innovation" is legalizing the breaking of protection codes, without which there is no protection"
Copyright law already protects these works. You're not talking about protection, you're talking about corporate mandated enforcement.
The future is independent content producers, who use the internet as their distribution medium, instead of short sighted, money grubbing, creatively vacant middlemen. The trick will be figuring out how to ensure creators get paid adequately.
"What's more important to you? Being happy or having expendable income to waste on gas-guzzling autos, bleeding-edge geek toys"
;)
You mean there's a difference?
Not bad... 150 KB/sec. I wonder how long Carnegie Mellon will hold up to the /. effect :)
"Every sound you hear in these movies is being produced by the harddisks and nothing else."
Ah yes.. the good old 1541, I remember it well...
;)
WHIRRRR... CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK.
It used to get confused about where the head was positioned, so it would move it a long distance until it physically collided with the edge of the platter to re-align itself. Fruits of reading "Commodore DOS" back to back
LOL.. touché. I would have to go with one from first season though... there's some real groaners. (And some real gems too, of course)
"unlike X-files it had the balls to take something so perfectly MUNDANE like fastfood and make it so twisted, sinister and evil"
:)
What about the X-Files episode with the proboscis wielding kid working at the fast food place, that eats meat and the occasional late night customer?
Actually I seem to recall a lot of X-Files episodes dealing with mundane rural life. (Don't get me wrong, I like Buffy better
The Double Meat conspiracy? The one where she takes the new job, and finds out the old lady is eating everyone? You thought that was one of the bets episodes ever?? WHY? Please explain the appeal... because my friend and I (long time Buffy fans) thought it was one of the WORST episodes ever. It just seemed... unbalanced. Just kinda weird and creepy.. and not in a good X-Files way.
:)
I thought "Hush" was one of the best ever... loved the musical too. Whedon wrote all the music and lyrics himself, and the entire cast trained for 3 months so they could all sing their own parts.
*Wonders how we went from talking about CmdrTaco's wedding to Buffy, and watches the sky nervously for the inevitable "-1 Offtopic"*
"facade of neutrality"?
:)
:)
Do you even read Slashdot?
I don't think anyone claims this is an unbiased news site. It's a message board for Linux geeks. Love it or leave it. Or present your own viewpoint.
No shit... 1.3.1's memory management and garbage collector are whacked.
"I've been working on a server that takes a lot of connections in Java, and you can finally do it with the support of "select" in Java 1.4."
I've been using NBIO (Non-Blocking IO) for quite some time, getting very good results. Been waiting for Java 1.4 to go final so I can start working with java.nio
This was the best part of The Phantom Menace 3rd person adventure game... in the Gungan city you could kill EVERY SINGLE GUNGAN.. well, except for Jar Jar :( Since the goal of the mission is to rescue him.
:)
Still, it's great fun to watch a tiny Gungan child run away screaming about monsters right before you cut em to ribbons
One of my biggest gripes is feature-creep. The essential functionality is planned out at the beginning, a realistic timeframe is projected, and coding beings.
THEN, on a sometimes daily basis: "Can we add this? How much trouble would it be to put this in? Can you squeeze this in? It would be really great if we could add this. I was thinking this would be a good thing to have in there. Just something to think about."
ARGH! Then they get all upset when the timeframe begins to get stretched. It's not our fault they don't take the time to carefully think it through at the beginning.
Well they're both renewable, I never said otherwise. Hemp paper production would be far more efficient though, and you can grow it anywhere. The more important renewable aspect of it is as a fuel... you can run a low emissions car off of hemp oil.