I enjoyed it a whole lot more than I expected to. The visuals were great and the soundtrack fit them perfectly. The story was merely passable, but at least it was no more insipid than your average action flick. If you're fond of the original you'll probably like this one (unless maybe if you're a lightcycle purist who thinks they should only go in straight lines, dammit!) Conversely, if you didn't enjoy the original there's nothing here for you. It's a worthy successor to the original Tron, no more, no less. Take that however you like.
But am I the only one who couldn't stop thinking of Rinzler as The Stig's evil digital cousin?
Those "awesomely bad 80s graphics" were awesomely good back in, you know, the 80s. I have no doubt that in another 30 years or so, the graphics in Tron Legacy will be just as laughable. And from everything I hear, the original Tron script will read like Shakespeare compared to the new one... Actually, I didn't find the original script too bad. It's certainly not great, but it held up a lot better than I expected it to when I saw it again a couple years ago.
BTW, there's already been a Tron sequel, just in video game form. Tron 2.0 came out in 2003 and was created as being a direct sequel to the original. It even had much of the original cast doing voice work, and Wendy Carlos doing the soundtrack. Find a copy and play it. It's a decent FPS, and it's very much in the spirit of the original movie. I hope there's at least some mention of the events of Tron 2.0 in Tron Legacy.
And why should anyone trust your hacker OS to be secure? Anyone can scan the source code for security holes, or even make their own nefarious modifications! For God's sake, Linux was written by a college kid, and a foreign national at that! Nope, you can't trust anything less than an OS written by professional programmers right here in America.
But it's not clear which books have DRM, nor is it clear which books have been locked by their publishers to be online-only (ie., no downloadable version). None of the books I looked at mentioned either item. I have an "unsupported device": a Nokia n810 with FBreader. I can read unencrypted epubs, but nothing with DRM. Unless I can see which those are they're not getting any business from me.
I'm amazed that people are cool with buying device-locked books. People have pretty much laughed device-locked music out of the marketplace. I don't know why anyone's putting up with it for books. Maybe it's because mass-market ebooks are new enough that people haven't been bitten badly by lack of portability when they get a new device. Or maybe the usage model is different enough for books and music -- I'm likely to want to listen to music again and again, but I typically read a book once. Portability isn't an issue if you plan to dispose of it after one use.
These are people who will panic brake, and fishtail their vehicle off the road. ABS saves their derriers because they just slam the brakes and the computer does the work for them.
I need to stand up for the non-idiots. I grew in western Michigan and went to college in the upper peninsula. Both locales get a lot of snow. I drove a monster of a mid '70s Oldsmobile, over 2 and a half tons of steel and a 455 cubic inch V8 to power it. This was in the age before traction control and ABS, and you better believe I knew how to make the thing start and stop on ice.
And now I love my traction control and ABS. Yeah, I can start and stop on slippery roads. But truth be told, the computer can do it better. It can pulse the brakes faster. It has better reaction time when it turns out that the dry patch of pavement isn't. I have better control and am ultimately safer because of these technologies.
BUT...
Even so, I wouldn't consider mandating them. Personally, I wouldn't buy a car without them, but if manufacturers want to sell cheaper models without I don't have a problem with that. Hell, I'm not even convinced that seatbelts and airbags should be mandated. It's none of my business if someone wants to risk it without them.
Don't worry. By 2016 they'll have figured out that having access points everywhere is a security risk of some sort. The current act will still be in force to require them to be installed, of course, but the We're Scared Of Our Shadows act of 2017 will require that they never have power connected. No problem.
My bet is that they're just going to tell us that the news Earth's Water Didn't Come From Outer Space will "impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life" in some minor way.
You could if you tracked which ones were installed through the browser, vs which ones simply showed up in the plugins directory and were never 'approved' by the user. It doesn't seem difficult.
How does the browser track this, and where is that tracking stored? What keeps the plugin from spoofing the tracking record to make it look like the plugin was in fact approved? In other words, how does the browser trust its own record of which plugins have been approved?
If it doesn't seem difficult, then you're insufficiently devious.:-)
It isn't torture when the good guys do it to the bad guys. Then it's simply "aggressive intelligence gathering". Come on, have you learned nothing from Jack Bauer?
So naturally I overindulged for a week or two and then... kinda lost interest in pictures
I know what you mean. I'm so jaded I can't get off with just pictures anymore, either. Fortunately, there's lots of video out there! I'll never get tired of that!
Speaking of absurd things to import, a few years ago I bought some stud-grade 2x4's at a big home improvement store (either Home Depot or Lowes, I forget which). They were imported from Sweden.
Mind you, I live in Michigan. You know, the state that's covered shore-to-shore in pine trees. It can't possibly be cheaper to ship ugly pine from Sweden than it is to get it locally. And yet it must be, because a purely profit driven superstore was doing just that.
4) The damned things don't make flying even the slightest bit safer.
When I hear an interview on the nightly news with someone who says they don't mind the new scanners and pat-down procedures, the statement is almost always along the lines of, "They're not so bad, as long as they're making us safer." Yeah, if they made flying any safer I might agree with you. But they don't. There will always be ways to carry aboard ordinary objects which can be used as weapons. The only thing that's making us any safer is the fact that the passengers are now willing stop a would-be hijacker (or bomber) themselves instead of waiting for negotiations.
There have already been two sequels to Homeworld: Homeworld: Cataclysm (essentially the same game engine, with new ships and storyline) and Homeworld 2 (all-new game engine, snazzier graphics). Each had its high points, but on the whole neither could hold a candle to the original.
I want a Homeworld-like game which actually uses Newtonian physics for space flight. Having a set maximum speed for a spaceship is just plain dumb. (Though I admit that it would be tough to make such a game easy enough to control.)
Well, the first step when they forbid boxcutters, bats, scissors and darts made some sense. The rest, not as much.
What sense, exactly, did those restrictions make? How did they make the plane, the flying public, or the people on the ground any safer?
Of course, you're right that a change in public attitude (and official hijack response doctrine) from "give the hijackers control" to "risk everyone onboards' lives to stop the hijacking" solves a huge number of problems.
This is the one and only change which has made a difference. Passengers will no longer allow hijackings. Everything else is just meaningless posturing. That attack vector is closed.
I don't know if my county uses eJuror or some other online system, but "got lost in the cloud, or that the network was down, or the Internet ate it" would all be perfectly valid excuses. It was horrible software. Bad UI, confusing directions, and it hung after my final "Submit" press, so I had no idea if the whole thing had been processed or not. Nephew-ware of the worst kind.
I know I have a better understanding of science & technology (through hobbies), law (by education), logic & fallacy (by education), and value my integrity more than the vast majority of the public.
Don't worry. With those qualifications you're virtually guaranteed to be removed from the jury pool by the lawyers. You're exactly the kind of troublemaker who can't be swayed by bogus emotional pleas. Each time I've been called in for jury duty the very first thing the lawyers did was to excuse anyone who might have any knowledge of the issues or any critical thinking ability.
In any case, you can opt-out of every alert type except one - Presidential-level alerts. I suppose that if Obama wants you to hear about something, you don't have a choice:)
Oh, that won't be abused! I imagine that, with the best intentions, of course, we'll get Presidential alerts on election day reminding us to go vote. And a poignant "moment of silence" message every September 11th. And on Veteran's Day and Memorial Day, of course. And on MLK day.
And that's if the President sticks to good intentions...
Even better than that. Now the carrier, which is probably your landline and internet carrier as well, through one of their nifty triple-play bundles, can hit you for "excessive internet usage" charges due to all that extra voice traffic. It's not just a win-win, it's a win-win-win.
That would be my only real concern about the system. We often get "Extreme Weather Alerts" for perfectly normal weather. "Warning: High chance of thunderstorms today." Wow. Thunderstorms. In Michigan. In the spring. Who could have expected that?
A feature I'd like on the handset side is the ability to receive and store messages, but only alert for certain types. I might be interested in seeing AMBER alerts, for instance, but not interested enough to be awakened in the middle of the night. On the other hand, I do want to be awakened for END-OF-WORLD alerts. If this isn't already part of the handset spec, consider it a feature request.
My question is, is this actually hidden? Stuff like this is usually in the data sheets. So, does anyone have access to the actual processor data sheets? I didn't find them on AMD's site, just stubs containing the first few pages.
I use both, and I agree with you. I've had consistently better luck with Steam. I think the marketplace is big enough for both, and I hope Impulse does well -- competition is good, and all that. But for now I'll choose Steam if a game is available both places.
The fact that Steam supports my Mac and Impulse doesn't is another big incentive for me to use Steam. I love how you can buy a game once on Steam and, if it's available for both Mac and Windows, play it on either one.
Amen, brother! I've been buying off the discount shelf for years. I've picked up some damned good games that way, games that I would never even have looked at at full price. TRON 2.0 and Freedom Force both come to mind. I even bought the sequel to FF the day it was released, simply because I'd liked the original that I got for less than $10 so much.
I'm absolutely in love with Steam and the fact that they often have deep discounts on stuff. I picked up Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 for $10 each, including DLC. (And if I'd waited a little longer I could have bought them both as a 2-pack for $15... *sigh*) I acknowledge that with Steam I'm really just renting the games, but at that price I don't mind. I picked up Civ III and Civ IV plus all expansions for $12.95 -- and I already owned the disks! But for the PC, and I have a Mac now. It's worth the price to play them natively instead of in VMware.
Hell, I've even been buying some games I may never get around to playing. I've bought some PC-only games that run marginally (or worse) in VMware. Why? They were cheap, they looked interesting, and I can install a Bootcamp partition if I ever get a serious urge to play. I got Overlord and its sequel for $4. Oblivion for $8.50. Supreme Commander 2 and its expansion for $8.50. It's doubtful that Mac versions will ever be released, but if they are it's almost certain that Steam will let me play them.
Games inevitably go on sale for dirt cheap. They are just as fun then as they are when they're first released. Multiplayer games may be an exception if their communities have moved on to something else by the time the game's on sale, but I'm in it for single-player almost exclusively.
That said, I'm willing to buy Civ V the day it's released for the Mac. I love the Civ series and I'll gladly pay full price. But who knows? It'll have been out for the PC for a month or two by the time the Mac port is released. Maybe Steam will have it on sale...
Slashdot Mirror
I enjoyed it a whole lot more than I expected to. The visuals were great and the soundtrack fit them perfectly. The story was merely passable, but at least it was no more insipid than your average action flick. If you're fond of the original you'll probably like this one (unless maybe if you're a lightcycle purist who thinks they should only go in straight lines, dammit!) Conversely, if you didn't enjoy the original there's nothing here for you. It's a worthy successor to the original Tron, no more, no less. Take that however you like.
But am I the only one who couldn't stop thinking of Rinzler as The Stig's evil digital cousin?
Those "awesomely bad 80s graphics" were awesomely good back in, you know, the 80s. I have no doubt that in another 30 years or so, the graphics in Tron Legacy will be just as laughable. And from everything I hear, the original Tron script will read like Shakespeare compared to the new one... Actually, I didn't find the original script too bad. It's certainly not great, but it held up a lot better than I expected it to when I saw it again a couple years ago.
BTW, there's already been a Tron sequel, just in video game form. Tron 2.0 came out in 2003 and was created as being a direct sequel to the original. It even had much of the original cast doing voice work, and Wendy Carlos doing the soundtrack. Find a copy and play it. It's a decent FPS, and it's very much in the spirit of the original movie. I hope there's at least some mention of the events of Tron 2.0 in Tron Legacy.
And why should anyone trust your hacker OS to be secure? Anyone can scan the source code for security holes, or even make their own nefarious modifications! For God's sake, Linux was written by a college kid, and a foreign national at that! Nope, you can't trust anything less than an OS written by professional programmers right here in America.
But it's not clear which books have DRM, nor is it clear which books have been locked by their publishers to be online-only (ie., no downloadable version). None of the books I looked at mentioned either item. I have an "unsupported device": a Nokia n810 with FBreader. I can read unencrypted epubs, but nothing with DRM. Unless I can see which those are they're not getting any business from me.
I'm amazed that people are cool with buying device-locked books. People have pretty much laughed device-locked music out of the marketplace. I don't know why anyone's putting up with it for books. Maybe it's because mass-market ebooks are new enough that people haven't been bitten badly by lack of portability when they get a new device. Or maybe the usage model is different enough for books and music -- I'm likely to want to listen to music again and again, but I typically read a book once. Portability isn't an issue if you plan to dispose of it after one use.
I need to stand up for the non-idiots. I grew in western Michigan and went to college in the upper peninsula. Both locales get a lot of snow. I drove a monster of a mid '70s Oldsmobile, over 2 and a half tons of steel and a 455 cubic inch V8 to power it. This was in the age before traction control and ABS, and you better believe I knew how to make the thing start and stop on ice.
And now I love my traction control and ABS. Yeah, I can start and stop on slippery roads. But truth be told, the computer can do it better. It can pulse the brakes faster. It has better reaction time when it turns out that the dry patch of pavement isn't. I have better control and am ultimately safer because of these technologies.
BUT...
Even so, I wouldn't consider mandating them. Personally, I wouldn't buy a car without them, but if manufacturers want to sell cheaper models without I don't have a problem with that. Hell, I'm not even convinced that seatbelts and airbags should be mandated. It's none of my business if someone wants to risk it without them.
Mandating backup cameras is just plain dumb.
First thing to learn: When the web site asks, "Are you at least 18 years of age?" the answer is always "Yes". All else follows from that.
Don't worry. By 2016 they'll have figured out that having access points everywhere is a security risk of some sort. The current act will still be in force to require them to be installed, of course, but the We're Scared Of Our Shadows act of 2017 will require that they never have power connected. No problem.
My bet is that they're just going to tell us that the news Earth's Water Didn't Come From Outer Space will "impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life" in some minor way.
How does the browser track this, and where is that tracking stored? What keeps the plugin from spoofing the tracking record to make it look like the plugin was in fact approved? In other words, how does the browser trust its own record of which plugins have been approved?
If it doesn't seem difficult, then you're insufficiently devious. :-)
It isn't torture when the good guys do it to the bad guys. Then it's simply "aggressive intelligence gathering". Come on, have you learned nothing from Jack Bauer?
I know what you mean. I'm so jaded I can't get off with just pictures anymore, either. Fortunately, there's lots of video out there! I'll never get tired of that!
Speaking of absurd things to import, a few years ago I bought some stud-grade 2x4's at a big home improvement store (either Home Depot or Lowes, I forget which). They were imported from Sweden.
Mind you, I live in Michigan. You know, the state that's covered shore-to-shore in pine trees. It can't possibly be cheaper to ship ugly pine from Sweden than it is to get it locally. And yet it must be, because a purely profit driven superstore was doing just that.
Something just ain't right with this world.
4) The damned things don't make flying even the slightest bit safer.
When I hear an interview on the nightly news with someone who says they don't mind the new scanners and pat-down procedures, the statement is almost always along the lines of, "They're not so bad, as long as they're making us safer." Yeah, if they made flying any safer I might agree with you. But they don't. There will always be ways to carry aboard ordinary objects which can be used as weapons. The only thing that's making us any safer is the fact that the passengers are now willing stop a would-be hijacker (or bomber) themselves instead of waiting for negotiations.
There have already been two sequels to Homeworld: Homeworld: Cataclysm (essentially the same game engine, with new ships and storyline) and Homeworld 2 (all-new game engine, snazzier graphics). Each had its high points, but on the whole neither could hold a candle to the original.
I want a Homeworld-like game which actually uses Newtonian physics for space flight. Having a set maximum speed for a spaceship is just plain dumb. (Though I admit that it would be tough to make such a game easy enough to control.)
What sense, exactly, did those restrictions make? How did they make the plane, the flying public, or the people on the ground any safer?
This is the one and only change which has made a difference. Passengers will no longer allow hijackings. Everything else is just meaningless posturing. That attack vector is closed.
I don't know if my county uses eJuror or some other online system, but "got lost in the cloud, or that the network was down, or the Internet ate it" would all be perfectly valid excuses. It was horrible software. Bad UI, confusing directions, and it hung after my final "Submit" press, so I had no idea if the whole thing had been processed or not. Nephew-ware of the worst kind.
Don't worry. With those qualifications you're virtually guaranteed to be removed from the jury pool by the lawyers. You're exactly the kind of troublemaker who can't be swayed by bogus emotional pleas. Each time I've been called in for jury duty the very first thing the lawyers did was to excuse anyone who might have any knowledge of the issues or any critical thinking ability.
Oh, that won't be abused! I imagine that, with the best intentions, of course, we'll get Presidential alerts on election day reminding us to go vote. And a poignant "moment of silence" message every September 11th. And on Veteran's Day and Memorial Day, of course. And on MLK day.
And that's if the President sticks to good intentions...
Even better than that. Now the carrier, which is probably your landline and internet carrier as well, through one of their nifty triple-play bundles, can hit you for "excessive internet usage" charges due to all that extra voice traffic. It's not just a win-win, it's a win-win-win.
You obviously don't hang out with many real scientists!
That would be my only real concern about the system. We often get "Extreme Weather Alerts" for perfectly normal weather. "Warning: High chance of thunderstorms today." Wow. Thunderstorms. In Michigan. In the spring. Who could have expected that?
A feature I'd like on the handset side is the ability to receive and store messages, but only alert for certain types. I might be interested in seeing AMBER alerts, for instance, but not interested enough to be awakened in the middle of the night. On the other hand, I do want to be awakened for END-OF-WORLD alerts. If this isn't already part of the handset spec, consider it a feature request.
My question is, is this actually hidden? Stuff like this is usually in the data sheets. So, does anyone have access to the actual processor data sheets? I didn't find them on AMD's site, just stubs containing the first few pages.
I use both, and I agree with you. I've had consistently better luck with Steam. I think the marketplace is big enough for both, and I hope Impulse does well -- competition is good, and all that. But for now I'll choose Steam if a game is available both places.
The fact that Steam supports my Mac and Impulse doesn't is another big incentive for me to use Steam. I love how you can buy a game once on Steam and, if it's available for both Mac and Windows, play it on either one.
Amen, brother! I've been buying off the discount shelf for years. I've picked up some damned good games that way, games that I would never even have looked at at full price. TRON 2.0 and Freedom Force both come to mind. I even bought the sequel to FF the day it was released, simply because I'd liked the original that I got for less than $10 so much.
I'm absolutely in love with Steam and the fact that they often have deep discounts on stuff. I picked up Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 for $10 each, including DLC. (And if I'd waited a little longer I could have bought them both as a 2-pack for $15... *sigh*) I acknowledge that with Steam I'm really just renting the games, but at that price I don't mind. I picked up Civ III and Civ IV plus all expansions for $12.95 -- and I already owned the disks! But for the PC, and I have a Mac now. It's worth the price to play them natively instead of in VMware.
Hell, I've even been buying some games I may never get around to playing. I've bought some PC-only games that run marginally (or worse) in VMware. Why? They were cheap, they looked interesting, and I can install a Bootcamp partition if I ever get a serious urge to play. I got Overlord and its sequel for $4. Oblivion for $8.50. Supreme Commander 2 and its expansion for $8.50. It's doubtful that Mac versions will ever be released, but if they are it's almost certain that Steam will let me play them.
Games inevitably go on sale for dirt cheap. They are just as fun then as they are when they're first released. Multiplayer games may be an exception if their communities have moved on to something else by the time the game's on sale, but I'm in it for single-player almost exclusively.
That said, I'm willing to buy Civ V the day it's released for the Mac. I love the Civ series and I'll gladly pay full price. But who knows? It'll have been out for the PC for a month or two by the time the Mac port is released. Maybe Steam will have it on sale...