The Sarah Connor Chronicles are more a web of skynet bad guys. Many don't even know they are bad. Some are bad. It occasionally intermingles with the John Connor Chronicles.
My big problem with The Sarah Connor Chronicles is that nearly all the problems the so-called "heroes" run into are self-inflicted. Very few are caused by time-traveling robots from the future. None of the good guys trusted each other. None. Everyone had his, her, or its own secret agenda. If they just talked to each other once in a while most of the problems would never occur.
This isn't "meditative and complex". This is just a bunch of egotistical assholes tripping over each other. By the end I was rooting for Skynet, because the humans were just too dumb to let live.
The custom security question I always use is, "Why should I compromise security with a security question?" The answer, regardless of the question, is always to mash the keyboard a few times.
There's only one reason why I have Adobe Reader on my Mac. It's because I don't know any other way to search through a directory full of PDFs. Is there anything else that can do it?
(Don't bother suggesting Spotlight unless there's a way to run the search on demand rather than pre-building a big index file. I need to run this on arbitrary directories on network drives.)
I'll second this. This extension has changed the way I use the browser, and for the better. If Mozilla really hates the way the default tabs function, they need to start looking at Tree Style Tabs for a replacement.
Thirded. I get to see far more tabs than I would across the top, and they're arranged in a hierarchy. Opening a new tab by, say, middle-clicking a link opens it as a child of the current tab. For me, this style works much better than the across-the-top non-hierarchical tabs.
Baen is great. One of the big advantages is that they are seriously opposed to DRM. All of their books, for free or for pay, are available in a variety of formats. None are encrypted. One of the formats is plain ol' HTML. EBook formats may come and go, but HTML will be recognizable forever.
They also have no problem with you lending your copy to a friend, or reselling it. They ask that you treat it like a paper book in that there shouldn't be more than one person reading any one "copy" at the same time.
I'll also take a moment to plug Jim Baen's Universe. It's a bi-monthly magazine, similar to Analog or Asimov's, but only available electronically. Same unencrypted distribution formats as their books. Well worth a subscription.
My sat-nav doubles as an MP3 player. I have it on so I can listen to music (well, podcasts as often as not), not necessarily because I need directions.
Right on! There's no need for the redundant "To Swine-Flu Panic" part of the headline.
Although, to be pedantic, I expect that Twitter is actually very helpful to the swine-flu panic, in the same way that shouting "Fire!" is very helpful to movie-theater panic.
How many twits could a twitter-twit tweet if a twitter-twit could tweet twits?
That's exactly my point. Sure, I'd be able to discern the difference. But unless this chef could made the seafood taste like something else entirely (and then, what would be the point of serving it?) I'd probably go with the Long John Silvers. At least that would taste like breading and tartar sauce, both of which I rather like.
I can tell the difference, I just don't enjoy the "good" stuff. It's not a stretch for me to imagine that other people feel the same way about beer. On the other hand, I avoid Long John Silvers as well. I'm not so sure why people who dislike the microbrews would still drink Bud Light. Maybe I'd seek out Long John Silvers if I could get buzzed off a six-pack of fish sticks.
I've met many people who prefer the taste of Bud/Miller/Coors over everything else. They're called my in-laws, and all their relatives who show up at family reunions.
Seriously. It's not an economic decision for them. I've offered them the good stuff, for free. I've spiked the communal cooler with various micro-brews alongside the piss-water. They really don't like it. Maybe their tastes have "never matured past their beer-swilling college days". Maybe it's just what they're used to. But whatever the reason, they do prefer the big names and would buy them even if all brands were priced the same.
Now, personally I don't like seafood. Is it because I haven't had good seafood? No, I've had a lot of stuff that my friends thought was great. Is it because we never ate it when I was a kid? No, we had it on a fairly regular basis. I just plain don't like the stuff. If it's an acquired taste then I never hope to acquire it. It's vile. I can manage fish sticks, if I get to drown them in tartar sauce to get rid of the fishy taste. So, I can completely understand that there are people out there, perhaps a lot of them, who don't like beer with flavor. They prefer the watery stuff, possibly because it has less flavor. But they do prefer it over what you or I would call "beer".
The Forever War, Cameron's Avatar, and Scott's other upcoming science fiction project, Brave New World, will make the next five years a fantastic time to be a science fiction movie enthusiast.
And, more than likely, an awful time to be a science fiction book enthusiast. Has there been an SF book-to-movie conversion that's been even halfway true to the source material? Enemy Mine, Nightfall, I, Robot, Starship Troopers... All good stories with truly cringe-worthy movie adaptations. Stop the madness!
[...] and in yet other scenes I saw multiple overlapping images instead of 3D.
That describes my experience throughout Coraline. The movie was good, but I never could get past the feeling that I was watching two distinct half-frame-rate movies on top of each other. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and my eyes don't shift focus quickly any more. I didn't have the same experience when I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas retrofitted for 3D a few years ago; I quite enjoyed that showing. Maybe Coraline just had much more pronounced 3D effects because it was made with that in mind. There were certainly points where I could see that the shot was deliberately set up to thrust some 3D object out at the audience.
I'll just take my old eyes and sit at home with my standard-def TV and old DVD player, and yell at kids to get off my lawn.
Does it seem odd to anyone else that you're arguing over the precise definition of a word that was stolen from a comedy sketch about a canned meat product? A word which even in the context of unwanted electronic messages has evolved since its original use regarding a couple of lawyers on Usenet? It wasn't even about email in the first place.
No. Spam is whatever Hormel says it is. If you want to apply the term to email you're going to have to live with a nebulous definition.
Sorry, it ain't gonna work. You're still trusting the end-user to set the QoS properly. That's just not going to happen. Even someone with good intentions who wouldn't otherwise try to subvert the system is going to get suckered into using a "web accelerator" that munges the QoS. And then he's going to complain about crappy VoIP quality, because he doesn't know he used up all his high-quality allocation downloading a torrent of the Star Wars Holiday Special.
Any system which relies on the cooperation of the user to declare the relative importance of the packets is going to get abused beyond hope.
Arrgh! I've said it before, but we really need to eliminate the TLDs, not make more of them. Get rid of every TLD other than country codes. Each country can subdivide its namespace as it chooses. If you want an online presence in a country, you deal with that country's registrar and play by its rules. Any disputes are handled within the jurisdiction of that country.
A lot of open source projects have problems like this. It's not uncommon to see something still at version "0.9.xx" after years of production use. All it means is that the developers don't have the cojones to say, "Yes, as far as I can tell this is ready." Google is no different.
Mind you, "ready" doesn't mean "done". That's why you can change numbers before the dot, too!
Of course I want it to be that easy. But making that easy vastly increases the likelihood of small-scale copies (letting a friend borrow the disc, etc.), which for an independent game is considerably more problematic than TPB.
I wouldn't worry about small-scale stuff. It is, by definition, small scale. Which means it's not worth bothering your legitimate customers to eke a few more dollars out of people who share it with a friend.
If I wanted to make a for-pay game like this, the first thing I would do is make sure that the demo doesn't contain any of the extra levels the purchased copy has. Make the demo a completely separate build and make it impossible to convert the demo into the full version. That will greatly reduce the effectiveness of distributing cracked keys or keygen programs.
Are you planning on physical distribution media, or download-only? If it's download-only you can embed some personal information ("This copy registered to ${NAME}") in the binary. This will be unique to each purchaser, and will discourage people from anything more than casual sharing.
For physical media (or even for downloads, if you don't want to watermark each binary individually) you can embed the personal information in the license key. This has pretty much the same effect as above. People will be more reluctant to share their keys around.
Sure, real pirates will immediately remove the personalization -- but there's nothing you can do to thwart the real pirates anyway. You're just trying to keep the honest people honest.
Because when you're selling something that looks like a used Edsel, you've gotta make up some flimsy excuse to get people to buy it.
"Sure, it's ugly and it looks like something from 40 years ago but... Safety! Yeah, that's it! Boy, they sure don't build 'em like they used to, do they? Well now they do! Yessiree, built like a tank with none of that 'computerized fuel injector' stuff to break down. God bless America."
Why censor it in that case? Is there a better form of free advertising than an appearance on the Mythbusters?
Maybe the producers didn't want to give the free advertising? And the gun club didn't want to pay?
Happens all the time on that show. You always see names and logos covered or blurred, except when they're paid for product placement. (Or at least have a swap deal where the vendor gives them free stuff if they show the name.)
Sure, but that has nothing to do with whether the web app is closed- or open-source. Let's assume we have Google Docs on the closed-source side, and a hypothetical OpenOfficeOnline service on the open-source side. What's the difference when the developers give up and shut down the site? In either case, the users are up a creek without a paddle.
But the open-source app can be taken up by someone else, right? Maybe. Certainly not by our "average user" though, who doesn't program. Maybe he can pay a programmer to maintain it for him. Probably not. I bet there's a reason why the developers shut it down.
I do agree with you that traditional apps beat hosted apps hands-down for end-of-life issues. Open-source or closed, makes no difference. If it's running on my computer it keeps running long after the company is dead and buried. If it's running on someone else's computer it can be pulled at any time.
I keep my games because I like to go back and re-play them later. Or my kids decide they want to see what all the fuss was about back in the day. Two days ago my son wanted to see what Warcraft II was like. So I pulled out the disk I bought 10 years ago, installed it, and fired it up. He loves it.
Will Valve still be around in 10 years? If I buy, say, Half-Life 2 today will I be able to install and play it in 10 years' time? Or will Valve decide it's not worth the time and storage to keep all the old games around?
Oh boy, a text editor with all the quality and accuracy of a Wikipedia article. I can't wait for the first edit war between two high-ranking programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
My big problem with The Sarah Connor Chronicles is that nearly all the problems the so-called "heroes" run into are self-inflicted. Very few are caused by time-traveling robots from the future. None of the good guys trusted each other. None. Everyone had his, her, or its own secret agenda. If they just talked to each other once in a while most of the problems would never occur.
This isn't "meditative and complex". This is just a bunch of egotistical assholes tripping over each other. By the end I was rooting for Skynet, because the humans were just too dumb to let live.
The custom security question I always use is, "Why should I compromise security with a security question?" The answer, regardless of the question, is always to mash the keyboard a few times.
There's only one reason why I have Adobe Reader on my Mac. It's because I don't know any other way to search through a directory full of PDFs. Is there anything else that can do it?
(Don't bother suggesting Spotlight unless there's a way to run the search on demand rather than pre-building a big index file. I need to run this on arbitrary directories on network drives.)
Thirded. I get to see far more tabs than I would across the top, and they're arranged in a hierarchy. Opening a new tab by, say, middle-clicking a link opens it as a child of the current tab. For me, this style works much better than the across-the-top non-hierarchical tabs.
Baen is great. One of the big advantages is that they are seriously opposed to DRM. All of their books, for free or for pay, are available in a variety of formats. None are encrypted. One of the formats is plain ol' HTML. EBook formats may come and go, but HTML will be recognizable forever.
They also have no problem with you lending your copy to a friend, or reselling it. They ask that you treat it like a paper book in that there shouldn't be more than one person reading any one "copy" at the same time.
I'll also take a moment to plug Jim Baen's Universe. It's a bi-monthly magazine, similar to Analog or Asimov's, but only available electronically. Same unencrypted distribution formats as their books. Well worth a subscription.
My sat-nav doubles as an MP3 player. I have it on so I can listen to music (well, podcasts as often as not), not necessarily because I need directions.
Right on! There's no need for the redundant "To Swine-Flu Panic" part of the headline.
Although, to be pedantic, I expect that Twitter is actually very helpful to the swine-flu panic, in the same way that shouting "Fire!" is very helpful to movie-theater panic. How many twits could a twitter-twit tweet if a twitter-twit could tweet twits?
That's exactly my point. Sure, I'd be able to discern the difference. But unless this chef could made the seafood taste like something else entirely (and then, what would be the point of serving it?) I'd probably go with the Long John Silvers. At least that would taste like breading and tartar sauce, both of which I rather like.
I can tell the difference, I just don't enjoy the "good" stuff. It's not a stretch for me to imagine that other people feel the same way about beer. On the other hand, I avoid Long John Silvers as well. I'm not so sure why people who dislike the microbrews would still drink Bud Light. Maybe I'd seek out Long John Silvers if I could get buzzed off a six-pack of fish sticks.
Just as long as there's no danger of wardrobe malfunction...
I've met many people who prefer the taste of Bud/Miller/Coors over everything else. They're called my in-laws, and all their relatives who show up at family reunions.
Seriously. It's not an economic decision for them. I've offered them the good stuff, for free. I've spiked the communal cooler with various micro-brews alongside the piss-water. They really don't like it. Maybe their tastes have "never matured past their beer-swilling college days". Maybe it's just what they're used to. But whatever the reason, they do prefer the big names and would buy them even if all brands were priced the same.
Now, personally I don't like seafood. Is it because I haven't had good seafood? No, I've had a lot of stuff that my friends thought was great. Is it because we never ate it when I was a kid? No, we had it on a fairly regular basis. I just plain don't like the stuff. If it's an acquired taste then I never hope to acquire it. It's vile. I can manage fish sticks, if I get to drown them in tartar sauce to get rid of the fishy taste. So, I can completely understand that there are people out there, perhaps a lot of them, who don't like beer with flavor. They prefer the watery stuff, possibly because it has less flavor. But they do prefer it over what you or I would call "beer".
And, more than likely, an awful time to be a science fiction book enthusiast. Has there been an SF book-to-movie conversion that's been even halfway true to the source material? Enemy Mine, Nightfall, I, Robot, Starship Troopers... All good stories with truly cringe-worthy movie adaptations. Stop the madness!
That describes my experience throughout Coraline. The movie was good, but I never could get past the feeling that I was watching two distinct half-frame-rate movies on top of each other. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and my eyes don't shift focus quickly any more. I didn't have the same experience when I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas retrofitted for 3D a few years ago; I quite enjoyed that showing. Maybe Coraline just had much more pronounced 3D effects because it was made with that in mind. There were certainly points where I could see that the shot was deliberately set up to thrust some 3D object out at the audience.
I'll just take my old eyes and sit at home with my standard-def TV and old DVD player, and yell at kids to get off my lawn.
Does it seem odd to anyone else that you're arguing over the precise definition of a word that was stolen from a comedy sketch about a canned meat product? A word which even in the context of unwanted electronic messages has evolved since its original use regarding a couple of lawyers on Usenet? It wasn't even about email in the first place.
No. Spam is whatever Hormel says it is. If you want to apply the term to email you're going to have to live with a nebulous definition.
Sorry, it ain't gonna work. You're still trusting the end-user to set the QoS properly. That's just not going to happen. Even someone with good intentions who wouldn't otherwise try to subvert the system is going to get suckered into using a "web accelerator" that munges the QoS. And then he's going to complain about crappy VoIP quality, because he doesn't know he used up all his high-quality allocation downloading a torrent of the Star Wars Holiday Special.
Any system which relies on the cooperation of the user to declare the relative importance of the packets is going to get abused beyond hope.
Arrgh! I've said it before, but we really need to eliminate the TLDs, not make more of them. Get rid of every TLD other than country codes. Each country can subdivide its namespace as it chooses. If you want an online presence in a country, you deal with that country's registrar and play by its rules. Any disputes are handled within the jurisdiction of that country.
There. Done. Simple, fair, and effective.
We do. It's called ".com".
1/2 :-)
A lot of open source projects have problems like this. It's not uncommon to see something still at version "0.9.xx" after years of production use. All it means is that the developers don't have the cojones to say, "Yes, as far as I can tell this is ready." Google is no different.
Mind you, "ready" doesn't mean "done". That's why you can change numbers before the dot, too!
I wouldn't worry about small-scale stuff. It is, by definition, small scale. Which means it's not worth bothering your legitimate customers to eke a few more dollars out of people who share it with a friend.
If I wanted to make a for-pay game like this, the first thing I would do is make sure that the demo doesn't contain any of the extra levels the purchased copy has. Make the demo a completely separate build and make it impossible to convert the demo into the full version. That will greatly reduce the effectiveness of distributing cracked keys or keygen programs.
Are you planning on physical distribution media, or download-only? If it's download-only you can embed some personal information ("This copy registered to ${NAME}") in the binary. This will be unique to each purchaser, and will discourage people from anything more than casual sharing.
For physical media (or even for downloads, if you don't want to watermark each binary individually) you can embed the personal information in the license key. This has pretty much the same effect as above. People will be more reluctant to share their keys around.
Sure, real pirates will immediately remove the personalization -- but there's nothing you can do to thwart the real pirates anyway. You're just trying to keep the honest people honest.
Because when you're selling something that looks like a used Edsel, you've gotta make up some flimsy excuse to get people to buy it.
"Sure, it's ugly and it looks like something from 40 years ago but... Safety! Yeah, that's it! Boy, they sure don't build 'em like they used to, do they? Well now they do! Yessiree, built like a tank with none of that 'computerized fuel injector' stuff to break down. God bless America."
Maybe the producers didn't want to give the free advertising? And the gun club didn't want to pay?
Happens all the time on that show. You always see names and logos covered or blurred, except when they're paid for product placement. (Or at least have a swap deal where the vendor gives them free stuff if they show the name.)
IPv6 is neither difficult nor expensive. Nor, for the most part, desired.
Damn, I must be hitting all the wrong sites! Do Paris and Miley get it on together, or just with the guy?
Sure, but that has nothing to do with whether the web app is closed- or open-source. Let's assume we have Google Docs on the closed-source side, and a hypothetical OpenOfficeOnline service on the open-source side. What's the difference when the developers give up and shut down the site? In either case, the users are up a creek without a paddle.
But the open-source app can be taken up by someone else, right? Maybe. Certainly not by our "average user" though, who doesn't program. Maybe he can pay a programmer to maintain it for him. Probably not. I bet there's a reason why the developers shut it down.
I do agree with you that traditional apps beat hosted apps hands-down for end-of-life issues. Open-source or closed, makes no difference. If it's running on my computer it keeps running long after the company is dead and buried. If it's running on someone else's computer it can be pulled at any time.
I keep my games because I like to go back and re-play them later. Or my kids decide they want to see what all the fuss was about back in the day. Two days ago my son wanted to see what Warcraft II was like. So I pulled out the disk I bought 10 years ago, installed it, and fired it up. He loves it.
Will Valve still be around in 10 years? If I buy, say, Half-Life 2 today will I be able to install and play it in 10 years' time? Or will Valve decide it's not worth the time and storage to keep all the old games around?
Oh boy, a text editor with all the quality and accuracy of a Wikipedia article. I can't wait for the first edit war between two high-ranking programmers.