All those burnt-out houses, and all those unburnt trees. WTF? It's as if the houses themselves were more flammable than the trees that surrounded them.
Most of the houses that burned fell to spot fires, from what I could see driving around the hardest hit suburb.
There are burned-out shells next door to houses where the flowerbeds are still green.
I guess a lot of it comes down to who had effective watering systems
I was also disturbed by his discussion of the "heroes", the ubermensch of LOTR, completely ignoring the fact that, for all the majesty and regal power and mystical strength of the kings and elves and wizards in LOTR, it is Frodo and Sam, the two characters who are explicitly drawn as being small and very ordinary characters, that really pull through and win the day.
I think Brin got a lot right in his attacks on the Star Wars universe, but trying to apply the same criticism to LOTR is just plain wrong.
Can't be any worse than Beyond Thunderdome
on
New Mad Max Film
·
· Score: 1
I'm a big fan of the original Mad Max movie, somewhat less of a fan of Mad Max 2 (Road Warrior in the US?), but I can barely stand to watch Beyond Thunderdome. It sucked badly.
I've got the books for the first two movies as well, and the difference in quality really shows there. Mad Max is a good book, if short and slightly lacking in depth. The book of Mad Max 2 is practically the script of the movie, absolutley nothing more.
I shudder at the though of reading the Beyond Thunderdome novelisation.
Hopefully this new one will be a return to the feel of the first movie, which actually had some depth and change in the characters.
Typical that the studio exec is talking about "nothing will stop [the robots] taking over."
Bicentennial Man has to be one of the best "robot" movies ever made, simply becasue it wasn't about a robot running amok and killing people. I hope "I, Robot" can live up to it, but I doubt it.
When hollywood takes a short SF story and makes a movie of it, they have a tendency to screw it up. Look at "The Running Man", which was a fantastic King novella (under a pseudonym), but a pretty awful movie, which bore little resemblance to the book. Casting Arnie in the lead role for that one completely threw out the feel of the story.
If they do it right, it will be a movie of *ONE* of the stories from the book. Probably "Nursemaid". That might make a decent movie.
Not from the description they gave of the plot. The robot in "Nursemaid" never killed anyone. In fact, I seem to rmember that in "Nursemaid", the family get rid of their robot out of fear, and the daughter wants to go see the robot where it's been reassigned to a factory, and the robot saves the little girl from an accident involving a large piece of machinery.
I have somehow managed to lose my copy of "I, Robot", but I remember one particular story involving robots that had the second part of the first law weakened (allow to come to harm), and there was an investigation to find one of those robots that had worked around the law to manage to kill someone. I can't remember all the details, (it's been a long time since I read it) but it's certainly there.
Didn't Douglas Adams come up with this idea? It was a program called Anthem, which turned a company's financials into music, rather than geometric shapes, but the idea's the same.
Yeah, that's just what I need on my computer. That way, when I have a bit of an accident in my workshop, and have to put a band-aid on my thumb, I'll be locked out of my computer.
Yeah, the big screen looks cool, but considering the number of users I've seen running their 21" monitor at 800x600, or even 640x480, I doubt the expense would be worth it for most users.
Probably not much call for remote control software for most end-users, but MS is promoting it in XP for consumers to use when calling up helpdesks, so VNC is a great GPLed solution.
The Gimp works perfectly under Win XP in my experience. I think I have one plug-in that crashes it, but otherwise it's very solid.
Poor handling of my Wacom tablet is the only issue, but then, I haven't got the tablet working in GNU/Linux properly, either. (Though there it's a matter of configuring it correctly)
Definitely. The only Ripping program that actually understands "Various Artists" CDs, and lets you create your filenames in the format you want them in. I'm very impressed with CDex!
Ah, but the main reason that MS Apps won out in the Windows world was that MS also developed the OS.
Now, you may believe that MS manipulated the APIs to make sure that their packages worked more reliably, faster etc than competing ones. (Yeah, right!)
Or you might think people just flocked to MS Office because of a perception that it would work better because of the connection. (Sounds likely to me; I've seen IT decisions made for that exact reason.)
Either way, MS loses their advantage if they port their apps to GNU/Linux. They would actually have to compete on quality and/or price.
The tragedy is, they would probably have a fair chance of doing so. MS employ a hell of a lot of great coders, who could probably get MS Office to work at least as well as the Mac version on GNU/Linux. But MS aren't interested in making small amounts of money; they can't afford it.
MS as a corporation has grown so large that their duty to their shareholders far outweighs any other motivations. They have to keep striving for the monopoly profits.
No, you didn't read what I sai. I re-installed Win XP from scratch, not using an XP image CD, but using a plain XP disc, and a driver disk.
I also got the driver RPMs for the video from nVidia, but getting it to work still meant finding an XF86Config file that works.
In any case, even a pre-installed laptop is not going to have drivers for a Wacom digitising pad, so I'd still have to deal with it seperately. Even Mandrake, though they list Wacom in their list of manufacturers for their hardware compatability list, don't actually have any details on the products.
Anyway, like I said, I am using Linux, and trying to use it more often to do more things, but I recognise that it is still harder to things beyond the basic install in Linux than in Windows.
My point is that I'd rather things like that got sorted out before we started encouraging every man and his dog to use Linux. There's nothing worse than to give people a bad initial impression. I'm sure there are already many people who will never again try Linux because they were convinced by a Linux Zealot to give it a try before it was ready for their level of expertise.
I have to say I agree completely. While Linux installers have certainly gotten better, they still aren't there yet. I just bought a new laptop, and I'm running both Win XP and Linux on it (Red Hat 7.2, but I'm about to upgrade to 7.3)
I re-installed XP from scratch, and it detected everything and installed all the required drivers straight off. I have also bought a Wacom tablet, which has a simple driver installation for XP. Dual screen setup was a snap under XP, I didn't even need to look at a help file.
Getting X working under Linux, though, has been a major headache. I to the Linux-on-laptops web site, and found a bunch of XF86Config files for the previous model of my laptop, one of which finally worked, at least for the laptop's own panel. Trying to get dual-screen functionality has still evaded me, and the (USB) wacom tablet is treated as though it was a mouse.
Trying to find information to get these things working involves trawling through lots of out-of-date information about XFree 3.x, and tweaking obscure XF86Config options. The XConfigurator is completely useless for me.
Before people start telling me I should just learn everything about how XInput works and such, I'm just making a point here, that if I were an artist instead of a geek, I'd have given up long ago, and would just stick to using the Windows alternatives. The Gimp is a great program, but the hoops of getting things set up properly make it very unlikely that ordinary consumers would be able to do this themselves, whereas they can under XP.
We like to believe that the early United States government was "by the people, for the people." Was it really, or is this another myth, another example of rewriting history?
It's perfectly correct. The trick is in the definition of "the people". In this case, I believe it basically consisted of land-owning white males.
How large a solar array do you think would be needed to power a small air-conditing unit, sufficient to keep 2-3 cubic metres of air cool on a hot day?
It's a project I'd love to see done, but i don't have anything approaching the electrical know-how to do it myself. What I'd like is a something to keep my car cool on a hot day, and if it can be powered by solar power, then it's plausible. The hotter the day, the more light you have for the photovoltaics - but is it enough?
The user-centric design depends on the users of your system. The users of a compiler and language runtime are not going to interact with a GUI, so user interface discussions are irrelevant at this time. Secondly any GUI issues that wil be brought to the implementers of the language runtime and the compiler will be technical issues to probably do with performance and not user interface issues.
Why can't compiler users interact with a GUI? I believe this one point is holding Linux back more than any other. There are too many things in Linux that require you to compile from source code, just to be able to run everything that people are used to with Windows.
It's easy to load up a game on Windows, you run the installer, then you run the game.
Under Linux, if you want to use high quality peripherals, half the time you need to recompile or patch your kernel, or compile and add modules to your system.
All of this has to be done using arcane commands and confusing config files. How-tos are not useful to beginners, since the differences between distibutions and versions mean that you almost need a CS degree to even get a common setup working.
Lets get some user-centric design right into the guts of the system, and make it easier to start out.
The arabs before the crusades invaded Outremer and other middle Eastern kingdoms purely for geographic/space reasons. They were not on any "holy war", but were simply extending their influence and control, much as most European kingdoms were attempting to do throughout the Dark Ages and Medieval times.
The arabic rulers did not persecute Christian and Jewish people, as long as they were peaceful people.
The (Catholic) Christians started the holy war, and commited far more butchering of innocent civilians due to their religious beliefs than the musims ever did throughout the crusades.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the houses that burned fell to spot fires, from what I could see driving around the hardest hit suburb.
There are burned-out shells next door to houses where the flowerbeds are still green.
I guess a lot of it comes down to who had effective watering systems
I was also disturbed by his discussion of the "heroes", the ubermensch of LOTR, completely ignoring the fact that, for all the majesty and regal power and mystical strength of the kings and elves and wizards in LOTR, it is Frodo and Sam, the two characters who are explicitly drawn as being small and very ordinary characters, that really pull through and win the day.
I think Brin got a lot right in his attacks on the Star Wars universe, but trying to apply the same criticism to LOTR is just plain wrong.
I'm a big fan of the original Mad Max movie, somewhat less of a fan of Mad Max 2 (Road Warrior in the US?), but I can barely stand to watch Beyond Thunderdome. It sucked badly.
I've got the books for the first two movies as well, and the difference in quality really shows there. Mad Max is a good book, if short and slightly lacking in depth. The book of Mad Max 2 is practically the script of the movie, absolutley nothing more.
I shudder at the though of reading the Beyond Thunderdome novelisation.
Hopefully this new one will be a return to the feel of the first movie, which actually had some depth and change in the characters.
Typical that the studio exec is talking about "nothing will stop [the robots] taking over."
Bicentennial Man has to be one of the best "robot" movies ever made, simply becasue it wasn't about a robot running amok and killing people. I hope "I, Robot" can live up to it, but I doubt it.
When hollywood takes a short SF story and makes a movie of it, they have a tendency to screw it up. Look at "The Running Man", which was a fantastic King novella (under a pseudonym), but a pretty awful movie, which bore little resemblance to the book. Casting Arnie in the lead role for that one completely threw out the feel of the story.
Not from the description they gave of the plot. The robot in "Nursemaid" never killed anyone. In fact, I seem to rmember that in "Nursemaid", the family get rid of their robot out of fear, and the daughter wants to go see the robot where it's been reassigned to a factory, and the robot saves the little girl from an accident involving a large piece of machinery.
I have somehow managed to lose my copy of "I, Robot", but I remember one particular story involving robots that had the second part of the first law weakened (allow to come to harm), and there was an investigation to find one of those robots that had worked around the law to manage to kill someone. I can't remember all the details, (it's been a long time since I read it) but it's certainly there.
Well, feel free to commit suicide as an attempt to do your part in reducing the population problem.
Or is just that there are too many "other" people?
Didn't Douglas Adams come up with this idea? It was a program called Anthem, which turned a company's financials into music, rather than geometric shapes, but the idea's the same.
Yeah, that's just what I need on my computer. That way, when I have a bit of an accident in my workshop, and have to put a band-aid on my thumb, I'll be locked out of my computer.
Yeah, the big screen looks cool, but considering the number of users I've seen running their 21" monitor at 800x600, or even 640x480, I doubt the expense would be worth it for most users.
Yeah, only they then need to go through all the hassle involved in getting their qualifications accepted.
Mind you, it's probably easier for US doctors to transfer their quals than most European countries.
Didn't take long, did it?
Did anyone manage to get a copy of Nastard's Reply?
How to Be a Comple Nastard for Dummies
http://tuxracer.sourceforge.net/
Probably not much call for remote control software for most end-users, but MS is promoting it in XP for consumers to use when calling up helpdesks, so VNC is a great GPLed solution.
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
The Gimp works perfectly under Win XP in my experience. I think I have one plug-in that crashes it, but otherwise it's very solid.
Poor handling of my Wacom tablet is the only issue, but then, I haven't got the tablet working in GNU/Linux properly, either. (Though there it's a matter of configuring it correctly)
Definitely. The only Ripping program that actually understands "Various Artists" CDs, and lets you create your filenames in the format you want them in. I'm very impressed with CDex!
Ah, but the main reason that MS Apps won out in the Windows world was that MS also developed the OS.
Now, you may believe that MS manipulated the APIs to make sure that their packages worked more reliably, faster etc than competing ones. (Yeah, right!)
Or you might think people just flocked to MS Office because of a perception that it would work better because of the connection. (Sounds likely to me; I've seen IT decisions made for that exact reason.)
Either way, MS loses their advantage if they port their apps to GNU/Linux. They would actually have to compete on quality and/or price.
The tragedy is, they would probably have a fair chance of doing so. MS employ a hell of a lot of great coders, who could probably get MS Office to work at least as well as the Mac version on GNU/Linux. But MS aren't interested in making small amounts of money; they can't afford it.
MS as a corporation has grown so large that their duty to their shareholders far outweighs any other motivations. They have to keep striving for the monopoly profits.
No, you didn't read what I sai. I re-installed Win XP from scratch, not using an XP image CD, but using a plain XP disc, and a driver disk.
I also got the driver RPMs for the video from nVidia, but getting it to work still meant finding an XF86Config file that works.
In any case, even a pre-installed laptop is not going to have drivers for a Wacom digitising pad, so I'd still have to deal with it seperately. Even Mandrake, though they list Wacom in their list of manufacturers for their hardware compatability list, don't actually have any details on the products.
Anyway, like I said, I am using Linux, and trying to use it more often to do more things, but I recognise that it is still harder to things beyond the basic install in Linux than in Windows.
My point is that I'd rather things like that got sorted out before we started encouraging every man and his dog to use Linux. There's nothing worse than to give people a bad initial impression. I'm sure there are already many people who will never again try Linux because they were convinced by a Linux Zealot to give it a try before it was ready for their level of expertise.
I have to say I agree completely. While Linux installers have certainly gotten better, they still aren't there yet. I just bought a new laptop, and I'm running both Win XP and Linux on it (Red Hat 7.2, but I'm about to upgrade to 7.3)
I re-installed XP from scratch, and it detected everything and installed all the required drivers straight off. I have also bought a Wacom tablet, which has a simple driver installation for XP. Dual screen setup was a snap under XP, I didn't even need to look at a help file.
Getting X working under Linux, though, has been a major headache. I to the Linux-on-laptops web site, and found a bunch of XF86Config files for the previous model of my laptop, one of which finally worked, at least for the laptop's own panel. Trying to get dual-screen functionality has still evaded me, and the (USB) wacom tablet is treated as though it was a mouse.
Trying to find information to get these things working involves trawling through lots of out-of-date information about XFree 3.x, and tweaking obscure XF86Config options. The XConfigurator is completely useless for me.
Before people start telling me I should just learn everything about how XInput works and such, I'm just making a point here, that if I were an artist instead of a geek, I'd have given up long ago, and would just stick to using the Windows alternatives. The Gimp is a great program, but the hoops of getting things set up properly make it very unlikely that ordinary consumers would be able to do this themselves, whereas they can under XP.
It's perfectly correct. The trick is in the definition of "the people". In this case, I believe it basically consisted of land-owning white males.
How large a solar array do you think would be needed to power a small air-conditing unit, sufficient to keep 2-3 cubic metres of air cool on a hot day?
It's a project I'd love to see done, but i don't have anything approaching the electrical know-how to do it myself. What I'd like is a something to keep my car cool on a hot day, and if it can be powered by solar power, then it's plausible. The hotter the day, the more light you have for the photovoltaics - but is it enough?
Why can't compiler users interact with a GUI? I believe this one point is holding Linux back more than any other. There are too many things in Linux that require you to compile from source code, just to be able to run everything that people are used to with Windows.
It's easy to load up a game on Windows, you run the installer, then you run the game.
Under Linux, if you want to use high quality peripherals, half the time you need to recompile or patch your kernel, or compile and add modules to your system.
All of this has to be done using arcane commands and confusing config files. How-tos are not useful to beginners, since the differences between distibutions and versions mean that you almost need a CS degree to even get a common setup working.
Lets get some user-centric design right into the guts of the system, and make it easier to start out.
The arabs before the crusades invaded Outremer and other middle Eastern kingdoms purely for geographic/space reasons. They were not on any "holy war", but were simply extending their influence and control, much as most European kingdoms were attempting to do throughout the Dark Ages and Medieval times.
The arabic rulers did not persecute Christian and Jewish people, as long as they were peaceful people.
The (Catholic) Christians started the holy war, and commited far more butchering of innocent civilians due to their religious beliefs than the musims ever did throughout the crusades.
That'll teach me to preview. Those options were
<Ctrl> + k - g, <esc> - transfer - file, and <F3>