Agreed. Westwood's Blade Runner adaptation is fantastic, and captures the look and feel of the movie perfectly.
TRON 2.0 is, as far as I'm concerned, the sequel to the movie TRON. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's better than the original movie (and I consider myself a fan of the original). The story is engaging and the special effects/graphics are jaw-dropping. They took everything that was good about the movie, made it better, and came up with a compelling plot that actually makes sense both from the perspective of the original movie and the modern world.
Sure, but a human being is better than a monkey. Killing monkeys is unfortunate, but if killing a few of them will save even a single human life or restore sight to blind people then I'm enthusiastically in favor of it.
Humans are better than other animals. Period. I have a cat that I love dearly. He's intelligent, friendly, and enriches my life greatly, and I'd kill him with my bare hands if it would restore sight to a blind person I'll never even meet. I'd weep at the loss of my beloved pet and have to take bereavement time off from work, but I'd never for a moment doubt that I'd done the right thing.
I don't have any experience with running computers in cold environments, but as long as thin clients are capable of doing the job that sounds like a great idea. Thin clients don't generally build up much heat at all, so there'll be less of a temperature differential stressing the components.
It might also be wise to keep the components wrapped up as best as possible to keep air away from them. Otherwise I could see condensation becoming a real problem.
I call bullshit. You're equating blowing up airliners with hijacking planes, when they are completely different animals. Yes, someone could check a bomb into the baggage of a plane and blow it up, but I submit that after 9/11 it became impossible for anyone other than an actual airline pilot to fly an airliner into a pre-designated building. Before 9/11 being on a plane that was being hijacked mostly meant a scary ride and some inconvenience. It was to your advantage to sit down, shut up, and not look anyone in the eye. The psychology of the airline passenger is now completely different (at least in the Western world). Today, being on a plane that gets hijacked means that unless you actively do something you are absolutely going to die. As a result, anyone stupid enough to try to hijack a plane today will suddenly find themselves outnumbered 100 to 1 by people willing to charge into gunfire to tear them to pieces because otherwise they're already dead. Add to this the pent up rage over 9/11 and locked/reinforced cockpit doors and hijacking is a fool's game. No need for air marshals or extra security there- the security comes from the passengers themselves.
Compared to that, simply blowing up a plane is a piece of cake, but far less effective. Hell, if high profile and high casualty rates are your goal, it'd be easier and much more effective to pull an Oklahoma City-style truck bombing on the airport itself, or better still a publicized crowded venue like a sporting event.
Your belief that you're safe from hijacking isn't an illusion. The illusion is your belief that airport security has anything to do with it. Enjoy your token searches and security checkpoints. I despise them as the unnecessary inconvenience and violation of my person that they are, and have shied away from flying as a result. If I can't have my laptop either then there's no way I'm going to fly. Screw the airlines, the TSA, and Homeland Security.
That has the potential to be huge, but unfortunately in the business groupware and scheduling sphere Exchange's stranglehold is probably stronger than their lock on the desktop OS. Everyone else put together still doesn't equal Microsoft here... unless what they come up with happens to also be compatible with Exchange. Were that to happen then they could do an end run around Microsoft and suddenly there are no longer any features and capabilities for which Outlook is the only option. Any idea if this is the plan, or even feasible?
We have a department that uses Macs for almost all of their work, and they were hoping to get rid of their PCs entirely. These aren't IT people, so having both a Mac and a PC at each of their desks is a huge headache for them. As much as they wanted to cut their ties to Windows and despite the availability of Entourage, just the fact that they'd lose some of their scheduling capability was a deal breaker for them.
I worked in the Staffing department of a large call center for a major corporation from 1994-1998. The phone rep schedules were all done using a software package called TCS (Tele Center System). It did an amazing job of keeping the phones manned appropriately and managing scheduling, balancing staff costs and answer/handle times. It used loads of historical data as a baseline, and also factored in holidays, team meetings and events, employee illness/vacation/absentee trends, time and day of the week, recent call trends, projected effects of marketing initiatives, popularity of overtime schedules, etc. It could also handle additional factors being thrown in on the fly (such as disasters or when the company was mentioned on Oprah Winfrey) and did at least as good a job of adjusting the overtime/time-off-without-pay offerings as any human could've. It was really quite impressive, and our customer service was rated as some of the best in the industry.
Eventually of course the company realized that as much as people complain about bad customer service they seldom make financial decisions based upon it, so most of the call centers were shut down and the department was outsourced to offshore workers who only barely speak English. Now God help you if you need customer service.
This is otherwise completely out of my area of expertise, but FWIW I do know that SPSS and Mathematica are both available for Mac. In fact, until I read your comment just now I actually thought that Mathematica was only available for Mac and other UNIX variants.
Um, no. Have you heard of the concept of "fixed overhead"? My wife and I both play WoW (her for the last year or so, me for the last 6 months), and do so over our broadband connection (Roadrunner w/o phone or TV, @ ~$45/month, BTW.). Do I include the price of broadband into the cost of WoW? Absolutely not, because I've had the same broadband connection for the last 8 years, and would still have it even if we didn't play WoW. WoW isn't even the major use of our broadband connection. The fact that we use it for WoW also doesn't change the amount that we pay for it, and therefore doesn't figure into our total outlay for WoW. It's effectively piggybacking onto a service that's already paid for, just as if I was "borrowing" a neighbor's open wireless connection.
10 years ago it would've been the "Super Sticky Pad" (thanks to Nintendo making "super" a meaningless prefix). Nowadays I think that "Sticky Pad Extreme" would be more likely.
I half disagree with you. Yes, Sega did a magnificent job of burying their heads in their collective butts, but despite their best efforts to totally muck it up the Dreamcast turned out to be a surprisingly kick-ass system. No, it wasn't perfect- the GD-ROM format was a mistake when they could have been the first console to support DVD- but it had a lot of very smart features. Four controller ports, built-in modem (which could be swapped out for a NIC interface!), a memory card (the VMU) which doubled as a secondary display and interlinkable pocket gaming device, etc. etc. etc.
Though I personally have a strong preference for the PS2 controller (the DC controller doesn't fit my hands well, nor does the X-Box controller), the variety of controllers available for the DC really stood out. Sure, the maracas and fishing pole controller were silly, but they attracted attention to the platform in a way that Sega's lackluster marketing never did. Additionally, the DC not only had keyboard and mouse controllers available for it, but actually had games which could use them!
I'm tempted to list the ability to boot off of CD-Rs without any hardware mods as a plus (I first got a DC to play around with Linux on it), but it also made piracy rampant, so that's a tough call.
My point is that the reason why there are still "Dreamcast freaks" out there is that the system had a lot of good things going for it. Unfortunately Sega wasn't one of them.
True, but it's also not an accurate reflection of the risks posed. Tethers are extraordinarily reliable, and there are two of 'em. A tether is basically a rope with a solid clip on the end, so there isn't much short of deliberate sabotage that's going to cause even one of them to fail, let alone two. I think that the SAFER is there primarily for psychological reassurance.
The really "funny" thing is that he's right. Depending upon the direction in which you push off, you're more likely to simply make your orbit more elliptical. By the time you reach the other side of the orbit it's not absurd to expect to smack right back into the station (or close enough to be rescued) at the same velocity with which you kicked off.
Orbital mechanics is counterintuitive until you become accustomed to it. If you want an easy and fun way to wrap your brain around the subject, I suggest downloading and playing with "Orbiter", a free space flight simulator. It has a bit of a learning curve (no pun intended), but it's surprisingly educational and a hell of a lot of fun.
While I agree with the +5 Funny mod you got, your post seems to so accurately reflect the thought process actually being used to justify what's happening now that I find it impossible to laugh. Pity there isn't a "+5 Frightening" mod.;-)
It's being called "The War on Terror", and yet despite having friends who've served in Iraq and one who lost loved ones on 9/11 I'm far more afraid of my own government than I am of any foreign conspirators. What does that say to you?
Everything an OS X user could brag about is wiped away and now Vista has a lot that OS X doesn't.
Not hardly. One glaring "feature" that OS X users can brag about is that OS X is a real product you can buy in stores- one that has had years to mature and improve- whereas Vista is nothing more than a beta and a litany of press releases. You're comparing the last version of OS X with the next version of Windows, and bragging about it having features that, for the most part, have been available in OS X for the last several iterations. Microsoft bashing aside, Vista is a startlingly unimpressive successor to XP.
Additionally, the laundry list of "new features" that Vista sports come with a steep list of system requirements. Meanwhile, I have a lowly 400MHz G3 iMac (remember the multicolored ones that shipped with OS 9 waaay back when?) that runs OS X quite happily. No, it's not going to win any benchmark competitions anytime soon, but it's perfectly usable and absolutely stable. Good luck getting Vista to boot on a CPU that's 3 generations behind.
Sadly, it ain't gonna happen. Nick made sure that the experience of creating Invader Zim was as traumatic as possible for all involved. I think that the end result was absolute brilliance (parts of my house are like a shrine to Invader Zim- it's kinda scary really), but nobody involved has any interest in picking it back up. *cries*
As a side note, you probably already have the DVD box set, but in case you don't the first volume is now available on the iTunes Music Store.:-)
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Agreed. Westwood's Blade Runner adaptation is fantastic, and captures the look and feel of the movie perfectly.
TRON 2.0 is, as far as I'm concerned, the sequel to the movie TRON. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's better than the original movie (and I consider myself a fan of the original). The story is engaging and the special effects/graphics are jaw-dropping. They took everything that was good about the movie, made it better, and came up with a compelling plot that actually makes sense both from the perspective of the original movie and the modern world.
Only if you're Caroline Dhavernas.
Mmmmm... Jaye...
Sure, but a human being is better than a monkey. Killing monkeys is unfortunate, but if killing a few of them will save even a single human life or restore sight to blind people then I'm enthusiastically in favor of it.
Humans are better than other animals. Period. I have a cat that I love dearly. He's intelligent, friendly, and enriches my life greatly, and I'd kill him with my bare hands if it would restore sight to a blind person I'll never even meet. I'd weep at the loss of my beloved pet and have to take bereavement time off from work, but I'd never for a moment doubt that I'd done the right thing.
I get the joke, but actually it's only G4 iBooks and PowerBooks that are affected. None of Apple's current lineup is included.
I don't have any experience with running computers in cold environments, but as long as thin clients are capable of doing the job that sounds like a great idea. Thin clients don't generally build up much heat at all, so there'll be less of a temperature differential stressing the components.
It might also be wise to keep the components wrapped up as best as possible to keep air away from them. Otherwise I could see condensation becoming a real problem.
I call bullshit. You're equating blowing up airliners with hijacking planes, when they are completely different animals. Yes, someone could check a bomb into the baggage of a plane and blow it up, but I submit that after 9/11 it became impossible for anyone other than an actual airline pilot to fly an airliner into a pre-designated building. Before 9/11 being on a plane that was being hijacked mostly meant a scary ride and some inconvenience. It was to your advantage to sit down, shut up, and not look anyone in the eye. The psychology of the airline passenger is now completely different (at least in the Western world). Today, being on a plane that gets hijacked means that unless you actively do something you are absolutely going to die. As a result, anyone stupid enough to try to hijack a plane today will suddenly find themselves outnumbered 100 to 1 by people willing to charge into gunfire to tear them to pieces because otherwise they're already dead. Add to this the pent up rage over 9/11 and locked/reinforced cockpit doors and hijacking is a fool's game. No need for air marshals or extra security there- the security comes from the passengers themselves.
Compared to that, simply blowing up a plane is a piece of cake, but far less effective. Hell, if high profile and high casualty rates are your goal, it'd be easier and much more effective to pull an Oklahoma City-style truck bombing on the airport itself, or better still a publicized crowded venue like a sporting event.
Your belief that you're safe from hijacking isn't an illusion. The illusion is your belief that airport security has anything to do with it. Enjoy your token searches and security checkpoints. I despise them as the unnecessary inconvenience and violation of my person that they are, and have shied away from flying as a result. If I can't have my laptop either then there's no way I'm going to fly. Screw the airlines, the TSA, and Homeland Security.
...or is that possibly Paul Thurrott? Please mod parent up +5 funny! It looks like Steve Jobs isn't the only one with a Reality Distortion Field.
That has the potential to be huge, but unfortunately in the business groupware and scheduling sphere Exchange's stranglehold is probably stronger than their lock on the desktop OS. Everyone else put together still doesn't equal Microsoft here... unless what they come up with happens to also be compatible with Exchange. Were that to happen then they could do an end run around Microsoft and suddenly there are no longer any features and capabilities for which Outlook is the only option. Any idea if this is the plan, or even feasible?
We have a department that uses Macs for almost all of their work, and they were hoping to get rid of their PCs entirely. These aren't IT people, so having both a Mac and a PC at each of their desks is a huge headache for them. As much as they wanted to cut their ties to Windows and despite the availability of Entourage, just the fact that they'd lose some of their scheduling capability was a deal breaker for them.
I worked in the Staffing department of a large call center for a major corporation from 1994-1998. The phone rep schedules were all done using a software package called TCS (Tele Center System). It did an amazing job of keeping the phones manned appropriately and managing scheduling, balancing staff costs and answer/handle times. It used loads of historical data as a baseline, and also factored in holidays, team meetings and events, employee illness/vacation/absentee trends, time and day of the week, recent call trends, projected effects of marketing initiatives, popularity of overtime schedules, etc. It could also handle additional factors being thrown in on the fly (such as disasters or when the company was mentioned on Oprah Winfrey) and did at least as good a job of adjusting the overtime/time-off-without-pay offerings as any human could've. It was really quite impressive, and our customer service was rated as some of the best in the industry.
Eventually of course the company realized that as much as people complain about bad customer service they seldom make financial decisions based upon it, so most of the call centers were shut down and the department was outsourced to offshore workers who only barely speak English. Now God help you if you need customer service.
And yet your original comment implies that you will one day "upgrade" to Vista? Have fun with that.
Are you saying that your Gateway was one-button?
This is otherwise completely out of my area of expertise, but FWIW I do know that SPSS and Mathematica are both available for Mac. In fact, until I read your comment just now I actually thought that Mathematica was only available for Mac and other UNIX variants.
Click the green button. It should resize the window so that it fits on your screen.
It never will. You can always run WoW under OS X. ;-)
You've read my mind, and I agree completely. We have become the very example of what we once looked down upon as evil and barbaric.
Of course, I'm also going to sue you under the DMCA for possessing an unauthorized copy of my thoughts.
Um, no. Have you heard of the concept of "fixed overhead"? My wife and I both play WoW (her for the last year or so, me for the last 6 months), and do so over our broadband connection (Roadrunner w/o phone or TV, @ ~$45/month, BTW.). Do I include the price of broadband into the cost of WoW? Absolutely not, because I've had the same broadband connection for the last 8 years, and would still have it even if we didn't play WoW. WoW isn't even the major use of our broadband connection. The fact that we use it for WoW also doesn't change the amount that we pay for it, and therefore doesn't figure into our total outlay for WoW. It's effectively piggybacking onto a service that's already paid for, just as if I was "borrowing" a neighbor's open wireless connection.
10 years ago it would've been the "Super Sticky Pad" (thanks to Nintendo making "super" a meaningless prefix). Nowadays I think that "Sticky Pad Extreme" would be more likely.
I'll bet I can be a far worse CEO than you, and I'll do it for only twice the money!
I half disagree with you. Yes, Sega did a magnificent job of burying their heads in their collective butts, but despite their best efforts to totally muck it up the Dreamcast turned out to be a surprisingly kick-ass system. No, it wasn't perfect- the GD-ROM format was a mistake when they could have been the first console to support DVD- but it had a lot of very smart features. Four controller ports, built-in modem (which could be swapped out for a NIC interface!), a memory card (the VMU) which doubled as a secondary display and interlinkable pocket gaming device, etc. etc. etc.
Though I personally have a strong preference for the PS2 controller (the DC controller doesn't fit my hands well, nor does the X-Box controller), the variety of controllers available for the DC really stood out. Sure, the maracas and fishing pole controller were silly, but they attracted attention to the platform in a way that Sega's lackluster marketing never did. Additionally, the DC not only had keyboard and mouse controllers available for it, but actually had games which could use them!
I'm tempted to list the ability to boot off of CD-Rs without any hardware mods as a plus (I first got a DC to play around with Linux on it), but it also made piracy rampant, so that's a tough call.
My point is that the reason why there are still "Dreamcast freaks" out there is that the system had a lot of good things going for it. Unfortunately Sega wasn't one of them.
True, but it's also not an accurate reflection of the risks posed. Tethers are extraordinarily reliable, and there are two of 'em. A tether is basically a rope with a solid clip on the end, so there isn't much short of deliberate sabotage that's going to cause even one of them to fail, let alone two. I think that the SAFER is there primarily for psychological reassurance.
The really "funny" thing is that he's right. Depending upon the direction in which you push off, you're more likely to simply make your orbit more elliptical. By the time you reach the other side of the orbit it's not absurd to expect to smack right back into the station (or close enough to be rescued) at the same velocity with which you kicked off.
Orbital mechanics is counterintuitive until you become accustomed to it. If you want an easy and fun way to wrap your brain around the subject, I suggest downloading and playing with "Orbiter", a free space flight simulator. It has a bit of a learning curve (no pun intended), but it's surprisingly educational and a hell of a lot of fun.
While I agree with the +5 Funny mod you got, your post seems to so accurately reflect the thought process actually being used to justify what's happening now that I find it impossible to laugh. Pity there isn't a "+5 Frightening" mod. ;-)
It's being called "The War on Terror", and yet despite having friends who've served in Iraq and one who lost loved ones on 9/11 I'm far more afraid of my own government than I am of any foreign conspirators. What does that say to you?
Everything an OS X user could brag about is wiped away and now Vista has a lot that OS X doesn't.
Not hardly. One glaring "feature" that OS X users can brag about is that OS X is a real product you can buy in stores- one that has had years to mature and improve- whereas Vista is nothing more than a beta and a litany of press releases. You're comparing the last version of OS X with the next version of Windows, and bragging about it having features that, for the most part, have been available in OS X for the last several iterations. Microsoft bashing aside, Vista is a startlingly unimpressive successor to XP.
Additionally, the laundry list of "new features" that Vista sports come with a steep list of system requirements. Meanwhile, I have a lowly 400MHz G3 iMac (remember the multicolored ones that shipped with OS 9 waaay back when?) that runs OS X quite happily. No, it's not going to win any benchmark competitions anytime soon, but it's perfectly usable and absolutely stable. Good luck getting Vista to boot on a CPU that's 3 generations behind.
Agreed. I can't be in the room when Jurassic Bark is playing, and I'm a heartless monster!
Sadly, it ain't gonna happen. Nick made sure that the experience of creating Invader Zim was as traumatic as possible for all involved. I think that the end result was absolute brilliance (parts of my house are like a shrine to Invader Zim- it's kinda scary really), but nobody involved has any interest in picking it back up. *cries*
:-)
As a side note, you probably already have the DVD box set, but in case you don't the first volume is now available on the iTunes Music Store.