Um, you're a bit confused about the timeline -- Tron came quite a bit after Star-Wars, and indeed was generally thought of as having great special effects, even compared with SW. Tron's sfx lacked a sort of gritty and realistic quality compared to those in SW, but they were very cool. [Story-wise, of course, Tron was pretty damn stupid...]
#1 reason why Orkut is cooler than Friendster (besides the obvious things, like -- hey it's by Google!):
It's not called "friendster".
[Man, what godawful name that is; if the people there are anything like the name suggests, stay far, far, away... and even if they're not, it's pretty annoying if you cringe everytime you go there.]
I hate to interrupt your furious attempts at self-delusion, but IBM is (obviously) no longer a monopoly, and no longer doing (too many) evil things.
Microsoft is (obviously) still a monopoly, and is still doing an evil-thing-a-minute trying to preserve that monopoly, regardless of what the courts told them.
Those of us who have to program large programs in C often have the misfortune of having to use complex constant/#define names: FOO_BAR_ENABLE_ON_BOOT, etc. For that, the caps lock key is very, very useful. On the other hand, as and Emacs user
As an emacs user you should probably be using dynamic-abbrev for about 90% of such names: e.g., type FOO, hit M-/, and whoot! it's converted to FOO_BAR_DISABLE or something; hmmm, wrong, so hit M-/ again, and ah, this time it's right: FOO_BAR_ENABLE_ON_BOOT!
Dynamic-abbrev is one the best features ever for typical coding; try it, you'll like it, guaranteed.
I own two happy-hacking keyboards: an original `Lite' model, which doesn't have arrow keys, and also a newer `Lite2' model, which does have (small) dedicated arrow keys.
I'm an emacs user, so I prefer not to use arrow keys, but there are plenty of (!@#%*) programs out there that require them. What I've found is that even on the model with no dedicated arrow keys, I quickly became used to the FN- key sequences for them, to the point where I don't even think about it anymore, I just use them unconciously.
In fact, even on the newer model with dedicated arrows, I still use the FN- key sequences about half the time[*], and I'd judge both styles as better than traditional keyboards, because so much less hand movement is required.
[*] Depending on the application: if I'm constantly switching between typing text and movement, I tend to use the FN- key sequences, because it keeps my hands closer to the home-row, but if I'm browsing something where I can just keep my hands on the arrow keys, I use them instead.
Modern Art: With a sleek, modern design incorporating an aluminum chassis and rubber endbells, NEKO 64(TM) is as beautiful as it is powerful.
Which couldn't be farther from the truth. Maybe having a computer keyboard, laptop screen, and several generic looking banks of controls wedged in right above the (synth) keyboard is handy, but man, does it look clunky (and frankly, ugly).
It also appears to be heavy and awkwardly large, to the point where having a separate laptop and music keyboard might actually be more convenient -- and if your keyboard has built-in sounds, keeping them separate gives you the option of ditching the laptop when you want to, which obviously you can't do with the neko.
sendmail: I don't even know how many root exploits there have been in the past 2 years, but I do know that a respectable percentage of MX'ers out there run it. For you folks on sendmail: qmail. Trust me on this one
There are zillions of good mail-transport systems for free OSes. Postfix seems to be the current favorite for security/speed (and no Bernstein!).
Re:One thing I dislike about Linux community
on
BSD For Linux Users
·
· Score: 1
The first page stated that BSD is for those who like Unix and Linux is for those that hate microsoft, and that last statment is not going to win support for Linux.
No doubt -- but of course it's also a completely befuddled viewpoint. There are zealots[*] in both camps, and sometimes you get Giant Government Chooses Linux to Spite MS, but for the most part Linux users/hackers seem to have pretty much the same motivations as BSD users/hackers: it's a useful, cool, system.
To be honest the main point of the article seems to be `I like BSD because that's what I'm used to!'
Great.
[*] Ok, I'll give him this: Linux zealots probably do focus more on MS (the BSD zealots are busy being bitter at the success of linux).
Ha ha, yeah definitely Green Hills has reason to be scared of free software: we use their stuff at my work for embedded type development, and it seems pretty clear that their presence in the market is slipping due to competition from free software (mostly gcc in my experience, in competition with Green Hills' compiler).
Peanut Butter is a fairly extreme case though, especially if you compare against one of the particularly horrible brands like Skippy, which contains huge quantities of sugar, and really tastes very little like peanuts.
[BTW, Japanese peanut butter tends to be even worse: most that I've tasted has resembled peanut-flavored cake frosting more than anything else! I find it basically inedible.]
Actually in my experience much `organic' PB often commits a related sin, by adding way too much salt, far past the point where it's really justified for taste reasons.
The problem I suppose is that everything is simply over-saturated with those tastes, so if you eat something that's not, it seems bland. There's a lot to be said for backing off on these things for a while, and seeing what subtleties turn up...
First point is that tiny notebooks don't have to give up important features like network connectivity and touchpads.
Of course in many people's view, the touchpad is a drawback, not an `important feature.' It's good there's a laptop for everybody's taste, though -- in fact, Sony's use of an eraserhead is a hopeful sign, given the lemming-like movement of the industry towards touchpads lately.
Oh, and according to the review, the Sony does have an ethernet adapter.
Me too, but I wonder if there are patent issues involved.
Whenever I see a particular unique solution used heavily by one manufacturer, and only sparsely used by others (and in the case of eraserheads, it's usually for notebooks which are physically too small to use anything else), I start to suspect patents...
Does anyone know if Sony has addressed the widespread touchpad issues that have plauged the Vaio laptops, specifically the 505 series?
Well, obviously, by getting rid of it.:-)
I'm quite glad myself, as I really hate touchpads... Eraserheads are not much better for fine movement, but their location is far superior for occasional large-scale movement -- which as a mostly-emacs/xterm-in-X user, is what I care about the most (to switch windows, etc). I'd guess that space issues were the main the reason Sony switched though.
To tell the truth the best laptop pointing device I ever tried was one of those little mini-trackballs that I think panasonic used to put on their notebooks. It lacks the great placement of the eraserhead, but both fine and gross movements were much easier and more accurate than with a touchpad or eraserhead. I suppose that sort of thing is not very workable for an ultra-thin laptop though... (not to mention more mechanical stuff to go wrong)
How many people own an esoteric piece of hardware like an MD yet do not own a computer?
In Japan I suspect the answer is: quite a few.
Sony, remember, is a Japanese company.
Anyway, maybe this will change in the future when everybody has grown up using a computer (or the software/hardware has gotten less sucky), but I think there are many people who really don't want to screw around with their computer to do something `simple' like recording music.
why did they even bother making MD that could only play and not record?
I used to wonder this too. Then I realized that everybody in Japan has two MD players -- one in their stereo system that records (even little cheap stereo systems in Japan seem to have a MD recorder now), and a tiny little playback-only model for carrying around.
Seen this way, PB-only models make a lot more sense: the decreased functionality makes them smaller (some are really, really small, barely more than the size of a double-thick MD) and cheaper (which is important for something you carry around a lot, and might break).
the X-Box section... is usually situated in the *very* back of the game section
Note that this wasn't true when the xbox was first released in Japan -- in fact at that point, xbox games had a primo up-front location in many stores, and quite often a prominently situated demo unit. There was also a huge amount of advertising accompanying the release (e.g., it was almost impossible to escape xbox adverts in central shibuya, as even the street lamps were flying xbox banners).
Of course as the xbox has continued to not sell, it's gotten less and less attention from stores.
So while maybe you could accuse the public of some sort of anti-xbox prejudice (I wouldn't though), the same could hardly be said of retailers. In my estimation, they gave it a game shot.
It's a bit hard for me to comment since I have no idea who Suzy Orman is -- but I did a google search for `Suzy Orman', and result #8 was www.suzeorman.com, which says that `Suze is pronounced Suzy'. So maybe you got the spelling wrong? If I search for `Suze Orman' instead, her site is the #1 hit (seems pretty good to me!).
I never quite understand comments like this; google's results for some searchs suck, but their results for most searches that I do are extremely good, in fact probably better now than a few years ago (e.g. it's very common these days that the first hit is the one I want).
Other search engines like altavista were simply never in the same league as google, at any point -- that is, with them, most searches yielded sucky results, which maybe you could get something useful out of with a lot of work on your part.
[The only thing I can figure is that the people complaining about google's results are searching for um, widely spammed subjects, e.g., `britney spears nude'...]
I drink about two cups of coffee a day, I'm not sure if that's really a lot or not, but I get occasional headaches if I stop drinking it for a few days.
However, the main problem I have with quitting is simply that I miss having something warm and toasty to drink on cold mornings (so indeed I find it much less necessary to drink coffee in the summertime)! I guess this is the sort of `psychological addiction' people talk about.
Decaf is one solution (though you hear nasty rumors about that too), but decaf coffee is generally less available, and usually seems to be lower-quality -- e.g., I can easily find my personal favorite super-fresh italian-roast coffee, but with decaf I basically only can find starbuck's `decaf' beans, which are very mediocre in taste.
For the hot-cup-of-something factor I generally drink various types of tea during the day (I live in Japan so high-quality green tea is very easy to find, and there's a lot of other different interesting varieties of tea available -- e.g. Pu-ar is a great change from other sorts), but for that first cup of the day when your stomach isn't really settled, it seems hard to beat the thick bitterness of coffee.
My mom used to have some sort of roasted grain coffee substitute (the kind hippies like to drink) when I was a kid, which actually came pretty close to achieving the `feel' of coffee -- thick, bitter, toasty; I wish I could find some of that stuff!
With that being said, one could quesiton whether Mozilla has a relevance outside developing a rendering engine. GNOME has standardised on Epiphany for the browser and Evolution for the eMail/Contact manager, so where does the Mozilla foundation.
Keep in mind that `Gnome has standardized on' is not equivalent to `users will use.' I've used epiphany recently, and well, basically it sucks compared to firebird.
I'm sure Gnome wants to have a `native' browser, just so there's something in the standard install, but really, epiphany has an incredibly long way to go before it's anywhere near as usable as firebird (and given the current religion at the Gnome project, they may never let it get there).
Yeah, that's half the problem -- neither side of the `debate' seems to know when to stop talking and listen for a while.
I'm pretty liberal, and pretty `pro environment' (don't drive, like forests far more than golf courses, would rather enjoy seeing the price of gas hit $500/gallon), but even I'm embarassed by some of the morons I see associated with the `environmental movement.' In far too many places, it seems to have degenerated into mindless dogma and a social club for people who like goretex.
On the other hand, that doesn't excuse the similarly mindless stupidity of typical right-wing responses (`hey, there's still some small doubt that there's a problem, so let's completely ignore everything, and buy more SUVs!').
BTW, I'm all for ipods, but... in many ways the sort of rampant consumption that people love these days, and the infrastructure which supports it, is pretty disturbing. Not just for `environmental' reasons, but the way it affects peoples' lifestyles, and the (often not so obvious) costs that must be paid. In the end I don't think a full suite of the latest goodies for everybody is a sufficient justification for a world consisting of a single huge walmart and a really big parking lot... but because such changes happen incrementally, the connections are not always clear until it's too damn late.
Circa 1980, after bugging my parents incessantly, I got for christmas an RCA COSMAC VIP 1802 single-board computer (note this was the official board offered by RCA, not the ELF design published in hobbyist magazines -- though at some point I tried to build one of those too), with:
RCA 1802 processor. Very odd architecture, 16 16-bit registers, each of which could be used for addressing purposes, but almost all other processing had to go through the single [8-bit?] accumulator; you could choose which 16-bit register was the PC, so a certain kind of quick subroutine call was easy (but there were no conventional jsr/ret instructions). It was apparently of the few micro-processors at the time hardened enough for use in spacecraft (regretably, I failed to take advantage of this feature).
1KB of RAM. I later expanded this to 2KB by soldering in another pair of static RAM chips (whoo-hoo, who'll ever need more than 2KB?!).
64 x 64 pixel B&W video display -- note that's pixels, not characters (that's smaller than many icons today)! I actually did a lot of graphics programming with this, including a terminal emulator, which used very, very low-res characters (and I made them variable pitch to save space), but still only got like 12 per line. BTW, note that the display memory consumed 512 bytes of RAM -- half the memory of the computer in an `unexpanded' model!
16-key hexadecimal membrane keyboard. No tactile feedback, so it made an annoying beep for every key hit; I eventually cut the speaker wire to avoid waking up my brother during late-night coding sessions.
Built-in ROM monitor featuring two advanced functions: (1) display memory address (in hex), and (2) enter hex value into memory. That was it. Needless to say, I assembled my programs manually on yellow legal pads.
Wow I had a lot of fun with that computer... at some point I added a primitive D/A converter using a resistor network attached to 8 output pins, and programmed digital music (well I called it music), and 64x64 pixel display hacks....
If you want to really understand how a computer works at the most primitive level, it's the to go. Emphasis on the primitive of course; I always envied people with KIM 6502 single-board computers, which seemed pretty luxurious in comparison (man, a keyboard with tactile feedback, and real subroutine call instructions!).
Lewis had more apologetic aims with his books, and this is by no means a secret fact. Hopefully they don't temper this angle too much with the movies. Certainly not everybody is thrilled by an underlying Christian theme, but removing it would make the story anemic.
Strongly agreed.
While it's no secret that Narnia was a christian allegory to some extent, I think one of Lewis's most charming features was his ability to do this without seeming preachy. I'm no christian (rather an atheist/agnostic/what-have-you*), but Narnia, and in fact C.S. Lewis's more explicit writings on christianity, are some my favorite and most loved books ever.
It's not just that he was a good writer (though he was). You can sense that he was writing about christianity because it was something he loved very much (and not because he felt the devil's pitchfork in his behind). Morever, he was an academic, and I believe a late convert to christianity, and you feel that he's talking to you, and that he perfectly well realizes that you might -- rationally -- disagree with him (this is in contrast with the more usual, rather condescending, forms of proselytizing). You get the feeling that if you objected, he'd say something like `Ah well; it makes a great story though, doesn't it?'
[* I don't believe in god because I don't think it makes much sense.]
Slashdot Mirror
Um, you're a bit confused about the timeline -- Tron came quite a bit after Star-Wars, and indeed was generally thought of as having great special effects, even compared with SW. Tron's sfx lacked a sort of gritty and realistic quality compared to those in SW, but they were very cool. [Story-wise, of course, Tron was pretty damn stupid...]
#1 reason why Orkut is cooler than Friendster (besides the obvious things, like -- hey it's by Google!):
It's not called "friendster".
[Man, what godawful name that is; if the people there are anything like the name suggests, stay far, far, away... and even if they're not, it's pretty annoying if you cringe everytime you go there.]
Microsoft is (obviously) still a monopoly, and is still doing an evil-thing-a-minute trying to preserve that monopoly, regardless of what the courts told them.
So, to sum up:
- apple
- orange
- go play with clippy -- he's your friend
Thank you.Those of us who have to program large programs in C often have the misfortune of having to use complex constant/#define names: FOO_BAR_ENABLE_ON_BOOT, etc. For that, the caps lock key is very, very useful. On the other hand, as and Emacs user
As an emacs user you should probably be using dynamic-abbrev for about 90% of such names: e.g., type FOO, hit M-/, and whoot! it's converted to FOO_BAR_DISABLE or something; hmmm, wrong, so hit M-/ again, and ah, this time it's right: FOO_BAR_ENABLE_ON_BOOT!
Dynamic-abbrev is one the best features ever for typical coding; try it, you'll like it, guaranteed.
I own two happy-hacking keyboards: an original `Lite' model, which doesn't have arrow keys, and also a newer `Lite2' model, which does have (small) dedicated arrow keys.
I'm an emacs user, so I prefer not to use arrow keys, but there are plenty of (!@#%*) programs out there that require them. What I've found is that even on the model with no dedicated arrow keys, I quickly became used to the FN- key sequences for them, to the point where I don't even think about it anymore, I just use them unconciously.
In fact, even on the newer model with dedicated arrows, I still use the FN- key sequences about half the time[*], and I'd judge both styles as better than traditional keyboards, because so much less hand movement is required.
[*] Depending on the application: if I'm constantly switching between typing text and movement, I tend to use the FN- key sequences, because it keeps my hands closer to the home-row, but if I'm browsing something where I can just keep my hands on the arrow keys, I use them instead.
Gah, where is this rat-backed-into-a-corner routine going to end???
`SCO takes out hits on prominent open-source developers'?
`SCO threatens to use biological warfare if demands not met'?
`SCO produces evidence!'? (nah...)
Which couldn't be farther from the truth. Maybe having a computer keyboard, laptop screen, and several generic looking banks of controls wedged in right above the (synth) keyboard is handy, but man, does it look clunky (and frankly, ugly).
It also appears to be heavy and awkwardly large, to the point where having a separate laptop and music keyboard might actually be more convenient -- and if your keyboard has built-in sounds, keeping them separate gives you the option of ditching the laptop when you want to, which obviously you can't do with the neko.
No thanks, neko-san.
sendmail: I don't even know how many root exploits there have been in the past 2 years, but I do know that a respectable percentage of MX'ers out there run it. For you folks on sendmail: qmail. Trust me on this one
There are zillions of good mail-transport systems for free OSes. Postfix seems to be the current favorite for security/speed (and no Bernstein!).
The first page stated that BSD is for those who like Unix and Linux is for those that hate microsoft, and that last statment is not going to win support for Linux.
No doubt -- but of course it's also a completely befuddled viewpoint. There are zealots[*] in both camps, and sometimes you get Giant Government Chooses Linux to Spite MS, but for the most part Linux users/hackers seem to have pretty much the same motivations as BSD users/hackers: it's a useful, cool, system.
To be honest the main point of the article seems to be `I like BSD because that's what I'm used to!'
Great.
[*] Ok, I'll give him this: Linux zealots probably do focus more on MS (the BSD zealots are busy being bitter at the success of linux).
Is ITRON a standard or an implementation? It looks just like a standard from the web site.
I'm not sure of the status of the original itron, but recently there's a GPL rewrite of itron called TOPPERS:
http://www.toppers.jp/
(sorry, japanese, but maybe you can find a download there somewhere...)
Ha ha, yeah definitely Green Hills has reason to be scared of free software: we use their stuff at my work for embedded type development, and it seems pretty clear that their presence in the market is slipping due to competition from free software (mostly gcc in my experience, in competition with Green Hills' compiler).
Peanut Butter is a fairly extreme case though, especially if you compare against one of the particularly horrible brands like Skippy, which contains huge quantities of sugar, and really tastes very little like peanuts.
[BTW, Japanese peanut butter tends to be even worse: most that I've tasted has resembled peanut-flavored cake frosting more than anything else! I find it basically inedible.]
Actually in my experience much `organic' PB often commits a related sin, by adding way too much salt, far past the point where it's really justified for taste reasons.
The problem I suppose is that everything is simply over-saturated with those tastes, so if you eat something that's not, it seems bland. There's a lot to be said for backing off on these things for a while, and seeing what subtleties turn up...
First point is that tiny notebooks don't have to give up important features like network connectivity and touchpads.
Of course in many people's view, the touchpad is a drawback, not an `important feature.' It's good there's a laptop for everybody's taste, though -- in fact, Sony's use of an eraserhead is a hopeful sign, given the lemming-like movement of the industry towards touchpads lately.
Oh, and according to the review, the Sony does have an ethernet adapter.
Would love Apple to see the trackpoint light.
Me too, but I wonder if there are patent issues involved.
Whenever I see a particular unique solution used heavily by one manufacturer, and only sparsely used by others (and in the case of eraserheads, it's usually for notebooks which are physically too small to use anything else), I start to suspect patents...
Does anyone know if Sony has addressed the widespread touchpad issues that have plauged the Vaio laptops, specifically the 505 series?
:-)
Well, obviously, by getting rid of it.
I'm quite glad myself, as I really hate touchpads... Eraserheads are not much better for fine movement, but their location is far superior for occasional large-scale movement -- which as a mostly-emacs/xterm-in-X user, is what I care about the most (to switch windows, etc). I'd guess that space issues were the main the reason Sony switched though.
To tell the truth the best laptop pointing device I ever tried was one of those little mini-trackballs that I think panasonic used to put on their notebooks. It lacks the great placement of the eraserhead, but both fine and gross movements were much easier and more accurate than with a touchpad or eraserhead. I suppose that sort of thing is not very workable for an ultra-thin laptop though... (not to mention more mechanical stuff to go wrong)
How many people own an esoteric piece of hardware like an MD yet do not own a computer?
In Japan I suspect the answer is: quite a few.
Sony, remember, is a Japanese company.
Anyway, maybe this will change in the future when everybody has grown up using a computer (or the software/hardware has gotten less sucky), but I think there are many people who really don't want to screw around with their computer to do something `simple' like recording music.
why did they even bother making MD that could only play and not record?
I used to wonder this too. Then I realized that everybody in Japan has two MD players -- one in their stereo system that records (even little cheap stereo systems in Japan seem to have a MD recorder now), and a tiny little playback-only model for carrying around.
Seen this way, PB-only models make a lot more sense: the decreased functionality makes them smaller (some are really, really small, barely more than the size of a double-thick MD) and cheaper (which is important for something you carry around a lot, and might break).
the X-Box section ... is usually situated in the *very* back of the game section
Note that this wasn't true when the xbox was first released in Japan -- in fact at that point, xbox games had a primo up-front location in many stores, and quite often a prominently situated demo unit. There was also a huge amount of advertising accompanying the release (e.g., it was almost impossible to escape xbox adverts in central shibuya, as even the street lamps were flying xbox banners).
Of course as the xbox has continued to not sell, it's gotten less and less attention from stores.
So while maybe you could accuse the public of some sort of anti-xbox prejudice (I wouldn't though), the same could hardly be said of retailers. In my estimation, they gave it a game shot.
It's a bit hard for me to comment since I have no idea who Suzy Orman is -- but I did a google search for `Suzy Orman', and result #8 was www.suzeorman.com, which says that `Suze is pronounced Suzy'. So maybe you got the spelling wrong? If I search for `Suze Orman' instead, her site is the #1 hit (seems pretty good to me!).
I never quite understand comments like this; google's results for some searchs suck, but their results for most searches that I do are extremely good, in fact probably better now than a few years ago (e.g. it's very common these days that the first hit is the one I want).
...]
Other search engines like altavista were simply never in the same league as google, at any point -- that is, with them, most searches yielded sucky results, which maybe you could get something useful out of with a lot of work on your part.
[The only thing I can figure is that the people complaining about google's results are searching for um, widely spammed subjects, e.g., `britney spears nude'
I drink about two cups of coffee a day, I'm not sure if that's really a lot or not, but I get occasional headaches if I stop drinking it for a few days.
However, the main problem I have with quitting is simply that I miss having something warm and toasty to drink on cold mornings (so indeed I find it much less necessary to drink coffee in the summertime)! I guess this is the sort of `psychological addiction' people talk about.
Decaf is one solution (though you hear nasty rumors about that too), but decaf coffee is generally less available, and usually seems to be lower-quality -- e.g., I can easily find my personal favorite super-fresh italian-roast coffee, but with decaf I basically only can find starbuck's `decaf' beans, which are very mediocre in taste.
For the hot-cup-of-something factor I generally drink various types of tea during the day (I live in Japan so high-quality green tea is very easy to find, and there's a lot of other different interesting varieties of tea available -- e.g. Pu-ar is a great change from other sorts), but for that first cup of the day when your stomach isn't really settled, it seems hard to beat the thick bitterness of coffee.
My mom used to have some sort of roasted grain coffee substitute (the kind hippies like to drink) when I was a kid, which actually came pretty close to achieving the `feel' of coffee -- thick, bitter, toasty; I wish I could find some of that stuff!
With that being said, one could quesiton whether Mozilla has a relevance outside developing a rendering engine. GNOME has standardised on Epiphany for the browser and Evolution for the eMail/Contact manager, so where does the Mozilla foundation.
Keep in mind that `Gnome has standardized on' is not equivalent to `users will use.' I've used epiphany recently, and well, basically it sucks compared to firebird.
I'm sure Gnome wants to have a `native' browser, just so there's something in the standard install, but really, epiphany has an incredibly long way to go before it's anywhere near as usable as firebird (and given the current religion at the Gnome project, they may never let it get there).
Yeah, that's half the problem -- neither side of the `debate' seems to know when to stop talking and listen for a while.
... in many ways the sort of rampant consumption that people love these days, and the infrastructure which supports it, is pretty disturbing. Not just for `environmental' reasons, but the way it affects peoples' lifestyles, and the (often not so obvious) costs that must be paid. In the end I don't think a full suite of the latest goodies for everybody is a sufficient justification for a world consisting of a single huge walmart and a really big parking lot... but because such changes happen incrementally, the connections are not always clear until it's too damn late.
I'm pretty liberal, and pretty `pro environment' (don't drive, like forests far more than golf courses, would rather enjoy seeing the price of gas hit $500/gallon), but even I'm embarassed by some of the morons I see associated with the `environmental movement.' In far too many places, it seems to have degenerated into mindless dogma and a social club for people who like goretex.
On the other hand, that doesn't excuse the similarly mindless stupidity of typical right-wing responses (`hey, there's still some small doubt that there's a problem, so let's completely ignore everything, and buy more SUVs!').
BTW, I'm all for ipods, but
Wow I had a lot of fun with that computer
If you want to really understand how a computer works at the most primitive level, it's the to go. Emphasis on the primitive of course; I always envied people with KIM 6502 single-board computers, which seemed pretty luxurious in comparison (man, a keyboard with tactile feedback, and real subroutine call instructions!).
Lewis had more apologetic aims with his books, and this is by no means a secret fact. Hopefully they don't temper this angle too much with the movies. Certainly not everybody is thrilled by an underlying Christian theme, but removing it would make the story anemic.
Strongly agreed.
While it's no secret that Narnia was a christian allegory to some extent, I think one of Lewis's most charming features was his ability to do this without seeming preachy. I'm no christian (rather an atheist/agnostic/what-have-you*), but Narnia, and in fact C.S. Lewis's more explicit writings on christianity, are some my favorite and most loved books ever.
It's not just that he was a good writer (though he was). You can sense that he was writing about christianity because it was something he loved very much (and not because he felt the devil's pitchfork in his behind). Morever, he was an academic, and I believe a late convert to christianity, and you feel that he's talking to you, and that he perfectly well realizes that you might -- rationally -- disagree with him (this is in contrast with the more usual, rather condescending, forms of proselytizing). You get the feeling that if you objected, he'd say something like `Ah well; it makes a great story though, doesn't it?'
[* I don't believe in god because I don't think it makes much sense.]