Re:Seems like the whole concept makes a poor bet..
on
Death of a Rebel
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· Score: 1
They're still working on an assumption that the majority of potential customers are PC illiterates who prefer limited-tasking, ease of use systems to full-featured, flexible computers.
What does this have to do with Rebel.com? Netwinders are a an office server, not intend for use as a computer by anyone. You plug it in, serve files off it, spool your printing, run a webserver or VPN. It's not a netappliance.
Re:Appliances computers aren't...
on
Death of a Rebel
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· Score: 2
Again, Netwinders were not intended as computer replacements. They are for an office environment. You can use them as file/print/web servers, if you have two branches, you can use them to VPN your lans together. They are not a mass market type of product. They also have lots of problems and are too expensive, which is why Rebel.com went out of business. I would definitely buy a Netwinder-type product for my office, if the price was right. It wasn't.
Josh Sisk
Re:Appliances have always been in trouble....
on
Death of a Rebel
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· Score: 1
No matter who tries to sell these things, from Oracle to Gateway. No iternet appliance has ever sold very well. Computer users dont seem to want to shell out $200 to $500 for a machine that has nothing but a web browser. People STILL like PC's because of there various other functions beside the web, even if we dont use them everyday.
Do you even know what a Netwinder is? It's not a consumer web browser appliance, it's an office server. We use one at my office as a file server and intranet web server. I'm not at all suprised they went out of business, though- it's slow, has a small HD and is buggy as hell.
And do you really need to have every plot element explained to you in detail? I *like* movies that leave you with questions when you leave the theatre.
Did FF leave anyone with questions? I thought the plot was overly simple and dull. They explained things too many times "we need the opposite waveform to cancel out the phantoms!". The science aspect really reminded me of the worst aspects of Star Trek, the whole "reverse the polarity" thing that gets made fun of so much. There were a few nice points to the plot. I like what Grey does at the end to help beat the bad-ass phantom (I won't reveal it for those who haven't seen it).
Over all though, the story was a bit lame. It could have been shorter too... Or had more scenes where something exciting happened. the animation was worth the price of admission, though.
I'll second that. The story was just good, but combined with the amazing CG it really turns into a great movie.
I dunno. If you had this same movie with real actors, would you still think it was good? The plot was pretty hackneyed. The ONLY reason to see it, IMHO, were the visuals. I'd say anyone who likes animation should definitely see it, though it drags at times.
Re:Ben Affleck was more lifelike in this movie.
on
Review: Final Fantasy
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· Score: 1
I think he was kidding. When I saw it, in a packed auditorium, a good amount of the crowd laughed when he took his helmet off. Several people even said out loud "he looks like ben affleck".
If you want to examine it like that, there was at least one shot from overhead, with the camera moving over Captain Grey and Dr. Aki's shoulders where they totally look like CGI... stiff movements, totally unrealistic. There were shots in the movie that looked horrible. There were several that looked real (none of which involved faces), most just looked pretty good.
And, original poster, if you really think their faces looked _real_, god help you. Their faces and expressions looked like toys or something. The most realistic-looking parts, I thought were when the soldiers were in their armor, or when the shot was from far enough away you couldn't see the faces too well. Those were the ones that looked real.
Yeah, but the plot of the movie is shallow compared to even other summer movies. Even Shrek's plot was better. It was a better movie, too. Though I think FF's animation on a whole was better... Shrek's character's weren't really supposed to look real, so it's hard to judge, but FF had some cool-looking stuff.
The movie had a GREAT plot and astonishing animation.
The animation was pretty good (except the facial expressions)... But, sorry. The plot was terrible. It was boring. There was very little action. There were very few cool scenes and the characters weren't especially cool or interesting. The single best part of the movie was at the beginning, before we even know the story (when the Deepeyes come to take Dr. Aki out of the wastes).
They spent too much of the movie trying to show off the acting chops of their digital people... The problem was, their acting sucked. They should have gone for more action, more eye candy because everytime they went for a close up of Aki being "sad", they really lost it for me.
AFAIK, the most faithful adaptation from book->movie was probably "2001", which changed some pretty big details (it was a moon of Saturn originally, not Jupiter), but kept the main ideas intact.
AFAIK, this is because the novel was written from the script that Clarke and Kubrick collaborated on. The script/film is based on an earlier Clarke short story "the Sentinel", but the film's storyline is very different, and the book is based on the script, not the original story.
Are you smoking crack? This is a television miniseries, not a computer game. Gotta love it when people don't even read the synopsis, let alone the article.
Got to love it when people can't understand humor, let alone how to close their tags.
Why are you so upset about people wanting privacy? I've seen about a dozen of your posts on the subject, and you seem to be personally offended by the concept. Maybe some people just like the idea of being alone, with no one watching them. Perhaps this idea is more prevalent in Americans (as you have noted above) because more Americans can remeber a time when they, or their forebears, lived in relative isolation. My father lived on land thirty minutes away from his closest neighbour, until my mother convinced him to move to the "city" (more like a medium sized town). He raised me to appreciate the value of independence as well as privacy. I don't want people checking up on me, not because I'm scared of getting some junk mail
(I get plenty) or am scared of being caught for some crime (I don't commit them), but because I DON'T WANT THEM CHECKING UP ON ME. It's a simple as that.
I don't see any advantage to being tracking, be it by cameras or credit cards, so why allow the tracking to take place? I can control whether or not I use credit cards (only for large purchases, and for reoccuring charges like my ISP), but I can't control whether or not I am recorded on a camera. Luckily, this isn't an issue where I live, yet. My dislike of public, government or corporate-owned cameras is not enough that I'm going to go smash them, or anything of the sort, but I can definitely say it's a concept I do not like and would vote against, if I had the chance.
by having a project which is not-for-profit, and realeases source code under a free license, i am within my rights to infringe on anyone's patent or trademark or any other form of IP.
I don't think that's really the issue here. The issue is that "illustrator" is a word for a specific job and task- making illustrations. Adobe's program that is used to create illustrations is called "Adobe Illustrator". They think Killustrator is too close of a name. But is it, really? Is the name MacPaint infringing on MS Paint (or vice versa, MacPaint was probably first, now that I think about it)? I don't think there is anyway someone could confused Killustrator with Adobe Illustrator, so it would not seem to be a trademark violation. If they called it "Adobe kIllustrator", maybe then it could cause confusion.
I think people try to go way to far in trying to control the use of common dictionary words... This is an example of that. It's an illustration program, what the hell else are they going to call it? Will the company that makes "Sound Edit" now sue any company that makes an audio program with the word edit in the title? Should MS sue the makers of StarOffice? or Corel, didnt they have software called CorelWord?
Wrong. More SUVs = More Demand for Gas = Higher Prices (temporarily) = Building Modern Pumps = More Supply of Gas = Cheaper Prices (permanently)
Modern methods make it cheaper, temporarily, not permanently. Prices will go up again as supply dwindles. Look at recent events- we had a shortage, prices went up, not down. They are now nearing their recent levels, but are still higher. By your formula, prices should constantly go down. This is not the case.
Don't believe me? Ask yourself why the price of oil, a "non-renewable" resource, went DOWN in the past twenty years (as did gold, natural gas, etc).
Because a) modern methods have allowed to to get and use a greater supply, and b) we have also managed to cut deals with OPEC. Prices reached their highs in the 70s mostly because of ploblems with OPEC. That is why prices went down, because that was a national crisis.
However, oil supplies are dwindling. My father is in the oil business and I come from an oil state. We are now having to search much harder and do more work to get oil... Eventually the work it takes to get the oil won't be worth the reward we get from it. Probably not for more than 50 years, but the threat is there.
At any rate, If you're not complaining about DirecTV stealing billions of dollars of spectrum away from Canada, then your morals aren't worth the oxygen you've used to voice them.
Thats a good point as well. The DirectTV signal is being broadcast on what are public airwaves in Canada.
Again, morally, I think it's wrong to do it. It does not make it right to use the hairdresser just because he's blind and he can not count your money.
Totally different. The hairdresser can't work on someone else while he is working on you, thus you are hurting him finacially. In this case, the signal goes out to Canada as a byproduct of it being sent to paying customers in the USA. If DirectTV doesn't want Canadians to watch, they should figure out a way to not send the signal to Canada.
So what if they are not able to pay for the channel? They are getting something that has a value (yes, a TV channel may have a value, at least money-wise) without paying for it. That's morally wrong.
Actually, since it is ILLEGAL to sell DirectTV subscriptions in Canada, then it would seem the channels have no value in Canada (of, at least, DirectTv is losing nothing by Canadians decoding the signal). DirectTV is prohibited, by law, from making money off those Canadians.
Simply get a light gun that emulates a mouse, hook it up to Quake 3 with an arcade-style joystick bound to ESDF, and you nearly have the arcade experience.
Well, not really. A true gun game is a very different experience than that of a FPS.
Quake was designed for a mouse; why play it any other way?
Slashdot Mirror
They're still working on an assumption that the majority of potential customers are PC illiterates who prefer limited-tasking, ease of use systems to full-featured, flexible computers.
What does this have to do with Rebel.com? Netwinders are a an office server, not intend for use as a computer by anyone. You plug it in, serve files off it, spool your printing, run a webserver or VPN. It's not a netappliance.
Again, Netwinders were not intended as computer replacements. They are for an office environment. You can use them as file/print/web servers, if you have two branches, you can use them to VPN your lans together. They are not a mass market type of product. They also have lots of problems and are too expensive, which is why Rebel.com went out of business. I would definitely buy a Netwinder-type product for my office, if the price was right. It wasn't.
Josh Sisk
No matter who tries to sell these things, from Oracle to Gateway. No iternet appliance has ever sold very well. Computer users dont seem to want to shell out $200 to $500 for a machine that has nothing but a web browser. People STILL like PC's because of there various other functions beside the web, even if we dont use them everyday.
Do you even know what a Netwinder is? It's not a consumer web browser appliance, it's an office server. We use one at my office as a file server and intranet web server. I'm not at all suprised they went out of business, though- it's slow, has a small HD and is buggy as hell.
Josh Sisk
And do you really need to have every plot element explained to you in detail? I *like* movies that leave you with questions when you leave the theatre.
Did FF leave anyone with questions? I thought the plot was overly simple and dull. They explained things too many times "we need the opposite waveform to cancel out the phantoms!". The science aspect really reminded me of the worst aspects of Star Trek, the whole "reverse the polarity" thing that gets made fun of so much. There were a few nice points to the plot. I like what Grey does at the end to help beat the bad-ass phantom (I won't reveal it for those who haven't seen it).
Over all though, the story was a bit lame. It could have been shorter too... Or had more scenes where something exciting happened. the animation was worth the price of admission, though.
Josh Sisk
I'll second that. The story was just good, but combined with the amazing CG it really turns into a great movie.
I dunno. If you had this same movie with real actors, would you still think it was good? The plot was pretty hackneyed. The ONLY reason to see it, IMHO, were the visuals. I'd say anyone who likes animation should definitely see it, though it drags at times.
I think he was kidding. When I saw it, in a packed auditorium, a good amount of the crowd laughed when he took his helmet off. Several people even said out loud "he looks like ben affleck".
If you want to examine it like that, there was at least one shot from overhead, with the camera moving over Captain Grey and Dr. Aki's shoulders where they totally look like CGI... stiff movements, totally unrealistic. There were shots in the movie that looked horrible. There were several that looked real (none of which involved faces), most just looked pretty good.
And, original poster, if you really think their faces looked _real_, god help you. Their faces and expressions looked like toys or something. The most realistic-looking parts, I thought were when the soldiers were in their armor, or when the shot was from far enough away you couldn't see the faces too well. Those were the ones that looked real.
Josh Sisk
Yeah, but the plot of the movie is shallow compared to even other summer movies. Even Shrek's plot was better. It was a better movie, too. Though I think FF's animation on a whole was better... Shrek's character's weren't really supposed to look real, so it's hard to judge, but FF had some cool-looking stuff.
The movie had a GREAT plot and astonishing animation.
The animation was pretty good (except the facial expressions)... But, sorry. The plot was terrible. It was boring. There was very little action. There were very few cool scenes and the characters weren't especially cool or interesting. The single best part of the movie was at the beginning, before we even know the story (when the Deepeyes come to take Dr. Aki out of the wastes).
They spent too much of the movie trying to show off the acting chops of their digital people... The problem was, their acting sucked. They should have gone for more action, more eye candy because everytime they went for a close up of Aki being "sad", they really lost it for me.
Josh Sisk
Seriously, given the state of humor on slashdot, this could go on forever.
And there still isn't.
AFAIK, the most faithful adaptation from book->movie was probably "2001", which changed some pretty big details (it was a moon of Saturn originally, not Jupiter), but kept the main ideas intact.
AFAIK, this is because the novel was written from the script that Clarke and Kubrick collaborated on. The script/film is based on an earlier Clarke short story "the Sentinel", but the film's storyline is very different, and the book is based on the script, not the original story.
Josh Sisk
Are you smoking crack? This is a television miniseries, not a computer game. Gotta love it when people don't even read the synopsis, let alone the article.
Got to love it when people can't understand humor, let alone how to close their tags.
Josh Sisk
accessibility: automatic first-page mirrors of linked sites
I think they are worried that they will either get in legal trouble or piss off the site owners if they do this. See the FAQ for details.
Josh Sisk
I don't remember. Did the optical mouse first debut as an Apple product?
No, not even if you don't count those SGI optical mice.
Josh Sisk
What is wrong with them knowing where you are?
What's right with it?
Why are you so upset about people wanting privacy? I've seen about a dozen of your posts on the subject, and you seem to be personally offended by the concept. Maybe some people just like the idea of being alone, with no one watching them. Perhaps this idea is more prevalent in Americans (as you have noted above) because more Americans can remeber a time when they, or their forebears, lived in relative isolation. My father lived on land thirty minutes away from his closest neighbour, until my mother convinced him to move to the "city" (more like a medium sized town). He raised me to appreciate the value of independence as well as privacy. I don't want people checking up on me, not because I'm scared of getting some junk mail (I get plenty) or am scared of being caught for some crime (I don't commit them), but because I DON'T WANT THEM CHECKING UP ON ME. It's a simple as that.
I don't see any advantage to being tracking, be it by cameras or credit cards, so why allow the tracking to take place? I can control whether or not I use credit cards (only for large purchases, and for reoccuring charges like my ISP), but I can't control whether or not I am recorded on a camera. Luckily, this isn't an issue where I live, yet. My dislike of public, government or corporate-owned cameras is not enough that I'm going to go smash them, or anything of the sort, but I can definitely say it's a concept I do not like and would vote against, if I had the chance.
Josh Sisk
by having a project which is not-for-profit, and realeases source code under a free license, i am within my rights to infringe on anyone's patent or trademark or any other form of IP.
I don't think that's really the issue here. The issue is that "illustrator" is a word for a specific job and task- making illustrations. Adobe's program that is used to create illustrations is called "Adobe Illustrator". They think Killustrator is too close of a name. But is it, really? Is the name MacPaint infringing on MS Paint (or vice versa, MacPaint was probably first, now that I think about it)? I don't think there is anyway someone could confused Killustrator with Adobe Illustrator, so it would not seem to be a trademark violation. If they called it "Adobe kIllustrator", maybe then it could cause confusion.
I think people try to go way to far in trying to control the use of common dictionary words... This is an example of that. It's an illustration program, what the hell else are they going to call it? Will the company that makes "Sound Edit" now sue any company that makes an audio program with the word edit in the title? Should MS sue the makers of StarOffice? or Corel, didnt they have software called CorelWord?
Josh Sisk
Wrong. More SUVs = More Demand for Gas = Higher Prices (temporarily) = Building Modern Pumps = More Supply of Gas = Cheaper Prices (permanently)
Modern methods make it cheaper, temporarily, not permanently. Prices will go up again as supply dwindles. Look at recent events- we had a shortage, prices went up, not down. They are now nearing their recent levels, but are still higher. By your formula, prices should constantly go down. This is not the case.
Don't believe me? Ask yourself why the price of oil, a "non-renewable" resource, went DOWN in the past twenty years (as did gold, natural gas, etc).
Because a) modern methods have allowed to to get and use a greater supply, and b) we have also managed to cut deals with OPEC. Prices reached their highs in the 70s mostly because of ploblems with OPEC. That is why prices went down, because that was a national crisis.
However, oil supplies are dwindling. My father is in the oil business and I come from an oil state. We are now having to search much harder and do more work to get oil... Eventually the work it takes to get the oil won't be worth the reward we get from it. Probably not for more than 50 years, but the threat is there.
Josh Sisk
At any rate, If you're not complaining about DirecTV stealing billions of dollars of spectrum away from Canada, then your morals aren't worth the oxygen you've used to voice them.
Thats a good point as well. The DirectTV signal is being broadcast on what are public airwaves in Canada.
Josh Sisk
Again, morally, I think it's wrong to do it. It does not make it right to use the hairdresser just because he's blind and he can not count your money.
Totally different. The hairdresser can't work on someone else while he is working on you, thus you are hurting him finacially. In this case, the signal goes out to Canada as a byproduct of it being sent to paying customers in the USA. If DirectTV doesn't want Canadians to watch, they should figure out a way to not send the signal to Canada.
Josh Sisk
So what if they are not able to pay for the channel? They are getting something that has a value (yes, a TV channel may have a value, at least money-wise) without paying for it. That's morally wrong.
Actually, since it is ILLEGAL to sell DirectTV subscriptions in Canada, then it would seem the channels have no value in Canada (of, at least, DirectTv is losing nothing by Canadians decoding the signal). DirectTV is prohibited, by law, from making money off those Canadians.
Josh Sisk
Well, since they weren't Shooters, FPS (or TBFPS) is a bit of a misnomer. More like FPRPG.
Well, one of them was really more of an Alpha article...
Simply get a light gun that emulates a mouse, hook it up to Quake 3 with an arcade-style joystick bound to ESDF, and you nearly have the arcade experience.
Well, not really. A true gun game is a very different experience than that of a FPS.
Quake was designed for a mouse; why play it any other way?
Josh Sisk