"Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones" was not only the worst Star Wars related thing ever made, it's one of the worst movies of all time, sci-fi or otherwise.
Oh please. Yes, it was ineptly made. But it doesn't even rate in the top (or should I say bottom?) 100 Bad Movies of All Time. I mean there's Billy the Kid Meets Dracula, Hercules in New York, everything by Russ Meyer, everything starring Chesty Morgan, any movie with singing cowboys...
I guess I have some perspective, because I never thought the eps 4 and 5 were more than OK — and I hated ep 6, which seemed to have every "evil overlord" cliche in the book. Which puts me in a position to say: Get a life! Just as Gene Roddenbery wasn't the great seer of the 60s, George Lucas wasn't the great auteur of the 70s. He was just another film school hack who lucked into a set of recycled cliches that tapped into an underfed need for fantasy. The fact that the last three movies were bad wasn't some grand betrayal — it was just the late work of a has-been film-maker who never had that much imagination or creativity to begin with.
I mean if the GMail team *truly* watched people use email I suspect they would find out that "delete" is something people do commonly, even with GMail.
The GMail people are trying to change the paradigm. Their theory is that people mostly delete old email to make room for new email. In GMail, you have a humungous mailbox, and don't need to make room.
Personally, I think there are other reasons to delete old email, and don't buy the GMail paradigm. But the GMail people still deserve points for questioning "tried and true" assumptions. Somebody's got to do that once in a while, or we're stuck with obsolete assumptions forever. Now, when you question those assumptions, 99.9% of the time you just find out that they're tried and true for a reason. But that other 0.1% is still worth looking for.
The old system still works, but we know it won't work forever, and we know we need to change it. Why wait till it breaks?
Because it isn't all that obvious to most people that it will break. And making the change is difficult and expensive, with no immediate reward for the people expending the effort and money.
When you put gas in your car, there's still gas left in it, so it can still work. Yet you don't wait till you go dry to put some more gas in.
Dude, people run out of gas all the time. Not because they don't know that gas tanks are finite. But because they forget, or they think they have more gas in the tank then they do.
Which is why everybody is busting their ass and making all the sacrifices necessary to deal with all impending threats to civilization: overpopulation, pollution, depletion of non-renewable resources, global warming, nuclear war...
It's a lot easier to deny away a problem than to come up with the money to fix it. Especially when the disaster you're worried about has not happened in living memory.
Pity you're an AC. Otherwise, I could ask you what "bord" beans in Danish. That's the crucial term, since the confusion is over whether "board" means "piece of wood" (its most usual meaning in English) or "side of the vessel".
People love etymological folklore. Very often you see stories repeated over and over that not only don't have any documentation, but don't make any sense when you examine them closely. They're like urban legends — they persist just because they appeal to people on some obscure level.
My favorite is "starboard". I can show you a ton of books, including some authoritative-looking nautical dictionaries, that insist that this is an old term for "steering oar", from before the invention of the rudder, when ships were steered by an oar on the right side. But if you look at nautical terminology like "aboard", "overboard", etc., you soon realize that "board" doesn't mean a piece of wood, it means the side of a vessel. So the smarter lexicographers say that "starboard" used to mean the side of the ship where the steering oar was. Which makes sense to me — except it's not well-documented either, and I've seen even more obscure explanations for the word.
This is generally cronyism at its worst, and media attention getting at its finest. There is no Constitutional mandate or power. President Harry Truman enacted [medaloffreedom.com] the medal in 1945 and it was virtually ignored until JFK brought it back -- through an Executive Order [wikipedia.org] in 1963.
Dude, get a life. Cronyism is handing out jobs to underqualified friends. Dubya has certainly done his share of that, but it's not the same thing as handing out commerative tchatchkas to people he deems important.
BTW, there was only one president (Eisenhower) between Truman and Kennedy. So every prexy since Truman, with a single exception has done this.
OK, I'm no expert on locks, and my link was poorly chosen. But we're not talking real valuables that have to be protected from determined thieves. We're talking IT records that you need to protect from snooping. For that, a filing cabinet, maybe retrofitted with a steel bar and a padlock, is perfectly adequate. Yes, a serious burgler can just ignore the lock and tear off the sides. But that's not who we're guarding against.
At Sun, almost everybody has a private office. Supposed to be good for morale and productivity. Some say there's a downside — people get too used to going off and working by themselves. Not a good thing in an industry where collaboration is important. Which is why some companies actually forbid private offices.
I'm sure you're right. Still, their whole business model is built on adware and spam — there's just no other way for their affiliates to generate enough hits to keep them in business. As with so many seamy businesses, it isn't what you know, it's what people can prove you know.
Re:Highly suspectful site. Do NOT give any detail
on
Amazon's Mechanical Turk
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Well duh!
What amazes me is that it took over an hour for somebody to post a message noting such obvious signs that this is a phishing scam. Slashdotters love to see conspiracies everywhere, but they're all fooled by a site that isn't even in the Amazon.com domain, just because it has an Amazon logo.
They found a niche that kept them going for years, but the niche closed up and they were never very successful moving beyond it.
It wasn't just that they had a market niche (graphic workstations). The real problem was that this niche was sexy. Lots of blockbuster movies were being made with mind-blowing effects generated on SGI hardware. That gave the company a lot of mind share with greedy investors looking for "the next Microsoft". So for years SGI had more investment capital than they knew what to do with. The result was a bloated corporate structure with no ability to control costs.
I spent 1999 contracting at SGI, and that was just about the time everybody figured out that the party was over. But retooling the company as a server/supercomputer provider was a painfully slow process — the basic organizational structures of a mature corporation just weren't there.
But even if they had somehow moved past these problems, I think it would have just delayed the inevitable. There's never been that big a market for high-end computers, and now they have to compete with cluster and grid technology based on cheap commodity computers. There's only room for so many players in that marketplace, and big players like IBM are the ones with the experience and savvy to dominate it.
SGI's desktop machines ended up being slower than contemporary PCs from about 1999 on.
You're making the usual mistake of equating clock speed with processing power. Consider two processors that were common in high-end workstations in 1999: a 450 MHZ Pentium and a 300 MHZ MIPS. The Pentium may generate 1 1/2 times the cycles as the MIPS, but it doesn't have 1 1/2 times the processing power. Depending on the application plan to run, you could argue that the two processors are almost equivalent — especially for graphics applications.
The real problem is that Intel has a lot better economies of scale than MIPS, so that Pentium cost maybe half has much as the MIPS. Economies of scale applied to the whole system, so you could count on spending something like $10K extra for the privilege of running on SGI hardware.
When I was at SGI, there was a lot of awareness of the need to move to commodity hardware. That's when SGI spun off MIPS, and started making Pentium and Itanium systems. Unfortunately, 1999 was way to late to make such a move.
Making a bad argument is not the same thing as making a strawman argument. A strawman is when you distort somebody else's argument for your own purposes.
But who cares? Why not just say "revoking a license is not equivalent to instantly removing the ability to use the software?" Which is actually pretty much what you said. You did a decent job of explaining your opinions. You were doing fine, until you decided to prop up your argument with a fancy label. Big mistake — even if the label's correct, throwing in the extra jargon makes your point harder to understand. And when the label's incorrect you open yourself up to nitpicking about your terminology, even if the rest of your argument is well-stated.
A library has a bunch of books. They protect those books. I can go to a library, steal the books, make copies, and sell the copies. This is illegal. I don't think any court would honestly hold the library responsible.
Not true. Libraries are very careful about not facilitating piracy. Ever notice the legal warnings next to the copying machine? Or try checking a book out of a college library and taking it next door to the campus copy center. They will not let you make a copy of the whole book, or any copy that exceeds their notion of "fair use".
Of course, all these measure are a joke: if you really want to make an illegal copy, you just need a scanner or a self-service copier. But that doesn't remove the obligation of the library to make copying as hard for you as they can.
Your general argument is sound. But don't throw out fancy terms like "strawman argument" until you know what they actually mean. Better yet, explain what you think is wrong with somebody's argument, instead of hiding behind jargon.
...some very good podcasts that are really repackaged radio shows...
Podcasting may be big, but it's still got a tiny fraction of the audience of radio, and I don't see that changing any time soon. As long as that's true, the best podcasts will be mostly repackaged radio.
"Bowl full of brains"? Yuck! Brains have to be freshly-killed to have any flavor at all. Optimally, the victim should still be thrashing as you scoop them out.
Except that Lost DVDs aren't available until after the season ends. An episode is available on iTunes the day after it's broadcast. There's a certain kind of TV show that generates a lot of buzz, and people want to watch them at about the same time as their friends. Waiting six months or longer (some TV shows don't make it to DVD for years) is not an acceptable option.
You're right. But that only moves Classical-era literature out of "pure" myth and into the grey area between myth and fantasy. But I would still insist that Buffy and Xena are not myth.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I have some perspective, because I never thought the eps 4 and 5 were more than OK — and I hated ep 6, which seemed to have every "evil overlord" cliche in the book. Which puts me in a position to say: Get a life! Just as Gene Roddenbery wasn't the great seer of the 60s, George Lucas wasn't the great auteur of the 70s. He was just another film school hack who lucked into a set of recycled cliches that tapped into an underfed need for fantasy. The fact that the last three movies were bad wasn't some grand betrayal — it was just the late work of a has-been film-maker who never had that much imagination or creativity to begin with.
Personally, I think there are other reasons to delete old email, and don't buy the GMail paradigm. But the GMail people still deserve points for questioning "tried and true" assumptions. Somebody's got to do that once in a while, or we're stuck with obsolete assumptions forever. Now, when you question those assumptions, 99.9% of the time you just find out that they're tried and true for a reason. But that other 0.1% is still worth looking for.
It's a lot easier to deny away a problem than to come up with the money to fix it. Especially when the disaster you're worried about has not happened in living memory.
Pity you're an AC. Otherwise, I could ask you what "bord" beans in Danish. That's the crucial term, since the confusion is over whether "board" means "piece of wood" (its most usual meaning in English) or "side of the vessel".
My favorite is "starboard". I can show you a ton of books, including some authoritative-looking nautical dictionaries, that insist that this is an old term for "steering oar", from before the invention of the rudder, when ships were steered by an oar on the right side. But if you look at nautical terminology like "aboard", "overboard", etc., you soon realize that "board" doesn't mean a piece of wood, it means the side of a vessel. So the smarter lexicographers say that "starboard" used to mean the side of the ship where the steering oar was. Which makes sense to me — except it's not well-documented either, and I've seen even more obscure explanations for the word.
BTW, there was only one president (Eisenhower) between Truman and Kennedy. So every prexy since Truman, with a single exception has done this.
OK, I'm no expert on locks, and my link was poorly chosen. But we're not talking real valuables that have to be protected from determined thieves. We're talking IT records that you need to protect from snooping. For that, a filing cabinet, maybe retrofitted with a steel bar and a padlock, is perfectly adequate. Yes, a serious burgler can just ignore the lock and tear off the sides. But that's not who we're guarding against.
At Sun, almost everybody has a private office. Supposed to be good for morale and productivity. Some say there's a downside — people get too used to going off and working by themselves. Not a good thing in an industry where collaboration is important. Which is why some companies actually forbid private offices.
So you upgrade the locks
I'm sure you're right. Still, their whole business model is built on adware and spam — there's just no other way for their affiliates to generate enough hits to keep them in business. As with so many seamy businesses, it isn't what you know, it's what people can prove you know.
What amazes me is that it took over an hour for somebody to post a message noting such obvious signs that this is a phishing scam. Slashdotters love to see conspiracies everywhere, but they're all fooled by a site that isn't even in the Amazon.com domain, just because it has an Amazon logo.
Fine. I'll give you 50 cents to come to my house and perform degrading sex acts. Where's your work ethic now?
Elvis says you're full of shit.
Nonsesne. Nitpicking is a fine old Slashdot tradition!
I spent 1999 contracting at SGI, and that was just about the time everybody figured out that the party was over. But retooling the company as a server/supercomputer provider was a painfully slow process — the basic organizational structures of a mature corporation just weren't there.
But even if they had somehow moved past these problems, I think it would have just delayed the inevitable. There's never been that big a market for high-end computers, and now they have to compete with cluster and grid technology based on cheap commodity computers. There's only room for so many players in that marketplace, and big players like IBM are the ones with the experience and savvy to dominate it.
You're making the usual mistake of equating clock speed with processing power. Consider two processors that were common in high-end workstations in 1999: a 450 MHZ Pentium and a 300 MHZ MIPS. The Pentium may generate 1 1/2 times the cycles as the MIPS, but it doesn't have 1 1/2 times the processing power. Depending on the application plan to run, you could argue that the two processors are almost equivalent — especially for graphics applications.The real problem is that Intel has a lot better economies of scale than MIPS, so that Pentium cost maybe half has much as the MIPS. Economies of scale applied to the whole system, so you could count on spending something like $10K extra for the privilege of running on SGI hardware.
When I was at SGI, there was a lot of awareness of the need to move to commodity hardware. That's when SGI spun off MIPS, and started making Pentium and Itanium systems. Unfortunately, 1999 was way to late to make such a move.
But who cares? Why not just say "revoking a license is not equivalent to instantly removing the ability to use the software?" Which is actually pretty much what you said. You did a decent job of explaining your opinions. You were doing fine, until you decided to prop up your argument with a fancy label. Big mistake — even if the label's correct, throwing in the extra jargon makes your point harder to understand. And when the label's incorrect you open yourself up to nitpicking about your terminology, even if the rest of your argument is well-stated.
Of course, all these measure are a joke: if you really want to make an illegal copy, you just need a scanner or a self-service copier. But that doesn't remove the obligation of the library to make copying as hard for you as they can.
Your general argument is sound. But don't throw out fancy terms like "strawman argument" until you know what they actually mean. Better yet, explain what you think is wrong with somebody's argument, instead of hiding behind jargon.
"Bowl full of brains"? Yuck! Brains have to be freshly-killed to have any flavor at all. Optimally, the victim should still be thrashing as you scoop them out.
Uncool! Your web site is in the .com domain! Until you get your own TLD, no geek can recognize you as a real country!
Except that Lost DVDs aren't available until after the season ends. An episode is available on iTunes the day after it's broadcast. There's a certain kind of TV show that generates a lot of buzz, and people want to watch them at about the same time as their friends. Waiting six months or longer (some TV shows don't make it to DVD for years) is not an acceptable option.
Most of the web is crap. Better uninstall your web browser!
You're right. But that only moves Classical-era literature out of "pure" myth and into the grey area between myth and fantasy. But I would still insist that Buffy and Xena are not myth.