It occurs to me that New Hampshirites have it both ways. They're close enough to the tech centers in Mass to get some of the jobs, but rural enough to satisfy the rustics. A good place to go if you're trying to satisfy a city-hating spouse.
I have to comment on "I can't really explain what makes us compatible.". If you figure it out, you should bottle it and sell it. That would be the end of your money issues!
Indians may work cheap, but they do sleep. And India is 10.5 hours ahead of EST!
I'm a tech writer, and the latest problem in my profession is: how do you interview an engineer who's never awake at the same time as you are? I suppose that problem is doable (though I haven't actually had to do it yet) but I'd balk at dealing with a sysadmin on the other side of the planet.
Jeez dude. The guy asks for help relocating, and you lecture him on his choice of mates? I'm trying to figure out whether you're insensitive or just plain stupid.
Interesting definition of "two way street". The guy's problem is to advance his career, the woman's is to make the sacrifices necessary for him to do so. How's your marriage, I wonder?
Couples often have to make difficult choices when one partner's needs conflict with those of the other. Does her problem with urban living rate with his problem finding work? That's something they have to decide for themselves -- you're in no position to decide for them.
Your understanding of the word "demo" isn't anything like mine. If you're demo-ing an interactive device, the demo has to be interactive too. Otherwise it's just a fancy graphic presentation of the device. Which is what Sony Ericsson provides. It certainly doesn't allow you to probe the features. And it doesn't give any real indication as to how the device functions in the real world -- as your suprise about the size indicates.
I bought my current (and first) cell phone online, after spending a lot of time reading reviews and making comparisons. All of which was time wasted -- if I'd held the thing in my hands for 2 minutes, I'd have seen design flaws that all the reviewers managed to overlook. For some devices, there's no evaluation that can tell you more than actually using the damned thing.
What the world really needs is a cheap, non-bulky rechargable battery. It's the only thing that keeps solar power, wind power, electric cars, and a lot of other cool sustainable tech from happening. Conspiracy theories, anyone?
Speilberg's JAWS was the genesis of the summer 'blockbuster' -- a term defined by the fact that people lined up around the block to see JAWS.
I'm sorry, but how does lining up around the block bust that same block?
The term "blockbuster" was around for a long time before Jaws came out -- during WW II, it referred to a bomb capable of destroying a whole city block with a single blast. Don't recall if I ever heard it applied to movies before Jaws came out. I suppose this other meaning could have appeared independently, but I suspect that it's just a way of saying that a movie made a lot of noise.
Oh yes. The site's style attempts to immerse you into the mythos of the series. This following the lead of the series in tying in both the movie and broadcast.
You must have really enjoyed the series. You've also taught me to be more patient with seemingly-illogical premises.
Unless they're authored by Rick Berman of course!
It gets difficult in some areas though, such as comic books, especially ones that crossover with other comics like Superman.
Superman is, of course, the very epitome of "make up the premise as you go along." I seem to recall that they originally explained all his powers by saying he came from a planet with heavy gravity, making him super-strong. But that didn't have enough wow-value...
My least favorite crossover is X-Men meet Star Trek: TNG. Some things just shouldn't be allowed...
You're lucky that your favorite fantasy-verse is more or less consistent. I've seen Star Wars fanataics engage in just astonishing contortions to try to make all the movies, comic books, novelizations, and what not hang together. Don't know whether to pity or admire them.
The first Star Wars movie I saw was Empire Strikes Back. I really dug the "i am your father" scene. But a guy I went to the movie with was appalled, because it de-canonized one of his favorite SW comic books, which showed Vader and Anakin together in a flashback. Oh well!
In addition, much of the details are wrong (uniforms, patches, weapons, tactics, etc.), which ruins the film in many ways...
From a purely personal point of view, I strongly agree. But I'm forced to admit that most people don't think that way. I once read this famous crime novel that's been praised by critics and readers around the world. I suppose it's decently written (Dunne is widely considered one of the great writers of his time), but I could never get past the fact that the author didn't seem to understand that the Los Angeles (city) Police Department and the Los Angeles (county) Sherrif's Office are completely separate entities!
I just finished reading this Israeli historical novel, where the Hebrew (or maybe Arabic) word for "forecastle" is repeatedly translated as "bridge". Drove me crazy, but at least it makes more sense than the more usual mistake, which is to call a quarterdeck a "bridge". (Isn't the bridge the place you steer the ship from?) Of course, this only bothers me because I happen to know that a bridge is a raised structure that wasn't invented until the age of steam. (Originally it was a literal bridge between the paddlewheel housings.) Most people don't know this sort of thing, and don't care, and look at nipickers like you and me with disdain and impatience.
Writers in the era just weren't well versed on the forces of rapid accelleration.
Still aren't, judging from Star Trek, and other such attempts to depict space travel. But is that an excuse? Not when Newton's Laws have ben part of the scientific canon for over 300 years. And not when you're writing in a genre where scientific and technical detail is itself a key part of the story.
Verne deserves credit for helping to establish SF as a genre where you play with ideas. But like many SF writers, he wasn't all that careful about playing with them in a plausible or logical manner. My favorite example is Around the World in 80 Days where the ending rests on Phineas Fogg's ignorance of the circumnavigator's paradox. Which is an interesting idea -- but is it really plausible that a guy could travel from Tokyo to London without once hearing anybody mention the date?
Why is the subject of the movie in any way relevant to the objective analysis of the movie?
Fine. Let's suppose everybody you know or love is murdered in a particularly cruel fashion. Suppose they make a movie about it. Are you utterly confident you could review the movie objectively? If so, your understanding of how humans work is nonexistent.
Kids were lining up to buy the books long before there was any glimmer of a movie.
I enjoyed the first couple of HP books, though I'm not sure there's enough story there to sustain the books that have already been published, never mind two more.
I'm not a rabid fan, but I was disappointed by the first movie's failure to capture the feeling of the book. (No chance I'll go to any of the sequels.) My favorite scene in the first book is where Harry is all uptight about having to learn to ride a broom. All the other kids have been doing it all their lives, and he's never even touched a flyable broom. What if he makes an ass of himself? Then he goes to class and he already knows how. It's a magical (in a non-literal sense) moment that movie utterly fails to capture.
And then there's those moving staircases. In the books, people keep getting lost because all the rooms and corridors at Hogwarts are mysteriously enchanted. Cool! (And crucial to the plot in the latest book.) But in the movie, they explain the same thing by showing the staircases moving back and forth for no obvious reason. Lame.
Let me tell you why I first picked up a Harry Potter book. I heard this commentator on NPR talking about how he read the books to his elementary school class. The kids would not let him show them the illustrations, because they were too into the internal fantasies they'd formed about what Harry's life at Hogwarts must be like. Does Hollywood provoke that kind of imagining? It does not. Hollywood has to show everything, because it doesn't trust its audience.
Sometimes an adaptation promotes the original. Sometimes it destroys it. I've always been grateful that Bill Watterson never allowed any adaptations of Calvin and Hobbes. But now Rowling is a billionaire, so I guess that makes it all right.
Seeing a favorite book made into a bad movie isn't like having the glass half empty. It's like having the glass filled with some foul-smelling fluid that you have to drink, and people make fun of you if you can't do it without gagging.
Yeah, yours was the first site I hit when I Googled for sites that talk about the TV series. Your conceit (I hope that's what it is!) that all the books, movies, and series are somehow based on fact is amusing. It's meant to be amusing, right? Right?
Except that Welles did say "It's Halloween" at the end of the broadcast. Not because WoTW was any kind of "Halloweeen Special" (that was the only mention of Halloween). It was his way of responding to the reports of panic that had already begun to reach him.
This discussion brings to mind this really good docudrama about the making of the radio play and the way people responded to it. There are thoughts on the way mass media was emerging as an influence on what people believed, with appropriate references to emerging political media stars like Hitler and Roosevelt. And some amusing scenes, as the sound effects folks try to get just the right kind of sound, utilizing a microphone, a mason jar, and a toilet bowel!
Anyone else think Bruce Sterling would've been a good choice for that?
Sterling is pretty much my favorite living SF writer. But I'd run in the opposite direction from any movie with his name on it. His best stories are motivated by weird philosophical premises (which I mostly disagree with, but usually enjoy the way he incorporates it into his storytelling) and extremely good insight into the future of technology. Good reading, but not the stuff of good movies.
I come from a cultural heritage (eastern European Jewish) that was basically eradicated by the Holocaust. Add that to the usual immigrant identity crisis and guilt-tripping, and you have a subject matter that's so painful to deal with, I could never form an objective appreciation of a movie on the subject. So I might as well concede that I have no real opinion about the quality of Schindler's List. It's simply that every other post-Jaws Spielberg movie has motivated my disgust. The adventure movies are painfully derivative (by intent, but that doesn't make it any better), mindless, sadistic, and over-long. The more serious movies are hyper-sentimental and lack any real humanity. Perhaps Schindler is an exception. I'll never know.
If my personal taste has no value, what about yours? Plenty of critics hated Private Ryan. As for Schindler, the subject of the movie totally precludes anything like objective analysis.
...but the "businesses create more jobs" bullshit is getting old.
Getting? It's been the Republican mantra since Ronald Reagan made it a central theme of his presidential bid -- 25 years ago!
It's called being "on message". You pick an idea that appeals to people and you repeat it as often as you can. Never mind if it's illogical or even irrelevent to the subject at hand. (Journalists complain that politicians don't answer questions any more, they just recide the message-du-jour.) What matters is the picture created in the minds of the voter the politician is targeting.
Appalling? Nauseating? Sure. But I'm darned if I know what to do about it.
You remind me of the strangest version of WoTW, which was the 1988 TV series. This was written as a sequel to the 1953 movie, set in the present day! One thing I never quite figured out: was the series set in some alternative universe where there actually was a 1953 invasion from Mars? Or was the show written by and for people who never stop to wonder why an interplanetary invasion didn't make the news?
I have to pick nits with your hero H.G. Using giant cannon to send your invasion force? Navigation issues aside, how can thin layers of Martian Jam invade anything?
As for Steven Spielberg -- I'm probably the only living human who knows this, but he's totally overrated, the epitome of everything I hate about Hollywood. What has he done of any real quality? Lots of brainless adventure movies, just disneyland rides caught on film. Films based on popular mythology about flying saucers. And "literary" films that totally fail to capture the spirit of the book he's adapting. Rounded out by the nausea-inducing, bloated Oedipus-fest, A.I. His script is real, but he is not.
The last decent Spielberg movie (and the one he's been coasting on ever since) was Jaws. Which, if it had gone as planned, would have been a hopeless piece of crap, dominated by an absurd-looking mechanical shark. Fortunately, Bruce (yes, he had a name!) was broken most of the time, and being on a tight schedule, Spielberg had to shoot around him. Which meant a lot of improvising by a team of very talented actors. And which meant portraying the shark mainly as an ominous presence, which the critics consider a stroke of genius, forgetting that it was just a last-minute fallback. And most of all, it meant that Bruce was on-screen long enough to scare the bejesus out of people, but not long enough for them to notice how fake he looked.
You didn't read my post (I was talking about children of gays, not gays themselves). And you obviously pulled your numbers out of your ass. So why am I talking to you?
Oh yeah, needed to tell you something. You're an idiot.
as well as demo versions of the text processing application Textmaker and the spreadsheet application Planmaker (from Softmaker - but do we really need another office suite?).
But Softmaker applications run on OS/2! Not that many office suites still stupport OS/2!
Isn't that the whole point? Forget this nonsense about challenging Windows on the desktop. Linux is an OS by and for hackers. Hackers need stuff to hack: lots of little toys to play with. That's why most distros not only supply 8 different window managers (multiplied by 3 or so desktop environments!), but allow you to choose a different one each time you log in.
Then again, SuSE pretends to be more of a turnkey OS than that. (Unless they've changed -- I haven't looked at SuSE since before the UnitedLinux thing.) Instead of hacking the system at every little level, you're supposed to use the administration system they've wired in. You can easily bypass the system, and config it the old fashioned way (most SuSE users seem to prefer to do that) but that's not a supported setup, which means SuSE won't sell you tech support. Or has that changed?
Anyway, a distro with pretensions to serious non-hacker usage, like SuSE, should pick a standard set of tools and stick with them. I think SuSE actually tried to do this at the beginning, but couldn't resist pressure to include this package or that one.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to comment on "I can't really explain what makes us compatible.". If you figure it out, you should bottle it and sell it. That would be the end of your money issues!
I'm a tech writer, and the latest problem in my profession is: how do you interview an engineer who's never awake at the same time as you are? I suppose that problem is doable (though I haven't actually had to do it yet) but I'd balk at dealing with a sysadmin on the other side of the planet.
Interesting definition of "two way street". The guy's problem is to advance his career, the woman's is to make the sacrifices necessary for him to do so. How's your marriage, I wonder?
Couples often have to make difficult choices when one partner's needs conflict with those of the other. Does her problem with urban living rate with his problem finding work? That's something they have to decide for themselves -- you're in no position to decide for them.
I bought my current (and first) cell phone online, after spending a lot of time reading reviews and making comparisons. All of which was time wasted -- if I'd held the thing in my hands for 2 minutes, I'd have seen design flaws that all the reviewers managed to overlook. For some devices, there's no evaluation that can tell you more than actually using the damned thing.
What the world really needs is a cheap, non-bulky rechargable battery. It's the only thing that keeps solar power, wind power, electric cars, and a lot of other cool sustainable tech from happening. Conspiracy theories, anyone?
The term "blockbuster" was around for a long time before Jaws came out -- during WW II, it referred to a bomb capable of destroying a whole city block with a single blast. Don't recall if I ever heard it applied to movies before Jaws came out. I suppose this other meaning could have appeared independently, but I suspect that it's just a way of saying that a movie made a lot of noise.
Which is precisely why I mostly hate Hollywood movies -- they're too easy on the mind.
Unless they're authored by Rick Berman of course!
Superman is, of course, the very epitome of "make up the premise as you go along." I seem to recall that they originally explained all his powers by saying he came from a planet with heavy gravity, making him super-strong. But that didn't have enough wow-value...My least favorite crossover is X-Men meet Star Trek: TNG. Some things just shouldn't be allowed...
You're lucky that your favorite fantasy-verse is more or less consistent. I've seen Star Wars fanataics engage in just astonishing contortions to try to make all the movies, comic books, novelizations, and what not hang together. Don't know whether to pity or admire them.
The first Star Wars movie I saw was Empire Strikes Back. I really dug the "i am your father" scene. But a guy I went to the movie with was appalled, because it de-canonized one of his favorite SW comic books, which showed Vader and Anakin together in a flashback. Oh well!
I just finished reading this Israeli historical novel, where the Hebrew (or maybe Arabic) word for "forecastle" is repeatedly translated as "bridge". Drove me crazy, but at least it makes more sense than the more usual mistake, which is to call a quarterdeck a "bridge". (Isn't the bridge the place you steer the ship from?) Of course, this only bothers me because I happen to know that a bridge is a raised structure that wasn't invented until the age of steam. (Originally it was a literal bridge between the paddlewheel housings.) Most people don't know this sort of thing, and don't care, and look at nipickers like you and me with disdain and impatience.
Verne deserves credit for helping to establish SF as a genre where you play with ideas. But like many SF writers, he wasn't all that careful about playing with them in a plausible or logical manner. My favorite example is Around the World in 80 Days where the ending rests on Phineas Fogg's ignorance of the circumnavigator's paradox. Which is an interesting idea -- but is it really plausible that a guy could travel from Tokyo to London without once hearing anybody mention the date?
You're entitled to disagree with me. But if you don't explain why you disagree, why bother to post?
Thanks for pointing that out. Never would have occurred to me.
I enjoyed the first couple of HP books, though I'm not sure there's enough story there to sustain the books that have already been published, never mind two more.
I'm not a rabid fan, but I was disappointed by the first movie's failure to capture the feeling of the book. (No chance I'll go to any of the sequels.) My favorite scene in the first book is where Harry is all uptight about having to learn to ride a broom. All the other kids have been doing it all their lives, and he's never even touched a flyable broom. What if he makes an ass of himself? Then he goes to class and he already knows how. It's a magical (in a non-literal sense) moment that movie utterly fails to capture.
And then there's those moving staircases. In the books, people keep getting lost because all the rooms and corridors at Hogwarts are mysteriously enchanted. Cool! (And crucial to the plot in the latest book.) But in the movie, they explain the same thing by showing the staircases moving back and forth for no obvious reason. Lame.
Let me tell you why I first picked up a Harry Potter book. I heard this commentator on NPR talking about how he read the books to his elementary school class. The kids would not let him show them the illustrations, because they were too into the internal fantasies they'd formed about what Harry's life at Hogwarts must be like. Does Hollywood provoke that kind of imagining? It does not. Hollywood has to show everything, because it doesn't trust its audience.
Sometimes an adaptation promotes the original. Sometimes it destroys it. I've always been grateful that Bill Watterson never allowed any adaptations of Calvin and Hobbes. But now Rowling is a billionaire, so I guess that makes it all right.
Seeing a favorite book made into a bad movie isn't like having the glass half empty. It's like having the glass filled with some foul-smelling fluid that you have to drink, and people make fun of you if you can't do it without gagging.
Yeah, yours was the first site I hit when I Googled for sites that talk about the TV series. Your conceit (I hope that's what it is!) that all the books, movies, and series are somehow based on fact is amusing. It's meant to be amusing, right? Right?
This discussion brings to mind this really good docudrama about the making of the radio play and the way people responded to it. There are thoughts on the way mass media was emerging as an influence on what people believed, with appropriate references to emerging political media stars like Hitler and Roosevelt. And some amusing scenes, as the sound effects folks try to get just the right kind of sound, utilizing a microphone, a mason jar, and a toilet bowel!
I come from a cultural heritage (eastern European Jewish) that was basically eradicated by the Holocaust. Add that to the usual immigrant identity crisis and guilt-tripping, and you have a subject matter that's so painful to deal with, I could never form an objective appreciation of a movie on the subject. So I might as well concede that I have no real opinion about the quality of Schindler's List. It's simply that every other post-Jaws Spielberg movie has motivated my disgust. The adventure movies are painfully derivative (by intent, but that doesn't make it any better), mindless, sadistic, and over-long. The more serious movies are hyper-sentimental and lack any real humanity. Perhaps Schindler is an exception. I'll never know.
If my personal taste has no value, what about yours? Plenty of critics hated Private Ryan. As for Schindler, the subject of the movie totally precludes anything like objective analysis.
It's called being "on message". You pick an idea that appeals to people and you repeat it as often as you can. Never mind if it's illogical or even irrelevent to the subject at hand. (Journalists complain that politicians don't answer questions any more, they just recide the message-du-jour.) What matters is the picture created in the minds of the voter the politician is targeting.
Appalling? Nauseating? Sure. But I'm darned if I know what to do about it.
I have to pick nits with your hero H.G. Using giant cannon to send your invasion force? Navigation issues aside, how can thin layers of Martian Jam invade anything?
As for Steven Spielberg -- I'm probably the only living human who knows this, but he's totally overrated, the epitome of everything I hate about Hollywood. What has he done of any real quality? Lots of brainless adventure movies, just disneyland rides caught on film. Films based on popular mythology about flying saucers. And "literary" films that totally fail to capture the spirit of the book he's adapting. Rounded out by the nausea-inducing, bloated Oedipus-fest, A.I. His script is real, but he is not.
The last decent Spielberg movie (and the one he's been coasting on ever since) was Jaws. Which, if it had gone as planned, would have been a hopeless piece of crap, dominated by an absurd-looking mechanical shark. Fortunately, Bruce (yes, he had a name!) was broken most of the time, and being on a tight schedule, Spielberg had to shoot around him. Which meant a lot of improvising by a team of very talented actors. And which meant portraying the shark mainly as an ominous presence, which the critics consider a stroke of genius, forgetting that it was just a last-minute fallback. And most of all, it meant that Bruce was on-screen long enough to scare the bejesus out of people, but not long enough for them to notice how fake he looked.
And that's Hollywood!
Oh yeah, needed to tell you something. You're an idiot.
Then again, SuSE pretends to be more of a turnkey OS than that. (Unless they've changed -- I haven't looked at SuSE since before the UnitedLinux thing.) Instead of hacking the system at every little level, you're supposed to use the administration system they've wired in. You can easily bypass the system, and config it the old fashioned way (most SuSE users seem to prefer to do that) but that's not a supported setup, which means SuSE won't sell you tech support. Or has that changed?
Anyway, a distro with pretensions to serious non-hacker usage, like SuSE, should pick a standard set of tools and stick with them. I think SuSE actually tried to do this at the beginning, but couldn't resist pressure to include this package or that one.