Keanu as Klaatu. Don't forget that part of the story. Keanu Reeves adds suck to just about anything he touches. His manager/agent recently got the rights to do a live-action version of Cowboy Bebop, so now it's almost a certainty that will be FUBAR as well. Keanu will either be Spike or Vicious. Guaranteed suckfest.
There's something called Multipath Interference that happens when a line-of-sight signal hits a bunch of obstacles. Like buildings. The signal degrades, and degrades, and degrades, and you wind up with not being able to lock on to some channels. You wind up with what I call the "Max Headroom effect" where the picture freezes with lots of blocky artifacting and the sound repeats like a stuck CD. Yet another reason why that show was so goddamn prophetic.
Anyway, not everyone can stick an uber-antenna or antenna farm on their roof. And indoor antennas fucking suck, even the legendary Silver Sensor which is better than most. So there will be a lot of angry people come February. And they won't just be the people who forgot to buy their sucky digital TV converter box and digital TV grade antenna.
This whole issue would have been better solved by forcing cable and satellite companies to sell a "lifeline package" to low-income people, and just saying "On February 17, 2009, broadcast TV is going bye-bye." But the electronics companies smelled money, and corporate welfare money at that, so they sold the FCC a bill of goods.
OTA Digital TV works in flat rural areas where people have money and land enough to put up mega-antennas, and there are no buildings to cause multipath for miles. Mongoloid Middle America will be set. Those of us in the cities, on the other hand...suck it up or get cable or satellite, bitches.
Dr. Randy Pausch was part of the team that created Alice, a tool to teach programming masquerading as a game. Salute Dr. Pausch's memory by downloading Alice and playing with it. And if you can, help the effort to finish Alice v. 3!
But the program will NOT transcode from.VOB to.DV. That's all I want to do. I want to point Handbrake to a VOB and have it transcode direct to.DV, particularly Final Cut-friendly.DV. Yeah I'm on a Mac. MacBook Core 2 Duo (Merom) 2GHz. I converted from.VOB to.MKV, then I took the.MKV into VisualHub. The transcode in VisualHub died silently towards the end. Fail.
There has GOT to be a better way. On Mac. I'm willing to learn command line apps to do this if I can take a.VOB and convert direct to.DV.
I was not aware of the long leash Dell and HP are giving their respective boutique gamer divisions. I suppose that's also the reason why neither Voodoo nor Alienware mentions the mergers on their websites...in fact, I was actually expecting to be diverted to an HP or a Dell web page, respectively, when I went to their sites before writing the initial post. The plot thickens.
1.) Wall-E watches Hello, Dolly by piping the input from an old fashioned VHS VCR through an iPod Video, and magnifies the screen with a fresnel lens. 2.) Old Quadra-vintage Mac Chord sound when Wall-E hits full solar charge. 3.) Eve was designed by Jonathan Ive, the creator of many Apple designs. 4.) Eve is made of the same shiny white plastic that has covered Mac products since the first Snow iMac, and the first white iBook. 5.) Eve's reboot sound is reminiscent of the 20th Anniversary Mac sound, the first and last time the sound was used. 6.) Autopilot also looks designed by Apple. 7.) Autopilot's voice is "Ralph," a Mac voice that dates back to the 68K era. The voice is credited as "Macintalk" in the end credits. 8.) Many have pointed out that Wall-E's eyes seem to do the same type of internal adjustments that the iSight did. 9.) The "foreign contaminant" voice that M-O uses is another Mac voice called "Zarvox." Zarvox is also from the same batch that Ralph is from. 10.) The fried card inside Wall-E, and also the cards Eve tries to use to replace it, all look like Apple II expansion cards.
Ahem...there is Freeware for Mac OS X. There is also F/OSS for Mac OS X. And if you want more F/OSS, you can use Fink or MacPorts. Fink basically gives Mac OS X Debian file tools, and MacPorts gives Mac OS X the FreeBSD Ports system. Finally, if one can get the source code and you have Mac developer tools installed, you can roll your own. Use the Source, Luke.
You can now conceivably run your Mac completely with F/OSS equivalents of all the useful stuff one uses that one usually pays for. It's nice to have the iApps but they aren't even necessary unless you want to bring in and edit video. For that purpose iMovie '06 (a free download for those who have iMovie '08 or even just an iMovie '08 license) is best unless you want to pay for something better like Premiere or Final Cut Express.
...and at this juncture some of the best Windows computers are Macs. You heard me right. They also make some of the best Linux computers. Now that MacIntel is the standard architecture for Macintosh, some people are actually running Windows or Linux on them. The reason why they do it? It's because quality control at the major PC manufacturers is down in the dumpster. If you want something that's built as good on the PC side, you have to go with boutique manufacturers like VoodooPC or Alienware, and even those are questionable because VoodooPC is now owned by HP and Alienware is owned by Dell. Since Lenovo took over the ThinkPad and ThinkCentre lines from IBM, quality has gone down the crapper quicker than you can say "ni hao."
Of course, part of the experience of Macs includes Mac OS X. And the folks who buy Macs only to put Windows or Linux on them are kind of unclear on the concept, in my not so humble opinion. Mac OS X is right now the best Unix or Unix-like operating system on the desktop. Now that Leopard is at 10.5.4 it is just plain awesome and just plain works. 10.5.2 was good for me too and so was 10.5.3, but I had no occasion to use 802.11n connectivity and I know that broke with 10.5.2. With 10.5.4 even those with 802.11n wireless access points are happy.
Still, if it means more people with Macs regardless of what OS they run, that's fine by me. More Macs sold equals more visibility for Mac. Everyone assumes that Macs run Mac OS X so the bigger the market share the more likely people will consider Mac users as more than fringies.
Here's a definitive (at least as far as my observations go) list of Apple and Mac references in Wall-E:
1.) Old Quadra-vintage Mac Chord sound when Wall-E hits full solar charge. 2.) Eve was designed by Jonathan Ive, the creator of many Apple designs. 3.) Eve is made of the same shiny white plastic that has covered Mac products since the first Snow iMac, and the first white iBook. 4.) Eve's reboot sound is reminiscent of the 20th Anniversary Mac sound, the first and last time the sound was used. 5.) Autopilot also looks designed by Apple. 6.) Autopilot's voice is "Ralph," a Mac voice that dates back to the 68K era. 7.) Many have pointed out that Wall-E's eyes seem to do the same type of internal adjustments that the iSight did. 8.) The "foreign contaminant" voice that M-O uses is another Mac voice called "Zarvox." Zarvox is also from the same batch that Ralph is from. 9.) The fried card inside Wall-E, and also the cards Eve tries to use to replace it, all look like Apple II expansion cards.
Yes, I know. But right now the Ubuntu variants are the easiest distro for the Great Unwashed to use. And whatever you need on top of the original install is just a few clicks in Synaptic away.
...is pronounced LIE-nuss in the US. Not LIH-nuss. Or LEE-nuss. Everyone knows Peanuts. Everyone knows Linus, the little boy with the security blanket. So the natural tendency in the US is to pronounce LIH-nux LIE-nux. Probably most people you will meet outside of geeky circles won't know what Minix is. So nobody will get the joke that spawned the "correct" pronunciation of Linux. So why fight it? LIE-nuss is your security blanket to keep you secure and your files safe from the aftermath of nasty crashes.
Someone needs to do artwork of Tux with a security blanket.
I'd like to see them make the top-level domain.lan a "non-routable" top level domain. Then again,.local would still be a "not legal" TLD and most people use that anyway.
And let's face it...in the early days Linux really was a bear to install and administer. You really did need to be a guru. Now? Not so much. I suspect that with ASUS EeePCs coming pre-installed with an easy, friendly, shiny happy Linux, people will finally be in their comfort zones with Linux. You don't buy an Eee with the expectation of a full-function computer, you buy an Eee with the expectation of a machine a little north of a PDA, a little south of a laptop. So you are more open to a new interface and new apps.
I think Linux on the Desktop will fly, finally...but it will start its flight in unconventional laptops and desktops, not in standard desktops and desktop-replacement laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
Better pic here. Perhaps Lenovo should have used Red Flag Linux for this mission-critical application?
McCain and Obama on geek issues. This also covers candidates who have been eliminated from the race.
Keanu as Klaatu. Don't forget that part of the story. Keanu Reeves adds suck to just about anything he touches. His manager/agent recently got the rights to do a live-action version of Cowboy Bebop, so now it's almost a certainty that will be FUBAR as well. Keanu will either be Spike or Vicious. Guaranteed suckfest.
...is that nobody talks about Hushmail.
http://www.hanzismatter.com/.
Spindler was also a gross incompetent.
...so yeah, it's kind of assured the 3D animation will be state of the art.
...urban reception of OTA Digital TV.
There's something called Multipath Interference that happens when a line-of-sight signal hits a bunch of obstacles. Like buildings. The signal degrades, and degrades, and degrades, and you wind up with not being able to lock on to some channels. You wind up with what I call the "Max Headroom effect" where the picture freezes with lots of blocky artifacting and the sound repeats like a stuck CD. Yet another reason why that show was so goddamn prophetic.
Anyway, not everyone can stick an uber-antenna or antenna farm on their roof. And indoor antennas fucking suck, even the legendary Silver Sensor which is better than most. So there will be a lot of angry people come February. And they won't just be the people who forgot to buy their sucky digital TV converter box and digital TV grade antenna.
This whole issue would have been better solved by forcing cable and satellite companies to sell a "lifeline package" to low-income people, and just saying "On February 17, 2009, broadcast TV is going bye-bye." But the electronics companies smelled money, and corporate welfare money at that, so they sold the FCC a bill of goods.
OTA Digital TV works in flat rural areas where people have money and land enough to put up mega-antennas, and there are no buildings to cause multipath for miles. Mongoloid Middle America will be set. Those of us in the cities, on the other hand...suck it up or get cable or satellite, bitches.
Dr. Randy Pausch was part of the team that created Alice, a tool to teach programming masquerading as a game. Salute Dr. Pausch's memory by downloading Alice and playing with it. And if you can, help the effort to finish Alice v. 3!
But the program will NOT transcode from .VOB to .DV. That's all I want to do. I want to point Handbrake to a VOB and have it transcode direct to .DV, particularly Final Cut-friendly .DV. Yeah I'm on a Mac. MacBook Core 2 Duo (Merom) 2GHz. I converted from .VOB to .MKV, then I took the .MKV into VisualHub. The transcode in VisualHub died silently towards the end. Fail.
There has GOT to be a better way. On Mac. I'm willing to learn command line apps to do this if I can take a .VOB and convert direct to .DV.
I was not aware of the long leash Dell and HP are giving their respective boutique gamer divisions. I suppose that's also the reason why neither Voodoo nor Alienware mentions the mergers on their websites...in fact, I was actually expecting to be diverted to an HP or a Dell web page, respectively, when I went to their sites before writing the initial post. The plot thickens.
Missed the most obvious one...doggone-it!
1.) Wall-E watches Hello, Dolly by piping the input from an old fashioned VHS VCR through an iPod Video, and magnifies the screen with a fresnel lens.
2.) Old Quadra-vintage Mac Chord sound when Wall-E hits full solar charge.
3.) Eve was designed by Jonathan Ive, the creator of many Apple designs.
4.) Eve is made of the same shiny white plastic that has covered Mac products since the first Snow iMac, and the first white iBook.
5.) Eve's reboot sound is reminiscent of the 20th Anniversary Mac sound, the first and last time the sound was used.
6.) Autopilot also looks designed by Apple.
7.) Autopilot's voice is "Ralph," a Mac voice that dates back to the 68K era. The voice is credited as "Macintalk" in the end credits.
8.) Many have pointed out that Wall-E's eyes seem to do the same type of internal adjustments that the iSight did.
9.) The "foreign contaminant" voice that M-O uses is another Mac voice called "Zarvox." Zarvox is also from the same batch that Ralph is from.
10.) The fried card inside Wall-E, and also the cards Eve tries to use to replace it, all look like Apple II expansion cards.
Damn, forgot to put that one on the list! #^_^#
Ahem...there is Freeware for Mac OS X. There is also F/OSS for Mac OS X. And if you want more F/OSS, you can use Fink or MacPorts. Fink basically gives Mac OS X Debian file tools, and MacPorts gives Mac OS X the FreeBSD Ports system. Finally, if one can get the source code and you have Mac developer tools installed, you can roll your own. Use the Source, Luke.
You can now conceivably run your Mac completely with F/OSS equivalents of all the useful stuff one uses that one usually pays for. It's nice to have the iApps but they aren't even necessary unless you want to bring in and edit video. For that purpose iMovie '06 (a free download for those who have iMovie '08 or even just an iMovie '08 license) is best unless you want to pay for something better like Premiere or Final Cut Express.
There. Hope that helps.
...and at this juncture some of the best Windows computers are Macs. You heard me right. They also make some of the best Linux computers. Now that MacIntel is the standard architecture for Macintosh, some people are actually running Windows or Linux on them. The reason why they do it? It's because quality control at the major PC manufacturers is down in the dumpster. If you want something that's built as good on the PC side, you have to go with boutique manufacturers like VoodooPC or Alienware, and even those are questionable because VoodooPC is now owned by HP and Alienware is owned by Dell. Since Lenovo took over the ThinkPad and ThinkCentre lines from IBM, quality has gone down the crapper quicker than you can say "ni hao."
Of course, part of the experience of Macs includes Mac OS X. And the folks who buy Macs only to put Windows or Linux on them are kind of unclear on the concept, in my not so humble opinion. Mac OS X is right now the best Unix or Unix-like operating system on the desktop. Now that Leopard is at 10.5.4 it is just plain awesome and just plain works. 10.5.2 was good for me too and so was 10.5.3, but I had no occasion to use 802.11n connectivity and I know that broke with 10.5.2. With 10.5.4 even those with 802.11n wireless access points are happy.
Still, if it means more people with Macs regardless of what OS they run, that's fine by me. More Macs sold equals more visibility for Mac. Everyone assumes that Macs run Mac OS X so the bigger the market share the more likely people will consider Mac users as more than fringies.
Here's a definitive (at least as far as my observations go) list of Apple and Mac references in Wall-E:
1.) Old Quadra-vintage Mac Chord sound when Wall-E hits full solar charge.
2.) Eve was designed by Jonathan Ive, the creator of many Apple designs.
3.) Eve is made of the same shiny white plastic that has covered Mac products since the first Snow iMac, and the first white iBook.
4.) Eve's reboot sound is reminiscent of the 20th Anniversary Mac sound, the first and last time the sound was used.
5.) Autopilot also looks designed by Apple.
6.) Autopilot's voice is "Ralph," a Mac voice that dates back to the 68K era.
7.) Many have pointed out that Wall-E's eyes seem to do the same type of internal adjustments that the iSight did.
8.) The "foreign contaminant" voice that M-O uses is another Mac voice called "Zarvox." Zarvox is also from the same batch that Ralph is from.
9.) The fried card inside Wall-E, and also the cards Eve tries to use to replace it, all look like Apple II expansion cards.
I think you mean Panavision.
Yes, I know. But right now the Ubuntu variants are the easiest distro for the Great Unwashed to use. And whatever you need on top of the original install is just a few clicks in Synaptic away.
Windows2000 Professional saved the world from Windows ME.
There, fixed that for you.
Something will save us from Vista.
Like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or Xubuntu.
...in the Big Blue Room.
TOWANDA!!!!!
Life imitates "Mirror, Mirror." Swell.
...is pronounced LIE-nuss in the US. Not LIH-nuss. Or LEE-nuss. Everyone knows Peanuts. Everyone knows Linus, the little boy with the security blanket. So the natural tendency in the US is to pronounce LIH-nux LIE-nux. Probably most people you will meet outside of geeky circles won't know what Minix is. So nobody will get the joke that spawned the "correct" pronunciation of Linux. So why fight it? LIE-nuss is your security blanket to keep you secure and your files safe from the aftermath of nasty crashes.
Someone needs to do artwork of Tux with a security blanket.
I'd like to see them make the top-level domain .lan a "non-routable" top level domain. Then again, .local would still be a "not legal" TLD and most people use that anyway.
And let's face it...in the early days Linux really was a bear to install and administer. You really did need to be a guru. Now? Not so much. I suspect that with ASUS EeePCs coming pre-installed with an easy, friendly, shiny happy Linux, people will finally be in their comfort zones with Linux. You don't buy an Eee with the expectation of a full-function computer, you buy an Eee with the expectation of a machine a little north of a PDA, a little south of a laptop. So you are more open to a new interface and new apps.
I think Linux on the Desktop will fly, finally...but it will start its flight in unconventional laptops and desktops, not in standard desktops and desktop-replacement laptops.