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  1. HHG movie - something for everyone on Slashback: Cameos, Sculpture, Brimstone · · Score: 3, Interesting

    what the BBC is saying here:

    for non-fans, it's a fun romp with some gags and plenty of fun effect to look at. ooh! a cute, crazy little robot! buy the plushie!

    for those that are already fans of the books (and whatnot) you're going to hate it with a passion! but come back twice - there's more in jokes that you missed the first time because you were crying in your popcorn over the sheer bloody stupidity of it all. and look! there's douglas adams' nose! again!

    (from TFA: "There are tons of things crammed in there. Basically if we needed a prop or a name for something we just used the original material as a reference.")

    it seems to me that, in reality, when they needed a prop or something to fill in the space, they used bits of the author's corpse, and the money-grubbing whores that are his surviving family.

  2. HHG - look closer on Slashback: Cameos, Sculpture, Brimstone · · Score: 3, Funny

    [SPOILER]
    if you look closer - pay attention in the second reel - you can see Douglas Adams actually spinning in his grave.
    [/SPOILER]

  3. Re:I'm happy without virtual desktops... on Brief Tutorial on Reverse Engineering Mac OS X · · Score: 1

    i usually run 4 desktops using desktop manager. one with my email in it, full screen; one with my web browser(s) peppered on the screen; one with whatever actual work i'm doing; and one with my admin tools full screen. it's very easy to do a full-screen term window as a .term file, pop that open on desktop #2 at login...

    it used to be that my 2 monitor setup confused my coworkers, but you should see the bug-eyes i get when i switch from desktop to desktop - each looking different from the last. i've had people start looking for the other computer under my desk.

  4. whither flash 8 / mx 2005? on Adobe Buys Macromedia for $3.4B · · Score: 1

    at south by southwest, i witnessed an excellent demonstration of what will, hopefully, become flash 8 - the player at least. the IDE will likely be called MX2005. regardless of how it's named, the next version of flash will be (will have been?) a great leap forward in performance, especially on mac and linux browsers. while vague on timing, the indication was that the player and IDE would be released or at least previewed in the next couple of months.

    the single biggest question i have about this whole merger / acquisition / eating of the corspe of macromedia is 'are they still going to release flash 8?' or will it be put on hold until adobe has a chance to crap all over it? don't get me wrong, i hate flash with a passion, but it keeps me billable. i have to shut off whole parts of my brain to work within its interface, but i'm used to doing that just to talk to my coworkers, too... i can only imagine how bad it will be if adobe takes and futzes with it before release

    i recall the days of golive 2 - i didn't have enough sense to start down the road of dreamweaver, but then there were a lot of things i regret from those days... anyhow, adobe bought golive, shat out the next release with the adobe interface plastered on, called it a must-have upgrade so they could make some more money that quarter. it was a hellish mix of the old and new keyboard shortcuts, dialog boxes, menu and naming conventions. there were even several error messages that still said "golive cyberstudio" on them. similar things can be said of the first release (hell, all releases) of pagemaker since they bought aldus. and after effects - that was an improvement, at least, but they didn't get it right until about version 5.

    as it is, i can generally switch gears pretty well when going from an adobe app to a macromedia one (and again to an apple one). how much will it mess with my instincts to go into some hybrid of the two for the next release?

    being in charge of purchasing software for the macs at my company, i'll recommend for my office that we sit out the next version of the CS/MX suites. i'm probably not alone.

  5. Re:Anyone who says... on Hitchhiker's Movie is Bad, says Adams Biographer · · Score: 3, Informative

    couple of things...

    "wear gown"
    "put all in thing"
    "put thing in gown"

    unlimited inventory.

    and the guy's douglas adams' fucking biographer for christsakes. of course his review smacks of idolatry. i'd be amazed if it didn't so smack.

  6. Re:The point here... on Apple Easter Egg · · Score: 1

    older, i think DPx versions of X had a fun one. maybe it was rhapsody...

    do a ctl+alt+del at the login prompt, or i think anywhere in the finder, and a dialog would pop up informing you that you were not using Windows NT.

    (ah! found an ars technica review of DP3: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/macos-x-dp3/ma cos-x-dp3-4.html

  7. Re:anyone care to translate? on Apple Easter Egg · · Score: 1

    thanks much.

    so, which one were you in the video?

  8. one egg i've always wanted to try on Apple Easter Egg · · Score: 1

    i have a lot of macs at home. a LOT. but i don't have a mac classic. color classic, 512k, SE, SE/30... yes. but not a classic. or a 128... but that's another rant.

    apparently the classic had an undocumented feature in the ROM that allowed it to boot without a floppy. if one held down Command + Option + X + O whilst turning on the computer, it would boot into a very limited system 6.0.3 shoehorned into the ROM.

    considering how much room this took up in the precious ROM, and how bloody useful it would be to boot without spinning media, it's amazing it was hidden away.

    http://www.savetz.com/ku/ku/byard_system_in_the_ma chine_the_january_1991.html for more.

  9. anyone care to translate? on Apple Easter Egg · · Score: 1

    can anyhone translate what they're geeking out about when showing off the board? there's some gushing about components on both sides of the board, which is understandably new back then, but then they go on about "new age" - is that the ROM? i thought the new age macs were much more recent than the quadras, more in the PPC realm?

    and civic-1?

    PS1?

    and the leftover port for "when all our video-in stuff was out on separate boards" did they ship with that still on? did they call it karma?

    anyhow, i find it interesting that, despite the fact that they could probably have all been fired for being part of the egg, or at least whoever put the 91 meg video on the master could have been sacked, they were still a little coy about putting things on the video itself. the sound cuts out as they're talking, i presume about something on the board that they shouldn't have said, and there's one guy on the team wearing a badge he didn't want on camera, "what do you mean we can't show that? what are they going to do"

    "to you?"

    interesting glimpse into those days. i used to fight to get one of the quadras in the labs at school. the alternative was a centris.

  10. worst. themsesong. ever. on Enterprise Finale Synopsis Released · · Score: 1



    yeah. i had high hopes for a prequel series when the buzz started up about it... i think i first read about it on /. actually

    but as soon as the first episode started up and that... song... oozed out of the speakers... sweet mother of crap, that was awful. it killed the mood, shat on the entire majesty and nobility of the journey into the unknown that makes trek, well Trek.

    even TNG, on its worst wesley crusherest of days, still kept the spirit alive, though it was sitting in a corner, crying a little. a big part of it was characters like picard, but, as with a lot of the best movies and series, one of the characters was the music. in my mind, enterprise was DOA in that department.

    well, that and the decision to make enterprise's pre-TOS technology too far advanced. where are the knobs and switches? analog, kitschy interfaces would have made things a little humorous, but the series took itself way too seriously anyway. that and the transporter. i wanted so badly for them to not have that plotcrutch to lean on. to have to write themselves out of a wet paper bag, without the deus ex machina of instant matter transmission.

    and time travel. god, how readily that's trotted out when the soup gets thin. it's all somehow worse than the dark days of deus ex wesley. at least those episodes can be explained by a writers' strike. or so i'd like to believe.

    paramount should have hired the writing team from firefly as soon as fox let them out of their contract, killing off the last great hope of many scifi tv fans. firefly will be missed.

    in the long run, though, enterprise will not be mourned, at least not any more than ensign whatshisname that got killed that time. the one in the red shirt that transported down to that planet...

  11. i did some math back in the day... on A History of Icons · · Score: 1
    [this was back before Mac OS 9, 1998ish, when mac icons were 32x32 @ 32 bits/pixel with 16x16 versions as well. i had just started creating my own custom icons, and was intrigued by the idea that i could potentially write a program to create every possible bitmap icon, but thought about where to store them.]

    i thought i'd share with you folks the results of a few moments' inspiration, and several moments' calculation - hey it was a friday afternoon.

    i was thinking today, with the number of icons i have stuffed away on my hard drive, just how many possible icons there could be, and, consequently, could i have them all (would i have room)?

    so, i looked at 8 bit icons first. 8 bits means 7 bits (255 levels) of color and 1 bit (2 levels) for transparency. this isn't exacly how it works in icons, but it's close enough. so let's say 256 possible colors for each of 1024 (32 columns x 32 rows) pixels in a standard 8 bit, 32x32 icon.

    though it's been a while since i did any permutation/combination, i think this means that an icon can take on any one of 256^1024 (256x256x256... 1024 times). and that's just the 8 bit, 32x32 variety. which, to answer my first question, is a very, very large number of possible icon combinations - the iconfactory will never go out of business. not in my lifetime, anyway.

    so, would i be able to store them all?

    considering each 8 bit icon takes on a 4 bit and 1 bit version, as well as a 1 bit mask, _and_ 16x16 (256 pixel) versions of same, each custom icon takes up 2240 bytes ((8 + 4 + 1 + 1 * 1024) + (8 + 4 + 1 + 1 * 256) bits) (resedit shows 2640 bytes, what's the other 400?). so, in one megabyte, i can theoretically store 3,177 uncompressed icons. on a one gig drive, that's about 3,253,763. compressed? ask aladdin.

    unfortunately, i have no calculator that will tell me an actual numerical answer to 2240x(256^1024) but suffice it to say, it's quite a large number. much too large to be contained on any hard drive i own.

    now, if you consider that macos 8.5 added a 32 bit icon to the mix (24 bits color + 8 bits tranparency) the number of possible icons jumps to a whopping 4,294,967,296^1024, and that multiplied by the additional 4k per icon.. well, i doubt even nasa has that kind of storage. well, maybe nasa.

    - bored with a calculator on a friday afternoon -
  12. start where i did on Integrating Microsoft's AD into Apple's OD? · · Score: 1

    o'reilly's article - a little out of date now, but still valid.

    and AFP548.com - run by the guy i took OS X server classes from.

  13. Cutest. 404. Ever. on Bipedal Dinosaur Robot · · Score: 1

    silly buggers, never post a direct link to a movie on slashdot...

  14. Newton OS 2.x on In Which OS Do You Feel More Productive? · · Score: 1

    Newton OS 2 on a MessagePad 2100.

    best, most useful UI out there, even a decade since its design.

  15. in defense of the dock on Was the Mac mini Intended to Have an iPod dock? · · Score: 1

    the logic behind the dock connector, as i see it, is in the third party support.

    the original ipod's remote connector and standard firewire connection limited its potential to connect to anything but third party remote replacements and, though i don't recall anyone doing so, some clever hacks based on firewire.

    with the dock, apple supplies the third parties with a way to get line in and out (not just headphone, but line level, which is important), power, and all kinds of other goodies.

    it is a proprietary connector, and one that doesn't exist on any other device, but i think it's safe to say, even with the original dock-connected ipod, that apple could count on enough demand for ipods that they would create a demand for the third party peripherals to jump on board.

    it also opened up the possibility to use other means to connect your ipod than firewire - USB, for instance (maybe wirelessly with the right adapter someday) without having to ugly up the lines of the ipod with more and more ports most people wouldn't use. or, for that matter, branching the line with different flavors for different connectors. with a dock-connected ipod, you can connect over USB or firewire, plug in an FM transmitter, microphone, speakers, CF card reader, battery pack, even a laser pointer and flashlight - not at the same time, mind you. if apple had built all that, or even a couple of different, more industry-standard connectors into the ipod itself, it would never have been the jobsian elegant bar-of-soap that it is.

  16. more awful than the most awful thing ever on Fan Group Creates Full-Length Discworld Movie · · Score: 1

    worse even than awfulness itself, which is, you have to admit, pretty awful.

    and really... why lords and ladies? why not start at the beginning and do the colour of magic... i suppose L&L has elves. and the nac mac feegle. oh, and the witches. and cohen, it seems... can't remember that part...

    as long as it has DEATH, it's all good in my book.

    so, maybe not as awful as i thought.

    be great if peter jackson would commit to the whole series. maybe as a... what do you call a trilogy with 37 parts? maybe after king kong...

  17. Re:More chest-pounding... on Napster To Campaign Aggressively Against iPod · · Score: 1

    like, say, $10 for an album, and you can burn it to an audio CD?

  18. replay extinct? on EFF Creates Endangered Gizmos List · · Score: 1

    as far as i can tell, my replay 5000 series does everything the 4000 series did, except share shows over the internet - a dubious feature at best (when the service was available, there was no bittorrent to make the bandwidth burden easier. when a show i copy from my 5080 over to my mac takes a half hour over ethernet, i cringe to think how long it would take to upload to a friend over cable/DSL)

    there's still a 30 second skip button, and it doesn't take a hack to activate it. for that matter, if you press the forward arrow on the remote, the show skips forward to the next "chapter" - on most shows these are set (don't ask me how they're set - the box seems to know where they are) at the beginning and end of each commercial break. even the 30 second skip knows where these are and usually drops into the video about a second before the end of the last commercial in a break in lieu of jumping the full 30 seconds ahead.

    as a longtime mac user, i'm used to people forecasting the doom and extinction of the things i own and their manufacturer, so i'm not too upset by my "fringe" DVR being called extinct. i just hope replay (or their new owners, anyway) stick around and do as well as Apple has since they were all but declared dead in the mid '90s

  19. it's an iTunes remote. on Rumored iPod Flash Leaked · · Score: 1

    iTunes remote control. not an iPod.

    control the mac in your office you're running iTunes on and streaming the audio to your living room stereo with airport express.

    i thought it might have some display to show the current song/playlist, but i must have been wrong. could be handled with a small display/receiver unit (not shown) that sits on your stereo shelf...

    kinda like this: http://www.keyspan.com/products/usb/urm17a/ only cooler and Apple-simple.

    just riffing. i don't know anything.

  20. encouraging, actually on Serenity Pushed Back to September · · Score: 1

    from TFA:
    "And now they have seen it, and unless they're way better liars than I'm used to, they dug it. Actually, they dug it pretty large, which is a good sign since there's not a single finished effect in the film. There's no reworking the end, no reshoots, no "does it have to be in space?". It's just a marketing issue. Now you'll get to watch lots of trailers in the summer."

    studio execs dug it large. how often does that happen?

    i love the "does it have to be in space" comment, since i seem to recall one of the commentary tracks from the DVD set talking about how hard it was to convince people at fox that the show should, in fact, happen in space. or could, for that matter.

    looking forward to september '05.

  21. hm. seven. on New Hominid Species Unearthed in Indonesia · · Score: 1

    hate to self-reply, but i read the BBC coverage, and it indicated that there was only one specimen. the ABC news coverage says there's seven - which i originally thought to be a lame snow white joke by the poster.

    my bad.

    but still, my question is a valid one - how much can we make from a sample size of one specimen (i.e. Lucy)?

  22. one specimen on New Hominid Species Unearthed in Indonesia · · Score: 3, Interesting

    it always concerns me that paleontologists and anthropologists are always so excited over finding *one* specimen. and usually just a partial one at that.

    i'm no paleontologist (and i don't play one on tv, either) so i don't know exactly how well you can really extrapolate a whole species' traits from one specimen. do you know, for instance, that it's genetically "normal" for its species? was it typical of the nutritional, physical, and in the case of hominids, social environment?

    for instance, what would be the inference if a future archaeologist found the skeletal remains of the following: someone born with Down Syndrome, someone with Marfan Syndrome, and someone with one of the 522 different types of dwarfism - skeletons or models of which can typically be found in better natural history and science museums around the world.

    where, for instance, are Lucy's kin? and she's the basis for whole shelves of books on human evolution.

  23. the ultimate Murphy on Probe Crash Due to Misdesigned Deceleration Sensor · · Score: 1

    i seem to recall a series of stories on slashdot about the origination of the ubiquitous Murphy's Law. they centered around the first experiments of excessive gee forces on humans, and the phrase was first used in conjunction with a set of accelerometers wired backwards.

    here's the link to the story: http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume9/v 9i5/murphy/murphy0.html
    (remove the fnords... er.. slashdot inserted spaces)

  24. visions of linux-powered newton dance in my head on World's First Linux Computer In A CF Card · · Score: 3, Interesting

    i read the blurb, and skimmed the article, and immediately an idea formed in my head.

    i have a newton messagepad 2100 (two of them, actually). i'd love to be able to shove this little CF module into its PC card slot (with one of the PCMCIA/CF converter doohickeys i have) and use the newton's display with the processor (and all the other good bits) on the card. 8 megs of flash and 32 megs of ram is considerably more than the newton's 4 of each. i'd love the capacity to run a good, scaled down linux install built for PDA installs on the newt's half VGA screen and still-impressive battery life.

    this would be a sweet hack, if someone could manage it. hell, i'd buy three.

    incidentally, the newt has a strongARM 110 running at 161.9 MHz, which i've read does 150 MIPS (considerably more than the 63 the CFC does)

  25. original lyric on Parody or Satire? Threat To Sue JibJab · · Score: 1

    a verse cut before most published recordings of the song, but included in the manuscript:

    Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
    A sign was painted said: Private Property,
    But on the back side it didn't say nothing --
    [God blessed America for me.]

    says it all.