I'm always torn between Hush and Once More With Feeling as my favorite, with The Body coming in third. I think that between the three, there's such a huge amount of creativity and versatility demonstrated in the entire staff and cast.
Strong, capable, confident female characters? take your pick from BSG's female cast
Wait, really? Those are your ideas of strong, capable, confident female characters? Most of them ran to their men any time the chips were down, and one of them took the "easy" way out by shooting herself in the head (and prior to that scene, was pretty two-dimensional). They gave the appearance of being strong while really being pretty lame.
The closest thing to a strong female character in that show was Head Six, and that's only because Baltar was a submissive masochist who thought he needed punishing (well, right up until the Deus Ex moment when it turns out that she was just a force of God, the Universe, or whatever.)
I'll grant you the others, but BSG is a farce in this respect.
A big difference is that there were still constants. With Buffy, the constants were the good guys--her friends and family. With Dollhouse, the constants were a two-dimensional FBI agent whose motives we don't really know and an evil corporation who seems more neutral than evil. You might count the chlid-like dolls as constants, but they weren't compelling when they weren't imprinted, and the imprints went away every episode.
There was no one to identify with whatsoever. No one to really care about in a meaningful way. You cared about the dolls in the same way you care about starving children in another country (it feels bad and you might send over a dollar a day, but you don't connect with them.)
I'm not sure such a premise could ever really work on TV these days.
Serenity is one of the 5 movies he's written that actually made it to the screen, and it's the only movie he has directed. You might as easily say that he was too constrained by the TV show to really make it work--that he was too close to the original material.
As far as the rest of his feature film writing credits, he had success with Toy Story as writer. Titan AE and Alien Resurrection weren't bad, they just weren't great. Buffy...well it wasn't the story he wanted, but I'm not sure who's to blame for that.
There's a great body of work for the Avengers, too, but whoever ends up writing the final script also has a large precedent to muck around in the universe. Just about every comic book-turned-movie that was in any way successful has deviated significantly from the canon of the books. With Serenity, I could very easily see Whedon being unwilling to retcon anything.
One last thing to note is that The Avengers will be drawing heavily from the other movies in that universe. That means that creative control is likely to be pretty restricted. It's likely that we won't see any of Joss come through with the script or direction, if he ends up being selected.
I don't like it and don't think it should be used. I don't think it provides the customer anything that couldn't be done some other way. I was really only pointing out one of the reasons that it's so pervasive--something that it's good for.
You could have said the same thing about Visual Basic in the late 90s. It was a pain to track down DLLs for, and it wasn't cross-platform, but it enabled a whole bunch of people to churn out programs much more easily than if it hadn't existed.
In the end, web-based games are really pretty big right now. That's a market that most mobile devices decidedly fail to capture, relying on platform specific games. It's probably better this way, since the games likely won't translate well to devices which are smaller and/or touch-based. But for full computers, web-gaming wouldn't be anywhere near what it is today without Flash.
Not where I live. Where I live, all we've ever had was dial-up and then Big Content ISPs. We never had a broadband provider that wasn't a telco or part of a cable conglomerate.
I think you just fed a troll--the market forces comment was a clue.
That said, Flash is actually really good for developers. It's dead simple to write programs (with the existing commercial tools) so things like game development will be quicker in Flash than JS+HTML5+Canvas. The latter set of tools is also not universally supported yet (HTML5 isn't even standardized yet, I don't think.)
I read a story not all that long ago that stated that people are inclined to give people they trust quite a bit of power. That is, they might not care that the 43rd president of the United States can bypass the courts to obtain wiretaps, but when the 44th president inherits that power, they start to worry.
It's a facet of human nature, not hypocrisy. That, or hypocrisy is a facet of human nature.
In logic, his statement might be true. I can say "Every one of my BMWs is white." I have no BMWs, so my statement is logically true while being somewhat useless.
"Apple's monopoly is being abused," has a similar ring to it.
If we're talking about the iPhone/iPad market, then Apple does indeed have a "monopoly". This scope is equivalent to that of the x86 PC market. It's a specific type of device, made by a relatively small number of manufacturers.
It's more like the IBM PC than the x86 PC market. The IBM PC was the one which was effectively proprietary, but was eventually cloned. Did IBM have a monopoly on IBM PCs back then? Sure. Did they have a monopoly on personal computers? No, in fact, they launched their PC line in response to Apple.
Now, you might say that it's nothing like the Microsoft monopoly of the x86 PC market. In reality, however, they're very similar situations. In fact, Apple's monopoly is much worse than Microsoft's ever was. Microsoft only ever directly controlled the software. Apple, on the other hand, controls the software, the hardware, and the distribution channel.
Interestingly, if Microsoft had tried to do that from the beginning, they never would have succeeded in the market like they have. The rampant piracy of DOS combined with the ability to run anything you wanted on it (and write anything you wanted on it) almost certainly lead to the quick and massive uptake of the platform.
But the problem with the monopoly (any monopoly, really) is not inherent to having the vast majority of the market. The problem is using that as leverage to maintain your monopoly or grow even further. It would be hard to accuse Apple of anti-competitive behavior[1] with regards to the iPhone platform.
Even if you could make the case for that specific platform, that's not the market that the FTC would consider. They would consider the smartphone market, where Apple is a small player compared to the whole. There's no way that anyone could reasonably say that Apple has a monopoly in this market, and thus they aren't held to the same standards as Microsoft was in the late 90s.
With the iPad and iPhone, Apple is moving away from general computing. I would never consider griping that Samsung doesn't let me run Linux on my TV, even though there's a processor and memory in there quite capable of doing it. Apple is trying to establish some of their products as appliances. Whether or not this will hold up is still up in the air, but I have a hard time thinking that it's somehow wrong even if I don't like some of the implications of it. The iPhone feels very much like a tiny general-purpose computer. Calling it an appliance may well fail the duck-test if it comes to that.
[1] Or it would have been prior to the launch of the iPad. It's been found that Apple developers are not held to the same standards as everyone else when it comes to App-store approval. Apple developers are allowed to use private APIs that will get any other developer a quick rejection notice. Speculation is that this will be rectified in iPhone OS 4.0 with the expanded APIs.
I've had a very different experience. eSATA barely pushed more data for me with my setup. I think greed has it right--the rest of the hardware probably has quite a bit to do with performance in this arena.
Intel's naming scheme has been piss-poor for a long time. Some Core2Duos come with virtualization extensions, and some don't. There are differences even within the same model number (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#Intel_Virtualization_Technology_for_x86_.28Intel_VT-x.29 which says "# Pentium Dual-Core E6300, E6500, E6600 and some versions of the E5300 and E5400*" and "# Core 2 Duo E5400, E7600, E8200, E8300, E8400, E8500, E8600 and some versions of the E7400 and E7500 (Wolfdale)")
There's almost no way to correlate performance with processor number. Ghz is also out of the window due to architectural differences. It really makes me long for the days of the 286.
Damn them Linux gremlins! As for your post - i'm happy you didn't thought I was being offensive
No worries. It was a legitimate complaint!
i'd like to add that mac users are by definition more careful with their computers. They just didn't bought a computer, they bought a Mac, and that makes them be extra-careful with them. PC users just bought a random computer for whatever they needed it and are prepared to lay waste upon their components. I generally have a lot of care with my own PCs, but most people simply don't. They just sell-take apart, use as an ashtray or something similar with their old computers, and buy another one. That's not the case with Macs.
Maybe. There are certainly factors other than build-quality that could apply. The lower market-share combined with cost could simply mean that a different type of person, one who is more careful with their things, buys Macs. I'm not equipped to do a major study on such things, so all I can really do is speculate.
That sucks. That someone must have purchased it just before the Mac Pro with Intel was introduced in August 2006. By that point, though, anyone who was paying attention knew that the switch was coming and probably should have planned accordingly.
The fact that Apple was switching to Intel was announced in 2005, and the first products were available at the beginning of 2006. I sure as hell wouldn't have bought a machine based upon the older processor at that point.
Of course, Leopard's still getting updates. I doubt it will get them for as long as XP has, but that seems to be the exception (not the rule) for Microsoft. One should be able to find a copy of Leopard online pretty easily.
There are times they simply don't want to meddle with their machine.
Yeah, that's a big deal I think. Windows has gotten better, but they're playing catchup in this arena.
That said, OS X tends to be slow with the updates. They'll have vulnerable versions of e.g. Java for a long time between updates.
The Dell Latitude line is both durable (I use one) and pricey.
My last two notebooks have been Precisions, which are the same chassis as Latitudes, but more expensive (with a professional-grade graphics card.) So I feel your pain and agree with your assessment.:)
The hardware is falling to pieces.
That's what I see regularly.
My experience is hardly scientific, but anecdotally, I'm finding that others have similar experiences.
Exactly. I keep hearing and seeing these sorts of things. And then someone like Budenny comes along and says that they're not true, but doesn't even provide anecdotal evidence (much less a large body of it.)
I was referring to the person to whom I replied. He said that there were rave reports on reliability which are obviously false. I assume that he takes this position because they use a lot of commodity parts these days. It is a common argument.
I meant to say that there can obviously be build-quality differences, even within a brand, but there could be an element of abuse that is going on, too. If so, that would be an interesting area to explore. Why would Mac users be less abusive to their computers?
Obviously that didn't make it into my post. I blame gremlins and the fact that I posted from Linux.
3. eSATA isn't "sleek" enough for Apple; it needs a second power cable, has a relatively flimsy plug, has hot-plugging/compatibility issues, etc, etc.
I was really excited about eSATA on my last laptop. I plugged it in once to try it out, and never have since. My USB drive is perfectly adequate, more portable, doesn't require external power, etc.
6. Most people don't use ExpressCards; they'd rather have a slightly larger battery or other features taking up the space.
Damn straight. Who makes ExpressCards, anyway? What can you get in them? I remember talk of things like high-end video cards, capture cards, etc. but has any of it materialized/are they any good? And are you going to actually want one in a laptop?
I agree with the rest of your points, too, but these two hit home.
I think the problem is that in a lot of ways, the design really is very nice. There are a lot of really small touches that make Macs quite enjoyable to work with. It's hard to put a price tag on that. How much is a really good touchpad worth? Magsafe? Weight? Battery life? How much is running OS X worth if you hate Windows and don't have the time to manage/learn Linux?
Nor are they more reliable or longer lived. So what explains the rave reports on this subject?
I've done "family support" for decades. My laptops (none Macs, though I tend to get "business-class") get retired after 5 years in nearly perfect working order except for the battery. My family is lucky if their laptops last 2. System boards fail, connectors fail, optical drives fail, power connector (this is a big one) fails, etc.
Either there is a noticeable difference in build quality from the low-end to the high-end in e.g. Dells (that's pretty much all we buy) or I'm much more careful with my laptops. Or perhaps there's an element of both. But all we really have are a bunch of anecdotes, and the anecdotes point to the Macs lasting longer.
No, he USED a classic to make an "80GB Touch."[1] Pogoplug+Classic * iPod Touch+PogoApp.
[1] As long as he stays within the range of his wifi network. Otherwise it reverts back to a 16GB Touch (or whatever, I didn't pay that much attention to the article.)
It really is a pretty bad deal for the merchants. What they get out of it, though, is the ability to compete with other merchants who take credit cards. Since that is most other merchants, it just means that they're on equal footing. If they refused to take credit cards, they'd probably lose a lot of sales.
I'd love to have more proof of identity in purchasing with credit cards. Having had my CC stolen or compromised 3 times in my life (and gone through the hassle of changing auto-pay services to the new number) I'd welcome a little more trouble at the register in order to keep fraud down, even though for credit cards, there is little customer financial burden if the card is stolen.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm always torn between Hush and Once More With Feeling as my favorite, with The Body coming in third. I think that between the three, there's such a huge amount of creativity and versatility demonstrated in the entire staff and cast.
Use trinary.
Buffy wasn't on Fox at all. It started on the WB and then moved to UPN.
She had one of my favorite lines, though, in Walk Through The Fire.
You don't need a big guy to play Thor if you have Lord of the Rings special effects.
Strong, capable, confident female characters? take your pick from BSG's female cast
Wait, really? Those are your ideas of strong, capable, confident female characters? Most of them ran to their men any time the chips were down, and one of them took the "easy" way out by shooting herself in the head (and prior to that scene, was pretty two-dimensional). They gave the appearance of being strong while really being pretty lame.
The closest thing to a strong female character in that show was Head Six, and that's only because Baltar was a submissive masochist who thought he needed punishing (well, right up until the Deus Ex moment when it turns out that she was just a force of God, the Universe, or whatever.)
I'll grant you the others, but BSG is a farce in this respect.
A big difference is that there were still constants. With Buffy, the constants were the good guys--her friends and family. With Dollhouse, the constants were a two-dimensional FBI agent whose motives we don't really know and an evil corporation who seems more neutral than evil. You might count the chlid-like dolls as constants, but they weren't compelling when they weren't imprinted, and the imprints went away every episode.
There was no one to identify with whatsoever. No one to really care about in a meaningful way. You cared about the dolls in the same way you care about starving children in another country (it feels bad and you might send over a dollar a day, but you don't connect with them.)
I'm not sure such a premise could ever really work on TV these days.
His movie's aren't very good.
Serenity is a great example of that.
Serenity is one of the 5 movies he's written that actually made it to the screen, and it's the only movie he has directed. You might as easily say that he was too constrained by the TV show to really make it work--that he was too close to the original material.
As far as the rest of his feature film writing credits, he had success with Toy Story as writer. Titan AE and Alien Resurrection weren't bad, they just weren't great. Buffy...well it wasn't the story he wanted, but I'm not sure who's to blame for that.
There's a great body of work for the Avengers, too, but whoever ends up writing the final script also has a large precedent to muck around in the universe. Just about every comic book-turned-movie that was in any way successful has deviated significantly from the canon of the books. With Serenity, I could very easily see Whedon being unwilling to retcon anything.
One last thing to note is that The Avengers will be drawing heavily from the other movies in that universe. That means that creative control is likely to be pretty restricted. It's likely that we won't see any of Joss come through with the script or direction, if he ends up being selected.
I don't like it and don't think it should be used. I don't think it provides the customer anything that couldn't be done some other way. I was really only pointing out one of the reasons that it's so pervasive--something that it's good for.
You could have said the same thing about Visual Basic in the late 90s. It was a pain to track down DLLs for, and it wasn't cross-platform, but it enabled a whole bunch of people to churn out programs much more easily than if it hadn't existed.
In the end, web-based games are really pretty big right now. That's a market that most mobile devices decidedly fail to capture, relying on platform specific games. It's probably better this way, since the games likely won't translate well to devices which are smaller and/or touch-based. But for full computers, web-gaming wouldn't be anywhere near what it is today without Flash.
Not where I live. Where I live, all we've ever had was dial-up and then Big Content ISPs. We never had a broadband provider that wasn't a telco or part of a cable conglomerate.
I think you just fed a troll--the market forces comment was a clue.
That said, Flash is actually really good for developers. It's dead simple to write programs (with the existing commercial tools) so things like game development will be quicker in Flash than JS+HTML5+Canvas. The latter set of tools is also not universally supported yet (HTML5 isn't even standardized yet, I don't think.)
I read a story not all that long ago that stated that people are inclined to give people they trust quite a bit of power. That is, they might not care that the 43rd president of the United States can bypass the courts to obtain wiretaps, but when the 44th president inherits that power, they start to worry.
It's a facet of human nature, not hypocrisy. That, or hypocrisy is a facet of human nature.
In logic, his statement might be true. I can say "Every one of my BMWs is white." I have no BMWs, so my statement is logically true while being somewhat useless.
"Apple's monopoly is being abused," has a similar ring to it.
If we're talking about the iPhone/iPad market, then Apple does indeed have a "monopoly". This scope is equivalent to that of the x86 PC market. It's a specific type of device, made by a relatively small number of manufacturers.
It's more like the IBM PC than the x86 PC market. The IBM PC was the one which was effectively proprietary, but was eventually cloned. Did IBM have a monopoly on IBM PCs back then? Sure. Did they have a monopoly on personal computers? No, in fact, they launched their PC line in response to Apple.
Now, you might say that it's nothing like the Microsoft monopoly of the x86 PC market. In reality, however, they're very similar situations. In fact, Apple's monopoly is much worse than Microsoft's ever was. Microsoft only ever directly controlled the software. Apple, on the other hand, controls the software, the hardware, and the distribution channel.
Interestingly, if Microsoft had tried to do that from the beginning, they never would have succeeded in the market like they have. The rampant piracy of DOS combined with the ability to run anything you wanted on it (and write anything you wanted on it) almost certainly lead to the quick and massive uptake of the platform.
But the problem with the monopoly (any monopoly, really) is not inherent to having the vast majority of the market. The problem is using that as leverage to maintain your monopoly or grow even further. It would be hard to accuse Apple of anti-competitive behavior[1] with regards to the iPhone platform.
Even if you could make the case for that specific platform, that's not the market that the FTC would consider. They would consider the smartphone market, where Apple is a small player compared to the whole. There's no way that anyone could reasonably say that Apple has a monopoly in this market, and thus they aren't held to the same standards as Microsoft was in the late 90s.
With the iPad and iPhone, Apple is moving away from general computing. I would never consider griping that Samsung doesn't let me run Linux on my TV, even though there's a processor and memory in there quite capable of doing it. Apple is trying to establish some of their products as appliances. Whether or not this will hold up is still up in the air, but I have a hard time thinking that it's somehow wrong even if I don't like some of the implications of it. The iPhone feels very much like a tiny general-purpose computer. Calling it an appliance may well fail the duck-test if it comes to that.
[1] Or it would have been prior to the launch of the iPad. It's been found that Apple developers are not held to the same standards as everyone else when it comes to App-store approval. Apple developers are allowed to use private APIs that will get any other developer a quick rejection notice. Speculation is that this will be rectified in iPhone OS 4.0 with the expanded APIs.
I've had a very different experience. eSATA barely pushed more data for me with my setup. I think greed has it right--the rest of the hardware probably has quite a bit to do with performance in this arena.
Intel's naming scheme has been piss-poor for a long time. Some Core2Duos come with virtualization extensions, and some don't. There are differences even within the same model number (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#Intel_Virtualization_Technology_for_x86_.28Intel_VT-x.29 which says "# Pentium Dual-Core E6300, E6500, E6600 and some versions of the E5300 and E5400*" and "# Core 2 Duo E5400, E7600, E8200, E8300, E8400, E8500, E8600 and some versions of the E7400 and E7500 (Wolfdale)")
There's almost no way to correlate performance with processor number. Ghz is also out of the window due to architectural differences. It really makes me long for the days of the 286.
Was the original post just a wall of text, too? Next time, maybe just link to it?
Damn them Linux gremlins! As for your post - i'm happy you didn't thought I was being offensive
No worries. It was a legitimate complaint!
i'd like to add that mac users are by definition more careful with their computers. They just didn't bought a computer, they bought a Mac, and that makes them be extra-careful with them. PC users just bought a random computer for whatever they needed it and are prepared to lay waste upon their components. I generally have a lot of care with my own PCs, but most people simply don't. They just sell-take apart, use as an ashtray or something similar with their old computers, and buy another one. That's not the case with Macs.
Maybe. There are certainly factors other than build-quality that could apply. The lower market-share combined with cost could simply mean that a different type of person, one who is more careful with their things, buys Macs. I'm not equipped to do a major study on such things, so all I can really do is speculate.
That sucks. That someone must have purchased it just before the Mac Pro with Intel was introduced in August 2006. By that point, though, anyone who was paying attention knew that the switch was coming and probably should have planned accordingly.
The fact that Apple was switching to Intel was announced in 2005, and the first products were available at the beginning of 2006. I sure as hell wouldn't have bought a machine based upon the older processor at that point.
Of course, Leopard's still getting updates. I doubt it will get them for as long as XP has, but that seems to be the exception (not the rule) for Microsoft. One should be able to find a copy of Leopard online pretty easily.
There are times they simply don't want to meddle with their machine.
Yeah, that's a big deal I think. Windows has gotten better, but they're playing catchup in this arena.
That said, OS X tends to be slow with the updates. They'll have vulnerable versions of e.g. Java for a long time between updates.
The Dell Latitude line is both durable (I use one) and pricey.
My last two notebooks have been Precisions, which are the same chassis as Latitudes, but more expensive (with a professional-grade graphics card.) So I feel your pain and agree with your assessment. :)
The hardware is falling to pieces.
That's what I see regularly.
My experience is hardly scientific, but anecdotally, I'm finding that others have similar experiences.
Exactly. I keep hearing and seeing these sorts of things. And then someone like Budenny comes along and says that they're not true, but doesn't even provide anecdotal evidence (much less a large body of it.)
I was referring to the person to whom I replied. He said that there were rave reports on reliability which are obviously false. I assume that he takes this position because they use a lot of commodity parts these days. It is a common argument.
I meant to say that there can obviously be build-quality differences, even within a brand, but there could be an element of abuse that is going on, too. If so, that would be an interesting area to explore. Why would Mac users be less abusive to their computers?
Obviously that didn't make it into my post. I blame gremlins and the fact that I posted from Linux.
3. eSATA isn't "sleek" enough for Apple; it needs a second power cable, has a relatively flimsy plug, has hot-plugging/compatibility issues, etc, etc.
I was really excited about eSATA on my last laptop. I plugged it in once to try it out, and never have since. My USB drive is perfectly adequate, more portable, doesn't require external power, etc.
6. Most people don't use ExpressCards; they'd rather have a slightly larger battery or other features taking up the space.
Damn straight. Who makes ExpressCards, anyway? What can you get in them? I remember talk of things like high-end video cards, capture cards, etc. but has any of it materialized/are they any good? And are you going to actually want one in a laptop?
I agree with the rest of your points, too, but these two hit home.
I think the problem is that in a lot of ways, the design really is very nice. There are a lot of really small touches that make Macs quite enjoyable to work with. It's hard to put a price tag on that. How much is a really good touchpad worth? Magsafe? Weight? Battery life? How much is running OS X worth if you hate Windows and don't have the time to manage/learn Linux?
Nor are they more reliable or longer lived. So what explains the rave reports on this subject?
I've done "family support" for decades. My laptops (none Macs, though I tend to get "business-class") get retired after 5 years in nearly perfect working order except for the battery. My family is lucky if their laptops last 2. System boards fail, connectors fail, optical drives fail, power connector (this is a big one) fails, etc.
Either there is a noticeable difference in build quality from the low-end to the high-end in e.g. Dells (that's pretty much all we buy) or I'm much more careful with my laptops. Or perhaps there's an element of both. But all we really have are a bunch of anecdotes, and the anecdotes point to the Macs lasting longer.
No, he USED a classic to make an "80GB Touch."[1] Pogoplug+Classic * iPod Touch+PogoApp.
[1] As long as he stays within the range of his wifi network. Otherwise it reverts back to a 16GB Touch (or whatever, I didn't pay that much attention to the article.)
It really is a pretty bad deal for the merchants. What they get out of it, though, is the ability to compete with other merchants who take credit cards. Since that is most other merchants, it just means that they're on equal footing. If they refused to take credit cards, they'd probably lose a lot of sales.
I'd love to have more proof of identity in purchasing with credit cards. Having had my CC stolen or compromised 3 times in my life (and gone through the hassle of changing auto-pay services to the new number) I'd welcome a little more trouble at the register in order to keep fraud down, even though for credit cards, there is little customer financial burden if the card is stolen.