but is unnecessary for the overall gag: namely that the notice was on "public display" in a very unpublic place.
No, the joke is 100% that it's a comedy of excess.
There's nothing funny about a "public display" document being inconvenient to get at. That's what most of us call "everyday life."
However, a "public display" document in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in the back of a disused lavatory with a sign on the door which says "beware of the leopard" is fucking hilarious.
Taking it out would be like re-editing the last reel of The Blues Brothers so they would only be chased for five miles by two or three cop cars. The scene would be shorter, cheaper, still contain everything "needed" to tell the story, but it would not funny.
The mini is basically a "headless eMac." I bought one to be a high-def HTPC, and it works terrific for that purpose, but every once in a blue moon I wished both the CPU and the video card were a little beefier. (For example, World of Warcraft performance with a GB of RAM is good, but not outstanding.)
If they were to release a $750 or so "headless iMac G5", I would be all over it. The mini would go down to my music studio (with a firewire drive), and the new system would take over my living room.
I grant that it's fairly comfortably shaped, but it is, without doubt, by far the heaviest standard console gamepad ever made besides the original Xbox controller. They are both unacceptably heavy for long periods of use.
The X-Box controllers are too heavy for you!?
Holy shit, dude. You clearly need to stop playing console games for a while and get some exercise! You're a small step away from needing a feeding tube to survive.
Maybe learning the trombone would be a good move for you. Holding that thing up for an hour or two at a time while working the slide would probably do you a world of good.
A Mac owner wakes up from a nightmare in which he encountered a BSOD, and wonders to himself... Is he a Mac user who had a nightmare about Windows XP, or is he a PC user, now asleep and dreaming that he uses OS X?
I don't know is Cringely is ever to be "trusted", but I happen to think he's 100% correct in this case.
Out in Bloomington (a Minneapolis suburb), I've already got 2.4 GHz noise fouling things up to the point that my 802.11g hub has to be located almost dead-center in the middle of my house to reach every room. I would hate to think what would happen if the city started spraying competing signals all over town.
Fortunately, it doesn't look (yet) like Bloomington is jumping on the bandwagon with Minneapolis. As part of the same county, we often get sucked into their bad ideas (such as building a new ball park for the Twins), but hopefully we will stay out of this fiasco.
As I said in another part of this thread, I don't think I would buy this service even if it was available to me, as the DSL connection I have now is well worth the higher price.
We tend to put almost all of our antennae on top of the IDS tower, the tallest skyscraper in Minneapolis.
In fact, over a dozen other towers have gone up in downtown Minnepolis over the last 20 years, all built to be a tiny bit shorter than the IDS, so they wouldn't have to put all the antennae on the newer structure.
We also have a few broadcast towers over by the airport.
TV reception around here is terrific.
Steering back on topic:
It's kind of cool, but there's a local coffee shop chain around here (Dunn Bros. Coffee) which offers free wi-fi already, as do many of the "mom & pop" coffee shops around the city. I was recently playing World of Warcraft in the Dunn Bros. in Richfield (just south of Minneapolis) on my iBook, and found the connection to be solid and fast.
If I lived in Minneaplolis (or if they extended this out to the 'burbs), I would consider using this service, but I'm pretty darn happy with my DSL service from iphouse.com, so I probably would just stick with what I've got anyway.
You've never been to northern Canada have you? It's been done.
Yes, I have. A good three-hour puddle-jumper flight North-by-Northwest from Red Lake, Ontario. We spent a week just a few miles North of "nowhere" and a little East of "whothefuckknows."
Apart from the "ozone hole", it's lovely in the summer time. Great fishing, pretty country, lots of trees, and like Mars in almost no way whatsoever. Also, they've got those neat little two-dollar coins which are almost the exact right ammount to tip your waitress if you buy breakfast in a cheap diner on your way up there.
I certainly didn't feel much like a space explorer as I took a nap in the Lund fishing boat on a quiet lake as eagles flew by.
The point of the Antarctica analogy is that it's not only cold, barren, and inhospitable all year round, but it's also very, very remote. Once you get a few hundred miles inland, you are out of radio contact with pretty much everybody, and emergency help can be a matter of a days away... longer if it's too stormy for flying.
Living on a Mars colony would be like living at Ice Station Zebra, except you would be even more cut off from the rest of civilization, because at times the Earth can be up to about 15-20 light-minutes away. Need your appendix taken out? You better have a facility there for it, and you better not happen to be the only doctor they sent to take care of such things, or you are screwed.
Oh yeah... and there's no water, and you can't breathe outside. Sounds like a real party, huh?
Unless another sequel to Knights of the Old Republic comes out for the new X-Box right away. Then you could play that while all the other chumps are in line for Star Wars, and enjoy fresher dialog, a more compelling story, and better-composed shots, without a hint of Hayden Christiansen anywhere to be seen.
Anyone who thinks we need to colonize Mars sometime within the next two generations should move to Antarctica for a couple years and get back to us.
Mars is just like Antarctica, except there's pretty much no water, less sunlight, and you can't breathe the air.
Until the Sahara desert and both of the Arctic Circles are completely populated with big cities, things are not so crowded here that we need to move to Martian suburbs.
Please, please, please star in our new show. We think you are the right man for the job, and we are really committed to making this new show work.
Cheers
Dear BBC,
Okay, but only for one season. I would like to spend the rest of my career taking on new roles in film and on television, rather than being the guest of honor at Sci-Fi conventions for the rest of my life.
Citizen Kane is the most boring movie ever created.
Casablanca? My god, get your head out of your ass. That movie is only one step above the sappy "It's a Wonderful Life" in terms of pandering to the audience's emotions.
Philistine.
People like you are the reasons movies today suck.
You take "Attack of the Clones" I'll take either of those films over it any day (and twice on Sundays.)
I found it to be a damn good-looking movie with little else going for it.
Sometimes, that's enough. Miss Paltrow is still a hottie in blurry black & white, after all.
Watch it expecting great story-telling, and you will be let down. Think of it as a piece of visual art which you stare at for two hours, and it's not bad.
In any case, "Sky Captain" was a big step up from "Attack of the Clones", which was awful storytelling and also looked like horse-shit.
Everybody talks about backwards compatibility like it will save (or kill) the second X-Box.
If playing our old games on the new system was a priority, nobody would ever change platforms.
Repeat: If playing our old games on the new system was a priority, nobody would ever change platforms.
How many Sega owners looked at the PS2 and said, "hmmm... Grand Theft Auto 3 looks very cool, but the PS2 can't play my old Soul Calibur disk, so forget it"?
Microsoft's success or failure with the new X-Box comes down to one thing and one thing only:
If the flagship games they line up for it are good enough to be worth buying the console, people will buy the console. If not, they won't.
The ability to play an old X-Box copy of Splinter Cell on it will make zero difference to anybody, apart from a few screaming know-it-alls on Internet chat forums.
Slashdot Mirror
but is unnecessary for the overall gag: namely that the notice was on "public display" in a very unpublic place.
No, the joke is 100% that it's a comedy of excess.
There's nothing funny about a "public display" document being inconvenient to get at. That's what most of us call "everyday life."
However, a "public display" document in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in the back of a disused lavatory with a sign on the door which says "beware of the leopard" is fucking hilarious.
Taking it out would be like re-editing the last reel of The Blues Brothers so they would only be chased for five miles by two or three cop cars. The scene would be shorter, cheaper, still contain everything "needed" to tell the story, but it would not funny.
The mini is basically a "headless eMac." I bought one to be a high-def HTPC, and it works terrific for that purpose, but every once in a blue moon I wished both the CPU and the video card were a little beefier. (For example, World of Warcraft performance with a GB of RAM is good, but not outstanding.)
If they were to release a $750 or so "headless iMac G5", I would be all over it. The mini would go down to my music studio (with a firewire drive), and the new system would take over my living room.
I grant that it's fairly comfortably shaped, but it is, without doubt, by far the heaviest standard console gamepad ever made besides the original Xbox controller. They are both unacceptably heavy for long periods of use.
The X-Box controllers are too heavy for you!?
Holy shit, dude. You clearly need to stop playing console games for a while and get some exercise! You're a small step away from needing a feeding tube to survive.
Maybe learning the trombone would be a good move for you. Holding that thing up for an hour or two at a time while working the slide would probably do you a world of good.
A Mac owner wakes up from a nightmare in which he encountered a BSOD, and wonders to himself... Is he a Mac user who had a nightmare about Windows XP, or is he a PC user, now asleep and dreaming that he uses OS X?
It should me noted that the just-released OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") comes with Xcode 2.
Among other things, it's capable of importing Code Warrior projects.
I don't know is Cringely is ever to be "trusted", but I happen to think he's 100% correct in this case.
Out in Bloomington (a Minneapolis suburb), I've already got 2.4 GHz noise fouling things up to the point that my 802.11g hub has to be located almost dead-center in the middle of my house to reach every room. I would hate to think what would happen if the city started spraying competing signals all over town.
Fortunately, it doesn't look (yet) like Bloomington is jumping on the bandwagon with Minneapolis. As part of the same county, we often get sucked into their bad ideas (such as building a new ball park for the Twins), but hopefully we will stay out of this fiasco.
As I said in another part of this thread, I don't think I would buy this service even if it was available to me, as the DSL connection I have now is well worth the higher price.
Dude. 100 feet of elevation change is what most of the country calls "flat."
I'm from here, but I have no delusions of our hills impressing anybody.
We tend to put almost all of our antennae on top of the IDS tower, the tallest skyscraper in Minneapolis.
In fact, over a dozen other towers have gone up in downtown Minnepolis over the last 20 years, all built to be a tiny bit shorter than the IDS, so they wouldn't have to put all the antennae on the newer structure.
We also have a few broadcast towers over by the airport.
TV reception around here is terrific.
Steering back on topic:
It's kind of cool, but there's a local coffee shop chain around here (Dunn Bros. Coffee) which offers free wi-fi already, as do many of the "mom & pop" coffee shops around the city. I was recently playing World of Warcraft in the Dunn Bros. in Richfield (just south of Minneapolis) on my iBook, and found the connection to be solid and fast.
If I lived in Minneaplolis (or if they extended this out to the 'burbs), I would consider using this service, but I'm pretty darn happy with my DSL service from iphouse.com, so I probably would just stick with what I've got anyway.
Anyone have any reviews for Tiger on any hardware platform?
Sure thing. Here you go:
It's total shit on the Athlon XP 2500+. You can't even get it to boot up. Less functionality than either Linux or Windows.
I hear it works much better on other platforms, specifically Apple-built PPC systems, but you will have to look at other reviews for that information.
The complacency of the last five years is over.
;)
Now on with the complacency of the next five years!
Enjoy your wait for Longhorn, the exclusive platform of Duke Nukem Forever.
As if college football players ever went to class!
Old joke:
Q: How many [insert local class-A college here] football players does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Just one, but he gets four credits for it.
How about (very low-resolution) DivX movies on the floor?
No lower than the resolution of the first Doctor Who rip I downloaded earlier this month.
Thank goodness people with better encoders and more bandwidth started showing up on the newsgroups.
The idea is to create a human outpost, so if something happens on Earth, then some of our civilization will remain elsewhere.
And that matters. Because... ?
Hey, don't discourge the fanatics from moving to mars. This world will be far better off with them on Mars.
But wouldn't we all die from our dirty telephones then?
You've never been to northern Canada have you? It's been done.
Yes, I have. A good three-hour puddle-jumper flight North-by-Northwest from Red Lake, Ontario. We spent a week just a few miles North of "nowhere" and a little East of "whothefuckknows."
Apart from the "ozone hole", it's lovely in the summer time. Great fishing, pretty country, lots of trees, and like Mars in almost no way whatsoever. Also, they've got those neat little two-dollar coins which are almost the exact right ammount to tip your waitress if you buy breakfast in a cheap diner on your way up there.
I certainly didn't feel much like a space explorer as I took a nap in the Lund fishing boat on a quiet lake as eagles flew by.
The point of the Antarctica analogy is that it's not only cold, barren, and inhospitable all year round, but it's also very, very remote. Once you get a few hundred miles inland, you are out of radio contact with pretty much everybody, and emergency help can be a matter of a days away... longer if it's too stormy for flying.
Living on a Mars colony would be like living at Ice Station Zebra, except you would be even more cut off from the rest of civilization, because at times the Earth can be up to about 15-20 light-minutes away. Need your appendix taken out? You better have a facility there for it, and you better not happen to be the only doctor they sent to take care of such things, or you are screwed.
Oh yeah... and there's no water, and you can't breathe outside. Sounds like a real party, huh?
Unless another sequel to Knights of the Old Republic comes out for the new X-Box right away. Then you could play that while all the other chumps are in line for Star Wars, and enjoy fresher dialog, a more compelling story, and better-composed shots, without a hint of Hayden Christiansen anywhere to be seen.
Anyone who thinks we need to colonize Mars sometime within the next two generations should move to Antarctica for a couple years and get back to us.
Mars is just like Antarctica, except there's pretty much no water, less sunlight, and you can't breathe the air.
Until the Sahara desert and both of the Arctic Circles are completely populated with big cities, things are not so crowded here that we need to move to Martian suburbs.
That's what I said. 13 lives.
"happened"... heh.
:P
It's a time-travel show. You can get away with just about anything.
BTW: I haven't downloaded episode 2 yet. Thanks for the spoiler.
The could gain one regeneration back by simply pretending that the McGann doctor in the FOX special never happened.
After all, the Peter Curshing movies are not really part of the "canon" of the show either.
Plus, that means we can convieniently ignore all that "half-human" bullshit.
Odds are, the conversation went:
Dear Chris,
Please, please, please star in our new show. We think you are the right man for the job, and we are really committed to making this new show work.
Cheers
Dear BBC,
Okay, but only for one season. I would like to spend the rest of my career taking on new roles in film and on television, rather than being the guest of honor at Sci-Fi conventions for the rest of my life.
Yours, etc.
You recall incorrectly. Doctor Who gets 13 lives, and his main rival has already broken that rule.
Citizen Kane is the most boring movie ever created.
Casablanca? My god, get your head out of your ass. That movie is only one step above the sappy "It's a Wonderful Life" in terms of pandering to the audience's emotions.
Philistine.
People like you are the reasons movies today suck.
You take "Attack of the Clones" I'll take either of those films over it any day (and twice on Sundays.)
I found it to be a damn good-looking movie with little else going for it.
Sometimes, that's enough. Miss Paltrow is still a hottie in blurry black & white, after all.
Watch it expecting great story-telling, and you will be let down. Think of it as a piece of visual art which you stare at for two hours, and it's not bad.
In any case, "Sky Captain" was a big step up from "Attack of the Clones", which was awful storytelling and also looked like horse-shit.
Rubbish.
Everybody talks about backwards compatibility like it will save (or kill) the second X-Box.
If playing our old games on the new system was a priority, nobody would ever change platforms.
Repeat: If playing our old games on the new system was a priority, nobody would ever change platforms.
How many Sega owners looked at the PS2 and said, "hmmm... Grand Theft Auto 3 looks very cool, but the PS2 can't play my old Soul Calibur disk, so forget it"?
Microsoft's success or failure with the new X-Box comes down to one thing and one thing only:
If the flagship games they line up for it are good enough to be worth buying the console, people will buy the console. If not, they won't.
The ability to play an old X-Box copy of Splinter Cell on it will make zero difference to anybody, apart from a few screaming know-it-alls on Internet chat forums.