I'm tired of all these slashdot stories that all have the same answer. The right tool for the right job. If you are screwing in screws you need a screwdriver. If you are hammering nails you need a hammer.
Except the problem is that Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows are all screwhammers. The whole point of the "personal computer" is that it is not a specialized tool that does one or two things incredibly well, but a multi-function Finite State Machine for All Your File Processing Needs.
Since just about any application can be written to run on just about any modern OS, the only two things that set them apart are 1: Application development for the platform, and 2: The user experience.
Factor 1 is quantifiable, but arbitrary, based mostly on traditional market segments for the platforms. (Most of the best media software is written for the Mac because media people use Macs, because most of the best media software is written for the Mac, because...)
Factor 2 is where the OS designers have control, but are very difficult to quantify, becuase almost any user with any real experience will ultimately be biased by those same experiences which qualify them to form their opinions. Put a Linux user in front of the legendary Mac OS, and he will complain about the lack of middle-click text pasting. Put the Mac user in front of a Linux desktop and they will complain just as loudly about the lack of universal drag-and-drop text pasting.
Had I mod points, AC, they would be yours. Instead, enjoy your words repeated at "2" until I am modded down as "Redundant" and you get the 5 "Funny" mods you so richly deserve.:)
Re:Go Out with a Bang
on
WB Cancels Angel
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Meh. The show was on the bubble to even get made this season. WB never treated the show very well after Buffy changed networks. The time slot was changed many times, and it was paired up with some of the dumbest choices imaginable (i.e. immediately after "Seventh Heaven.")
Frankly, I'm surprised it's getting an entire 5th season. If this was FOX, a reality show would have replaced it by now.
Maybe now Joss Whedon will get busy on that "Ripper" idea he wanted to do for the BBC. (That, and the "Firefly" movie.)
In a pure market system, lumber business #2 wins, because their re-use of land means they don't need to be constantly buying new land to cut.
Unfortunately, we have a government which owns most of our forest land, who sells it for less than they buy it for, skewing things in favor of the irresponsible clear-cutters.
Not only will the cost of alternatives decrease, but the cost of fossil fuels will increase when easilly-tapped sources run dry. Eventually, we will hit the "sweet spot" where alternative fuel is cheaper than oil, everybody will switch, and Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" will once again prevail in providing the ideal solution.
As long as market forces are not making it happen, there's no real reason to force it. (Certainly not for the environment's sake. Industrial agriculture makes the gas-burning automobile look like a field of lillies... and non-industrial agriculture could never provide the yeilds needed without plowing under all the rainforests and irrigating all the deserts of the world.)
Actually now I'm beginning to wonder why scifi anime is practically the only thing they import to US.
A stroll through the "Anime" section at Best Buy proves you wrong. Sure, there's plenty o' sci-fi, and also several fantasy series (Slayers probably being the most popular)
There's also romance (Love Hina), sports drama (Princess Nine), modern espionage (Noir), soft-core pr0n comedy (Najica Blitz Tactics), parody (Excel Saga), war stories (Grave of the fireflies), horror (Boogiepop Phantom), Buffy-esque modernist occult fantasy (Witch Hunter Robin) and several other genres I've probably forgot to mention at the moment.
Not to mention a lot of the great shows and movies which actually are for kids and/or families: Castle In the Sky, Kiki's Delivery Service, Sailor Moon, Spirited Away, etc.
So, lots of different anime is imported... It's just that the sci-fi stuff has caught on with American audiences. Mostly because sci-fi is the one place where anime can be better than live action. Doing live action sci-fi, even if you spend a million dollars per episode, can look very cheezy. (For example, that stupid-looking "desert rat" puppet in the SciFi Channel production of Dune) With anime, you can do a show like Cowboy Bebop or Neon Genesis Evangelion for no more money than it takes to make an anime about a girl's baseball team. American audiences are not really used to the idea of watching an animated feature that could have just as easilly have been done with live actors, so shows like Princess Nine, in spite of being extremely well-written and well-made, simply don't get more than a small cult following, while Macross (a.k.a. Robotech) is a staple of the sci-fi nerd diet.
It's written by a pessimistic brit and the essential subtext is that we don't believe in things because we have no ties to the earth and thus no traditions.
Which shows that a lot of "Brits" [sic] don't really understand America at all. None of us are tied to a particular piece of dirt, that's true. Even for somebody like me, who has family ties going back to the colonial days, we are only talking about roughly 400 years of history here, which is nothing compared to the age of many important European cities.
Everybody knows what a "Scotsman" looks like, or a "Korean", but an "American" could look like either one of them. We are not united by geography, race, or even religious tradition. What unites us is simply this: The overwhelming majority of us believe the freedom not only works better as a means of running a society, it is the only moral option. We don't believe that our rights and freedoms are "given" to us by our government. We are born free, and cede certain powers and privileges to our government (such as the ability to enforce contracts, or call us to military service as needed), which we view as our servants. Walk through the campus of the capital buildings in Washington DC, and you will see the true Religion of America. Massive shrines built to common men who advanced the cause of freedom.
Walk through Wall Street and you will see the other Religion of America: property. What we each earn, whether by labor or by investment, is ours... not collectively, but individually. We pay taxes, we even have some social welfare services (though far less than most), but for the most part, we consider "The Right To Keep What's Yours" an essential part of why poets once labeled America "The Land of Opportunity."
This being slashdot, I'm sure there will be a dozen replies from the radical fringes of both the Left and the Right who will tell me I'm full of shit, but what I just described is an idea which most mainstream Americans believe, even if we sometimes forget it. New immigrants, if anything, tend to believe it even more strongly. (As the saying goes, there's no greater zealot than a convert.)
Steering quickly back on topic: Yea, Gaiman is a good writer, at least what I've read. I've been meaning to read more of his stuff, especially his "Sandman" series, just to see if it lives up the the hype.
Sure, 1984 is obviously a dystopia, I'll grant that. But in BNW, most of the population is *HAPPY* - and the ones that aren't, are freely allowed to go do whatever they want to BE happy.I didn't even mention 1984 (which I consider to be an inferior work.)
The population in Brave New World was happy with their utopia because they were conditioned to be. Those who wanted out of their too-perfect society were put on reservations which were essentially zoos. The fact that you don't find such a state of affairs to be morally repugnant is another strong indicator that it's already way too late to consider the novel to be a "warning" anymore. A lot of the cultural transformations that were direly predicted in that book have already happened.
Comic... graphic novel... Call it whatever you like, but Watchmen by Alan Moore remains one of the best books I've ever read. It sits proudly on the same shelf with Melville, Tolkein, and any other authors of "real" books on my bookshelf.
In Japan, nearly half of all books are essentially what Americans would call comic books. They include every genre you could find in a bookstore, from bodice-ripping trash romance to murder mysteries. The term they use is "Manga." Also, pretty much all of the best movies made in Japan since Kurosawa's death have been animated features.
Re:Authors overusing themes...
on
King Rat
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· Score: 1
What has happened to the Chuck Palahniuks of the world? Even his books have become too samy samy.. is it me, or do we need another Wodehouse to rise up?
I humbly suggest you check out Christopher Buckly. Little Green Men is a comical political thriller which shines a glaring light on the culture of alien abductees and Sunday morning Washington TV journalists. Thank You For Smoking is a painfully funny novel in which the protagonist is a paid lobbiest for a tobacco "research institute" which is actually a front for Big Tobacco. God Is My Broker is a brilliant novel about greed and corruption, formatted to read as if it were a self-help book.
His latest book, No Way To Treat A First Lady, is a comedy about presidential assassination.
Even his early books like Wet Work (about a millionaire who uses his wealth to crusade against the drug empire he sees as responsible for the death of his child), and The White House Mess are not without merit.
I continue to be amazed that none of his novels have been made into films. Little Green Men in particular would make a sensational comedy movie.
Congratulations. You are the very first person in the universe to describe The Long Dark Tea-Time Of the Soul as "cohesive."
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was a recycle of an half-filmed Dr. Who episode, which shoe-horned in a detective character who was more or less the same archetype as FBI Special Agent Cooper from David Lynch's Twin Peaks.
The Long Dark Tea-Time Of the Soul was an even more confused, muddled, and cobbled-together sequel to that book. I'm pretty sure he was using the Dirk Gently franchise as a clearing house for any ideas which didn't fit into his H2G2 stories. Lots of half-thought-out ideas patched together into something that looked a lot like narrative, but really wasn't. Listen to a geek try to explain to his girlfriend what either book was "about" sometime, and you will understand what I mean.
Both books were often funny and entertaining, but there was nothing cohesive about either of them.
I would say it's about time for Brave New World to be put on required High School reading lists, except it may already be too late, because it's often seen as terribly old-fashioned these days to be the least bit worried about the issues which that book fretted over, especially the fears of turning all phases of human development, from womb to college, into a manufacturing process.
Damn, I let my sentences run on when I'm ranting...
Your reply is equally off-topic (it's not even discussing the topic I was speaking of, let alone the one from the article), and a equally a troll (it attributed Cobain's death as a "murder" rather than a suicide, a very controversial position, as absolute fact), yet was modded up as "Informative."
What fun. Maybe it's time to drop the whole moderation concept. The trolls have clearly taken it over.
Nothing more pedantic than correcting a correction, but the quote is "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."
Also, I'm pretty sure it was neither Woody Allen nor Kurt Cobain who said it first, but Hunter S. Thompson.
Of course, I could be wrong, too. The web is rife with mis-attributed quotes, and I have not seen it cited in a reliable source.
What I do know for a fact is that people were already repeating that quote for many, many years before Cobain grew up to be a drug-addled singer for a one-hit-wonder band, and then shortly afterwards did his part to improve the gene pool.
You seem to be missing the point. Good tech support does not gain customers, but bad tech support loses them, so "screw-you automated phone support" does not really benifit the company in the long run.
This is why Best Buy purchaced Geek Squad (at no small expense) even though adding on-site product support does nothing to bring in new customers.
Not all movies are WS, some directors didn't take to it. Kubrik for example didn't use it, except maybe for "eyes wide shut" (never seen it, too much BS hype). Jeez, most of his films only had monoural sound.
That's funny, "2001" is the best example I can name of a movie which must be seen in wide-screen to be fully experienced.
PS. "Eyes Wide Shut" was an interesting movie, although the scope of the story was a bit smaller and more personal than Kubrick's other work. You should probably see it.
FOX has a long and storied history of trying out inventive new shows and cancelling them prematurely.
The Ben Stiller Show won an Emmy award several months after cancellation. Action aired for one episode and then was pulled. The Tick was dropped just as it was getting good. I could go on to list nearly a dozen other critically aclaimed shows which FOX dumped in a season or less to make more room for crap like Fastlane, Dark Angel, and reality TV.
FOX has had three major hits in the entire history of their network: X-Files, The Simpsons, and Married With Children. All of those shows started out modestly in the days when FOX was in less of a hurry to develop audiences, and grew into pop culture landmarks. If FOX had continued to stick with even half of the really good shows they could have been as big as the "big 3" by now. Instead, they are fending off UPN and WB for the #4 spot, and they richly deserve thier current lowly status.
I'm almost positive that Empire was on 72mm film, and I think Star Wars might have been, too, but I was about 7 years old at the time, so I'm less sure.
I agree that Greedo was there to play Peter Lorrie to Han's Bogart, but the dramatic impact of that scene is completely drained in the SE version by the fact that Jabba says the exact same lines two minutes earlier in the re-inserted footage. I mean, both scenes were in made-up languages with subtitles! If you really needed that scene, would it have been so hard to make Jabba say something else!?
There's a reason why Sam Spade doesn't meet the Fat Man before his initial scenes with Peter Lorrie's character. Once the mystery of "my employer" is gone, the pathetic lackey is not really as interesting.
Bah. I said more than two years ago that the originals, as released, were the only versions I would ever be interested in buying, and that remains the case. The explosion of the Death Star in Star Wars was a major moment in film special effects history, and Lucas chose to paint over it with crappy CGI.
It will be LD rips only for my DVD player unless the non-SE versions are released somehow.
You are correct... and for the life of me I can't recall the hand weapon from the original Quake. I recall the Medic in the original Quake Team Fortress mod hand kind of an axe-like thing... Was it a knife? I guess it's true when they say the memory is the first thing to go when you get older.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the problem is that Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows are all screwhammers. The whole point of the "personal computer" is that it is not a specialized tool that does one or two things incredibly well, but a multi-function Finite State Machine for All Your File Processing Needs.
Since just about any application can be written to run on just about any modern OS, the only two things that set them apart are 1: Application development for the platform, and 2: The user experience.
Factor 1 is quantifiable, but arbitrary, based mostly on traditional market segments for the platforms. (Most of the best media software is written for the Mac because media people use Macs, because most of the best media software is written for the Mac, because...)
Factor 2 is where the OS designers have control, but are very difficult to quantify, becuase almost any user with any real experience will ultimately be biased by those same experiences which qualify them to form their opinions. Put a Linux user in front of the legendary Mac OS, and he will complain about the lack of middle-click text pasting. Put the Mac user in front of a Linux desktop and they will complain just as loudly about the lack of universal drag-and-drop text pasting.
Had I mod points, AC, they would be yours. Instead, enjoy your words repeated at "2" until I am modded down as "Redundant" and you get the 5 "Funny" mods you so richly deserve. :)
Frankly, I'm surprised it's getting an entire 5th season. If this was FOX, a reality show would have replaced it by now.
Maybe now Joss Whedon will get busy on that "Ripper" idea he wanted to do for the BBC. (That, and the "Firefly" movie.)
Unfortunately, we have a government which owns most of our forest land, who sells it for less than they buy it for, skewing things in favor of the irresponsible clear-cutters.
As long as market forces are not making it happen, there's no real reason to force it. (Certainly not for the environment's sake. Industrial agriculture makes the gas-burning automobile look like a field of lillies... and non-industrial agriculture could never provide the yeilds needed without plowing under all the rainforests and irrigating all the deserts of the world.)
A stroll through the "Anime" section at Best Buy proves you wrong. Sure, there's plenty o' sci-fi, and also several fantasy series (Slayers probably being the most popular)
There's also romance (Love Hina), sports drama (Princess Nine), modern espionage (Noir), soft-core pr0n comedy (Najica Blitz Tactics), parody (Excel Saga), war stories (Grave of the fireflies), horror (Boogiepop Phantom), Buffy-esque modernist occult fantasy (Witch Hunter Robin) and several other genres I've probably forgot to mention at the moment.
Not to mention a lot of the great shows and movies which actually are for kids and/or families: Castle In the Sky, Kiki's Delivery Service, Sailor Moon, Spirited Away, etc.
So, lots of different anime is imported... It's just that the sci-fi stuff has caught on with American audiences. Mostly because sci-fi is the one place where anime can be better than live action. Doing live action sci-fi, even if you spend a million dollars per episode, can look very cheezy. (For example, that stupid-looking "desert rat" puppet in the SciFi Channel production of Dune) With anime, you can do a show like Cowboy Bebop or Neon Genesis Evangelion for no more money than it takes to make an anime about a girl's baseball team. American audiences are not really used to the idea of watching an animated feature that could have just as easilly have been done with live actors, so shows like Princess Nine, in spite of being extremely well-written and well-made, simply don't get more than a small cult following, while Macross (a.k.a. Robotech) is a staple of the sci-fi nerd diet.
Which shows that a lot of "Brits" [sic] don't really understand America at all. None of us are tied to a particular piece of dirt, that's true. Even for somebody like me, who has family ties going back to the colonial days, we are only talking about roughly 400 years of history here, which is nothing compared to the age of many important European cities.
Everybody knows what a "Scotsman" looks like, or a "Korean", but an "American" could look like either one of them. We are not united by geography, race, or even religious tradition. What unites us is simply this: The overwhelming majority of us believe the freedom not only works better as a means of running a society, it is the only moral option. We don't believe that our rights and freedoms are "given" to us by our government. We are born free, and cede certain powers and privileges to our government (such as the ability to enforce contracts, or call us to military service as needed), which we view as our servants. Walk through the campus of the capital buildings in Washington DC, and you will see the true Religion of America. Massive shrines built to common men who advanced the cause of freedom.
Walk through Wall Street and you will see the other Religion of America: property. What we each earn, whether by labor or by investment, is ours... not collectively, but individually. We pay taxes, we even have some social welfare services (though far less than most), but for the most part, we consider "The Right To Keep What's Yours" an essential part of why poets once labeled America "The Land of Opportunity."
This being slashdot, I'm sure there will be a dozen replies from the radical fringes of both the Left and the Right who will tell me I'm full of shit, but what I just described is an idea which most mainstream Americans believe, even if we sometimes forget it. New immigrants, if anything, tend to believe it even more strongly. (As the saying goes, there's no greater zealot than a convert.)
Steering quickly back on topic: Yea, Gaiman is a good writer, at least what I've read. I've been meaning to read more of his stuff, especially his "Sandman" series, just to see if it lives up the the hype.
Yea, but now it probably won't. The worst thing about Palm-for-Mac sync software is that it breaks iSync.
The population in Brave New World was happy with their utopia because they were conditioned to be. Those who wanted out of their too-perfect society were put on reservations which were essentially zoos. The fact that you don't find such a state of affairs to be morally repugnant is another strong indicator that it's already way too late to consider the novel to be a "warning" anymore. A lot of the cultural transformations that were direly predicted in that book have already happened.
In Japan, nearly half of all books are essentially what Americans would call comic books. They include every genre you could find in a bookstore, from bodice-ripping trash romance to murder mysteries. The term they use is "Manga." Also, pretty much all of the best movies made in Japan since Kurosawa's death have been animated features.
I humbly suggest you check out Christopher Buckly. Little Green Men is a comical political thriller which shines a glaring light on the culture of alien abductees and Sunday morning Washington TV journalists. Thank You For Smoking is a painfully funny novel in which the protagonist is a paid lobbiest for a tobacco "research institute" which is actually a front for Big Tobacco. God Is My Broker is a brilliant novel about greed and corruption, formatted to read as if it were a self-help book.
His latest book, No Way To Treat A First Lady, is a comedy about presidential assassination.
Even his early books like Wet Work (about a millionaire who uses his wealth to crusade against the drug empire he sees as responsible for the death of his child), and The White House Mess are not without merit.
I continue to be amazed that none of his novels have been made into films. Little Green Men in particular would make a sensational comedy movie.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was a recycle of an half-filmed Dr. Who episode, which shoe-horned in a detective character who was more or less the same archetype as FBI Special Agent Cooper from David Lynch's Twin Peaks.
The Long Dark Tea-Time Of the Soul was an even more confused, muddled, and cobbled-together sequel to that book. I'm pretty sure he was using the Dirk Gently franchise as a clearing house for any ideas which didn't fit into his H2G2 stories. Lots of half-thought-out ideas patched together into something that looked a lot like narrative, but really wasn't. Listen to a geek try to explain to his girlfriend what either book was "about" sometime, and you will understand what I mean.
Both books were often funny and entertaining, but there was nothing cohesive about either of them.
Damn, I let my sentences run on when I'm ranting...
What fun. Maybe it's time to drop the whole moderation concept. The trolls have clearly taken it over.
Also, I'm pretty sure it was neither Woody Allen nor Kurt Cobain who said it first, but Hunter S. Thompson.
Of course, I could be wrong, too. The web is rife with mis-attributed quotes, and I have not seen it cited in a reliable source.
What I do know for a fact is that people were already repeating that quote for many, many years before Cobain grew up to be a drug-addled singer for a one-hit-wonder band, and then shortly afterwards did his part to improve the gene pool.
But, as the person I was replying to was pointing out, most people don't "know" if the support is any good until they've already become customers.
Nothing pisses me off more than $FOO
$BAR just pisses me off more.
Okay, maybe pointing that out actually is a little pedantic.
In fact very pedantic.
It just struck me as funny.
This is why Best Buy purchaced Geek Squad (at no small expense) even though adding on-site product support does nothing to bring in new customers.
That's funny, "2001" is the best example I can name of a movie which must be seen in wide-screen to be fully experienced.
PS. "Eyes Wide Shut" was an interesting movie, although the scope of the story was a bit smaller and more personal than Kubrick's other work. You should probably see it.
The Ben Stiller Show won an Emmy award several months after cancellation. Action aired for one episode and then was pulled. The Tick was dropped just as it was getting good. I could go on to list nearly a dozen other critically aclaimed shows which FOX dumped in a season or less to make more room for crap like Fastlane, Dark Angel, and reality TV.
FOX has had three major hits in the entire history of their network: X-Files, The Simpsons, and Married With Children. All of those shows started out modestly in the days when FOX was in less of a hurry to develop audiences, and grew into pop culture landmarks. If FOX had continued to stick with even half of the really good shows they could have been as big as the "big 3" by now. Instead, they are fending off UPN and WB for the #4 spot, and they richly deserve thier current lowly status.
I'm almost positive that Empire was on 72mm film, and I think Star Wars might have been, too, but I was about 7 years old at the time, so I'm less sure.
In that case, count me in! :)
There's a reason why Sam Spade doesn't meet the Fat Man before his initial scenes with Peter Lorrie's character. Once the mystery of "my employer" is gone, the pathetic lackey is not really as interesting.
It will be LD rips only for my DVD player unless the non-SE versions are released somehow.
You are correct... and for the life of me I can't recall the hand weapon from the original Quake. I recall the Medic in the original Quake Team Fortress mod hand kind of an axe-like thing... Was it a knife? I guess it's true when they say the memory is the first thing to go when you get older.